Monday, December 27, 2021

Live In It

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

- Joan Didion (1934-2021)

This week's featured post is "Closing Out a Dismal Year".

This week everybody was talking about the pandemic

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

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

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


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

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


The toll on healthcare workers is particularly worrisome.

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


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

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

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


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


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

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

and January 6

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

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

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

and the new space telescope

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

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

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

https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/the-james-webb-space-telescope-is-headed-to-space/

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

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

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

and whether Build Back Better is dead

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1008251/sorry-kid

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

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

and 2021

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

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

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


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

and you also might be interested in ...

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

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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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


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


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

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


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

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


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


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


Doctor Historianess educates conservatives about freedom of speech.

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


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

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


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

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

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

and let's close with something musical

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

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

Monday, December 20, 2021

Liberators and Destroyers

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. ... The shepherd drives the wolf from the sheep’s throat, for which the sheep thanks the shepherd as a liberator, while the wolf denounces him for the same act as the destroyer of liberty.

- President Abraham Lincoln (April 18, 1864)

This week's featured post is "The Emotional Roots of Political Polarization".

This week everybody was talking about Build Back Better

https://www.stltoday.com/opinion/editorial/in-the-cartoons-covid-meadows-manchin/collection_72938683-0b96-54e3-9726-e8dc16b82424.html#4

Joe Manchin announced on Fox News Sunday that he could not vote for President Biden's Build Back Better bill, effectively dooming it. The White House released an angry statement in response, ratifying the breakdown in the Biden/Manchin relationship.

For half a year, Manchin has delayed progress on the bill, raising the question of whether he would eventually come through after he had whittled the proposal down to his liking, or if he was simply stringing Biden along. Now it looks like the latter.

Manchin's decision sinks a number of popular proposals, including lowering prescription drug prices, continuing the child tax credit, and mitigating climate change.

and January 6

https://claytoonz.com/2021/12/15/fox-news-knew/

During the House debate on whether to find Trump Chief of Staff Mark Meadows in contempt of Congress for his defiance of a subpoena, (the contempt resolution passed) members of the January 6 Committee revealed a number of text messages Meadows had received on January 6 from various conservative luminaries, including Fox News hosts, at least one member of Congress, and Donald Trump Jr.

The point of publicizing these texts was that they emphasize the need for Meadows' testimony. But they make another important point about the subsequent cover-up of January 6: As much as Trump propagandists try to claim that (1) the Capitol insurrection wasn't a big deal, and/or that (2) Trump bore no responsibility for it, they knew at the time that those things weren't true.

The texts plead with Meadows to get Trump to stop the violence, which demonstrate their authors' belief at the time that Trump was controlling the violence. The texts would make no sense if the demonstrators were basically peaceful, or if the violence were a false-flag operation sparked by antifa, as Trumpists like to claim.


As Trump's attempt to block the January 6 Committee's access to documents from his administration goes to the Supreme Court, Vox points out what a flimsy claim he has under existing precedents. If the Court's partisan majority wants to protect him, they'll have to invent new law.

They might, but I'll bet not. Roberts won't go for it, and he only needs to convince one more conservative. Either Gorsuch or Kavanaugh might be that deciding vote. If the Court doesn't find against Trump, they'll manufacture an excuse to keep the legal wrangling going in hopes that a new Republican House majority will make the case moot by sacking the whole committee in 2023.


The Atlantic follows freshman Republican Rep. Peter Meijer through the events of January 6.

On the House floor, moments before the vote, Meijer approached a member who appeared on the verge of a breakdown. He asked his new colleague if he was okay. The member responded that he was not; that no matter his belief in the legitimacy of the election, he could no longer vote to certify the results, because he feared for his family’s safety. “Remember, this wasn’t a hypothetical. You were casting that vote after seeing with your own two eyes what some of these people are capable of,” Meijer says. “If they’re willing to come after you inside the U.S. Capitol, what will they do when you’re at home with your kids?”

That account led WaPo's Aaron Blake to write "The role of violent threats in Trump's GOP reign".


This is one panel of a Tom Tomorrow comic in which the news anchors outline the run of recent bad news.


AP reviewed "every potential case of voter fraud in the six battleground states disputed by former President Donald Trump" -- all 475 of them.

The cases could not throw the outcome into question even if all the potentially fraudulent votes were for Biden, which they were not, and even if those ballots were actually counted, which in most cases they were not.

The review also showed no collusion intended to rig the voting. Virtually every case was based on an individual acting alone to cast additional ballots.


Not all Republicans are comfortable centering their Party on a lie that undermines democracy. Wisconsin State Senator Kathy Bernier called out her fellow Republicans.


A Delaware judge has ruled that Dominion Voting System's lawsuit against Fox News can go forward. At issue is whether Fox knew at the time that the election-fraud claims it was making against Dominion were baseless.

and Omicron

The pandemic numbers continue to increase: New cases per day in the US are up to 133K, a 21% rise over two weeks. Deaths are inching up: 1296 per day (7-day average), up 9%. Hospitalizations are at 69K, up 16%.

The records were set last January: 248K cases per day on January 11, deaths at 3336 per day on January 15, 140K hospitalized on January 5.


Omicron spread in the United Kingdom is running ahead of the US, so it may provide a glimpse of our future. The UK has been setting new-case records, and London bars and restaurants have begun shutting down on their own, creating a "lockdown by stealth".

The economic consequences could be more dire this time around, because the government isn't providing support to businesses that close temporarily. That could happen here too.

There’s no federal money left to keep restaurants open. The aid for concert halls and other customer-starved performance spaces has nearly gone dry. Federal officials ended their primary effort that pumped money into small businesses with sagging balance sheets, and they stopped paying out extra sums to workers who are out of a job.

Like the original strain of Covid-19, Omicron is hitting the US first in New York City. I'm writing these words in Florida, which has become a low-Covid oasis since the summer surge passed. But a new outbreak seems to be starting in Miami.


Ed Yong's article in The Atlantic does a great job of explaining the biology of Omicron in terms ordinary people can understand.

The coronavirus is a microscopic ball studded with specially shaped spikes that it uses to recognize and infect our cells. Antibodies can thwart such infections by glomming onto the spikes, like gum messing up a key. But Omicron has a crucial advantage: 30-plus mutations that change the shape of its spike and disable many antibodies that would have stuck to other variants.

... In terms of catching the virus, everyone should assume that they are less protected than they were two months ago. As a crude shorthand, assume that Omicron negates one previous immunizing event—either an infection or a vaccine dose. Someone who considered themselves fully vaccinated in September would be just partially vaccinated now (and the official definition may change imminently). But someone who’s been boosted has the same ballpark level of protection against Omicron infection as a vaccinated-but-unboosted person did against Delta.

... Even if Omicron has an easier time infecting vaccinated individuals, it should still have more trouble causing severe disease. The vaccines were always intended to disconnect infection from dangerous illness, turning a life-threatening event into something closer to a cold. Whether they’ll fulfill that promise for Omicron is a major uncertainty, but we can reasonably expect that they will. The variant might sneak past the initial antibody blockade, but slower-acting branches of the immune system (such as T cells) should eventually mobilize to clear it before it wreaks too much havoc.


Data continues to come in.

Moderna’s results show that the currently authorized booster dose of 50 micrograms — half the dose given for primary immunization — increased the level of antibodies by roughly 37-fold, the company said. A full dose of 100 micrograms was even more powerful, raising antibody levels about 83-fold compared with pre-boost levels, Moderna said.

But not all the results are encouraging:

All vaccines approved in the United States and European Union still seem to provide a significant degree of protection against serious illness from Omicron, which is the most crucial goal. But only the Pfizer and Moderna shots, when reinforced by a booster, appear to have success at stopping infections, and these vaccines are unavailable in most of the world.

The other shots — including those from AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson and vaccines manufactured in China and Russia — do little to nothing to stop the spread of Omicron, early research shows.


Six anti-vax protesters were arrested for a sit-in at the Cheesecake Factory in New York City. They barged in after refusing to show their vaccine cards, as the city requires.

The protesters compared the employees who refused to serve them to Nazis, and claimed a constitutional right not to reveal their private medical information. (And that is true, of course. But there is no constitutional right to eat at Cheesecake Factory.)


Because the sports leagues do such regular testing, they are spotting mild and asymptomatic Covid cases that the larger society misses. In the last two weeks, Covid's effect on games has greatly increased. We're starting to hear calls for the leagues to shut down again.


Fox News has been actively denying the well-established link between vaccine status and hospitalization for Covid.


When it comes to pronunciation, I am on Team OH-micron rather than Team AH-micron. To me, it's obvious: omicron is a companion to omega (little-o/big-o) and nobody says AH-mega.

and inflation

The Bank of England became the first central bank to start raising interest rates in response to rising inflation.

The Federal Reserve is also responding, but more slowly. The Fed controls short-term interest rates on dollar deposits more-or-less directly, through the rates that it charges to banks; it affects long-term rates indirectly, by purchasing bonds in the market.

The Federal Reserve said on Wednesday it would end its pandemic-era bond purchases in March and pave the way for three quarter-percentage-point interest rate hikes by the end of 2022 as the economy nears full employment and the U.S. central bank copes with a surge of inflation.

Paul Krugman writes a readable account of the history and causes of inflation, and summarizes the debate between economists who think the current inflation is transitory and those who expect it to persist. Krugman himself is on Team Transitory, but he acknowledges that the current bout has already gone further than he expected, and I think he presents the debate fairly.

The problem, as Krugman presents it, isn't so much that demand has soared as that during the pandemic it shifted from services into goods.

The caricature version is that people unable or unwilling to go to the gym bought Pelotons instead, and something like that has in fact happened across the board.

Services tend to be local, but goods depend on a global supply chain, which hasn't broken, but hasn't responded flexibly enough to accommodate increased demand. This, Krugman believes, will work itself out: As the pandemic recedes, service consumption will go back up, and supply-chain adjustments are already being made.

A second factor has been workers' reluctance to return to the labor market, the so-called Great Resignation, which is forcing wages up. Krugman confesses he doesn't understand exactly what is causing this or how quickly workers will come back.

A third factor in inflationary periods of the past has been psychological: Businesses raise prices and workers demand higher wages because they're convinced that other prices will go up. In other words, inflation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. He doesn't see evidence of this happening yet, but acknowledges that it could.

but you might want to think about this

Take a look at James Muldoon's article "Regulating Big Tech is not enough. We need platform socialism." I'm not sure how these specific ideas would work in practice, but I think we need to expand the universe of possible solutions to our social-media problem.

In practice, all participatory democracy processes -- the daily hours-long open meetings of the Occupy movement being a prime example -- run into the widespread desire for what I like to call Disneyland authoritarianism: Somebody should set things up so that I don't have to worry about how anything works, and I don't care if they exploit me a little as long as they also provide an enjoyable experience.

Disneyland authoritarianism works fine in a place like Disneyland, where management knows that you can easily walk out and never come back if you don't like how you're treated.

A lot of democratic-on-paper organizations end up running in a Disneyland authoritarian manner, because only a small group of people can be bothered to show up to decision-making meetings and man the bureaucracy. As long as the insider cabal keeps providing the services that the larger community expects and maintaining an acceptable level of quality, most people are content to fall into the role of customers rather than citizens. And that can be OK, as long as the processes are transparent and the cabal's boundaries are permeable.

Small-town school boards are a good example. As long as local schools function at an acceptable level, most people can't be bothered to participate, or even to vote in school-board elections. Democratic control exists mainly as a fail-safe, but that's enough to keep authoritarian abuses at bay.

Disneyland authoritarianism becomes problematic when essential systems of everyday life depend on decisions made inside a Disneyland by a cabal that isn't transparent or permeable. That's the problem with social-media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

In the beginning, free privately owned social media apps seemed like a good deal. We got to stay in touch with our friends, participate in communities of interest, and so on. Sure, they harvested our data and used it to target ads at us, but that seemed like a small price. If we didn't like their online Disneylands, we could leave them and never come back.

But now we've gotten into a situation where democracy itself is strongly influenced by what happens inside social media platforms that are organized to maximize their owners' profit. Disinformation and polarization are good for profits, but not for us as individuals, and not for our country or the world. But we can't join the decision-making group, or even find out what they're doing. And while we can walk away from the platforms themselves (at some cost to our ability to fully participate in society), we can't isolate ourselves from their effect on our democratic systems.

and you also might be interested in ...

A heart-breaking article about how conspiracy theorists hurt the very people they claim to help, like the children they are misguidedly trying to save from sex trafficking, as well as the actual sex-trafficking investigations they monkey-wrench.


For years we've been hearing about American airstrikes that go wrong and kill innocent people. This week the NYT published a series based on internal Pentagon assessments, claiming that

the American air war has been plagued by deeply flawed intelligence, rushed and imprecise targeting and the deaths of thousands of civilians, many of them children.

... Taken together, the 5,400 pages of records point to an institutional acceptance of civilian casualties. In the logic of the military, a strike was justifiable as long as the expected risk to civilians had been properly weighed against the military gain, and it had been approved up the chain of command.

The Pentagon records point to an official count of about 1,600 civilian deaths from airstrikes in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan since the official American ground war ended in Iraq in 2014. The Times' estimate is much higher.


Christine Emba brings some common sense to the critical race theory disinformation campaign. Is math racist? Of course not. But the subject can be taught and its classes organized in racially biased ways.


Now we know what Putin's sabre-rattling in Ukraine is about: He wants NATO to renounce expansion or other interference in what he imagines to be the Russian sphere of influence.


https://www.startribune.com/sack-cartoon-presidential-approval-ratings/600125549/

Bruce Springsteen's half-billion-dollar deal with Sony induced the NYT to explain the new economics of the music business.


The intrepid war correspondents of Fox News are on the front lines as the War on Christmas enters its 17th year. CNN's John Avalon looks back at the origins of this annual conflict. He interviews Alisyn Camerota, who is now with CNN, but was at Fox back in those early days of the War, when "marching orders" to give national 24/7 coverage to any local nativity-scene controversy "so that you begin to think it's a national crisis" came down from Fox president Roger Ailes.

The turning of something that unifying, something that really should transcend partisan politics in every way, into something divisive that people can fixate on and feel fear about -- that's a real trick. And it's also a sign of sickness, a sign of partisanship seeping into every element of our lives at the hands of people who are trying to gin up this anxiety.


The Sackler family had negotiated a sweet deal for itself: The family's company, Purdue Pharma, would take full responsibility for its role in creating the opioid crisis, and then declare bankruptcy. That plan would generate $4 billion to pay out to victims, but shield the family from any further lawsuits, letting them walk away with their own billions intact.

But a federal judge threw that agreement out Thursday, saying that the New York bankruptcy court didn't have the authority to offer the family that protection.

The Sackler family is the subject of the best-selling book Empire of Pain, and the HBO documentary The Crime of the Century.

and let's close with something seasonal

Trust Stephen Colbert to remind us of what the Christmas season is really about: blockbuster movies. This year in particular marks the 20th anniversary of The Fellowship of the Ring, the first film in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy. Colbert commemorates this milestone as they undoubtedly would in Rivendell, with rap.

Monday, December 13, 2021

Solemn Mockery

The legislature of a State cannot annul the judgments, nor determine the jurisdiction, of the courts of the United States. ... If the legislatures of the several states may at will annul the judgments of the courts of the United States, and destroy rights acquired under those judgments, the Constitution itself becomes a solemn mockery, and the Nation is deprived of the means of enforcing its laws by the instrumentality of its own tribunals.

- Chief Justice John Marshall
United States v Peters (1809)
quoted by Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday
in Whole Women's Health v Jackson

There is no featured post this week.

This week everybody was talking about threats to democracy

https://www.politico.com/cartoons/2021/12/03/2021-12-3-december-2021-000270?slide=1

The Biden administration hosted a virtual Summit for Democracy Friday and Saturday. The talks are available on the web site.

The event comes at a time when the US has been designated a "backsliding democracy" in the Global State of Democracy 2021 report by International IDEA.

The Global State of Democracy 2021 shows that more countries than ever are suffering from ‘democratic erosion’ (decline in democratic quality), including in established democracies. The number of countries undergoing ‘democratic backsliding’ (a more severe and deliberate kind of democratic erosion) has never been as high as in the last decade, and includes regional geopolitical and economic powers such as Brazil, India and the United States.

... Disputes about electoral outcomes are on the rise, including in established democracies. A historic turning point came in 2020–2021 when former President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election results in the United States. Baseless allegations of electoral fraud and related disinformation undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process, which culminated in the storming of the US Capitol building in January 2021.

That backsliding was highlighted in the week's most important article "Trump's Next Coup Has Already Begun" by Barton Gellman in Atlantic.

For more than a year now, with tacit and explicit support from their party’s national leaders, state Republican operatives have been building an apparatus of election theft. Elected officials in Arizona, Texas, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and other states have studied Donald Trump’s crusade to overturn the 2020 election. They have noted the points of failure and have taken concrete steps to avoid failure next time. Some of them have rewritten statutes to seize partisan control of decisions about which ballots to count and which to discard, which results to certify and which to reject. They are driving out or stripping power from election officials who refused to go along with the plot last November, aiming to replace them with exponents of the Big Lie. They are fine-tuning a legal argument that purports to allow state legislators to override the choice of the voters.

By way of foundation for all the rest, Trump and his party have convinced a dauntingly large number of Americans that the essential workings of democracy are corrupt, that made-up claims of fraud are true, that only cheating can thwart their victory at the polls, that tyranny has usurped their government, and that violence is a legitimate response.

Atlantic is hosting a virtual conversation about Gellman's article today. A good companion to Gellman's article is The Washington Post's "18 Steps to a Democratic Breakdown".


Meanwhile, we're still learning more about Trump's first coup attempt. Friday, Chris Hayes pulled together a narrative of Trump's attempt to hold power after losing the 2020 election.

Both Hayes' segment and Gellman's article express a deep frustration at the story's inability to grab public attention. Trump tried to overthrow American democracy and is setting up to try again. And yet, this doesn't break through as a Watergate-level story that dominates the headlines day after day.

The response of each party is disappointing in its own way. By their complicity and silence, and sometimes by their active participation in Trump's attempt to overthrow democracy, Republicans have let their party become the de facto party of autocracy. There are a few exceptions, but not many.

Because of their small majorities in Congress, Democrats have to be completely united to accomplish anything. So a few holdouts like Joe Manchin have prevented filibuster reform, which in turn has doomed any attempt to protect voting rights, limit gerrymandering, or put up any other resistance to the prospect of installing Trump (or some other MAGA Republican) against the will of the voters. The result is that, as a party, Democrats are not showing the urgency the situation requires.

CNN's Zachary Wolf points out how this inability to act in the face of "existential threat" runs through multiple issues, including climate change.

https://www.ajc.com/opinion/mike-luckovich-blog/mike-luckovich-1210/THT5WBMSQNF43AQCDQYURQGWWE/

Among the documents Mark Meadows turned over to the House January 6 Committee (before he started stonewalling again) was a 36-slide Powerpoint presentation outlining how to overturn the 2020 election: "Election Fraud, Foreign Interference & Options for 6 Jan", which was presented to some Trump-allied senators and representatives on January 4.

Senators and members of Congress should first be briefed about foreign interference, the PowerPoint said, at which point Trump could declare a national emergency, declare all electronic voting invalid, and ask Congress to agree on a constitutionally acceptable remedy.

The PowerPoint also outlined three options for then vice-president Mike Pence to abuse his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress on 6 January, when Biden was to be certified president, and unilaterally return Trump to the White House.

Apparently the "foreign interference" in the presentation's title was a bizarre and unsupported-by-evidence claim that "the Chinese systematically gained control over our election system."


The DC Circuit Court of Appeals rejected former President Trump's attempt to block a subpoena by the January 6 Committee for documents from his administration now held in the US Archives. The 68-page decision concluded that

former President Trump has failed to satisfy any of [the] criteria for preliminary injunctive relief.

Namely: a likelihood of success on the merits of his claim, irreparable harm if an injunction is not granted, and advancing the public interest.

In short, confronting former President Trump’s claim of privilege is the hydraulic constitutional force of not only a reasoned decision by the President that a limited release is in the interests of the United States, and the uniquely compelling need of Congress for this information, but also this court’s “duty of care to ensure that we not needlessly disturb ‘the compromises and working arrangements that those [Political] branches themselves have reached.’” ...

President Trump bears the burden of at least showing some weighty interest in continued confidentiality that could be capable of tipping the scales back in his favor ... He offers instead only a grab-bag of objections that simply assert without elaboration his superior assessment of Executive Branch interests, insists that Congress and the Committee have no legitimate legislative interest in an attack on the Capitol, and impugns the motives of President Biden and the House. That falls far short of meeting his burden and makes it impossible for this court to find any likelihood of success.

The main problem with the suit is that Trump claims to be suing to preserve the interests of the Presidency, and that's just not his job any more. This isn't the legislative vs. executive branch conflict he frames it as. It's a private citizen asking the judicial branch to undo an agreement between the legislative and executive branches.

The case looks headed for the Supreme Court, but I think the best the conservative majority can do for Trump is stall. He hasn't given them a credible way to rule in his favor.

and the pandemic

The post-Thanksgiving surge continues. New cases are averaging 119K per day, up 43% in two weeks. Deaths are averaging 1298 per day, up 32%. The Midwest and Northeast continue to be hardest hit, though Kentucky and West Virginia are still among the leaders in deaths and hospitalizations per capita.

Meanwhile, the first information about vaccines and the Omicron variant started coming out. British and Israeli studies tell similar stories: Two doses of vaccine don't provide much protection against Omicron, but three do.

Meanwhile, the UK reported its first Omicron death.


Meanwhile, misinformation and conspiracy theories don't have to wait for data.


Michael Osterholm from the University of Minnesota predicted in April, 2020 that the US could see 800K deaths in the next year and a half, which is startlingly close to what has happened. It's always hard to tell how much luck is involved in a prediction like that, but you do have to wonder what he's saying now.

Here's what I found interesting:

While it's early, I believe that Omicron is less virulent than Delta. The variant is being studied in South Africa, which is important because the virus has been in that country longer than others. And we do know that hospitalizations, serious illness and deaths are lagging indicators. Rates often rise two to three weeks after rises in case numbers start to occur. But as of today, the epidemiologic and clinical data on Omicron cases around the world support this virus is less lethal than Delta.

... When we first investigated the Covid-19 vaccines, we had to prioritize the assessment of the safety of the vaccines, which was done well. But we never really understood how to best use the vaccine in terms of number of doses, dose spacing, even the dose amount to maximize our immune response both for the short and long-term. ... [W]e do need that third dose -- and not as a luxury dose, but the third dose of a three-dose prime series. It should have been three doses all along.

... [W]e keep hearing about technology transfer and giving [low-income] countries the ability to make their own vaccines, and yet the expertise needed to make these vaccines is really at a premium. It's very difficult to find people who know how to do this. So, it's not enough to transfer technology to a low-income country if you don't provide the expertise to make these vaccines. It's not as simple as making chicken soup.


Ridiculous claims of executive privilege are not just for coup plotters. Trump administration trade representative and Covid-adviser Peter Navarro is refusing to comply with a subpoena from the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis.

Navarro claims he is obeying a "direct order" from Private Citizen Donald Trump.

While he was in the government, Navarro was a font of misinformation about hydroxychloroquine and other snake-oil Covid cures, as well as calling Anthony Fauci the "father of the virus" based on a thinly supported conspiracy theory about a Wuhan lab.

and SB8

Supreme Court had another chance to rule on Texas' vigilante-enforced anti-abortion law SB8.

The Supreme Court on Friday refused for a second time to block Texas Senate Bill 8 (SB8), which bans abortions as early as six weeks into pregnancy, in what may seem like a misleading 8-1 vote in favor of abortion providers’ attempts to challenge the law.

The reason the 8-1 vote is misleading stems from the fact that the Court left open “a single tenuous route to challenging” SB8 while not only keeping intact the most restrictive anti-abortion law in the US, but also foreclosing relief against Texas state court officials and its attorney general. As one academic commentator from Florida State University remarked, “If you read the win for abortion providers here as some kind of positive sign in the Dobbs case, I think you’re deluding yourself.”

I confess that I haven't read the Court's ruling, but I make the link available in case you want to.

The Court was not ruling on the case itself, but on various motions: to dismiss the case, or to grant in injunction against enforcing the SB8 until a final decision on its constitutionality. It denied the injunction, and narrowed the scope of who the pro-choice plaintiffs can sue.

If you consider Roe v Wade a binding precedent (which it is until the Court reverses it), SB8 is clearly unconstitutional. But SB8 is designed to evade the federal courts, and by a 5-4 vote, the Court is doing nothing about that.

This evisceration of the Supreme Court's authority does not sit well with Chief Justice Roberts (hence the quote at the top), but the five radical conservative justices on the Court now leave him on the outside looking in.


California Governor Gavin Newsom plans to strike back. If conservative states can nullify federal court rulings, so can liberal states:

If states can shield their laws from review by federal courts, then CA will use that authority to help protect lives. We will work to create the ability for private citizens to sue anyone who manufactures, distributes, or sells an assault weapon or ghost gun kit or parts in CA.


A Texas judge is doing what the federal Supreme Court has refused to do: block the enforcement mechanism of SB8 because it violates the state constitution. The judge

ruled that the law unconstitutionally gave legal standing to people not injured, and was an "unlawful delegation of enforcement power to a private person."

and commented:

In response to a direct question from this court, the attorneys responded that they are not aware of any comparable set of procedures in American law, ever, whether enacted for civil cases generally or for one special kind of lawsuit alone.


If you're wondering what a religious takeover of government looks like, consider parts of India dominated by Hindu nationalists.

Citing complaints from Hindus as well as health concerns, local officials in Ahmedabad, Gujarat’s largest city, and at least four other cities in mid-November banned the sale and display of meat, fish and eggs on the street. As the mayor of one city, Rajkot, told the local news media: “Carts with nonvegetarian food can be seen everywhere in the city. The religious sentiments of the people are hurt by this.”

See? The religious nationalists are victims of those horrible egg-eaters and the vendors who serve them. They're just fighting back.

and tornadoes

Tornadoes ripped through the center of the country late Friday and early Saturday, probably killing over 100 people, most of them in Kentucky.

Does global warming increase the number and force of tornadoes? Probably, but scientists are careful about stuff like that.

and you also might be interested in ...

https://nickanderson.substack.com/p/the-sanctity-of-lifw

Weirdly, another Republican in Congress decided to celebrate the birthday of the Prince of Peace by posting a photo of her children with their military-style guns. Didn't some guy once tell his followers to put their weapons away because "all who draw the sword will die by the sword"?

I am reminded of the John Pavlovitz column where he asks conservative Christians what Jesus they believe in, and concludes "It's not any Jesus I know."


As Fox News becomes the Tucker Carlson Channel, there is less and less place for anyone hoping to do real journalism. The network's latest loss is Chris Wallace. He will join CNN's new streaming service, CNN+.


Paul Krugman remarks on the strange disjunction between the economy and public opinion about the economy. Jobs are up, GDP is up, businesses are investing, retail sales are up, and the stock market is high. If you ask people how they are doing personally, they are upbeat. But if you ask them how the economy in general is doing, they say "not so good". There's some inflation (which is a global phenomenon), but does that really negate everything else?


Speaking of Mark Meadows (as I did above), I have never before heard an author refer to his own book as "fake news". Trump objected to Meadows' account of him testing positive for Covid and not telling the people around him, so Meadows backed down. Because the Truth is whatever Trump says it is.

Chris Christie, meanwhile, is pretty sure Trump gave him the Covid that sent him to the ICU.


There is now a unionized Starbucks. It's in Buffalo.


Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker, a popular Republican in a Democratic state, isn't running for re-election or anything else next year.

Rather than try to rehabilitate the party he’s belonged to for decades, Baker chose to step aside. His move dovetails with the recent decisions of Chris Sununu of New Hampshire and Phil Scott of Vermont—two other Republicans who routinely poll among the most popular governors in the country—to spurn what could be competitive Senate races next year.

Baker-style Republicans are starting to recognize that they have no place in the Trump personality cult that the GOP has become. Why would they want to rise in a party where Trump can make you denounce your own book as "fake news"?


Derek Thompson in The Atlantic reflects on the decline in religious affiliation among Americans (especially young Americans), what caused it, and what it means going forward.

The main causes the article cites are (1) liberal disgust with the increasing identification between Christianity and conservative politics; and (2) America's main enemy switching from the atheistic USSR to the hyper-religious Al Qaeda.

He also inverts the usual link between families and churches. It's not that loss of religion undermines families, but that the loss of close family relationships undermines religion.

just as stable families make stable congregations, family instability can destabilize the Church. Divorced individuals, single parents, and children of divorce or single-parent households are all more likely to detach over time from their congregations.


A new product entered the market this week: eyedrops that temporarily fix age-related near-sightedness.

The new medicine takes effect in about 15 minutes, with one drop on each eye providing sharper vision for six to 10 hours, according to the company.

Hating eyedrops myself, I don't see the win. But I guess other people do.


Gawker demonstrates the right way to publish an interview with someone who makes a lot of off-the-wall and unsupported claims. This interview is with RFK Jr., who was anti-vax before anti-vax was cool among the people who think it's cool now. Kennedy's words are published as he spoke them, but fact-checking and other needed contextual information is displayed just as prominently.

and let's close with a different kind of merriment

If you're about to OD on Christmas movies, maybe this collection of SNL Christmas-movie parodies will get you feeling like yourself again.

Monday, December 6, 2021

Institutional Survival

Will this institution survive the stench this creates in the public perception that the constitution and its reading are just political acts?…If people actually believe it’s all political, how will the court survive?

- Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor

This week's featured post is "The Roe v Wade Death Watch".

This week everybody was talking about the Supreme Court

Most of what I have to say about this is in the featured post, but I feel that I should elaborate on the Sotomayor quote above: The authority of the Supreme Court comes not from armies or police, because it commands none. It also doesn't come from money, because the Court has none to disperse.

The power of the Court depends on the other branches' compliance. If a President openly defied the Court (as Nixon did not, and we often wondered whether Trump would), the only possible consequences would have to come from someone else: impeachment by Congress or rejection by the voters at the next election.

Whether those other parties would back the Court up depends on its reputation as a body above politics. The public needs to believe in the analogy John Roberts made at his confirmation: The justices are umpires who call balls and strikes objectively, rather than assert their own preferences. If the Court is seen as just another actor in our partisan drama, someday a president will feel empowered to ignore its rulings, and then constitutional government will be over in America.

The striking thing about the current reconsideration of Roe is that nothing of significance in the legal or scientific environment has changed since Roe was decided in 1973. All that has changed are the particular people who are on the Court. The Mississippi case comes to the Court now because conservatives have maneuvered their way into five or six anti-Roe votes. Justice Ginsberg dies and Justice Barrett replaces her; suddenly the Constitution says the opposite of what it said two years ago.

That dependence on personalities is what threatens the Court's survival as an institution.

https://theweek.com/political-satire/1007725/hold-his-beer

and the Omicron variant

The day after Thanksgiving, the World Health Organization named a new Covid variant-of-interest "Omicron". The stock market immediately tanked, more out of fear than knowledge, and much panic has ensued.

The worry, of course, is that this is Delta all over again: It looked like we had the pandemic licked in June, but then the rise of the more transmissible Delta variant started another surge.

Every new variant raises questions about how well our previous protections will work: Is it more transmissible than even Delta? More deadly? Can Omicron evade the vaccines and the natural immunity of people who have already recovered from one bout of Covid? How effective are current anti-viral treatments? Will it sneak past our current generation of tests? Do we have to revise our previous ideas about masking and distancing? Will new lockdowns be necessary?

The first headlines about any of these questions should be taken with a grain of salt. As useful as it is to get quick answers, fast research is less accurate than slow research. Bearing that in mind, here's what I'm seeing:

Omicron is outcompeting Delta in South Africa, where it was first detected, so it's probably more transmissible. On the positive side, anecdotal evidence from South Africa says the symptoms have been mild, though some experts discount this because South Africa's population skews young.

On defeating natural immunity:

A study published on Thursday as a pre-print, which is still awaiting peer review, found that Omicron is at least 2.4-times more likely to reinfect someone who's already had a COVID infection compared to the other variants that have been studied.

I'm not sure about this, but I'm guessing a person without a previous infection would be more than 2.4 times as likely to get infected, implying that natural immunity to Omicron from infection by a previous variant is diminished but not gone.

As for vaccine effectiveness, Moderna's chief medical officer said on November 28 "we should know in a couple of weeks", but he sounded pessimistic, based on the number of mutations in Omicron. (As with natural immunity, I'll guess that antibodies targeted at earlier variants would be less effective, but not ineffective.) He predicted an an Omicron-specific vaccine would be "available in large quantities" in early 2022.

If in fact the current vaccines turn out to be less effective, but not ineffective, against Omicron, the conventional wisdom says that you want your immunity to start out as high as possible. So Omicron is an argument for, not against, vaccination and booster shots.

The chair of the South African Medical Association says that the nation’s hospitals were not overwhelmed by patients infected with the new variant (another indication that symptoms may be mild), and most of those hospitalized were not fully immunized.

Until they can be updated, Regeneron's monoclonal antibody treatments are also likely to be less effective on Omicron, according the company's CEO. Merck and Pfizer are optimistic about their anti-Covid pills, because their attacks on the virus aren't targeted at the spike protein, where most of the mutations seem to be. For similar reasons, Gilead says its drug Remdesivir should still work against Omicron, though it doesn't have test results yet.

The current generation of Covid tests appear to detect Omicron.

Speculations about lockdowns seem wildly premature. As with the original Covid outbreak, travel restrictions can only slow the spread, not keep Omicron out. It has already been detected in multiple states.


For a few days it looked like case numbers were going down again, but we always knew that Thanksgiving would give the virus another boost. New cases in the US are averaging 110K per day, up 19% over two weeks. Deaths, which have been staying in the 1000-1200 per day range for several weeks, are at 1178. The current surge continues to be concentrated in the cold-weather states, with New Hampshire and Minnesota having the highest per capita rates.

Despite the recent surge in cases, the highly vaccinated Northeast continues to have lower death rates than less vaccinated regions. Vermont (73% vaccinated) is averaging 69 new cases per 100K per day, but only .15 deaths. For comparison, Wyoming (46% vaccinated) averages 30 new cases per 100K per day, but 2.00 deaths.

As other numbers go up and down, the ratios of vaccinated/unvaccinated cases and deaths remain fairly steady: The unvaccinated have about five times as many cases per capita as fully vaccinated people, and 13 times as many deaths. Those numbers probably understate the effectiveness of vaccination, because higher-risk people have been more eager to get vaccinated.


https://theweek.com/political-satire/1007718/so-much-winning

Marcus Lamb, a religious broadcaster who championed anti-vaccine arguments and other Covid-advancing misinformation, has died of Covid at age 64. His son's account of his illness is a classic example of epistemic closure, i.e., having a belief system that is impervious to contradictory evidence.

"There’s no doubt in my mind that this is a spiritual attack from the enemy,” Lamb’s son, Jonathan, said about his father’s COVID-19 illness on a Nov. 23 broadcast of the Ministry Now program. “As much as my parents have gone on here to kind of inform everyone about everything going on to the pandemic and some of the ways to treat COVID — there’s no doubt that the enemy is not happy about that. And he’s doing everything he can to take down my Dad."

Yes, Lamb died because Satan wanted to keep him from spreading the Truth, and not because of his own willful ignorance and misguided ideas.

and recent murders and trials

https://claytoonz.com/2021/12/01/critical-gun-theory/

Tuesday, a public still buzzing about the Rittenhouse and Arbery verdicts got a new act of violence to argue about: the Michigan school shooting. Fifteen-year-old Ethan Crumbley has been arrested and charged as an adult in the murder of four students, plus injuries to seven other people, including a teacher.

In an unusual move, Crumbley's parents have been charged with involuntary manslaughter, meaning that they participated in the deaths unintentionally. The parents didn't attend their original arraignment hearing, and were captured hiding in a warehouse.

Oakland County Prosecuter Karen McDonald explained the charges: The parents "could have stopped it. And they had every reason to know [Ethan] was dangerous, and they gave him a weapon and they didn’t secure it. And they allowed him free access to it."


By canceling last week's Sift, I missed the chance to make a more timely comment on the guilty verdict against the three men charged with murdering Ahmaud Arbery.

Shortly after the verdict was announced, I checked how NewsMax was covering it: Their commentators saw the verdict as proof that the justice system is not racist, and as an implicit vindication of the Kyle Rittenhouse not-guilty verdict a few days before.

I, on the other hand, saw the Arbery verdict as the exception that proves the rule of systemic racism in the justice system. (The adage uses proves in the archaic sense of tests.) The murderers very nearly got away with a KKK-style lynching, and would never have stood trial but for some incredibly stupid moves.

  • It's hard to imagine them being convicted without the video evidence they recorded themselves. Pro tip: If you're going commit crimes, don't make videos of yourself in the act. If you discover that you have accidentally videoed yourself participating in a murder, drop your phone in a lake as soon as you can.
  • The local prosecutor saw the video proving their guilt, but didn't charge them and didn't release the video. Now that the cover-up of the murder has failed, she's been indicted for prosecutorial misconduct.
  • The video leaked to the public because a friend of the murderers thought it would clear them. Second tip: If your friends are idiots, don't let them see the evidence against you, no matter how much it will impress them.
  • Only after the video went viral did the Georgia Bureau of Investigation get involved, which led to the murder charges.

All of this makes me wonder how many similar lynchings have been committed by White racists who weren't total morons, and who consequently are still walking around free.

So anyway, the Arbery verdict proves that the justice system isn't totally racist. If you can get video of a white-on-black crime to go viral, public pressure can embarrass the justice system into doing the right thing, as it did (sort of, eventually) in response to George Floyd's murder. Hurray for America!


https://jensorensen.com/2021/11/24/protests-guns-rittenhouse-kenosha-cartoon/

It's been hard to find a good dispassionate analysis of the Rittenhouse verdict. I like this one, written by Harvard Law Professor Ronald Sullivan Jr.

He simultaneously believes that the not-guilty verdict was a reasonable application of the laws of Wisconsin, and that a Black defendant in a similar case would have been convicted.

My view is that the aim of the criminal legal system should be to level up, not level down. We should spend our energies insisting that the system treat black defendants as Rittenhouse was treated, and not advocate for the system to treat Rittenhouse as black defendants are, and have historically been, treated. Leveling down inures to no one’s benefit. The derogation of rights would spiral downward—and quickly—such that all of our rights would be in jeopardy.

The law, Sullivan argues, always embodies our moral sensibilities imperfectly. (Oliver Wendell Holmes is said to have reprimanded a newly minted lawyer for his overly idealistic argument: "This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice.") The solution is to change the laws, not misapply them to get a more satisfying outcome in a particular case.

Long-standing self-defense law conspired with absurdly permissive open carry laws to create the set of conditions to make the Rittenhouse affair possible. Perhaps those of us who find the verdict troubling are better served by focusing our attention on state legislatures. I see nothing in the text of the Second Amendment or its doctrinal exegesis that compels states to permit minors to stroll about town with a rifle strapped across their shoulder. It makes no sense, and the unintended consequence of such a legal regime is a Wild Wild West mentality where citizens feel emboldened to engage in private law enforcement.

and you also might be interested in ...

Former Senator and Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole died at 98. He represented a bygone era when rivals were not necessarily enemies, senators compromised to get things done, and presidential candidates -- even Republicans -- conceded after they lost.


Trump's co-conspirators are changing their stonewalling tactics. They're starting to drop executive privilege as an excuse not to answer, and starting to invoke the Fifth Amendment. The implication is that they know they've been involved in a criminal conspiracy.


A handful of anti-public-health Senate Republicans threatened to torpedo the last-minute bill to prevent a government shutdown. Their price was to get a vote on an amendment to defund enforcement of President Biden's vaccine mandate (which is already on hold pending a court challenge); the vote failed 48-50. The funding bill then passed and was signed by Biden on Friday, so the government will stay open until sometime in February.

Senator Mike Lee of Utah made the unvaccinated sound like a persecuted minority: "All we wanted to do was have a vote to give a chance to the hardworking mom or dad, soldier, sailor, airman or Marine struggling to put food on the table." Of course, these unvaccinated workers are not just risking their own lives, but (given how contagious diseases spread) everyone else's as well. And they already have two chances to save their jobs: get vaccinated, or take advantage of the alternative frequent-testing option. Defunding the vaccine mandate serves the interests of Covid, not American workers.

As the nation approaches 800,000 deaths, close to double the number that we lost in combat in World War II, I have lost my patience for unvaccinated Americans' misguided and self-centered stubbornness.


The Republicans' next chance to sabotage America is the debt ceiling, which will probably be hit sometime next week. (At the risk of tediously repeating myself every time this comes up: Having a debt ceiling at all is a terrible idea.)

Edward Geist of the Rand Corporation argues in The Atlantic that the more often Congress plays chicken with the debt ceiling, the more likely it becomes that the nation will default someday.

Nuclear-war strategists have long understood how recklessness, or the appearance of recklessness, may help one side get the other to relent during a single game of chicken. But these strategists’ work also offers a warning for Congress: The more times the game is played, the more treacherous it becomes, because when both sides become convinced that catastrophe will always be averted in the end, each behaves more rashly.


CNN fired Chris Cuomo for conflicts of interest related to the sexual harassment charges against his brother, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. Reportedly, Chris helped Andrew craft his media strategy, and used his own investigative resources to gather information on his brother's accusers.

It was always dicey having a news-talk host whose brother was a governor with national ambitions. But for a time the relationship seemed to have more benefits for CNN than costs. Prior to the scandal, when Andrew would be a guest on Chris' show, the brotherly banter was often entertaining and even informative. Once Andrew got into trouble, though, Chris should have been much more scrupulous. CNN was right to fire him.


A few days after the Michigan school shooting (see above), Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) tweeted his family Christmas card photo.

You may recall the outrage generated two weeks ago when Vice President Harris spent $375 on a serving dish "as US families fret over the cost of Thanksgiving dinner". How much do you think the Massie family arsenal cost? I'm betting each one of those killing machines is more expensive than Harris' dish.

But Massie is male, White, and Republican -- so who cares?


While we're talking about fake outrage directed at uppity women, right-wing media recently invented a Nancy Pelosi story out of nothing. According to a rumor that apparently was too juicy to check, Pelosi had just bought a $25 million Florida mansion, simultaneously demonstrating how out of touch she is with ordinary Americans (I wonder how much her cookware costs) and abandoning liberal California for Ron DeSantis' Florida.

The story was tweeted far and wide (as fact) by the likes of Sean Hannity before anyone bothered to see if it was true. Using Ninja investigative reporting skills far beyond the capabilities of anyone at Fox News, Realtor.com's Claudine Zap called the listing agent, who debunked the rumor. "I have no idea where the rumor started in regards to Nancy Pelosi. I keep saying I can’t disclose who the buyer is, but it’s not Pelosi." Hannity has not acknowledged the error.


Putin is upping the pressure on Ukraine, increasing military forces on the border, and causing speculation in US intelligence services that he plans an invasion in 2022. Ukraine says it recently foiled a coup attempt, which it blames on Russia.

American conservatives are split on how to respond. Ted Cruz wants a tougher stand on Russia, while Tucker Carlson wonders why we aren't allied with Putin, who is popular among Tucker's white-nationalist base.

Who's got the energy reserves? Who was the major player in world affairs? Who's the potential counterbalance against China, which is the actual threat? Why would we take Ukraine's side, why aren't we on Russia's side? I'm totally confused!

When schooled by GOP Rep. Mike Turner about democracy vs. authoritarianism and the undesirability of condoning nations expanding by military force, Tucker responded tentatively: "I'm for democracy in other countries, I guess."


I thought I was just getting old, but apparently movie dialogue is objectively harder to understand these days.


Why choose among solar, wind, and wave power when you can harness all three with one device?

and let's close with something something imperial

When I first got to Rome, I wasn't taking the ancient statues seriously as representations of real people. I mean, the Romans also made statues of the gods, and who knows what Jupiter or Minerva look like?

After a day or two in the museums, though, I started recognizing some of the emperors before reading the plaques. (A famous statue of Augustus in the Vatican Museum has tucked-under little toes. There's no way a sculptor would give the Emperor crooked toes unless he really had them.) By the end of the week, Augustus, Trajan, Hadrian, and Marcus Aurelius were becoming old friends, to the point that I could say, "Oh, this statue is Trajan styling himself as Augustus."

Now an artist in Switzerland has used modern tech to create photo-realistic images of the masters of the ancient world. This head-shot of Augustus is so real it inspires a whole new level of detail in my imagination of his life. Like: When you grow up with a name like Octavian, what do the other kids call you on the playground?

https://www.facebook.com/groups/653238131358606/user/100001895844030