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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
At long last, the NYT raises the question of Trump's age and whether he is all-there mentally.
Trump and Vance are claiming they don't support a federal abortion "ban", but that's because they've started calling it something different: a "minimum national standard" on abortion.
Josh Marshall has been digging deep into the Trump get-out-the-vote (GOTV) operation, which might be trying out a novel theory or might just be failing.
GOTV is an important part of the inside-baseball of campaigning. Typically, GOTV isn't about convincing people to vote for you -- that's already happened or not happened -- it's about making sure that the people who lean in your direction actually do vote. So you develop lists of people to call, looking for folks who don't always vote, but have told past callers that they favor you. (Or maybe they just look like your voters demographically). Close to the election you contact those iffy voters, making sure they know where their polling place is, how they're going to get there, and so on, offering help as needed.
By itself, GOTV isn't going to produce a landslide, but a good vs. bad GOTV operation can make the difference in a close election. That's why some Republicans have been expressing alarm about the apparent lack of a Trump GOTV push. Marshall has been trying to get to the bottom of these rumors.
What he's finding is that Trump people had a decentralized GOTV concept intended to supplement the usual door-knocking and phone-banking. But more and more it looks like the decentralized plan is replacing their traditional GOTV, which is a big gamble. Partly that's happening because the money for traditional GOTV instead went to pay Trump's legal bills.
Susan Faludi writes in the NYT about how the "protection" theme works differently for male and female candidates. Trump can fear-monger and then tell women: "I will be your protector." But a woman offering men protection runs into a deep resentment: "You cannot defend us without unmanning us."
She also notes how protection comes in two flavors: protection from threats in the real world, and symbolically acting out the tropes of strength.
The symbolic is performative. Those who crave it don’t actually want effective measures to alleviate a threat. They wish to rage against the threat, and they seek a protector in chief who validates their wrath. For them, war’s the point, not victory — outrage, not outcomes
... Time and time again, nations that have sought protection under a fantasy führer — or a real one — have reaped the whirlwind. This fall, I’m voting my fears, too, but what I fear most is the whirlwind. I’m voting my need for protection, as well. I want a Constitution protected from the paper shredders. I want democratic process and the rule of law protected from rioters and scammers. I want reasoned and stable governance, exemplified by a president whose lodestar is the well-being and security of her citizenry, not the bloodlust of his base. I want, most of all, the fate of my nation to be protected against the judgment that history’s gods level against strongman societies.
The protection theme exemplifies the often misunderstood concept of structural privilege or structural discrimination. Male and female candidates can make the same promises, but the man will be cheered while the woman provokes dismay or anger. It's not how she words or delivers the pledge, it's the fact that she's a woman.
Saturday, Elon Musk spoke (and danced wildly) at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania. I can only imagine the right-wing outrage if Mark Zuckerberg or any other social-media mogul appeared at a Harris rally.
This is a common pattern: Baseless right-wing accusations (like that social media favors Democrats) often lead to the Right blatantly doing that very thing. In the 2020 cycle, for example, Trump's false charge that Biden had stolen the election justified his very real attempt to steal it through fraud and force.
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Cory Doctorow uses Amazon Prime's decision to start showing its customers even more ads to illustrate the general concept of "enshittification" (a term he coined in 2022).
Every ad that Amazon shows you shifts value away from you — your time, your attention — to the company’s shareholders.
That’s the crux of enshittification. Companies don’t enshittify — making their once-useful products monotonically worse — because it amuses them to erode the quality of their offerings. They enshittify them because their products are zero-sum: the things that make them valuable to you (watching videos without ads) make things less valuable to them (because they can’t monetize your attention).
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.
