Monday, November 18, 2024

New Heights

There's no question, he's the leader of our party. So now he's got a mission statement. His mission, and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it. All of it, every single word. ... If Donald Trump says "Jump three feet high and scratch your head", we all jump three feet high and scratch our heads. That's it.

- Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX)

This week's featured posts are "Harris lost the war of ambient information" and "Caligula's Horse and other controversial appointments".

This week everybody was talking about Trump's appointments

The worst ones are covered in one of the featured posts. In general, Americans believe that presidents should get to choose their own people, unless they go too far. Generally, the Senate revolts on one or maybe two appointees. At a minimum, though, Gaetz, Hegseth, Gabbard, and RFK Jr. deserve to be rejected. Picking them is a test of the phenomenon in the quote above: Will GOP senators really disgrace themselves because Trump asks them to?

and more election retrospectives

As the final votes get counted, it becomes clear that Trump's victory -- while still clear and undisputed -- was anything but the mandate-establishing landslide he wants to claim. Currently, his percentage of the vote has fallen under 50% and is likely to continue shrinking. In both percentage and vote-margin terms, his popular vote victory is smaller than what he lost to Hillary Clinton by in 2016.

Lots of ink is being spilled to explain Harris' defeat and what Democrats should do better next time. I've been unimpressed by most analyses, because often Harris did do the things her critics claim she didn't, and didn't do the things they claim she did.

The point my brain keeps sticking on is why so many voters believed things that just weren't true. If you can't explain that, I don't think you've gotten to the root of the problem.

The other featured post focuses on a New Yorker article that is at least a step in the right direction.

and Palestine

I'm not sure how I didn't notice this until now -- I noticed it this week because Truthout had an article on Thursday -- but in September a UN Special Committee submitted a report on the situation in not just Gaza but the West Bank as well.

The report raises serious concerns of breaches of international humanitarian and human rights laws in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including starvation as a weapon of war, the possibility of genocide in Gaza and an apartheid system in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. It documents the impact of the conflict escalation since 7 October 2023 on Palestinians’ rights to food; to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment; to physical integrity, liberty and security of persons; as well as the disproportionate effects on the rights of women, children, and future generations more broadly. The report also highlights the ongoing attacks against the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and refers to developments in the occupied Syrian Golan. The report provides recommendations to the General Assembly and Member States; to the State of Israel; and to businesses operating with Israel, that in any way contribute to maintaining Israel’s unlawful presence in the occupied territories.

The report doesn't present Israel's actions as unprovoked, or paint Hamas in a positive light. Section IV, the first substantive section, describes the October 7 attacks and the ongoing rocket attacks on Israel.

and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)

Tuesday, Trump announced that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy will co-lead the "Department of Government Efficiency". This could mean a lot or practically nothing. It's hard to tell at this point.

Programs to streamline government come and go. Al Gore led one during the Clinton administration, a fact that virtually no one remembers. Musk and Ramaswamy will lead a "department" that doesn't exist: It has no employees and no budget. (They're both rich, maybe they'll fund it themselves.)

It also has no authority. Congress establishes the size and funding of government agencies. Trump apparently intends to challenge a Nixon-era law that prevents the President from impounding funds that Congress has appropriated. This will lead to a court battle that only the Supreme Court can decide, and could take some while to play out. It will be a test of the Court's partisanship, because the Court obviously would not have granted Biden such power.

But even if the Court rewrites the laws and the Constitution to give Trump impoundment power, it still belongs to him, not to Musk and Ramaswamy. Maybe Trump will rubber-stamp the DOGE's recommendations. But they're bound to be deeply unpopular, so maybe he won't. We'll see.

In general, the American people are inconsistent on the subject of government. If you ask them the broad question of whether government is too big or spends too much money, they'll say it is and does. But if you give them a specific list of programs to cut, they'll support those programs. Typically, voters grossly overestimate how much of the federal budget is spent on foreign aid, bridges to nowhere, and obscene art projects.

Trump pledged during the campaign not to cut entitlements, and some of his proposals would make the entitlement-funding situation worse. He is likely to want to spend more on defense, and he'll have a hard time refusing to pay the interest on the national debt. Once you set all that aside, not much is left for DOGE to slash.


One thing is certain: We will be seeing a whole bunch of articles/tweets/posts about how stupid science is and how crazy the government is to support it. I'm already seeing tweets about studying the sex life of beetles, and I'm sure there will be many more.

Science is always an easy target if you want to make government spending sound ridiculous. Decades ago, Senator William Proxmire, a Democrat from Wisconsin, gave out the Golden Fleece Award to highlight expenditures he thought were obviously wasteful. Scientific research was a frequent "winner".

I'm sure that silly research projects do occasionally get funded, but the bigger problem is that good scientific experiments often sound stupid if you don't understand what the scientists are looking for. Ben Franklin flying kites during thunderstorms probably looked foolish to any neighbors who noticed. The significance of Galileo dropping weights off a tower was probably lost on contemporary observers. ("They fell. What did you think would happen?")

More recently, the popular weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy came out of research on Gila monster venom, which no doubt could have been made to sound like a complete waste while it was happening. But what about the sex lives of beetles? Well, if a beetle invasion is devouring your crops, you might wonder about ways to discourage them from reproducing. Shutting down the beetle equivalent of Match or Tinder is probably worth a look.

and BlueSky

X/Twitter has been losing users ever since Elon Musk bought it and turned it into a safe space for Nazis, and eventually into a big in-kind contribution to the Trump campaign. He's made it much harder to avoid right-wing propaganda or to shield yourself from abusive trolls. (Brian Klaus has labelled it a "Perfect Disinformation Machine".)

The big reason to stay on X has been all the other people who are there, including a lot of the world's top journalists. (Frequently, I back up points I'm making in the Sift by linking to X.) But as the user experience has gotten worse and worse -- a prime example of what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification" -- restless X-natives have talked more and more about going somewhere else.

The question was where? One candidate was Threads, a platform created by Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram. But whatever advantages Threads might offer are overwhelmed (at least in my mind) by the fact that you're just replacing one Internet oligarch with another. Mark Zuckerberg might just be playing Saruman to Musk's Sauron.

At the other extreme is Mastodon, which is based on open-source software and exists in a variety of "instances", in which somebody has generously decided to host a social-networking community on their hardware.

But since the election there has been a mass exodus to another alternative, BlueSky. Lots of the people I have followed on X -- Paul Krugman, Chris Hayes, Michelle Goldberg, Josh Marshall, James Fallows ... -- are now on BlueSky, with more joining every day. This week The Guardian closed its X accounts and moved to BlueSky en masse.

I've been experimenting with BlueSky (and also Mastodon) for several months. As on X, I don't post much, and mainly use the platforms to announce Sift articles. I read a lot there, though, to find things to write about.

I've generally found BlueSky a more pleasant experience than X, though I can't tell how much of that is cultural and how much is baked into the software. (I'm told that blocking trolls is much easier on BlueSky, though I haven't had to use that feature. People seem to understand that they'll be blocked if they become abusive, so abuse is comparatively rare.) Recently, though, it has become useful in the same way that X has been useful, so my attention has been shifting in BlueSky's direction.

I confess I don't really understand BlueSky as an organization. Wikipedia says:

Bluesky is a decentralized microblogging social media service primarily operated by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation based in the United States.

I'm not sure how the "public benefit" part works, but the corporation does have investors who probably expect to make money somehow. Ultimately, that might make BlueSky subject to the same forces that enshittify everything on the internet. So it's hard to say how long this halcyon period will last. Long term, Mastodon is probably the more durable alternative, if only everyone would move there. But for now, BlueSky seems to be the sweet spot of short-message social media: more pleasant than X, more useful than Mastodon.

and you also might be interested in ...

I had to check this several times before believing that it wasn't a joke: The new owner of Alex Jones' fallen media empire is the satirical newsite The Onion.

Jones lost a defamation suit to the parents of the children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre, which he repeatedly claimed was a hoax. He filed for bankruptcy in an attempt to avoid the $965 million judgment, and the bankruptcy process resulted in auctioning off his assets.

The Onion plans to shutter Jones' InfoWars and rebuild the website featuring well-known internet humor writers and content creators, according to a person with knowledge of the sale.

The Onion published a very Onionish statement from the CEO of its parent company, Global Tetrahedron.

All told, the decision to acquire InfoWars was an easy one for the Global Tetrahedron executive board.

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

Through it all, InfoWars has shown an unswerving commitment to manufacturing anger and radicalizing the most vulnerable members of society—values that resonate deeply with all of us at Global Tetrahedron.

The statement does not reveal the purchase price, but says GT got a "steep bargain" of "less than one trillion dollars".


Nazis are apparently feeling emboldened by Trump's victory. Saturday afternoon, a small band of them marched through downtown Columbus. The Columbus mayor and Ohio governor have condemned the march, though I expect we'll wait a long to before Trump has anything to say about it.


Red-state Democrat Jess Piper divides Trump-supporting women into four categories:

  • Wealthy and well-connected. They'll get tax cuts and they feel safe from Trump's anti-woman policies.
  • Indoctrinated. Mainly by religion. They're single-issue anti-abortion voters who explain away Trump's personal issues.
  • Pick-me. Women who count on the men in their lives to protect them.
  • Ignorant. "I watched an interview of one young White woman who said she voted for Trump because he 'brought abortion back to the states.' She thought Trump was legalizing the procedure. Roe fell during Biden’s term, and she seemed to blame Biden for the ban."

Rudy Giuliani's illegal attempts to avoid paying his defamation liability have finally gotten to be too much for his lawyers.


State laws that single out trans kids for discrimination are inevitably headed for the Supreme Court. Some have been thrown out, but Indiana just upheld one.

and let's close with something deep

We often talk about people "going underground" to escape attention, but in ancient Cappadocia they literally did.

The ancient city of Elengubu, known today as Derinkuyu, burrows more than 85m below the Earth's surface, encompassing 18 levels of tunnels. The largest excavated underground city in the world, it was in near-constant use for thousands of years, changing hands from the Phrygians to the Persians to the Christians of the Byzantine Era. It was finally abandoned in the 1920s by the Cappadocian Greeks when they faced defeat during the Greco-Turkish war and fled abruptly en masse to Greece.

The article estimates that 20,000 people might have lived in the underground city at its peak.

Monday, November 11, 2024

Sorrowful Arrivals

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.

and you also might be interested in ...

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.

Monday, November 4, 2024

Sufficiency

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.

- Matthew 6:34

I haven't checked, but this may be the shortest Weekly Sift ever. Here's why: Given how close and how consequential tomorrow's election looks, it's hard to think about anything else. And yet, it's also hard to come up with anything worthwhile to say about it. I could try to predict who's going to win, but you'd be foolish to believe me, because I don't know. I could collect a lot of other people's predictions, but they don't know either.

We're down to the point where you can vote, you can encourage your friends to vote, and you can do some election-day volunteering. Beyond that, you can watch the Future arrive at the usual rate of one second per second.

Back in 2008, I started doing election preview posts, predicting how the evening was likely to play out, given poll-closing times and what the opinion polls were saying. The 2008 preview was so accurate that I started thinking I knew something. (I said that California's outcome would be projected almost immediately after polls closed at 11 EST, putting Obama over the top. That's exactly what happened.) I got 2016 drastically wrong, but I didn't learn my lesson and wrote a 2020 preview anyway.

This year has been an ongoing master class in the pointlessness of speculation. Pundits have talked and written endlessly about how the debates would go, whether Biden would or should drop out, what process the Democrats should use to replace him, whether Harris would do any better, who the two VP nominees should be, whether Trump's endless gaffes would cost him, what the "October surprise" might be, how various voting blocs -- women, Blacks, Hispanics, union members -- would respond to Harris, and on and on.

If you ignored all of it, you are probably better off than the rest of us, or at least calmer. By tomorrow, we will all have voted, contributed, volunteered -- or not. What has mattered is action, not divining the future.

Here's what I will say: In a typical election, late-deciding voters mostly break the same way. So for better or worse, there's a good chance we won't have the kind of photo-finish the polls are predicting.

If this were a typical election, it would be obvious that Trump is blowing it down the stretch: the Puerto Rico insult (and his unwillingness to distance himself from it), simulating oral sex with a microphone, fantasizing about pointing guns at Liz Cheney, and so on. Despite major media continuing to sanewash Trump -- CNN posted video of the oral-sex pantomime with the caption "At a rally in Milwaukee, former President Donald Trump became visibly frustrated after dealing with technical problems on stage." You'd never know he raged for over three minutes about problems any other speaker would shrug off, and then made an inappropriate sexual gesture -- the man's hateful and unhinged nature has been on full display for anyone who cares to look.

But as we all know by now, this isn't a typical election. No one knows what the late-deciders are thinking. We'll just have to wait and see.

There are any number of other things you could choose to worry about. But there will be plenty of time to start worrying about them after Wednesday or so.

For example: Trump seems to be gearing up once again to claim power even if the voters reject him. He and Speaker Johnson have some "secret plan". Elie Mystal has a guess about what it might be. And who knows what the Supreme Court will do? Will they let him lose? Every time the Court has had a question put to it, it has ruled for Trump, often in complete opposition to precedent or even written law. How far will it go? I don't know and neither does anybody else who isn't on the Court. But unless you're on the Harris legal team, you can procrastinate on that bit of worrying until the post-election legal battles actually start -- which they won't if Trump wins legitimately (because Democrats respect the voters' right to reject them).

If Trump wins and begins assembling a fascist administration, that also would be worth worrying about, and even moreso if Republicans get control one or more houses of the new Congress. But worrying about it now won't give you any special advantage.

As for the next two days: I voted early and I sent Harris a check months ago. I've been trying to make the case for her and against him for months. Now all I can do is watch and wait -- and try not to obsess about things that may or may not happen.

If you're trying to convince some last-minute deciders to vote for Harris, here's some material to work with.

The NYT writes one paragraph that sums up why you shouldn't vote for Trump, and backs up each statement with a link to a longer article. Matt Yglesias writes a positive case for Harris, which isn't flashy because it centers on "normal" things like integrity, the rule of law, and taking a pragmatic approach to helping ordinary people solve typical problems like how to afford a house or send their kids to college.

If you're talking to someone who thinks voting for Trump is the "Christian" position, point them to this guy.

If you're talking to a progressive who won't vote for Harris because of Gaza, show them this.

One final thing: As I explained at some length in August, if you think you're nostalgic for the "Trump economy", what you're actually nostalgic for is the pre-Covid economy, when a lot of things were cheaper. But electing Trump won't bring those days back.

Around the world, governments took very similar actions to keep their economies going while fighting Covid. And around the world, those actions eventually led to inflation; it's not a Biden/Harris thing. Our inflation happened to show up after Trump left office (because that's when the new vaccines allowed the economy to reopen) but his actions had as much to do with it as Biden's. Once you recognize the hit Covid was on the economy -- and would have been even if Trump had been reelected in 2020 -- you can appreciate how well the Biden/Harris administration has managed the recovery from Covid.

Here's a metaphor that might help: Think about how you might feel as you leave the hospital after being treated for a heart attack. Do you feel as carefree and vibrant as you did before the heart attack? Probably not. But you also feel a heck of a lot better than you did when you arrived in the ER, and you should appreciate what the doctors did to pull you through.

Trump is selling nostalgia for 2019, before Covid did its damage. But on that day in 2021 when Biden was inaugurated, the "Trump economy" was a mess. It's much better now.

Monday, October 28, 2024

Fragile, not Perishable

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.

Monday, October 21, 2024

Waiting

Good news will wait, and bad news will refuse to leave.

- Tevye, Fiddler on the Roof

This week's featured posts are "Mifepristone, round 2" and "Trump's Weird Week".

This week I refused to pay attention to polls and speculation

I can't help learning from headlines that the race is still close, and how much more do I need to know? I know who I'm voting for, and I've already written my check to the Harris campaign. I could spend all day fretting about whether the likelihood of Harris winning is 55% or 45%, but what's the point?

Here's something I learned years and years ago when my wife was being treated for breast cancer: For the first month or two, I combed through all the statistics I could find, trying to find the numbers that fit her exact situation. Eventually, though, it dawned on me that survival and death were both possibilities too likely to ignore. No matter what study I found next, I wasn't going to be able to tell myself "That's not going to happen", and we would also have to keep making long-range plans for our life together. (She lived, and those plans have served us well.)

That was as much as the statistics could tell me, and trying to get a more precise answer out of them was pointless.

Same thing here. On this Election Night "the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat" (to use the old Wide World of Sports tagline) will both be legitimate possibilities. You're going to have to prepare yourself emotionally to face either one. No poll or expert analysis is going to tell you anything more than that.

but I couldn't help noticing Trump's weird week

One featured post covers this point, but a few noteworthy odds and ends got left out, like this photo of a Trump makeup fail.

Sure, the photo makes Trump look ridiculous, but that's not why I call it to your attention. It's also evidence of a more serious problem: He's surrounded by people who are afraid to tell him he looks ridiculous. That's why the prospect of his second term is scarier than his first term was: In his first term, he was hemmed in by people -- Don McGahn, John Kelly, Jeff Sessions, etc. -- who would tell him that what he wanted to do was illegal. Those people are gone now, and they've been replaced by yes-men.


My article also overlooked the fact that the mainstream press (like the NYT, the Boston Globe, and AP) is finally beginning to cover Trump's deterioration, after obsessing endlessly about Biden's age issues.


Dave Bautista, former pro wrestler and Marvel's Drax the Destroyer, gets real about "tough guy" Donald Trump. There's not a joke in here anywhere, but it's funny because it's true.

and Elon's campaign shenanigans

In the 2020 cycle, Trump and his people told bald-faced lies about Dominion voting machines stealing his votes. The lies were so transparent that Fox News had to pay $787 million to Dominion to settle a defamation suit. (Think about that: Defamation suits are hard to win, especially against news organizations, especially big ones who can afford the best lawyers. Trump threatens to sue news organizations all the time, but he hasn't collected a dime.)

But why not do it again? Both MTG and Elon were out spreading crap about Dominion this week, and the MAGA sheep are probably swallowing it. You know who's also doing it: Rasmussen Reports, a supposedly neutral polling organization whose polls always wind up favoring Trump -- and get included in many polling averages as if they were legit.


Elon's money is funding a lot of shady election tactics. Chris Hayes reports on how Muslim voters in Michigan are being micro-targeted with borderline antisemitic ads saying that Harris is all-in for Israel because she is controlled by her Jewish husband, while Jewish voters in Michigan are being micro-targeted with ads saying that Harris "panders to Palestine". The ads are all from the same group.

Another Elon project is the fake pro-Harris "Progress 2028".

They have set up fake sites impersonating the Harris campaign using fake policy positions and then sending out text messages also impersonating the campaign which aim to drive voters to the fake site.

Josh Marshall thinks the fake web site is probably legal, but the texts might not be. Matt Yglesias makes a good point:

It tells you something that they literally made up from scratch a fake version of Kamala Harris to run against.

This should be a bigger story: The richest guy in the world, who could make billions more from the right government contracts, is funding ethically dubious projects to get a fellow billionaire into the White House. Working-class voters who believe Trump is their champion might want to think about that.

and mifepristone, round 2

When the Supreme Court tossed an anti-mifepristone lawsuit on technical grounds, you knew that couldn't be the end of the story. The other featured post details some of the creepy ideas the new lawsuit raises, like states being upset that their teen birthrate is too low. (When I saw that claim on social media, I didn't believe it. So I read the 199-page lawsuit and discovered that it's true.)

and here's another story that deserves more attention

Capitalism does some things well, but it should be kept far away from other things, like running hospitals.

Thursday, the WaPo published a column summarizing a report Senator Ed Markey put out in September about the collapse of the Steward Health Care hospital chain.

The 34-hospital chain was formed in 2010 by a private equity group, Cerberus, which acquired the hospitals as investments. The WaPo article gives the firm credit for initially having benign intentions: ObamaCare had just passed, so maybe there would be a surge of new patients able to afford health care. Running the hospitals as hospitals looked likely to be a money-maker for Cerberus.

For various reasons that turned out not to be the case. But Cerberus had to produce profits for its investors anyway, so it turned to financial engineering. It formed a real estate investment trust, Medical Properties Trust, which bought the land under Steward hospitals and leased it back to the hospitals. Rather than simply owning the land, the hospitals now had to rent it, increasing annual costs. But the transaction created both a pile of money that Steward could distribute to Cerberus shareholders, as well as a regular income stream Cerberus could collect through MPT.

The downside of this transaction was diminishing the underlying viability of the hospitals, which now struggled to cover their increased costs. In May, the chain declared bankruptcy, and state governments are now spending many millions to keep at-risk communities from losing their hospitals.

In total, Cerberus has said it made roughly $800 million on its investment in Steward, more than tripling its original investment, even as the hospitals themselves were hemorrhaging cash.

As best I can tell, none of this is illegal. It's just one more example of capitalists taking risks where the profits will be private but the losses can be socialized.

Similar stories can be told about private equity's role in the destruction of America's newspapers, especially local ones: Take over a challenged but surviving paper, borrow massively against its assets to pay inflated "management fees" to the investment company, then declare bankruptcy. It's a slow-motion version of what Tony's mob does to a local business in the "Bust Out" episode of The Sopranos.


In mythology, Cerberus is the name of Hades' three-headed dog, who guards the gate to the Land of the Dead. It's a rather macabre name for a firm that owns hospitals.

and you also might be interested in ...

From the UK, The Economist notices something a lot of American media misses: The US economy is "The Envy of the World".


Israel announced the death of Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar, the likely mastermind behind the October 7 attacks. Under a different administration, Israel might use this event to declare victory and start moving towards peace.


Maybe you don't have the time to read the full 900-page Project 2025 plan. But how about a few comics explaining the worst of it?

And if you want to understand the related movement of White Christian Nationalism, Kat Abu has an hour-long video explaining it.


Doug Balloon puts aside his satirical NYT Pitchbot persona to opine about WHY the NYT has covered the campaign as badly as it has, and in particular why it has consistently sanewashed Trump. He decides against any cynical argument about financial advantage and instead attributes the Times' behavior to simple incompetence and laziness: "their system isn't built to deal with a narcissistic sociopath" and they don't want to change. The company is run by a "nepo baby" who is the son of a nepo baby, and he has hired high-level people who aren't very good at their jobs.

Not to say there aren't lots and lots of great journalists and editors at the Times. It pays well and it's tough to get good jobs in journalism, so they can certainly hire lots of great people. But I suspect that on the really big decisions, ones where Sulzberger himself or people near him weigh in, the fact neither Sulzberger or the people near him are very smart or competent plays a big role.


A commenter recently pointed me to this Lancet article, claiming that the actual number of deaths caused by the war in Gaza is probably much higher than the official estimate. Wars, the article points out, commonly produce "indirect deaths" well beyond the number of people who directly die by violence. These deaths are from disease, malnutrition, and various other causes, and they may occur even after the violence ends. Looking at past conflicts, the article claims the total death toll could be between 3 and 15 times the official count of around 42,000.


I always come back from a driving trip with a new podcast to recommend. This time I listened to Trevor Noah's "What Now?". In particular, Noah's interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates is amazing. In the final essay in his new book The Message, Coates compared the Israeli occupation of the West Bank to South Africa's apartheid. Noah grew up in South Africa, and was 10 when apartheid ended. They have a lot of interesting things to say.

and let's close with something tiny

Ever since Anton van Leeuwenhoek began to popularize the microscope in the early 1600s, people have been amazed by what ordinary objects look like under extreme magnification. In this article Scientist assembles beautiful and surprising images of extremely small things, like this close-up of a sugar found in Coca-Cola.

Monday, October 7, 2024

Tactics and Strategy

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.

and you also might be interested in ...

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.