THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The chair of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol said Tuesday that former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has begun cooperating with their probe.

"Mr. Meadows has been engaging with the select committee through his attorney," Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said in a statement. "He has produced records to the committee and will soon appear for an initial deposition."

The committee had been considering pressing ahead with a criminal contempt of Congress referral against Meadows after he failed to show up to answer questions under oath earlier this month.

...AND CHEAPER...:

IT'LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

It seems like scientists and innovators are able to 3-D print just about anything--bridges, schools and even prized cuts of Wagyu beef. Now, a team of researchers introduced a new printing material: an entirely living ink made of microbes, which they hope can be used to improve building materials, human health and the environment, reports Sabrina Imbler for the New York Times. [...]

Though the ink is in the very beginning stages of its development, researchers are hopeful about its future. They are currently trying to scale up the printable structures from the small shapes they have now to sturdier designs. If it works, the microbial ink could become a greener and more renewable construction material, ultimately leading to the possibility of self-healing buildings, per the Times. Plus, this research can be used to fashion new medical devices for cancer treatments or to clean up toxins in the environment.

ONLY THE GRANTS PRETEND THAT THERE ARE DIFFERENT SPECIES OF FINCHES:

 

Neanderthals and Denisovans are some of the nearest ancestors to modern humans. These hominins were so similar to us that they even interbred with humans for thousands of years when the three overlapped in time and space in certain areas. Many people today still carry important genetic material from these cousins of ours -- meaning that, in a sense, they never completely went extinct.

MAYBE DON'T ENCOURAGE CARS TO RAM THEM EITHER?:

Armed demonstrators have become a disturbingly familiar sight at American protests in recent years. A study by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project and the Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund documented 560 armed protests over an 18-month period in 2020 and 2021. It found that armed protests are nearly six times as likely to turn violent or destructive as unarmed ones. (Michael Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, is a backer of Everytown.)

These incidents are taking a significant human toll. When armed militias descended on Louisville, Kentucky, during a protest over the fatal police shooting of Breonna Taylor, three people were injured after an accidental firearm discharge. In Portland last year, a pro-Trump demonstrator was shot and killed after a day of clashes between protesting groups. All told, about one in every 62 protests involving firearms results in a fatality.

The National Rifle Association and its elected allies seem to think that this should be the new normal. They want civilians armed to the teeth in state after state, city after city. As awful as that prospect might be, it is nonetheless gaining traction. Twenty-one states now allow the open and concealed carry of firearms without a permit -- a status that gun activists call "constitutional carry." Six states joined that list this year, most recently Texas in September (despite a majority of residents opposing the legislation).

Absent government intervention, this trend suggests that more incidents like Kenosha are all but inevitable. Authorities need to recognize that protests are an inherently charged situation, and that armed citizens are a threat to the First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly they're meant to express. 

LEAD HIMSELF TO THE SLAUGHTER:

Marcus Lamb, a prominent Christian broadcaster known for his outspoken opposition to COVID-19 vaccines, has died after contracting the virus.

NOT MUCH OXYGEN IN THAT BUBBLE, HUH?:

"Exploiting the tragedy of people who became victims of criminal pseudo-medical experiments in Auschwitz in a debate about vaccines, pandemic and people who fight for saving human lives is shameful," the museum's Twitter account wrote. "It is disrespectful to victims and a sad symptom of moral and intellectual decline."

THE INFLATION HYSTERIA WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED:

AMAZIN' MAN:

[G]il stood out as not only one of the game's finest first basemen but also as a great American and an exemplary human being, someone who many of us were in awe of because of his spiritual strength. I often heard Dodgers players refer to Gil as a "saint."

The son of an Indiana coal miner, Gil played one game for the Dodgers in 1943 at the age of 19 before enlisting in the U.S. Marines and serving our nation in World War II. He participated valiantly in the Pacific campaign, earning a Bronze Star for his actions during the Battle of Okinawa. He returned to the Dodgers in May 1947 and played an important role in one of the game's most significant accomplishments -- the integration of Jackie Robinson into the Major Leagues.

Jackie dealt with relentless racial discrimination and unprovoked attacks from opposing teams and fans throughout his career. It was so painful to see for so long, and it would make you shudder. Gil was always there to protect Jackie as the unassuming, yet effective, peacekeeper on the field. While Jackie was the target of many on-the-field skirmishes, Gil was able to defuse many more of them. Their relationship was special. I remember a game when the Dodgers were playing the Cardinals in old Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. There was a high foul ball by the first-base stands and Gil went over to make a play, and Jackie came over to back him up. Someone threw a whiskey bottle out of the upper deck in an attempt to hit Jackie. Thankfully, the bottle landed right between the two of them. I remember Gil patting Jackie on the back as if to say, "Hey, you're not alone. I'm with you."

Gil's support for Jackie and the Robinson family was not limited to just the playing field. The Hodges family supported the Robinsons and did whatever was needed to help them during difficult times, including grocery shopping for the Robinson family while the Dodgers were in Florida for Spring Training at a time in the South when, sadly, African Americans were not allowed to shop in many of the nearby markets. Everything Gil did for Jackie and his family was done quietly and without any fanfare or attention drawn to himself. At Gil's funeral in 1972, a sobbing Jackie told Gil's son Gil Jr., "Next to my son's death, this is the worst day of my life."

CRT-ANITY:

Amid the pandemic and its 5.2 million reported deaths, the Pew Research Center surveyed 6,485 American adults--including 1,421 evangelicals--in September 2021 about how they philosophically "make sense of suffering and bad things happening to people."

The most common explanation: It happens.

"Americans largely blame random chance--along with people's own actions and the way society is structured--for human suffering, while relatively few believers blame God or voice doubts about the existence of God for this reason," concluded Pew researchers in a new study released today. [...]

Among the survey's main findings:

7 in 10 American adults agree that suffering is "mostly a consequence of people's own actions." Yet also 7 in 10 agree that suffering is "mostly a result of the way society is structured."

8 in 10 are believers--either in "God as described in the Bible" (58%) or in "a higher power or spiritual force" (32%)--yet say most suffering "comes from the actions of people, not from God."

7 in 10 believe human beings are "free to act in ways that go against the plans of God or a higher power."

5 in 10 believe God allows suffering because it is "part of a larger plan."

4 in 10 believe Satan is responsible for most of the world's suffering.

Less than 2 in 10 say they have doubted God's omnipotence, goodness, or existence because of suffering.

IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

In his new book, "The Cloud Revolution: How the Convergence of New Technologies Will Unleash the Next Economic Boom and A Roaring 2020s" (Encounter Books, 2021), Mark Mills argues that not only is Moore's law alive and well but that a number of other technologies are now maturing into powerhouses of their own. Further, the confluence of information and these new physical technologies will lead to another "roaring" era, akin to the 1920s, when radio, automobiles, airplanes, electrification, and other technologies remade the world. In 1965, Intel founder Gordon Moore, with help from Carver Mead, saw that transistor densities on microchips were doubling every year or two and predicted that they could continue to do so for the next decade, at least.

As transistors got smaller, they would get faster and cheaper. At a furious compound doubling pace, they would launch an information revolution. Few predictions in technology work out, and none so spectacularly as Moore's law.

For the last 20 years, however, many technologists have argued that Moore's law is now, or will soon be, dead. In the last five years, those assertions have hardened into common knowledge. It's true that by the most traditional measure of feature size, Moore's law can't continue forever. Existing transistor designs can only shrink so far before they reach an atomic limit. Leading-edge "fabs" (or semiconductor factories), meanwhile, keep growing in cost (now around $12 billion to construct one).

And yet Mills shows that the combination of micro chip advances and macro architectural innovations (the cloud, in which millions of microchips are linked to perform common, commoditized tasks) have combined to keep Moore's law going strong.

ALL THAT HYSTERIA WASTED:

The Chronicle published another of its famed deep dives into crime statistics today, using SFPD reported crime data, the supposed gold standard in the great crime debates. And the data singles out  -- guess who?  -- the Target at the Metreon.

The Chron found that reported San Francisco shoplifting incidents doubled in the month of September 2021. Sounds bad! But that spike completely disappeared the following month. And then there's another crazy insight in that reported data.

"A closer look at the data shows that the spike in reported shoplifting came almost entirely from one store: the Target at 789 Mission St. in the Metreon mall," the Chron reports. "In September alone, 154 shoplifting reports were filed from the South of Market intersection where the Target stands, up from 13 in August. And then, in October, the reports from this intersection went down again to 17."

A Target spokespeson told the Chron the September shoplifting surge is attributed entirely to a new reporting system wherein they could report shoplifting by phone. 

...AND CHEAPER...:

Israel is making plans to build solar power plants in cooperation with Egypt and other neighboring countries, Bloomberg reported Nov. 18.

Bloomberg quoted Yair Pines, head of the Israeli prime minister's office, as saying, "Discussions are underway for potential joint projects in Jordan, Egypt, Greece, Cyprus and countries further afield."

"The sites will be built in countries with more idle land than densely populated Israel, which will provide its technological know-how," Pines said. "Our neighbors have lots of open land, something we don't have. We have the technology."

According to Pines, the plants would be connected to the respective countries' energy grids, paving the way for Egypt to increase solar's contribution to its energy mix.

HOW IMPORTANT CAN CUOMO AND CARLSON BE TO THE BUSINESS MODELS?:

Chris Cuomo hosts a primetime CNN show on which he discusses national political issues. He's also the brother of Andrew Cuomo, the disgraced former governor of New York who resigned in August in the wake of a damning report detailing several allegations of sexual misconduct. It was a pretty big conflict of interest, especially considering Cuomo the younger was advising his brother on how to weather the scandal. Documents released on Monday by the New York attorney general's office reveal that Chris was involved more intimately than previously believed.

In an interview with state investigators, Chris said he talked to other journalists about what they were hearing about allegations coming down the pike, and then fed information to Melissa DeRosa, Andrew's top aide. "I have a lead on the wedding girl," Chris texted DeRosa days after The New York Times reported that Andrew attempted to kiss a woman at a wedding. The "lead," which turned out to be false, was that the girl, Anna Rauch, was lying about the encounter.

IT'S A MYSTERY:

Here is the month-by-month relationship between vaccination rates and either cases or deaths.

Notice the shifts since July. The red arrows below, marking the most-red counties, point more to the right: Their case and death rates increased along with vaccination rates. In the most-blue counties, the arrows from July to November point more up than to the right, meaning that vaccination rates rose much more than case or death rates.

If we look just at the increases in per capita totals during three periods -- before vaccines, during the early rollout and since that point -- we see that a relatively even increase in cases and deaths has become lopsided along a partisan axis. That axis, of course, correlates with vaccine uptake.

There is no guarantee that this pattern will hold. Winter is almost upon us and, last year, the Northeast got hammered. The Sun Belt was hit hard during this summer's fourth wave, spurred by the delta variant, and may be less likely to see a surge this winter. It's also possible that the omicron variant spurs a fifth surge of the virus that slams more-blue counties pushed indoors for the winter months.

All of the data, though, suggest that vaccination plays an important role in preventing infection, illness and death. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the unvaccinated are at far more risk of those worst-case outcomes -- which might help explain why more-vaccinated blue counties saw slower growth in deaths during the fourth wave than cases. Hence Biden's call Monday to get vaccinated with the new variant looming.

But the problem, as always, is that the people who disproportionately need to be convinced to get vaccinated are also those least likely to follow Biden's lead.

JUST A MATTER OF POOR GOVERNANCE:

[T]he state still hasn't fixed the critical problem that paralyzed his plants: maintaining a sufficient supply of natural gas, Morgan said.

Natural gas slowed to a trickle during the storm, leaving the Midlothian facility and 13 other Vistra power plants that run on gas without enough fuel. The shortage forced Vistra to pay more than $1.5 billion on the spot market for whatever gas was available, costing it in a matter of days more than twice what it usually spends in an entire year. Even then, plants were able to operate at only a small fraction of their capacities; the Midlothian facility ran at 30 percent during the height of the storm. 

"Why couldn't we get it?" Morgan asked recently. "Because the gas system was not weatherized. And so we had natural gas producers that weren't producing."

If another major freeze hits Texas this winter, "the same thing could happen," Morgan said in an interview.

The predicament in Midlothian reflects a glaring shortcoming in Texas' efforts to prevent a repeat of February, when a combination of freezing temperatures across the state and skyrocketing demand shut down natural gas facilities and power plants, which rely on one another to keep electricity flowing. The cycle of failures sent economic ripples across the country that cost hundreds of billions of dollars. 

The power and gas industries say they are working to make their systems more reliable during winter storms, and the Public Utility Commission, the state agency that regulates the power industry, finally acted on recommendations that federal regulators made a decade ago after another severe winter storm. 

But energy experts say Texas' grid remains vulnerable, largely because new regulations allowed too much wiggle room for companies to avoid weatherization improvements that can take months or years. More than nine months after February's storm -- which could exceed Hurricane Harvey as the costliest natural disaster in state history -- a lack of data from regulators and industry groups makes it impossible to know how many power and gas facilities are properly weatherized. 

Many energy providers, like Vistra, are preparing their plants for extreme weather to prevent a repeat of last winter's power problems.Shelby Tauber / The Texas Tribune

For millions of Texans, that means there is no assurance that they will have electricity and heat if there is another major freeze. 

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Two top ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel published a missive Monday evening denouncing the proposed establishment of a permanent mixed-gender plaza for non-Orthodox prayer at the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem, and urging their followers to act against it.

Rabbis Chaim Kanievsky, 93, and Gershon Edelstein, 98, are leaders of the Lithuanian (non-Hasidic) stream of ultra-Orthodoxy.

In an open letter, the rabbis wrote that they "vigorously protest the intention to desecrate the sanctity of the Western Wall by giving space and recognition to the destroyers of religion" who want to "uproot everything and desecrate Heaven."

THE SLAVE IS OUR BROTHER:

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

Nissan Motor Co (7201.T) announced it will spend 2 trillion yen ($17.59 billion) over five years to accelerate vehicle electrification to catch up with competitors in one of the fastest growth areas for car makers.

This is the first time Japan's No.3 automaker, one of the world's first mass-market electric vehicle (EV) makers with its Leaf model more than a decade ago, is unveiling a comprehensive electrification plan.

APPARENTLY NOT THE ONION:

A strange new ideology has been growing over the last few years, you might have noticed -- amid the day-to-day chaos -- the slow, proto-planet-like formation. Currently, it has no name, nor an obvious leader. Its many thousands of proponents do not even seem, yet, to consider each other fellow-travellers. But to the onlooker, they're clearly marching the same steps to the same tune. We might call it neoclassical reactionism.

The central refrain is a familiar one: the modern world is ugly, decadent, sick. But rather than seeking refuge in religion or racial politics, neoclassical reactionaries hark back to Ancient Greece and Rome -- in particular, to supposedly lost values like vitality, beauty and strength. They're obsessed with bodybuilding and Latin. They're also obsessed, less predictably, with cryptocurrency, considering it a long-awaited way to bypass the sclerosis of centralised economies. The whole thing is sort of Nietzsche meets Bitcoin.

THE REVOLUTION, NOT THE REGIME:

'We just cannot go on living like this', Mikhail Gorbachev tells his wife, Raisa, on the eve of his nomination as Soviet leader. Nor did they. Gorbachev was to be the last leader of the Soviet Union. Instead of solving the moribund Marxist-Leninist system's many problems, the reforms Gorbachev initiated ended in its downfall - or collapse, to borrow the title of Vladislav Zubok's insight-filled and engaging new history of the end of Soviet power. 

Such an outcome was never Gorbachev's intention. He aimed instead to bring new life to a system in which he seems to have believed until the last. After coming to power in 1985, Zubok tells us: 'For the next five years, Gorbachev would invoke Lenin's name constantly.' It was not the system that was wrong, Gorbachev apparently believed, but a 'glitch' in its design that had led to 'tyranny and mass murder'. An aide remembers volumes of Lenin's work on Gorbachev's desk, from which Gorbachev would read aloud and compare what he found there with 'the present situation'. The last Soviet leader comes across as a religious devotee searching sacred texts for solutions to contemporary secular challenges. 

Alas, in Gorbachev's case, this was not adequate reading material. Zubok persuasively argues that Gorbachev 'willingly overlooked history lessons apparent to those who had read widely on world and Russian history'. Perhaps more serious is the charge of ignorance of the way the Soviet economy worked, especially given that its system of a cashless economy functioning between state enterprises, alongside the notes and coins used for wages and shopping, was, Zubok writes, 'not an easy matter for a novice'. In 1990, as the Soviet Union hurtled towards its final crisis, 'Gorbachev did not understand' the plans advanced by an official from the Soviet Ministry of Finance. 

TEAR DOWN THIS WALL:

The chase was over. U.S. Border Patrol agent Brendan Lenihan had finally caught up with the group of undocumented migrants he'd been diligently tracking. Yet when he came face-to-face with the first man of the group in a remote stretch of the Las Guijas Mountains that marked the Arizona border with Sonora, Mexico, he didn't arrest him.

There was something in the man's eyes, Lenihan told journalist and author Todd Miller in a dramatic scene detailed in Build Bridges Not Walls.

Appearing at the midpoint of Miller's book, the "open-hearted Border Patrol agent" is the centerpiece of Miller's book. Echoing the book's theme of seeking bridges between people to overcome the borders that wreak such death and destruction throughout the world, Lenihan had an out-of-body experience, shearing him of "his uniform, badge, laws, and gun," Miller writes. "In their place was a bridge, across which [Lenihan] could see and feel the world from [the migrant's] side--his longing, his love, his family, and his anguish and despair."

SIMPLE SCIENCE:

RELEASE THE HOUNDS:

PURITAN NATION:

In the deepening debate over the future of American democracy, the progressive Left and the religious Right have this in common: They both cling to nostalgic fictions about the past. Their revisionist histories, rooted in secularism on the one hand and sectarianism on the other, would propel our politics in the same direction: toward the Leviathan imagined by Thomas Hobbes, an omnicompetent state that offers security and prosperity at the price of freedom.

On the Right, the rejection of liberal democracy is motivated by a yearning for a premodern world: a society animated by medieval concepts of virtue, faith, and authority. Catholic scholars such as Patrick Deneen argue that, under Christendom, the "cultivation of virtue" and "aspiration to the common good" served as bulwarks against tyranny. But liberalism dissolved these ideas, he writes, replacing them with "civic indifference" and "the unfettered and autonomous choice" of the individual. Likewise, Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule condemns the liberal project as the enemy of the historic church. "Both politically and theoretically," he writes, "hostility to the Church was encoded within liberalism from its birth."

Behind these views is a cluster of pious -- and dangerous -- falsehoods about the history of European Christianity. The Catholic medieval project brought with it great reforms in law and education; it abolished slavery and established institutions to care for society's most vulnerable. Yet, for all its achievements, Christendom failed to uphold the most revolutionary tenets of Christianity -- namely, the freedom and equality of every human soul. [....]

Contrary to these revisionist histories, the concept of natural rights and freedoms was not a secular idea. Rather, it grew in the soil of revealed religion, when elements of Protestantism supplied the moral and theoretical bedrock for constitutionalism.

JUST A QUESTION OF GOVERNANCE:

But despite the early plant closure, and an unemployment rate that more than doubled overnight, Nucla had done enough to prepare. The town has leaned on tourism, driven by outdoor activities, and the recent opening of dozens of small businesses to survive.

"Initially we saw a lot of frustration and concern, mostly about selling homes and folks moving away," Sheriff said. But the town has adapted fairly well, she said: "We've diversified our economy enough that we're not going to die because one industry went away."

Increasingly outpaced by cheaper alternatives, including renewables, and under pressure from climate concerns, at least two dozen US coal power plants - many of them in small, rural communities - are expected to close or downsize in the next 10 years, as are most of the coalmines that supply them, according to the Environmental Protection Agency and experts. Most coal communities face the same challenges as Nucla: how to replace the jobs and tax dollars that have kept these towns afloat for decades?

In some cases, such as in Nucla, local officials started planning early. In others, the closures appear to have taken leaders by surprise.

SYSTEM:

Health-care companies can't fix the root causes of the country's systemic inequality, but doctors and hospitals can ensure their services don't inflict financial harm on patients. For instance, they can determine how to screen patients for financial assistance and how to respond when a bill goes unpaid. But patient advocates say the medical industry perpetuates such harsh billing practices as garnishing wages, charging high interest rates, placing liens on homes, and suing patients. Those tactics often land harder on communities of color.

Meanwhile, these aggressive billing practices bring in little revenue for hospitals--less than 1% of the total by some estimates, patient advocates say. "These are already people who've been struggling to pay," says Jenifer Bosco, a staff attorney at the National Consumer Law Center who co-wrote proposed legislation to strengthen protections for patients. "It's not the way the hospitals are balancing their budgets."

Hospital industry groups have opposed state legislation intended to shield patients from harsh collections practices. Yet complaints about medical collections filed with federal authorities have persisted through the pandemic, the protests that followed Floyd's murder, and beyond.

Most U.S. hospitals are nonprofits or public entities; only about a quarter are for-profit companies. Consumer advocates say that as tax-exempt organizations, health-care systems should ensure that patients eligible for financial help don't get passed to debt collectors instead. They want medical providers to make clear to patients what assistance is available and halt the practice of garnishing wages or putting liens on houses. And they're pressuring hospitals to more broadly reexamine the impact of billing and collections tactics on communities of color. Those practices, they argue, are especially punitive in the context of the $119 billion in taxpayer money doled out to stabilize hospital finances upended by the pandemic.

"We invest a lot in our nonprofit hospital systems, and in exchange we ought to be able to expect them to behave like charities," says Elisabeth Ryden Benjamin, vice president for health initiatives at the Community Service Society of New York, a consumer group that fields health-care questions and complaints on behalf of the state.

In response to a rising number of complaints about medical billing, Benjamin's group analyzed almost 31,000 debt-collection lawsuits filed by New York state's hospital systems over five years. The median debt was $1,900. The results surprised her: Most of the litigation seeking debt repayment came from a handful of big nonprofit health systems, while dozens of other hospitals never brought suits.

NYC Health + Hospitals, which calls itself the largest public health-care system in the U.S., was among those that brought suits, though it was far from the most litigious. Benjamin was alarmed to find hundreds of lawsuits filed by the city's main safety-net provider. In a meeting in 2019 she asked the system's chief executive officer, Mitch Katz, about them.

Katz was surprised, too. He didn't know about the lawsuits. "I thought that was unacceptable, and so we ended all of those suits," he says in an interview. "We've been known to sue insurance companies, but we don't want to sue our patients." NYC Health + Hospitals has always provided free and low-cost care, Katz says, but some patients didn't apply or didn't know they could apply. Some undocumented immigrants may fear volunteering the information needed to qualify. The health system has boosted its outreach and extended the hours its financial counselors work. Those changes are intended to make charity care more accessible. "If we have a bill, we proactively contact them and say, 'Did you know that you are eligible?'" Katz says.

Benjamin also got a meeting with leaders from NewYork-Presbyterian, another one of the city's largest health-care systems. They didn't renounce lawsuits as NYC Health + Hospitals did, but they did instruct their collections agency to stop charging a 9% interest rate, Benjamin says. A spokesperson for NewYork-Presbyterian says the hospital doesn't charge interest on patient judgments but didn't comment on the rest of Benjamin's account.

Other health-care systems, including Northwell Health, the state's largest, have been less receptive to change, Benjamin says. Northwell representatives say that the system resorts to lawsuits only if patients don't respond to outreach, including offers of financial assistance, and that it has paused lawsuits during Covid.

For Benjamin, the meetings were revealing. "In some cases, hospitals didn't know what they were actually doing," she says. "There's something going on where it's on autopilot for these systems." Indeed, a November report by Benjamin's group revealed that New York hospitals filed thousands of liens against patients even as they collected state funds intended to cover the care of people who can't pay.

It's hard to separate the disparities in medical debt from other inequities. Black and Hispanic households are more often uninsured than White and Asian households, and they have lower incomes and less wealth to absorb unexpected shocks like medical bills.

Still, racial gaps in medical debt aren't inevitable. Massachusetts, Minnesota, Washington, and other states have low levels of medical debt and narrow differences in debt levels measured by race, according to Urban Institute data. In other areas, including much of the South, where states haven't expanded Medicaid eligibility, debt is more common, and the gaps between White communities and communities of color are wider.

SHOTS, SHOTS AND MORE SHOTS:

While South African officials are unhappy with it, travel restrictions are the obvious first response. The U.K. government announced a temporary travel ban on several countries Thursday night. However, when a flight from Gauteng -- the South African province that includes Johannesburg -- arrived in London Friday, some 300 passengers were released into the wild with only an advisory message to self-isolate and take some tests. (For a government that has done a lot of complaining about lax French border controls, that counts as an own goal.)

Meanwhile, Israel put in new travel restrictions, quarantines and PCR testing at the border. The EU recommended an "emergency brake" on travel from South Africa. These restrictions merely buy a little time to map out the next steps. If scientists confirm that omicron can indeed escape the defenses of current vaccines, then the race is on to develop a better defensive weapon.

Pfizer Inc. says it can deliver a vaccine that would counter the new variant within 100 days of sequencing. That's fast. Regulators like the U.S. Food and Drug Administration are likely to speed approval processes for vaccines that are just tweaked for new variants. Pfizer estimates it could make 4 billion doses in the first 12 months. Another 8 billion doses of the Moderna Inc. and AstraZeneca Plc vaccines are likely to be available in a similar time frame. [...]

Omicron was a statistical probability long before it actually turned up. With a 24% vaccination rate, it's hardly a surprise it first appeared in South Africa. The Hong Kong case was in a vaccinated traveler; the Belgian in an unvaccinated one. The longer it takes to vaccinate whole populations, the faster we'll cycle through the Greek alphabet with new variants; the only way to prevent that is to vaccine more people faster.

Wherever omicron is seeded, it's likely we'll need the now familiar range of detection and mitigation measures -- mask mandates in public places, more frequent testing and work-from-home guidance. While these measures are already back in place in much of Europe, it would be an unwelcome regression for the U.K., where mask-wearing is progressively rarer.

South Africa's transparency and the early response suggests we're at least learning the first lesson of pandemic management: that "wait and see" is a losing strategy.

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

Here is just a partial list of the things, short of death rates, we know are affected by air pollution. GDP, with a 10 per cent increase in pollution reducing output by almost a full percentage point, according to an OECD report last year. Cognitive performance, with a study showing that cutting Chinese pollution to the standards required in the US would improve the average student's ranking in verbal tests by 26 per cent and in maths by 13 per cent. In Los Angeles, after $700 air purifiers were installed in schools, student performance improved almost as much as it would if class sizes were reduced by a third. Heart disease is more common in polluted air, as are many types of cancer, and acute and chronic respiratory diseases like asthma, and strokes. The incidence of Alzheimer's can triple: in Choked, Beth Gardiner cites a study which found early markers of Alzheimer's in 40 per cent of autopsies conducted on those in high-pollution areas and in none of those outside them. Rates of other sorts of dementia increase too, as does Parkinson's. Air pollution has also been linked to mental illness of all kinds - with a recent paper in the British Journal of Psychiatry showing that even small increases in local pollution raise the need for treatment by a third and for hospitalisation by a fifth - and to worse memory, attention and vocabulary, as well as ADHD and autism spectrum disorders. Pollution has been shown to damage the development of neurons in the brain, and proximity to a coal plant can deform a baby's DNA in the womb. It even accelerates the degeneration of the eyesight.

A high pollution level in the year a baby is born has been shown to result in reduced earnings and labour force participation at the age of thirty. The relationship of pollution to premature births and low birth weight is so strong that the introduction of the automatic toll system E-ZPass in American cities reduced both problems in areas close to toll plazas (by 10.8 per cent and 11.8 per cent respectively), by cutting down on the exhaust expelled when cars have to queue. Extremely premature births, another study found, were 80 per cent more likely when mothers lived in areas of heavy traffic. Women breathing exhaust fumes during pregnancy gave birth to children with higher rates of paediatric leukaemia, kidney cancer, eye tumours and malignancies in the ovaries and testes. Infant death rates increased in line with pollution levels, as did heart malformations. And those breathing dirtier air in childhood exhibited significantly higher rates of self-harm in adulthood, with an increase of just five micrograms of small particulates a day associated, in 1.4 million people in Denmark, with a 42 per cent rise in violence towards oneself. Depression in teenagers quadruples; suicide becomes more common too.

Stock market returns are lower on days with higher air pollution, a study found this year. Surgical outcomes are worse. Crime goes up with increased particulate concentrations, especially violent crime: a 10 per cent reduction in pollution, researchers at Colorado State University found, could reduce the cost of crime in the US by $1.4 billion a year. When there's more smog in the air, chess players make more mistakes, and bigger ones. Politicians speak more simplistically, and baseball umpires make more bad calls.

In 2019, a comprehensive global review by the Forum of International Respiratory Societies found that air pollution damages every organ, indeed virtually every cell, in the body. Nanoparticles of pollution have been found inside the brainstems of even the very young. But you don't have to wait until birth to see the effects of breathing particulate matter. The impact begins in the womb, damaging the development of lungs and shortening future lives. In 2019, a small-scale study at Hasselt University found particles of black carbon in every single placenta examined, including those from mothers who lived in areas where the air was thought to be clean, with thousands of particles found in every cubic millimetre. For those who worry about microplastics in the flesh of fish, this is a yet more invasive category of intrusion. Of course, there are also microplastics in the air. They've been found in placentas too.

That​ everything is worse in the presence of pollution means that everything should be better in its absence. And, as best we can tell, it is. According to the National Resources Defence Council, the US Clean Air Act of 1970 is still saving 370,000 American lives every year - more than would have been saved last year had the pandemic never arrived. According to the NRDC, a single piece of legislation delivers annual economic benefits of more than $3 trillion, 32 times the cost of enacting it - benefits distributed disproportionately to the poor and marginalised.

WHERE'S DONALD WHEN THEY NEED HIM?:

Calling the US plan "an evident product of its Cold-War mentality," ambassadors Anatoly Antonov of Russia and Qin Gang of China said the December 9-10 event would "stoke up ideological confrontation and a rift in the world, creating new 'dividing lines.'"

The summit is meant to fulfill a campaign pledge by Biden to advance the cause of global democracy at a time when autocratic governments have been on the rise.

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM ALL:

Four years ago, Comedian Louis C.K. observed that "everything is amazing but nobody is happy". This is a fitting description for the US in 2021: households' net worth has increased $31 trillion since March 2020. An additional 1.5 million workers retired early thanks to soaring asset prices. As I explained in the F.I.R.E economy, engineers at big tech companies have amassed multi-million fortunes simply by showing up for the job. And yet, the University of Michigan Current Economic Conditions index is at the same level it was in March 2020, at the worst of the pandemic and after a brutal bear market.

The first part will show that all the major sectors of the economy are experiencing an unprecedented windfall. Personal income tax collections have soared by 18% this year and gig income is doubling every two years. The household sector purchased a record $1.2 trillion in stocks in the second quarter and $3.2 trillion since March 2020.

Junk-rated corporations get to borrow at negative real yields when nominal GDP is growing by close to 10%, the fastest growth since the Reagan economic boom. Analysts keep increasing their EPS expectations.

Pension funds are fully funded for the first time in 15 years and tax collections in California have soared so much that even Sacramento politicians cannot spend the money fast enough.

THE rIGHT EXISTS TO AMUSE US:

The specifics of what is happening are quite complicated, but, basically, ConstitutionDAO raised more than $40 million worth of Ethereum using a crowdfunding platform called Juicebox. In exchange for donations, contributors had the option to redeem a "governance token" called $PEOPLE at a rate of 1 million $PEOPLE tokens per 1 ETH donated, issued through Juicebox. If ConstitutionDAO had won, those $PEOPLE tokens would be used for voting on what would happen to the Constitution. 

It was never explained exactly how voting rights would be apportioned (the DAO said "Due to the unusual and extremely short timeline of needing to rally around obtaining the Constitution during the auction window, we have not been able to focus on giving the technical aspects of DAO governance mechanics the careful consideration and community deliberation this topic requires.") But many DAOs use a proportional voting structure; for explanation's sake, one way of doing this would have been to give 1 vote per $PEOPLE token, allowing people who donated more to have an outsized say in what happened to the document.

Crucially, ConstitutionDAO repeatedly said that donors were not buying a fractionalized share of the Constitution and that individual donors would not "own" part of the Constitution, they would merely have a say in where it was displayed, etc. ConstitutionDAO also said that donating to the project should not be looked at as an "investment." 

"You are receiving a governance token rather than fractionalized ownership of the artifact itself. Your contribution to ConstitutionDAO is a donation with no expectation of profit," the DAO's FAQ section read. "Some examples of this would be voting on advisory decisions about where the Constitution will be displayed, how it should be exhibited, and for how long."

That's all well and good, but regardless of the intentions of the core team, many people of course were looking at this as an investment (the meme was "buy the Constitution," after all.) This was a somewhat reasonable expectation--many cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed to ridiculously high valuations off the strength of a meme alone, and DAO governance tokens are themselves a $40 billion market. Clearly, some people expected to be able to flip either a tiny ownership stake in the Constitution or $PEOPLE tokens for a profit. This did start happening over the weekend, with some investors selling $PEOPLE tokens on decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap. ConstitutionDAO repeatedly said on Discord that it "neither prohibits nor encourages any secondary trading of the $PEOPLE token."

This is all important because, on Saturday, ConstitutionDAO's admins announced two important things. First, it announced that it would be moving away from the $PEOPLE token into a new, yet-to-be-created token called "We the People" ($WTP), which would govern whatever future the project had. $PEOPLE, meanwhile, would go by the wayside because "we did not acquire the constitution and $PEOPLE's explicit reason for existing has now run its course," an admin said in what was billed as "a note from our legal team." They also announced that they were going to try to issue refunds outside of the Juicebox platform to those who wanted them.

These announcements had the effect of cratering the price of the now apparently worthless $PEOPLE, according to hundreds of angry messages on the Discord ($PEOPLE's price is not currently tracked by any exchanges, but recent trades on Uniswap show it going for $0.0044), as well as sowing confusion and anger within the community. Many posters on the ConstitutionDAO Discord felt like the team was moving away from $PEOPLE tokens for reasons that weren't well-explained; this also led to a bunch of arguments about what the purpose of the project was, what the intentions of the founders were, and whether they were being scammed or not. As the price of $PEOPLE cratered, some people bought tons of the now close-to-worthless token. 

THE TRUMPBOTS EXIST TO AMUSE US:

Despite months of promising to file an explosive lawsuit that would "pull down" the 2020 presidential election results and reinstate Donald Trump to the White House, pillow-monger Mike Lindell has instead turned his election-fraud-athon into a four-day sales promotion.

"I want to show you guys some Black Friday specials that we're doing with MyPillow," Lindell said Friday morning, rattling off sales for pillows and sheets. "That's the lowest price in history."

He then went off on a long explanation of why his sheets were made overseas from Egyptian cotton rather than U.S.-grown cotton, with "Save up to 66% off over 110 products" displayed on-screen below him.

FROM PULLING STRINGS TO DANCING TO OUR TUNE:

Those close to the Kremlin say the Russian president doesn't want to start another war in Ukraine. Still, he must show he's ready to fight if necessary in order to stop what he sees as an existential security threat: the creeping expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in a country that for centuries had been part of Russia.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

The question of how life came to be has captivated humans for millennia. The prevailing theory now is that on a highly volatile early earth lightning struck mineral rich waters. And that the energy from lighting strikes turned those minerals into the building blocks of life: organic compounds like amino acids. Something we often refer to as the "primordial soup."

The wide acceptance of this theory is in large part due to the very famous Miller-Urey experiment. You surely encountered this in a science textbook at some point--but to refresh your memory: in 1952 Stanley Miller and Harold Urey simulated the conditions of early earth by sealing water, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen in a glass flask. Then they applied electrical sparks to the mixture. Miraculously, amino acids came into existence amid the roiling mixture. It was a big deal.

But recently a team of researchers realized that--much like that first primordial soup sitting in a bowl of Earth--the experiment's container played an underappreciated role. That perhaps it was also critical to the creation of organic building blocks inside their laboratory life soup.

DODGING THE DESANTIS FLU:

As of November 22, Puerto Rico had fully vaccinated 74 percent of its population -- a higher proportion than any other US state or territory -- and had among the lowest Covid-19 death rates since the start of the pandemic, with 102 in 100,000 people dying from the virus.

By comparison, Florida's vaccination rate is far more typical for the US; it has administered two shots to 60.9 percent of its population, slightly above the national average of 59.2 percent. That's after Florida led the country in total caseloads for months, and after significant loss of life: Florida residents have died of the virus at nearly triple the rate of Puerto Rico residents.

Throughout the US, politics has been a key factor in determining how states have fared during the Covid-19 pandemic. States that embraced the individualistic approach of the Trump administration, sometimes ignoring scientific guidelines and avoiding mandates, have seen worse outcomes than states that took more comprehensive actions to stop the spread of Covid-19.

Florida Republican Gov. Ron De Santis has been threatening government agencies with millions in fines if they mandate vaccines for employees and has boosted the voices of anti-vaxxers. At the same time, Puerto Rico Gov. Pedro R. Pierluisi, a member of the Partido Nuevo Progresista who caucused with Democrats while a commissioner in Congress, has quietly implemented some of the broadest vaccine mandates in the country across the private and public sectors.

And while Floridians have taken to the streets with signs reading "No jab, no job, no way," Puerto Ricans have largely embraced the mandates without protest. Though coronavirus cases have risen across the mainland in recent weeks, Puerto Rico has avoided a spike, with cases and hospitalizations even trending downward. [...]

The federal and Puerto Rican governments failed to adequately respond to the hurricane and the quakes, with the Trump administration deliberately delaying more than $20 billion in relief. The Puerto Rican government mismanaged the funds that were delivered.

NGOs and community leaders picked up the pieces, which built trust with the people they served. In the immediate aftermath, they helped assess the damage, mobilized volunteers, set up emergency support centers, helped clear routes to water sources and medical facilities, and distributed basic supplies including non-perishable food, medicine, water purifiers, hygiene kits, and tents.

"It was the NGOs that put together everything because the government, locally and federally, couldn't deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Maria," said José Rodríguez-Orengo, executive director of the Puerto Rico Public Health Trust (PRPHI), a public health institution that partners with the Puerto Rican government and community groups.

Data gathered after Hurricane Maria was crucial. PRPHI captured data on individuals whose homes had been damaged or destroyed and who were staying in camps in the southwest of the island. It provided that information to the local Department of Health to ensure that victims received the services they needed.

And Voces, a coalition of Puerto Rican community groups and health care providers focused on immunization, provided flu vaccines in the wake of both disasters to people who could not otherwise access a vaccination site. That was important because the lack of clean drinking water and overpopulation at emergency shelters was creating the ideal conditions for the flu to spread and become a serious public health issue.

By the time the coronavirus pandemic hit, such organizations had already established the infrastructure and community relationships necessary for effective Covid-19 prevention and vaccination campaigns under difficult circumstances -- an advantage that Puerto Rico might have had over other states and territories. Voces alone, for example, has administered close to a quarter of a million vaccine shots.

MAY AS WELL GO TO MOMA:

It is the spell of privilege, of permanent adolescence, of living life high above common concern and plastering it all with bongwater symbols and sayings that The Journey Home tries to cast. As non-fungible tokens of grift and graft -- such considerations dwell beyond the event horizon of what you see on the gallery walls. Instead what you get are tattoo-like symbols of snakes, birds, dragons and Celtic writing all stenciled in gold pen. You read the saying by Joseph Campbell that "we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path." The pre-socratic Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea informs us that "one path only is left for us to speak of, namely, that It is." This one, also written in gold pen, appears on a painting featuring a bald female figure resembling the V'Ger robot from Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

When Biden descends from this astral plane, he lets his paints run in bloody patterns. He drips out pointillist landscapes trip-trap. His blows pigments into floral patterns, in particular across "Untitled #13" -- arrangements that are inoffensive but inauthentic. The wild artist is falsely tamed.

You find a sweep of styles and techniques presented here across two floors, none of it dated, none with any sense of direction. But those works labeled "mixed media" seem to convey a truer artist. Here through computer manipulation, Biden has distorted images, mostly of himself. He prints them out and doodles on top of them. When I entered the exhibition, there was a velvet rope closing off the downstairs half of the show. At some point it came down and I descended. A gallerist followed close behind. "One of us has to be downstairs with you," he explained, "just in case...you never know." Here, in "Hockney," we catch a glimpse of the pool of Biden's Hollywood Hills home -- and Ms. Cohen-Biden's derriere floating therein. There it is again, in "Self Portrait," behind some crystal schlock, another bikini-clad babe next to Biden, all covered in paint.

In Freudian psychoanalysis, it is said that an anal stage follows the oral stage in early-childhood development. Biden has lived life as the anal-explosive son, but many of his paint-the-dots numbers are fussy, restrained, retentive. It seems more honest to start with those digital images that made him famous and manipulate them further, as he does here, pouring paint or wherever else on the end result. If your art is crap, it's best not to pull the handle.

AS IF FEUDALISM NEEDS DEFENDING:

I pushed Michael Warren Davis' new book, The Reactionary Mind (Regnery Publishing), on a friend of mine, a noted Catholic and academic leader. I told him a good part of the book was a defense of feudalism. I thought he'd like that. Instead, he said, "Well, recent scholarship shows that feudalism did not exist. So, he's wrong about that." 

Okay, fine. "You really ought to read it." 

Finally, one evening he texted me, "I am up to page 25 and really enjoying it." Two hours later, close to midnight, he texted, "I am at page 96, and I cannot put it down." 

The following day at Mass, he said, "I want to sell all I own and buy a farm in New Hampshire." Davis had spoken to my friend's long-faded inner-distributist, a distributism my friend left when he had his fourth child and private school tuitions loomed. He said, "Just wait till Davis has his fourth."   

As is evident, Davis' new and first book is dangerous. And utterly fun. 

For instance, I am totally fine with anyone unloading on the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment deserves it, and Davis gives it to the Enlightenment right in the chops. But the Renaissance? Every sixth grader knows the Renaissance is sacrosanct; but man, Davis goes hammer and tongs after the Renaissance. Davis writes:

The Renaissance was subversive by its very nature, asserting the culture of the pagan, classical world against the medieval Christian order. The question, then, is: Why this revolt against the Middle Ages? Those who launched and perpetuated the Renaissance found the medieval worldview bleak, pessimistic and limiting. If life was nothing but a vale of tears, and man himself merely a sinner, then no real happiness could be found in this world, and all we could do was submit to the authorities, say our prayers, and hope we make it to heaven.

Of course, the medieval worldview wasn't gloomy pessimism but hard-nosed realism; man is a sinner.

Davis compares Titian's Venus of Urbino to Botticelli's The Birth of Venus. Botticelli's Venus is "nude, yes, but her face is kind. Her eyes shine with a sort of innocent curiosity. There's nothing of the haughty, cruel, alluring gaze of the Urbino." Davis writes, "I won't deny that the Venus of Urbino is attractive. I'm sure Titian's model turned a few heads in sixteenth-century Venice. But ask a forty-year-old man who the most beautiful woman in the world is. If he describes a sixteen-year-old girl with milky skin and curly golden hair, we'd probably call him a pervert. We certainly wouldn't call him a humanist." 

The difference, Davis argues, is that Botticelli was under the influence of someone we are supposed to hate: Savonarola, who espoused an aesthetic not of the burgeoning Renaissance but the Middle Ages, and he burned perfectly fine art. Davis loves him. I never felt one way or the other about Savonarola, but I'm with Davis now. [...]

Davis writes all this with great humor and charm. For instance, he occasionally calls himself a "Young Earth Creationist," but he doesn't really mean it. What he means is he doesn't really know or really care about the age of the earth. And so what? "The truth is that I haven't the faintest idea whether the universe was created in seven days or seventy billion years. I've devoted no serious time or thought to the question because it doesn't interest me. From what I know of astronomy and physics--that is, nothing at all--the Young Earth Creationist account is as plausible as any other."

In praising the Puritans who "strove to live by the law of love," he says, "(g)ranted, burning old women at the stake was a funny way of showing they loved them. But then I am not a Puritan." 

He describes Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet as "a bigger man than all the dandy poets in all the decadent courts of Europe." Davis is a monarchist but not an absolute one. He detests the soft and effeminate Court of the Bourbons with their orgies and little yapping dogs. 

COME BACK, ADMIRAL POINDEXTER, ALL IS FORGIVEN:

In this tweet, Barbara Walter seems to propose that we allow the CIA to create a task force that would "try to predict where and when political instability and conflict is likely to break out" domestically, just as they do around the world now. I would like to assume that Professor Walter, a political scientist at UC-San Diego, meant this tweet ironically. But, given the rest of her intellectual profile, I think it wasn't meant in jest. Instead, it represents a new comfort level that people, especially those on the left, now have with the apparatuses of government. Insofar as the so-called "deep state" did seem to work to help stabilize and, critics would say, undermine the Trump Presidency, the left is alarmingly comfortable with the same apparatus used on a more regular basis in domestic politics. As long as Professor Walter is confident that this CIA task force will be looking for Trumpey types, she isn't much worried about this power.

THE LINGUA FRANCA:

In "Leonard Cohen: The Mystical Roots of Genius," author Harry Freedman focuses on one element of Cohen's work: the ideas drawn from Judaism and Christianity that helped shape Cohen's identity and the way he made sense of the world.

Freedman, Britain's most prominent author of popular works of Jewish culture and history, keenly stresses how Cohen harnessed biblical and religious traditions for his own artistic purposes.

"Cohen grew up in a very religious environment and saw the Bible as a common definition of truth that everybody could relate to," the 71-year-old Freedman tells The Times of Israel via Zoom from his home in London. "So when he wanted to write metaphors, or write about life in general, he always returned to the Bible as a [primary source]."

Cohen was always reluctant to describe his work as having a religious or theological purpose, says Freedman, but a spiritual quest for meaning clearly exists in his music and poetry.

The author claims Cohen's religious outlook was not bound up in formal ritual observance, nor did he make a point of publicly advocating virtues such as justice and charity. Rather, Cohen's religion "was introspective and experiential, and used as a way of engaging with the yearnings of his soul, and as a space for self-examination," Freedman says.

DONALD AND RUDY CAN'T SAVE THEM ANYMORE:

A comedian with a popular TV show but no prior political experience, Zelenskiy -- now 43 -- won the 2019 presidential election by a large margin, riding a surge of support based in part on his pledges to stand up to the handful of tycoons who have wielded outsized influence over Ukraine's economy, government, and media over much of its 30 years as an independent country.

In office, he has made taming the tycoons -- or "deoligarchization," as his administration calls it -- the cornerstone of his presidency.

"If Zelenskiy wins this confrontation, it will be much easier for him to run for a second term" in 2024, Yevhen Mahda, director of the Kyiv-based Institute of World Politics, told RFE/RL.

The "oligarchs" enjoy little sympathy among the millions of Ukrainians facing poverty or stark economic challenges, many of whom believe the magnates accumulated their wealth at the expense of the state.

Ukrainians demonstrate in front of the Communist Party's Central Committee headquarters in Kyiv on August 25, 1991.

But analysts say they have been able to maintain sway through several changes of government since the 1991 Soviet collapse -- including two that followed massive popular protests against corruption, among other things -- in part by bankrolling officials and lawmakers.

Akhmetov, 56, is the biggest in terms of revenue from businesses ranging from metals, mining, and energy to banking, telecommunications, real estate, and the media -- a portfolio whose size and breadth means almost any law or regulation is likely to impact his interests.

While he is dogged by rumors of alleged criminal activity in amassing his assets -- for which he reportedly had been denied entry to the United States -- the tycoon has never been charged with any crime. He denies any wrongdoing.

With a net worth estimated by Forbes at more than $7 billion, Akhmetov is richer than the next three Ukrainian tycoons combined. He is also the country's largest taxpayer and employer, with about 200,000 workers nationwide.

That gives him enormous power to lobby at all levels of government for policies favorable to his companies, such as low tariffs on ore transportation and high tariffs for power, analysts and business executives say.

Akhmetov -- who briefly served in parliament in the 2000s, representing the Russia-leaning Party of Regions, which disbanded after the Euromaidan protests that pushed Moscow-friendly President Viktor Yanukovych from power -- can turn to dozens of lawmakers in the Verkhovna Rada for support in getting policies that favor him enacted, according to Ukrainian media. The magnate has denied he has "control" over any deputies.

However, Zelenskiy has an advantage over his predecessors in dealing with lobbying from tycoons: The seventh person to serve as president since independence, he is the first to control a majority in the Rada.

That means that at least in some cases, he can push legislation through without needing the support of lawmakers who may be loyal to a particular tycoon.

Anti-Oligarch Law

But the billionaires' control over several major TV stations has been a potential weak spot for Zelenskiy -- and he is now seeking to end that vulnerability, putting him on a collision course with tycoons including Akhmetov.

In June, Zelenskiy introduced a controversial bill that legally defined the term "oligarch" based on several criteria, including wealth, industry dominance, political activity, and influence over media assets.

Anyone meeting certain benchmarks in three of those areas is to be labeled an "oligarch" and barred from participating in both political activity -- such as financing parties -- and state asset sales.

WELL, SHE'LL NEVER BE NBA COMMISSIONER:

A U.S. lawmaker defied what she says was a stern demand from China that she abandon a trip to Taiwan, a move that risks escalating tensions between Washington and Beijing.

"When news of our trip broke yesterday, my office received a blunt message from the Chinese Embassy, telling me to call off the trip," Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, wrote on Twitter shortly after landing in Taiwan late Thursday as part of a trip that that also includes Japan and South Korea.

"But just as with other stops, we're here to learn about the region and reaffirm the U.S. commitment to our hosts, the Taiwanese," she added. "I'm looking forward to an informative trip."

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

After decades in which governments and industry groups have often assumed that the shift to renewable energy will be a financial burden, economists and analysts are increasingly making a case that the opposite is true: The transition will lead to cost-savings on a massive scale that will add to its momentum.

A recent paper by University of Oxford economists and mathematicians finds that a rapid transition to renewable energy would lead to global savings of $26 trillion compared to the costs of maintaining the current energy mix.

NO PLACE LIKE HOME:

Zainora Babayee arrived with her family to the US from Kabul five years ago. It was September, just two months before Thanksgiving, a holiday she hadn't heard about until then, and one she would later add to the range of holidays she now celebrates with friends and family.

"If you ask me what comes to mind when I hear Thanksgiving, it means getting together, family gatherings, and eating meals. Thanksgiving has different meanings for different communities," Babayee, a 23 year-old University of Virginia student and oldest of seven siblings, tells The New Arab.

"For Native Americans, it's a different meaning. For diaspora communities, it's a different meaning. For us, since Thanksgiving is a national holiday, it's a chance to be with family and have fun."

Three years ago, as a new student in northern Virginia, she had the opportunity to spend the holiday with the Amish community in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. There, she and other students spent three days with Amish families, seeing a rural life where people found creative ways to be self-sufficient, a way of life that few who grow up in America ever see.

"They were so warm and welcoming. They were welcoming like Afghans. I felt at home," she says. "They loved their culture. They prayed and they welcomed us, and they said it's time to give thanks to God and welcome new people."

It was quite a change in scenery from the life she had made in northern Virginia, home to one of the country's largest Afghan communities. There, she has been able to celebrate Nowruz and the two Eids with her family and friends from Afghanistan and Iran.

UNMUTING:

In the ebbing days of the Merkel coalition, Merkel's interest and commitment to human rights and values waned. Interests often took precedence.

Baerbock has no illusions about China, Beijing's clampdown in Hong Kong, or Russia's unremitting pressure on civil society activists and organizations, with the closing of Memorial the latest development. Nor have the Greens illusions about how Russia uses its energy as a geopolitical weapon to divide Europe and increase its dependence on Russian gas.

The Greens are still against the highly controversial Nord Stream 2 pipeline through which Russia will send more gas to Germany via the Baltic Sea. The pipeline is all but completed. But a final legal hurdle by the German energy regulators and renewed pressure from the United States means that Russian President Vladimir Putin now has to deal with the Greens even though incoming Chancellor Olaf Scholz is pro-Nord Stream 2 and, well, not a firm Russian critic.

This element of foreign policy links to human rights and climate change. Both matter hugely to the Greens but also to the other coalition partners.

With the EU's COVID-19 recovery fund slowly being disbursed, the coalition agreement makes the rule of law an issue. With an implicit reference to Poland and Hungary, the text states: "We urge the European Commission ... to use the existing rule-of-law instruments more consistently and in a timely manner." Berlin will sign off payment of these funds to those countries "if preconditions such as an independent judiciary are secured."

As for climate change, the coalition contract is radical. Coal will be phased out by 2030. The expansion of renewable energy will be speeded up so that the share of renewable energies in electricity will be 80 percent by 2030. Among other measures, freight trains and electric cars will be increased.

Digitization, an issue that Merkel talked a lot about but did very little, is another major plank of the coalition. The agreement refers to a "comprehensive digital awakening" for people's "prosperity, freedom, social participation and sustainability."

In his deadpan manner, Scholz said: "We are expanding the digital infrastructure so that there is fast internet and reliable cell phone reception everywhere." And state and local services will go digital. Finally!

The coalition agreement includes quite a lot on how to make the EU more accountable and more efficient, which will be welcomed in Paris. The text refers to developing a "federal European state," more qualified majority voting at the expense of unanimity (which often paralyses decisionmaking and waters down statements), and transnational candidates for some of the top EU posts.

The coalition is well aware of how difficult it's going to be to give a new impulse to Europe. It starts at home by considering a points-based immigration system and introducing dual citizenship, with immigrants able to apply for citizenship after five years. 

FIRST WORLD WHINGE:

I have many happy memories of the meals prepared by my single mother and my extended family during the holidays. I know well the debate between turkey and ham as the central dish. I was taught to recognize the difference between good and mediocre macaroni and cheese. I remember spades tournaments, games of dominoes and the rich tenor of Black male laughter. My family found happiness even when it was hard to come by.

The difference between my childhood Thanksgivings and those of my kids is the world that existed around the holiday. My mother was diagnosed with a brain tumor when I was in elementary school; she couldn't work full time, so we lived mostly on government assistance. Our home was in Huntsville, Ala., some 100 miles northeast of Birmingham, the site of so many pivotal events of the civil rights movement. My little corner of the city, Northwest Huntsville, still bears the scars from redlining and the inadequate desegregation of its schools during the civil rights era.

Violence complicated school, parties and sporting events. As far back as I can remember, I've known how to look into a person's eyes and tell the difference between someone who is willing to fight and someone who is comfortable with much worse.

I loved my neighborhood and fought anyone who tried to reduce us to a series of stereotypes. But the violence exhausted me. I felt as if it would kill me if I didn't leave -- maybe not physically but spiritually. I needed more. I needed space.

Education was a path toward finding that space, and, in some sense, I succeeded. I made it to college and graduate school, and then became a professor. But now I find myself in a difficult, bewildering position: My children do not know how to read a room, observe the set of a jaw or assess the determination of a glare. They wave at strangers and are apt to start up conversations, assuming that the other person bears them good will. They speak about college and futures as lawyers, doctors and teachers as a matter of course. They open the refrigerator and expect to find food. And I sometimes find that I don't know how to be their father.

This tension is pressing, because this fall, after years as nomads -- first because of my wife's military career and later because of the rough and tumble world of academia -- we purchased a beautiful home that we expect to live in for a while. Two of our children entered a private Christian school. We have obtained what many consider to be the American dream. I'm not sure what comes next for me or for them. What has been lost among all the things we have gained?

FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS:

The good news is that a third dose of the vaccine appears not just to boost immunity back to the level achieved soon after a second dose, but also actually to produce even greater immunity. This was demonstrated in Israel, which led the world in vaccination but then saw that immunity tail off. Third doses have had a dramatic impact on the numbers of people being infected, hospitalised and dying. In the UK, over 26 per cent of people over 12 years old have already had a third dose - and those triple-jabbed people are in the most vulnerable groups. The boosters should help keep a lid on hospitalisations as we head into winter.

Yet some people cling to the idea that vaccines do not really work. They will find some way of cutting the data so that it appears that vaccinated people are more likely to die than unvaccinated people. But such claims rarely take account of age. Almost all older people have been vaccinated, yet because the risk from Covid is much, much greater in older people, they may still die in greater numbers. For example, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimate that for someone who is 85 or older, the risk of hospitalisation is 10 times greater than for someone aged 18 to 29. When we compare vaccinated and unvaccinated people in the same age groups, it is crystal clear how effective vaccines are.

Another claim being made a lot lately is that vaccines do not have any impact on transmission. This is clearly wrong. A recent study in the Lancet has muddied the waters somewhat. It found that in household settings, the risk of an infected person transmitting the virus to another member of their household is pretty much the same whether the infected person is vaccinated or not. It also appears that vaccinated people have a similar 'peak viral load' as unvaccinated people, on average.

But we need to be clear about what is being said here. The Lancet paper looked at infected people - yet people who have been vaccinated are less likely to be infected. Transmission is impossible until there is infection - that is, until the virus is spreading and reproducing in someone's body. As one respondent to the Lancet study argues, 'a vaccinated person is less likely to get Covid in the first instance, is less contagious and is contagious for a shorter time, resulting in significantly less spread of the virus through a highly vaccinated community'.

THE PROBLEM WITH BLAMING JOE FOR THE ECONOMY...:

Stronger third-quarter GDP

Economists have different ways of measuring economic growth. GDP, the most traditional, is based on spending on goods and services. It grew by 2.1% in the third quarter, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). But on Wednesday, the agency released another measure of growth, gross domestic income (GDI), which is based on people's and companies' income. It grew much faster than GDP, by 7.6% compared with the same period last year.

The accounting for both figures is prone to errors and is often revised months or even years after, so economists have begun to average the two. The resulting indicator has proven to be a pretty good predictor of final GDP figures.

According to the calculations of Jason Furman, a Harvard economist, the new GDI figure translates into 4.4% growth in the third quarter, double what was reported.

Jobless claims hit historic low

Meanwhile, jobless claims for the week ending Nov. 20 fell to a 50-year low (pdf) at 199,000, which probably spells a strong jobs report for November. This is the first time that claims have fallen below pre-pandemic levels, and is an indication that employers are very hesitant to lay off workers given the labor shortage, senior Glassdoor economist Daniel Zhao said on Twitter.

However, claims filed before this week are at 2.05 million, and the number of unemployed is still higher than it was pre-pandemic, signaling that the labor market won't fully recovery anytime soon.

Consumers and companies are spending more

Americans are keeping up with their spending habits in the face of higher prices. Consumer spending  increased by 1.3% (or 0.7% adjusted for inflation) in October, BEA data show. Incomes, meanwhile, rose 0.5% after falling by 1% in September.

Companies are shopping, too, with business spending on equipment up by 0.6% in October. Overall, shipments of durable goods increased by 1.5% from the prior month. To be sure, some sectors are still struggling due to supply chain snags. Orders for transportation like airplanes dropped by 2.6% 

NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

The immune response generated by Russia's Sputnik V coronavirus vaccine could fade significantly six months after vaccination, a new study published in leading medical journal The Lancet has found. 

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

[I]n the third quarter of this year, the country recorded a 0.5 percent year-on-year decline in emissions from fossil fuels and cement -- the first quarterly fall since the post-lockdown rebound, CREA analyst Lauri Myllyvirta found.

The decline was caused by a construction slump after Beijing cracked down on speculation and debt in the real estate sector, as well as high coal prices that resulted in power rationing across the country, Myllyvirta said.

"The drop in emissions could mark a turning point and an early peak in China's emissions total, years ahead of its target to peak before 2030," Myllyvirta said in his report.

GOODNESS IS BEAUTY:

One of the problems was that Hellenism was the culture of the human figure which was penetrating Judea. What attracted the Judeans was not so much the grandeur of Greek intellectuality but a cynical, pleasure-loving form of indulgence that appealed to the physical body and felt alienated by the spiritual dimensions emphasised by Judaism. The more you read the cynicism of Qohelet (Ecclesiastes), the more you see how great was the allure of Hellenism. No wonder some pagan-minded Jews were in two minds when the traditionalist Maccabees prevailed and the Temple altar in Jerusalem was cleansed and rededicated for the worship of the unseen God.

Loewe saw the problem as ideological. He thought "a dramatic danger signal" had shocked the Jews and challenged the strict Jewish sense of the nature of God. After all, the ancient Greeks liked to be surrounded by statues and pictures, and they admired physical handsomeness, bodily exercise, sport, and sculpture. Judaism saw all this as an example of avodah zarah, forbidden graven images. What Judaism valued was not the physical man but the non-physical God, not avodah zarah -- outward appearance -- but avodah shebalev, inner virtue. What mattered was not looks but books. As the Psalmist says, "God is not impressed with the legs of a man" (Psalm 147:10). What mattered with God was the mind, heart, and soul.

Solomon Schonfeld wrote in his book The Universal Bible that the Greeks esteemed beauty as an end in itself, whereas Jews believed in a higher ideal -- beauty for goodness' sake. The Jewish sages say that when Scripture speaks of Yefet (Japheth) dwelling in the tents of Shem (Genesis 10:27), it is making a statement that the beauty of Greece must not be allowed to overwhelm the ethics of Israel. Samson Raphael Hirsch, the nineteenth-century Jewish exegete, said that while Yefet beautified the world, Shem enlightened it. Judaism would not have appreciated what modern-day urban civilisation calls "temples of beauty".

Loewe was right to regard Antiochus as the chief enemy. He was right to see Antiochus as something of a largely irrelevant red herring. He was right to pinpoint the paganism that Antiochus symbolised, but he could have said more about the Greek adulation of art, since the Jewish objection was not to art itself but to how it reduced Divine truth from Revelation to Reason, making man, not God, the arbiter of accuracy. It has been said, "The altar was rededicated and so were the people."

LIKE GETTING EVERY SPORTS SECTION IN THE WORLD:

Just a reminder, the best Black Friday deal is the Athletic for $1 a month. https://t.co/MFtENx1Xvg

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) November 25, 2021

PURITAN NATION:

IN THE NAME OF GOD, AMEN. We, whose names are underwritten, the Loyal Subjects of our dread Sovereign Lord King James, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, King, Defender of the Faith, & c. Having undertaken for the Glory of God, and Advancement of the Christian Faith, and the Honour of our King and Country, a Voyage to plant the first Colony in the northern Parts of Virginia; Do by these Presents, solemnly and mutually, in the Presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil Body Politick, for our better Ordering and Preservation, and Furtherance of the Ends aforesaid: And by Virtue hereof do enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions, and Officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general Good of the Colony; unto which we promise all due Submission and Obedience. IN WITNESS whereof we have hereunto subscribed our names at Cape-Cod the eleventh of November, in the Reign of our Sovereign Lord King James, of England, France, and Ireland, the eighteenth, and of Scotland the fifty-fourth, Anno Domini; 1620.

My first thought after reading this every January for the past fourteen years is, what incredibly and pugnacious audacity these Pilgrims had. Ruling themselves with a simple agreement, a single paragraph, and a deep and abiding faith--a faith I don't necessarily share but one I respect immensely. Who were these people, and what was their secret?

My second thought is that this could never have been composed by anyone but the most Protestant of Protestants.

Indeed, even as a practicing Roman Catholic, I have a hard time imagining the same scene being played out by French, Spanish, or Portuguese settlers. No, this is one of the great fruits of Protestantism, and it's probably one we Catholics should take to heart, especially as we continue to struggle over issues of religious freedom and freedom of conscience in our rather fallen world of the 21st century. [...]

In their critical and essential study of America and her self-identity, Basic Symbols, Wilmoore Kendall and George Carey argue that one might very well call this the foundational document of America, a creation of the "basic symbol" around which even the Declaration and Constitution revolved and, ultimately, fulfilled.

The authors of the Combination, according to Kendall and Carey "merely established a society, not a government, so that their symbols, with the passing of time, will have to be revised in order to provide the relationship between society and government, between the social order and the specifically political order."

While I'm sure many historians and political theorists would agree with this assertion, it has a nice logic to it. At least as I understand it.

While we could interpret the Combination from a Lockean or a Hobbesian perspective, it would be nothing short of absurd to do so. Hobbes was still thirty-one years away from writing Leviathan, and Locke was age negative 12 in 1620. As our own John Willson has argued emphatically for many years, America is not Lockean. If anything, the influence went the other direction--toward and on Locke from America.

NEIGHBOR LOVE:

Integration is good

The government in Singapore doesn't put a lot of value on individual autonomy, so they force every neighborhood and every high-rise apartment building to roughly match the country's overall ethnic balance.

From the standpoint of the government, this solved a problem that existed early in Singapore's history where neighborhoods dominated by the large Malay minority in the country would become hotbeds of anti-government agitation. Now there are no Malay neighborhoods and no Indian neighborhoods, either. Every neighborhood is mostly Chinese, but with Malays and Indians integrated -- no minority clusters or ghettos.

The United States is not like that, but freshman dorms at American colleges sort of are -- central planners dictate where people will live and force racial integration. And that lets us ask, "what if you are assigned a Black roommate?" The answer is that students assigned to a Black roommate end up with more Black friends, even if you exclude the roommate from the count. A somewhat similar survey looked at peer group assignments in the Air Force Academy, with broadly similar results.

This general phenomenon is the Contact Hypothesis -- that actual interaction with members of diverse groups will lead to less prejudice. And while Contact Hypothesis doesn't hold up in all cases, meta-analyses tend to strongly support it overall. A really interesting study by Xuechunzi Bai, Miguel R. Ramos, and Susan T. Fiske finds that "at national, state, and individual levels," places with more diversity feature less stereotyping. Detailed research from Census records suggests that white kids who grew up living next door to a Black family are more likely to grow up to be Democrats. There is a similar outcome based on the rise and fall of integration-promoting busing in North Carolina.

We've obviously not going to go Full Singapore, but we should absolutely reform zoning laws to promote more integrated neighborhoods and (as D.C. does) draw school boundaries to err on the side of integration rather than doing the reverse the way most localities do.

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

Thanksgiving dinner in 2021 will be cheaper than what it was in 2019. The feast cost 2.08 hours (124.8 minutes) of work in 2019. That means that the average American worker will work 3 minutes less in 2021 than he or she did in 2019 to pay for the meal.

Also, do not forget the long-term trend. The U.S. Farm Bureau started collecting the Thanksgiving dinner cost data in 1986. That year, the feast cost $28.74 (in 1986 dollars), while the average blue-collar hourly wage was $8.92 (in 1986 dollars). That means that the time-price of Thanksgiving dinner in 1986 was 3.22 hours or 193.2 minutes.

Take-away no. 3:

On average, the American worker will work 71.4 minutes less to pay for Thanksgiving dinner in 2021 than he or she did in 1986 (193.2 minutes - 121.8 minutes = 71.4 minutes).

It has been a difficult year for most people, and our analysis is not meant to belittle the hardship that Americans have endured since the start of the pandemic. But doom and gloom are not our friends either.

Take-away no. 4:

To wit, the time price of Thanksgiving dinner in 2021 will be 7 percent higher than it was in 2020. It will be 2.4 percent lower than it was in 2019. Finally, it will be 37 percent lower than it was in 1986.

A GOOD MODEL:

In British terms, Scholz is more of a Gordon Brown than a Tony Blair. He has been a reliable Finance Minister, who has guided the Federal Republic's  through the pandemic with his reputation intact. Even so, his successor in that role, Christian Lindner, will have his work cut out to allay German angst about rising inflation , now at 6 per cent -- higher than at any time since the 1970s. It is a shrewd move by the new Chancellor to make the leader of the most Right-leaning party in the coalition responsible for the nation's finances. He will resist moves to raise taxes or lose control of public spending -- but radicals will blame Lindner rather than Scholz.

Germany, then, will continue to be a powerful force for economic stability and orthodoxy in the concert of Europe -- with one exception. On climate change, the new coalition has agreed to spend unprecedented sums to speed up the transition to a net zero economy. Coal will be phased out by 2030, much sooner than had been envisaged, and the sale of new petrol or diesel vehicles will be banned soon afterwards. Germany, which once pioneered environmental politics but in recent years has fallen behind on carbon emissions, will now redouble its efforts to lead Europe towards a green utopia.

Sunday, February 23, 2020 | 1:16pm "Two subjects on Holmes Road. Shots fired. Male on ground, bleeding out," radios an officer. Maud musters his last breath near the intersection of Holmes Road and Satilla Drive, a mere 300 yards from where, not 10 minutes prior, he wandered inside a construction site. The officers will cordon the scene and investigate. They will question the McMichaels--Gregory's hands bloody from rolling Maud onto his back--and William Bryan. And in an act that is itself another violence, they will let all three go about their merry way as free men--for almost three months.

On February 23, 2020, a young man out for a run was lynched in Glynn County, Georgia.

His name was Ahmaud Marquez Arbery, called "Quez" by his beloveds and "Maud" by most others. And what I want you know about Maud is that he had a gift for impressions and a special knack for mimicking Martin Lawrence. What I want you to know about Maud is that he was fond of sweets and requested his mother's fudge cake for the birthday parties he often shared with his big sister. What I want you to know about Maud is that he signed the cards he bought for his mother "Baby Boy." What I want you to know about Maud is that he and his brother would don the helmets they used for go-carting and go heads-up on their trampoline, and that he never backed down from his big brother. What I want you to know about Maud is that he jammed his pinkie playing hoop in high school and instead of getting it treated like Jasmine advised, he let it heal on its own--forever crooked. What I want you know about Maud is that he didn't like seeing his day-ones whining, that when they did, he'd chide, "Don't cry about it, man. Do what you gotta do to handle your business." What I want you to know about Maud is that Shenice told me he sometimes recorded their conversations so he could listen to her voice when they were apart. What you should know about Maud is that he adored his nephews Marcus III and Micah Arbery, that when they were colicky as babies, he'd take them for long walks in their stroller until they calmed. What you should know about Maud is that when a college friend asked Jasmine which parent she'd call first if ever in serious trouble, she said neither, that she'd call him. What I want you to know about Maud is that he was an avid connoisseur of the McChicken sandwich with cheese. What I want you know about Maud is that he and Keem were so close that the universe coerced each of them into breaking a foot on the same damn day in separate freak weight-room accidents, and that when they were getting treated in the trainer's office, Maud joked about it. You should know that Maud dreamed of a career as an electrician and of owning a construction company. You should know that Maud gushed often of his desire to be a great husband and father. You should know that he told his boys that he wanted them all to buy a huge plot of land, build houses on it, and live in a gated community with their families. You should know that Maud never flew on a plane, but wanderlusted for trips to Jamaica, Japan, Africa. What you must know about Maud was that when Travis McMichael, Gregory McMichael, and William "Roddie" Bryan stalked and murdered him less than three months shy of his 26th birthday, he left behind his mother Wanda, his father Marcus Sr., his brother Buck, his sister Jasmine, his maternal grandmother Ella, his nephews, six uncles, 10 aunts, a host of cousins, all of whom are unimaginably, irrevocably, incontrovertibly poorer from his absence.

Ahmaud Marquez Arbery was more than a viral video. He was more than a hashtag or a name on a list of tragic victims. He was more than an article or an essay or posthumous profile. He was more than a headline or an op-ed or a news package or the news cycle. He was more than a retweet or shared post. He, doubtless, was more than our likes or emoji tears or hearts or praying hands. He was more than an R.I.P. t-shirt or placard. He was more than an autopsy or a transcript or a police report or a live-streamed hearing. He, for damn sure, was more than the latest reason for your liberal white friend's ephemeral outrage. He was more than a rally or a march. He was more than a symbol, more than a movement, more than a cause. He. Was. Loved.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Germany's new coalition government stepped up efforts to slash greenhouse gas emissions with a faster coal exit, more renewables and a new carbon price floor.

The incoming government agreed that Europe's powerhouse economy will stop burning coal for electricity by 2030, eight years earlier than planned, according to a coalition agreement document. Rapid expansion of renewable energy plants and a fleet of new natural gas generators will make up for the shortfall in electricity production.

"We will further develop climate legislation in 2022 and launch an immediate climate protection program with all the necessary laws and measures," the parties said in the accord. "All sectors will have to contribute: transport, construction and housing, power generation, industry and agriculture."

ALWAYS WISE TO RUN AGAINST MISGOVERNANCE:

O'Rourke launched his bid earlier this month talking about the February blizzard and deep freeze that has been estimated to contribute to as many as 700 deaths amid the power outages.

"I'm running for governor, and I want to tell you why," the 2020 presidential candidate said in a video. "This past February, when the electricity grid failed and millions of our fellow Texans were without power, which meant that the lights wouldn't turn out, the heat wouldn't run, and pretty soon their pipes froze and the water stopped flowing, they were abandoned by those who were elected to serve and look out for them."

BEYOND COMEDY:

There was an indefensible assumption at the root of Ahmaud Arbery's killing in a quiet coastal Georgia town. Contrary to everything you've read and heard in the mainstream media, it was not a racial assumption. It was a legal assumption.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

One of Noor's most memorable sermons happened in 2017 - a surprise, considering it was largely an improvisation. After a scheduling hitch left Noor with less than half of the 45-minutes she should have had, she shortened her talk and changed tack: leading the congregation in a meditation.

"She asked us to track our emotions in our bodies, and let them run their course," recalled Nurjahan Boulden, who was in the audience that day. "I didn't know it was even possible to own and control your emotions like that, but it worked."

Boulden had come to Noor's sermon that day not knowing what she would find. Before that sermon, she was haunted by a destructive guilt she carried.

She grew up with a love for belly-dancing - a practice inherited from her Baloch mother - but also hearing a lot of "if you do this, you'll burn in hell". That belief took hold inside her, and began to grow. Then, she was shot in the leg in a nightclub in Toronto in 2006. Boulden, a college student at the time, overheard one of her aunts say, "She was out dancing, what did she expect?"

Then, she conceived a child out of wedlock with her Christian partner. After they married, they had several miscarriages, and so the guilt grew again. She got to a point where she believed her misfortunes resulted from not conforming to religious traditions.

Noor offered Boulden another frame. "I didn't tell her she was wrong for feeling punished," Noor said. "I helped her to look at it differently and asked, 'What else is true?'" Noor told her that God had given her the talent of dancing and that it wasn't a shameful practice, like many thought. She told her that her intentions - what's in her heart - is what mattered. If she felt happiest belly dancing, , then dancing was how she was meant to connect with God.

Boulden was in disbelief.

"You're the guide I had been waiting for," Boulden told her.

Noor was also in disbelief. She had never seen herself as someone that people had been waiting for.

Noor grew up in a pious family in Karachi, Pakistan. Everyone in the house prayed five times a day. At the time, women weren't allowed in the mosque in Karachi (although that is now changing). But Noor also had women to look up to: her mother Naima had memorized the Arabic scriptures and was usually the designated prayer leader in the house.

In the summer of 2000, when Noor was 16, her family migrated to the US and moved into a townhouse in Culver City, California. On their street, in this upper middle-class suburb of about 40,000 people, old ficus trees formed an archway. There were few Muslims in the town - they represent only about 1% of the population even now - but in the first couple of months after settling in to her California home, she went to a giant prayer for an Eid celebration at the Los Angeles convention center.

She was amazed. It was the first time she would pray in public. Noor wore a blue and yellow salwar kameez she had brought in her suitcase from Karachi, silver earrings with small blue stones that hung down to her chin and two dozen bangles around her henna tattooed wrists. The teenager was mesmerized by the ethnic and gender diversity in the crowd. She saw the power of praying outside the house, in communion.

Her new life was already teaching her what kind of religious leader she wanted to be - although she had not yet realized she wanted to become one.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Scholar of Jewish history Deborah Lipstadt, who has been nominated by President Joe Biden to serve as special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, argued in an expert report presented to the court concerning the history, ideology, symbolism and rhetoric of antisemitism - subsequently summarized in her personal testimony - that the Charlottesville chant carried several meanings.

"In its simplest and most straightforward interpretation," she explained, "that chant can be understood to say Jews will not replace 'us,' i.e., white Christians in our job or our dominant place in society. We as whites will remain the dominant and supreme force in society."

She also pointed to a "subtler but deeply ideological meaning to this chant," rooted in the fear referred to by white nationalists as the "great replacement" or "white genocide." The Charlottesville chant is expressing centuries-old fears that Jews, in league with peoples of color, are engaged in a nefarious plot to destroy the white Christian civilization.

David Lane, a white supremacist convicted, among other crimes, of conspiring in the 1984 machine-gun assassination of the Jewish talk-radio host Alan Berg in Denver, did much to publicize this idea. "The Western nations," he wrote, "were ruled by a Zionist conspiracy ... [that] above all things wants to exterminate the White Aryan race." His 14-word goal, today a central plank of white nationalist ideology, declares that "we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children."

Alex Linder, a neo-Nazi who operates the racist website the Vanguard News Network, has written that Jews merely pretend to be white "in order to shame, discredit, blame, mock, harass and otherwise discomfit and discredit white people and the white race."

XI AND VLAD BADLY NEEDED A nATIONALIST IN THE OVAL:

The Biden administration included Taiwan among the 110 invitees to its upcoming democracy summit, the State Department announced on Tuesday night, a move that's intended to show solidarity with a key regional partner but risks angering China.

EASY UNSQUEEZY:

"There may still be swings, but overall, I think the worst is over," Esben Poulsson, who chairs the International Chamber of Shipping, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia" on Tuesday.

Poulsson explained that retailers had made a "significant level" of pre-orders, and that should help ease shortages of goods.

TOO LATE TO RETIRE WHEN YOU'VE BEEN DEAD FOR CENTURIES:

After leaving Princeton's philosophy department in 1981, he never held another appointment as a philosopher--by choice. He thought philosophy's days were numbered and spent the second half of his career (and much of the first) explaining why.

But how can philosophy end? Surely the quest for Truth is eternal? Surely the hunger for Wisdom is part of human nature? Surely questions about the Good will never cease to exercise us? Well, yes and no. Certainly Rorty was not proposing that we simply give up on all the big questions. We will always mull over "how things, in the largest sense of that word, hang together, in the largest sense of that word," a phrase he quoted often from one of his favorite philosophers, Wilfrid Sellars. But he thought that philosophy's perennial abstractions, distinctions, and problems--including Truth, human nature, and the Good--though they were once very much alive, had by now led Western thought into a dead end and should be retired.

Truth, for example, has meant many things since Plato: a knowledge of the Forms; a subsistent Essence, in virtue of which all true things are true; a correspondence between sentences and states of affairs. Likewise the Good: fulfillment of one's telos, or natural end; participation in the Divine Essence; the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Each of these definitions has its partisans, but to each of them most other philosophers are quite deaf. Schools wax and wane but, unlike scientific theories, none steadily gains adherents as it achieves generally recognized solutions to common problems, while its competitors fade away. Philosophy makes no progress.

Rorty was hardly the first to make this observation and draw the conclusion that something else was necessary and inevitable. Hume's mordant aphorism gives the gist of much later criticism: "If we take in our hand any volume, of divinity or school metaphysics, for instance, let us ask: Does it contain any abstract reasoning concerning quantity or number? No. Does it contain any experimental reasoning concerning matter of fact and existence? No. Commit it then to the flames, for it can contain nothing but sophistry and illusion." John Stuart Mill dispensed with most of traditional philosophy, though he was the greatest political and moral philosopher of his day. William James did grapple with many of the traditional problems and gave the new orientation a name ("pragmatism") and some pithy formulations: "The true is the good in the way of belief." "A difference that makes no difference is no difference at all." And perhaps the best-known and most misunderstood: "Grant an idea or belief to be true...what concrete difference will its being true make in anyone's actual life?... What experiences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief were false? What, in short, is the truth's cash-value in experiential terms?" The face of twentieth-century pragmatism and Rorty's main influence was John Dewey, a penetrating and prolific writer who unfortunately never spoke or wrote a memorable sentence.

In the introduction to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty attributed to Dewey, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger the view that he himself had adopted. It is one of innumerable passages in which Rorty advocated the euthanasia of philosophy:

Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey are in agreement that the notion of knowledge as accurate representation, made possible by special mental processes, and intelligible through a general theory of representation, needs to be abandoned. For all three, the notions of "foundations of knowledge" and of philosophy as revolving around the Cartesian attempt to answer the epistemological skeptic are set aside. Further, they set aside the notion of "the mind" common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant--as a special object of study, located in inner space, containing elements or processes which make knowledge possible. This is not to say that they have alternative "theories of knowledge" or "philosophies of mind." They set aside epistemology and metaphysics as possible disciplines.... [They] glimpse the possibility of a form of intellectual life in which the vocabulary of philosophical reflection inherited from the seventeenth century would seem as pointless as the thirteenth-century philosophical vocabulary had seemed to the Enlightenment.

"Setting aside epistemology and metaphysics" is as good a short definition of pragmatism's purpose as one may hope for.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Nearly one quarter of Israel's population will be ultra-Orthodox by the year 2050, according to projections by Israel's National Economic Council.

A TEMPORARY BOTTLENECK IS NOT INFLATION:

"The good news for the holiday season is that Best Buy won't have trouble meeting consumers' expectations. It has 15% more inventory compared with a year ago." https://t.co/ZuFlu9v99G

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) November 23, 2021

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

THE FISH ROTS FROM THE SPHINCTER:

[P]osts quickly devolved into calls for further violence, with many saying they could "reference this case" to defend violent acts. Using slurs for antifa and the Black Lives Matter movement, one poster on Patriots.win said that those two groups "gotta be s[*****]ing. We have permission to defend ourselves now." Another poster responded: "We don't need f[****]ing permission and never did. But now, it's legal precedent." (It should be noted that posters on anonymous message boards are not known for their legal expertise.)

Many posters on the extreme right also called for Rittenhouse to sue media companies whose coverage of the trial they deemed unfair or defamatory, citing Nicholas Sandmann, another conservative teenage martyr, whose family sued The Washington Post over coverage of a viral video in which Sandmann, who was attending a March for Life rally, encountered Omaha tribe elder Nathan Phillips in 2019. The Post settled with the Sandmann family, and many posters said Rittenhouse should seek similar lawsuits. [...]

Meanwhile, Republican politicians have praised the verdict and Rittenhouse. Former President Donald Trump called into Fox News Friday evening to say he thought that Rittenhouse was "brave" for testifying and that the verdict was a "great decision"; Trump also asserted that the case was baseless to begin with -- a common refrain on the far right. Republican Reps. Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, and Madison Cawthorn all seemed to offer Rittenhouse internships. (No word on whether they're paid or unpaid.) Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the state where the shootings took place, tweeted that justice had been served, and Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky tweeted a video of the verdict being read with the caption: "There is hope for this country."

Rittenhouse's evolution into a right-wing martyr is a product of the highly politicized nature of his case and the circumstances surrounding the shootings. The case weaved together multiple issues over which there is stark partisan division, including gun rights and protests over police brutality. But it's also a part of a long history on the far right of raising certain figures to holy status, as I've previously reported.

Almost immediately after he was identified as the shooter last year, Rittenhouse was elevated to a quasi-saint status among the right. This marked the first time this phenomenon occurred in a major way among the mainstream right in America. Since then, we've seen it repeating. Take the individuals charged with participating in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol who have attracted support in the form of fundraisers and rallies. Rittenhouse's place amid the right-wing hagiography demonstrates how much the far right and the mainstream right have converged, with members of Congress who send out pithy tweets and extreme posters on message boards who call for violence all praying at the same altar of St. Kyle.

MEANWHILE, IN AMERICA...:

They meet outside of November as well, grabbing dinner and spending hours chatting. Dench's husband, Lonnie, died of COVID-19 complications last year, and moving forward, their Thanksgivings will be different. Dench told Today she's grateful for the time they all spent together and the lesson she's learned from Hinton. "It dawned on me that there doesn't have to be a generation gap to have friendships," she said. "So now I look at a lot of young people in a different light than I used to and I make it a point to talk and get to know them." Hinton, she added, "changed my life a lot, I know that." 

SKIMMING THE TRUMPIST CREAM:

New details are emerging about the newest dozen police officers lauded by Gov. Ron DeSantis for moving to Central Florida from New York City to escape what the governor described as low morale and a lack of support from Democratic politicians there. 

The new hires include one previously fired as a Walmart security guard, one with only three years of experience who demanded more than double his salary and others with mysterious gaps in their résumés. 

One said he mistakenly checked a box on his employment application indicating he illegally used marijuana recently -- then said he actually never did. 

Two failed to disclose on their Lakeland applications they had been disciplined over minor matters by the NYPD. 

Another worked on the NYPD's notorious anti-crime units. Plainclothes officers in unmarked cars in those units targeted violent crime with car stops and frisks in minority neighborhoods and were involved in controversial shootings of civilians. 

The police commissioner there disbanded the teams and reassigned those officers last year after high-profile incidents. 

In one incident, the newly hired officer in Lakeland was among eight NYPD plainclothes officers accused in a federal lawsuit of handcuffing and brutally beating a man in January 2015. The city paid $178,000 to settle the case. The man was left with four broken bones in his face, a dislocated shoulder and cuts and bruises -- as the city dropped minor marijuana charges against him six weeks after the beating, the lawsuit said.

SNOWFLAKERY:

The need to see oneself as heroically resisting an all-powerful https://t.co/f8ibQzId0p? & Randy Kritkausky?--is one of the more amusing pathologies of the Right these days. But coming from the Press adds to the hilarity. https://t.co/VLKkTX1ZRS

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) November 23, 2021

THE LITTLE DIG:

Federal officials said Manchester was selected to receive $25 million to transform its downtown because of the ingenuity of the city's proposal.

The funds awarded by the U.S. Department of Transportation were the highest amount possible under the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity program.

Manchester plans to use the RAISE grant to mitigate traffic congestion, improve biking and walking trails, and add a pedestrian bridge over Granite Street.

"It's connected to a vision of overall design and mixed-use development, and we're looking for projects that do that, that link how planning and housing and how development is going to work for the future to transportation, because we should be thinking about those at the same time," said Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg.

THE SNOWFLAKE DEFENSE:

Travis McMichael had every reason to fear a 25-year-old Black man running through his Georgia neighborhood and was justified in attempting to make a "citizen's arrest" that led to the deadly shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, an attorney for the defense said in one final appeal to jurors.

Attorney Jason Sheffield said his client did nothing wrong when he and his father, Gregory McMichael, decided to chase after Arbery on the afternoon of Feb. 23, 2020, because of alleged reports of stolen goods, trespassing, and break-ins in the neighborhood.

"What was happening in their neighborhood scared them," Sheffield said during closing arguments in the Glynn County courthouse Monday.

NEXT BEST TO FIRING THEM:

As Covid cases surged over the summer, Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian took action: Unvaccinated workers would have to pay an extra $200 a month for their health insurance, starting Nov. 1.

It felt less onerous than the vaccine mandate imposed on workers by rival United Airlines. But still, it was audacious.

Around 75% of Delta's workforce had already received the Covid shots by that time. But each employee who was hospitalized with Covid had cost Delta $50,000, and Bastian noted in an August memo that none of those hospitalized in the summer surge had been fully vaccinated.

"This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company," he wrote.

Now, as Covid cases climb once again, more companies are putting aside carrots and turning to sticks in an effort to protect their workers. From Utah grocery chain Harmons to Wall Street banking giant JPMorgan Chase, companies are telling their unvaccinated workers to get the shots or pay more for health insurance.

IT'S NEARLY REQUIRED TO GET THE ENDORSEMENT:

IT'S WHAT THE ANTI-VAXXERS ARE:

THIS IS LEGAL IN FLORIDA NOW:

A joyous scene of marching bands and children dancing in Santa hats and waving pompoms turned deadly in an instant, as an SUV sped through barricades and into a Christmas parade in suburban Milwaukee, killing at least five people and injuring more than 40 others.

One video showed a woman screaming, "Oh my God!" repeatedly as a group of young dancers was struck Sunday. A father talked of going "from one crumpled body to the other" in search of his daughter. Members of a "Dancing Grannies" club were among those hit.

The city of Waukesha posted on its social media accounts late Sunday that it could confirm at least five died and more than 40 were injured, while noting that it was still collecting information. The city's statement also noted that many people took themselves to hospitals. The city did not release any additional information about those who died.

JUST SHOP:

There are signs that inflation in the price of turkeys, pies, green beans and bread rolls has peaked, for this season at least, as more supermarkets start stepping up their promotions. [...]

There are risks in supermarkets yo-yoing between markups and markdowns, however. In Britain, the last time there were significant inflationary pressures about a decade ago, grocers responded first by raising prices and then later offering promotions to stimulate demand. That gave oxygen to discounters Aldi and Lidl, which undercut the back-and-forth by maintaining consistently low prices. With Aldi expanding aggressively in the U.S. and Lidl also finding its footing there, American retailers won't want to make the same mistake. 

Already, there are signs that consumers are trading down in categories where prices are rising.

...AND CHEAPER...:

[A]dvocates of fusion technology say it has many parallels with the space industry. That, too, was once confined to government agencies but is now benefiting from the drive and imagination of nimble (albeit often state-assisted) private enterprise. This is "the SpaceX moment for fusion", says Mowry, referring to Elon Musk's space-flight company in Hawthorne, California.

"The mood has changed," says Thomas Klinger, a fusion specialist at the Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) in Greifswald, Germany. "We can smell that we're getting close." Investors sense the real prospect of returns on their money: Google and the New York City-based investment bank Goldman Sachs, for instance, are among those funding the fusion company TAE Technologies, based in Foothill Ranch, California, which has raised around $880 million so far. "Companies are starting to build things at the level of what governments can build," says Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And just as private space travel is now materializing, many industry observers are forecasting that the same business model will give rise to commercial fusion -- desperately needed to decarbonize the energy economy -- within a decade. "There's a very good shot to get there within less than ten years," says Michl Binderbauer, chief executive of TAE Technologies. In the FIA report, a majority of respondents thought that fusion would power an electrical grid somewhere in the world in the 2030s.

IGNORE THE SANCTIONS IN OUR EYE:

US officials have warned Israel that its attacks against the Iranian nuclear program are counterproductive and have enabled Tehran to rebuild an even more efficient enrichment system, the New York Times reported Sunday.

Citing officials familiar with the behind-the-scenes discussion between Washington and Jerusalem, as the US continues to try and bring Iran back into the nuclear deal, the report said that Israeli officials have dismissed the warnings, saying they have "no intention of letting up."

Noting that in the last 20 months there have been four explosions at Iranian nuclear facilities attributed to Israel, along with the killing of Iran's top nuclear scientist, the report said US officials have cautioned their Israeli counterparts that while such efforts may be "tactically satisfying," they are "ultimately counterproductive."

DONALD WHO?:

I designed a model that takes into account experts' race ratings, the last presidential vote in each state, whether the incumbent is running for reelection, and the generic congressional ballot. I did that for the 2022 cycle and examined how these factors were correlated with Senate election outcomes since 2006. Based on those calculations, the GOP's odds are roughly 3 in 4 (75%) to pick up one seat for a majority. The most likely outcome is a Republican net gain of two to three seats.

FIGHTING NOTHING WITH NOTHING:

In our political culture, there is no issue quite like wokeness. The conversation it provokes tends to be about everything and nothing at the same time. It is central to our politics because Republican resistance to it is perhaps the single greatest force binding the American Right together. And while the mass messaging of Democratic politicians tends to focus more on health care and jobs, in institutions that the Left con­trols, like academia, it punishes opposition to wokeness more stringently than any other heresy.

At the same time, the conversation is, in a sense, not actually about anything. CPAC can hold entire conferences on the theme of "cancel culture" without producing any real policy suggestions. Although at the state level, politicians will occasionally address narrow issues, like whether to ban the teaching of critical race theory in public schools, there is no concrete anti-wokeness agenda that conservatives hope Republicans will implement the next time they return to power in Washington.

While voices on both left and right have argued that the United States is going through a cultural revolution more extensive than anything we have seen since the 1960s, it remains a kind of background noise to our political culture. Into this debate steps Vivek Ramaswamy with Woke, Inc., a book that combines features of an autobiography, a work on policy, and a cultural critique.

As a practicing Hindu, a son of immigrants, and a successful biotech founder--but also a conservative--his is a uniquely American story. And it is an endearing one, written by an author who is widely rumored to have a future in politics, with the kind of résumé and background that Republican strategists dream about. Indeed, as the party suffers a long-term brain drain among both its leaders and its voters that has only accelerated since 2016, intelligent conservatives should hope Ramaswamy has a future in their party. Unfortunately, however, when Ramaswamy puts forward policy suggestions for responding to our cultural drift toward identity politics and more stringent forms of speech restriction, he re­veals the larger shortcomings of the anti-wokeness movement. [...]

For a work that centers around the problems with wokeness, Woke, Inc. tells us surprisingly little about why wokeness is bad. Yes, the author is concerned that it distracts and divides us, and that conservatives feel put upon by the ideological conformity demanded by major corporations. But one way out of that division is for the opponents of wokeness to simply give up. If two sides are fighting a war, the most natural path to peace is for the weaker side to lay down its arms, not for the one that's winning to surrender. From the book, one never understands why that isn't an option.

In some cases, Ramaswamy himself uses racial disparities as a justification for his own preferred policies. While he says he rejects theories of "systemic racism," he argues for national service during the summer on the grounds that minorities fall further behind when they're out of school. There are a few problems with this argument, most notably that it is unclear how most forms of national service would close any gap. (It is also unclear that kids doing worse on tests in the short run has much to do with real intellectual achievement anyway, since it is quite obvious that the function of schooling is mostly some combination of daycare and signalling.)

Putting that aside, once you justify a policy as necessary to close gaps, you beg the question of why you are not doing more to achieve equality. The fact of the matter is that liberals are not imagining differ­ences in test scores, income, and incarceration rates between racial groups. There is no evidence that government can realistically close these gaps, though it can force a more balanced distribution of jobs through affirmative action. If anti-wokeness is to mean anything, it must oppose such policies, and that is difficult to do while portraying the anti‑woke agenda as the one that will eliminate statistical disparities.

PURITAN NATION:

In mid-November 1848, a mad dog was on the loose in Concord, Massachusetts. Roaming freely on the edge of town, the distracted animal posed an immediate threat to livestock and people. Rabies drove the poor creature to lunge at the hogs in one barnyard, bite several dogs in the village, and attack three or four people before it was finally shot dead. In its wake a "great excitement" spread through the town, for nobody knew how many other dogs were now infected with the virus of "hydrophobia." So anxious were the inhabitants that 21 of them banded together and petitioned the town to establish a board of health, with the power "to destroy all the dogs in the town as nuisances and causes of sickness." Among their number was Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher of individualism, who was rapidly gaining a national reputation as the Concord Sage.

Why would a thinker renowned for love of nature and skepticism of government endorse so extreme a measure? [...]

In their perfectionist outlook, the Transcendentalists thought every child was something new under the sun, with an untapped potential for creativity that could not be prescribed or channeled in advance but could be trusted to further the progress of humankind. This vision was democratic and egalitarian. As Emerson remarked, once the principle took hold that "every man has within him somewhat really divine," ancient hierarchies and entrenched inequalities would collapse, and "the unpardonable outrage of slavery" would meet an immediate end. Let individuals learn to "reverence" themselves and heed the "voice of Reason" within; the "citizen" would then be elevated into a "state." Emerson upended the priorities that had guided past societies from time immemorial and affirmed a credo of individualism that is now an American faith. Previous generations, he pronounced, "acted and spoke under the thought that a shining social prosperity was the aim of men, and compromised ever the individuals to the nation. The modern mind teaches (in extremes) that the nation exists for the individual; for the guardianship and education of every man."

Yet, the individualism of Emerson and Thoreau was far too radical for their neighbors, not to mention fellow Transcendentalists, who experimented with social forms and founded such alternative communities as Brook Farm to facilitate the growth of individuals as free and equal beings. In Concord, earnest young people were drawn to Emerson's message--the restlessness with inherited ways, the perception of the divine in nature, the desire for an authentic self, the excitement of widening intellectual horizons, the hopes of social reform. Transcendentalism inspired the rising generation of Thoreau and his contemporaries as they came of age in New England and the North in the 1830s and 1840s. It even reached well beyond Concord and inspired free men and women of color--activists for freedom--in leading cities of the North. But the moment was short-lived, as few in Concord and its environs could turn away from the imperative of being "useful" to society.

The libertarianism of the Transcendentalists was simply too selfish for most Concordians. The townspeople had listened too long and absorbed too well the message from the pulpit that they were "moral and social beings" with duties to their fellow men and women.  Each voluntary association affirmed a higher social purpose. "Every member of the community is obliged to seek and promote the public good," declared the constitution of the Charitable Library Society. "It is the duty of every one, as far as in his power, to relieve the wants of the indigent and the distressed," said the Female Charitable Society. The rules for the schools were progressive; with a child-centered curriculum stressing learning by doing, exposure to up-to-date knowledge, and discouragement of corporal punishment, public education embraced a mission "to bring all the powers and faculties of our nature to the highest perfection of which they are capable." But the development of the individual was not an end in itself, as the school committee explained in its 1830 code of regulations. It was the means to "qualify us for the greatest usefulness in the world" as well as "for the eternal enjoyments of heaven."

This social ethic sustained a local political culture with a strong regard for the common good. Despite the intense polarization between Democrats and Whigs, town government was capable of overcoming partisan divisions and taking robust action at moments of crisis. Whenever cases of smallpox broke out, local authorities took quick steps under state law to isolate the sick, often in "pest houses" at a safe remove from neighbors, and to keep them under quarantine until the illness was over. In 1832, some two years before Emerson arrived, the town launched a campaign to inoculate anybody "who may desire it" against the dread disease, and it hired a physician to visit each of the schoolhouses to vaccinate vulnerable children. Nobody requested an exemption, and should any pupils be absent on the appointed day, the doctor was directed to seek them out at home. Similar precautions were taken to protect the inhabitants against cholera. It was thus in keeping with long precedent that the townsmen, Emerson included, were prepared to protect themselves against rabies by euthanizing the canine population.

COULDN'T EVEN MAKE IT TO THE END OF NOVEMBER?:

Clashing with anchor Dana Bash on whether or not critical race theory is part of Virginia's public school curricula, for instance, Sears went on a tangent about one of the most notorious events in American history.

"But while we're talking about history, how about we talk about how Black people from the 1890s to about 1950-1960, according to the U.S. Census, had been marrying in a percentage that had far surpassed anything that whites had ever done," she declared. "When we talk about the Tulsa Race Riots, let's ask ourselves how did the Black people amass so much wealth right after the Civil War, so that it could even be destroyed? How did they do that?! You know, they were coming from nothing, from zero, some of them never even got the 40 acres and a mule. Let's try to emulate that."

It was the incoming lieutenant governor's stance on COVID-19 vaccines and mandates, however, that appeared to really catch Bash off guard. After the CNN host and Sears went back and forth about the fact that Virginia has long had mandates for vaccines for a host of other diseases, Sears grumbled that vaccines had become too politicized.

She also claimed that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris said they "would not trust any vaccine" that was developed by the Trump administration when they were candidates.

"What is the science? Can somebody tell us what to finally believe?!" Sears exclaimed.

After the State of the Union moderator explained that Harris and Biden actually said they would trust scientists and experts on the vaccines and not just Trump's word, she then pressed Sears on her own vaccination status. Throughout her campaign, while encouraging others to get the vaccine, Sears refused to say whether she herself was vaccinated, stating that "no one should be forced to disclose their vaccination status."

Once again, the lieutenant governor-elect declined to share whether or not she was vaccinated.

"As I said, America, if it's nothing else, it's about liberty," Sears replied. "It's about being able to live your life free from the government telling you what to do."

She continued: "And so we understand this thing about slippery slopes, the minute that I start telling you about my vaccine status, we're going to be down the bottom of the mountain trying to figure out how we got there because now you want to know what's in my DNA. You're going to want to know this, that and the other."

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

[A]t an event like this, one way I measure progress is by the way people are thinking about what it'll take to reach zero emissions. Do they think we already have all the tools we need to get there? Or is there a nuanced view of the complexity of this problem, and the need for new, affordable clean technology that helps people in low- and middle-income countries raise their standard of living without making climate change worse?

Six years ago, there were more people on the we-have-what-we-need side than on the innovation side. This year, though, innovation was literally on center stage. [...]

The second major shift is that the private sector is now playing a central role alongside governments and nonprofits. In Glasgow, I met with leaders in various industries that need to be part of the transition--including shipping, mining, and financial services--who had practical plans to decarbonize and to support innovation. I saw CEOs of international banks really engaging with these issues, whereas many of them wouldn't even have shown up a few years ago. (It made me wish we could get the same kind of turnout and excitement for conferences on global health!)

I announced that three new partners--Citi, the IKEA Foundation, and State Farm--will be working with Breakthrough Energy Catalyst, a program designed to get the most promising climate technologies to scale much faster than would happen naturally. They're joining the first round of seven partners we announced in September. It's amazing to see how much momentum Catalyst has generated in just a few months.

I was also honored to join President Biden and his climate envoy, John Kerry, to announce that Breakthrough Energy will be the primary implementation partner for the First Movers Coalition. It's a new initiative from the U.S. State Department and the World Economic Forum that will boost demand for emerging climate solutions in some of the sectors where it'll be especially hard to eliminate emissions: aviation, concrete and steel production, shipping, and more.

The third shift I'm seeing is that there's even more visibility for climate adaptation. The worst tragedy of rising temperatures is that they will do the most harm to the people who have done the least to cause them. And if we don't help people in low- and middle-income countries thrive despite the warming that is already under way, the world will lose the fight against extreme poverty.

PITY THE POOR "CONCERNED PARENTS":

Born on the Water opens with a familiar classroom assignment: making a family tree. A young Black girl is depicted with a look of dismay on her face. In the background, faint sketches of children holding up their ancestors' countries' flags with big smiles can be seen. The contrast of their glee with her distress is a testament to the evocative nature of Smith's paintings. "Most of my classmates can count back many generations," the girl reflects, "and learn about the countries where their families came from. They draw their flags, but I leave my paper blank. I do not know where I begin, what my story is."

This is an appropriate place to begin telling the story of slavery for young readers. Long before they learn about slavery in a formal way in history classes (where instructors, as we know, sometimes struggle to teach about the topic), children are informally introduced to slavery from other sources, such as picture books, television programs, and conversations with family. Hannah-Jones, Watson, and Smith begin Born on the Water in a contemporary elementary school classroom, with a lesson on family that many students will find familiar, but that this girl's teacher didn't intend to use as a way into the topic of slavery. Like many younger kids in real life, the fictional protagonist has come up against the history of slavery in a roundabout way.

How should this little girl begin her project? What's her family background and identity?  She asks her grandmother to tell her the story of their beginnings. One page turn later, we're transported back in time.

"They say our people were born on the water, but our people had a home, a place, a land before they were sold," the grandmother says. This evocative reference to the Black Atlantic reframes where the story of Black America truly begins. It is neither in our African origins, nor on the slave ships, auction blocks, and plantations.

MORE REGULAR THAN THE Q CROWD BEING INVOLVED IN CHILD ABUSE:

The mysterious case of Rosemarie Hartle's vote in the last presidential election, three years after her death, was trumpeted in November 2020 by the Nevada Republican Party and various prominent conservatives. From then-President Donald Trump on down, Republicans used stories about phony votes cast under the names of dead people as key evidence for their claim that Joe Biden's victory was marred by major fraud.

The Hartle mystery is now solved. And it turns out that the fraud was committed by a Republican.

Hartle was married to Las Vegas businessman Donald Kirk Hartle, a registered Republican. In November 2020, Hartle told Las Vegas television station 8 News Now (KLAS-TV) that he felt "disbelief" when he found out that a mail-in ballot was submitted in his late wife's name. It was "pretty sickening," he said at the time, adding that he didn't know how it could've happened.

But Hartle had actually cast the phony ballot himself.

On Tuesday, Hartle pleaded guilty to the crime of voting more than once in the same election.

FAVORITE SON:

"I think politics in its entirety, on both sides of the aisle, in Washington is screwed up," Sununu said. "They have got their priorities all wrong. They focus on the wrong things. They don't talk about balancing budgets. They don't talk about fixing health care, immigration reform."

Although he supports the House censure, Sununu said stripping Gosar of his committee assignments will do little to improve the quality of life for voters.

Such divisiveness will only continue to ruin America, the governor said. "We got to get beyond that, because, culturally, it's really, really ruining America," he explained. "We got to get back to showing that public service can work, and especially at a localized level."

Sununu also criticized the GOP and its poor messaging and urged the party to focus on its more successful policies.

"Republicans have had huge successes, with cutting taxes, limiting government, creating -- creating opportunities in schools, supporting parents, making sure kids -- those are our wins, and those are America's wins," he said. "That's what we have to focus on as a party."

A TEMPORARY BOTTLENECK IS NOT INFLATION:

A LITTLE PAIN NEVER HURT ANYBODY:

You've just put in a great block of training. Now your knee hurts. Does that mean you're injured? Well... it's complicated, according to a new opinion piece in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. Athletes are constantly dealing with pains and niggles, some that disappear and others that persist. Judging which ones to ignore and which ones to take seriously is a delicate art--and how we choose to label those pains, it turns out, can affect the outcome.

The new article is by Morten Høgh, a physiotherapist and pain scientist at Aalborg University in Denmark, along with colleagues from Denmark, Australia, and the United States. It argues that, in the context of sports medicine, pain and injury are two distinct entities and shouldn't be lumped together. When pain is inappropriately labeled as an injury, Høgh and his colleagues argue, it creates fear and anxiety and may even change how you move the affected part of the body, which can create further problems.

BECAUSE TARIFFS ARE DEMOCRATIC PARTY ORTHODOXY:

Economist Austan Goolsbee, who served on the Council of Economic Advisers for President Barack Obama, came on the show for this bonus episode to help make sense of the sentiment--and explain how we fix it.

"I think part of what happened is the economic polling always comes in with a lag," he explains. "It doesn't reflect what happened this week. It reflects how people have been feeling for the last two or three months. And over the summer coming into the fall, it was disappointing."

THERE IS NO YEMEN:

The foreign minister of Yemen's government in exile warned Sunday that a rebel takeover of the crucial, energy-rich city of Marib would be a disaster on the scale of the collapse of its ancient dam that decimated an entire kingdom.

Ahmad Awad Bin Mubarak's comments mark some of the most dire made regarding the offensive by the Iran-backed Houthi rebels, who have held Yemen's capital since September 2014. Though the intervention of Saudi-led coalition halted their march south in 2015, the war has slogged on for years and created the world's worst humanitarian crisis.

Meanwhile, forces backing Yemen's exiled government and Saudi Arabia have fallen back recently from the key port city of Hodeida, allowing the Houthis to regain ground there as well.

THANKS, W:

Sudan's General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan and Prime Minister Abdalla Hamdok have reached a deal for his return and the release of civilian leaders detained since a military coup, mediators said Sunday.

Burhan on October 25 declared a state of emergency and ousted the government in a move that upended a two-year transition to civilian rule, drew international condemnation and punitive measures, and provoked large protests.

"A political agreement has been reached between General Burhan, Abdalla Hamdok, political forces and civil society organisations for Hamdok's return to his position, and the release of political detainees," senior Sudanese mediator Fadlallah Burma, acting head of the Umma party, told AFP.

HECK, DESANTIS ADVERTISES FOR THEM TO COME TO FLA:

THE TRUMP BRAND:

IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO RECOGNIZE YOUR ALLIES:

SCRATCH A TRUMPIST:

A paid spokesperson for DeSantis named Christina Pushaw fired out a tweet this week suggesting that the Jewish Rothschild family--whose name has been woven into antisemitic conspiracism since the era of the "Protocols" in the 1920s -- was part of a plot to draw European nations into the "Green Pass" vaccination system. Pushaw suggested that a business visit by a member of the Rothschild family with the prime minister of Georgia (which recently joined the "Green Pass" system) was evidence of this plot, writing ironically: "No weird conspiracy stuff here!"

Pushaw later denied any antisemitic intent, claiming that she was instead criticizing the Georgia prime minister "for intentionally fueling conspiracy theories to troll Green Pass opponents."

Rogers, an Arizona legislator already notorious for promoting QAnon conspiracy-cult nonsense and defending Donald Trump's phony claims of a stolen election, also fired off a tweet this week saying: "Retweet if you are a pure blood."

This is a reference to the spreading meme among COVID denialists identifying people who are unvaccinated as "pure bloods"--a la the eugenicist belief in racial purity through one's bloodlines, which is now best known in popular culture through J.K. Rowling's fantasy Harry Potter books, in which the villainous devotees of the evil Lord Voldemort identify using similar terms. Many anti-health-measure conspiracists believe the COVID vaccines permanently taint recipients' blood.

Rogers is no stranger to antisemitism. She frequently makes reference to antisemitic theories that liberal financier George Soros, a Jewish man, is the "puppet master" secretly manipulating mainstream Democrats and leftists--including a recent tweet referring to "Soros puppets."

Overt white nationalists also have adopted the anti-vaccination cause as a recruitment tool. Far-right "Groyper" leader Nick Fuentes--who has "jokingly" denied the Holocaust and compared Jews burnt in concentration camps to cookies in an oven, and recently opined: "I don't see Jews as Europeans and I don't see them as part of Western civilization, particularly because they are not Christians"--in particular has seized on the issue.

Fuentes recently held anti-vaccine rallies in the New York City area, including an event in Staten Island at which he railed: "I'm wearing this bulletproof vest here today, because they're gonna have to kill me before I get this vaccine!" [...]

A report last month from Hope Not Hate found that COVID denialism was acting as a recruitment gateway to broader antisemitic beliefs. It found that content posted with the hashtags #rothschildfamily, #synagogueofsatan and #soros was viewed 25.1 million times on TikTok in half a year--and was similarly widespread at Facebook and Twitter.

The report found that the now-defunct 4chan site, particularly its /pol/ section, contained the most antisemitic slurs of any platform. However, the encrypted chat site Telegram is now becoming the site with the most voluminous and vicious antisemitism, with numerous antisemitic channels, some boasting tens of thousands of members.

The report explained:

While conspiracy thinking fuels extremism of all kinds, in particular it can function as a slip road towards antisemitism and Holocaust denial, especially as far-right activists are actively attempting to exploit these networks. While conspiracy ideologies have always formed part of the social and political backdrop, the recent fever pitch has posed challenges to social cohesion and a heightened threat to Jewish people and other minoritised communities.

The report's authors also observed a close connection between the amount of antisemitism on a platform and how lightly or loosely it is moderated: the less restrictive the moderation, the greater and louder the antisemitism.

Far-right media personality Tim Gionet, who calls himself "Baked Alaska" and has been charged over the riot at the US Capitol, is also suspected of defacing a Hanukkah menorah in Arizona last year, The Daily Beast reported Friday.

Gionet, known for promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories, was arrested earlier this year over his role in the January riot at the US Capitol and is awaiting trial, although he is not in custody.

NO ONE HAD TENNIS PLAYERS IN THE POOL...:

Nothing in Steve Simon's career as a tennis promoter prepared him for the crisis he is suddenly faced with this month: a player's disappearance that has forced his organization, the Women's Tennis Association, into a standoff with the Chinese government.

But the string of events since a post on the social media account of a Chinese player named Peng Shuai accused one the country's most senior retired officials of sexual assault has placed Simon, the head of the WTA, in an unexpected role. He is the rare sports executive willing to quit one of the most lucrative foreign markets on the planet. 

Simon has accused China of lying to him about Peng's safety amid mounting international outrage, and he has indicated that he understands the stakes.

"We're at a crossroads with our relationship, obviously, with China," Simon said in a televised interview with CNN on Thursday. "We're definitely willing to pull our business, and deal with all the complications that come with it, because this is bigger than the business."

STRUCTURE (profanity alert):

Two days before a nearly all-white jury bought Kyle Rittenhouse's claim he was acting in self-defense when he shot three men, killing two, at a Black Lives Matter protest, Maddesyn George, a 27-year-old Native mother, was sitting in a courtroom in Eastern Washington, waiting to learn how many years she would have to spend in federal prison for a shooting a white man she said had raped her.

George, a member of the Colville Confederated Tribes, admits she killed Kristopher Graber in July 2020. The two had been friends; in a police interview, she said was at Graber's house doing scratch-off tickets when he got on top of her and raped her with a vibrator. When she protested, he pulled out a gun, George told the tribal detective. Graber eventually fell asleep, and George took the gun from him, along with cash and drugs, according to prosecutors. Then she left. The next day, Graber went out looking for her, found her sitting in a locked car, and confronted her. In the altercation, she shot him once through the window, killing him.

IT IS, AFTER ALL, WHAT THE rIGHT BELIEVES IN:

The Onion called it with their headline: "Kyle Rittenhouse Sentenced to 45 Years of CPAC Appearances," published just after Rittenhouse was acquitted of all charges, including homicide, stemming from when he shot and killed two people and injured a third during a racial justice protest in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Mere hours after the jury announced the not guilty verdicts and The Onion published its not-so-satirical headline, Fox News announced that Tucker Carlson landed an exclusive interview with Rittenhouse, which will almost certainly cement the teen's place in right-wing culture as a conservative darling and future pundit.

A GOOD TIME TO RECALL THE rIGHT'S LAST MURDERER HERO:

George Zimmerman's name trended on Twitter late Wednesday night, and it will likely be filling most social newsfeeds throughout Thursday. That's the day his auction begins -- he's selling the very gun he used to kill unarmed, 17-year-old Trayvon Martin on February 26, 2012. He calls the gun an "American Firearm Icon" and wrote that proceeds will be used to "fight [Black Lives Matter] violence against Law Enforcement officers" and to "ensure the demise of Angela Correy's persecution career and Hillary Clinton's anti-firearm rhetoric," though he hasn't expounded upon how.

George Zimmerman tweeted a picture of Trayvon Martin's corpse only two months ago, three years after being acquitted in the teen's shooting death. Now he's in hot water again for his social media antics, after tweeting nude photos of his girlfriend.

According to Zimmerman, she cheated on him with a "dirty Muslim."

Less than a week later, Zimmerman's wife - who had filed for divorce earlier that month - called police alleging he had threatened her and her father with a gun. During a 9-1-1 call, she said Zimmerman punched her father in the nose, grabbed an iPad out of her hand and smashed it and then threatened them both with a gun. He was not arrested over the incident.

In November 2013, he was arrested on domestic violence-related charges of aggravated assault, battery and criminal mischief after his girlfriend claimed he choked her. The case was later dropped.

But two years later he was arrested again for allegedly throwing a bottle of wine at his girlfriend; however, that case was also dropped.

STRUCTURE:

Black workers in Georgia who lost jobs during the pandemic were more likely than White ones to be denied unemployment benefits and suffered disproportionately when the state withdrew early from a temporary federal program.

Those conclusions, drawn from a Bloomberg News analysis of more than 2 million claims, tell a bigger story about what happened to many of America's most vulnerable workers: A historic government response pushed more than $860 billion through a system designed more for Ford and General Electric than Uber and TaskRabbit. [...]

The story of how and why some workers were left behind reveals long-running structural inequities in the U.S. For many of the almost 317,000 Black workers rejected for benefits in Georgia, the economic consequences remain all too present.

NOT EVERY RITTENHOUSE WALKS:

One of the most disturbing and bizarre sagas involving an infamous American neo-Nazi terror group came to an end in a Georgia court today. Luke Austin Lane, 23, and Jacob Kaderli, 21, two members of The Base, were sentenced to six and 13 years in prison, respectively, for their role in an assassination plot against an antifascist activist and his wife.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

The falling cost of wind and solar power significantly reduces the need for carbon capture and storage technology to tackle climate change, a new paper has argued.

CCS, which removes emissions from the atmosphere and stores them underground, has long been presented as critical to restricting global heating to 1.5C by the end of the century.

But a paper published today by Imperial College London's Grantham Institute finds that rapidly-falling costs in wind and solar energy could "erode" the value of CCS by up to 96 percent.

The authors suggest that targeted, rather than blanket, deployment of CCS is the best strategy for achieving the Paris Agreement goals.

...AND CHEAPER...:

According to Rolls-Royce, the airplane uses a 400-kilowatt electric powertrain "and the most power-dense propulsion battery pack ever assembled in aerospace." In September, it completed its maiden flight, soaring across skies in the U.K. for around 15 minutes.

As concerns about sustainability and the environment mount -- the World Wildlife Fund describes air travel as "the most carbon intensive activity an individual can make" -- discussions around aviation are increasingly focused on how innovations and ideas could cut its environmental footprint.

Over the last few years, a number of companies have sought to develop plans and concepts related to low and zero-emission aviation.

Last September, for instance, a hydrogen fuel-cell plane capable of carrying passengers took to the skies over England for its first flight.

The same month also saw Airbus release details of three hydrogen-fueled concept planes, with the European aerospace giant claiming they could enter service by 2035.

THE ABRAHAM ACCORD ESTATES

YOU CAN BE TRUTFUL AND STILL HATE THE PRC:

There is, however, a way to step back to a period before any such bias could have crept in, by considering what happened in the hospitals that first pieced together that a new viral outbreak was underway. Although not mentioned by name in scientific publications (9), media reports reveal that Hubei Provincial Hospital of Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine (HPHICWM) was the first hospital to alert district, municipal, and provincial public health authorities about the mysterious pneumonia cases (see fig. S1). Zhang Jixian, director of respiratory and critical care medicine, noticed on 27 December that an elderly couple had large "ground glass" opacities in computed tomography (CT) images of their lungs, distinct from those she had seen in other cases of viral pneumonia. Zhang insisted that the couple's son, who was not a patient and had no symptoms, undergo a CT scan, and the same unusual lesions were observed. The husband and wife evidently are "cluster 1" in the World Health Organization (WHO)-China report (1): They are the earliest known case cluster and the only cluster admitted by 26 December. They had no known connection to Huanan Market.

Another patient with similar CT imaging, a worker at Huanan Market, was admitted on 27 December. Zhang, concerned about a new, probably infectious viral disease, reported the four cases to hospital officials, who alerted the Jianghan District CDC that same day. Over 28 and 29 December, three more patients, all of whom worked at Huanan Market, were admitted and recognized to have the same unknown respiratory disease. A vice president of HPHICWM, Xia Wenguang, brought together 10 experts from the hospital, including Zhang, for an emergency meeting on 29 December, and they concluded that the situation was extraordinary. Upon learning of similar patients, also linked to Huanan Market, at Tongji and Union (Xiehe) Hospitals, Xia alerted the Wuhan and Hubei CDCs on 29 December.

A notably similar situation unfolded at Wuhan Central Hospital. On 18 December, Ai Fen, director of the emergency department, encountered her first unexplained pneumonia patient, a 65-year-old man who had become ill on either 13 or 15 December. Unbeknownst to Ai at the time, the patient was a deliveryman at Huanan Market. A CT scan revealed infection in both lungs, and he did not respond to antibiotics or anti-influenza drugs. On 24 December, a bronchoalveolar lavage specimen collected from him was sent to Vision Medicals, a metagenomics sequencing company. They identified a new SARSr-CoV on 26 December and relayed the finding by telephone to the hospital on 27 December. By 28 December, Wuhan Central Hospital had identified seven cases, of which four turned out to be linked to Huanan Market. Notably, these seven cases, like those at HPHICWM, were ascertained before epidemiologic investigations concerning Huanan Market commenced on 29 December.

At Zhongnan Hospital in the Wuchang District of Wuhan, 15 km away from Huanan Market and on the opposite bank of the Yangtze River, Vice President Yuan Yufeng asked units on 31 December to search for unexplained pneumonia cases, and the Respiratory Medicine Department reported two. The first lived in Wuchang District but worked at Huanan Market (in Jianghan District). The second did not work at Huanan Market but had friends who did and who had visited his home. On 3 January, three more cases were identified--a family cluster unlinked to Huanan Market. Clearly, hospitals in the first weeks of the outbreak were identifying cases both with and without a known connection to Huanan Market. And Wuhan hospitals were not swamped with unexplained pneumonia cases at the end of December--that would come later.

Thus, 10 of these hospitals' 19 earliest COVID-19 cases were linked to Huanan Market (~53%), comparable both to Jinyintan's 66% (of 41 cases) (4) and to the WHO-China report's 33% of 168 retrospectively identified cases across December 2019 (1). Regarding cases at the Wuhan Central Hospital and HPHICWM, patients with a history of exposure at Huanan Market could not have been "cherry picked" before anyone had identified the market as an epidemiologic risk factor. Hence, there was a genuine preponderance of early COVID-19 cases associated with Huanan Market.

How can this knowledge inform our understanding of the pandemic? If Huanan Market was the source, why were only one- to two-thirds of early cases linked to the market? Perhaps a better question is why would one expect all cases ascertained weeks into the outbreak to be confined to one market? Given the high transmissibility of SARS-CoV-2 and the high rate of asymptomatic spread, many symptomatic cases would inevitably soon lack a direct link to the location of the pandemic's origin. And some cases counted as "unlinked" may have been only one or two transmissions away, as exemplified by the second patient identified at Zhongnan Hospital. That so many of the >100 COVID-19 cases from December (1) with no identified epidemiologic link to Huanan Market nonetheless lived in its direct vicinity is notable (see the figure) and provides compelling evidence that community transmission started at the market.

Additionally, the earliest known cases should not necessarily be expected to be the first infected or linked to Huanan Market: They probably postdated the outbreak's index case by a considerable period (10) because only ~7% of SARS-CoV-2 infections lead to hospitalization (11); most fly under the radar. Similarly, it is entirely expected that early, ascertained cases from a seafood market would be workers who were not necessarily directly associated with wildlife sales because the outbreak spread from human to human. The index case was most likely one of the ~93% who never required hospitalization and indeed could have been any of hundreds of workers who had even brief contact with infected live mammals.

Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist who signed a high-profile letter in May urging further study of the theory that the COVID-19 coronavirus accidently leaked from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, reported in the journal Science on Thursday that new research strongly suggests the new virus spread to humans from animals at the Huanan Seafood Market, several miles from the lab. His reconstruction of the early days of the pandemic adds to mounting evidence that the coronavirus has natural origins in bats and infected humans through an intermediary mammal, The Wall Street Journal reports.  

Worobey, a leading expert in tracking the evolution of viruses, pored through all available records and found that 10 of 19 early COVID-19 patients worked at or had been in the Huanan seafood market, around the area where raccoon dogs were slaughtered. His research determined that a World Health Organization report incorrectly identified a 41-year-old accountant who had not been near the market as the earliest known case, on Dec. 8, 2019. Instead, the first confirmed patients was a female seafood vendor who became symptomatic on Dec. 11.

"In this city of 11 million people, half of the early cases are linked to a place that's the size of a soccer field," Worobey said. "It becomes very difficult to explain that pattern if the outbreak didn't start at the market." 

FOLLOWING THE rIGHT'S RITTENHOUSE STANDARD...:

A man who screamed obscenities about Black Lives Matter and carried an AR-15 rifle outside the Kenosha County Courthouse while the Kyle Rittenhouse jury deliberated is a former Ferguson, Missouri, police officer, he confirmed Thursday.

Records show the man -- who initially identified himself as "Maserati Mike" -- is Jesse Kline, who had been a member of the Ferguson Police Department for three years. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Kline was fired from the Ferguson Police Department in 2018 after being charged with stalking a woman and threatening her male companion by poking his chest with a handgun.

RECOGNIZE THE HOUTHI AS WELL:

A group of U.S. senators are opposing the Biden administration's first major arms sale to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia over Riyadh's involvement in the conflict in Yemen, three senators announced on Thursday.

A joint resolution of disapproval to block a proposed $650 million in U.S. arms sales to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was introduced by Republicans Rand Paul and Mike Lee, as well as Bernie Sanders who caucuses with Democrats.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Kimberly Guilfoyle, a top fundraiser for former President Donald Trump and the girlfriend of his son Donald Trump Jr., boasted to a GOP operative that she had raised $3 million for the rally that helped fuel the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

In a series of text messages sent on Jan. 4 to Katrina Pierson, the White House liaison to the event, Guilfoyle detailed her fundraising efforts and supported a push to get far-right speakers on the stage alongside Trump for the rally, which sought to overturn the election of President Joe Biden.

Guilfoyle's texts, reviewed by ProPublica, represent the strongest indication yet that members of the Trump family circle were directly involved in the financing and organization of the rally. The attack on the Capitol that followed it left five dead and scores injured.

A CONVENIENT WAY TO PURGE THE rIGHT:

Soldiers who refuse to get the COVID-19 vaccine and have not requested an exemption will no longer be allowed to re-enlist or be promoted. That applies to active-duty troops as well as reservists and National Guardsmen, including those serving in states whose governors do not require the vaccine. 

Under a policy announced in a Nov. 16 memo signed by Army Secretary Christine Wormuth, troops' service records will be flagged the day they make their final vaccine refusal, which follows a meeting with a medical professional and a second order to get vaccinated. This flag will bar them from being promoted, reenlisting, continuing to receive enlistment bonuses, attending service-related schools, or receiving tuition assistance.

"I authorize commanders to impose bars to continued service...for all soldiers who refuse the mandatory vaccine order without an approved exemption or pending exemption request," Wormuth wrote in the memo. "The Soldier will remain flagged until they are fully vaccinated, receive an approved medical or administrative exemption, or are separated from the Army." 

INFLATION HYSTERIA WAS FUN WHILE IT LASTED:

Oil edged lower, extended declines from a six-week low, as China said that it's carrying out work on a release of crude from strategic reserves.

West Texas Intermediate declined 0.6%, after earlier falling as much as 1.6%. The move suggests the world's two biggest oil consumers are willing to work together to keep a lid on energy costs.

A CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON:

Media engagement with Singer, including Novara Media, has tended to focus on his highly influential work on animal rights and his views on veganism. Singer is notable for arguing that personhood - an attribution that provides rights, protections, privileges, and moral consideration - should be extended to non-human animals such as primates that exhibit specific characteristics: self-awareness; the capacity to plan, form alliances and relationships, manifest grief and anger; and to learn sign language.

But most engagement with Singer's philosophy of personhood fails to fully acknowledge the significance of his work in contributing to a culture in which the value of disabled peoples' lives is viewed as a matter for debate rather than a given, and reflects a broader failure to engage meaningfully with disability activism and activists whose work has, for example, been vital in challenging the economic and ideological justifications of austerity and highlighting its brutal human costs.

WINNING THE WoT:

When the weak civilian government established after the 2019 revolution was toppled by a new military coup on 25 October, the reaction was immediate.

By dawn the following day, Sudanese people were on the streets, united in their demands that the military give up power and stop interfering in the country's political life.

The unity of the Sudanese people towards a single goal has never been achieved so easily before. It didn't happen because of the high levels of coordination between different groups, but because of the shared hope of building a civilian government and ending the failed rule of elite old men, whether civilian or military.

The two-year transitional period was full of failure and struggles, but more importantly, it was also full of debates: heated public discussions about the present and the future of a country long torn by civil wars and divisions. These debates were not given the time to mature and lead to the creation of new institutions or leaderships, but they were enough to demonstrate the type of government most Sudanese people want: a civilian government.

A new generation

The protesters on the streets of Sudan's villages, towns and cities are not just defying Al-Burhan and Hemedti. They are fighting the ghosts of the past, and the old traditions and political practices that are dominating our present.

Resistance committees, youth groups, women's groups, professional unions and political parties are leading the protests. But the new leadership is highly diverse and grassroots-based, providing the best representation of the social and political complexity of a country made up of dozens of tribes and languages.

The young generations leading the revolt have managed to create their own language, their own visions, and their own way of leading. Take Randok, a street language created by the displaced young men from conflict areas, mostly non-Arabic speakers, who found themselves homeless on Khartoum's streets since the 1990s.

IF TX WANTED A STABLE GRID, IT'S PRETTY EASY:

METRICS > EMOTIONS:

October data for the labor market and the industrial sector continue to paint a bright profile of recovery in absolute and relative terms vs. previous economic expansions. Retail sales data through last month, updated earlier in the week, suggest the same for personal consumption expenditures, which will be updated for October on Nov. 24. The weak outlier is personal income and it's unclear if this key indicator will deliver more encouraging results in the upcoming report.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

A 15MW/10.4MWh battery energy storage system is to be built in Tahiti, helping the French territory in the heart of the Pacific save millions from the replacement of diesel generators, and help reach its target of 75 per cent renewables by 2030.

BIBI WHO?:

Opposition Leader Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party penned a letter to the Foreign Ministry on Wednesday complaining that meetings weren't scheduled for the former prime minister with United States Congress members who visited Israel.

Responding to the letter, Foreign Minister Yair Lapid's office acknowledged the "long-standard practice" of opposition leaders meeting with visiting diplomatic delegations, including during his own recent stint as head of the opposition.

"After checking, the delegations did not express any interest in meeting with Opposition Leader Netanyahu, and therefore it was not necessary to coordinate such a meeting," Lapid's office said, according to Channel 12.

THE ANGLOSPHERIC INSIGHT:

The terminal question of Wittgenstein's philosophy is whether our understanding of the world can ever step outside of language. If language is a kind of container for human experience, can that experience exceed it? The conclusion seems to be that it cannot. Language as the limit of the world is a constant, but whereas the Tractatus ends with a call for silence, the Investigations ends with an invitation to play. This is our "obligation to express," even if it proves futile. If Wittgenstein had truly believed that philosophy ended with the Tractatus, then the book's legacy is the challenge of discovering what you're left with after you've reached the end.

THANKS, DR. FAUCI:

Using a new model and an Iowa State University supercomputer, we compared the real-world CDC recommendations with 17.5 million possible strategies that also staggered the rollout in up to four phases. To calculate how well a vaccine allocation strategy performed, our model measured total deaths, cases, infections and years of life lost.

Understand new developments in science, health and technology, each week

We found that the CDC allocation strategy performed exceptionally well - within 4% of perfect - in all four measures.

According to our model, the CDC's decisions to not vaccinate children initially and prioritize health care and other essential workers over nonessential workers were both correct. But our model also showed that giving individuals with known risk factors earlier access to vaccines would have led to slightly better outcomes.

No single rollout was able to simultaneously minimize deaths, cases, infections and years of life lost. For example, the strategy that minimized deaths led to a higher number of cases. Given these limitations, the CDC plan did a good job of balancing the four goals of vaccination and was particularly good at reducing deaths.

REPOST: ALL THAT JAZZ #8

IT'S QUITE FITTING...:

THANKS, JOE:

The government sharply underestimated job gains for most of 2021, including four months this summer in which it missed more job growth than at any other time on record.

In the most recent four months with revisions, June through September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported it underestimated job growth by a cumulative 626,000 jobs -- that's the largest underestimate of any other comparable period, going back to 1979. If those revisions were themselves a jobs report, they'd be an absolute blockbuster.

In an average month before the pandemic, estimates would be revised by a little over 30,000 jobs, or just 0.02 percent of all the jobs in the United States. The recent revisions to the jobs reports have been much larger.

SCRATCH A TRUMPBOT...:

Amid a flurry of tweets mocking pandemic-related restrictions, Christina Pushaw singled out the Republic of Georgia for its new policy requiring citizens to hold a "Green Pass" in order to enter public establishments like restaurants and theaters to try to contain the coronavirus pandemic. (The passes do not require that one be vaccinated; those who have recovered from the virus and can provide proof of a negative COVID test can also use the passes.)

While the system largely resembles similar measures put in place worldwide, Pushaw appeared to employ some deeply revolting (and flawed) logic to suggest the system is part of a nefarious Jewish plot.

"Georgia decided to enact a 'Green Pass' system (biomedical security state). Immediately after that, the Rothschilds show up to discuss the attractive investment environment in Georgia (lol). No weird conspiracy theory stuff here!" she wrote Tuesday.

WHY SHOULDN'T THE rIGHT HAVE ITS OWN SAFE SPACE U?:

Harvard's Pinker has kept quiet about why he's ending his affiliation, but the University of Chicago chancellor Zimmer made it clear: He's all for free expression, but not the direct attack on existing higher education that attended the university's launch, saying in his statement that "the new university made a number of statements about higher education in general, largely quite critical, that diverged very significantly from my own views." West Virginia University president Gordon Gee, another adviser, kept his affiliation but said even more directly: "I do not agree other universities are no longer seeking the truth nor do I feel that higher education is irreparably broken."

The discord reflects the inconvenient contradiction at the heart of an ambitious project: Despite the University of Austin's claim to independence from the political minefield that is higher ed in 2021, it's almost impossible to see the project as anything but political in its own right. Kanelos, a former St. John's College president, announced its launch on the Substack of Bari Weiss, another founding fellow who is not an academic, but a journalist who specializes in lancing the liberal consensus. Co-founder and trustee Joe Lonsdale, also a co-founder of the data analytics company Palantir with Peter Thiel, defended the project in the conservative New York Post, and Ferguson wrote acidly in Bloomberg that "academic freedom dies in wokeness."

The University of Austin's explicitly stated ideological commitment is to a pluralistic, classically liberal freedom of expression. But as Zimmer and others have pointed out, the university's project as constituted today rests on an inherently political critique of schools as they are. And for an intellectual vehicle so committed to diversity of thought that it can't even exist in the current academic landscape, its affiliated thinkers comprise a near-monoculture in their own right: They're nearly all icons of the same confrontational, non-"progressive" liberal rationalism.

ORANGE IS THE NEW ORANGE:

Chansley pleaded guilty in September to obstructing an official proceeding.

He and thousands of other supporters of former US President Donald Trump stormed the building in an attempt to stop Congress from certifying President Joe Biden's election. He has been detained since January.

Prosecutors described how during the riot, Chansley had taken then-vice president Mike Pence's seat on the dais in the Senate chamber, and left behind a message saying: "It's only a matter of time. Justice is coming."

Video footage showed Chansley in the chamber with an American flag on a spear, giving long howl and shouting "time's up."

"What you did was so serious that I cannot justify a sentence lower than what was suggested by federal sentencing guidelines," Judge Royce Lamberth said. 

NO ONE DISPUTES THE FACTS OF CRT...:

It's impossible to know exactly how many racially restrictive covenants remain on the books throughout the U.S., though Winling and others who study the issue estimate there are millions. The more than 3,000 counties throughout the U.S. maintain land records, and each has a different way of recording and searching for them. Some counties, such as San Diego County and Hennepin County, which includes Minneapolis, have digitized their records, making it easier to find the outlawed covenants. But in most counties, property records are still paper documents that sit in file cabinets and on shelves. In Cook County, Illinois, for instance, finding one deed with a covenant means poring through ledgers in the windowless basement room of the county recorder's office in downtown Chicago. It's a painstaking process that can take hours to yield one result.

Cook County Clerk Karen Yarbrough, whose office houses all county deeds, said she has known about racial covenants in property records since the 1970s, when she first saw one while selling real estate in suburban Chicago. She called them "straight-up wrong."

"I see them and I just shake my head," she said in an interview with NPR. "Those things should not be there."

While the covenants have existed for decades, they've become a forgotten piece of history.

Desmond Odugu, chairman of the education department at Lake Forest College in Illinois, has documented the history of racial residential segregation and where racial covenants exist in the Chicago area. He said he was stunned to learn "how widespread they were."

"The image of the U.S. I had was a post-racial society," said Odugu, who's from Nigeria. "But as soon as I got to the U.S., it was clear that was not the case. I had a lot to learn."

Odugu said he has confirmed 220 subdivisions -- home to thousands of people -- in Cook County whose records contain the covenants.

"It only scratches the surface," he said.

When the Great Migration began around 1915, Black Southerners started moving in droves to the Northeast, Midwest and West. Their hope was for a better life, far away from the Jim Crow laws imposed on them by Southern lawmakers. Blacks soon realized, though, that segregation and racism awaited them in places like Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, particularly in housing. They often were forced to live in overcrowded and substandard housing because white neighborhoods didn't want them.

Chicago, which has a long history of racial segregation in housing, played an outsize role in the spread of restrictive covenants. It served as the headquarters of the National Association of Real Estate Boards, which was a "clearinghouse" for ideas about real estate practice, Winling said.

"This was kind of ... like a nerve center for both centralizing and accumulating ideas about real estate practice and then sending them out to individual boards and chapters throughout the country," he said.

In 1917, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that local governments could not explicitly create racial zones like those in apartheid South Africa, for example. But another Supreme Court case nine years later upheld racial covenants on properties. In Corrigan v. Buckley, the high court ruled that a racially restrictive covenant in a specific Washington, D.C., neighborhood was a legally binding document between private parties, meaning that if someone sold a house to Blacks, it voided the contract, Winling said. That ruling paved the way for racially restrictive covenants around the country. In Chicago, for instance, the general counsel of the National Association of Real Estate Boards created a covenant template with a message to real estate agents and developers from Philadelphia to Spokane, Wash., to use it in communities.

"So we see a standardization and then intensification of the use of covenants after 1926 and 1927 when the model covenant is created," Winling said.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Drivers around the world will buy about 5.6 million electric passenger vehicles this year, according to a new report from BloombergNEF released in concert with the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference. That's almost double the number purchased last year and, more importantly, it represents almost 8% of all vehicle sales.

"We are seeing some more organic demand for EVs," Aleksandra O'Donovan, one of the BNEF analysts who authored the report, commented via email. Among the factors affecting this rise: "One, the wider choice of electric vehicles now available to customers, and even more importantly, vehicles addressing those sought after segments like the SUVs," O'Donovan said.

Also, EV sales are 20% or more of total vehicle sales for several European automakers, including Volvo and Daimler. And there are more than 500 models of EVs and fuel cell vehicles available for sale today -- just six years ago, that figure was under 100.

Charging often has been cited as the reason why adoption wasn't happening more quickly. But the narrative around the dearth of public charging infrastructure creating a bottleneck to EV adoption also is set to change, as consumers more and more are taking matters into their own hands. Garages and parking lots will see some 2.1 million vehicle chargers installed this year, according to the BNEF report, a 63% increase over the number of private plugs at the start of the year.

Meanwhile, electric motors are being put to work, in trucks, buses and tractors. BloombergNEF expects commercial buyers to purchase 150,000 electric vehicles this year, also nearly double last year's tally. Stretching how far these machines can travel between charges plus predictable drive cycles and relatively low maintenance costs increasingly tilt the economics in favor of things like electric mail trucks and battery-powered flower delivery vans.

CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS...:

At the start of the Covid crisis, authoritarian leaders as a group seemed better able to avoid the public and economic backlash suffered by many governments in developed democracies. That was true regardless of whether they, like Xi, imposed tough lockdowns and restrictions, or they, like Putin, downplayed the disease's threat. (Remember the advice of Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko to fight Covid with vodka and tractor riding?)

Now, as the pandemic grinds on, that advantage is in doubt.

Russia is struggling to reduce record Covid fatalities; its households have been getting poorer, and Putin's approval ratings have fallen. China's strict Covid policies paid big dividends when its economy bounced back, with growth from a year earlier hitting 18.3% in the first quarter of 2021. But Xi's zero-case approach to battling Covid forced the continued lockdown of borders and cities that, together with his crackdown on capitalist excess, has sapped growth. Erdogan, above all, has floundered in his attempt to contain what you might call economic long Covid.

Many democratic governments are in deep trouble, too, including that of the U.S. But one advantage of democracies is coming into its own at this stage of the pandemic, says Ivan Krastev, chairman of the Bulgaria-based Centre for Liberal Strategies, a think tank: They can afford failure. When elected governments are perceived to have bungled so fundamental a task as protecting the lives of their citizens, they can pay the price at the ballot box, leaving the state bruised but intact.

That's even true for populists, the would-be authoritarians who still face the test of meaningful elections. Pandemic failures contributed to the defeat of former President Donald Trump in the U.S. and more recently Andrej Babis, the Czech prime minister. "We're seeing the end of a populist cycle," says Krastev--but there's no such cycle for leaders able to rig or ignore elections. "In an autocracy, all problems are owned by the system itself," he says.

YET AT THE PIVOTAL MOMENT IN HISTORY...:

In the church where I grew up, apparently God was telling all my peers who to marry and which Bible college to attend. Hearing God was quite the obsession. Because I didn't hear God telling me things with the clarity my friends were, I felt like a religious reject. God was more silent than not. Granted, I'm sure there were times I didn't listen and other times when I should have been paying more attention. I won't be naive and deny that. Still, He just wasn't as transparent and as clear to see, hear and understand as I believed He should have been. I was plagued with questions. Why was God ignoring me? What was wrong with me? Should I pray more? [...]

I believe God can speak to us in the still, small voice in our soul, through words of wisdom from other people, through the indescribable beauty of creation and through the Bible. I believe He speaks to us through movies and even reality TV shows (He did speak through a donkey), when we're staring blankly into space paralyzed by life circumstances, daydreaming while mopping the kitchen floor, crunching numbers and bothered by a case of the Mondays, or while experiencing road rage in a traffic jam. God can speak to us whenever and wherever.

Most of us are plagued by the same questions when we feel God is silent. Why does God choose to keep mum? Why doesn't He choose to talk to us more clearly? The truth is, there just aren't any pat answers. Sometimes we're too busy with our own conversations to hear Him. Sometimes His reasons for communicating (or not) with us are as mysterious as He is. And the truth is, when we feel we hear God, sometimes we're right and, sadly, sometimes we're wrong. That's why getting wise counsel and following biblical principles are critical for guiding us to figure out what we think God is telling us.

Don't base your spiritual walk on how often you hear God or don't or what He's saying or not saying. When Jesus told Thomas, "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed" (John 20:29), I think He was saying something like, "Blessed are you who still believe in me but don't hear me all the time, or don't always experience the kind of religious pomp and circumstance that makes you feel warm and fuzzy."

NO PLACE FOR PETROPHILES TO HIDE:

Hydrogen has a key role to play in the years ahead, especially in industrial applications, according to the CEO of German power company RWE.

"When you look long term, there is no way around hydrogen," Markus Krebber, who was speaking to CNBC's Annette Weisbach, said.

In an interview broadcast Tuesday morning, Krebber claimed this was because hydrogen was "the only technology ... we currently know which is able to decarbonize those industries which cannot electrify like steel, but also some parts of the chemical industry." [...]

Krebber told CNBC that it would take time to build a hydrogen economy and that his company wanted to -- and would -- play an active role. "But we need to be fast, because I think wherever green hydrogen is available it is a very competitive edge for the location."

A SIMPLE TEST:

Biden's arrival in the White House with a promise of a more humane approach towards migrants led to an increase in flows of undocumented foreigners fleeing poverty and violence.

But instead of the warm welcome they had hoped for, most have been turned away at the US border -- if they are not detained by the Mexican authorities along the way.

Organizers of the caravan had initially intended to go to the capital to demand refugee status that would allow them to avoid deportation.

But they announced last week that the plan had changed and they would head to the US border instead, denouncing alleged mistreatment by the Mexican security forces.

Each night the mostly Central American migrants stop somewhere along the highway and spread out their blankets, plastic sheets or cardboard wherever they can find a place to sleep.

At dawn, they pack up their few belongings and carry them on their backs or in baby strollers.

Some wear flip-flops or flimsy sandals. Others hobble along using walking sticks, their feet chafed and bandaged after walking around 500 kilometers (300 miles) since leaving the southern border city of Tapachula on October 23.

One woman lay down by the side of the road, too tired or sick to go any further.

Struggling to keep up at the back of the caravan as organizers urged her to keep going, Erlinda Lopez made a plea to the US and Mexican presidents for help.

"We want to be free," she said.

EVERYTHING INSIDE THE BUBBLE IS HILARIOUS:

This is the best thing I have ever seen. Just watch it. Sound up. pic.twitter.com/EBIJ6lKe8k

— CHOAM Nomsky (@samthielman) November 16, 2021

THE TEAM OF DONALD AND BIBI...:

The attack on Karaj was just the latest in a series of suspected assaults targeting Iran's nuclear program that have heightened regional hostilities in recent months. Israel is widely believed to have carried out the sabotage, though it has not claimed responsibility.

Earlier this month, Iran said it had almost doubled its stock of enriched uranium, as it prepares to resume talks with world powers on curbing its nuclear program.

"We have more than 210 kilograms of uranium enriched to 20 percent, and we've produced 25 kilos at 60%, a level that no country apart from those with nuclear arms are able to produce," said Atomic Energy Organization of Iran (AEOI) spokesman Behrouz Kamalvandi, in a report carried by the semi-official Tasnim and Fars news agencies.

THANKS, JOE!:

A new survey from MassMutual shows that consumers are feeling optimistic about their finances -- and are planning to spend $1,243 on average on holiday-related purchases this season. For comparison, the national median rent was $1,312 in October, according to a report from Apartment List.

The MassMutual Consumer Spending & Saving Index surveyed 1,000 U.S. adults online between Oct. 18 and Oct. 22, 2021.

The survey found that despite record-high inflation, 73% of Americans said they're feeling optimistic about their finances. Thirty-five percent said they're feeling "very optimistic" about their finances, up from 27% in July and 21% in February.

KEYSTONE KOPS:

Germany's energy regulator halted the certification process necessary before the new link from Russia can start. The suspension will allow Switzerland-based Nord Stream 2 AG, the operator of the pipeline owned by Gazprom PJSC, to set up a German subsidiary in an effort to meet European Union rules requiring gas producers to be legally separate from entities transporting the fuel. 

The watchdog "concluded that it would only be possible to certify an operator of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline if that operator was organized in a legal form under German law," it said in a statement on Tuesday. 

IT'S NOT EVEN WRONG...:

Any attempt to describe the universe as a totality inevitably involves self-reference. This isn't something that one often confronts in physics. Most day-to-day physics is modelling other systems: cells, gases, planets. We maintain a separation of subject and object, or of investigator and system being investigated. And even though cosmology is explicitly devoted to the study of the universe as a whole, it is customary in cosmology to maintain the imaginative fiction that we - the people modelling the universe - are looking at it from the outside. We adopt, that is to say, the God's Eye View. 

Ultimately, though, we are part of the universe. And that means that however we regiment the universe, whatever regime we work in, if we aim for a theory that describes all of existence, self-reference is unavoidable. Any system that is modelling the universe as a whole - aiming for full coverage of all of existence - is going to encounter self-reference. This is something that we can ignore in some contexts. It matters in others.

The people that have unavoidably encountered it are people who are trying to program an artificial general intelligence (an AGI).  They want to program a system with a bunch of general knowledge and the ability to model the world, and they are coming up against the fact that some of what happens is stuff that the computer does and that will give rise to the possibility of paradox. [1]

Let me give you a simple example. Suppose we want to program a computer to serve as a grand overarching database for the universe: a repository of information about everything.  We begin by programming it with as much factual information as we can about the world. We program the laws of physics and all of the scientific knowledge we've amassed. We add the facts of history, what we know about the monkeys of costa Rica and the vast reaches of space. The goal is to be able to put any question of physical fact to it and the answer will appear in the output channel.

It is not, however, hard to find a factual question that it can't answer truthfully. Ask it 'is the answer to this question that's about to be displayed in the output channel 'no'?'. 

Think this through and you will see that any answer that it gives will be false. If it answers 'yes', clearly it is wrong, since that misdescribes what it wrote. And if it answers 'no', it is wrong as well. This might seem like a little logical glitch but its significance is profound.

These kinds of problems are familiar to philosophers and certainly to computer scientists. The problem arises because what the computer does in giving the answer interacts with what the answer says by rendering it false. And by saying things, the computer is doing things. There is interference between what it says and what it does.

SPOILER ALERT...:

I truly believe that 50 years from now, historians are going to look back at this moment and say, "That's the moment America began to win the competition of the 21st century."

NEITHER WILL BE ON THE TICKET:

Worn out by what they see as entrenched dysfunction and lack of focus, key West Wing aides have largely thrown up their hands at Vice President Kamala Harris and her staff -- deciding there simply isn't time to deal with them right now, especially at a moment when President Joe Biden faces quickly multiplying legislative and political concerns.

The exasperation runs both ways. Interviews with nearly three dozen former and current Harris aides, administration officials, Democratic operatives, donors and outside advisers -- who spoke extensively to CNN -- reveal a complex reality inside the White House. Many in the vice president's circle fume that she's not being adequately prepared or positioned, and instead is being sidelined. The vice president herself has told several confidants she feels constrained in what she's able to do politically. And those around her remain wary of even hinting at future political ambitions, with Biden's team highly attuned to signs of disloyalty, particularly from the vice president.

She's a heartbeat away from the presidency now. She could be just a year away from launching a presidential campaign of her own, given doubts throughout the political world that Biden will actually go through with a reelection bid in 2024, something he's pledged to do publicly and privately. Or she'll be a critical validator in three years for a President trying to get the country to reelect him to serve until he's 86.

Few of the insiders who spoke with CNN think she's being well-prepared for whichever role it will be. 

THE GREEN REVOLUTION IS THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE:

Electric cars could help to power millions of households in the coming years, simply by harnessing their battery power. The electricity in the vehicle's battery could be plugged back into the grid, instead of being stored. The technique was pioneered in Japan and our research will help understand how best to use it in the UK.

Many electric vehicles (EVs) are being produced with the ability to use their onboard battery to send power back to the electricity supply they are connected to. Whether that is the owner's house, or the electricity grid more generally, these technologies have been led by governments and electric car manufacturers mainly in order to balance the demand on the power transmission network, or grid.

The ability to use these huge connected batteries complies with the future management and provision of cleaner grids - instead of burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, we should harness clean renewable sources such as wind and solar when abundant, and store the electricity in batteries for when not. So by charging electrical vehicles from renewable sources, we can lower our greenhouse emissions.

BY WHAT THEY HATE SHALL YOU KNOW THEM:

Should college professors be permitted to assign writings by Martin Luther King? If you've been listening sympathetically to opponents of critical race theory, you'd expect them to answer with a resounding yes, while woke identitarians equivocate. You'd be disappointed, as a comprehensive new report from PEN America demonstrates. CRT's opponents claim to be carrying on King's work, but a series of pending and enacted red-state laws ostensibly aimed at keeping critical race theory out of the classroom explicitly ban the teaching of 'divisive concepts', like King's demands for radical structural change and his critiques of white resistance to equality. An America in which we would be judged by the content of our characters not the colour of our skins was Martin Luther King's dream. His reality was the vicious racism that killed him, but in states across the country teachers will point that out at their peril. It's too divisive, apparently.

Never mind that one purpose of education is teaching people to debate intellectual and ideological divisions, instead of resorting to violence (as many Americans, right and left, are increasingly apt to do). Consider the vague meaning but clear intent of a ban on discussing 'divisive concepts'. As the PEN report explains, it's drawn from a former Trump executive order banning diversity training by federal agencies and private entities contracting with the federal government. '[T]he United States is fundamentally racist or sexist' was one verboten concept in the executive order. It is indeed divisive, which is precisely why it should be subject to classroom debate.

You don't have to defend or harbour any sympathy for the preachings of diversity, equity and inclusion consultants to view with alarm the legal campaign against teaching whatever the right calls critical race theory. 

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

It's not the security implications of holding a game in Afghanistan that has been the problem (they haven't actually played a competitive game in Kabul since 2003, with only a couple of friendlies -- against Pakistan in 2013, and Palestine in 2018 -- staged at home. Their 'home' games have mostly taken place in Tajikistan or Qatar). The main issue has been money -- as a knock-on effect of the crisis at home, the federation's bank account was frozen, meaning they simply weren't able to fly their various players to where they needed to be.

This game is only taking place because of help from FIFA, although the hope is that the banking issues will be solved by the time of the Asian Cup qualifiers next year, which have been pushed back to June 2022 due to pandemic-related complications.

Dastgir was born in Kabul in 1989. He and his family fled to escape the civil war that erupted after the USSR left the country that year, seeking refuge first in Pakistan, then India, before settling in the Netherlands when he was 11. His father returned home, to the northern Panjshir area, to help rebuild the country after the Americans arrived in 2001.

But Dastgir remained in the Netherlands, at first as a player with Eredivisie side VVV Venlo. Then a knee injury curtailed his career, so he instead threw himself into coaching. He has worked with NEC Nijmegen and his current 'day job' is as head coach of VV Duno, in the fifth tier of Dutch football.

He was assistant to Otto Pfister, the itinerant German manager who, among many other appointments, took Cameroon and Ghana to Africa Cup of Nations finals and was in charge of the Afghanistan team in 2017 and 2018. When Pfister departed, he recommended Dastgir for the job. It's a fairly extraordinary story, and will be the subject of a book by the Dutch journalist Ivo Roodbergen, to be released next year.

"When I got the chance," Dastgir says, "I said to the president, 'I will do something different. I will not just play against small countries to make the people happy. I want to develop the team, so we need to play strong teams. Maybe we will lose for two years all our games'. And so we started playing against countries which were 50 or 80 places higher in the rankings."

That plan was held back a little by the pandemic, but results have been respectable under Dastgir: they came fourth in their World Cup qualifying group but acquitted themselves well with a win and three draws from the eight games, and have only lost once in their five matches this year after not playing at all in 2020. When those Asian Cup qualifiers resume next year, Dastgir's aim is to make it to the finals for the first time in the country's history.

The results are only half the point, though.

There was no football in Afghanistan during the Taliban's first rule: it banned most sports, so between 1995 and 2002, the national team didn't play at all.

A ROLL OF THE DICE ON KEEPING 5 JUSTICES FOREVER:

The Court would be roundly criticized for the basic lack of justification undergirding Roe--and lack of an attempt at offering one. In the months immediately after Roe, progressive law professor Laurence Tribe described the Court's tweet-length rationale as "mistak[ing] a definition for a syllogism," and offering "no reason at all for what the Court has held." It is telling that despite his approval of "the direction in which Roe may take the Court," Professor Tribe devoted a 53-page article to coming up with an alternative justification for its holding.

Pro-choice Professor John Hart Ely likewise criticized Roe as "bad constitutional law . . . because it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be." The "fundamental right" Roe sought to protect is far from being one that is "objectively[] 'deeply rooted in this nation's history and tradition,' and 'implicit in the concept of ordered liberty'" as the Court's substantive due process analysis requires. Rather, as Ely argued "this super-protected right is not inferable from the language of the Constitution, the framers' thinking respecting the specific issue, any general value derivable from provisions they included, or the nation's governmental structure." In short, Roe was bad law because the Court was simply making things up. And if a decision, like Roe, "lacks connection with any value the Constitution marks as special, it is not a constitutional principle and the Court has no business imposing it."

One of Justice Blackmun's clerks, Edward Lazarus, was similarly unimpressed with Roe. While Lazarus is firmly committed to the right to abortion, and even believes it can be found somewhere in the Constitution, he nonetheless opined that "[a]s a matter of constitutional interpretation and judicial method, Roe borders on the indefensible." Why? For the simple fact that the opinion has "little connection to the Constitutional right it purportedly interpreted." Whereas the Roe majority blithely announced that the right to privacy is (probably) in the Fourteenth Amendment and is broad enough to encompass abortion, Lazarus observed that any right to privacy that broad "has no meaningful foundation in constitutional text, history, or precedent--at least, it does not if those sources are fairly described and reasonably faithfully followed."

Progressive legal scholar Archibald Cox wisely predicted that Roe would always be controversial, precisely because it lacked a firm foundation. The former solicitor general criticized the Court for failing to "confront the issue in principled terms," and anticipated that "neither historian, nor layman, nor lawyer will be persuaded that all the prescriptions of Justice Blackmun are part of the Constitution." A little more than a decade later, then-Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg echoed Cox's concerns: "Roe v. Wade sparked public opposition and academic criticism, in part, I believe, because the Court ventured too far in the change it ordered and presented an incomplete justification for its action."

Regardless of what one thinks of the policy outcome in Roe, there is a sizable and bipartisan consensus that the judgment in Roe is simply indefensible.

Progressives' Concerns about Roe's Undermining Legislative Power

Most of Roe's defenders support its outcome and try to downplay the shaky foundation on which it rests. Professor Tribe's article and the Supreme Court's later decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey are two leading examples of this trend. But therein lay the second major criticism, even from pro-abortion thinkers: the Court's results-oriented, policy-based decision was one better left in the hands of legislatures.

Rather than leave abortion to the political process--which Ginsburg observed "was moving in the early 1970s" toward a more liberal abortion regime--Roe put an end to that process, in dramatic fashion. After Roe, states could no longer experiment with regulations through the democratic process, but instead had to mold their statutes to fit within the frameworks developed in Roe (as amended by the plurality in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, then amended again in Whole Women's Health v. Hellerstedt, and again by the Chief Justice's concurrence in June Medical v. Russo). This limited the states' ability to react to public opinion and advances in science. Removed from the public square, abortion became a "super-protected right" controlled by five justices (sometimes three, and sometimes just one) in a country of 329 million people.

Whether the Constitution permits abortion is an open question: whether it requires a "right" to abortion is closed.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

They also found three stickers espousing violently bigoted views, a photo of which is included in the complaint. One, which included an illustration of an undocumented family in the crosshairs of a rifle scope, bore a caption reading, "No invader is innocent." The other two included line drawings of a police officer, a politician, and a doctor, all with Jewish stars and an "X" over their faces. "Would you kill them all to seize your rights?" it said on the front, with two swastikas bookending a line at the bottom, reading, "The price of freedom is paid in blood."

NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

The United States on Monday confirmed that a Russian anti-satellite missile test was responsible for causing a debris field in space that forced astronauts aboard the International Space Station to temporarily seek shelter.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price told reporters that Russia had "recklessly conducted a destructive satellite test of a direct ascent anti-satellite missile against one of its own satellites."

WHERE'S WARREN HARDING WHEN WE NEED HIM?:

After five years of political, economic and social upheaval in America, this month has seen some hints of a return to normalcy. The question is whether the two political parties (and their rabid ideological bases) are willing to settle for the benefits of "normal" politics instead of going for the "transformative" variety -- which is tempting but almost always destructive.

Consider the events of November so far: Republicans won a gubernatorial race in Virginia by running an issues-based appeal to voters, particularly on education. Democrats passed legislation filled with hundreds of billions of dollars to build and repair physical infrastructure in all 50 states.

Are the parties reverting to form? It's not quite that simple. But they're getting there.

THE WAGES OF HATE:

It's good to harvest crops

Indeed, basic crop harvest is in some ways even more given to these labor dynamics because "just import the wheat from somewhere else" is an extremely viable option if labor costs get too high. Most Americans have higher aspirations in life than doing agricultural work in Nebraska, so this is what you get:

"We've struggled on this issue for a long time to try to come up with a more reasonable, common-sense approach," said John Hansen, president of the Nebraska Farmers Union, which is part of a group lobbying Congress for new immigration laws. Vilifying immigrants "just makes it harder to get there."

The population trend is clear in Nebraska, where only 24 of the state's 93 counties gained residents. Of those 24, just eight reported an increase in the white population, suggesting that most of the growth was driven by minorities, said David Drozd, a research coordinator for the University of Nebraska Omaha's Center for Public Affairs Research.

The key dynamic in farm work is that -- while, again, there is of course some hypothetical wage at which you can persuade people to spend all day picking strawberries -- the American consumer will only pay so much for berries. When labor is scarce, it makes more sense to let your strawberries rot on the vine than to pick them:

One thing explained the stark difference between Serrano's two fields: despite offering nearly twice the going wages, he had been unable to secure enough workers to tend and, when the time came, pick his strawberries. The shortage of labor had forced him to perform farming's version of triage and abandon the berries to ensure that he could harvest as many zucchini as possible, which he is contracted to sell to Costco. "Summer squash are this farm's bread and butter," he explained. "I had to give them first dibs on workers."

Now again, it's genuinely great that people are finding job opportunities that are better than "pick fruit for low wages."

But the problem with immigration curbs as an economic development strategy is that telling unemployed former factory workers in Ohio, "don't worry, we fixed your problems by getting rid of the immigrants, so now you can go be a berry-picker in California" doesn't make sense. That's a downwardly mobile occupational trajectory. The genius of immigration is that these jobs are actually upward mobility for lots of foreign-born people who are eager for the opportunity to come here and work. And them doing that work not only mitigates inflation on the supply side, but it also creates more opportunities for Americans to do higher-value stuff elsewhere in the great economic chain of being.

THE nEAR eNEMY:

The Taliban have launched a crackdown on suspected Islamic State hideouts in southern Afghanistan, officials said Monday, following an increase in bloody attacks by the group in recent weeks.

The operation against Islamic State-Khorasan - the local chapter of the extremist group - started around midnight in at least four districts of Kandahar province and continued through Monday morning, Taliban provincial police chief Abdul Ghafar Mohammadi told AFP.

"So far, four Daesh (IS) fighters have been killed and ten arrested... one of them blew himself up inside a house," he said.

TAX EXTERNALITIES:

More than half of the 307,000 premature deaths due to air pollution in the EU in 2019 could have been avoided with new air quality guidelines, according to a new report published by the European Environment Agency (EEA) on Monday.

The report said that air quality -- measured by the amount of fine particulate matter, nitrogen dioxide and ground-level ozone in the air -- had improved from 2018 to 2019. This had a positive impact on health.

But new guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO), published this year, could have reduced the number of premature deaths caused by air pollutants by some 178,000, or 58%.

YEAH, BUT, THEY PROMISED US RENEWABLES...:

"They promised us flying cars!" It's the hoariest joke/lament in the tech world, shorthand for the uneven blessings of progress. Computer chips, web connections, "big data" storage and algorithms, and other tools of technology all get better, faster, and cheaper by the day. And we use them for... a zillion ways to distract ourselves, sell ads, and be spied upon or misinformed.

Meanwhile, where are the flying cars?

At last they are coming. 

LOCKDOWN WORKS:

Here are some interesting stats about the current state of affairs:

GDP - all-time high

Stock prices - all-time high

Real estate prices - all-time high

Household net worth - all-time high

Corporate profits - all-time high

These are amazing statistics given where we were just a year ago.

IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

South Australia produced nearly twice as much wind and solar as it could use at times on Sunday, forcing renewable plant operators to massively curtail their output. The total amount of curtailed at one point nearly equalled total demand.

South Australia leads the world in the share of wind and solar in its grid, but it wasn't the only state affected by a big surplus of wind and solar over the weekend, with curtailment records falling across the grid.

THE BLUE BRAND:

The case of Sgt. Javier Esqueda, a 27-year veteran of the Joliet Police Department, was featured in September as the first installment of the USA TODAY series "Behind the Blue Wall," an investigation involving more than 300 cases of police officers over the past decade who have spoken out against alleged misconduct in their departments.

A subsequent story published this week outlined patterns of retaliation against such officers in departments large and small across the country, highlighting how some within law enforcement use internal affairs investigations and other forms of retaliation and intimidation to punish those who break the code of silence.

"My biggest fear? Lose my livelihood and go to prison," says Javier Esqueda, a former training sergeant for the Joliet Police Department. Esqueda is at risk of losing his job and his freedom for exposing a video showing two of his trainees and another sergeant slapping, choking and berating a man dying of a drug overdose instead of getting him medical help.

Esqueda told USA TODAY that he's become a pariah among his coworkers since July 2020, when he shared with a television reporter footage from January of that year showing how officers treated a handcuffed Black man in medical distress. Officers slapped Eric Lurry, restricted his airway and shoved a baton in his mouth hours before his death. Esqueda faces up to 20 years in prison after department officials opened a criminal investigation into his actions and prosecutors charged him with four counts of official misconduct.

Members of the Joliet Police Officer's Association on Wednesday voted 35-1 to expel Esqueda, a move first reported by The Herald-Ledger newspaper in Joliet.

THEY'RE JUST "CONCERNED PARENTS":

Fox News edited an article Sunday to downplay the presence of white nationalists at an anti-vaccine protest over the weekend, removing references to the racist activists after an initial article describing their role organizing the event prompted pushback from far-right critics.

On Saturday afternoon, followers of white-nationalist leader Nick Fuentes rallied near New York City's Gracie Mansion to protest the city's vaccine mandate. That night, Fox News writer Adam Sabes wrote an article about Fuentes' group facing off with left-wing, anti-fascist activists.

The article's original headline read "Antifa members clash with White nationalists over COVID vaccine mandate outside NYC's Gracie Mansion." The first version of the article described how Fuentes' fans call themselves "groypers," and included an Anti-Defamation League description of them "as a white supremacist group."

The story soon prompted online criticism from Fuentes and other far-right activists, including columnist Michelle Malkin. On social media app Telegram, Fuentes declared that Fox was "scum" for quoting the ADL.

HE PROBABLY DOESN'T MEAN ISLAM?:

Scratch a Trumpist find an anti-Semite. https://t.co/mqktJ87P9P

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) November 14, 2021

DONALD WHO?:

The Philadelphia suburbs buried Donald Trump in 2020.

One year later, after enabling Joe Biden to flip one of the nation's most critical swing states, their lurch in the opposite direction is a cause for alarm among Democrats.

Largely overlooked amid the party's dismal suburban results in Virginia and New Jersey last week, Republicans regained ground in the vote-rich Philly suburbs after years of losses under Trump. The GOP flipped multiple row offices in populous Bucks County, carried a state Supreme Court race there, and even came close to winning seats on the county council in Delaware County, where Biden romped by nearly 30 points in 2020.

Pennsylvania will be home to highly competitive House, Senate and gubernatorial races in next year's midterm elections -- and the GOP's local comeback here shows that Democrats' newfound shakiness among suburban voters reaches far deeper than one or two states.

THE PROBLEM IS VOTES, NOT VOLTS:

The Texas Public Utility Commission, fully reconstituted with new appointees by Governor Greg Abbott since last February, is still working on creating a model for revamping its regulations that govern the state's electricity market, but no final rule has yet been proposed. The PUC's new chairman, Peter Lake, recently told the Dallas Morning News that he plans to introduce a "strawman" soon that will serve as a starting point for negotiations over revised rules. That's great, but comes far too late to protect consumers through this coming winter.

Whether new regulations will ultimately impose any real requirements for winterization of existing facilities and demand or incentivize the building of much-needed new thermal generating capacity on the state's grid is something no one is able to currently guarantee. This is the reality Texans face today as the coming winter approaches. It is a reality that reflects the state legislature's latest lost opportunity to correct chronic issues impacting the grid that have been well-known for many years.

The process that Texas policymakers have engaged in since last February's winter storm event is basically a carbon copy of the process that took place in the wake of the state's previous Big Freeze event that hit the state in February of 2011. 

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

Looming over the land from her perch atop Norman siegeworks, a witch chanted an evil spell. Employed by supporters of William the Conqueror, she had been charged with helping to smoke out a band of rebels secreted nearby on the Isle of Ely - at the time, a spit of land surrounded by swampy fens in what's now Cambridgeshire - in an attempt to quell an English uprising.

Cursing the inhabitants of the isle, she turned her back before repeating her incantation twice more. Suddenly a deafening crack rang out - not, though, the result of the witch's spell taking effect but instead the sound of a fire set by the rebels, hidden in the marshes surrounding the Norman troops. As the heat and noise intensified, panic spread among the besiegers and the witch tumbled to her death: "smitten by fear as if by a whirlwind, she fell from on high", reported a 12th-century English chronicle, the Liber Eliensis. "And thus she who had come for the infliction of death upon other people, herself perished first, dead from a broken neck."

The Liber Eliensis's version of this particular episode in the English rebellion of 1070-71 is, no doubt, heavily embellished. But there's one fact that's beyond dispute: such a setback was an unfamiliar experience for William the Conqueror. Just a few years earlier, the Norman duke had won the crown of England in battle. He had then brutally put down a revolt in the north, scarring the region for generations. "Never," complained the monk Orderic Vitalis, "did William commit so much cruelty; to his lasting disgrace, he yielded to his worst impulse, and set no bounds to his fury, condemning the innocent and the guilty to a common fate."

Despite several rebellions, the Conqueror seemed unstoppable. Yet here was an uprising successfully defying the new king, led by an effective and belligerent opponent. As William rode away from the siege of Ely in frustration, one man must have haunted his thoughts: Hereward.

NO ONE SAID IT WAS EASY TO KILL THIS MANY AMERICANS:

In new excerpts of transcribed interviews, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the former director of the CDC's National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said she was made aware that then-President Donald Trump was angered by a February 25, 2020, briefing during which she warned the public about the dangers of the coronavirus. Messonnier says in the transcript she had calls with former CDC Director Dr. Robert Redfield and former US Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar after the briefing, and that she was "upset" after her conversation with Azar.

In the transcripts, other CDC officials described how requests to hold briefings about mask guidance and pediatric Covid-19 cases and deaths were denied. When asked about a CNN report that CDC officials felt "muzzled," Dr. Anne Schuchat, CDC's former principal deputy director, said, "That is the feeling that we had, many of us had."

CDC officials also appeared to take issue with invoking a public health authority to expel migrants.

Further, several interviews described efforts by the administration to alter or influence the agency's guidance and weekly scientific reports, the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, which typically are not shared outside the agency before they're published.

It took "great effort to protect that integrity," Schuchat said in the transcribed excerpt, and "active effort" on the part of CDC officials "to make sure that the attempts were not successful" to alter the reports.

In another interview, Dr. Christine Casey, an editor of CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, described an email from Trump appointee and former US Health and Human Services adviser Paul Alexander that she saw as a request to stop a report. 

She called it "highly unusual and quite concerning for somebody to ask to put an immediate stop on MMWR reports. I don't think in my memory that has ever happened. And, to be accused -- because it is accusatory language -- that MMWR content is designed to harm our commander in chief, the President."

Casey said she was instructed to delete the email and was told the direction came from Redfield.

The transcripts also include a conversation with Dr. Deborah Birx, who served as the White House coronavirus response coordinator, in which she described how the Trump administration pushed for guidance that said people who were not symptomatic did not need to be tested, despite disagreement from health officials. She said it was the intent of Dr. Scott Atlas, a Trump coronavirus adviser, "to change the testing guidance."

"This document resulted in less testing and less -- less aggressive testing of those without symptoms that I believed were the primary reason for the early community spread," she said.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Negotiators from almost 200 countries clinched a deal that seeks to keep the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement alive, breaking new ground in the fight against climate change but punting the hardest decisions into the future.​​

After two weeks of often fraught United Nations COP26 talks, delegates agreed to reduce the use of coal, end "inefficient" fossil-fuel subsidies and boost their climate targets sooner. The Glasgow Climate Pact puts the world, barely, on a path to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius from pre-industrial times -- the stretch goal of the Paris Agreement and the level scientists say is needed to avoid catastrophic warming.

"This is the beginning of that 10-year sprint," said John Kerry, the U.S. climate envoy. "We are in fact closer than we have ever been before to avoiding climate chaos and securing cleaner air, safer water and a healthier planet."

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Solid-state batteries have been hailed as the Holy Grail for electric vehicles. While that might be an overstatement, they do promise to boost range and slash charging times, bringing zero-emissions vehicles that much closer to parity with their fossil fuel competition.

Yet solid-state batteries, which use a solid electrolyte as opposed to a liquid or gel, remain just over the horizon. Recently, they've started to look less like vaporware and more like a real product, and they will probably make their way into cars and trucks by the end of the decade. Still, that's a timeline that gives competitors an opening.

One of those competitors is a company called SES, which last week announced a new battery that promises to nearly double the energy density of today's lithium-ion cells. The key was eliminating a piece of the battery that added weight and thickness--but to do so without introducing dangerous conditions that could lead to a fire.

THE ENTIRE POINT OF AN ECONOMY IS TO CREATE WEALTH:

First, let's consider the constitutional issue at hand. Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution establishes the power of Congress "To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States," however this power is not absolute. A second clause constrains this power, noting that "No Capitation, or other direct, Tax shall be laid, unless in Proportion to the Census or Enumeration herein before directed to be taken."

The "Capitation Clause," as it is sometimes called, divides taxation into two categories: direct and indirect. Indirect taxes include those specified in the earlier clause, "Duties, Imposts and Excises." A direct tax is a different instrument, constitutionally speaking. Before we get to the definition of that term though, suffice it to say that the Capitation Clause imposes substantial constraints on the enactment of direct taxation. In order to pass constitutional muster, the burdens of a direct tax must be apportioned across the individual states according to their share of the national population. This requirement would preclude a national tax policy, as that burden would be assessed for a state as a whole. Virginia would "owe" a sum commensurate with its population, as would California, as would Idaho and so forth. The rate of direct taxation on individuals living in each state would accordingly vary to the point of making such a tax system politically impractical if not impossible to administer.

The applications of the Capitation Clause have undergone some modification in our constitutional history. In 1909 Congress passed the 16th Amendment. This measure was intended as a workaround that would exempt the direct taxation of income from the apportionment requirement of the Capitation Clause. As the amendment reads, "Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration."

The history of the 16th Amendment is complex, but its immediate occasion came from a revision to the tariff system - the main source of the federal government's revenue for most of the 19th century. While debating the Payne-Aldrich Tariff Act of 1909, a group of anti-protectionist Democrats proposed a revenue swap that would replace the import tariff system with an income tax and thereby alleviate the former regime's burdens on international trade.

The income taxers of 1909 recognized that they had a constitutional problem though. They previously attempted to initiate the revenue swap strategy in 1894, only to run directly into the Capitation Clause. Within a year of its enactment, the Supreme Court invalidated a key portion of the 1894 income tax on the grounds that it imposed an unapportioned direct tax, running afoul of the constitutional requirement. The complex findings of the Pollock v. Farmers Loan and Trust case were controversial in their day and some members of Congress wished to press the case further by attempting another legislatively enacted income tax in 1909. To defuse the volatile constitutional situation, President William H. Taft negotiated a compromise that would allow the tariff bill to proceed without the revenue swap in exchange for a new constitutional amendment that would exempt future income taxation from the Capitation Clause and the Pollock case. The 16th Amendment met the ratification threshold four years later, giving us the federal income tax.

Legal arguments for wealth taxation today typically try to bring the definition under the umbrella of the 16th Amendment, or argue around the implications of Pollock, which technically remains a matter of standing case law. Income and wealth are two very different instruments, however, and the "unrealized capital gains tax" relabeling of the latter gives away the game. Income refers to generated earnings - usually taxed on an annual basis - whereas wealth refers to what a person owns, whether or not it increases in value from year to year. A tax on "unrealized capital gains" would thus assess a levy against the change in an owned asset's value even if it remained unsold and thus unconverted into income.

BRING THEM HERE AND SOLVE THREE CRISES IN ONE FELL SWOOP:

The U.S. and Russian presidents have publicly stepped into the debate over the mounting crisis on the Poland-Belarus border, where military movements and the discovery of a body overnight have highlighted the dangers as thousands of third-country migrants shelter in freezing conditions on the Belarusian side hoping to cross into the European Union. [...]

EU leaders have accused Minsk of "hybrid warfare" tactics, saying it has lured migrants from war-torn and impoverished countries in the Middle East and Africa and then pushed them toward the border.

EU officials say Minsk's policies are retaliation for sanctions that Brussels has imposed on Lukashenka's regime over its violent crackdown on dissent after he claimed victory in last year's election, widely seen as rigged.

JUST A CONCERNED PARENT:

Lonnie Coffman toted guns and hauled a cache of weapons and Molotov cocktails to Washington, D.C. on January 6 and on Friday, at a court in the nation's capital, he pleaded guilty to two criminal charges that prosecutors, if they wished to hit him with the max sentence, could earn him up to 15 years in prison.

The 71-year-old of Falkville, Alabama was indicted on January 11 and was the first person tied to the siege to be charged. Coffman, a U.S. Army veteran who served multiple tours in Vietnam, was arrested on January 6 after he was stopped by police near the Capitol.

TRES VECES:

There's a word in Latin American soccer that describes a player who always seems to punish their opponents: verdugo. It has many translations, but the most fitting one in a sporting sense is "the tormentor." 

In 2021, Christian Pulisic has become Mexico's ultimate verdugo. His 74th minute goal was the first of two daggers that Mexico endured in a 2-0 loss in Cincinnati, and it came five months after his extra time penalty kick dealt El Tri the first of three straight losses to their bitter regional rivals. 

Such a record against the U.S. in a calendar year is unprecedented for Mexico in the modern era, and hasn't been done at all since 1937. [...]

Perhaps one source of the U.S. intensity was comments made by Mexico goalkeeper Guillermo Ochoa earlier in the week. Citing the success of Liga MX versus MLS, Mexico's Confederations Cup win in 1999 and the fact that Mexico has played in more World Cups than the U.S., Ochoa told TUDN, "Mexico is the mirror in which the United States wants to see itself."

Petty or not, Ochoa's comments motivated the U.S. team and its fans. Ochoa's every touch was jeered on Friday night. A reference to his mirror analogy was emblazoned on a t-shirt that Pulisic displayed after scoring his goal. Michael Jackson's 1988 hit "Man in the Mirror" was played on the TQL Stadium loudspeakers after the final whistle. The USMNT went all in on Ochoa's comments and it provided the edge they needed to win the game.

Tim Weah, who assisted Pulisic for the first goal of the night, revealed the origin of the shirt that will now highlight a new chapter of gamesmanship in the USMNT-Mexico rivalry. 

"Me and DeAndre (Yedlin) had the kit guys make the shirt," Weah told reporters. "It's just to send a message, you know. I think it's a new era now. Before the game, Mexico was talking a lot of smack, and beating them just shuts them up. We have to continue to win games and continue to beat them. That's the only way we're going to earn their respect and the world's respect."

These players believe they belong at the top of CONCACAF. They believe they've more than done enough to earn the respect of their regional rivals -- three wins in as many matches against Mexico this year proves that -- and they aren't afraid to say it, with their play or into a microphone.

"It's a new era now," Weah said in the postgame press conference. "Before the game, Mexico was talking a lot of smack. Beating them just shuts them up. We have to continue to win games, continue to beat them. That's the only way we're going to earn respect. I think we're on a great path right now and the future is bright."

The way this U.S. team stepped up in the biggest of games was undoubtedly impressive, but the growth must continue in four days in Jamaica.

In the minutes after a decisive win against the Reggae Boyz in Austin, Texas last month, Berhalter talked about how important it would be for the U.S. to carry over the confidence on the road in Panama. They couldn't afford to think too highly of themselves, he said. They had to be ready to bring the same energy against Los Canaleros. That obviously failed to occur in a pretty big way. The U.S. came out flat in Panama City and deservedly lost 1-0.

The warnings were delivered again after the Mexico win. The U.S. will have to find a way to come down from the high of beating their regional rival for a third consecutive time in the last six months and be ready for yet another difficult road trip.

"We're definitely pleased with the way we're playing at the minute, but again I think we can improve," Pulisic said. "We're happy with where we're at, but throughout this qualifying process we still want to get a lot better."

The margin for error still remains thin in qualifying. The U.S. is in first on goal differential, but is also just three points ahead of fourth-place Panama. A result in Jamaica will be important, especially if the U.S. can manage another rare road win.

It should be easier to carry over some of the momentum from this game. With just two games in this window, the lineup will mostly be unchanged from Friday's win, though Weston McKennie and Miles Robinson will both miss out due to suspensions resulting from bookings against Mexico. Berhalter said the U.S. will likely call in reinforcements, but the absences of those two key starters will again highlight the youth of the squad. Two candidates to start in place of Robinson and McKennie against Jamaica: 21-year-old Chris Richards, who has four caps, and 19-year-old Gianluca Busio, who has seven.

Berhalter has been unafraid to thrust young, unproven players into the lineup to try to seize the moment. After Friday's win, that shouldn't change.

THANKS, JOE:

Supervisor Dean Preston then wrote a Twitter thread lamenting that "media reports have accepted without analysis Walgreens' assertion that it's closing due to retail theft," and shared an SEC filing from 2019 in which Walgreens announced plans to close 200 stores.

"So is Walgreens closing stores because of theft or because of a pre-existing business plan to cut costs and increase profits by consolidating stores and shifting customers to online purchases?" Preston asked.

The city's leaders and critics alike appear highly motivated to preserve their respective narratives, and the online discourse on the Walgreens closures is as polarized as one would expect regarding San Francisco crime.

To make sense of whether Walgreens is telling the truth, let's start with the August 2019 SEC filing Preston and other city progressives are widely sharing. It states that the company "plans to close approximately 200 locations in the United States," as part of a "cost management program" that was announced in December 2018. [...]

According to San Francisco's crime dashboard, larceny theft is up nearly 8% year-over-year, though crime statistics in 2020 are skewed downward because the early days of the pandemic brought life to a near-halt and forced temporary store closures.

When comparing 2021 larceny theft figures to pre-pandemic 2019 figures, one will find that reports of theft are actually down. From Jan. 1, 2021, to Oct. 10, 2021, there have been 21,842 reports of larceny theft, and there were 31,958 reports over the same period in 2019, which is a 31.6% decrease. 

There were 33,312 reports of larceny theft during the same time period in 2018 and 35,483 reports in that period in 2017, so the number of theft reports has actually been in decline over the past few years.

THE FUTURE HAS NOT BEGUN YET:

The accounting standards now viewed by some as a pointless hindrance in determining stock values first began as an effort to reform corporate reporting following the 1929 stock market crash. Rules first published in the late 1930s evolved into the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in use today. 

The problem is that the rules developed to track steelmakers' businesses don't always work in an economy where intellectual property reigns. 

  

If spending on intangibles such as research turned into assets whose costs were spread out over three to five years, current profits from S&P 500 companies could increase by 10%, according to an estimate by Alger, an investment management firm that uses R&D as a measure of innovations to pick stocks. If nothing else, the adjustment could help rationalize indicators like price-earnings ratios, valuation metrics that at first blush make the U.S. stock market seem overpriced.

"The market is doing the right thing" by looking past earnings in their conventional form, said Brad Neuman, director of market strategy at Alger. "One of the reasons why the P/E looks higher today is because there's much more intangible investment, which is weighing on earnings."

Last year, 46 companies in the S&P 500 posted net income that was smaller than their R&D outlays, an amount only eclipsed twice in the last decade, data compiled by Bloomberg show. While most were companies that saw organic earnings crushed by the recession, a larger number of firms posted a similar deficit in 2016 and 2018.

Changing the rule to reflect market practice would enhance profits -- in some cases, turning losers into bottom-line winners -- and perhaps better focus managers on the seemingly sensible goal of attending to growth in the future. 

EVERY HOUSE A NODE:

One of the most exciting and revolutionary aspects of Mansoor's thinking is that the consumer will become a partner in the electric utility future. They will join the ecosystem by providing load management assistance through smart meters, now installed in 60 percent of homes.

Mansoor thinks the nation's 480,000 school buses, if electrified, along with private electric vehicles, can be used to store energy. This answers the concern many utility executives have about storage and the concern that a tsunami of electric vehicles will overpower electric supply in the coming decade.

Personally, I think the utilities should plan right now for the integration of electric vehicles into their systems. They should offer electric vehicle owners financial incentives for plugging in and sending their stored power to the grid.

Likewise, the utilities should provide rate incentives for off-peak electric vehicle charging. They could do worse than look at the algorithms which have made Uber and Lyft possible, unlocking value in the personal car.

The utilities could devise a flexible system whereby they pay for power when needed and give a price break for charging during off-peak hours, or when there is a surfeit of renewable energy. That is the kind of data flow that will mark the utilities going forward and stimulate demand for private broadband networks.

We, the consumers, will be partners in the electric future, managing our own uses and supporting the grid with our electric cars and trucks. 

KEEP YOUR MASK ON:

Wildlife species sold in wet markets in China were linked to the emergence of SARS and Covid-19. Now a comprehensive survey of viral pathogens has found they harbor a range of diseases threatening humans and other animals.

A study of more than a dozen species of game animals traded, sold and commonly consumed as exotic food in China identified 71 mammalian viruses, including 18 deemed "potentially high-risk" to people and domestic animals. Civets, the cat-like carnivores implicated in the spread of severe acute respiratory virus in markets in southern China almost 20 years ago, carried the most worrisome microbes, according to the research, released Friday.

Although the authors in China, the U.S., Belgium and Australia didn't find anything resembling SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic, they showed that strains carried by bats are transmitted across the species barrier to infect other animals in spillover events that risk seeding dangerous outbreaks. They also found game animals were infected with viruses previously thought to exist only in people.

HOW ABOUT MOVING WORKERS OUT OF INNER CITIES:

If you're a young person looking for work in Bakersfield, California, some of your best bets are likely to be in the warehouse and retail jobs on the fringes of town. But getting there can be a challenge if you don't have a car.

That helps explain why some 18,500 people between the ages 16 and 24 in this Central Valley city of 400,000 were neither in school nor working in 2019. Bakersfield is saddled with one of the highest rates of youth disconnection in the U.S., which the pandemic has likely made even worse.

An experimental program aims to close some of those gaps, as well as others around the country. Later this month, 100 vulnerable young Bakersfield residents will be selected to participate in a year-long study about how free access to public transit, e-scooters and e-bikes affects their lives.  

It's one of several pilots in U.S. cities testing the concept of " universal basic mobility." In Oakland, up to 500 residents will receive prepaid $300 debit cards for transit and shared mobility services later this month. Pittsburgh plans to launch a year-long study with a 50-person cohort next spring. Los Angeles is preparing a similar grant-funded program focused in south L.A. 

The goal of the experiments is to understand how having a minimum guaranteed level of transportation could change outcomes for people who have previously gone without it.

TAX CONSUMPTION INSTEAD OF INCOME:

And these numbers reflect big changes in Americans' lifestyle. The average U.S. home was 1,700 square feet in 1980, by 2015 it was 2,000 square feet, even though the number of people in the average household shrank. In 1980, 15% of households didn't have a TV, now only about 3% don't. In 2015, 40% of American households had three or more TVs, including 30% of households earning less than $40,000 a year! In 1980, only 13% of households had 2 or more refrigerators, in 2015 30% did -- including many low-earning households. Clothing purchases have increased five-fold since 1980 and the average garment will only be worn seven times before it's disposed of.

Our spending habits slowed some during the pandemic but, despite all the shortages, they've come roaring back.

There are many reasons we've become a nation of shopaholics. We've become a richer country which means we spend more. Many goods have become cheaper and more accessible. That's partly because of technology that makes production more efficient. For shoppers, the Internet makes it easier to find more goods for the best prices without even leaving your home. The other big factor is we get more stuff from abroad, imports of goods and services as a share of GDP has nearly doubled since the 1980s.  Lots of trade has been with countries like China and Mexico who have lower labor costs. Even American-made goods use parts that come from abroad. We experienced the vulnerabilities of a global supply chain in the last few years, but when it does work (most of the time) it means the U.S. can fully exploit the comparative advantages of trade and provide goods more efficiently, faster and for less money.

THE INFLATION BUBBLE...:

The logjam of container ships outside the California ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach swelled to another record as stepped-up efforts to clear cargo off the docks failed to prevent the average wait for vessels from reaching nearly 17 days.

The queue, both at anchor and in a holding zone, rose to 83 ships as of late Friday, four more than Wednesday and topping the previous high of 81 set earlier in the week, according to officials who monitor marine traffic in San Pedro Bay. The average wait increased to 16.9 days, double the level from two months ago, according to L.A.'s Wabtec Port Optimizer.

WHAT ARE THEY TEACHING KIDS AT THAT SCHOOL?:

Keep in mind that one source of cheap, clean power will lead to others. Maybe nuclear fusion cannot be used to fly a jet plane, but perhaps it could be used to produce relatively clean hydrogen fuel, which could then be deployed in ways fusion could not. A chain reaction would occur, eventually bringing cheap, clean energy across the economy.

As an inveterate traveler, my first thought is that I would be able to get everywhere much more quickly. How about a supersonic or perhaps suborbital flight from Washington to Tokyo? A trip to Antarctica would no longer seem so daunting. Many remote places would be transformed, one hopes for the better.

One second-order effect is that countries with good infrastructure planning would reap a significant relative gain. The fast train from Paris to Nice would become faster yet, but would trains on the Acela corridor?

Next in line: Desalinating water would become cheap and easy, enabling the transformation and terraforming of many landscapes. Nevada would boom, though a vigorous environmental debate might ensue: Just how many deserts should we keep around? Over time, Mali and the Middle East would become much greener.

How about heating and cooling? It might be possible to manipulate temperatures outdoors, so Denmark in January and Dubai in August would no longer be so unbearable. It wouldn't be too hard to melt snow or generate a cooling breeze.

Wages would also rise significantly. Not only would more goods and services be available, but the demand for labor would also skyrocket. If flying to Tokyo is easier, demand for pilots will be higher. Eventually, more flying would be automated. Robots would become far more plentiful, which would set off yet more second- and third-order effects.

Cheap energy would also make supercomputing more available, crypto more convenient, and nanotechnology more likely.

TOO WEALTHY TO WORK:

Companies in North America added a record number of robots in the first nine months of this year as they rushed to speed up assembly lines and struggled to add human workers.

Factories and other industrial users ordered 29,000 robots, 37% more than during the same period last year, valued at $1.48 billion, according to data compiled by the industry group the Association for Advancing Automation. That surpassed the previous peak set in the same time period in 2017, before the global pandemic upended economies.

The rush to add robots is part of a larger upswing in investment as companies seek to keep up with strong demand, which in some cases has contributed to shortages of key goods. At the same time, many firms have struggled to lure back workers displaced by the pandemic and view robots as an alternative to adding human muscle on their assembly lines.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

YOU GET THE GOVERNANCE YOU VOTE FOR:

During the winter storm, natural gas prices spiked as cold temperatures drove demand up while also depressing supply. Much of Texas' natural gas comes from fracking, which uses large amounts of water. To prevent the wellheads from freezing, many producers shut-in their wells in advance of the storm. The governor's office knew of the looming shortages days before they happened, yet the preparations they made did little to alter the course of the disaster.

The shortfall caused a cascade of effects throughout the state. Many wells run on electricity, but the state lost half its generating capacity. Many natural gas-fired power plants had to shut down because they weren't weatherized--their equipment was literally frozen. Even those that could operate had a hard time receiving gas because of the wells that were either shut in or frozen. Power producers paid an extra $8 billion to gas producers during the five-day storm.

Gas sellers made record profits in just a few days, together bringing in as much as $11 billion, about 70-100 times more than normal, based on spot prices at the time.

Meanwhile, many Texans suffered through blackouts and bitter cold, and 210 people died, according to the latest estimate from the Texas Department of State Health Services.

In the wake of the storm, many officials have called on utilities and oil and gas companies to winterize their operations.  In a law passed in May, the Railroad Commission was given the authority to write regulations for critical gas infrastructure, including winterization. But facilities have to voluntarily [file] forms declaring that they're critical infrastructure, and the regulator says that the law includes a loophole that allows gas producers, for $150, to file for an exemption from winterizing wellheads. (The fee amount is laid out in another Texas law, which lawmakers apparently overlooked.) Winterizing a wellhead, on the other hand, can cost tens of thousands of dollars.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Researchers reported last month that an inexpensive, widely available pill substantially reduced hospitalizations and deaths in a large study of individuals with mild COVID symptoms who were at high risk for complications. It is the only existing oral medication with promising peer-reviewed data from multiple randomized COVID trials--and it is already used by millions of people worldwide. The drug is fluvoxamine, and it is approved in the U.S. for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. So how did this antidepressant end up in a trial for treating COVID?

THERE ARE NO "CONCERNED PARENTS":

Despite widespread criticism among Republican lawmakers and governors over the teaching of critical race theory (CRT) in public schools, a new poll suggests that the majority of GOP voters aren't against their children being taught about the "history of racism" in the classroom.

A poll released by the Monmouth University Polling Institute on Wednesday suggests that more than 5 in 10 Republicans--54 percent of respondents--back public schools teaching the subject. In contrast, 94 percent of Democrats said that they supported teaching about the history of racism.

WHY THERE IS NO CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS:

I looked at every research study I could find that showed a statistically significant correlation between culture and higher levels of innovative activity. I then studied 367 companies that have appeared on "most innovative" lists.

The findings were surprising, showing that much of what we think to be true about innovation is false--it's not about youthful new hires or bustling office happy hours. In reality, there are only four cultural values that have proven to drive higher levels of innovation. They are:

Innovative thinking

Autonomy and proactivity

Market awareness

Risk

If you want to elevate innovation into your organization, focus on these four areas.

YEAH, BUT SOME BLACK GUY ONCE WROTE AN ANTI-ANTI-RACIST OP-ED!:

Aspiring right-wing political figure and Hillbilly Elegy enthusiast J.D. Vance introduced a new terminology in a tweet this week, notoriously suggesting Black men are "wolves" who "set fire to their communities," and defended Rittenhouse as a boy without a father whose "human nature" told him to "go and defend what no one else is defending." Not content with his racist dog whistle, Vance also exercised some good ol' fashioned antisemitism to suggest Rittenhouse, and other culture warriors like him, are fighting "global monopolists," otherwise known as "The Jews" to white supremacists and modern Republicans.

Through the lens of the prism of white supremacy, white killers like Rittenhouse can never be the criminals, the antagonists, or the bad guys. They are heroes, romanticized and lionized for trying to save and defend white, Western civilization under attack by the insidious forces of "Wokeness," which is weaponized by the right as a smear to defame all people of color and their allies who are trying to demand equality, racial justice, and fairness.

And lionizing a teen killer--who may duck justice any day now--is just the tip of an increasingly terrifying iceberg.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

SAY WHAT, WILBUR?:

The country's first driverless trucks are operating on roads in Bentonville. They are shuttling merchandise for Walmart from a warehouse to a Neighborhood Market.

What's new: Walmart and its self-driving technology partner, Gatik, said today they had pulled the human safety driver from autonomous delivery trucks on a 7-mile route in the retailer's hometown -- an industry first, writes Axios' Joann Muller.

CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS...:

Also, political scientists point to the experience of other countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America and warn that long periods of one-person rule lead to poor official decisions and economic performance.

ROLL THE TUMBRILS...:

Trump: "No, I thought he was well-protected, and I had heard that he was in good shape. No. Because I had heard he was in very good shape. But, but, no, I think -- "

Karl: "Because you heard those chants -- that was terrible. I mean -- "

Trump: "He could have -- well, the people were very angry."

Karl: "They were saying 'hang Mike Pence.'"

Trump: "Because it's common sense, Jon. It's common sense that you're supposed to protect. 

WHOEVER RUNS IS GOING TO GET TO SERVE...:

The 2022 midterms were always going to be tough for Democrats. But unless there's some fundamental shift in American politics, the right track/wrong track and "generic ballot" numbers today are worse than they were for the "shellacking" of 2010.

Republicans didn't win 63 House seats that year because they had 63 Chris Sununus running flawless campaigns. They won because voters went to the polls and voted against every name with a "D" next to it they could find.

Once again, the disclaimer: A lot can happen in a year. There could be another COVID-level event. But assuming that what usually happens is what usually happens -- in 1994, 2006, 2010, 2018, and today -- Hassan's race is over now. She's already lost. She'll get the "Generic Democrat" level of votes which, in a Red Wave, won't be enough to win.

All Republicans have to do is nominate a competent candidate who's acceptable to the "I'm not voting Democrat in 2022" majority. They don't need a "Superstar" Sununu or "Rock Star" Reagan. This is a year when "Generic Republican" beats "Generic Democrat" every time.

So, who is that "Generic Republican?" There are plenty of them. One obvious choice is state Sen. Chuck Morse (R-Salem). If Hollywood made a movie called "Generic Republican," his face could be on the poster.

Then again, the "monied class" candidates like Rich Ashoo and Phil Taub are fairly typical Republicans, too.

Former U.S. Rep. Frank Guinta has some baggage, as does former U.S. Senate candidate Bill Binnie. But can they re-hab their images? It's definitely doable.

Matt Mowers could abandon his frontrunner status in the CD1 race, and he could probably be "GR" enough to win.

Two interesting names are the North Country's Jeff Cozzens and Londonderry's Kevin Smith. Fresh faces with compelling stories that starkly contrast with Hassan's D. C. hackery. (That's not a partisan comment. Right now, everyone in D.C. looks like a hack. That's part of Hassan's problem.)

GOING TO RETALIATE BY BRINGING DAVID DUKE AND DONALD?:

A defense attorney for one of the three White men charged in 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery's killing objected Thursday to nationally recognized civil rights leaders attending the trial to support the victim's family.

"If we're going to start a precedent, starting yesterday, where we're going to bring high-profile members of the African-American community into the courtroom to sit with the family during the trial in the presence of the jury, I believe that's intimidating and it's an attempt to pressure," attorney Kevin Gough, who represents William "Roddie" Bryan Jr., told the court following a lunch break.

BUT HE'S ALL THAT STANDS BETWEEN THE rIGHT AND MUSLIM DEMOCRACY...:

SAUDI CROWN PRINCE Mohammed bin Salman is enacting revenge on Democrats in general and President Joe Biden specifically for the party's increasingly standoffish attitude toward the kingdom -- by driving up energy prices and fueling global inflation.

Biden himself seemed to allude to this at a town hall event with CNN last month, during which he attributed high gas prices to a certain "foreign policy initiative" of his, adding, "There's a lot of Middle Eastern folks who want to talk to me. I'm not sure I'm going to talk to them."

Biden was making a not-so-veiled reference to his refusal to meet with Salman and acknowledge him as Saudi Arabia's de facto ruler due to his role in the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in October of 2018. The move came after Biden vowed during a debate with President Donald Trump to make MBS, as he's known, "a pariah" and represented a stark departure from Trump's warm relations with the desert kingdom and the crown prince.

In 2017, Trump broke with tradition by choosing Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia, for his first foreign visit and soon announced a record arms sale to the kingdom. Later, after Khashoggi, a contributor to the Washington Post, was brutally dismembered in a Turkish consulate, Trump cast doubt on MBS's involvement, saying, "Maybe he did, maybe he didn't." After his own CIA director briefed Congress on Salman's culpability, Trump reportedly boasted about his efforts to protect the crown prince, saying, "I saved his ass." Since then, a senior adviser to Trump's campaign, Tom Barrack, has been indicted for allegedly working as an unregistered agent of the UAE -- Saudi Arabia's closest ally.

ALWAYS FUN WHEN FOLKS WONDER WHY CIVIL WARS ELSEWHERE ARE SO BRUTAL:

DEFUND:

After surveillance video emerged of him leaving a KKK note in Pool's raincoat in July, Campo retired from his position in the city, some 25 miles west of Cleveland -- which last year declared racism a public health crisis. Campo maintained it was a "joke," per CNN.

Speaking for the first time about the incident on Thursday, Pool said at a news conference that he just looked at the police chief and said in response to the note: "Are you serious?"

"What else can you say to the chief of police, who had done something so heinous and so awful to the first Black officer ever? It's not understandable," he added.

Pool also accuses Campo of wearing a "pointy Ku Klux Klan hat" he made in front of him and other employees.

POOR LITTLE SNOWFLAKES:

Among both parties, fear of crime rose after 9/11. After that, fear of crime among Democrats steadily declined over the next 15 years.

But Republicans showed an entirely different response. When Barack Obama was elected president, fear of crime spiked 13 points. When Donald Trump was elected, fear of crime plummeted 18 points. Finally, when Joe Biden was elected, fear of crime once again spiked, this time by 29 points.

Needless to say, the actual amount of crime doesn't change much over the course of a single year.

ALL THAT JAZZ #62

YOU GO, GIRL:

Ilhan Omar says she is 'working on legislation' to stop a $650 million weapons sale to Saudi Arabia, amid concerns about the kingdom's actions in the Yemen war.

HE KNOWS HIS HILLBILLIES:

In addition to his lagging poll numbers. Vance has made gaffes, of the sort that sank Terry McAuliffe or the one that helped put a nail in the coffin of Martha McSally's Arizona Senate campaign. In Vance's case, at the National Conservatism conference in Orlando last week--think of it as a CPAC for super-traditional isolationists--Vance said:

You can all go to JDVance.com and make yourselves as poor as possible to support my campaign.

NO ONE WILL MISS DRIVERS:

Every 52 minutes, someone in the US dies in a drunk-driving accident... According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), each year, around 10,000 people are killed due to alcohol-related crashes, which translates into nearly 30% of all traffic fatalities.

Despite the laws, fines, and penalties that exist to prevent drunk driving, people still get behind the wheel after consuming alcoholic beverages. And if we can't stop them from making this irresponsible choice, maybe we can stop them from driving altogether.

That's what the Congress is trying to do as part of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill, which includes a mandate for anti-drunk driving technology in new cars.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

During the Enlightenment, David Hume sought to replace the ideal of the Christian knight with that of the gallant. He was sure that a military with baggage trains stocked with champagne would prevail against enemies with less refined tastes. Rustic soldiers, minds stuffed with superstitions, should be supplanted by the scientific soldier, the officer and gentleman. Ambassadors of the refinement of the arts and sciences, a new model army would deliver a revolution in military affairs to the battlefield. For the first sixty years of his film life, Hume's fellow Scot, James Bond was the definition of the gallant. With suavity to disarm the ladies and the latest refinements in weapons and spy trickery to dispatch enemies, Bond was the lethal edge of the Enlightenment. In No Time to Die, the Christian knight makes a comeback.

The cars, the tuxedo, and the Omega are all still there, but the whole is an exposition of John 15:13: Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

The change had been coming. Skyfall, the most poignant and best of the Daniel Craig films, dwelt on mothers. After decades away, Bond returns to his rustic Scottish country estate. There, he visits the grave of his father and mother, Andrew and Monique Delacroix Bond. Orphaned as a young boy, the plot twist of Skyfall is the rivalry between Bond and former MI6 agent Raoul Silva for the attention of M (played by Dame Judi Dench). Silva feels betrayed by his "Mummy" M, who abandoned him when captured, leaving him no choice but cyanide. The capsule failed, save to eat away half of Silva's face. In Skyfall--the title of the film is the name of Bond's family estate--Silva is out to get "Mummy" and finally gets his chance. Bond is also estranged from M, but reconciled, she dies in Bond's arms, a reverse Pietà.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

As Din travels to various planets tracking down the mysterious alien child Grogu (better known as Baby Yoda) and eventually seeking a good home for him, he meets people whose beliefs severely challenge his own. Din's soul-searching becomes the heart of the show, and his willingness to question his worldview makes a good example for us as well.

Trained as a bounty hunter by a secretive religious community of Mandalorians on a backwater planet, Din thinks he knows everything about his culture and his personal convictions. His people even have a mantra to remind them to hold fast to their beliefs: "This is the Way."

But what, exactly, is the Way? Is it protecting the Mandalorians' covert on the planet Nevarro at all costs? Is it keeping his face hidden from even his own people? Is it caring for foundlings, orphans who are rescued and reared to preserve Mandalorian culture? What if fulfilling one of these tenets jeopardizes another? Worse, what if some of them aren't essential for a Mandalorian to follow?

Suddenly, Din feels pretty relatable. As Christians, we may be confident in our convictions until a leader we admire is exposed as not the role model we knew them to be. Or until we meet people who challenge our private stereotypes. Or until a community we belong to starts expressing values we don't hold. We find ourselves feeling pulled in two directions, torn between beliefs that no longer agree or reconsidering our loyalties.

The name for this tumultuous feeling is cognitive dissonance. Psychologist Leon Festinger coined it in 1957 after observing firsthand a group of people have their greatest anticipation fail to materialize--he infiltrated a doomsday cult. Its leader said she had received messages from a higher being that a giant flood would destroy North America, and she convinced some people to come to her house to be picked up by a spaceship.

When the foretold day passed, the most ardent believers didn't admit they were wrong. Instead, they believed that their devotion had prevented the disaster. Their conviction became stronger than ever.

Festinger replicated these types of responses in research, and he identified the ways we go about trying to reduce the dissonance. We can discard one of the conflicting beliefs, add new beliefs that tip the scale one way or the other, or tell ourselves that a certain belief is more or less important than its opposing cognition. We may even know we're siding with a deception but do it anyway.

BRAZILIAN BERNIE:

The far-right Brazilian leader is expected to sign his Liberal Party membership papers in Brasilia on November 22. 

The Liberal Party is a member of an establishment coalition of parties called "centrao." These parties have helped Bolsonaro pass legislation while in office and protected him from impeachment. 

Joining the Liberal Party signifies a shift in political strategy by Bolsonaro, who railed against the establishment during his presidential campaign in 2018. 

YOU BET HE WANTS TO SEE THEM:

Two Spotsylvania County, Virginia School Board members declared they want books in local school libraries burned. On Monday in a unanimous 6-0 vote the board ordered any books housed by the school, including online material, that contain "sexually explicit" content, to be removed immediately.

No guidelines or professional oversight of what would be considered "sexually explicit" - much less age-appropriate content - were given.

"I think we should throw those books in a fire," said school board member Rabih Abuismail, according to The Free Lance-Star.

Fellow board member Kirk Twigg went even further, saying he wanted to "see the books before we burn them so we can identify within our community that we are eradicating this bad stuff."

THANKS, GHWB:

A federal judge ruled Wednesday that Gov. Greg Abbott's executive order prohibiting mask mandates in schools violates the Americans with Disabilities Act -- freeing local officials to again create their own rules.

The order comes after a monthslong legal dispute between parents, a disability rights organization and Texas officials over whether the state was violating the 1990 law, known as the ADA, by not allowing school districts to require masks. U.S. District Judge Lee Yeakel barred Attorney General Ken Paxton from enforcing Abbott's order.

"The spread of COVID-19 poses an even greater risk for children with special health needs," Yeakel said. "Children with certain underlying conditions who contract COVID-19 are more likely to experience severe acute biological effects and to require admission to a hospital and the hospital's intensive-care unit."

WHO KNEW SPENDING TIME AT HOME WITH FAMILY IS GOOD?:

The kids are all right -- or, at least, they report being a lot more all right than we were expecting. The COVID-19 pandemic drastically changed the lives of children and teens, cutting them off from friends, activities and adults other than their parents. The combination of limited social contact, disrupted schooling and fear of the virus itself led many to anticipate a major mental health crisis looming in youth. A poll conducted this past spring by the Children's Hospital of Chicago found 65 percent of parents believed the mental health consequences for kids will be worse than for adults. So we were surprised to find that the kids who participated in our survey almost universally don't describe themselves as struggling.

OPPOSING THE INTERESTS OF MINORITIES IS THE PRICE::

To make sense of why racially prejudiced white Americans are willing to support some Black candidates, it is worth considering why they so strongly oppose Black Democrats in the first place. Given the racialized nature of the two-party system in the United States, most Black political candidates are Democrats who embrace liberal positions on issues of race and justice. When asked whether they would support such a candidate, research shows that racially prejudiced white voters worry that these candidates will represent the interests of Black Americans, both because of a shared African American identity  and because Democrats are perceived as the party more supportive of Black interests. So, it makes sense that racially resentful white Americans oppose candidates like Obama, as his racial identity and partisanship signaled to voters that he was more supportive of Black interests than prior presidents. 

Put another way: Racially prejudiced white voters are not opposed to Black candidates simply because they are Black, but because they believe that most Black candidates will fight for "those people" and not "people like us."

Black Republicans, on the other hand, are perceived differently by racially prejudiced white Americans. Their embrace of the Republican Party and its conservative ideology help assure racially prejudiced whites that, unlike Black Democrats, they are not in the business of carrying water for their own racial group. Instead, they are viewed as distinct from other Black elites. If Blackness is viewed as intertwined with a kind of racial liberalism that is antagonistic to the interests of white Americans, Black Republicans' partisan and ideological commitments allay concerns that they are for "them," not "us."

This argument is buttressed by more recent scholarship in political science, which has found that Black candidates who embrace a "bootstrap" ideology -- an ideology that focuses on individual versus structural explanations of inequality -- are more positively evaluated by racially prejudiced whites relative to their white competitors. Explaining this finding, the authors note that racially prejudiced white voters "might find black Republicans delivering an individualism message more favorable than they might find other candidates delivering a similar message precisely because the aesthetic character and the partisan affiliation of the messenger contradict racial and political expectations." LaFleur Stephens-Dougan, a professor of political science at Princeton University, similarly shows in her book "Race to the Bottom" that racially resentful whites respond well to Black candidates who take stances against the expected positions of their racial group -- a phenomenon she calls "racial distancing."

Finally, voting for Black Republicans may also be especially appealing to racially prejudiced whites because it assuages concerns of being seen as racist by enabling them to say, in essence, "I can't be racist! I voted for a Black candidate!" Psychologists call this "moral credentialing," and there's even some evidence that voters who expressed support for Obama shortly after the 2008 election felt more justified in favoring white Americans over Black Americans. Electing a Black Republican like Sears, who railed against critical race theory during the run-up to the election and supports voting restrictions that adversely affect racial minorities, is similarly used as a symbolic shield by the entire party from inevitable charges of championing racist policies. 

IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

In Chinese-speaking communities beyond the reach of Beijing's censorship regime, the song "Fragile" has been an unexpected hit. With more than 26 million views on YouTube since dropping in mid-October, the satirical love song to Chinese nationalism has topped the site's charts for Taiwan and Hong Kong, its lyrics mocking Chinese Communist Party rhetoric about Taiwan while also taking aim at Xi Jinping and Chinese censors.

In parts, the Mandarin Chinese duet portrays Taiwan as an object of unwanted overtures that simply wants to get along with a hypersensitive and aggressive Beijing. Its chorus goes full it's-not-you-it's-me: "Sorry I'm so strong-minded / The truth always upsets you / Maybe I shouldn't be so blunt / I'm so sorry / I've angered you again."

The song, by the Malaysian rapper Namewee and the Australian singer Kimberley Chen, seems to have hit all the right notes for those tiring of a perpetually offended and angry China--and resulted in the scrubbing of the duo's Chinese social-media accounts.

In Taiwan, where many pop stars stay out of the political realm to retain access to China's lucrative market, the song has been greeted as a refreshing, and rare, send-up of its giant neighbor's refutation of Taiwanese sovereignty. (Beijing claims that Taiwan is its territory, though the CCP has never controlled it, and Taiwanese overwhelmingly reject the idea of unification.)

Yet it is also a sign of something more: Its lyrics and its context mirror the actions of democracies around the world that are growing tired of walking on eggshells to avoid angering a petulant Beijing. Rather than releasing a song, officials in Europe, Japan, and Australia are expanding long-ignored relationships with Taiwan. China's foreign ministry has lambasted and threatened them all, but echoing the song's ethos, they are no longer as worried as they once were about offending a fragile Beijing.

HE-MAN WOMAN-HATERS CLUB:

As for Ocasio-Cortez, she predicted last night that House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy would do nothing except cheer Gosar on "with excuses," reports MSNBC News. 

So now the ball is in McCarthy's court, so to speak, and he has a number of options - if he so chooses to use one or more of them.

McCarthy could endorse Gosar's expulsion, support a censure resolution, strip the Arizonan of his committee assignments, announce that the NRCC will not support Gosar's re-election campaign, or possibly choose to do nothing at all.

The whole point is simple - The more McCarthy tolerates his members' radicalism, the more radicalism our system will be asked to endure. Quite frankly, I think our Democracy has reached the point where any civility, morality, or thoughts of open and frank discourse are lacking.

Twitter should have removed the offending Tweet instead of determining "it may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain accessible." The only people interested in that Tweet are those who want to continue with this reprehensible behavior.

CBC Canada is reporting that Gosar is among a number of lawmakers whose phone or computer records a House panel investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection asked social media and telecommunications companies to preserve as they were potentially involved with efforts to "challenge, delay or interfere" with the certification or otherwise try to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

I am afraid that MSNBC News may prove to be right in their assessment of what will happen to Gosar. They are saying that "the House GOP leadership will say something mild and meaningless about the "tone" on Capitol Hill, before waiting for the story to fade away, at least until Gosar's next outrage."

I am more inclined to agree with top Yale historian, Joanne Freeman, who says the Gosar Tweet is indicative of the "broader threat the Republican party poses to democracy in the US."

LOCKDOWNS WORK:

"For some people, they figured out I actually can work fewer hours and produce more," Petersen tells NPR's Morning Edition. "And so I think what companies have to be thinking about is: How do we keep our workers in that high level of productivity while also figuring out a schedule that allows people to have that collaborative space when and if they need it or want it?"

Interview Highlights

On why the office isn't productive for everyone

There is a lot of waste inherent to going into the office. Some of that is just the commute, right? But I think people also forget that the office required a lot of sitting around and being in your chair when you didn't need to be. And a lot of it too is just like hanging out with co-workers. That's part of the great part. It's part of what people really miss, but it's also not necessarily getting work done. [...]

On how managers keep tabs on their remote employees and the skill of successfully managing remote workers

I think a lot of this has to do with managers feeling very insecure about how to manage. And I don't necessarily think that this is a character flaw or that there's ill intent. Historically, managing has involved surveillance of some sort, like eyes on the people that you are managing, seeing them every single day in the office or seeing when they come and leave, how they interact with other people. It's been a very physical act.

So I think that a lot of managers are hoping that if employees come back into the office, then managing will get easier and also that their jobs as managers will become more visible, the work that they're doing will be more tangible and easier to ascertain to value.

So I think that companies who are moving into this more flexible and remote style have to really be thinking about: What does management look like? What does good remote management look like? It's not something that you can say, "Oh, I've just been doing it for these last 18 months. I know how to do it." It's a real skill.

And the other thing too is, I think especially people who are in power in organizations and whose job really is to kind of walk around and just like, check on people: They want to feel that power again. They want to feel like they are doing a good job. And the way that they know that they are doing a good job is by walking around. And that's not enough reason to make an entire organization come back into the office.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

AND HE'LL BRING THE WHOLE TICKET WITH HIM:

Sununu didn't give McConnell the courtesy of a heads up. "He found out when you did," Sununu said during Tuesday's presser. Sources say it was to keep the news secret. ("If we told them, it would have leaked immediately," one insider said.) But it could also have been a reminder of Sununu's fundamental point about being a governor and not a senator.

When you're governor, you only make the calls you want to make.

Sununu brags about being transparent, and it's true -- though not exactly the way he means it. Sununu is transparently pro-Sununu. If his goals line up with the Republican Party's goals, as they did during the 2020 campaign, that's great. But if they don't, if the state party with a thin bench needs him to take on a weak, incumbent Democrat for the good of the GOP cause, but it's not part of his plan -- that's OK with Sununu, too.

In a state like New Hampshire, loosely holding your partisan affiliations is smart politics. Sen. Maggie Hassan, whose entire brand is "generic Democrat" is about to find that out. When Sununu says "there are plenty of Republicans who can beat Hassan," he's not bragging about the talent of the GOP field. He's simply pointing out the political weakness of Hassan.

In 2018, a blue wave washed through the Granite State. Sununu survived. He had a brand beyond the GOP.

In 2022, assuming trends continue, a red wave will hit New Hampshire. Why would any non-Democrat vote for Hassan? She won't even have the fake "abortion ban" issue. She'll just have Joe Biden, inflation, trillion-dollar spending deals, and vaccine mandates. She isn't even independent enough to speak out against the Biden administration's plan to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to illegal immigrant families separated at the border -- an absolutely killer issue among the blue-collar voters her party is already losing so badly.

For the moment, Democrats are determined not to learn the lesson. Their messaging on Tuesday was full of "whistle-past-the-graveyard" bravado.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Pennsylvania GOP Senate candidate Sean Parnell testified Monday in a contentious custody battle with his estranged wife, entirely refuting her allegations of abuse against herself and their children.

Parnell, who said he "never" got physical with his wife or their three kids, was not subject to cross-examination and will take the stand again Tuesday.

At the same time, Politico reports that Parnell's candidacy is on life support and Donald Trump is eagerly trying to revive it.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Gelion's battery technology uses an electrolytic gel that is inherently fire retardant. In a recent test by the company's tech team, the battery did not catch fire, and even continued to operate, while being heated on a barbeque plate at about 700 degrees for half an hour.

On a practical level, this means the Endure battery systems can operate at temperatures up to 50°C without the need for air-conditioning systems.

Other advantages include that the batteries be discharged to zero volts without impacting performance, are more energy dense and last longer than traditional lead-acid batteries, and offer a safe and recyclable alternative to lithium-ion batteries for stationary storage.

"Gelion's robust and scalable zinc-bromide Endure batteries, coupled with large-scale solar energy could provide remote PNG communities with an affordable, renewable and robust solution for their energy needs," said Mayur managing director Paul Mulder.

Gelion has been able to crunch the costs of its battery storage technology through the use of lower cost components and by producing them in existing lead acid battery factories - earlier this year the company announced a manufacturing partnership with local Sydney-based outfit, Battery Energy.

IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Colour is first and foremost an experience: it exists only so far as we are here to look at it, and nobody looks at colour in exactly the same way. The human eye possesses around 100m photoreceptors responsible for absorbing photons, the particles of energy that make up light. As these photons enter the eye, they trigger a rapid chain of events in the brain that ends in our ability to see, and make visual sense of, the world.

Only about four or five million photoreceptors, called cone cells, are responsible for colour vision. Most people have three types of cone cell, each of which picks up on a different wavelength of visible light. By comparing these different wavelengths, the brain can distinguish between millions of different hues and shades of colour. But everyone perceives colour slightly differently. Some people have fewer cone cell types than others, and therefore perceive fewer colours; others have a fourth type of cone cell, and so possess an "extra dimension" in how they see colour.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, however, ruled that she would not step in the way of the Archives turning over those records.

"The court holds that the public interest lies in permitting--not enjoining--the combined will of the legislative and executive branches to study the events that led to and occurred on January 6, and to consider legislation to prevent such events from ever occurring again," she wrote.

Chutkan agreed with the committee that this is "a matter of unsurpassed public importance because such information relates to our core democratic institutions and the public's confidence in them."

MARGINALLY BETTER THAN NOTHING:

Immigrants caught in yearslong green-card backlogs could become permanent residents in the U.S. much faster because of a little-noticed immigration provision tucked into Democrats' $1.85 trillion social-spending and climate package.

While Democrats haggle over the size and scope of legal protections for so-called Dreamers and other immigrants in the country illegally, they have also included a measure in the House bill that would recover hundreds of thousands of unused green cards over the last several decades and make them available to applicants waiting in line. Under the proposal, the unused green cards, which confer permanent U.S. residency, would be "recaptured" or put back in circulation and remain available until they are issued.

VOTE BETTER:

A survey of 1,200 registered voters in Texas showed that 57% of voters support mask requirements in indoor public spaces based on local conditions, while 58% support mask requirements for students and staff in public schools. 

MEANWHILE, OUTSIDE THE BUBBLE...:

Most Americans -- including more than two-thirds of Republicans -- give their local schools good marks for balancing public health and safety with other priorities, according to the latest installment of the Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index.

SHUTDOWNS WORK:

Economic strength is undeniable, both in the country overall and at the household level. The economy is expected to grow 5.7% this year.

Almost 6 million jobs were created just between January and October; the unemployment rate is now just 4.6%. The quit rate, the standard barometer of workers' optimism, hit an all-time record high of 2.9% in August.

Average earnings are up 3.5% this year and 4.9% annually, to $31 per hour.

Checking accounts are 50% fatter than they were pre-pandemic, while the bottom 50% of the population now has more than $3 trillion in household wealth -- up 32% just in the first half of this year, and up 55% from before the pandemic.

Stocks hit a new record high every day last week (and yesterday, too), and are up more than 30% year-t0-date.

THE nEAR WAR:

While on the surface, ISIS's shift toward mass-casualty attacks, accompanied by a targeted anti-Taliban media campaign, can be seen as signals of confidence--it's far more likely that the group is acting out of pure desperation. Both locally and globally, the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan threatens ISIS in profound new ways, and marks yet another major defeat from which ISIS will likely not recover.

ISIS's Khorasan Province, also known as ISKP or ISIS-K, originated from the Taliban and allied groups in 2015. Its pitch to the radical jihadists of Afghanistan was easy to make in those days: With the U.S. still in Afghanistan, and with its "caliphate" then growing rapidly across the world, ISIS was the group that could finally change the course of the region.

It didn't take long before the Taliban asserted its overwhelming dominance, though. Much like the Shabaab al-Mujahideen did to ISIS-pledged militants in Somalia, the Afghan Taliban steadily rooted out the vast majority of ISIS's Khorasan Province. The former Afghan government and U.S. government put further pressure on ISIS in the years that followed, helping to cut its ranks from an estimated 3,000 to 300.

Now, with the Taliban in control of Afghanistan and the U.S. military gone, the ISIS sales pitch becomes a much harder sell: no "infidel" invasion of Muslim lands to rail against, and no significant ranks to resemble a "caliphate."

Today, ISIS is instead reserved to cell-based terrorism and guerrilla warfare. Its unsophisticated attacks in the last year point to its limited capabilities: IED attacks, dismantling power lines, sniper attacks, and suicide operations. And with the Taliban now armed with scores of U.S. Humvees, armored fighting vehicles, and other major weaponry, it seems very implausible that ISIS will ever have a stable base in Afghanistan.

This new reality has required ISIS to reconfigure its pitch to Afghans. The Taliban, after all, has now established an "emirate" far more secure than the "caliphate" ISIS failed to hold onto. All that considered, ISIS may have even been better off with the U.S. in Afghanistan than it is now.

STRUCTURE:

While some examples of racism in U.S. highway planning have been cited from the 1930s and 1940s, the highest-profile allegations have involved the Interstate Highway System, which was established in the mid-1950s and was in its heaviest design and building phase through the mid-1970s. 

Most of the system consists of inter-city routes, which generally run through lightly populated areas and have attracted little controversy. However, the routes through cities -- which often required the clearing of densely populated neighborhoods -- were controversial at the time, and have only become more so in recent years.

One fundamental reality of road-building, experts say, is to keep costs down, and the price tag for land acquisition can sometimes exceed the cost of construction.

Sometimes the quest for cheaper real estate led through public parks or dilapidated waterfronts. These produced some unpopular examples of vista-scarring blight -- some of which were later torn down or scaled back, such as the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco.

But in other cases, highway planners eyed routes through populated areas -- and "inevitably, this sent interstates barreling through the poorest parts of town," Swift said. "In the years during which the system was being laid out, that usually meant African American neighborhoods."

Often, the motivations for road-building came from political and business leaders in urban centers, who sought to stop the loss of population and businesses from downtown by luring back car-driving suburbanites, said Mark H. Rose, a historian at Florida Atlantic University.

"In hindsight, we correctly understand that a tacit racism was a part of many of the planners' decisions," said Tom Lewis, the author of "Divided Highways" and a professor of English at Skidmore College. "It was rarely, if ever, overt. Planners had little guidance other than to create a safe highway at the least possible cost."

But he added: "The effects on the underrepresented, especially Blacks and Latinos, were devastating."

Often, extra-wide rights of way were approved so that "decaying" homes and apartments in a project's path could be demolished. "It seemed a win-win to planners, but it didn't feel that way to the people who found themselves in the juggernaut's path," Swift said.

Black neighborhoods scarred by highways

There are numerous examples of Interstate highways tearing through existing neighborhoods populated largely by people of color.

In Miami, I-95 ran through the predominantly Black neighborhood of Overtown. In Alabama, portions of I-65 or I-85 were routed through Black communities in Montgomery and Birmingham. In Los Angeles, freeway planners targeted Boyle Heights, a neighborhood with many Mexican Americans. 

In North Carolina, a freeway decimated the "Black Wall Street of the South" in Durham's Hayti neighborhood. The North Claiborne Avenue area of New Orleans was the home of the Black Mardi Gras, but in the early 1960s, highway planners all but destroyed the neighborhood for an elevated section of I-10. Other examples can be found in Baltimore, Detroit and Richmond, Va., among other cities.

Sometimes Interstates were built in ways that kept racial groups apart.

"In Atlanta, the intent to segregate was crystal clear," Princeton University historian Kevin M. Kruse has written. "Interstate 20, the east-west corridor that connects with I-75 and I-85 in Atlanta's center, was deliberately plotted along a winding route in the late 1950s to serve, in the words of Mayor Bill Hartsfield, as 'the boundary between the white and Negro communities on the west side of town."

In St. Paul, Minn., I-94 was built through the Rondo neighborhood, which had been settled initially by Jewish residents and then by African Americans moving out of the tenements of downtown St. Paul, said Rebecca Wingo, a historian at the University of Cincinnati who has written about the history of Rondo along with community resident Marvin Anderson.

Initially, developers proposed two routes, one along an abandoned railroad and the other along Rondo Avenue, the neighborhood's main artery. The state chose the path through the Black neighborhood.

"Some residents took the lowball offer on their home and moved away; others fought through the legal system; still others sat on their front porches with shotguns and waited for police," Wingo and Anderson wrote.

All told, the highway construction displaced over 750 families and 125 businesses. "But it's not like Rondo residents were able to go and buy a new home for the price of their payment -- their homes were undervalued, and racist housing covenants prevented residents from buying in certain areas," Wingo told PolitiFact.

The legacy of Robert Moses

One of the most notorious examples of racism in highway planning predates the Interstate system: the Southern State Parkway on New York's Long Island, which was built by the powerful planner Robert Moses.

ALL ABOARD:

Ariana Afghan Airlines on Monday resumed regular flights from Kabul to Dubai, reopening a heavily used international route that had been suspended since the Taliban victory over the Western-backed government in August.

Ariana will operate daily flights, charging $550 for a one-way ticket, the state-run airline said on its Facebook page. [...]

PIA said it could not afford to operate services at previous prices because of the high cost of insuring flights to a country considered by insurers to be a war zone.

With a worsening economic crisis compounding concerns about Afghanistan's future under the Taliban, there has been heavy demand for flights out, made worse by repeated problems at land border crossings into Pakistan.

GETTING TO COLONUS:

He "poisoned" the lugubrious, brooding, and sacred atmosphere of orthodox psychoanalysis of the 1950s with hope and pragmatism and good sense--and he was scarcely forgiven for it.

It was a case of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood taking over The Addams Family. Beck, soft-spoken, bow-tie-wearing, calmly rejected the dense, tortured language of Freudian theory and the Kafkaesque, labyrinthine lexicon of psychoanalytic treatment and quietly dethroned the king.

For example: A Jewish woman is conflicted about eating ham and shrimp. "God will punish me if I indulge," she says. Beck might say, "Let's put these automatic thoughts and these beliefs about God to the test. Let's go where the evidence is: Go ahead, eat, my child and let us see if God will strike you dead."

To the Freudians he would say, we don't have to deal with heavy transference and a tortured Oedipus complex in order to be good therapists and help people. We can do away with that and keep the good stuff! You mean, we can be good Jews and not have to keep kosher? Bring on the ham, man. This stuff tastes good!

What about Beck's beliefs? My sense is that he was a belonging Jew, but not a believing one, at least in the formal sense. A good Jew and a good human being were of one gestalt for him. He was a New Englander by birth who wore his ethnicity and religion like a Unitarian from Toronto. He was Jewish, but Jewish-light, very light.

This is not to say that CBT is superficial. It is not. Practitioners of CBT will investigate the source of automatic thoughts that are linked to beliefs. Beck patiently and without malice shucked off the nonlinear, disorderly, and subversive ethos of Old World psychoanalysis. Many credit the CBT master with having rescued psychotherapy from itself. He single-handedly discovered that what is on the surface (and what is superficial) is deep.

Beck once worked with a man who felt unloved by his wife because she left in the morning without saying goodbye. "You think your wife doesn't love you because you believe you are unlovable. There is no evidence to support this idea yet you hold to it. How is this belief helpful to you?" he asked.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The lawsuit against former President Donald Trump's 2017 inaugural committee and his private business could potentially go to trial after a D.C. Superior Court judge allowed some of the local attorney general's claims to move forward on Monday.

The lawsuit, filed by District of Columbia Attorney General Karl Racine in January 2020, alleges that the Trump International Hotel in Washington illegally received more than $1 million by charging the Presidential Inaugural Committee inflated prices to use ballrooms and other event spaces -- violating the city's laws governing nonprofit organizations.

THAT WAS EASY:

Hawaiian Electric, the islands' main electric utility, has set a goal of cutting carbon emissions from power generation by 70% by 2030, and will not only shutter the state's last coal plant in 2022 but will aim to add nearly 50,000 rooftop solar systems across the islands.

TRICKED OUT GARAGE ROCK?:

There must have been dozens upon dozens of Minneapolis punk bands in the late '70s and early '80s cutting scrappy demos in their basements. What was it about the Replacements that set them apart? Can one hear the deciding factors in Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash that turned these guys into the college radio/underground heroes they would eventually become? One obvious factor that fans will gladly bend your ear over is Paul Westerberg's songwriting ability. Anyone who has had their personal antennae tuned into "alternative" rock since the beginning of the '80s can tell you that his approach was unique, mining hooks meant for loftier musical ends that instead wound up getting fed through the punk filter. His lyrics could be both clever and juvenile at the same time, his voice snotty one moment and road-weary the next. As of 1981, Westerberg hadn't really found his songwriting voice yet but a handful of Sorry Ma's 18 tracks proved that he was already well on his way there. Throw in Bob Stinson's lead guitar, influenced by punk and progressive rock in near-equal measure, add the rhythm section of Bob's kid brother Tommy on bass and the multi-talented Chris Mars on drums and you have the Replacements, a band that canceled out its own talent with an unfortunate knack for self-sabotage.

But before diving into the album, we have to acknowledge "punk" as the lazy label that it is. This isn't to say that a band like the Replacements weren't totally befitting of the adjective, because there were times when they very much were. It's that the punk label obfuscated everything else at work here, even during Sorry Ma's fastest and loudest moments. It's true that Westerberg spends a lot of time shouting his vocals on this album, but his melodies and phrasing thereof hinted that his influences probably cast a wider net to include blues and rockabilly. By exploring this box set, you'll find that "Johnny's Gonna Die," the band's ode to Johnny Thunder's drug problems, began life as a hard-driving punk thrasher before calming down into the mellow piece it eventually became. So while songs like "Careless" and "Customer" pretty much fit everyone's definition of punk ― fast, loud, very few chords, lots of shouting, lasts no longer than 90 seconds ― calling Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash a punk record doesn't feel completely appropriate considering that it also features "Shiftless When Idle" and "Raised in the City."

IT STARTS WITH THE MOST IMPORTANT THING UNIVERSITIES CAN OFFER...:

It is possible today, for the first time in generations, to build a new university to compete with top schools -- one that attracts the most talented young people in the world and empowers them to pursue truth and innovation. We can, today, found a university that will prepare a new generation of leaders to think for themselves about all sides of an issue, speak truth to power, and take power back from ideologues.

I've spent my entire adult life founding and helping build mission-driven companies to provide long-term value to our society, and I've made a great deal of money by doing so. This year, I'm embarking on a very different type of venture, a philanthropic one that many have told me is crazy, but grounded in the same long-term mindset: founding The University of Austin.

The University of Austin is, at its heart, a project based on optimism. By getting the values, incentives, and interdisciplinary structure right from the beginning, we can restore the classically liberal university and the enlightenment values that made our civilization what it is. We can show off something so compelling that it inspires a revival of the values of free inquiry and pluralism, not just in one new university, but in hundreds of universities. And when we do, we can reclaim the civilizational achievements that come from the open competition of ideas.

As we advance in science and technology and better understand our world and ourselves, we can partner with entrepreneurs to help billions live longer and more prosperous lives. We can find the best ways to protect our natural environment. We can help our fellow citizens find meaning in work and in life. Above all, an open debate will help us to preserve the good governance and checks on power, embodied in the American founding, that make us free.

I am an optimist on humanity, on innovation, on America, on our civilization. But optimism without action is just wishful thinking. Zero-sum thinkers and pessimists have captured too many of our institutions. It's up to us - especially those of us with the resources to do so -- to build new institutions that reflect the principles that we want to define the future. For me, there is nothing more important than making sure that future generations are equipped with the requisite knowledge, virtue, and responsibility to be stewards of a free society.

It's time to build America's next great university. I am lucky to be joined in this herculean task by dozens of courageous men and women, not least my fellow founders Pano Kanelos, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, and Niall Ferguson; faculty fellows including Peter Boghossian, Kathleen Stock, Ayaan Hirsi Ali; and advisors including Robert Zimmer, Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Glenn Loury, Tyler Cowen, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Deirdre McCloskey, David Mamet, Sohrab Ahmari, Caitlin Flanagan and many more.

NOT TO MENTION THE JEW HATRED:

While visiting a prison recently, the provocative Republican Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene came across a rumpled copy of The Final Call, the national newspaper of the Nation of Islam, a homegrown American denomination that turned the Muslim faith into a force for Black empowerment.

Greene, though more familiar with the Daily Caller, nonetheless immediately recognized the similarities between the NOI's stance on COVID-19 prevention and her own.

While leafing through the Final Call, Greene said in a series of Twitter posts Monday (Nov. 8), she discovered "that the Nation of Islam sees the use and benefit of Ivermectin and is very angry that our media, Democrats, and Dr Fauci have attacked the drug and refuse to save people's lives by not promoting it and shunning the use of it."

DADDY, WHAT WAS INTERNAL COMBUSTION?:

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

According to the committee, Flynn took part in an Oval Office meeting on Dec. 18 "during which participants discussed seizing voting machines, declaring a national emergency, invoking certain national security emergency powers, and continuing to spread the false message that the November 2020 election had been tainted by widespread fraud."

Kerik took part in a Jan. 5 meeting at the Willard Hotel in Washington and paid for rooms and suites that served as command centers.

"The Select Committee needs to know every detail about their efforts to overturn the election, including who they were talking to in the White House and in Congress, what connections they had with rallies that escalated into a riot, and who paid for it all," Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said in a statement.

CAN'T HAVE A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS...:

Recent policy actions show the difficulty he faces managing a sprawling bureaucracy in the world's second-biggest economy: Officials either take orders too far, as in the case of coal mine and power plant supervisors who worsened a national energy crisis, or they're so paralyzed by fear they fail to take autonomous decisions -- even during major crises such as unprecedented flooding or an emerging pandemic. 

In many ways, Xi has himself to blame. China's local governments had long turned a blind eye to some Beijing dictates, a dynamic captured by a saying in Sun Tzu's "The Art of War": "A general in the field is not bound by the orders from his sovereign." Xi's centralization of power, along with an anti-corruption campaign that has ensnared more than four million officials, has both raised the stakes and skewed the incentives for officials on the ground. 

The result is legions of bureaucrats struggling to understand how they can please the bosses in Beijing, and secure promotions up through the ranks of the opaque Communist Party. While that may give Xi greater control than previous Chinese leaders and helped clamp down on excessive corruption, it also risks sapping economic dynamism at a time when growth is slowing and the country faces challenges from an aging workforce, mounting domestic debt and increasingly acrimonious trade partners. 

"The great irony is that in the 2020s and beyond when China needs to embrace a new development model, there would normally be a strong case for more decentralization and experimentation," said George Magnus, research associate at Oxford University's China Centre. "But Xi's model calls for precisely for an inflexible and flawed opposite structure. He may rue this governance model sooner or later."

TAKING EXTERNALITIES SERIOUSLY:

Leaders of Michigan's federally recognized Indigenous tribes recently united to seek the White House's help in their collective fight to shut down the Line 5 pipeline - particularly the four-mile underwater section in the Great Lakes' Straits of Mackinac.

President Joe Biden received a collaborative request from Michigan's 12 federally recognized tribes that make up the Three Fires Confederacy of the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi to intervene in their ongoing struggle to shut down Line 5 and preserve their treaty rights.

THE GAS COMPANY:

West Nova News appears to be a standard local news website. It is not. Rather it is part of a massive network of websites linked to "conservative businessman Brian Timpone." There are more than 1300 sites currently in the network, including at least 28 that operate in Virginia. 

The sites in Virginia look identical and feature much of the same content. Most of the articles do not have a byline and are automatically generated. 

Timpone has a long history of leveraging "low-cost automated story generation." A previous company run by Timpone, Journatic, "attracted national attention and outrage for faking bylines and quotes, and for plagiarism." 

Journatic was rebranded Locality Labs and is now part of the Metric Media network, which operates the 1300+ local news sites. Metric Media boasts that it produces "over 5 million news articles every month." It has claimed to be "the largest producer of local news in the United States."

West Nova News and the other news sites in the network include no advertising and have no subscription fees. The Columbia Journalism Review linked funding for sites in the network to "the dark-money ATM of the conservative movement" and "a Catholic political advocacy group that launched a $9.7 million campaign in swing states against the Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden."

But donations aren't the only way that the Metric Media network funds its work. And this is where Ian Prior enters the story. 

An investigation last year by the New York Times found that Metric Media sites operate on a "pay-to-play" system. In 2020, a freelance journalist was paid $22 to write an "article calling out Sara Gideon, a Democrat running for a hotly contested U.S. Senate seat in Maine, as a hypocrite." After the story was published in the Maine Business Daily, which is part of the Metric Media network, the freelancer received an email saying the "client" who ordered the article had requested she add "more detail." 

The client was Ian Prior, who also ordered articles promoting Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senator Roy Blunt (R-MO). Prior, a longtime Republican operative, previously worked for the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican PAC which spent millions on ads to defeat Gideon. 

In this way, Prior and other clients can use the network to launder partisan attacks as "news." Quotes from sites in the Metric Media network can then be used in political mailers or in television ads with the authority of a neutral source. In some cases, the publications themselves are delivered "unsolicited, to doorsteps." The clients pay Metric Media thousands to produce "news" that meets their specifications.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Walmart said Monday it has started using fully driverless trucking in its online grocery business, aiming to increase capacity and reduce inefficiencies.

Walmart and Silicon Valley start-up Gatik said that, since August, they've operated two autonomous box trucks -- without a safety driver -- on a 7-mile loop daily for 12 hours. The Gatik trucks are loaded with online grocery orders from a Walmart fulfillment center called a "dark store." The orders are then taken to a nearby Walmart Neighborhood Market grocery store in Bentonville, Arkansas, where Walmart is headquartered.

It'll be two or three years before autonomous trucks are ready for commercial deployment on U.S. highways. But the first data-driven studies from early pilot programs suggest they'll be substantially more efficient.

TuSimple and UPS, for example, say their self-driving test trucks achieved 13% fuel savings while racking up 160,000 autonomous highway miles in Arizona.

"To get 13% fuel savings is unheard of," TuSimple CEO Cheng Lu tells Axios -- worth billions of dollars for the U.S. trucking industry.

Fuel accounts for 24% of the cost per mile for heavy-duty trucks, second to labor, at 42%, per the American Transportation Research Institute.

TuSimple's system drives more smoothly and efficiently than a human driver, Lu explains. "How you operate the truck has a very big impact on fuel economy. It's a great validation of the maturity of our technology."

Another study by Georgia Tech found that Ryder Systems' new autonomous transfer hub networks -- combining self-driving trucks on highways with conventional trucking operations for the first and last miles -- could save shippers up to 40%.

HAWLEY'S RIGHT ABOUT THESE GUYS PLAYING TOO MANY VIDEO GAMES:

The sun rises on January 6, 2021 while a nation is in crisis.

Michigan's presidential electors are in dispute after a mysterious fire in Detroit destroyed thousands of mail-in ballots, ultimately throwing the election to Congress.

The nation's capital is overwhelmed by riots organized by left-wing radicals.

A Republican member of Congress is attacked and critically injured in the violence, potentially depriving Donald Trump of the decisive vote.

However, the representative heroically insists on being taken to the House floor. "With IVs and blood transfusions being administered, the member casts the deciding vote, giving Trump 26 state delegations and the needed majority."

This is the grisly climax of a report by the Claremont Institute and Texas Public Policy Foundation's (TPPF) called "79 Days to Inauguration," prepared by "Constitutional scholars, along with experts in election law, foreign affairs, law enforcement, and media . . . coordinated by a retired military officer experienced in running hundreds of wargames."

Among these luminaries were figures such as John Eastman--lawyer for Donald Trump and author of a memo advising Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally block certification of Joe Biden's win in order to buy time for GOP-controlled state legislatures to send competing slates of electors--and K.T. McFarland, who served as deputy national security advisor under Michael Flynn in the Trump White House.

Other participants include Kevin Roberts, then-executive director of the Texas Public Policy Foundation (soon to be head of the Heritage Foundation), Jeff Giesea, "a [Peter] Thiel protégé and secret funder of alt-right causes," and Charles Haywood, a fringe blogger who anxiously awaits an American "Caesar, authoritarian reconstructor of our institutions."

Yet despite the authors' pretensions to scholarship and rigor--"for a simulation to be valuable, the other side gets a vote and actions must be based in realism"-- the final document is a frenzied and paranoid piece of work, revealing of the anxieties and aspirations of the authoritarian right.

Practically, the report is an instruction manual for how Trump partisans at all levels of government--aided by citizen "posses" of Proud Boys and Oath Keepers--could, quite literally, round up opposition activists, kill their leaders, and install Donald Trump for a second term in office.

ISMS ARE OPIATES:

In the opening essay, Arthur Koestler wrote: "I became converted because I was ripe for it and lived in a disintegrating society thirsting for faith." Here Koestler speaks of his coming to communism in religious terms. Koestler wrote that after having read Marx, Engels, and Lenin, "something had clicked in my brain that shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had 'seen the light' is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows, regardless of what faith he has been converted to."

Another image for the appeal of communism is drug addiction. "The addiction to the Soviet myth," Koestler wrote, "is as tenacious and difficult to cure as any other addiction. After the Lost Weekend in Utopia the temptation is strong to have just one last drop, even if watered down and sold under a different label." For Koestler those different labels were the many forms of popular front politics of the late 1930s.

Koestler's essay closes with a biblical allusion:

"I served the Communist Party for seven years--the same length of time as Jacob tended Laban's sheep to win Rachel his daughter. When the time was up, the bride was led into his dark tent; only the next morning did he discover that his ardors had been spent not on the lovely Rachel but on the ugly Leah. I wonder whether he ever recovered from the shock of having slept with an illusion. I wonder whether afterwards he believed that he had ever believed in it. I wonder whether the happy end of the legend will be repeated; for at the price of another seven years of labor, Jacob was given Rachel too, and the illusion became flesh. And the seven years seemed unto him but a few days, for the love he had for her."

In The New York Times Book Review on Jan. 8, 1950, Rebecca West, the eminent British woman of letters, penned a laudatory review of The God That Failed. It opened with this trenchant observation: "There is no subject on which it is more difficult to establish communication with one's fellow-creatures than anti-communism." West described Arthur Koestler's essay as "one of the most handsome presents that has ever been given to the future historians of our time." She concludes her review with this observation: "The value of this book is not that its authors showed themselves outstanding, but they were typical."

THE HATE THAT FAILED:

Everybody has a hot take on the results of the nationwide elections on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021. Here's mine: The elections prove the neoliberal restoration is proceeding apace.

By "restoration," I mean the return to power of establishmentarian Republican-right neoliberals and Democratic-left neoliberals--who together comprise the American ruling elite--at the expense of Democratic progressives and Republican conservatives. Following the populist upheavals of 2016-2020, American politics is reverting to the pattern of 1992-2016, when moderate pro-business Democrats like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and moderate pro-business Republicans like the two Bushes alternated in power while squelching the voices of the American majority.

The mechanism by which this happens is the American two-party system. If you think of the factions in the two major parties as separate parties, then we have a de facto four-party system. From left to right, the parties are progressive Democrats, neoliberal Democrats, neoliberal Republicans, and conservative Republicans. While their donor bases are somewhat different, with tech and finance leaning toward Democrats while extractive industries are more Republican, both Democrat and Republican neoliberals are effectively two wings of one party: the neoliberal establishment uniparty. Neoliberal elites tend to move in the same establishment social circles and their children tend to go to the same Ivy League schools.

IF THE rIGHT ACTUALLY WANTED TO HELP THE POOR:

The study, published in Energy Policy journal by the University of Adelaide's Tracey Dodd and Tim Nelson, a senior economist currently leading the energy markets team at Iberdrola Australia, compares the net benefits of rooftop PV on low-income homes compared to those for standard customers.

Based on energy consumption data from AGL Energy - where Nelson was previously chief economist - the study compares the profiles of 1000 Victoria-based customers participating in the retailer's hardship program to those of 1000 generic Victoria-based customers.

The results reveal that putting more solar on "hardship homes" - defined for this study as low-income rental properties - promises to slash annual grid-based electricity consumption by 40%, lower greenhouse gas emissions by 1.6 tCO2e per household annually, and cut energy bills by $2908 per low-income household over 15 years.

THAT WAS EASY:

Wind and solar power, alone, can meet more than 80 per cent of demand in many countries around the world without "crazy amounts" of storage or excess generating capacity, a new report has found.

The study led by researchers at the University of California, Irvine, and published recently in Nature Communications argues that most of the current electricity demand in advanced, industrialised nations can be met by some combination of wind and solar power.

The report's authors, including from China's Tsinghua University, the Carnegie Institution for Science and Caltech, don't deny the crucial need for a range of storage and other grid balancing technologies.

But they do stress that "reliable renewable" energy based systems can do an enormous amount of the heavy lifting needed to replace outgoing fossil fuel-based generation technologies as the world commits to a rapid shift to net-zero emissions power supplies.

The team analysed 39 years worth of hourly energy demand data from 42 major countries and found that a full conversion to sustainable power resources could be easier for larger, lower-latitude countries, which could rely on solar power availability throughout the year. Australia comes to mind.

THEY DO LOVE THEIR COSPLAY:

The Daily Beast has identified eight recently created anti-CRT groups which operate at local levels across the country but bear ties to ideological right-wing aristocrats and political operatives. Their backers include former officials in Donald Trump's administration, an executive at a notorious D.C. lobbying firm, as well as Koch entities and The Federalist Society.

In Virginia, one of the key leaders against critical race theory is Ian Prior. If Prior's name sounds familiar, that's because you may have been one of the tens of thousands of Americans who to receive emails from Prior in one of his many different former roles: press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, Justice Department official during the Trump administration, communications director for the Karl Rove super PAC American Crossroads, and now, a GOP operative behind two organizations that have inflamed attacks on so-called critical race theory in Virginia's public schools.

Prior runs Fight for Schools, a state-level PAC which emerged this year to challenge educational decisions in Loudoun County and mobilize behind Youngkin. The candidate turned to Prior's group for fundraising and voter outreach efforts, and state election disclosures show that the organization raised hundreds of thousands of dollars during the campaign.

Over the last several months, Prior--whose children attend Loudoun County schools--has appeared on Fox News at least 15 times to discuss critical race theory, according to a Media Matters analysis. He has been introduced on those shows as a "Loudoun County parent" and a "father" who went "from concerned parent, like many of you, to legal activist," Media Matters reported. In one such appearance last month, Prior was identified by the host as a "parent," while the graphic on the screen labeled him "vice president at Mercury Public Affairs"--a D.C. lobbying firm with a history of representing controversial foreign clients.

Fight for Schools--which this spring launched an effort to recall half a dozen Loudoun County school board members--also reported significant financial backing from 1776 Action, a "dark money" nonprofit led by former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Dr. Ben Carson. The group also coordinated local events in Virginia with The Heritage Foundation, an influential conservative think tank with connections to the Koch empire and Tea Party organizing efforts. And while Prior denies being present for the most controversial of those Loudoun County events--a June 22 protest that turned violent and ended with the arrests of two parents--that event was organized by another one of his groups, Parents Against Critical Theory.

PACT's incorporation documents with the state of Virginia show Prior as its signatory, via his Parents Against Critical Theory LLC. However, he does not appear on the group's website, which claims its founder is Scott Mineo, another Loudoun County parent who spoke at the June 22 protest. (Mineo has also reportedly posted anti-Black and anti-Muslim remarks on Facebook.) And, like Fight For Schools, PACT also received significant financial backing from Carson's 1776 Action, and has coordinated events with the Heritage Foundation.

A separate group that recently launched a seven-figure anti-CRT ad campaign appears to be an arm of another conservative dark-money juggernaut.

According to Virginia state incorporation records, the group--the Free to Learn Coalition--appears connected to the Concord Fund, aka the Judicial Crisis Network, a nonprofit which has poured millions of dollars into efforts to stack the Supreme Court with conservatives. JCN is effectively controlled by Leonard Leo, a wealthy conservative activist and Federalist Society executive.

And another prominent new anti-CRT organization, the 1776 Project, was founded by right-wing operative Ryan Girduksy. Girdusky, who once co-wrote a book with current Matt Gaetz spokesperson Harlan Hill, has implied support for the Great Replacement Theory--a casus belli for white nationalists.

KAMALA IS RIGHT:

A Palestinian protester trying to block Israeli security forces on their way to break up a demonstration against new construction of Jewish settlements and a section of the separation wall in Turmus Ayya, a village near Ramallah, West Bank, August 7, 2020

Future historians may single out 2021 as the year the tide turned for the Palestinian struggle--though it was hard to see coming. The final months of 2020 were among the bleakest in decades, as a US administration bent on furthering Israel's right-wing expansionist vision sought to dismantle, bit by bit, the central concerns that make up the Palestinian cause: the right of refugees to return to homes from which they were expelled in 1948, the status of Jerusalem as the capital of Palestine, and the right to self-determination on lands currently occupied by Israel. At the year's end, the coup de grâce came when several Arab states turned their backs on Palestine, normalizing diplomatic and economic relations with Israel despite its continuing subjugation of Palestinians. The Palestinian people seemed to have been vanquished, while Israel pursued its annexation of occupied territory.

But breakthroughs came unexpectedly. In January 2021, B'Tselem, Israel's leading human rights organization, released a report unambiguously titled A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This Is Apartheid. In it, the authors argued that their organization's mandate from its founding in 1989--to bring to light Israeli human rights violations in the Occupied Territories--was no longer adequate. "The situation has changed," the report explained. "What happens in the Occupied Territories can no longer be treated as separate from the reality in the entire area under Israel's control."

The power of this report was not in the accusation, delivered by an Israeli organization, that Israel was practicing apartheid; Yesh Din, an Israeli human rights organization committed to protecting Palestinians living under Israel's military regime in the West Bank, had leveled that charge six months earlier, as had several leading Israeli public figures. Indeed, numerous Israeli and international voices have warned for years that Israeli practices, left unchecked, would amount to a system of apartheid. What was different about B'Tselem's analysis was its challenge to a pervasive myth, one to which much of the international community subscribes, that Israel's military rule in the occupied Palestinian territory can be treated as somehow separate from the state of Israel. Instead, the organization characterized Israel as a single "regime that governs the entire area."

Three months later, Human Rights Watch, the world's leading international human rights organization, echoed this finding when it issued an exhaustive report, including extensive legal analysis, which concluded damningly that a historic threshold had been crossed: Israeli authorities were committing crimes against humanity, in the form of apartheid and persecution of the Palestinian people. Beyond the South African origin of the term, apartheid is universally prohibited under the 1973 International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, and the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which also prohibits the crime of persecution.

To justify their claim of a watershed, B'Tselem and Human Rights Watch cited a number of developments: Israel's continuing de facto annexation of Palestinian territory; the laws with constitutional status within Israel enshrining Jewish supremacy; the entrenchment of Israel's system of control over Palestinians; the demise of the peace process; and the efforts of the US to ratify and formalize this reality under the guise of a nominal commitment to a two-state solution. For both organizations, as for many other analysts, activists, and policymakers, the convention of treating Israel's occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip as temporary--and therefore a matter that could potentially be resolved outside the confines and control of the state of Israel--was no longer an accurate description of reality. There was no indication of anything other than the permanence of Israel's hold over "the entire area," as B'Tselem had put it.

LIKE ALL GREAT LOVE STORIES:

3. There are lovely subtleties and secret puns in the screenplay. When Walter first visits the Dietrichson house and is waiting for Phyllis to descend the staircase wearing her alluring anklet, the maid tells him the liquor cabinet is locked, and he replies that he brought his own keys.

I think, too, of the movie's last line ("I love you, too") as MacMurray dies in Robinson's arms, a scene that poet Suzanne Lummis beautifully characterizes as "the pietà that closes Double Indemnity, where instead of mother and crucified son it's Boss kneeling by his fallen Star Employee, insurance salesman Walter Neff, blood seeping from his bullet wound. Turns out it was a love story after all--the kind the Greeks called philia."

STRUCTURE:

The NYPD in the mid-1960s was thoroughly corrupt, racist and violent. Officers, individually and collectively, reserved their worst behavior for the city's segregated Black neighborhoods, like Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Brownsville. Taking bribes from building contractors, tow truck drivers, funeral directors and defense lawyers was as much a part of the job as clocking in. They ran protection rackets on sex traffickers and heroin dealers, generating substantial weekly payments that would be split among the men working these patrols, and required local businesses to pay smaller amounts, which would be divvied up and spread around the local precinct. To anyone skeptical, read the Knapp Commission's report.

Police in the city treated Black neighborhoods, especially Harlem, as crime reservations, containment areas for drugs, gambling and sex work. It's not that the NYPD, from rank-and-file high up into the executive corps, permitted these illicit industries to exist. Instead, they worked hard to make sure these outlets of misery and ruin flourished, both out of selfish financial motives and racial spite, given that the NYPD was 95 percent white. Multiple memoirs from men on the force during this time establish that they worked with "a deep sea of racism and bitterness, poison and untamed cruelty in our souls."

And yes, the police were also violent, ranging from arbitrary roughness on the street, to sadistic squad room beatings, to shootings. Of course Black New Yorkers opposed this. But they also wanted safer communities, which the NYPD assiduously denied them. They had to live with all manner of random street crime, especially that which is concomitant with an impoverished neighborhood rife with addiction. More policing and less police violence and discourtesy are not mutually exclusive, or at least they should not be.

Some of this behavior has changed. It is much more difficult for police departments today to be so outwardly corrupt that they effectively act as untouchable criminal organizations. But many aspects remain. Police departments across the country have long used drivers as ATMs to fund local budgets, frequently targeting Black motorists for heightened enforcement of minor traffic laws. Not only do these stops engender bitterness, but the resulting fines also threaten to financially ruin people already living on the edge, and too often escalate into totally unnecessary shows of force. Ticket and arrest quotas demand that people be brought into the criminal justice system without good reason.

The racist assumption that Black and Brown men are more likely to be up to no good led to the explosion of stop-and-frisk in New York City, a practice the state approved in 1965. For decades, the police practiced the on-street search of someone who aroused an officer's suspicion, including "furtive movements" or simply being in a location with a high crime rate. The number of these searches peaked at  685,724 in 2011. Since 2014, the department instructed officers to only detain people when they have a strong suspicion of criminal activity, and the numbers dropped into the five-figure range.

For the last two decades, ninety percent of those officers detained were Black or Latinx, though the city is about 45 percent white. Ninety percent were released, having been found not engaging in or possessing anything illegal. Put another way, the NYPD was stopping and frisking tens of to hundreds of thousands of people, every year, who were doing nothing illegal. There is no evidence the practice measurably reduces crime.

ALL IN YOUR MIND:

Imagine a medicine that could help people process disturbing memories, sparking behavioural changes rather than merely burying and suppressing symptoms and trauma. For the millions suffering with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and depression, such remedies for their daily struggles could be on the horizon. Psychiatry is rapidly heading towards a new frontier - and it's all thanks to psychedelics.

In an advanced phase trial published in Nature in May, patients in the US, Israel and Canada who received doses of the psychedelic stimulant MDMA, alongside care from a therapist, were more than twice as likely than the placebo group to no longer have PTSD, for which there is currently no effective treatment, months later. The researchers concluded that the findings, which reflected those of six earlier-stage trials, cemented the treatment as a startlingly successful potential breakthrough therapy. There are now hopes that MDMA therapy could receive approval for certain treatments from US regulators by 2023, or perhaps even earlier - with psilocybin, the active ingredient of magic mushrooms, not far behind in the process. (A small study at Johns Hopkins University, published last year, suggested it could be four times more effective than traditional antidepressants.)

You could say interest in psychedelics is mushrooming.

PURITAN SUPERIORITY:

One in three might make you think, "wow, West Virginians are lazy!" But actually, they're average for the U.S. A study by Barbend revealed that 32% of Americans would prefer to drive instead of walk compared to 31% of West Virginians, making West Virginia just slightly less lazy than your average American.

Two states reported that over half their population would drive to a destination barely further than across the street; 63% North Dakotans and 52% South Carolinians said they would drive instead of walk.

The states that would walk the most are Vermont at 13%, New Jersey at 17% and New Hampshire at 18%.

GASLIGHTING THE BUBBLE:

More than a year after Fox News fired him over complaints about "willful sexual misconduct in the workplace," Ed Henry has quietly returned to right-wing media, landing at a fringe outlet with ties to Steve Bannon.

Real America's Voice is a fledgling internet and satellite TV network starring mostly obscure MAGA hangers-on, with the exception of former Donald Trump confidants like Steve Bannon, whose daily War Room podcast airs on the channel, and the ex-president's Ukraine conspiracy architect John Solomon, who partnered with RAV to produce "news" content for the network.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Trucks arrive at the brown hill like an army of ants, then crawl up, whipping dust into the sky before dumping trash unceremoniously at the top. What happens later sets the Buenos Aires landfill apart from most others in South America: Planet-warming methane leaking from the trash is turned into power.

Norte III -- a 1,200-acre site whose garbage hills draw the eye in table-flat Buenos Aires -- recently activated a new power station that runs on gas piped from under the hill through tree-trunk-sized black tubes. The five megawatts generated by landfill operator Ceamse may be enough to run only several thousand homes, but they represent a victory in a global campaign against methane that's gathering momentum at the United Nations climate summit in Scotland.

Methane rising from the hill known as module D became a global hot spot, with rotting food creating a plume so dense that it could be seen from space, according to a June image from geoanalytics firm GHGSat. [...]

Landfill gas accounts for a fifth of methane releases, according to a report this year by the Climate & Clean Air Coalition and the UN Environment Programme. Countries including Mexico, France and Thailand are increasingly capturing it to feed power production, and in the U.S. around 500 trash dumps produce energy. As part of the redoubled effort to contain leaks, the U.S. is aiming to capture 70% of landfill gas emissions, President Joe Biden said at COP26.

THANKS, COVID:

American workers are hoping that the tight pandemic labor market will translate into better pay. It might just mean robots take their jobs instead.

Labor shortages and rising wages are pushing U.S. business to invest in automation. A recent Federal Reserve survey of chief financial officers found that at firms with difficulty hiring, one-third are implementing or exploring automation to replace workers. In earnings calls over the past month, executives from a range of businesses confirmed the trend.

Domino's Pizza Inc. is "putting in place equipment and technology that reduce the amount of labor that is required to produce our dough balls," said Chief Executive Officer Ritch Allison.

Mark Coffey, a group vice president at Hormel Foods Corp., said the maker of Spam spread and Skippy peanut butter is "ramping up our investments in automation" because of the "tight labor supply."

The mechanizing of mundane tasks has been underway for generations. It's made remarkable progress in the past decade: The number of industrial robots installed in the world's factories more than doubled in that time, to about 3 million. Automation has been spreading into service businesses too.

LAUGHINGSTOCKS:

When a Taliban militant meets Afghan pop star Ayrana Sayeed, he tries to charm her. 

"If you marry me, I will have a beard and a moustache and tanks. And I will build you a nightclub!"

The scene, completely unimaginable in real life with the singer now based in exile after fleeing in the wake of the Taliban's takeover, is part of a satirical YouTube animation series that has captivated Afghans in recent weeks.

It shows Sayeed appearing to the militant in his dreams. But then the man, sleeping with his Kalashnikov slung around his shoulder, wakes up to reality to find he is in fact hugging a bearded fellow militant. [...]

Satire can also make the political figures targeted "think twice" about the way they govern and the measures they take, said Zafar, who posts his work under the name "Imam Musa".

One of his jokes recently posted on Afghanistan International, a widely read news site for Afghans, referenced vegetables to poke fun at the Taliban. 

"A new committee has been formed within the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice to discuss the shape of cucumbers, eggplants and pumpkins" -- in case they resemble sexual organs. 

For the same reasons, "bakers now have two weeks to produce bread that is neither round nor long," he continued.

His post echoed the televised statements of a pro-Taliban cleric who at the end of September advised women "not to put on perfume when they leave their homes", nor to wear shoes with heels or click them on the ground lest they arouse men.

"The ignorance and narrow-mindedness of the Taliban energises satirists," said Imam Musa.

POPULISM ISN'T POPULAR, SO...:

WHY THE rIGHT IS TRYING TO PROP UP CARBONS:

"The low-carbon transition could lead to a period of global financial and political instability due to the combination of deep structural change, widespread financial loss and reorganization in financial and market power worldwide," a group of researchers from British universities said in a landmark paper, published Thursday in the journal Nature.

Their calculations show more than half of Russia's estimated $3.9 trillion stock of fossil fuel assets -- such as oil and gas rigs, pipelines, extraction facilities and other infrastructure to support the country's vital energy sector -- would become "stranded," or effectively worth nothing, by 2036.

SYSTEMIC:

Masked Israeli settlers were filmed throwing stones at a Palestinian home near Burin in the central West Bank on Saturday, while Israeli soldiers on the scene appeared to stand idly by.

PITY POOR JARED DIAMOND:

An unknown population of humans that left few traces on the landscape of the Falkland Islands may have brought large fox-like dogs still present when Europeans first visited the archipelago in the late 17th century.

The Falkland Islands sit roughly 300 miles east of Argentina in the southern Atlantic Ocean. They were uninhabited when English captain John Strong first visited in the late 17th century and weren't settled until the 1760s or 1770s. Whalers and seal hunters bolstered the area's population in the 19th century, then Argentina and the United Kingdom went through a series of sometimes bloody conflicts over control of the islands over the next two centuries -- a dispute that continues today.

"It's still an incredibly remote and sparsely populated archipelago," said Kit Hamley, a graduate student in paleoecology at the University of Maine in Orono.

But the warrah, a fox-like canid related to other dogs, also sometimes called the Falkland Islands wolf, was ubiquitous on the archipelago before Europeans ever arrived -- and they were even strangely docile with humans, according to historical accounts.

MAN, HAVING NOT FLOWN YET, EVERYONE KNEW IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE:

In 1870, during the Franco-Prussian War, the Prussian army besieged Paris, Penaud's hometown. Bored and laid low by a bone disease, the 24-year-old distracted himself by improving on Cayley's plaything, substituting rubber bands for bone. Friends and acquaintances enjoyed watching the propeller hoist his toy-like contraption skyward. When peace returned, Penaud continued to fiddle with miniature flying machines. At the Gardens of the Tuileries in central Paris, he demonstrated a rubber band-powered "planophore." The unit had two bat-like wings with a span measuring 20 inches, a long, narrow body, and a vertical stabilizer. A propeller's spoon-shaped blades pushed the mechanism aloft. Members of the Société Aéronautique watched the thing rise and circle to a gentle landing--the first self-powered flying machine resembling what became the airplane. Penaud, who credited his yen for aviation with mitigating his bone condition, undertook a series of unsuccessful flying projects with beautiful and imaginative designs. In 1876 he took his own life.

Penaud's miniature helicopter design survived him, crossing the Atlantic to be marketed as a children's toy. In 1878 Milton Wright, a circuit-riding bishop of the United Brethren, a Protestant sect, bought one of these toys while traveling among congregations in Ohio. Milton and wife Susan lived in Dayton. They had five children; their youngest sons were Orville, seven, and Wilbur, 11. Arriving home for one of his brief stays, Milton summoned Orville and Wilbur and told his sons to watch. He tossed a Penaud helicopter their way. The toy rose to the room's ceiling, hovered, and descended. Fascinated, Wilbur and Orville tried to build larger versions. This first collaboration started a partnership that matured and deepened. Among the brothers' first discoveries was that any increase in size hampered the task of getting the model to fly. In time the Wrights' wind tunnel research showed to that if a flying machine's weight doubled, its motive power had to increase by a factor of eight to keep the machine aloft.

This reality, which had vexed Penaud and other would-be aviators, drove the Wrights to keep tinkering until, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, in 1903, they got their wood-and-fabric biplane Wright Flyer aloft, pushed by a propeller connected to a 12-horsepower four-cylinder water-cooled internal combustion engine with an aluminum crankcase. Orville, who had won a coin toss, was at the controls. Press coverage enveloped the brothers, who explained that a toy had set them on their path. Both Wrights described Penaud's helicopter as a "bat"--Orville doing so when being deposed for a patent lawsuit. The Penaud helicopter became known as the "Wright Bat," and as such is still being sold. 

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON...:

A sizeable portion of Americans believe that God has "granted America a special role in history'.

This was one finding from the Public Religion Research Institute's annual survey of American values. [...]

In similar findings, most Americans overall (74%) feel that their country has always been a force for good in the world, rising to 88% among white evangelicals.

IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

For months, Democrats have been battling amongst themselves, with some members more attached to the infrastructure bill and others more attached to the social-welfare bill. But ultimately, time and again, it has become clear that the two bills were inextricably linked, and would rise and fall together.

Senate Republicans got the ball rolling when 18 of them decided support the unnecessary infrastructure bill, with its $550 billion in new spending, and send it to the House for final passage. 

On Friday night, after months of back and forth, it looked like Biden's agenda could suffer another setback, as not all progressives were sold on the idea of agreeing to pass the infrastructure bill with only a commitment from holdouts in the House that they would vote for the social spending bill in a few weeks, once the CBO analysis comes out. With only three "no" votes to spare within her own caucus, Pelosi lost six Democrats -- enough to sink the bill. Yet 13 Republicans swooped in to rescue Pelosi, provide Biden with the biggest victory of his presidency, and put the rest of his reckless agenda on a glide path to passage in the House.

PUTTING THE "Q" IN QUARTERBACK:

IF THE rIGHT DIDN'T HAVE DIS-INFORMATION THEY'D HAVE NONE AT ALL:

THE A-FRAME:

McWhorter... argues that the cultural left, along with major institutions and companies, have gone too far in embracing "anti-racist" ideas.

Much of it relates to the way two prominent writers about race have influenced public opinion about racism. Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Antiracist and Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility have both landed on bestseller lists since last summer, after widespread protests erupted over George Floyd's killing. [...]

Why is it that you assert that people who are pushing a particular kind of anti-racism are practicing something like a religion?

Part of many religions is that at a certain point, you're supposed to suspend disbelief. At a certain point, you're supposed to stop using logic and you're just supposed to, for example, believe. You're just supposed to have faith. That is the way this new anti-racism goes in many cases. ...

This is a religion where instead of it being about your faith in Jesus, it's about showing that you know that racism exists above all else, including basic compassion. That's religious.

And then also, the way we talk about white privilege is eerily consonant with the way one talks about original sin. You have it from the beginning, it's a stain that you'll never get rid of. You're supposed to always think about it. It's there regardless of the condition of your life, and you're going to die with it. So white privilege becomes the original sin that you're supposed to live in a kind of atonement for.

Would you agree with your critics that racism, systemic racism is real and present now?

Yes. It's funny, I'm grappling with this idea that the response to me is to say "he doesn't know systemic racism exists." I think part of it is that that's a very clumsy term. Yes, I know that those inequities exist. I think that those inequities must be battled. The issue is, what do you do to battle them? And I say, telling people not to be racist or thinking of those inequities as some abstract version of bigotry doesn't help people who need help.

Would you also argue to lower the penalty for racist speech? That essentially people should be a little more accepting of unacceptable language by other people and just be willing to debate them rather than push them off the stage.

I think that there's an extent to which any society is going to have taboos, and that taboos can be useful. But I also think that we are tending to take that sort of thing a little too far in the name of the idea that our job is to signal that we know racism exists.

And so, yeah, I kind of like the way it was about 20, maybe 15 years ago. But we've gotten to the point that we're so focused on what people say and how they say it that we're paying more attention to that than to the perhaps less glamorous work of getting out on the ground and trying to change society.

BUT THEY ARE RACIALLY PALESTINIAN...:

A confidential Israeli dossier detailing alleged links between Palestinian human rights groups and an internationally designated terrorist organization contains little concrete evidence and failed to convince European countries to stop funding the groups, the Associated Press reported Friday night.

The 74-page document appears to have been prepared by Israel's Shin Bet internal security service and shared with European governments in May. The Associated Press obtained the document from the online +972 Magazine, which was the first to report on it, along with the Hebrew-language Local Call.

PURITAN NATION:

THE TRUMP BRAND:

FASTER REPLACEMENT, PLEASE:

Muslim Americans gave more to charity in 2020 than non-Muslims, we found in a new study. They are also more likely to volunteer, we learned.

Only 1.1% of all Americans are Muslim, and their average income is lower than non-Muslims'. But as we explained in our Muslim American Giving 2021 report, their donations encompassed 1.4% of all giving from individuals. U.S. Muslims, a highly diverse and quickly growing minority, contributed an estimated US$4.3 billion in total donations to mostly nonreligious causes over the course of the year.

NEED TO ADMIT A WHOLE LOT MORE REFUGEES:

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer said the report shows that Germany is one of the safest countries in the world

Crime in Germany fell by 15% between 2005 and 2019, according to official data released to the newspapers of the Funke media group Friday.

The federal government's Periodic Security Report, which is due to be presented later in Berlin, showed the decline was heavily influenced by a fall in burglaries and thefts of other assets.

The report said the number of cases of serious violent crime had also fallen.

Interior Minister Horst Seehofer told Funke that the report went beyond statistics to show that "Germany is one of the safest countries in the world."