IT'S A GAME:

For decades the people making decisions about what should be in a puzzle have been straight white men according to Taussig, who said crosswords were a "very much elite, hyper educated, white, New York City thing, where if you didn't know chess and your classics you were screwed."

When Shortz became editor of The Times crossword in 1993, things began to change. Shortz brought pop culture into crosswords, Taussig said. Yet Shortz doesn't always get it right. A few years ago, Shortz included the word "beaner" in a puzzle. "It's baseball slang for a ball that hits the batter's head. But it's also, as I did not know at the time, an offensive term for Hispanics," he said. "There was a lot of anger over that."

Even Sharp, who is one of Shortz's biggest critics, said that "Shortz changed the New York Times, radically in terms of how fun it was...turning away from being a test about arcane knowledge and toward a kind of playful, wordplay-oriented kind of puzzle."

Although crossword constructors and solvers are overwhelmingly left-wing--Shortz surveyed attendees of his American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in March 2017 and found that close to 90 percent voted for Clinton--there is no consensus among editors, podcasters, and solvers on what should be included in a puzzle.

So how do constructors decide what's in and what's out? Patrick Berry, a constructor whose puzzles have appeared in The New York Times and The New Yorker, said that he strives to keep his puzzles "apolitical," which is difficult. "It becomes an endless series of judgment calls. Is this slang term offensive? Is that world leader merely unpleasant, or too toxic to even mention?" Berry said.

While there are some answers that constructors and solvers all agreed were objectionable, such as racial slurs, the community is divided on other types of clues. Berry thinks that mainstream crosswords shouldn't have "Curse words, certain bodily functions...notorious figures like Harvey Weinstein [because] puzzles are meant to be entertaining, and that stuff generally isn't." Yet omitting these terms is a political choice as well. Some people (me) find curse words and bodily functions very entertaining, and who counts as a notorious figure is up for debate. While Berry won't put references to Nazis in his puzzles, not everyone feels that way.

Shortz will include Nazi if it is clued in a non-offensive way. "I've had Nazi in the puzzle a number of times. But usually I clued it Raiders of the Lost Ark villain...or 'Soup Nazi' from Seinfeld," he said. A reference to notorious Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, however, caused him to reject a puzzle. "I just found that so offensive, that I just didn't want that in the New York Times crossword," Shortz said.

In response to the "beaner" incident, the Times created a diversity panel that reads over every crossword to find terms that could cause offense. "The standard we use now...is, taken out of context, is the answer, something that is likely to offend people," Shortz said.

Recently the panel flagged "pig," because its clue was "gluttonous." "One of the people...objected to that ...because in their mind, it suggested fat shaming," he said. "And I went to the dictionary...gluttonous is basically one who overeats. It's not a matter of fat shaming," he claimed." It's just what the word means." But he took the word out so as not to offend readers.

PLANET JAMES:

The frostiness began thawing in 2019, and the band committed to a short run of four shows that summer. MMJ's live gigs are legendary (in 2008, the group played a career-defining four-hour set at Bonnaroo...in the rain), and the shows, including two nights at Colorado's famed Red Rocks, rekindled the spark that had gone missing. "I knew it was right the minute I walked onstage," James recalls. "We found a way to enjoy each other's company again." 

Rejuvenated, they reconvened at 64Sound in L.A. to take a swing at recording new material. James functions as something of a benevolent dictator for the band, sending members voice memos of music and lyrics the night before, which then get fleshed out in the studio the next day. On previous records, other personnel would join the sessions, but this time, it was just the five of them. "Our recording process has been grandiose at times," Broemel says. "This time we needed to be alone." 

The result, My Morning Jacket, the band's ninth studio album, marks a milestone. It's the record that finally captures the ferociousness, the moodiness, and the delicacy they've honed so well onstage. "It feels like the world is so loaded with information right now and grand statements," James says of self-titling the album. "It made sense to us to just let the band and the music speak for itself." 

My Morning Jacket does just that, moving seamlessly among soaring rock anthems ("Regularly Scheduled Programming" and the earthshaking "Complex"), wistful pop melancholia ("In Color" and the twinkling "Out of Range"), and haunting psychedelic gems, including the nine-minute masterpiece "The Devil's in the Details," inspired by James's trips to the mall during a tumultuous adolescence. "I was ruthlessly bullied until I was like twenty," says the singer, who's now forty-three. 

James is one of music's most mysterious personalities, part shaman, part seventies soul spinner (Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On" is his all-time favorite), part guitar god. "I've never felt like I fit in on this planet," he readily admits. And the pandemic did him no favors. The band finished recording at the start of March 2020 and was eager to get back on the road, but the world had other ideas. "I got profoundly depressed," James says quietly. "I found myself alone. I felt like I was thrown into a soundless, loveless void, and it really, really got to me."

One of the album's best tracks is perhaps also its simplest: the sizzling "Lucky to Be Alive," which takes on added meaning in light of the pandemic.

THE DESANTIS BRAND:

Antisemitic rallies were held near Orlando, Florida, on Saturday and Sunday, with some two dozen people in neo-Nazi gear waving swastikas, stomping on Israeli flags, and yelling antisemitic epithets at passersby.

While various officials in the state condemned the protest, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis came under fire as his spokesperson expressed doubt over whether the demonstrators were actually antisemitic...

THE AXIS POWERS:

The flags of the UAE and Israel fly at the Expo 2020 Dubai in the gulf emirate on 31 January 2022. [Getty]

Israel's burgeoning relationships with various autocratic Arab regimes represent one of the most significant developments in the modern Middle East. 

Though these high-level connections have been broadening considerably for over two decades, they have evolved from largely behind-the-scenes cooperation to more overt forms of coordination, particularly following the 2011 Arab Uprisings and culminating in the 2020 "Abraham Accords," originally signed between Israel, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates, and later expanded to include Morocco and Sudan.  [...]

"Understanding this shared desire of both Tel Aviv and various Arab regimes to maintain the regional authoritarian status quo is critical to understanding the full scope of these relationships.

Though the lens of realpolitik certainly captures critical elements of these relationships, they extend beyond just geopolitics: there is a strong normative component rooted in a shared counterrevolutionary ethos among these actors that views democracy -- anywhere in the region -- as anathema to their own survival. 

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

[L]et's do what any good consultant would call a deep dive into the scenarios behind the McKinsey report.

McKinsey's estimates are based on climate scenarios developed by the Network for Greening the Financial System, a consortium of over 60 central banks and monetary authorities. The net-zero-by-2050 scenario leading to the additional $3.5 trillion in annual costs cannot stand in isolation. Instead, it must be compared to current policies already on the books. Those policies, too, lead to additional investments down the line, mostly (though not exclusively) on low-carbon assets.

All told, the difference between current policies and net zero by 2050 is only $25 trillion in total spending over the next 30 years, or less than an extra $1 trillion per year on average.

The all-important difference: The net-zero path ramps up spending this decade, reaching its annual peak of around $10 trillion in the 2030s, before falling again. The current policy scenario assumes a much slower ramp-up, reaching its peak by 2050. Essentially, the net-zero path front-loads investments. The reason why is what Saul Griffith, author of Electrify, describes as the shift from fuels to capital: upfront investments to save on fuel costs later. 

These fuel costs savings do not yet even include the minor detail of saving the planet by reducing climate risks. Another just-published report, by Aon Plc, found around $330 billion in weather and climate-related economic losses in 2021 alone, the third-costliest year on record after adjusting for inflation. The European Central Bank is looking to a climate stress test that factors in single-year losses of up to 45% in homes exposed to flooding, wildfires and other climate risks. Overall global climate damages easily exceed the cost of action, justifying limiting temperatures to 1.5°C through pure economic reasoning. 

Comparing costs now with benefits later is precisely the virtue and the political stumbling block of the low-carbon, high-efficiency transition. 

REAGANESQUE:

Irish Justice Minister Helen McEntee says it is a "once in a generation scheme"

Thousands of undocumented migrants and their families will have a pathway to Irish citizenship under a government scheme which opened on Monday.

The Department of Justice estimates there could up to 17,000 undocumented people living in Ireland, including 3,000 children, RTÉ reports.

Those who have lived in Ireland for the past four years can apply for official permission to live there.

THE DESANTIS FLU:

Almost half of the US Covid-19 hospitalisations this winter could have been averted if the country had matched the vaccination coverage of leading European countries, according to a Financial Times analysis of the Omicron variant's impact on either side of the Atlantic.

The data show large pockets of unvaccinated or partially vaccinated people in the US have placed more pressure on hospitals during the Omicron wave than in European nations with higher immunisation rates. The analysis supports the findings of scientists and accounts of frontline medics who say lower vaccination levels are perpetuating the pandemic in the US.

The number of Covid patients in US hospitals on January 19 would have peaked at 91,000 instead of 161,000 if the US had the same rates of vaccine coverage in each age-group as Denmark, 100,000 if the US had matched the UK, and 109,000 if the US uptake rates looked like Portugal's, the analysis showed.

Across the seven months since July, spanning the Delta and Omicron waves, US daily patient numbers would have averaged 39,000 -- rather than the 80,000 recorded -- had its vaccination coverage tracked that of Portugal.

VLAD WHO?:

"There will be nowhere to hide for Putin's oligarchs," Truss told Sky News, adding that "nothing is off the table" when asked about Britain's ability to seize property in London.

President Vladimir Putin's spokesman Dmitry Peskov described Truss' warning as an "extremely alarming" statement that "undermines investment attractiveness and the United Kingdom's attractiveness as such."

"It's not often you see or hear such direct threats to attack a business," Peskov told reporters.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Israel's two chief rabbis led a demonstration by thousands of Orthodox youths outside the Knesset Sunday calling on Religious Affairs Minister Matan Kahana to abandon major reforms of state-controlled Jewish religious services.

Kahana's plans include easing the process of conversion to Judaism and broadening the range of organizations qualified to give kosher certification, thereby weakening the ultra-Orthodox hegemony, including the Chief Rabbinate's control over Jewish religious life cycle events in Israel.

His plans, in particular the changes to the conversion services, have drawn sharp criticism from ultra-Orthodox figures, including Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi David Lau.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Eastman penned the infamous two-page memo (which he later called "a preliminary, incomplete draft") and a subsequent six-page memo outlining a legally bogus plan to snatch the presidential election from the voters. The scheme had Vice President Mike Pence duly counting Electoral College votes on Jan. 6, 2021 but "when he gets to Arizona" announcing "that he has multiple slates of electors." The plan entailed filing with the National Archives and submitting to Congress illegitimate slates of electors from seven states that Trump lost, a ruse designed ultimately to give Pence cover--in Eastman's words--to "gavel[] President Trump as re-elected."

On Jan. 4, 2021, Eastman met with Trump and Pence in the Oval Office to discuss these plans. Two days later, standing next to Rudy Giuliani at the White House rally on Jan. 6th, Eastman shouted: "All we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at one o'clock he let the legislatures of the states look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not!" The crowd then moved toward the Capitol to see that his demand was carried out.

By refusing to follow Eastman's instructions, Pence undoubtedly saved the United States from constitutional catastrophe. And he did so while risking his own life: The images of Pence being escorted from the Senate chamber, of the gallows erected to hang him as a traitor, of rioters chanting "hang Mike Pence," will be lasting reminders of that day's disturbing events.

The fake electors scheme is rife with criminal red flags, including possible forgery, conspiracy, and election fraud. Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco stated last week that prosecutors "are looking at" the fake electoral ballots submitted by Republicans from seven states that Biden won. Meanwhile, Eastman's memos have landed him in trouble with the California Bar for possible violations of legal ethics rules, including counseling his client to violate the law, misstating the facts and the law to his client and to a tribunal, filing a meritless claim, and failing to uphold the Constitution. And in response to the Jan. 6th Committee's subpoena, Eastman said that he would avail himself of his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination--which he reportedly did 146 times during an interview with the committee.

It is worth noting that Eastman's Jan. 6th memos weren't his only attempt to overturn the Electoral College results. He filed on Trump's behalf a motion in support of an illegitimate lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton seeking to cancel the Electoral College votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (The Supreme Court tossed it out on Dec. 11, 2020.) And Eastman pushed the envelope earlier in 2020 as well: He wrote an August 2020 op-ed in Newsweek claiming that Kamala Harris is ineligible to be vice president because she supposedly fails to meet the constitutional requirement of being a "natural born Citizen"--a notion so explosive (not to mention wrong) that the magazine's editors felt compelled to append an awkward apology atop the article.

Let's turn back now to Eastman's clash with the Jan. 6th Committee. Last week, Judge Carter denied Eastman's emergency motion to enjoin the committee's requests for information, slicing through his arguments like a hot knife through butter.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

In a warning hailed by the United States as "very, very strong", German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock has said the pipeline will be part of a sanctions package if Russia made a move on Ukraine.

Long viewed as a problem by Western allies and Ukraine, the 10-billion-euro ($12 billion) pipeline had been seen by former chancellor Angela Merkel's government as a key stop-gap option while Germany shifts to renewables.

But critics have repeatedly warned that it would only serve to increase German dependence on Russian energy, and Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky has branded it a "dangerous geopolitical weapon of the Kremlin".

Yet weaning Germany off Russian energy will be painful.

"If we give up Russian gas and Nord Stream 2, it won't be lights out immediately, but it will be expensive, it will exacerbate unanswered gas supply questions for the future, and we'll have a problem," warned chairman of the mining, chemistry sector union IG BCE, Michael Vassiliadis. 

With time pressing, the German government is launching a massive programme to build wind turbines covering two percent of the country's land surface, and require the installation of solar panels on roofs. 

"Phasing out the burning of fossil fuels also strengthens Europe in geopolitical terms and protects the climate," Economy Minister Robert Habeck said earlier this month.

AMEN:

A full-page advertisement in The New York Times on Saturday urged athletes and corporate sponsors to "walk away" from the Winter Olympic Games, set to begin on Friday in Beijing, to protest China's persecution of the Uighurs.

"We urge the athletes and the sponsoring corporations to walk away from these games unless Beijing takes steps to reunite Uyghur families. And we urge the world's citizens to embrace the cause of this persecuted population," the ad stated.

The ad was paid for by the Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity and was signed by the French Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, the former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky, and Eli Wiesel's son Elisha Wiesel. Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986 for his work speaking out about the lessons of the Holocaust and bringing attention to other genocides, died in 2016.

TARGET RICH ENVIRONMENTALISM:

Jochen Homann told the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that "further steps are missing" before a German-based subsidiary set up by Russian owner Gazprom could be added to the commercial register.

"A conclusion will unlikely be possible in the first half of the year," Homann said in an interview to be published on Monday.

The mammoth project has been completed in September last year, but no gas is flowing. With tensions escalating in Ukraine, both Berlin and Washington have warned that the project could be sanctioned if Russia launches an invasion of its neighbor.

WE CRUSHED THOSE TOO:

If there is a historical precedent for the truckers' revolt in Canada, and the populist protests in so many other parts of the world, I would like to know what it is. [...]

Note too that these movements are spontaneous and from "below:" they are populated mostly by the very workers whom governments shoved to face the pathogen two years ago, while the ruling class hid behind their laptops in their living rooms. It was the lockdowns that sharply divided the classes and the mandates that are imposing segregation. Now we are facing a modern allegory to the peasants' revolt in the Middle Ages. 

DON'T LET THEM OFF THE FLOOR NOW:

BEAUTY IS NOT SUBJECTIVE:

Newman did not want to be misunderstood as one interested in an aesthetic of beauty which neither leads to nothing beyond itself nor becomes a mere sort of self-advertising for the aesthetic self.

He finds this beauty in nature first because nature is alive and points beyond itself toward its Creator. Nature, in other words, is obviously alive and is not a "sullen" wall or an "eyeless tower" or a "tongueless" hall. Nature breathes, moves, and speaks, the effect of the "master-hand" hidden both behind and within. It's the poet's master-hand, then, which lets "rich nature ... Unfold her varied plan."

Much like his sermon voice, however, Newman suppressed the kind of poetry of, say, Wordsworthian dramatic self-advertisement, during which a spot of time leads him to utter that he again is strong; rather Newman is intending something beyond his personality and thus attempting to reach his auditors' hearts. Near the end of his sermon "Wisdom and Innocence," for example, he draws poetically upon the image of a garden at the close of day "when the shades lengthen, and the evening comes, and the busy world is hushed, and the fever for life is over and our work is done."

The point is not abstract but clear that Newman held a lively hope in the brighter and more beautiful world of the eternal heaven which, as Father Nicholls writes, is "not merely a future reality, but ... a present one awaiting its unveiling." For Newman beauty is to be treated with caution and reverence rather than a mere "superficial sense of aesthetic pleasure."

VLAD WHO?:

"This package would send a clear message to the Kremlin - we will not tolerate their destabilising activity, and we will always stand with our NATO allies in the face of Russian hostility," Johnson said in a statement late on Saturday.

The offer could double the number of UK troops in eastern Europe and see "defensive weapons" sent to Estonia, Johnson's office said. There are about 1,150 UK troops in the region at the moment.

"I have ordered our Armed Forces to prepare to deploy across Europe next week, ensuring we are able to support our NATO allies," Johnson said.

IT TAKES A TONKIN VILLAGE:

JUST A "CONCERNED PARENT":

 In a rare rebuke of prosecutors, a federal judge handed down a jail sentence to a California man who spent some four years sending dozens of racist death threats on personalized, handmade postcards, court records show.

Michael Anthony Gallagher, 71, pleaded guilty last August to mailing a threatening postcard to Rep. Maxine Waters, signed "KKK," but his crimes from 2016 to 2020 went well beyond that single offense. The U.S. Department of Justice argued a one-year probation term, and no jail, was a sufficient consequence.

But at the December sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Richard Seeborg decided to jail Gallagher for four months, according to a minute order of the hearing. Gallagher was ordered to report to the Bureau of Prisons by the first week of March to begin his sentence.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

The film opens with soaring music, footage of white children laughing and playing, beautiful vistas of classical European architecture. Fifteen seconds in, the music turns dark. We see images of dark-skinned youth, chaos, and blood. Then there's a foreboding black-and-white shot of a man in profile, hunched at a desk, the curvature of his nose prominent in silhouette.

He's the one responsible for all of this, the brown assault on white tranquility. Europe, we are told, is this predator's "main hunting area."

This is the beginning of Tucker Carlson's new "documentary" for Fox Nation, the right-wing media giant's streaming service. It is titled Hungary vs. Soros: The Fight for Civilization, and it purports to tell the story of how a plucky little democracy in Central Europe has carved out a conservative model in the face of a relentless assault by the forces of global liberalism personified by George Soros, the Hungarian-American financier.

The story is a lie. Hungary is nominally a democracy but it has made a turn toward authoritarianism in the last decade; Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has painted Soros as a scapegoat whose allegedly nefarious influence justifies Orbán's anti-democratic moves. The documentary amplifies this propaganda, treating the Jewish philanthropist as the spider at the center of a global web of conspiracy.

"It's appalling to see Tucker Carlson & Fox invoke the kind of anti-Semitic tropes typically found in white supremacist media," writes Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League (an anti-hate group). "There's no excuse for this kind of fearmongering, especially in light of intensifying anti-Semitism."

NO LONGER A WESTERN NATION:

IT'S A RICO CASE:

THANKS, NEVER TRUMP AGAINERS:

CONSTITUTION SCHMONSHTITUTION:

 In a sworn declaration submitted as part of an ongoing federal court challenge, a senior Republican state senator with redistricting experience said he believes his party violated federal voting laws when it drew new boundaries for state Senate District 10 in the Fort Worth area.

"Having participated in the 2011 and 2013 Senate Select Redistricting Committee proceedings, and having read the prior federal court decision regarding SD10, it was obvious to me that the renewed effort to dismantle SD 10 violated the Voting Rights Act and the U.S. Constitution," state Sen. Kel Seliger said in a declaration signed in November.

The statement from the Amarillo Republican emerged this week as part of a dayslong hearing before a three-judge panel considering a lawsuit that claims the district was intentionally reconfigured to discriminate against voters of color in Tarrant County.

"DO NOTHING, IT'S THE COMMON COLD":

VLAD WHO?

"I don't consider the situation now more tense than before. There is a feeling abroad that there is war here. That's not the case," he said January 28. "I am not saying an escalation is not possible...[but] we don't need this panic."

In recent weeks, a number of U.S. officials have made sometimes dire warnings that Russia planned to launch a new invasion of Ukraine. White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki earlier this week said that an invasion was "imminent."

Ukrainian officials have made notably different statements in an attempt to downplay an immediate threat.

"Are there tanks driving on our streets? No," Zelenskiy said. "But if you are not here, that's the sense you are getting in England, Germany, France, in Lithuania.... The impression you are getting from the media is that there is a war going on here, that soldiers are marching down our streets, that a mobilization has been declared, that people are going somewhere. That's not the case. We don't need this panic."

THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET IS THAT UKRAINE WOULD WIN A WAR:

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

ELUSIVE?:

TOKAMAKS, WHICH USE magnets to contain the high-temperature plasma in which atomic nuclei fuse and release energy, have captured the spotlight in recent months, due to tremendous advances in superconducting magnets. Despite these gains, though, traditional magnetic-confinement fusion is still years away from fulfilling nuclear fusion's promise of generating abundant and carbon-free electricity.

But tokamaks aren't the only path to fusion power. Seattle-based Zap Energy's FuZE-Q reactor, scheduled to be completed in mid-2022, bypasses the need for costly and complex magnetic coils. Instead, the machine sends pulses of electric current along a column of highly conductive plasma, creating a magnetic field that simultaneously confines, compresses, and heats the ionized gas. This Z-pinch approach--so named because the current pinches the plasma along the third, or Z, axis of a three-dimensional grid--could potentially produce energy in a device that's simpler, smaller, and cheaper than the massive tokamaks or laser-fusion machines under development today.

APPROPRIATELY MILLARDESQUE:

An arch conservative member of Arizona's state House of Representatives has proposed a mammoth overhaul of the state's voting procedures that would allow legislators to overturn the results of a primary or general election after months of unfounded allegations and partisan audits.

The bill, introduced by state Rep. John Fillmore (R), would substantially change the way Arizonans vote by eliminating most early and absentee voting and requiring people to vote in their home precincts, rather than at vote centers set up around the state.

VLAD WHO?:

Perhaps most significantly, the compromise effort could include a bipartisan lend-lease bill authored by Sens. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and four other senators from both parties. The measure would give Biden the authority to provide Ukraine with military equipment at no cost, though with the promise of repayment later. The U.S. undertook a similar effort during World War II when it sent weapons, food and energy to the U.K. and other nations.

Sens. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) are also working on legislative language regarding the Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline that can attract bipartisan support, people familiar with the effort told POLITICO. The nearly completed Russia-to-Germany pipeline has been, and remains, one of the most contentious policy issues of the Biden administration, with Republicans and some Democrats criticizing the president for waiving sanctions earlier this year.

In an interview this week, Shaheen said the group wants to "have a united front, both to support Ukraine and to show Vladimir Putin that he's not going to divide Democrats and Republicans on this issue."

ARM THE SEPARATISTS:

The United States is calling for the immediate release of all people who are being "unjustly detained" in Russia's North Caucasus region of Chechnya, citing "dozens of reported abductions and arbitrary detentions in recent weeks."

"In addition to cases within Chechnya, there have been numerous instances of individuals being detained in other parts of the Russian Federation and forcibly transferred to Chechnya," State Department's spokesman Ned Price said in a statement on January 27.

JUST THE COMMON COLD:

New U.S. data shows that the daily average deaths from the Omicron wave are exceeding the peaks driven by the Delta surge, which was the previous dominant variant. Data from John Hopkins University shows that the seven-day average for daily reported Covid-19 deaths reached 2,258 last Tuesday -- the highest number since February of 2021. The data is a troubling and tragic reminder that just because many Americans are "over" the pandemic, the pandemic itself is not yet over.

JUST BAN THEM:

In July 2016, the city of Edinburgh implemented a bold change. It lowered the speed limit on almost all of its roads from 30 mph to 20 mph that didn't already have a 20 mph speed limit. The city center, main streets, and residential roads all became 20 mph zones. The only roads that retained 30 or 40 mph speed limits were in the city suburbs. 

At the same time, a group of researchers, including ones at the University of Edinburgh, formed a team called "Is Twenty Plenty For Health?" to study the impacts of the new 20 mph policy. The results all pointed in one direction: 20 mph is plenty. The zones with a reduced speed limit saw 371 fewer crashes per year, or 38 percent, including fewer crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians. On average, cars went slower. And, as a rule, people felt safer biking and walking. These results have been replicated in further studies since and most of London is now a 20 mph zone, too.

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

The U.S. intelligence community's approach to classifying vast amounts of information is so flawed that it harms national security and diminishes public trust in government, according to Avril Haines, President Biden's director of national intelligence.

The acknowledgment of such concerns about how the nation's spy agencies choose what information to keep secret under various classification levels is among the most significant by a president's sitting intelligence chief, government transparency advocates said, and could indicate broader interest in the Biden administration for loosening restrictive access to some of the government's growing collection of secrets.

"It is my view that deficiencies in the current classification system undermine our national security, as well as critical democratic objectives, by impeding our ability to share information in a timely manner" with allies, policy makers and the public, Ms. Haines wrote in a letter earlier this month to Sens. Ron Wyden (D., Ore.) and Jerry Moran (R., Kan.), which was reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

Australia's electricity markets are now experiencing a significant north-south divide, where state grids in the north more dependent on black coal and gas are suffering significantly higher wholesale prices than those in the south with great shares of renewables.

BIDENOMICS:

The U.S. economy grew at a much better-than-expected pace to end 2021 from sizeable boosts in inventories and consumer spending, and despite signs that the acceleration likely tailed off toward the end of the year.

Gross domestic product, the sum of all goods and services produced during the October-through-December period, increased at a 6.9% annualized pace, the Commerce Department reported Thursday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for a gain of 5.5%.

NATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

The U.S., Britain, Brazil and other nations with "populist" governments mishandled the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and caused unnecessary deaths with relatively lenient policies, according to an academic research paper.

Excess mortality -- the number of deaths beyond those that could be expected without the pandemic -- was more than twice as high on average in populist-governed countries, Michael Bayerlein, a researcher at the Kiel Institute for the World Economy and one of the authors of the paper, said Thursday in a press release.

The main reason for the difference was that "citizen mobility" -- measured using Google data on the number of people in places like grocery stores or parks -- was higher in populist countries at similar infection rates, the study showed. Excess mortality was 18% in populist-led countries and 8% in non-populist nations.

MET ONE NATIONALIST YOU'VE MET THEM ALL:

GOP operatives working in 2022 primary races tell Axios they worry they'll alienate their base if they push to commit American resources or troops to help Ukraine fight Russia.

Any assistance President Biden provides to Ukraine could grow instantly into an ideological war back home.

OUR GLORIOUSLY FEUDAL FOUNDING:

Shays' Rebellion was an organized rebellion of western Massachusetts farmers and countrymen against the state of Massachusetts in 1786-1787. These farmers rebelled against the unjust collection of excessive taxes and seizure of property when taxes went uncollected.

Many of the rebels were disgruntled former Continental army soldiers who went unpaid during the revolution. These poor farmers were now being forced to give up their lands when they could not pay the high taxes imposed on them by the state governments.

After peaceful attempts to come to a resolution were ignored by state leaders primarily from the eastern coastal area, the protesters took more forceful means to protect their interests. Courthouses and state buildings were surrounded and government officials prevented from following through with evictions and arrests.

The federal government was aware of the rebellion and the possibility of an attempt to take weapons from the federal armory in Springfield, MA. It soon found itself powerless to take any action given that it could not raise an army of its own nor levy taxes.

Shays' Rebellion was ultimately put down by a militia privately funded by wealthy Massachusetts citizens. Despite this, the rebellion highlighted just how weak the federal government was and convinced the founding fathers a new, stronger federal government was needed.

KEYSTONE 2:

US State Department spokesperson Ned Price said on Wednesday the Nord Stream 2 pipeline between Russia and Germany will not move forward if Moscow invades Ukraine.

UM, ORVILLE...:

US physicists have confirmed that they achieved a stage in nuclear fusion called "burning plasma" last year.

There's a longstanding effort to crack fusion power because it promises an unlimited source of clean energy.

Burning plasma occurs when fusion reactions become the dominant source of heating in the process, rather than energy introduced from outside.

The stage was seen in experiments carried out at the National Ignition Facility (NIF) in California.

NATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

Based on a new report from corruption watchdog Transparency International, seven countries in the former Soviet Union - from Estonia to Uzbekistan - have made significant reforms toward honest and clean governance in the last few years. Not so in Mr. Putin's Russia. In the report's ranking of countries on perceptions of corruption, Russia's score has worsened. A new law, for example, has made reporting on corruption even riskier for pro-democracy activists.

It may be only a matter of time before Russian citizens wonder why so many neighbors are moving toward civic equality, transparent government, and other essentials for curbing corruption. Ukraine's moves toward democratic ideals since 2014 may be driving Mr. Putin to end its progress. The country has a close association with Russian history, culture, and geography.

While Ukraine has instituted a host of anti-corruption reforms under President Volodymyr Zelenskyy since 2019, the Transparency report shows one of Russia's other neighbors, Armenia, is the world's top mover in making anti-corruption changes over the past few years. And that is despite the fact that the small landlocked nation of nearly 3 million suffered an embarrassing defeat in a brief war with Azerbaijan in 2020, triggering political turmoil.

Armenia's military loss in the war, however, has been widely attributed to the country's legacy of corruption from the Soviet era. It has stirred even more support for reforms, such as laws for an independent judiciary and a rule for public figures to declare their financial interests. By setting up anti-graft watchdogs, Armenia can help guarantee the country's security, says Haykuhi Harutyunyan, head of a new body to prevent corruption.

The nature of Netanyahu's corruption tells a story that is bigger than the man himself. The tentacles of Netanyahu, his family, his political entourage, his business networks and his media outreach point to a growing and rooted corruption in Israeli society, at all levels.

While other Israeli officials have been charged, tried and sentenced before for far less significant crimes, Netanyahu could potentially walk free, despite the fact that during his years in power, his illegal practices have turned corruption in Israel from a normal phenomenon into an endemic.

It seems that Israelis have become so familiar with corruption among their own political circles that the main question left to ponder is simply whether Netanyahu will be allowed back in politics or will the 72-year-old politician be banned for a fixed number of years. The answer will largely depend on the duration and the language of Netanyahu's indictment, per the plea deal.

According to Israeli law, if Netanyahu's community service is shorter than three months, and he faces the final verdict as a private citizen, not as an elected member of the Knesset (parliament), then the prosecutors will not slap him with a label of moral turpitude. In such a case, Netanyahu would be allowed to return to politics.

THE IRON LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:

Although the change benefited Republicans at the time, it has allowed Democrats to confirm judges during Biden's first year at a pace that was last rivaled by former President Ronald Reagan's initial 365 days in office. [...]

And it's not the only arcane change that Democrats have benefited from, taken right out of the GOP playbook, when it comes to judicial fights.

Senate Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) is continuing his GOP predecessors' move to nix the veto power that home-state senators once wielded over circuit court nominees. That tradition is known as the"blue slip," named for the paper that senators use to express their favorable or unfavorable opinion about a specific judicial pick. Durbin took his first formal step against the practice this month, moving forward on a circuit court nominee who would represent Tennessee and lacked support from both GOP Sens. Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty.

"Senate Democrats and the Biden administration are not allowing Republicans to play by one set of rules and Democrats by the other," said Christopher Kang, chief counsel at the liberal group Demand Justice. "Of course they should take advantage of the fact that blue slips don't exist anymore for circuit court judges, and obviously the fact that the time has decreased now to two hours for district court nominees."

...AND CHEAPER...:

Canadian renewable energy and battery developer Amp Energy has announced it will build two 400MW, two hour battery storage facilities in central Scotland which, upon operation in 2024, will be the two largest grid-connected battery storage facilities in Europe.

nATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

An anti-corruption watchdog on Tuesday gave Israel its worst-ever score in a global ranking of how countries tackle government graft.

Transparency International's 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index, which measures the perception of public sector corruption according to experts and businesspeople, gave Israel a score of 59 out of 100. It received a score of 60 in 2020, and scored 64 in 2016.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Anyone remotely familiar with studies of mass hysteria would have known immediately that Havana syndrome had nothing to do with malevolent foreign actors. For instance, Robert Bartholomew, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland, concluded last year that Havana syndrome was likely 'an outbreak of mass psychogenic illness that was exacerbated by government incompetence'.

Mass psychogenic illness occurs when people in a group start feeling sick at the same time, even though there is no physical or environmental reason for them to be sick. In the case of Havana syndrome, symptom-sharing by anxious bureaucrats and intelligence operatives must have played an important role in encouraging diplomats to feel ill. The readiness of sections of the State Department to point the finger of blame at foreign agents helped provide this otherwise inexplicable syndrome with meaning.

As Bartholomew put it: 'I would go so far as to rename it Havana syndrome delusion - the absurd belief, in the wake of persistent evidence to the contrary, that diplomats are being targeted with an energy weapon.'

No doubt State Department groupthink led to too many taking Havana syndrome seriously. But there is also another reason why mass hysteria was able to permeate Washington's foreign-policy establishment - namely, the extent to which American society in general, and its elites in particular, lead an intensely medicalised existence. That is to say, they increasingly experience everyday challenges as medical problems. This means they were all too willing to see Havana syndrome as a genuine medical condition rather than the psychogenic illness it almost certainly is.

DADDY, WHAT WAS INTERNAL COMBUSTION?:

General Motors Co. GM, -1.41% confirmed plans for a multibillion-dollar investment to produce electric pickup trucks in Michigan, giving the Great Lakes region a boost as competition intensifies between states to win a bigger role in the industry's shift to battery-powered cars.

ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

American officials demanded that Iran account for and roll back the advances it had made in its nuclear program before the United States agreed to remove punishing sanctions reimposed by President Trump after he pulled out of the deal in 2018.

Iranian officials demanded that the U.S. make the first move--and lift sanctions as well as unfreeze Iran's financial assets.

The Iranians had the better side of the argument. After all, the U.S. had unilaterally withdrawn from the JCPOA, while the other nations that were party to the deal (the P5+1: basically, major European powers plus Russia and China) stayed with it.

Since most of the sanctions on Iran are based on executive action, there was nothing stopping Biden from going back into the deal offering the caveat that if there was no progress on Iran coming back into compliance, he'd simply reimpose them.

When I asked Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nonproliferation at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, why the U.S. didn't adopt this strategy, he offered me a simple, though pungent answer: "Biden is a wimp."

THE DESANTIS FLU:

Hospitalized patients who survived at least a week after being discharged were more than twice as likely to die or be admitted again within months, scientists from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and the University of Oxford found. The Covid survivors also had an almost five times greater risk of dying in the following 10 months than a sample taken from the general population.

The findings, published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine, add to evidence that the pandemic's effects on health and wellbeing extend well beyond an initial infection. A Dutch study on Monday showed that three-quarters of Covid patients treated in intensive care were still suffering fatigue, impaired fitness and other physical symptoms a year later, and one in four reported anxiety and other mental symptoms.

"Covid-19 isn't just an acute respiratory viral illness -- like a cold or some other inconsequential infection -- that goes away in a few days or a few weeks," said Ziyad Al-Aly, director of the clinical epidemiology center at the Veterans Affairs St. Louis Health Care System in Missouri, who has led similar studies in the U.S. "It carries serious long-term consequences, including higher risk of death."

THE VALUE OF VALUES: (profanity alert):

Q: You're 60. You're getting all these honors, which must be gratifying. But we're still in the middle of this pandemic. What's your mood? Are you feeling reflective? Thinking about your youth?

A: When I saw Terence Blanchard's opera, I went back in my mind -- he and I were together in seventh grade in an honors band. We were the two saddest trumpet players in the band. I remember we looked at each other and said, "We've got to do better than this." And when I saw him come out on stage at the end of his opera, I felt full -- the journey that everybody's taken out here. Of course, some of the members of our generation have passed: Wallace Roney; that hit me. (Roney, the trumpeter, died of complications from COVID-19 in March 2020.) I stayed at his house in D.C. even before I moved to New York. We were 17, 18; we were young.

So it's kind of wistful, but not really. We're all still working in the music and we're still serious about it. To receive any kind of honor -- I feel gratitude, for me and for jazz institutions as we're trying to get all this stuff off the ground and make sure the music has an institutional base. I'm just honored by it. But I don't look at it in the context of "I was young and now I'm old." I felt like I was old when I was young, and now I feel younger. I felt much older when I was younger than I feel now.

Q: Why did you feel old when you were young?

A: My thinking was unique. I didn't know a lot of young people who thought what I thought. I thought about playing the music.

Q: Meaning, jazz.

A: We were all playing pop music, too. But I was trying to play the music and I stuck to the music. And this was always considered to be traditional and old-fashioned. I was a young man -- 18, 19, 20 -- defending the values of the music. So now I'm older and there are many more young people around who understand the value of values. So I feel younger.

Q: You were mentored by all these older people, and now you mentor so many young people. You're an educator. You've become the mentor, the elder.

A: I don't really look at it like that, because the generations function differently now than they functioned earlier. The technological revolution gave young people a base of knowledge that older people don't have. But yes, I was always so much younger than anybody else. I used to crack a joke: "I was 19 for 15 years." People were calling me `sonny' when I was 40. I knew so many older people.

I was always teaching younger people, and I was being taught by older people.

Q: Name three teachers who shaped you in an essential way.

A: First, it would definitely be my father. Then my theory teacher when I was in high school: Dr. Bert Braud, a great, fantastic teacher -- unbelievable. He taught me so much about theory and that kind of thing. And, let's see, of the jazz musicians -- man, I learned from so many of them. I would say John Lewis and Gerry Mulligan, together, both of them. And Art Blakey was a great teacher, too. Plus, from an intellectual standpoint: Albert Murray, Stanley Crouch, and Ralph Ellison. Those three. I was learning from all of them at the same time.

Q: Why John Lewis and Gerry Mulligan?

A: They were both very interested in my development and they taught me different sides of things. Of course, about music: counterpoint, arrangement, history. They also would speak to me very honestly about a range of subjects, including racism, America. I just had the benefit of their wisdom, and they would speak very frankly, listen to my pieces, tell me what they thought. It was an uncommon investment in a younger person.

Q: Were they very critical?

A: Of course they were. Because they were holding me to a standard. To be critical is a sign of respect. And, yes, they were very critical. But they also were very supportive.

I always tell my students about Gerry. One time (in 1993), we both played at the Ravinia jazz festival in Chicago, and he listened to a 45-minute movement of this piece I'd written called In This House, On This Morning. And about 17 minutes into it, I wrote a passage that had minor ninths at the top of a voicing. (Marsalis sings a bit of it.) Very dissonant! So Gerry stood and listened to the whole 45 minutes, and as I walked off, he looked at me and said, "Exposed minor ninths at the top of a voicing. Damn, you have balls."

So yes, he would be critical, and he also would be supportive.

I was raised by jazz musicians. My father was critical. He was a teacher. Teachers can't be shaking your hand and making you feel okay about who you are all the time. The love they have for you is underneath it. And if you don't understand or feel that, then you're not going to get the type of instruction that they can give you.

Q: Is there a single lesson you were taught that has shaped you, and that you pass on to your own students?

A: (He pauses.) Yeah, by my father. One lesson he always had about being a student was, "You can bring a horse to water, but you can't make him thirsty." That was always the thing: If you want to know about this, you'll know about it. If you don't, you won't.

That's the thing about being a student, is the freedom to learn: "If you don't want to learn, I can't make you." That was the thing he would say all the time. And there's a lot of those sayings that musicians have said to me. I could give you a hundred of them.

Q: What's another one?

A: Tell me a musician you want me to quote.

Q: Elvin Jones

A: Oh, man. I would go to Elvin's house all the time. I would go to Elvin's house at like 1 in the morning and stay 'til 5. Elvin was absolutely my man. The nights I hung with Elvin -- there's so much. I always called cats, but Elvin would call me. And he would always say the same thing: "Keiko (Jones's wife) has two lobsters here that's ready to be et." It would be 1 o'clock, 1:30 in the morning. I would make sure I went up there to Central Park West; he lived in the same building with Max (Roach).

Elvin treated me like I was his son; I used to always hang with Elvin, talking with Elvin. The main thing I learned from Elvin is the respect he had for the music and for people. Because Elvin's stories were always about people: Tyree Glenn, the trombone player, or (trumpeter) "Sweets" Edison, who was my man from when I was in high school. Elvin had millions of stories, man, deeply soulful stories about all the musicians: Trane, Miles, Monk.

One time we were playing a gig, and, man, it was loud. I was trying to play with Elvin -- my chops started to bleed, right? Damn. And I told him, "Elvin, it's kind of loud." And he answered me (Marsalis imitates Jones's squeaky, gravelly voice): "All you have to do is say something. Anybody can be told something, including me." Direct communication, right? It didn't mean he played softer, but that's what he told me.

Q: What else?

A: Somebody in the group said they wanted to solo -- a rhythm section member. They said, "I want to play" -- meaning, "I want to solo." And Elvin said, "You been playing all f[****]ing night!"

Elvin said he was in the Village Vanguard, and somebody came to him when he was playing with Trane, and said, "You know, a lot of people don't like what y'all are playing." And he said, "Well, they better start liking it, cuz we're gonna keep playing it."

THE POINT IS TO BAN DISCUSSION OF CIVIL RIGHTS:

A Florida school district canceled a professor's civil rights history seminar for teachers, citing in part concerns over "critical race theory" -- even though his lecture had nothing to do with the topic.

THANKS, W!:

Housing First is one such solution - complex, yes; expensive too. However, this evidence-based approach has successfully supported homeless people with high needs and histories of entrenched or repeat homelessness to live in their own homes.

As the name suggests, it provides housing 'first', as a matter of right, rather than 'last' or as a reward - it is not only successful in ending the cycle of homelessness, but it is also, I believe, a moral and humane approach to tackling homelessness.

Set up in 2016, the methodology has been widely adopted across the US, is central to the national homelessness strategies in Canada, Denmark, Finland and France, and is growing in popularity in countries including Italy, Sweden, Spain and - I'm happy to say - increasingly in the UK too. Housing First pilots are currently operating in Newcastle, London, the Midlands, Greater Manchester, on the South Coast and in Wales and Scotland with great success, providing a stable, independent home and intensive personalised support for homeless people with multiple and complex needs.

Currently, there are no conditions around 'housing readiness' before providing someone with a home - rather, secure housing is viewed as a stable platform from which other issues can be addressed.

PYRAMIDS ARE BUILT ON SAND:

As cryptocurrency investors reel from the sharp sell-off in bitcoin and other digital currencies, some fear the worst is yet to come.

Bitcoin, the world's largest virtual currency, briefly plunged below $33,000 Monday to its lowest level since July. It's since recovered back above the $36,000 mark, but is still down almost 50% from a record high of nearly $69,000 in November.

Meanwhile, the entire crypto market has shed more than $1 trillion in value since bitcoin's all-time high, as top tokens such as ether and solana followed the No. 1 digital currency to trade sharply lower. Ether has more than halved in value since reaching its peak in November, while solana has suffered an even steeper decline, falling 65%.

THEY JUST DON'T HATE THE PALESTINIANS ENOUGH:

While evangelicals overall remain supportive of Israel, the last few years have apparently seen a significant loss of support for the Jewish state among younger evangelicals. Two University of North Carolina at Pembroke professors--Mordechai (Motti) Inbari and Kirill Bumin--conducted a poll of evangelicals of all ages in 2018 and another poll in 2021 focusing specifically on evangelicals age 18-29. According to their data, support for Israel among young evangelicals dropped from 69 percent to 34 percent during that three year period.

While commentators have suggested that some of the apparent shift among young evangelicals between the two polls can be explained by differences in the methodology, variations in the wording of the two polls' questions, and news headlines at the time the polls were taken, it is worth noting that other surveys show similar trends. Shibley Telhami, a University of Maryland professor and Brookings Institution senior fellow, told Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) that two polls he conducted between 2015 and 2018 also showed a widening gap between older and younger evangelicals. For example, in the earlier survey, 40 percent of young evangelicals said the United States should lean towards Israel; in 2018, only 21 percent did.

"A generation ago, support for Israel was automatic among most evangelicals in America," said Robert Stearns in a 2018 interview. Stearns, a Pentecostal bishop and the founder and executive director of Eagles' Wings Ministries, a pro-Israeli group, continued:

You pretty much couldn't be an evangelical without supporting Israel. Millennials don't accept that. They're suspicious of the demand to be automatically supportive of the country. They don't want this pushed down their throat. Instead, they are asking questions. They want to know--why should we support Israel?

Stearns said that starting a few years earlier, he noticed that at pro-Israel Christian gatherings "there were usually very few young people. It was increasingly an older and older crowd attending these gatherings, despite the fact that there is a lot of young Christian activism in our country."

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

The world's cheapest and most widely used vegetable oil, palm oil production is a primary driver of deforestation and biodiversity loss in the tropics. These and other problems with the palm oil industry, such as exploitative labor practices, have for years driven interest in more sustainable options. But good alternatives have proven difficult to come by: Other vegetable oils have similar drawbacks to palm oil, and sustainable forestry practices are not always effective in the face of rising demand. Today, the world consumes nearly 7.7 million tons (70 million metric tons) of palm oil each year, used in everything from toothpaste and oat milk to biodiesel and laundry detergent. Demand is expected to more than double by 2050.

But with advances in bioengineering and increasing concerns about sustainability, a number of companies like Xylome have developed microbial oils they say could offer an alternative to palm oil while avoiding its most destructive impacts. They join numerous other synthetic biology companies -- from ventures hawking new biofuels and fertilizer to lab-grown meat -- that aspire to solve environmental problems but share similar challenges scaling up production and demonstrating their approach is in fact more sustainable than the problem they're trying to solve.

Last year, a startup called C16 Biosciences opened a gleaming new lab in Manhattan to develop a microbial palm oil alternative, backed by $20 million from Bill Gates' climate solutions investment fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures. A California-based startup called Kiverdi is also working to manufacture yeast oil using carbon captured from the atmosphere, and a team of bioengineers at the University of Bath is at work scaling up its own strain of oily yeast. Xylome recently sent the first batches of its palm oil alternative -- called Yoil -- to a number of large palm oil suppliers and the FDA for testing.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

"We urge the entire Israeli government to unite in strong condemnation against these acts, to work decisively to hold those responsible accountable, and to confront the growing threats posed by these extremists with the determination and seriousness that this grave situation requires," they wrote.

The letter was signed by the Anti-Defamation League, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the Israel Policy Forum, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Union for Reform Judaism, and the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism. It was addressed to Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett as well as Foreign Minister Yair Lapid and Defense Minister Benny Gantz.

VLAD WHO?:

NO ONE THOUGHT THEY HAD MEDICAL CONCERNS:

Many of the rally attendees wore yellow replicas of the Star of David badges that were forced upon Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and many of them carried signs referencing both that horrific episode of history and the German Nazi regime that inflicted it. So did other speakers, such as Del Bigtree, CEO of the anti-vaccination group Informed Consent Action Network, who added a threatening tone directed at journalists.

"Unlike the Nuremberg Trials that only tried those doctors that destroyed the lives of those human beings, we're going to come after the press," Bigtree told the crowd.

Violence was also an undercurrent in the audience, some of whom carried signs suggesting a lethal response: "Shoot those who try to kidnap and vaccinate your child." Another agreed with Bigtree, calling for "Nuremberg Trials 2.0."

The inherent antisemitism of the anti-vaxxers' conspiracism was also on full display: A large bus pulled up to the protest area blaring music with lyrics pronouncing "It's God Over Government," festooned on its side with mock "Wanted" posters featuring the anti-vaxxers bogeymen, notably Dr. Anthony Fauci, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, and attorney Jacob Rothschild--the latter of whom has no known connection to the vaccine or mandates whatsoever, but whose last name conjures up Hitler's antisemitic conspiracy theories that identified the family as one of the primary components of the Jewish cabal that Nazis believed secretly controlled the world.

The audience was a veritable showcase of the wide bandwidth of a far-right extremism. White nationalists from Nick Fuentes' "Groyper army" (who have begun attaching themselves to anti-vaxx rallies as a way to recruit new followers) brought their "America First" banners. Proud Boys, who similarly have become a presence at COVID-denialism events, were also scattered throughout the crowd.

VLAD WHO?:

Vladimir Putin is in the midst of a colossal blunder--a miscalculation that will haunt the rest of his presidency.

Regardless of what happens next between Russia and Ukraine, Putin has given the NATO alliance a renewed sense of purpose. He might have even strengthened it. At the same time, he has helped to restore the US' leadership role, which he has long sought to weaken.

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

There is one fundamental reason why the United States and the rest of the democratic world should support Ukraine in its current fight with Putin's Russia: Ukraine is a real, but struggling, liberal democracy. People are free in Ukraine in a way they are not in Russia: they can protest, criticize, mobilize, and vote. In 2017 they voted for a complete outsider to be president, and turned over a majority of their parliament. On two occasions, during the Orange Revolution in 2004 and the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, Ukrainian civil society came into the streets in massive numbers to protest corrupt and unrepresentative governments.

This is the real reason that Vladimir Putin is preparing to further invade Ukraine. He sees Ukraine as an integral part of a greater Russia, as he indicated in a long article last summer. But the deeper problem for him is Ukrainian democracy. He is heavily invested in the idea that Slavic peoples are culturally attuned to authoritarian government, and the idea that another Slavic state could successfully transition to democracy undermines his own claims for ruling Russia. Ukraine presents zero military threat to Moscow; it does, however, pose an alternative ideological model that erodes Putin's own legitimacy.

Ukraine is at the same time a highly flawed democracy. Its economy and politics are dominated by a handful of oligarchs, each of whom acquired a key industrial sector, also own a media company and TV station, and can buy the support of deputies in the parliament. Corruption is endemic in many parts of the Ukrainian political system, beginning with its judiciary and extending through much of its bureaucracy and political class.

Since 2014, there have been major efforts at reform: authority was devolved to provinces and cities; there was an effort at land reform; an anti-corruption agency was established, and the central bank and parts of the health system were modernized. But each advance has been bitterly resisted by politicians and officials who profit off of the current system and have been largely unaccountable. The hopes engendered by Volodymyr Zelensky's election have been betrayed as the newcomers in his own party have been swallowed up by the system. Even in the midst of an existential crisis for his country, the Ukrainian president is pursuing a campaign to prosecute his immediate predecessor for treason.

It is reasonable to ask whether it is worthwhile investing time and effort in protecting such a flawed democracy. I personally have no reservations whatsoever about this. My view has been shaped by the young Ukrainians I have met and worked with over the past few years. There is a younger generation coming up that does not want to be part of the old corrupt system, that believes in European values, and that wants nothing more than for Ukraine to become part of Europe. These Ukrainians are extremely well educated and highly motivated. They are the ones who have led the Maidan Revolution and who are at the forefront of the effort to make Ukraine part of Europe. Their generation will gradually come to power, and will hopefully exercise power more democratically than their predecessors.

THE rIGHT IS THE WRONG PLACE TO LOOK FOR LOGIC; TRY EMOTION:

There is a new form of bafflingly illogical social media crowing that needs to be put to bed.

Those who erroneously asserted that 'lockdowns don't work' are bizarrely claiming victory now that restrictions are rightly coming to an end. 'We told you all along', they say. Contending that those of us who accepted the need for restrictions to avoid a health system collapse have now performed some kind of reverse ferret.

It makes me wonder whether or not these Covid-sceptics have ever heard of vaccines.

There is a blindingly obvious distinction between the need for non-pharmaceutical interventions amongst a non-immune population, verses one with incredibly high levels of immunity.

Stop me if I am getting too technical, but if lots of people have decent immunity to a disease, there is far less justification for trying to stop that disease spreading.

And that is what our stupendously successful vaccine rollout has delivered us in the UK. The ability to replace non-pharmaceutical interventions (social restrictions) with pharmaceutical ones (vaccines and therapeutics).

IF ONLY REPUBLICANS ACTUALLY WERE PRO-LIFE:

 [E]vidence that a single year of subsidies could alter something as profound as brain functioning highlights the role that money may play in child development and comes as President Biden is pushing for a much larger program of subsidies for families with children.

"This is a big scientific finding," said Martha J. Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, who conducted a review of the study for the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, where it was published on Monday. "It's proof that just giving the families more money, even a modest amount of more money, leads to better brain development."

AMEN, SISTER:

A former scholar at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft on Monday cheered on a Houthi missile attack launched against the United Arab Emirates' capital city of Abu Dhabi.

"To be honest," Sarah Leah Whitson tweeted, "it's a miracle the United Arab Emirates has been immune to retaliatory Houthi attacks for the past seven years, sitting atop those easy-target glass highrises while raining death and destruction on Yemeni men, women, and children." She emphasized a quote in the Wall Street Journal's article about the attack from Houthi deputy foreign minister Hussein al-Ezzi, who said the missile strike was "intended to punish the U.A.E. for renewing attacks on Yemen despite a pledge more than two years ago to withdraw from the war." No one was killed or injured in the attack.

NATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

Approaching noon in Europe, the MOEX Russia Index had dropped around 7% and is now down more than 15% year-to-date. The Russian RTS Index was down 8.8% on the day and around 20% lower so far in 2022.

The Russian ruble was down 1.5% against the dollar at 78.53, its lowest since late 2020.

THUS THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS:

The Palestinian Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas, has between 70 and 80 per cent support in the West Bank, a former Israeli chief of the general staff has warned. Retired General Gadi Eisenkot made his comment when asked about the possibility of a new outbreak of violence between Israel and the Palestinians.

THE OWNERSHIP SOCIETY:

Western housing shortages do not just prevent many from ever affording their own home. They also drive inequality, climate change, low productivity growth, obesity, and even falling fertility rates.

Try listing every problem the Western world has at the moment. Along with Covid, you might include slow growth, climate change, poor health, financial instability, economic inequality, and falling fertility. These longer-term trends contribute to a sense of malaise that many of us feel about our societies. They may seem loosely related, but there is one big thing that makes them all worse. That thing is a shortage of housing: too few homes being built where people want to live. And if we fix those shortages, we will help to solve many of the other, seemingly unrelated problems that we face as well. [...]

The price of housing does not just affect the places where people live; it determines the kinds of homes they live in as well. And that has a huge influence on people's family lives, affecting both when people have kids and how many kids they have.

The more expensive an extra bedroom is, the more expensive it is to have more (or any) children. Expensive housing can force people to wait before having kids and move out of city cores and into cheaper suburbs when they do. This means losing many of the amenities and social life benefits of city life, adding a long commute to their day, and probably reducing their number of job options.

Across the developed world, the number of children that women actually have is well below the number they say they would like to have. According to one recent study, after controlling for other factors, a 10% rise in house prices was associated with a 1.3% fall in overall births. Put together with the huge rises in housing costs we've seen over the past four decades, this implies a massive reduction in births across the Western world. One report estimated that rises in the cost of UK housing between 1996 and 2014 may have led to 157,000 fewer children being born in that period alone.

Combine these effects with the fact that higher incomes allow people to have more kids because they can more easily afford things like childcare, and housing costs may be causing dramatically fewer children to be born than people would like to have. There is also a fiscal cost to this, of course, but it is fundamentally a personal, human one: fewer brothers and sisters, less time spent with grandparents, and less of the meaning that children bring to their parents' lives.

ALL ROADS LEAD BACK TO HUME:

Indeed, Chalmers argues that we could already be inhabitants of a virtual reality: "We can never prove we're not in a computer simulation because any evidence of ordinary reality could be simulated."

This is known as the simulation hypothesis, the scenario that is explored in the recently released Matrix Resurrections. Chalmers points out that humans have already invented games that simulate real life, such as The Sims. These will become more sophisticated over time, with versions of them running on millions of devices. Furthermore, out there in the rest of the universe, "if any aliens have human-level intelligence, they should eventually develop computers and program them. If these alien civilisations survive long enough, they'll likely create simulated universes." Statistically speaking, that means simulated beings probably already vastly outnumber "real" ones. In other words, it's more likely we're living in a simulation than in the original version of our world.

If we are indeed living in a simulation, then the creator of it is our god, be that a mad scientist, an alien or a teenage girl who has pressed a button in SimUniverse and set us going. As an atheist, says Chalmers, "the simulation hypothesis has made me take the existence of a god more seriously than I ever had before".

WHERE'S McARTHUR WHEN YOU NEED HIM:

Waving signs denouncing President Joe Biden and calling for "freedom," several thousand people demonstrated in Washington Sunday against what some described as the "tyranny" of Covid-19 vaccine mandates in the United States. It was a much smaller turnout than the 20,000 marchers expected by the event organizers.

Speaker after speaker -- including notorious anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who compared vaccine mandates to the Holocaust -- took to the microphone in front of the white marble Lincoln Memorial to decry the rules.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE (profanity alert):

THOSE PARANOID BLACK DEMOCRATS:

The technology was complicated, but the plan was simple: Scan mail-in and absentee ballots in populous Maricopa County, remove the "invalid votes," and recertify the state's 2020 election count, surely declaring then-President Donald Trump the rightful winner.

This scheme to subvert the election outcome in Arizona is laid out in newly released emails obtained by Rolling Stone. Sent in early December 2020, the emails cover a critical moment when the post-election push by Trump and Republican allies to find fraud and overturn the presidential election was in full swing.

The emails show how a group of fringe election sleuths pressed state legislators on a plan to disrupt the 2020 election certification and potentially change the vote count in a battleground state that helped deliver Joe Biden the presidency. The emails also reveal that several Trump advisers, including campaign lawyer Jenna Ellis and legal adviser Bernie Kerik, were included in the discussion.

OPPOSITE:

Harlan's view in Plessy is one we now see as foundational to liberal democracy, and it's not just progressives who venerate him. Neil Gorsuch cited him as a role model at his confirmation hearing in 2017, and Chief Justice John Roberts put Harlan's portrait in the conference room where justices decide cases. But left unasked by Stewart was the question at the heart of his shrewd rhetoric: Would Harlan himself really have dissented in Roe? Would he support those who wish to see it overturned today?

The question can't be answered with any certainty. No one can probe so deeply into the mind of a historical figure as to ascertain how he or she would view later events. But the unusual prescience of Harlan -- who earned the sobriquet The Great Dissenter for his willingness to stand on principle -- provides a unique lens through which to view the deliberations of current-day justices. He was thoughtful and foresighted, and even in his own time was seen as something of an apostle of the American system -- a man who, in the words of his Supreme Court colleague David Brewer, "goes to bed every night with one hand on the Constitution and the other on the Bible, and so sleeps the sweet sleep of justice and righteousness."

A man like that presumably would have the sovereign wisdom to untangle the legal and ethical knots in Roe v. Wade. But Stewart may be wrong to locate that wisdom in Harlan's Plessy dissent. As many have noted, the parallels between Plessy and Roe that Stewart tried to draw go only so far. Perhaps the most notable is their relationship to rights: In Roe, the court conferred a right, the right to choose to terminate a pregnancy within certain parameters, and Stewart asked the court to roll it back. In Plessy, the court refused to confer a right, that of Black people to travel alongside white people.

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

The first Taliban delegation to visit Europe since the hardline Islamists returned to power there, led by Foreign Minister Amir Khan Muttaqi, spent the first day of their three-day visit talking with women activists and journalists, among others.

"It was a positive icebreaking meeting," feminist activist Jamila Afghani told AFP. The negotiators "displayed goodwill... Let's see what their actions will be, based on their words", she added.

Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid, in a tweet, said: "All Afghans need to work together for better political, economic and security outcomes...

"The participants... recognised that understanding and joint cooperation are the only solutions."

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

A number of a vehicles were vandalized in the northern West Bank village of Qira overnight, police said Sunday morning, amid rising attacks by Jewish extremists.

The vehicles were spray-painted with Stars of David as well as slogans calling for an end to administrative orders, under which suspects can be barred from certain areas or detained without charge. The tires on a number of cars were slashed.

COMING UNSTUCK (profanity alert):

The singer's debut album, TV, is full of summery sing-alongs and laid-back vibes

At the start of 2020 Tai Verdes was selling mobile phones and sleeping on a friend's couch when his career suddenly took off.

Stuck In The Middle, a catchy, scrappy song he'd written after his shifts ended, blew up on TikTok. More than 2.3 million people took his story of being stuck in romantic limbo and used it to soundtrack their own videos.

The success spilled over to Spotify, where Verdes topped the viral songs chart. When his song hit two million streams last July, the US singer celebrated by posting a video from the Verizon store where he still worked.

"Someone even recognised me today," he says in the clip. "It wasn't much, but it was enough for me to think about getting out of here."

The 24-year-old says the purpose of the video was to show that overnight success is a myth.

A hit song "doesn't just turn into a million dollars and a nice car", he explains. "It turns into waiting - which I think I've gotten pretty good at."

That's an understatement. The singer, born Tyler Colon, has been waiting for his break since dropping out of university five years ago.

Unsure how to make it in the music industry, he auditioned for shows like American Idol and The Voice, only to be rejected seven times. Songs he released under the moniker Tylersemicolon weren't going anywhere either. So he applied to go on an MTV dating programme - and ended up winning the series.

With $50,000 (£36,000) in his pocket, he moved to Los Angeles and started hustling - taking jobs in retail, fashion and film while working on his music late at night.

His persistence finally paid off with Stuck In The Middle, and he has worked to turn viral success into a sustainable career. Subsequent singles Drugs and A-OK have also racked up millions of streams, and his debut album, TV, has won support from Rolling Stone, Billboard and Apple Music.

HOW SHAKESPEARE INVENTED NOIR:

In its newest film adaptation, the Scottish play also has another influence: film noir, the postwar style of filming that featured crimes, shadowy, morally compromised characters--including nasty, duplicitous women known as femme fatales--and often violent, bloody endings. Directed by Joel Coen in a rich black-and-white that seems to have come from the 1950s, Macbeth uses the sharp angles, intense close-ups, and geometric lighting of noir to tell the story of the ambitious 11th-century Scottish warrior who killed his own king in order to take the throne. Macbeth's mind unravels as he tries to control the fallout from his evil act. He is militarily defeated, then beheaded and replaced on the throne. It's like a medieval precursor to Double Indemnity or Body Heat. [...]

After the King, Duncan, hears the news that his best generals, Macbeth and Banquo, have defeated two invading armies, Macbeth is named the thane of Cawdor. Yet--as is the case with most politicians--it's not good enough. Macbeth has heard a witches' prophecy that he himself will be king and becomes possessed by reckless ambition. The Macbeths plot to murder Duncan in his sleep so that Macbeth himself can gain the throne. The sets on this Macbeth are very spare, like a modernist stage mounting of the play. There is an intentional artificiality to the sets, which ironically intensifies the realism. Just as the more abstract film noir settings can tap into an archetypical consciousness with sharp lines separating good and evil, Macbeth seems to live in a world outside of any particular time but deep within the human soul and its primal knowledge about evil.

At first, Macbeth has doubts about the plot, but when he expresses them, he is taunted, belittled, and ridiculed by his power-hungry wife. Lady Macbeth taunts her husband, telling him he's not a man unless he murders the king: "When you durst do it, then you were a man; And to be more than what you were, you would be so much more the man." When, after the regicide, Macbeth begins to imagine he is seeing ghosts, Lady Macbeth attacks: "You do unbend your noble strength, to think so brainsickly of things." Then she calls him a coward: "My hands are of your color, but I shame to wear a heart so white."

Many of Shakespeare's female characters are strong-willed, witty, and able to match language with their male counterparts--yet they are also imperfect, flawed, and fully human.

In film noir, bad guys are often women: Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity, Kathie Moffat in Out of the Past, Gilda Mundson in Gilda, Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. The 1960 noir Gun Crazy was originally titled Deadly is the Femme Fatale. These women are not the sinless saints of modern #MeToo movies. They are brilliant, conniving, sarcastic, and sometimes downright evil. In other words, much more like real people.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATION:

In 1959, the average family spent 19 percent of their budgets on food. That fell to 7 percent in 2019

Amazing charts in here from @binarybits https://t.co/5RAia1xReV pic.twitter.com/fGhh5by8gC

— Michael Batnick (@michaelbatnick) January 22, 2022

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

"One of the GPs there taught me that sick notes can be the most powerful prescription I ever write. Most people try and go back to work too quickly; the amount of abuse in the sick note system is tiny, about 1%. It can be a lovely thing to actually reassure somebody, 'You need time, you need to give some respect to this process.'" He likes, too, the fact that a sick note can be deliberately left vague. "Quite often, I'll put 'life crisis'. If somebody's basement is flooded, their cat died, and their wife left them all in the same week, that's a life crisis."

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Iran is expected to regain its vote in the U.N. General Assembly after South Korea paid Tehran's delinquent dues to the world body with frozen Iranian funds in the country, South Korea said on Sunday.

Iran had regained its U.N. voting rights in June after a similar payment, but said this month it had lost them again because it could not transfer the funds to pay its dues as a result of U.S. sanctions.

ON TO THE NEXT COLONY:

Tesla is turning to Mozambique for a key component in its electric car batteries in what analysts believe is a first-of-its-kind deal designed to reduce its dependence on China for graphite.

Elon Musk's company signed an agreement last month with Australia's Syrah Resources, which operates one of the world's largest graphite mines in the southern African country.

SO, JUST RACE BAITING? GOT IT:

"We felt like it was a bill that was not deserving of our vote," said Sen. Derrick Simmons, D-Greenville. "We have so many issues in the state that need to be addressed. We did not need to spend time on this.

"Even the author of the bill (Michael McLendon, R-Hernando) said this was not occurring in Mississippi," Simmons continued.

McLendon, who handled the bill during more than 90 minutes of debate on the Senate floor, did concede that he could not point to an instance of critical race theory being taught in Mississippi.

He said he heard from many of his constituents who had learned of critical race theory "on the national news" and wanted to ensure it would not be taught in Mississippi.

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

"The Islamic Emirate has taken steps for meeting the demands of the Western world and we hope to strengthen our relations through diplomacy with all the countries, including European countries and the West in general," Zabihullah Mujahid told AFP on Saturday.

The Taliban want to "transform the atmosphere of war... into a peaceful situation." 

Talks between the Taliban and Western officials will open in Oslo on Sunday on human rights and humanitarian aid as a poverty crisis deepens. 

The humanitarian situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated drastically since the Taliban's takeover. International aid came to a sudden halt and the United States has frozen $9.5 billion (8.4 billion euros) in Afghan central bank assets held overseas.

Hunger now threatens 23 million Afghans, or 55 percent of the population, according to the United Nations, which says it needs $5 billion from donor countries this year to address the humanitarian crisis in the country.

The visit from Sunday to Tuesday will see meetings between the hardline Islamists, Norwegian authorities and officials from a number of allied countries including Britain, the European Union, France, Germany, Italy and the United States, the Norwegian foreign ministry statement said. 

The Taliban delegation is also expected to meet Afghans from civil society, including women leaders and journalists, at a time when the freedoms of those living in Afghanistan are being increasingly curtailed.

DONALD WHO?:

WHY WOULD DEMOCRATS FEAR GOP ELECTION THEFT?:

A draft executive order written by Donald Trump's White House in the weeks after his defeat in the 2020 election directed the nation's top military leader to seize voting machines, a report said Friday.

The explosive document, released by the National Archives and obtained by Politico, highlights the extreme measures Trump may have been willing to take to cling to power against the will of voters who picked Joe Biden to be their next president.

NURTURE TUMPS NATURE:

Three studies released Friday offered more evidence that COVID-19 vaccines are standing up to the Omicron variant, at least among people who received booster shots.

They are the first large US studies to look at vaccine protection against Omicron, health officials said.

The papers echo previous research -- including studies in Germany, South Africa and the UK -- indicating available vaccines are less effective against Omicron than earlier versions of the coronavirus, but also that boosters doses rev up virus-fighting antibodies to increase the chance of avoiding symptomatic infection.

IF YOU'RE MOVING TO TX YOU'LL WANT ONE:

SEVENSES:

You smell hot dogs and beer. You feel the anticipation. Men sport bright caps with fancy insignias. Women wear shiny team jackets two sizes too large. Kids struggle with long leather mitts. They hand over their tickets and enter the arena and start to search, not for a seat, but for history, for second-hand iconography, for dusty slices of immortality, for Number 7.

The Baseball Memorabilia Show has converted the fourth floor of the Claridge Hotel and Casino in AC into an American archeological dig. Antiquarians from California and Florida and most place in between are here to unearth rare fossils and sentimental artifacts. Walls are lined with the hieroglyphics of the sport: pennants and posters. Tables are stacked with faded baseball cards and assorted souvenirs, a Philadelphia A's ashtray, a Pete Rose parka. Living relics, Whitey Ford and Duke Snider and Billy Martin, are here for atmosphere, an occasional autograph and to have their memories tested by fans who possess baseball encyclopedias for brains.

It doesn't take long to realize that the greatest number and most treasured antiques revolved around one particular player. His face is everywhere, his signature on everything.  His is the King Tut of Hardball. He is down the long hall now, in a private room, confronted by an endless stream of supplicants.

Mickey Mantle sits behind a wooden table surrounded by sentinels who keep the crowds moving and the communions brief. Hundreds file by, quietly, respectfully, as if in a religious procession. They are relieved to find their hero has retained his dignity, his diffidence, and his hairline. Under a maroon sweater, his shoulders are still massive, his demeanor still regal. He will rarely look up to see the faces of the pilgrims who have journeyed so far and waited so long for his cursive blessing. Few will dare a conversation. They must be content to present their offering and watch the man who stroked 536 home runs now drag a felt-tipped pen across their memories.

He will write "Mickey Mantle" quite legibly, somewhat delicately, on baseballs and bubble-gum cards and paperback books and Little League uniforms and old Life magazines and ticket stubs and mugs and Polaroids with his mug and body casts and naked skin and anything that will hold ink. He will write Mickey Mantle 200 times this afternoon, and then he will do it again tomorrow.

"It's exhausting, but I don't really mind," says the autographer. "It's just this tension in the air. I want everyone to be happy. Especially when it's in my place, in the hotel that pays me. I have to be careful about the time. If you stop and personalize every autograph and talk to everyone, there's gonna be a lot pf people real mad. So my main goal is just to get everyone through the line at least once. When these people leave here, if they don't get what they came for, they're gonna blame me. Not Whitey or Billy, but Mickey Mantle."

"It's like it's happening to someone else. Like this Mickey Mantle is some other guy."

Neither sullen nor charming, Mantle signs beyond his two-hour allotment. He is so dedicated, so diligent that one wonders if signing his name isn't a form of penitence.

"I saw Mantle push kids aside," writes a former teammate. "He closed bus windows on a bunch of kids who wanted his autograph. He refused to sign baseball in the clubhouse before games. Everybody had to sign except Mantle.  There are thousands of baseballs around the country that have been signed not by Mickey Mantle but by Pete Previte, the clubhouse attendant."

There will be no autograph pinch-hitters today. Mantle earns a living by signing his name for $5,000 per appearance. Each time he comes to the Claridge Hotel, boxes of baseballs await him. And when he walks into a restaurant, men, women, and children too young to have seen number 7 roam centerfield for the Yankees will ask him to sign his name.

"It's been amazing how good my name has been," says Mickey Mantle with more wonderment than hubris. "I guess people think of Jack Armstrong when they think of me. This is the biggest year of my life. I'm more popular now than ever. I've been real lucky. Lucky to have played with the Yankees.  Lucky my appearance hasn't changed over the years.  Lucky my name is Mickey Mantle. It's easy to remember. You know, I haven't played ball in over 15 years. Long time."

Later, under less stress, Mantle tells of strangers who hug him on street corners and weep; of people who send him scrapbooks--he has over 50--that document every event of his life; of a woman who paid him $3,500 to attend her husband's birthday party; of throngs that grow unruly at the sight of him. Mantle is befuddled and bemused. He calls it "very strange" to have affected so many people he's never met, to be so admired for acts he can no longer perform.  Signing autographs is one thing, but the clipping and the awe and the tears....

"It's like it's happening to someone else," he says. "Like this Mickey Mantle is some other guy."

Sometimes, it must feel as if it's the other guy who has all the luck. Tom Catal doesn't operate on luck. "Mickey Mantle guarantees success," says the stockbroker-turned-memorabilia organizer. "I've been doing these shows for five years, and every year, he gets more popular. In Detroit, he almost caused a riot. Same thing in Kansas City. Mickey Mantle can outdraw God.  By 50 percent. I've tried to figure out the appeal, and all I can come up with is he's white, he's a living legend, and I will never do another show without Mickey Mantle."

Four dollars gets one autograph by Hall of Famers Duke Snider or Harmon Killebrew. Six dollars buys a Willie Mays or Pete Rose. Mickey Mantle goes for seven simoleons. Who would have guessed that the number of his back would end up his price?

EVERY ROOF A NODE:

A new report from Environment America finds that big box stores could be a huge resource for solar power, potentially providing enough power for 8 million homes. And once you think about the math, this is a little bit of a no-brainer.

The U.S. has a lot of big box stores. There are more than 100,000 superstores across the country, which means about 7.2 billion square feet (670 million square meters) of rooftop space. Using data from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the report estimates that about two-thirds of that underutilized area could be used for solar panels. Fully equipping that space could generate 84.4 terawatt-hours of energy per year, which would save more than 52 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

There's even room for improvement: Environment America last ran a similar analysis in 2016, and this year's figures for possible electricity generation are about 9% higher than they were seven years ago--thanks in large part to improvements in solar technology, rather than more big stores being built.

NATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

On the surface, it might seem reasonable to believe that those with close ties to China -- by birth, ethnicity, or business -- are more likely to become deliberate or unwitting agents of Beijing. But that's the wrong way to look at it. The vast majority of ethnic Chinese in the U.S. are simply living their lives, contributing to society, and enjoying the American Dream.

There have been successful prosecutions of Chinese nationals on U.S. soil. Earlier this month, Xiang Haitao pleaded guilty to conspiring to steal trade secrets in the agriculture industry. Yet, other defendants have also been successfully prosecuted. Harvard University professor Charles Lieber was last month convicted of tax offences and making false statements. Lieber admitted to carrying bags of up to $100,000 in cash from Wuhan to Boston. 

From an investigative point of view, focusing on one racial group risks incorrectly charging innocent victims, while missing those perpetrators who don't fit the pre-conceived framework of a "likely suspect." We've seen this play out with disastrous effect on African-American communities.

Just as important, this approach misses the forest for the trees. A key tenet for the U.S. ramping up the Tech Cold War, and bringing allies into the fight, is the belief in its own moral superiority. Freedom of speech, freedom of movement, due process, and the presumption of innocence are concepts which Washington and like-minded nations want to promote globally.

A rising China, which doesn't pretend to advocate the same beliefs -- instead emphasizing safety and stability -- is a risk to these so-called American values. So when prosecutors start hunting down defendants based on race and file charges for crimes that are of little real risk to national security -- tax and wire fraud is a far cry from stealing nuclear technology -- they start to undermine these same ideals they're supposedly promoting. 

MOST TRAGIC SLIDING DOORS MOMENT IN HISTORY:

By war's end his command, operating more than 1,000 Superfortresses, was the deadliest air force on earth, having killed at least 220,000 Japanese civilians, possibly more than 500,000, and left five million homeless. When he stood on the deck of the battleship Missouri to witness the signing of the peace treaty, LeMay saw to it that hundreds of his B-29s thundered overhead.

As World War II transitioned into the Cold War, LeMay relocated to England in charge of the new USAFE, United States Air Forces in Europe, rebuilding the downsized command just in time. When the USSR blockaded West Berlin, he recommended immediately bombing Soviet air bases in East Germany. "I think we would have cleaned them up pretty well, in no time at all," he boasted.

Instead Western powers opted for an airlift. LeMay threw himself into the effort with equal enthusiasm, commandeering cargo planes from all over the Free World to fly supplies into the beleaguered city. Cynics called the Berlin Airlift "LeMay's Coal and Feed Company," but at the height of operations it was delivering almost 13,000 tons of supplies daily, with a transport touching down in West Berlin every 30 seconds. LeMay found it personally gratifying to sustain the city, still full of rubble from his bombs. "We had knocked the place down....Now we were doing just the opposite," he noted. "We were building and healing."

With his demonstrated expertise in assembling air forces from scratch, LeMay was called upon to take over what was to be America's main weapon of the Cold War, the new Strategic Air Command. "This had occurred right at the time [1948] when the Air Force had gone to utter hell," he asserted. "...We didn't have one crew, not one crew in the entire command who could do a professional job."

On his principle that "A force that cannot fight and win will not deter," LeMay had just started building up SAC when the Cold War flared hot again. "I suggested informally, when the Korean flap started in 1950, that we go up north immediately with incendiaries and delete four or five of the largest towns," he recalled. 

Needless to say, his advice was not followed. The fighting raged down almost to the tip of South Korea, up to the border with Red China and back down to the Demilitarized Zone, a draw. "And what happened?" LeMay demanded. "We burned down just about every city in North Korea and South Korea both."

Accused of being heartless, LeMay thought himself pragmatic. "Actually I think it's more immoral to use less force than necessary, than it is to use more," he reasoned. "If you use less force, you kill off more of humanity in the long run, because you are merely protracting the struggle."

To that end LeMay, now a four-star general, molded SAC to win a war--a nuclear war--from the outset. Its motto was "Peace is Our Profession," but its task was to prevent a Soviet first strike, stop any Warsaw Pact advance into Europe and then carry the war to the Russian heartland, obliterating 70 picked cities within 30 days. LeMay kept America's ever-growing fleet of B-36 Peacemakers, then B-47 Stratojets, B-58 Hustlers and B-52 Stratofortresses, in a constant state of readiness, with bases around the world, midair refueling, aerial command centers and strategic bombers flying 24 hours a day, prepared to strike on a moment's notice. 

Yet SAC--and LeMay, a man of proven will­ingness to kill civilians by the hundreds of thousands in pursuit of victory--was a weapon too terrible for Washington to unleash. Even as he rose to chief of staff of the Air Force, LeMay found himself butting heads with presidents. John F. Kennedy cancelled his pet project, the supersonic XB-70 Valkyrie bomber, in favor of intercontinental ballistic missiles. (LeMay oversaw SAC's ICBM program but was not a proponent. "Missiles are spectacular and they play their role," he said, "but they have no sense of loyalty; they can't think; they can't be recalled.")

During the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy refused to let LeMay bomb the island's launch sites, and during the Vietnam War Lyndon Johnson and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara also restricted bombing, lest it draw the Soviets and Chinese into the war. "He was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war," McNamara said of LeMay, "but he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal." 

LeMay's answer to the North Vietnamese was, unsurprisingly, "Tell them they've got to draw in their horns and stop their aggression, or we're going to bomb them back into the Stone Age." Author Kantor was accused of inventing that quote for LeMay's biography, but it came to exemplify his approach to war.

Arguably Operation Linebacker II, the strategic bombing of North Vietnamese military and industrial targets in December 1972--the largest USAF bomber operation since World War II--proved LeMay right. It forced Hanoi back to the negotiating table and gave the U.S. a way out of the conflict. By that time LeMay had retired--some would say he was eased out--but not before wearing four stars longer than any other general in American military history. 

GOSH, WHY DOES IRAN THINK IT NEEDS TO DEFEND ITSELF?:

Israeli fighter jets carried out a large drill over the Mediterranean that included practicing mid-air refueling, according to a report in a Saudi-run news outlet Thursday.

The unverified report in London-based Elaph described air maneuvers on Thursday by "an unusually large" contingent of F-15, F-16 and F-35 fighter craft, as well as Boeing mid-air refueling tankers, in what would likely be seen as a warning beacon to Iran amid Israeli threats to take military action in order to stop Tehran's nuclear program.

THE BRILLIANCE OF GOOD MANNERS:

"What made me withdraw and go to the bridge was how I felt about my own playing," reflects that saxophonist today, 91-year-old Sonny Rollins. "I knew I was dissatisfied."

He climbed the steep iron steps within two blocks of the apartment he shared with his wife, Lucille, at 400 Grand Street in Manhattan, and was thrilled by the space, light and noisy solitude they led to. Rollins was 28 and already one of the undisputed giants of the subtle and sophisticated modern-jazz advances known as bebop that had taken off in the 40s - even though Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman were close on his heels with radical new approaches to how melody, harmony and rhythm could dance spontaneously together.

Between 1956 and 1958, after a series of brilliant small-band albums including Saxophone Colossus and Way Out West, Rollins was acclaimed by the New Yorker's Whitney Balliett as "possibly the most incisive and influential jazz instrumentalist since Charlie Parker", while the jazz/classical musicologist Gunther Schuller wrote that the thematic fertility and coherence of the young genius's off-the-cuff improvisations "held together as perfect compositions".

In the summer of 1959, though, Rollins disappeared from the radar and stayed off it for the next two years - instead playing the saxophone on the bridge day and night, rain or shine, in solitary sessions of sometimes 15 hours or more. This month is the 60th anniversary of his return to the recording studio, when he entered RCA Victor's Studio B in New York on 30 January 1962 with a classy rhythm section and an even classier frontline partner in Jim Hall - one of the subtlest jazz guitarists of the era. That January session, and another a fortnight later, produced Rollins' eagerly awaited comeback album, The Bridge.

Down the phone from his home in upstate New York, Rollins sounds as sprightly as he has in the handful of conversations we have had down the years - always curious, sharp of memory and generous about everyone who makes music. He hasn't played the saxophone since 2014, due to a respiratory condition. But memories of the long days and changing seasons on the bridge are vivid, as are the reasons that propelled him there, when logic suggested staying in the public eye.

"I was getting a lot of publicity for my work at that time, but I wasn't satisfying my own requirements for what I wanted to do musically," he says. One of his neighbours at the time was an expectant mother, so "there was an immediate reason, too: it was difficult to practise a loud horn like the tenor saxophone in my apartment without disturbing somebody".

Rollins had withdrawn from jazz before, in the early 50s, when heroin addiction had taken him into a stretch of hard-labour rehab at the Lexington Narcotics Farm in Kentucky. In 1956, the year after he got clean, the exultant Saxophone Colossus session emerged. So Rollins understood the liberating potential of focused, relentless hard work, away from gigging and hanging out. But he also knew how fresh and different the new music of Coltrane, Coleman and Davis was sounding by 1959 (the year in which those three made the groundbreaking albums Giant Steps, The Shape of Jazz to Come and Kind of Blue) and felt he needed to provide answers of his own.

Did he worry about the disappointment his withdrawal might bring to his fans? "Am I playing music for other people, you mean?" Rollins inquires. "Yes I am, in a way. But I'm playing for myself. I have to sound good. I don't want to make my public feel I'm great if I don't feel like that. Also, I've always loved practising - as much as I did performing. Wherever I was, on tour or whatever, I always wanted to find some place to practise, because that's in my DNA, to keep improving myself."

...AND CHEAPER...:

Japanese researchers backed by Softbank Corp have developed a lithium-air battery they say shows some of the highest energy densities and best cycle life performances ever achieved - "significantly higher" than current mainstream lithium-ion batteries.

The National Institute for Materials Science said this week that the lithium-air batteries it had been developing using "original materials" had achieved an energy density - the measure of how much energy a battery contains in proportion to its weight - of more than 500Wh/kg.

THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

Oh, Putin also has effective control over South Ossetia these days, which has gotten him nothing much except increased fear from all his neighbors, who are even more dedicated to European integration than before.

What else has this mastermind accomplished? There's Syria, but what has that done for him? Nothing. It was just a stupid attempt to poke America in the eye, and it didn't even work at doing that.

And of course, there's Ukraine. But we all remember more about Ukraine than just the past few months, don't we? Putin has been meddling in Ukraine for the past two decades, and he keeps botching it. He put his guy in power and poisoned the opposition leader, which led to the Orange Revolution and closer ties to the West. He did it again and got the Maidan protests--which led to closer ties to the West. Since then, the government of Ukraine has been steadfastly dedicated to pushing away Russia and joining trade agreements with Europe. So now, having failed at literally every attempt to bring Ukraine into his orbit, Putin is left with no options except a military attack.

So what will Putin do? Media reports say he has about 100,000 troops massed on the border of Ukraine, and it's likely that this is about as many as he can put there. About half of them are raw conscripts and the other half are contractors. This might well be enough to occupy Eastern Ukraine, which is generally sympathetic to Russia, but that's about it.

And then what? Keep 100,000 troops there forever? Spend decades fighting a low-intensity conflict with Ukraine? And for what? It's a military rat hole, like Afghanistan or Vietnam.

THEN YELLED, "FREE AAFIA SIDDIQUI!":

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

THE MENACE WAS ORANGE, NOT YELLOW:

"Today's dismissal of the criminal charges against Gang Chen is a result of our continued investigation," US Attorney for the District of Massachusetts Rachael Rollins said in a statement after the filing. "Through that effort, we recently obtained additional information pertaining to the materiality of Professor Chen's alleged omissions in the context of the grant review process at issue in this case. After a careful assessment of this new information in the context of all the evidence, our office has concluded that we can no longer meet our burden of proof at trial."

"The government finally acknowledged what we said all along: Professor Gang Chen is an innocent man," Robert Fisher, Chen's defense attorney, said in a statement. "Our defense was never based on any legal technicalities. Gang did not commit any of the offenses he was charged with. Full stop. He was never in a talent program. He was never an overseas scientist for Beijing. He disclosed everything that he was supposed to disclose and never lied to the government or anyone else."

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Eric Trump and Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg invoked their Fifth Amendment rights more than 500 times when questioned by the New York attorney general's office for its investigation into the company's finances, according to a Tuesday court filing.

"Eric Trump then invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination in response to more than 500 questions over six hours," the filing says of an Oct. 5, 2020, interview with former President Donald Trump's son.

Weisselberg reportedly did so during an interview on Sept. 24, 2020: "After answering a number of preliminary questions, Allen Weisselberg invoked his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination to more than 500 questions over five-and-a-half hours."

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

In a new intelligence assessment, the CIA has ruled out that the mysterious symptoms known as Havana Syndrome are the result of a sustained global campaign by a hostile power aimed at hundreds of U.S. diplomats and spies, six people briefed on the matter told NBC News.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Incels obsess over their "beta" status and how to become "alpha", like the Chads. And occasionally Incels talk of taking arms against their seas of troubles, ending their "#incelnightmare" in an "#incelrebellion."

In their excited talk about rebellion and revenge, they often venerate Incels who have committed mass murder, even as the rest of the world condemns them as pathetic cowards. The young man who rampaged through Isla Vista, California in 2014, killing six people and then himself, is considered a celebrity. Likewise, since an Incel killed five people in Plymouth, UK, last August, traffic to UK-based Incel forums has increased sixfold.

Are Incels an aberration of 21st century Western culture? Do they arise because the Internet breeds misogyny and radicalises men against feminism? Or do local circumstances, in the places where they live their offline lives, prod some men toward Inceldom when they go online.

While the term "Incel" has only been around since the early '90s, misogyny and male anger have been around far longer. History suggests that today's Incels are just the most recent expression of an ancient problem so widespread that psychologists have given it a name: "young male syndrome." Young men whose circumstances furnish few prospects of finding a partner will risk their lives and futures to improve those prospects by jostling with others for status and respect.

These behaviours are more common in men because, as genetic studies show, for millions of years far more men than women died without ever having children. Your ancestors--and mine--were among those who escaped the Incel fate by outcompeting their contemporaries.

Young men, especially ones not born to status, have the least to offer a potential mate. Their vulnerability to remaining involuntarily celibate makes them especially prone to frustration and anger. They have much to gain and little to lose in risky competition for status.

How men seek to avoid the Incel fate depends on the avenues open for them to gain status and respect. Some show off with crazy stunts, dangerous driving, or fighting. Others throw themselves into sports or risky jobs. A few gravitate to crime and gangs. And, in the 21st century, some fulminate on social media.

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

IN 1939, WHEN THE SOVIET UNION was an ally of  Nazi Germany, the U.S. Army began collecting copies of encrypted cables sent commercially to Moscow by the Soviet diplomatic missions in the United States. No effort to decrypt the cables, thought to be diplomatic in nature, was made until 1943, when reports were received that Stalin, by then an ally of the United States, was negotiating a separate peace treaty with Germany. At that time, the Army Signals Security Agency (SSA), an early predecessor of the National Security Agency (NSA), was ordered to establish a program--eventually called VENONA--to decipher the cables. The Soviet codes did not yield readily to cryptanalysis, because, as it was soon discovered, a two-part ciphering system had been employed; the second step used a one-time pad--theoretically unbreakable. As it happened, none of the messages was deciphered before the end of the war.

Once progress began to be made, however, the SSA cryptanalysts made a startling discovery. Only slightly more than half of the 750,000 intercepted cables concerned foreign ministry and trade matters; the balance involved Soviet intelligence organizations. By 1946, when the first message was decrypted, KGB, GRU (military intelligence), and naval GRU-user systems had been identified. When the VENONA program ended in October 1980, portions of nearly three thousand of the cables intercepted between 1939 and 1948 had been decrypted. The results revealed that Soviet agents had penetrated every important organization in the American government, including the Manhattan Project. The Allies were not immune; VENONA revealed Soviet penetrations in Britain, Canada, and Australia. In 1995 the VENONA decrypts were declassified. Hard copies were made available to scholars, while digital versions were posted on the NSA Website, together with several monographs providing historical details.

The public reaction to the VENONA decrypts was mixed. Walter and Miriam Schneir, longtime advocates of the "the Rosenbergs are innocent" theory, wrote in the 5 July 1999 issue of The Nation that "no reasonable person who examines all the relevant documents can doubt, for example, that in World War II Washington some employees of government agencies were passing information that went to the Russians, that the American Communist Party provided recruits for Soviet intelligence work or that VENONA yielded clues that put investigators on the trail of Klaus Fuchs[,] . . .  Julius Rosenberg and others." But many still could not accept the charges that Communist Party members had engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. There were a variety of countercharges. Some claimed that the U.S. government had fabricated the cables. Others argued that the interpretation of the partially decrypted messages was faulty. Still others claimed "Red scare revisionism," coupled with "right-wing triumphalism," aimed at rehabilitating Senator Joseph McCarthy.

The books discussed here consider these issues to varying degrees. They reveal how the codes were broken, who did the work, the nature of the espionage, how the Soviets found out about VENONA  (long before the CIA was officially informed by the FBI in 1952), and why most of the spies identified were never prosecuted. While there is some overlap between them, each book contributes its own details and analysis.

THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

What Putin truly fears is what Navalny's movement seeks--a change of power in Russia, followed by cashiering its corrupt clan of oligarchs and spies. It isn't NATO that keeps Putin up at night; it's the space for democratic dissent that NATO opens up along his border. This fear, Navalny argues, is what drives all the conflicts Russia wages with the West. "To consolidate the country and the elites," he writes, "Putin constantly needs all these extreme measures, all these wars--real ones, virtual ones, hybrid ones or just confrontations at the edge of war, as we're seeing now."

Rather than convening talks or offering concessions, Navalny wants the U.S. to pressure the Kremlin from without while Navalny and his supporters pressure it from within. The combination, he believes, will split the elites around Putin, ushering in what Navalny's followers like to call "the beautiful Russia of the future," one that is free, democratic, at peace with its neighbors and the West.

But that slogan elides the ugliness of how dictatorships often fall. Russians need not look far for examples. In early January, protests swept through neighboring Kazakhstan, an oil-rich autocracy to Russia's south. Government buildings were set ablaze. Scores of police and protesters were killed. Kazakhstan's President issued a shoot-to-kill order to his security forces and called for assistance from Russia and its allies. Within hours, Putin dispatched thousands of troops to help put down the uprising. The crackdown worked. The protests subsided.

In our exchange of letters, I asked Navalny about the prospect of such violence in Russia, and whether he sees it as the price of change after 21 years under the rule of one man. "Our path," he wrote, "was never strewn with roses."

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled that although Trump retained some limited authority to claim executive privilege, it wasn't strong enough to overcome Biden's decision that Congress has a legitimate need for the material. It cited a 1977 Supreme Court decision in a dispute between former President Richard Nixon and the Archives, which said the incumbent president is in the best position to decide whether the privilege should be asserted.

COME BACK, ADMIRAL POINDEXTER, ALL IS FORGIVEN:

In 2011, a former Pentagon strategist named Phillip Karber who was teaching at Georgetown University asked his students to study the Chinese tunnel system known as the "underground great wall." The tunnel's existence was well-known, but its purpose was not. Karber's students turned to commercial imagery, blogs, military journals, even a fictional Chinese television drama to get answers. They concluded the tunnels were probably being used to hide 3,000 nuclear weapons. This was an astronomical number, about 10 times higher than declassified intelligence estimates and other forecasts of China's nuclear arsenal.

The shocking findings were featured in the Washington Post, circulated among top officials in the Pentagon, and led to a congressional hearing. They were also incorrect.

Experts quickly found egregious errors in the study. A Harvard researcher found that Karber's students based the 3,000 weapon number on an American intelligence projection from the 1960s, assumed it was accurate, and then just kept adding weapons at a constant rate of growth. Apparently, they did not take seriously more recent declassified intelligence estimates that China probably had no more than 200 to 300 warheads. And Karber's estimates for the amount of plutonium needed for the weapons were based on sketchy sources using even sketchier ones: The study cited Chinese blog posts that were based on a plagiarized grad school essay from 1996, which in turn relied on a single anonymous post on the site Usenet. The plutonium sourcing was "so wildly incompetent as to invite laughter," wrote nonproliferation expert Jeffrey Lewis.

Phillip Karber speaking on a screen at the U.N. Security Council Arria Meeting on Crimea.

Former Pentagon strategist Phillip Karber, whose Georgetown students shockingly -- and wrongly -- concluded that China was hiding thousands of nuclear warheads. | Estonian Foreign Ministry/Flickr

This is the radical new world of open-source intelligence -- where crises move faster, information is everywhere and anyone can play. Intelligence isn't just for governments anymore, thanks to three major trends over the past several years: the proliferation of commercial satellites, the explosion of Internet connectivity and open-source information available online, and advances in automated analytics like machine learning. These changes have touched every part of the intelligence landscape. In particular, they've given rise to a host of non-governmental detectives who track some of the most serious and secret dangers of all: nuclear weapons.

The world of open-source nuclear sleuthing is wide open to anyone with an Internet connection. It draws people with a grab bag of backgrounds, capabilities, motives and incentives -- from hobbyists to physicists, truth seekers to conspiracy peddlers, profiteers, volunteers and everyone in between. Many are former government officials with years in the field, but others are amateurs with little or no experience. There are no formal training programs, ethical guidelines or quality control processes. And errors can go viral; nobody loses their job for making a mistake.

The open-source revolution has been lauded for disrupting and democratizing the secretive world of intelligence. There is no doubt that open-source intelligence is invaluable and that spy agencies must find new ways of harnessing its insights. But the news is not all good. Citizen-detectives also generate risks. From the most obvious risk of getting it wrong, to harder-to-see downsides like derailing diplomatic negotiations by publicly revealing sensitive findings, the U.S. intelligence community needs to pay attention to the potential dangers of open-source intelligence as it adapts its spycraft to the digital age.

...AND CHEAPER...:

THIS IS WHO THE rIGHT OPPOSES:

 Rather than saying what I think everyone else should do, I want to say out loud what I am willing to do.

I will wear my mask. Sometimes to protect me, always to protect you. I will get my third shot. And my fourth, and my fifth if it comes to that. Because in my world of million-dollar technology, this shot is still the most effective way to keep people alive.

I will come to work every day and take care of anyone who is sick in my unit. I don't care if they are vaccinated, unvaccinated, rich, poor, Black, white, brown, gay, straight, Republican, Democrat or Independent. I will put on whatever mask, face shield, gown and gloves I need to come to their bedside and help. I will learn as much as I can, so that when you are sick, I can promise we are doing everything that can be done to save your life.

I will support my peers in the MICU in any way I can. Because, like me, they are tired, they are frustrated, and they are sad. And because they are not only the front line; they are the last line separating the sick from the dead.

I will treat everyone in my care with compassion, because no one deserves what COVID does. And for those who cannot survive, I will do everything I can to ensure that they do not suffer, and I will grieve their loss.

VLAD WHO?:

Standing next to Annalena Baerbock, his new German counterpart, at a news conference in Moscow on Tuesday, Lavrov, the éminence grise of world diplomacy, seemed, well, a bit gray, a bit grumbly, and a tad more tiresome than his usually fearsome self.  [...]

Meanwhile, Baerbock, who was making her first visit to the Russian capital as foreign minister from the Green party in Germany's new governing coalition, maintained steely composure throughout the encounter as she accused Russia of refusing to adhere to common rules, and challenged Lavrov on the jailing of the political opposition leader Alexei Navalny, and the shuttering of Memorial, a venerable human rights organization. 

If she was at all intimidated by her far more seasoned and senior host, Baerbock did not let on. 

Her opening statement lasted nearly a minute longer than Lavrov's, and she closed her prepared remarks by delivering a bit of a lecture about the obligations of public officials to maintain peace and security for their citizens, an unmistakable poking at Russia for threatening further war against Ukraine. 

"We, who bear political responsibility, have no more important duty than to protect our people -- especially from war and violence," she said. "I am convinced that we can achieve this best through successful talks, not against each other but with each other." 

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Attorney General Letitia James revealed new details in the court filing and a statement on her office's investigation into the Trump Organization's business practices, including a preliminary finding alleging the company used "fraudulent and misleading asset valuations to obtain economic benefits."

THE DAMAGE DONE:

The United States has a lower vaccination rate than any other country tracked besides Russia. https://t.co/86cWoe9o07 pic.twitter.com/GHopSXSXJH

— Morning Consult (@MorningConsult) January 17, 2022

MAKE IT THE WHOLE ANGLOSPHERE:

WHAT A BUNCH OF WOKE SNOWFLAKES:

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

The jury is in. The global race between passenger electric vehicles and hydrogen fuel cells vs petrol vs diesel is over. EVs have won in China, the world's biggest auto market.

EV sales in China grew 154% year-on-year to 3.3 million in 2021.

China now wants new energy vehicles (NEVs), including plug-in hybrids and hydrogen fuel cell cars, to make up 20% of sales by 2025, and aims to ban internal combustion engine (ICE) sales by 2035.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Scotland has awarded 17 leases worth nearly 25GW for the development of offshore wind and floating offshore wind farms, including a gigawatt-scale floating offshore project developed by Ørsted and up to 5GW worth of floating offshore wind to be jointly developed by Shell and ScottishPower.

The mammoth ScotWind Leasing round is the first Scottish offshore wind leasing round in over a decade and the first ever since the management of offshore wind rights were devolved to Scotland.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The select House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol riot on Tuesday issued subpoenas to Rudy Giuliani, another former lawyer for ex-President Donald Trump, and two other allies.

The subpoenas add to a raft of demands for interviews and evidence that the House panel has already issued to people in Trump's orbit, a number of whom have resisted cooperating.

The committee said that the new subpoenas were aimed at four people, Giuliani, the attorneys Jenna Ellis and Sidney Powell, and Trump associate Boris Epshteyn, "who publicly promoted unsupported claims about the 2020 election and participated in attempts to disrupt or delay the certification of election results."

AUGURING INTO THE DECK:

WHAT MORE DO YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND...:

 A more accurate assessment of why the Iranian government behaves as it does could lead U.S. policymakers to devise a different and less hostile policy than our government has had for the last 40 years.

That is why Gawdat Bahgat and Anoushiravan Ehteshami's new study, Defending Iran: From Revolutionary Guards to Ballistic Missiles, is such an important contribution to our understanding of Iranian security policies. Through their extensive research into Iranian military capabilities and defense doctrine, Bahgat and Ehteshami explain how and why the post-revolutionary government developed the policies that it still pursues now. They detail how the Iranian government learned from the experience of isolation during the war with Iraq and began building up its own indigenous military-industrial complex, and they stress the importance of the experience of the war in shaping their leaders' thinking about the need for an effective defense against foreign attack. 

The U.S. looms large in this thinking as the main threat to be deterred, and to that end Iran has invested heavily in building up its missile arsenal to make sure that they do not suffer the same vulnerability to attack that they endured in the 1980s. Because Iran cannot match the conventional strength of its adversaries, it has adopted an asymmetric warfare doctrine to exploit the weaknesses of other states with the aim of making Iran secure against external threats.

 As Bahgat and Ehteshami stress several times throughout the book, "The Islamic Republic's military doctrine is essentially a defensive one." Therefore, one of the main goals of the asymmetric doctrine is "to convince those adversaries that they would pay a high price if they attacked Iran."

MAKE CARBON TAXES CONFISCATORY:

That cost surge is driving demand for solar panels and extra insulation as people seek to ease the pressure on their wallets.

Rooftop solar is "going to grow quite substantially all over Europe," said Vegard Wiik Vollset, head of EMEA renewables at researcher Rystad Energy AS. "The potential of reducing your electricity bill with these sort of installations is now suddenly a lot more attractive" amid higher energy prices.

France saw the biggest expansion in rooftop solar in Europe last year, with new installations jumping almost fourfold, according to Rystad. Germany was still first in terms of volume, adding more than 1,600 megawatts of capacity. The growth in both countries builds on an existing trend, with more and more residents opting to "green" their homes in recent years.

...AND THEN WONDER THAT THEY ARE CONDESCENDED TO BY NORMAL PEOPLE...:

At former President Donald Trump's rally in Arizona on Saturday, there were enough conspiracy theories and lies about "election fraud" and "psy-op" being spread from the stage by Trump and his cadre of sycophant GOP lawmakers to keep hardcore MAGA fans happy. 

But for one group, the conspiracies needed to be taken to a completely new level.   

Having spent the last two-and-a-half months holed up in Dallas awaiting the reappearance of John F. Kennedy and his son, a group of two dozen or so QAnon followers, led by an antisemitic guru called Michael Protzman, made the 1,000 mile trip to hear Trump speaking at his first major rally of 2022.

Ahead of the rally, Protzman, or Negative48 as he's known to his followers, predicted the event would feature some major revelations. While most QAnon followers criticized Trump for talking about returning in 2024 rather than trying to overturn the 2020 election result, Protzman told his followers that something huge happened in the desert on Saturday night.

In an audio chat with his followers on Sunday, Protzman claimed that Kari Lake, the former TV anchor who is now running for Arizona governor, had just finished speaking but was brought back up on stage by Trump, in order to show people that Trump was in fact JFK in disguise.

WHAT WE LOST:

On Nov. 20, 1934, a brand new symphony brought a Carnegie Hall audience to its feet. The concert featured the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by its star conductor Leopold Stokowski. The music was the Negro Folk Symphony, by the 35-year-old African American composer William Dawson. He was called back to the stage several times to take bows after his symphony ended.

Stokowski conducted four back-to-back performances of the piece, one of which was nationally broadcast by CBS radio. One New York critic called it "the most distinctive and promising American symphonic proclamation which has so far been achieved." Olin Downes, writing in The New York Times, noted: "This music has dramatic feeling, a racial sensuousness and directness of melodic speech."

The immediate success should have made Dawson a household name and buoyed him to write more symphonic works. But after just a handful of performances over the next 18 months, the symphony inexplicably dropped off the radar, and Dawson never wrote another. After decades of neglect, a new recording of the Negro Folk Symphony has finally been released this week, performed by the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

In raising our child, we are combining elements of both of our cultural practices and theological interpretations of Hinduism, making sure that he participates in the Hindu devotionals his Caribbean ancestors did to maintain their religion through a life of bondage, while teaching him how to identify religious symbols in Tamil, my ancestral language. 

Groups, such as the Pew Research Center, that study religious demographics don't keep data on intercultural and inter-tradition relationships and marriages, but such bonds among American Hindus are clearly on the rise as the children of different diaspora communities meet at school or at work and as Hindus have begun identifying more with the idea of being Hindu than a specific sect or tradition within the faith.

It's no longer uncommon to see relationships between, say, Sri Lankan and Trinidadian Hindus, or Hindus from South Africa and those from the Indian state of Punjab. While these couples have Indian heritage in common, however distant, we have also seen increasing numbers of relationships between Indic and non-Indic young people, such as Indonesian Hindus.

The choices American Hindus make about who they will marry will have profound implications for the next generation. In some sense, the implications are contradictory: Some Hindus will inevitably move away from regional and cultural identities -- losing some of their grounding in the faith -- while at the same time more deeply embracing a faith based on common devotional practice.

The most significant example may be caste, a system that is not theologically intrinsic to or scripturally codified in Hinduism but is internalized by many Hindus from India and other parts of the Indian subcontinent. Already we have seen caste become a less important issue as Indian-American Hindus enter into relationships with non-Indian Hindus (and, indeed, non-Hindus). 

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Roughly one thousand people of various faiths and backgrounds gathered for a vigil at a church five miles north of Colleyville, Texas, on Monday evening, showing solidarity with the nearby Jewish community as it began to heal from the hostage standoff at Congregation Beth Israel 48 hours earlier. [...]

Before he began speaking, the rabbi, known in the surrounding Colleyville community for his interfaith work, noted with humor the sticky note reading "Let them see Jesus" that has always been affixed to the massive church's podium the several times over the years he's made use of it.

Cytron-Walker said the amount of "well-wishes and kindness and compassion" has been overwhelming.

He thanked those who packed the massive White Chapel Methodist Church from all over the Dallas area as well as the over 24,000 viewers on Facebook Live -- the same medium that was used by CBI to stream its Sabbath morning services and where the first three hours of Saturday's hostage standoff played out eerily for the public to watch.

"How amazing is it for us to know... that our small congregation in Colleyville, Texas, which no one had ever heard of before, [is being so] supported on this journey.

"To my CBI family," he said, again choking up, "I wish I had a magic wand. I wish I could take away all of our pain and struggle.

"I know that this violation of our spiritual home was traumatic for each and every one of us," Cytron-Walker continued. "We will take the next step. We will comfort each other."

The gathering appeared emblematic of Cytron-Walker's efforts as CBI spiritual leader. It saw him thank "religious leaders, and atheist leaders and political leaders of all parties." He could be heard telling the audience that "if you're comfortable, you can say amen," after finishing the recitation of an English prayer, determined to be inclusive to all. [...]

Imam Azhar Subedar, who's the spiritual leader of the Plano Mosque 40 miles northeast of Colleyville and is active in interfaith efforts as well, viewed his attendance at the vigil as an extension of his work.

He described his reaction as a Muslim to Saturday's standoff as "twofold."

"For us it's about the work to establish peace in the world, but at the same time, working on the people within our faith to ensure that extremist ideologies are done with," Subedar said.

KRUSH THEM:

In the 1980s, the Southern Poverty Law Center took the United Klans of America to court after two Klansmen lynched a 19-year-old Black man, Michael Donald, in Mobile, Alabama. A jury awarded his family $7 million. The white supremacist group, however, could not scrounge together the payment and had to turn over the deed to their Tuscaloosa headquarters -- their lone asset -- to Donald's mother.

In 1990, the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League successfully sued the leader of another white supremacist group, the White Aryan Resistance, for his part in inciting the 1988 fatal beating of an Ethiopian man in Portland, Oregon. The family of Mulugeta Seraw was awarded $12.5 million in damages, and the head of the group, Tom Metzger, found himself in financial ruins over the litigation, losing his home and filing for bankruptcy protection.

Like the case against the White Aryan Resistance, the suit targeting the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers hinges on proving at trial that they violated the Ku Klux Klan Act, a rarely used federal law codified after the Civil War to protect civil rights. The litigation has a good chance of succeeding, experts on hate and extremism in the U.S. say, because it sources the information that's being collected as part of the congressional investigation into what role the two groups played in the planning and execution of the assault on the Capitol.

"That's pretty damning -- it's coming from the federal government," Randy Blazak, a sociologist at the University of Oregon who is involved in efforts in the Portland area to combat hate speech and extremist activity, said of the lawsuit.

PITY THE POOR FLATLANDERS:

"It scored well in terms of affordability, as it has the third-highest median household income, over $68,000. Looking at the capital's economic well-being, we found that it has the third-lowest share of the population living in poverty, just 9 percent, the lowest unemployment rate, 2.2 percent, as well as a low bankruptcy rate," added WalletHub's Jill Gonzalez.

Concord finished ahead of Montpelier, Vt. (18) and well ahead of Boston, Mass. (23). The remaining New England capitols all finished in the bottom 10: Providence, R.I. (41), Augusta, Maine (44), and Hartford, Conn. (48).

Concord's positives are no secret to Granite Staters like state Rep. Safiya Wazir (D). Wazir's family fled Taliban rule in Afghanistan when she was a child and she is proud to call Concord her new home.

"Concord is a great place to raise a family and offers a variety of quality educational opportunities for children and adults," she said. "Concord was a welcoming place when my family and I arrived as refugees, a place we could live and thrive, contribute to, and form strong connections and a deep sense of community."

THERE'S NEVER BEEN ANY SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

From mules to ligers, the list of human-made hybrid animals is long. And, it turns out, ancient.

Meet the kunga, the earliest known hybrid animal bred by people. The ancient equine from Syro-Mesopotamia existed around 4,500 years ago and was a cross between a donkey and a hemippe, a type of Asiatic wild ass, researchers report January 14 in Science Advances.

Denisovans are an elusive bunch, known mainly from ancient DNA samples and traces of that DNA that the ancient hominids shared when they interbred with Homo sapiens. They left their biggest genetic imprint on people who now live in Southeast Asian islands, nearby Papua New Guinea and Australia. Genetic evidence now shows that a Philippine Negrito ethnic group has inherited the most Denisovan ancestry of all. Indigenous people known as the Ayta Magbukon get around 5 percent of their DNA from Denisovans, a new study finds.

This finding fits an evolutionary scenario in which two or more Stone Age Denisovan populations independently reached various Southeast Asian islands, including the Philippines and a landmass that consisted of what's now Papua New Guinea, Australia and Tasmania. Exact arrival dates are unknown, but nearly 200,000-year-old stone tools found on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi may have been made by Denisovans (SN: 1/13/16). H. sapiens groups that started arriving around 50,000 years ago or more then interbred with resident Denisovans.

NATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

IT'S A TROUBLING TREND...:

Politicians rarely set out to piss off their constituents, much less admit to doing so. So when French President Emmanuel Macron expressed his desire to antagonize France's unvaccinated citizens into receiving COVID vaccinations, observers and many of his rivals were appalled, and some were a bit confused. Macron is up for reelection in April, and a quarter of his country remains unimmunized.

But what looked like a risky move for Macron could prove to be a more politically shrewd calculation, not because of whom it alienates, but rather because of whom it doesn't. In France, and in other democratic countries around the world, the unvaccinated make up a relatively small segment of the population. Macron and his peers in countries such as Australia and Italy have calculated that condemning this group could be more politically effective than pandering to it. Even world-famous celebrities such as tennis star Novak Djokovic, whose unvaccinated status dashed his hopes of defending his Australian Open title, have become the targets of politicians' ire. By taking a tougher line on the unvaccinated, Macron and other democratically elected leaders facing elections this year may be courting an energetic new voter base: the vaccinated, and ever more impatient, majority.

TO V. FROM:

 It is easy today to dismiss Burke's politics as too rooted in history, too accepting of existing injustices, and too hostile toward demands for change. It is easy to do so because the language of politics has in large measure become the language of Paine. But this language also is the language of abstraction, of simplification, and of power. For Paine, in his drive for justice and individual freedom, sought to construct a politics rooted in the individual and the demand for equality here and now. Political structures were to be reshaped to make them democratic and to make them capable of remaking society so that it would be friendlier toward the demands of individuals seeking their own good on the basis of their own, unfettered reason. Paine experienced how the drive for such a radical transformation, and such a radical rejection of the institutions, beliefs, and practices inherited from those who went before us and believed they were leaving an inheritance for those who would come after us, led to mass murder in the French Revolution. But he remained convinced that only a forceful re-founding of society on the consent (however gleaned) of the people taken as an (undefined) whole could be just and could lead to justice. He followed his own reasoning to its logical conclusion: promotion of a secular state seeking to free individuals from want, from the past, and from the confines of the social order. Succeeding revolutions and their aftermaths have shown how bloody and enervating such a program is. Yet the political left continues to insist that these are the only true principles, and that we try again and again to put them into action, whatever the consequences, because this is the only just and caring way to proceed.

Burke, meanwhile, insisted that order is the first need of all, that it begins in the soul, and that the soul is shaped through normative education rooted in society seen as an inheritance we must preserve and hand on to later generations. On this view, injustices must be addressed, and reforms made. But this must be done with an eye toward ameliorating abuses in a manner that preserves the functioning of society and the ability of people to go about their lives with an assurance of stability and the support of the cultural institutions and norms necessary for any good life.

As Mr. Levin emphasizes, it is more than anything else the emphasis on simplification that makes Paine's assumptions regarding the good society dangerous to actual persons. The idea that society can be reduced to a set of principles, which can be imprinted upon a shapeless reality, is not merely wrong, but destructive. We are not merely individuals, but persons. We do not create our own characters, they are formed through the interaction of reason and experience; and each of these is a social endeavor. We reason together through classrooms, juries, and various other associations in which we must address problems of the day. Our experience is, if we are not angels or beasts (or the figments of philosophical imaginations) overwhelmingly social. Even reading is a form of social activity as it means entering the mind of another, or the world created or remembered by another.

What is lost in the demand for abstract justice, now, is the very process of pursuing the good in common with our fellows. And, having lost that process, we also lose the associations in which we once pursued the good. Our families, churches, and local associations lose their reasons for being as the state takes over the tasks of tending the sick, the needy, the powerless, and the general public. And the result is a society in which the individual is left alone, fending for himself in the face of life's tragedies and, more dangerously, in the face of a government convinced that it knows best and that opposition to its will means intolerable opposition to the will of The People.

SUICIDE BY COP:

"He did not come there to kill Jews ... He came here to release [Aafia Siddiqui], and he had bought into the extremely dangerous, antisemitic trope that Jews control everything, that we could call President [Joe] Biden and have him release her," Jeffrey Cohen said in an interview over Zoom. [...]

After those first 30 minutes though, Akram calmed down and focused on trying to release his "sister" Siddiqui.

"He had one objective. He repeatedly said that he didn't want to hurt us... that he would let us go, that he was the only one who was going to die... and that if the police brought his sister there, he and she would go out on the front lawn and let the authorities kill him. He kept speaking about martyrdom. He was the only one who needed to die that day," Cohen said. "He told us that he chose the closest synagogue to the facility where [Siddiqui was] being held."

Referencing a statement issued by Akram's brother on Sunday in which the latter insisted the gunman suffered from mental health issues, Cohen said he "believe[d] that to be true."

Regardless, the hostage recalled the attacker railing against people of varying races, sexual orientations and religions -- including fellow Muslims.

VLAD WHO?:

"We have taken the decision to supply Ukraine with light anti-armour defensive weapons systems," Wallace told the Commons on Monday, adding that "a small number" of British troops would provide training to help Kyiv's forces in using them.

The defence secretary insisted the arms sales were intended to be defensive, although the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, has recently complained about other Nato members selling modern weapons to Ukraine.

NOT IDLE:

Foresight: The ability to plan ahead with wisdom and insight.

Circumspection: The quality of being able to take a wide variety of circumstances and situations into account and judge accordingly.

Caution: Knowing the consequences which could result from bad choices and seeking avoidance of those at all costs.

And, lastly, we learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favourable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources. 

NATIONALISM HAS ALWAYS BEEN CONSERVATISM'S ENEMY:

All modern European history began, Babbitt declared, with the French Revolution. Though it had proclaimed a sort of radical internationalism, it had devolved very quickly into a brutal and violent nationalism, with "Viva la nation!" becoming its unholy war cry.

Infected by the ideologies and "isms" first propounded by the French, modern Europe had, too, devolved into particular chaoses of national units. "Europe is to-day less cosmopolitan in any genuine sense of the word than it was at almost any period in the Middle Ages. Moreover, the type of internationalism that has broken down so disastrously, as well as the type of nationalism that has overthrown it, are both of comparatively recent origin. 'The sentiment of nationalities,' says Renan, 'is not a hundred years old.' And, he adds that this sentiment was created in the world by the French Revolution," Babbitt explained. The so-called brotherhood of the Jacobins, Babbitt reminded his readers, was not so much one of universal love, but rather an alliances of "Cains, men whose hands were stained with blood and who looked on one another with incurable distrust." The French, Babbitt continued, moved from universalism to particularism to "bestiality."

How did all this infect Europe? Mostly, the great humanist claimed, because of the rise of a romantic and mushy humanitarianism, one that desired the individual to throw off the so-called shackles of tradition, custom, mores, and norms, to revolt against the fathers and mothers and against all that one inherited. By doing so, the humanitarians had desired the liberation of the "beautiful souls" but, in reality unleashed a form of Promethean individualism. "Not having to reform himself, the beautiful soul can devote himself entirely to reforming society; and this he hopes to do, according as his temper is rationalistic or emotional, either by improving its machinery or by diffusing the spirit of brotherhood." Both utilitarianism and sentimentalism become his tools.

In general, such universalism was flabby in its understanding of the world. With it, "men are not governed by cool reflection as to what pays, but buy their passions and imagination [a word Babbitt held in the highest regard, except when employed poorly]; and the appeal that the emotional pacifist can make to their passions and imagination in the name fo humanity at large, turns out to be pale and unsubstantial compared with the appeal of nationality." Internationalism, thus, would rather inevitably become nationalism.

Critically, Babbitt feared, one could readily (perhaps inevitably) transfer the idea of the beautiful soul from the individual to the nation. "Now, nothing is easier than to transfer this conception of free expansion, without the need of either inner or outer check, from the temperament of the individual to the national temperament."  Though the French may have begun all this with their failed revolution, it was the Germans, Babbitt believed, who adopted the idea--through their mythic Teutonic insanities--and placed it upon the German character. It was, he believed, one of the most "monstrous flatteries" in modern history, and it infected everything the Germans did and believed.

ALLTHAT JAZZ #63 - Benny Carter's tribute to MLK

For years we searched for the original manuscript of Peaceful Warrior but it eventually became clear that we never received it. In April of 2017 I ran into Archivist Elizabeth Surles at the Institute for Jazz Studies (IJS) and asked her if she had any ideas about the missing score. It became our mission to track it down and retrieve it. To make a long story short, the score was found in Ed Berger's apartment. Ed and his father Morroe Berger had written the definitive biography Benny Carter: A Life in American Music (Scarecrow Press) and he remained close to Carter for the rest of his life. Ed was also the Associate Director of the Institute of Jazz Studies(IJS) at Rutgers. He was Carter's long-time road manager and produced many of Carter's later recordings. Berger passed on January 22, 2017 and it's no surprise that his collection ended up at IJS. It took approximately two years for this detective story to play out so we wish to thank Elizabeth and her IJS colleagues for their dogged determination. It's a great piece that is now finally here in the Music Division. It's been cataloged and can be accessed in the Performing Arts Reading Room

My obit of Ed Berger

The piece as performed by the US Army Jazz Band (aka The Jazz Ambassadors):

ORESTES BROWNSON WEPT:

[E]vangelicals and others should be concerned about growing challenges to the founding premises of American democracy, not just from secularists but also from conservative Christians preferring some form of theocracy or confessional state. Likely you have never heard of integralism, but you need to know about it.

Integralism is a growing movement popular among Catholic intellectuals who think America's liberal democracy, with its free speech and religious liberty, was doomed from the start because its design is at odds with God's purposes for the community and state. Liberal democracy, the integralists believe, allows for the proliferation of immorality by its denial of any sort of religious basis undergirding society. They advocate a peaceful social and political revolution against our democracy, replacing it with a new arrangement in which, as Wikipedia describes, "Catholic faith should be the basis of public law and public policy within civil society." Some non-Catholics, despairing of our democracy, share parts of this perspective.

This cause may sound extreme and unlikely. And it's true that very few Americans, including Catholics, are integralists. But this perspective commands zeal from a band of smart thinkers and highly educated young people whose influence exceeds their small numbers. And it reflects a shrinking confidence in our democracy, fueling increasing brands of illiberalism--forms of rejecting the idea of classical liberty. Integralism is just one example.

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

New analysis by energy think tank Ember reveals that the skyrocketing price of fossil gas was responsible for 85% of the increase in UK wholesale electricity prices in 2021. In just one year, wholesale electricity prices quadrupled and it became almost five times more expensive to generate electricity from gas plants.

"Gas is the villain. Not the green investments that can end the UK's dependence on this costly and polluting fossil fuel," said Ember COO Phil MacDonald.

Monthly average UK wholesale electricity prices jumped by almost £190/MWh in 2021 - from £55/MWh (December 2020) to £245/MWh (December 2021). The cost of fossil gas was responsible for £162/MWh (85%) of this spike.

NATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

The European Union may move in a matter of weeks to punish countries that don't uphold the bloc's democratic standards by withholding emergency pandemic aid as well as payments from the EU's trillion-euro budget.

Poland, which has clashed with the EU on multiple rule-of-law fronts, stands to miss out on more than 130 billion euros ($149 billion) from the bloc's seven-year budget. Hungary could lose more than 40 billion euros.

The EU has accused the governments in Warsaw and Budapest of illegal judicial revamps, corruption and refusing to adhere to the primacy of EU law, a key premise of the bloc's founding treaty. The flow of billions of euros from Brussels has helped transform the two ex-communist economies, but the EU has become wary of funds being used by the governments to undermine democracy and to attack the bloc.

EXORCISING THE OIL CURSE:

According to the IRENA report, Australia is well placed to retain its status as a leading global energy exporter, provided it embraces its renewable hydrogen production potential, even as global demand for fossil fuels dwindle.

Just as fossil fuel resources have long been influential on geopolitical developments, the latest IRENA assessment suggests an emerging hydrogen industry could reshape global political and economic relationships, potentially bringing new participants into the global energy market and reshaping the roles of current energy market powers.

"It is green hydrogen that will bring new and diverse participants to the market, diversify routes and supplies and shift power from the few to the many," director-general of IRENA, Francesco La Camera, said.

"With international co-operation, the hydrogen market could be more democratic and inclusive, offering opportunities for developed and developing countries alike."

The IRENA assessment found that renewable hydrogen could be a much larger focus of international trade compared to fossil fuels, forecasting that as much as 30 per cent of global hydrogen production would be traded across country borders by 2050 - a much larger proportion compared to fossil gas.

SO DO YOUR DUTY:

But somewhere along the pandemic's long and tortuous road, which saw his native Switzerland imposing first one lockdown, then another, and finally introducing vaccination certificates, Rimoldi decided he had had enough.

Now he leads Mass-Voll, one of Europe's largest youth-orientated anti-vaccine passport groups.

Because he has chosen not to get vaccinated, student and part-time supermarket cashier Rimoldi is -- for now, at least -- locked out of much of public life. Without a vaccine certificate, he can no longer complete his degree or work in a grocery store. He is barred from eating in restaurants, attending concerts or going to the gym.

"People without a certificate like me, we're not a part of society anymore," he said. "We're excluded. We're like less valuable humans."

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

Staffan de Mistura, a former UN envoy to Syria, met the Polisario's Brahim Ghali in a camp for Sahrawi refugees outside the desert town of Tindouf, Algeria's official APS news agency said.

The Polisario chief told the envoy that his organisation sought "a just and fair solution" that "guarantees the Sahrawi people their right to self-determination and full national independence", APS reported.

The Polisario Front, which took up arms in the 1970s to seek independence in the disputed Western Sahara, demands an independence referendum on the basis of a 1991 deal that included a ceasefire.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

The Hashd al-Shaabi militia launched a military operation on Sunday to hunt down Daesh militants in the Iraqi capital Baghdad, reports Anadolu Agency.

In a statement, the pro-government Shia militia said its fighters searched several areas in the town of Tarmiyah in Baghdad. The militia said the operation aims to arrest militants holed up in rural areas outside cities, without giving any further details.

Last month, the militia launched a similar operation in eastern Iraq, targeting Daesh militants hiding in the Hamrin Mountains in the eastern Diaal province.

HE WAS HIRED TO NOT BE DONALD:

Desperate Democrats pointed fingers at one another Saturday amid the apparent collapse of President Biden's legislative agenda -- with calls for drastic change coming from every corner of the dispirited party.

"I don't know if the right word is 'apoplectic' or 'demoralized,'" said Quentin Wathum-Ocama, president of the Young Democrats of America. "We're down. We're not seeing the results."

One year into Biden's presidency, his inability to push an ambitious $2 trillion social spending plan or a sweeping election law through the evenly divided US Senate has his supporters at odds, with midterm elections looming just 11 months from now.

"We are not going to win the elections in 2022 unless our base is energized and ordinary people understand what we are fighting for, and how we are different than the Republicans," Democratic Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told the New York Times. "Clearly, the current strategy is failing and we need a major course correction."

ANGLOSPHERIC SOVEREIGNTY:

More's Utopia is a republic. Each city elects a 'prince' who rules alongside an elected council.

The cities elect three representatives to sit in a grand council or assembly, which governs the entire country. There is no hereditary monarch or concept of divine-right kingship.

This is very different from the political system in England, in which monarchs justified their claim to the throne through lines of inheritance and divine right. More, however, was not alone in considering the benefits of a republican system. Many humanists sought to finds ways of bolstering the power of other political institutions, such as representative councils and parliament.

More often writes of consent of the people "bestowing sovereignty" and that a king "ought to have command not one instant longer than his subjects wish". For More, the rule of a king was legitimate, because the people had authorised its existence over a long period of time. But, importantly, political power ultimately resided with the people and their representative assembly. In a political environment such as England, it was a message that More could only communicate through the creation of his fantastic island: Utopia.

60-40 NATION:

Congregation Beth Israel was founded in 1998 as an informal community in a rapidly growing suburb of Fort Worth, located just miles from the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Cytron-Walker, who joined the Reform congregation in 2006 after graduating from rabbinical school, has been its only full-time rabbi.

In that role, he has tackled the everyday challenges of synagogue leadership -- seeking out a virtual program when COVID-19 forced Beth Israel's Hebrew school to go online, for example -- while also becoming well known in the area for his interfaith and social justice work.

He has made friends everywhere he has gone, locally and across the extended network of Reform and Conservative rabbis who poured out their recollections of studying and working with him over the years. Colleyville's police chief called Cytron-Walker a close personal friend. Even the man who attacked the synagogue praised him, saying on the live-streamed audio that the rabbi had welcomed him into the building when he knocked on the door asking whether the synagogue was a shelter. "I bonded with him," the man said. "I really like him."

BEAUTY/TRUTH:

All the things aesthetics examines are things which please, are attractive, and therefore draw us toward that which is good and true.

And here we glimpse the close inner relationship between these transcendentals: An action that is morally good attracts us; likewise, a true proposition attracts us. But this quality of attraction is none other than beauty (which results in love). Aesthetics is thus a dimension of reality that interpenetrates with truth and goodness. We experience them together, in alternation, and in such a way that we sometimes cannot distinguish them.

THANKS, VLAD:

Putin's Russia isn't admired in the city of Mariupol in the way it once was. When people imagine the future they might have under his rule, they no longer see a wealthier, more comfortable one in Russia, 30 miles (48 kilometers) away.

Today many compare their lives instead to the territory that lies between, held by Kremlin-backed separatists since an unsteady ceasefire stopped their approach to the city. They don't like what they see. Crime rates are high, the economy is crippled and living standards are even lower than on the Ukrainian side of the so-called line of contact.

Life in the shadow of conflict has also taken a toll on Putin's reputation among many of the Russian-speaking Ukrainians once most likely to believe they belong with Moscow. So too the influx of more than 100,000 people displaced from separatist areas of Donbas, who have direct knowledge of life there.

VLAD WHO?:

Serbia may take a step closer to joining the European Union on Sunday, when voters in the Balkan nation will decide on whether to change the constitution to create a more independent judiciary in line with the 27-member bloc's standards. 

Shielding judges and prosecutors from political influence is a key step in aligning the former Yugoslav republic's laws with the EU. If the ballot measure is approved, the power to appoint and fire members of the judiciary would be taken from the government and the legislature and given to top judges and academics. 

BECAUSE SOMEONE HAS TO DEFEND THE SEPARATION:

In the 6-3 OSHA decision, Gorsuch wrote a separate concurrence with a separate purpose. He didn't just reject the claim by the administration of President Joe Biden that a workplace mandate could be imposed under OSHA's power to regulate "occupational" safety, as the majority did. He said something fundamental about the Constitution and what it allows Congress to do when allocating power to any administrative agency.

According to Gorsuch, the right question to ask, in considering whether an agency has power to do something, is not merely whether Congress has passed a statute that authorizes it. The right question is whether the Constitution allows Congress to delegate broad power at all.

The traditional Supreme Court answer to that question has two parts. First, the court said in 1928 that when Congress delegates power to an agency, it must articulate an "intelligible principle" to limit the agency's actions. Second, in a 1935 decision striking down a key part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, the court added, "Congress is not permitted to abdicate or to transfer to others the essential legislative functions with which it is thus vested."

For more than three-quarters of a century, the justices have interpreted their own words generously, to maximize the powers that Congress is allowed to give to the agencies that regulate the air we breathe, the water we drink and the safety of our workplaces, among many other functions. The court has treated almost any words used by Congress as satisfying the intelligible-principle requirement. And the justices have allowed Congress to delegate enormous lawmaking powers without saying that the delegation counted as an impermissible transfer of essential legislative functions.

Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas want to give new vitality and force to these two requirements, to scale back radically what Congress is constitutionally permitted to allow agencies to do. The key line of the Gorsuch opinion reads: "If the statutory subsection the agency cites really did endow OSHA with the power it asserts, that law would likely constitute an unconstitutional delegation of legislative authority."

GET YOUR SHOTS:

The omicron wave is so new there is no conclusive data available yet on the quality of immunity provided via infection, but it's likely to be similar to other variants, said Schulze zur Wiesch. That means that if you've been infected with omicron over the past few weeks, you're probably safe from reinfection for the next few months.  

But because omicron has a higher transmissibility rate than previous strains, higher levels of antibodies are needed to prevent infection. Immunity gained via only two vaccines or infection to earlier COVID variants (like delta or alpha) won't necessarily prevent omicron infection, he said, adding that regardless of whether you've been previously infected or double-vaccinated, a booster is your best defense against reinfection.

The effectiveness of protection against omicron provided by "natural immunity" from other COVID variants may be as low as 19%, according to a study conducted by the Imperial College London COVID-19 response team in late December 2021. 

With that said, early findings generally indicate that as long as you have some form of immunity -- either through two doses of a vaccine or past infection plus a singe dose -- your course of an omicron infection is likely to be mild. 

Is there such thing as 'super immunity?' 

The body seems to respond best to a mixed immunity cocktail,according to Schulze zur Wiesch, citing a study his team conducted among German healthcare workers in 2021. Patients who received different types of vaccines -- for example, the AstraZeneca vaccine, then a Moderna dose and a booster -- appeared to have some of the greatest protection. 

Other studies have indicated that people with a combination of immunity acquired through past infection plus two shots seem to fare the best of all. Immunologists have dubbed this phenomenon "hybrid" or "super" immunity.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

When Robert Habeck's election campaign came to Freiburg on September 10, 2021, he was very much on home ground. The Green Party's motto is "Ready - because you are." So where better than this Green stronghold to take the lead on sustainability and help Germany achieve climate neutrality as quickly as possible?

In 2008, the Black Forest city of Freiburg (population: 230,000) rather grandiosely adopted the title of "Green City." It likes to describe itself as the environmental capital of Germany. With 1,800 hours of sunshine a year, this southwestern city is a big promoter of solar energy, in line with Habeck's plans.

It already boasts a great many showcase projects: Freiburg's new city hall was one of the first in the world to be conceived as a zero-energy building, with 800 solar panels on the facade. The new soccer stadium has a world-beating solar installation on the stadium roof. The archdiocese of Freiburg aims to be the first in Germany to reduce the church's CO2 emissions to zero.

As the new climate protection minister, Robert Habeck wants to make Germany climate-neutral by 2045. And, as so often, Freiburg is ahead of the game: It hopes to achieve this seven years earlier, in 2038.

GOOD RIDDANCE:

Djokovic had been seeking to overturn Immigration Minister Alex Hawke's decision to cancel his visa for a second time. 

His visa was initially canceled on January 6 at Melbourne airport hours after he arrived, when authorities decided that Djokovic didn't qualify for a medical exemption from Australia's rules for unvaccinated visitors.

However, a circuit court overruled the decision.

Immigration Minister Hawke then canceled the visa again on the grounds that Djokovic's presence in Australia could pose a risk to public health and "good order," while being "counterproductive to efforts at vaccination by others in Australia.''

WINNING BACK THE SEATS DONALD COST US:

[I]t may be useful to revisit the Senate model that I developed in 2014 and updated about a year ago for the coming midterms. It attempts to predict Senate race outcomes according to three factors: The president's estimated job approval in a state, whether an incumbent is on the ballot, and whether the parties nominate "problematic" candidates (think Christine O'Donnell). This model has performed remarkably well over the past decade, predicting the actual outcome within a single seat in the four elections that have transpired since it was created, and always landing within its "error margin."

What does it tell us about 2022? Assuming the parties don't nominate particularly weak candidates and there are no further retirements, a Republican-controlled Senate starts to come into the picture when Biden's job approval falls to around 51% and becomes the most likely outcome at around 48%.

At 42%, the model envisions virtually no chance for Democrats to hold the Senate and predicts a loss of four seats as the most likely outcome. At 42%, the Colorado Senate seat could potentially come into play, assuming that Republicans produced a credible candidate (remember that a relatively unheralded candidate held Sen. Michael Bennet to a six-point margin in 2016).

PITY THE POOR INCELS:

The 69-year-old Putin has long been seen as a man so insecure about his fading virility that he has engineered sometimes comical macho displays from ill-considered shots of him riding horseback shirtless through the Russian countryside to hockey games in which his side always wins thanks to a tsunami of goal-scoring by a Gretzky-like Vlad.

In some ways the most poignant of all of Putin's efforts to turn back the clock would be his vain attempts to restore Russia's place in the world to a status akin to that of the Soviet Union in which he was raised and for which he worked as KGB officer from 1975 until 1991, when he resigned following a coup attempt against Mikhail Gorbachev. Putin has called the collapse of the USSR and its empire "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century."

In a speech in 2005, Putin described that as "a genuine tragedy. Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory." In the years since, he has weaponized his nostalgia into a near calamity for the planet. He has done so by returning the country more toward Soviet-style authoritarianism, crushing opponents in brutal ways of which Stalin might be proud. He has turned Russia into a geopolitical spoiler and maintained a military far beyond what the country could afford.

THERE'S ONLY ONE STORY:

Gallivanting through the rolling Spanish landscape, sallying forth without hesitation on another courageous mission, Don Quixote rides into the mind of the reader upon his aged nag and in his tattered and crudely-fashioned armor. His shocking appearance and eccentricities may prompt the reader to attempt to brush him off as ridiculous, but Don Quixote's passion and personality cling closely to the reader's mind. We can easily call Don Quixote a "madman," but his intelligence and kind spirit are reasons for a reevaluation. As we look at the world through Don Quixote's eyes, his actions and motives bear a similarity to the protagonist of an unexpected genre.

In his perceived insanity, Don Quixote takes on not only the identity of a knight but also the identity of a saint. Thus, Don Quixote's tale falls under the genre of a hagiography, a text about the life of a saint. One saint that stands out as an analogue to Don Quixote is Ignatius of Loyola, a famous Spanish saint who founded the Society of Jesus--the Jesuits--and whose death and subsequent beatification and canonization occurred during roughly the same time period as Don Quixote's writing. The book Don Quixote evokes a hagiographic form thanks to Don Quixote's mission, and the idea of a "San" Quixote arises because of his actions and their connections to Jesuit practices.

In the story, Don Quixote meticulously imitates various legendary knights; similarly, St. Ignatius of Loyola acts as a pattern of sainthood. Saints' lives tend to overlap in certain situations and reflect similar themes because they are all ultimately following the path of holiness. One might argue, therefore, that Don Quixote resembles not just one but various other saints. Nonetheless, St. Ignatius appears to have a strong claim as a foundational model for Cervantes' hero. Since St. Ignatius is never explicitly mentioned, we cannot be sure that Cervantes purposely intended this connection. However, Cervantes definitely had Jesuit influences in his life that likely translated to his writing. In his youth, Cervantes visited Rome during a time of great growth in Jesuit membership and had a close relationship with clergymen who were Jesuits or who followed Jesuit practices. In his book on Ignatius of Loyola, Frédéric Conrod argues that Cervantes's deep familiarity with St. Ignatius's principles is sufficient to suggest that they manifested themselves in Cervantes's writing.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Specifically, the memo circulated by Census officials--compiled as part of a plan to approach Trump's Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross (who oversaw the Census)--complains that there had been an "unusually high degree of engagement in technical matters, which is unprecedented." Or, put more simply, administration officials were meddling in the most fundamental inner workings of a complex and finely tuned process in ways that had never been seen before. Political appointees tried to influence the way the Census Bureau counted people, processed the data, avoided disclosing private information, counted citizens, and calculated undocumented populations. Basically everything the Census Bureau undertakes. 

The Brennan Center says that other documents show that a plan was in place to have Ross call GOP state governors and have them provide their own data to help determine how to count immigrant populations (while not making a similar effort with Democratic governors). Documents also show that new political appointees joined the Census as late as August 2020 as the election loomed, and the new officials were apparently solely interested in affecting how citizenship data was calculated.

Other documents show that when the administration ordered the Census to curtail the count and use new methodologies to fill in the details, Census officials argued back, pointing out the statistical and legal shortcomings of the Trump-proposed methods. The documents show that while Trump political appointees at the Bureau did not seem to be interested in career officials' concerns about the process, there was direct contact between Ross and the executive director of an anti-immigration group and Commerce Department employees talking with employees of the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank.

WE CAN'T REPLACE THEM FAST ENOUGH:

When Capitol Hill staffers were busy trying to clean up on Jan. 7, 2001, people in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office suddenly started answering an unusual set of phone calls. Some who had taken part in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot started calling Pelosi's office to find out where they could recover any items they had left behind.

THANKS, VLAD!:

PARDON THE INTERRUPTION:

Supply chain pressures remain well above their pre-pandemic levels, but there are signs that global trade relations could start to normalise this year -- even as many countries face rising cases of the Omicron coronavirus variant and persistently high inflation.

A gauge of worldwide supply chain constraints produced by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that such pressures reached their highest point in October 2021. But the index -- which is based on 27 variables, including global shipping rates and air freight costs -- ticked slightly lower in both November and December.

Some analysts believe that the squeeze in certain areas will continue to ease off in the coming months.

THE WALKING CURE:

At his mother's insistence, he started taking the family's black dog, Reggie, for walks. "We started going for short walks along the river. Soon this became my daily routine and gradually I started feeling better. My posture started improving, my confidence was returning, and I often found myself in a state of quiet appreciation of the stillness and the simplicity of nature," he says.

"Being outside wasn't just about fresh air and earthy smells, it gave me the mental space I needed to let go of poisonous thoughts, to recognise that, as insufferably painful as my life had become, I had never actually wanted to die, I had just needed to remember what it was like to feel alive."

One day, when he realised that he had hiked for 12 miles (19.3km), he headed to a bookshop and bought a map of Great Britain. At home, he began circling every section of natural Britain he could see - national parks, trails, beaches.

Tyler envisaged himself hiking through the Lake District (a scenic upland area in northwest England), the Scottish Highlands, along the rugged coast of Cornwall (in southwest England).

"I connected all the circles I'd drawn with a thick black line. What appeared before me was a giant loop, a lap of Great Britain."

Tyler planned to circumnavigate Britain on foot, but feared no one was going to take him seriously. "Imagine an overweight, depressed barman with flat feet and a coke [cocaine] habit attempting a 3,000-mile walk. I decided to stop thinking about whether it was possible and began believing that I would succeed."

MANDATING MISEDUCATION:

The right-wing fight to suppress the teaching of uncomfortable truths in public schools reached a comical new low this week in a Virginia bill that blatantly misstated a basic fact about U.S. history.

Wren Williams, a 33-year-old Republican, pre-filed the bill on Tuesday, the day before he was sworn in as a new member of the Virginia House of Delegates. It proposed a new standard for regulating high-school social studies curricula in the state, including a requirement that students learn about "the first debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass."

ONLY UNDER-POWERED WOOSES DRIVE GAS TRUCKS:

GM and Ford have managed to bring prices of plug-in pickups down to the point where a contractor or fleet customer can buy them. Both pickups start at just under $40,000. The Cybertruck also will supposedly be priced there, but knowing how Tesla pricing has worked, they typically sell for much more than the company claims.

Ford's F-150 Lightning goes on sale in May. It's basically the existing truck with a 300-mile battery pack retrofitted in. That makes it stylistically the same truck that sells very successfully to fleet and commercial customers. The Silverado work truck will be out of the gate first for Chevy -- in Spring 2023 -- before the more pricey trucks for retail customers hit the market. Chevy is betting that larger fleet customers will want the zero-emission trucks for ESG (environment, social, governance) compliance and bragging rights.

Gasoline prices are hovering around $3.30 a gallon nationally, according to AAA. That's $1 more than it was this time last year. Fleet buyers may not take road trips where they need maximum range, but they do crank out a lot of miles running their pickups to different jobs all day -- they burn a lot of gasoline. An electric pickup could mean substantial savings.

These trucks are increasingly able to tow. Chevy is planning an electric truck that can pull 20,000 pounds. That's a bit more than the large and brawny HD version of the truck. One big question is whether towing will run the battery down rapidly. Chevy Marketing director Steve Majoros said that GM's testing shows that hauling trailers and other freight doesn't run the battery down any faster than it burns up more gasoline for the same duty in today's internal-combustion trucks.

Oh yeah, there's one more thing driving the push into electric work trucks. Regs. California's proposed Advanced Clean Fleet regulations would require fleet owners start to add zero-emission trucks starting in 2024, with a goal of 100% ZEV trucks by 2040. If truck customers have to buy them, automakers need to make them. California's rules have typically forced automakers to go green. Their customers may soon have the same pressure.

DONALD WHO?:

U.S. prosecutors will likely urge a judge to drop an indictment against an MIT professor charged a year ago with receiving federal grant money but failing to disclose his ties to China, according to people familiar with the matter.

The reversal in the case of Gang Chen, a nanotechnology expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, comes as the Justice Department is reviewing its policy of investigating and prosecuting cases of economic espionage intended to benefit China. 

That program, launched in 2018, resulted in dozens of prosecutions for hacking, data and trade secret theft and concealing ties to the Chinese government. But last year, the U.S. dropped several cases and a judge ordered an acquittal because of law enforcement errors and prosecutorial overzealousness.

A FUNCTION OF THE UNVACCINATED:

DER SPIEGEL: The new variant which is even more transmissible than Delta.

Fauci: Yes, it's extraordinary. But we're starting to see in studies from South Africa, from the United Kingdom and in some recent studies from the United States that the severity of the disease is considerably less with Omicron. That's the good news. In the United States the overwhelming proportion of hospitalizations and deaths are among unvaccinated people or vaccinated who have profound immune deficiencies. The sobering news is that so many people get infected that the sheer volume of cases, even if only a smaller percentage get seriously ill, might be really very challenging to the health care systems.

DER SPIEGEL: You said this week that nearly everybody will become infected with Omicron. Are we now witnessing the last steps toward the virus becoming endemic?

Fauci: Well, you can only make an educated guess. I think we're seeing the evolution into a much more prevalent but less severe infection. At least we hope for this, but there's no guarantee. To get to where we all want to be, which is a level of control so that people will get infected but they'll get a common cold and won't get seriously ill, many people will either have to be vaccinated or have already been infected and recovered, together with an occasional boost. When this is the case, as we go into the next year, we'll start to see cases coming down and hospitalizations going way down. Once we get there, we may be able to look upon this as another respiratory illness that for most of the population is not a problem. I hope we're going in that direction. I think we are, but we can't make the mistake of saying, "Oh, this is less severe, we are done with it." We might be done with it, but there's no guarantee that we are.

DER SPIEGEL: Will there be other variants after Omicron?

Fauci: Given the fact that there are so many countries, particularly low- and middle-income countries, where the rate of vaccination is still very low, you are going to see continuing smoldering of infection. By this we give the virus the opportunity to mutate, and it is conceivable that the next variant will have a high degree of transmissibility but also a high degree of severity.

"2022 may be the year that the pandemic enters an endemic phase, but it really depends on what happens and the decisions that are made across the world," Afeyan said in a Bloomberg Television interview Friday with Francine Lacqua. Although omicron is highly transmissible,"on the other hand it's having a lesser effect in terms of seriousness of disease," he said.

For now, the world remains in the pandemic's grasp, Afeyan wrote in a letter published this week on the website of Flagship Pioneering, the venture-capital firm he leads. Afeyan said he was among the millions of people who contracted the omicron variant going into the holiday season. 

Moderna's omicron-specific booster shot could enter into human trials within weeks, Afeyan said Friday, reiterating comments Chief Executive Officer Stephane Bancel made earlier this week. The CEO said he expected another booster would be needed in the fall, and it is likely to contain a component tailored to omicron.

"We will be ready with our testing starting in weeks," Afeyan said Friday. "Whether we need a booster rather in the spring than the fall is something that we're going to have to work with officials all around the world to sort out."

ET TU, POST?:

Nearly all teenagers who had to be admitted to the ICU for COVID-19 treatment were unvaccinated, according to a new study.

The Pfizer vaccine was 98% effective in preventing hospital intensive-care scenarios and 94% effective against all COVID-related hospitalizations in teenagers, the study published Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine found.

The peer-reviewed analysis, which is backed by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pediatric hospitals, included data on 1,222 hospitalized teens between 12 to 18.

ENJOY, JUDGE, SHARE:

TOTALLY NOT A CULT:

One version of the argument implies that there's no point in getting vaccinated, since natural immunity is more effective. (Never mind that, unlike a vaccine, acquiring natural immunity first requires you to get a potentially deadly infection.) Another variation suggests that people who are unvaccinated and have already experienced COVID shouldn't feel pressured to get a shot, because their natural immunity is sufficient to protect them. This point sounds more level-headed, but it's also misleading.

We'll get to why in a moment. But first, it's important to recognize the extent to which the gospel of natural immunity has come to dominate right-wing media. On Fox News, viewers routinely hear that natural immunity is superior to getting a Pfizer or Modern shot. Mark Levin says it's "stronger than the vaccine"; Sean Hannity says it's "27 times more effective"; Tucker Carlson says those with "natural immunity are safer than most people." Ben Carson, the former surgeon, presidential candidate, and Trump Administration housing secretary, often appears on Fox--introduced as a "real expert" about COVID--to claim, erroneously, that in contrast to "people who are getting immunity by vaccines," "people with natural immunity seem to have a much better resistance to the disease and to its variants."

Republican senators are peddling the same line. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah says studies show "natural immunity is more effective than vaccines." Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas says members of the armed forces shouldn't have to get vaccinated because "many already have natural immunity which can be better than the vaccine." On Monday, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky tweeted, preposterously, that tennis star Novak Djokovic--who has been infected but not vaccinated--"likely has more natural immunity now than two dozen boosters."

THANKS AGAIN, DARPA:

UMass Chan Medical School researchers are embarking on a clinical trial of an mRNA vaccine by Moderna against the Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), a common cause of infectious mononucleosis. EBV has also been associated with several autoimmune disorders and has been implicated in the development of several cancers, including Burkitt and Hodgkin's lymphomas.

The study, called the Eclipse Trial, is a randomized, observer-blind, placebo-controlled, dose-ranging Phase I clinical trial in 18- to 30-year-old healthy adults. Study participants will be randomly assigned to one of four arms: one for each of three doses of the investigational vaccine and one placebo.

The investigational vaccine targets four glycoprotein antigens on the virus particle, using the same type of mRNA vaccine platform used for mRNA COVID vaccines.

SEND MORE:

Four months after the U.S. officially concluded its military withdrawal from Afghanistan, more than 50,000 refugees have been evacuated from the country and resettled in communities across the U.S., including the Upper Valley. Local community members have been providing support to help Afghan refugees settle down and welcoming them to their new homes.

260 Afghans are expected to arrive in Vermont by the end of February according to VTDigger, and 50 have arrived in New Hampshire already, New Hampshire Public Radio reports. Many Afghans arriving in New Hampshire have come to the U.S. through a process called humanitarian parole, allowing them to access most services available to refugees but requiring that they achieve asylum to become long-term residents or citizens. 

Martha Tecca, president of Community Care of Lyme, a community health organization, said that last year her group started to work in the Upper Valley to create a "Welcome Fund" for displaced Afghan families and individuals.

"My focus has been to welcome as many people as possible and share the tremendous resources that we have here in the Upper Valley," Tecca said. "Right now, we're anticipating a family of 10 and a related family of nine sometime in the next several weeks."

WHAT WE GET FOR PRETENDING WE KNOW BETTER THAN AUSTRALASIA:

THEY'VE BEEN DEAD FOR YEARS; DRIVE A STAKE INTO THEM:

It is an argument without merit. The current presidential debate format--in which moderators are discouraged from interrupting even the wildest statements and in which an appearance of neutrality is privileged over any rigorous application of facts or, for that matter, journalism--is heavily tilted towards Republicans. More to the point, these arrangements serve the interests of cable news: These debates privilege partisan conflict over substantive discussion. They also consistently reward the trivial and superficial over the substantive--the better to manufacture some cheap controversy to fill up the next day of cable news chyrons. While the RNC's turn against the debates may be seen as part of its larger authoritarian drift, this contretemps over debates largely exists as a distraction from more important anti-democratic actions on the right.

DON'T STOP IT, REPLACE IT WITH A MINIMUM CONSUMPTION TAX:

The Biden administration has been working with foreign governments to set a global minimum tax rate on American businesses.  

Why collude with our competitors to keep taxes on American businesses high? It does nothing to help American taxpayers, workers or, small businesses. This huge concession sets the stage for a global tax regime that rigs the system in favor of bigger government.

The proposed changes to the international tax rules contain two parts or "pillars." Pillar one would allow other nations to tax American businesses in ways that today's rules forbid. The United States would be one of the biggest losers when it comes to the effects of pillar one because it would give foreign governments the power to further raise taxes on American companies. 

Pillar two would require each country to keep their business taxes at 15 percent or higher. A cartel of tax collectors like OPEC was for oil prices. One can imagine how the opening bid of 15 percent will increase year after year. 

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has said this agreement will stop nations from competing by keeping taxes low. The United States will have to compete with China and Bangladesh by reducing wages. Limited wages rather than a limited cost of government.

THIS BEING A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

It wouldn't be until 1997, curiously, when inflation-indexed Treasury bonds formally made their American reappearance. The late nineties were hardly a time like the 1970's let alone the three thousand percent inflation of the late 1770's. There's something deeply embedded in monetary distrust, this lingering idea governments will just print too much money one day regardless of any current proof or evidence for the suspicion.

Even though inflation was far from anyone's list of problems during the dot-com (OK, consumer price inflation was far from anyone's mind, but even Alan Greenspan's irrational exuberance speech told you the issue wasn't money printing but money itself), a 10-year TIPS instrument made its debut on January 29, 1997, anyway.

These securities give the holder inflation protection in two forms, each decided by the published CPI rate. Every year, the owner is credited with additional principal to make up for the amount general consumer prices have increased; if the CPI rises 5% during a yearly period, if you started it with $1,000 face value the government gives you an extra 5%, or $50, principal.

And then it pays you interest the following year on that updated principal value. You get both principal and coupon protection from inflationary currency in a way not too dissimilar to the Massachusetts trial.

There are any number of arguments relating to how accurately the CPI measures consumer price inflation, and there is definitely a mystique of pseudo-precision surrounding the government's (BLS) consumer price bucket concoction, and whether there is such a direct relationship between modern money printing and how much or if might find its into this kind of data.

Yet, the index's lengthy history correlates closely enough with bouts of genuine inflation that we can reasonably and predictably expect someaffiliation between perceptions about future inflation and the prices of these TIPS instruments. There's enough of a profit motive in how these things pay out to make this a rational assertion.

Should the market get a sense of any money printing excesses, why wouldn't we see it in the TIPS market?

You've probably already guessed where I'm going with this. Earlier this week, the BLS said the US CPI had increased a touch more than 7% in December 2021 from its level estimated for December 2020. The highest "inflation" rate in almost forty years; dating back just after that whole Great Inflation business of the seventies.

And, relatively speaking, TIPS are in pretty high demand. The way they've been priced - though not just recently - is so that each's posted "real" yield is decidedly less than zero. Negative real yields because the market expects only some small positive level of CPI increases over the years each TIPS instrument (there are denominations of 5-years, 10-years, and 30-years) might be in any investor's possession.

It is incongruous to last year's elevating CPI rates.

The most straightforward interpretation, the only rational one, is that the market for inflation protection isn't actually all the robust for protection against real inflation. There's some expectation for some positive CPI increases, though nowhere near these recent levels.

Whatever they've been in 2021, the TIPS market doesn't believe they're going to stick around for long enough that these "real" yields would fall any further (as higher demand for TIPS given the perception for sustained CPI rates we are not currently seeing).

On the contrary, very recently, especially since the start of this year.

FUN WHILE IT LASTED:

[B]onds have a more direct relationship with inflation, which erodes the future value of fixed interest payments as well as the bond's face value at maturity. So in general, the higher the expected inflation rate, the higher the interest rate investors will charge to preserve purchasing power. If inflation were likely to stay high enough for long enough to cause big problems, we should see it in elevated long-term Treasury yields. Yet, much as everyone is hyping the new year's recent yield climb, as Exhibit 1 shows, the 10-year Treasury yield hasn't jumped alongside the inflation rate. It actually fell for a good four months as the inflation rate accelerated past 5.0%. Following a brief uptick, it fell again as the Fed started reining in QE, a development everyone thought would bring higher rates. Even with the recent uptick, today's 1.73% 10-year yield is right around where it was in late March, when the inflation rate was much, much lower.

The market knows inflation hit 7.0% last month, and it likely priced that outcome well before today's data confirmed it. It knows people worry about the implications. It knows that one political party is blaming corporate greed while the other party is blaming its opponent's spending plans. Yet it also knows that the culprit most apparent in the data--the supply chain crisis--is starting to ease up. It knows people surveyed in December purchasing managers' indexes across the US and Europe reported cost and logistics pressures are starting to moderate. It has seen numerous businesses' investments in increased capacity. It has seen the push toward vertical integration that larger companies are using in hopes of controlling their costs and destiny. And it has seen the inflation math evolve over the past year, so it knows that in a few months, lockdown-deflated early-2021 prices will be out of the denominator in the year-over-year calculation, removing the funky math helping skew the inflation rate higher. It has seen all of this and, based on where yields are, it has decided inflation isn't a major problem for stocks. This, coming from the most efficient pricing and forecasting mechanism on earth.

Yes, markets can be inefficient in the short-term--this is where corrections and bubbles alike come from. But it isn't in markets' nature to ignore something as big as inflation for over half a year. So, in our view, the most rational conclusion when the hype says one thing and the market says another is that the market is right. If it knows where inflation is and how people and businesses are responding to it and long-term yields aren't soaring, that is a powerful signal. Take a deep breath, and trust it.

GOD ISN'T WHO YOU NEED HIM TO BE:

Because Mark's Gospel was the first one written, probably about 70 A.D., it is essential for understanding the other Gospels. Scripture scholars believe that Matthew and Luke had a copy of Mark's Gospel on their desks as they were writing their own Gospels. They used parts of Mark's story, editing and rearranging them, then added new material. This is why these three Gospels are referred to as the synoptic Gospels, because they include many of the same stories.

Mark's Gospel, the shortest, has no infancy stories. It begins with the baptism of Jesus by John the Baptist.

Mark's message is unrelenting. You must accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior. Absolute commitment is required. His repeated message is that no one understands Jesus. No one gets him. Not the Apostles, not even his mother.

He ends his Gospel not with the appearances of the risen Jesus, but with a young man (perhaps representing Mark himself) in the empty tomb telling the women that Jesus has been raised. "Go and tell his disciples and Peter, 'He is going before you to Galilee; there you will see him, as he told you.'"

But what do the women do? They run away. "Then they went out and fled from the tomb, seized with trembling and bewilderment. They said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." The end. 

Later editors added to Mark's Gospel an appearance of the risen Jesus, but that is not in the original. 

Mark believed in the resurrection, but he ended his Gospel this way in order to emphasize to Christians that they did not understand Jesus and therefore could not see him. Even confronted by the message of the resurrection, the disciples don't get it.

WE'LL NEVER SEE HIS LIKE AGAIN (profanity alert):

His diverse gifts are unmatched in any other single player. Only three men have stolen as many bases, and their landmarks--Ty Cobb, 892; Billy Hamilton, 937; and Lou Brock, 938--should fall by the middle of next season if Rickey stays healthy. His waist-high grabs of dying liners would be spectacular grabs for a slower left fielder, and underlying his base running is the slugging potential that means you could bat him anywhere from first to fourth. "He's an offense machine, the most dangerous Yankee," says Royals wise man Bob Boone. 

And yet, though Rickey occasionally proclaims his leadership, he seldom shows it. As he squats in the outfield stretching his hamstrings between pitches, he reinforces the idea that it's Rickey's world and the other uniformed guys out there are just visiting. Still there's something comfortably corny in the way he judges himself--he hears the fans first, before his manager, teammates, or agent. Infamous in Oakland for his verbal and body-English dialogues with fans, he once explained simply, "I get bored." Just watch when he has an easily stolen base and some candy-ass shortstop clouts him with a late tag--a flash of anger yields to consternation, condescension, imperial indifference, and finally, as he dusts his shirtfront and takes a lead, that kidlike joy he finds in making pitchers feel his cleats eagerly tapping the dirt behind them.

No contemporary works the count any harder. When the ump calls a bad strike, he'll stare fixedly at the spot where the ball passed by. He uses body language to nudge the whole ballpark into looking closely, and without being too obvious about it, he'll give the TV cameras some too.

"He's one of the rare players in any sport," says Milwaukee manager Tom Trebelhorn. "He can do things in a way that just draws attention to him--part of the entertainment package in our game." Trebelhorn should know. Even more than Billy Martin, he is Rickey's mentor--dating back to his second year managing pro ball in Boise, where 17-year-old phenom Rickey arrived late in the season, straight from the unkind streets of Oakland's Bush Rock Park district. 

Rickey's mother, Robbie, had raised him and six siblings alone. (Born in Chicago on Christmas Day in 1958, Rickey was the fourth child of a father who decamped when Rickey was quite young.) As a largely unmolested ballcarrier at Oakland Technical High, Rickey was recruited by USC as a tailback but took his mom's counsel and held his .716 high school batting average under the Oakland A's nose. He reported to the club in Idaho, says Trebelhorn, as "a fine young man with very good values. I think his mother did a marvelous job with him, instilling basic, common-sense values." Trebelhorn saw Henderson's hunger to succeed and was canny enough to immediately set to work on the one major league tool Rickey didn't arrive with, a threatening throwing arm. Raw speed gave him 29 steals in 46 games that first year, and Trebelhorn worked on the crouch that would give Rickey a minuscule 10-inch-high strike zone to draw walks with, but mostly they met around a fungo bat.

The next year he had 95 steals, and it was in his third year, at Jersey City in the Eastern League, that fellow Oakland prospect Mike Norris became his roommate. Norris would burn up his extravagant talent (22 and 9 for Oakland in 1980) with drug and alcohol bouts. He spoke recently by phone from Phoenix, where he was trying to pitch his way onto the A's Tacoma farm club. When they played together, Rickey hadn't yet married high school sweetheart Pamela Palmer (their daughter Angela is 2 now), but, says Norris, "He was never too much a partying type as far as going out into the city....I made those trips alone. He's very goal-oriented: he might say, 'Well, I need four bases this week, or four bases this night, to get to that number I'm trying to accomplish.'"

Ten seasons have changed Rickey some. He says he's stealing bases for the team now, and he and Roberto Kelly do make a nice, shiny hinge in the ninth and leadoff spots. Kelly sees juicy fastballs with Rickey up next, and Rickey sees fastballs because Kelly will steal you blind, too. The crouching strike zone Trebelhorn helped him perfect has inched open as he has tried to get his homers back to a 1986 high of 28, and the theatrically nonchalant "snatch" catch that appeared along the way ("Oh," says Trebelhorn, subtly eschewing any blame, "I think he's kind of added that") is not open to managerial discussion. Rickey compares it to the basket catches by another number 24, Willie Mays. "Does anyone," he asks, "think Mays was a hot dog?"

EVERYONE'S A CRITIC:

As was his custom before the drive home from work with his son, the old man walked across the narrow, tenement‐lined street in Manhattan's Little Italy to buy some fresh fruit. The grocer, who had known him for many years, helped the old man sort out some prize oranges and, as a gift, handed him a perfectly ripened, home‐grown fig. The old man smiled, accepted the backyard offering with a slight nod and started toward his car. It was then that he spotted two gunmen.

He called out to his son and began to sprint toward the safety of his car with surprising speed for a man of his age, but the gunmen were too quick. As they opened fire, the old man seemed caught in a great leap, suspended momentarily in the air, his arms thrown protectively around his head. Loud shots hammered through the street, bright oranges rolled across the gray pavement and the old man crashed onto the fender of his car and collapsed. The people of Mott Street watched in silence from tenement windows, fire escapes and rooftops as the gunmen slipped away. Then, to spontaneous applause, the grim street tableau came to life, and the old man--the godfather, Marlon Brando--lifted himself slowly from the ground, smiled at the cheering crowd and bowed.

At 11 o'clock on April 12, just as Brando was getting shot on Mott Street, Carlo Gambino, one of New York's real godfathers, sat around the corner in a Grand Street cafe, sipping black coffee from a glass and holding 18th‐century Sicilian court in 20th‐century New York. He had arrived moments earlier in the company of his brother, Paul, and five bodyguards. It was his custom, as well as his duty as head of a Mafia family, to hear at regular intervals the endless woes of racketeers, dishonored fathers and deportable husbands. They were ushered before him, one at a time, from a waiting area in a restaurant across the street. He was the final judge to people still willing to accept his decisions as law.

Back on Mott Street, two Mafiosi assigned to observe the movie production were unaware of his arrival. For hours, they had been watching Brando getting shot. They had had innumerable cups of coffee and had adjusted their open‐throat, hand ironed shirts so often that their collars had begun to wilt. Neither of them had been impressed when they heard Brando was to play the godfather, so they watched his performance critically. They volunteered to grips, cameramen and extras that they would have preferred Ernest Borgnine or Anthony Quinn.

"A man of that stature," one of them said, pointing to Brando, "would never wear a hat like that. They never pinched them in the front like that. Italian block, that's the way they wore them, Italian block."

They did not like Brando's wearing his belt below his trouser loops, either.

"He makes the old man look like an iceman. That's not right. A man like that had style. He should have a diamond belt buckle. They all had diamond belt buckles. And a diamond ring and tie clasp. Those old bosses loved diamonds. They all wore them. Brando makes the guy look like an iceman."

In truth, Brando did not look like the traditional double‐breasted, wide lapeled, blue‐serge racketeer. He had accepted the advice of an Italian American friend, rather than the Mafiosi themselves, and made himself look old and bent. He wore a sack shaped suit of an undistinguished brown stripe and an outsize over coat. He wore a cardboard‐stiff white shirt with a collar at least two sizes too large and a striped tie so indifferently knotted that its back, label and all, faced front. The makeup man, who was never very far away, had fixed Brando with an elaborate mouth plate that made his jaw heavy and extended his jowls. Brando's complexion was sallow, his eyes were made to droop on the side and with his graying temples and mustache many people on Mott Street that day did not recognize him until the filming began.

There was an aura about the production that was unmistakable, just as there is an aura of real and imagined power around the honored society itself.

The two Mafiosi did approve the vintage cars and were amused by the streetlamps, pushcarts and prices, circa 1940, tacked up in store windows. But they did not like the way the godfather's assassins fired their guns.

"They hold pieces like flowers," one said.

Shortly before noon a third man came up behind the pair and whispered:

"The old man's around the corner." The two men were stunned. "You kidding?" one asked. "Believe me, he's around the corner."

"Kee‐rist!"

"Shooo!"

Without further hesitation--and with the same pitch of excitement most neighborhood people saved for a peek at Brando--the trio left the movie set. They walked quickly toward the intersection and stopped. One of them darted his head around the corner of the building for a quick peek and shot back to his friends: "He's there. He's there. I see his car. I see Paul's guy."

Mario Puzo's best seller may have started out to be just another multimillion‐dollar movie for Paramount, but it wasn't long before its producers realized that to the Mafiosi themselves the making of The Godfather was like the filming of a home movie.

EVERY MAN A NODE:

Driving the news: Ford Motor recently announced that the electric and hybrid versions of its popular F-150 pickup truck have an innovative feature that allows owners to "share" miles with other EVs by transferring power from one car's battery to another's.

An F-150 Lightning could add an average range of 20 miles per charging hour, for example, to a Mustang Mach-E SUV, or 13 miles of charge per hour to another F-150 Lightning.

Volkswagen's ID.4 electric crossover has bidirectional capability in Europe, but so far, not in the U.S.

The bidirectional feature could one day be common on all EVs.

ALWAYS AND ONLY THE TRUMPISTS:

In court documents made public Thursday, prosecutors alleged that Rhodes spent large sums on weapons in the days before January 6, including $10,000 on an AR-15 and $17,000 on other military equipment. Rhodes further purchased and shipped tactical gear and a weapon sight to an unnamed individual in Virginia, near DC, just before January 6, according to the indictment. Rhodes allegedly helped to organize a so-called quick reaction force in a northern Virginia hotel room, a conspiracy previously alleged by the DOJ to involve numerous Oath Keepers who stashed weapons there that they brought to the DC area just ahead of January 6. Rhodes has said the Oath Keepers anticipated using the weapons inside DC if Trump declared a national emergency and called on Oath Keepers and other militia groups to help him keep order.

The indictment also includes new details from a "Leadership Intel Chat" allegedly convened by Rhodes just after the November 2020 election. "We aren't getting through this without a civil war," he told the group of Oath Keepers, according to the indictment. "Too late for that. Prepare your mind, body, spirit."

The indictment contains further stark evidence from alleged communications among Rhodes and fellow Oath Keepers in the run-up to January 6, with Rhodes anticipating "a bloody and desperate fight" if Biden became president. Further planning by Oath Keepers in those talks allegedly included holding a training session to focus on "convoy operations" and "setting up hasty ambushes."

SYSTEMIC:

The threat this time: ethylene oxide, a cancer-causing chemical that facilities like the Union Carbide plant, now owned by Dow Chemical, make and that helps produce a huge variety of products, including antifreeze, pesticides and sterilizing agents for medical tools. The regulators, their Zoom backgrounds set to photos of pristine pine forests and green fields, shared a map of the area, a short drive west from Charleston. Institute, one of just two majority-Black communities in the state, is home to West Virginia State University, a historically Black college whose alumni include Katherine Johnson, the NASA mathematician made famous by the film "Hidden Figures," and Earl Lloyd, the first Black player in the NBA. Blocks on the map were shaded green, yellow or red, from lowest to highest cancer risk. Much of Institute was bright red. 

Institute is representative of Black communities across the country that bear a disproportionate health burden from industrial pollution. On average, the level of cancer risk from industrial air pollution in majority-Black census tracts is more than double that of majority-white tracts, according to an analysis by ProPublica, which examined five years of emissions data. That finding builds on decades of evidence demonstrating that pollution is segregated, with residents of so-called fence-line communities --  neighborhoods that border industrial plants -- breathing dirtier air than people in more affluent communities farther away from facilities.

The disparity, experts say, stems from a variety of structural imbalances, including racist real estate practices like redlining and decades of land use and zoning decisions made by elected officials, government regulators and corporate executives living outside these communities. That means that these areas, many of which are low-income, also lack the access that wealthier areas have to critical resources, like health care and education, and face poorer economic prospects. 

All of the concentrated industrial activity in these so-called "sacrifice zones" doesn't just sicken the residents who happen to live nearby. It can also cause property values to plummet, trapping neighborhoods in a vicious cycle of disinvestment.

IT'S A DEFLATIONARY EPOCH:

DWEEB ALERT:

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

The Leclerc supermarket group has come under fire from France's bakers after selling baguettes for as little as €0.29.

French bakers have taken aim at a major supermarket chain that is offering inflation-busting low prices for baguettes, saying the move would undermine competition in one of the country's prized industries. [...]

Leclerc boss Michel-Edouard Leclerc told business magazine Capital that prices for baguettes in his shops has been around 30 cents "for at least a year."

"In an environment where (prices for) everything are going up and will keep going up, we wanted to send a signal that Leclerc will keep prices accessible for consumers," he said.

"Players in this sector have to accept that Leclerc shops have control over their relationship with consumers," he added.

HE LOVES ME, NOT:

NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

A large number of jobs exist not because they create economic value but because they make business sense given the institutions we have - customer expectations, bureaucratic regulations, and so on. They do not solve a real problem but a fake problem created by inefficient institutions. They therefore do not make our society better off but rather they represent a great cost to society - of many people's time being expended on something fundamentally pointless instead of something worthwhile. One way of spotting such anti-jobs is to compare staffing in the same industry across different countries. US supermarkets employ people just to greet customers and bag groceries, for example, which would seem a ridiculous waste of time in most of the world. In Japan one can find people standing in front of road construction waving a flag (they are replaced with mechanical manikins on nights and weekends).

Another way to spot anti-jobs is to to observe the effects of Covid restrictions and look for areas where removing workers or tasks made no impact on performance, or even improved it. Take waiters. In America there are around 2 million people doing this job (1.4% of all employment). The experience of Covid lockdowns shows that much of what waiters do can be done better by pasting a QR code to tables for customers to scan to visit the menu webpage and order and pay directly. Having learned this, it would be ridiculous to go back to employing people to waste their time and their customers' by doing such fundamentally needless work. We still need some waiters to bring the food and drink we ordered (for now), but we don't need nearly as many because we don't need to employ people to ask us what we want and then tell someone else to make it.

I. Waiters are Bad at their Job

The point of going to a restaurant is to enjoy a nice meal in good company. The people you want to interact with are the ones you brought with you. Unless you are rather odd, your interactions with waiters are merely of the instrumental kind - they are merely a means to get food and drink brought to the table. If there were a better way to get served you should take it. And the fact is that relying on waiters is a major hassle and a distraction from the meal and the company you chose. In Europe they tend to leave you alone, but then when you do want something you have to interrupt your conversation to try to find one. In North America they are constantly interrupting your conversation in an effort to insert their unctuous willingness to please into your memory for when you calculate their tip.

This hassle is not only annoying but actually quite expensive because human interaction is a friction that slows everything down and adds to the costs of going out. It is notably quicker as well as easier to get food in places that use QR ordering (or variations on it, such as ipad menus). At the same time, those restaurants don't need as many staff to serve the same number of customers. Lower costs for operating a restaurant show up as lower prices for customers, which means more people can afford an (improved) experience of going out for dinner. In turn that means more restaurants and more jobs in those restaurants. (It's like what happened with ATMs. They made it cheaper to operate bank branches so the number of branches went up and the total number of bank teller jobs actually rose.)

There may have been a time when computing power was so scarce that it made economic sense to pay an actual person to act as an information retrieval device, telling you from memory what was available and answering your questions about it (allergies and substitutions and so forth). But now that nearly everyone under 65 (and most over 65s) has a smartphone this scarcity no longer exists.

TO DRIVE INNOVATION, TAX GAS:

Like the new generation of space launch companies, many of the private developers of commercial fusion power owe their existence to taxpayer-funded backing and work spinning out of universities, many of which have ties to national laboratories. Fusion power technology companies are also attracting funding from deep-pocketed investors and venture capital firms.

The following list of companies, while not exhaustive, illustrates the myriad approaches to achieving fusion power under development in the private sector:

Commonwealth Fusion Systems of Cambridge, Massachusetts, is working with MIT on its SPARC fusion demonstration reactor designed on the tokamak concept. The team's approach is to use a new high-temperature superconducting magnet to contain and sustain the fusion process, enabling smaller and more practical commercial power plants.

Tokamak Energy of the U.K. is, not surprisingly, pursuing magnetic plasma containment. The company is also using high-temperature superconducting magnets with the goal of producing a spherical plasma field, which its research suggests is more efficient than torus-shaped tokamaks.

CTFusion has partnered with the University of Washington to develop a reactor design that produces fusion from deuterium and tritium fuel through a containment produced from coiled magnets. Plasma is injected continuously into the reactor, where the coils induce it to form a shape that can achieve fusion. The company says the design will enable smaller fusion reactors.

Helion Energy of Everett, Washington, is developing a fusion process from a fuel of deuterium and helium-3, a rare isotope of helium that the company produces through a patented process. Helion's reactor design has two chambers in a dumbbell configuration, in which fuel is heated to plasma and then accelerated into a central chamber where the collision results in fusion. In November the company announced it had received $500 million in funding from a group of investors led by OpenAI, with $1.7 billion in additional funding promised if certain milestones are met.

California-based TAE Technologies has a reactor design that also generates fusion from plasmas created from wing chambers that are propelled to collide in a central chamber. The design uses boron for fuel and employs particle accelerators to stabilize and prolong the fusion reaction. The company says it has raised over $880 million from an array of investors.

General Fusion seeks to eliminate magnets from the fusion process with a reactor design that injects deuterium-tritium-fueled plasma into a spherical chamber lined with a rotating wall of liquid metal. Steam-driven pistons compress the tokamak to achieve fusion. Heat is collected from the liquid wall to run turbines. Jeff Bezos is among the company's investors.

HyperJet Fusion of Chantilly, Virginia, is developing a reactor that creates fusion in a central chamber from an array of plasma guns fueled by tritium and lithium. The company was born from research sponsored by NASA, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

Zap Energy of Seattle, Washington, is seeking to develop a fusion reactor using a variation of the Z-pinch process that uses electric current to confine and manage streams of plasma. The process was born out of Department of Energy-funded research from the University of Washington and Lawrence Livermore. In August 2020, Chevron announced it was investing in the company.

LLPFusion of Middlesex, New Jersey, is also following the Z-pinch path to develop a fusion generator. The company's design directs plasma streams fueled by hydrogen and boron into a vacuum chamber by means of a pair of electrodes. The process produces a beam of helium ions that are decelerated to produce electricity through direct conversion rather than by heating a medium.

Australia-based HB11 Energy proposes achieving fusion without heating plasma by using a laser to initiate a reaction in a hydrogen-boron fuel target that is contained in a magnetic field produced by a second laser. The reaction creates charged helium nuclei that are captured by a surrounding metal sphere. Electricity is produced by direct conversion.

Essentially all these companies say they are on track to produce practical fusion first with their unique approach. Moreover, national labs and research facilities in the fusion field increasingly are willing to partner with private industry or launch startups to commercialize fusion energy. While it is impossible to predict which firm or team (if any) will be the breakout performer, the fact that many are attracting significant venture capital suggests that fusion power can no longer be dismissed as part of a far-future civilization.

BEWITCHING:

Ten years ago AFCON 2012 threw up one of the biggest surprises in international footballing history when Zambia, 10th favourites at 40-1 before the competition started, shocked favourites Ivory Coast (and others) by winning the final in Libreville via a penalty shootout. It was the culmination of a heady three-week adventure that made no sense analytically, but complete sense from a storyline point of view. In April 1993, most of the incredibly promising Zambian national squad - their eyes on a place at the 1994 World Cup spot and victory at the 1994 Cup of Nations - were killed when the military plane transporting them to a World Cup qualifier in Senegal, crashed into the sea shortly after taking off from a refuelling stop in Gabon.

Although a rebuilt team, based around star striker Kalusha Bwalya (who had avoided the 1993 disaster due to the fact he was, as a PSV Eindhoven player, travelling to Senegal from the Netherlands) finished as runners-up at AFCON 1994, Zambia never made it to the 1994 World Cup and are still waiting to appear at one. By 2012, Zambia had slipped back firmly into the second tier of African footballing powers, often capable of getting through the group stages in many editions of the AFCON, but usually despatched by one of the continent's big boys, invariably due to a lack of goalscoring threat. In 2010 Zambia made it through the group stage in first place ahead of Cameroon, Gabon and Tunisia, but then went out on penalties to Nigeria in the quarter-finals after a 0-0 draw. Disappointment once again. On to 2012, then, and try again.

AFCON 2012 was full of players who had graced the club scene in Europe for much of the previous decade and would do so in the future, from Kole Toure to Didier Drogba, from a 22-year-old Pierre-Emerick Aubameyang to a 22-year-old Andre Ayew. Zambia's squad, in contrast had five players who played domestically, eight from the South African top-flight as well as five from 2009 CAF Champions League winners TP Mazembe from the Democratic Republic of Congo. The only European-based player in the squad was 21-year-old striker Emmanuel Mayuka. He was about to go on to big things, but no-one in January 2012 saw it coming.

BALL FIVE:

The minor leagues. The pennants along the foul lines read Pawtucket, Toledo, Columbus, Syracuse--the AAA farm clubs of the International League. The outfield is surrounded by billboards promoting barbecue stands and Oldsmobile dealerships. A Lions Club baritone salutes the star-spangled banner fluttering in dead center field, and the crowd settles back for the first pitch of a doubleheader between the Charleston Charlies and the Richmond Braves.

Jim Bouton, former sportscaster, former actor, former author, former 20-game winner for the New York Yankees, arrives at his usual post at the edge of the bleachers' behind the Richmond dugout. He can't go on the field and he's not willing to sit in the stands, so he loiters around the hot dog concession, looking around absently like a man who's lost his bearings. At the age of 39, Bouton no longer resembles a fresh-faced Army recruit, as he did in 1964 when he won two games in the World Series. The hair is short again, but it's graying, and the eyes are attracting crow's feet. To the fans in Richmond, he must look like somebody's dad trying to get a peek in the bullpen to see if his son is warming up. But it's his own youth that Bouton is searching for, and tomorrow night when the anthem concludes before the exhibition game with the Atlanta Braves, Jim Bouton will walk to the mound and face a major league club for the first time in eight years.

Comebacks among baseball pitchers are not unknown, but they are rare. Tommy John did it after a surgeon rebuilt his arm in 1974, and Mickey Lolich is trying to do it now with the San Diego Padres, after sitting out a year. What makes Bouton's attempt so exceptional is that he's been out of baseball since 1970, and when he quit he wasn't injured, he was washed-up. He hadn't pitched effectively for six years. But instead of falling into the panic many ballplayers face when their careers are finished, Bouton wrote Ball Four, one of the best-selling sports books of all time.

He was censured by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and reviled by the baseball establishment. ("It's the most derogatory thing and the worst thing for baseball I've ever seen," Joe Cronin, then president of the American League, said of the book. "He's got ballplayers sleeping with each other's wives. He's got them being Peeping Toms. He's even got them kissing each other. I've never read anything so bad in my whole life.") But a lot of ballplayers, even those who detested the book, gladly would have traded their seat in the dugout for a spot on the WABC Eyewitness News Team, or a part in a Robert Altman movie (The Long Goodbye), or a role in a TV sitcom (Ball Four, 1976's short-lived series based on Bouton's book). After all, what does a ballplayer have to look forward to when he's out of the game? If he's immortal, like Joe DiMaggio or Mickey Mantle, maybe he can do some TV commercials, but if he's merely average, he'll be lucky to land a high-school coaching job. From that perspective, Jim Bouton was the most conspicuously successful ex-ballplayer since Chuck Connors, who hit .239 for the Cubs but went on to glory as the favorite Hollywood actor of Leonid Brezhnev.

That's all gone now, the television, the movies and even the money, sacrificed for a long-shot "comeback." Last year he was cut by two minor league teams and finished the summer with a bunch of kids on a class A club in Portland, Oregon, at the lowest level of professional baseball; and since spring training this season, when he was released by the Braves, he has been pitching batting practice for meal money for the Richmond club--and that as a favor from Ted Turner, owner of the Braves organization.

The young players are nice to him, but he's part of another world to them, a world of long-distance calls and funny tales about famous people. His equipment bag says "Washington Americans"--it's a prop from his TV series, when he played Jim Barton, "number 56 on your scorecard but number one in your hearts." The players kid about the yogurt he keeps in the icebox and the health food he eats on the road, but they admire the shape he's in. At 165 pounds, he is 20 pounds lighter than his Yankee days, and his body is as lithe and springy as an acrobat's. Still, it's a mystery why Bouton is among them. He is not even on their roster. When the team flies to Syracuse, or Toledo, Bouton tags along, just to pitch batting practice and perhaps talk to the general managers of the opposing teams, letting them know he's available. So far, no offers. "If I don't make the big leagues soon, the money's going to run out," Bouton says. Today, the day before his big opportunity, Bouton sold his house in Englewood, New Jersey. "I've even taken all the money I put away for a college education for my kids, that's all gone." Tomorrow, if he doesn't pitch well, the comeback of Jim Bouton is over.

WHAT ABOUT THE THREAT FROM CRT? (profanity alert):

As the Omicron variant rages across the US, some students are expressing frustration and worry over being forced back into classrooms with minimal protections. But rather than wait around for fumbling adults, youth across the country are taking matters into their own hands: organizing strikes, participating in city-wide walk-outs, and laying out detailed proposals for how their well-being could be prioritized during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

On Wednesday, thousands of students in New York City walked out of class to protest conditions and demand temporarily shutting down schools. Students are also planning a walkout this Friday in Boston, where 4,500 people have already signed a petition calling for a remote learning option. In Oakland, California, over 1,000 students signed a districtwide petition threatening to boycott classes entirely until the school district meets its demands--which include KN95 masks, increased testing, and more outdoor space for students to safely eat lunch.

And in Chicago, where in-person classes have resumed after negotiation with the local teachers' union, students announced a city-wide walk-out for this Friday at 12:30 PM to bring increased attention to their demands for "physical, mental, spiritual, and structural safety."   

THANKS, JOE:

The U.S. budget deficit fell sharply to $21 billion in December thanks to surging tax revenue and fading government stimulus.

The U.S. deficit shrank from $144 billion in the same month of 2020, the Treasury Department said Wednesday.

MORAL MIDGET WRESTLING:

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Top Hezbollah official Hashem Safieddine said Saudi Arabia should stop its policy of "bullying" others as well as its interference in Lebanon's internal affairs.

The conference was attended by Saudi opposition figures as well as members of Yemen's Iran-backed Houthi rebels. It was meant to commemorate the anniversary of influential Saudi Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr, who was executed in January 2016 in a mass execution of 47 people in the kingdom.

Al-Nimr was an outspoken government critic and a key leader of Shiite protests in eastern Saudi Arabia in 2011 demanding greater rights in the majority Sunni nation and fair treatment.

EVERY MAN A NODE:

[A] path to tackle the climate crisis became clear: Transition the electric grid to carbon-free wind and solar and convert most other fossil fuel users in transportation, buildings and industry to electricity.

The U.S. is headed in that direction. Early projections suggest the world just wrapped up a record year of renewable electricity growth in 2021, following a record 33,500 megawatts of solar and wind electricity installed in the U.S. in 2020, according to BloombergNEF data. Even faster growth is expected ahead, especially given the Biden administration's plans to tap high-value offshore wind resources. But will it be fast enough?

The Biden administration's goal is to have a carbon emissions-free grid by 2035. One recent study found that the U.S. will need to nearly triple its 2020 growth rate for the grid to be 80% powered by clean energy by 2030. (As difficult as that may sound, China reportedly installed 120,000 megawatts of wind and solar in 2020.)

The foundation of this transition is a dramatic change in the electric grid itself.

Hailed as the greatest invention of the 20th century, our now-aging grid was based on fundamental concepts that made sense at the time it was developed. The original foundation was a combination of "base load" coal plants that operated 24 hours a day and large-scale hydropower.

Beginning in 1958, these were augmented by nuclear power plants, which have operated nearly continuously to pay off their large capital investments. Unlike coal and nuclear, solar and wind are variable; they provide power only when the sun and wind are available.

Converting to a 21st-century grid that is increasingly based on variable resources requires a completely new way of thinking. New sources of flexibility - the ability to keep supply and demand in balance over all time scales - are essential to enable this transition.

AS LONG AS THEY WEREN'T TEACHING CRT...:

James called for the formation of a new kind of national service. He wanted to replace military conscription with a draft of young men, especially the wealthy, who he believed could benefit from it the most, to do the hard labor of society. (Given that this was 1910, it's not surprising that James didn't include women in his calculation.) 

"To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them," James wrote, "and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas." 

He saw such projects as society's best hope, because "war has been the only force that can discipline a whole community, and until an equivalent discipline is organized, I believe that war must have its way." 

But societal change seldom comes quickly; James was a thinker, and thinkers rarely change the world without help. Before his idea was taken up seriously, the world's nations had slaughtered an estimated 16 million during World War I, or the ill-named "War to End All Wars." 

'American life is barren'

German scholar Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy sought to realize James' dream by helping create voluntary youth service work camps during the 1920s in Germany. When the Nazis rose to power, however, they took over the camps for their purposes and Rosenstock-Huessy fled to the United States, where he accepted a teaching position at Harvard. 

After an academic dispute, Rosenstock-Huessy moved in 1935 to Norwich, Vermont, and taught at nearby Dartmouth College. 

The United States was just then starting its own youth service work camps, the Civilian Conservation Corps, which employed jobless, unmarried young men. Rosenstock-Huessy faulted the CCC for admitting only disadvantaged youths, which he said created another barrier between social classes. He wanted to bring college-educated, mostly urban, young men back to rural areas. "American life is barren because the city and the farm have become separate," he said. 

Rosenstock-Huessy's passionate support for James' ideal of the "moral equivalent of war" rubbed off on his students, who sought to help him put those ideals into action. Shortly after graduating from Dartmouth in 1940, one of those students, Robert O'Brien, met a farmer in Tunbridge who needed a farmhand. O'Brien took the job and soon persuaded five other recent Dartmouth graduates to join him. 

O'Brien found numerous local jobs that needed doing just down the road from a CCC camp that had recently closed for lack of projects. 

At the same time, a group of Harvard graduates contacted Rosenstock-Huessy about starting a work camp in the Tunbridge area. Together with the Dartmouth men, they hatched the idea for Camp William James to be located at the CCC's former Camp Sharon in the Downer State Forest. 

Working with Rosenstock-Huessy, they found three influential women to promote their cause. Two were Vermonters: writer Dorothy Canfield Fisher and newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson (whom the Nazis had expelled from Germany in 1934 for her criticism of Hitler). The third was First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, who managed to get her husband, President Franklin Roosevelt, on board. 

Idealists vs. realists

In December 1940, an initial group of 40 young men, a mix of recent college graduates and others on economic relief, started rehabilitating the abandoned Camp Sharon. The men planned to tackle forestry, soil conservation, land resettlement and community revitalization projects. 

The enrollees' first order of business was learning to live and work together. "There was remarkably little friction over the past fortnight," reported one. But some complaints arose over the quality of the food and the lack of hot water. "Also some hot words about policies and tactics, but no black eyes. ... Everyone in the group came to know the others as people. There was no brooding. Any conflicts came out quickly, which was much healthier. We assumed shape, confidence and above all, a concrete unity." 

While enrollees prepared to put James' vision to the test, officials in Washington battled over how the camp would operate. One faction, sometimes dubbed the idealists, wanted the camp to be based on more democratic principles, with enrollees choosing their leader, who would supervise work. They also wanted enrollees to work closely with local residents on projects. 

The other faction, called the realists, argued for a top-down approach. They wanted the camp run along the lines of the CCC, with Washington appointing a military commander and dictating what work would be done and by whom. 

President Roosevelt's opponents attacked the camp as they had attacked most of his New Deal projects. Republican Rep. Albert Engels of Michigan demanded an investigation of Camp William James. He called it a camp for the "overprivileged" that ran counter to the CCC's mission to help the underprivileged. He also ignited rumors that the camp was secretly preparing the way for labor camps, like those in Nazi Germany. 

Some opponents pointed out that Rosenstock-Huessy was not yet an American citizen and that he had organized youth camps in Germany.  

The Bennington Banner defended Rosenstock-Huessy and the camp from Engels' attacks. "Although we do not think Americans can be too careful in scrutinizing the records of Axis dupes in this country," the paper editorialized, "it does seem that in the case of Rosenstock-Huessey (sic) the congressman has erred and been too cautious." The paper said that, yes, Rosenstock-Huessy was German, but he had applied for American citizenship and had been "forced out of Germany for being anti-Hitler." Furthermore, Rosenstock-Huessy "had been checked and passed as OK" by the FBI.

IT'S ALWAYS THE rIGHT:

GOP Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene on Tuesday suggested using "Second Amendment rights" on those trying to implement what she referred to as "tyrannical government."

Greene, who appeared on former President Donald Trump White House aide Sebastian Gorka's radio program Tuesday, was talking about programs proposed by Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. The freshman congresswoman mentioned that Abrams, "in her announcement speech, said she would pursue aggressive vaccinations of Georgians."

WE SONS OF CAIN WIN:

CONCERN:

Public-school attendance across the U.S. has dropped to unusually low levels, complicating efforts to keep schools open, as districts also contend with major staff shortages.

Many students in kindergarten through 12th grade are out sick because of Covid-19 or are being kept home by anxious parents, as the Omicron variant surges, officials say. Remote learning often isn't being offered anymore for students who are home. Empty desks create a quandary for teachers, who must decide whether to push ahead with lesson plans knowing a large number of their students will need to catch up.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Part travelogue, part memoir, this cultural history of Islam in the Western Hemisphere follows Mouallem's travels to dozens of mosques, discovering Muslim communities worshipping from the Arctic Circle to the edge of the Amazon. Through meeting indigenous Mayan Muslims in southern Mexico and congregants at a 170-year-old mosque in Trinidad, Praying to the West traces the pasts, present, and futures of diverse Muslim communities throughout the Americas.  [...]

What do we gain when we put these diverse Muslim communities in conversation with one other?

"One of the most unique things about greater American Islam, and maybe its defining feature, is just how diverse it is. Here in Calgary, there are probably 30 mosques and probably 12 different branches with decently sized communities. That's just one typical Western city. You don't necessarily find that kind of denominational diversity in African, Middle Eastern, South Asian cities where there is a large Muslim population.

And you certainly don't find that kind of ethnic diversity -- Muslima are the most ethnically diverse religious group in the US, and you probably extrapolate that to the rest of North America. When you put these groups in conversation, you see how even Muslims who subscribe to the same branch developed in culturally different ways. 

You can actually capture quite a bit of the 1500-year history of Islam, I think, by looking at one city in the Americas and examining its different denominations, Sufi inflections and mosques. I don't think you can do that in Beirut or Cairo, and certainly not Mecca. It's maybe a provocative thing to say. But I think if you were to do a deep dive into all the mosques of a city like Houston versus a city like Mecca, you'll walk away with a much better understanding of Islam." [...]

How did working on this project reshape your personal faith and identity?

"What surprised me is it started to feel that, whether or not we hold firm to the exact same beliefs, we have a lot in common -- going to mosques, spending Eid with a community, relating to people. We have a shared experience. Over the past few years I'd been experiencing more racism, and I realized that whether or not I call myself Muslim, people assume I am. And there are certain values, traditions and rituals that I still cherish. 

So I started to wonder if there was a place for someone like me. That became a challenge, a test -- if there is, where would I find it and what would it look like? I felt like reclaiming my Muslim identity on my own terms and in claiming a spot in it felt like a just to do. 

Everywhere I went, I met Muslim people who were called illegitimate -- people who were very observant, very pious, extremely faithful, sometimes dogmatic. And there was always someone else who was telling them, "You're not a real Muslim." Something that challenged me was meeting people from the Moorish Science Temple and recognising some judgment within myself, where I was questioning whether they are legitimate Muslims. And then I was like, "Well, why not?"

Going to their conferences, I saw efforts to wrestle with the original text and syncretise it with more orthodox Muslim traditions. They have a lot in common with other Muslim communities because of their beliefs. They see themselves as Muslims. So why aren't they a part of the ummah?"

...AND CHEAPER...:

The Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) said on Wednesday it was set to produce 85 percent of Abu Dhabi's clean electricity by 2025.

The Barakah nuclear power plant's fourth unit had the potential to create one million tonnes of hydrogen per year, Mohamed Ibrahim al-Hammadi, chief executive of ENEC, said.

"This low carbon fuel is essential to transition to a net zero world," he said at an energy conference.

WEAR YOUR MASK:

Influenza cases in Japan are at a record low level for a second consecutive season.

Every year, the Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare publishes weekly figures of flu cases from September until May of the following year. In a typical year, there is a steady uptick in cases from November, but as with last season, the number of reported cases in 2021-22 remains extremely low. Measures were taken against COVID-19, including the use of masks and regular washing and disinfecting of hands, seem to  also be effective in flu prevention.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Members of Hezbollah will on Wednesday mark six years since the execution of prominent Shia cleric Sheikh Al-Nimr, according to reports, amid heightened tensions between Saudi Arabia and Lebanon.

The event will mark six years since Riyadh's execution of Al-Nimr, a popular figure among Saudi Shia Muslims whose execution sparked angry protests in neighbouring Iran. [...]

Saudi Arabia executed Al-Nimr, a renowned Shia cleric who often criticised the ruling family, on 2 January 2016, on "terrorism" charges.

He was executed due to his support of the mass anti-government protests that took place in the Eastern province of Qatif, where a Shia majority have long complained of marginalisation.

MASK UP:

The big picture: Fitted particle-filtering masks like N95s are up to 75 times more effective at preventing infection with COVID-19 than surgical masks, according to a study published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This echoes recent recommendations by public health experts about the value of N95 masks, reported by the Wall Street Journal.

It will take 25 hours for an infectious dose of COVID-19 to transmit between people wearing non-fit-tested N95 respirators but if they're wearing a tightly sealed N95, they'll have 2,500 hours of protection, per a study reported by the WSJ.

MAKE THEM OWN MUTUAL FUNDS...:

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

A prominent Afghan university professor arrested by Taliban authorities after criticising them on television was released on Tuesday, his daughter said. 

"A GREAT AMERICAN":

[L]ike other pre-Negro National League players such as John Donaldson and Cannonball Dick Redding, Poles was a legend. He played everywhere he could latch onto -- joining Pop Lloyd and the Philadelphia Giants in 1909, teaming up with Smokey Joe Williams on the New York Lincoln Giants in 1913 and starring with Redding on Atlantic City in 1919. And although it's hard to totally tabulate his exact numbers, nearly every story or available stat sheet recognizes him as a fantastic hitter, his career average somewhere in the .300-.400 range. SABR researcher John Holway has Poles batting .440 in 1911, .364 the following season in Cuba and an incomprehensible .487 in 1914.

And not only did Poles dominate against Black pitchers, he also, in limited at-bats, did so against white Major League pitching. He reportedly faced big leaguers 41 times in his career and got 25 hits. That's a ridiculous .610 average. In the fall of 1913, playing exhibition series against MLB teams, the 5-foot-9 leadoff batter got three straight hits off Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander and five against George Chalmers.

"He lit Major League pitching up," Kendrick said. "These were documented games; he played Major League All-Star teams that were pretty well stocked with talent. Spot didn't discriminate on who he lit up -- he lit everybody up."

But what most people stress when they talk about Poles is his speed.

"Any time you draw comparisons to the speed of Cool Papa Bell, we know you're fast," Kendrick said. "Some believe he may have even been faster."

Bell, as many baseball fans may know, has always been considered the fastest player in Negro Leagues history -- and perhaps the fastest to ever step onto any baseball field anywhere. There are stories of him getting hit by his own line drives sliding into second base or outrunning the speed of light. Of course, Bell -- now a Hall of Famer -- started his career 12 seasons later than Poles, in the prime of the Negro National League. His numbers were more accurately recorded, his stories more readily reported.

Still, there are anecdotes to back up Poles' legendary quickness. Reporters who covered his career abroad and in the U.S. referred to him as "the Black Ty Cobb." Poles once ran a 100-meter race in less than 10 seconds. Negro Leagues All-Star pitcher Sam Streeter, who saw both Bell and Poles play and thought Poles was faster, talked about a time facing 36-year-old Spot:

"He hit that ball on one hop right back to me," Streeter said. "It was straight, just like a line drive. I turned to throw to first, and he crossed first before the ball got there."

According to Seamheads, Poles' Major League similarity scores can be compared to elite speedsters like Lou Brock and Ichiro Suzuki. [...]

Poles even missed a year of his prime, signing up to fight in World War I at the age of 30 after the 1917 season. And he did it in the face of a country that refused to fight beside him: The U.S. didn't allow Black men to serve with them at the time, so he, and thousands of other Black soldiers, fought bravely for France in the 369th Infantry -- a group famously known as the Harlem Hellfighters. He earned five battle stars and a Purple Heart for a regiment that spent more days on the frontline and lost more people than any other on the Allied side.

"Yeah, for me, his story is more than just baseball. We're talking about a great American," Kendrick told me.

CALLED IT:

I am telling you that before the ball game began the Babe knew he was going to hit one or more home runs. He had smacked half a dozen balls into the right-field bleachers during his hitting practice and he knew he had the feel of the trick for the day. When his hitting practice was over he waddled over toward the Cubs' dugout, his large abdomen jiggling in spite of his rubber corsets, and yelled at the Cubs sulking down there in the den, "Hey, muggs! You muggs are not going to see the Yankee Stadium any more this year. This World Series is going to be over Sunday afternoon. Four straight."

He turned, rippling with the fun of it and, addressing the Chicago customers behind third base, yelled, "Did you hear what I told them over there? I told them they ain't going back to New York. We lick 'em here, today and tomorrow."

There never was such contempt shown by one antagonist for another as the Babe displayed for the Cubs, and ridicule was his medium.

The Babe had been humiliating the Cubs publicly throughout the series. They were a lot of Lord Jims to him. They had had a chance to be big fellows when they did the voting on the division of the World Series pool. But for a few dollars' gain they had completely ignored Rogers Hornsby, their manager for most of the year, who is through with baseball now apparently without much to show for his long career, and had held Mark Koenig, their part-time shortstop, to a half share. The Yankees, on the contrary, had been generous, even to ex-Yankees who were traded away months ago, to their deformed bat boy who was run over and hurt by a car early in the season, and to his substitute.

There never was such contempt shown by one antagonist for another as the Babe displayed for the Cubs, and ridicule was his medium.

In the first inning, with Earle Combs and Joe Sewell on base, he sailed his first home run into the bleachers. He hit Charlie Root's earnest pitching with the same easy, playful swing that he had been using a few minutes before against the soft, casual service of a guinea-pig pitcher. The ball would have fallen into the street beyond the bleachers under ordinary conditions, but dropped among the patrons in the temporary seats.

The old Babe came around third base and past the Cubs' dugout yelling comments which were unintelligible to the patrons but plainly discourteous and, pursing his lips, blew them a salute known as the Bronx cheer.

He missed a second home run in the third inning when the ball came down a few feet short of the wire screen, but the masterpiece was only deferred. He hit it in the fifth, a ball that sailed incredibly to the extreme depth of center field and dropped like a perfect mashie shot behind the barrier, long enough to clear it, but with no waste of distance.

Guy Bush, the Cubs' pitcher, was up on the top step of the dugout, jawing back at him as he took his turn at bat this time. Bush pushed back his big ears, funneled his hands to his mouth, and yelled raspingly at the great man to upset him. The Babe laughed derisively and gestured at him. "Wait, mugg, I'm going to hit one out of the yard." Root threw a strike past him and he held up a finger to Bush, whose ears flapped excitedly as he renewed his insults. Another strike passed him and Bush crawled almost out of the hole to extend his remarks.

He licked the Chicago ball club, but he left the people laughing when he said goodbye, and it was a privilege to be present because it is not likely that the scene will ever be repeated in all its elements.

The Babe held up two fingers this time. Root wasted two balls and the Babe put up two fingers on his other hand. Then, with a warning gesture of his hand to Bush, he sent him the signal for the customers to see.

"Now," it said, "this is the one. Look!" And that one went riding in the longest home run ever hit in the park.

...AND CHEAPER...:

A wind turbine sitting idle on a calm day or spinning swiftly when power demand is already met poses a problem for renewables, and is one researchers think can be tackled under the sea.

In one vision, offshore wind farms could use seawater to essentially store energy until it's needed, helping wean humanity off fossil fuels. 

"We came up with a solution that we call the ocean battery," Frits Bliek, CEO of Dutch startup Ocean Grazer told AFP while showing off the system at the CES tech fair in Las Vegas.

CRANK THE CONSUMPTION TAX:

European electricity prices plunged as increasing supplies of liquefied natural gas is easing the region's energy crunch. 

German power for next month fell for a third day, dropping as much as 8.2%, as Dutch gas extended its bearish streak this week. Warmer weather in central Europe as well as forecasts for higher wind output in the coming days are also damping the risk of further price spikes, at least for now.

IT'S A MYSTERY:

Danish study of household Delta transmission. Even when infected, vaccinated people were less likely than unvaxed to transmit, evidently because vaccination -- while unable to prevent infection in those people -- reduced their viral load, thereby protecting others in the household. https://t.co/8IiDB3WZ1J

— Will Saletan (@saletan) January 11, 2022

AND MASK UP:

THANKS, UR!:

Twenty percent of the Syrian people support the current regime, whereas the majority, representing 50 percent, want radical change to the present system.

These words did not appear in a Syrian opposition outlet, but the international propaganda arm of the Kremlin, RT. Their author, a Moscow-based political analyst, is a frequent critic of Russia's ally Bashar al-Assad, although always careful to emphasize the Syrian president's legitimacy.

This raises the question: Does Rami Shaer's critical commentary shed light on Russia's frustrations with Assad? At least one Russian scholar, Vitali Naumkin, has publicly wondered whether Shaer was channeling "a message from the Kremlin" through his work.

Shaer writes for the ultranationalist Russian broadsheet Zavtra. From there his articles are translated into Arabic and posted on RT, giving them the appearance of an official imprimatur. Strengthening this impression, the author's criticisms of Damascus match those raised by Russian diplomats and media reports, and dovetail with key features of Russia's Syria strategy. Shaer's principal target is Assad's maximalism: the latter's refusal to entertain peace negotiations requiring minor concessions, his treatment of all opponents as terrorists and his inflammatory rhetoric. Shaer argues that these tendencies run counter to Russian efforts to wrap up the war with a U.N.-facilitated settlement, thereby keeping Syria in a state of miserable limbo. Left unsaid is that Assad's intransigence prevents Moscow from reaping the full economic and political benefits of its brutal military campaign.

...AND CHEAPER...:

NORDWHAT?:

Habeck wants an "immediate climate protection program" -- with laws, regulations, and other measures in place by the end of the year.

Among the measures mentioned so far are:

More wind turbines and solar plants to be encouraged by an increase in tendering for renewable energy

More planning certainty for renewable energy installations, easing some rules on where wind turbines can be built

A "wind on land" law requiring an average of 2% of percent of state and community land to be used for wind power

A "solar acceleration package" that could mean all new buildings would need to be fitted with solar panels

A reliable subsidy system for the introduction of climate-neutral industrial production processes

Changes meaning the federal government picks up the tab on funding renewables rather than consumers

New investment in green hydrogen

A first package of urgent laws and plans is expected to be approved by the cabinet by April, and put into law by the time parliament breaks for the summer.

A further package is expected to be drafted over the summer in time for approval by the end of the year. 

TAXING CARBON CREATES THE MARKET:

In building their case for an artificial market for carbon removal, Athey, Glennerster, Ransohoff, and Snyder point to the recent success in building a market for pneumococcal vaccines in low-income countries. In the early 2000s, pneumococcal disease -- which causes illnesses like pneumonia and meningitis -- killed around 1.1 million people every year, most of them kids under age five.

While pharmaceutical companies possessed the know-how to develop a vaccine to save these lives, they were reluctant to sink millions of dollars into R&D for it because the financial rewards were too small and uncertain. As it is now with carbon removal, there was basically no market for a pneumococcal vaccine in the developing world.

In 2007, five countries -- Canada, Italy, Norway, Russia, and the United Kingdom -- and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation agreed to try and change this. They donated $1.5 billion to create an "Advance Market Commitment," which pledged to buy vaccines from pharmaceutical companies at a set price. In doing so, they created a market where there wasn't one.

It worked. Not only did the Advance Market Commitment convince one pharmaceutical company to create such a vaccine; it convinced three of them to do it (GSK, Pfizer, and the Serum Institute of India). In the years since, more than 150 million kids have been immunized against pneumococcal disease, saving an estimated 700,000 lives.

Athey, Glennerster, Ransohoff, and Snyder now want governments and NGOs to create an Advance Market Commitment for carbon removal. "If you look at the numbers, you'll realize we've got to figure this out," says Athey, a technology-focused economist at Stanford University. "We've just got to do it. Most models show that just reducing emissions won't work."

VLAD WHO?:

Hostile Russian coverage of Ukraine has declined since early December, following a steep rise in the months before, according to a study of almost 19 million online items with Russia's ".ru" domain name by Semantic Visions, a Prague-based data analytics company that offers risk assessment to corporations.

The pattern is almost identical to last spring. In that case, negative Russian media sentiment toward the nation's ex-Soviet neighbor peaked shortly before the government announced in late April that it was ending another major build-up of forces.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

This Abrahamic connection is important, because the precursor to Islamic sharia is really the Jewish halakha. The latter not only has the same literal meaning--"the way"--but also similar strictures. In both sharia and halakha, believers are guided in all spheres of life: on how to pray and fast, what to eat or not (for example, no pork), how to circumcise male children and how to dress. There are also penal codes in both that dictate corporal punishments such as flogging and stoning for various religious and moral offences.

Yet there is a big historical difference between halakha and sharia. Over the last 2,000 years, Jews have lacked a religious state of their own. (Israeli law is technically secular.) Living as minorities under Islamic or Christian rule, rabbis adopted the maxim dina d'malkhuta dina, or "the law of the kingdom is the law," making halakha a matter of individual practice, communal norms and, at most, rabbinical courts that manage family affairs and arbitrate civil disputes. (A similar view has been adopted among Muslims in the west as well, which should soothe the "creeping sharia" anxiety.)

Yet most Muslims, since the birth of Islam in the seventh century, have lived under Islamic rule. From the first "caliphs," or successors of the Prophet Muhammad, these were the imperial states that launched wars of conquest, ruled large territories in which Muslims subdued non-Muslims, and where sharia defined the legal system, including the penal code. In other words, unlike the halakha, sharia has had an unbroken relationship with power. It has remained therefore not just a way of life practised by faith, but also the law of the land enforced by power.

There was nothing exceptional about this Islamic combination of religious law and political authority: separation between the state and religion was unknown in the ancient world. During the long centuries before they lost their sovereignty, Jews had their own "theocracy"--a word coined by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus to define the ideal regime his people wanted to live under. Christianity began as a civil faith, but once it captured power--nothing less than the world superpower, Rome--it soon used it coercively.

The rise of Islamic empires based on sharia, then, was "normal." It was also, for its time, progressive in some respects. These empires allowed a religious pluralism that Christian ones often didn't. That is because the Quran honoured Jews and Christians as "the People of the Book"--monotheists whose faith was deemed flawed but legitimate. The result was a hierarchical tolerance that fell short of equal status, but was much better than the forced conversions or persecutions of Christendom. No wonder European Jews repeatedly fled to Islamic lands, such as the Ottoman Empire, where they found a measure of safety and liberty.

Regarding women, too, one really can argue that the sharia, historically speaking, advanced their rights. The Quran, as Islamic feminists such as Asma Barlas have argued, contains some liberating messages for Muslim women, giving them rights in marriage, divorce and inheritance. And while these rights would be whittled down by later male interpreters, Muslim women could own property, for example, centuries before western women. (The Married Women's Property Act in Britain arrived only in 1870.)

Sharia also upheld a value that European liberals such as Montesquieu would much later champion: "separation of powers" or "checks and balances." Since sharia was God's law, all of His creatures, including rulers, were subject to it. The sharia's legal interpretation and judicial implementation lay in the hands of independent scholars who, at least in theory, could act as a check on caliphs and sultans. There are many examples in Islamic history of judges mitigating tyranny--by disallowing political executions, confiscation of property or over-taxation. A sharia court even sentenced Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, to pay compensation to a Greek architect he had abused.

Such examples as these led the American orientalist Bernard Lewis--hardly shy in criticising the Muslim world--to observe that "the medieval Islamic world offered vastly more freedom than any of its predecessors, its contemporaries and most of its successors."

Today, Muslim intellectuals reasonably evoke such historic contributions of the sharia to correct western biases against Islam. But in doing so they often overlook the other side of the coin. All the universal values we can discern in classical Islam--religious freedom, women's rights or the rule of law--have progressed further in the past two centuries outside the Islamic world: first as liberal norms in the west, then as "universal human rights." By comparison, sharia has come to seem increasingly archaic. Granting some rights to women or religious minorities may have been a remarkably progressive step 1,000 years ago; but depriving them of equal rights is now unacceptably oppressive. 

That oppressive rigidity is pervasive in traditional interpretations of the sharia, whose primary objective, "the protection of religion," was often understood by medieval jurists as religious coercion.

Take the religious practice most fundamental to Islam: the five-times-a-day prayer prostrating to God. For hundreds of millions of Muslims around the world, this is an act of personal piety that they perform without compulsion. But in traditional jurisprudence, daily prayers were not just a voluntary act of faith: they were legal obligations. That is why jurists discussed "the punishment of those who give up prayer," as Al-Mawardi (972-1058) explains in his classic Ordinances of Government. Accordingly, the strictest Hanbali school of jurisprudence decreed the death penalty for those who failed to comply. The Shafi'i school also ordained this penalty, but only after giving the accused a chance to repent.

The relatively lenient Hanafis settled for beating with sticks. Nur al-Idah, by the 11th-century Hanafi thinker Hasan Shurunbulali, described the punishment in graphic detail: "One who intentionally neglects prayer due to laziness or idleness is to be beaten harshly until blood flows from his body and is then imprisoned during which he is subject to physical pain, until he performs his prayers or dies in confinement. This ruling also applies for one who does not fast [in] Ramadan due to laziness." 

It is worth noting that Nur al-Idah has long been a popular text in the Deobandi madrasas of Pakistan, from which the Taliban arose as a radical offshoot. That may also help explain why, in the late 1990s, the Taliban's ministry for "commanding right and forbidding wrong," which has recently been revived to replace the women's ministry, used to whip men into mosques to pray. And today, while the newly reformed ministry promises to be gentler, its guidebook still includes stipulations of "compulsory prayer."

Many Muslims, especially those living in the west, would find such compulsion bizarre. What would be the point of praying and fasting, they might ask, if it is done under the threat of beating? Many traditional jurists, by contrast, seem to have believed that sincere prayers would follow compulsory ones.

In the same spirit, traditional texts--including the famous Revival of the Religious Sciences by the towering 11th-century theologian al-Ghazali--are full of injunctions about punishing drinkers and pouring away their wine. There is also licence in the text to "break musical instruments," a practice the Taliban revived in the 1990s, and extended to TV sets and video players.

And then there are coercive rules regarding women in such texts. First, they should cover themselves from the head to the ankles--there are disagreements on whether the face veil is "compulsory" or just "recommended." Women should "obey" their husbands on most issues, including not leaving the house without their permission. And they should not travel without a "male guardian." Two other offences are especially serious: "apostasy," or publicly renouncing one's faith, and "blasphemy," insulting God, the Quran or the Prophet Muhammad. The punishment for both, with some nuance in the details, is execution. 

Finally, traditional Sunni jurisprudence also envisions an authoritarian political system in which the Muslim ruler--who must be male and act as the enforcer of sharia--should be "obeyed," with little room for dissent. Democracy, according to this particular interpretation, is not an option. No wonder the Taliban's Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan--just like the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia--doesn't hold free elections. It just has a ruler everyone is expected to follow.

The Taliban's rise is one bitter chapter in a wider crisis of Islamic civilisation. The broader story is the growing tension between traditional interpretations of sharia and the universalising aspirations of many modern Muslims: the right of every individual to think, speak, dress, behave and live freely, with equal rights under the law, including political participation.

In fairness, the problems in the Muslim world cannot all be ascribed to sharia. Owing to various trajectories of secularisation over the past two centuries, of about 50 Muslim-majority states, only around a dozen have sharia in their penal code, with Saudi Arabia and Iran among the harshest. And even in those cases, the actual implementation is typically not as brutal as under the Taliban, or the terrorist army that calls itself Islamic State, the darkest end of the spectrum.

SHOULD'VE HIRED THE COW:

In the meantime, Trump's "Truth" platform has fallen victim to a series of delays ranging from the dozens of hires necessary to staff it up to scrutiny from the Securities and Exchange Commission over a planned merger between Trump Media and a publicly traded company, Digital World Acquisition. Such mergers, made through a Special Purpose Acquisition Company or SPAC, typically take five to six months from the time the merger is announced to the time the deal closes, according to Michael Ohlrogge, an assistant law professor at New York University.

Enter new Trump Media CEO Devin Nunes, the newly resigned California congressman and former dairy farmer who appears to have no credentials equal to the task of standing up a social media startup.

Trump also didn't exactly hit it out of the park with his debut of TruthSocial.com last fall. The Post writes:

The early version of the site was quickly taken down after pranksters posted a photo of a defecating pig under the username "donaldjtrump." Days later, the creators of the open-source social media software that the site used, Mastodon, sent Trump Media a letter saying Truth Social had violated the terms under which the software could be used. 

Following that debacle, a planned beta launch in November never actually took place. Apple's App Store pegs the expected launch date for the Truth Social app at February 21.

Meanwhile, Nunes is reportedly burning up the phone lines with venture capitalists to get the lowdown on how to build a company.

GOOD NEWS, SISTER...:

The attempt to make sense, fill in blanks, tell the real from the imagined, becomes tiring the way a profound conversation is tiring, when the subject is important but not clear.

GOSH, WHY DOES IRAN WANT TO DEFEND ITSELF?:

"We are investing in security rearmament of the IDF and the entire defense establishment. I would say this was rearmament that we haven't seen for years. This rearmament is important to our survival, and I am very glad about it and am determined to see it through quickly," Bennett says, speaking to the parliament's powerful Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Bennett reiterates that Israel will not be a party to a nuclear deal reached with Iran and will do whatever it deems necessary to ensure the country's security.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Sadr, a former militia leader himself, urged Iraqis to rally behind the national army, police and security forces.

"Today, there is no place for sectarianism or ethnic division, but a national majority government where Shias defend the rights of minorities, the Sunnis and Kurds," Al-Sadr tweeted.

"Today there is no place for militias, and everyone will support the army, police and security forces," he continued, also rallying against corruption and calling on all sects to get behind reform."

THE BEST PART OF THE SCHOOL DAY:

Following a mid-COVID-19 pandemic move to Norwich, Kim Dovin said it's been hard to meet people.

But her three children have made friends at Marion Cross School and the ice rink on the town green has proved to be a good place to meet up on a cool and sunny day as Saturday was. The family, which has lived previously in Michigan's Upper Peninsula and in Maine, has learned to embrace winter sports.

"You've got to do that in the north," Dovin said as she laced up her skates in preparation to join her husband, Christian Dinsmore, and their children: Henry, 11; Stanley, 9; and Charlie, 6, on the ice. It's "great for the kids."

The Dinsmore boys joined friends Abe and Sol Rojansky, 8 and 5, respectively, on the ice with hockey sticks and a puck, creating goals at each end of the rink. Dovin, Dinsmore and Lucy Rojansky, Abe and Sol's mom, joined them.

All wore masks and there were some falls, but the play was brisk enough for some of the players to peel off their jackets.

Many Upper Valley towns have opened their community ice rinks this month as the temperatures have dipped low enough to freeze the ice. Conditions appeared to be top-notch on Saturday afternoon, following several days of below-freezing temperatures. By Saturday afternoon, temperatures were in the low 20s, following a morning in the single digits.

Conditions were right for skaters of varied abilities. As the hockey game in Norwich continued, 4-year-old Maya Northern took to the ice, with her father Alex, Norwich's fire chief. Maya, who wore a pink helmet and snowsuit, slipped a bit and fell, but stood up clinging to the side of the rink. As she did so, she grabbed a bit of snow from the edge and threw it in her father's direction, playfully.

Northern, who said he learned to skate at Occom Pond in neighboring Hanover, said Norwich's rink on the green in front of Marion Cross School is "one of the benefits of living in a town like this."

THAT TED?:

"HEY, JOHNNY, WHAT ARE YOU REBELLING AGAINST?":

[W]hat if modernism itself is the dead thing? Again, we are arguing a question of fact. The most remarkable thing about modernism as an ideology or even an emotional attitude is its destructive hatred, envy, and violence. Chairman Mao and his Red Guard battled to obliterate the "four olds": old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. They steeped China in blood.  

American proponents of a "living Constitution" do not really believe that that written law says what they wish it would say. It simply does not matter what it says; and, by the abortion license, it has steeped America in blood. The old Soviet Union, reeling inconsistently between veneration of and hatred for ancient Russian culture, sent authors and artists to the gulags for being "reactionary," for committing the dreadful crime of dragging their feet as the nation was marching forth into the glorious future.

Of course, people devoted to tradition can be bloody and warlike too. Think of the ancient Romans. Think of the Sioux and the Apaches. Think of the Zulus. But modernism is hostile at its heart. It is defined by opposition, and what it opposes is a deeply human thing, a natural good. Man does not live merely in time, like a tree or a dog. By his imagination and his memory, he seeks to grasp time at both ends, to transcend it. 

The dreadful curse of the Old Testament is that a people's place will know them no more. That curse is modernism's demand. If I say, "You are graduating people with degrees in English who do not recognize the name of George Herbert," the modernist response is to shrug and say, "So what?" or to cock the head and say, "Exactly."

But there is a terrible self-contradiction here, one that many people have noted. You cannot consign your forefathers to irrelevance without instructing your son to do the same to you. The blade turns against the hand.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATION:

There is no common ground between us; consensus is dead and buried. In these trying times, however, we need something, anything, to unite us on our lowest-common-denominator instincts. My suggestion: Logging into Wordle every morning, like I do, trying to figure out what five-letter word starts with a B and ends with an L.

I know I'm not alone in my daily moment of Wordle. The free-to-play browser game has recently gone viral, as my fellow obsessives post their high scores all across Twitter and brag to their group chats about their daily successes. This all happened in short order, too: The invention of Josh *ahem* Wardle, a software designer in New York, the game began as a private contest for Wordle and his word game-loving wife; they played it together for months before releasing it to the wider world last October. At first, Wordle had a daily player count in the triple digits. Today, that number has jumped to over 300,000.

The gambit is simple. You have six attempts to guess a five-letter word. With each entry, Wordle lets you know if your characters are in the right place, if they're in the wrong place, or if they don't appear in the word at all, until the player pares down their vocabulary into a solution. (For example: You might start with "OUIJA" and move onto "HINGE," before eventually deducing "TIGER.") There is only one new Wordle puzzle a day, and old Wordles are not archived on the site. That means I wake up to a smattering of friends tweeting out their own detective journeys -- marked by mysterious green, yellow, and gray squares that correspond with their progress -- which will spur either superiority or envy. Man, my sister-in-law arrived at TIGER in only three guesses?

THE MAGIC OF THE CUP, LITERALLY:

Due to the lack of infrastructure in African football, there is not the mass industrialisation of footballing talent at grassroots and academy levels that we now take as the norm in Europe.

Only a competition such as AFCON could lead to two separate investigations into players using witchcraft to gain an advantage.

If you want a uniquely AFCON story, Mali were once eliminated via the drawing of lots -- and not in the dim and distant past but in 2015.

No other tournament can manifest performances as brilliant as Ndaye Mulamba's 1974 AFCON, when he managed to score nine goals across six games, including a final that went to a replay, for Zaire (now DR Congo), prompting journalist and author Dipo Faloyin to remark, "I'm not sure Africa's fragile internal politics could take a player doing something so outrageously provocative again."

To properly understand AFCON is to know the story of Kalusha Bwalya, the only Zambian to win African Player of the Year in 1988, but who lost 18 of his international team-mates in a 1993 air crash in Gabon. Bwalya and Zambia would come up just short in the 1994 and 1996 editions of the tournament, only to finally triumph in 2012.

There is a photograph of Bwalya -- by then the president of the Zambian FA -- as he collects the trophy on behalf of the team who had just won it, and the team he lost years prior. Study his face and you will understand the power of his tournament.

"He deserved that moment, to stand on the house he rebuilt," wrote Faloyin.

This AFCON will, again, be different.

Twenty-four teams will compete, after AFCON upsized from 16 in 2019. Several former heavyweights are approaching the ends of their supposed "golden generations" while countries including Nigeria, Algeria, Egypt and Morocco appear to be entering their prime.

Thanks to FIFA rule changes in 2020 -- introduced in part thanks to the work of the football federations in Algeria and Morocco -- there are more first, second and third-generation immigrants playing for their mother nations. If he can recover from COVID-19, Paris-born Manchester United youngster Hannibal Mejbri could have a breakout tournament for Tunisia.

This month's matches will not be like the football you typically see in Europe or South America. It has its own internal rhythms and playing styles, unique in time signature and tactics.

Every time an Africa Cup of Nations arrives, you will see sceptics and doubters try to underplay its importance to the wider footballing landscape.

But you cannot bury an AFCON tournament, for it is a seed of unbridled footballing joy.

MANDATE MUTUAL FUNDS:

Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff is looking to introduce a bill that would ban members of Congress from trading individual stocks -- a practice that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has defended as her husband rakes in millions of dollars trading shares of tech companies, The Post has learned.

The Ossoff ethics bill, which the Democratic freshman Senator plans to introduce once he finds a Republican co-sponsor, would crack down on conflicts of interest by making it illegal for lawmakers and their families to trade stocks while in office, a Washington, D.C. source close to the situation said. 

PRESENCE, RATHER:

On the afternoon of Christmas Day 1956, in a snow-covered field on the outskirts of the small Swiss town of Herisau, some children and their dog discovered the body of a dead man, hand clutched tight to his stilled heart. It was the writer Robert Walser, who had died that day, aged seventy-eight, while out walking far from the mental institution where he had dwelled for the previous two decades. A photograph taken by the local medical examiner Kurt Giezendanner shows the body at rest, left arm thrown out as in the style of a sleeper midway through a restless night, while two shadowy figures at the margins look on. The sorrow of the scene is rather gently assuaged by the odd fact that Walser's hat, perhaps moved by a breeze, lies at a modest distance from his body, as if it has leapt off his head to cartoonishly express surprise at its owner's death. A few distant trees squeeze into the top of the frame like awkward mourners paying their respects. The snow, even on the ground but for a few shaggy lumps close to his boots, appears at first to be nothing more than a dazzling absence, as if the dead Walser were floating on a white winter sky.

In his essay on Walser, William H. Gass takes the perspective of one of those marginal witnesses and studies the photograph as a peculiar abstraction: "I like to think the field he fell in was as smoothly white as writing paper. There his figure ... could pretend to be a word--not a statement, not a query, not an exclamation--but a word, unassertive and nearly illegible, squeezed into smallness by a cramped hand."6 Another photograph of the scene by the medical examiner taken from a different angle reveals the fateful trail of footprints--the only other marks in the snow. Examine them with a Gass-like slant and they become an ellipsis on this near-blank page, trailing away from a last, unfinished thought.

In his prose, Walser assumes the voice of a bewildered innocent, neither a child nor a full-grown man, enchanted and unsettled by the surrounding world. Snow was certainly something that fascinated him, and perhaps left him a little scared: "If there is snow, everything is soft, it's as if you were walking on a carpet."7 Before this comes the little wonder of watching snow fall "slowly, that is, bit by bit, which means flake by flake, down to the earth."8 The schoolboy narrator of Fritz Kocher's Essays adores snow because it smoothly removes the loud distraction of color from the landscape: "Colors fill up your mind too much with all sorts of muddled stuff. ... I love things in one color, monotonous things. Snow is such a monotonous song."

eNDING hISTORY:

THE NECESSITY OF EXPERIENCE:

It is not just the spectacular sinners, with their hands drenched in blood, whose victims cry out for justice. The quiet, respectable sinners--those American whites, for example, who could have done something about racial injustice but chose to turn a blind eye--have responsibilities that a just and loving God cannot ignore.

God cannot love the victim of violence or exploitation without loving and indeed demanding justice; but He cannot love anybody at all unless He finds a way to deal with the reality that no human being can withstand strict moral scrutiny. To hold everyone to a strict standard is to condemn the whole world, but to wink at the real evil that people do is to give up on the moral standard of true justice, and to leave people trapped in a cycle of evil and pain. Christians believe that God refused to choose between His love and His justice. He refused to overlook the evil of the world and say things were OK when they weren't, but He also refused to walk away from the whole ugly mess.

Instead, God chose to engage. He would draw closer to us, but not in a way that took evil lightly. Specifically, God chose to become a human being, to live with us, and ultimately to do for the human race what we could never have done for ourselves. The baby in the manger wasn't just there to look cute and beam rays of benevolence to shepherds and kings. He was born to suffer rejection and injustice, to be tortured and scourged, humiliated and mocked, to face an unjust trial before an oppressive foreign ruler, to feel the full weight of the wrath of God due to all the evil in the world, and to die a cruel death while being ridiculed and mocked by those He came to serve.

God resolved the dilemma between love and justice by taking them both all the way. The Creator of the world took the hit we had coming. The anger, the condemnation, the judgment all fell on Jesus, who bore it all out of love. That, for Christians, is what makes Christmas such a special time of year. God really knows us; He knows the worst things about us and isn't fooled by our rationalizations and evasions. And He still loves us enough to be born among us and to pay the price for all we have done.

Jesus came to deal with the flaws, the weakness, and the twisted selfishness that stand between us and God. He came to deal with the reality that no matter how much we might wish to live the right way--we haven't and don't.

NO, THEY FANCY THEMSELVES A TRIBE:

Distraught and despairing, Camus said and wrote nothing on Algeria between early 1956 and mid-1958, when he collected his articles and speeches into a book. Behind the scenes, he interceded with French ministers to show leniency to Algerian fighters sentenced to the guillotine. By 1958, however, no one in a with-us-or-against-us climate of mutual detestation wanted to hear from the sad guy in the middle of the road. The publication flopped; and it took until 2013 for these Algerian Chronicles to appear in Arthur Goldhammer's first-rate English translation. It remains an exemplary, even inspiring, act of conscience and of witness.

Camus's Algerian dilemmas had nothing to do with "centrism", with compromise or with even-handed detachment. He knew, he loved, and he suffered with, both irreconcilable sides. Riven to the core of his being by divided allegiances, Camus the Algerian appears, in hindsight, to be as much of a tragic figure as any of the existential heroes he created in works such as The Fall or The Just. Posterity, and reputation, has sometimes blunted the force of the wrenching ambivalence that he felt about his homeland and its fate. Read his own words and this conflicted integrity comes into dazzling focus.

In 1957 -- as Algerian Chronicles though not Speaking Out explains - Camus ran into trouble after he had travelled to Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize. At a press conference the next day, an FLN journalist attacked his stance. Camus responded by reaffirming his belief in "a just Algeria in which both populations must live in peace and equality". But he also condemned "blind terrorism" in Algiers. "People are now planting bombs in the tramways of Algiers," he said. "My mother might be on one of those tramways. If that is justice, then I prefer my mother".

Le Monde, however, reported a twisted paraphrase of what he had said: "I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before justice." Worse, a grossly distorted version of his meaning passed into political folklore when later writers pretended Camus had stated: "Between justice and my mother, I choose my mother." Yet the thrust of his remark was to show that indiscriminate violence against civilians never counts as "justice". Divided souls, even one as eloquent as Camus, may struggle to get their message of balance, nuance and plurality across. Now, in another age of fervent faith and monocular vision, we need to hear it again.

OMICRON IS NOT OMEGA:

Kostrikis and his team have identified 25 such cases and the statistical analysis shows that the relative frequency of the combined infection is higher among patients hospitalized due to Covid-19 as compared to non-hospitalized patients. The sequences of the 25 deltacron cases were sent to GISAID, the international database that tracks changes in the virus, on Jan. 7. 

"We will see in the future if this strain is more pathological or more contagious or if it will prevail" over delta and omicron, he said. But his personal view is that this strain will also be displaced by the highly contagious omicron variant.

VLAD WHO?:

THE WEST'S TARGET RICH ENVIRONMENT:

Geopolitically, what is happening in Kazakhstan is a distraction from the Kremlin's carefully crafted game plan on Ukraine. With more than 100,000 Russian troops, tanks and artillery massed on the border with Ukraine, Putin has won himself a seat at the table for security talks with the U.S. and NATO next week. The situation in Kazakhstan, however, threatens to weaken that agenda.

"Looks like Ukraine and NATO are no longer the only main focus of the future Russia-U.S. talks, there is a new hot-button issue for negotiations with [U.S. President Joe] Biden, plus it's harder for Putin to make a concerted effort on his key diplomatic front," said Alexander Baunov of the Moscow Carnegie Center. 

For Putin personally, the optics are not good either. Protesters' chants of "Shal Ket" -- Kazakh for "old man, go" -- echo jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny's mockery of Putin as "the old man in the bunker."  

And after uprisings against Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych and Belarus' Alexander Lukashenko, Kazakhstan provides yet more proof that no "Father of the Nation" -- no matter how big his victories in doctored elections or how enthusiastic the official accolades -- is safe. 

TOUGH DAY FOR TRUMPISTS:

Three white men who chased and murdered a 25-year-old Black jogger in Georgia in February 2020 were sentenced to life in prison Friday. Two of the men have no possibility of parole. Judge Timothy Walmsley sentenced Travis McMichael, who fatally shot Arbery, and his father, Gregory McMichael, to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Their neighbor, William "Roddie" Bryan, will be eligible for parole after serving 30 years in prison. The three men had been convicted of murder in November.

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

So what will it take to convince more people to embrace EVs? One answer might be for everyone to rethink what EVs actually are. Most Americans, including Biden, talk about electric vehicles solely as modes of transport -- which is understandable, given they have motors and wheels and get us around. But they are so much more than cars: they're batteries, and batteries have uses far beyond transport. Done right, integrating EVs into American society could help prevent power blackouts, stabilize the US's crumbling electric grid, and make solar and wind energy more reliable sources of power for more people. The first step is to stop thinking about electric vehicles as cars that happen to be powered by batteries, and instead see them as batteries that happen to be inside cars.

THE DESANTIS FLU:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the state's top emergency management official confirmed Thursday that 800,000 to 1 million Covid test kits in the state's stockpile recently expired without being used.

WELCOME, NEIGHBOR:

A Vermont credit union is developing what would be the state's first lending program that complies with Islamic law, aiming to help more Muslim households buy homes.

Islamic law, or Shariah, prohibits the collection and payment of interest by lenders and investors, which means many existing loans, including mortgages, don't comply. In general, relationships that favor the lender are prohibited, or considered haram.

Financing models that do comply with Islamic law include arrangements where a bank buys property for a customer and leases it back, or where a bank and customer jointly purchase property and agree to share in the profits and losses.

Timothy Carpenter, a senior lending manager at Opportunities Credit Union, which is developing the framework, said the organization hasn't worked out all the details but is looking to create a model where it and its customers share ownership of a home.

JUST A "CONCERNED PARENT":

 A right-wing political party has caused a stir in Romania for calling Holocaust education, which was recently mandated in high schools there, a "minor topic."

The populist Alliance for the Union of Romanians party, or AUR, issued a statement Monday accusing the the government of relegating "fundamental subjects" such as "exact sciences, Romanian language and literature and national history" in favor of "minor topics," such as "sexual education" and "history of the Holocaust."

ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

XI WHO?:

Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida met his Australian counterpart Scott Morrison virtually on Thursday. The two countries signed a reciprocal access agreement (RAA) that will go through necessary domestic procedures before going into effect "as early as possible."

The agreement will pave the way for much closer defense relations between the two countries, as Japanese and Australian forces can deploy from each other's bases and establish common protocols, according to Malcolm Davis from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute.

"What is even more important is the strategic message this RAA sends to the region -- that Japan and Australia are working together much more closely to ensure a free and open Indo-Pacific," Davis said on CNBC's "Squawk Box Asia."

"That is occurring against a context of a rising China that is much more assertive, and even aggressive, in areas such as the South China Sea, East China Sea, where Japan and China have a territorial dispute, and of course, in relation to Taiwan," he added.

IT'S ALWAYS THE rIGHT:

The Villages, a sprawling retirement community in Florida bigger than Manhattan, is facing some of its residents' worst fears: voter fraud. As the Orlando Sentinal reports, a fourth resident has been arrested for allegedly casting multiple ballots during the 2020 election. A majority of Villagers voted for Donald Trump to be re-elected and likely buy into the "Big Lie" paranoia that Trump was robbed of his rightful place as president. Perhaps it's time for Villagers to look within, since it appears as if some of the fraudsters accused of casting multiple ballots likely did so for Trump. Three of those who've been accused--Joan Halstead, Jay Ketcik, and John Rider--are very clearly Trump supporters. Halstead and Ketcik are registered Republicans. Though Rider has no party affiliation listed, his Facebook page appears to show multiple pro-Trump posts.

The latest person to be arrested, Charles Franklin Barnes, is registered unaffiliated in both the state of Florida and the state of Connecticut. The 64-year-old was arrested on Tuesday and faces one charge of fraud in casting more than one ballot during an election. He was released from Sumter County Jail after paying a $2,000 bond. Little information has been revealed about how authorities discovered Barnes' alleged misdeeds. In the case of Halstead, Ketcik, and Rider, it was a mysterious tipster who called themselves "Totes Legit Votes" who alerted Florida's Division of Elections. The anonymous tipster also emailed Michigan's Bureau of Elections. "Hello Florida and Michigan!" the email began. "I was looking at voter data between your two states and I noticed a couple records that seem similar."

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Saudi Arabia's ambassador to Beirut said Thursday that Hezbollah was a threat to Arab security after the leader of the Iran-backed Lebanese movement branded King Salman a "terrorist."

BORN TO GROVEL:

Cruz was lambasted during Carlson's Wednesday night show for describing Jan. 6 as "a violent terrorist attack on the Capitol." During his Thursday night appearance, when Carlson asked him why he used the word "terrorist," Cruz brushed off his previous phrasing as "sloppy" and "frankly dumb."

THE DESANTIS FEVER:

Florida has more citizens involved in federal cases regarding the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol than any other state by far.

COULD DONALD'S FINGERS BE ANY SHORTER?:

The disloyalty of Attalus and his supporters had undermined Honorius's efforts to restore his authority as emperor and weakened his claim to the loyalty of the Roman troops at a critical juncture. Attalus had put his political ambition above the security of the state.

Alaric departed the city on August 27, 410, and died unexpectedly in southern Italy weeks later. The Goths then headed west for Gaul, easing the Romans' fears. Some of the senators who had fled Rome appeared in public in the city once more.

A number of senators who had been loyal to Honorius emerged to help rebuild the city. Senator Epiphanius, who was also urban prefect (a position akin to mayor of Rome), started repairs on a section of the Senate House that had been damaged in the attack. Another senator, Albinus, oversaw the restoration of the food supply, and Probus, a member of the Anician family who had returned to support Honorius, was put in charge of state finances.  Absent from any of these positions were the senators who had supported Priscus Attalus, and, we must imagine, those who had left with the Goths as well.

Honorius's new general, Constantius, regained control of Gaul in 415 and captured Priscus Attalus and his followers, handing them over to the emperor. We can only imagine the conversations among the senators as they saw the chastened Attalus being paraded through the city. No one spoke publicly in Attalus's defense--including the senators who had sided with him. There was no attempt at minimizing Attalus's role in the coup, nor did the senators pretend they had not witnessed an attempted regime change by their former colleague. Rather, the full Senate and the emperor witnessed and approved Attalus's public punishment--the removal of his thumb and forefinger, the digits used for speaking. Attalus accepted his punishment, and was exiled to the Lipari Islands. No one objected or appealed the sentence.

Our leaders would do well to reflect on these Roman exemplars. We do not have to remove the fingers of members of Congress who colluded with the insurrectionists. But politicians must publicly acknowledge their responsibility for the attack, including spreading the "Big Lie" about the election. And if they cannot acknowledge their guilt and accept the consequences and take steps to repair the damage, as the Roman Senate did, like Attalus they should be forced from the capital.

Only then can our representatives begin to rebuild the civility and public trust that once made the Congress a respected institution, and the Capitol a hallowed place. The Romans did it, and their Senate lived on for another 200 years after the attack of 410.  We should be so fortunate.

OPEN SOURCE THEM:

EVERY MAN A NODE:

For the past two years, Standard Industries' GAF Energy has been working on a new solar roof that integrates solar technology into traditional roofing. Today, the three-year-old firm--sister company of the nation's largest roofing manufacturer, GAF--is introducing the new solar roof that's designed for the masses at the CES trade show in Las Vegas.

"Everybody who has put solar up has tried to do it by going around the roof. You have waterproofing problems, and it's ugly, too. It doesn't make for very good roofing," says David Millstone, co-CEO of Standard Industries, the nation's 65th-largest privately owned business. "So we had to invent almost everything as we were going along."

The new solar roof, called Timberline Solar, integrates a nailable solar shingle--the world's first, according to the company--that will be assembled at GAF Energy's facility in San Jose, California. GAF Energy worked with the Department of Energy's Sandia National Laboratories in order to verify the product's strength and durability before the launch.

WE'VE FINALLY GOT THOSE DEATH PANELS!:

At some point after he became chief surgeon in Napoleon's army, Dominique Jean Larrey started walking across blood-soaked battlefields to pick out those among the wounded who could still be saved, usually by instant amputation of limbs. In time, he developed a system of sorting and separating -- trier in French -- the casualties. Ignoring rank and nationality, he considered only those who had the greatest chance of surviving. His method became known as triage.

In worst-case scenarios, triage is nowadays accepted almost universally as necessary and justified. And yet, the idea still rests on an act of cruelty -- cruel both to a victim and to the doctor having to make the decision. It often necessitates allowing one human being to die in order to ration the care that might let another live. 

The current pandemic is a worst-case scenario. On-and-off for almost two years, doctors and nurses in some places have had to make traumatizing choices about life and death. Sometimes they had too many Covid patients for too few ventilators; other times too many with SARS-CoV-2 to be able to treat those dying from cancer or other diseases. Now the omicron variant -- which appears to be somewhat milder but much more infectious -- threatens to overwhelm hospitals yet again.

JUST A "CONCERNED PARENT":

An anti-COVID-19 vaccine organization leader, who recently set out on a cross-country road trip with the end goal of conducting citizen arrests of Democratic governors, has found himself behind bars.

THERE IS NO SYRIA:

NO SNOWFLAKE ZONE:

In NH this is lunchtime everyday: pic.twitter.com/jSpV8nvRgO

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) January 4, 2022

THE ESSENCE OF THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS:

To prevent Hamas from politically gaining the upper hand over the Palestinian Authority, Israel heeded the US call to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas's rule by providing concessions for Palestinians. The concept, which Israeli Defence Minister, Benny Gantz, has been vocal about, is that improving the Palestinian economy will lessen resentment against the PA, thus purportedly weakening Hamas.

Only the concessions should not be concessions at all. The fact that the PA is agreeing to concessions rather than rights speaks volumes about its precariously weakened position. Mahmoud Abbas is not in a position to insist upon political rights; hence the dressing up of concessions as a gain for the Palestinian people but not a word on how Israel can swiftly impose other restrictions, or reverse its decision.

BEING POORLY GOVERNED IS COSTLY:

Texas's natural gas industry had almost a year to prepare for last weekend's cold blast and avoid another loss of production. But yet again, instruments froze, output plunged and companies spewed a miasma of pollutants into the atmosphere in a bid to keep operations stable. [...]

 Natural gas is composed mostly of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. And the roughly dozen gas facilities that reported problems with the cold also emitted a combined 85 tons of sulfur dioxide and 11 tons of carbon monoxide, among other pollutants, according to a Bloomberg review of environmental filings. 

"We know this is pollution that can hurt people's health and, overwhelmingly, this is avoidable," said Luke Metzger, executive director of the nonprofit Environment Texas. "These facilities could be investing in better insulation and other kinds of things that would prevent equipment from freezing," he said. "It's easier to pay a fine."

It's a stark reminder of the industry's continued vulnerability to extreme weather. Despite calls for producers to harden their infrastructure against cold, much of the industry has managed to avoid doing so. The Texas Railroad Commission, the state's top regulator of the industry, plans to adopt some weatherization standards but those won't go into effect until 2023, and they include loopholes that allow some companies to opt out of compliance. 

YOUR NEXT PLANE WILL BE A VOLT:

AMEN, BROTHER:

Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Iran-backed Lebanese armed party Hezbollah, accused Saudi Arabia of terrorism in a speech on Monday night, saying the "ideology of ISIS" came from the Gulf country.

Nasrallah claimed that Saudi Arabia and the US were complicit in spreading "Wahabi ideology" throughout the region, and that Riyadh "cheered" when IS took control of parts of Iraq in 2014.

"[Saudi Arabia] sent its youth to kill Iraqi men and women and children in suicide operations, but Iran sent its men and youth to be killed in defense of Iraqi men, women and children," Nasrallah said.

THE DESANTIS FLU:

This chart from Massachusetts health officials is an interesting way to look at the data - the state's unvaccinated population would have the nation's highest per-capita case rate, and its boosted population would have the lowest (via @TollyTaylor) https://t.co/fpKMyhOl6n pic.twitter.com/5JLnhuaAsZ

— Ted Nesi (@TedNesi) January 3, 2022

MAN UP...FOREVER:

The somewhat disappointing, second piece of news is this: The virus will stay, most likely forever. As will COVID. Endemic, Zeeb explains, means that the virus no longer poses a threat to the health care system. "At best, we will then see flat-lining waves of infection with lower overall case numbers and closer to normal levels of hospitalizations," he says. Zeeb believes there will always be local outbreaks, which the authorities can counter by reintroducing the requirement to wear masks indoors or with other measures. But the period of mass deaths will then be behind us.

There are only two paths that can get us to endemic status: mass infection, along with the illness and deaths that entails. Or mass vaccination.

Given the new, highly infectious virus variants like Omicron, a combination of those two paths is the most likely outcome. All roads ultimately lead to increased baseline immunity in the population. It requires a relatively high percentage, but once it is reached, it becomes difficult for the pathogen to find unprotected hosts. At that point, it becomes a constant, but less alarming presence for humans.

In a country like Germany, where the vaccination rate remains too low, at around 80 percent of adults, it will still be quite a while before we reach endemic status. Less than half of those vaccinated have received their booster shot. In a recent interview, Christian Drosten, Germany's leading virologist, warned: "If we let the virus run its course now, we're going to have a lot of deaths and full intensive care units."

Drosten attests to Omicron's "enormous contagiousness." But he also says it's possible that the variant will cause a milder progression of the disease than the Delta strain that is still prevalent in Germany. Omicron, he says, has the potential to become the first "post-pandemic" version of the virus.

Zeeb is also impressed by the pathogen's contagiousness. He says that this is likely the end of its genetic optimization, adding that "probably not much more is possible." Zeeb says he is "cautiously optimistic" that Germany will get through the next wave "reasonably well."

Ultimately, a scenario is emerging that is still fraught with many uncertainties. Omicron could exploit the vaccination gaps in Germany and, given that vaccination protection gradually fades, very quickly infect many more people - even those who have been vaccinated several times. For skeptics, this variant of the virus could be the one that ultimately ensures that they are finally immunized, but the price would be numerous deaths.

Drosten expects two further waves of infection in England - one now and another next winter. The population there has achieved a higher baseline immunity after vaccination or having suffered through infection. In Germany, further waves may be in store if the debate in the country over mandatory vaccination doesn't result in concrete action. It's also possible that other, previously unknown, escape mutants will emerge.

According to Zeeb, vaccine manufacturers will continue to be under significant supply pressure. "I'm presuming the need for repeated vaccinations at this point," he says, and that could continue for quite some time to come. Many experts expect that a booster dose against COVID could become part of future annual flu shots.

THE PROPER COMMON CORE:

If you're someone who makes New Year's resolutions, creating a higher net worth is probably on your list.

Establishing a plan to achieve this goal is a first step, but know that results will not come quickly. As Scott Alan Turner, a certified financial planner in Dallas, says, "Wealth is built over time - not overnight."

"When I'm teaching people about wealth building, one of the best things they can do is be patient," he says. "Compound interest works if you let it. The time it takes $500 to double to $1,000 is the exact same amount of time it takes $50,000 to double to $100,000, or $500,000 to $1 million."

With that said, to accumulate more wealth in 2022, try these suggestions from financial advisors serving high net worth clients.

Update your budget.

Boost your savings.

Pay off debt.

Increase retirement contributions.

Invest in yourself.

Lower your tax bill.

Improve your career.

Audit your insurance.

NATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

The World Bank estimates Russia's growth potential -- a key indicator of how fast an economy can expand in normal times and which is seen as the best predictor of long-term prosperity -- at below 2% a year.

"Russia still faces the challenge of raising its long-term growth rates ... in large part, the constraints that were there prior to the pandemic remain," said David Knight, the World Bank's lead economist for Russia. 

The list of those constraints is long. It includes "adverse demographics, structural economic bottlenecks, a lack of far-reaching reform to diversify from the oil and gas sector's dominant role in the economy, weak governance ... high vulnerability to geopolitical risk ... weak physical infrastructure, high income inequality and inefficient social safety nets," according to Scope Ratings analyst Levon Kameryan.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

According to people in Moscow who are close to the Kremlin and security services, Russian intelligence has concluded that Klyushin, 41, has access to documents relating to a Russian campaign to hack Democratic Party servers during the 2016 U.S. election. These documents, they say, establish the hacking was led by a team in Russia's GRU military intelligence that U.S. cybersecurity companies have dubbed "Fancy Bear" or APT28. Such a cache would provide the U.S. for the first time with detailed documentary evidence of the alleged Russian efforts to influence the election, according to these people.

Klyushin's path to the U.S. -- his flight from Moscow via private jet, his arrest in Switzerland, and his wait in jail as Russia and the U.S. competed to win his extradition -- is described in U.S., European and Swiss legal filings, as well as in accounts of more than a half-dozen people with knowledge of the matter who requested anonymity to speak about Moscow's efforts and its causes for concern.

According to these accounts, Klyushin was approached by U.S. and U.K. spy agencies in the two years before his exit from Russia and received heightened levels of security in Switzerland. He also missed a final chance to appeal his extradition, an omission that baffled many observers in Moscow. His transfer to the U.S. represents a serious intelligence blow to the Kremlin, several of the people said, one that would deepen if Klyushin decides to seek leniency from U.S. prosecutors by providing information about Moscow's inner workings.

Three of the people added that they believe that Klyushin has access to secret records of other high-level GRU operations abroad. Russian military intelligence agents in recent years have been linked to a series of hacking attacks as well as the attempted chemical poisoning assassination of dissident ex-GRU colonel Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the U.K. in 2018. Russia has denied involvement.

Indications of Klyushin's vantage point are peppered throughout U.S. filings. His IT firm, M-13, worked for the Russian presidency, government and ministries, according to his insider trading indictment. Among his subordinates was a former military intelligence official named Ivan Yermakov, who is charged alongside Klyushin in the indictment. Yermakov is also a defendant in a 2018 indictment from U.S. Special Counsel Robert Mueller's team that accuses him and 11 other Russians of hacking into Democrats' computers systems. That case has yet to be resolved because its defendants remain outside the U.S., but prosecutors could pursue and expand that case if new information presents itself.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

THERE IS NO BEAR IN THE WOODS:

Having the discussions take place in a NATO forum, as Russia has now agreed to do, allows the West to showcase its increased solidarity. Russia's threats have unified the alliance. The discussions will also contrast the U.S.'s preferred model of power, which emanates from our ability to persuade others to share the burdens of what we're trying to achieve, with the model pursued by Russian and China, which relies on threatening nations into submission.

The United States and its allies have the easier side of that argument. As Ronald Reagan said, "There is a profound moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest." Russia may mobilize some support among countries that feel threatened by governments held accountable by their citizens, but the U.S. has the moral and mathematical advantage of arguing against strong states imposing their will on those unable to protect themselves.

Not that Ukraine is truly incapable of protecting itself. One other thing that may be restraining a Russian invasion of Ukraine is the fact that, even in the Donbas, the mighty Russian military has not succeeded in subduing Ukrainian resistance. Quite the opposite: Russia has enhanced Ukrainian national identity. A Russian occupation would encounter the sort of insurgency that the Russian military proved incapable of subduing in Afghanistan and Chechnya, despite its brutality. Half a million Ukrainians have military experience; 24 percent of respondents in one recent poll said that they would resist Russian occupation "with a weapon in hand." Russia might succeed in taking Ukraine, but it is unlikely to hold it.

NATO countries might not fight for Ukraine, but they're likely to arm and train Ukrainians to fight for themselves. A Russian invasion would open the floodgates of Western support for Ukraine, and activate similar mobilizations of civilian society among NATO frontline states. Putin's threats have already convinced Germans that Nord Stream 2 is not just a business deal, but rather a means of geopolitical leverage. The EU can use its regulatory tools on Gazprom and other Russian businesses seeking access to Europe's markets more aggressively, to scrutinize their practices and enforce compliance with the law.

AMEN, SISTER:

Rep. Waters told Rev. Sharpton: "Let me just say this, when you talk about congresswoman Greene, you're talking about the kind of extremist radical that is now in the House of Representatives who is basically, you know, dangerous."

The long-serving Democrat then claimed Rep. Greene had intimidated other lawmakers and referred to an infamous incident in 2021 when she confronted Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY).

She then referred to Rep. Greene's endorsement of the claim the 2018 Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Florida was staged, although her comments were made before she entered Congress.

Rep. Waters said: "She's dangerous because she doesn't believe in the Constitution herself. She has been threatening other members of Congress. They have been all over and in the face of AOC out of New York, following her around, trying to intimidate her.

"She does not believe that children that got killed in school by a murderer who invaded their school. It actually happened. She denies it."

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

In 2018, 44 countries signed on to the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement, which, when it took effect a year ago, created the largest free-trade zone in the world. After years of negotiations it was a huge step forward and, in my view, marked a turning point: Africa would finally move toward true industrialization. Instead of consuming mostly foreign-made products, we would make and trade our own goods. European and Chinese companies had already started setting up African-staffed factories on the continent, and domestic businesses would get an even bigger boost from AfCFTA.

For UBI Group, the oil and gas distribution company that I founded in Ghana and still help lead as chair, this was welcome news. We were well positioned to capitalize on the coming transformation. But I knew that Africa didn't want to repeat the mistakes the West and China had made as they pursued development and economic growth. Our continent's industrialization would require an enormous amount of energy to propel it, and I wanted to help my country and its neighbors develop responsibly.

That's why, also in 2018, after a few years of research and planning, I moved forward with my plans for a new venture: the solar-focused Blue Power Energy. Though I'd spent the previous decade working on infrastructure for storing and moving fossil fuels around Ghana, I knew that renewables were a better long-term alternative for Africa. 

YOUR NEXT (EVERYTHING) WIILL BE A VOLT:

Solar power is booming. In the last decade alone, in the U.S, the number of solar panels installed has gone up by 40%, while the cost to install them has dropped by more than 70%. Now, the Biden administration wants the country to generate almost half of its own electricity from the sun by 2050 (compared to only 4% in 2020). The infrastructure bill that passed in November includes billions of dollars for clean energy projects, building momentum for more innovation in the industry.

Already, an increasing number of designers and startups across the globe are leading what Van Dongen calls the "solar movement."As a result, solar applications are growing more and more diverse: a company in the U.S. has developed solar cells that can be integrated into windows. Another has transformed dreary solar panels into patterned masterpieces by redesigning how the silver lines look on the panels. Elsewhere, designers are creating colored glass tables that can absorb energy from daylight and charge your devices, clothes that can charge your phones, and textile roofs that can stretch over buildings while harnessing energy from the sun. As solar energy becomes more affordable, the options are increasing, and 2022 may well become a banner year for solar energy.

YOU CAN BE EITHER TRUMPIST OR CHRISTIAN, NOT BOTH:

[T]here was one short section of Trump's speech that I thought was particularly revealing. Relatively early in the speech, he said, "If we get together, they cannot cancel us all. Okay? They won't. And this will be contrary to a lot of our beliefs because--I'd love not to have to participate in cancel culture. I'd love that it didn't exist. But as long as it does, folks, we better be playing the same game. Okay? We've been playing T-ball for half a century while they're playing hardball and cheating. Right? We've turned the other cheek, and I understand, sort of, the biblical reference--I understand the mentality--but it's gotten us nothing. Okay? It's gotten us nothing while we've ceded ground in every major institution in our country."

THANKS, W!:

"IT'S NOT GENOCIDE WHEN WE DO IT":

German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier had planned to present the Order of Merit to Gideon Greif, but the presidential office and Foreign Ministry said they would review the plans for the award in October.

German news agency dpa reported on December 31 that the Foreign Ministry withdrew the nomination earlier this month.

Greif, who is primarily a Holocaust researcher, chaired an international commission of historians who published a report in July that suggested the Srebrenica massacre at the end of the 1992-95 war in Bosnia was not genocide.

International courts have deemed the mass murder of more than 8,000 Muslim Bosniaks around Srebrenica by Bosnian Serb forces as genocide. 

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Scores of Israeli settlers on Sunday forced their way into the flashpoint Al-Aqsa Mosque compound in occupied East Jerusalem, according to a Palestinian agency, Anadolu Agency reported.

In a statement, the Jordan-run Islamic Waqf Department, which oversees holy sites in Jerusalem, said the settlers entered the complex through the Al-Mugharbah Gate under Israeli police protection.

STANDING AGAINST THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS:

 

In September, more than 40 Muslim organizations in the U.S. and abroad announced a boycott of Hilton, after reports that a planned hotel in Xinjiang would be built atop a demolished mosque.

In December 2020, more than 70 Muslim student associations around the world and dozens of Uyghur groups wrote an open letter to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), comprised of 57 member states, urging them to denounce China's abuses.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), one of the largest U.S. Muslim advocacy groups, regularly sends out press releases highlighting new reporting on the Uyghur situation in China and demanding action by U.S. lawmakers and the international community.

What they're saying: "It's important that all American Muslims stand together in fighting this genocidal campaign," Robert McCaw, government affairs director at CAIR, said in an interview with Axios.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

EVEN THE BIDEN ECONOMY CAN'T FIGHT HISTORY:

1. One Party in Power [...]

The last three midterm elections which featured one-party control of the White House, House and Senate were 2006, 2010, and 2018. In all three cases, the president's party lost the House. In 2010, Democrats lost seats but managed to hold the Senate. They lost Senate control in the 2014 midterms. 

2. President Biden's Low Job Approval Ratings [...]

Biden's job approval sits within the range of the previous three presidents who presided over big midterm losses. According to Gallup, Pres. George W. Bush clocked in at 38 percent in late October of 2006. Pres. Barack Obama was between 42-45 percent in the 2010 and 2014 midterms, while President Trump's showing in late October of 2018 was 43 percent.  [...]

3. Enthusiasm Gap [...]

There are multiple ways to explore the enthusiasm gap for the upcoming midterm. 

First, we can look at the intensity of support/opposition to Biden from 2020 voters. In this case, I looked at a cross-tab in Marist polling taken this year that asks respondents to say if they voted for Trump or Biden in 2020. Between April and June, those who voted for Biden and those for Trump felt equally supportive/unfavorably about Biden. For example, in June, Biden's job approval rating among those who said they voted for him last year was +86, while those who voted for Trump disapproved of Biden by a similar margin -86. 

But, starting in August, opposition to Biden rose among Trump voters (-92), while support among Biden voters dropped (+67). In the most recent polling, the gap between support of Biden voters and the opposition by Trump voters is 19 points (+74 to -93). 

We can also look to qualitative research. Focus groups of Democratic-leaning younger and so-called 'surge' voters (those who showed up in 2020 but not in a previous election year), show decided drop in enthusiasm for the president and the party.

And then there are election results. An analysis of the recent New Jersey governors election by Tom Bonier of TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, found that while turnout among Democrats was up by 65,000 voters from 2017, turnout among Republicans was up a whopping 195,000. As such, the overall share of the electorate in New Jersey was 4.2 percent less Democratic and 3 points more Republican.  [...]

4. Independent Voters

With Democrats feeling less enthusiastic, and Republicans united in opposition, Democrats can ill-afford to lose support from independent-leaning voters. Unfortunately, that's exactly what's happening. And, is similar to what happened in the previous midterms. 

Since 2010, the sitting president entered the fall of the midterm election year with a job approval rating among independents anywhere between 38 and 45 percent. In all three of those midterm elections, the party in the White House lost independent voters by double-digits.