The Weekly Sift

Murder is never the answer. Murder is not a healthy response to corruption. But it is healthy for people to fear that if they kill people for greed, they will be unsafe. … [T]he assassination of Brian Thompson is a wake-up call, a warning that if we don’t solve this problem politically, we may not have a choice about whether it’s solved with violence.

– Cory Doctorow

This week’s featured post is “The ball is in Trump’s court“.

This week everybody was talking about the guy who killed the guy who killed people

On December 4, United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was gunned down on the street in Manhattan. When I wrote last week, a manhunt for the killer was underway. It was probably a far more extensive manhunt than would happen if you or I were murdered, because this is America and some lives are valued above others. The Black Lives Matter movement has called attention to one end of that spectrum. This is the other end.

Wednesday police caught the guy the were looking for. The arrested suspect is Luigi Mangione. He left a short note explaining the attack, which I have not been able to find a full text of. The Economist reports:

What could have inspired the killing? Mr Mangione’s short note suggested a calculating desire to wreak revenge on America’s health-care system. America, he correctly noted, has the most expensive health care in the world, but life expectancy has stagnated. “Many have illuminated the corruption and greed” in the system, he wrote. “Evidently I am the first to face it with such brutal honesty.”

UNH’s pushback against the support received by the shooter hasn’t gone very well. An in-house video distributed to UNH employees leaked to the internet, and was scorched by comments from people whose lives have been affected by denied claims.

The most insightful commentary I’ve seen on this situation is by Cory Doctorow, who published a short story with a similar theme (people killing executives of companies that had harmed them) several years ago. So he had been thinking about this for a long time before it actually happened. He puts his finger on precisely why so many Americans hate health insurance companies in general and UNH in particular (because it is the worst of the lot): They routinely kill people for money.

Doctorow goes through UNH branch by branch and explains how each one kills people for money. And he expresses his general amazement not that the Thompson assassination happened, but that such killings don’t happen more often.

I don’t want people to kill insurance executives, and I don’t want insurance executives to kill people. But I am unsurprised that this happened. Indeed, I’m surprised that it took so long. It should not be controversial to note that if you run an institution that makes people furious, they will eventually become furious with you.

America is a place swimming in guns. Disgruntled Americans routinely shoot up venues that symbolize their unhappiness and despair: workplaces, schools, and so on. Why has it taken them so long to get to health insurance executives whose policies kill their loved ones?

The Buddhist corner of my brain reminds me that Thompson was a human being, and that all human beings deserve compassion. He undoubtedly had loved ones who will miss him dearly, and they deserve compassion too. But you know, the list of people deserving my compassion is long right now, and I don’t think I’ll get to Thompson or his family for quite a while. In the meantime, his heirs should take satisfaction in the millions of dollars he made by killing people.

I also suspect that Luigi Mangione will turn out to be no hero. But in some sense that doesn’t matter.

Here’s a quote I heard years ago and never traced to its source: Good karma is cost effective. That’s a further point Doctorow makes in different words. Maybe executives could spend less on guards and panic rooms if they gave people less reason to want to do them violence. Maybe corporations could spend less on public relations if they didn’t raise so much legitimate public hatred. Maybe executives could live freer happier lives with less money if they stopped being such monsters.

Adam Parkhomenko:

When right-wing scum tried to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, Republicans made excuses.

When a lunatic beat Paul Pelosi with a hammer, they made jokes.

And when Trump sent a mob to attack the Capitol, they made up lies.

Don’t lecture us about condemning violence.

Meanwhile, Trump and Vance took newly acquitted killer Daniel Perry to the Army-Navy game.

and bowing to the new overlord

There’s some debate over whether Senator Ernst is folding her opposition to Pete Hegseth or just temporizing until the FBI either validates the accusations against him or clears him. “I look forward to a fair hearing based on truth, not anonymous sources.” is only an endorsement if the truth favors Hegseth.

Meanwhile, retired priest Father Nathan Monk analyzes Hegseth’s controversial tattoos. J. D. Vance has tried to spin the reaction against those tattoos as anti-Christian bias, but Monk disagrees.

Alt-right accounts often utilize Crusader memes as ways to threaten violence without explicitly stating it. This has resulted in a resurgence of the use of symbols associated with the Crusades by Christian Nationalist groups, including the Crusader’s Cross and the phrase Deus Vult. … If [Hegseth] were a Roman Catholic, I think it would be hard to place him in the hate speech category, because there is a complicated history with the Jerusalem cross. It might have been a symbol he was accustomed to or had some major significance. However, that is not the case. These are not symbols of his Protestant upbringing or linked to any history or heritage, past or present, but symbols of the Crusaders that are heavily being used by Christian Nationalists to promote violence and hatred. …

This isn’t a case of his faith being called into question but his beliefs of supremacy, superiority, and sovereignty being actively called out by other Christians who are tired of the Prince of Peace yet again being used as a weapon of war against the very types of people Jesus called us to love.

ABC settled a defamation suit with Trump, which they probably would have won. At the very least, Trump would have been deposed under oath, which I’m sure he was anxious to avoid. In the settlement, ABC will pay $15 million to a “presidential foundation and museum”, pay another million for Trump’s attorney fees, and issue an apology.

Knowing the history of Trump and charities, I expect a big chunk of the $15 million to wind up in his pocket.

Michelle Goldberg:

I’m trying to put my finger on what’s happening with this great capitulation to Trump — ABC News, Chris Wray, the Democrats signing up to work with DOGE, Mark Benioff, etc. It’s like you can feel the air going out of an entire social order.

Big tech companies lined up to give $1 million each to Trump’s inaugural fund.

His 2017 inauguration was rife with corruption, ultimately resulting in a $750K settlement with the DC attorney general.

This is one small step in the Orbanization of America:

Yesterday I pulled overt references of queerness off my site, my very successful store that sells my books that have queer main characters. Because a few days ago, Meta emailed saying my advertising on their platform will be restricted – my site was categorized as “sexuality and gender identity.”

I don’t necessarily blame Novae Caelum for doing this, because this is the new world: If you want stay in business, even the business of writing novels with queer characters, you need to trim your sails a little. Stories like this won’t ever rise to the mass media’s attention, but there will be thousands of them.

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A heartbreaking story in yesterday’s NYT: Jaime Cachua is a 33-year-old undocumented Mexican immigrant who came to Rome, Georgia before his first birthday. He has no memories of Mexico, is not in contact with any relatives there, and speaks Spanish badly. He is married to an American citizen and they have 7-year-old twins who are citizens because they were born here. By all accounts, he is a productive member of a small-town society.

He’d lived all but the first year of his life in Rome, a riverside town of 40,000 in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. He was a customer service specialist at the local car dealership, a worship team volunteer at church and the host of family barbecues in his neighborhood cul-de-sac.

But Rome is Trump territory, and if Trump keeps his promises, Jaime will be deported to a country where he knows no one. Rome is represented in Congress by Marjorie Taylor Greene, who says she can’t wait for the mass deportations to start. Jaime’s closest friends, even Sky, the man who considers Jaime a surrogate son, voted for Trump.

Jaime’s conversations with Sky are surreal in the way that so many conversations with Trump supporters are: Sky simply doesn’t believe that what is happening is happening. Trump just wants to deport all the bad Mexicans, and Jaime is a good Mexican. Of course he’ll be fine. Sky never explains how he thinks millions of people can be deported “very quickly” while paying close attention to the nuances of each case.

Another situation where the implementation details will matter is the 1-6 pardons Trump keeps promising. Are we talking about people who got swept up in the crowd and walked through doors already broken down? Or about the people who broke those doors? Or the people who battled police to get into a position to break down the doors? What about planners like Enrique Tarrio or Stewart Rhodes, who were convicted of seditious conspiracy?

It’s important to remind people that none of the 1-6 convicts were sent to jail for supporting Trump, which has never been a crime and shouldn’t be. They were convicted of breaking specific laws.

Similarly, they weren’t convicted by the media or by Democrats. They were convicted by juries of their peers, who heard evidence from both sides and unanimously decided that they were guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

South Korea failed in its first attempt to impeach President Yoon Suk Yeol, who briefly declared martial law two weeks ago, but Saturday they got it done. 12 members of Yoon’s party flipped against him, and that was enough for the needed 2/3 majority of the Parliament.

The spotlight will now move to the country’s constitutional court, whose six justices must vote unanimously in favor to uphold parliament’s decision. Yoon will now be suspended from office while the court deliberates. It has 180 days to rule on Yoon’s future. If it approves the motion, South Koreans must elect a new president within 60 days of its ruling.

A new government is forming in Syria, after the previous tyrant escaped to Moscow. NBC News analyzes “How Syria’s Bashar al-Assad fell so quickly“. It will be a while before we really know what to think. Many Americans were optimistic back when Fidel Castro overthrew Cuba’s previous tyrant or the ayatollahs replaced Iran’s Shah.

Paul Krugman has retired from his NYT column, but he has shifted his energy to a Substack blog “Paul Krugman wonks out“, which is more focused on his specialty, economics. In this post from Friday, he points out that Trump’s desire for both a trade surplus and foreign capital coming to America violates arithmetic. The number of dollars in foreign hands is finite (i.e. dollars can only be created by the Fed in the US), and foreigners can either buy US products with their dollars or invest them in US assets. They can’t do both with the same dollars.

President Macron has appointed a new French prime minister, Francois Bayrou, following a vote of no confidence in the previous government. Bayrou has a deep hole to dig himself out of. He first needs to assemble a new cabinet that draws majority support in the French Parliament, and then get a new budget passed.

and let’s close with something big

Lots of people have advent calendars this time of year. But nobody has one as big as Gengenbach in Germany.

The Bible tells the story of Jesus’ birth, and many elements of traditional Christmas celebrations originate there: a manger scene, wise men, shepherds, angels, and so on. But nothing in the Bible anticipates Christmas as a holiday, let alone one with gatherings of the extended family and huge feasts. (Mary and Joseph spent the first Christmas in a stable far away from their relatives. I doubt they ate well.)

In particular, the Christmas-anticipating season of Advent is wholly non-Biblical. It seems to have originated in Europe in the fourth century. Advent calendars first appeared in the 19th century in Germany. They were still catching on in the US when President Eisenhower was shown opening one with his grandchildren in 1953. The first chocolate-filled Advent calendars appeared in the 1950s.

But Germany still does it best: Every year, the town of Gengenbach turns its entire town hall into a giant Advent calendar.

Every evening, they raise the shade of another window to reveal a new picture behind it, just as the owner of an Advent calendar unfolds a flap to procure a candy — or these days, a lipstick or a spice sachet.

“It’s quite spectacular because everything gets dark and then we have a spot on the window and then it’s like a little bit of a curtain that goes up,” said Michael Foell of Gengenbach’s tourism bureau. “Everyone is just watching with big eyes and mouths open.”

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

– George Orwell, “Second Thoughts on James Burnham” (1946)

I have admired the quote above for years, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I looked up the larger context. Often, well-loved quotes are taken out of context, and were never really intended to say what we hear in them today, so reading the whole paragraph or page or chapter can ruin the effect. But the context of this quote makes it even more relevant to the present moment:

Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible. If the Japanese have conquered south Asia, then they will keep south Asia for ever, if the Germans have captured Tobruk, they will infallibly capture Cairo; if the Russians are in Berlin, it will not be long before they are in London: and so on. This habit of mind leads also to the belief that things will happen more quickly, completely, and catastrophically than they ever do in practice. The rise and fall of empires, the disappearance of cultures and religions, are expected to happen with earthquake suddenness, and processes which have barely started are talked about as though they were already at an end.

This week’s featured post is “Resisting, eventually“. It describes my election hangover, and a corresponding unwillingness to commit to a resistance strategy, or even research one adequately.

This week everybody was still talking about Trump’s nominations

Now that Matt Gaetz is gone, the next nominee likely to fall is Pete Hegseth, chosen by Trump to run the Pentagon. We’ve known for two weeks that he paid a woman to drop her accusation of sexual assault in 2017, but a single episode of sexual assault is almost a badge of honor in TrumpWorld, so his nomination was still viable.

But then Friday, the NYT published an email Hegseth received from his mother in 2018:

You are an abuser of women — that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth. … … On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say… get some help and take an honest look at yourself

Sunday, The New Yorker detailed a history of Hegseth’s alcohol abuse and financial impropriety in addition to a pattern of sexual harassment. He headed two veteran-focused political groups, and each time was dismissed after overspending the organization’s funds for drunken staff parties. Hegseth’s drunken exploits include trying to get up on stage with the dancers at a strip club, and on several occasions being carried up to his room by co-workers.

The Republican senators whose votes Hegseth needs are probably impervious to sexual-assault claims, since they’ve already had to make so many excuses for Donald Trump’s behavior. “Don’t believe women” could be the party motto at this point. But a Defense Secretary who is often drunk and out-of-control is a different problem. From the New Yorker article:

Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut and the senior member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, described the report of Hegseth’s drinking as alarming and disqualifying. In a phone interview, Blumenthal, who currently leads the Senate committee that will review Hegseth’s nomination, told me, “Much as we might be sympathetic to people with continuing alcohol problems, they shouldn’t be at the top of our national-security structure.” Blumenthal went on, “It’s dangerous. The Secretary of Defense is involved in every issue of national security. He’s involved in the use of nuclear weapons. He’s the one who approves sending troops into combat. He approves drone strikes that may involve civilian casualties. Literally life-and-death issues are in the hands of the Secretary of Defense, and entrusting these kinds of issues to someone who might be incapacitated for any reason is a risk we cannot take.”

It would be bad enough if Hegseth were the kind of drunk who just quietly falls asleep. But the stories about him point to a drunk who loses inhibitions and does stupid things.

The hits keep coming. Trump’s nominee for FBI director is Kash Patel, whose main qualification is a slavish devotion to Trump.

The pattern here is something we often see from the Right: Democrats are falsely accused of something so that Republicans can “respond” by actually doing that very thing. In this case, the “something” is weaponizing the Justice Department. (The archetypal example is Fox News, whose right-wing bias parallels a grossly exaggerated notion of left-wing media bias. A completely different example is the Florida education system, which Governor DeSantis is turning into the indoctrination program he falsely claimed it already was. “DeSantis’s anti-education crusade is doubly authoritarian – most obviously in its use of state power to suppress ideas and information, but also in its more subtle assumption that teaching is ultimately about imposing doctrines of one sort or another.”)

The Biden Justice Department was not weaponized. Every Trump investigation began with probable cause for suspecting an actual crime, and every indictment was backed by evidence that probably would have led to convictions if Trump-favoring judges had allowed the cases to go to trial. That’s law enforcement, not weaponization.

But a Patel-led FBI and a Bondi-led Justice Department won’t bother with niceties like probable cause and proof beyond reasonable doubt. Look for people to be investigated because they are Trump critics, and for rumors of wide-ranging conspiracies to regularly leak to Fox News. Most of these investigations won’t lead to indictments, or even identification of the specific laws supposedly violated. Those that do will produce show trials that juries quickly dismiss with not-guilty verdicts.

The Durham investigation from Trump’s first term is the model here. Trump claimed it would uncover “the crime of the century“, and right-wing media regularly gave credence to Durham-inspired conspiracy theories that led to Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama. But only minor figures went to trial, and they were charged with minor offenses falling far short of the vast conspiracies Durham was supposed to reveal. Only two went to trial, and they were quickly acquitted.

Such prosecutions have three goals: generating a series of enraging headlines inside the right-wing echo chamber, making targets spend vast sums of money on lawyers, and intimidating people who fear falling out of Trump’s favor.

It’s hard to sort out the pluses and minuses of Biden’s pardon of his son Hunter. Undoubtedly, we will hear about this every time Trump makes a self-interested pardon, which he will do often, beginning with the January 6 rioters and seditionists.

But it’s also clear that a Bondi/Patel Justice Department would never leave Hunter alone. His father let the Trump-appointed prosecutor do whatever he wanted, with the result that Hunter was prosecuted far more intensely than an ordinary person who committed the same offenses would have been.

Biden is anticipating injustice from the Trump administration and acting to avert it. It would be better to wait for the injustice to begin, so that it’s obvious to everyone, but by then his power to mitigate it would have evaporated. He had to act now or not at all.

The larger cause of democracy probably would have been better served if Biden had been willing to sacrifice his son to it. (I’ll let you decide whether there’s a Christian metaphor worth inserting here.) But I don’t blame him for not letting that happen.

This account of budget-director-nominee and Project 2025 author Russell Vought is genuinely scary. Basically, he believes we’re in a “post-constitutional” situation. Our government has drifted so far from what he thinks the Constitution calls for that extra-constitutional presidential authority is needed to pull us back.

and Russia and its ally Syria

The Biden administration imposed a truly biting sanction on Russian banks two weeks ago, leading to this:

Against a backdrop of high inflation and fears over the value of the currency, Russia’s central bank has already lifted interest rates to 21% this year.

We’ll learn a lot about the state of the world in January, when we see whether Trump starts relaxing Russian sanctions. If he does, and he doesn’t get some major concession in return, we can be pretty sure that the rumors of kompromat are true.

It also looks like a bad time to be a Russian ally. Rebels in Syria have taken Aleppo, the country’s second-largest city, with surprising ease. The Assad regime, which was propped up by Russian intervention when it seemed to be falling over a dozen years ago, now has few allies it can count on: Russia pulled its troops out to fight in Ukraine, while Iran and its various proxy groups have their hands full dealing with Israel.

Meanwhile, the former Soviet nation of Georgia has seen days of massive demonstrations against the ruling party, which has been leaning towards Russia and away from joining the EU.

and tariff skirmishes

This week included a major reminder of what a Trump administration is like. Trump will troll us by threatening to do something, get some kind of response from the targets of his threats, falsely claim that the response is a concession, and do a victory lap for “winning” the exchange. Nothing has actually happened, but he has exhausted his opponents and given his followers a fake “victory” to crow about.

Trump loves tariffs, because this is the area where presidential power is its most authoritarian. Congress has largely delegated this part of its taxing power to the President — something the Supreme Court should (but won’t) look at in view of its emerging non-delegation doctrine — so he really can just decree something and see it happen.

Past presidents have used the tariff power for economic purposes: If we don’t like how a country treats our exports, we’ll put a tariff on their exports to us. Most of the time this has been a warning shot to induce another country to negotiate. But Trump views tariffs in a far more expansive way: If we don’t like anything another country does, we can punish them by taxing their goods. (Of course, the tax will be paid by the American consumer, but it should hurt the targeted country’s sales.)

So last Monday Trump tweeted that he would impose 25% across-the-board tariffs on imports from Mexico and Canada unless they solve our immigration and drug problems.

This Tariff will remain in effect until such time as Drugs, in particular Fentanyl, and all Illegal Aliens stop this Invasion of our Country!

He then had a conversation with the Mexican president, who told him that Mexico is already doing what he asked for (as part of an agreement negotiated by Biden). Trump then claimed victory. Does that mean the tariffs won’t happen? Who can say?

Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau also talked with Trump, but the outcome was less clear.

David Atkins summarized what I’ve been thinking:

The next four years are in large part going to be Trump taking credit for what Biden and Harris already did.

Inflation is headed down, fentanyl deaths are down, border apprehensions are down — in a few months we’re going to hear Trump claim all these accomplishments as his own.

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ProPublica has been reporting on women with problem pregnancies who have died because state abortion bans delayed their emergency treatment. (In general, life-of-the-mother exceptions are too narrow. Problems that don’t seem immediately life-threatening can go south faster than doctors can react.) You might think that the states would respond by issuing new treatment guidelines to keep similar deaths from happening in the future, but their response is going in a different direction entirely: They’re making it harder for the public to learn about such cases.

In other words, dead women is bad optics, not bad policy.

Paul Waldman points out something that’s been bugging me too: Critiques of Kamala Harris’ campaign or the Democratic message in general don’t have much to do with the actual campaign or message. He’s not arguing that everything was great and no changes are needed,

But if you want to alter your strategy in effective ways, you have to begin with a clear understanding of reality. Which is why it’s important to puncture some of the myths that keep getting repeated.

Short version: The election was very close, and not a groundswell repudiation of everything the Democrats stand for. Harris ran a centrist campaign rather than an identity-politics campaign. She focused her message on kitchen-table issues rather than culture-war issues. People can legitimately argue about why her message didn’t get through to enough voters, but they shouldn’t distort what her message actually was.

I continue to be skeptical of carbon-capture as a solution to climate change, but this piece of research does look promising.

They’re sad and depressing, but you should check out the comments on this Jess Piper post to BlueSky:

What does a defunded school look like?

A constant turnover of new teachers because of the pay rate. No science lab. No band. No track. No real cafeteria, just a warming center for pre-packaged foods. No school nurse. A lack of bus drivers and AP/dual credit classes.

Ask me how I know…

Oklahoma and Texas can mandate that schools teach the Bible, but to get the results Christian nationalists are aiming for, eventually they’re going to have to specify who teaches the Bible and how.

and let’s close with something colorful

In my father-in-law’s final days, my wife was managing his affairs, so his mail came to us. He died years ago and we’ve moved twice since, but somehow we still get fund-raising letters from a few of the bizarre-to-us Catholic organizations he supported. The mailings, when we don’t just toss them unopened, can offer a glimpse into a different world.

At the most basic level, fund-raising letters are all the same no matter who they come from. Whether the bogeyman is Trump, the Deep State, or the Elders of Zion, somebody is doing something terrifying that there is still time to head off if you send money.

Recently a mailing from America Needs Fatima in Hanover, PA warned us about “the growth of Satanism and its expanding legion of followers” — who never contact me despite all the weird web sites I wander through while I’m doing research for this blog. My wife collects Tarot decks, which seems like it should have put the Mark of the Beast on our mailbox a long time ago. But nothing.

Anyway, the growth of Satanism in general is too vague a development for a truly scary mailing, so ANF found something more specific: WalMart is helping the Satanists target America’s children.

“How?” you might ask. Well, the WalMart web site (not the stores, apparently) offers a “Satanist” coloring book: Let’s Summon Demons: A Creepy Coloring & Activity Book.

My first thought was that ANF was making this up, but journalism requires fact-checking, so I went to the WalMart web site and found it: available for $12.04.

HOME ALONE? PART OF AN OTHERWORLDLY CULT? Whether coloring alone or having fun together with others equally versed in the occult, paranormal, and witchcraft, this is the PERFECT coloring and activity book to pass the time until the great [your chaotic primordial god here] descends.

Sounds pretty serious, don’t you think? It’s also at Amazon, for the same $12.04, whose numerological significance escapes me. (BTW: I question the author’s magical technique: The boy in the cover drawing is breaking the summoning circle.)

Might your unsuspecting-but-curious child happen across this by accident while browsing for other kinds of indoctrination? Not likely. I scrolled through many screens worth of WalMart-offered coloring books and didn’t find it. Technically WalMart classifies it under “Other”. Amazon says it’s “Novelty”.

However, if your child is already versed in summoning the occult via Google (as I just did), anything can happen.

And once they find it, they will know the name Steven Rhodes, through which they can conjure the Threadless marketing site, full of t-shirts, posters, and other products spawned by the same dark-and-twisted sense of humor. This would be a totally inappropriate place to look for Christmas gifts for your friends, so I recommend you stay away from it.

Don’t thank me for that warning. Thank America Needs Fatima.

Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house.

– Alan Paton Cry, the Beloved Country  

This week’s featured post is “My Way-Too-Soon Election Response“.

This week it was hard to think about anything beyond the election

That’s the subject of the featured post. Long as that post is, there’s a lot I didn’t get to.

In general, I am avoiding articles that predict the electorate will now get what it deserves. They’re emotionally satisfying, but I don’t think they lead anywhere good. However, I can’t resist sharing this H. L. Mencken quote:

Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.

The stock market seems to be anticipating corruption, as well-connected companies saw their stocks soar after the election. The American Prospect runs through a list of big gainers, including the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase and installment lender MoneyLion, which the Biden administration has accused of overcharging members of the military.

Another big winner: Elon Musk, whose net worth has now exceeded $300 billion. On the surface this makes no sense, because Trump has been an outspoken critic of electric cars like the ones Musk’s Tesla makes. But if Trump surrounds himself with oligarchs like Putin has, Musk will be one of the most prominent.

BTW, I would be wary of investing in Tesla. If Musk decides to screw the minority shareholders, will the Trump Justice Department protect them? This question illustrates one of the problems of shifting from a rule-of-law government to an authoritarian government: Everything becomes less trustworthy, so the machinery of economics gets creeky and slow.

Another person apparently slated for a high position in the new administration — like maybe Secretary of Health and Human Services — is RFK Jr., who has no healthcare credentials and a history of promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines.

One of the first things to watch is how quickly Trump’s mass deportation plans come together, and what (if anything) can be done to slow them down. In his first administration, he moved quickly to implement his Muslim ban, which met a lot of resistance and eventually was significantly delayed/altered by the courts.

but there’s still a world out there somewhere

Meanwhile, Germany’s ruling coalition has dissolved, leaving the current chancellor without a majority in the Bundestag. Expect a no-confidence vote in January and elections in March.

Germany’s economy has stagnated since Covid, producing all sorts of internal tensions. (Germany is one of the countries that would love to have the “bad” Biden economy.) In recent years the neo-fascist Alliance for Germany (AfD) Party has been gaining. Whether they can win the March elections is the next political disaster to worry about.

I’m not sure which narrative of the recent violence in Amsterdam to trust. It followed a Netherlands/Israel soccer game. In some accounts the violence was a pure antisemitic eruption. In others, obnoxious fans on both sides exchanged provocations until fighting broke out.

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Pope Francis recently started using #Saints in his tweets, not realizing that it refers to the New Orleans Saints football team. The team’s X account thanked the Pope for his prayers and replied, “We need them.”

The Saints are having a slow start to the season, and were sitting in fourth, and last, place in the NFC South. A significant number of injuries have struck among wide receivers and the offensive line, and last week head coach Dennis Allen was fired. But there are signs the Pope’s prayers could be working: on Sunday the Saints won for the first time since September, holding on for a narrow win over the Atlanta Falcons.

and let’s close with some monkey business

Wednesday, 43 lab monkeys made a break for it after an employee at Alpha Genesis Primate Research Center in Yemasee, South Carolina left a door open. As of Sunday, 25 of the rhesus macaques had been recovered. Most of the rest seemed to be in the trees surrounding the lab complex, and occasionally jump back over the fence to interact with their caged compatriots. Police have warned people living nearby to keep their doors and windows locked.

News articles have been vague about what experiments the monkeys are part of, saying only that they “hadn’t been tested yet”, and so there was no public health threat. CBS reports:

According to its website, Alpha Gensis breeds monkeys and provides “nonhuman primate products and bio-research services” across the globe. The company’s clinical trials reportedly include research on progressive brain disorders. … The Post and Courier newspaper reported last year that Alpha Genesis won a federal contract to oversee a colony of 3,500 rhesus monkeys on South Carolina’s Morgan Island, known as “Monkey Island.”

Monkeys are uniquely valuable in medical research because they are so similar to humans. But that similarity also makes the cruelty of medical research uniquely horrible.

The Alpha Genesis CEO painted an amusing picture of the escape:

It’s really like follow-the-leader. You see one go and the others go. It was a group of 50 and 7 stayed behind and 43 bolted out the door.

I find myself rooting for the monkeys to stay free as long as possible. I occasionally vacation down the road on Hilton Head Island. The next time I do I’ll be looking closely up into the trees.

But to be fragile is not the same as to be perishable, as G.K. Chesterton wrote. Simply do not break a glass, and it will last a thousand years. Smash it, and it will not last an instant. Democracy is like that: fragile, but only if you shatter it.

– Alexandra Petri

This week’s featured posts are “MAGA’s Closing Argument: Dad’s Coming Home” and “Democracy Succumbs in Silence“.

This week everybody was talking about the campaign

One featured post tries to explain what Trump supporters could possibly be thinking.

I’m still doing my best to ignore polls and pundits’ speculations about who will win. I gather than the race still considered close, which is all I really need to know at this point. For what it’s worth, I will toss in my own speculation: Some last-minute shift will make the result more decisive than it looks now. I can’t say which way the shift will go, but I don’t think we’ll be waiting all week to find out who won.

Remember when it would have been an earthshaking October surprise if a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model accused a candidate of groping her to impress Jeffrey Epstein? Well, never mind.

A Trump campaign spokesman repeated its standard excuse, that the model is a partisan Democrat. After all, she gave $25 to Biden’s 2020 campaign. I’m always amazed anyone takes such claims seriously. I mean, maybe she’s accusing Trump of groping her because she supports his opponents. But isn’t it more likely that she supports his opponents because he groped her?

Trump’s Madison Square Garden rally yesterday is being widely described as a hate-fest. I haven’t had time to digest it all, but apparently warm-up comedian Tony Hinchcliffe thought it would be funny to describe Puerto Rico as “a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean“. Several people have pointed out that Hinchcliffe was using a teleprompter, so the Trump campaign had seen what he would say and presumably approved it.

From the same rally, Tim Miller posts an ironic picture of Elon Musk and Melania Trump — both immigrants — with the Stephen Miller quote “America is for Americans, and Americans only.”

The Democrats’ most powerful speaker continues to be Michelle Obama. In Kalamazoo Saturday, she laid out the extensive consequences for women’s health caused by the abortion bans that followed the Dobbs’ decision, and how Trump could extend many of these consequences to the entire country. She also pleaded with “the men who love us” to understand how their own lives could be affected.

If your wife is shivering and bleeding on the operating table during a routine delivery gone bad, her pressure dropping as she loses more and more blood or some unforeseen infection spreads, and her doctors aren’t sure if they can act, you will be the one praying that it’s not too late. You will be the one pleading for somebody, anybody, to do something.

I had planned to do an article collecting all the former Trump allies who have told us he should never wield power again, but the NYT did it for me.

The standard Trump defense (you can see Vance give it here) is that these are all disgruntled people Trump fired. But usually the cause-and-effect ran in the other direction: Attorney General Bill Barr and cybersecurity czar Chris Krebs were fired because they disputed Trump’s stolen-election lies. Mike Pence is out with Trump because he wouldn’t violate the Constitution for him.

The typical order things happen is: Somebody in TrumpWorld can no longer tolerate the illegal or unethical things they’re being asked to do. Then Trump fires them or otherwise forces them out. They’re fired for disloyalty, not incompetence.

The Lincoln Project has translated a number of Trump remarks into German and illustrated them with video from the 1930s. It fits perfectly.

Not to be missed is this Jon Stewart rant about the excuses Republicans make for Trump’s fascist rhetoric about “the enemy within”, and how major media lets them get away with it.

Grist analyzes the climate and environmental significance of a vote for either Harris or Trump.

In Georgia Wednesday, talking about his plans for mass deportation, Trump gave us some more insight into the “again” in “Make American Great Again”. He said:

We had to go back to 1798. That’s when we had laws that were effective.

I don’t know if they still teach this in US History classes, but the 1798 laws he’s talking about are the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were a low point in US civil liberties.

As the Adams administration’s relationship with France deteriorated, Federalists became increasingly worried about immigrants who might have French sympathies. So Congress passed a series of laws that together became known as the Alien and Sedition Acts. One of the Acts was the Alien Friends Act, which gave the president power to deport any non-citizen he considered dangerous.

Another, the Sedition Act, made it a crime for American citizens to “print, utter, or publish…any false, scandalous, and malicious writing” about the government.

Adams was pressured to invoke the AFA against Joseph Priestley, the chemist who isolated oxygen and figured out how to make carbonated water. Priestley had been chased out of England for his sympathy with the French Revolution, and then resettled in Pennsylvania. In many ways Priestley was precisely the kind of person the AFA targeted, but Adams resisted invoking it, citing Priestley’s age and fragility.

It’s impossible to say exactly how intimidated Priestley felt, but after Jefferson (a friend of Priestley and an opponent of the Acts) was elected in 1800, Priestley wrote: “It is only now that I can say I see nothing to fear from the hand of power”.

During the Jefferson administration, some the Acts expired and the others were explicitly repealed. Trump may remember those laws fondly, but he can’t legally invoke them.

and newspaper non-endorsements

The billionaire owners of the Washington Post and LA Times stepped in to prevent their papers from endorsing Kamala Harris. One featured post explains why this “obeying in advance” is a disturbing sign for American democracy.

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A correction from last week:

When talking about how the Steward chain of hospitals went bankrupt, I said that the private equity firm Cerberus (who owned the hospitals) created Medical Properties Trust to sell the hospital’s land to.

The sources I link to don’t actually say that. I extrapolated from the degree of collusion the two firms displayed to conclude that they were two tentacles of the same octopus. But it seems not to be true.

In the blog The Big Picture, David Pepper describes how Ohio broke its public school system. Once ranked fifth among the state systems, it’s now somewhere in the 20s and dropping, after money was siphoned off for charter schools and private school vouchers.

The Tennessee Holler writes about the 400 books Wilson County is removing from school libraries, in accordance with a recent state law.

As I study the list, the fantasy section of the high school libraries seems especially hard hit: George Martin, Sarah Maas, Diana Gabaldon, Margaret Atwood …

Jesse Kelly:

For those who aren’t old enough, you cannot imagine how little race tension there was in this country before Obama got into power

This sentiment is surprisingly widespread among White conservatives, and it even becomes true with a small substitution: Replace “little race tension there was in this country” with “comfortable White people were in their privilege”. My rewrite:

For those who aren’t old enough, you cannot imagine how comfortable White people were in their privilege before Obama got into power.

In my view, the increased race tension of the current era comes almost entirely from Whites freaking out about a Black man gaining power.

and let’s close with something slimy

When I closed last week with a microscope enlargement of sugar from a Coke, I didn’t realize that Nikon runs an annual Small World contest for similar photos. So this week I learned that slime mold can be unexpectedly interesting if you enlarge it enough.

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on October 21.

It’s a tactical success, but what is the strategy?

– Randa Slim on Israel’s war against Hamas and Hezbollah,
quoted by Nicholas Kristof

This week’s featured post is “One year later“.

This week everybody should have been talking about good economic news

The pandemic laid a one-two punch on the world economy. First came the job losses, and then an inflation spike associated with reopening the economy. Those same two phenomena happened all over the world, which is why (as I often point out) it’s a mistake to blame either Trump for the job losses or Biden for the inflation.

Sadly, though, most Americans understand only half of that truth: They give Trump a mulligan for his job losses while blaming Biden for inflation. In the public mind, the “Trump economy” is the pre-Covid 2019 economy, while Biden is held responsible for everything that has happened since.

What is remarkable, though, is how fast the US economy has bounced back, and the Biden administration deserves a lot of credit for that. In 2023, inflation-adjusted household income very nearly regained its 2019 high, and may well be at record levels by now. I have had trouble finding apples-to-apples statistics from other countries, but I believe no comparable nation has done as well with the Covid one-two punch as the US has.

This week we got more evidence for this view: The September jobs report came out showing a very strong economy: 254K new jobs were added (about 100K beyond economists’ expectations) and the unemployment rate ticked down to 4.1%.

Other good news: The East Coast dockworkers strike was suspended, preventing a major disruption of the economy just weeks before the election. (The work stoppage we did see is comparable to a spate of bad weather.) The shipping companies made a new offer, which was close enough to what unions are looking for to continue negotiations through January 15.

and the anniversary of October 7

This is covered in the featured post.

By coincidence, this week was also marked by the publication of a new book, The Message, by Ta-Nehisi Coates, who is the foremost Black public intellectual, and possibly the most significant American public intellectual. The final chapter of the book discusses his trip to the West Bank. (I haven’t read the whole book, but I have read that chapter.)

The controversy this chapter has raised underlines a point I made in the featured post: how hard it is to have a reasonable discussion of Israel/Palestine. A broad theme of The Message is how writers shape the world by deciding whose stories get told. People whose stories aren’t told don’t get fully envisioned as human beings.

Coates sees the Palestinians as such people, and tries to counteract their less-than status by telling some of their stories. He notes that no news organization he is aware of has a Palestinian bureau chief in Jerusalem. When Palestine is discussed in American media, Palestinian voices are usually not included. (I’m guilty of this myself. Even when I criticize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, I am usually linking to liberal American Jews like Peter Beinart.)

In some circles Coates has been met with vitriol, and broad implications that he is antisemitic. One CBS interviewer in particular went after him for not including more Israeli points of view. (He does talk to ex-IDF Israelis sympathetic to the Palestinian situation.) Coates kept his cool and explained that Israeli points of view are already widely available in American media.

Coates has also faced criticism for not being a Middle Eastern expert and missing the complexity of the situation. If I might put words in Coates’ mouth, he seems to be saying that solutions may be complicated, but certain basic moral judgments are simple.

The book makes many analogies between the Palestinian apartheid and slavery/Jim Crow in the US, so I’ll make another one: Before the Civil War, many Northerners toured the South and came back to denounce slavery. Universally, Southerners responded the way many have responded to Coates: They said the Northerners didn’t understand the complexities of the situation. How would a post-slavery Southern economy work? How would the races coexist? It was complicated.

But you didn’t need answers to those questions to look at the immediate reality of slavery and say “This is wrong.” That’s what Coates does. He wanders through neighborhoods of the West Bank, sees how people are treated, and says “This is wrong.”

and Jack Smith’s evidence

The Supreme Court has done a lot to help Trump get away with his January 6 coup. They sat on their hands to delay their decision as long as possible, and then invented a notion of “presidential immunity” that no lower court had any notion of. It’s not in the Constitution and there’s no indication that any pre-Trump administration believed it had such immunity.

As a result, Trump’s trial has been pushed past the election, and may not happen at all. This means that voters will have to decide the 2024 election without knowing precisely how Trump tried to invalidate the 2020 election. January 6 has become a he-said/she-said event, rather than the subject of a jury verdict.

But part of the delay is that the district court has to determine what charges and what evidence can survive the Supreme Court’s ruling. So Jack Smith assembled a 165-page brief describing the evidence he wants to present at trial and why he thinks it should not be subject to presidential immunity. This is as much of the evidence against Trump as the public is going to see before the election.

Just Security has posted an annotated version of Smith’s brief that re-enters nearly all the redacted names. In general, we got new details of the evidence, but the basic story remains the same.

As usual, Trump has had nothing specific to say about the evidence presented in the filing, but only assailed it in general as “election interference” and a “witch hunt”. In response, two facts are worth pointing out:

• Very little of the evidence the special counsel has collected comes from Democrats or never-Trump Republicans. Nearly all of it references grand jury testimony under oath by Republicans who supported the Trump campaign through Election Day. (A few, like Bill Barr, only broke with him after he started lying about his electoral defeat.)
• The brief is appearing now, just before the election, because Trump has pursued every opportunity for delay, and the Republicans on the Supreme Court have aided and abetted him at every turn. Otherwise, this trial would have been over by now. If he really were innocent — which he isn’t — Trump could have cleared his name long before the election.

and the VP debate

Last week I said that VP debates seldom move the needle in an election, and I think that held true for the Walz/Vance debate. [video, transcript]

Debates always have two impacts: in the moment and over time. People who watched the debate live tended to see Vance as the smoother debater who had fewer awkward moments. But the lasting impressions favor Walz: He confronted Vance directly on the question of who won the 2020 election, which Vance could not bring himself to answer. And Vance’s objection to being fact-checked crystallized his ticket’s approach, which is to get away with saying whatever they can, without regard to truth. Going forward, both clips provide fodder for Harris/Walz attack ads.

Vance’s nonanswer underlines something more general and ominous: The GOP has become an autocratic party where no one dares to offend the autocrat. We saw the same thing this weekend with Speaker Mike Johnson.

On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos asked Johnson whether he can “unequivocally” say that Biden won the 2020 election and that Trump lost. The long-debunked election conspiracy is something that the former president continues to bring up at his campaign rallies, even a month before the 2024 election.

“See, this is the game that is always played by mainstream media with leading Republicans. It’s a gotcha game,” Johnson said on ABC’s “This Week.” “You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future. We’re not gonna talk about what happened in 2020, we’re gonna talk about 2024 and how we’re gonna solve the problems for the American people.”

If Trump started saying that the sky is purple, it would become a “gotcha question” to ask other Republicans what color the sky is. They cannot contradict him, no matter how ridiculous his statements are. And this is what Trump wants for the country.

and the Helene aftermath

Most hurricanes’ worst damage comes from the high winds and storm surge near landfall, as when Katrina hit New Orleans. But Helene‘s most serious impacts have come from the heavy rains that it carried inland to places like Asheville, North Carolina, which sits in the Appalachian mountain range.

The confirmed death total from Helene in the US reached 227 Saturday, about half of them in North Carolina. Because they are inland and tucked into the mountains, many of the hardest-hit areas have been hard for relief workers and needed supplies to get to.

This situation has created opportunities for unscrupulous demagogues. Marjorie Taylor Greene, for example, has promoted the outrageous conspiracy theory that Helene was sent towards rural areas that the Biden/Harris administration doesn’t care about.

Yes they can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.

The all-powerful “they”. There’s nothing “they” can’t do. Fortunately, that charge was too crazy to catch on, and MTG’s tweet mainly resulted in ridicule directed at her.

But Donald Trump’s lies, echoed by many other Republicans, have been just credible enough to cause harm. Most damaging has been the claim that FEMA has run out of money because it spent it all housing foreign migrants.

At a campaign rally in Michigan on Thursday, Trump claimed that “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants, many of whom should not be in our country.” He added in an election-related conspiracy theory, saying, “They stole the FEMA money, just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them this season.”

This statement packs a number of lies into a small package.

• Noncitizens can’t vote, and there is no evidence that Harris or anyone else is trying to get them to.
• Housing for migrants is a separate appropriation from disaster relief. FEMA manages both pots of money, but keeps them separate. Nothing has been stolen.
• FEMA has not run out of money to respond to the disaster. If the $35 billion appropriated for disaster relief runs out, Congress can pass a supplemental appropriation, which it frequently does after major disasters. (If there is any delay in that process, it will be due to Speaker Johnson.)

Spreading this kind of disinformation has negative consequences for the very people Trump claims to be standing up for: If they think there’s no money, they may not apply for help they need.

And that’s just the tip of Trump’s iceberg of Helene-related lies. He has also falsely claimed

• Democrats don’t want to help victims in Republican areas. (Republican governors and other local officials say otherwise.)
• Federal help maxes out at $750. (In fact, $750 is what victims can get for immediate needs like groceries, and doesn’t affect their eligibility for further help.)
• Federal helicopters aren’t rescuing people in North Carolina.

FEMA is now maintaining a website to combat misinformation and disinformation like the nonsense Trump is spouting.

This is all just stuff he makes up for his own political advantage. It’s further evidence of a major Harris-campaign theme: Trump doesn’t care about you. He only cares about himself.

Chris Hayes’ coverage of this issue is particularly good. Calling it “misinformation”, Hayes says, doesn’t do it justice.

Hurricane Milton is expected to be Category 3 when it hits Florida’s Gulf coast Wednesday.

and the campaign

I’m looking forward to watching Kamala Harris’ 60 Minutes interview tonight. Short clips are already available. Trump was offered a similar interview but chickened out turned it down.

At long last, the NYT raises the question of Trump’s age and whether he is all-there mentally.

Trump and Vance are claiming they don’t support a federal abortion “ban”, but that’s because they’ve started calling it something different: a “minimum national standard” on abortion.

Josh Marshall has been digging deep into the Trump get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation, which might be trying out a novel theory or might just be failing.

GOTV is an important part of the inside-baseball of campaigning. Typically, GOTV isn’t about convincing people to vote for you — that’s already happened or not happened — it’s about making sure that the people who lean in your direction actually do vote. So you develop lists of people to call, looking for folks who don’t always vote, but have told past callers that they favor you. (Or maybe they just look like your voters demographically). Close to the election you contact those iffy voters, making sure they know where their polling place is, how they’re going to get there, and so on, offering help as needed.

By itself, GOTV isn’t going to produce a landslide, but a good vs. bad GOTV operation can make the difference in a close election. That’s why some Republicans have been expressing alarm about the apparent lack of a Trump GOTV push. Marshall has been trying to get to the bottom of these rumors.

What he’s finding is that Trump people had a decentralized GOTV concept intended to supplement the usual door-knocking and phone-banking. But more and more it looks like the decentralized plan is replacing their traditional GOTV, which is a big gamble. Partly that’s happening because the money for traditional GOTV instead went to pay Trump’s legal bills.

Susan Faludi writes in the NYT about how the “protection” theme works differently for male and female candidates. Trump can fear-monger and then tell women: “I will be your protector.” But a woman offering men protection runs into a deep resentment: “You cannot defend us without unmanning us.”

She also notes how protection comes in two flavors: protection from threats in the real world, and symbolically acting out the tropes of strength.

The symbolic is performative. Those who crave it don’t actually want effective measures to alleviate a threat. They wish to rage against the threat, and they seek a protector in chief who validates their wrath. For them, war’s the point, not victory — outrage, not outcomes

… Time and time again, nations that have sought protection under a fantasy führer — or a real one — have reaped the whirlwind. This fall, I’m voting my fears, too, but what I fear most is the whirlwind. I’m voting my need for protection, as well. I want a Constitution protected from the paper shredders. I want democratic process and the rule of law protected from rioters and scammers. I want reasoned and stable governance, exemplified by a president whose lodestar is the well-being and security of her citizenry, not the bloodlust of his base. I want, most of all, the fate of my nation to be protected against the judgment that history’s gods level against strongman societies.

The protection theme exemplifies the often misunderstood concept of structural privilege or structural discrimination. Male and female candidates can make the same promises, but the man will be cheered while the woman provokes dismay or anger. It’s not how she words or delivers the pledge, it’s the fact that she’s a woman.

Saturday, Elon Musk spoke (and danced wildly) at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. I can only imagine the right-wing outrage if Mark Zuckerberg or any other social-media mogul appeared at a Harris rally.

This is a common pattern: Baseless right-wing accusations (like that social media favors Democrats) often lead to the Right blatantly doing that very thing. In the 2020 cycle, for example, Trump’s false charge that Biden had stolen the election justified his very real attempt to steal it through fraud and force.

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Cory Doctorow uses Amazon Prime’s decision to start showing its customers even more ads to illustrate the general concept of “enshittification” (a term he coined in 2022).

Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you — your time, your attention — to the company’s shareholders.

That’s the crux of enshittification. Companies don’t enshittify — making their once-useful products monotonically worse — because it amuses them to erode the quality of their offerings. They enshittify them because their products are zero-sum: the things that make them valuable to you (watching videos without ads) make things less valuable to them (because they can’t monetize your attention).

Back in the summer, Oklahoma Superintendent of Schools Ryan Walters announced a new requirement that all public schools teach the Bible.

Effective immediately, all Oklahoma schools are required to incorporate the Bible, which includes the Ten Commandments, as an instructional support.

Now he’s asking the legislature for $3 million to buy 55,000 Bibles to put in Oklahoma’s classrooms. But issues of church-and-state aside, The Oklahoman found something fishy.

According to the bid documents, vendors must meet certain specifications: Bibles must be the King James Version; must contain the Old and New Testaments; must include copies of the Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights; and must be bound in leather or leather-like material.

Almost no Bibles on the market meet all those criteria, but two do: The God Bless the U.S.A. Bible for $60 each, and the We the People Bible for $90. Both are endorsed by Donald Trump. A few months ago, BBC reported that Trump had made $300,000 from the first one.

Paying $60-$90 for a leather-bound Bible just isn’t necessary. The text of the Bible can be downloaded free online, and there are a variety of free Bible apps for your phone. If you insist on a physical copy, you’ll find a wide selection for less than $10. In any version, you can look at John 2:14-16 to see how Jesus felt about this kind of profiteering.

and let’s close with something that turns down the voltage

You don’t see a lot of cartoons based on electrical engineering concepts.