The Weekly Sift

People who feel safer with a gun than with guaranteed medical insurance don’t yet have a fully adult concept of scary.

– William Gibson

This week’s featured post is “Repeating myself about guns“.

This week everybody was talking about gun violence

This week’s featured post is my confession that I’ve got no new ideas about America’s gun problem. Instead, I review what I’ve written on the topic since 2015. As far as I can see, nothing has changed in the last seven years, other than the list of mass shootings getting longer.

I also can’t report any ideas from others that struck me as new this week. The battle of ideas, such as it is, has been going around in circles for a very long time.

What did seem fresh, though, was the earnestness of emotion that I heard from many people, particularly from folks who aren’t politicians or news-show hosts. To me, the most moving comments came from people who have been successful enough to have people pay attention to them, but used that opportunity to channel what ordinary people are feeling.

One of them was NBA coach Steve Kerr, who on Tuesday couldn’t bring himself to focus on questions about his team’s progress in the playoffs. (They advanced to the finals on Thursday.) Violence is personal for Kerr. He was 18 when his father was gunned down by terrorists in Beirut. This is what he had to say.

The bill he’s talking about, HR-8, is summarized here. It’s hardly an attempt to seize people’s guns. Rather, it just makes it illegal to sell a gun to someone without a background check. Polls indicate that most Americans believe that’s already what the law demands, but it isn’t.

Jimmy Kimmel also had trouble keeping his voice steady. He recorded this statement without an audience.

Video can capture weaselly responses as well. In this clip, Ted Cruz has no answer for a British reporter who asks him why these kinds of shootings happen so much more often in America than anywhere else, and if our lax gun laws have something to do with it. Cruz can only pretend to be offended and storm off, because there’s nothing he can say.

Three years ago, the American Independent listed 13 absurd “causes” for mass shootings that Republicans offer to distract attention from guns. We heard just about the whole list this week as well. None of them answer the question the reporter asked Cruz: What’s special about the United States other than the ease with which people with violent intentions can lay their hands on weapons appropriate for fighting a war?

The lack of any link between shootings and video games, for example, was already clear nine years ago in this chart: If you’re having trouble reading it, the United States is the dot floating high above the field because of its per capita gun-related murders, while the Netherlands and South Korea spend far more per capita on video games.

The Texas Observer does a pretty thorough takedown of Governor Abbott and his finger-pointing at mental illness (which, of course, only exists in the US).

Abbott is simply changing the topic.

The Uvalde shooter did not kill those children with his purported mental health struggles. He did not shoot them with estrangement; he did not murder them with malaise; he did not ravage their little bodies with the inchoate rage of his misguided youth. He killed them with a goddamn assault rifle, and high-capacity magazines, designed for the precise purpose of human annihilation.

Abbott’s interest in mental health lasts just as long as it takes for voters’ attention to shift away from guns. (About four days, according to Princeton Professor Patrick Sharkey.) Just last month, he cut the state’s mental health budget.

Texas ranked last out of all 50 states and the District of Columbia for overall access to mental health care, according to the 2021 State of Mental Health in America report.

Texas could easily start reversing that sorry record by approving ObamaCare’s Medicaid expansion, which the Republican legislature still refuses to do.

But if you think pro-gun gaslighting can’t get any worse, I have bad news for you: The problem isn’t guns, says Derek Gilbert, it’s demons. Killing so many children with an AR-15 is so hard, Gilbert improbably claims, that the Uvalde shooter couldn’t have managed it unless he were possessed by a demon who has done this before. (Again, it’s not clear why this demon doesn’t possess people in the Netherlands or South Korea.)

The police in Uvalde arrived at the school within minutes. (It’s a small town. I saw someone on Twitter claim that nothing is more than five minutes from the school.) But they didn’t enter the room where the shooter was killing children until more than an hour later. Kids were calling 911 while police were just outside the door. The police changed their story many times in the first few days. Whether we have the true story now is anybody’s guess.

and Ukraine

Russia continues to advance slowly into eastern Ukraine. CNBC calls this “a subtle momentum shift in the war”. Some of the pro-Ukraine voices I’ve been following have stopped commenting, which worries me. The Week summarizes speculations in both directions.

As the war drags on, the likelihood of a global food shortage rises. It’s easy to sensationalize that possibility, but The Economist covers it pretty well.

Russia and Ukraine supply 28% of globally traded wheat, 29% of the barley, 15% of the maize and 75% of the sunflower oil. Russia and Ukraine contribute about half the cereals imported by Lebanon and Tunisia; for Libya and Egypt the figure is two-thirds. Ukraine’s food exports provide the calories to feed 400m people. The war is disrupting these supplies because Ukraine has mined its waters to deter an assault, and Russia is blockading the port of Odessa.

Even before the invasion the World Food Programme had warned that 2022 would be a terrible year. China, the largest wheat producer, has said that, after rains delayed planting last year, this crop may be its worst-ever. Now, in addition to the extreme temperatures in India, the world’s second-largest producer, a lack of rain threatens to sap yields in other breadbaskets, from America’s wheat belt to the Beauce region of France. The Horn of Africa is being ravaged by its worst drought in four decades.

If you’re a middle-class-or-higher American, this will be a nuisance but not a crisis. Food prices will increase, but the average American household spends only 10% of its income on food. We could afford to spend more, and we could eat more cheaply without starving. And if the rest of us choose to look out for Americans who are food insecure (always a dubious proposition), they could be fine too.

What will happen in poorer countries, though, is up in the air. The world still produces plenty of calories to feed everybody, if that were a priority. But much of that production goes into producing meat (which delivers calories much less efficiently) or fuel.

and the pandemic

Case numbers, which have been increasing since late March, seem to have leveled off nationally. In the Northeast, where the current surge started a little earlier, cases have started to drift downward. Hospitalizations, a lagging indicator, are still rising nationally, but are headed down in Maine, Vermont, and Rhode Island. Deaths never did take off during this surge, but are running at 374 per day, up somewhat from a low of around 300 a few weeks ago.

At this point, if you are in good health, have no special risk factors, and have gotten all the recommended vaccinations (including boosters), you don’t need to worry that much about dying from Covid. A number of people I know personally have had Covid in the last month or so, and none have been hospitalized for it.

My personal fear at this point centers around long Covid, in which symptoms unpredictably last for months or years.

and you also might be interested in …

The Georgia Republican primary showed the limits of Trump’s influence. Few Republicans have drawn more of the Great Orange One’s wrath than Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. But both won their primaries easily.

My reading of Republican primaries to date is that the GOP base fully supports Trump’s fascism, but is ambivalent about his personal vendettas. I lean towards believing that the party’s 2024 nominee will be a post-Trump fascist, like Ron DeSantis.

Georgia Republicans should be ashamed of themselves for nominating Herschel Walker to run against Senator Raphael Warnock. I don’t know whether to feel sorry for Walker as a victim of cerebral damage from his football career or to fault him for just being stupid. But he has trouble speaking in complete sentences, as his response to the Uvalde shooting demonstrated. He’s also dishonest and prone to violence. I know Republican standards have dropped sharply in the Trump Era. But this far? Really?

One of the themes of Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning was how racism in America has continuously evolved, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and beyond. Well, I think I just saw the future of racism in America: anti-racialism, as promoted in the current Atlantic by Reihan Salam of the Koch-funded Manhattan Institute.

Anti-racialism, basically, is an updated version of color-blindness, the idea that if we just stop calling attention to race, everybody will forget about it.

If liberal anti-racism is grounded in the idea that raising the salience of race is essential to achieving racial justice, anti-racialism holds that heightened race consciousness, and the racialization of disparities and differences that would obtain in any culturally plural society, more often than not cuts against fostering integration, civic harmony, and social progress.

One true observation Salam makes is that what we currently have (and are evolving toward) is not white supremacy, strictly speaking, because an increasing number of Asians and Hispanics are finding their way into the formerly all-white “mainstream” of American society.

In The Great Demographic Illusion, Alba underscores that the American mainstream is not coterminous with whiteness. “Just as the white Protestant mainstream that prevailed from colonial times to the middle of the twentieth century evolved through the mass assimilation of Catholic and Jewish ethnics after World War II,” he writes, “the racially defined mainstream of today is changing, at least in some parts of the country, as a result of the inclusion of many nonwhite and mixed Americans.”

Salam recognizes that of course there’s still the problem of “black exceptionalism”, i.e., not even an expanded mainstream has space for Black people.

the intense racial isolation experienced by most Black descendants of enslaved African Americans remains an important social fact

But, well, it sucks to be them. The rest of us should form a broad (or at least broader) multi-racial coalition that pretends race isn’t an issue any more.

and let’s close with something from another universe

The Marvel Cinematic Universe, to be exact. There’s probably no easier piece of music to turn into a fun video than Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk”. But together with this collection of Marvel outtakes, it’s irresistible.

That which is a sin within a certain set of religious beliefs is to be made a crime for all.

– Margaret Atwood, “I invented Gilead. The Supreme Court is making it real.“

This week’s featured post is “White replacement is MAGA’s unified field theory“.

This week everybody we tried not to talk about our one million dead

If you’d told anybody at the beginning of this pandemic that one million Americans would die in it, their almost certain reaction would have been that we should do whatever we can to avoid that outcome. But we didn’t.

It was the Trump administration, so of course the existence and seriousness of the disease turned into a political issue, and the country polarized into those who wanted to do what we could and those who wanted to ignore the whole thing and get on with life.

The one thing Trump did right was support vaccine development, and once he got into office Biden pushed every way he could to get the country vaccinated. But the political polarization got in the way, as well as the by-then well established networks of medical disinformation. So almost a year and a half after vaccines were approved, only 78% have received any vaccination at all, 66% are considered fully vaccinated, and a mere 31% have gotten a vaccine booster. (I got my second booster a week ago. I’ve been fortunate; none of the four shots have led to any adverse reaction beyond a little soreness at the site of the injection.)

Mask mandates are gone almost everywhere, and voluntary mask usage is way down. (I still wear one when I’m indoors in public.) It’s like we’ve all given up.

As the virus evolves, the vaccines no longer do that good a job of preventing infection, but they’re still very effective at preventing serious illness or death.

Right now, cases are surging: The 90K reported cases is almost certainly an undercount. I personally know people who tested positive at home, had only minor symptoms, and quarantined until they got better. Their cases never made it into the official statistics.

Deaths are harder to ignore, so the numbers are more accurate. They’re staying down; they’ve been in the 300s per day for more than three weeks. Hospitalizations are up, but only 21% in the last two weeks.

so instead we talked about the shooting in Buffalo

The featured post is about the Buffalo race massacre on Saturday, how it resembles past race massacres, and the White Replacement Theory that has motivated all of them.

The Buffalo shooting overshadowed another shooting: six people got shot in a church in California.

and Russia’s bad week

Putin’s original plan, I imagine, was for his stunning military success in Ukraine to set NATO on its heels. The old Warsaw Pact countries and once-Soviet Baltic republics would tremble with fear, doubting that the US or Germany had the resolve to stand by them in a crisis. Conquest of Ukraine might be the hammer-blow that shattered the European alliance.

Instead, Ukraine has exposed the weakness of the Russian military machine, NATO has banded more tightly together, and the NATO countries have provided the Ukrainians with billions in advanced weaponry.

And now Finland and Sweden, which had no plans to join NATO before Putin’s Ukraine invasion, are about to apply for membership. Finland’s president and prime minister announced their intention to apply Thursday, and Sweden is expected to apply sometime this week. Accepting new members requires unanimous approval from the existing members (which makes sense, considering that everyone will be obligated to defend the new members once they join), and Turkey is expressing doubts; but most speculation is that Erdogan is looking to get some concessions, not that he really wants to block the new members.

The first Russian offensive had to retreat from Kyiv, and now the second is pulling back from Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv.

Another military failure this week happened Tuesday, when Ukrainian artillery destroyed a pontoon bridge Russian forces were using to cross the Siverskyi Donets river in eastern Ukraine. Reports seem to show an entire battalion wiped out, including dozens of tanks and other vehicles. Retired Australian Major General Mick Ryan did a tweetstorm on military river crossings in general and this disastrous one in particular.

Saturday, as their colleague Rand Paul delayed President Biden’s Ukraine aid package, Republican senators visited Kyiv, producing this photo op for Moscow Mitch and his buddies.

Folks on Twitter competed to caption the photo. The hands-down winner is Amy Berg: “This is the closest Russian operatives have gotten to Zelensky since the invasion started.”

Berg’s caption is a little unfair, given the mostly bipartisan support Ukraine has received in Congress so far. But the Sharpie-writing is on the wall, and Ukraine’s fight for survival will soon become a partisan issue. Back in March, only three GOP congresspeople refused to stand up to Russian aggression.

Little by little, however, with each proposal, a few more Republicans would sign up: eight Republicans opposed suspending trade privileges for Russia in mid-March; 17 Republicans opposed a resolution supporting Moldova, whose leaders fear their Ukraine-bordering nation could be Putin’s next target; 19 opposed a similar resolution in support for Georgia.

Then, on April 27, 55 House Republicans opposed legislation to build secure telecommunications networks in Ukraine and neighboring nations. Finally, on Tuesday,, 57 Republicans opposed President Biden’s request for $40 billion in weapons and humanitarian aid

Friday, Trump came out against the $40 billion. Who knows? He may yet get to build Trump Tower Moscow.

The WaPo points out that we’re experiencing mission creep in Ukraine. Originally, we were aiding the Ukrainians in hope that Russia wouldn’t take over the whole country. Now our rhetoric has shifted towards a Ukrainian victory.

and reactions to the prospect of losing abortion rights

The Senate failed to pass a bill codifying abortion rights at the federal level. The bill got 49 votes, with Joe Manchin and all Republicans voting against it.

The featured post covers the link between abortion (especially Senator Daines’ weird comparison to sea turtles and eagles) and White Replacement Theory. Fear for the future of the white race justifies the push towards a Handmaid’s Tale dystopia. (A fertility crisis was the presenting problem in the novel, if you remember.) We need to take away women’s rights, the theory goes, because White women are not doing their job. Recall the advice once given to British women with unappealing husbands: “Close your eyes and think of England.”

This 2019 Onion article isn’t a joke any more: “Abused 12-Year-Old Alabama Girl Doesn’t Think She Can Handle Being A Mom On Top Of Everything Else“.

The Republicans’ most effective talking point against the Democrats’ codify-Roe bill concerns third-trimester abortions, which anti-abortion activists describe as “partial birth” abortions.

These abortions poll badly, largely because the public has been sold a false picture of them. It’s important to understand two things about late-term abortions.

• They’re rare. In 2019, the CDC tabulated 4882 US abortions after 21 weeks of gestation, out of 491,901 total abortions, or less than 1%. An study from 2018 estimated that only about 160 happened after 28 weeks.
• Each one is a special case, often involving unforeseen medical problems that either threaten the health of the pregnant woman or presage some hellish future for the fetus after birth.

NPR recounts the example of Dana Weinstein, whose doctors told her that her fetus’ brain was not developing properly:

“[We were told] that our baby would have seizures 70% of the time — that was a best-case scenario; that when we delivered her, that we’d need to have a resuscitation order in place because she would most likely seize to death,” Weinstein said.

Almost a decade later, Weinstein and her husband are the parents of three active children — a boy and two girls. She’s 48, living in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and working for a nonprofit.

She still tears up when she talks about that diagnosis and the difficult decisions that surrounded it. Fearing a short and painful life for their baby, Weinstein and her husband chose to travel to Boulder, Colo., to end the pregnancy, at one of the few clinics in the country that offer third-trimester abortions.

Weinstein has been speaking publicly about her experience for years. But she decided to tell her story again recently, amid renewed national debate over decisions like hers.

“I just don’t understand why and how this is so front and center in the national debate,” Weinstein said. “I would have given anything to have been able to help our baby live if she could have lived. But she was going to be incapable of that.”

Under the bills anti-abortion activists want to pass on the state level, Weinstein would have been forced to give birth and watch her daughter die painfully.

When you look at such real examples rather than hypotheticals, their messy complexity points out why these decisions have to be made case-by-case, by the people who are actually involved, and not by legislators dealing in abstractions or bureaucrats crafting one-size-fits-all rules.

Pete Buttigieg expressed things well in a 2019 Fox News town hall.

So, let’s put ourselves in the shoes of a woman in that situation. If it’s that late in your pregnancy, that means almost by definition you’ve been expecting to carry it to term.

We’re talking about women who have perhaps chosen the name, women who have purchased the crib, families that then get the most devastating medical news of their lifetime, something about the health or the life of the mother that forces them to make an impossible, unthinkable choice.

That decision is not going to be made any better, medically or morally, because the government is dictating how that decision should be made.

Clarence Thomas says the leak of Alito’s draft opinion “changes the institution fundamentally. You begin looking over your shoulder.” @PopeHat seems not to have forgotten Anita Hill:

Yeah, imagine being constantly afraid a coworker would do something inappropriate

and primaries

Fascinating race on the Democratic side in Pennsylvania, which votes tomorrow. Rep. Conor Lamb is a model of the kind of Democrat party leaders like to run in swing states: “a congenial, manicured candidate straight from Hollywood central casting who could appeal to voters turned off by Trump while still wary of the party that opposed the 45th president”. Ex-military, a former prosecutor with moderate positions on wedge issues, he won his seat in Congress in a swing district special election in early 2018, and then held the seat in the 2018 fall election and in 2020.

But the polls say he’s losing badly to Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, who takes more liberal positions on issues, but also is more of a character. One voter says he “has the ‘it factor’. I find him lovable.” Six-foot nine, wandering around in a Carhartt hoody and gym shorts, Fetterman says what he believes in very blunt, simple terms, and isn’t afraid to campaign in rural areas where Democratic candidates are seldom seen.

According to the longstanding right/left view of American politics, Lamb should be the better general-election candidate because he’s closer to the center on issues. But Fetterman has the common touch. The two candidates’ messages to swing voters are very different: Lamb isn’t crazy (like the Republican candidates are) and doesn’t take positions at odds with White working-class values (as Fetterman sometimes does). But Fetterman wants those voters to say, “He doesn’t always agree with me, but he gets me.”

I’d like to think that approach works. (It’s more-or-less what Jon Tester does. His views look centrist to Democrats nationally, but he’s way left-of-center for Montana.) I guess we’ll see in November.

As if all that wasn’t interesting enough, Fetterman suffered a stroke Friday. His campaign claims he is on his way to a full recovery. In a video taken in the hospital, Fetterman speaks clearly, but lets his wife do the bulk of the talking. (They’re cute together. She takes credit for making him get his symptoms checked out. “Because I was right, as always.”)

The Philadelphia Inquirer reports that it wanted to make endorsements on the Republican side of tomorrow’s primary, but “we can’t” because so many Republican candidates aren’t “operating in the same reality” where the Inquirer lives. In particular, they had a hard time getting Republican candidates to admit that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election.

How do you find points of agreement when you can’t reach common ground on facts so basic that they could be used in a field sobriety test?

Case in point, on the national level: Third-ranking House Republican Elise Stefanik. (Remember? She replaced Liz Cheney as the token woman in the GOP leadership team when Cheney decided to be honest about January 6.) These days her whole Twitter feed is about the baby-formula shortage, and one tweet begins

The White House, House Dems, & usual pedo grifters are so out of touch with the American people

This is where the GOP has gotten: Members of leadership can associate the President and Democrats in general with pedophilia, without the slightest justification. Because, like, facts — who needs them?

BTW, about that baby formula shortage. One major cause is one of the Trump administration’s proudest achievements: the United States Canada Mexico Agreement. Remember? USCMA replaced that horrible NAFTA deal with an almost-identical deal that was great because it had Trump fairy dust sprinkled on it.

Jim Wright explains:

Three (or four, depending on your point of view) American companies control 90% of the global infant formula market, chief among them is Abbott Nutrition. When a Chinese company announced it was investing in a Canadian manufacturing facility to make powdered baby formula from excess Canadian skim milk powder (Canada makes a lot of butter, so they have a lot of leftover skim milk), Abbott and the US diary industry spent millions lobbying congress to change the trade rules — claiming increased Canadian production of formula would “negatively impact U.S. dairy trade and jobs.”

… And so, when the Trump Administration backed by a Republican congress wrote and implemented the USCMA to replace NAFTA, they imposed new regulations restricting commercial importation of baby formula from Canada

… So when Abbott contaminated its production line and was forced into a massive recall, well, for Americans, there just ISN’T any other place to get infant formula. And you can thank the dairy industry, and their lackies in Congress (and, yes, the [Trump] White House) for that.

Wright points out that you can import Canadian formula for personal use, but you might get into trouble if you resell it for a profit.

But whatever caused the shortage, Stefanik and Fox News have a piece of the solution: The US government should starve the immigrant babies in its custody.

The most charitable way to look at this argument is that the Republican politicians and Fox hosts making it don’t really want Biden to starve migrant babies to death – they are just cynically using the specter of fed migrant babies to anger desperate American parents for political gain and ratings.

and some other things you might be interested in …

On second thought, maybe Elon Musk won’t buy Twitter. Or maybe he will.

This weekend it got hot in Texas. Who could have foreseen such a thing? Not the people who manage the state’s power grid. Friday, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas put out a statement asking people to turn their thermostats up to 78 and avoid running major appliances.

Industry groups of all sorts frequently sponsor studies about the cost of government regulations. Well, this is the cost of not having government regulations. In the free market, it’s always tempting not to prepare for unlikely scenarios. If they don’t happen, your quarterly numbers look better and your stock goes up. And by the time luck runs out, maybe you’ll have sold your shares or moved on to your next job.

Think you’ve worked for your company too long? This guy just turned 100, and he’s still with the company he joined when he was 15.

Fox News is furious at new White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre because in 2020 she called the network racist.

That’s known as “telling it like it is”. Fox would rather she be “politically correct” and spare its viewers’ sensitive feelings.

Remember John Durham and his assignment to investigate the people who had the temerity to investigate Donald Trump for colluding with Russia? Well, he’s still on that job — his investigation has already lasted more than a year longer than Bob Mueller’s.

And today he’s finally bringing a case to trial: He charges that lawyer Michael Sussman lied to the FBI when he brought the FBI information about suspicious internet traffic between the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, which is owned by Russia. Not that he lied about the traffic; no, he’s supposed to have lied by claiming he wasn’t giving them the data on behalf of a client.

If you really care, Marcy Wheeler analyzes what a thin reed this indictment rests on. And TPM’s Josh Kovensky summarizes its significance:

If Durham secures a win, it’s not clear what would come next.

As Harry Sandick, a former federal prosecutor, told me, the case that Durham made against Sussmann doesn’t quite match up with traditional up-the-chain prosecutions, in which lower-level defendants flip on higher-ups.

“It seems to me less like a logical first step in an up-the-chain prosecution, and more like an attempt by a prosecutor to justify a tremendous amount of time and expense in an investigation,” he said.

and let’s close with puppies

It’s been a hard week. We deserve some puppies. These 11 golden retrievers are just one of 210 puppy photos from Bored Panda.

Ask yourself this question: If Russian journalists, who are losing their livelihoods and their freedom for daring to report on what their own government is doing, if they had the freedom to write any words, to show any stories, or to ask any questions, if they had, basically, what you have, would they be using it in the same way that you do? Ask yourself that question every day, because you have one of the most important roles in the world.

– Trevor Noah, at the White House Correspondents Dinner

This week’s featured post is MAGA 2.0.

During my week off, I spoke at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois (my hometown). I converted the Sift post “How did Christianity become so toxic?” into a sermon “Where Christianity Went Wrong”. The text is here and the audio there.

This week everybody was still talking about Musk and Twitter

So far it looks like Musk’s takeover is really happening, though it still could fall through.

Like Adam Serwer, I am skeptical of Musk’s “free speech” rhetoric.

The fight over Twitter’s future is not really about free speech, but the political agenda the platform may end up serving. As Americans are more and more reliant on a shrinking number of wealthy individuals and companies for services, conservatives believe having a sympathetic billionaire acquire Twitter means one less large or influential corporation the Republican Party needs to strongarm into serving its purposes. Whatever Musk ends up doing, this possibility is what the right is actually celebrating. “Free speech” is a disingenuous attempt to frame what is ultimately a political conflict over Twitter’s usage as a neutral question about civil liberties, but the outcome conservatives are hoping for is one in which conservative speech on the platform is favored and liberal speech disfavored. …

The fact that conservative concerns about Big Tech vanish the second a sympathetic billionaire buys a social-media platform, however, illustrates the shallowness of their complaints about the power of Silicon Valley. Conservatives are not registering their concern over the consolidation of corporate power so much as they are trying to ensure that consolidation serves their interests. Put simply, conservatives hope that Twitter will now become a more willing vehicle for right-wing propaganda.

An issue that hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention is that Musk-ownership links Twitter’s interests to Tesla’s. And Tesla builds and sells a lot of cars in China. What happens when the Chinese government demands favorable treatment on Twitter (or deplatforming of its critics), and threatens to shut Tesla down? If Musk thinks he’s too rich to push around, he should have a talk with Alibaba’s Jack Ma.

and more January 6 revelations

Few stories illustrate the corruption of the Republican Party like the recent Kevin McCarthy tapes. It started with a report in the new book “This Shall Not Pass” by NYT reporters Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, that shortly after the 1-6 insurrection, House GOP Leader McCarthy told other members of the leadership team that he was going to tell President Trump it was time to resign. McCarthy branded the report “totally false and wrong”, and his spokesman said “McCarthy never said he’d call Trump to say he should resign.”

Except that he did, and it’s on tape.

McCarthy has long since come crawling back to Trump, of course, and now he hopes for Trump’s support in becoming Speaker, should the GOP take the House majority this fall. You might think that Trump would be angry to find out that McCarthy was saying such things in private, but in fact he’s not.

Trump doesn’t need Republican leaders to believe in him. He just needs them to be spineless, and McCarthy is.

Texts exchanged before the election between Sean Hannity and Mark Meadows came out. Meadows, who was then White House chief of staff, gave Hannity instructions about what to stress on his radio show, to which Hannity replied “Yes sir.”

The texts show the kind of political subservience that CNN fired Chris Cuomo for. But Fox News’ standards are much lower, and Hannity has not been disciplined in any way.

The Manhattan grand jury investigating Donald Trump for possible fraudulent bank and tax fraud is expiring without issuing an indictment, making such charges unlikely, though the DA says investigations will continue. The Washington Post has published a summary of the various Trump investigations and where they stand.

and the line between church and state

The Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of a football coach who led players in prayer on the 50-yard-line after games. His claim is that his prayers are private religious acts protected by the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause. I’m not sure why this private act needs to happen on the 50-yard-line, but the Court’s conservative majority didn’t seem bothered by this.

I will be more interested in the Court’s reasoning than in the decision itself. Whatever standard the justices use to find in the coach’s favor, does it apply to non-Christians, or is this yet another special right that Christians have and no one else does? It seems entirely implausible to me that we would be having this discussion if the coach were performing a Muslim or Hindu ritual.

The best thing I read about this case appeared in Baptist News Global, where the coach’s case was related to another recent story about Christians who turned a commercial air flight into a hymn-sing.

The common thread is performative Christianity that operates out of a place of assumed privilege. That is a privilege so taken for granted that the average American Christian has no clue they are swimming in it.

… The parallel to this, of course, is the thousands of evangelicals who have been trained — literally trained — to use places like airplanes to evangelize their seatmates. What Christians may see as a God-ordained witnessing opportunity, the poor seatmate may see as religious assault.

Such attitudes and actions from Christians are not evil, but they are misguided. And they originate from a place of assumed privilege. As I’ve written before, there’s an easy test to understand this: What if the roles were reversed and you, dear Christian, were seated next to an evangelizing Muslim or Hindu or Mormon or atheist? Would you afford them the same assumed privilege you claim for yourself? I don’t think so.

Modern Christians must understand that we live in an increasingly pluralistic society and that assuming Christian privilege actually does more harm than good. If you want to be a good witness for Jesus, this is not the way to do it. It is tone deaf and arrogant and rude — pretty much the opposite of every virtue of love described in 1 Corinthians 13.

Chaz Stevens, whose Twitter handle describes him as “stunt activist“, is responding to a new Florida law giving parents more input into school decisions by asking school districts across the state to ban the Bible.

On the one hand, he’s pushing precisely the point I was making above: The law needs to apply to Christians the same way it applies to everyone else. And he’s absolutely correct that the Bible describes murder, adultery, sexual immorality, and infanticide — stuff that would absolutely get any other book banned from Florida schools.

But at the same time, this tactic points out a strategic weakness in the secular position: We want to defend public schools, while Christian nationalists are looking for excuses to privatize them. Any tit-for-tat that drives public support away from the schools hurts us in the long run. If we ban their books after they ban ours, we’re still losing.

Meanwhile, Marjorie Taylor Greene says of Catholic Relief, an organization that assists immigrants: “Satan’s controlling the church.“

In previous weeks, I’ve talked about the right-wing takeover of the public library system in Llano County, Texas, which resulted in firing a librarian who wouldn’t cooperate. Last week, residents sued in federal court, charging that books are being removed without public hearings or any other due process.

The Texas school district in Southlake got bad publicity last fall when an administrator was taped advising teachers to “balance” books about the Holocaust with opposing perspectives.

The school district has come up with a way to make sure that doesn’t happen again: A “non-disparagement clause” has been added to teachers’ contracts. The problem isn’t what the administrator said, it’s that somebody snitched to the press.

and the war in Ukraine

It’s too soon to draw a firm conclusion about how Russia’s Plan B — advance in the Donbas rather than try to take Kyiv — is going, but the early reports look familiar: slow progress and heavy losses.

The Economist has a fascinating article about the Russian army’s radio problems. They know how to make secure hard-to-jam radios, but they didn’t procure enough of them, so only elite units have them. When those units try to coordinate with less-elite units, they end up reverting to more primitive equipment, including off-the-shelf walkie-talkies. The Ukrainians intercept their communications, and sometimes jam them by broadcasting heavy metal music on the same frequencies.

This is one example of a larger logistical problem: Apparently the Russian procurement system is even less efficient and more corrupt than ours.

“They put a lot of money into modernisation,” says [retired Czech] General [Petr] Pavel. “But a lot of this money was lost in the process.”

and the pandemic

Reported cases per day in the US have doubled since they bottomed out at 26K on April 3. They’re now up to 56K. Hospitalizations turned up about two weeks later, as they usually do. They bottomed at 14.8K on April 18, and are now at 17.1K. The number of Covid patients in ICUs bottomed at 1886 on April 22, and is now 1985.

Deaths are still dropping, about four weeks after case numbers turned up, and more than a week after ICU patients bottomed. An average of 321 Americans are dying of Covid each day, down considerably from 2652 on February 1. I thought that might be unusual, but it appears not. The last time deaths turned upward was on November 30, 20 days after hospitalizations bottomed, and 18 days after ICU patients bottomed. That would suggest that we’re about 10 days from deaths beginning to increase.

and you also might be interested in …

The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was held Saturday. Trevor Noah’s monologue is worth the time.

Solar energy is booming in both Texas and California, but in different ways that reflect different styles of government.

Texas solar projects often come with a “batteries not included” designation. In the Lone Star State, among Interconnection Agreement-signed projects expected to reach COD through 2024, only 28% of the 120 solar projects with completed are solar + battery projects. Again, this compares to nearly 99% of solar projects in California.

California is aiming towards a future where renewable energy replaces fossil fuels, and that requires batteries. Otherwise, you still need fossil-fuel or nuclear plants to generate electricity when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.

and let’s close with something bookish

Back in the old days, the stereotypic librarian was a dowdy woman shushing anybody who spoke above a whisper. These days, though, a big part of a librarian’s job is doing silly things to encourage reading. Electric Lit has collected librarian music parodies, like “Unread Book” to the tune of “Uptown Funk”.

What Putin has been doing for many, many years is building up to a big war. At a certain point, I felt crazy for saying it because the big war kept not starting. But the logic of his rhetoric, the logic of his actions, the logic of totalitarianism in general — all of these things required a big war.

– Masha Gessen

This week’s featured post is “Why the Russians did it“.

This week everybody was talking about Russian atrocities in Ukraine

The atrocities, and why I believe in them, are discussed in the featured post.

Everyone is saying that the war in Ukraine has entered a new phase. The attack on Kyiv from Belarus appears to be over. Forces are being shifted to the Donbas region in the east, where Russia is trying to conquer the two Ukrainian territories that it has recognized as independent countries.

This is sort-of-good news. Putin seems to understand that the effort to conquer the whole country has failed, and is scrambling to achieve secondary goals that he could still spin as a victory. Without admitting any failures, Putin has replaced the invasion’s top general.

A Russian column has been reported headed towards Kharkiv. It’s not clear whether this force will do any better than the one that targeted Kyiv.

Military experts and western officials have also speculated that Putin’s generals are feeling the pressure to deliver some sort of results ahead of May 9, when Russia marks Victory Day, the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. But a fresh analysis from the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), a US-based think tank, casts some doubt on Russia’s ability to concentrate the forces needed to make a breakthrough in the Donbas.

“We assess that the Russian military will struggle to amass a large and combat-capable force of mechanized units to operate in Donbas within the next few months,” the analysis states. “Russia will likely continue to throw badly damaged and partially reconstituted units piecemeal into offensive operations that make limited gains at great cost.”

Fiona Hill has a book coming out soon. The story about her in the NYT Magazine makes connections between Trump’s first impeachment, 1-6, and Putin’s Ukraine invasion.

“In the course of his presidency, indeed, Trump would come more to resemble Putin in political practice and predilection than he resembled any of his recent American presidential predecessors.”

Hill found it dubious that a man so self-​interested and lacking in discipline could have colluded with Russia to gain electoral victory in 2016 … Still, she came to see in Trump a kind of aspirational authoritarianism in which Putin, Erdogan, Orban and other autocrats were admired models.

… Hill was at her desk at home on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, writing her memoir, when a journalist friend she first met in Russia called. The friend told her to turn on the television. Once she did so, a burst of horrific clarity overtook her. “I saw the thread,” she told me. “The thread connecting the Zelensky phone call to Jan. 6. And I remembered how, in 2020, Putin had changed Russia’s Constitution to allow him to stay in power longer. This was Trump pulling a Putin.”

In the Economist, John Mearsheimer makes the blame-America case for the Ukraine invasion: We provoked Putin by raising the possibility that Ukraine could join NATO. I’m not convinced by that, because I don’t regard NATO-invades-Russia-for-no-reason as a credible fear; it’s been hard enough getting the alliance to unite in helping Ukraine defend itself. But Hill puts an interesting spin on that argument: Leaving Ukraine dangling as a maybe-someday NATO member was “the worst of all possible worlds”. We should either have let it in and helped defend it, or made it clear to Russia that NATO had no interest in extending that far.

and the larger lesson about autocracy

The most insightful thing I read this week was The.Ink’s interview with Masha Gessen, the Russian-American author who often writes for The New Yorker. She has written a biography of Putin, and a book-length account of contemporary Russian society. Her grasp of authoritarianism and totalitarianism reminds me of Hannah Arendt.

The opening part of the interview is focused on the Ukraine war and how it might play out. (Gessen takes the threat of nuclear war seriously, and believes that Putin, like Hitler, will not fall without bringing his country down with him. But, unless he dies soon of some other cause, he will fall.)

Then the discussion goes global, and this is the part I find most fascinating: Putin is part of a larger momentum towards right-wing autocracy, a wave that includes Orban in Hungary, Trump in the US, and Le Pen in France. Putin’s social rhetoric, she says, should be very familiar to Americans.

It’s how the American right weaponizes fear of your kids turning trans. It’s shorthand for the decadent West. It’s shorthand for the Other. It’s the promise of returning to an imaginary past when there was nothing that made you uncomfortable, like having to accept weird gender stuff and other queerness.

The message is: If you want to feel at home in the world again, if you want to feel at home in your country again, we have to get rid of this Western contagion. …

Erich Fromm very accurately describes preconditions for autocracy in Escape From Freedom. He wrote in the late 1930s and looked at extreme economic anxiety and mass displacement. Extreme economic anxiety related not only to hyperinflation in Germany but more broadly to a changing world, a world in which it was impossible for people to imagine who they’ll be and how they’ll live some years from now, or where their children will be. Those are conditions that are very much present in many parts of the world. There are kinds of societies and governments that try to address anxieties, and there are kinds that don’t. We definitely have the kind that doesn’t. I think that’s a culture-wide failure that isn’t concentrated on the right.

Is the point you’re making that, in a sense, the bad guys do address those kinds of anxieties whereas the good guys don’t?

Yes, that is the point I’m making. I think we see some attempts from the Biden administration to address those anxieties, but they’re meek, unconvincing, and unsustainable.

… What we need is recognition on the part of politicians that people all over the world are in this state of extreme anxiety, for very good reasons, and they need to be addressed as “my dears” [as the mayor of Kharkiv did recently]. We can’t just leave it to the bad guys to address the anxieties.

She sees Zelensky as a model, because he makes an FDR-like emotional connection with his people: He feels their fear and speaks to it, rather than telling them that everything is OK.

He models political speech. It is not about policy, and it is not about military strategy. It’s about people. No matter who he is addressing, he’s addressing people directly. He’s speaking directly to their experience.

and Justice Jackson

Thursday, Ketanji Brown Jackson became the first Black woman to be confirmed as a Supreme Court justice. The vote was 53-47, with all 50 Democrats voting in favor. They were joined by only three Republicans: Collins, Murkowski, and Romney. Romney was the only Republican with the good grace to applaud for her.

Justice Jackson will take her seat this summer, when Justice Breyer’s retirement takes effect.

Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted that voting for Jackson’s confirmation made the Collins, Murkowski, and Romney “pro-pedophile“. I wasn’t going to make a big deal about that desperate plea for attention, but then it turned into this bru-ha-ha with Jimmy Kimmel. In his response, Kimmel coined a useful term: snociopath, a person who is both a sociopath and a snowflake.

and the pandemic

A tug-of-war is going on between the fading of the January wave and the start of a new wave. The result is case numbers that have been more-or-less flat for almost a month. Falling numbers in the Midwest and South have masked rising numbers in the Northeast.

Probably because the increase is in the highly vaccinated Northeast, deaths continue to fall nationally. (When cases rise in Mississippi, more people die than when cases rise in Vermont.) They’re now averaging 570 a day, cut about in half in the last month. Hospitalizations and ICU admissions are also still falling.

The Tyee, an independent news site from British Columbia, summarized a study in Nature of Sweden’s hands-off approach to Covid. The results were not good: Sweden’s death rate (though enviable by American standards) was four times its neighbor Norway. The Canadian writer finds parallels to

places like Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, B.C. and Ontario, where political leaders didn’t adopt consistent public health goals, withheld data and offered little transparency about the decision-making process.

Yeah, but did they push quack treatments, demonize researchers, turn public health into a partisan issue, hold super-spreader events, ridicule people who wear masks, and personally spread the virus to others, as our former president did? That could be why Canada’s total of 991 Covid deaths per million people will never catch the US’s 3026. More than 600K Americans would still be alive if we had handled the pandemic as well as Canada. That should be a national scandal.

and the Trump coup

Newly released text messages show that Donald Trump Jr. was already envisioning how his father could stay in power in spite of the voters on November 5, two days after the election and before any news organizations had declared a winner.

The November 5 text message outlines a strategy that is nearly identical to what allies of the former President attempted to carry out in the months that followed. Trump Jr. makes specific reference to filing lawsuits and advocating recounts to prevent certain swing states from certifying their results, as well as having a handful of Republican state houses put forward slates of fake “Trump electors.”

If all that failed, according to the Trump Jr. text, GOP lawmakers in Congress could simply vote to reinstall Trump as President on January 6.

“We have operational control Total leverage,” the message reads. “Moral High Ground POTUS must start 2nd term now.”

Arizona’s Republican Attorney General Mark Brnovich reported on his six-month investigation into the 2020 presidential election in Arizona. He has uncovered no mass fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.

By law, the State Department is supposed compile an annual list of gifts US officials receive from foreign governments. But there is no accounting of gifts to Trump or other White House people in 2020, because the Trump administration routinely flouted anti-corruption laws.

and the culture wars

When radical Christian lawmakers propose extreme bills that hurt people, liberal politicians have a tendency to go easy on them: They have sincere beliefs, they mean well, they’re basically good people, and so on.

Well, not in Nebraska this week. Senator Megan Hunt represents a blue district in Omaha and is term-limited out of running again, so she’s got no appearances to keep up any more. She successfully led a filibuster of an abortion trigger law that would kick in if the Supreme Court overturns Roe “in whole or in part”, as it’s expected to do in June. The bill would have outlawed killing fertilized ova in just about all circumstances, including rape, incest, ectopic pregnancy, and possibly in-vitro fertilization, depending on how judges interpret its language.

Hunt played political hardball: Her maneuvers prevented amendments that might soften the bill to get the last few votes needed to end debate. So her filibuster held by two votes.

Her speech on the floor of the state’s unicameral legislature didn’t pull any punches:

There is no scenario where this will be amended, because I got to it first. You guys pulled the wrong bill. If this bill advances, IPP motions [to indefinitely postpone activity] are going on the bills of every proponent, because to me, yeah, this is personal.

I am not a person who can say, if you think my 11-year-old should be forced to give birth, that we can still be friends. I don’t understand a person who can say something like that. Maybe it’s a person who can’t give birth. Maybe it’s a person who’s never been raped. Somebody who doesn’t have a clue what it is to go through it. …

In life, sometimes we go through things where we have to draw a boundary. It is healthy for me, as a mother, as a rape survivor, to draw a boundary and say if you think that my child should be forced to give birth, you are not my friend.

And if I go to the Pearly Gates and meet your God someday—which sounds great, I hope I do—I don’t think I’m gonna get in any trouble for killing all of your bills who vote for this. I don’t think your God’s gonna have any problem with that. And I don’t think I’m gonna see any of you there either.

The guy who started the Republican panic about critical race theory is now planning a direct attack against public schools and public universities. “To get universal school choice,” he says, “you really need to operate from a premise of universal public school distrust.”

By belatedly objecting to Florida’s Don’t Say Gay law, Disney has made itself a target for conservative authoritarians.

Remember: In other contexts, conservatives believe that corporations are people and have a right to their own moral views. That’s why the Obama administration wasn’t allowed to make Hobby Lobby pay for birth control.

Now, if conservative individuals don’t want to do business with Disney any more, that’s their right. I’m fine with them declaring a boycott and trying to get people to unsubscribe from Disney Plus. It’s hypocritical to do that while denouncing “cancel culture”, but hypocrisy is not illegal. (I should mention here that I own some small amount of Disney stock. I don’t think it’s affecting my view of this situation, but full disclosure and so on.)

However, threats to retaliate against Disney by using government power in unrelated areas — that’s corrupt; it’s basic machine politics. Government power should be wielded for the benefit of citizens, and not to further partisan political goals. So it’s corrupt for Governor DeSantis to threaten to revoke the special local-government status of Disney’s holdings in Orlando. (As a protection racketeer might say: “Nice park you got there. Be a shame if anything happened to it.”) And Fox News host Laura Ingraham was promoting corruption when she said:

when Republicans get back into power, Apple and Disney need to understand one thing: Everything will be on the table–your copyright and trademark protection, your special status within certain states, and even your corporate structure itself.

I can only imagine Ingraham’s howl of rage if President Obama had similarly declared war on Hobby Lobby for getting in his way, or on Koch Industries because the Koch brothers contributed to conservative political campaigns. (That’s exactly what Trump repeatedly tried to do to Amazon to get back at Jeff Bezos for letting The Washington Post criticize him. But we already knew Trump was corrupt.)

(BTW: I have long opposed Congress’ repeated moves to extend copyright just as Mickey Mouse approaches the public domain. Lawrence Lessig is right about this. If the current conservative temper tantrum gets us a sensible copyright law, that would be good.)

Friday, Alabama became the latest state to pass laws targeting trans teens. Alabama’s SB184 is only 11 double-spaced pages, so you can read it for yourself. The bill makes a Class C felony out of medical treatments

performed for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of or affirm the minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex, if that appearance or perception is inconsistent with the minor’s sex as defined in this act

The banned treatments include puberty-blocking drugs, cross-sex hormones, and surgery.

The law justifies itself by claiming “Some in the medical community are aggressively pushing for interventions on minors”, and arguing the state knows better than either doctors or parents do. (Conservatives often claim to support “parental rights”, but that’s only when they approve of the parents’ decisions.)

Minors, and often their parents, are unable to comprehend and fully appreciate the risk and life implications, including permanent sterility, that result from the use of puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgical procedures.

Section 4b creates an exception for surgeries that attempt to turn intersex infants into boys or girls. (Conservatives only support “nature” when nature does what they want.)

Section 5 of the law forces nurses, counselors, teachers, and administrators at public or private schools to violate their students’ trust. They are forbidden to

(1) Encourage or coerce a minor to withhold from the minor’s parent or legal guardian the fact that the minor’s perception of his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with the minor’s sex.

(2) Withhold from a minor’s parent or legal guardian information related to a minor’s perception that his or her gender or sex is inconsistent with his or her sex.

Governor Ivey also signed HB322, which is just four pages. Section 1 of that bill requires public schools to segregate multiple-person bathrooms and locker rooms by sex. Students must use the facilities associated with the sex specified by their birth certificates.

Section 2 is a don’t-say-gay provision:

An individual or group of individuals providing classroom instruction to students in kindergarten through the fifth grade at a public K-12 school shall not engage in classroom discussion or provide classroom instruction regarding sexual orientation or gender identity in a manner that is not age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

It also requires the State Board of Education to establish such standards. (As with parental rights, local control is only a conservative value if local officials do what conservatives want.)

Reason eventually prevailed in Starr County, Texas: The woman arrested for murder after she had a miscarriage will not be prosecuted. She was charged with murder when the hospital reported to the county sheriff’s office that the miscarriage was self-induced. The local DA later announced that this was “not a criminal matter”. It was never clear exactly which law was being enforced.

Texas Public Radio has details.

Lynn Paltrow, executive director of National Advocates for Pregnant Women, said it was also troubling that this incident began with hospital staff making a report to police.

“We should not be living in a country where people who get pregnant are afraid to go for help at a hospital, because somebody there will turn them in or might turn them in, and it will result in arrest,” Paltrow told TPR.

Apparently there are some depths that Republicans are not willing to sink to yet. The Republican Party of Hampton, Virginia tried to remove the local Republican electoral board chair after his Facebook post assailed Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and retired three-star general Russell Honoré as “dirty stinking ni**ers” (without the asterisks) and recommended “a good public lynching” as “the best way to pull us back from the brink”.

That seems to be a step too far, at least for now. The Hampton GOP has revoked his membership and returned his contribution. But I’ve got to wonder how this guy managed to rise so far without anyone noticing he was a raving bigot.

The official in question, David Dietrich, refused to resign until Governor Youngkin stepped in. Dietrich faulted Austin for his attempts to remove White nationalists (who Dietrich characterizes as “conservative, freedom-loving Americans”) from the military. Honoré’s sin was to accept Speaker Pelosi’s invitation to review Capitol security infrastructure in the wake of the 1-6 insurrection. Dietrich says Honoré, who is Creole, sounds like “a Black nationalist”.

and you also might be interested in …

With hardly anybody noticing, the economy continues to do quite well. New claims for unemployment last week came in at the lowest level since 1968.

Europe is reconsidering nuclear power. The Ukraine war is causing European countries to question their dependence on Russian natural gas. According to Grist

Roughly one-fourth of Europe’s energy comes from natural gas, and as much as 40 percent of it flows from Russia.

If you do the math, 10% of Europe’s energy comes from Russian gas. There are ways to replace that 10%, but they’ll take time: increasing renewable power (which is already ramping up, but not fast enough), and importing liquified natural gas from places like the US (the port facilities for unloading it aren’t adequate yet). Europeans could turn down their thermostats, but that’s not going to be a popular solution.

In addition, the prospect of replacing gas-powered cars with electrics requires more generating capacity, not just maintaining the current capacity.

Normally, you wouldn’t think of nuclear power as a quick solution, because nuclear plants take a long time to approve and build. But Europe has recently decommissioned a number of plants, and more are scheduled to close over the next few years. Restarting the closed nuclear plants and extending the life of those still online would indeed provide a short-term boost over currently anticipated generating capacity.

Not everyone likes this idea, of course. Disasters like Chernobyl and Fukushima loom large in European thinking, as they should. The Grist article is a pretty well balanced look at the pros and cons.

A guy who has bounced around from one working-class job to another, and now cleans carpets, has a remarkable knack for languages. He speaks 24 languages, and has a lower-level understanding of many more. He didn’t set out to break any records, he just wants to understand what people are saying.

Proposed mergers involving smaller airlines Jet Blue, Spirit, and Frontier are a challenge to regulators. Air travel is dominated by four big carriers: United, American, Delta, and Southwest. Either of the proposed mergers would create a fifth large airline. Is that good or bad for competition in general?

and let’s close with something stupid

We should all be more familiar with economist Carlo Cipolla’s work on human stupidity. Cipolla had a very succinct definition of stupid people: those who cause harm to others without benefit to themselves.

Cipolla’s Five Laws of Stupidity are:

1. Always and inevitably, each of us underestimates the number of stupid individuals in the world.
2. The probability that a certain person is stupid is independent of any other characteristic of the same person.
3. A stupid person is one who causes harm to another person or group without at the same time obtaining a benefit for himself or even damaging himself.
4. Non-stupid people always underestimate the harmful potential of stupid people.
5. The stupid person is the most dangerous person that exists.

Cipolla’s theory leads to this four-bin categorization:

My one quibble with this model is in the upper left quadrant, which should be divided: If you understand that you are harming yourself to help others, you are generous. But if you don’t, you are gullible, and are probably being victimized by a bandit.

It’s not Russian airspace. It’s Ukrainian airspace.

– former NATO commander Wesley Clark
commenting on a no-fly zone over Ukraine

This week’s featured post is “About Those Gas Prices“. Last week’s “How did Christianity become so toxic?” is the most popular Sift post since last October’s “Reading While Texan“.

This week everybody was talking about Ukraine

This week, the conventional wisdom began entertaining a question that seemed absurd a few weeks ago: Could Russia actually lose this war?

Early on, everyone took for granted that Russia’s military superiority over Ukraine meant that of course they would eventually overrun the entire country, just as the US had overrun Iraq. The question then would shift (as it did in Iraq) to whether Russian occupation forces could pacify the country well enough to install a friendly government and keep it in power for the long term.

And they still might get to that point; maybe that’s still the most likely scenario. But the resilience of Ukrainian resistance, Russian military incompetence, and the unity NATO’s determination to keep Ukrainian fighters well supplied, have combined to raise the question: What if Russia can’t overrun Ukraine? How long can Russia sustain these kinds of losses before their army’s best option is to turn around and go home? And facing that situation, would Putin lash out in some desperate way with chemical or nuclear weapons?

The WaPo summarizes:

in the absence of substantive progress on the ground and given the scale of the losses being inflicted on its ranks, Russia’s military campaign could soon become unsustainable, with troops unable to advance because they lack sufficient manpower, supplies and munitions, analysts and officials say.

President Zelensky gave a virtual speech to the U.S. Congress on Wednesday. Zelensky had a narrow path to walk: He wanted to express gratitude for the help the US and NATO have given his country, but he also wanted to challenge us: “I call on you to do more.”

He asked for some very specific things:

• air defense. He’d like NATO to defend Ukrainian airspace directly by declaring a no-fly zone. But he seemed to realize he won’t get that commitment. “If this is too much to ask, we offer an alternative. You know what kind of defense systems we need, S-300 and other similar systems.” S-300s are Soviet-era air-defense missiles that three NATO countries (Bulgaria, Greece, and Slovakia) field. Slovakia has offered to provide S-300s to Ukraine if other NATO allies would replace them with some equivalent system. Russia has said it “will not allow” such a transfer, whatever that means. Presumably Zelensky specified S-300s because Ukrainians already know how to operate them.
• broader sanctions. “We propose that the United States sanctions all politicians in the Russian Federation who remain in their offices and do not cut ties with those who are responsible for the aggression against Ukraine, from State Duma’s members to the last official who has lack of morale to break this state terror. All Americans’ company must leave Russia from their market, leave their market immediately because it is flooded with our blood. All American ports should be closed for Russian goods.”

After Zelensky’s speech, President Biden announced an additional $1 billion of military aid.

800 Stinger anti-aircraft systems, 100 drones, “over 20 million rounds of small arms ammunition and grenade launcher and mortar rounds,” 25,000 sets of body armor, 25,000 helmets, 100 grenade launchers, 5,000 rifles, 1,000 pistols, 400 machine guns, 400 shotguns, as well as “2,000 Javelin, 1,000 light anti-armor weapons, and 6,000 AT-4 anti-armor systems.”

The US will specifically provide Switchblade drones to Ukraine, two sources familiar with the matter told CNN. The small, portable, so-called kamikaze drones carry warheads and detonate on impact. The smallest model can hit a target up to 6 miles away

Arnold the former Governator has a powerful message for the Russian people and Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Apparently a lot of people are hearing it.

Netflix has brought back Zelensky’s comedy TV series “Servant of the People”. You can also watch it on YouTube.

Varia Bartsova laments the Russia she grew up in, now that Soviet-style repression and Iron-Curtain-like isolation have returned.

Vladimir Putin gave his own speech Wednesday, a quite scary one that seemed to threaten a Stalin-style purge.

The Russian people will always be able to distinguish true patriots from scum and traitors and simply spit them out like a fly that accidentally flew into their mouths. I am convinced that such a natural and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to respond to any challenges.

A report from the Institute for the Study of War indicates that a purge may already be going on within the military and intelligence services. Some officials are being fired, while others are being arrested.

Putin reportedly fired several generals and arrested Federal Security Service (FSB) intelligence officers in an internal purge. Ukrainian Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council Oleksiy Danilov stated on March 9 that the Kremlin has replaced eight generals due to their failures in Ukraine, though ISW cannot independently verify this information.[21] Putin additionally detained several personnel from the FSB’s 5th Service, which is responsible for informing Putin about the political situation in Ukraine. The Federal Protective Service and 9th Directorate of the FSB (its internal security department) reportedly raided the 5th Service and over 20 other locations on March 11. Several media outlets reported that 5th Service Head Sergey Beseda and his deputy Anatoly Bolyukh are under house arrest on March 11.[22] Independent Russian media outlet Meduza claimed the 5th Service might have provided Putin with false information about the political situation in Ukraine ahead of his invasion out of fear of contradicting Putin‘s desired prognosis that a war in Ukraine would be a smooth undertaking.[23] Putin is likely carrying out an internal purge of general officers and intelligence personnel. He may be doing so either to save face after failing to consider their assessments in his own pre-invasion decision-making or in retaliation for faulty intelligence he may believe they provided him.

Everyone is focused on the war’s effect on the world’s energy production. (See the featured post.) But a more serious problem might be the effect on food production: Not only are Ukraine (where the next crop is not getting planted) and Russia (whose exports are sanctioned) top grain-exporters, but Russia and Belarus are important suppliers of potash, one of the key ingredients in fertilizer. Crop yields far from the battle zone may be affected.

And like the oil price rise, the expected rise in food prices will come at a time when prices are already high. This will be an annoyance to most Americans, and we may fight political battles over whether to offer some special food subsidy to the poor. But the world’s less well off countries could face real shortages.

There have been a lot of dark jokes about the apocalypse these last two years, as the world has faced Pestilence, Death, and now War. But soon the fourth horseman, Famine, may make an appearance.

and the pandemic

I feel like we’re in the eye of a storm. Here in the US, case numbers have been falling almost everywhere since January. We now average fewer than 30K new cases per day, a level not seen since July. Deaths are still over 1100 per day, but that also is lower than we’ve seen since a very brief period around Thanksgiving, and before that you have to go back to August.

So: great news. But there are also ominous signs: A new subvariant is out there (BA.2 where Omicron was BA.1). Europe, which experienced the original Omicron surge before we did, is currently having a BA.2 surge. And wastewater testing, the earliest warning signal of a new outbreak, is finding more Covid in many parts of the US.

It’s also hard to know how much trust to put in the case-number statistics these days. A lot of the less serious cases might never appear in the stats. (People I know personally have tested positive at home and dealt with their symptoms without telling the medical establishment.) It’s tempting to shrug off those easily managed cases. But the virus is the virus; you may or may not do as well as the person who infected you.

Hospitalizations and deaths are more reliable numbers, but they lag in time.

So deciding what risks to take is tricky right now. Maybe you should seize this chance to go to a concert or take a trip. Or maybe the new surge has already started, but we won’t notice it for a week or two.

Both Pfizer and Moderna have asked the FDA to approve a fourth vaccination shot. My advice: Trust your doctor on this. If the FDA approves it and your doctor recommends it, get it.

and the culture wars

Kim Davis is back in the news. She was the county clerk in Kentucky who in 2015 refused to process wedding licenses for same-sex couples who were legally entitled to them. She eventually got voted out, but two couples that she refused to serve are suing her. Friday, a judge ruled that as a matter of law, she did violate their civil rights. Now a jury has to decide what damages to award.

Davis is offering the usual defense: Because her bigotry arises from her “Christian” beliefs, discrimination laws don’t apply to her. I find it impossible to imagine this argument being taken seriously if you substitute a different faith. What if a county health commissioner refused to approve new steakhouses because of his sincerely held Hindu beliefs?

Davis’ lawyers say the case “has a high potential of reaching the Supreme Court”. Given the current Court’s record of inventing special rights for Christians, she may win.

Paul Waldman explains why the Republican plan to double down on unpopular culture war positions can make short-term political sense.

[T]o engineer a political backlash, you don’t actually need to win converts to your cause. Often, all you need is to persuade the people who haven’t changed their minds as the world changes around them to get more upset.

Which is what we’re seeing right now. Particularly at the state level, Republicans have successfully convinced their base that their entire way of life is under dire threat from a trans girl who wants to play on her middle school softball team or from the books that are sitting in school libraries.

Speaking of which: When USA Today included HHS Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine in their Women of the Year list, conservatives couldn’t take that lying down, because she’s trans. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tweeted “Rachel Levine is a man”, and National Review wrote a whole article to protest the choice. NR quoted Levine’s message to people questioning their gender identity:

I think you have to be true to yourself and I think that you have to be who you are. You have tremendous worth just for who you are, no matter who you love, no matter who you are, no matter what your gender identity, sexual orientation or anything else, and to be, be true to that. And then everything else will follow.

and commented “This is terrible advice.” Don’t be who you are; be who we say you are.

In an article focused on trans athletes in women’s sports, The New Yorker commented:

There was something absurd in the spectacle of conservative politicians who have never shown any interest in supporting women’s sports, which are chronically underfunded and underexposed, moralizing about the sanctity of collegiate women’s swimming.

I’m relieved to learn that no NFL team I root for won the bidding war for quarterback Deshaun Watson, who faces 22 civil lawsuits for sexual assault and other forms of sexual misconduct, but will not be criminally charged. Watson denies everything, which at some point starts to make it even worse: When you’ve got 22 accusers, it’s not a he-said/she-said any more. Denial doesn’t make you sound innocent, just unrepentant.

The Cleveland Browns gave up three first-round draft picks to get Watson from the Texans, and then signed him to a five-year contract for $230 million that sets an NFL record for the most guaranteed money. The contract is structured so that he’ll lose the minimum amount possible when the NFL gets around to suspending him for the start of next season. Given the way the NFL works, Cleveland has mortgaged the franchise for Watson; if he doesn’t work out, they can’t draft his replacement and they’ll have no money available to offer a free agent.

Just about any NFL team occasionally puts somebody on the field who is hard to root for, and like most football fans, I’ve adjusted by not thinking about it too hard. But I wouldn’t be able to stretch this far. Quarterbacks are so central in the NFL that rooting for the Browns next season means rooting for Watson. I couldn’t do it.

Yahoo sports columnist Shalise Manza Young makes the comparison to Colin Kaepernick: Kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism got him (unofficially) banned for life. Watson will probably be suspended for a few games, and then will be the public face of the NFL in Cleveland.

and you also might be interested in …

When Texas was passing its latest voter-suppression law, critics said its main effect would be to screw up people trying to vote legally. And guess what? That’s exactly what has happened.

As Texans’ ballots were cast and tallied across the Lone Star State last week, Monica Emery received multiple letters from county election officials saying that her attempt to vote by mail had failed.

The problem, she learned, stemmed from SB1, Texas Republicans’ restrictive new voting law that not only requires an ID number on voters’ absentee ballots and applications, but also that the type of ID number match the number that a voter originally used to register. 

That law, signed by Governor Greg Abbott (R) last year, has now caused a massive spike in rejected applications to vote by mail. And for absentee voters in last week’s primary election, many of whom are elderly or disabled, it added an extra hurdle to what was once a simple process. 

Apparently, the number Emery wrote on her ballot — she thinks it was her driver’s license number — was not the one she used when she registered to vote. Other options include various state ID numbers and the last four digits of her Social Security number. Any of those numbers could be a voter’s ID number, it’s a question of which one a voter provided when they first registered.

“I did that 40 years ago,” Emery told TPM of her voter registration. “I just put a number down.”

When law-makers are warned that a law has unfortunate consequences, and they pass it anyway, you have to assume those consequences are intended.

Haven’t you suspected all along that Stacey Abrams was from the future?

The Webb space telescope is starting to produce sharp images.

Senate hearings on Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson begin today.

Josh Hawley, the Senator who gave a raised-fist salute to the seditionists on January 6, and then put the image on a coffee mug for his supporters (without permission from the news organization that took the photo), has come up with a particularly slimy charge to throw at Jackson: She “has a pattern of letting child porn offenders off the hook for their appalling crimes”.

One characteristic of an effective smear is that the charge is easier to grasp than an explanation of what really happened. For those who really want to understand, Ian Millhiser goes through the details. Other writers simply observe that Judge Jackson’s sentencing practices are in line with most other judges. Sentencing guidelines in child porn cases are widely believed to be out of whack, particularly in their inability to distinguish more serious cases (i.e., professional producers of child porn) from less serious ones.

Senator Hawley has already voted to approve judges whose sentencing practices are similar to Jackson’s.

Other Republicans looking for ammunition against Judge Jackson are joining this attack.

I’m not grasping the reasoning behind the push to make daylight saving time permanent. I can see not wanting to change clocks twice a year, but why not standardize on the original time system, rather than move it by an hour?

and let’s close with something soothing

If life has been too hectic lately, take a few minutes to watch an otter getting a good combing.