The Weekly Sift

it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.

– Florida General Counsel Ryan Newman,
explaining what “woke” means to the DeSantis administration
(He thinks it’s a bad thing.)

There’s no featured post this week.

I’ve been battling a cold (or a minor case of Covid, the tests have been ambiguous, and either way I’ve almost recovered), which is my excuse for a number of failings:

• the mental glitch that caused me to turn Douglas Rushkoff into Douglas Coupland halfway through last week’s “Two Glimpses into the Future“. Douglas Coupland is also an author, but how his name got into my head, I have no idea. He had nothing to do with Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest.
• not paying attention to comments, which meant that a comment by Neo on the weekly summary sat in limbo for several days. (That comment takes me to task for complimenting Alaska’s ranked-choice voting system, when STAR voting has several advantages.) I should explain this wrinkle in the WordPress software: When a comment has some number of links (Neo’s had four), WordPress kicks it into my “moderation” queue. I think this is supposed to be a spam-control feature, but it happens seldom enough that I forget to check the queue.
• not getting enough research done to have a featured article this week.

This week everybody was talking about the Georgia runoff

In a runoff, turnout is everything. Early voting has set records (particularly in Democratic counties), and Election Day is tomorrow. I can easily imagine how in November, people who showed up at the polls to vote for Governor Kemp and the rest of the Republican slate might also vote for Herschel Walker. But I have a much harder time imagining Republicans going to the polls for the exclusive purpose of voting for Walker. He is, as this Warnock ad points out, an embarrassing candidate.

I’ve often said that speculation is a waste of both my time and yours, but I’m hopeful for a Warnock victory.

Shortly after the November election, I sent Warnock a contribution. So every time I hear Republicans complain that they’re being outspent, I’m like “That’s me, you losers!” I’m getting a lot of satisfaction for the amount of money I sent, especially if Warnock wins.

As you probably already know, Democrats will retain control of the Senate either way — either 51-49 or 50-50 plus VP Harris’ vote. The difference that makes is technical, but significant. Currently, all Senate committees are evenly split between the two parties. But if Warnock wins, Democrats will get a one-vote advantage on all committees. That matters for things like launching investigations and issuing subpoenas.

A Warnock victory would also mean that no single senator can veto what the rest of the Democratic caucus wants to do. Though probably anything Manchin or Sinema would object to is already doomed in the Republican House.

and a complete non-story about talks with Putin

Thursday, President Biden and President Macron of France held a joint press conference. The last question asked about the possibility of talking to Putin concerning Ukraine. Biden answered:

I have no immediate plans to contact Mr. Putin. Mr. Putin is — let me choose my words very carefully — I’m prepared to speak with Mr. Putin if in fact there is an interest in him deciding he’s looking for a way to end the war. He hasn’t done that yet. If that’s the case, in consultation with my French and my NATO friends, I’ll be happy to sit down with Putin to see what he wants — has in mind. He hasn’t done that yet.

So Biden didn’t bring up talking to Putin, his first response was that he has no plans to, and that he’ll only do so after Putin does something he hasn’t done yet. Even then, he’ll meet after consulting with France and our other NATO allies. Minutes before, the French president had said:

we will never urge the Ukrainians to make a compromise which will not be acceptable for them … If we want a sustainable peace, we have to respect the Ukrainians to decide the moment and the conditions in which they will negotiate about their territory and their future.

President Zelenskyy, meanwhile, has insisted that Ukraine won’t give up any territory.

There is only one condition for the negotiations: Russia must leave all captured territories.

So what is Biden supposed to say about talking to Putin? (Maybe something diplomatic, like: “Screw that guy. I’m not talking to him.”) He says he’ll talk to Putin if “he’s looking for a way to end the war”.

For some reason, Reuters interpreted this as a “trial balloon”. Russia then said it’s open to negotiations if the West “accepts its demands”, i.e., recognizes Russia’s ownership not just of Crimea, but also of the other Ukrainian provinces it has annexed (which its retreating forces don’t even fully occupy). Then Fox News’ wrote the headline: “Putin open to Ukraine talks after Biden signals willingness if Russia serious about ending war“.

Basically, each side has said that it’s willing to accept the other’s complete surrender. That’s not news.

and another bad week for Trump (and associated traitors)

Tuesday, two members of the right-wing paramilitary group Oath Keepers, including its founder Stewart Rhodes, were convicted of seditious conspiracy for their role in the January 6 riot, plus several other charges. Seditious conspiracy by itself carries a sentence of up to 20 years, and convictions for it are rare; this is the first guilty verdict since 1995.

The jury appears to have done its job carefully. There were five defendants and a list of charges, with each defendant guilty of some and not guilty of others. The deliberations took three days. So it’s hard to paint this jury as radical Trump-haters or a rubber stamp for the Justice Department. It sure looks like they went through the charge/defendant matrix cell by cell and asked “Did the government prove this charge against this defendant?”

To me, the main significance of this verdict is what it implies about future cases, including a possible charge against Donald Trump. In the Oath Keepers case, the Justice Department proved to a jury (beyond a reasonable doubt) that there actually was a conspiracy behind January 6; the attack on the Capitol wasn’t just a Trump rally that spiraled out of control. It also proved that the intention of the conspirators was seditious; the conspirators weren’t patriots, and they weren’t trying to protect democracy against a stolen election. Quite the opposite, they were trying to overthrow democracy.

What can be proved to one jury can be proved to others. Both the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys (whose seditious conspiracy trial begins later this month) must realize they are facing serious jail time. So it must be very tempting to make a deal with the government, perhaps delivering the goods on people closer to Trump, like Roger Stone or Mark Meadows.

The verdict has political as well as legal importance. Since the insurrection, most Republican politicians and conservative pundits have tried to claimed January 6 was no big deal. Maybe Democrats on the January 6 committee were trying to make something out of it, but that was just politics.

Well, a guilty verdict is more than politics. This is a jury of ordinary Americans unanimously saying that January 6 was a very serious matter. The guilty parties weren’t just some people trespassing on government property: The attack was planned, and the planners intended to subvert the orderly transfer of power.

For contrast, look at the Durham investigation, which really was just politics. It produced only minor charges against minor characters — and never persuaded a jury that the “conspiracy” it was investigating existed at all. (Kevin McCarthy is planning a similar investigation of the January 6 committee, for all the good that will do. Bring it, Kevin.)

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Ever since Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon interfered in the Mar-a-Lago case (by appointing a special master to review the documents seized from Trump under a legal search warrant), I and a lot of other people have been yelling about favoritism and corruption: Cannon was clearly repaying her debt to Trump by bending the the law in his favor.

Well, it looks like the appeals court agrees. Thursday, a three-judge panel from the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals (two of whom were also appointed by Trump, but seem loyal to the law anyway) vacated Cannon’s order, and sent the case back to Cannon with instructions to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit.

The law is clear. We cannot write a rule that allows any subject of a search warrant to block government investigations after the execution of the warrant. Nor can we write a rule that allows only former presidents to do so. Either approach would be a radical reordering of our caselaw limiting the federal courts’ involvement in criminal investigations. And both would violate bedrock separation-of-powers limitations. Accordingly, we agree with the government that the district court improperly exercised equitable jurisdiction, and that dismissal of the entire proceeding is required.

Trump will undoubtedly appeal to the Supreme Court, but I don’t think they’ll take long to deny his motion. (They didn’t take long to reject his claim with regard to the classified documents seized in the search.) The law here really is clear, and the Constitution does not define any special rights for former presidents.

Presumably, the Mar-a-Lago investigation can soon proceed the way any other criminal investigation would.

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Mark Meadows lost his case at the South Carolina Supreme Court, which refused to protect him from a subpoena to testify to the Fulton County grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia. (Meadows is currently living in South Carolina.)

Because of a previous adverse ruling on his executive privilege claim, Trump’s White House Counsel Pat Cipollone testified to a Washington, D.C. grand jury Friday.

News stories on these kinds of cases leave out the obvious: Trump’s people fight so hard against subpoenas because they don’t want the full truth to come out. Deduce from that what you will. Personally, I believe that if they knew something that would exonerate Trump, they’d be begging to testify.

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One sign that Trump has jumped the shark is that he keeps trolling the country harder and harder, in a vain attempt to regain the edginess he had in 2015. After seven years of watching his act, we’re not shocked any more if he calls Mexicans rapists or says that John McCain wasn’t a hero. So he’s got to turn it up to 11.

Last week we found out he had a pre-Thanksgiving dinner with a White supremacist, Nick Fuentes. (I was going to mention it in last week’s Sift, but it slipped my mind.) And then Saturday he called for “the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution” if that’s what’s necessary to undo the 2020 election and install him as president again.

What’s next? Maybe he’ll suggest genocide against the people who didn’t vote for him. Whatever.

Meanwhile, most Republicans in the House and Senate — stalwart defenders of the Constitution that they are — aren’t commenting. One or two are condemning the remarks, but Rep. Dave Joyce isn’t one of them.

Joyce, the chair of the influential Republican Governance Group in the House, was asked by ABC “This Week” anchor George Stephanopoulos to respond to Trump’s post on Saturday on his Truth Social platform.

Joyce initially declined to do so, saying the public wasn’t “interested in looking backwards.” But Stephanopoulos followed up and Joyce ultimately said that Trump’s comment shouldn’t be taken seriously but that it wouldn’t lead him to pull potential support for Trump’s 2024 comeback bid.

“I will support whoever the Republican nominee is,” Joyce said while noting he didn’t think Trump would manage to win the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

“That’s a remarkable statement,” Stephanopoulos said. “You just said you’d support a candidate who’s come out for suspending the Constitution.”

“Well, you know, he says a lot of things,” Joyce said. “I can’t be really chasing every one of these crazy statements that come out about from any of these candidates at the moment.”

It doesn’t seem to have occurred to Joyce that the GOP could find candidates who don’t constantly make “crazy statements”.

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Former prosecutor Dwight Holton imagines how this Trump statement might play in his own seditious conspiracy trial.

Now the defendant wants you to think that this is all a misunderstanding – that he never meant to subvert the Constitution when he urged his armed followers to go to Capitol Hill to “stop the steal.” “I’d never subvert the Constitution!” the defendant wants you to believe.

But we know that is not true – the evidence makes that crystal clear. We know that subverting the Constitution is right in this defendant’s wheelhouse. And you don’t have to take my word for it. We know he is ready to subvert the Constitution BECAUSE OF HIS OWN WORDS.

and the Twitter/Hunter flap

Twitter continues to go down the tubes under Elon Musk’s visionary leadership, but he has learned a trick from his new right-wing allies: Play the Hunter Biden card.

So at a time when the big Twitter-related stories are falling advertising revenue, Nazis getting their accounts back, and Musk deplatforming Ye (i.e. Kanye West, who is also starting to sound like a Nazi), Musk turned some internal Twitter correspondence over to Matt Taibbi, showing times when the 2020 Biden campaign asked Twitter to take down certain tweets about Hunter Biden based on material allegedly hacked from his famous laptop.

This is being hyped as yet another great Hunter scandal, but (unless there’s a lot more that hasn’t been revealed yet) it seems to fall apart pretty quickly: The tweets in question posted dick pics, which probably would have been taken down for anybody. Tim Miller explains.

A related concern is why the New York Post’s pre-2020-election story on Hunter’s laptop wasn’t the beginning of a big media firestorm. Philip Bump explains that: The authenticity of the laptop and its files was just sketchy enough to remind everyone of the 2016 DNC-emails story, which was based on Russian hacking for the purpose of getting Trump elected. The American media had been played once before, and was wary of getting played again.

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The other thing the Hunter story proves is that people like Musk and Tucker Carlson either don’t understand the First Amendment or don’t want you to understand it. Nothing in the Hunter/Twitter story concerns the First Amendment. The Atlantic’s David French elaborates:

In October 2020, when the laptop story broke, Joe Biden was not president. The Democratic National Committee (which also asked for Twitter to review tweets) is not an arm of the government. It’s a private political party. Twitter is not an arm of the government; it is a private company.

This matters for a simple but profoundly important reason. The First Amendment regulates government conduct. It does not regulate private actors. …

This means the First Amendment protects Twitter, the Biden campaign team, and the Democratic National Committee. The “TWITTER FILES” released so far do not describe a violation of the First Amendment. Instead, they detail the exercise of First Amendment rights by independent, private actors.

Even when the government does get involved, it’s not a First Amendment violation unless some kind of coercion is involved. (An example French doesn’t give, but could: Police may ask media outlets not to publicize certain aspects of a murder case. As long as that’s just a request, it’s not a First Amendment issue.)

But there’s no evidence of any such coercion (at least so far) in the Hunter Biden story, and unless and until there is, the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop is the story of private individuals making decisions they were entitled to make. It is not the story of a government run amok.

Similarly, when Twitter decides to block the account of somebody (like Ye, for example), it’s not a First Amendment issue, any more than it’s a First Amendment issue when The New York Times decides not to print your letter.

A related concern is that the major social-media companies — Twitter, Meta, Google — have too much influence over our national conversation. But that’s an antitrust problem, not a First Amendment problem.

and you also might be interested in …

Both Iran and China seem to have yielded (at least a little) in response to public protests. Iran may be abolishing its morality police, and China is backing off of its zero-Covid policies.

What China does next is tricky, because its population is much more vulnerable to Covid than, say America’s. Fewer people have immunity from previous infections, and China’s vaccine is much less effective, particularly against Omicron variants.

Looking at the results achieved in countries around the world, hindsight makes the right strategy obvious: Lock down hard to limit the spread of the disease until an effective vaccine can be developed, then vaccinate everybody as quickly as you can and reopen.

An authoritarian government like China’s should have an advantage in dealing with a pandemic, and during the lockdown phase it did: China has had fewer deaths per capita than almost any other country. But it should have recognized the superiority of the MRNA vaccines and imported them. Then it could have used its authoritarian power to vaccinate everybody, and reopened its economy with comparatively little damage.

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Tuesday, the Senate passed the Respect for Marriage Act. The House is expected to pass it this week, and President Biden is expected to sign it.

The bill is intended as a backstop in case the Supreme Court overturns its ruling in the Obergefell case, which mandates that same-sex marriages be performed in all 50 states. As Clarence Thomas pointed out in his concurring opinion in Dobbs, the logic the Court used to overturn abortion rights would also overturn same-sex marriage rights.

But this bill stops short of forcing states to perform same-sex marriages. Instead, it says that all states and the federal government must recognize marriages performed in other states. The Clinton-era Defense of Marriage Act allowed states not to recognize same-sex marriages from other states. (To me, that always looked like a violation of the Constitution’s Full Faith and Credit clause, but that’s a different argument.) That would once again be the law if this bill doesn’t pass and the Court overturns Obergefell.

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According to the UK’s Office of National Statistics:

For the first time in a census of England and Wales, less than half of the population (46.2%, 27.5 million people) described themselves as “Christian”, a 13.1 percentage point decrease from 59.3% (33.3 million) in 2011; despite this decrease, “Christian” remained the most common response to the religion question.

“No religion” was the second most common response, increasing by 12.0 percentage points to 37.2% (22.2 million) from 25.2% (14.1 million) in 2011.

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Back in August, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis suspended Hillsborough County State Attorney Andrew Warren (who was elected, not appointed) because Warren said he would not enforce the state’s 15-week abortion ban, and signed a statement supporting prosecutors in other states who refuse to enforce laws against gender-affirming care.

DeSantis summed up his objection by calling Warren a “woke ideologue”. “Woke” has been a buzzword for DeSantis, as it has been for much of the right. But does it mean anything, or is it just pejorative?

Warren challenged his suspension in court, and the trial was held this week, though there is no decision yet. During the trial DeSantis aides were asked what “woke” meant to them. I found DeSantis’ General Counsel Ryan Newman’s answer astounding.

Asked what “woke” means more generally, Newman said “it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.”

Newman added that DeSantis doesn’t believe there are systemic injustices in the U.S.

If you had asked me what conservatives mean by “woke”, I would have given more-or-less the same answer. But I’m viewing them as a hostile outsider. I never imagined they would put it that way themselves.

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While we’re on the subject, the NYT’s Jamelle Bouie has some interesting observations about the “woke capitalism” DeSantis objects to. Bouie thinks DeSantis should have read more Karl Marx. Then he would understand that capitalism inevitably upends established social relations and prejudices. You can have traditional values or you can have unfettered capitalism, but not both.

Conservatives, if their policy priorities are any indication, want to both unleash the free market and reserve a space for hierarchy and domination. But this will not happen on its own. The state must be brought to bear, not to restrain capital per se but to make it as subordinate as possible to the political right’s preferred social agenda.

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The WaPo’s Ruth Marcus savages the judicial philosophy of originalism. Two criticisms seem particularly on-target to me:

• Originalism encourages how-many-angels-can-dance-on-a-pinhead arguments about unknowable questions, like exactly what people in other eras thought some particular word meant. They may not have had a coherent view, and may have chosen a vague word precisely because they couldn’t agree on anything more specific.
• Conservative judges apply originalism opportunistically to get the results they want. (The Founders’ hostility to corporations like the British East India Company, for example, goes out the window whenever the Court considers corporate rights.)

and let’s close with something family oriented

John Wilhelm has some very cute and expressive kids, a camera, and photo-manipulation skills. The three come together in imaginative ways. He calls this one “Catch It Like a Dog”.

I look forward – always forward – to the unfolding story of our nation: a story of light and love, of patriotism and progress, of many becoming one, and, always, an unfinished mission to make the dreams of today the reality of tomorrow.

– Speaker Nancy Pelosi

This week’s featured post is “When can I stop writing about Trump?“.

This week everybody was talking about the new Congress

We finally have a result in the House: the Republicans will have a narrow majority, with somewhere between 3 and 11 more seats than the Democrats. (For comparison, Democrats came out of the 2020 elections with 9 more seats than the Republicans.) Kevin McCarthy was reelected leader of the GOP House caucus, but whether that means he has the votes to become speaker is still undetermined.

Successful Republican candidates ran on the issues of inflation and crime, so McCarthy immediately unveiled a legislative program to address those problems. NO, I’M KIDDING. Republicans immediately starting talking about investigating Hunter Biden.

At a press conference on Thursday, when a reporter began to pose a question about the plans of the coming Republican majority that was not linked to the Biden family, [incoming Chair of the House Oversight Committee James] Comer, from Kentucky, sprang forward to say, “If we could keep it about Hunter Biden, that would be great.”

This investigation is supposed to own the libs somehow, but I don’t know any Democrats who actually care about Hunter (other than, I assume, his Dad). Hunter is a private citizen who (unlike, say, Ivanka and Jared) has held no position in his father’s administration. In four years, the Trump Justice Department somehow failed to prosecute Hunter for anything, and there’s already a DoJ investigation and a grand jury hearing testimony about him in Delaware. But if McCarthy thinks the House can do better, he should have at it. (BTW: Marcy Wheeler’s opinion is that the “Hunter Biden laptop” is a forensic mess.)

If Hunter does wind up in jail someday, though, I don’t see that outcome having any effect on the country or even the government, other than making the President sad.

McCarthy promises investigations plural, but again, little in the way of legislation that will offer Republican solutions that the Democratic Senate will have to respond to. Other investigations might include harassing the Department of Justice for investigating Trump’s crimes (because the Durham investigation worked out so well), promoting conspiracy theories about the origin of Covid-19, examining Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the state of our border with Mexico (which could be interesting if Republicans look at it honestly, which I suspect they won’t).

Marjorie Taylor Greene claims that she has gotten a promise from McCarthy to “investigate Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Justice Department for their treatment of defendants jailed in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.” Because, you know, they’re all political prisoners who didn’t really do anything wrong, no matter what the juries say.

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Will the GOP learn anything from its disappointing 2022 results? Looking at the lame-duck agenda of the Pennsylvania House, which will flip to the Democrats in January, Amanda Marcotte thinks not.

[Philadelphia District Attorney Larry] Krasner’s impeachment is just a symptom of this larger problem. We shouldn’t expect any Republicans, anywhere, to respond to these midterm losses by actively trying to deradicalize their party. If only. They’ll just double down on conspiracy theories and lies, in a last-ditch attempt to delegitimize the voters who keep rejecting them.

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Josh Hawley’s WaPo op-ed is a somewhat mixed bag, but mostly proves Marcotte’s point. The GOP’s problem, Hawley thinks, is that it hasn’t been radical enough.

For the past two years, the Republican establishment in Washington has capitulated on issue after issue, caving to Democrats on the Second Amendment and on the left’s radical climate agenda (“infrastructure”).

“Caving to Democrats on the Second Amendment” is a reference to the very modest (and very popular) reform bill passed in June, which increased background checks for gun buyers under 21 and made it harder for domestic abusers to own guns. (Hawley is welcome to propose a “give guns back to domestic abusers” bill if he wants.) And I wonder what his alternative to “the left’s radical climate agenda” is. Let it burn?

The positive side of Hawley’s article is that he wants Republicans to stop threatening Social Security and Medicare, and siding with Big Pharma on insulin prices. But then there’s this:

Republicans will only secure the generational victories they crave when they come to terms with this reality: They must persuade a critical mass of working class voters that the GOP truly represents their interests and protects their culture. [my italics]

When he wrote the phrase “working class”, Hawley left out the modifying phrase “older White Christian”, which is clearly implied. A government that “protects the culture” against change is the essence of Orbanism, which appears to be the new model for Republican authoritarian government. That agenda is not just anti-immigrant, but also pro-fossil-fuel, pro-Don’t-Say-Gay, anti-trans, anti-voting-rights, and against any attempt to tell school children about America’s history of racism. I don’t think younger voters support that agenda, even in the White Christian working class.

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What happened to the Impeachment 10, the ten Republicans in the House who voted for Trump’s second impeachment? Only one, Dan Newhouse of Washington, got re-elected. Dan Valadao of California got renominated and leads, though his race still hasn’t been called.

Four retired: Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, Fred Upton of Michigan, and John Katko of New York. Gonzalez’ district got eliminated when Ohio lost a seat after the 2020 census. Republicans held Kinzinger’s and Katko’s seats, but lost Upton’s.

Four lost primaries: Liz Cheney of Wyoming, Tom Rice of South Carolina, Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington, and Peter Meijer of Michigan. Republicans held Cheney’s and Rice’s seats, but lost Beutler’s and Meijer’s.

So: One re-elected. One re-election still undecided. One seat eliminated. Four seats held by new Republicans. Three seats lost to Democrats. So Trump mostly got the scalps he was after, but at a cost to his party.

and Nancy Pelosi

She was going to have to give up the speakership anyway, now that the Republicans have won the majority and will take over the House in January. But she also announced that she won’t run to lead the House Democratic caucus, a position she has held since 2003. She has been speaker twice, 2007-2011 and 2019-2023.

Progressives like to bash Pelosi for favoring moderate positions, but I can’t think of an example during her speakership of a progressive bill that passed the Senate but got stuck in the House. If some part of the Obama or Biden agenda had a legitimate chance to become law, Speaker Pelosi passed it. She is widely given credit for the legislative maneuver that pushed ObamaCare over the finish line after the Democrats unexpectedly lost their filibuster-proof Senate majority.

I think Kevin McCarthy is about to show us just how difficult it is to be speaker when you have a narrow majority. (John Boehner and Paul Ryan had trouble governing with much larger majorities, or even predicting what their caucus was going to do.) Like Ginger Rogers matching Fred Astaire’s moves backwards and in heels, Pelosi has made speakership look easy these last few years, but it’s not.

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It’s not just Pelosi stepping aside, but also her second and third in command, Steny Hoyer and James Clyburn. That clears a path for a new generation of Democratic leaders. The new minority leader is likely to be Hakeem Jefferies, a 52-year-old from New York. 58-year-old Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and 43-year-old Pete Aguilar of California are likely to join him in the Democratic leadership.

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Pelosi’s resignation speech on the floor of the House included a classic Pelosi insult-by-omission.

It has been my privilege to play a part in forging extraordinary progress for the American people.  I have enjoyed working with three Presidents, achieving historic investments in clean energy with President George Bush, transformative health care reform with President Barack Obama, and forging the future – from infrastructure to health care to climate action – with President Joe Biden.

Wait. Wasn’t some fourth guy president during part of her speakership? Give me a minute. His name is right on the tip of my tongue.

and Trump

The featured post looks at the convergence of several Trump stories this week: the announcement of his candidacy, the surprisingly cool reaction that announcement got, Merrick Garland naming a special prosecutor to investigate Trump, and Elon Musk reactivating Trump’s Twitter account, which it’s not clear that he’s going to start using again.

and Twitter

This week Twitter continued to hemorrhage users, engineers, advertisers, and cash. MarketWatch reports on the engineers:

Elon Musk’s managerial bomb-throwing at Twitter has so thinned the ranks of software engineers who keep the world’s de-facto public square up and running that industry insiders and programmers who were fired or resigned this week agree: Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.

Musk ended a very public argument with nearly two dozen coders critical to the microblogging platform’s stability by ordering them fired this week. Hundreds of engineers and other workers then quit after he demanded they pledge to “extremely hardcore” work by Thursday evening or resign with severance pay.

The newest departures mean the platform is losing workers just at it is gears up for the 2022 FIFA World Cup, which opens Sunday. It’s one of Twitter’s busiest events, when tweet surges heavily stress its systems.

The Wall Street Journal describes the money situation:

Nearly 90% of its revenue last year came from advertising, and it traditionally has been the company’s main source of revenue. … The exodus of advertisers poses a threat for a company so reliant on that revenue stream. “As an online ad company, you’re flirting with disaster,” said Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business. … Market-research firm Insider Intelligence Inc. recently cut its annual ad-revenue revenue outlook for Twitter by nearly 40% through 2024.

Meanwhile, Twitter has interest payments to meet. Musk financed $13 billion of his $42 billion purchase by loading the company with debt. That debt is at higher interest rates because the credit rating has dropped.

As for users, I am regularly seeing messages from my Facebook friends telling me their new Mastodon address. I rarely use Twitter for anything other than posting links to Weekly Sift articles, but I will probably try out Mastodon soon.

I’m thinking that this might turn into a big enough disaster to change the culture. Going forward, it’s going to be really hard to make the case that billionaires are rich because they’re so much smarter than the rest of us.

and you also might be interested in …

There was a lot of fear in the air Tuesday when a missile crossed the Ukrainian border and hit inside Poland. What if this was a deliberate Russian attack, a warning shot telling NATO to stop supporting Ukraine? Would NATO have to respond somehow? If it did, would we be be on some kind of tit-for-tat escalation path towards World War III?

Apparently not. The currently accepted theory is that Russia’s missile attacks on Ukraine led the Ukrainians to fire air defense missiles. One of those went astray and landed inside Poland, killing two people.

During the coverage of this incident I learned that Russian misfires (which this strike now appears not to be) are more and more likely as the war goes on. Russia has used up nearly all of its most accurate missiles and is now shooting off whatever it has left. For example, they’ve started using anti-aircraft and anti-ship missiles against land targets.

Strikes from a Russian S-300 air defense system “don’t have the ‘oomph’ to really hit hardened military targets and they don’t have the accuracy in a land attack role to even strike the building you want to hit,” [Ian] Williams [of the Center for Strategic and International Studies] said. “This really is just firing them into the ether and seeing where they land.”

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It’s still too soon to say anything conclusive about the shooting at a Colorado Springs LGBTQ club Saturday night, but it has all the marks of a hate crime.

While no motive in the shooting has been disclosed by authorities, the violence comes amid heightened tensions for the LGBTQ community. Several drag events around the country have drawn protests and threats, with some protesters carrying firearms, and more than 240 anti-LGBTQ bills were filed in the first three months of this year, most of them targeting trans people.

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The COP-27 climate conference in Egypt was a mixed bag. The decision to create a loss-and-damage fund is big, but the commitment to phase out fossil fuels didn’t happen.

and let’s close with something epic

A strangely acquired taste is the Epic Rap Battles of History on YouTube. My favorite so far is Eastern vs. Western philosophers.

No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government — except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

– Winston Churchill

This week’s featured post is “Can conservatives be allies against climate change?“

And if you’re wondering what I did with my week off, here’s the talk I gave.

This week everybody has been talking about tomorrow’s elections

Ordinarily, the day before an election I write a guide for people who plan to watch the returns come in, including things like poll closing times in various states, which early-reporting races are likely to be bellwethers for how the night is going, and so on.

I’m not doing that this time, because I’m not planning to watch, so I’m not sure that I want to encourage you to watch. Probably I won’t be able to resist briefly turning the TV on every hour or two, but I don’t think that an all-evening watch party will be good for my health and sanity.

It’s not that I’m sure my candidates will lose, although the polls have been trending that way for the last few weeks. It’s possible that the attack on Paul Pelosi (see next note) was a wake-up call to the electorate, that Obama’s tour of swing states will make a difference, or that the polls have been undercounting young women who previously haven’t voted, but will turn out to protect their reproductive rights. So there’s reason to hope, reason to vote, and reason to do whatever you can to encourage others to vote.

The reason I’m planning to restrain myself from watching the returns is that I have a bad attitude: I’m pissed at the American people. A lot of these races shouldn’t be close. Herschel Walker, for one, should not have gotten anywhere near the Senate, and the idea that he can run (against a minister like Rafael Warnock) as the “Christian” candidate should scandalize anyone who cares about Jesus or the churches founded in his name. And Ron Johnson didn’t just wink and nod as Trump tried to overthrow American democracy, he was an active participant in the plot to count the votes of fake electors. I could go on.

I didn’t used to feel this way. When John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 ran against Barack Obama, for example, I had no doubt that I wanted Obama to win. But I also saw some virtues in McCain and Romney, and I understood how someone with different values could rate those virtues higher than Obama’s virtues. (During the 2012 primaries, I wrote “The Tragedy of Mitt Romney” about the candidate he could have been.)

This year, I’ve lost that vision and that generosity of spirit. I can’t twist a few knobs in my values and picture myself supporting Doug Mastriano or Kari Lake. How does that go? “Sure, he’s antisemitic, but …” or “I know she’s against democracy, but …”

With exceptions I can count on my fingers, the Republican Party is now a personality cult, and the man they worship is a fascist. I can’t get past that.

So anyway, there are polls. Nate Silver is currently giving Republicans an 83% chance to take the House and a 55% chance to take the Senate.

The key Senate races are Georgia (where Herschel Walker has a 58% chance of defeating Raphael Warnock), Nevada (Paul Laxalt has a 57% chance to defeat Catherine Cortez Masto), and Pennsylvania (John Fetterman has a 54% chance to defeat Mehmet Oz). Whichever party takes two of those three races probably wins the Senate.

and the Pelosi attack

The narrative here is pretty simple: Republican rhetoric has been demonizing Nancy Pelosi for decades, and we’ve known for a while that some of the more unhinged right-wing partisans take that demonic image very seriously. QAnon folks, for example, promote the libel that she (and other top Democrats) drink the blood of children. Some of the seditionists on January 6 were roaming the halls of the Capitol calling “Nancy … Nancy” like villains in a horror movie.

So early in the morning of Friday October 28, the Speaker’s 82-year-old husband woke up to find a man standing over his bed with a hammer, asking where Nancy was. He said he was there to “have a little chat” with Speaker Pelosi, and later told police he intended to kidnap the Speaker and break her kneecaps unless she told him “the truth”, whatever he imagined the truth to be.

Paul Pelosi then had a bizarre conversation with the attacker, during which he managed to call 911. When police arrived, the attacker hit Pelosi in the head with the hammer. We don’t have a lot of details about his injuries, but he needed surgery and didn’t get out of the hospital until Thursday.

It’s important to be clear on what Republicans are and aren’t responsible for here. The attacker looks to be a deranged loner, rather than part of an organized fascist group like the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys, or even the men recently convicted of plotting to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. No one is accusing Trump or any of the leaders of his cult with planning or carrying out the attack.

At worst, this seems to be “stochastic terrorism” — promoting the idea that your political enemies deserve violence, while knowing that you have violent followers who are likely to respond. The classic example is King Henry II saying “Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?“, which resulted in the murder of Thomas Becket. Henry’s hands may have stayed clean, but he knew or should have known what might happen.

Even that judgment may seem a bit harsh, until you look at how Republicans reacted to news of the attack. Their immediate reflex was to make up and promote a false narrative in which the attack had nothing to do with politics, but instead reflected badly on Paul Pelosi himself.

The flood of falsehoods showed how ingrained misinformation has become inside the G.O.P., where the reflexive response of the rank and file — and even a few prominent figures — to anything that might cast a negative light on the right is to deflect with more fictional claims, creating a vicious cycle that muddies facts, shifts blame and minimizes violence.

Donald Trump Jr. quickly tweeted a joke about the attack, and Trump Sr. told an interviewer that there were “weird things going on in that household the last couple of weeks”, as if the Pelosis had done something to invite violence. Kari Lake got uproarious laughter by telling a campaign crowd “Nancy Pelosi, well, she’s got protection when she’s in D.C. Apparently, her house doesn’t have a lot of protection.” Lake did not appear shocked by the response, and did nothing to rein in the hilarity.

What should Republicans say? Well, here’s what Bernie Sanders said in 2017 (which is how far back you have to go to find any comparable liberal political violence) after the shooter of Steve Scalise turned out to have been a volunteer for the Sanders presidential campaign:

I am sickened by this despicable act. Let me be as clear as I can be. Violence of any kind is unacceptable in our society and I condemn this action in the strongest possible terms. Real change can only come about through nonviolent action, and anything else runs against our most deeply held American values. My hopes and prayers are that Representative Scalise, congressional staff and the Capitol Police Officers who were wounded make a quick and full recovery. I also want to thank the Capitol Police for their heroic actions to prevent further harm.

No jokes, no conspiracy theories, no implications that Scalise was asking for it somehow. No excuses about how “passionate” Sanders’ supporters are, or how “angry” the state of the country has made them. Just: This is wrong. Don’t do it.

Given the upswing in right-wing violence since Trump lost the 2020 election, I’d like to hear an even stronger statement:

If any of my supporters think they’re doing me a favor by physically attacking my political rivals, they’re wrong. If you’re involved in any ongoing plots, I want you to stop.

But Trump and the other MAGA Republicans won’t say anything like that, because don’t believe political violence is “unacceptable”. Quite the opposite: They’re counting on it.

and Twitter

So, after months of stop-and-start will-he-or-won’t-he, Elon Musk finally owns Twitter. He immediately fired a lot of people and announced a lot of intentions that may not manifest for some while, if ever. There’s some evidence that trolling and hate speech have already increased in anticipation of lower standards and more lax enforcement.

My personal experience of Twitter hasn’t changed yet, so I’m in a wait-and-see mode. I’m hearing a lot of people talk about closing their account and moving to some rival platform, but there’s not a simple Coke/Pepsi or iPhone/Android replacement.

What we need is a sagacious, media-savvy voice of sanity, and I’ll nominate James Fallows. He makes a few key points in his Substack post “Twitter is Our Future“.

• He plans to stay on Twitter for the time being.
• He’s not going to pay a monthly fee to maintain his “blue check mark” (which verifies that he is who he says he is), because those check marks benefit the system as a whole, not him as an individual.
• Twitter is a “bellwether” for changing media platforms in general. Many online communities are going to be displaced as media sites change, but the process is happening much faster on Twitter.
• While individual tweets aren’t reliable sources of information, they are valuable tips about what might be happening.
• Musk himself is “like a rich football fan buying an NFL team and imagining that he can name draft-picks and call plays.” Fallows also quotes a line from The Great Gatsby: “They were careless people… they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness… and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
• No single site will replace Twitter, but “there will have to be many, and we’ll blunder and feel our way forward.”

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The substitute most Twitter-refugees are choosing is Mastodon, which is not exactly the same thing. I haven’t tried it yet.

and nuclear threats

If the rest of the news wasn’t depressing enough this week, The New Yorker’s resident Putin expert, Masha Gessen, warns that we need to take his threat to use nuclear weapons seriously.

In the end, every “rational” case for why Putin won’t use nuclear weapons in Ukraine falls short. He is not afraid of losing support from his current allies, because he misapprehends Russia’s position in the world; he sees Russia as politically, economically, and militarily stronger than it is. Chinese and Indian leaders may express alarm at the use of extreme measures such as nuclear weapons, but to Putin this points to their lack of resolve—their weakness, not the Kremlin’s. And, if need be, he is prepared to make outlandish denials, no matter how implausible. …

The arguments that Putin won’t use nuclear weapons because doing so would endanger Russians, including himself, are blind to the fact that Putin believes he has the right, possibly the moral obligation, to sacrifice hundreds of thousands or millions of people. The argument that a nuclear strike wouldn’t help Putin achieve his strategic goals mistakes Russia’s strategic goals as anything but inflicting terror on Ukrainians. The losses the Russian military is suffering now can only motivate Putin to create more terror, against more people.

you also might be interested in …

The week’s good news was that Jair Bolsonaro narrowly lost his re-election bid in Brazil, and it looks like he’s going to accept that he has to leave office. Brazilian election officials made an interesting choice: They avoided the appearance of election shenanigans by going with electronic voting systems that produce instant results. In the long run, though, they’ve made real voting fraud easier, because the lack of paper ballots makes the system impossible to audit.

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Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to reclaim the prime minister’s office following the recent elections. It’s tempting to shrug and say “We’ve been here before”, but actually we haven’t. This time his coalition includes some right-wing parties that used to be beyond the pale in Israeli politics.

Some members of his likely parliamentary majority believe in Jewish supremacy and support racist policies that may ultimately change the way the state of Israel protects the rights of its citizens, whether Palestinians who hold citizenship or leftists, activists, and critics who seek equal rights for Palestinians in the occupied territory.

NYT columnist Thomas Friedman says “The Israel we knew is gone.”

Netanyahu has been propelled into power by bedfellows who: see Israeli Arab citizens as a fifth column who can’t be trusted; have vowed to take political control over judicial appointments; believe that Jewish settlements must be expanded so there is not an inch left anywhere in the West Bank for a Palestinian state; want to enact judicial changes that could freeze Netanyahu’s ongoing corruption trial; and express contempt for Israel’s long and strong embrace of L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

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and let’s close with something moving

When the world gets to be too much, you can always dance, even if the music isn’t from your era.

The misgovernment of the American people is misgovernment by the American people.

– Lincoln Steffens, The Shame of the Cities (1904)

This is our last election. It is fascism or communism. We are at the crossroads. I take the road to fascism.

– Father Charles Coughlin (1936)

This week’s featured post is “American Democracy has been in trouble before“.

This week everybody was talking about the upcoming elections

Polls seem to be tipping back towards Republicans as inflation continues and the stock market keeps falling. But it’s not too late for them to turn again.

Conventional wisdom says Democrats should hope voters are thinking about abortion or democracy or Trump rather than the economy. But I wonder if perhaps the Democrats’ closing message ought to focus on what Republicans will do to the economy if they win one or both houses of Congress: They’ll sabotage it, like they did when Obama was president.

That seems pretty obvious, but not many Democrats are talking about it.

Republicans are already promising a return to their Obama-era hostage-taking policies. If they get hold of any lever of power, you can count on them to force government shutdowns and to play chicken with the debt ceiling. If the Fed succeeds in starting a recession, they’ll try to make it worse with spending cuts.

When I imagine a debt-ceiling crisis, the worst thing is that the MAGA generation of right-wing radicals is significantly dumber than the Tea Party generation. Ted Cruz may have pretended otherwise, but he always knew what a disaster it would be if the US defaulted on its debt. I don’t think Marjorie Taylor Greene does, and I can’t see Kevin McCarthy standing up to her, especially if Trump thinks a global economic panic will help him in 2024.

and Ukraine

Unable to win on the front lines, Putin seems to have settled on a Battle-of-Britain strategy. He’s raining destruction on Ukrainian cities in hope of breaking the people’s will. It didn’t work for Hitler, but I guess you never know.

and the Trump subpoena

The January 6 Committee held another hearing on Thursday. I didn’t feel like I learned much that was new, but the Committee did bolster what might be its closing argument: January 6 wasn’t a rally that got out of control. Rather, it was the culmination of a plot to steal the 2020 election that Trump was already hatching the summer before.

The conclusion of the hearing was a unanimous vote to subpoena Trump himself. I think it’s extremely unlikely that Trump will ever testify to the Committee, which goes out of business on January 1 and certainly won’t be renewed if Republicans get control of the House. But issuing the subpoena does establish a key point: Trump isn’t telling his side of the story because he doesn’t want to, not because the Committee doesn’t want to hear it.

and other egregious malefactors

A Connecticut jury decided Alex Jones owes the Sandy Hook families nearly $1 billion. That’s on top of the $50 million a Texas jury awarded earlier this year, and it doesn’t count possible punitive damages still to be assessed by the judge.

Most observers believe Jones doesn’t have a billion dollars, though he does have considerably more than he claims. (Somewhere in the hundreds of millions, probably.) Declaring bankruptcy probably won’t save him.

When the last appeal ends, the experts predict Jones will be left owing many millions of dollars to the Sandy Hook families he defamed in his broadcasts, in addition to other creditors chasing him through bankruptcy court.

“Alex Jones probably doesn’t have much of a project in life at this point other than beating these kinds of money judgments,” said UConn law professor Minor Meyers. “By and large, he is going to have a hard time earning money without immediately being forced to hand it over. He may really enjoy being a radio personality, but I can’t imagine he wants to do it pro bono.”

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Steve Bannon’s contempt-of-Congress trial has moved to the sentencing phase. The government is asking for a six month prison sentence, rather than the maximum two years.

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So Sean Hannity played a recording of a Biden phone message to his son Hunter from October, 2018. (Obtained how, exactly?) It revealed Biden as a compassionate father trying to support a troubled son.

It’s Dad. I called to tell you I love you. I love you more than the whole world, pal. You gotta get some help. I don’t know what to do. I know you don’t either. I’m here, no matter what you need. No matter what you need, I love you.

For some reason, Hannity appeared to consider this a “gotcha” of some sort, which says more about Hannity than he probably intended to reveal.

I keep seeing tweets from people who made some mistakes in their lives and wish their parents had been more like Joe Biden.

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Perhaps the most interesting thing about Tucker Carlson’s interview with Kanye West is how Carlson edited out Kanye’s anti-semitism to fit the story he wanted to tell.

Media Matters’ Matt Gertz has the details, along with this summary of Tucker’s overall message and mission.

Tucker Carlson Tonight revolves around an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The host posits that a cabal of global elites controls the heights of U.S. politics, media, culture, and business, and is using its power to corrupt American children, destroy western civilization, and replace its population with immigrants.

Carlson’s innovation is that he generally deracinates these familiar antisemitic tropes. While open white supremacists might argue, for example, that Jews are using immigration to replace the white population with a black and brown one, Carlson tells his viewers that elites like the financier George Soros (who is Jewish) are replacing “legacy Americans” with people from “far-away countries” in the “third world.”

Carlson’s stated worldview is close enough that neo-Nazis regularly praise his show for mainstreaming their blood-soaked positions. But Carlson’s careful use of language, and his furious denials that he is a racist, give the Fox brass just enough plausible deniability that they can continue to defend and support his program. 

but maybe we should be talking about nuclear power

This week, the stock broker I inherited from my father tossed out a speculative idea: NuScale Power. He said he couldn’t recommend it, because he wasn’t sure exactly what the company does. But one of his other clients had done the research and was very hot on it. So it might be something to look into, given that my portfolio has been light on energy stocks ever since I purged my fossil-fuel holdings.

The symbol for the stock is SMR, which turns out to stand for “small modular reactor”, a new generation of nuclear power plants that promise to be smaller, safer, easier to build, and less one-of-a-kind than current nuclear power plants. The environmental news site Grist had a mostly favorable article about SMRs in 2020.

While it’s true that renewable energy is cheap now, most energy wonks think it will get expensive when renewables are powering the entire grid, which will require building lots of batteries to deal with fluctuations in the sun and wind. Sure, there are studies suggesting it wouldn’t be prohibitively expensive to power the country purely on renewables, but the most accurate ones — which model the nitty-gritty details of how electrical systems work — tend to show that the best way to keep renewable power cheap is by having a source of clean energy that can be turned up when wind dies and the sun is hiding behind the clouds, said Matt Bowen, a research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy, at Columbia University.

“In the energy world, there are really two camps: The all-renewables camp and everyone else,” he said. “I’m with everyone else.”

The negative case was outlined by Farhad Manjoo last month in the NYT: At best, nuclear power is the expensive kind of power you throw into a low-CO2-emission system when its renewables-and-batteries component is failing to keep up with demand. Manjoo recognizes the potential of SMRs, but if you have to do research to make a power-generation system work, why not spend your research dollars on better renewables and batteries? (And I’ll add this: There’s still no long-term storage plan for the radioactive waste.)

In the end, I decided SMR is not for me (which is one reason I feel no ethical qualms about discussing it here; I’m not touting a stock I own). Even if nuclear does have a role to play in the transition to a low-carbon-emission future, that role looks purely transitional to me. So a nuclear power-plant construction company doesn’t seem like a good long-term investment. If I bought into the industry now, I’d also have to figure out when to sell.

and you also might be interested in …

One of the most important topics in political research is just how social media contributes to political polarization. A new study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has a surprising answer. (The study itself is behind a paywall, but an article about it is here.)

Most people think social media is polarizing because it isolates you inside an echo chamber. You are constantly hearing people agree with you that Trump or Biden is a villain, so there’s no reason you should change your mind.

The study says it doesn’t work quite that way. What establishes and hardens a political identity is that social media also exposes you to opposition. You solidify as this or that when you argue with people on the other side.

We shouldn’t think of the internet as an “echo chamber” in which our arguments are repeated back to us until we get more and more convinced. I think it’s more like the island in the Lord of the Flies: it creates a social space that affords the emergence of separate social groups, it strengthens collective identities, and pushes opposing groups into conflict. This leads to a form of politics that is based on cycles of conflict between two warring tribes.

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Slate examines just how hard it is for a transman to get breast-reduction surgery. Anti-trans mythology imagines doctors all too eager to prey on impressionable people, especially minors, by pushing irreversible gender-affirming treatments. The article claims exactly the opposite is true.

This detail sounds especially weird:

It is, after all, much easier for cis people to get plastic surgery than for trans people to get gender-affirming care. In 2020, there were 15.6 million cosmetic procedures performed in the U.S., according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. Breast augmentations were one of the most popular surgeries, with 3,223 of these procedures performed on people aged 13 to 19.

If that sounds OK to you, but you still object to a similarly aged person with a female birth certificate getting their breasts reduced, you might want to think some more about that.

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Apropos of nothing, Dan Kois’ retrospective on Rod McKuen is fascinating. Kois is too young to remember when McKuen sold poetry books by the millions and was the kind of celebrity poets never get to be.

But by the time I was a teenager, he had completely vanished from the cultural landscape. I only know of him because I spent the entire 1990s in thrift stores and used bookshops, and everywhere I went, I saw Rod McKuen’s name.

Eventually, Kois’ article turns into a meditation on cultural memory.

One of the weird contradictions of living in the future is that every artist is at the tip of your fingers, but you can only find who your fingers know to search for. In the not-so-distant past, artists could avoid slipping away thanks to only the physical evidence: a record in a thrift store, a used book with a man in a white turtleneck on its cover, murmuring to the bewildered shopper, “Who am I? To whom did I matter? To whom did I stop mattering?”

The Spotify algorithm, Amazon’s recommendations, they’ll never, ever show you Rod McKuen. Those are designed to direct you towards things that other people like right now. But thrift stores, used bookshops, and Goodwills are, accidentally, perfectly designed to show you things that people liked decades ago, then stopped liking.

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I love surprising science results. The WaPo’s Well Being column offers this:

“Healthy fat is not about the amount of fat” someone carries, said Jeffrey Horowitz, a professor at the University of Michigan, who studies exercise and metabolism. It is about how well that fat functions, he said. “A person who has healthier fat is much better off than someone with the same body fat percentage whose fat is unhealthy.”

Apparently, what you want are small fat cells that can expand or contract as the body’s supply-and-demand of calories requires. What you don’t want are big inefficient fat cells leaking fatty acids that can build up inside vital organs.

This is why physical activity can make you healthier, even if you don’t lose weight or even lose fat. Exercise can “remake” your fat.

and let’s close with something batty

It turns out that bats aren’t just screeching for no reason, or even necessarily echolocating. A lot of the time they’re arguing with each other.

Yossi Yovel and his colleagues recorded a group of 22 Egyptian fruit bats, Rousettus aegyptiacus, for 75 days. Using a modified machine learning algorithm originally designed for recognizing human voices, they fed 15,000 calls into the software. They then analyzed the corresponding video to see if they could match the calls to certain activities.

They found that the bat noises are not just random, as previously thought, reports Skibba. They were able to classify 60 percent of the calls into four categories. One of the call types indicates the bats are arguing about food. Another indicates a dispute about their positions within the sleeping cluster. A third call is reserved for males making unwanted mating advances and the fourth happens when a bat argues with another bat sitting too close. In fact, the bats make slightly different versions of the calls when speaking to different individuals within the group, similar to a human using a different tone of voice when talking to different people.

You know who questioned slavery? The enslaved people.

– Van Jones

There’s no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about Ian

I won’t try to cover the devastation or the human suffering, because the mainstream media has been all over that. (I can’t tell you how many NBC reporters I’ve seen standing in front of a boat sitting on top of a crushed Chevy Suburban in Fort Myers. The network appears to have declared that particular site Ground Zero.)

I do think it’s worth noticing how normal Biden’s response has been. No Sharpie controversies. No playing politics with disaster funding. No presidential whining that some governor hasn’t been nice enough to him. No tossing paper towels into a crowd, as if relief supplies come from his personal largesse.

One big reason Biden was elected was to make government normal again. This is an example of him doing precisely that. It doesn’t matter that Governor DeSantis is one of Biden’s potential rivals in 2024. Florida needs help and it’s the president’s job to see that they get it.

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Disasters like Ian emphasize a point that David Graeber made in Debt: the first 5,000 years: Society rests on a core of communism that we seldom see until an emergency happens. When everything else breaks down, we help people because they need it and expect people to help because they can.

In a pure market economy, you’d be perfectly justified to frame a disaster as an opportunity to make enormous profits by, say, only rescuing people who can pay you a lot. But we all understand how unseemly that would be.

(Crassus, the rich man who joined Caesar and Pompey in Rome’s First Triumvirate, made a lot of his money by training a crew of slaves to fight fires — which happened all the time in a crowded city built out of wood. When he saw a fire, he’d show up with his crew and offer to buy adjacent properties for a low, low price. After the sale, he’d have the fire put out. What a guy!)

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As I predicted last week, the hurricane in Florida made us all forget Hurricane Fiona’s damage to Puerto Rico, which never did get the 24/7 coverage of Ian. But PR isn’t back to normal yet.

On Friday – as Floridians assessed the destruction left by Hurricane Ian and the storm made landfall in South Carolina as a Category 1 – more than 230,000 customers in Puerto Rico were still without electricity, according to the PowerOutage.US website. More than 800,000 customers were without power last weekend.

Nearly 80,000 customers – about 6% – of the Puerto Rico Aqueduct and Sewer Authority were without water on Friday, according to the government’s emergency portal system website.

Fox News even forgot Puerto Rico is part of the United States.

Martha MacCallum was telling Fox News viewers about the devastating impacts of hurricanes in places such as Cuba and Puerto Rico on Wednesday when she quipped: “Thank God we have better infrastructure in our country”.

We should never forget the reason Puerto Rico isn’t a state: race and language prejudice. If the US owned an island of three million English-speaking White people, it would have joined the union decades ago.

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After Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans, right-wing Christians proclaimed it as a sign of God’s judgment. Franklin Graham in particular showed little sympathy for the city’s suffering:

This is one wicked city, OK? It’s known for Mardi Gras, for Satan worship. It’s known for sex perversion. It’s known for every type of drugs and alcohol and the orgies and all of these things that go on down there in New Orleans. … There’s been a black spiritual cloud over New Orleans for years. They believe God is going to use that storm to bring revival.

Those voices are silent now. Florida has been competing with Texas to lead the nation in persecuting trans youth, shoving LGBTQ people back into the closet, and keeping students ignorant about racism. So what about that, fundamentalist preachers? Does God speak through storms or not? What might God be trying to tell Ron DeSantis?

Or maybe all the signs-of-God’s-judgment talk has always just been a way for flim-flam artists like Graham to put their own words into God’s mouth.

and Putin’s annexations

He went through with it.

On Friday, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally declared four regions of Ukraine as part of Russia following sham referendums this week in eastern and southern Ukraine. Putin made the illegal decree as he lobbed even more threats against the United States and its allies, another potential escalation in the war in Ukraine and in Russia’s standoff with the West.

Putin moved to annex four regions of eastern and southern Ukraine — Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia — after officials in Russian-controlled territory staged an illegal vote on joining Russia. The Kremlin does not fully control any of these areas, and pollsters reportedly went door to door with armed soldiers in Russian-controlled zones, but Putin justified the decree by saying that it was done on behalf of the “will of millions of people.”

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“Illegal” can be a loaded word, so I tracked down the basis for the claim that the annexation referendums are illegal. The 1958 commentary on the fourth Geneva Convention (1949) says:

As was emphasized in the commentary on Article 4, the occupation of territory in wartime is essentially a temporary, de facto situation, which deprives the occupied Power of neither its statehood nor its sovereignty; it merely interferes with its power to exercise its rights. That is what distinguishes occupation from annexation, whereby the Occupying Power acquires all or part of the occupied territory and incorporates it in its own territory.

Consequently occupation as a result of war, while representing actual possession to all appearances, cannot imply any right whatsoever to dispose of territory. As long as hostilities continue the Occupying Power cannot therefore annex the occupied territory, even if it occupies the whole of the territory concerned. A decision on that point can only be reached in the peace treaty.

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The practical point of the annexation is to frame Ukraine’s current offensive (which is still advancing) as an attack on Russia itself rather than a recapture of its own territory. Putin has said he will use “all available means” to defend “Russia”, which raises the specter of nuclear war.

Yesterday’s NYT discusses the possibility that Russia will use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

“The chance that Putin would strike out of the blue seems very low,” said Graham T. Allison, the author of a seminal 1971 book about the Cuban Missile Crisis, “Essence of Decision.” “But as Kennedy said back then, the plausible scenario is if a leader is forced to choose between a catastrophic humiliation and a roll of the dice that might yield success.”

Mr. Allison suspects Mr. Putin will not face that choice unless Ukraine succeeds in pushing Russian forces out of the areas Mr. Putin annexed on Friday.

For that reason, the next few weeks could prove a particularly dangerous time, a range of American and European officials agree. But Mr. Putin is not likely to use a nuclear weapon immediately.

That’s not very comforting. During the Cold War, I didn’t worry much about a Soviet first strike because it didn’t make sense from a Marxist worldview. Soviet dogma said that communism was the inevitable outcome of history. So why would you risk everything on a roll of the dice now if your eventual victory was certain? But that thinking doesn’t apply now. If Putin sees his regime going down, he might think rolling the dice is his best bet.

OTOH, a gangster regime rests on the self-interest calculations made by all the henchmen. If a lot of those calculations are based on the belief that Putin would never do something that could get them all killed, the possibility of nuclear war could start people up and down the regime reevaluating their cooperation.

I’d like to see Biden address Putin’s henchmen directly, in a statement something like this:

A nuclear attack is something that the world will never forget and never forgive. Anyone who in any way participates in such a decision or such an attack will never know a moment’s peace. You must realize that Putin’s regime will eventually fall and his protection will fail. When that happens, there will be no safe place for you. You will be hunted to the ends of the Earth.

As for how the US should respond if Putin does use a tactical nuke in Ukraine, I’ve been reluctant to say what I’m thinking, because I’d be just another ignorant guy spouting off. So I found a knowledgeable guy who is saying the same thing: former general and CIA head David Petraeus. NATO should respond directly, but with conventional weapons. The goal would be to make sure Russia lost at least as much as it had gained by using the nuke.

The US and its allies would destroy Russia’s troops and equipment in Ukraine – as well as sink its Black Sea fleet – if Russian president Vladimir Putin uses nuclear weapons in the country, former CIA director and retired four-star army general David Petraeus warned on Sunday.

I understand fully the temptation to back down: To the rest of the world, losing Ukraine is a small price to pay to avoid the kind of escalation that could lead to an all-out nuclear war. But giving in to threats means giving something up without getting anything back. Putin retains his nuclear arsenal and can make the same threat over the next conflict. Where does that road end?

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CPAC has since deleted the tweet, but its reflex response to the annexations was to line up with Putin’s propaganda. The tweet referred to the four territories as “Ukrainian-occupied”, as if they had always been Russian and Ukraine is the aggressor.

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A possibly related event is the rupture in the Nord Stream pipelines, which take Russian natural gas to Germany. This appears to be sabotage, but everybody is pointing fingers at everybody else. In the short term it helps Russia, because this winter Europe will realize how much it depends on Russian energy. In the long run it hurts Russia, which will need the pipelines to sell natural gas after the Ukraine-related sanctions get resolved somehow.

and other right-wing foreign governments

Speaking of ultra-conservative foreign leaders, Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro was up for re-election yesterday. He trails another former president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known more simply as “Lula”) 48.4%-43.2%, which means a run-off will happen October 30. There has already been violence in this campaign, and it is expected to get worse.

In addition to how the run-off will come out, everyone wonders what Bolsonaro will do if he loses. Like Trump in 2020, Bolsonaro started questioning the integrity of the election before it happened. His supporters are more likely than his opponents to be armed, and the nation’s police support him. He probably has enough military support to keep Brazil’s army on the sidelines.

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The far-right Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) Party, which traces its ancestry back to the World War II Fascists, leads the new Italian government, elevating Giorgia Meloni to prime minister. Wikipedia explains the history.

FdI emerged from a right-wing split within Silvio Berlusconi‘s party, The People of Freedom (PdL), in December 2012. The bulk of the party leadership including Meloni, as well as the symbol of the movement (the tricolour flame), comes from the National Alliance (AN, 1995–2009) party, which had merged into PdL in 2009. AN was the heir to the Italian Social Movement (MSI, 1945–1995), a neo-fascist party founded by former members of the banned National Fascist Party (1921–1943) and the Republican Fascist Party (1943–1945).

American conservatives are ecstatic, and Meloni looks likely to join Hungarian authoritarian Viktor Orbán in the pantheon of foreign leaders who get cheered at CPAC (where she has already spoken twice). But lots of people on my social media feeds posted this quip:

I can’t believe they made Mussolini a woman in the reboot. This woke nonsense has ruined yet another franchise.

The most immediate problem raised by Italian neo-fascism is whether Italy will become pro-Putin voice inside NATO. So far, Meloni is not signalling that.

Meloni, 45, has sought to moderate her views recently, and this week she tweeted support for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Yet as Europe teeters on the brink of a recession stemming at least partly from energy sanctions imposed on Russia, there are fears within the Biden administration and elsewhere that Meloni could slash what’s been a significant Italian contribution to Ukraine’s defense.

Such a move could have a domino effect and cause key Western allies to push for a negotiated end to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Trump backed that position Wednesday, one Ukraine’s leaders vehemently oppose because it would likely require giving up large swaths of their territory to Putin.

and the Supreme Court

The start of the new Court term led a lot of pundits to raise a bunch of the issues I discussed last week. The NYT Editorial Board wrote:

The actual cause of [the Supreme Court’s] historic unpopularity is no secret. Over the past several years, the court has been transformed into a judicial arm of the Republican Party. This project was taking shape more quietly for decades, but it shifted into high gear in 2016, when Justice Antonin Scalia died and Senate Republicans refused to let Barack Obama choose his successor, obliterating the practice of deferring to presidents to fill vacancies on the court. Within four years, the court had a 6-to-3 right-wing supermajority, supercharging the Republican appointees’ efforts to discard the traditions and processes that have allowed the court to appear fair and nonpartisan.

The WaPo’s Ruth Marcus wrote an extended introduction to the new Court term, which includes a number of race-related cases: affirmative action and voting rights in particular. Another case revisits whether anti-discrimination laws apply to Christian businesses that turn away gay customers for religious reasons. There’s an opportunity for the Court to limit the power the Clean Water Act gives the EPA, and to increase state legislatures’ power to sway elections.

and the pandemic

Case numbers are dropping almost everywhere except where I am in New England. Nationally, deaths stubbornly remain around 400 per day.

When President Biden declared the pandemic over a couple weeks ago, I had to decide when I’ll start thinking of it as over: When the death numbers get down to about 100 per day. That would be flu-like.

According to data collected by the CDC from 2010 to 2020, the agency estimates that the flu has caused 12,000 to 52,000 deaths annually.

100 per day would be 36,500 annually, right in the middle of a normal flu range. Until then, I’m going to keep wearing masks and avoiding indoor crowds.

and you also might be interested in …

The week’s dumbest controversy was about Lizzo playing James Madison’s flute. If you’ve seen references to it and want to know what it was about, click the link. But if you don’t care, don’t start caring on my account.

I aspire to someday have a life so carefree that how the Library of Congress handles James Madison’s flute rises to the top of my list.

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The dumbest statement about a controversy had to be this one by Ron DeSantis, who was defending his initiative to put a right-wing slant on how Florida public schools teach American history.

It was the American Revolution that caused people to question slavery. No one had questioned it before we decided as Americans that we are endowed by our Creator with unalienable rights and that we are all created equal.

CNN’s Van Jones pointed out the obvious.

You know who questioned [slavery]? The enslaved people.

Like the history I was taught growing up, DeSantis’ history is based on the principle that only European views count. There’s no other way to justify the claim that “no one” questioned slavery before 1776, that Columbus “discovered” America, that Gutenberg (and not Bi Sheng of the Song Dynasty) invented movable type, or a bunch of other pseudo-facts I remember from my K-12 years.

But even if you only count English-speaking White people, DeSantis’ history is just wrong.

In the 1569 case it had been ruled that English law could not recognise slavery. This view, although overturned by the ruling in Butts V. Penny, was subsequently upheld in 1701 when the Chief Justice, Sir John Holt, ruled that a slave became free as soon as he arrived in England. In this view, different from, but no less unequivocal than that of the Solicitor-General in 1677, slavery was illegal.

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Judge Cannon continues to put Trump above the law. Once again, the special master that Trump chose wanted to pin down exactly what he’s claiming — this time about whether the FBI planted documents or not. But no. Those claims are allowed to float, and presumably to influence the case, without even being stated for the record, much less supported by evidence.

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New Tory Prime Minister Liz Truss’ first major act was to propose a gigantic tax cut for the rich.

Last week, Truss’ government announced that they would cut taxes by £45 billion ($48 billion) in a bid to get the UK economy moving again, with a package that includes scrapping the highest rate of income tax for top earners from 45% to 40% and a big increase in government borrowing to slash energy prices for millions of households and businesses this winter.

Truss has acknowledged mistakes in how the proposal was rolled out, but seems to be standing by it, even as the pound crashes. But not everybody is behind her.

Conservative members of parliament fear the combination of tax cuts along with huge public spending to help people cope with energy bills, rising inflation, rising interest rates and a falling pound are going to make winning the next general election impossible.

Who better to comment than UK fake-news personality Jonathan Pie?

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Having passed the House and gotten support from Mitch McConnell, a bill to reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887 looks likely to become law. The bill eliminates various loopholes and vagueries that Trump used to try to hang onto power after losing the 2020 election.

McConnell’s support is one more step in the continued souring of his relationship with Trump. Obviously, Trump doesn’t like the implication that his failed coup attempt was the kind of thing America should avoid in the future. But he really lashed out after McConnell supported a continuing resolution to keep the government open until after the election. On his Trump-centered Twitter-clone, the former president said McConnell “has a death wish”, which I (and a lot of other people) interpret as a suggestion that McConnell be assassinated. The same post insulted McConnell’s Chinese-American wife, Elaine Chao, who left Trump’s cabinet after January 6. Trump called her McConnell’s “China loving wife Coco Chow”.

Explain to me again how “divisive” Joe Biden is.

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Speaking at a Trump rally in Michigan Saturday, Marjorie Taylor Greene said

I’m not going to mince words with you all. Democrats want Republicans dead. They’ve already started the killings.

Again, the point here seems to be to incite and justify right-wing violence.

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This week I learned two words: Having an implant removed is called “explanting”. And a person known by a one-word name (like Madonna or Lula) is “mononymous”.

and let’s close with some practical information

Ryan North’s career in comic books (Dinosaur Comics, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, …) has led him to spend an enormous amount of time contemplating plausible supervillain schemes. Now you can benefit from his lifetime of research by reading his book How to Take Over the World.

The infrastructure chapter alone could save you billions. Where should you build your secret lair? (Not at the bottom of the ocean or on the Moon. You’d just be creating problems for yourself.) How much space do you need to achieve food and energy independence from the outside world? (The Biosphere 2 research is invaluable here.)

And then there are the more specific villainous plans. How can you create your own dinosaurs? (Actual dinosaur DNA is unrecoverable now, so the Jurassic Park technique can’t possibly work. But you might be able to create pseudo-dinosaurs by manipulating the DNA expression of the dinosaurs’ bird descendants. This technique also avoids a lot of catastrophic outcomes, because your dinosaurs’ offspring would be birds again.) What’s the most plausible path to immortality? How can you control the weather? (The plan here looks a lot like the one Neil Stephenson explores in Termination Shock, which was probably being written simultaneously.)

Supervillainy may seem like a radical career choice, but there’s no time to lose, because Disney owns Marvel Comics and Warner-Discovery owns DC. Think about what that means:

Two of the most powerful multinational corporations on the planet have spent decades, in plain sight, paying some of the most creative people alive today to design increasingly credible world-domination schemes.

So if you don’t take over the world, one of those two undoubtedly will. Your reign is bound to be better than theirs.