IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR CITIZENS:

The detailed study by the Latino Donor Collaborative, a non-profit organization researching Latino issues, was unveiled at the L'attitude conference in San Diego. L'attitude seeks to connect venture capitalists with startups and pressure media to diversify.

The study found that the 2019 U.S. Latino gross domestic product of $2.7 trillion had spiked from $2.1 trillion in 2015 and $1.7 trillion in 2010.

The GDP growth from 2010 to 2019 for U.S Latinos outpaced Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan.

Over the past two years, the growth of Latino GDP averaged 5.63%, double the rate of the broader U.S. economy.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

From my n~3,400 survey of reproductive-age women in the US fielded last month. In the n~550 subsample with kids under 2 in the house, here's share of moms who say the kid has a given allergy, based on whether the mother eats meat or not. pic.twitter.com/MCaQU9EgIH

— Lyman Stone 石來民 🦬🦬🦬 (@lymanstoneky) September 30, 2021

WHEN EVERN THE ITALIANS CAN FACE THE FUTURE:

"There is no longer a trade-off between what generates business value and is good for the climate, these two objectives today are fully aligned thanks to the evolution of technology,"  said Francesco Starace, Enel Group CEO and General Manager.

"Therefore, financial efforts must be aimed at achieving the SDGs (sustainable development goals) and a net zero economy. This requires ambitious commitments and strategies, as well as the tools to promote their effective deployment.

"Transition is bound to happen and not only in the energy sector: indeed it will sweep across many sectors of the world economy.  We must ensure that it happens in an orderly, decisive, just and inclusive manner."

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

A GOP flier distributed to homes in the Virginia suburbs of Washington depicts the Jewish Democratic candidate for the House of Delegates at a table stacked high with gold coins, a pairing of images of Jewish candidates with money that has proliferated in political attack ads in recent years. [...]

Similar depictions of Jewish candidates reveling in cash in recent election cycles have drawn condemnations from Jewish groups. Most of the attacks have targeted Jewish Democrats, although in one instance, a Republican Jewish nominee was targeted by Democrats.

One of Helmer's fundraising emails in the 2019 election condemned the recent spike in antisemitic attacks and accused his opponent, a longtime incumbent, of ignoring it. It showed Helmer celebrating his son's bar mitzvah. Helmer's grandmother spoke at his swearing-in in 2020 about her joy, as a Holocaust survivor, at witnessing her grandson's election to public office.

Helmer also said that the way the original photograph was made grainy in the photoshopped mailer appeared to accentuate his nose. Helmer, a veteran, also noted that the photoshopped version erased the West Point insignia on his jacket. 

WHICH IS THE MOST STINGING INDICTMENT?:

The online conservative journal American Greatness published a report on Tuesday with anonymous sources claiming Noem and Lewandowski have been engaged in an affair for months. The sources also said this alleged dalliance is an "open secret" in Washington, D.C., with members of Congress aware of it.

Lewandowski, who serves as an adviser to Noem, is married with four children, while Noem is married with three children. "I love Bryon," Noem tweeted, referring to her husband of 29 years. "I'm proud of the God-fearing family we've raised together. Now I'm getting back to work."

Earlier Wednesday, Politico reported that GOP donor Trashelle Odom accused Lewandowski of making unwanted sexual advances toward her last weekend during a charity event in Las Vegas that Noem also attended. Odom told Politico that Lewandowski "repeatedly touched me inappropriately, said vile and disgusting things to me, stalked me, and made me feel violated and fearful."

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

It's as if progressive expectations from last autumn -- when it looked like then-candidate Joe Biden was headed toward an easy win over then-President Donald Trump, and Democrats anticipated sizable congressional majorities -- were never updated to match our political reality this year. Instead of a historic Democratic landslide, Biden's legitimacy is still denied by a large swathe of the public, and the party was left with a 50-50 tie in the Senate and three-seat edge in the House, hardly the ideal political foundation for transformational government. (For comparison, Democrats had a Democrat in the White House and large majorities in both houses when they passed Medicare in 1965 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010.)

No one should blame progressives for taking their best shot. But now they should think hard about what happens if this week's stand-off in the House -- where progressives are threatening to tank the already Senate-approved infrastructure bill unless they get some guarantee of passage of the larger bill -- results an increase in the debt ceiling being the only bill to pass.

I don't mean just the potential electoral consequences, although it seems likely that failure would be terrible for Democratic hopes of holding Congress in November 2022. Both the infrastructure and social spending bills are broadly popular, and even Republicans who may not like the infrastructure bill probably agree the nation has an infrastructure problem. Given the typical off-year election swing to the out-of-power party, Democrats likely need to run on a solid record of achievement.

But there are bigger stakes, ones progressive should realize. After all, they've been the loudest voices complaining that the Trump-era Republican Party has undermined democracy or even set America down the road to fascism. Though some rhetoric is overblown, there's also some basis for those concerns. Illiberalism is rising both here and abroad: Advocacy group Freedom House finds global democracy on the retreat for the past 15 years, including a big step backward for the United States in 2020.

That poor health of global democracy led MIT economist Daron Acemoğlu and a team of researchers to examine what makes people both supportive and skeptical of democracy. The results aren't surprising: A successful democracy makes people enthusiastic about democracy. In particular, Acemoğlu and colleagues conclude in "(Successful) Democracies Breed Their Own Support," it's "exposure to democratic regimes that deliver economic growth, peace and political stability and public services that makes people more willing to support democracy. In contrast, greater exposure to democracies that are not hampered by deep recessions, mired in political instability, or unable to provide public services does not appear to increase support for democracy." 

THE LEAST WE CAN ASK OF RED STATES IS THAT THEY BE BETTER THAN THEIR LOCAL GOP:

Catholic Charities is the sole refugee resettlement agency in Oklahoma, and they're gearing up for the arrival of around 1,800 Afghans in the days and weeks to come. That's the third most in the country, after only California (5,255) and Texas (4,481). Tulsa alone is set to take in 850, more than most states.

Preparing for the refugees' arrival has fallen largely on the shoulders of the city's faith leaders. On a residential block a few miles from the warehouse, First United Methodist Church lead pastor Jessica Moffatt unlocks the front door to one of six houses her congregation is fixing up and leasing to the Afghans at no cost.

"We just talk all the time about being aware of opportunities to provide what I call 'holy hospitality' to anyone who comes our way," she says.

The city's spiritual leaders from various denominations and faiths are in agreement about helping the Afghans, she says.

"And there's not a lot we can say that we all agree on," she says.

Mohamed Herbert, imam at the Islamic Society of Tulsa, politely disagrees.

"I've seen that a lot in Tulsa," says the leader the of city's only mosque, which draws roughly 2,000 worshippers weekly.

"Of course this is not to say we don't have problems, everybody's got problems," says Herbert, a Baltimore native who moved to Tulsa two years ago after graduating seminary in Dallas. "But from my own unique personal experience, I've seen nothing but, you know, people just opening their hearts and their hands to anyone that's new."

Public sentiment in Oklahoma seems to mirror recent NPR/Ipsos polling that finds most Americans support resettling the Afghans. But there is some loud dissent.

In multiple Facebook videos, Oklahoma Republican Party Chairman John Bennett says the party does not consider the refugees to be welcome in the state.

FREEDOM IS NOT A WORTHWHILE VALUE:

As I thought, a story broke. The United States' fertility rate was declining. But this wasn't actually news, the reporters informed us. The birth rate had been down for several years, which was good, and also bad. Fewer births meant fewer teen pregnancies and more accessible contraception. The planet couldn't support more people anyway, some pundits said.

At the same time, many women who wanted to have children had been delayed, even deterred. They had student debt. The rents were too high. Childcare was unaffordable, but a one-income household wasn't feasible. These problems could be helped, other pundits argued, by universal preschool, paid parental leave, remote work and the child-tax credit. As I read, I found myself in agreement. Children shouldn't be a luxury good.

Still, I felt that something was missing from the arguments about funding and flexibility. An uncomfortable acknowledgment had to be made: motherhood would always cost something. There was no getting around this, no matter how much support you had. Take my friend, for example. Her husband also took care of the baby. Her extended family was happy to help. She was able to work on a flexible schedule. Her writing could be done from home. All of these things were true for me, too.

And yet, her life had irrevocably changed. Like anyone, there were only so many hours in her days, only so much space in her mind. Now some of those hours were spent changing diapers, and some of the space was taken up by thoughts of a new person. She was less available. Did that mean she was also less free?

In her new book On Freedom, poet and essayist Maggie Nelson begins by asking, "Can you think of a more depleted, imprecise, or weaponized word?" She then sets out to examine its contradictions. She draws on others' work about drug addiction and climate change, sexual liberation and art, in order to think through how each of us can be free to make our own choices while also caring for the needs of others.

Freedom, Nelson argues, is never absolute. It's always "knotted up" with "so-called unfreedom, producing marbled experiences of compulsion, discipline, possibility, and surrender." We can choose to be obligated, or dependent. We can choose to be restricted or distracted. All this to say, we are free to make choices--to get married, adopt a dog, move an aging parent into our home, convert to a religion--that make us less able to do whatever we want. That's what my friend had done in having her baby. She's made a choice, willingly and joyfully. Neither the will nor the joy is negated by new limits on her schedule and resources.

CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS WHEN THERE IS ONLY ONE:

The new dual thrust of Chinese policy - redistribution plus re-regulation - strikes at the heart of the market-based "reform and opening up" that have underpinned China's growth miracle since the days of Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. It will subdue the entrepreneurial activity that has been so important in powering China's dynamic private sector, with lasting consequences for the next, innovations-driven, phase of Chinese economic development. Without animal spirits, the case for indigenous innovation is in tatters.

With Evergrande blowing up in the aftermath of this sea change in Chinese policy, financial markets, understandably, have reacted sharply. The government has been quick to counter the backlash. Vice Premier Liu He, China's leading architect of economic strategy and a truly outstanding macro thinker, was quick to reaffirm the government's unwavering support for private enterprise. Capital markets regulators have likewise stressed further "opening up" via new connectivity initiatives between onshore and offshore markets. Other regulators have reaffirmed China's steadfast intention to stay the course. Perhaps they doth protest too much?

Of course, on one level, who wouldn't want common prosperity? US President Joe Biden's $3.5 trillion "Build Back Better" agenda smacks of many of the same objectives. Tackling inequality and a social agenda at the same time is a big deal for any country. It is not only the subject of intense debate in Washington but also bears critically on China's prospects.

The problem for China is that its new approach runs counter to the thrust of many of its most powerful economic trends of the past four decades: entrepreneurial activity, a thriving start-up culture, private-sector dynamism, and innovation. What I hear now from China is denial - siloed arguments that address each issue in isolation. Redistribution is discussed separately from the impact of new regulations. And there is also a siloed approach to defending regulatory actions themselves - case-by-case arguments for strengthening oversight of internet platform companies, reducing social anxiety among stressed-out young people, and ensuring data security.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis swore on Wednesday night that he isn't considering a 2024 presidential run at the moment, claiming he's too busy trying to "make sure people are not supporting critical race theory."

NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

Russian residents may soon be able to receive vaccines not recognized by the government, the Kommersant business daily reported, citing a Health Ministry proposal put up for public discussion.

THERE IS NO EUROPE:

Officials and diplomats across the European Union are getting really frustrated with the French. 

The scope of what some are calling President Emmanuel Macron's "Europe First" strategy -- which aims to make the EU more independent from Washington for defense and sensitive technologies -- is causing concern in many EU member states and hampering western efforts to forge a united response to the rise of China. 

Macron's stance has become more visible since the humiliating loss of a giant Australian submarine contract this month and has held up preparations for a crucial meeting with U.S. trade officials. The French have also blocked efforts to modernize NATO's capabilities and fueled divisions at the top of the European Commission, according to diplomats with knowledge of those discussions.

Opposition to Macron's approach is most acute in eastern Europe, where many countries see the U.S. as a shield against potential Russian aggression and have little faith in the French -- France just acts in its own interests, one eastern diplomat said. 

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

RACE TO THE BOTTOM:

NOTHING EVER SPECIATES:

Around 20 years ago, biologists expected genetics and environmental factors to produce substantial heterogeneity, giving natural selection plenty of choice, said Alex Lancaster, an evolutionary biologist at the Ronin Institute in New Jersey who wasn't involved in the new study. But, he said, more recent observations have attested to unexpected similarity across populations.

Over dinner with co-author Richard Carthew a few years ago, Mani started thinking about pinning down exactly how much and in what ways individuals can physically vary. In other words, what options exist within the constraints of embryonic and postnatal development? For a growing organism, "What's on the menu?" Mani wondered. "People like to say that science is some sort of method, but it started with just that childish, harebrained question."

Prior studies relied on a few points of comparison on an organism, but Mani, Carthew and their co-authors Vasyl Alba and James Carthew (Richard Carthew's son and a member of his lab) wanted more thorough information. They knew that, when sequencing genomes, algorithms line up sections of the genetic code for comparison. In the same way, the scientists decided to align the wings of common Drosophila melanogaster fruit flies.

Their thousands of wing photos resemble line drawings with dark veins standing out from light backgrounds. A computer program standardized these images, fitting each into a circle while preserving features such as the angles of the veins, and digitally stacked the thousands of pictures on top of one another. This gave the researchers around 30,000 points of comparison -- every pixel in that stacked image -- instead of a few dozen crude landmarks. "It's more comprehensive," said Lancaster. "It catches features that wouldn't normally be caught."

Unexpected simplicity emerged from this rich data. The scientists saw a narrow range of possible appearances for the wings, which mostly diverged in a small set of characteristics. The variation was concentrated near the hinge of the wing and showed up in a few particular spots, such as the shape of the frontmost vein. Moreover, these variable traits were linked: When one of the traits on a wing was far from the average, the other traits usually were, too. This was true no matter which genetic or environmental modifications that fly experienced, implying that these factors individually have very limited influence.

Richard Carthew had anticipated that more of the flies' developmental complexity would be captured in their physical forms. That the variation was all funneled into a short list of menu options is "quite a marvelous thing," he said. As flies grow into adults, they have "this magical ability to correct for differences and create a very robust final form."

KIDS THESE DAYS:

Afghanistan's new defense minister has chastised junior Taliban fighters for "damaging" the Islamist group's status by taking selfies, wearing stylish clothes, sightseeing and generally having too much fun.

Since the Taliban took over the country on August 15, its members have been observed riding bumper cars in amusement parks, touring Kabul's zoo and enjoying a series of other attractions many of them have never encountered previously.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

When members of one's own ideological camp act badly, there is a heightened responsibility to speak out. It is thus praiseworthy that a few conservatives--I think here of Princeton professors Robert George and Keith Whittington--have spoken up vigorously against conservative censors. Disgraceful is the silence of so many other conservatives. The sentinels on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal are keenly sensitive to left-wing cancel culture. By contrast, they are deplorably complacent in the face of right-wing abusiveness.

The fact of the matter is that the episodes of overreaching by excessively "woke" educators that the right wing eagerly seizes upon and weaponizes are mainly props in the campaign against racial equity instruction in schools. For the right-wing campaign is not really concerned with improving education. It is, for the most part, a race-baiting ruse to gin up the Trumpian base, to vent the status anxieties of aggrieved whites, and to bait progressives into saying and doing things that alienate potential allies.

Some of the racial equity literature vilified by the right wing does contain errors or misjudgments deserving of criticism and has inspired "sensitivity trainings" and related initiatives that can be tendentious, overbearing, and even coercive. It is a mistake to refrain from publicly criticizing any aspect of the racial equity camp out of a sense of solidarity with those being targeted by the right-wing campaign. Adopting that posture entails accepting indefinite inhibition since the prospect of right-wing attack is always present. It is important for at least two reasons to be willing to share candidly criticism of the racial equity camp even as it faces vilification from the right. The racial crisis is a large, complex, difficult problem that will require for clarification, much less resolution, knowledge and insight coming from all sorts of different vantages. Developing useful thought will almost inevitably entail disagreements. Avoiding friction for the sake of displaying a putative solidarity will come at the price of evading disputes that are essential to confront.

No strain of thought is free of error, weaknesses, missteps. Contrary to what the 1619 Project initially posited, protecting slavery was not a substantial motivation behind the American colonists' move to secede from the British Empire. And, yes, some of the ideas propounded by those who march under the banner of CRT ought to be rejected. The notion that there has been no appreciable advancement by Black people since 1950 is ridiculous. The idea that Black people cannot be racist because they lack power to effectuate their prejudice is misguided for a number of reasons including the obvious empirical point that there are Black people who, as police chiefs, mayors, Cabinet officials, members of Congress, professors, directors of human resources offices, chief executive officers, prison wardens, and president and vice president of the United States, do exercise decisive, often unreviewable, power over whites and others. Another bad idea, popular among some proponents of CRT, is that "racist" speech is a readily identifiable species of worthless expression that individuals and institutions should not hesitate to censor. The irony, of course, is that the right wing, replicating that logic, has now labeled critical race theory as "racist' and demanded that it be suppressed. One hopes that this experience will drive home a point made recently in Dissent magazine by Katha Pollitt in "The Left Needs Free Speech." What gives protesters such as critical race theorists the space to promote unpopular positions in unfriendly places, she observed, "is the respect most Americans give to free speech"--at least for now. (She also archly remarked that while many progressive dissidents spend a lot of time attacking liberalism, they also rely on liberalism to protect them "like children who assume they can say awful things to their parents [but that] their parents will still be there for them.")

There ought to be no airbrushing of the racial equity thinking under right-wing attack. Some of that thinking is radical. So? Some of that thinking is misguided. Again: so? Even if flawed, even if objectionable, even if disturbing, that thinking should nonetheless be allowed to be considered and debated in age-appropriate settings under the superintendence of teachers who are presumably competent. Radical and misguided writings can contain useful information and provide excellent platforms from which to inculcate tastes for complexity, skepticism, and questioning. The arguments of Nikole Hannah-Jones and Kimberlé Crenshaw and Ibram Kendi are part of the cultural inheritance of the country and should be carefully understood, vigorously debated, and conscientiously included in school curriculums without ideological censorship--just as the pro-slavery sentiments of John C. Calhoun, the anti-slavery secessionism of William Lloyd Garrison, the socialist advocacy of Eugene Victor Debs, the patriotic imagery of Martin Luther King, Jr.,  and the reactionary ramblings of Donald Trump ought to be made available for study and discussion. No significant idea that sheds light on the development of the American experiment should be banished in the way that the right wing is seeking to banish CRT and kindred communities of thought.

Preserving credibility is another reason for declining to withhold sincerely held criticism of racial justice talk even when it is under right-wing attack. Good-faith sharing of candid impressions deduced from disciplined study is imperative in an environment in which falsity has been unleashed on a grand scale, in which adherence to principle is scoffed at as sentimental, and in which reason itself is under siege. It is essential to emphasize, moreover, that whatever one's ultimate judgement of the thinking in question--whether one agrees with it or not--a well-organized polity should put firm boundaries around the capacity of people, especially governmental officials, to banish ideas, thereby depriving prospective audiences, including precollegiate pupils, of an opportunity to consider for themselves what guardians have repressed.

Going forward, resistance to right-wing censoriousness should include redoubled efforts to tell the truth about the American story, its triumphs and defeats, its heroes and villains, its complicated mixture of good and bad. 

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Lesson No. 1: While Republicans are fluent in the language of fear and racism, Democrats are equally skilled in the art of deceit and opportunism.

We already know who Republicans are. They shun the stranger as part of their mission to convert America into the world's largest exclusive country club. They don't hide their know-nothing ways. They advertise them to excite their base.

It is Democrats who need to be exposed, once and for all, as the underhanded frauds they are.

It's not that Democrats can't update an immigration system that everyone agrees is outdated, ineffective, and unfair. It's that they don't want to. It's that simple. They'd rather stall, and waste time and raise people's hopes with legislative hocus-pocus like their recent attempts to get immigration reform past the Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough.

On Tuesday, Dick Durbin said that Senate Democrats are currently proposing an alternative plan -- a plan B, if you will -- to MacDonough, who will ultimately decide whether Democrats can shove an immigration overall into the $3.5 trillion infrastructure spending bill they are aiming to pass on a party-line vote.

Democrats previously tried to slip a plan into the spending bill that would have provided 8 million green cards for undocumented immigrants. But MacDonough shot down that idea, arguing that the Democratic maneuver didn't have enough to do with spending and that it would create a whole new immigration system. Thus, she ruled, the plan did not comply with the rules for reconciliation--the budget process that Democrats are using to bypass the filibuster in the Senate.

Now, according to Durbin, part of the new pitch to MacDonough is to change the registry date for certain categories of undocumented immigrants, which would essentially limit the number of people who would gain legal status. We'll see what the parliamentarian says about that.

IT'S NOT A SOVEREIGN STATE YET:

The Taliban on Wednesday warned of consequences if the United States did not stop flying drones over Afghan airspace.

"The US has violated all international rights and laws as well as its commitments made to the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, with the operation of these drones in Afghanistan," the Taliban said in a statement on Twitter.

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

Abdul Hakim Sharaey made the announcement in a meeting with China's Ambassador to Kabul Wang Yu, according to a statement on the Facebook page of the Justice Ministry.

"The Islamic Emirate (Afghanistan under Taliban rule) will implement the constitutional law of the former King Mohammad Zahir Shah for a temporary period without any content that contradicts Islamic law and the principles of the Islamic Emirate," said the statement.

...AND CHEAPER...:

The Dubai Electricity and Water Authority has successfully switched on a pilot Tesla battery system at the mammoth 1GW Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, as part of the company's efforts to diversity its energy mix.

The Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park is one of the world's largest renewable energy projects, and while its current generating capacity sits at around 1,013MW, DEWA plans to expand the project to 5GW by the end of this decade.

HMMMM...WHAT'S DIFFERENT IN CHINA:

In broad terms, nuclear power has been stagnant for 30 years. WNISR notes that the world's fleet of 415 power reactors is 23 fewer than the 2002 peak of 438, but nuclear capacity and generation have marginally increased due to uprating and larger reactors being built.

There is one big difference with the situation 30 years ago: the reactor fleet was young then, now it is old.

The ageing of the reactor fleet is a huge problem for the industry (as is the ageing of the nuclear workforce ‒the silver tsunami). The average age of the world's reactor fleet continues to rise, and by mid-2021 reached 30.9 years. The mean age of the 23 reactors shut down between 2016 and 2020 was 42.6 years.

The International Atomic Energy Agency anticipates the closure of around 10 reactors or 10 gigawatts (GW) per year over the next three decades. Reactor construction starts need to match closures just for the industry to maintain its 30-year pattern of stagnation. But construction starts have averaged only 4.8 per year over the past five years, and there's no indication of looming growth.

Over the past decade, the average time between reactor construction start and grid connection has been 10 years. (In Australia, were it to be considered, another 10 years would be required for planning and approvals.)

From 2001-2020, there were 95 reactor startups and 98 closures around the world. There were 47 startups and no closures in China, while in the rest of the world there were 48 startups and 98 closures.

TO BE FAIR, THE LAB LEAK NEVER HAD ANYTHING TO DO WITH EVIDENCE:

A paper posted online earlier this month chiefly by researchers at France's Institut Pasteur and under consideration for publication in a Nature journal, however, reports that three viruses were found in bats living in caves in northern Laos with features very similar to SARS-CoV-2, the virus responsible for COVID-19.

As Nature reported, those viruses are "more similar to SARS-CoV-2 than any known viruses."

Another paper, posted in late August by researchers from the Wuhan lab, reports on viruses found in rats also with features similar to those that make SARS-CoV-2 infectious in humans. Two other papers published on the discussion forum virological.org present evidence that the virus jumped from animals to humans at more than one animal market in Wuhan, not just the Huanan seafood market.

Given that these so-called wet markets have long been suspected as transmission points of viruses from animals to humans because they sell potentially infected animals, that makes the laboratory origin vastly less likely, according to a co-author of one of the papers.

"That a laboratory leak would find its way to the very place where you would expect to find a zoonotic transmission is quite unlikely," Joel Wertheim, an associate professor at UC San Diego's medical school, told me. "To have it find its way to multiple markets, the exact place where you would expect to see the introduction, is unbelievably unlikely."

As virologist Robert F. Garry of Tulane, one of Wertheim's co-authors, told Nature, the finding is "a dagger into the heart" of the lab-leak hypothesis.

Garry and Wertheim are among the 21 expert co-authors of a "critical review" of virological findings on the origins of COVID-19. The review concludes, "There is currently no evidence that SARS-CoV-2 has a laboratory origin."

THE RAND PAUL SCHOOL OF MEDICINE:

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem knows that to gain national prominence and have a shot at the presidential or vice presidential nomination, a Republican governor has to be particularly terrible, not just on policy but as a human being. She's giving it her best shot. Bolstering her credentials this week is the Associated Press report that Noem leaned on state officials to certify her daughter as a real estate appraiser.

Noem's 26-year-old daughter, Kassidy Peters, was initially denied the certification, according to a letter from her supervisor--though no official record of a denial exists. Days later, Noem summoned Sherry Bren, the head of the licensing agency, to a meeting along with the state labor secretary and a host of lawyers. As if that doesn't look suspicious enough, Peters herself was at the meeting.

Peters got the certification months later, and days after that, state Labor Secretary Marcia Hultman demanded Bren's retirement. Bren filed an age discrimination complaint and got a $200,000 settlement. The settlement, though, bars her from disparaging state officials, and she limited the details in her account of the meeting to the AP. But she did say that the letter from Peters' supervisor complaining that Peters had been denied her appraiser's license was brought out at the meeting. Which, again, Peters, the governor's daughter and would-be certified appraiser attended.

So: Peters was either denied certification in a way that there's no record of, or her supervisor thought she had been or would be rejected. The supervisor wrote a letter complaining. The governor, Peters' mother, summoned the responsible official and her bosses and top lawyers in the governor's office for a meeting that included Peters and at which the letter complaining about her rejection was discussed. Peters got her license. The head of the agency responsible for the licensing was forced into retirement by someone at that original meeting, at the cost to South Dakotans of a $200,000 age discrimination settlement.

And ... Noem is playing victim.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

Former president Donald Trump lost a years-long arbitration battle against writer, reoccurring former Apprentice star and onetime White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman late last week.

The decision by the American Arbitration Association is dated Sept. 24 but was released to the interested parties on Monday.

The ruling puts the kibosh on Trump campaign efforts to enforce a nondisclosure agreement against Manigault Newman after she penned Unhinged, a tell-all memoir about her scandal-ridden, tumultuous and brief stint in government. The campaign also objected to her releasing an audio file of then-White House chief of staff John Kelly and for making certain allegedly disparaging remarks about Trump himself during another T.V. show.

Trump's campaign sought millions for those alleged violations of the NDA's non-disparagement clause. Manigault Newman and her legal team fought back-seeking to have the arbitration lawsuit dismissed on summary judgment based on various legal grounds.

THE LAWLESS BORDER:

More than 200 people jailed under Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's border enforcement operation are being released after weeks of detainment in state prisons without charges and far from lawyers.

Despite the release, Abbott's program remains under fire from attorneys and others who say he is running an operation that is unconstitutional and illegal.

They allege the operation is targeting Mexican and Central American men, that officials are speeding detainees through proceedings without proper translations of hearings and documents and that they are moving the men to state prisons where they are held without charges beyond legally allowed times.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Nahdlatul Ulama, or NU, was founded in 1926 in reaction to the Saudi conquest of Mecca and Medina with their rigid understanding of Islam. It follows mainstream Sunni Islam, while embracing Islamic spirituality and accepting Indonesia's cultural traditions.

Functioning in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population, Nahdlatul Ulama is the world's biggest Islamic organization with about 90 million members and followers. In terms of membership, the organization hugely outstrips that of the Taliban - yet this face of Islam has not been sufficiently recognized on the international stage.

In 2014, NU responded to the rise of the Islamic State group and its radical ideology by initiating an Islamic reform. Since then, it has elaborated on this reform that it calls "Humanitarian Islam."

During the past seven years, NU's general secretary, Yahya Cholil Staquf, has organized several meetings of the organization's Islamic scholars with a reformist agenda. They made public declarations for reforming Islamic thought on controversial issues, including political leadership, equal citizenship and relations with non-Muslims.

The Nahdlatul Ulama declarations include crucial decisions that differentiate "Humanitarian Islam" from other interpretations. First of all, they reject the notion of a global caliphate, or a political leadership that would unite all Muslims. The concept of a caliphate has been accepted by both mainstream Islamic scholars, such as those in Al-Azhar - Egypt's world-renowned Islamic institution - and radical groups, such as the Islamic State group and al-Qaeda.

Moreover, the NU declarations emphasize the legitimacy of modern states' constitutional and legal systems, and thus reject the idea that it is a religious obligation to establish a state based on Islamic law.

Additionally, these declarations stress the importance of equal citizenship by refusing to make a distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims as legal categories.

They call for a deeper cooperation among Muslims, Christians and followers of other religions to promote world peace.

Nahdlatul Ulama has taken practical steps for realizing these aims. For example, it has established a working relationship with the World Evangelical Alliance, which claims to represent 600 million Protestants, to promote intercultural solidarity and respect.

NO ONE JUST HATES MEXICANS:

Texas added 4 million people in the last decade, and 95 percent of that growth came from surges in Hispanic, Black, and Asian-American populations. Hispanics were an especially fast-growing group in the state: There are 2 million more Hispanics in the state than there were a decade ago, the equivalent of three House seats' worth of population. Hispanics now make up 39.3 percent of Texas' population, just behind Anglos (Texans' term for non-Hispanic whites), at 39.8 percent. But Republicans didn't draw even one of Texas' two new House seats to be Hispanic-majority.

Domingo Garcia, the president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, accused Republicans of "protecting incumbents by disenfranchising Hispanic voters" and promised that if this map is passed, his organization would sue to try to keep it from becoming law.

NEITHER THE lEFT NOR THE rIGHT COULD FORGIVE HIM BEING CONSERVATIVE...:

The caricatures of Bush tended to render him as either a clueless cowboy who was easily manipulated by the likes of Dick Cheney, or as a warmongering theocrat eager to bring about the Christian apocalypse. The portrayal of Bush as the right's useful idiot has been particularly enduring, as seen in Will Ferrell's portrayal of Bush on SNL, Oliver Stone's W. (2008), and Adam McKay's Vice (2018).

As noted by David Martin Jones and M. L. R. Smith's study of music produced in response the War of Terror, frequent protest songs released throughout the War in Iraq featured "ad hominem attacks on Bush's character and the general charge that the War on Terror was simply a pretext for a war-for-oil." One popular Twitter account, "G.W. Bush-era Leftism", offers daily reminders of the rancour that was directed at Bush, particularly with constant artistic allusions to Hitler.

Most shocking were the conspiracy theories which claimed Bush knew or was somehow involved in the 9/11 plot, supposedly using it as a pretence for war and to profit. Throughout the 2000s, survey after survey revealed that a significant amount of Democratic voters entertained the idea that "George W. Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place" -- a feeling that is still alive and well today. As time has gone on, people's selective memory about the Bush years have led many to forget that most Americans, as well as most members of Congress, supported the War in Iraq at first.

But Bush had plenty of critics on the right as well. The whole concept of an "alternative-right" grew out of 80's era disputes between so called neoconservatives and paleo-conservatives. During the George W. Bush administration, the conflict was renewed. In addition to some paleoconservative stalwarts like Patrick Buchanan, the critics were a loose group of conservatives and libertarians who were bound together by their hatred of Bush and opposition the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Founded in 2002, The American Conservative relentlessly attacked Bush, even encouraging its readers to support John Kerry. Buchanan indicted the Bush Doctrine and dubbed the 43rd president "Woodrow W. Bush." These paleo-conservatives took Bush's "compassionate conservatism" as an attack on "real" conservatism. But even 9/11 conspiracy theorists could be bipartisan, with Republican figures like Ron Paul and Greg Brannon, playing footsies with 9/11 truthers. [...]

Some of Bush's harshest historical critics have started to re-evaluate their analyses, such as Sean Wilentz, Princeton historian and long-time Clintonian Democrat. Wilentz had once called Bush a contender for the status of worst president ever, but has recently reconsidered some of his condemnations, even complimenting how Bush in the wake of 9/11 "rallied the country's spirit while cautioning Americans not to turn their grief and outrage into reprisals against Muslims."

Bush has concentrated on the present, focusing on his humanitarian work, leaving the past to historians

In a recent post for Arc Digital, Cathy Young -- herself no fan of Bush -- sympathetically emphasised the "unprecedented crisis" Bush faced following 9/11, reminding readers that many of Bush's efforts in the War on Terror were "overwhelmingly supported and even demanded by traumatised Americans". Even so, with the Iraq War behind us, the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as the apparent end to the War on Terror, no doubt critical works focused on those conflicts will continue to question their efficacy.

George W. Bush is aware of his controversial status and poor standing among historians. But while his vice president, Dick Cheney, has been defensive about their choices, Bush has generally chosen to stay out of the public eye, rarely commenting on politics (much to the disappointment of Never Trump Republicans during the 2020 Election).

Instead, Bush has concentrated on the present, focusing on his humanitarian work, leaving the past to historians. This was made clear upon the publication of his presidential memoir, Decision Points, which ended with the statement, "Whatever the verdict on my presidency, I'm comfortable with the fact that I won't be around to hear it. That's a decision point only history will reach." Bush has surrendered his presidency to the longer judgement of history, and hindsight is rarely 20/20.

AND THEN WE DO IT ALL AGAIN TOMORROW...:

Baseball was an obsession in my home and my region. Greater Boston. Baseball is an easy complement in the evening. After work. After obligations. After dinner, there's baseball, for seven months of the year, more if you bother with Spring Training.

Some prefer basketball, football, or soccer. These games have different rhythms. Each game is an event, full of action and movement. Baseball's a game of patience and waiting. A game of foul balls and pitching changes. They say, "It's a marathon, not a sprint," but the reality is more like a very long walk. It's walking the Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine. Looking at that map, you might call anyone who hikes this trail crazy, but especially those who insist on continuing past Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

This slower rhythm is why listening to baseball on the radio works for me. If you enjoy the descriptions of the game and the anecdotes sprinkled here and there, and you want something to accompany your slow dog walk, baseball on the radio works well. 

THE POLITICAL WINDS ALL BLOW IN THE SAME DIRECTION:

THE FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE PALESTINIAN NATION:

Imprisoned member of Fatah Central Committee, Marwan Barghouti, has said: "the Palestinian Authority (PA) has no authority" adding that the Battle for Jerusalem "revealed the inability and fragility" of the Palestinian political system, Sama news agency reported yesterday.

Barghouti also said that the PA "has allowed the Israeli occupation to cost nothing," noting that the occupation "is practicing ethnic cleansing and much aggression on the Palestinians."

YOU LEFT OUT RACE:

This change allowed Donald Trump to arrive on the scene in favor of big government.

The "anti-state" conservatives--those who had arrived at conservatism on the merits of conservative arguments--refused to join him. But by then they had become the minority even within the right-wing intelligentsia, displaced by the barkers and hucksters.

At which point the schism became irreparable. Eliot Cohen drafted an anti-Trump letter, signed by fellow Republican national security experts, while John Bolton, an anti-left Republican, impatiently waited and lobbied for Trump's attention and a job. Robert P. George, the Catholic philosopher, rejected Trumpism, while the anti-leftists Jerry Falwell and Franklin Graham were rallying Christians for Trump. Free-market libertarians stood athwart the Trump train while the pro-business tax-cutters, such as Art Laffer, Stephen Moore, and the Wall Street Journal opinion page, became advisers to the new big-government conservative president. East Coast Straussians who spent their lives studying regimes and virtues stood where they were. The West Coast Straussians at the Claremont Institute, more interested in everyday politics and culture war, followed Trump.

Looking back, none of these divisions should have surprised us.

For two generations, anti-state conservatives and anti-left conservatives had taken different paths to arrive at the same place. But when American politics transformed, they continued along their paths to arrive at different destinations. And only the divergence has allowed us to measure the relative size of the two groups. It turns out that the anti-state conservatives were a relatively small cadre. Most of the people who identified as being "conservative" were only at the party because they hated the left.

Trump finally exposed the division, and in so doing revealed that what's left of the conservative movement--the conservative movement as dominated by the popularizers and the populists, the conservative movement that gave up on its positive principles and only clung to the negative principle of anti-leftism--has become explicitly pro-state, just so long as it controls the state.

They want the state to have the power to tell businesses what to do.

They want the state to have the power to pick winners and losers.

They want the state to spend tons of money on entitlement programs.

They just want all of those things directed to their constituents. It's a nationalized vision of machine-era politics.

The erstwhile anti-state conservatives look at their former friends and ask, "How can you betray the principles you once preached?"

Meanwhile, the anti-left conservatives respond by saying, "Trump is all that is standing between us and the left. How can you take a position that puts you on the side of the liberals?"

The dispiriting truth is that these two sides never wanted the same thing from politics.

THE REVOLUTION EATS ITS OWN:

Covid-19 robbed humanity of years of life.  According to a new Oxford University study published yesterday in the International Journal of Epidemiology, life expectancy at birth in 2020 was on average almost a year shorter than it was in 2019. The last time there was a comparable setback in a single year was during World War II.

The research looked at the 29 countries--27 European nations, the US, and Chile--for which high-quality data on mortality is available. In 22 of them, more than six months of life expectancy were lost to the pandemic. In 11, the loss of life expectancy surpassed a year for men. In eight it did so for women, too.

Women from 15 countries, and men from 10, had a life expectancy shorter in 2020 than they did in 2015. Men had the more significant losses. US males fared the worst, losing 2.2 years of life expectancy in 2020 compared to 2019, a loss compounded by a broader lagging of life expectancy in the country, which already trailed the rest of the wealthy world prior to the pandemic.

A BLUEPRINT FOR TX:

South Australia's Liberal government has celebrated the fifth anniversary of the controversial state-wide blackout by claiming that the state is now leading the country - both in terms of renewables, but also in the lack of any supply shortfalls.

"Five years ago South Australia was plunged into a statewide blackout that put lives at risk, inflicted immense damaged our economy and made us the laughing stock of the nation," state energy minister Dan van Holst Pellekaan said in a statement.

"Today South Australia has the best performing electricity grid in the nation as the Marshall government's energy policies have strengthened what was a fragile, unstable and highly vulnerable electricity network."

The state-wide blackout, triggered by massive storms that tore down multiple transmission towers and three transmission links, quickly became a political football and an ideological battleground between parties pro-renewables, and those against.

It amplified the "when the wind don't blow and the sun don't shine" meme, but far from putting a stop to renewables, it ensured that more work was done to underpin the massive rollout of large scale wind and solar that followed.

SCRATCH AN IMMIGRATION OPPONENT, FIND AN ANTI-SEMITE (profanity alert):

[H]ours after ADL called for his firing, Carlson singled out Jewish financier and philanthropist George Soros for his role in promoting the resettlement of Afghans "without the consent of the people who live there," through the group Welcome.US. According to Carlson, Soros' motivation is that he "hate[s] this country and want[s] to destroy it."

"It doesn't matter what you want, you're just a citizen," Carlson spat. "Shut up. George Soros is richer than you, he decides what you get."

Carlson added that Soros and the Clintons, Bushes, and Obamas, who are honorary co-chairs of the group, "have no idea who we are because they know nothing about the country." He concluded by promising more reporting in the future about what he learned in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán, the country's autocratic leader touted by Carlson, has waged a years-long war on Soros and his organizations.

FAVORITE SON:

Sununu won by a 65-33 spread in New Hampshire in 2020 (but you know that!) in a year when top of the ticket Donald Trump lost the state. His example shows the importance of retail politics that makes New Hampshire work. Unfortunately, retail politics is a lost art here in California. 

He stressed the importance of listening.  His story of Mink the bear and her cubs was a reminder that constituents reward you when you really listen to their concerns. Everyone loves animals, there's nothing partisan about it. Republican leaders in California can connect with voters on nonpartisan issues as well. Sadly, that talent is inherently lacking in my party at the moment.

And Sununu certainly caught our attention when he talked about your legislators getting paid $100 a year, thereby attracting people who are dedicated to true public service. California, in contrast, gives its 40 senators and 80 assemblymen six-figure salaries and a handsome benefits package. So part of our problem is structural. 

But perhaps the most important lesson Sununu conveyed to this California crowd was the power of just being pleasant.

Likability goes a long way and Sununu has it in spades. He was charming, warm, and in the moment. He talks like a regular person, not an Ivy League snob. (I say this as an Ivy League graduate.) I want someone who can communicate to everyone with simple common sense solutions, not someone who uses language to divide. If you can't convey complexity in simplicity, voters will likely conclude you don't know what you're talking about.

GETTING RECONSTRUCTION RIGHT THIS TIME (profanity alert):

Fox News' Tucker Carlson drew widespread condemnation when, in April, he promoted the Great Replacement Theory, a racist belief that is embraced by white supremacists and white nationalists. Some of that condemnation came from the Anti-Defamation League, but Carlson has only doubled down on his views. And he railed against the ADL during a conversation with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly on SiriusXM.

The Great Replacement, a white supremacist/white nationalist conspiracy theory, claims that liberals in western countries are trying to "replace" whites with non-whites. In France, supporters of far-right white nationalist Marine LePen claim that French liberals and progressives are trying to "replace" France's whites by bringing in immigrants from Africa and the Middle East -- and Carlson, similarly, has claimed that Democrats and the Biden Administration are trying "to change the racial mix of the country" by bringing in immigrants from developing countries.

TO POWER YOUR ELECTRIC TUAREG:

British company Xlinks has unveiled its plans to build 10.5GW worth of wind and solar power in the north African country of Morocco and link it to Great Britain via 3,800 kilometre-long HVDC subsea cables.

The project - similar in concept to Sun Cable's plans to supply Singapore from Australia - aims to create up to 10.5GW worth of wind and solar generating capacity and combine it with a massive 5GW/20GWh battery storage facility.

It says this will be able to deliver 3.6GW of renewable energy for an average of more than 20 hours a day, and proposes to deliver this power to the UK via a 3,800km HVDC sub-sea cable by the end of the decade.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

Open science operates under the principle that any scientific result should be shared immediately, without restrictions on its use. Some say open science won't work for drug development, because it removes the financial incentives: Without the promise of patent protections, they believe, no one will assume the costs and risks to discover and develop new drugs. We disagree.

In March 2020, we started COVID Moonshot, which we believe is the first open-science effort to develop an antiviral drug. Now we are close to bringing an oral antiviral that's effective against SARS-CoV-2 (the virus that causes Covid-19) to the clinic, with no patent protection. As soon as the drug is approved, any drug manufacturer around the world can manufacture and sell it without needing to license it, thus driving prices down.

This shouldn't be a one-time thing: We believe open-science drug discovery against current and future pandemics is an essential public service -- one that should be completely funded by governments for the benefit of their people.

The idea started with a tweet. Early in the pandemic, structural biologist Martin Walsh posted a 3D structure of one of the main proteins SARS-CoV-2 requires to replicate. We knew this protein was an attractive drug target because it doesn't easily mutate, which can render a drug less effective. (In contrast, the coronavirus spike protein targeted by vaccines and therapeutic antibodies is more likely to acquire mutations.) The protein, called Mpro, is also present in other disease-causing coronaviruses, suggesting that any antiviral drug targeting Mpro has a good chance of being effective against future coronavirus pandemics.

Since time was of the essence, we decided to approach drug discovery in an entirely different way -- by putting all our work online and asking the international scientific community to contribute. Ideas started streaming in right away, and scientists around the world have submitted more than 17,000 potential drug candidates targeting Mpro, each building on the ideas and data generated by others.

We have synthesized and tested more than 1,400 of these designs, using a network of collaborating labs including the Weizmann Institute of Science, the University of Oxford and Diamond Light Source. We also partnered with pharmaceutical companies (UCB, Boehringer Ingelheim), contract research organizations (Enamine, Sai Life Sciences), computing networks (Folding@home) and charities (DNDi and LifeArc) that donate labor and resources. This is a grassroots movement -- our whole drug discovery process is based on crowdsourcing ideas, experiments and support from the scientific community.

THE DESANTIS SNAKE OIL:

Scientific American talked with several experts about mAbs and how they fit into the fight against COVID.

What are monoclonal antibodies, and how do they work?

MAbs have long been used to treat diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders--the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved nearly 100 such treatments since 1994. To create them, researchers inject a protein--part of SARS-CoV-2, for instance--into a mouse and then collect some of its immune cells that create antibodies against the protein. These cells are then fused with human cancer cells and allowed to multiply so that the specific antibodies can be made at scale and infused into patients. Many mAbs for COVID seem to work best as a "cocktail" of antibodies that each target different parts of the virus.

The approved COVID mAbs appear to be most effective when given right after a person begins showing symptoms. "That's the time window in which the virus itself is playing a bigger role, before it triggers the inflammatory complications," says Brandon Webb, an infectious disease physician at Intermountain Healthcare in Utah. If a patient's immune system overreacts to the infection and requires artificial ventilation because of inflammatory damage to the lungs, the antibodies appear much less effective--and may even be harmful. [...]

Are mAb treatments a substitute for vaccination?

Both Webb and Doblecki-Lewis stress that mAb treatment is no substitute for vaccination. "Unfortunately, the vaccine has become so political that some people would prefer monoclonal antibodies because of the way they're being promoted," Doblecki-Lewis says. But the vaccines have fewer side effects, are cheaper and more widely available, and are much easier to administer. "The vaccine is just so clearly a better step one," she says.

...IF I CAN'T SEE IT, IT CAN'T SEE ME...:

Proponents say this research is essential for developing new therapies and vaccines and understanding how viruses cause pandemics.

Although the changes to the virus also appeared to make it less virulent -- none of the ferrets infected with the viruses through the air died -- the finding confirmed that H5N1 poses a pandemic threat; it also created an international uproar, and many scientists were divided over the experiments. Some expressed support. Fauci, for instance, during a press conference marking publication of the Fouchier paper, acknowledged the possibility that a scientist working with an altered virus might become infected, causing an outbreak or even a pandemic.

Still, the benefits of "stimulating thought and pursuing ways to understand better the transmissibility, adaptation, pathogenicity" of H5N1, he added, "far outweigh the risk." Others accused Fouchier and Kawoaka of being reckless, prompting the two virologists and their colleagues to agree to a temporary moratorium on the research.

Then in 2014, in the wake of a series of biosafety incidents involving microbiology experiments at U.S. government facilities, including one in which samples of a relatively benign avian flu virus were inadvertently contaminated with H5N1 by influenza researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the NIH announced a pause on new funding for gain-of-function studies. According to the U.S government's phrasing, the pause was specifically directed at "gain-of-function research projects that reasonably may be anticipated to confer attributes to influenza, MERS [Middle East Respiratory Syndrome], and SARS [Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome] viruses such that the resulting virus" is either more deadly or better able to spread in mammals.

In all, 18 laboratories were affected. Their new grant funding was frozen, and researchers in these labs were asked to put their gain-of-function work on hold while a team of experts undertook what became a three-year effort to craft new federal oversight policies.

During this time, however, and with Fauci's approval, the NIAID continued to supply funding to the Wuhan investigators, who were trying to predict where the next coronavirus outbreak might come from. During his July spat with Fauci, Paul singled out a 2017 research paper co-authored by Peter Daszak, president of the EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based nonprofit group through which the NIAID money was channeled. (EcoHealth's press officer, Robert Kessler, declined to make anyone available for an interview, and said in an email: "We've not conducted gain-of-function research, so aren't really good authorities to speak on the subject.")

In the most basic sense, gain-of-function research refers to the introduction of a mutation that enhances a gene's functional properties -- farmers have arguably practiced it for thousands of years through plant breeding.

Over the course of the five-year project, the investigators took fecal samples from cave bats in Yunnan, China, about 1,000 miles southwest of Wuhan, and isolated close relatives of the coronavirus that causes SARS. Then, using a method called reverse genetics, they attached surface "spike" proteins from those newly identified microbes to a different SARS-like coronavirus called WIV1. (Coronaviruses, including SARS-CoV-2, use their spikes to attach to other cells and initiate an infection, but for these experiments the researchers used an engineered form of WIV1 that lacked spike proteins of its own).

Daszak and the Wuhan team wanted to know if these lab creations -- called chimeras -- could infect human airway cells. As it turned out, several could, which suggested that natural coronaviruses outfitted with the the same spikes used in making the chimeras might also be able to infect people. This information, the team concluded presciently, "highlights the necessity of preparedness for future emergence of SARS-like diseases."

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Stories have power. Alban's martyrdom has inspired generations of Christian believers. It underlines the cost of being a follower of Christ and being willing to suffer for him. Christians regard Jesus's death and resurrection as the greatest true story ever told.

The Harry Potter stories have entertained and entranced millions. Some Christians, initially suspicious, have traced the themes of sacrifice, of the struggle between good and evil, and other Christian parallels in the books. The author, JK Rowling, has talked about her faith.

In these days, increasing numbers of people are sadly unaware of the Bible and the stories it contains. They may have only a vague knowledge of the story of Christ's life, his death and resurrection. Few could explain the deep and lasting impact of his death on the cross.

As Christians, we are encouraged to keep telling this story, to stay rooted in the Bible - and to illustrate it in ways that connect with modern people.

Many millions are familiar with the Harry Potter series. A recent BBC radio programme looked at the religious symbolism in the books. It concluded: "What makes the Harry Potter series so universally lovable is the way that, regardless of our cultural or religious experience, readers can draw their own messages of hope, love and goodness from the books."

I recently heard a leading Christian speaker having to explain carefully the story of Legion, the man who, in Mark's Gospel, had demons exorcised from him by Jesus. And yet she referred easily to the Dementors in Harry Potter, "preying upon young people, sucking out their joy and hope."

This seemed a clear indication of which story would be most familiar to her listeners, and I reflected on what this might mean for other preachers. Just now, I'm studying the Harry Potter books - with a renewed interest in seeking out the Christian parallels and what they say to today's generation.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Rooftop solar PV has a few important new benchmarks in South Australia, contributing 84.4 per cent of total energy demand on Sunday afternoon, as well as setting a new low for minimum "operational demand".

The 84.4 per cent rooftop solar share was set in a five minute interval at 1.15pm, on a mild sunny day. It suggests that the state may well deliver on the Australian Energy Market Operator's predictions that rooftop solar could reach 100 per cent of local demand at some point this spring.

DANCING IN THE DEEP:

Of the thousands of gospel songs recorded in the early 1960s, how did "Peace Be Still" come to define its era? Was it a case of being the right song at the right moment? Were embers of emotion from the Birmingham blast hovering over the recording session that evening?

That was my personal theory--that the song's raw power was prompted by the terrorist attack. But when I interviewed Angelic Choir members, I discovered they saw things differently. They insisted that the bombing and other violent acts against African Americans did not govern their lives, nor their singing, that night. "We weren't so disturbed that we couldn't serve the Lord. We knew the Lord, and we were there to praise and lift up His name. That was the purpose," one chorister, now in her 80s, told me. "So anything that happened anywhere else, we were just there to praise the Lord and thank Him that we were able to make it."

Thank Him that we were able to make it. Therein lies the key to decoding "Peace Be Still"--gratitude to Jesus for helping his people overcome the winds and waves of oppression right there in Newark. In many ways, this sentiment speaks to gospel music writ large, which expresses the unflinching refusal of African Americans to surrender to life's injustices, especially those incited by racial prejudice, and gratefulness to God for being their ultimate protector.

EVERY HOME A NODE:

Lord Howe Island's solar and battery storage system recently marked its six month anniversary, including managing stretches of up to five days (and nights) without calling on additional diesel power.

The grant funding under the new Regional Australia Microgrid Pilots Program - or RAMPP - will be allocated in two stages, an initial $30 million through to 2022 and a further $20 million through to 2023.

ARENA chief executive Darren Miller said he expected the program would showcase the benefits of microgrids, "whether it's maintaining electricity supply during and after emergencies such as bushfires and floods, or improving the reliability and security of power supply in remote communities."

Microgrids are small-scale electricity grids which can either operate as standalone systems or connect to larger grids.

SIC TRANSIT NORDSTREAM:

At 14 percent, the Green Party achieved the best result in the party's history and is set to become the third strongest camp in the next federal parliament, with gains of about five percentage points compared to 2017. [...]

All major parties vowed to make climate action a central focus of the next government. Current finance minister Scholz, who emerged as the surprise favourite among voters during the campaign, said it was his intention to form a climate government that would speed up renewables expansion.

Laschet said Germany needed "a coalition for more sustainability in every sense, in climate action and finances." He added the government had a responsibility for future generations. "We have to meet this responsibility better than so far, in particular in climate action." The Greens' Annalena Baerbock said: "This country needs a climate government, that is the result of this election."

NGOs also said the election will result in more climate action. "It's already clear: The climate is the winner of this election," said Kai Niebert, president of the environmental umbrella organisation DNR. "It's no longer a green topic, but one of all democratic parties."

SING OUT, SISTER:

"And in my view, the American people, they deserve better than having to choose between what I think are the really disastrous policies of Joe Biden -- in a whole range of areas, really bad for our economy. "

GLOBALIZATION IS ANGLOFICATION:

In the aftermath of Brexit, the pro-EU Irish media and political establishment are ever so keen to emphasise the Europeanness of the Irish people. Of course, us Irish are one of the peoples of Europe, but the other Europeans we share the most in common with are the people of Britain. This reality is one rarely acknowledged and seldomly less celebrated by a political and media class who would have you believe that the Irish are closer to Latvians and Belgians despite all the evidence that shows our closest ties lie twelve miles off the coast of Antrim and less than seventy from Dublin. As a friend of mine in Dublin pointed out, most Irish people could tell you what their favourite British sitcom is or which British novelists they admire, but they would be clueless on French popular culture or Spanish cinema. There's a reason why most of the Republic pay for British satellite TV packages and not continental ones.

Despite Dublin's political and liberal cultural elite waxing lyrical about how we are an integral part of the EU, Britain is still the number one destination for Irish emigrants, as it always has been. The UK has far more Irish born permanent residents than all EU countries combined. It is one of history's greatest ironies that for centuries many Irish people longed to be rid of British rule, but during the century since the Republic's independence was achieved, hundreds of thousands of us couldn't get on a boat or to an airport quick enough to avail of the advantages of being back under the crown. We complained about the English for centuries, but as soon as they left it seems like we missed them so much that we decided to follow them home. When we are not migrating to Britain or marrying Britons in far greater number than other Europeans, we are mostly choosing life outside of Ireland in other parts of the English speaking world such as Australia or Canada rather than anywhere in the EU. Culturally, we are not only part of the British Isles, but also the global Anglosphere.

As in most western countries, there is much emphasis in the Republic of Ireland these days about welcoming immigrants, celebrating cultural diversity and being inclusive. Yet, there is little emphasis or celebration from the Irish political and liberal cultural establishment that, before more recent arrivals to Irish shores, we already belonged to a set of diverse islands in which the English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh share an enormous degree of common culture. These links have existed for centuries and (to take just the post war era) can be seen from politics and literature to sport and music. To name just a tiny few, we are the people of: Billy Connolly, Terry Wogan, John Lydon, The Smiths; Snooker star Ronnie O'Sullivan; the actors Claire Foy, Michael Gambon, Michelle Dockery, Michael Caine and Neil Morrisey. Former UK Prime Ministers James Callaghan, Tony Blair and Margaret Thatcher all had Irish ancestry. Mrs.Thatcher's ancestral links to Ireland is one of those facts Irish republicans aren't too keen to celebrate.

CONGRESS DOESN'T GOVERN:

No idea is more dearly held by political activists than the notion that voters will reward elected officials who enact an ambitious policy agenda. But it's entirely possible that what voters really want, especially in a time of political and social insecurity, is competence and stability.

Two of the most popular governors in America are Larry Hogan of Maryland and Charlie Baker of Massachusetts. Neither can be said to have a signature accomplishment or celebrated failure. In both cases, a Republican with moderate affect narrowly won a governor's race in a huge Republican wave year and then spent four years mostly checking the excesses of a Democratic legislature. For their trouble, they both won with landslide victories.

Conversely, Kansas has a Democratic governor because the state's Republican Party decided to enact supply-side economics. It was an unpopular disaster, and led to a backlash in an extremely red state. Something similar happened in Vermont in 2016, when Governor Peter Shumlin made an ambitious push for single-payer health care. The legislature suffered sticker shock over the price tag, and a Republican got elected basically on a promise to not rock the boat too much. He then cruised to re-election and remains popular based on his competent handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Americans are just more complacent than activists on either side of the aisle want to believe.

Are parents mad about "woke" teachers injecting Critical Race Theory into the classroom? Some of them, probably. But 73% of parents say they are satisfied with the education their children are receiving.

Or consider the U.S. health care system, which virtually every analyst on both the left and right says is wracked by huge irrationalities and inefficiencies. Most people are satisfied with the health insurance they have -- whether from the public or private sector. Famously, a single national health insurance system polls very well until people learn it would involve eliminating private insurance or shifting health cost payments into the tax system. Indeed, Americans aren't even that bothered about the amount of taxes they pay -- though woe betide anyone who tries to raise taxes on the middle class.

IT'LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

New technology coming out of UNC Chapel Hill could change everything about how vaccines are administered.

Scientists at UNC and Stanford created a 3-D printed vaccine patch that's as small as the tip of your finger.

The vaccine patch uses microneedles just long enough to attach to the skin. From there, the vaccine directly targets immune cells in the skin.

The brains behind the new vaccine patch said it creates an immune response 10 times stronger than a typical vaccine injection that sends its contents into muscle.

The skin patch is also painless, can be self-administered and doesn't need to be kept in the freezer. All of those advantages, according to the patch creators, should mean the patches are more efficient and easier to distribute all around the world.

HONORLESSNESS:

In the early scenes, Becket's motives seem shady; does he really enjoy serving the king like a valet, as he claims, or is he only looking toward self-advancement? If the latter, then Becket gets his wish in short order, but it is not exactly what he bargained for. The king, wanting a loyal party man in the high ranks of the church, names him archbishop of Canterbury to replace the one who has just died. This announcement shocks Becket, who up to now has not led a life conspicuous for sanctity and who has not even yet been ordained a priest.

In an earlier scene, Becket and the king had been hunting and Becket had seen wild boar about to be killed. He had reflected that putting one's life on the line gives one "a moment of delicious personal contact when one feels, at last, responsible for oneself." It is in losing one's life that one finds it.

This line turns out to be prophetic for Becket as, now installed as archbishop, he increasingly defies the king's policies toward the church. The king's noblemen have had priests and monks murdered, abducted, or tried in secular courts; Becket accordingly excommunicates the noblemen in a move to protect his flock. In a later scene with the king, Becket says that his duty is not so much to do things as simply "to say no" to the king. The king is consequently torn with a mixture of love and hate toward Becket, seeing his opposition as a betrayal of their friendship. This violent passion eventually leads him to have Becket murdered.

The supreme irony is that the king caused his own crisis by elevating Becket, not foreseeing that Becket's character would be influenced and molded by his new office. It is here perhaps that the existential dimension of Becket is most evident: in its vision of how the roles we play in life and the moral choices we make shape who we are.

Upon becoming archbishop, Becket undergoes a shift of character so abrupt as to make the audience wonder if it missed a scene or two. He embraces his new office with the zeal of a monk, giving away his possessions to the poor and--in an unmistakable allusion to the Gospel parable--throwing open the doors of his residence for the poor to come and dine.

Becket gives voice to his conversion in two great prayer-soliloquies. In the first, he tells God of the liberating joy he feels in giving away his riches; the whole thing feels "far too easy" and he worries that God is somehow tempting him. In the second, he concludes "I don't believe you are a sad God" and that everything that is happening to him is part of the divine plan. Becket's change of identity is enacted in a neat coup de théâtre: At first dressed in fancy courtier's attire, he goes behind a screen in his bedroom and emerges a moment later wearing a simple woolen monk's robe. The moment symbolizes graphically how Becket has "put on Christ" and abandoned a life of power and privilege for one of humble service.

The suddenness of Becket's conversion conveys the idea of how having a great role thrust upon us can effect an immediate change. Anouilh is concerned with showing, in existential fashion, how our moral choices shape who we are as individuals. In standing against the king at great risk to himself Becket is defending the honor of God, but at the same time he is asserting his own identity and rights as a priest. The play asserts that our identities come from God and consist in the fact that we are his children and must obey his laws. As Becket says, "I was a man without honor. And suddenly I found it--one I never imagined would ever become mine--the honor of God." Because human beings are inherently moral agents, doing what is right leads us to our true fulfillment, peace and happiness. 

WE ARE ALL THIRD WAY:

[C]hristian Democrats (CDU), inflexibility and complacency in a post-Merkel world spell stagnation or a further downslide for this once-mighty Volkspartei (major party), reminiscent of the decline of the other major party, the center-left Social Democrats (SPD).

On paper, at least, the Social Democrats and the Greens are emphasizing the need for fundamental change to meet the many daunting challenges ahead: notably, those of tackling the climate crisis and finally joining the digital 21st century. Despite the CDU's assertions to the contrary, it still comes across as being mired in Merkel's sedate weiter so (keep it up) politics.

But here's the paradox: Though there is public recognition to a certain extent of the need for some form of change, German politics are steeped in conservatism and the tradition of not upsetting the status quo. Deep down, it will always be a bourgeois society. Change is welcome only when it doesn't compromise wealth and prosperity.

The CDU's claim that a possible coalition of the SPD, the Greens and the Left Party would somehow constitute a political shift to the radical left and spell doom for the country is misplaced fearmongering. It doesn't get more mainstream and middle-of-the-road than the SPD and the Greens these days.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Rep. Matt Gaetz called the Anti-Defamation League "racist" after it again called on Fox News host Tucker Carlson to be fired for promoting the white supremacist "Great Replacement" conspiracy theory.

Gaetz, the Republican congressman from Florida, also endorsed the conspiracy theory.

On his popular show Wednesday, Carlson trumpeted the idea that Democrats are working to bring foreigners into the United States in order to weaken the voting power of white people. He said,"this policy is called the 'Great Replacement,' the replacement of legacy Americans with more obedient people from far-away countries."

The "Great Replacement" is a term used by white supremacists who (falsely) claim that Jews are orchestrating the replacement of white people in western countries with nonwhite immigrants. It has inspired multiple antisemitic and extremist attacks, including the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting. A year earlier, white supremacists marching in Charlottesville, Virginia infamously chanted "Jews will not replace us."

This is not the first time Carlson has promoted this conspiracy theory. In April, the ADL called on him to be fired after he sad that "the Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate, the voters now casting ballots, with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World."

TRUMP LITE:

Up until recently, the Biden administration seemed to have been banking on the persistence of this double standard, whereby the left-leaning parts of the public assume general goodwill on the part of Democratic politicians and therefore give them a pass. The administration has taken up court battles to protect some of Trump's harshest asylum policies and commenced flying multiple planeloads of migrants back to Haiti. Now-viral images show that, in recent days, Border Patrol agents have been charging at--and in some cases verbally assaulting--Haitian migrants marooned at the Mexican border across from Del Rio, Texas.

But the assumption that these tactics would go unchallenged when deployed by a Democratic administration, as was often the case in the past, appears to have been a serious miscalculation. The spotlight that Trump shined on the southern border for four years is still plugged in. The public is still paying attention. And images that evoke the era of slavery--with fair-skinned men on horseback rushing Black migrants, whiplike reins flailing behind them--have added to a long-simmering push from the left to consider immigration policy not simply in terms of economics or national security, but also in terms of race.

Key allies of President Joe Biden are responding in ways that suggest the era of presumed goodwill may be over. The recent treatment of Haitians "turns your stomach," Senator Chuck Schumer, the Democratic majority leader, said this week in a speech on the Senate floor. "We cannot continue these hateful and xenophobic Trump policies that disregard our refugee laws." Members of the Congressional Black Caucus were whisked to the White House for a meeting this week, and Al Sharpton, who traveled to the border recently, told The Washington Post that, like thus-far-unsuccessful efforts toward police reform, the treatment of Haitian migrants was an example of how Biden was failing Black Americans. Biden "said on election night: Black America, you had my back, I'll have yours," Sharpton said. "Well, we're being stabbed in the back, Mr. President. We need you to stop the stabbing--from Haiti to Harlem."

Belatedly realizing that the political climate seems to have changed, the Biden administration is now scrambling to do damage control. Vice President Kamala Harris called the images from Del Rio "deeply troubling." Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said he was "horrified," and he suspended horse patrols there. The president himself said on Tuesday that the encounters were "dangerous" and "wrong," and that "those people will pay." All of this seems slightly disingenuous: As the administration well knows, Border Patrol agents have been policing on horseback for more than 100 years. And in this case, they were doing so under orders from their supervisors, who serve at the pleasure of the president. The scapegoating of rank-and-file agents will likely alienate a workforce that feels it was ordered to show force and then hung out to dry. Putting the focus on the horseback patrols also draws attention away from a larger issue: The administration has taken the legally dubious position of blocking most Haitian migrants from requesting asylum--and in this case, pushing them back onto the Mexican side of a dangerous river from which border agents often have to save people from drowning.

These events have stoked a broader conversation about race, not only because of the specifics of the encounters in Del Rio, but because of the way our current system is set up. One would be hard-pressed to imagine a scenario in which, following a coup or an earthquake in France, a large crowd of Parisians would show up in Matamoros, Mexico, and face the same treatment as the Haitians--because they would not be required to present themselves at the border in the first place. People from wealthy Western countries don't need visas to come to the United States. For a few hundred dollars, they can simply hop on planes and enter the U.S. as tourists. Then, at some point on their "vacation," they can show up at a government office and request asylum as part of a non-adversarial administrative process. Or they can simply stay in the U.S. illegally without seeking permission, as thousands of Western Europeans and Canadians do each year.

EVERY HOUSE A NODE:

About 10 miles off the coast of New Hampshire, there's a little island that could be a snapshot of what our future on the mainland might look like when it comes to renewable energy.

Appledore Island is home to the Shoals Marine Laboratory, run jointly by the University of New Hampshire and Cornell University. But it's also a laboratory of sorts for engineering a grid that runs on a high percentage of renewable energy -- a place where the challenges and opportunities of using lots of solar and wind are already playing out, years ahead of the mainland.

Appledore isn't connected to the mainland's electricity grid, which means the remote island has to be self-sufficient when it comes to generating electricity. The island runs on what's called a microgrid, a self-contained system where the electricity being produced by solar panels and a wind turbine has to be carefully balanced with how much electricity is being used: for running lab equipment, keeping the fridge cold, purifying drinking water, or just turning on the lights.

Currently, a big chunk of the island's energy needs are met with renewable energy, but that wasn't always the case. In fact, through the mid-2000s, the laboratory was entirely powered by a diesel generator, which was both costly and a source of the kind of emissions that are driving global warming. But between 2007 and 2019, the lab reduced the use of diesel by 90%. This summer, the solar panels provided about two-thirds of the island's energy consumption, the wind turbine provided 11%, and diesel made up the remaining 22%.

THE DESANTIS BOUNCE:

NOT DONALD IS THE LOWEST THRESHOLD IMAGINABLE:

Chuck Schumer ripped him. So did members of the Congressional Black Caucus, Hispanic Caucus, Asian Pacific American Caucus and Progressive Caucus, 17 Democratic attorneys general, and a host of other advocacy groups across the country.

This week's cavalcade of outrage directed at President Joe Biden's handling of Haitian migrants at the U.S. southern border was as fierce as it was uncharacteristic.

Taken together, the scathing criticism revealed the growing political cost of the disconnect between Biden's promise of a fair and humane immigration system and his use of a Trump-era public health order to kick out migrants -- a crack in the Democratic coalition that threatens the party's morale and unity in advance of the 2022 midterms.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

The importance of the information in the Epik hack--if it proves to be accurate--seems obvious, especially for researchers tracking QAnon groups or other disinformation sources, hate-speech advocates, and domestic extremists. "The company played such a major role in keeping far-right terrorist cesspools alive," Rita Katz, executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which studies online extremism, told the Washington Post. "Without Epik, many extremist communities--from QAnon and white nationalists to accelerationist neo-Nazis--would have had far less oxygen to spread harm, whether that be building toward the January 6 Capitol riots or sowing the misinformation and conspiracy theories chipping away at democracy."

Emma Best, co-founder of Distributed Denial of Secrets, a journalism nonprofit that specializes in leaked data, told the Post that some researchers have called the Epik hack "the Panama Papers of hate groups," a comparison to the leak of more than 11 million documents that exposed the offshore finance industry, and earned the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists a Pulitzer. Megan Squire, a professor at Elon University who studies right-wing extremism, told the Post "It's massive. It may be the biggest domain-style leak I've seen and, as an extremism researcher, it's certainly the most interesting. It's an embarrassment of riches." 

Like the Panama Papers, getting information out of the huge database and making sense of it is time-consuming, which may explain why coverage of the Epik hack lagged; some outlets published their first stories more than one week after Monacelli's tweet. So far, most reports on the Epik hack have been explainers, recapping the data breach and then bringing in commentary on the potential value of the leaked materials from cybersecurity experts and extremism scholars. Gizmodo, in its report, noted that it had "downloaded copies of the Epik data and will be assessing its content." 

YEAH, BUT THAT WAS JUST AN AUDIT; WAIT FOR THE AUDIT!:

"This is a huge win for the 3 November movement to get to the bottom of the 2020 election," said Boris Epshteyn, former special assistant to Trump who has been tracking efforts in Arizona. He said "the next step is a full audit and canvass of all Arizona counties and including a full canvass in Maricopa County."

The Arizona state GOP held a watch party for the unveiling of the report, and multiple candidates for governor questioned the validity of the state's 2020 election results throughout the day. The same thoughts and statements have spread to other states, too, driven by Trump's lies and unsubstantiated claims about the election.

For months, Trump has been fixated on reports about the 2020 election results, and has been particularly interested in the Republican efforts in Arizona. During media appearances and at event speeches, Trump made questioning the 2020 election results a major rallying cry, even calling it the "crime of the century." Behind the scenes, Trump got regular updates from aides and allies about the minutiae of the Arizona auditors' findings and closely followed the right-wing media's coverage.

Months of work and millions of dollars poured into producing a report that election experts -- including Democrats, Republicans and nonpartisan officials -- have urged people to reject out of hand because of the improvised processes of the review, the inexperience of those running it and their promotion of conspiracy theories about the election. They said the fact that the final vote tally from the report closely tracks the actual official results does not change the fact that it should be dismissed.

"The takeaway is that this was a colossal waste of time," said Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, a Democrat who is now running for governor, in a brief interview on Friday. "And anyone who is considering replicating it in their state, or taking further action based on this report, should not be considered a serious leader."

WAY TO WRECK ANOTHER RACIST NARRATIVE:

For this research, I combine data from Fatal Encounters, a national database of fatal encounters with law enforcement officials, with data collected from Ele​phrame​.com, a website that tracks BLM protests, to create a new state‐​by‐​month panel data set. This panel data set allows me to analyze what impact the BLM movement may have had on black fatal encounters with police. To the best of my knowledge, this is the largest and most complete data set that has been compiled on this subject. Then, using data from the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting database, I am able to examine whether the BLM movement has had any impact on the number of crimes across a variety of crime classifications.

For both of these questions, I use the number of BLM protests as a measure of intensity of the movement in a state over time. Generally, one would expect a positive correlation between the current month's protests and the number of fatal police interactions if protests are motivated by black fatal encounters with police. This paper focuses on the impact of protests on fatal interactions with police in subsequent months. As protests bring a higher level of scrutiny to police actions, they may lead to fewer fatal interactions with law enforcement in the following months. However, the added scrutiny on police may make officers more hesitant to proactively police, which could lead to emboldened criminals and higher crime rates.

I find that an increase in the number of protests within a state is associated with a decrease in the number of black fatalities from police encounters in the month immediately following the protests, yet there does not appear to be a longer‐​lasting impact on the number of fatalities. In addition, I do not find evidence that BLM protests have any measurable impact on a variety of crime measures or the number of arrests within states. This suggests that, contrary to the Ferguson effect hypothesis, increased scrutiny of police due to BLM protests did not, in fact, lead to increased crime rates.

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

Japan's push into China eventually led to a punishing war with the Soviet Union. Japan's designs on Southeast Asia alarmed Britain. Its drive for regional primacy also made it a foe of the United States--the country from which Tokyo imported nearly all of its oil with an economy vastly larger than Japan's. Tokyo had antagonized an overwhelming coalition of enemies. It then risked everything rather than accepting humiliation and decline.

The precipitating cause, again, was a closing window of opportunity. By 1941, the United States was building an unbeatable military. In July, then-U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt imposed an oil embargo that threatened to stop Japan's expansion in its tracks. But Japan still had a temporary military edge in the Pacific Ocean, thanks to its early rearmament. So it used that advantage in a lightning attack--seizing the Dutch East Indies, the Philippines, and other possessions from Singapore to Wake Island as well as bombing the U.S. fleet at Pearl Harbor--which guaranteed its own destruction.

Japan's prospects for victory were dim, acknowledged then-Japanese Gen. Hideki Tojo, yet there was no choice but to "close one's eyes and jump." A revisionist Japan became most violent when it saw that time was running out.

This is the real trap the United States should worry about regarding China today--the trap in which an aspiring superpower peaks and then refuses to bear the painful consequences of descent.

China's rise is no mirage: Decades of growth have given Beijing the economic sinews of global power. Major investments in key technologies and communications infrastructure have yielded a strong position in the struggle for geoeconomic influence; China is using a multi-continent Belt and Road Initiative to bring other states into its orbit. Most alarming, think tank assessments and U.S. Defense Department reports show China's increasingly formidable military now stands a real chance of winning a war against the United States in the Western Pacific.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that China has also developed the ambitions of a superpower: Xi has more or less announced that Beijing desires to assert its sovereignty over Taiwan, the South China Sea, and other disputed areas, becoming Asia's preeminent power and challenging the United States for global leadership. Yet if China's geopolitical window of opportunity is real, its future is already starting to look quite grim because it is quickly losing the advantages that propelled its rapid growth.

From the 1970s to the 2000s, China was nearly self-sufficient in food, water, and energy resources. It enjoyed the greatest demographic dividend in history, with 10 working-age adults for every senior citizen aged 65 or older. (For most major economies, the average is closer to 5 working-age adults for every senior citizen.) China had a secure geopolitical environment and easy access to foreign markets and technology, all underpinned by friendly relations with the United States. And China's government skillfully harnessed these advantages by carrying out a process of economic reform and opening while also moving the regime from stifling totalitarianism under former Chinese leader Mao Zedong to a smarter--if still deeply repressive--form of authoritarianism under his successors. China had it all from the 1970s to the early 2010s--just the mix of endowments, environment, people, and policies needed to thrive.

Since the late 2000s, however, the drivers of China's rise have either stalled or turned around entirely. For example, China is running out of resources: Water has become scarce, and the country is importing more energy and food than any other nation, having ravaged its own natural resources. Economic growth is therefore becoming costlier: According to data from DBS Bank, it takes three times as many inputs to produce a unit of growth today as it did in the early 2000s.

China is also approaching a demographic precipice: From 2020 to 2050, it will lose an astounding 200 million working-age adults--a population the size of Nigeria--and gain 200 million senior citizens. The fiscal and economic consequences will be devastating: Current projections suggest China's medical and social security spending will have to triple as a share of GDP, from 10 percent to 30 percent, by 2050 just to prevent millions of seniors from dying of impoverishment and neglect.

To make matters worse, China is turning away from the package of policies that promoted rapid growth. Under Xi, Beijing has slid back toward totalitarianism. Xi has appointed himself "chairman of everything," destroyed any semblance of collective rule, and made adherence to "Xi Jinping thought" the ideological core of an increasingly rigid regime. And he has relentlessly pursued the centralization of power at the expense of economic prosperity.

State zombie firms are being propped up while private firms are starved of capital. Objective economic analysis is being replaced by government propaganda. Innovation is becoming more difficult in a climate of stultifying ideological conformity. Meanwhile, Xi's brutal anti-corruption campaign has deterred entrepreneurship, and a wave of politically driven regulations has erased more than $1 trillion from the market capitalization of China's leading tech firms. Xi hasn't simply stopped the process of economic liberalization that powered China's development: He has thrown it hard into reverse.

The economic damage these trends are causing is starting to accumulate--and it is compounding the slowdown that would have occurred anyway as a fast-growing economy matures. The Chinese economy has been losing steam for more than a decade: The country's official growth rate declined from 14 percent in 2007 to 6 percent in 2019, and rigorous studies suggest the true growth rate is now closer to 2 percent. Worse, most of that growth stems from government stimulus spending. According to data from the Conference Board, total factor productivity declined 1.3 percent every year on average between 2008 and 2019, meaning China is spending more to produce less each year. This has led, in turn, to massive debt: China's total debt surged eight-fold between 2008 and 2019 and exceeded 300 percent of GDP prior to COVID-19. Any country that has accumulated debt or lost productivity at anything close to China's current pace has subsequently suffered at least one "lost decade" of near-zero economic growth.

All of this is happening, moreover, as China confronts an increasingly hostile external environment. The combination of COVID-19, persistent human rights abuses, and aggressive policies have caused negative views of China to reach levels not seen since the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Countries worried about Chinese competition have slapped thousands of new trade barriers on its goods since 2008. More than a dozen countries have dropped out of Xi's Belt and Road Initiative while the United States wages a global campaign against key Chinese tech companies--notably, Huawei--and rich democracies across multiple continents throw up barriers to Beijing's digital influence. The world is becoming less conducive to easy Chinese growth, and Xi's regime increasingly faces the sort of strategic encirclement that once drove German and Japanese leaders to desperation.

Case in point is U.S. policy. Over the past five years, two U.S. presidential administrations have committed the United States to a policy of "competition"--really, neo-containment--vis-à-vis China. U.S. defense strategy is now focused squarely on defeating Chinese aggression in the Western Pacific; Washington is using an array of trade and technological sanctions to check Beijing's influence and limit its prospects for economic primacy. "Once imperial America considers you as their 'enemy,' you're in big trouble," one senior People's Liberation Army officer warned. Indeed, the United States has also committed to orchestrating greater global resistance to Chinese power, a campaign that is starting to show results as more and more countries respond to the threat from Beijing.

In maritime Asia, resistance to Chinese power is stiffening. Taiwan is boosting military spending and laying plans to turn itself into a strategic porcupine in the Western Pacific. Japan is carrying out its biggest military buildup since the end of the Cold War and has agreed to back the United States if China attacks Taiwan. The countries around the South China Sea, particularly Vietnam and Indonesia, are beefing up their air, naval, and coast guard forces to contest China's expansive claims.

Other countries are pushing back against Beijing's assertiveness as well. Australia is expanding northern bases to accommodate U.S. ships and aircraft and building long-range conventional missiles and nuclear-powered attack submarines. India is massing forces on its border with China while sending warships through the South China Sea. The European Union has labeled Beijing a "systemic rival," and Europe's three greatest powers--France, Germany, and the United Kingdom--have dispatched naval task forces to the South China Sea and Indian Ocean. A variety of multilateral anti-China initiatives--the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue; supply chain alliances; the new so-called AUKUS alliance with Washington, London, and Canberra; and others--are in the works. The United States' "multilateral club strategy," hawkish and well-connected scholar Yan Xuetong acknowledged in July, is "isolating China" and hurting its development.

No doubt, counter-China cooperation has remained imperfect. But the overall trend is clear: An array of actors is gradually joining forces to check Beijing's power and put it in a strategic box. China, in other words, is not a forever-ascendant country. It is an already-strong, enormously ambitious, and deeply troubled power whose window of opportunity won't stay open for long.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

A wild fight has erupted within the sprawling finance and propaganda apparatus former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon co-founded with a fugitive Chinese billionaire.

The battle involves an organization Bannon inaugurated at the Statue of Liberty last year with Guo Wengui, a Chinese disinformation kingpin, and hostilities broke out even before the SEC this month charged companies linked to Guo with unregistered stock and cryptocurrency sales. But a federal probe into the dealings had been underway for months, and a key contention in a new lawsuit is that money intended to bankroll the duo's vision of a vast anti-Beijing network instead went toward paying back irate investors in illicit transactions.

IT IS THE BIBLE TALE:

An ancient civilization in the Dead Sea area was wiped out by an apparent "airburst" meteor explosion with the force of a nuclear weapon that destroyed cities and salted the earth some 3,600 years ago, leaving it uninhabitable for centuries, scientists said in a study published this week, and postulated it could have inspired the biblical account of the destruction of Sodom.

XI MISSES HIS PAL:

Zhao Lijian, the Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson, said it was a symptom of "outdated Cold War zero-sum mentality and narrow-minded geopolitical perception."

At the end of a two-hour meeting, Indian Foreign Minister Harsh Vardhan Shringla said Biden and other leaders had agreed to keep a close eye on historic rival Pakistan.

"There was a clear sense that a more careful look and a more careful examination and monitoring of Pakistan's role in Afghanistan -- Pakistan's role on the issue of terrorism -- had to be kept," Vardhan Shringla told reporters after the White House talks.

He said Pakistan was "projecting itself as a facilitator whereas it has really been in many senses an instigator of some of the problems in our neighborhood and beyond."

Pakistan, which backed the Taliban when it was in power from 1996 to 2001, quickly switched sides and supported the US during its occupation of Afghanistan.

But US officials have long accused Islamabad's intelligence services of supporting the Taliban, because of US links with Indian leaders. [...]

Last week, the US announced a new military alliance with the UK and Australia that will see Australia receive nuclear submarines, giving it a competitive edge over China's growing naval prowess. 

India and Japan welcomed the the partnership, dubbed "AUKUS," as a sign of deepening US involvement in the region to counterbalance China.

YOU'RE NOT PRO-LIFE IF YOU STOP CARING ONCE THEY'RE BORN:

Face-mask requirements in schools drastically reduce the spread of Covid-19 among children, two studies published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention suggest.

Researchers in Arizona found that schools that didn't require masking at the start of the academic year were much more likely to experience Covid-19 outbreaks than those that did. A second study found that counties without mask requirements for schools saw larger increases in pediatric Covid-19 case rates compared with counties with school mask requirements. 

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The ballyhooed and controversially conducted hand count of nearly 2.1 million Maricopa County ballots still showed Biden defeating Trump, and though the margin changed by 360 votes it was actually Biden whose margin of victory grew from 45,109 to 45,469.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

"The committee is very quickly moving to narrow in on the most important question: Trump's exact actions in and around January 6," said Norm Eisen, who served as the co-counsel on the House Judiciary Committee during Trump's first impeachment trial. "They're hitting people from the White House chief of staff on down, in and outside of the White House, who have critical information." He continued: "In Watergate, the question was what did the president know and when did he know it. Here, the question is what did the president do and when did he do it?"

Three recent moves have raised the stakes. First and most notably, on Thursday night, the committee issued its first round of subpoenas directed at four close associates of Donald Trump and prominent figures in his administration: former chief strategist Steve Bannon; former chief of staff Mark Meadows; former deputy chief of staff Dan Scavino; and Kash Patel, who was a chief of staff to acting Secretary of Defense Christopher C. Miller in the administration's waning days. That same night, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, a committee member, told Rachel Maddow that more subpoenas would be on the way.

Second, the Biden White House is reportedly hewing toward handing over detailed information on the whereabouts of Trump and his aides on January 6 to Congress, a move that could trigger huge political and legal battles moving forward.   

Third, and more quietly, earlier in the week, the panel announced it had brought on John Wood. This is interesting because Wood is a former lawyer for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce with impeccable conservative credentials. That's on top of the committee bringing on former Representative Denver Riggleman, a Virginia Republican, as a top member of the committee's staff. [...]

Trump has become more openly hostile to the committee's progress. He's given it a Trumpian nickname--the "'Unselect Committee' of highly partisan politicians"--and has vowed to "fight the Subpoenas on Executive Privilege and other grounds, for the good of our Country, while we wait to find out whether or not Subpoenas will be sent out to Antifa and BLM for the death and destruction they have caused in tearing apart our Democrat-run cities throughout America."  

Raskin, a constitutional law professor, argued executive privilege doesn't apply to former presidents. He told The Washington Post that "there's no such thing as a former president's executive privilege."

YEAH, BUT...BLM!:

Police departments around the country are trying to persuade officers to get vaccinated against Covid-19 as their rates lag behind in communities they serve, but resistance persists despite efforts that include mandates.

Some officers are filing lawsuits, while others are quitting their jobs or applying for religious exemptions in response to vaccine requirements.

Covid-19 is now the leading killer of law enforcement officers in the U.S., according to the Officer Down Memorial Page, a nonprofit that tracks police officer deaths. Since January 2020, 420 have died from the disease, compared with 92 from gunfire, the second leading cause of death.

INNOVATION ALWAYS HAPPENS FASTER THAN YOU CAN IMAGINE:

New research predicts that green hydrogen -- a clean fuel produced from water using renewables -- will be comparable in cost and likely cheaper than blue hydrogen by 2030. This is much sooner than what the blue hydrogen industry is estimating when advocating for the natural gas-based fuel to be widely adopted -- essentially eliminating the only viable argument to invest in blue hydrogen. 

"The True Cost of Solar Hydrogen," the report from a European research team led by the European Technology and Innovation Platform for Photovoltaics, was published September 7 in the journal Solar RRL and concludes that "during this decade, solar hydrogen will be globally a less expensive fuel compared with hydrogen produced from natural gas with CCS [blue hydrogen]." (CCS is carbon capture and storage.)

This is a much different scenario than the argument being made by supporters of blue hydrogen, such as the gas industry and others who are claiming that within a decade green hydrogen will still be at least double the cost of blue hydrogen.

CHRIST AND MOSES ARE OUT GOLFING...:

Which reminds of the greatest joke ever: "No, he is Jesus Christ, but he thinks he's Jordan Speth." https://t.co/5kiNo7kQvH

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) September 24, 2021

TRUMP LITE:

I'm old enough to remember when Joe Biden opposed busing blacks. https://t.co/DkeHI4TarK

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) September 24, 2021

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Study after study has found that younger adults in particular are cagey about procreating because they think that life as we know it is fast approaching its final act. They think climate change is propelling us towards the heat death of our planet, or at least into situation where vast swathes of the Earth will be uninhabitable, where floods and hurricanes and other forms of 'weather of mass destruction' will be more frequent, and where life could become harder, more parched and altogether more unpleasant. And who would want to bring a child into such dystopia? Who would want to risk worsening this dystopic nightmare by creating yet another carbon-producing lifeform?

This worldview, this supposedly environmentalist turn against the propagation of our species, of ourselves, should concern us all. Because it points to an incredibly worrying development in the early 21st century: the internalisation of Malthusian thinking; the mental embrace by growing numbers of people of the kind of anti-humanism that was once loudly pushed by population doom-mongers. Where once the admonition to have fewer children, to stop polluting society and the environment with your pesky, ungrateful offspring, was made from the pulpit by the likes of the Reverend Thomas Malthus in the late 1700s, or from the pages of eugenicist magazines in the interwar period, now people are doing it to themselves. Now people have their very own Malthus in their minds, always, instructing them not to inflict any more humanity on poor Mother Earth.

Earlier this month, a global survey found that growing numbers of young people fear having children. Described as 'the biggest scientific study yet on climate anxiety and young people', it found that four in 10 people between the ages of 16 and 25 are concerned about procreation in an era of so-called climate catastrophe. The study, which questioned 10,000 young people in various countries around the world, including the UK, uncovered just how fearful the young now feel about climate change. Three-quarters of respondents agreed with the statement 'the future is frightening'. Almost six in 10 said they were very worried or extremely worried about climate change. And four in 10, as one headline summed it up, 'fear having children due to climate crisis'.

The eco-fuelled anxiety about procreation has been gathering pace for years. 'A growing contingent of young people are refusing to have kids - or are considering having fewer kids - because of climate change', Vox magazine reports. A movement of British women called Birthstrike is encouraging women not to procreate until our governments get their act together on climate change. These women, many of whom are influenced by the regressive ideologies of Extinction Rebellion, have decided to publicly articulate their decision 'not to bear children due to the severity of the ecological crisis'.

The left's favourite icon, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, has raised questions about how moral it is to have children in an era of climate madness. 'It is basically a scientific consensus that the lives of our children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead young people to have a legitimate question: is it okay to still have children?', she asked her millions of followers on Instagram. Green anti-natalism was given a further boost by the left's favourite royals, too. Harry and Meghan told British Vogue they would have 'maximum' two children, partly for environmental reasons. For saying this, they were named as green 'role models' by Population Matters, formerly known as the Optimum Population Trust. This is an organisation that has been campaigning for population-control measures for decades. When old-style Malthusians cheer on the internalisation of Malthusian thinking by today's influencers, it becomes clear that there's a close relationship between past demands for top-down curbs on procreation and today's eco-fear of having children.

ACCIDENTAL CRT:

If highlighting crime differentials were Murray's only aim, he would not achieve much. Plenty of left-leaning criminologists going back to W.E.B. DuBois have been perfectly willing to admit that some Black communities struggle with violence. But Murray intends to go further, for he cannot endorse DuBois's contention that different rates of violent crime are the product of oppression and concentrated deprivation. Instead, Murray hopes that his readers will connect his work on crime to his broader hereditarian project. It is not just that some Black communities struggle with high levels of crime, Murray insinuates, but that elevated levels of violent crime are the product of inalterable genetic factors. Lest there be any uncertainty about whether Murray believes that crime differentials are the product of genetic inheritance, he made it clear on Twitter that he thinks violent crime will be a problem anywhere "sub-Saharan African populations" are found.

The claim that some races are biologically more violent than others is obviously controversial, which is why Murray leaves it up to his readers to draw the unpleasant conclusions. But in failing to offer any evidence regarding the source or cause of crime differentials, he also provides the few liberal readers sympathetic to his project no good reason to look to population genetics. If anything, what little he says about crime in Facing Reality supports the position he wishes to avoid at all costs: that elevated levels of violent crime really are the product of past injustices and present systems that continue to perpetuate inequalities.

...AND CHEAPER...:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

In an age in which most comics avoid disturbing our civic pieties--or avoid comedy all together--Norm soldiered forth. Norm made jokes about rape, pedophilia, and autoerotic asphyxiation; he made jokes about Hitler, 9/11, and death--he transgressed almost every norm. His deadpan delivery killed audiences, and news of his unexpected death was delivered in the same deadpan fashion. One can imagine him grinning impishly at the long-delayed delivery of the punchline. [...]

It's not just that Norm was funny; it's that, in addition to being funny, he was also thoughtful, philosophic. He was widely read in literature, especially Russian literature, and it often seemed he was trying to channel both the dark comedy and tragic sensibility of a Tolstoy--but not Dostoevsky! His joke about suicide as an appropriate response to modern life conveys a similar message to The Death of Ivan Ilyich. He joked about people who battle cancer while himself dying of the affliction. These jokes now appear in a new light. Instead of an irreverent gibe at the sick, we now see Norm's jokes about death were his own comic attempt to make sense of the universal fate of mankind. He prodded you to consider your own mortality, but with the pleasant palliative of jest. In his recent memoir--a fake memoir, by the way--he noted that the occasion of watching his beloved cat kill a mouse led him to "that hardscrabble truth" that "there is a difference between what a thing is and what it appears to be." And this reflection led him to attempt, unsuccessfully, to see a picture as merely paint:

"I stared at the thing long and hard, trying to only see the paint. But it was no use. All my eyes would allow me to see was the lie. In fact, the longer I gazed at the paint, the more false detail I began to imagine. The boy was crying, as if afraid, and the woman was weaker than I had first believed. I finally gave up. I understood then that it takes a powerful imagination to see a thing for what it really is."

The chapter that follows is quite tragic in the distinctions it draws between appearances and reality. Perhaps we need to reread his "memoir" and see it for what it really is. Of course, he also reflected seriously on comedy.

It is no secret that Norm was also deeply pious, a quality almost entirely lacking among our comedians (and a fact notably absent from his Wikipedia page). Norm was a Christian who spoke respectfully and openly of his own faith, who respected the faith of others, and who had little patience for ignorant disrespect of religious belief. Even in the midst of the bawdiest joke, the bluest topic, or the rudest insult, Norm always affirmed his belief when prodded by a guest or host. He looked at the world with wonder and awe, and he saw in it evidence for God. As he tweeted a few years back: "Scripture. Faith. Grace. Christ, Glory of God. Smart man says nothing is a miracle. I say everything is."

Despite coming across as a sort of conservative, and perhaps in part because of it, Norm also eschewed being "political" or "relevant" or "edgy" and looked down upon comedians who thought their task was to speak to the political issues of the day and to lecture their audience. He recognized that what was often praised for bravery was usually nothing but the dominant political views expressed to an entirely sympathetic audience. Comedy, he would wryly observe, is supposed to be funny, not important. He preferred laughter to applause, recognizing that human laughter is a sudden, involuntary response, a kind of relief brought about by the supposed restoration of order in the world which a joke had momentarily called into question. Applause, by contrast, was the polite, intentional response an audience offers to comics of which it consciously approves. He scorned mere approval.

Yet, Norm's comedy was funny. He made audiences laugh, though he never pandered to them. He didn't look to flatter them, and that meant he was comfortable when his jokes were met with silence, hisses, or even boos. If a joke didn't work, that didn't mean it wasn't funny--it meant the audience didn't get it. His jokes, of course, were laugh-out-loud funny. Once you realized what he was doing, you were incapable of restraining your laughter, whether he was roasting a fellow comedian, trolling humorless, dour moralists, or ridiculing powerful television executives, Hollywood types, politicians, and public figures.

EVIL IS AS EVIL DOES:

The harshest and most dramatic coverage of the recent migrant crisis -- photos of Black immigrants being rounded up by CBP officers on horseback, stories of the dire conditions in the camp under the bridge -- only hint at the bigger picture on the ground, in which people on both sides of the border, Mexico and the U.S., are living in a state of subjective and at times seemingly arbitrary enforcement of policy. In Del Rio this past week, but across the border for months now, people of any number of nationalities are getting through in small numbers, finding themselves suddenly relieved to be in the U.S. but at the same time uncertain about their future, let alone where they'll sleep at night. On the other side, a growing mix of migrants is waiting, uncertain whether to cross and risk the consequences of not being let in or to stay and wait for a better opportunity that may not come. Ever constant is the threat of being sent back to their home countries, a fate most who have crossed up to now have been dealt.

The past few days in Del Rio, white prison transport vans have rolled at a steady rate down the dusty road to the bridge, where agents have forced migrants to board. From there, groups of migrants have been taken to the town's airport, or nearby ones in San Antonio, Laredo and Brownsville, where they've been placed on flights back to their home countries. In order to do so without allowing these people their legal right to plead their case for asylum in court, President Joe Biden has relied on Title 42, a public health order implemented last year by the Trump administration to summarily expel border-crossers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

JUST IN CASE THE TRUMPISTS WEREN'T BEING CLEAR ENOUGH:

KIRK: Deputize a citizen force, put them on the border, give them handcuffs, get it done. Sure that's dramatic. You know what's dramatic? The invasion of the country. 

We're going to talk more about that, we're going to talk about how the other side has openly admitted that this is about bringing in voters that they want and that they like and honestly, diminishing and decreasing white demographics in America. We're going to say that part out loud, as so many people in the corporate media are afraid to talk about it. 

SUSPEND THE BORDER PATROL, NOT THE HORSES:

A TRAIT NO ONE EVER ACCUSED HIM OF POSSESSING:

Biden receives his least positive assessments for being mentally sharp. Currently, 43% say this describes Biden very or fairly well, an 11-point decline since March.

LEVERAGE:

One by one, foreign aid groups with long histories of working in Afghanistan are insisting on clear guarantees for their female Afghan staff to work freely in delivering goods and services, especially to other women. From the Norwegian Refugee Council to CARE International, relief groups have set a red line for gender rights.

"If women are prevented from delivering humanitarian services, we become complicit in the entrenching of gender inequality," says Anita Bhatia, deputy executive director of United Nations Women. For his part, U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres told the Security Council that aid must be delivered "without ... discrimination."

This principled stance by the humanitarian aid community reflects three decades of work to shift global thinking about women's rights. It also reflects faith in Afghan women to insist on the rights and freedoms they enjoyed under nearly two decades of democracy.

The Taliban are definitely listening to the international community, Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi told The Associated Press. "Yes, there are no women yet [in the Cabinet]," he said. "But let us let the situation evolve."

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Through various applications, this tiny molecule can provide the heat, reduction properties, fuel, and other services needed to replace fossil fuels. In fact, given the technical challenge of getting these "hard-to-abate" sectors to a state of carbon neutrality, hitting 2050 net-zero targets without it would be virtually impossible.

H2 uptake can serve other objectives beyond decarbonization. For example, hydrogen's ability to substitute for natural gas in many applications allows for a degree of energy independence and reduced reliance on liquefied natural gas or pipeline imports from Russia. And while renewables like solar and wind are limited by the extent of electrical grids, hydrogen can be transported by pipeline or potentially by ship. That means it could become an exportable renewable-energy source, eventually replacing petroleum as the main global energy commodity.

H2 uptake is starting from vastly differing points, depending on the market. In Europe and Southeast Asia, political and market incentives are already fully aligned for the deployment of H2 infrastructure. But in large oil- and gas-exporting economies, the incentives are often conflicting. Notably, there is significant misalignment in the United States, where natural gas fulfills all the political priorities that hydrogen can provide for other markets.

As a crucial element in achieving 2050 net-zero targets, hydrogen production, storage, and transport represents a multi-trillion-dollar opportunity, not only for energy incumbents but also for investors. While hydrogen is currently more expensive (per unit of energy delivered) than competing options such as fossil fuels, the scaling up of electrolyzer production is driving down costs. Within the next decade, we can expect H2 to reach break-even points with fossil fuels across different applications, after which hydrogen uptake will bring cost savings.

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM AL:

Total U.S. household net worth -- the value of all assets minus liabilities -- jumped by $5.8 trillion to a record $141.7 trillion at the end of June, according to a report from the Federal Reserve released Thursday.

TRUTH:

BLAST FROM THE PAST:

A 23-year-old Maryland man has been sentenced to 35 years in federal prison for his role in a violent street gang prosecutors said preyed on the Hispanic community in Annapolis over a two-year period.

HAD TO KILL THE HILLBILLIES TO SAVE THEM:

If Kirk's virulent anti-vax rhetoric reflects his own evolution from campus free-speech warrior to Trump lackey, it also reflects the extent to which the base of the conservative movement has narrowed in recent years. According to one poll, less than a fifth of Americans and fewer than a third of Republicans say they will never get the vaccine. No matter--the principal task for pundit-operatives like Kirk is not so much to create disciples or persuade the undecided as it is to rack up partisan points with a well-placed and intractable minority. The more Kirk plays up problems with the vaccines that Biden is pushing, the worse Biden looks; by the same token, if the Delta variant draws out the pandemic and stalls the economic recovery, the current administration's approval ratings may sink. That Kirk would stake out what amounts to a pro-death position shows how well he has learned the lessons of today's Republican Party: Everything is a campaign, and one need only preach to the already converted.

THE DESANTIS FLU:

Russia reported 820 deaths from Covid-19 on Thursday equalling August's record, while Moscow reported its highest number of daily cases since July. [...]

Russia has the fifth-highest number of recorded Covid-19 cases in the world and the highest death toll in Europe. 

BUT BETWEEN THE THREAT SHE POSES TO BLACKS AND THE VICTIMOLOGY...:

Every generation has its share of narcissistic celebrities. But in the past, that sense of entitlement was leavened with what might be called noblesse oblige. It wasn't that long ago that baseball players were expected to be role models. I'm sure that earlier celebrities had just as many odd and occasionally dangerous ideas as some modern ones, but whether through a sense of responsibility to their fans or fear of them, they usually kept them to themselves. You can't imagine, say, Lawrence Tureaud, casually passing along anti-vaccination rumors.

That's no longer true. Today's celebrities feel justified, even obligated, to pass along their every stray thought without considering the impact on the wider world. Because they live largely in bubbles of adoring fans, they are often convinced they can do no wrong. It's the Dunning-Kruger Effect on steroids.

And needless to say, these celebrities seldom take well to criticism.

This is a real problem and it's obviously not limited to the issue of vaccine hesitancy. Social media is a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and misinformation that are too often amplified by people who ought to know better. Social media gives modern celebrities unprecedented direct connections with people who already like and trust them. Out of the top 150 Twitter accounts, 109 of them belong to entertainment and sports figures. It's one thing when your Uncle Jim starts babbling about vaccine conspiracy theories and the "agenda of the CDC." It's another thing entirely if your Uncle Jim is Jim Carrey and has 14 million twitter followers.

Some people seem to believe that Joy Reid was wrong for publicly castigating Minaj and that it should have been viewed as a teachable moment. But Nikki Minaj should not need to be "taught." She's a world figure with more Twitter followers than Fox News--or Pope Francis--not an errant 14-year-old. The suggestion that someone in her position should be granted a pass for spreading misinformation about something as basic and important as COVID vaccines is both patronizing and dangerous.

The truth is that Minaj's worst offense wasn't tweeting about exploding testicles. It was a tweet that was far more damaging and far less clickbaity. Worse, it's the kind of casual and deadly misinformation that is spread on social media thousands of times a day. In response to one of her fans pointing out that the vaccine "prevents you getting serious symptoms" and that "non vaccinated people are 11x more likely to pass away from covid than vaccinated." Minaj responded. "Babe. That's not true. I had the exact same symptoms as ppl with the damn vaccine." This little nugget of death got almost 23,000 likes and over 17,000 retweets.

Again, Minaj is completely wrong. Vaccines do dramatically reduce the seriousness of COVID infections, even if you do catch the disease after being vaccinated. This basic fact has been shouted from the rooftops for months now. Someone who speaks directly to 22 million people, has a responsibility to know this kind of thing.

NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

The An-26 is a civilian and military transport plane equipped with two turboprop engines designed and produced in the Soviet Union from 1969 to 1986.

Accidents involving aging planes in far-flung regions are not uncommon in Russia.

THE DESANTIS FLU:

Alaska is activating crisis standards of care for the entire state and bringing in contracted health workers as staff shortages and influx of COVID-19 patients make it difficult for hospitals to operate normally.

Gov. Mike Dunleavy and top health officials announced the hospital support on Wednesday, the same day Alaska's new single-day cases hit another record as the highly infectious delta variant drives infections.

A combination of short staffing and high numbers of COVID-19 patients is overwhelming medical facilities in Anchorage, Mat-Su and Fairbanks. Rural hospitals say they struggle to transfer patients to urban centers for higher care. At least one patient died recently when a bed in Anchorage wasn't available. [...]

Alaska, once the most vaccinated state in the nation, has dropped into the bottom third. 

WHAT WAS THE FIRST CLUE?:

A federal judge has struck down portions of a Florida immigration enforcement law that was a priority of the state's Republican governor, saying in her ruling that the measure was racially motivated.

U.S. Judge Beth Bloom on Tuesday rejected sections of the law that ban local government sanctuary policies and require local law enforcement to make their best effort to work with federal immigration enforcement authorities.

The office of Gov. Ron DeSantis, who signed the bill into law with much fanfare in 2019 as a priority of his administration, said Wednesday that it would appeal.

Bloom repeatedly said that the law was racially motivated and that its supporters showed no evidence as to why it was needed to lower crime. She said that the sponsor of the bill -- SB 168 -- was guided by anti-immigrant hate groups such as Floridians for Immigration Enforcement.

"Allowing anti-immigrant hate groups that overtly promote xenophobic, nationalist, racist ideologies to be intimately involved in a bill's legislative process is a significant departure from procedural norms," Bloom wrote. "This involvement strongly suggests that the Legislature enacted SB 168 to promote and ratify the racist views of these advocacy groups."

Bloom cited numerous communication between Floridians for Immigration Enforcement and state Sen. Joe Gruters' staff. Gruters sponsored the bill and also serves as chairman of the state Republican Party.

"On many occasions during the 2019 legislative session, (Floridians for Immigration Enforcement's ) racial animus and discriminatory intent were made apparent to Senator Gruters and his staff but were ignored," Bloom wrote.

NOT EVEN THE KAREN CARPENTER VERSION:

Booker called Scott just before noon on Wednesday to tell him the negotiations were over. The call came after a meeting on Tuesday between the trio where Booker and Bass presented a drastically scaled-back proposal, according to a source familiar with the negotiations.

"Unfortunately, even with this law enforcement support and further compromises we offered, there was still too wide a gulf with our negotiating partners and we faced significant obstacles to securing a bipartisan deal," Booker said.

Booker's "skinny" proposal, obtained by NBC News, didn't include some of the main sticking points, including qualified immunity. It addressed less controversial issues, such as a database of officer misconduct and terminations, ban of no-knock warrants and mental health support for police officers. It also included an executive order signed by President Donald Trump that would allow the Department of Justice to create a police accreditation standard.

WEAPONIZING THE DESANTIS FLU:

Donald Trump-aligned Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, whose state recorded more COVID-19 cases and deaths in August than it did in any month before vaccines became widely available, has appointed a new state surgeon general. Is it someone normal who will tell people to get vaccinated? No, you idiot! It's a doctor named Joseph Ladapo who was last seen on the national stage participating in a COVID miracle cure event with another doctor who believes that lizard people control the government and that demons cause gynecological problems by implanting stolen sperm, as well as a third doctor who later got arrested for being part of the mob that smashed into the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the presidential election.

THE VACCINE MADE HIM DO IT:

THE LEAST THEY SHOULD REQUIRE:

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi said he supports the resumption of negotiations aimed at reviving the nuclear deal if the "ultimate goal" is to lift all unjust sanctions imposed on the Islamic Republic.

"The Islamic Republic considers the useful talks whose ultimate outcome is the lifting of all oppressive [US] sanctions," Raisi said in a recorded address to the annual UN General Assembly.

TOTALLY NOT A DEATH CULT...:

The average rate of Covid-19 deaths in the 10 least vaccinated states was more than four times higher over the past week than the rate in the 10 most vaccinated states, according to a CNN analysis. [...]

The states with the lowest vaccination rates have fully vaccinated less than 45% of their residents. They are Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Dakota, Tennessee, West Virginia and Wyoming. [...]

The 10 states with the highest vaccination rates have fully vaccinated more than 62% of their residents. They are Connecticut, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT AND FORCE INNOVATION:

Key Takeaways

Carbon pricing, either in the form of a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade system, has the potential to limit pollution to an economically optimal level. 

Carbon pricing allows various pollution sources with differing marginal abatement costs to achieve emissions reduction efficiently whereas regulations tend to treat all pollution sources alike.

Carbon pricing has greater efficiency advantages over regulations when technology changes over time than when it is fixed. 

A carbon tax combined with revenue recycling would be a less costly policy to reduce emissions than regulations of comparable effectiveness.

It is difficult to compare the distributional impact of carbon taxes to that of regulations, as there is substantial analysis of the distributional effects of a carbon tax but very limited information on how environmental regulations would impact various demographic groups.

OUR TALIBAN:

In his testimony, Wray explained that there are two primary groups of threats the bureau focuses on - homegrown violent extremists radicalized by foreign terrorist organizations and ideologies, and domestic violent extremists, who are radicalized by racial hatred or anti-government sentiments.

Wray said that while the amount of homegrown violent extremists has remained fairly steady over the past few years, the number of domestic violent extremists has been rising exponentially since the spring of 2020.

"For the past 16, 18 months or so, we have more than doubled our domestic terrorism caseload from about 1,000 to around 2,700 investigations," Wray said, adding that "we have surged personnel to match, more than doubling the amount of people working that threat than the year before."

HAMAS IS THE POPULAR GOVERNMENT...:

A recent poll found that about 80 per cent of Palestinians want Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas to resign, Quds Press reported yesterday.

The poll was conducted by Khalil Shikaki, who runs the Palestinian Center for Survey and Policy Research in the West Bank city of Ramallah. [...]

"If presidential and parliamentary elections were held today," Shikaki said, "Hamas will win against Fatah if Abbas was Fatah's choice, but if Fatah nominated Marwan Al Barghouti, it will win."

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Antisemitism within QAnon has intensified in recent months, with the movement's most popular supporter praising Hitler and other influencers posting increasingly blatant anti-Jewish messages on social media.

The shift is documented in a new report from the Anti-Defamation League in what it describes as one of the most comprehensive studies to date on the role of antisemitism in the sprawling QAnon conspiracy theory and social movement, which organized around the belief that the Democratic party is controlled by Satan-worshipping pedophiles.

IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Nature as medicine is a cliché with a robust pedigree that you can trace back to our sun-worshipping, tree-venerating proto-ancestors millennia ago. The idea started going scientific in the early 1980s: that's when Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson published his book Biophilia, on humanity's innate affinity for nature; when the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry, and Fisheries coined the term shinrin-yoku, or forest bathing; and when a researcher named Roger Ulrich noticed that patients recovering from gallbladder surgery at a Pennsylvania hospital were discharged nearly a day earlier, on average, if they had a view of trees outside their window. These days, the link between cumulative time spent in natural settings and health outcomes--including the big one, longevity--is solid. There's data on cancer and heart disease, anxiety and depression, immune function and stress hormones, and more. "It's not just one study," points out Harvard epidemiologist Peter James, whose 2016 analysis of the 108,000-person Nurses' Health Study found a 12 percent lower rate of nonaccidental mortality among those with the most greenery in a 250-meter radius around their home address. "It's 500 studies."

Of course, there's a perennial gap between knowing and doing. Psychologist Laurie Santos and philosopher Tamar Szabó Gendler have dubbed it the G.I. Joe Fallacy, from the tagline of the PSAs that followed the 1980s cartoon: "Now you know. And knowing is half the battle." Most of us know, or at least intuit, that a walk ­in the park is restorative. But knowledge alone has not sent us flocking to the woods. In the 1990s, data collected by the ­Environmental Protection Agency suggested that Americans were spending less than 8 percent of their lives outdoors. There is little evidence that the situation has changed for the better in the past 30 years, despite that mounting pile of nature-is-medicine research. (It remains to be seen whether the pandemic-inspired park frenzy of both 2020 and 2021 heralds a lasting shift.)

That's the conundrum that Jared Hanley, the data scientist and veteran adventure racer who organized the Three Sisters trip back in 2016, kept contemplating. "And I came to the conclusion that for things to matter, you have to measure them," he recalls. "You just gotta slap a number on it. And once you start tracking it and ascribing value to it--however arbitrary it is, like Bitcoin for example--society starts focusing on it." A 2019 study from Britain's University of Exeter offered a handy benchmark: 120 minutes of nature per week, it found, was enough to measurably boost health and well-being. An Outside cover story around the same time, on "science's newest miracle drug" (that would be nature), provided Hanley with the impetus to recruit his erstwhile tripmates Bailey and Minson, with their complementary skill sets, to the cause. Nature, Hanley decided, needed an app.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

"China will step up support for other developing countries in developing green and low carbon energy and will not build new coal-fired power projects abroad," Xi Jinping said in translated remarks.

It was seen as a stunning development because after the withdrawal of Japan and South Korea earlier this year, China was basically the world's last significant backer of international coal generation projects.

Its sudden commitment to cease its support is expected to eliminate three quarters of current proposed coal fired power stations and deliver a significant blow to global coal demand - including for Australian thermal coal.

WING SERVICE:

Half of all respondents thought that masks should be required in all K-12 schools, with another quarter of respondents saying that the decision should be left up to individual school districts. Only 20% of respondents opposed mask requirements. The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.9 percentage points.

In May, Abbott issued an executive order prohibiting school districts and most other governmental entities from requiring masks. With rising COVID-19 case counts heading into the school year, dozens of school districts -- including Dallas, Plano, Richardson and Garland ISDs -- defied the order, implementing some form of a mandate under the protection of temporary restraining orders.

THE FACT HE EVEN ASKED IS DISQUALIFYING:

The Eastman memo laid out a six-step plan for Pence to overturn the election for Trump, which included throwing out the results in seven states because they allegedly had competing electors. In fact, no state had actually put forward an alternate slate of electors -- there were merely Trump allies claiming without any authority to be electors.

Under Eastman's scheme, Pence would have declared Trump the winner with more Electoral College votes after the seven states were thrown out, at 232 votes to 222. Anticipating "howls" from Democrats protesting the overturning of the election, the memo proposes, Pence would instead say that no candidate had reached 270 votes in the Electoral College. That would throw the election to the House of Representatives, where each state would get one vote. Since Republicans controlled 26 state delegations, a majority could vote for Trump to win the election.

The plan was first proposed to Pence when Eastman was with Trump in the Oval Office on January 4, during one of Trump's attempts to convince Pence that he had the authority to stop the certification of the election.

"You really need to listen to John. He's a respected constitutional scholar. Hear him out," Trump said to Pence at that meeting, Woodward and Costa write in "Peril."

In the memo, Eastman went so far as to suggest Pence should take action without warning.

"The main thing here is that Pence should do this without asking for permission -- either from a vote of the joint session or from the Court," Eastman wrote. "The fact is that the Constitution assigns this power to the Vice President as the ultimate arbiter. We should take all of our actions with that in mind."

In the end, Pence didn't go along with Eastman's scheme, concluding that the Constitution did not give him any power beyond counting the Electoral College votes. He did his own consultations before January 6, according to the book, reaching out to former Vice President Dan Quayle and the Senate parliamentarian, who were both clear in telling him he had no authority beyond counting the votes.

WHEN HAS ANYONE EVER CARED ABOUT FRANCE?:

One day after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in October 2018, President Emanuel Macron of France and his top ministers received a classified intelligence briefing documenting how Saudi Arabia was using French weapons in Yemen. Six months later, with Germany and other European countries having stopped selling arms to the Saudis, Macron dismissed as "populist" calls for France to do the same. 

"What's the link between arms sales and Mr. Khashoggi's murder? I understand the connection with what's happening in Yemen, but there is no link with Mr. Khashoggi," the president said. "That's pure demagoguery to say, 'We must stop arms sales.' It's got nothing to do with Mr. Khashoggi."

More than 130,000 Yemenis have already been killed in that country's ongoing civil war, and more than 16 million don't have enough to eat. But ordinary Yemenis' suffering at the hands of the Saudi coalition and the Houthi fighters hasn't ended French arms exports to Saudi Arabia. In 2018, French arms exports grew by 50 percent; they included a one-billion Euro sale to Saudi Arabia of patrol boats and other equipment. As Reuters noted, one of the tactics used by Yemen's Saudi-led coalition is to block ports controlled by the rival Houthis. 

And last year, when French arms exports slumped dramatically, sales to Saudi Arabia helped keep the French defense industry afloat. The Gulf kingdom bought 704 million Euros' worth of French arms, more than any other country. And despite last year's slump, French arms sales rose 44 percent from 2016 and 2020, outperforming all the other top-five arms exporters.

Most countries with significant defense industries rely on exports to keep them going. But France goes about securing exports in an extremely energetic manner that involves not just defense industry executives but politicians all the way up to the President of the Republic. Indeed, even for French arms-makers that are not owned or part-owned by the government, French politicians act as salesmen to other countries and don't mind outflanking other countries' companies in the process. To be sure, U.S. and many other countries' ministers and officials, too, ply their countries' deadly wares to other leaders. Few, though, do so as energetically as France. 

And France, which considers itself a global actor, clearly feels that status justifies unfriendly negotiation tactics at the expense of allied countries. "Arms exports are the business model of our sovereignty," Defense Minister Florence Parly noted in 2018. 

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

It's one of several pay-fors that Senate Finance Chair Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is working on as part of the effort to fully offset the massive spending package, according to a presentation given to Senate Democrats during their weekly caucus lunch Tuesday.

Wyden, who spoke at multiple events with interest groups yesterday, said that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) is "working very closely with me on the pricing issue."

"If you're really going to change behavior and combat this climate crisis -- and my God, last few weeks have shown why this is urgent -- you've really got to start with taxes and prices," Wyden said during an event with the business group Environmental Entrepreneurs, or E2. "That's how you drive changes in behavior."

It's the latest sign that a carbon tax or fee could be in the mix for reconciliation, in addition to the Clean Electricity Performance Program, or CEPP, and a suite of other climate policies.

A separate Finance Committee document circulating around Capitol Hill last month included a broad proposal for a carbon tax starting at $15 per ton, paired with rebates for low-income taxpayers, as a potential way to finance the package. Whitehouse, a longtime carbon pricing supporter, and other Senate Democrats, have also said for weeks that the idea is still in play 

THE ANGLOSPHERE IS THE WEST:

The latest sign is AUKUS, the new geopolitical alliance of Australia, the U.K. and the U.S., which has China as the obvious adversary. There it is again: the old Anglosphere, as distinct from the wider West. The undertone is that when it comes to staring down genuine threats -- in the 21st century as in the 20th -- it's those ancient ties of language and culture that bind. 

France under President Emmanuel Macron, predictably, is as livid about being snubbed as it ever was under Charles de Gaulle or other Gallic roosters. As part of AUKUS, Australia will buy nuclear-powered submarines from its fellow Anglophones, instead of conventional ones from France, as previously agreed. Macron recalled his ambassadors to Washington and Canberra and is now preparing for an extended sulk.

You can expect to hear a lot from him in coming weeks about "European sovereignty" and "autonomy," nebulous slogans he's been pushing alongside his more evocative ruminations about the alleged "brain death" of NATO, which remains the most concrete manifestation of a strategic West. If it were up to Macron, the European Union, now unencumbered by those pesky Brits, should finally become a distinct geopolitical and military power, at eye level with the U.S., and presumably led by France.

The usual suspects in a few other European capitals have taken up his rallying cry, especially since the ignominious Western withdrawal from Afghanistan. There, too, the Europeans felt betrayed by the Americans, who didn't bother to meaningfully consult or coordinate with their allies as they pulled out. Predictably, the call for a "European army" has returned. In this latest iteration, the idea is to start with an EU 5,000, a sort of elite force that could have secured the Kabul airport without American help. Forgive my skepticism, but the Spartan 300 this will never be. 

It's understandable that the Europeans are frustrated about not being taken all that seriously, either by adversaries like Russia and China or by friends like the U.S. and Australia. But rather than fume impotently, they'd do better to take an honest look at themselves to find the reasons.

60-40 NATION:

Merkel became Germany's first female chancellor in 2005 and has frequently been described as the most powerful woman in the world. So it's perhaps no surprise that her party received higher-than-usual support from women. 

In fact, during the Merkel years, a shift in support for the CDU was most striking among women.

In recent federal elections, the CDU has had the widest advantage with women of any political party. The last time Germany held a federal election, in 2017, the party won 29.8 percent of votes cast by women and 23.5 percent of those cast by men, a gender gap of 6.3 percentage points.

Merkel also helped the party do well among older voters generally, but especially among older women. Older female voters provided the strongest base of support for the CDU. Among women aged 70 and older at the 2017 election, 40 percent voted for the CDU, compared to the party's overall result of 27 percent. Among the other parties that tend to do well among older voters is the CDU's Bavarian sister party, the Christian Social Union (CSU).

Figures from the Federal Returning Officer, the national election authority, confirm that German elections are won or lost with older voters.

The majority of Germany's electorate is over 50, and almost 23 million voters -- or 38 percent of the electorate -- are over 60. Looking at the breakdown by gender of those over 60, women make up a clear majority.

...AND CHEAPER...:

An international team of researchers led by scientists from the University of Adelaide has found a way to boost the conversion of waste water to renewable hydrogen, making for more efficient clean energy generation while also removing a source of pollution from the environment.

Hydrogen can be produced by using electricity to "split" water into hydrogen and oxygen. Much emphasis has been placed on the source of electricity used to produce hydrogen, such as wind and solar. But the source of water is also a key consideration.

The use of treated wastewater is one option, and was recently pin-pointed by New South Wales energy minister Matt Kean as a critical component in realising that state's ambitious renewable hydrogen strategy.

Urea is globally abundant in waste water and can be used to power fuel cells as an alternative to conventional technology which uses clean water in an electrolyser.

GOOD RUBLES AFTER BAD:

Jesse Benton, spokesman for the Ron Paul campaign, speaking to reporters in the spin room after the CNN Debate on January 1, 2012. Photo: Robert Daemmrich Photography Inc/Corbis via Getty Images

A former senior aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul was indicted this month for allegedly funneling $25,000 from a wealthy, unnamed Russian to former President Trump's reelection efforts.

NO ONE MISSES JOBS:

Emergency unemployment benefits in the U.S. expired two weeks ago, but employers who expected an increase in job applications are still largely waiting for them to roll in. 

Federal programs that had offered an extra $300 per week for jobless Americans, provided extended benefits for the long-term unemployed and gave special aid for the self-employed expired Sept. 6. Economists and companies expected a wave of interest from workers as the financial lifeline was pulled away, hoping it would provide the incentive to get back into the workplace. 

That hasn't happened, according to employers across industries.

"People who have been on the sidelines have by and large stayed on the sidelines," said Richard Wahlquist, president of the American Staffing Association, the country's largest recruitment-industry group. "Nothing has changed in regard to the benefits that have fallen off and the need for people continues to grow."

IT'LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

David Zopf straddles the line between scientist and doctor; as an affiliate professor at the University of Michigan, he conducts research at the intersection of biomedical engineering and 3D printing. And as a pediatric surgeon there, he works with children born with malformations of the head and neck.

In 2019, a 9-year-old boy with cerebral palsy -- a group of disorders that affect movement and posture -- came to his practice. His breathing was extremely labored, and his parents had tried and failed to alleviate the issue with other specialists. "These children will work really hard for every breath," Zopf says. "It's almost like they're snoring when they're awake."

The boy lacked the muscle tone to keep his upper airway from spontaneously collapsing; every inhalation was a struggle between his lungs and throat muscles. What he needed was a simple device to prop the airway open, so Zopf took careful measurements and then drew up a design for a 3D-printed device that would bypass the obstruction.

Days later, he implanted a prototype into the boy's throat. "There was immediate improvement," Zopf says. "His eyes got wider and I saw him smile. He took a deep breath of air -- that struggle for every breath was relieved."

3D printers have long been lauded for their "rapid prototyping" capability. Engineers can quickly produce one-off iterations of a device and tweak them as issues arise. In the medical space, the same qualities allow doctors to quickly produce devices that are customized to a patient's anatomy at a relatively low cost. Once a practitioner has access to a 3D printer, the marginal cost of producing a device is often no more than a few dollars.

SUPER ON BRAND:

A staff member at an elementary school in Newberg, Oregon, came to work on Friday in blackface and allegedly claimed she was portraying Rosa Parks as part of a protest against a vaccine mandate for school staff.

Details of the incident at Mabel Rush Elementary School were relayed to The Newberg Graphic by an unnamed staff member, who said that Lauren Pefferle, a special education assistant, had used iodine to darken her face and called herself Rosa Parks while protesting mandatory COVID-19 vaccinations for school staff in Oregon.

A spokesperson for the school district declined to comment on the motivation of the staff member to The Daily Beast, but confirmed that an employee had worn blackface, which was "unacceptable."

THE BLUE BRAND:

The Minnesota Department of Public Safety has a new plan to keep drivers safe during traffic stops: clear, plastic holders called "not-reaching pouches" that put a person's driver's license and insurance information in plain view so a cop doesn't think they're grabbing  something more nefarious. 

But some people are grimly dubbing the devices--which drivers can keep on their air vent--"please-don't-execute-me pouches" or a "don't-murder-me pouches."

"...THE KINDNESS OF OTHERS":

The structure of Afghanistan rentier's economy is unsustainable. Under the previous regime, grants made up around 40% of GDP. The country runs a massive trade deficit, amounting to about 30% of GDP. It has required grant assistance to finance its trade deficit. And, at the moment, it's unable to access its foreign exchange reserves.

Afghanistan is a net food and energy importer. Domestic milling capacity remains inadequate, so the country imports substantial amounts of wheat flour. Officially, the country's top exports include raisins and pine nuts. In reality, its largest export is opiates. Ending the cultivation of poppy, as the Taliban have recently pledged to do, will be massively disruptive and jeopardize their support. The narcotics industry is a major provider of livelihoods, especially in southern Afghanistan.

While agriculture plays a big role in the Afghan economy -- making up approximately a quarter of GDP and providing income for around 60% of households -- Afghanistan is a recipient of significant food aid, totaling in the hundreds of millions of dollars annually. And these numbers will grow as drought, displacement, and the collapse of the previous government exacerbate food insecurity.

Afghanistan's existential challenges will consume the bandwidth of its new government, whose own capacity to govern is unclear, though the Taliban do not come to power entirely inexperienced. They will also have non-aid sources of revenue. Many members of the new cabinet served during the previous era of Taliban rule. And, as an insurgency, the group has operated as a quasi-state.

Informed by extensive fieldwork, scholar Ashley Jackson notes that shadow governance by the Taliban insurgency was "largely parasitic, seeking to take credit for what others provide." Graeme Smith and David Mansfield assess that the Taliban had already earned hundreds of millions of dollars annually by "taxing" international trade along Afghanistan's borders.

The Taliban will now command a much larger share of tax revenue from Afghanistan's border trade. But, as Vanda Felbab-Brown notes, those flows are contingent upon the goodwill of neighboring and regional states.

Humanitarian aid is also coming. While foreign governments have balked at recognition of the Taliban government, they seek to avert an all-out catastrophe and are making substantial pledges of humanitarian aid.

Nonetheless, the Taliban will struggle in bearing the burden of governing an entire country with a fast-growing population of nearly 40 million people. Transitioning from insurgency to government will involve choosing between gaining international legitimacy and jeopardizing internal cohesion and support from the population.

Much of the Taliban operates like a criminal syndicate, with significant involvement in the narcotics industry. Opiates and other forms of illicit trade are deeply embedded into the country's broader political economy -- partly because it lacks competitively-priced goods to formally trade.

While the Taliban face new cost-benefit calculi as a government, their choice of only senior Taliban figures for the "interim" cabinet -- including Sirajuddin Haqqani as interior minister -- indicates that their imminent priority is internal cohesion.

If the Taliban are intent on assuming some characteristics of a normative state, and if the group can overcome the current crisis, bring some degree of economic stability, and gain international recognition, then their next priorities should include developing a legitimate export base and sources of revenue for public expenditures.

Achieving this simply through agriculture is unlikely. Import substitution and diversifying cash crops remain vital, but it is difficult to see the country developing meaningful foreign exchange simply through low value-added agriculture.

However, connectivity projects and extractive industries have the potential to generate several billion dollars in annual revenue for the Afghan government as well as precious foreign exchange. These projects include the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan India (TAPI) gas pipeline, the CASA-1000 regional power project, the Hajigak iron ore and Mes Aynak copper mines, as well as substantive natural gas fields in the north.

Indeed, extractives and transit trade may be Afghanistan's only path out of state failure. 

COOKIE MONSTER HUNTERS:

Last October, the all-White school board unanimously banned a list of educational resources that included a children's book about Rosa Parks, Malala Yousafzai's autobiography and CNN's Sesame Street town hall on racism. [...]

The fact that all the banned materials are by or about people of color is just a coincidence, according to Jane Johnson, the school board president.

TRACKING THE DESANTIS FLU:

Dr. Veasna Duong, Head of Virology at the IPC, said his institute had made four such trips in the past two years, hoping for clues about the origin and evolution of the bat-borne virus.

"We want to find out whether the virus is still there and ... to know how the virus has evolved," he told Reuters.

Deadly viruses originating from bats include Ebola and other coronaviruses such as Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS).

But Veasna Duong said humans were responsible for the devastation caused by COVID-19, due to interference and destruction of natural habitats.

"If we try to be near wildlife, the chances of getting the virus carried by wildlife are more than normal. The chances of the virus transforming to infect humans are also more," he said.

The French-funded project also aims to look at how the wildlife trade could be playing a part, said Julia Guillebaud, a research engineer at the IPC's virology unit.

"(The project) aims to provide new knowledge on wild meat trade chains in Cambodia, document the diversity of betacoronaviruses circulating through these chains, and develop a flexible and integrated early-detection system of viral spill-over events," Gillebaud said.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Deep in the Oman desert lies one of BP's more lucrative projects, a mass of steel pipes and cooling towers that showcases the British energy giant's pioneering natural gas extraction technology.

The facility earned BP Plc (BP.L) more than $650 million in profits in 2019, according to financial filings reviewed by Reuters. Yet the oil major agreed to sell a third of its majority stake in the project earlier this year. The deal exemplifies a larger strategy to liquidate fossil-fuel assets to raise cash for investments in renewable-energy projects that BP concedes won't make money for years.

BP's big bet is emblematic of the hard choices confronting Big Oil. All oil majors face mounting pressure from regulators and investors worldwide to develop cleaner energy and divest from fossil fuels, a primary source of greenhouse-gas emissions that cause global warming. That scrutiny has increased since early August, when the United Nations panel on climate change warned in a landmark report that rising temperatures could soon spiral out of control.

BP Chief Executive Bernard Looney, who took office in February 2020, is gambling that BP can make the clean-energy transition much faster than its peers. 

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Secretary-General of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (IUMS), Ali Al-Qaradaghi yesterday urged the Taliban government in Afghanistan to "establish a just rule".

"Dr. Al-Qaradaghi has recommended the [Afghan] government place its priority in establishing a just rule that will be a model of the Islam of justice and the Islam of mercy," IUMS said in a statement.

#BLM:

It wasn't supposed to be like this. In seeking the presidency in 2020, Biden actually made one of his primary pitches that he would wash away the moral stain of Donald Trump's xenophobic immigration agenda. Included in that was the Democrat's explicit pledge that he'd reverse Trump's policies that reduced the number of refugees granted U.S. political asylum to record lows, with a paltry annual target of just 15,000 going into the 2020 election. Biden promised to hike the yearly goal back to 125,000 "and to seek to raise it over time."

But since the moment that a predictable late-winter surge of Central American migrants led to scare chyrons on Fox News, Team Biden has aggressively moved to break his promise, lowering his actual target for 2021 to 62,000 and then admitting he wouldn't come close to meeting even that. At least before the Afghan crisis, Biden was on track for an even worse year in 2021 for refugee admission than Trump's last-year low point -- despite the fact that giving all political asylum seekers a fair hearing is both U.S. law and an international human right.

Biden's Haitian policy sums up his muddled and so far failed efforts to reverse Trump's legacy. Even before the second deadly and devastating earthquake in little more than a decade struck the island nation this summer, Biden's Department of Homeland Security extended Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, to Haitians in the United States threatened with possible deportation because of Haiti's economic and political crises. Yet just weeks later, the Biden administration invoked a public health order known as Title 42 to fill a plane with 86 of the first Haitians to arrive at the Mexican border and to send them back to the country that other U.S. officials had deemed too dangerous, and is now recovering from a natural disaster.

"That ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] would continue to carry out the mass deportations of our Haitian neighbors -- with Haiti in the midst of its worst political, public health and economic crises yet -- is cruel and callous," Democratic U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts said, and that was before the news that Biden wants to use Title 42 to move the thousands now trapped in Del Rio. People on the left and groups like the ACLU were righteously outraged last year at Trump for using that provision and the thinly veiled excuse of the COVID-19 crisis to deny asylum seekers their fundamental rights. That Biden is continuing this practice -- erecting walls to human suffering instead of building bridges -- is profoundly disappointing.

"The situation in Del Rio wouldn't be happening if the [administration] had cleaved to principle [and] focused on universal access to asylum in an orderly manner through ports of entry," Clara Long, Human Rights Watch's associate director for migrant policy and climate, wrote in a devastating Twitter thread on Saturday. "Instead its border policies are chaotic [and] unpredictable [and] people who need protection don't know what to do."

NOT WHETHER, JUST HOW:

Meaning four.  Some institutions are racist because they pursue policies and practices that have a different effect on different races even though they don't target any of them deliberately.

As before, if there is a problem here it lies with the policies and practices, not with the institutions per se.  But is there a problem here?  That depends on what is meant by having a different effect. 

Consider two cases.  Although I wouldn't call a policy racist that for purely actuarial reasons denied health insurance coverage for sickle cell anemia, it would certainly be racially calloused, and ought to be reformed because it would defeat the social purpose of health insurance.  On the other hand, although black youths are statistically more likely to commit certain kinds of crimes, in this case the problem lies with behavior.  We don't need to stop arresting people who commit crimes, although we ought to use the same standards for every race.

TRUMP LITE:

The U.S. flew Haitians camped in a Texas border town back to their homeland Sunday and tried blocking others from crossing the border from Mexico in a massive show of force that signaled the beginning of what could be one of America's swiftest, large-scale expulsions of migrants or refugees in decades.

More than 320 migrants arrived in Port-au-Prince on three flights, and Haiti said six flights were expected Tuesday. In all, U.S. authorities moved to expel many of the more 12,000 migrants camped around a bridge in Del Rio, Texas, after crossing from Ciudad Acuña, Mexico.

The U.S. plans to begin seven expulsion flights daily on Wednesday, four to Port-au-Prince and three to Cap-Haitien, according to a U.S. official who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly. Flights will continue to depart from San Antonio but authorities may add El Paso, the official said.

The only obvious parallel for such an expulsion without an opportunity to seek asylum was in 1992 when the Coast Guard intercepted Haitian refugees at sea, said Yael Schacher, senior U.S. advocate at Refugees International whose doctoral studies focused on the history of U.S. asylum law.

Similarly large numbers of Mexicans have been sent home during peak years of immigration but over land and not so suddenly.

AND XI IS NO W:

Evergrande, the world's most indebted property developer, is crumbling under the weight of more than $300 billion of debt and warned more than once it could default. Banks have reportedly declined to extend new loans to buyers of uncompleted Evergrande residential projects, while ratings agencies have repeatedly downgraded the firm, citing its liquidity crunch.

The financial position of the other Chinese property developers also took a hit following rules outlined by the Chinese government to rein in borrowing costs of the real estate firms. The measures included placing a cap on debt in relation to a company's cash flows, assets and capital levels.

While the struggling developers are tiny individually, compared to Evergrande, they make up about 10%-15% of the total market on aggregate, Zeng said. She warned that a collapse could result in a "systemic" spillover to other parts of the economy.

"Once it starts, it takes much more from a policy perspective to stop it than to prevent it from happening," she added.

SHOULD HAVE SAVED NUKES FOR MOSCOW:

The first bombing raid against Tokyo occurred on November 24th. The city was 1,500 miles from the Marianas. Brigadier-General Emmett O'Donnell flying the 'Dauntless Dotty' led 111 B-29's against the Musashima engine factory. The planes dropped their bombs from 30,000 feet and came across the first of a number of problems - accuracy. The B-29's were fitted with an excellent bomb aimer - the Norden - but it could not make out its target through low cloud. Also flying at 30,000 feet meant that the planes frequently flew in a jet stream wind that was between 100 and 200 mph which further complicated bomb aiming. Of the 111 planes on the raid, only 24 found the target.

In January 1945, Curtis LeMay flew to the Marianas to take control of 21st Bomber Command. The 20th Bomber Command, which had been based in India and China, was also transferred to the Marianas and LeMay was given command of this as well. Both units became the 20th Air Force. By March 1945, over 300 B-29's were taking part in raids over Japan.

However, flights over Japan remained risky as there were very many young Japanese men who were willing to take on the risk of attacking a B-29, despite its awesome firepower (12 x .50 inch guns and 1 cannon). When Japan introduced its 'George' and 'Jack' fighters, the number of casualties for the 20th Air Force increased and the damage done by the bombers was not really worth the losses. In March 1945, the capture of Iwo Jima meant that P-51 Mustangs could be used to escort the B-29's. P-61 'Black Widows' gave night time protection to the bombers during night raids. The Mustang was more than a match for the 'Jack' and 'George' fighters and daylight bombing raids over Japan became less hazardous with such protection.

LeMay still experienced one major problem though. The investment the Allies were getting for the number of bombs dropped was small. The bombers were not having a discernable impact on manufacturing in Japan. Pinpoint bombing was simply not giving the returns that LeMay wanted. He was also acutely aware that any potential invasion of Japan would be massively costly for the Americans if the Japanese Home Defence Force was well-equipped with reasonably modern weapons. If the manufacturing industries of Japan could not be destroyed, then there was no doubt in his mind, that the force would be well equipped - to the detriment of the Americans.

LeMay, having already seen the success of a fire raid on Hankow when B-29's flew much lower than their normal 30,000 feet and dropped incendiary bombs.

LeMay decided that Tokyo would be the first target for a massive raid on Japan itself. The raid was planned for the night of March 10th and the B-29's were to fly at between 5,000 and 8,000 feet. As Japan was not expected to send up night fighters, the guns from the planes were taken off as was anything that was deemed not useful to the raid. By effectively stripping the plane of non-essentials, more bombs could be carried for the raid. Along with Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka and Nagoya were also targeted. As each had flourishing cottage industries that fed the factories of each city, LeMay hoped to starve these factories of required parts. He also hoped that the fires that would be started would also destroy the larger factories as well. As the target for the raid was so large - a city area - the B-29's did not have to fly in strict formation, especially as little resistance was expected from the Japanese.

The incendiary bombs dropped were known as M-69's. These weighed just 6 lbs each and were dropped in a cluster of 38 within a container. One B-29 usually carried 37 of these containers, which equated to just over 1,400 bombs per plane. The bombs were set free from the container at 5,000 feet by a time fuse and then exploded on contact with the ground. When they did this, they spread a jelly-petrol compound that was highly inflammable.

For the attack on Tokyo, over 300 B-29's were involved. They took off for a flight that would get them to Tokyo just before dawn, thus giving them the cover of darkness, but with daylight for the return journey to the Marianas. They flew at 7,000 feet. This in itself may have baffled the city's defenders as they would have been used to the B-29's flying at 30,000 feet.

The raid had a massive impact on Tokyo. Photo-reconnaissance showed that 16 square miles of the city had been destroyed. Sixteen major factories - ironically scheduled for a future daylight raid - were destroyed along with many cottage industries. In parts of the city, the fires joined up to create a firestorm. The fires burned so fiercely and they consumed so much oxygen, that people in the locality suffocated. It is thought that 100,000 people were killed in the raid and another 100,000 injured. The Americans lost 14 B-29's; under the 5% rate of loss that was considered to be 'acceptable'.

THAT ALONE MAKES BREXIT WORTHWHILE:

According to a new article by Jenny Gross at The New York Times, Great Britain has announced its intention to return to the system of imperial measurements that it's used in the past. What does that mean, in practice? As Gross writes, shops in the U.K. would be able to sell good measured in pounds and ounces only, rather than showing measurements in the metric system as well.

THE TALIBAN ISN'T VERY GOOD AT THIS WHOLE TALIBANNING THING:

THE END OF IDENTITY:

Saul of Tarsus, an observant Jew who was renamed Paul after his dramatic conversion to Christianity, claimed a divine calling to bring the message of Jesus to those outside the Jewish faith, that is, to the Gentiles. His mission ended here when, according to tradition, he was executed by the authorities of Rome. Hence, the historical irony: Paul's letter to the believers in Rome, the theological loadstar of the Christian church, helped to topple the regime that could not tolerate his uncompromising message of redemption.

A relentless evangelist with almost reckless courage, Paul is the dominant figure in the early decades of the Christian movement. Of the 27 documents that compose the New Testament, 21 are letters; 13 of them are attributed to Paul. His Letter to the Romans stands apart. Written around 57 a.d., near the end of his career, it contains the most thorough exposition of Christian doctrine in the Bible. It also advances concepts considered utterly radical for their time -- ideas that would shape the course of Western civilization and the American political order.

In his Social Contract (1762), Jean Jacques Rousseau claimed that "Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains." Paul disagreed. To the apostle, every person was born into a state of spiritual slavery and death. Everyone stood guilty before a holy God, no matter what their achievements or circumstances: "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (Romans 3:23). His second proposition remains as controversial today as when it first appeared: Jesus was sent by God to set people free, making salvation available to everyone through faith in his death and resurrection. "If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved" (Romans 10:9). The last proposition, which follows from the others, involves an astonishing universalism. "There is no difference between Jew and Gentile -- the same Lord is Lord of all and richly blesses all who call on him" (Romans 10:12). The sacrifice of Jesus renders null and void the deep, cultural divisions within the human family; all are welcomed into God's new spiritual community.

In a way no ancient text had contemplated, the Letter to the Romans introduced two great themes into the bloodstream of the West: human equality and human freedom. No ideas in the history of political thought would prove more transformative and ennobling.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Saudi Arabia said it plans to overhaul the kingdom's flagging education system to better prepare citizens to find jobs and tackle intolerance.

The revamp will cover all levels of education, from early childhood to adult learning opportunities, according to a summary of the Human Capability Development Program announced by the official Saudi Press Agency on Wednesday.

NO WORRIES; THE rIGHT HATES LAOTIANS TOO:

Bats dwelling in limestone caves in northern Laos were found to carry coronaviruses that share a key feature with SARS-CoV-2, moving scientists closer to pinpointing the cause of Covid-19.

Researchers at France's Pasteur Institute and the University of Laos looked for viruses similar to the one that causes Covid among hundreds of horseshoe bats. They found three with closely matched receptor binding domains -- the part of the coronavirus's spike protein used to bind to human ACE-2, the enzyme it targets to cause an infection.

The finding, reported in a paper released Friday that's under consideration for publication by a Nature journal, shows that viruses closely related to SARS-CoV-2 exist in nature, including in several Rhinolophus, or horseshoe bat, species. The research supports the hypothesis that the pandemic began from a spillover of a bat-borne virus. About 1,000 such infections may be occurring daily in southern China and Southeast Asia in areas with dense populations of bats from the Rhinolophus genus, a study Tuesday found. 

BETTER GOVERNANCE:

California's ability to reduce the spread of the virus lies partly in vaccinations. Among residents 18 and older, 69% are fully vaccinated, according to the New York Times vaccination tracker.

That's good, but nowhere near good enough, said Stephen Shortell, dean emeritus at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health, who said it may take a 90% vaccination rate to achieve herd immunity because of the delta variant.

California is the 19th state by vaccination percentage.

"We are not the most vaccinated state," said Dr. Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo, chair of UCSF's Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics. "But we are also a state that has not completely abandoned the other mitigation methods."

California requires mask wearing at schools, on public transportation, and in hospitals, nursing homes and prisons. Masks in other indoor settings are recommended.

The Bay Area has been far more aggressive than the state. In eight of the nine counties, masks are required in nearly all indoor public settings -- restaurants and bars being the main exceptions, though San Francisco, Berkeley and Contra Costa County require people to be vaccinated to enter those venues. Case rates in the region have plunged faster in recent weeks than those statewide.

Experts say many residents go beyond the rules.

"I think in California, there is a social norm around masking," said Arnab Mukherjea, chair of Cal State East Bay's public health department. "If you go outside, 75% of people are wearing masks."

JUST MORE CASUALTIES OF THE lONG wAR:

For France, of course, the cancellation of its submarine deal is a painful humiliation, and a severe blow to thousands of workers in its hi-tech defence industry. It also comes at a sensitive moment politically, with Emmanuel Macron keen to demonstrate his international standing ahead of the 2022 presidential election. Instead, France now looks rather lonely on the strategic landscape alongside the more homogeneous and collectively powerful AUKUS trio.

But, rather than take the high road, a furious French reaction has compared Biden to Donald Trump and argued that this defence industrial failure for France should drive an acceleration towards European - for which, read EU - strategic autonomy.

This implies France sees European strategic autonomy as protecting and extending its own sovereign power and industrial interests rather than as a process for EU members to achieve more together in security and foreign policy than they can alone - thereby undermining rather than enhancing its case.

The gap between European strategic rhetoric and practical action was further highlighted by the AUKUS partnership being announced the evening before the EU launched its own Indo-Pacific strategy, and on the same day as China refused to allow a German frigate its first planned port visit to Shanghai.

There is still a long way to go before the new submarine deal becomes reality. Australia needs to extricate itself from the French deal, decide how to secure the highly enriched uranium to power its new nuclear submarines, decide with the US and UK the division of labour and technology transfer of production, and assuage the International Atomic Energy Agency's concerns about the precedent this deal sets. The fruits of this dramatic announcement will, therefore, be a long time in coming.

But, however the details play out, 15 September 2021 was a consequential day. The AUKUS announcement showed that China's growing hard power is now eliciting a genuinely tough and structural political-military reaction.

THE TRUMP MODEL:

Protests intensify at China Evergrande Group offices across the country as the developer falls further behind on promises to more than 70,000 investors. Construction of unfinished properties with enough floor space to cover three-fourths of Manhattan grinds to a halt, leaving more than a million homebuyers in limbo.

Fire sales pummel an already shaky real estate market, squeezing other developers and rippling through a supply chain that accounts for more than a quarter of Chinese economic output. Covid-weary consumers retrench even further, and the risk of popular discontent rises during a politically sensitive transition period for President Xi Jinping. Credit-market stress spreads from lower-rated property companies to stronger peers and banks. Global investors who bought $527 billion of Chinese stocks and bonds in the 15 months through June begin to sell.

While it's impossible to know for sure what would happen if Beijing allows Evergrande's downward spiral to continue unabated, China watchers are gaming out worst-case scenarios as they contemplate how much pain the Communist Party is willing to tolerate. Pressure to intervene is growing as signs of financial contagion increase. 

"As a systemically important developer, an Evergrande bankruptcy would cause problems for the entire property sector," said Shen Meng, director of Chanson & Co., a Beijing-based boutique investment bank. "Debt recovery efforts by creditors would lead to fire sales of assets and hit housing prices. Profit margins across the supply chain would be squeezed. It would also lead to panic selling in capital markets."

YEAH, BUT THEY'RE BLACK!:

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

In another meeting, Trump joked: "You know, Jared Kushner, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family, is more loyal to Israel than to the United States."

HAVING DEFEATED THE SEGREGATION CANDIDATE:

SB9 allows homeowners to build duplexes and fourplexes on most residential lots that would have previously been zoned for just one home. SB10 would make it much easier for cities to rezone land for small multi-family projects near public transit and jobs. Together, they would allow for denser housing in a state where more than two-thirds of the land is zoned for single-family homes, and where millions of additional homes are needed to meet demand, according to recent estimates.

"These bills, over time, will create more housing," says Scott Wiener, the California senator who advanced SB10 and has been a champion for upzoning in the state. "There won't be an immediate shift. Zoning reform is about planting seeds for the future."

Although housing advocates are divided over how directly SB9 and 10 will spur development that's truly affordable, there's widespread agreement among both factions that a Newsom loss could have stalled progress on alleviating the state's housing crisis. 

When the Democratic governor took office in 2019, he set out a goal of building 3.5 million homes by 2025. Two years and a pandemic later, the state has more than 150,000 unhoused residents, and has made little progress towards that high production goal. But progress has come in other arenas: After repurposing vacant hotel rooms during the pandemic into housing for the homeless, Newsom recently announced plans to invest $12 billion of California's budget surplus into expanding that program, while investing in permanent homeless housing, homelessness prevention and rental support programs. Another $10.3 billion will go into building affordable housing statewide. 

Rob Wiener, the executive director of the California Coalition for Rural Housing, said before the vote that a Newsom loss would have been a death knell for "any kind of affordable housing strategy of substance and any transformational housing policy changes for the next year." Although Wiener questions the effectiveness of SB9 and 10, he said none of the almost 50 candidates had a housing policy that "really makes any sense and that will make any demonstrable difference."

Two of Newsom's highest-profile challengers from the right, radio show host Larry Elder and former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, promised to address homelessness by clearing outdoor homeless encampments and building more homeless shelters. But they had less to say about creating long-term housing opportunities for the unhoused. Elder and Faulconer also opposed reform to single-family zoning on the campaign trail, pledging to keep multi-family developments out of low-density neighborhoods. 

THANKS, W!:

A powerful mix of insecurity and traditional prejudice against more liberal female politicians put Awatef Rasheed off running for parliament when she returned to Iraq in 2014 after years abroad.

Seven years later, with Iraq less unstable, Rasheed has decided to contest a Oct. 10 election for the assembly, even if abuse and intimidation of women would-be lawmakers persist.

Today, she is one of the 951 women, representing close to 30% of the total number of candidates, running for election to the country's 329-seat Council of Representatives.

Passing a new domestic violence law, and more representation for women in the executive branch of government, are among the goals of some of the would-be female lawmakers.

THE nEAR eNEMY:

Three explosions that targeted Taliban vehicles in Jalalabad -- the capital of Afghanistan's eastern Nangarhar province -- have left at least two dead and 20 wounded, a health official and local media reported on Saturday. 

At least one of the blasts targeted a police vehicle that was carrying some Taliban fighters, one source, who did not wish to be named, told Germany's dpa news agency.

A hospital source in Nangarhar province said at least two bodies and 19 wounded people have been taken to the hospital so far, dpa reported. [...]

Also on Saturday, a sticky bomb exploded in Kabul injuring two people, according to police officials.

FEED YOUR MIND (self-reference alert):

 I would argue that chess is of positive and absolute social benefit, and that it would be a major step forward in the solution of social problems and unrest in urban civilisations, if chess were not only encouraged, but also added to school sports curricula, like cricket, swimming, hockey, football or rugby in England.

The American thinker, Robert Ardrey (1908-1980) in his work The Social Contract -- not to be confused with the book of the same name by the 18th-century apostle of the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) -- suggested that in all higher animals, including humans, there are basic inborn needs for three satisfactions: identity, stimulation and security. Ardrey described them in terms of their opposites: anonymity, boredom and anxiety, maintaining that a society or government so designed, as to present its members or citizens with equal opportunity to achieve identity, stimulation and security, will survive, whereas one that fails in this psychological function will, in the long run, be selected out.

Ardrey wrote that, like some monstrous whale devouring plankton by the acre, so the organisation of modern life devours the individual. Specialisation reduces the individual to a needle lost in a bureaucratic and organisational haystack. Classification will place the individual with all beans of equal size.

In support of Ardrey, I challenge any reader who has had a complaint or a query directed to a large organisation, such as a bank, airline or some branch of government, to deny that they have been at some time ignored, or given a circular, quasi-Kafkaesque run-around, leading, via multiple buck-passing, back to the point of origin.

I propose that mind sports, such as chess, bridge and draughts, made available in schools and clubs, can help to solve such problems as erosion of identity. Winning a game does wonders for one's sense of personal identity and victory does tend to cancel out memory of the losses. Likewise stimulation, and where the individual is personally committed, this seems to me a stimulation of a generally higher order than the vicarious variety provided by mass tribal attendance at, for example, a football match. What can be more stimulating than personal involvement in an intellectual struggle, where the result depends entirely on you alone and not on some umpire or referee or touch judge who might rob you of a well-merited victory by a fatuous decision, as so regularly happens in football for example, even with the dreaded VAR.

In chess you can clearly see the outcome of your efforts and, above all, you are personally responsible for the result. In this sense, the Stakhanovite chess promoter, Malcolm Pein, with his charity Chess in Schools and Communities, has performed inspirational miracles in getting chess accepted in mainstream education.

With the problem of increasingly empty time (i.e. a potential stimulation-vacuum) we need an activity that occupies time in a meaningful, stimulating and identity-boosting fashion and that will also act as a counterweight to the often drab and repetitive tasks of mundane social existence. So why not encourage chess in the young? It will do more for them than "waste" mtheir time.

An article in The Times newspaper of September 7 Chess Mania lures millions of players to get on board helpfully hammered home many of these points. The author Jack Malvern pointed out that chess sets are selling out quickly, as the TV hit Queen's Gambit and the pandemic , causing empty time, are together causing demand to surge in dramatic fashion.

Anya Taylor-Joy's portrayal of the chess prodigy could have been a short-term boost, but insiders assert that enthusiasm is still growing at alarming speed, while the pandemic has forced people to find new ways to entertain themselves, and thereby driven vast numbers to play and follow chess online. Thus, Chess.com  , the gaming platform, according to The Times, has 72 million members worldwide, up from 50 million in December 2020 and a colossal increase from the 20 million of four years ago. Lichess , a free chess gaming service, recorded 5 million games in March 2020, but had shot to 100 million a year later.

The annual Norway Grandmaster Tournament attracted 2.5 million television viewers, in Norway alone.  The Times went on to catalogue a further series of plus points in favour of chess, including:

• The boxers Lennox Lewis and Mike Tyson, actors Arnold Schwarzenegger, Stephen Fry, Humphrey Bogart and Director Stanley Kubrick were, or are, committed chess fans.

• Chess players burn upwards of 6,000 calories per game during tournaments based on breathing rates, increased blood pressure and muscle contractions, according to Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University researcher (2019).

• Learning chess improved reading test scores and reading performance in primary school pupils, a two-year study in the US found in 2011.

• Playing chess has the potential to raise a person's IQ scores and strengthen problem-solving skills, according to research by Peter Dauvergne, Professor of International Relations at The University of British Columbia.

• Elderly people who engage in mentally challenging games, such as chess and bridge, are two and a half times less likely to develop dementia, a US study found in 2006 (Professor Joe Verghese of the Albert Einstein Institute of New York).

• Chess could even enhance the creative part of the brain. The Times article cites a 2017 study in India, saying it helped to give children "the ability to think divergently".

THE WRITER'S ESCHEWING REALISM THIS SEASON:

Just a day after testing positive for COVID-19, a Florida Republican official who battled against mask mandates, attacked the vaccine, and railed at CDC officials has died in Tampa.

Gregg Prentice, who was 61, led the Hillsborough County Election Integrity Committee--and his sudden death has sent the local GOP scrambling as it no longer has access to essential campaign finance software without his help.

It may be recalled that one of the chief GOP arguments against the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was that it would institute bureaucratic "death panels" to determine, in the words of former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, whether someone was "worthy of healthcare."

The claim was always pure fabrication. But something akin to death panels are a reality now, specifically in COVID-stricken, and deep red, Idaho.

Hospitals there have become so overwhelmed by COVID patients, almost all of them unvaccinated, that the state has activated its "crisis standards of care." What that means, according to the state Department of Health and Welfare, is that the normal triage standards, in which the more seriously sick or injured are prioritized, are thrown out.

ALWAYS HELPFUL WHEN THE rIGHT CLARIFIES IT'S THINKING ABOUT BLACKS:

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy on Friday urged President Biden to deploy the National Guard in response to the Haitian migrant surge at Del Rio, Texas which has overwhelmed the small town and has officials describing the situation as "out of control."

THE BLUE BRAND:

GONNA NEED MORE IMMIGRANTS TO BUILD THEM:

California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Thursday approved two measures to slice through local zoning ordinances as the most populous state struggles with soaring home prices, an affordable housing shortage and stubborn homelessness.

He signed the most prominent legislation despite nearly 250 cities objecting that it will, by design, undermine local planning and control.

The outcome marks the latest battle between what's come to be thought of as NIMBY vs. YIMBY. While most agree there is an affordable housing shortage, proposed construction often runs into "not in my backyard" opposition.

"The housing affordability crisis is undermining the California Dream for families across the state, and threatens our long-term growth and prosperity," Newsom said in announcing his approval. "Making a meaningful impact on this crisis will take bold investments, strong collaboration ... and political courage from our leaders and communities to do the right thing and build housing for all."

He also announced the state will put $1.75 billion into what his administration is calling a new California Housing Accelerator, which he said will speed building 6,500 affordable multi-family units that had been stalled for lack of tax-exempt bonds and low-income housing tax credits.

It's part of $22 billion that the state plans to spend to spur new housing and ease homelessness along with the new laws.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

Analysis of the data by the Daily Dot revealed the names, addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses of those who registered web domains for a range of sites related to everything from the QAnon conspiracy theory to forums for supporters of former President Donald Trump. The data was also verified on Wednesday evening by the Record.

The Daily Dot spoke with an individual listed as the registrar for TheDonald, an offshoot of a pro-Trump forum banned from Reddit last year, that operates from the domain Patriots.win. The individual confirmed that the information listed in the breach was his but claimed that he had distanced himself from the site.

The original TheDonald subreddit, which boasted nearly 800,000 members, was removed by Reddit for repeatedly violating the platform's rules against harassment, hate speech, and content manipulation.

The forum's replacement at Patriots.win has also found itself embroiled in controversy following the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol after members were found to have discussed hanging and beheading politicians.

Another individual listed as running a knockoff version of 8chan also confirmed to the Daily Dot that the information listed in the breach was accurate over the phone.

A Linux engineer tasked with conducting an impact assessment on behalf of a client who uses Epik's services told the Daily Dot that the breach was one of the worst he had ever seen. The engineer did not have permission to speak about the breach by his employer and was granted anonymity by the Daily Dot.

"They are fully compromised end-to-end," they said. "Maybe the worst I've ever seen in my 20-year career."

The engineer pointed the Daily Dot to what they described as Epik's "entire primary database," which contains hosting account usernames and passwords, SSH keys, and even some credit card numbers--all stored in plaintext.

The data also includes Auth-Codes, passcodes that are needed to transfer a domain name between registrars. The engineer stated that with all the data in the leak, which also included admin passwords for WordPress logins, any attacker could easily take over the websites of countless Epik customers.

THAT'S GIRARDIANISM, NOT CHRISTIANITY:

Christian Passover Seders are often connected to the idea that the Last Supper was a Passover meal. But the arguments for observing Yom Kippur are less obvious. While Yom Kippur is mentioned in the Bible -- as is a Passover meal, at greater length -- Christian theology generally understands Jesus's death to have fulfilled and transcended religious laws.

While most Christians believe that moral laws, such as the Ten Commandments, still apply to them, they believe that ceremonial and civil laws do not -- which includes keeping kosher, mixing fibers and observing all festivals, including Yom Kippur.

Romans 10:4 says that "Christ is the culmination of the law so that there might be righteousness for everyone who believes." Hebrews 8:13 is even more clear: "By calling this covenant 'new,' he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear."

This is particularly relevant when it comes to atonement; Christian theology posits that Jesus died for the sins of humanity, and that everyone is thus already forgiven through his sacrifice. This means that a day of atonement, every year, is superfluous.

So why do Christians observe Yom Kippur? It varies, depending on the congregation and discipline. Some do so in an attempt to connect more deeply with the life and practices of Jesus. As Jon Levenson, a professor of Hebrew Bible at Harvard Divinity School, told the JTA, "There's this notion that church tradition has gotten farther and farther from the real word of God, and that somehow the Jews and their Bible is closer to the real word of God."

Others focus on the holiday because they see it as theologically significant, albeit in a different way than Jews do. Jesse Rogers, a Twitter user who was defending Christian Yom Kippur in the comments of a tweet, commented that his congregation's observance centers around meditating on Jesus's love for "even those who killed him." He also said that "every Yom Kippur dinner ends with the sharing of snacks and a small prayer."

This, of course, made me curious; Yom Kippur dinner? I reached out to better understand his practice.

Via Twitter direct message, Rogers explained that his congregation focuses on the idea of Jesus as the scapegoat. This term comes from Leviticus, which directs how to make a sin offering on Yom Kippur with two goats, one of which will be chosen as a sacrifice and slaughtered to atone for sins. 

YOU CAME TO THE WRONG PLACE FOR COHERENCE, SON:

One of the best arguments against Biden's plan is that it's unfair to people who, through prior infection, have developed natural immunity to the virus. McCarthy estimates that 40 million Americans are in this category. But by his own calculation, that leaves another 50 million who have been neither vaccinated nor infected. Furthermore, studies show that vaccination boosts immunity even in people who were previously infected. But the central problem with accepting natural immunity as an alternative to vaccination is that the immunity would have to be verified. That would require an antibody test or access to the employee's medical records, both of which Republicans oppose. At a press conference in Florida on Tuesday, DeSantis and other critics of Biden's plan accused the president of ignoring natural immunity, yet they vowed to tighten COVID privacy rules because "your medical health records are your business, not the government's."

Another common refrain among Republicans is that if unvaccinated people lose their jobs, their children will suffer. J.D. Vance, the Trumpist author who's running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio, says vaccine refusers won't be able to feed their families. But McCarthy, Abbott, and other Republicans say just the opposite: that mandates will hurt employers because jobs are so abundant that vaccine refusers will just quit and easily find other work. At the press conference in Florida, DeSantis accused Biden of threatening people's livelihoods, but other speakers said the mandate would fail because workers who opposed vaccination already had other job offers.

Despite their outcry over mandatory vaccinations for COVID, Republicans express no objections to vaccine mandates for other diseases, such as polio, measles, and hepatitis. When they're asked why, they suggest that COVID isn't as worrisome. It's "very different from polio, [which] has very devastating effects," says Ricketts. This is spectacularly false, and Republicans know it. At the DeSantis press conference, Rep. Kat Cammack--who has belittled COVID and downplayed the importance of vaccination--insisted that as a matter of loyalty, unvaccinated first responders should be allowed to keep their jobs, since they had bravely risked their lives by coming to the aid of numerous people infected with the virus. But if the virus posed such a risk to these heroes, why wouldn't it pose the same risk to anyone whom they, as carriers, later encountered? And for that reason, shouldn't they be vaccinated?

Politicians on the right also argue that COVID vaccines, unlike vaccines for other diseases, should remain voluntary because they're widely distrusted. But this argument is circular, because the same politicians are inciting that distrust. Last week, in a statement against Biden's mandate, Sen. Ron Johnson said the president had failed to "answer basic questions regarding [COVID] vaccine safety." On Monday, Rep. Ronny Jackson told Fox News viewers that the vaccines' long-term effects were unknown and that Jackson had agreed to get a COVID shot only under duress. On Tuesday, the first speaker at DeSantis' anti-mandate press conference asserted, falsely, that "the vaccine changes your RNA." DeSantis, standing next to him, said nothing.

CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

Unlike a lot of parents with young kids in the city, I never longed to move to the suburbs during those weeks of being cooped up in lockdown. At the time I put it down, absurdly, to a combination of loyalty to the city, lack of opportunity to leave and, as I saw it, my own superior tolerance for discomfort. Now that the place is jumping again, I realise that a much larger part of the experience had to do with the changed dynamics of the city. If lockdown brought on feelings of claustrophobia, these were offset by the bizarre - and there's no denying it, thrilling - experience of living in an emptied-out city. New York shorn of visitors was a different, and in some ways easier, place to live, where, even at rush hour, you could time your movements around the city in increments of 10 minutes rather than hours. Those numbers crept up but, over an endless summer of few tourists and modest plans, the spell remained largely unbroken.

For businesses, Broadway, city finances and the rest, this September boom is welcome and necessary. At street level, however, struggling for room on the pavement or an inch of space on the subway, it's hard to avoid asking why we live like this. The airlessness of lockdown, when no one could get away from their families, has been replaced with a sense of proximity to the city's 8.5 million people, all of us trying to get to the same place, at the same time, on the same bus.

After school on Monday, I picked up my kids and we fought our way across Amsterdam Avenue to stand at the bus stop, where 15 other people milled around waiting. The bus was full when it came, but we all shoved ourselves on. Somewhere at the back, a woman squawked. Someone else screamed to keep the doors open. The bus lurched to a stop every two blocks and, after converging with the traffic on Broadway, ground to a complete halt. A woman crammed in next to me apologised for pushing past and said: "Watch out for that guy in black, he just touched me and said, 'You look good.'" New York was back, as they say.

GIVE US YOUR LIBERALS:

[I]n Afghanistan's rural districts like Baraki Barak, where Taliban rules don't differ that much from existing conservative customs, the calculation is different, particularly in the mostly Pashtun southern and eastern provinces. To villagers here, the collapse of the Afghan republic and the U.S. withdrawal mean, above all, that the guns have fallen silent for the first time in two decades.

"There was war here day and night, every day. It never ceased. The land wasn't ours, the fields weren't ours, the house wasn't ours, we didn't even have honor," said village elder Daud Shah Khan, as he stood by the remains of the wrecked shrine. "Now, there is peace. And when someone doesn't feel danger, doesn't fear war, and can walk with a peace of mind, he is happy even if he is hungry," he said.

Sixteen members of his family, Mr. Khan added, were killed during the war: three nieces, three nephews and 10 cousins. "Their graves are over there," he said, pointing at the cemetery in the dusty field, where faded white and green flags fluttered above small gravestones.

While Kabul was hit by occasional suicide bombings and other insurgent attacks during the 20-year American presence, life in the Afghan capital remained relatively normal throughout that time, with busy streets, restaurants open late into the night and bustling markets.

Districts like Baraki Barak, by contrast, were the site of constant skirmishes between the Taliban, Afghan government forces and, until last year, American troops. Strategically located on the southern approaches to Kabul, Baraki Barak used to house one of the largest U.S. bases in Afghanistan, Forward Operating Base Shank, that at one time endured more frequent rocket attacks than any other U.S. outpost. [...]

One of the men detained in the raid was Qandagha Momand, a 35-year-old shopkeeper. Three days into his detention in Kabul, he suddenly noticed his prison guards ditching their uniforms to don traditional Afghan clothes.

"They dressed like us, left their jobs, and freed us," Mr. Momand said. He returned to his home in Baraki Barak to find that three of the family's cows had been killed in the raid.

"In the past, we couldn't go outside after 5 or 6 p.m., we were afraid. We didn't know who were our enemies and who were our friends," he said. "Now, we have freedom. The democracy has ended."

As in many Afghan villages, some of Mr. Momand's neighbors have served in the Afghan army and police, while others joined the Taliban. The Taliban have proclaimed an amnesty, and some of these former soldiers have been back to their homes after Aug. 15. "We're Muslims, humans and Afghans, our hearts are wide enough," said Mr. Khan, the village elder. "We forgive them all."

THANKS, DONALD!:

Amid a surge in new coronavirus cases and hospitalizations that are overwhelming medical facilities, the Idaho Department of Health and Wellness on Thursday announced that the state is experiencing a hospital resource crisis, and strained hospitals are allowed to ration health care.

Under crisis standards of care, hospitals are able to determine how to prioritize care based on patients doctors believe have the best chances of survival. "In other words, someone who is otherwise healthy and would recover more rapidly may get treated or have access to a ventilator before someone who is not likely to recover," the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare said.

GLOBALIZATION IS ANGLOFICATION:

Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have embarked on the most important development in Western security arrangements since the formation of NATO, leaving their Five Eyes and EU partners scrambling. The Aukus deal is a renewed commitment to uphold freedom, democracy, and the rule of law in the Indo-Pacific - it's also a strong signal to China before next week's meeting of the 'Quad' of Australia, India, Japan and the US.

The agreement, announced earlier this week, represents a significant step up in the security relationship between the three allies and demonstrates the importance of shared values among friends. It is the West's first serious response to China's increasingly antagonistic behaviour in the South China Sea and the broader Indo-Pacific.

AUKUS promises to deliver greater joint capabilities and interoperability between the three partners, with a focus on sharing cyber, artificial intelligence, and quantum technologies. Australia will receive technology and support to build its first fleet of nuclear submarines as part of the deal - the first nation apart from Britain to gain access to US nuclear propulsion technology since 1958

In time this will be seen as both a defining moment for the Biden presidency and is a significant win for the UK and Australia. For other nations in the Indo-Pacific, it will be interpreted as a renewed commitment to upholding international law and norms of territorial sovereignty.

TRUMP LITE:

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that the Biden administration may not expel migrants under a Title 42 public health order.

Judge Emmet Sullivan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued the ruling, which will not take effect for another 14 days. Under the Title 42 policy implemented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, border agents were authorized to immediately expel migrants back into Mexico in order to prevent the spread of coronavirus.

"In view of the wide availability of testing, vaccines, and other minimization measures, the Court is not convinced that the transmission of COVID-19 during border processing cannot be significantly mitigated," Sullivan wrote in his ruling. "Indeed, the government has successfully implemented mitigation measures with regard to processing unaccompanied minors in order to minimize risk of COVID-19 transmission."

The Title 42 policy was initially instituted under the Trump administration at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, and continued during the Biden administration. 

"SAW A PEANUT STAND, HEARD A RUBBER BAND":

In a statement, the company said the aircraft's trip on Wednesday marked "the beginning of an intense flight-testing phase" that would involve the collection of performance data on its electrical power and propulsion system.

According to Rolls-Royce, the airplane -- dubbed the "Spirit of Innovation" -- utilized a 400 kilowatt electric powertrain "with the most power-dense battery pack ever assembled for an aircraft." Eventually, the firm wants the aircraft's speed to exceed 300 miles per hour.

SUBLIME:

NEW: Prosecutor John Durham has told a cyber lawyer -- who works for the firm that repped Clinton campaign -- that he wants to indict him on suspicion of lying about who he repped when he told F.B.I. in '16 about potential ties b/w Trump and Russia. https://t.co/KiSUIeGuzh

— Michael S. Schmidt (@nytmike) September 15, 2021

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

More than 60% of American parents want their kids to learn about the ongoing effects of slavery and racism as part of their K-12 education, according to a new USA TODAY/Ipsos poll.

But just half of parents support teaching critical race theory in schools - even though the theory's main premise is that racism continues to permeate society. About 4 in 10 parents support restrictions on schools' ability to teach critical race theory.

INEXPLICABLE!

The map on the left is the recall results. The one on the right is the current COVID situation. pic.twitter.com/5An0GV13hg

— Eric Ball (@DrEricBall) September 15, 2021

WINNING THE 2024 PRIMARY:

More nursing home residents and staff died of COVID-19 in Florida during a four-week period ending Aug. 22 than in any other state in the country, according to an AARP analysis released today.

Florida accounted for 21 percent of all nursing home resident deaths due to the virus nationwide.

THE POST-TRUTH rIGHT (profanity alert):

LAST WEEK'S HATE:

The proposed center would establish a landmark in bustling New York City where Muslims from across the state and the country could participate in everything from art classes to halal bazaars, sports and educational programming. The 15-story center would include a mosque, a swimming pool, a 500-seat performing arts center and child care facilities.

"For us, it was a way to feature Islam in its full glory and its full diversity and its cultural production. The music, the art, the cuisine, and the history," said Khan, an award-winning speaker and women's activist. "It would become an iconic center in New York."

But Khan and Abdul Rauf's vision for the multifaceted center would never come to be. Instead, a coalition of conservative antagonists managed to turn an entirely imagined version of it into the centerpiece of an ideological war in the aftermath of Sept. 11. 

That began with the name itself: Cordoba House became the "Ground Zero Mosque," despite the fact it wasn't just a mosque and was not exactly located at Ground Zero, either.  

The "Ground Zero Mosque" took on a life on its own, inflaming a grieving city after 9/11 and inciting Islamophobic groups from across the country. Overnight, a local story about a community board meeting to discuss the proposed Islamic center became a fiercely debated international controversy. There was a 50% increase in anti-Muslim hate crimes the year after it was proposed. 

THE lEFT DOESN'T LIKE SCIENCE ANY BETTER THAN THE rIGHT:

The origins of trigger warnings date to the 1970s, when post-traumatic stress disorder was codified as a psychiatric condition, the symptoms of which include flashbacks, nightmares, intrusive thoughts, and social withdrawal. The term "trigger" signified any stimulus that set off a post-traumatic stress reaction, from particular sights, sounds, and smells to certain foods, faces, and calendar dates.

When debates about trigger warnings first erupted, there was little-to-no research on their effectiveness. Today we have an emerging body of peer-reviewed research to consult.

The consensus, based on 17 studies using a range of media, including literature passages, photographs, and film clips: Trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress. They do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, two hallmarks of PTSD. Notably, these findings hold for individuals with and without a history of trauma. (For a review of the relevant research, see the 2020 Clinical Psychological Science article "Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories" by Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally.)

We are not aware of a single experimental study that has found significant benefits of using trigger warnings. Looking specifically at trauma survivors, including those with a diagnosis of PTSD, the Jones et al. study found that trigger warnings "were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors' traumas."

What's more, they found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to "view trauma as more central to their life narrative." "Trigger warnings," they concluded, "may be most harmful to the very individuals they were designed to protect."

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:

Instead of debating who pays their fair share of taxes, let us take another approach. Let me introduce the FairTax.

The FairTax would eliminate the federal income, payroll, and estate and gift taxes, replacing them with a revenue-neutral national 23% consumption tax. This dramatic overhaul of our tax code would allow people to keep every cent of their hard-earned money and give them the freedom to spend as much or as little in taxes as they decide.

Instead of pumping the IRS full of cash to hound taxpayers and invite political abuse, the FairTax would rid us of the need for an IRS, and the Gordian knot of credits and loopholes in our tax code would be a thing of the past. This means no more IRS, threats of audits, and hours that citizens and businesses spend on filing taxes.

The FairTax would capture tax revenue from anyone spending money in the United States. This means not just Americans, but also visitors, illegal immigrants, and that 61% of people who paid no federal income tax last year. Through the FairTax, it is a certainty that everyone pays their taxes.

While normally such a tax would disproportionately affect lower-income people, the FairTax accounts for that by providing a "prebate." The "prebate" is an advance tax refund to every legal American family up to the national poverty level at the beginning of every month to purchase goods and services tax-free.

The FairTax actually taxes everyone, American or not, while encouraging economic growth, being more efficient, and being more productive. Many states have already seen success with this approach. States such as Florida and Texas, two of the fastest-growing states, have no income tax and are attracting more and more people from higher-taxed states, such as California and New York.

NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

France is not holding back showing its disappointment with Australia after it abruptly ended a submarine contract in order to sign a new deal with the U.S. and U.K.

"It was a stab in the back. We had established a relationship of trust with Australia. This trust has been betrayed," Jean-Yves Le Drian, France's minister for foreign affairs, told radio station FranceInfo Thursday morning.

WE ARE ALL NEOLIBERAL:

Drawing on the work of Ralph Miliband, Burton-Cartledge argues that the Conservatives are a ruling class party who faithfully represent capitalism. But this isn't to be understood in a crude fashion where the party constantly furthering the interests of capital - rather, the Conservatives are presented as making 'socially situated' decisions reflecting their own circles and internal pressures, acting to pursue the perceived interests of capital.

Crucial to Falling Down's narrative is the shift from the paternalist one-nation Tory Party of the post-war consensus to the party's reconfiguration as a Thatcherite vanguard engaged in open class warfare and punitive, divide-and-rule tactics. This 'two-nation' conservatism of Thatcher is described as 'opposing a nation of law-abiding, decent people to a minority of malcontents and troublemakers.' While there are risks in overstating the scale of this shift in Conservative ideology, this does represent a very real move from a paternalist, consensus politics to the authoritarianism and acquisitive individualism of Thatcher and beyond.

Central to the book's thesis of the Tory Party's evolution and direction is Burton-Cartledge's account of class. By exploring the changing and 'contradictory' class position of the UK, the author charts the evolving political landscape of the country. As Laurie Macfarlane has argued, widened asset ownership was used to 'unmake' the British working class and splinter people's sense of solidarity - reminding us of Thatcher's famous claim that the 'object' was 'to change the soul'. Mass homeownership and the widening of pension and share ownership allowed for the fundamental logic of Thatcherism to become a social norm.

Though the Thatcher era may have been the decisive moment for the transformation of class, the author rightly emphasises that the roots of these changes trace back to at least the 1940s. Though some argue that neoliberalism won the battle and was subsequently used to reshape society, there are reasons to cast doubts on this narrative.

Instead, Burton-Cartledge points to the rise of asset ownership since the war, and the way in which these economic changes steadily eroded the social foundations of the post-war welfare state. Here, the contradictions in the economic regime of the mid-century eventually brought on its own demise. However, rather than a never-ending trend toward growing asset ownership and private affluence, a stark divide has emerged between a generation of asset owners and a generation locked out of these same privileges.

Burton-Cartledge's account of the Thatcher era is a useful counter to narratives that stress economic liberalism was at the heart of the Conservative's programme.

THE DESANTIS FLU:

HUNTING SEASON:

INSURRECTION IS EASY; GOVERNING IS HARD:

One Taliban source told BBC Pashto that Mr Baradar and Khalil ur-Rahman Haqqani - the minister for refugees and a prominent figure within the militant Haqqani network - had exchanged strong words, as their followers brawled with each other nearby.

A senior Taliban member based in Qatar and a person connected to those involved also confirmed that an argument had taken place late last week.

The sources said the argument had broken out because Mr Baradar, the new deputy prime minister, was unhappy about the structure of their interim government.

The row also reportedly stemmed from divisions over who in the Taliban should take credit for their victory in Afghanistan.

Mr Baradar reportedly believes that the emphasis should be placed on diplomacy carried out by people like him, while members of the Haqqani group - which is run by one of the most senior Taliban figures - and their backers say it was achieved through fighting.

Mr Baradar was the first Taliban leader to communicate directly with a US president, having a telephone conversation with Donald Trump in 2020. Before that, he signed the Doha agreement on the withdrawal of US troops on behalf of the Taliban.

Meanwhile, the powerful Haqqani network is associated with some of the most violent attacks that have occurred in Afghanistan against Afghan forces and their Western allies in recent years. The group is designated by the US as a terrorist organisation.

Its leader, Sirajuddin Haqqani, is the interior minister in the new government.

Rumours about a fallout have been spreading since late last week, when Mr Baradar - one of the best-known faces of the Taliban - disappeared from public view. There was speculation on social media that he might have died.

The Taliban sources told the BBC that Mr Baradar had left Kabul and travelled to the city of Kandahar following the row.

THE BLUE BRAND:

The city of Philadelphia will pay $2 million to a Black woman who was pulled from a car, beaten by officers and had her toddler used for social media fodder by the police union, officials said.

Nursing aide Rickia Young was headed home in the early morning hours of Oct. 27, 2020, when she unknowingly drove into a large protest over the police killing of Walter Wallace Jr.

She tried to make a three-point turn to get away from the tense scene when officers smashed out her windows with their batons, according to her attorneys.

THE HARDEST THING TO ACCEPT ABOUT THE WoT IS THAT WE WON:

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

All eyes are now focused on the US position in Iraq and its active involvement in Syria and Libya. Arab assessments are rather negative, expecting an all-out American military retraction in the coming months. Despite the use of honeyed diplomatic statements by the Biden Administration, the real developments on the ground are worrying. Saudi Arabia and Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman are sure to be on edge in the coming weeks. The US' apparent decision to put its long-term strategic relationship with Saudi Arabia under pressure is a surprising one. It has been confirmed that the US has removed its most advanced missile defense system and Patriot batteries from Saudi Arabia in recent weeks. The removal of the defense system was done despite repeated requests made by Saudi officials and royals to keep the weapon systems in place to counter continued air attacks by Yemen's Houthi rebels.

The Yemeni rebels, who are officially designated as terrorists and widely known to be supported by Iran, have been stepping up their rocket and drone attacks on Saudi civil and commercial targets (airports and oil and gas targets) again. The US unilateral decision to redeploy the anti-missile systems and Patriots from Prince Sultan Air Base outside of Riyadh is remarkable, especially taking into account that most US-Gulf allies are worried about the fall-out of the Afghanistan disaster.

Analysts in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Bahrain are also very worried about possible new US plans to even remove large parts of the tens of thousands of American forces in the region, now in place as a bulwark against Iran and possible insurgencies. Biden's focus on his new military power theatre in Asia is the underlying basis for the ongoing troop movements. Most Gulf states, especially Saudi Arabia and the UAE, are especially worried due to the unsuccessful Iran JCPOA talks, leaving Tehran in a position to increase its nuclear programs. 

THE BLUE MODEL:

California no longer has "high" community levels of coronavirus transmission, according to data published Tuesday by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an achievement a top state health official credited to broad vaccination uptake and public compliance with restrictions such as mask-wearing.

The state is now the only one in the country to reach the "substantial" tier of the agency's risk chart, for the first time since the rapid spread of the delta coronavirus variant brought the summer COVID-19 surge, state epidemiologist Dr. Erica Pan said Tuesday.

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, THE rIGHT WASTED A LOT OF MONEY ON THIS NON-STARTER:

With ~70% counted in CA, the margin for "No" looks like it will be similar to Gavin Newsom's margin when he was elected in 2018. But at least in the exit poll, the composition of his coalition is different: pic.twitter.com/DYt34m9796

— Steve Kornacki (@SteveKornacki) September 15, 2021

9-1-WHAT?:

There's a sense among rank-and-file Taliban members that the group should govern "without making any concessions towards women's rights," the writer Anand Gopal says.Photograph by Alex Majoli / Magnum

Last week, The New Yorker published "The Other Afghan Women," a penetrating report on an unlikely source of support for the Taliban during their stunningly quick reconquest of Afghanistan: the country's rural women. While the Taliban's recapture of Kabul sparked panic among residents of that city, the response of women in Afghanistan's countryside--home to the majority of the population, and the site of much of the violence of the two-decade U.S. occupation--was more complicated. Reporting this spring and summer from the country's southern Helmand Province, the writer Anand Gopal encountered relief and outright support among some local women, despite the Taliban's harshly repressive treatment of women when the group last ruled the country, and in the areas it has controlled more recently. [...]

Anand, many of the young Taliban members who recently surged into Kabul and into cities and towns all over Afghanistan--they weren't even born when 9/11 happened. I wonder, when they talk about 9/11, when they think about 9/11--this is an event that fundamentally shaped their lives, and they have no memory of it--how do they talk about it?

Well, David, the remarkable thing is that most of them don't even know about 9/11, and many of them have no conception of it or the foggiest notion of it. You know, they'll say, Yeah, there was some attacks in the U.S.A., but they don't really link 9/11 to what's happened in their country for the last twenty years.

Why do they think the United States came to Afghanistan, invaded Afghanistan, in the first place?

You know, it's interesting. I often ask Taliban members and non-Taliban members, Why do you think the U.S. is here? And they give all sorts of reasons, from, you know, "Oh, we have minerals here and, you know, the Soviets wanted our precious metals, and now the U.S. does, too."

You know, "They just hate our way of life," which always struck me as interesting because that was the frame that we're using on 9/11 here in the U.S. And, of course, it's different when you get to the edge--you know, the sort of more élite Taliban who, who follow the news--but I'm, I'm talking about the rank-and-file Taliban. They really don't see their conflict, or their struggle, as having anything to do with September 11th. [...]

We hear talk about a potential civil war, yet again, in Afghanistan. What is the potential for that, and, if it happens, what would the lineup be? What would the sides be?

So, you know, the Taliban is very different today than it was in the nineties--where, in the nineties, it was really like this hardcore clique of mullahs or, or religious clerics, from Kandahar and Helmand, these southern provinces, and it's really broadened and diversified in the last twenty years, so it includes Uzbeks and even some Hazaras and other ethnic groups. It's really a coalition today of tribes and clans and villages, and what really held that coalition together over the last twenty years is that they all felt one way, that they were marginalized from the post-2001 order for various reasons. So that was the cohering factor. But now that factor is gone because now they're in government. So now they actually have to do a much harder thing, which is to actually govern, to distribute revenue fairly among these various groups, to distribute ministerial posts and patronage among these groups, and I think that is where the fault lines are probably going to emerge, where there's groups that said, O.K., we were opposed to the previous Afghan government, but now we're joining this government. We don't want to be dominated by people from Kandahar--Pashtuns from Kandahar--for example. So there are real fault lines. There are already some signs that some of the ethnic minority groups within the Taliban are disaffected, so this is one potential way in which the Taliban could break apart.

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

Here's the real trick of it all: It seems like the Clarity Fuel Cell car is creating power -- energy to drive the car -- out of nothing. But like so many other times in life, things that seem to be "nothing" are actually quite something. Ask any mom. "Oh, it's nothing," she'll say. The truth is, that family meal or professional letter of recommendation she helped you with actually took a lot of work.

So the "nothing" of the Honda Clarity is that it's simply an electric car similar, in some ways, to the Chevy Bolt or a Tesla Model S TSLA, +0.20%. One exception: You don't plug this one in. Both Toyota TM, +0.52%  and Hyundai HYMTF, +0.54%  also have hydrogen-powered fuel cell vehicles as well.

Instead of plugging the Clarity fuel cell vehicle in, you fill the pressurized tank with hydrogen. The range between fillups is about 366 miles depending on the terrain and your driving habits. 

As a result of the chemical process that creates electricity, the Clarity fuel cell vehicle emits only clean water vapor.

IT'S NOT 9/12:

"I SERVED AS VP; I KNEW THE VICE PRESIDENCY; MIKE, YOU'RE NO VICE PRESIDENT":

"Peril" also describes the tense encounter in the Oval Office on January 5 when Trump pressured Pence to overturn the results of the election. While the showdown went on inside, the two men could hear MAGA supporters cheering and chanting outside near Pennsylvania Avenue.

"If these people say you had the power, wouldn't you want to?" Trump asked.

"I wouldn't want any one person to have that authority," Pence said.

"But wouldn't it be almost cool to have that power?" Trump asked, according to Woodward and Costa.

"No," Pence said. He went on, "I've done everything I could and then some to find a way around this. It's simply not possible."

When Pence did not budge, Trump turned on him.

"No, no, no!" Trump shouted, according to the authors. "You don't understand, Mike. You can do this. I don't want to be your friend anymore if you don't do this."

Trump called Pence again the morning of January 6. "If you don't do it, I picked the wrong man four years ago," Trump said, according to the authors. "You're going to wimp out," he said, his anger visible to others in the office.

Even though Pence stood up to Trump in the end, "Peril" reveals that after four years of abject loyalty, he struggled with the decision. Woodward and Costa write that Pence reached out to Dan Quayle, who had been the vice president to George H.W. Bush, seeking his advice.

Over and over, Pence asked if there was anything he could do.

"Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away," Quayle told him.

Pence pressed again.

"You don't know the position I'm in," he said, according to the authors.

"I do know the position you're in," Quayle responded. "I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That's all you do. You have no power."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

NOT EVEN CLOSE:

While it is cliche for political figures to portray themselves as being "as American as apple pie," President Joe Biden has long advertised another selling point: He's also as Irish as a pint of Guinness (despite being, like his predecessor, a teetotaler).

More so than any president since John F. Kennedy -- the only other Catholic to hold the office -- Biden's Irish heritage is central to his public persona. He is so strongly identified with it that Sarah Palin, famously, could not get his name right. During prep sessions for their 2008 vice presidential debate, she kept referring to him as Senator O'Biden, according to an account given by a campaign aide. His Secret Service codename, meanwhile, is Celtic.

INCELS IN CELLS:

A militia group leader, who was convicted of the 2017 bombing of a mosque outside of Minneapolis that "terrorised" the Somali community it served, was sentenced on Monday to 53 years in prison.

Emily Claire Hari, 50, was found guilty in December, after a five-week trial, on five federal charges related to the pipe bombing of the Dar al-Farooq Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota, while worshipers were in the building for morning prayers. No one was hurt in the bombing.

"Emily Claire Hari, 50, formerly known as Michael Hari, was sentenced to life in prison for the Aug. 5, 2017, bombing of the Dar al-Farooq (DAF) Islamic Center in Bloomington, Minnesota", the US Department of Justice said in a statement.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

I have been left slack-jawed not by the reliable anti-vaxers/anti-maskers of the right, such as Sen. Ron Johnson, Sen. Rand Paul, and the self-described Trumpistas I know in South Florida, but by friends who self-identify as progressives.

All are highly educated yet will not get a COVID vaccine, voicing qualms about its creation, side effects, and effectiveness. Some cite personal issues--one had Lyme disease, another blames her heart arrhythmia--although millions of people with the same issues have been vaccinated without serious side effects.

Most alarming is the news that one of my cousins and her husband, both successful television actors, will not get vaccinated. Instead, my cousin is "microdosing" a homeopathic remedy. Another normally sensible family relation is also not getting vaccinated. He is currently dating a popular yoga "influencer" and has been, well, influenced.

According to a recent Los Angeles Times piece, many of the anti-vax memes and false claims now circulating on the left can be traced back to QAnon, the far-right conspiracy cult. But much is coming from prominent figures in alternative medicine.

A widely reposted letter from Frank Shallenberger, a Nevada-based integrative practitioner, suggests that mRNA vaccines are potentially fatal: "We have absolutely no idea what to expect from this vaccine. We have no idea if it will be effective or safe. . . . If you ever wanted to be guinea pig for Big Pharma, now is your golden opportunity." (While it is true that deadly pandemics tend to galvanize all-hands-on-deck action, the research into mRNA vaccines goes back about fifteen years, to when SARS first appeared.)

Disturbingly, most of my "vax refusenik" friends work in health care. One has a Ph.D. in nutrition. Another works in biofeedback, a field of alternative medicine. A third (and well-known) naturopath/chiropractor sent me an anti-COVID screed at the beginning of the pandemic, saying that COVID was nothing more than a bad flu afflicting the elderly or infirm; indeed, nothing more than the Big Lie created by the Deep State. As the U.S. death toll crested past half a million, he modulated his message: The disease was sort-of real for those with weak immune systems. Still, he maintained that vaccines are the sinister product of collusion between the Deep State and Big Pharma.

Last week, he was admitted to an L.A. hospital with COVID pneumonia. As of this writing, he remains on oxygen.

IF YOU'RE RUNNING ON IDENTITY, BETTER GET THE IDENTITY RIGHT:

Banking on an identity-based appeal, Democrats last year trotted out the sort of bilingual messaging in South Texas that has played well among Mexican Americans in Los Angeles and Puerto Ricans in New York, focused on a celebration of diversity and immigration. Republicans, by contrast, recognized that Hispanic South Texans share many of the same values as non-Hispanic white voters elsewhere in Texas and swept in with a pitch about defending gun rights, promoting the oil and gas industry, restricting abortion, and supporting law enforcement. Republicans proved more persuasive. 

Indeed, for decades, the dominant ideologies in South Texas have been the same as in other rural areas and small towns across the state--that is, conservative. Many Democrats in South Texas are ardent supporters of gun rights who spend fall and winter weekends hunting white-tailed deer. On Sundays, churches--mostly Catholic but also evangelical--swell to the brim. In hotels, mud-caked boots line the hallways at night as oil workers travel from job to job. As nine-term U.S. congressman Henry Cuellar, a Democrat whose district stretches from the banks of the Rio Grande all the way to San Antonio, told me, "Aside from our Mexican heritage, much of South Texas has . . . demographic similarities with some of the more conservative strongholds and white rural communities in the state." 

But so much more than just ideology--whether one is conservative or moderate or liberal--determines how a person votes. Cultural factors matter too. While ideology has been strongly predictive of whether white voters opt for Republicans or Democrats since the late eighties, that had not been true of the state's Hispanic voters. David Shor, an iconoclastic data scientist who has polled South Texas extensively, explains that about 40 percent of American voters are conservative, 40 percent are moderate, and 20 percent are liberal. Those numbers don't vary much by race or ethnicity, whereas party loyalty does. And for decade after decade, part of being Hispanic in South Texas, just like wrapping tamales on Christmas Eve or listening to Selena at family reunions, meant voting Democratic, even as the party became less welcoming to those with conservative views. What changed in 2020 is that conservative Hispanic South Texans voted like their non-Hispanic white neighbors. Ideology suddenly became polarizing for the group in a way it never had been before.

Many Hispanic South Texans shared something else with non-Hispanic white rural Texans: their racial identity. Hispanic residents of our state are much more likely to identify as white than Hispanic residents of cities elsewhere in the country. With roots many generations deep in lands that were annexed from Mexican control to that of the U.S., many also actively reject being cast as immigrants. In 2020 ignorance of these facts embarrassed state and national Democrats. While Hispanic South Texans are proud of their Mexican heritage, many do not consider themselves to be "people of color" at all. 

AFTER ALL, IT'S JAYAPAL, NOT PAY PAL:

 Last May, Rep. Pramila Jayapal introduced the Paycheck Recovery Act, aimed at curbing layoffs during the pandemic by having the federal government pay people's salaries. Publicly, Jayapal contended that passing the bill was a matter of survival for workers. But privately, former staffers said, the lawmaker acted very differently.

In November 2020, she laid off two staffers without severance, two people familiar with the incident told BuzzFeed News. Chris Evans, a spokesperson for Jayapal, said the decision to consolidate was made to "best utilize" the office's resources, and the staffers were given six weeks' notice. But one staff member who was told they were being laid off was invited to reapply for a new job in the office that would consolidate the two roles, those familiar said. The staffer was required to go through the full application process, despite the job being nearly identical to the one they had been laid off from. And then, without advance warning, they found out in an all-hands meeting that they did not get the job. The staffers who were let go declined to provide comment for this story.

The incident upset at least four staffers in the office who spoke with BuzzFeed News. It was, they said, one of many instances in which Jayapal's interactions with her employees have run counter to the public persona she's built for herself.

AN EFFECTIVE MEANS OF WEEDING OUT WHACKOS:

Companies that have imposed COVID-19 vaccine requirements say they have seen major jumps in the number of vaccinated workers. Delta Air Lines' chief health officer said on Thursday that the company's decision to impose $200 penalties for unvaccinated workers led to a "huge" surge in the 20,000 unvaccinated employees getting the vaccine.

"Just within the two weeks of the announcement, we've seen nearly 20 percent, or one-fifth, of that 20,000 decide to get the vaccine," Dr. Henry Ting said at a news conference held by the Infectious Diseases Society of America, accordingto a local media report. That surge means 78 percent of Delta employees are now vaccinated.

Tyson Foods saw an even bigger jump in vaccinated employees after announcing a mandate in August. Tyson employees who have at least one dose skyrocketed from 45 percent to 72 percent after the mandate was announced, according to a White House news release laying out President Joe Biden's vaccination mandate plan. In the early days of the pandemic, Tyson Foods saw massive COVID-19 outbreaks in their meatpacking plants that impacted the food supply chain.

AFGHANIWHAT?:

The C|T Group, an international consulting firm, sent one-sentence arguments to people in the United States, Britain and Australia, both in favor of and against President JOE BIDEN's pullout decision. They found that pro-withdrawal lines drove more people to support leaving Afghanistan, whereas statements that backed remaining in the country weren't as convincing.

The most effective line for Biden was this one: "The U.S. has been in Afghanistan for 20 years, that is far too long, regardless of the impact we should leave now." Six other summations of the administration's arguments -- such as how the United States couldn't keep spending money to prop up an ineffective Afghan state -- also resonated with the American, British and Australian respondents.

"Our data shows that the Biden administration, the messaging it's doing, is reaching an audience and is making an impact," said PRICE FLOYD, director of campaigns and communications at C|T's Washington, D.C., office. [...]

The survey results all track with polling conducted since the withdrawal showing broad support for the war's end, which helps explain why Biden's rhetoric is working.

WHICHEVER BLUE YOU WANT:

NAVIES ARE A WASTE OF MONEY:

The 85th Test and Evaluation Squadron (85th TES), part of the 53rd Wing at Eglin Air Force Base (AFB), Florida has been conducting tests that were designed to determine how an air-to-surface weapon could be used against targets on the water. During the tests, which were conducted last month, three Boeing F-15E Strike Eagle fighters demonstrated a series of new tactics, techniques and even procedures that included the dropping of modified GBU-31 Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMS) on moving and stationary maritime targets.

HE HAD THEM AT ISLAMOPHOBIC ANTI-IMMIGRANT:

It was an interesting time to arrive in Hungary. Orbán and his Fidesz party have controlled the government since 2010 and made major changes to its structure. First, in 2012, came a new constitution, which increased the number of justices on the Constitutional Court from eleven to fifteen and introduced a new process for selecting them; by 2013, Orbán's party had chosen nine of them. The new constitution also eliminated election runoffs, allowing Orbán's party--the largest of a half-dozen in the country--to convert vote totals of forty-four per cent and forty-eight per cent in the past two parliamentary elections into legislative supermajorities. Second has been an extension of political power into cultural spheres, a shift marked first by the strident anti-migrant position Orbán took in 2015 and his statement the previous year that a democracy need not be liberal. The landmark Central European University, founded in 1991 by George Soros, was effectively evicted from Hungary; theatre directors have been replaced by politically compliant figures; the largest newspaper in the country, Népszabadság, was shuttered, with journalists and opposition figures alleging that government pressure was responsible, and owners blaming declining sales. In its 2020 annual report, Freedom House concluded that these steady incursions against Hungarian freedoms meant that the country no longer met its definition of a democracy. Next year, Orbán will stand for reëlection; Hungary's other parties have formed an anti-Orbán coalition, making the vote especially high-stakes. Meanwhile, Orbán has begun taking stands against cultural progressivism--banning children's media deemed to be L.G.B.T.-friendly, granting broad subsidies to the country's churches, and refusing to let Muslim migrants settle in Hungary--that have made him the kind of figure whom American social conservatives could idolize, and drawn his politics nearer to their own.

A RELIGION OR A RACE?:

Jewish history presents many instances of boundaries being set, sometimes resulting in schisms. Those processes of "separation" weren't always simple, fast, or straightforward, but they have been a constant feature of the Jewish journey. Christianity is one such example. It was started by Jews, was deeply rooted in Jewish texts, and was purported to present a more "authentic" view of Judaism with what it believed to be the "correct" interpretation of biblical prophecies. That schism represented a dialectical process toward separation led by both Jews and early Christians. The breaking point was probably the defeat of the Jamesian faction (named after Jesus' brother who believed that Christians--then called Nazarenes--were an integral part of the Jewish people and subject to Jewish Law) by the Paulist faction, a group that looked to convert Gentiles and replace the obligations of Jewish Law with belief in Jesus. Originally, Jewish authorities were split, some favoring the exclusion of the Nazarenes, while others considered them to be simply another of the era's many sects. Eventually, the rabbinic authorities of the time understood that Christianity, with its belief in Jesus as a resurrected messiah, put them "beyond the pale"; the Paulist rejection of Jewish Law was the last straw in that separation process. A key factor was, simply, that the overwhelming majority of Jews had rejected Jesus' divinity. Rabbis were not only defending orthodoxy but channeling the majority sentiment as well.

Eight centuries later, the Karaites, of the Karaite movement led by Anan ben David, presented similar but different dilemmas. The Karaites believed that only the "written Torah"--not its rabbinical interpretations, called collectively "oral Torah"--should be the basis for Jewish observance. Karaist-adjacent attitudes had been present in Judaism since the time of the Second Temple (Abraham Geiger, for example, proposes that Karaites continue some Sadducean traditions). But in the 10th century the movement enjoyed a golden age of sorts that demanded a definition in terms regarding its role in Judaism. Rabbinical opinions diverge, as they often do, about how deviant Karaism was; but a consensus developed around the notion that Karaim were not, as a community, part of the Jewish people. Most medieval Jewish sages, notably Rabbi Yehuda Halevi, wrote powerful justifications for that exclusion. It wasn't so straightforward, however, for individual Karaim. Maimonides, for example, says that a Karaite can't be held personally responsible for the beliefs that his parents instilled in him and should be allowed back into the Jewish community if that's what he wants. Today the Israeli chief rabbinate considers some Karaim to be Jews, even though they are not considered, as a group, to be part of the Jewish people. Here again, it was critical that the majority of the Jews of the time rejected Karaism.

In other cases, like the followers of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, a herem (excommunication) was applied, signifying that he and his believers were not considered part of the community. The setting of boundaries wasn't easy in this case either. Many prominent Jews believed in Zvi's messianism; entire communities celebrated his arrival and some in Hamburg and Amsterdam sold their property and moved to the Holy Land in anticipation of redemption. The popularity of the movement was such that Rabbi Abraham Sasportas, a leading advocate of the herem, was harassed and ridiculed. But the majority opinion shifted dramatically when two major lines were crossed: Zvi's declaration that many mitzvoth did not need to be fulfilled anymore and, of course, his final conversion to Islam in 1666.

Not every polemic in Jewish history resulted in a schism or exclusion. The emergence of Kabbalah after the 12th century and Hasidism in the 18th century, for example, were both close calls. The "orthodoxy" of the time was extremely nervous about kabbalistic descriptions of the "inner life of God," which to them appeared dangerously close to polytheism. Hassidism posed many dilemmas; the most serious was likely the role attributed to the "rebbe" as a sort of intermediary between man and God. These fights were, in fact, more vicious that those we see today between Zionists and anti-Zionists, including some episodes we'd all prefer to forget, such as denunciation to the czarist authorities, imprisonment, and the like. The leading rabbi of the time, the Vilna Gaon, led the Misnagdim (opponents) and issued a ban against the Hasidism. Over time, however, a consensus seemed to emerge; as long as these new movements did not reject the monotheistic idea and continued fulfilling mitzvoth in a traditional fashion, they were considered "within the pale," even though the divisions between Hasidim and Misnagdim continue to this day.

In the 1970s, Jews for Jesus, the most visible face of the Jewish messianic movement, presented yet another dilemma, for they claimed to be fully Jewish while recognizing the divinity and messianic nature of Jesus as the Son of God. Consensus in this case was easier to reach. Not only rabbinical authorities but ordinary Jews tend to think the frontier of Judaism stops at belief in Jesus. In fact, in a rare moment of unity, all Jewish denominations signed on to a declaration that said that "though Hebrew Christianity claims to be a form of Judaism, it is not..."

The idea that a new movement can gain acceptance and become normative to the exclusion of others is at the root of Judaism as we practice it today.

Zionism is indeed a "new" movement. It is of course deeply rooted in Jewish history and belief, but it is clearly a product of the historical realities of the 19th century, in which groups of humans bound by certain particularities started to see themselves as "nations" and "peoples" with the right to sovereignty and self-determination within the framework of a nation-state. Some activists cite this supposed novelty as an argument against making Zionism a key parameter of belonging to the Jewish collective. How, they ask, can a movement that is so new become the litmus test of belonging to an ancient people?

But the idea that a new movement can gain acceptance and become normative to the exclusion of others is at the root of Judaism as we practice it today. Rabbinic Judaism triumphed over the Temple-worshipping priestly caste and redefined the basic tenets of Judaism. A new movement, in this case the Pharisees, changed the normative positions of Judaism over the course of a century, then excluded from the community those who didn't share them. Pharisaic Judaism was as "new" in the first century BCE as Zionism is today. It was as influenced by external forces (like Greek philosophy and hermeneutics) as Zionism was influenced by Hegelian views and Italian national "Risorgimento." Yet, despite their novelty, key beliefs of the Pharisees, such as the "world to come" or resurrection of the dead, became a sort of litmus test in order to be accepted within the rabbinical community. In a way, as Zionism does today, Pharisaic Judaism introduces groundbreaking innovations and then shifts the boundaries by redefining belonging. Here too, a key factor was that a vast majority of the Jewish people, especially after the destruction of the Temple, embraced Pharisaic Judaism.

In that sense, Zionism is deeply inscribed in a Jewish historic dynamic of boundary setting. If one argues against Zionism redefining the limits of belonging, one should also reject the lines drawn by Pharisees and welcome back into the fold the people they excluded--Saducees, Karaites, and Christians--as full members of the Jewish people.

BIRDS OF A FEATHER:

Larry Elder, the leading Republican candidate to replace California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in the recall election that ends Tuesday, spoke at a conservative conference in July 2017 that also featured speeches by white nationalists Kyle Chapman and Johnny Benitez.

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEY'RE A NATION ARE ONE:

Balochis have their own language and a separate identity. In the decades before the 1947 partition of India, Balochistan--at least those portions not incorporated into Persian--coalesced into a loose confederation of Baloch states under British protection. While some Baloch princely states chose to join Pakistan, the largest and most important--the Khanate of Kalat--asserted independence for several months before Pakistan ultimately absorbed it. The port city of Gwadar, meanwhile, remained part of the Sultanate of Oman until Pakistan annexed it in 1958. Today, Gwadar is among China's most important investments in Pakistan: it is not only among the most important ports in China's Indian Ocean "String of Pearls" strategy, but it is also the outlet for China's multibillion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC). Absent the Gwadar port, CPEC's strategic and economic potential plummets.

The Balochis have long been restive inside Pakistan. For its first decade, Pakistan neglected the region. It invested little and left the British administrative system in place. In 1958, Balochi tribes rose in revolt against Pakistani rule, and Karachi (Pakistan's capital before the creation of Islamabad) declared martial law and moved to dismantle the tribal system and erase any notion that Balochistan was a legitimate entity. Against this backdrop, the Balochistan People's Liberation Front inaugurated a low-intensity guerilla campaign. In 1970, as Pakistan also faced unrest (and eventual secession) of its Bengali population, it acquiesced to the formation of a Balochistan province. Over subsequent decades, civil strife repeated erupted--first during the reign of President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto and then against the backdrop of a 2004 development plan which locals believed would lead to an influx of Punjabis to the region. Balochi militants and terrorists continue to harass Pakistani state forces.

ALMOST AS IF CRIME HYSTERIA IS JUST ANTI-BLACK?:

The study shows that homicides went up last year, but found that category to be an outlier.

The paper explores crime rates in the 22 states and the District of Columbia, which submitted and published full data. They cover a broad mix from deep-red states like Nebraska and Tennessee to swing states like Wisconsin and Florida to liberal New York and D.C.

Nine of the jurisdictions have Republican governors and 14 have Democratic governors. The report finds "no difference in crime trends between Republican-led and Democrat-led states" from 2019 to 2020. Crime rose in some blue states and fell in some blue states; it rose in some red states and fell in some red states.

And the paper said there was no apparent disparity in crime trends between states that changed police laws and states that did not.

"There seems to be a hysteria that began about a year and half ago to try and convince Americans that we're undergoing another crime wave," said Jim Kessler, the executive vice presidency for policy at Third Way. "At a certain point, we just wanted to look at what the actual data was. And it doesn't bear up."

"What we're seeing is really scant evidence of a crime wave," he said.

SUBVERSION IS EASY; GOVERNING IS HARD:

On Sunday, an AFP correspondent at the airport saw border police members deployed at several checkpoints outside the main buildings of the airport, including the domestic terminal.

"I came back to work yesterday more than two weeks after being sent home," one of the police force members told AFP, speaking on condition of anonymity.

"I received a call from a senior Taliban commander who asked me to come back," another officer said.

"Yesterday was great, so happy to serve again."

The Taliban say they have granted a general amnesty to everyone who worked for the former government -- including the army, police and other security branches.

THERE IS NO LEBANON:

The most basic foods have become political assets in economically devastated Lebanon. And no one's tapped that currency of oil, milk and bread like Iran-backed Hezbollah.

Designated a terrorist group by the U.S., it has galvanized its power by taking on more functions of a state hollowed out by an imploding economy and sectarian feuding. By offering food, cash and medical services amid widespread poverty in this once-middle class nation, the Shiite Muslim group has become a lifeline for many. [...]

Hezbollah says the U.S. is trying to incite Lebanese against the group by blocking aid during the crisis, which deepened two years ago as protests over a failing, corrupt elite toppled the government.

"Now they have turned to water, fuel and gasoline to gradually -- because they can't do it suddenly -- pressure the Shiite community and move it away from Hezbollah, and that's what prompted Hezbollah to intervene," Hezbollah press official Mohammad Afif said. The group had to bring in food, medicine and fuel from outside of the system, he added.

DARN CONSERVATIVES...:

The higher education minister in the new Taliban government says women can study in universities, including at post-graduate levels, but that classrooms will be gender-segregated and that Islamic dress is compulsory.

Last October, more than 450 public school teachers, principals and central administrators from across the United States -- as well as from Argentina, Bermuda, Canada and Poland -- came together in Atlanta, Georgia, for the fifth annual convention of the National Association for Single Sex Public Education.

Dozens of presentations extolled the superiority of gender-segregated classrooms and entire schools, with lecture titles such as, "Burps, Farts and Snot: Teaching Chemistry To Middle School Boys," and "Just Don't Say 'SEX' -- tips on how to implement single-gender programs in conservative, rural communities."

Attendees ranged from Chicago and Philadelphia inner-city high school teachers to elementary school principals from small towns in Idaho and Indiana. They represented a fraction of recent converts to the Single Sex Public Education (SSPE) movement, which has expanded at a remarkable pace.

In 2002, only 11 public schools in the United States had gender-segregated classrooms. As of December 2009, there were more than 550. [...]

Separating boys and girls is a longstanding tradition at private and parochial schools. The concept began to gain traction in American public schools earlier this decade as schools began to experiment with SSPE in oft-desperate attempts to reduce disciplinary problems and improve test scores. The Department of Education accelerated the trend in 2006 by altering the Title IX provision of the No Child Left Behind Act to ease restrictions on gender-segregated education in public schools.

KNOWING YOUR ENEMY:

The trove of documents are being released at a politically delicate time for the US and Saudi Arabia, two nations that have forged a strategic -- if difficult -- alliance, particularly on counterterrorism matters. The Biden administration in February released an intelligence assessment implicating Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in the 2018 killing of US-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi, but drew criticism from Democrats for avoiding a direct punishment of the crown prince himself.

SPOILER ALERT:

For all the writers here, mass immigration undermines national culture. 

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT, NOT WHAT YOU DO:

An economy-wide carbon tax would raise a significant amount of revenue. The Treasury modeled a $49-per-metric-ton carbon tax that would rise at a two percent real rate to $70 per metric ton over a decade. Such a carbon tax would raise approximately $2.2 trillion in net revenue over ten years. In a recent op-ed, Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) wrote that he is concerned about America's national debt levels and rising inflation, and called for "a strategic pause" on the reconciliation legislative bill. If not adding to the current national debt is a priority, Democratic lawmakers should view a carbon tax as an important source of revenue to fund the Democratic spending priorities in the reconciliation package. 

A carbon tax incentivizes decarbonization efficiently and effectively. It prices the negative externality imposed on society from the consumption of carbon-intensive goods. Levying a carbon tax is also a great alternative to command-and-control climate regulations. It is more economically efficient and less vulnerable to administrative and legal challenges than regulations. 

A border-adjusted carbon tax would level the playing field between U.S. and foreign producers, and encourage them to decarbonize their production processes. Border adjustment is a common mechanism used in different types of taxes, such as a value-added tax. Coupled with a domestic tax, a border adjustment taxes all domestic consumption by levying an import tax on imported goods and providing an export rebate for exported goods. A border-adjusted carbon tax would ensure importers are subject to the same tax burden as domestic producers, and U..S exporters are exempted from the carbon tax. It is an effective way to preserve U.S. producers' competitiveness if America were to enact a unilateral carbon tax. 

NOW ENROLL EVERY AMERICAN IN ONE AND FUND THEM...:

The marketplace has spoken. When 401(k) plans began, in the aftermath of the Revenue Act of 1978, they were highly customized. Companies that adopted 401(k) plans used a variety of investments, including insurance-company pools, mutual funds, separate accounts, and company stock. All were actively managed. Effectively, every 401(k) plan was a tiny self-directed brokerage firm, offering a handful of options from which employees selected.

Moving Toward One

Over the decades, the 401(k) industry has gradually standardized. Some variety remains, because sponsors tend to adjust their 401(k) plans incrementally rather than overhaul them abruptly. However, the drive toward conformity is clear:

1) Plan lineups are shrinking, as sponsors eliminate their actively run funds.

2) Almost every plan now includes index funds.

3) Ditto for target-date funds, which are usually a plan's default investment.

These trends are most pronounced with Vanguard. Last year, the company reports, 60% of its 401(k) participants owned but a single fund. Among that group, 91% did so through one of the company's target-date funds. Such investors exemplify all three of the industry's prevailing forces. They require only a limited fund lineup; they index (the method of investing for Vanguard's target-date funds); and they hold a target-date fund, which was likely selected for them.

In the fund industry, where Vanguard treads, others follow. In other words, future retirees will invest quite differently than did the early 401(k) adopters. By and large, future 401(k) participants will hold target-date funds. When they invest otherwise, they will mostly use index funds. The actively managed funds that were once the 401(k) industry's mainstream will continue to lose popularity. [...]

For that reason, the recently published monograph Defined Contribution Plans by the CFA Institute--an impartial, not-for-profit organization that represents investment researchers and managers--recommends to plan sponsors that "passively managed funds" be "the default choice for their plans." Indeed, absent a strong belief to the contrary, "sponsors should make available only passively managed options."

THE DESANTIS FLU:

The family of a man who died of heart issues in Mississippi is asking people to get vaccinated for COVID-19 after 43 hospitals across three states were unable to accept him because of full cardiac ICUs. 

THE W-SHAPED HOLE IN THE GOP:

Twenty years ago, we all found in different ways, in different places, but all at the same moment, that our lives would be changed forever.

The world was loud with carnage and sirens, and then quiet with missing voices that would never be heard again. These lives remain precious to our country and infinitely precious to many of you. Today we remember your loss, we share your sorrow, and we honor the men and women you have loved so long and so well.

For those too young that clear September day, it is hard to describe the mix of feelings we experienced. There was horror at the scale of destruction and awe at the bravery and kindness that rose to meet it. There was shock at the audacity of evil and gratitude for the heroism and decency that opposed it.

In the sacrifice of the first responders, in the mutual aid of strangers, in the solidarity of grief and grace, the actions of an enemy revealed the spirit of a people. And we were proud of our wounded nation.

In these memories, the passengers and crew of Flight 93 must always have an honored place. Here, the intended targets became the instruments of rescue. And many who are now alive owe a vast, unconscious debt to the defiance displayed in the skies above this field.

It would be a mistake to idealize the experience of those terrible events. All that many people could initially see was the brute randomness of death. All that many could feel was unearned suffering. All that many could hear was God's terrible silence. There are many who still struggle with a lonely pain that cuts deep within.

In those fateful hours, we learned other lessons as well. We saw that Americans were vulnerable, but not fragile -- that they possessed a core of strength that survives the worst that life can bring. We learned that bravery was more common than we imagined, emerging with sudden splendor in the face of death. We vividly felt how every hour with our loved ones was a temporary and holy gift. And we found that even the longest days end.

Many of us have tried to make spiritual sense of these events. There is no simple explanation for the mix of providence and human will that sets the direction of our lives. But comfort can come from a different store of knowledge. After wandering long and lost in the dark, many have found they were actually watching step by step toward grace.

As a nation, our adjustments have been profound. Many Americans struggled why an enemy would hate us with such zeal. The security measures incorporated into our lives are both sources of comfort and reminders of our vulnerability. And we have seen growing evidence that the dangers to our country can come not only across borders, but from violence that gathers within.

There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.

After 9/11, millions of brave Americans stepped forward and volunteered to serve in the armed forces. The military measures taken over the past 20 years to pursue dangers at their source have led to debate. But one thing is certain: We owe an assurance to all who have fought our nation's most recent battles.

Let me speak directly to veterans and people in uniform. The cause you pursued at the call of duty is the noblest that America has to offer. You have shielded your fellow citizens from danger. You have defended the beliefs of your country and advanced the rights of the downtrodden. You have been the face of hope and mercy in dark places. You have been a force for good in the world. Nothing that has followed -- nothing -- can tarnish your honor or diminish your accomplishments. To you, and our honorable dead, our country is forever grateful.

In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, I was proud to lead an amazing, resilient, united people. When it comes to the unity of America, those days seem distant from our own. Malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear and resentment. That leaves us worried about our nation and our future together.

I come without explanations or solutions. I can only tell you what I've seen.

On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another. That is the America I know.

At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith. That is the nation I know.

At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees. That is the nation I know.

At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action. That is the nation I know.

This is not mere nostalgia. It is the truest version of ourselves. It is what we have been and can be again.

Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans on a routine flight to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and seven crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by face. In a sense, they stood in for us all.

The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil. These Americans were brave, strong and united in ways that shocked the terrorists but should not surprise any of us.

This is the nation we know.

And whenever we need hope and inspiration, we can look to the skies and remember. God bless.

UNIVERSALITY OBVIATES LIBERTY CONCERNS:

The polio vaccine was less controversial, mainly because it wasn't initially mandated and because it had been funded by a widely respected nonprofit: the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis, now called the March of Dimes. This reduced opposition based on mistrust of pharmaceutical companies, and most parents willingly got their children vaccinated. The measles vaccine, too, was not particularly controversial because mandates were not initially enforced.

"Nobody was enforcing vaccination, and so it simply didn't elicit that mistrust," Professor Conis said. In the smallpox era, by contrast, "skeptical people said, 'Well, why are we doing this? It just benefits the companies making the vaccine and the doctors administering the vaccine, and why should we trust any of them?'"

But the fear and anger came roaring back with the introduction of childhood vaccination mandates in the 1970s. By 1980, all 50 states required schoolchildren to be vaccinated against an array of diseases.

None of it is new, but one thing distinguishes today's anti-vaccination protesters from those of the past. The opposition was always political. It wasn't always partisan.

DEPLOY THEM TO PROTECT THE REBELS:

The US has removed its most advanced missile defense system and Patriot batteries from Saudi Arabia in recent weeks, even as the kingdom faced continued air attacks from Yemen's Houthi rebels, satellite photos analyzed by The Associated Press show.

IT REQUIRES FORCE, NOT PERSUASION:

HASTA LA VISTA, LARRY:

FRIENDLY FIRE:

The Pentagon said it disrupted a new attack planned by the Islamic State extremist group through a Reaper drone strike on 29 August [Getty]

A video analysis shows the United States may have mistakenly targeted an aid worker rather than Islamic State fighters in its final strike in Afghanistan which killed 10 civilians, the New York Times said Friday.

The Pentagon has said it disrupted a new attack planned by the IS extremist group through a Reaper drone strike on 29 August - the day before US troops ended their 20-year mission and following a devastating attack outside the airport where vast crowds rushed to leave the victorious Taliban.

But Kabul resident Aimal Ahmadi earlier told AFP that the strike killed 10 civilians including his small daughter, nephews, nieces and his brother Ezmarai Ahmadi, who was driving the car that was struck after he parked.

The New York Times, analysing security camera footage, said the US military may have been seeing the slain Ahmadi and a colleague loading canisters of water, which was in short supply after the collapse of the Western-backed government, and picking up a laptop for his boss.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

In polls taken since early August, when the Afghan army and government began to collapse, Democrats have said consistently and decisively that the United Should accept Afghan refugees. But fewer than half of Republicans--on average, about 35 percent--have agreed. A week ago, in a Yahoo News survey, nearly two-thirds of Republicans said the United States wasn't "doing enough to get at-risk Afghans out of Afghanistan safely," but only one-third said the refugees should "be allowed to come to the United States."

The closer to home these questions get, the more Republicans squirm. Two weeks ago, in a Politico/Morning Consult survey, more than 70 percent of Republicans said the United States should help Afghan civilians with "evacuation from Afghanistan" and "relocation to countries other than the U.S." When the poll asked about helping these civilians with "relocation to the U.S.," Democrats overwhelmingly supported the idea, but Republicans narrowly opposed it. And when Republicans were asked about helping the Afghans with "relocation to my state," their opposition increased.

YOU'LL NEVER REPLACE BLACKSMITHS...:

Flying across the American Southwest, brilliant points of light shine in the distant wastes of the Mojave Desert. Three glowing spots hover over the horizon, each surrounded by a gleaming field. These are the towers and mirrors (heliostats) of the Ivanpah generating station, one of the largest concentrated solar power plants on Earth. What is this technology that allows solar power to continue at night, and how does it work?

Traditional photovoltaic (PV) solar cells absorb sunlight and pour out electricity. Particles of light (photons) emitted by the sun travel through space, transit Earth's atmosphere, and smack into a solar panel. Some photons are reflected away by the panel and lost. Most of them are absorbed by the atoms of the panel, which then release electrons. The solar cell's electrical design gathers these electrons and channels them out as electrical current. Further electrical devices convert this low voltage direct current (DC) to higher voltage alternating current (AC) to send across power transmission lines.

Concentrated solar thermal (CST) power plants do not directly exchange solar photons for electrons. They gather the photons and use them to heat water, which turns a steam turbine, which turns an electrical generator. This is the same way that nuclear fission and fossil fuel plants generate electricity -- the difference being that uranium or coal or natural gas are replaced by the heat of the sun's rays.

OUR TALIBAN:

Despite Chinese pressure on the Taliban to crack down on militant groups, the Uighur separatist organization at the heart of Beijing's own "war on terror" sees a new opportunity in the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan to undermine the People's Republic.

"The United States is a strong country, it has its own strategy, and we see the withdrawal of the American government today from this war in Afghanistan, which is incurring huge economic losses, as a means of confronting China, who are the enemy of all humanity and religions on earth," a spokesperson for the political office of the Turkestan Islamic Party, commonly known as the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM), told Newsweek.

In what appears to be the first remarks by the secretive group to an international media outlet since being removed from a U.S. list of terrorist organizations last year, the Turkestan Islamic Party spokesperson expressed hoped the U.S. military exit last month would be followed by greater pressure against China.

"We believe that the opposition of the United States to China will not only benefit the Turkestan Islamic Party and the people of Turkestan," the spokesperson said, "but also all mankind."

...AND CHEAPER...:

When London vanquished cholera in the 19th century, it took not a vaccine, or a drug, but a sewage system. The city's drinking water was intermingling with human waste, spreading bacteria in one deadly outbreak after another. A new comprehensive network of sewers separated the two. London never experienced a major cholera outbreak after 1866. All that was needed was 318 million bricks, 23 million cubic feet of concrete, and a major reengineering of the urban landscape.

The 19th and early 20th century saw a number of ambitious public-health efforts like this. The United States eliminated yellow fever and malaria, for example, with a combination of pesticides, wide-scale landscape management, and window screens that kept mosquitoes at bay. One by one, the diseases that people accepted as inevitable facts in life--dysentery, typhoid, typhus, to name a few more--became unacceptable in the developing world. But after all this success, after all we've done to prevent the spread of disease through water and insects, we seem to have overlooked something. We overlooked air.

This turned out to have devastating consequences for the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The original dogma, you might remember, was that the novel coronavirus spread like the flu, through droplets that quickly fell out of the air. We didn't need ventilation or masks; we needed to wash our hands and disinfect everything we touched. But a year and half of evidence has made clear that the tiny virus-laden particles indeed linger in the air of poorly ventilated areas. It explains why outdoors is safer than in, why a single infected person can super-spread to dozens of others without directly speaking to or touching them. If we are to live with this coronavirus forever--as seems very likely--some scientists are now pushing to reimagine building ventilation and clean up indoor air. We don't drink contaminated water. Why do we tolerate breathing contaminated air?

It's not just about COVID-19. The scientists who recognized the threat of airborne coronavirus early did so because they spent years studying evidence that--contrary to conventional wisdom--common respiratory illnesses such as the flu and colds can also spread through the air. We've long accepted colds and flus as inevitable facts of life, but are they? Why not redesign the airflow in our buildings to prevent them, too? What's more, says Raymond Tellier, a microbiologist at McGill University, SARS-CoV-2 is unlikely to be the last airborne pandemic. The same measures that protect us from common viruses might also protect us from the next unknown pathogen.

SOMETIMES NOTHIN' IS A REAL COOL HAND:

The escape bolted public opinion in a way not seen for years. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh told journalists that every prisoner wishes to be free and that Israel should free all prisoners. When Al Jazeera reporter Guevara Budeiri was asked about security coordination, she said that there was no coordination at all with the Israelis. The combination of Fatah and Islamic Jihad -- a collaboration that used to be strong -- has reignited ideas of combined acts of resistance.

After initially holding off on arresting relatives of the escapees in the hope that they can listen in on conversations with the prisoners, Israel arrested parents and brothers of the detainees. A number of family members whose relatives are in jail told Al-Monitor that the imprisoned relatives are likely to be held for information gathering, pressure on the escapees and might be used possibly as human shields if a battle with armed prisoners takes place.

The situation in Israeli prisons has been volatile since the jailbreak, with guards appearing to take revenge on those under their control, and in return the prisoners have protested. In one prison in the Negev Desert prisoners burnt the contents of their own cells in an act of protest to the Israeli guards' harsh treatment.

Scores of Palestinians in the West Bank were injured on Thursday when Israeli soldiers attacked protesters demonstrating in solidarity with the Palestinian prisoners who escaped from Israel's Gilboa Prison. 

More than 100 Palestinians were injured after Israeli soldiers fired tear gas, live ammunition and rubber bullets at crowds who were waving Palestinian flags and chanting "freedom", the Palestine Red Crescent said.

The attacks on protesters reportedly took place in the Arroub refugee camp, north of Hebron; the town of Dura, south of Hebron; and in al-Khader town, south of Bethlehem, according to local sources. 

"We came out in solidarity with our prisoners in the occupier's jails," Jihad Abu Adi, a protester, was quoted by Reuters as saying. "It's the least we could do for our heroic prisoners."

NAKED AND AFRAID:

The central philosophical idea behind the Matrix films is that of simulation theory, namely that we are living in a fake world that has been constructed around us by artificial intelligence to hide the altogether grimier reality of human existence. This has been interpreted by many not to be a provocation, but instead an accidental revelation of what our lives are actually like. The documentary A Glitch In The Matrix, released earlier this year, interviewed many of the most vociferous proponents of such a theory, all of whom idolise Elon Musk as a truth-telling sage. Many of them don the "Matrix ensemble" of long trench coats and go about in a fog of body odour and paranoia, looking around for like-minded crypto-conspiracists to share their pet ideas with. It is rather like small children exchanging Top Trumps, but this time the cards revolve around the hidden evils lurking in society.

It is not overstating the case to say that there are those -- often supporters of Donald Trump -- who subscribe fully to the idea that The Matrix and the concept of red-pilling is documentary realism rather than imaginative fantasy. In its own way, this has become a form of religion, to be believed in without question. We thrill to stories of why vaccines are evil, of how Joe Biden's election was rigged and of shadowy powers controlling our every action. Personally, I find all these ideas of omnipotence rather comforting. It would be splendid to believe that there was an international conspiracy controlled by George Soros and Bill Gates -- or robots -- that dictated our every move, rather than the more likely prospect of venal and selfish stupidity, mixed with incompetence, being the primary mover in contemporary society.

SUNUNU 2022:

New Hampshire's economy ranks No. 5 in the country and No. 1 in the Northeast, according to a 247Wallstreet analysis released on Wednesday.

Then on Thursday, Wallethub rated New Hampshire's COVID-19 workforce recovery the third-best in the nation since the start of the pandemic. Only Florida and South Carolina posted faster recoveries, based on the decline in weekly unemployment claims.

New Hampshire had a 91.48 percent decline in weekly jobless claims since the start of the pandemic. No other New England state was in the top 10. Maine, the closest, ranked 13th with an 84.09 percent decline.

"Responsible economic policies and fiscal management pay off, said Taylor Caswell, commissioner of the Department of Business and Economic Affairs. "Our COVID response, the investments we've prioritized, and the pro-growth policies we've pursued have given us the result we see here."

In July, New Hampshire had the third-lowest unemployment rate in the U.S. at 2.9 percent. 

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed legislation on Wednesday that effectively bans the sale of new internal combustion engine cars, off-road vehicles, light-duty trucks and equipment by 2035.

The legislation, introduced by New York state senator Pete Harckham, also requires new heavy- and medium-duty trucks for sale in New York to be in the "zero-emissions" category by 2045.

ROUTINE:

A little more than a week ago, Wardak was beaten by the Taliban as he tried to make his way to the Kabul airport in a frantic bid to leave the country. On Thursday, he was back at the airport, this time transported by a shuttle bus and cleared through security in an orderly fashion.

"Today was easy," said Wardak, 40, as he waited on the tarmac with his family of six to board a chartered flight to Doha, the first leg of a journey back home to the United States. "I'm feeling really happy that we are leaving today."

Wardak had returned to Afghanistan from his home in Maryland in 2015 to take care of his mother. Unfortunately, he said, she could not accompany him back to the United States.

"We are sorry for her, and we will miss her," he said. A short while later, he and his family were in the air.

They were among dozens of people to board the first passenger flight out of the Kabul airport since the end of the U.S.-led evacuation, an effort that enabled an estimated 120,000 people to leave the country.

But the evacuation was also defined by searing images of bedlam -- young Afghans falling from the sky as they tried to cling to a departing U.S. transport plane, babies being handed over razor wire by frantic parents and crushing crowds that left many dead.

Hundreds of children were separated from their parents, and rogue flights landed without manifests.

The scene on Thursday could hardly have been more different.

Shaheer, 16, and Rubina, 19, siblings from Ontario, Canada, were among those waiting in line to go home after failing to reach the airport earlier.

The two had traveled to Afghanistan for the month of August to visit family and then found themselves stranded in Kabul when it was overtaken by the Taliban.

"At first it was scary," said Rubina. "Honestly, the war zone was the airport. The city was fine."

She said that she did not feel threatened but was relieved to leave the country.

"When we were being let in today, they were super nice," Rubina said of the Taliban guards. "We're mostly worried to get back in time for school."

They both also hoped to return to Afghanistan soon.

"Even if I can't come back in the next few years, I'd like to come back in future years for service," Rubina said. "It's my home country, I love it."

GIVEN THAT WE'RE UNINDICTED CO-CONSPIRATORS?:

Senior officials in the Biden administration have privately pressed the Palestinian Authority, including its president Mahmoud Abbas, to walk back Ramallah's effort to have Israel tried for war crimes at the International Criminal Court (ICC), a Middle Eastern diplomatic official told The Times of Israel on Thursday.

IT HAD TO BE VAGUE ENOUGH TO ONLY APPLY TO BLACKS:

U.S. District Judge Mark Walker called the laws "vague and overbroad" and said that the bill would make it hard for protestors to know if they are in violation of the new law.

"[We] are happy that the safety of Black organizers will be protected and that a person of power saw what we saw - the law is unjust," Dream Defenders press secretary Jessika Ward told Axios.

"We as an organization just want every to feel safe when they are speaking up for what is right - in this case, it's violence against Black and brown people by the hands of police," Ward added.

TOOK LONG ENOUGH:

United States President Joe Biden is toughening COVID-19 vaccine requirements for federal workers and contractors, as he aims to boost vaccinations and curb the surging Delta variant that is killing thousands each week and jeopardizing the nation's economic recovery.

Just weeks after he mandated that federal workers get shots or face rigorous testing and masking protocols, Biden will sign a new executive order to require vaccination for employees of the executive branch and contractors who do business with the federal government -- with no option to test out -- White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday morning.

THAT WAS EASY:

"[The Taliban] have shown flexibility, and they have been businesslike and professional in our dealings with them in this effort. This is a positive first step," US National Security Council spokesperson Emily Horne said in a statement.

UK Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab said some 13 UK nationals were among the passengers.

"We are grateful to our Qatari friends for facilitating a flight carrying 13 British nationals from Kabul to safety in Doha today," Raab said in a statement.

"We expect the Taliban to keep to their commitment to allow safe passage for those who want to leave," he added, noting that Qatar has acted as the "central intermediary" between the Taliban and the international community in recent years.

THE HIGH COST OF NOT ELECTING GOVERNORS:

While a majority of Americans are now almost completely protected against severe disease, hospitalization, and death from COVID-19, the Biden administration seems to have almost no meaningful strategy to bring the pandemic to an end beyond magical thinking that vaccine uptake will increase with some polite prodding and artfully produced briefings. The country is racking up over a million COVID cases a week, pediatric hospitalizations have reached or exceeded their winter peaks in some states, and the vaccinated public is receiving very mixed messages about the state of their immunity, whether and when to get a booster and the kinds of activities they should be engaged in.

The worst and most public dysfunction seems to be coordination between regulatory bodies and the private sector regarding boosters and pediatric vaccines. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is mysteriously slow rolling not just third shots of the existing mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna for the general population, despite clear data from Israel that efficacy against infection wanes as times marches on, but also new boosters from Moderna specifically geared to fight variants. Last month, the Biden administration suddenly announced that boosters would be administered starting on Sept. 20 for anyone eight months or more out from their second shots. Six days later that timeline was bumped up to six months. Then scientists at the FDA and CDC balked at their marching orders and publicly called that timeline into question, accusing the White House of rushing them for political reasons.

To make matters worse, the administration announced on Sept. 3 that Moderna vaccine boosters would be delayed at least several weeks to complete a review of the company's trial data. There remains no timeline for a Johnson & Johnson booster even though the company says a second shot of their vaccine produces a robust immune response. The 14 million people who got that company's single-shot vaccine will remain in limbo indefinitely. The whole fiasco has rendered the "one vaccine is just as good as the other" discourse from the spring maddeningly hollow.

And what are ordinary people to make of our immunity levels right now? It's waning, some say, based on Israeli data suggesting that those who got their shots first are getting sick with breakthrough infections more often than those who got their jabs recently. On Aug. 27, Dr. Anthony Fauci said that boosters are not necessary for the time being and vaccinated people should be confident in their protection from severe disease -- but last week he seemed to endorse the idea that all vaccinated people will need a booster for maximum protection. The administration has not addressed studies suggesting that the Moderna vaccine provides longer-lasting immunity than Pfizer. Meanwhile, Moderna and the FDA are fighting over dosages for the company's proposed booster vaccines. Biden's team promised that it could quickly roll out boosters for any variant, but here we are more than six months into the Delta nightmare, and they are nowhere to be seen.

The Premonition's story begins with the first and mightiest of the modern pandemics. In 1918, an avian flu mutated and killed 50 million people worldwide, including 675,000 in the United States.1 Since then, the specter of influenza has haunted the world's public health agencies. Much smaller pandemics in 1957, 1968, and 2009 kept the danger to the fore. But the first national pandemic preparedness plan was only created in 2005, after President George W. Bush read John Barry's The Great Influenza, the classic study of the 1918 pandemic, and concluded that "[i]f anything like the 1918 flu occurred, the basic functions of the society would come to a halt, and no one in the federal government seemed to have worried about it."2 Rajeev Venkayya, the youthful head of the Biodefense directorate of the Homeland Security Council, was tapped to draft a pandemic strategy embracing not just the production and stockpiling of vaccines, but also immigration, commerce, tourism, and whatever else would affect the course of a pandemic. He put together a team of brilliant and dedicated oddballs whose accomplishments and frustrations are the storyline of The Premonition.

To begin with, Venkayya's team concentrated on modeling. They were led by an oncologist, Richard Hatchett, who had once been a gifted undergraduate poet--he had chosen medical school because "[w]riting is too hard."3 But however elegant their models, the verdict of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and other health experts was always, "Not enough data." Then Carter Mecher, an intensive-care physician from Veterans Affairs studying the pandemic of 1918, noticed that, even though the two cities took similar preventive measures, St. Louis had half the death rate of Philadelphia. There was a crucial difference: the measures were only instituted in Philadelphia several weeks after the first reported case in the city, while St. Louis had acted almost immediately. As a result, the exponential spread of the disease exacted a heavy toll on Philadelphia; much less so in St. Louis. And there was a further lesson. Philadelphia was reluctant to act without federal guidance, which did not come until three weeks after the city's first reported case. Fortunately for St. Louis, the US surgeon general spoke out recommending school closure and social distancing on the same day as the first case was reported there, giving the city authorities political cover to take unpopular measures. Clearly, federal leadership would be crucial to any future pandemic response.

Though Mecher, Hatchett, and their colleagues would never be taken seriously by the CDC, the National Institutes of Health, and other public health organizations, it must be some comfort to them that the paper in which they reported the above results, "Public Health Interventions and Epidemic Intensity During the 1918 Pandemic," became phenomenally popular.4 As of October 2020, it ranked as the eighth most cited paper out of 86,622 published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.5

The administration's pandemic plan was completed and the Mecher-Hatchett team dispersed by the end of Bush's final term. Despite reaching this milestone, a number of political problems had not been overcome. The new strategy called for closing schools as soon as the infection rate reached 0.1. That sounds small, but only because exponential growth is hard to grasp intuitively, especially when, as with politicians and school boards, one has angry constituents demanding to know how so few apparent infections could justify so much inconvenience. Of course, by the time the number of infections has grown, controlling the pandemic will be many times more difficult.

A political test for the new strategy soon arrived in the form of a swine flu epidemic in early 2009, just a few months after the inauguration of Barack Obama. The new president asked for advice. Mecher was asked to provide a briefing and advised closing the schools; the CDC counseled against it. Obama declined to close the schools. The swine flu infected 40-80 million Americans, but luckily only 12,500 died.6 The right decision was made, it turned out, but for the wrong reasons--the numbers could easily have been much worse. Did the failure to take action this time make it even harder to do so the next time, in 2020?

NO ONE WANTS TO ACCEPT THAT WE WON THE WAR:

For starters, it will entail a confluence of deploying satellites, drones, missiles, and aircraft from far away--to monitor terror enclaves and rain death on terrorist targets and training camps. Most likely, the U.S. will also work with its partners in the region to embed assets in suspected ISIS-K cells and other groups gaining a foothold in Afghanistan.

To be sure, it's much easier to conduct such an operation with troops and air bases inside the country. But according to multiple foreign policy experts and national security veterans, it's a viable plan. Whether it turns out to be a Hail Mary pass or a successful strategy will depend on how fast the military and intelligence assets can adapt.

William F. Wechsler, director of the Rafik Hariri Center and Middle East Programs at the Atlantic Council, told me that successful over-the-horizon missions often depend on how far the units are from the targets, whether there are local partners to assist the U.S., and what nations in the region can share intelligence.

For now, the horizon may be a U.S. air base in an allied country like Qatar in the Persian Gulf, or submarines, warships, and aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea. But launching strikes at jihadists in landlocked Afghanistan from that far away does take more time--and depends on adjacent countries allowing overflight rights. Better options would be basing forces in one of the six countries bordering Afghanistan. So far, none has agreed. The U.S. is reportedly discussing options with Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, and it is already flying intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions from Gulf countries. Military strategists worry that more time in flight getting there will mean less time over targets for surveillance or strikes. Also, there may be a steep decline in actionable intelligence with fewer American assets in the country.

Wechsler says the U.S. is now in a race to develop even more effective counterterrorism strategies over long distances as Salafist-jihadist groups will surely seek safe havens in Afghanistan to plot new attacks. Fortunately, the U.S. has a much bigger antiterrorism infrastructure in place since the attacks 20 years ago. "We have a defense against terrorism now. We built that machine since 9/11, and it's pretty good, though not infallible," Wechsler says, pointing to a reinvigorated FBI, a new Homeland Security Department, countless security measures to protect airplanes, and technical intelligence capabilities to track phones and other communications.

Others see Afghanistan as far less dangerous than it was 20 years ago. The U.S. military has insight and intelligence deep into the hinterlands that it didn't have in 2001. Rival powers in the region--China, Russia, and Iran--all have a similar interest in pressuring the Taliban to keep terrorists off their doorsteps. Indeed, the Taliban is currently on a charm offensive, when it's not beating protestors.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Trump's first response to the 9/11 attacks was to congratulate himself (on the radio) for now having the tallest building in downtown Manhattan, the two taller structures having been destroyed. (Naturally, the boast was false.) His bid to buy the Park51 project seemed about as serious as his pledges to ease tension, or his bizarre insistence that he saw people in New Jersey on 9/11 celebrating on rooftops: just more Trumpian bluster.

It is one thing to oppose radical Islamist terrorism. But when Republican politicians, for short-term political gain, redefined the enemy not as violent jihadists but Muslims in general, they also began to redefine their party as one welcoming xenophobic rhetoric and candidates. Remember, this was also the era when Republicans went out of their way to emphasize the middle name of "Barack Hussein Obama," and when Donald Trump, with an eye on the White House, was helping to spread lies about Obama's birth certificate and hinted that Obama was secretly Muslim. The GOP became the sort of party that would stand by Donald Trump when he told Democratic members of Congress to "go back" to where they came from. The sort of party that would stand by his "Muslim ban."

It didn't have to be that way. Not all Republicans were as irresponsible: After 9/11, President George W. Bush made every effort to communicate that America's war was not against Muslims--and many of the Muslims who have come here from Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere over the past two decades got that message.

But too many Republicans ensured that their party's base heard a very different message. And they still are: Some are rightly criticizing Biden's botched response to the Afghanistan withdrawal that Trump sought, but others are demeaning the very people who will be great Americans.

NEVERMIND CRT:

Overall, 44% of Americans say they have heard at least a fair amount about the phrase, including 22% who have heard a great deal, according to the Center's survey of 10,093 U.S. adults, conducted Sept. 8-13, 2020. Still, an even larger share (56%) say they've heard nothing or not too much about it, including 38% who have heard nothing at all. [...]

As part of the survey, respondents who had heard about "cancel culture" were given the chance to explain in their own words what they think the term means.

Conservative Republicans less likely than other partisan, ideological groups to describe 'cancel culture' as actions taken to hold others accountable

The most common responses by far centered around accountability. Some 49% of those familiar with the term said it describes actions people take to hold others accountable...

#BLM IS WORKING:

After months of careful planning by Virginia officials and engineers, Richmond's 21-foot-high statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee's "surrender came so fast -- after less than an hour of work Wednesday -- that hundreds of onlookers were caught by surprise," The Washington Post reports. The jubilant crowd cheered. Gov. Ralph Northam (D), who had ordered Virginia's largest remaining Confederate statue removed in June 2020 and persisted through several court challenges, said "this day has been a long time coming."

THANKS, W:

Two liberal parties on Thursday celebrated victory in Moroccan elections.

The National Rally of Independents (RNI) and Authenticity and Modernity Party (PAM) won 97 and 82 seats respectively, according to preliminary results with most of the votes counted.

The Islamist party which headed a ruling coaliltion in the country for the past decade, the Justice and Development Party (PJD), saw its support collapse from 125 to just 12 seats. 

KNOWING YOUR ENEMY:

The late founder of the Taliban, Mullah Mohammad Omar, graduated from a Deobandi seminary in Pakistan, along with several other Taliban leaders. But while Afghanistan's new rulers call themselves Deobandis, clerics here in the birthplace of Deobandi Islam are keen to distance themselves from the Taliban -- even if they occasionally speak admiringly of them.

"The Taliban say they are doing what we did in India. The way we kicked the British out of India, that's what the Taliban are doing in Afghanistan. They're kicking out outsiders: first the Russians, then the Americans," Maulana Arshad Madani, the 80-year-old principal of Darul Uloom, told NPR at his residence just outside the walled seminary's ornate brick gates. "What they say is right."

But Madani -- and everyone else NPR met in Deoband -- denied any contact with the Taliban and seemed uncomfortable with any association with them.

"They call themselves Deobandi, but 99% of the Taliban have never even visited India. We have no connection to them," Madani says. "The Taliban say our guiding idea -- of not being enslaved by anyone -- that comes from a Deobandi scholar who had gone [to Pakistan and Afghanistan]. Apart from that, there is no connection."

Scholars say he's right -- that the Taliban's version of Islam diverged from the original Deobandi movement in the latter years of the 20th century.

"The Indian Deobandi [version] is classical, whereas the one in Pakistan and Afghanistan is neo-Deobandi," explains Soumya Awasthi, a security expert at the Vivekananda International Foundation, a think tank in New Delhi. "I call it 'neo-Deobandi' because it's walking away from the true tenets of Deobandi Islam. It has a strain of Wahhabism in it," she says.

Wahhabism is another ultraconservative movement within Sunni Islam, named for the 18th-century Saudi theologian Muhammad ibn Abdul Wahhab. It's the version of Islam enshrined in Saudi law and practiced there today.

"After the Iranian revolution in 1979, Saudi Arabia was worried that the Muslim world would be dominated by a Shia country -- Iran. So they started funding [Sunni-majority] Pakistan to run these madrassas on their [Afghan] border," Awasthi says. "Slowly the Wahhabi culture came into Deobandi Islam."

Wahhabi influence grew in Pakistan and Afghanistan throughout the 1980s, when the CIA and Saudi Arabia both funneled arms to mujahedeen guerrilla groups fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, during the Cold War.

Over time, different strains of Deobandi Islam were influenced by the different politics of the countries in which they flourished: the Wahhabi-infused strain, practiced by the Taliban, whose adherents have attacked more moderate Muslims and people of other faiths, and the original Deobandi strain, which has existed overwhelmingly peacefully in India for more than 150 years.

IT'LL BE VIRTUALLY 100% BY 2025:

Australia has easily beaten its previous record for the share of renewables on its main grid, reaching 58.3 per cent just after noon on Thursday - and also setting a new record for the share of wind and solar in the grid.

The new record, according to data from OpenNEM, was set at 12.30pm, and easily beat the previous record of 57.3 per cent set just a few days earlier. More importantly, it occurred on a weekday. Such records are usually set on weekends when industrial use is lower.

THE STUFF BLACKS HAVE TO SAY FOR THE TRUMPISTS TO ACCEPT THEM...:

The conversation began when Owens joked that she could support reparations.

"I think I could be pro-reparations," Owens said. "I think we should allow people the opportunity or the chance to go back to Africa. I would sponsor that like you wouldn't believe."

"I don't think you would have a long line," Elder said, laughing. 

"This was one of the first countries to ban the slave trade," Owens added. "I mean Britain was ahead of us. The U.K. was ahead of us. America was just right behind them." 

"By the way, when you say that the U.K. was ahead of us, they were," Elder said. "Did you know that the slave owners were compensated? After they lost their 'property,' the government compensated slave owners."

"I didn't know that. Interesting," Owens said. 

"Yeah, and so when people talk about reparations, do they really want to have that conversation?" Elder said. "Because like it or not, slavery was legal. And so, their property, their legal property was taken away from them after the Civil War. So, you can make an argument that the people who are owed reparations are not only just Black people but people whose 'property' was taken away after the end of the Civil War."

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

The Q in QBism came from Quantum, of course, and the B originated with "Bayes". In the wide spectrum of ways to think about probability, "Bayesianism" encompasses a variety of schools of thought which hold that a probability is a value that an agent asserts, a quantitative expression of a degree of belief. Probabilities encode expectations, and without someone around to do the expecting, there would be no probabilities. Before there were weather forecasters, there were no forecasts, even though the world had plenty of weather. In the proto-QBist days, around the turn of the millennium, the idea was just that the probabilities in quantum physics could be understood in a Bayesian way. But "Bayesian" is a broad label, and those early attempts were not very good at narrowing it down; nor, as further investigation revealed, were they internally self-consistent. That early "Quantum Bayesianism" took several more years to mature into QBism.

QBism regards quantum mechanics as a "user's manual". In this interpretation, quantum mechanics is about what happens at the interface between an agent and the rest of nature. Most of the mathematical entities employed in the theory, like the "wavefunctions" of which so much has been said, boil down to being bundles of expectations. Whose expectations? Yours, or mine, or those of whoever has picked up the user's manual and is trying to benefit from its guidance. Expectations for what? For the consequences of the user's own actions. What kind of actions? Any kind, in principle. Very often, physicists think of a "quantum measurement" as something that requires a laboratory to pull off. But in principle, the act of smelling a rose has every right to be considered a "quantum measurement". It is only that roses are big and we manipulate them clumsily, so one's expectations about a rose will be too fuzzed out for invoking quantum mechanics to be worthwhile in practical terms.

QBism has elements that are radical --- perhaps subversive, even --- while at the same time showing how some things we do as part of "weekday physics" are philosophically respectable after all.

Following the genre conventions of information-theory books, let's name our agent Alice. She has a system of interest before her --- perhaps an atom, perhaps an ion-trap quantum computer or a rose or a loaf of sourdough bread. She contemplates the possible actions she might take upon the system. By using quantum mechanics, she can assign probabilities to the possible consequences of each action, in a self-consistent way. Then she makes a choice and reaches out, taking action and experiencing the result. She can then update her expectations for future experiences in accord with this measurement outcome --- with the new fact that she, in synergy with the system, has brought into being. Prior to the measurement, Alice's uncertainty was not due to ignorance of an outcome already there, waiting to be uncovered, but rather her recognition that the fact of the outcome did not yet physically exist. It is this last realization, the principle that measurement outcomes aren't just waiting to be read off but instead require participation to elicit, that opens up the radical new possibilities of quantum physics.

This is at least an internally coherent narrative about the mathematics, which is the first thing we ask of an interpretation. But what does it say about nature that quantum mechanics is such a good user's manual for you or me or Alice to employ? Why this particular sage advice for swimming in the madness and salt of the world? Here we move into the realm of speculation; it is one thing to provide a narrative and another to successfully extract a lesson from it.

Consider again Alice measuring an atom. Her wavefunction for the atom encodes her personal expectations for future experiences, and her changing her wavefunction for it upon obtaining a novel experience is a transformation within her. But both Alice and the atom participate in the measurement event; both partake in the creation of a new fact for the pair of them. And if the atom can participate in such ongoing acts of creation when the other player is an agent, surely it can do so when the other player is not. That is to say, whatever fundamental capacity for creation the atom brings to an event, it should bring whether or not the other participant is a conscious agent, let alone a trained quantum mechanic. As one of our papers said, "Certainly QBism has creation going on all the time and everywhere; quantum measurement is just about an agent hitching a ride and partaking in that ubiquitous process."

It is this last realization, the principle that measurement outcomes aren't just waiting to be read off but instead require participation to elicit, that opens up the radical new possibilities of quantum physics.

This kind of imagery has predecessors. It's not unlike Karen Barad's notion of "intra-actions", or Alfred North Whitehead's "actual occasions" and "throbs of experience". William James wrote of "new being com[ing] in local spots and patches". And John Archibald Wheeler went all in. For him, the generation of a measurement outcome was the "elementary quantum phenomenon". "Is the entirety of existence," he would ask, "rather than being built on particles or fields of force or multidimensional geometry, built upon billions upon billions of elementary quantum phenomena, those elementary acts of 'observer-participancy,' those most ethereal of all the entities that have been forced upon us by the progress of science?" He would say, "In some strange sense the quantum principle tells us that we are dealing with a participatory universe."

CONSPIRING AGAINST DEMOCRACY:

By mid-July this year, the US Deputy Assistant Secretary for Israel and Palestinian Affairs Hady Amr stated, "I have never seen the Palestinian Authority in a worse situation," as he urged Israel to alleviate the Palestinian economy to prevent a complete collapse. As protests against the PA's violent authoritarianism showed no signs of abating, keeping Abbas in power at the expense of the Palestinian people seems to be the chosen option.

Defense Minister Benny Gantz's recent meeting with Abbas was swiftly contextualised by Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett. "This is a meeting that deals with security issues," he declared. 

"There is no diplomatic process with the Palestinians, nor will there be."

Yet the meeting has significance. Taken at face value, it might seem as if the Israeli government is attempting a new approach in policy towards the Palestinians. However, the backdrop to the meeting is saving the PA, which in turn ensures continued security coordination with Israel and prominence for Israel's security narrative.

Given the PA's weak position at the moment, which is the real reason why Abbas cancelled the elections, a power vacuum in Palestine would not only embolden Hamas but also allow new voices from among the people to emerge. Were that to happen, Israel, the US, and the international community would find that clinging on to the two-state diplomacy as a veneer might no longer suffice.

EVERY TOM, DICK, AND HARRY::

Six Palestinian prisoners escaped from the high-security Gilboa prison in northern Israel on Monday, using a tunnel and apparently coordinating their escape via a smuggled mobile phone. The ensuing manhunt, along with headlines in Israeli newspapers and responses on social media, created an action-film halo around the event, which came on the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah.

The escape was planned despite the closure imposed across the occupied West Bank during the holiday. The response from the Israeli government and the Israel Prison Service (IPS) was one of surprise and humiliation. The prison break quickly became a symbolic event, giving hope that all Palestinians living under Israeli occupation can find a way to break free.

The refusal of Israeli authorities to permit fair trials for Palestinians leaves no choice but to consider all Palestinians in Israeli prisons as political prisoners

Palestinian prisoners receive minimal services in Israeli prisons, and must pay for food and hygiene products from their own pockets. Although the Palestinian Authority (PA) transfers payments to the canteen accounts of prisoners to help keep them alive, right-wing Israeli politicians have attacked this practice, and in 2018 the Knesset passed a law to deduct such payments from the tax money Israel collects on behalf of the PA and is legally obligated to transfer.

Despite the unwillingness of Israeli authorities to maintain basic dignity for Palestinian prisoners, no aspect of the occupation is more expensive than the prison system. According to the Israeli government, since the 1967 occupation and until 2008, the budget of the Israeli police and prison ministry has increased by 18.8 percent every year, more than any other ministry.

The money is not directed to ensuring prisoners' standard of living, but rather is invested in security and keeping prisons under strict control. The escape on Monday made a mockery of this.

BUT, BOY, THEY DO MAKE IT HARD:

ARE THEY MILESTONES IF YOU CROSS THEM EVERY FEW FEET?:

Siemens Gamesa announced the launch of its RecycleableBlade on Tuesday, as a "milestone" step towards its goal of making whole wind turbines fully recyclable, by 2040.

For now, the company has produced the first six 81-meter long recyclable blades at its manufacturing plant in Aalborg, ready for commercial use.

The blades look likely to make their operational debut at the 342MW Kaskasi offshore wind farm, which is in the early stages of construction in the German North Sea, as part of an agreement with developer RWE. The project is expected to be operational in mid-2022.

Siemens said it had also made deals with French company EDF Renewables and German wind project developer, wpd, both of which had agreed to install sets of the RecyclableBlades at one of their future offshore wind farms.

The production of fully recyclable wind turbine blades is a milestone for the global wind industry, which - like the solar and battery industries - has been scrambling to find sustainable end-of-life solutions to match with the enormous and escalating uptake of the technology.

A FRAUGHT CHOICE:

Akhund is probably best known as one of the architects of the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, the giant cliff statues destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

Initially, Omar had no intention of destroying the statues. But the Taliban founder was angered at seeing conservation money being made available for the UNESCO world heritage site while failing to secure humanitarian aid from the United Nations for Afghanistan. As such, Omar sought out the advice of his shura, and Akhund was part of the council that ordered the destruction of the sixth-century statues. [...]

Today, there are broadly two factions in the Taliban - a military wing that carries out the day-to-day campaigns, and a conservative religious elite grounded in Deobandism that acts as its political wing. Mullah Akhund aligns very much with the religious faction of the Taliban.

There appears to be a power struggle behind Akhund's appointment. Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, who served as deputy to Omar during the early years of the Taliban before assuming the position of de facto leader after Omar's death, had been seen by many experts on Afghanistan as a potential head of state. But there is political tension between Baradar and the powerful Haqqani network - a family-based Islamist group that has become the Taliban's de facto diplomatic arm in recent years and has been successful in gaining support for the group among other local groups.

The Haqqanis are among the most militant factions of the Taliban. And recent conciliatory language from Baradar on issues such as women's rights, working with the international community and amnesty for members of the former government runs counter to the ideology of the Haqqani network.

Akhund seems to be a compromise candidate between supporters of Baradar and the Haqqani network. The delay in his appointment - the Taliban repeatedly put off making an announcement - could be an indicator of internal divisions in the Taliban. When the announcement came, it was accompanied by news that Baradar would be his deputy, while two members of the Haqqani network would also serve in the Afghan government.

Whether this arrangement is permanent or temporary remains to be seen, but the compromise could be a testing of the waters of the Taliban - to see how effective Akhund is as a unifying figure for the group.

WAR IS SEX BY OTHER MEANS?:

The head of Guinea's military special forces, Lieutenant-Colonel Mamady Doumbouya - a former French foreign legionnaire officer - later appeared on public television, draped in the national flag, saying government "mismanagement" prompted the coup.

"We are no longer going to entrust politics to one man, we are going to entrust politics to the people," Doumbouya said. "Guinea is beautiful. We don't need to rape Guinea any more, we just need to make love to her."

Youssouf Bah, a journalist based in Conakry, said members of the special forces told him: "This is not a military coup. We are here to free the people."

Bah noted there were celebrations among the people in many neighbourhoods in the capital, and a noticeable absence of military patrols on the streets.

"There came a time when Guineans were asking for change, most Guineans asked for change. So this is exactly what has happened," Bah told Al Jazeera.

In neighboring Senegal, which has a large diaspora of Guineans who opposed Conde, news of his political demise was met with relief.

"President Alpha Conde deserves to be deposed. He stubbornly tried to run for a third term when he had no right to do so," said Malick Diallo, a young Guinean shopkeeper in the suburbs of Dakar.

"We know that a coup d'etat is not good," said Mamadou Saliou Diallo, another Guinean living in Senegal. "A president must be elected by democratic vote. But we have no choice. We have a president who is too old, who no longer makes Guineans dream, and who does not want to leave power."

PITY THE POOR LUDDITES:

TO FIND SOME of the coldest objects in the universe, you don't have to go much further than your local university. There, a physicist may be using laser light and magnets to cool atoms below a stunning -450 Fahrenheit. They might use these ultracold atoms to sense even the weakest magnetic fields in the room, or to build a clock accurate to within a quadrillionth of a second. But they probably could not take these sensors or clocks outside of their lab, as they tend to be large and fragile.

Now, a team of physicists at the University of Nottingham have shown that 3D-printing parts for these ultracold quantum experiments allows them to shrink their apparatus to just a third of its usual size. Their work, published in the journal Physical Review X Quantum in August, could open the door to a quicker and more accessible way to make smaller, more stable, customized setups for experiments.

THE CRACKER CUOMO:

August was Florida's deadliest month of the COVID-19 pandemic. With a new batch of delayed COVID-19 deaths reported Monday, Florida lost more than 6,600 people to the coronavirus in August, an average of 213 deaths a day. The newest seven-day average of COVID-19 deaths in Florida, 346, amounts to 23 percent of the 1,498 deaths recorded in the entire U.S. each day, according COVID-19 data compiled by The Washington Post. 

FROM fAR wAR TO nEAR wAR:

In the 20 years since the 9/11 attack, U.S. counterterrorism policy has achieved some striking successes and suffered some horrific failures. On the positive side, jihadi organizations such as al Qaeda and the Islamic State (also known as ISIS) are now shadows of their former selves, and the United States has avoided another catastrophic, 9/11-scale attack. The worst fears, or even the more modest ones, of U.S. counterterrorism officials have not been realized. With terrorism less of an immediate concern, U.S. President Joe Biden has turned Washington's focus toward China, climate change, and other issues--even withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan as part of an effort to end the so-called forever wars.

At the same time, however, many of the United States' more ambitious foreign policy efforts done in the name of counterterrorism since 9/11, such as effecting regime change in the Middle East and winning the goodwill of Muslims around the world, have failed and even backfired. Although al Qaeda and ISIS are far weaker than they were at their peak, they have persisted in the face of tremendous pressure, and their reach, albeit at times more ambitious than their grasp, has only grown since 2001. Today, other countries face potent terrorist threats, and al Qaeda, ISIS, and their various affiliates and allies remain active in civil wars around the world.

Instead of a decisive victory, the United States appears to have settled for something less ambitious: good enough. It recognizes that although jihadi terrorism may be impossible to fully and permanently eradicate--or the costs of trying to do so are simply too high--the threat can be reduced to the point where it kills relatively few Americans and no longer shapes daily life in the United States. As Washington has grown more skeptical of large-scale counterinsurgency operations designed to reshape whole societies, the most recent three administrations--Barack Obama's, Donald Trump's, and now Biden's--have focused on keeping jihadi organizations weak and off balance. Through a mix of intelligence gathering, military operations, and homeland security efforts, they have mostly succeeded in keeping the fight "over there." To a remarkable degree, the United States itself has been insulated from the threat. Jihadism remains alive and well abroad and is not going away anytime soon, but the current U.S. doctrine is a politically feasible and comparatively effective way of managing the issue. Good enough, it turns out, is good enough.

THE HEAT HIS PREDECESSORS REFUSED TO TAKE:

Hours after the last US military flight out of Kabul, President Joe Biden began a meeting in the White House Situation Room with praise.

"You all did a helluva job," Biden told his top national security aides, according to a White House official. He feels the same way about his own performance.

His conviction was not melted by a weeks-long blowtorch of criticism for the chaotic conclusion to the nation's 20-year military involvement in Afghanistan. The flames, as broad as they were intense, came from Democrats as well as Republicans, Americans who voted for him and those who didn't.

They have eroded his political strength and stalled momentum for his economic agenda at home. Biden responded with heat of his own.

He has heard, and rejected, all the principal indictments. Publicly and privately, he and his aides dismiss the charge that they neglected fundamentally better alternatives for ending America's longest war.

They acknowledge failing to anticipate the lightning collapse of the Afghan government and security forces as the Taliban advanced amid US troop withdrawals. But even if they had anticipated it, they say potential options -- starting mass evacuations earlier, or handing the country to the Taliban directly -- would have produced the same chaotic rush for the exits.

They accept that they could have processed special visa applications for Afghan allies faster. But given the scale of demand, they say that would have only marginally swelled the tens of thousands ultimately flown to safety.

ALWAYS FORCE THE CONTRADICTIONS:

Central to these worries are the stepped-up attacks against Chinese in Pakistan recently.

A bus carrying Chinese workers in northern Pakistan was bombed on July 14, killing 13 people, nine of whom were Chinese, and has since been attributed to Tehrik-e Taliban Pakistan (TTP) by Pakistani authorities. They said the attack was planned inside Afghanistan.

This was followed by another attack on Chinese workers in Karachi on July 28 and, in April, China's ambassador to Pakistan narrowly avoided a terrorist attack at a hotel in Quetta where his delegation was staying.

China has been targeted by Pakistani militants before, with the BLA launching a high-profile attack against the Chinese Consulate in Karachi in 2018. But the recent spate of incidents marks a new trend, says Abdul Basit, an expert on South Asian insurgent groups at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore.

"China's future is in South Asia, but there is tons of volatility at the moment," Basit told RFE/RL. "The main motivation in going after Chinese targets is that it is an effective way to cause problems for Pakistan, but the increased attacks point to a more permissive environment for groups to operate in."

While Beijing remains fixated on the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP) -- a Uyghur group that Beijing blames for unrest in its western Xinjiang Province and refers to it by its predecessor's name, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) -- groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State-Khorasan (IS-K) could also pose threats to China in the future.

JOINT OPERATIONS:

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken says the State Department is working with the Taliban to facilitate additional charter flights from Kabul for people seeking to leave Afghanistan after the American military and diplomatic departure.

Blinken was speaking on Tuesday at a joint news conference with Qatar's top diplomats and defense officials. He said the U.S. has been in contact with the Taliban "in recent hours" to work out arrangements for additional charter flights from the Afghan capital. [...]

Blinken said the United States believes there are "somewhere around 100" American citizens still in Afghanistan who want to leave. The State Department had previously put that estimate at between 100 and 200.

WELL, IT IS FRENCH:

Officials in New Orleans found elderly wheelchair-bound residents trapped on the upper floors of privately owned senior living facilities with no electricity and no way to escape the heat after Hurricane Ida swept through the city, Mayor LaToya Cantrell said Monday. Hundreds of people were evacuated on Saturday, nearly a week after Ida hit, The Associated Press reports, and officials said five residents of these facilities died in the days after the storm. 

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

There is a superhighway to rapid elimination of 80% of Australian greenhouse emissions. It uses mature, low-cost, reliable technology from vast production runs. Neither new technology nor taxes are needed. And it will cost approximately nil.

To get onto this superhighway, we need to electrify everything: we accelerate the already-rapid growth of solar and wind to displace coal and gas from electricity generation; we move to electric vehicles to displace oil; and we use electric heating to displace gas.

The deployment of solar and wind needs to double from 7 gigawatts in 2020 to 15 gigawatts per year. This is relatively straightforward considering that the deployment rate of solar and wind in 2015 was only 1 Gigawatt, and that prices continue to fall.

Australia has declining electricity emissions and declining electricity prices because cheap solar and wind energy is replacing more expensive electricity from coal and gas burning. Deep emissions reductions will have low or zero net cost.

CONFEDERACY OF DUNCES:

Disease forecasting, especially with an emerging new pathogen, is always fraught with uncertainty. But there are signs that the Delta variant's summer tear through the unvaccinated American South is the first phase of a protracted and scary new chapter in the coronavirus pandemic.

It is one that could eventually consume most of the nation.

This latest fourth wave began, among other places, in southern Missouri in June, before spreading quickly across conservative southern states where vaccinations among those under the age of 65 are almost 40 percentage points lower than in the Northeast. Among those aged 12-17, the gap is even greater.

Now, some 100,000 Americans are hospitalized with COVID-19, a number almost as high as during January's COVID-19 peak, and we are at over 1,500 deaths per day and climbing. Even worse: The spike continues to spread both north, consuming the Midwestern states of Indiana, Illinois, and Ohio; and west into Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas. At least one other new front of COVID-19 surge has also begun following the Sturgis Rally in South Dakota, and is now at risk of entering adjacent areas.

One of the ways to gauge the severity of a COVID-19 surge in a particular state or city is how busy funeral homes become -- and in Florida, according to CBS News, employees of funeral homes are absolutely swamped.

In July, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that one in five new COVID-19 cases in the United States was occurring in Florida. Ron DeSantis, Florida's far-right Republican governor, has been receiving a great deal of criticism for his response to the COVID-19 surge; DeSantis has opposed social distancing measures, forbidden public schools from having mask mandates, and tried to score cheap political points with his MAGA base by railing against expert immunologist Dr. Anthony Fauci.

CBS News' Khristopher J. Brooks explains, "In the last week of August, Florida hospitals averaged 279 deaths per day -- up from 52 in July, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. The spike in fatalities, although not yet definitively linked to the coronavirus, is strongly suspected to stem from the ongoing surge in cases caused by the Delta variant. Overall, the state has reported a total over 44,000 coronavirus deaths over the course of the pandemic, according to a New York Times tracker. COVID-19 has claimed so many lives in Florida that funeral directors said there aren't enough hours in the day to schedule all the services, a local TV station reported."

JOINT OPERATIONS:

The United States has evacuated four American citizens from Afghanistan via a land route, an official told reporters accompanying US Secretary of State on his flight to Qatar.

"This is the first overland evacuation facilitated by the State Department," the official said, but did not clarify which countries the Americans had transited through or arrived in. He added that the Taliban were aware of the move and had not hindered it. [...]

Washington has said it is closely monitoring a promise by the militants not to interfere with the departure of US citizens and allies.

NEVERMIND TRANSNATIONALISM...:

Over the summer, as the UK public sector prepared for a spending review focused on levelling up the nation, the Biden administration pressed ahead with its own plans, a $1trillion infrastructure programme aimed at rebooting the post-COVID US economy. Included in those plans is $10bn of direct support to community-based organisations aimed at rebuilding the social infrastructure of its most deprived communities.

Explaining the decision to directly fund neighbourhood level social infrastructure in a recent seminar, Robin Keegan, the senior official in the Biden administration responsible for the plans explained that "good municipalities will welcome stronger communities capable of working with them to deliver change; badly performing municipalities desperately need the help that local communities can provide in turning things around".

Recently, Boris Johnson reiterated his commitment to support local government and give local council leaders "the tools to make things happen for their communities" as part of his evolving levelling up agenda. If it is serious about transforming the quality of life in local communities - particularly those that are deprived or otherwise 'left behind' - there needs to be a recognition in the UK as well that the most powerful tool of transformation locally is the community itself. 

The notion that we should trust communities with the resources and tools to improve their areas and deliver better outcomes for local people has gained some traction recently. Local Government think tank New Local has published some significant reports on what it calls a new "Community Paradigm" - in which both the design and delivery of key services might increasingly be shared between a reimagined enabling local state and increasingly empowered local communities. Some forty local authorities and city majors have signed up to the cross-sectoral Community Wealth Fund campaign, which seeks to commit up to £4bn of dormant assets to rebuild social infrastructure of left behind areas. And over the last 18 months, across the country, we've seen community based organisations effectively partnering with local government to help manage and mitigate the worst of the impacts of pandemic and lockdown at a neighbourhood level.

But trusting local people with power and resources, as a way of generating better outcomes is not a new concept. In fact, it is one that has a solid academic foundation. The Nobel-Prize-winning economist Eleonor Ostrom, and more recently the likes of Raghuram Rajan and Andy Haldane, have all made the case for focusing on building stronger communities as a key means of achieving better outcomes at a local level. Ostrom famously showed that, given the opportunity, communities have the skills and knowledge to successfully self-govern, whilst Rajan and Haldane have developed this thinking further, applying it to the various mechanisms and structures of power that exist today.

TOPPLE REGIMES MORE; OCCUPY LESS:

Indian independence began on August 14, 1947. Pakistan broke away. Horrendous violence between Hindus and Muslims claimed a half-million lives. Many more lost their homes. The wounds of partition are yet to heal.

Attlee was widely blamed for getting out too soon and leaving the former colony in chaos. If only a better police force had been organized. If only the army could have kept order. If only the British could have left once the country was stable.

US President Joe Biden now finds himself in the same situation. American troops have left Afghanistan in a bloody mess. Critics of Biden's decision to withdraw claim that the United States should have stayed longer. In the opinion of Robert Kagan, a well-known American promotor of robust military policies, the US should have promised to stay at least 20 years, instead of being non-committal. After all, the US military presence was minimal and could easily be afforded. But in that case, why just 20 years? Why not 40? Why not forever?

THEY SOUND JUST LIKE TRUMPISTS:

The websites of several prominent Western news outlets have been targeted by a pro-Russian influence operation that uses the websites' comment sections to distort public opinion, research conducted in Britain shows.

The study by Cardiff University's Crime and Security Research Institute found pro-Russian comments often receive an unusually high number of favorable responses. These comments in turn are fed back to Russian-language media outlets and used as the basis for stories to suggest Western public approval of Kremlin policies or discontent with Western governments or institutions.

The operation, which the researchers said was ongoing, has targeted 32 media outlets in 16 countries, including The Washington Post and Fox News in the United States, and the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and The Times in Britain.

The Cardiff team said it began examining the comments in April but the operation was just the latest part of a long-running campaign to support Russia's narrative about the end of liberal democracy and the failure of NATO.

Almost 250 stories were found to contain pro-Kremlin or anti-Western sentiments in the comments sections about matters of relevance to Russia since April.

Some articles suggested extensive support in the West for Russia, President Vladimir Putin, or a particular policy.

A SUPER SIMPLE TROLLEY PROBLEM:

Torture is the purposeful delivery of torment onto the body of a totally dominated person in the name of a public authority. These features, not the specific techniques, or purposes, or locations, or even the quantum of pain inflicted, make torture what it is.

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

StoreDot, an Israeli developer of extreme fast-charging (XFC) battery technology for electric vehicles, unveiled this month what it called the "world's first" silicon-dominant battery prototype capable of recharging in just 10 minutes.

The company's cylindrical cells use a 4680 format -- 46 millimeters wide by 80 millimeters long -- that is favored by global carmakers, specifically electric vehicle giant Tesla.

MAZEL TOV:

Eleven years ago, the Anti-Defamation League surprised many by opposing an Islamic center planned for Lower Manhattan, blocks from the World Trade Center site of the September 11 terrorist attacks, even as its leader denounced anti-Muslim bigotry.

Now, the ADL's CEO says the position, taken four years before he joined the US civil rights organization, was a mistake.

"We were wrong, plain and simple," Jonathan Greenblatt wrote in an op-ed published Saturday morning on CNN.

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

Europe's carmakers have their orders: Electrify or die.

That automotive ultimatum landed during the summer on both sides of the Atlantic amid efforts to green up transportation. It put to rest a long-festering argument over which technology will be dominant for decarbonizing passenger vehicles but sparked a fresh political struggle over the terms and pace of transition.

"I think it is fair to say that there is no other option for global automakers than to transition quickly to electric vehicles," said Peter Mock, a researcher at the International Council on Clean Transportation who tracks the auto industry.

BAD ENOUGH THE rIGHT ISN'T rEPUBLICAN....:

The Founders knew this history well. They wanted a constitution that could weather the storms of faction, jealousy, and lust for power. As James Madison put the matter in The Federalist Papers (1787-88), the Americans sought "a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government."

And they seized upon Cicero. In his influential Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787), which circulated at the Constitutional Convention, Adams traced the development of the balanced constitution from Aristotle to Cicero, his hero. "As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character," Adams wrote, "his authority should have great weight."

The Founders also turned to thinkers such as the French philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755), author of The Spirit of Laws, one of the great works in the history of political thought. Montesquieu famously developed a theory of the separation of powers: legislative, executive, and judicial. "When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates," he wrote, "there can be no liberty." Yet, in this, Montesquieu acknowledged his own intellectual debt to Cicero and Rome's example. [...]

Cicero wrote with great insight about the concepts of justice, education, morals, and the character of the ideal statesman. But perhaps his most important contribution to the American political order was his understanding of natural law.

Cicero believed that a rational Providence oversaw the world, a world embedded in divine law: a set of moral and religious truths that govern the human condition. These truths were etched into the mind and conscience of every human being. "The nature of law must be sought in the nature of man," he wrote in The Laws. "Man is a single species which has a share in divine reason and is bound together by a partnership in justice."

As Cicero explained it, a political commitment to justice was only possible because of the universal and unchangeable character of natural law. It alone provided "the bond which holds together a community of citizens." His description of natural law would be embraced by thinkers ranging from Thomas Aquinas to John Locke to Thomas Jefferson:

We cannot be exempted from this law by any decree of the Senate or the people; nor do we need anyone else to expound or explain it. There will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal and unchangeable law; and there will be, as it were, one lord and master of us all--the god who is the author, proposer and interpreter of that law. Whoever refuses to obey it will be turning his back on himself. Because he has denied his nature as a human being he will face the gravest penalties for this alone.

All of the Founders subscribed to some version of natural law; it seemed to confirm the teachings of Christianity, held in high regard in the Protestant culture of colonial America. Thus, most of the Founders had Cicero in mind when they made natural law part of their political discourse. "Although the Founders had access to every level of Western discourse on natural law," writes historian Carl J. Richard, "they cited Cicero in support of the theory even more than in support of mixed government."