The Weekly Sift

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.

– Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man
[Darwin’s 213th birthday was Saturday]

This week’s featured post is “Who Should You Back in the Midterm Elections?“

This week everybody was talking about the Canadian truckers’ “Freedom Convoy”

Police finally began arresting the protesters who for six days had shut down the bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario with Detroit. To me, this whole episode is an example of how the legal system treats conservative protesters with kid gloves and liberal protesters more harshly. Does anyone believe that Black Lives Matter protesters would have been allowed to shut down international trade for nearly a week? What do you think the death toll would have been if BLM had stormed the Capitol to protest a Trump victory? How long would an armed liberal group have been allowed to occupy a federal wildlife sanctuary? Would a jury have let them go scot free?

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Amarnath Amarasingam doesn’t describe the convoy as fascism, but his version of what’s going on has a lot in common with my definition of the word. He uses populism to denote an ideologically vacuous movement that revolves around the conflict between “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”. This particular brand of populism is flavored by the “far-right extremism of the organizers”, and an element of racism.

When people keep shouting “true Canadian”, to people like me – a refugee to this country – it feels like they just mean white Canadian, and a very specific kind of white Canadian at that. …

It is in this hatred of the elite that there is often an opening for conspiracy theories, as you can imagine. It is a very short Uber ride from “elite” discourse to “tiny cabal of evil doers”, usually Jews, New World Order, and so on. …

Finally, the people rhetoric is also characterized by (d) a threatened nationalism – that something at the core what makes our country great is being eroded by elites: think MAGA, but also the upside down Canadian flags, etc.

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Rupa Subramanya wrote a piece “What the Truckers Want” for Bari Weiss’ “Common Sense” substack. She opens by emphasizing the universality of the backgrounds in the truckers occupying Ottawa: “Vaxxed, unvaxxed, white, black, Chinese, Sikh, Indian, alone or with their wives and kids.” The piece’s subhead says “What’s happening is far bigger than the vaccine mandates.” But when you get down to the actual quotes, it all seems to be about less than vaccine mandates. It’s not even the mandates they’re against, it’s Covid vaccines.

Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Covid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. …

Peter, 28, a long-haul trucker from Ontario … refused to get vaccinated, he said, because the whole thing had been so politicized, and you couldn’t be sure who to trust. …

Theo, 24, felt the same way. He wasn’t a trucker—he used to work at a major accounting firm and now works another big company—but he was angry, like the truckers were. “They treated me like a second-class citizen,” he said, referring to his old firm. He explained that he’d refused to get vaccinated. …

Theo’s brother, Lucas, who’s 21, is also unvaccinated for similar reasons. He’d planned to go to law school, but, being unvaccinated, he had to take only online courses, but some of the courses he’d need to graduate were only available in person. Now, his future was uncertain.

And so on. Nobody is saying, “I believe the vaccines work and I’m vaccinated myself, but I think it’s wrong to impose that choice on others.”

I’m reminded of the people who claim that the Civil War was about states’ rights, not slavery. A state’s right to do what, though? Legalize slavery.

Same thing here: People claim it’s not about vaccines, it’s about freedom. But the only freedom they seem concerned about is the freedom not to get vaccinated. They want to be free to make an anti-social choice without facing social repercussions.

and the pandemic

Omicron continues to fade, and the evidence is finally showing up in death statistics. Covid deaths are averaging 2465 per day, down 3% over two weeks. New cases are averaging 175K per day, down 31%. 93K Americans are hospitalized with Covid and 17K are in ICUs, down 35% and 29%. In the next few weeks, I expect the decline in deaths to steepen to match the other stats.

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If you find yourself discussing the effectiveness of vaccines with someone, be sure to reference these stats from the CDC:

During October–November, unvaccinated persons had 13.9 and 53.2 times the risks for infection and COVID-19–associated death, respectively, compared with fully vaccinated persons who received booster doses, and 4.0 and 12.7 times the risks compared with fully vaccinated persons without booster doses.

So do three shots guarantee you won’t get sick or die? No. But your risk of getting sick is 14 times lower than an unvaccinated person’s, and your risk of death is 53 times lower.

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In his recent piece “Open Everything“, The Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk spoke for a lot of the people who are sick of the pandemic and just want to put it out of their minds. He starts out by establishing his lockdown bona fides — he was for closing everything before you were — and then takes on the objection that most things are already open: You can go to sports events, movies, restaurants, and whatever. But, he notes “An Axios/Ipsos poll found that only 18 percent of Americans say their lives have returned to normal.”

To fix the situation he wants this:

[W]e should lift all remaining restrictions on everyday activities (which were, in any case, unable to prevent the rapid circulation of Omicron cases this winter). Children should be allowed to take off their mask in school. We should get rid of measures such as deep cleaning that are purely performative. Politicians and public-health officials should send the message that Americans should no longer limit their social activities, encouraging them to resume playdates and dinner parties without guilt.

Sure it’s risky, but Mounk recalls our courageous ancestors.

The risk posed by bacteria and viruses remains much lower today than it was for the majority of human history. In the America of 1900, for example, nearly 1 percent of people died from infectious diseases every year, about an order of magnitude higher than today. And yet Americans exposed to such dangers chose to engage in a full social life, judging that the risk of pestilence—however serious—did not justify forgoing human connection.

And that’s where I lose it: Don’t make me list all the ways that life was valued more cheaply in past eras.

I don’t remember 1900, but I do remember the 1960s. The cars were death traps. Practically nothing had a railing on it. People insulated their homes with asbestos and painted their walls with lead. So don’t try to make me nostalgic for the health-and-safety standards of the Good Old Days.

I (along with Mike the Mad Biologist) am one of the people whose lives have not returned to “normal” yet, and it’s got nothing to do with public-health officials making me feel guilty. I just don’t want to get sick. I understand that deaths among the triple-vaccinated are rare now (see above), and if Mounk weighs risks differently and wants to “resume playdates and dinner parties”, I’m not stopping him. Nobody is.

But it sure sounds like he wants my permission, or Tony Fauci’s, or somebody’s. Generate your own permission, Yascha. Stop looking at the rest of us. We’re not the problem.

and fake controversies

This week in the conservative alternative universe:

1. At an awards show, Adele said something that shouldn’t have offended anybody. She “loves being a woman”. Good for her. It’s great when people love being what they are.
2. Conservative media freaked out about the “woke Left” taking offense at what Adele said and threatening to “cancel” her.

Notice a step missing? As best I or anybody else can detect, the Left did not interpret Adele’s statement as a slam against the trans community, because there’s no reason to think it was. Nobody is trying to cancel Adele. Ari Drennen from Media Matters tweeted:

As a trans person, I also very much love being a woman, and I’m glad that Adele feels the same. Whether you’re a man, a woman, or nonbinary, it’s good to love yourself and the life you’ve made!

Instead, the Crazy Right imagined what their caricature of a “woke” person would do, and reacted against that. Then they all quoted each other about the (non-existent) insane left-wing freakout, until Fox devoted a segment of Outnumbered to the manufactured controversy, and Joe Rogan monologued on how “intolerant” the “they/them people” are. The Daily Beast has the full story.

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Oh, and the widely reported (on the Right) story that the Biden administration was spending millions distributing crack pipes? Not true. But you probably guessed that already.

and Trump

Every week, the picture of Trump’s general lawlessness gains more detail.

While President Trump was in office, staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper, Maggie Haberman scoops in her forthcoming book, “Confidence Man.”

Meanwhile, the National Archives has retrieved 15 boxes of presidential documents, some highly classified, from Mar-a-Lago. By law, those documents belong to the American people, not Trump. Transporting classified documents is a highly regulated process, but nobody seems to know who moved the 15 boxes to Florida.

“He would roll his eyes at the rules, so we did, too,” said Stephanie Grisham, the former Trump White House press secretary who has become an outspoken Trump critic since the Jan. 6 insurrection on the U.S. Capitol. “We weren’t going to get in trouble because he’s the president of the United States.”

Is it worth pointing out that people with nothing to hide don’t act this way?

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It all looks legal, but it’s amazing how efficiently Trump sucks money out of his cultists. Ostensibly he’s seeking contributions for his political movement, but the money has a way of gravitating into his pocket.

The roughly $375,000 [Trump’s political action committee] paid in Trump Tower rent was more than the total of $350,000 that Mr. Trump’s group donated to the scores of federal and state-level political candidates he endorsed in 2021.

Many of those candidates, in turn, redirected funds back to Mr. Trump, holding lavish events at his properties. Herschel Walker, the former football player whom Mr. Trump recruited to run for Senate in Georgia, spent more than $135,000 at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s private Florida club. The Republican National Committee forked over $175,000 for a fund-raiser there in the spring.

Mr. Trump’s PAC made two $1 million donations to conservative nonprofits in 2021: the America First Policy Institute and the Conservative Partnership Institute. Both also hosted big events at Mar-a-Lago.

but I have a question …

about Substack and who you subscribe to. But before I ask it, I want to say this: I’m not considering turning the Sift into a subscription service, or even asking for donations. There’s something liberating about the Sift being a hobby rather than a job, and I feel lucky to be able to approach it that way. I don’t want that to change.

But anyway, I notice that I’m starting to subscribe to stuff on Substack. Some people do consider writing internet columns to be their jobs, or at least profitable sidelines, and they’re good enough at it that I don’t mind paying them. At the moment I’m subscribed to Heather Cox Richardson, James Fallows, and David Roberts.

Who do you consider worth paying money for? Who should I be keeping track of?

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While I’m mentioning James Fallows, check out “Framing the News, an update“, which I’m pretty sure you can see without subscribing. Framing is a concept he didn’t invent and has explained before:

As a reminder, framing involves the unstated, sometimes unconscious assumptions that reporters and editors bring to a story, and why these can make a bigger difference than more visible expressions of partisan slant.

He then talks about the influence of two particular frames that shape a lot of news coverage:

• Nothing works in Washington.
• That’s just Trump.

Under the first bullet, he draws a distinction between situations that are terrible and ones that are hopeless.

The frame of many stories about “the mess in Washington” is that public life is hopeless. Nothing works, and nothing can. Tim Noah’s story argues: many things don’t work, but some things do—and here is what we can learn from them, even as we consider what has failed.

The power of framing is that painting Washington as hopeless doesn’t require justification; it’s a background assumption that need never be examined closely.

“That’s just Trump” is an example of “grading on the curve”, of “not holding Trump to the standards applied to other politicians, because you know he’s not going to meet them.” He demonstrates with recent Trump stories that would have been front-page, banner-headline scandals for any other president or ex-president, but were reported in the NYT well down the front page, or deep in the interior of the paper: looking for ways to seize voting machines, destroying presidential records, taking classified documents to Mar-a-Lago when he left office.

For contrast, he reproduces that NYT’s front page when Hillary Clinton was accused of mishandling records as Secretary of State. His point isn’t that the NYT has a pro-Trump bias, which would be absurd. It’s that Trump benefits from the NYT’s (and most major media’s) low expectations of him. He broke the law again? That’s just Trump. Nothing to get excited about.

and you also might be interested in …

The Ukraine crisis continues. Maybe there will be war. Maybe not. I’d tell you more, but I’ve just exhausted my knowledge.

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It’s rare for common-sense reforms to get bipartisan support in Congress these days, but it looks like a couple of things are going to pass: rescuing the Post Office from ridiculous financial restrictions passed during the Bush administration, and banning members of Congress from trading stocks.

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The Super Bowl is the year’s most important event not just in football, but in advertising. This year Coinbase’s floating-QR-code ad was too successful: the resulting traffic crashed their app, which couldn’t have been the impression they wanted to make. Polygon lists their top ten SB commericals. My favorite was the robot dog.

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Former Obama advisor David Axelrod gives President Biden some good advice about his State of the Union address, which will come a little late this year, on March 1. The problem is that the national mood is more negative that it ought to be. We’re all tired of dealing with Covid and annoyed by rising prices, but Biden isn’t getting the credit he deserves for job growth, for beginning the infrastructure-rebuilding process (that Trump kept promising but never delivered), and for ending America’s wars. (That hit me during the pageantry before the Super Bowl: They showed troops at a base in Kuwait, not in Afghanistan or Iraq or some other war zone, as in previous years.)

So Biden needs to thread a needle: He needs to remind Americans of all that he’s accomplished, and to envision a hopeful road into the future, while not telling us that our negative feelings are wrong. People don’t become happy just because you tell them that they should be.

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Yeah, MTG really did accuse Nancy Pelosi of having “Gazpacho police“, which has me thinking of “Women on the Verge of Nervous Breakdown” for some reason. The jokes and memes have been raining down so hard I can’t even keep track of where they come from: Don’t collaborate with the Gazpacho like the Vichyssoise French did. Nobody expects the Spinach Inquisition. During the London Blintz, the Luftwaffles almost toasted me.

People are accusing MTG of being stupid, but she was probably just hungry.

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The Sift used to have an “Expand Your Vocabulary” feature, where I’d highlight terms I had just discovered and found useful. Here’s one. Eric Deggans defines bigotry denial syndrome like this:

the belief that, because you personally don’t view yourself as a bigot, you don’t believe that you can say or do something that is seriously bigoted or damaging

He uses Joe Rogan as an example: Sure, he occasionally says or does something that looks racist, but it can’t really be racist, because he knows he’s not a racist at heart.

The opposite view is one I try to implement in my own life: I occasionally catch myself thinking, saying, or doing something that is racist, sexist, or bigoted in some other way. I take that as a sign that I’ve still got stuff to work on. That stuff doesn’t become OK just because I know I’m a good person. Conversely, I don’t have to redefine myself as a monster because I still have some bigotry in me. I’ve just got stuff to work on.

It’s weird how many Evangelicals don’t get this, when they understand the Seven Deadly Sins perfectly: You’re not a monster just because you’re occasionally motivated by Greed or Envy, but you do have something to work on. Just make Bigotry an eighth deadly sin and you’ve got it.

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Trevor Noah has an occasional feature on The Daily Show called “If you don’t know, now you know.” This one explains how racism got built into the interstate highway system. One question I’d like to ask Pete Buttigieg, though, is why he thinks the process is reversible. Once a highway displaces people and disrupts a neighborhood for several decades, I don’t see how moving the highway fixes anything.

and let’s close with something cute

I love the way border collies herd various animals by silently staring them down. Here, the technique is applied to ducklings.

It would take many books, my life. And no one wants anyway to hear such stories.

– Holocaust survivor Vladek Spiegelman,
quoted by his son Art in Maus

This week’s featured post is “McMinn County’s Maus Problem“.

This week everybody was talking about Ukraine

Often in this blog, I encourage people to trust the experts. Unless you have some really solid reason not to, listen to the CDC about Covid, and to the climate scientists about global warming. If a bipartisan election commission certifies your state’s results, believe them. And so on.

Defense and foreign policy, though, is one place where I get skeptical. I don’t usually characterize national-security-state insiders as villains, but I also don’t always believe what they say. I remember how they misled us into the Iraq invasion, and how victory in our 20-year Afghan War was always just a few months away. I also remember how easily respected news platforms like The New York Times and The Washington Post let themselves be used to spread Iraq-invasion propaganda.

So now the experts are warning us that Russia might invade Ukraine at any moment, and they could be right. I certainly have no reason to think Putin is on the side of the angels, or that he was satisfied by the chunks of Ukraine he stole away in 2014.

But still. This is one of the hidden costs of the Iraq deception: The Pentagon and the State Department have lost a lot of credibility with Americans like me. It’s going to take a long time to win it back, if in fact they deserve to win it back — which they might not.

So who do we believe in all this?

The most convincing thing I read this week was written by Ukrainians. The gist is that Putin does threaten Ukraine, but not as immediately as Western sources make it sound.

According to our estimates, supported by many of the indicators below, a large-scale general military operation can’t take place for at least the next two or three weeks. As of Jan. 23, we do not observe the required formation of several hundred thousand troops, not only on the border with Ukraine, but also on Russian territory behind the front line.

They’re not seeing behind-the-lines mobilizations necessary for a major invasion, like medical infrastructure for handling mass casualties. Overall troop deployments, they say, haven’t changed since April.

Russia could mobilize for an invasion — that’s where the “two or three weeks” comes from — but the Ukrainian writers don’t think it’s likely.

Overall, a large-scale offensive operation with an attempt to hold large occupied territories is a gamble that has no chance of a positive outcome for Russia. It is impossible to calculate the course of such an operation, and when implemented, it will quickly move to an uncontrollable point. 

When we add non-military components to this formula, such as international isolation and sanctions, then the result of an invasion will be politically suicidal for the Kremlin. We believe that, if Putin and his team have not lost their ability to think rationally, they will not go for such a scenario. 

More likely, they say, is a multi-faceted pressure campaign aimed at “destabilization and demoralization of the population”. The troops on the border are part of that, but so are

cyberattacks, which are already taking place, … psychological operations, such as active disinformation, mass bomb threats at schools, subway systems, administrative offices, and other facilities, along with the spread of disinformation and other methods.

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A Putin talking point that I’ve seen repeated on both the Left and the Right is that NATO promised Russia in 1991 that it would stop expanding. This seems not to be true.

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One striking thing about the media debate in America is how quickly the MAGA-right repeats Putin’s propaganda. Peter Navarro parrots Putin’s line that “Ukraine is not really a country.” Tucker Carlson on multiple occasions has wondered why the US would side with Ukraine rather than Russia. The distinctions between aggressor and target, or between democracy and authoritarianism, seem to elude him.

Meanwhile, Tucker’s identification with the authoritarian nationalist government of Hungary gets ever more explicit. The new “documentary” Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization that Carlson has made for the subscriber channel Fox Nation supports Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban’s Nazi-themed tropes: Jewish money is behind Hungary’s troubles.

and the Supreme Court

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the three liberals remaining, announced his retirement Thursday, kicking off what is sure to be an epic battle over his replacement.

President Biden had promised during the campaign that he would nominate the first Black woman to the Court, and he appears ready to make good on that promise. There are many worthy candidates, as you would suspect from the fact that previous presidents haven’t used up any of the good choices.

Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi characterized Biden’s unnamed nominee as “a beneficiary of affirmative action”, and without knowing any more about her than her race and gender, predicted that “this new justice will probably not get a single Republican vote”.

I will point out that Jackie Robinson was an “affirmative action” pick in exactly the same sense: Branch Rickey went looking for a Black player to sign, because he saw the Negro Leagues as an untapped source of talent for the Dodgers.

and the pandemic

The Omicron wave is now clearly receding in most the country, particularly in the Northeast. But case-numbers are still high: 519K new cases per day in the US, down 35% in two weeks. Hospitalizations seem to have peaked also — 144K, down 8% in two weeks — but have not yet begun to fall sharply. Deaths still haven’t peaked: 2524 per day, up 28%.

Weirdly, at this moment when deaths are higher than they’ve been in about a year, we’re seeing a lot of calls to end special Covid precautions entirely and go “back to normal”. You know how when you get an infection, the doctor tells you to finish the antibiotic prescription even if you start feeling better? It’s like that. Historian John Barry, author of The Great Influenza, explains what we can learn from that pandemic.

Nearly all cities in the United States imposed restrictions during the pandemic’s virulent second wave, which peaked in the fall of 1918. That winter, some cities reimposed controls when a third, though less deadly wave struck. But virtually no city responded in 1920. People were weary of influenza, and so were public officials. Newspapers were filled with frightening news about the virus, but no one cared. People at the time ignored this fourth wave; so did historians. The virus mutated into ordinary seasonal influenza in 1921, but the world had moved on well before.

We should not repeat that mistake. …

As in 1920, people are tired of taking precautions.

This is ceding control to the virus. The result has been that even though Omicron appears to be less virulent, the seven-day average for daily Covid-19 deaths in the United States has now surpassed the Delta peak in late September.

Worse, the virus may not be finished with us.

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The FDA is withdrawing monoclonal antibody treatments that were based on antibodies to previous versions of the virus and that provably don’t work on Omicron. But Ron DeSantis and other anti-public-health conservatives have embraced monoclonal antibodies as the one Covid-fighting method they can support, and they’re having trouble backing away from it.

Rand Paul has gone so far as to put forward a conspiracy theory: The FDA is taking away an effective treatment in order to “punish” conservative states like Florida.

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A new low in Fox News’ deadly Covid-disinformation project: Tucker Carlson listens attentively while his invited guest Alex Berenson says:

The mRNA COVID vaccines need to be withdrawn from the market. No one should get them. No one should get boosted. No one should get double boosted. They are a dangerous and ineffective product at this point.

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I don’t usually link to those gloating look-who-died-of-Covid stories, but I’m going to make an exception for Robert LaMay, a former Washington state trooper who in October made a viral video out of his decision to lose his job rather than comply with Governor Inslee’s vaccine mandate for state employees. “Jay Inslee can kiss my ass,” he broadcast from his patrol car. The video was clearly a planned stunt, because the dispatcher was prepared to respond with a list of LaMay’s accomplishments.

LaMay went on talk shows “non-stop” for a day or two afterward, including Laura Ingraham’s show on Fox News. “What’s next for you?” Ingraham asked. “Other than being a celebrity.”

I’ll bet that Ingraham won’t do a follow-up, now that her question has an answer: LaMay died of Covid on Friday, about three months after he made his video and appeared on her show. At least he wasn’t able to use his status as a state patrolman to infect members of the general public, who aren’t allowed to socially distance themselves from the police. Thank you, Jay Inslee.

BTW: Fox News itself has a vaccine mandate, which it doesn’t like to talk about. Tucker Carlson, in spite of spreading misinformation about vaccines night after night, always refuses to say whether he has been vaccinated. If he himself were the kind of anti-vax hero he frequently praises, don’t you think he’d say so?

and censorship

The featured post delves into a Tennessee school board’s decision to cancel an 8th-grade reading module based on the Holocaust-survivor graphic novel Maus.

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Newly inaugurated Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin has set up an email address for concerned parents to report teachers who engage in “divisive practices” like teaching critical race theory. Because that’s what freedom-loving people do: They snitch on each other to the government.

He appears not to have thought this out very well, though, because a very predictable thing happened: The account has been deluged with prank reports like “Albus Dumbeldore was teaching that full blooded wizards discriminated against mudbloods!”

For shame, people! You should definitely NOT send prank emails to

helpeducation@governor.virginia.gov

and you also might be interested in …

The most nerve-wracking part of the James Webb telescope mission has passed. The million-and-one things that had to go right for the Webb telescope to wind up fully unfolded and positioned at L2 have gone right. Now comes a few months of aligning and calibrating.

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Meanwhile, Fox News has uncovered a major new Biden administration scandal: ice cream. It’s even worse than Obama’s tan suit. Criticizing Biden for doing something frivolous lines up with the effort to gaslight us about how hard Trump worked. “My father sat there 24 hours a day,” Eric lied.

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I don’t pretend to know whether Bitcoin and its relatives will rebound from the latest slump. But the recent 50% drop reinforces the reasons I’ve stayed away from it. First, when the market started worrying about inflation, crypto-currencies behaved like speculative investments, not like the inflation hedges they’re supposed to be. And second, because I don’t see what you tell yourself to avoid panicking when it starts to crash. Any investment can fall, but when the value of your house crashes, you can just keep living in it. If the dollar falls, the US government will still let you pay your taxes with dollars. When a blue-chip stock slumps, you keep collecting the dividend. When the market turns against your stock in some speculative company, you can reassure yourself that the long-term trends are in place. (Businesses are still buying robots and moving their IT to the cloud.) But cryptocurrencies have no underlying fundamentals. When they fall, they just fall.

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Despite devoting an indefensible amount of my time to watching sports, I usually don’t discuss sports on this blog. I’ll make an exception for this week’s vote on the Baseball Hall of Fame, in which Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens failed to get in on their final year of eligibility.

Fans have strong opinions both ways about this, and here’s mine: It’s not a Hall of Virtue, it’s a Hall of Fame. The point of going to Cooperstown isn’t to worship role models, but to revisit your memories of being a fan, and to imagine what it was like to be a fan in the distant past.

If you were a baseball fan in the 1990s and early 2000s, most of your memories are of Bonds, Clemens, Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and a bunch of other guys who are not in Cooperstown because of suspicion of steroid use. Maybe you loved those players and maybe you hated them, but you can’t remember the era without them. The story of baseball in those years was their story, but the Hall has decided to pretend none of that happened.

I’d extend amnesty to to other eras as well. Joe Jackson should be in the Hall, and Pete Rose. Gaylord Perry threw an illegal spitball most of his career, but he got in, and I’m fine with that. These guys aren’t supposed to be heroes, just baseball players.

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Apropos of nothing in particular:

and let’s close with some white-on-white crime

In a move that looks oddly romantic, a white rabbit nibbles a snowman’s carrot nose.

Violence can only be concealed by a lie, and the lie can only be maintained by violence.

– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

This week’s featured post is my review of what we now know about January 6, “One Year Later“.

This week everybody was talking about the January 6 insurrection

The featured post is my look back at January 6, but everyone else was doing it too. Here’s the Late Show’s musical tribute.

President Biden also spoke out more forcefully than usual.

For the first time in our history, a president had not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob breached the Capitol. But they failed. They failed. And on this day of remembrance, we must make sure that such attack never, never happens again.

… We must be absolutely clear about what is true and what is a lie. And here’s the truth: the former president of the United States of America has created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election. He’s done so because he values power over principle. Because he sees his own interest as more important than his country’s interest and America’s interest. And because his bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or our constitution.

But my favorite line was “You can’t love your country only when you win.”

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Meanwhile, the Maricopa County Elections Department put out a report that systematically went through all the conspiracy theories about the 2020 election in Arizona’s largest county, concluding

The November 2020 general election was administered with with integrity and the results were accurate and reliable. … The Elections Department followed all state and federal laws.

The report responds to the questions raised by the pro-Trump-biased Cyber Ninja election audit, typically concluding that the Ninjas were confused by their own ignorance of election law and the county’s voting systems, and that they then interpreted their confusion as evidence of nefarious activity.

We determined that nearly every finding included faulty analysis, inaccurate claims, misleading conclusions and a lack of understanding of federal and state election laws.

The Elections Department operates under the supervision of the Maricopa County Board of Supervisors, which has a Republican majority.

In other Arizona election news, the Cyber Ninjas are insolvent and are shutting down. I’ve gotta wonder what happened to the millions of dollars MAGA fans contributed to them.

and the pandemic

The vertical ascent in the new-cases graph continued this week. New cases are averaging 678K per day, more than tripling in the last two weeks. Hospitalizations have also turned upwards, but not as steeply: up 82% in two weeks, to roughly the same level as last January’s peak. Deaths have turned upward as well, but are nowhere near previous peaks: The seven-day average is 1674 now, compared to 1160 two weeks ago, but 2555 on September 22 and 3344 last January 16.

Those numbers remain hard to interpret: Many of the new cases will undoubtedly progress to hospitalizations or deaths in the coming weeks. But it also increasingly looks like the Omicron variant is somewhat milder than Delta. (Though possibly worse here than in Europe.) Unfortunately, the case-numbers are so huge that even smaller percentages turning serious will still produce a lot of serious cases. And 1674 deaths each day from a single disease is a toll that would have shocked us two years ago.

So it’s hard to answer the questions we all really want to ask: How risky is it to go to the grocery or eat in a restaurant or have people over for dinner? You’re more likely than ever to catch Covid, but maybe you’ll throw it off, especially if you’ve had three shots. Personally, I’m erring on the side of caution.

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The really difficult question right now is when/whether to open the schools. I think there’s a broad consensus that distance learning didn’t work very well for a lot of kids, and that we should have had more in-person school last year. But now? With 600K+ new cases per day?

I can hear the debate inside my own head: “Wouldn’t it make sense to stay closed for a week or two until the surge passes?” “But everybody was saying ‘two weeks’ when we first closed the schools in March, 2020. How do we know that two weeks won’t turn into six months?”

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NPR provides guidance on when and how to test.

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On January 1, at least 800K unused Covid tests expired in a Florida warehouse. A state official explained: “We tried to give them out prior to that, but there wasn’t a demand for it.”

and the Supreme Court

which heard arguments about President Biden’s vaccine mandates, one applying to health care workers (including those at nursing homes), and the other to businesses with more than 100 employees.

You might think this should be just another note under the pandemic headline, but that’s not really what this case is about. The Court’s conservative justices have been looking for a chance to make a sweeping “nondelegation” ruling that cripples federal regulating agencies in general. Vaccine mandates are just an opportunity for six unelected judges — half appointed by a president who lost the popular vote — to remake American government.

In other words, the vaccine cases reach a Supreme Court that appears to be on the verge of reining in the ability of federal agencies to regulate any and all private conduct — a trend that has nothing at all to do with the Covid pandemic or the Biden administration’s responses to it.

In both situations, the law passed by Congress is clear:

Congress enacted the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSH Act), which gives a similarly named agency — the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) — sweeping authority to protect workers from health hazards. Among other things, Congress gave OSHA the power to issue binding rules that provide “medical criteria which will assure insofar as practicable that no employee will suffer diminished health, functional capacity, or life expectancy as a result of his work experience.”

Ordinarily, OSHA must complete a lumbering process that requires years of study and consulting with employers before it can hand down a new rule, but a provision of the OSH Act permits OSHA to issue an “emergency temporary standard” if the agency determines that “employees are exposed to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful,” and that such a standard is “necessary to protect employees from such danger.”

If anything qualifies as an emergency, you would think that a plague killing over a thousand people a day would, especially given that several of the early outbreaks were in workplaces. So this is exactly the kind of situation Congress had in mind when it passed OSH in 1970 (and sent it to be signed by that flaming socialist Richard Nixon).

But not so fast. The OSH Act, like the founding legislation of most of the federal regulatory agencies, violates a principle that conservative jurists invented precisely for the purpose of wrecking federal regulatory agencies: nondelegation. According to the nondelegation doctrine, Congress violates the Constitution if it delegates too much of its power to agencies of the executive branch. So it doesn’t matter what OSH says, because it’s unconstitutional. Congress should have to pass a new law every time the country needs a new regulation — or at least a regulation that the Court’s conservative majority doesn’t like.

Have you seen what we have to go through to pass a law these days? Imagine needing to overcome a filibuster every time there’s a new carcinogenic food additive.

Ominously, Chief Justice Roberts drew attention to OSH being more than 50 years old. Recall that his main rationale for gutting the Voting Rights Act in 2013 was that “things have changed”, a legal principle I am unable to find in the Constitution. No wonder Vox’s Ian Millhiser believes

NFIB is likely to be a turning point in the right-wing Roberts Court’s relationship with the elected branches — and it could permanently disable the federal government’s ability to address crises like the Covid-19 pandemic in the future.

and electric vehicles

The day-long traffic jam on I-95 in Virginia drew my attention because I had driven that very stretch of road just a week before. But I was still surprised by where WaPo columnist Charles Lane took the story: into scare-mongering about electric vehicles.

If everyone had been driving electric vehicles, this mess could well have been worse. … It is a scientific fact that batteries of all kinds lose capacity more rapidly in cold weather, and that includes the sophisticated lithium-ion ones used by Teslas and other EVs. … Absent some breakthrough in mobile charging technology, out-of-juice EVs in out-of-the-way places will need a tow. If Monday’s nightmare had been an all-electric affair, they might have littered the highway for miles.

A few quick observations:

• Dissing EVs is a hobby horse for Lane. He’s also done it here and here, where he described EV-skepticism as his 10-year “fixation”.
• An electric-vehicle driver running the heater and wondering when his battery will die is in basically the same situation as a gas-powered-vehicle driver watching his fuel gauge go down.
• Mobile charging doesn’t require a “breakthrough”. Systems “designed to be carried by a standard roadside-service truck” already exist, it’s just a matter of deploying them — which service stations should be eager to do as the number of EVs on the road increases. In the same way that a gas-powered car can be rescued with a single can of gas, and doesn’t require a complete fill-up, a stranded EV would just need enough juice to get to the next charging station rather than a time-consuming full charge. So in an I-95-type situation, one truck should be able to get many EVs moving again.
• In the meantime, you can put your Tesla in neutral and push it into the breakdown lane, right next to all the cars that have run out of gas.
• Lane waves off the popularity of EVs in frigid Norway, but his reasons for doing so are sketchy. For example, the link supposedly supporting his claim that Norwegian EVs are almost all second cars goes to a 2014 survey. Could anything possibly have changed since then?
• As I know from driving my hybrid Accord, cold weather does have an effect on batteries, but it’s nothing to panic about. The cold also lowers the mileage of my gas-only second car.

I’m reminded of last February, when Texas Governor Greg Abbott blamed the collapse of his state’s electrical grid on green energy’s supposed inability to cope with cold weather, rather than his own free-market dogmatism. But somehow Wisconsin and Germany hadn’t noticed the same limitations.

The lesson I draw: Change is scary, so light-on-facts horror stories about the New often sound more convincing than they should. Remember when same-sex marriage was “presaging the fall of Western Civilization itself“?

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Fascinating look at how Tesla was able to double its car production in 2021, while larger automakers often had to shut down plants for lack of key components:

When Tesla couldn’t get the chips it had counted on, it took the ones that were available and rewrote the software that operated them to suit its needs. Larger auto companies couldn’t do that because they relied on outside suppliers for much of their software and computing expertise.

and you also might be interested in …

The Webb Space Telescope has successfully deployed its mirror, which had been folded up to fit inside the launch vehicle. The unfolding in space required 178 separate release mechanisms to work, and they did.

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The three men who lynched Ahmaud Arbery while he was out jogging were sentenced to life in prison. Only one of the three will be eligible for parole.

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Notable deaths seem to come in clusters. This week: Sidney Poitier. There was a time in my childhood when Poitier was the only bankable Black actor. And of course, he only played characters that were specifically written as Black. The idea of a general-purpose Black movie star like Denzel Washington or Morgan Freeman, who might compete for any role not specifically written as some other race, was far in the future.

[W]ithout him, many filmgoers of previous generations might never have imagined an educated, Black authority figure.

Follow-up question: Who’s the female version of Poitier, or of Washington and Freeman?

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What if you didn’t have to fund Fox News through your cable subscription? The goal of this campaign is to not to get cable systems to drop Fox, but to offer a Tucker-Carlson-free cable package that people can choose if they want.

Personally, I’d probably get the with-Fox package, because I think I need to keep an eye on the Right in order to do this blog properly. (Just this week, I wanted to check whether Sean Hannity was leading his show with the Sean-Hannity-tweet story that MSNBC was focusing on. He wasn’t. I didn’t watch the whole show, but Uproxx claims he never got around to mentioning it.) But I sympathize with the desire to know that your subscription money is not being used to promote White supremacy and knowingly spread disinformation.

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Novak Djokovic appears to have won his battle with the Australian government. Today a judge ruled that he can enter the country without vaccination and play in the Australian Open.

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As the son of a small farmer — I mean, he was 6’1″, but the farm was just 160 acres — I have mixed feelings about John Deere’s prototype “fully autonomous tractor“. Driving a tractor up and down the rows is repetitive and boring — exactly the kind of thing that an AI should be able to handle — but it’s also kind of peaceful and meditative. The idea that in a decade or two no one will do that job brings out the Luddite in me. Or maybe the John Henry.

Perversely, I think capitalism is about to achieve the Soviet vision of massive farms under unified management. It will happen not via worker collectives, but by eliminating the workers altogether.

and let’s close with a photo finish

I couldn’t pick which closing I liked better this week, so I’ll give you two of them. First, it must be great to be a panda cub rolling in snow for the first time.

But I can’t leave out an actual photo finish: the second annual Christmas Covid horse race.

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment.

– Joan Didion (1934-2021)

This week’s featured post is “Closing Out a Dismal Year“.

This week everybody was talking about the pandemic

Even for people expecting a Christmas/Omicron surge, the numbers this week have been frightening. The 7-day average for new cases per day in the US rose to 214K, up 83% from levels that were already surging two weeks ago. (The record is 251K on January 11. At the current rate of increase we’ll break it in a few days.)

Hospitalizations (71K, up 8%) and deaths (1328, up 3%) are not rising as fast, but it’s still uncertain whether that is the normal time lag or an indication that Omicron is less dangerous, at least for the vaccinated.

The other ominous thing about the increase is that (like the original Covid infection), it’s concentrated in a few big cities: The national average is 65 new cases per 100K per day, but Miami-Dade County has 276; Cuyahoga County (Cleveland) 262; New York City 231; Washington D.C. 186. As we’ve seen before, a surge that starts in the cities doesn’t stay there. Like fashions, infections in the cities eventually reach the countryside.

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One hopeful possibility is still speculative: Maybe there’s a reason for Omicron to be more contagious but less deadly.

[T]he [Hong Kong] study also found that Omicron is significantly less effective than previous strains at multiplying in the lower-lung tissue. This might suggest a different disease profile for Omicron. Upper-respiratory-tract infections typically cause colds and sore throats, while lower-respiratory infections are more likely to cause pneumonia. The finding might also suggest a mechanism for greater contagiousness: Virus particles in the upper lung region are less likely to cause severe disease but more likely to be expelled when people talk or sing or just breathe.

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The toll on healthcare workers is particularly worrisome.

Many workers who persisted through the first year of the pandemic have departed jobs because of burnout and anxiety. And with the Omicron variant pushing case numbers up dramatically, the caregivers who remain are getting infections, too, straining staff levels in unpredictable ways.

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If you wonder why healthcare workers are throwing in the towel, read this Reddit account that claims to be from a doctor who has practiced for 30 years. (I know there’s no way to verify Reddit posts. You just have to read it and judge its credibility for yourself.)

He says the last straw was being physically assaulted by the wife of a Covid patient who had just died alone, because the family refused to wear the masks that hospital rules required for visitors. The wife blames the doctor for her husband’s death, because he used real anti-Covid medicine rather than hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin.

“I will never treat a patient again,” the doctor writes.

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Israel has a more aggressive attitude towards vaccines than the US does. Rather than wait for clinical evidence that a fourth shot helps with Omicron, Israeli authorities are going ahead with a recommendation. Israel believes that early booster shots blunted its Delta wave.

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The Covid surge snarled holiday air traffic, as flight crews called in sick.

Globally, airlines have canceled about 5,700 flights on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and the day after, according to FlightAware. That includes about 1,700 flights within, into or out of the United States.

and January 6

Merrick Garland’s former professor Laurence Tribe is worried that his former student is not rising to the challenge of the times: holding former president Donald Trump and his top-level co-conspirators accountable for their attempt to keep Trump in power after he lost the election. Writing in the NYT with two former prosecutors, he says:

Based purely on what we know today from news reports and the steady stream of revelations coming from the House select committee investigating the attack, the attorney general has a powerful justification for a robust and forceful investigation into the former president and his inner circle. … And yet there are no signs, at least in media reports, that the attorney general is building a case against these individuals — no interviews with top administration officials, no reports of attempts to persuade the foot soldiers to turn on the people who incited them to violence.

… To decline from the outset to investigate would be appeasement, pure and simple, and appeasing bullies and wrongdoers only encourages more of the same. Without forceful action to hold the wrongdoers to account, we will likely not resist what some retired generals see as a march to another insurrection in 2024 if Mr. Trump or another demagogue loses.

and the new space telescope

The most powerful telescope ever, the James Webb Space Telescope, was launched into space on Christmas.

NASA now faces “30 days of terror” as the telescope travels a million miles out to Lagrange point L2 (the place behind the Earth where terrestrial and solar gravitational fields cancel out orbital acceleration), and unfolds its mirrors and sun shields. Everything has to work: Unlike its predecessor, the Hubble, the Webb will operate well beyond the range of current manned vehicles.

“This telescope is not designed to be a serviceable mission,” Heidi Hammel, an interdisciplinary scientist on the James Webb Space Telescope project, tells Inverse. “So we’re designing it to work, not to send it up and try it.”

After deployment, the Webb will need months of calibration, so we probably won’t see images from it until summer.

But if everything works, the Webb will stretch the bounds of astronomy: It will tell us about the atmospheres of planets in other solar systems (including detecting possible signs of life), and will see light that has been in transit for billions of years — essentially looking into the universe’s distant past.

In the case of cosmology, JWST will be able to detect redder wavelengths than any Great Observatory before it, thereby looking further back in space and time. The proposed COSMOS-Webb project, for example, aims to explore the universe 400,000 to 1 billion years after the Big Bang, back when the first stars were just starting to shine, by examining the same patch of sky as the famous Hubble Deep Fields.

and whether Build Back Better is dead

Last week, Joe Manchin’s announcement that he couldn’t support President Biden’s Build Back Better bill brought months of negotiations to an end. But BBB is a big collection of stuff, so the next question is: Is there anything in there that Democrats can still pass?

E. J. Dionne makes the case for guarded optimism.

and 2021

The featured post takes aim at two year-in-review articles: one that tries to be funny but isn’t, and another that tries to be serious and ends up being ridiculous. But I did enjoy this one: the NYT’s “The Year in 41 Debates“, which recalls what we argued about this year.

Some of the questions are abstract, like “What does it mean to be woke?”, while others point to specific events, like “Should Obama get to celebrate his birthday?” and “What happened to Nicki Minaj’s cousin’s friend?”

The NYT doesn’t make any judgments about whether these topics were worth the attention they got, it just remembers them. Put together, the 41 questions bring 2021 back (in all its glory and silliness) like few other year-in-review articles can.

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The New Year brings a minimum-wage increase to 21 states.

and you also might be interested in …

Here’s the best summary of the difference between the parties: Democrats want to protect school children from mass shootings. Republicans want to protect them from books.

Fox News is outraged that a Texas teacher would publicly mock book-banners with a Dr. Seuss parody.

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While we’re talking about parody, McSweeney’s “Ayn Rand Writes Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer” is priceless, particularly to anybody who read as much Rand as I did in my misspent youth. Do you think being left out of reindeer games would have bothered Howard Roark?

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South Africa’s Bishop Desmond Tutu died yesterday. Joan Didion on Thursday. Edward O. Wilson this morning.

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Apparently God told an Evangelical woman to intrude on the conversation of two young female friends to warn them about the dangers of lesbianism. Because the small god Evangelicals worship often makes mistakes like that.

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Right-wing rhetoric against Dr. Fauci is getting increasingly violent.

Referring to tabloid-style surprise interviews, [Fox News host Jesse] Watters said in a speech that activists should “ambush” Dr. Fauci with adversarial questions that he deemed “the kill shot.” Describing the imagined effect of such a filmed confrontation, Mr. Watters added: “Boom! He is dead! He is dead! He’s done!”

And that’s another major difference between liberals and conservatives: Liberals embarrass their enemies with merciless Dr. Seuss parodies, while conservatives fantasize about “kill shots”.

I have no doubt that CNN or MSNBC would have fired any host who used similarly violent language during the Trump administration, but Fox News is not disciplining Watters in any way, reasoning that his kill-shot image is merely “metaphoric”.

No one disputes that, but the talking heads at Fox would never accept such an excuse from a liberal commentator at another network.

I mean, in 2017 nobody believed comedian Kathy Griffin had literally cut off Trump’s head, but she was not only fired from the CNN New Year’s Eve special, but spent two months on the federal no-fly list. The right-wing media still hates her; New Jersey’s Shore News Network could barely contain its glee in announcing this August that she had lung cancer.

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Sarah Palin is trying to become relevant again by going full anti-vax. One reason I say the GOP has passed the point of no return is that no one thinks they can become relevant on the Right by speaking truth and being reasonable.

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Another police conviction shows that the times might be changing. Police officer Kimberley Potter was convicted of first-degree manslaughter Thursday. In April, she killed Daunte Wright near Minneapolis when she mistook her gun for a taser. She’ll be sentenced in February. A typical sentence is about seven years. CNN analyzed:

“Three to five years ago, this would be a full acquittal, not even a concern over a mistrial. So the fact that we are now seeing more accountability for officers — the idea they are not above the law, that if they do the crime, they do the time,” criminal defense attorney Sara Azari said Thursday after the conviction. “It’s definitely not systemic change, but it is definitely a change in trend.”

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Former Governor Andrew Cuomo won’t be charged with sexually harassing a female police officer in his security detail. The prosecutor found the allegation of inappropriate touching to be “credible, deeply troubling, but not criminal under New York law.”

A attorney for Cuomo charged that NY Attorney General Letitia James pursued the investigation for political purposes, a quote that I’m sure will be ammunition for Trump to attack the NY state investigation into his shady financial dealings.

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Reuniting the immigrant families Trump separated is proving to be harder than it sounds.

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The agency that was supposed to oversee Trump’s illegal hotel lease never really looked at the ethical or constitutional issues.

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Doctor Historianess educates conservatives about freedom of speech.

#jaredschmeck was totally within his rights to say Let’s Go Brandon. But I’m within my rights to say Jared Schmeck is a total asshole. See how that works?

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Frank Bruni argues against using adverbs that commonly modify gay, such as openly or flamboyantly, terms which are almost never paired with straight.

When milestones are being chronicled and a succinct qualifier is in order [as when Pete Buttigieg was described as “the first openly gay cabinet secretary” to acknowledge the probable existence of closeted gay secretaries in the past], I indeed vote for “out” over “openly.” And otherwise? If a person’s sexual orientation or identity is specifically and indisputably relevant to a given article or conversation and isn’t a secret, call that person simply “gay,” “lesbian,” “bisexual,” “trans” or such. Let the “openly” be implicit.

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The Satanic Temple continues to point out the distinction between free expression of religion in public spaces and Christian supremacy. Their installation at the Illinois State Capitol of a baby Baphomet next to a Christian nativity scene has outraged Christians, who say that it “should have no place in this Capitol or any other place”.

But if you want a Christian nativity scene at the Capitol without any Satanic expression, then you don’t want religious freedom. You want Christian supremacy.

Personally, I would get rid of both displays. In America, government is a secular institution.

and let’s close with something musical

I suspect huskies evolved shortly after wolves and humans started singing together.

And can’t we all sympathize with this dog, who wants to stay mad, but can’t resist joining in on her favorite song?

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on December 6.

There’s still plenty of reason to fear where we are currently headed, but at the same time, there’s no reason to think that five years from now, at the next major Paris “stocktake,” we’ll still be headed there.

– David Roberts, “Don’t get too bummed out about COP26“

This week’s featured post is “Does the Red Pill have an antidote?“

This week everybody was talking about the Rittenhouse verdict

The 18-year-old vigilante was found not guilty on all counts.

I worry about the lessons people are learning from this verdict. As for Rittenhouse himself, I can’t guess. It’s possible that he was genuinely horrified to see people die at his own hand. Many stories tell of young men who were excited to go to war, and yet were traumatized to learn up close what it means to kill another human being. We can hope Rittenhouse responds similarly, and that even as he walks free, he is determined to avoid violence in the future.

On the other hand, he may have learned that killing makes you a hero, and has lasting negative consequences only for the people who die. If that’s the case, he will likely kill again.

As for the violent conservative movement that has lionized Rittenhouse, I have little doubt that they have been emboldened. Killing protesters is a widespread and longstanding fantasy on the Right. Until now, hitting them with a car has been the preferred method. But the Rittenhouse case established that you can walk up to protesters with a gun, and if they worry that you might be a mass shooter and try to disarm you, you can kill them in “self defense”. I’m sure we’ll see more of that. No doubt at this very moment, militia groups are holding training sessions on the loopholes in self-defense laws.

David French:

Most of the right-wing leaders voicing their admiration for Rittenhouse are simply adopting a pose. On Twitter, talk radio, and Fox News, hosts and right-wing personalities express admiration for Rittenhouse but know he was being foolish. They would never hand a rifle to their own children and tell them to walk into a riot. They would never do it themselves.

But these public poses still matter. When you turn a foolish young man into a hero, you’ll see more foolish young men try to emulate his example. And although the state should not permit rioters to run rampant in America’s streets, random groups of armed Americans are utterly incapable of imposing order themselves, and any effort to do so can lead to greater death and carnage.

In fact, that’s exactly what happened in Rittenhouse’s case. He didn’t impose order. He didn’t stop a riot. He left a trail of bodies on the ground, and two of the people he shot were acting on the belief that Rittenhouse himself was an active shooter. He had, after all, just killed a man.

Farhad Manjoo amplifies that last point, noting that the Rittenhouse shootings “unravel some of the foundational tenets of gun advocacy”.

That guns are effective and necessary weapons of self-defense. That without them, lawlessness and tyranny would prevail. And that in the right hands — in the hands of the “good guys” — guns promote public safety rather than destroy it.

In the Rittenhouse case, none of that was true. At every turn that night, Rittenhouse’s AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle made things worse, ratcheting up danger rather than quelling it. The gun transformed situations that might have ended in black eyes and broken bones into ones that ended with corpses in the street. And Rittenhouse’s gun was not just a danger to rival protesters. According to his own defense, the gun posed a grave threat to Rittenhouse himself — he said he feared being overpowered and then shot with his own weapon.

This is self-defense as circular reasoning: Rittenhouse says he carried a rifle in order to guarantee his safety during a violent protest. He was forced to shoot at four people when his life and the lives of other people were threatened, he says. What was he protecting everyone from? The gun strapped to his own body, the one he’d brought to keep everyone safe.

I am struck by the fact that the only people who died in the Kenosha riots were the ones Rittenhouse killed. He was the primary danger.

The legal wrangling over this case is likely not over. A civil lawsuit for wrongful death is a possibility, though Jonathan Turley warns against it. There’s also a disagreement over the vast sums of money raised for Rittenhouse’s defense. The state will return his $2 million bail, but to whom? Rittenhouse himself? His lawyers? The fund-raisers?

Turley is also skeptical that Rittenhouse can win a defamation lawsuit for all the negative things people have said about him.

and Paul Gosar

who was censured by the House and expelled from his committees on Wednesday.

The vote was close to splitting on party lines: Among Republicans, only established anti-MAGA representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger voted for the censure.

Republicans like Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy complained that by taking away Gosar’s committee assignments the censure resolution went too far. But (as so often happens) they offered no counter-proposal. I can find no suggestion that Republicans other than Cheney and Kinzinger were willing to reprimand Gosar in any way. Speaker Pelosi waited ten days for the GOP caucus to discipline its own member, and acted only when it was clear they would not.

I think AOC summed it up pretty well:

What is so hard about saying this is wrong? This is not about me. This is not about Rep. Gosar. This is about what we are willing to accept. … If you believe that this behavior should not be accepted, then vote yes.

As many people have pointed out, no other workplace would tolerate this. If you posted a video depicting yourself killing a colleague you frequently disagreed with, you’d be fired.

Gosar defended himself by saying that it’s just a cartoon. But if what Gosar did wasn’t over the line, where is the line? What if he had superimposed his own and AOC’s heads on a rape cartoon? What if the cartoon had been more realistic?

As we saw again and again during the Trump years, Republicans don’t want to answer such questions. Democrats were always “overreacting” to Trump, but Republicans would not react at all, and would never speculate on how far they might let him go in the future. Ultimately, they saw him unleash a mob on Congress itself, and still did nothing.

The same moral cowardice is on display here: Kevin McCarthy knows the MAGA faction will eventually cross any line he might draw, and he won’t want to respond then either. So he says nothing.

For his part, Gosar remained defiant. “I explained to [the Republican House caucus] what was happening. I did not apologize. I said this video didn’t have anything to do with harming anybody.” After the censure, he reposted the offending video and then took it down again.

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Gosar also suggests that Kyle Rittenhouse get a Congressional Medal of Honor “for selflessly protecting the lives and property of the people from an armed mob of arsonists and criminals”. [I see the link no longer works, presumably because the tweet has been taken down. I had verified the tweet myself before trying to link to it.]

Bottom line: Like much of the far right, Gosar is pro-violence — as long as people he likes are attacking people he doesn’t like.

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One reason McCarthy is such a pushover for the MAGA faction is that he fears he won’t be named speaker if Republicans get the majority back in 2022. Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows appeared Thursday on Rep. Matt Gaetz’ podcast and suggested that a new Republican House majority should bypass McCarthy and name Trump as speaker. (Only tradition says that the Speaker has to be a member of the House.)

Since Trump has no legislative agenda, I can only see two purposes in making him Speaker:

• As Speaker, he could sabotage the country by blocking bills to fund the government or raise the debt ceiling.
• Being Speaker would put him in the presidential line of succession, in case his violent followers could somehow get Biden and Harris out of the way. I’m sure Trump himself would never suggest such a thing, unless maybe he were “joking”.

and Build Back Better

A version of the bill passed the House. What happens in the Senate is anybody’s guess. Here’s CNBC’s speculation:

Multiple senators will push for changes to the bill’s provisions including paid leave and taxes along the way. Any tweaks will require another vote in the House, where House Speaker Nancy Pelosi can afford three defections (only one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden of Maine, voted against the bill Friday). …

[Senator Joe] Manchin, who has not publicly endorsed the package as he expresses concerns about spending and inflation, will seek at least one overhaul. He has signaled he will push to scrap a House provision offering four weeks of paid leave to most Americans.

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., is another Democrats who could seek to influence the bill in the Senate. She already shot down her party’s efforts to hike tax rates on the biggest businesses and wealthiest individuals, forcing lawmakers to opt for more complicated policies such as a minimum tax on corporations.

The open question in my mind is whether Manchin’s and Sinema’s votes are really available. If they are, some compromise will pass the Senate and go back to the House. But I can also imagine that at least one of them is just stringing out the process and will never get on board.

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Kevin McCarthy delayed the House vote by unleashing a record-breaking eight hour and 32 minute speech. Unsurprisingly, much of what he said wasn’t true.

and the pandemic

The recent surge in cases accelerated this week: the 7-day average of new cases per day is up to 93K from a recent low of 71K November 4. Hospitalizations have turned up as well: +6% in the last two weeks. Deaths are still falling, but not sharply: down 9%.

I speculated last week that vaccines and better treatment might keep the rise in cases from leading to a rise in deaths, but that’s still uncertain. Typically there’s a time lag between when cases start rising and when deaths start rising. The rise in hospitalizations is worrisome.

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No, Anthony Fauci had nothing to do with a beagle experiment in Tunisia. Lots of people aren’t even trying to tell the truth any more.

White Coat Waste spokesman Justin Goodman … defended the decision to capitalize on the anti-Fauci fervor that has been brewing for more than a year and a half. “When you have such a high-profile person to point the finger at for funding animal experiments, it would be malpractice for us not to do that,” he said.

and climate change

David Roberts isn’t as bummed about the COP26 meetings in Glasgow as many environmentalists seem to be. First, he says, you need to appreciate what these meetings are and aren’t. They aren’t legislatures.

[A] COP agreement can’t make a country do anything. … The utility of the Paris process is that every few years it provides the equivalent of a giant camera flash, revealing where everyone stands. That is useful. International transparency and peer pressure can sometimes move national governments. But it is a mistake to invest any particular hopes for change in the UNFCCC process — it can’t really do anything. It can only illuminate what is being done.

What is being done currently isn’t enough, but we’re also not at the end of the story.

The good news is, we’re making progress. A decade ago, we were on track for 4° to 6° Celsius average warming by the end of the century, which would have been species-threatening.

As this report from Climate Action Tracker shows, thanks to actions taken by national governments since then, we have “bent the curve” on climate change, as it were, and brought the average expected warming down to 2.7°C.

That would still be devastating. But we’re not going to stop there. Progress is only accelerating. … There’s still plenty of reason to fear where we are currently headed, but at the same time, there’s no reason to think that five years from now, at the next major Paris “stocktake,” we’ll still be headed there.

In parallel with a COP meeting, there’s always “climate festival-cum-trade-show, featuring governments, nonprofits, and private-sector actors announcing all kinds of new campaigns and initiatives alongside the UNFCCC process”. Roberts found this part of the meeting encouraging.

[N]ational governments are often going to be in the caboose of this train — civic groups, the private sector, and subnational governments are leading the way. That’s distributed all over the world, less easy to see and sum up, but it shows that the caution and intransigence of national governments are not the whole story.

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A long article in yesterday’s NYT examined how China got control of the vast cobalt supplies of the Congo, giving it a huge advantage in the battery technology needed by the electric cars that are the best hope for cutting CO2 emissions.

During the Cold War, US policy focused on keeping the Soviet Union from controlling Congo’s natural resources. But after the Soviet government collapsed, interest in those resources waned under multiple administrations. In 2016, when a US company, Freeport-McMoRan, made bad investments in fossil fuels and needed to sell assets to pay down debt, only Chinese companies made bids. A second sale to China Molybdenum closed in 2020.

and you also might be interested in …

The Pollo Tropical restaurant chain in Florida came up with an ingenious solution to its labor shortage: It paid workers more.

[Parent company CEO Richard] Stockinger said Pollo Tropical had also offered hiring incentives and improved its benefits package by adding childcare leave, company-paid educational programs, and more affordable medical plans. These measures would help its restaurants “remain competitive in these challenging market conditions,” he said.

The chain will compensate by raising prices.

Adam Smith would have predicted this supply-and-demand result, but it’s funny how such stuff gets discussed in most of the media: When the fluctuations of the labor market go against workers, that’s just how life is. But when they benefit workers, it’s some kind of crisis.

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Self-described socialist Fredrik deBoer makes some of the same observations I’ve been making for a while:

What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.

Looking at the 2016 and 2020 Democratic primary races, he observes that (whatever else might be said about the fairness of the process) Bernie Sanders didn’t get as many votes as the candidates he lost to.

Whatever else we may want to say about the system, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the voters of the liberal party in American politics twice had the opportunity to nominate Mr. Sanders as their candidate for president and twice declined to do so. If we don’t allow this to inform our understanding of the popularity of our politics, we’ll never move forward and start winning elections to gain more power in our system.

This may be seen as a betrayal of the socialist principles I stand for, which are at heart an insistence on the absolute moral equality of every person and a fierce commitment to fighting for the worst-off with whatever social and governmental means are necessary. But I am writing this precisely because I believe so deeply in those principles. I want socialism to win, and to do that, socialists must be ruthless with ourselves. … Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country.

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Beau of the Fifth Column addresses a practical problem: how to convince your parents to get vaccinated. He suggests two arguments: First, find out whether they are afraid of some specific ingredient they think the vaccines contain. Probably that chemical isn’t there at all. Second, point out that even if you believe the most exaggerated estimates of people who have vaccine side-effects, taking the vaccine is still safer than getting Covid.

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The best-of-2021 lists have started appearing. The WaPo’s best ten books is, as usual, humbling. I haven’t read any of them.

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Trump’s mail-slowing postmaster general may finally be on his way out.

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Department of I-can’t-believe-somebody-had-to-prove-that-but-I-guess-they-did: The new book Homelessness is a Housing Problem looks at regional variations in the rate of homelessness, and concludes that the problem is high rents. Not drug abuse or mental illness or unemployment or any of the other frequently cited explanations.

If your community has a lot of homeless people, it should build more housing they can afford. It’s really that simple.

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Matt Yglesias points out a problem with the focus on social-justice language: A group like the AMA might adopt language changes and leave its inequality-producing policies in place.

[B]ecause doctors are perennially in such short supply in the United States, they can afford to be extremely choosy about their assignments. You never have a down-on-his-luck doctor looking for work and realizing that there’s demand for medical care in poor neighborhoods or rural communities. Even more subtly, because doctors are scarce, they can afford to treat their patients relatively poorly. …

There are lots of ways to increase medical abundance, but unfortunately, the AMA is normally standing in the way — blocking increased scope of practice for nurses, making it hard for foreign-trained doctors to practice in the United States, and historically pushing to train too few doctors here at home.

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I took this screenshot while browsing the NYT on Tuesday. In the view of the NYT opinion-page editors, four articles prophesying doom for the Democrats constitutes a “debate”.

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Speaking of the Democrats, they face two separate problems in 2022:

• Getting people to vote for them.
• Overcoming gerrymandering that could give Republicans a majority even if most voters choose Democrats.

Gerrymandering is getting worse, but recent Supreme Court decisions have closed off most avenues for challenging gerrymandered maps in court.

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The Staples Center in LA is about to become the Crypto.com Arena. I am nostalgic for the era when the Lakers played in the Forum, the 76ers in the Spectrum, and the Celtics in the Boston Garden. As far as I know, Madison Square Garden in New York is the NBA’s lone survivor of those simpler times. Now the New Orleans Pelicans play in the Smoothy King Center.

In his 1996 novel Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace parodied the naming-rights-for-money trend with the notion of subsidized time. Events take place during the Year of Glad and the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment.

For decades, fans have been struggling to turn the ever-changing corporate names into something as charming as the traditional ones (like referring to the former Verizon Center in DC — now the Capital One Arena — as “the Phone Booth”). I hear Crypto.com is likely to be nicknamed “The Crypt”, which doesn’t bode well for the teams that will play there. Personally, I’d prefer to pretend it’s named for Krypto the Superdog, and refer to it as the Dog House.

and let’s close with something visual

As even amateur photographers know, it’s hard to get the Moon to pose just the way you want.