THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

President Biden will deny the shield of executive privilege for two top advisers to former President Donald Trump -- his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, and former trade adviser Peter Navarro -- in Congress' Jan. 6 investigation, Axios has learned.

"FOR YOUR FREEDOM, AND OURS":

Ukrainian pilots have arrived in Poland to begin taking control of fighter planes donated by European countries, a Ukrainian government official told POLITICO.

The impending transfer of older Russian-made planes to be used in combat against Russian forces is the most significant moment yet in a wave of promised arms transfers over the past 24 hours that includes thousands of anti-armor rockets, machine guns, artillery and other equipment.

KEYSTONE 2:

Shell announced today that it would be pulling out of the stalled Nord Stream 2 pipeline and looking to sell its stakes in various oil and gas projects in Russia as President Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukrainian grinds on.

The decision to exit the Nord Stream 2 investment comes days after German Chancellor Olaf Scholz effectively killed the project by suspending its certification. The Dutch company split about half the cost of the pipeline with four other European energy companies. Gazprom, the gas company controlled by the Russian government, covered the other half. Shell also owns significant stakes in two other oil and gas projects in Russia.

...SO FAR...:

NOT TERMINATING THE USSR IS OUR ENDURING SHAME:

The Russian army has always been bad at setting up and sustaining supply lines. Gen. Omar Bradley once said about different types of military officers, "Amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics."* In that sense, Russians are amateurs. This is well known. It is why Ukrainian soldiers explicitly attacked the Russian supply lines. It's why so many tanks and other vehicles have been spotted stuck on the side of a road.

This weakness might not matter so much if an army makes rapid progress at the start of its offensive. Its troops could plunder the places they conquer for fuel, food, and other supplies. But the Russian army isn't cut out for lightning strikes. Troops are trained in rote set pieces, with no time devoted to improvising if things don't go as planned. One reason for this is that junior officers are not allowed to take initiative. This is deliberate; it's part of the top-down command system dating back to Soviet times, if not earlier. In politics and in warfare, the small elite on top doesn't want subordinates to get too creative--if they did, they might take over.

And so, as the Russian invaders met resistance, they didn't quite know what to do. Military operations designed to take place sequentially--Step 1, then 2, then 3, etc.--fell apart, catastrophically. If Step 2 hit a big obstacle, the by-the-book soldiers moved on to Step 3 anyway. Therefore, large troop-transport planes tried to land, even though the airport hadn't been completely secured and Ukrainian air defense systems hadn't been destroyed. As a result, two Il-76 transport planes, each carrying 100 airborne troops, were shot down.

Similarly, tanks aren't supposed to roll through hostile territory all alone. They need to be escorted by infantry troops alongside or by combat planes from above, to avoid getting ambushed. Yet, in this invasion, Russian tanks are rolling all on their own or providing protection for reconnaissance scouts, but getting no protection for themselves. So, as might be expected, lots of Russian tanks are getting ambushed.

Nor have the Russians established air superiority, even though their air force far outnumbers Ukraine's. As a result, Ukrainian drones have been picking off Russian convoys with impunity.

There is a larger factor here: The Russian army is composed, by and large, of one-year conscripts, who are poorly trained (even within the confines of Russian military training), badly treated, and uninspired by ideology or any other motivating spirit. Hence the stories of captured Russian troops who had no idea why they were in Ukraine. At least a few didn't even know that they were in Ukraine--they thought they were still doing exercises in Belarus. Others have reportedly been found knocking on village doors for food or, in one case, asking a local police station for fuel.

NEVER BET AGAINST THE NEW WORLD ORDER:

On Monday, the U.S. Treasury Department also sanctioned the leader of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, Putin ally Kirill Dmitriev.

"The unprecedented action we are taking today will significantly limit Russia's ability to use assets to finance its destabilizing activities, and target the funds Putin and his inner circle depend on to enable his invasion of Ukraine," Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in a statement. 

A senior Biden administration official said in a conference call Sunday that the new sanctions were imposed because the administration found out over the weekend that the Russian central bank "was attempting to move assets and there would be a great deal of asset flight starting on Monday morning from institutions around the world," according to CNBC. 

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau similarly announced on Monday a ban on all Canadian financial institutions from doing business with Russia's central bank, "eliminating its ability to deploy Russia's international currency reserves and further restricting Putin's ability to finance his war of choice."

DASVIDANYA:

A run on Russian banks is underway.

Russia's ruble dropped dramatically in Monday's trading on the news of unprecedented sanctions levied on Moscow by the EU and U.S. for its invasion of Ukraine.

Lines at ATMs snaked down sidewalks and around buildings in Moscow and at Russian banks in Europe as depositors rushed to withdraw cash. Sberbank Europe, which is owned by Russia's state-run Sberbank, says it has experienced "significant outflows of deposits in a very short time."

Russia's central bank announced it would more than double its key interest rate from 9.5% to an eye-watering 20% in an attempt to stabilize the ruble, which dropped as much as 30% against the dollar, an all-time low, trading at 119 to the greenback. 

Russia's soccer teams were suspended indefinitely from international competition by major governing bodies Monday because of the country's invasion of Ukraine.

The ban means that Russia's national team will be blocked from playing in the 2022 World Cup.

Traditionally neutral Switzerland will adopt all the sanctions already imposed by the EU on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine, including against Russian President Vladimir Putin, Bern said Monday.

"This is a big step for Switzerland," Swiss President Ignazio Cassis told a press conference, after the Alpine nation had for days hesitated over whether to join the international move to sanction Moscow over the attack on its neighbor.

WHO'S WINNING VLAD'S WAR? TAIWAN.:

US President Joe Biden will send a delegation of former senior defence and security officials to Taiwan this week, a senior official of his administration said, a sign of support for the island amid Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

REVENGE OF THE NERDS:

[T]he move is part of a tsunami of hacktivism in opposition to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Earlier someone leaked internal messages from the pro-Russia ransomware group Conti.

"Dear citizens. We urge you to stop this madness, do not send your sons and husbands to certain death. Putin makes us lie and puts us in danger," the message displayed on the websites read. "This message will be deleted, and some of us will be fired or even jailed. But we can't take it anymore."

ru_media_message.png

On top of an image of the Russian flag, the message added that there have been "5,300 dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine in four days," and that this was "More than during the First Chechen War (1994-1996)."

News sites Fontanka and Kommersant were also targeted in the hack. The message included a logo for the hacking collective Anonymous.

YEAH, BUT HE HATES WOMEN, MUSLIMS AND JEWS!:

WHO IS SHOCKED THAT ILLIBERAL REGIMES ARE WEAK?:

Collapsing the Russian economy is turning out to be much easier than anybody guessed.

Last week the ruble and the Moscow stock market were in free fall. Fortune called it "the fifth-worst plunge in equity market history," meaning not in the history of Russia's equity market but in the history of 90 equity markets around the world that are monitored by Bloomberg. Meanwhile, the ruble fell to 89.60 to the dollar, its lowest foreign-exchange rate in history. In a scene straight out of the Great Depression, Russians raced to their ATMs to pull out what cash they could.

All that happened before the United States, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, Canada, Italy, and the European Union announced on Saturday that they were imposing sweeping restrictions on Russia's central bank, disrupting its efforts to end the bank runs through stepped-up lending from its $600 billion in reserves. On Monday, the ruble fell further by nearly one-third, the central bank jacked up interest rates to 20 percent, and the Moscow stock market closed. Wrecking the Russian economy, it turns out, is like blowing on a dandelion.

THANKS, VLAD!:

Often described as predictable and "robotic", Chancellor Olaf Scholz has become emboldened since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, smashing policy taboos to steer Germany into "a new era" that could reshape its role on the world stage.

Just a few weeks ago, German media were openly asking "where is Scholz?", slamming the Social Democrat's perceived lack of leadership on pressing issues like the coronavirus pandemic and worsening Ukraine crisis.

But Moscow's attack on Ukraine last week has jolted the chancellor into action, culminating in what commentators have called a "historic" speech on Sunday.

Scholz, who has only been in office three months, spoke with uncharacteristic clarity when he unveiled a slew of defence and foreign policy shifts that promise to upend Germany's decades-long reluctance to raising its military profile.

"The Ukraine crisis has changed the chancellor. And now he's changing our country," the top-selling Bild daily wrote.

THE DURATION OF A JUDICIAL INNOVATION...:

Conservatives have long argued that the executive branch routinely oversteps the authority granted by the Constitution in regulating all kinds of economic activity.

"This is really about a fundamental question of who decides the major issues of the day," said West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey, speaking at an event in Washington this month, before his appearance before the Supreme Court on Monday. "Should it be unelected bureaucrats, or should it be the people's representatives in Congress? That's what this case is all about. It's very straightforward."

Others maintain that Congress delegated authority to the executive branch to broadly regulate air pollution under the Clean Air Act. The legislature makes the law; the executive implements it through regulation, they say.

"Just because the opponents are particularly shrill in their objection doesn't change the fact that this regulation is no different than hundreds of regulation that the agencies have produced since the New Deal -- just as Congress intended them to do," said Richard Revesz, who teaches environmental law at New York University and filed a brief in support of the administration.

THE MANLEY EXPERIMENT WAS TRIED IN EASTERN EUROPE, ASIA AND AFRICA...:

The scion of a famous political dynasty, Michael Manley could have easily become just the kind of establishment figure that could be trusted to take charge of a vital former colony without rocking the boat. Educated at exclusive British colonial schools, Manley served as a fighter pilot in the Second World War. But after the war, Manley took up his university studies at the London School of Economics (LSE), where the teachings of Marxist professors like Harold Laski and Ralph Miliband made an impression on him. He moved from theory to practice when he returned to Jamaica to inherit the leadership of the People's National Party from his father, Norman Manley, becoming prime minister 50 years ago, in 1972.

What would the world today have looked like if the freshly decolonised nations had been able to 'take back control' from multinational corporations?

Upon taking office, he began implementing one of the most ambitious programmes of social reform that has ever been tried in a former British colony. But it was on the international stage that Manley would cause the biggest stir. For him, the arena of international law offered the perfect avenue to organise all of the recently decolonised countries to use their growing power to call for what he and his allies would christen a 'New International Economic Order' (NIEO).

Manley mobilised the numerical advantage that the former colonies enjoyed in the UN to pass a resolution in May 1974 that still reads as radically today: the Declaration on the Establishment of a New International Economic Order. This UN declaration contained a commitment to ending all waste of food products, a recognition of the right for countries to enjoy full, permanent sovereignty over their own natural resources and, perhaps most strikingly, a provision which reinforced the power of national governments to control "the activities of transnational corporations". What would the world today have looked like if this declaration had been actualised, if the freshly decolonised nations had been able to 'take back control' from multinational corporations? Could this moment have altered the balance of power between the interests of capital and the democratic demands of people across the world? We will never know. Because as all the attention was focused on the battle at the UN, changes to the political landscape back in the old centre of the world - Westminster, London - would soon have major consequences for the dreams of Manley and his allies.

After the failure of free marketeers like Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph to seize control of Conservative Party, in 1975 Margaret Thatcher succeeded where they had failed and, after the 1979 election, became Britain's first woman prime minister. Thatcher's position was reinforced by the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as the new US president. The Anglosphere had taken a decisive ideological turn just in time for tensions to come to a head. In 1981, 22 heads of state from across five continents met for the world's first and only 'North-South' conference. The world leaders gathered at the Cancun Sheraton, looking out over the coast of Mexico towards the crisp Caribbean Sea, an idyllic setting to contrast with the tension that underpinned the power struggles taking place.

Michael Manley had paved the road to Cancun. Prior to this summit meeting, Manley had even hosted a preliminary mini-summit in Jamaica, which, while snubbed by the UK and the USA, was able to bring the leaders of West Germany, Australia, Canada and Norway together with the leaders of post-colonial countries to discuss a set of new rules to govern the global economy more fairly. However, the year before the Cancun conference took place, just five days before Reagan won the vote in the USA, Manley lost one of the most bitter and conflict-ridden elections to have taken place in the Western hemisphere. After a bloody contest that was marked by a shocking level of politically sponsored violence, Jamaica had elected a new president - the 'business-friendly' Edward Seaga, a politician known to opponents as 'Edward CIAga' due to his perceived closeness to Reagan and the USA.

So after years of trying to bring the global powers to the table, when the NIEO was finally put before the world's global powers at the Cancun conference, it was without the man who had done so much to bring it together. With the wind of change now firmly blowing back in their direction, Thatcher and Reagan had little reason to compromise and casually dismissed the NIEO's calls to allow for more democratic control over capitalism. Instead, Thatcher took this historic 'North-South' conference as an opportunity to tell the 'Third World' that the solution to its problems was simply to privatise and financialise further. In an early significant appearance on the international stage, Thatcher rejected the idea of protecting every nation's sovereignty over its resources and shot down the idea of a UN bank, from which countries could access cheap credit to see them through financial storms, declaring that 'there was no way that I was going to put British deposits into a bank which was totally run by those on overdrafts'.

DONE THE ANTI-VAXXERS...ON TO PUTIN:

As Russian forces readied to steamroll into Ukraine, Canada's finance minister began drumming up support for a move that could be devastating for Russia's economy.

Chrystia Freeland, who also serves as the deputy prime minister, spent much of last week "pushing the idea of sanctioning the central bank," said a senior Canadian official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The finance minister began floating the idea Tuesday, as speculation over whether President Vladimir Putin's military build-up was a bluff. As his intention became clear, and the invasion began in earnest, Freeland began working on "building some momentum" behind targeting the central bank in Moscow and cutting off the Putin regime from billions in foreign currency reserves.

"The response by Canada and our allies will be swift and it will bite," Freeland swore after Putin's forces crossed the border. "This barbaric attack cannot and will not be allowed to succeed." Freeland was born in Canada to Ukrainian parents -- her mother helped draft Ukraine's constitution.

nATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

A blow like this to a country's currency sits somewhere on the line between economic and psychological warfare.

It threatens to vaporize much of the ruble-based savings sitting in Russia's banks.

It will send rates of inflation -- already high in Russia -- sharply higher.

It drives people to withdraw their cash en masse and quickly try to convert it to more stable currencies, such as the dollar, the euro, gold or even crypto currencies. (Runs on ATMs were already starting to happen in Russia over the weekend.)

It sends interest rates skyward, as global investors pull back in horror at the idea of lending to banks or countries that use a currency that could become worthless.

High interest rates slam the brakes on the economy, throwing people out of work just as prices soar, a miserable combination of conditions known as stagflation.

THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS:

Prime Minister Naftali Bennett demurred when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked Israel for military aid, according to a Sunday report.

Zelensky asked for "assistance with military implements and weapons" during a Friday phone call with Bennett, the Kan public broadcaster reported.

AGAINST iDENTITY FROM THE BEGINNING:

When George Washington sought to warn Americans about the most fearsome threats to their liberty, he did not cast his eyes toward Europe, where nations were waiting, like vultures, to pounce upon the carcass of a failed experiment in self-government.

Instead, Washington challenged Americans to look within. Their greatest enemy, he wrote in his Farewell Address (1796), was "the spirit of party." By that he meant the relentless desire to form political tribes, or factions, in order to gain advantage over others. "This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature," Washington wrote, "having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind."

Here we are reminded of one of the great forces tearing apart contemporary America: the scourge of identity politics and the "cancel culture" that supports it. And herein lies the genius of the American Founders. They anticipated this threat to self-government because they took seriously both the nobility and the tragedy of human nature. They remained deeply sober about the prospects of liberty, even as they described their experiment as a "new order for the ages." Like no other generation of political revolutionaries, the Founders lived in the shadow of the biblical doctrine of the Fall.

In The Federalist Papers--the political essays defending the U.S. Constitution -- James Madison defined a faction as a group of citizens "united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." Echoing Washington, he insisted that "the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of man."

When Alexander Hamilton, another contributor to The Federalist Papers, asked why governments were formed in the first place, he answered his own question thus: "Because the passions of men will not conform to the dictates of reason and justice, without constraint." Hamilton denied that benevolence was the natural drift of political societies. "Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general or remote considerations of policy, utility, or justice?"

THEN, HAPPILY, I'LL DIE OF BOREDOM:

After an elderly patient died suddenly during a routine test, scientists accidentally captured unique data on the activity in his brain at the very end of his life: During the 30 seconds before and after the man's heart stopped, his brain waves were remarkably similar to those seen during dreaming, memory recall and meditation, suggesting that people may actually see their life "flash before their eyes" when they die. 

...AND CHEAPER...:

Monash University researchers have made a breakthrough in the development of lithium-sulfur batteries that they believe could yield a cheaper, greener and more efficient energy storage solution - that could be made in Australia.

In a study published by the Royal Society of Chemistry, the team from the University's Faculty of Engineering have created a new lithium-sulfur battery interlayer that promotes "exceptionally fast" lithium transfer, while also improving the performance and lifetime of the batteries.

Already, lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries have the potential to store two-to-five times as much energy by weight than the current generation of lithium-ion batteries, which has offered great promise for the storage of renewable energy and for longer-range electric vehicles, in particular.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Vladimir Putin is a "genius", chortled Donald Trump. The former US president was speaking on the very eve of Russia's invasion of Ukraine -- and was lost in admiration for the "very savvy" man in the Kremlin.

So what has this genius achieved? Four days into the invasion and Russian troops have failed to win the quick victory that Putin was counting on. Ukrainian resistance is much fiercer than the Russian leader anticipated, as Ukraine's army fights back and the population mobilises. Captured Russian soldiers have been filmed complaining that they were told they were going on a training mission.

The international response has also been tougher, more co-ordinated and united than Putin bargained for. Russia is being cut out of the global financial system. Most European airspace has been closed to Russian airlines. There has been a historic reversal in German foreign and security policy -- with Berlin finally sending weaponry to Ukraine and pledging to spend more than 2 per cent of gross domestic product on defence. The Nato alliance has been given a new sense of purpose. Russia is turning into a pariah, with even China failing to back it at the UN -- it abstained instead.

Inside Russia itself, panicked citizens are rushing to withdraw money from banks. The rouble has plummeted in value, as has the Russian stock market. Small demonstrations against the war have broken out across the country, with the protesters swiftly arrested. Local celebrities, oligarchs and even the children of some Russian officials have condemned the conflict. Putin's own officials look visibly uncomfortable as they take his orders in front of television cameras. The Russian official media have been left in the incredible position of denying the extent of the war, as it continues to insist that this is just a special military operation to support the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk.

Meanwhile, Ukraine itself is receiving a level of international admiration and recognition that is unprecedented since the country won independence in 1991. Volodymyr Zelensky, the Ukrainian president, once derided as a comic actor out of his depth, has won international acclaim for his inspirational leadership. His physical bravery on the streets of Kyiv is a marked contrast to the cowardice of Putin, who is too scared of a virus to allow his own officials within breathing distance. Calls for Ukraine to be put on a fast-track to EU membership are growing.

Putin has achieved all of this in a mere four days. Genius, sheer genius!

TWISTING THE KNIFE:

As the Russian government remains silent about the number of losses it has incurred in its invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv is appealing directly to families of Russian soldiers to identify their relatives captured or killed in the four-day-old war.

The Ukrainian Interior Ministry issued the appeal on February 27, directing relatives of Russian soldiers to online platforms where they can search through photos and videos of Russian soldiers captured or killed by Ukrainian forces.

The initiative, called Ishchi Svoikh (Look For Your Own), appears aimed in part at undermining morale and support for the war in Russia, where officials and state media have refrained from disclosing details of Russian casualties and military assaults against Ukrainian cities, including the capital, Kyiv.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Turkey is set to implement an international pact that could ban both Ukrainian and Russian warships from passing through the straits connecting the Black Sea to the south, Turkey's top diplomat has announced.

Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu, speaking to CNN Turk live on Sunday, said Turkey had decided that the invasion of Ukraine and the resulting fighting constituted "war".

"It's no longer a military operation but a state of war," Cavusoglu said, in a rhetorical shift that opened a path to trigger the 1936 international treaty concerning the Black Sea straits. 

ALWAYS BET AGAINST THE dEEP sTATE:

In Russia, power is a pyramid. This pyramid was built by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century - an ambitious, brutal tsar overrun by paranoia and a great many other vices. With the help of his personal army - the oprichnina - he cruelly and bloodily divided the Russian state into power and people, friend and foe, and the gap between them became the deepest of moats. His friendship with the Golden Horde convinced him that the only way to rule the hugeness of Russia was by becoming an occupier of this enormous zone. The occupying power had to be strong, cruel, unpredictable, and incomprehensible to the people. The people should have no choice but to obey and worship it. And a single person sits at the peak of this dark pyramid, a single person possessing absolute power and a right to all.

Paradoxically, the principle of Russian power hasn't even remotely changed in the last five centuries. I consider this to be our country's main tragedy. Our medieval pyramid has stood tall for all that time, its surface changing, but never its fundamental form. And it's always been a single Russian ruler sitting at its peak: Pyotr I, Nicholas II, Stalin, Brezhnev, Andropov... Today, Putin has been sitting at its peak for more than 20 years. Having broken his promise, he clutches onto his chair with all his might. The Pyramid of Power poisons the ruler with absolute authority. It shoots archaic, medieval vibrations into the ruler and his retinue, seeming to say: "you are the masters of a country whose integrity can only be maintained by violence and cruelty; be as opaque as I am, as cruel and unpredictable, everything is allowed to you, you must call forth shock and awe in your population, the people must not understand you, but they must fear you."

Alas, Yeltsin, who came to power on the crest of the wave of Perestroika, did not destroy the pyramid's medieval form, he simply refurbished its surface: instead of gloomy Soviet concrete, it became colorful and was covered over with billboards advertising western goods. The Pyramid of Power exacerbated Yeltsin's worst traits: he became rude, a bully, and an alcoholic. His face turned into a heavy, motionless mask of impudent arrogance. Toward the end of his reign, Yeltsin unleashed a senseless war onto Chechnya when it decided to secede from the Russian Federation. The pyramid built by Ivan the Terrible had succeeded in awakening the imperialist even in Yeltsin, only a short-lived democrat; as a Russian tsar, he sent tanks and bombers into Chechnya, dooming the Chechen people to death and suffering.

Yeltsin and the other creators of Perestroika surrounding him not only didn't destroy the vicious Pyramid of Power, they didn't bury their Soviet past either - unlike the post-war Germans who buried the corpse of their nazism in the 1950s. The corpse of this monster, which had annihilated tens of millions of its own citizens and thrown its country back 70 years into the past, was propped up in a corner: it'll rot on its own, they thought. But it turned out not to be dead.

After coming to power, Putin began to change. And those who initially welcomed his reign gradually understood that these changes didn't bode well for Russia. The TV channel NTV was destroyed, other channels began to pass into the hands of Putin's comrades-in-arms, after which a regime of strict censorship came into effect; from that point forward, Putin was beyond criticism.

DON'T SLUR THE DON:

[W]ith Ukraine dominating airwaves across the globe - no one was paying much attention to the American truckers. Especially, perhaps, as the convoy was promoting "freedom" against restrictions in the US that have largely been lifted already as the pandemic has ebbed recently and weary politicians have focused on the economy.

Another trucker, wearing an American and Canadian flag as a cape, nodded in agreement with Wright that it was all a plot. Others around the campfire too agree with the conspiracy myth that the outbreak of war in Europe is an attempt to divert attention away from this trucker convoy, which is currently about a couple hundred people parked in the desert of the American southwest. [...]

But in the long distances the convoy has so far driven across the vast expanses of the American West, the convoy has had too few vehicles to make an impact on traffic or "clog up cities", as right-wing Senator Rand Paul had declared he hoped they would.

A LIBERAL REGIME SHOULD BE THE MINIMUM REQUIREMENT:

An effort is under way to isolate Vladimir Putin diplomatically by challenging Russia's right to a permanent seat of the UN security council on the grounds that Russia took the seat from the defunct Soviet Union in 1991 without proper authorisation.

ALWAYS A TOUGH DAY TO BE A rIGHTWING KOOK:

Scientists released a pair of extensive studies on Saturday that point to a market in Wuhan, China, as the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. Analyzing data from a variety of sources, they concluded that the coronavirus was very likely present in live mammals sold in the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in late 2019 and suggested that the virus twice spilled over into people working or shopping there. They said they found no support for an alternate theory that the coronavirus escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan.

"When you look at all of the evidence together, it's an extraordinarily clear picture that the pandemic started at the Huanan market," said Michael Worobey, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Arizona and a co-author of both studies. [...]

The authors of the new study include researchers who previously published smaller reports that had pointed toward a similar conclusion, but were based on much less detail. Their earlier analysis suggested that the first known case of the coronavirus was a vendor at the Huanan market.

In a separate line of research, scientists at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention carried out a new analysis of the genetic traces of coronaviruses collected at the market in January 2020. Previous studies have shown that the viruses sampled from early cases of Covid belonged to two main evolutionary branches. The Huanan market samples included both branches, the scientists reported in a study they posted online on Friday.

Dr. Worobey, who said he was not aware of the study until it was made public, said that their findings are consistent with the scenario he and his colleagues put forward for two origins at the market.

"The beauty of it is how simply it all adds up now," said Jeremy Kamil, a virologist at Louisiana State University Health Sciences, who was not involved in the new study.

IT'S THE DANGDEST THING...:

BREAKING: Germany has announced its allies have taken decision to cut Russia from SWIFT

— The Spectator Index (@spectatorindex) February 26, 2022

HILARITY ENSUED:

First, to many observers, it's simply shocking that the Russians have not been able to establish complete air superiority over Ukrainian air space. After three days of hostilities, Ukrainian pilots are still taking to the skies and Ukrainian anti-air batteries are still exacting a toll on Russian aircraft. The fact that the Russians have not been able to mount a dominant Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) campaign and yet are insistent on attempting contested air-assault operations is, simply put, astounding. It's also been extremely costly for the Russians.

To compound that problem, the Russians have undertaken operations on multiple avenues of advance, which, at least in the early stages of this campaign, are not able to mutually support each other. Until they get much closer to the capital, the Russian units moving north out of Crimea are not able to help the Russian armored columns advancing on Kyiv. The troops pushing towards Kyiv from Belarus aren't able to affect the Ukrainians defending the Donbas in the east. As the Russians move deeper into Ukraine, this can and will change, but it unquestionably made the opening stages of their operations more difficult.

Third, the Russians -- possibly out of hubris -- do not appear to have prepared the logistical train necessary to keep some of their units in action for an extended period of time. Multiple videos have emerged of Russian columns out of gas and stuck on Ukrainian roads.

The Kremlin's February 24 invasion -- and expectations of severe sanctions response by the West -- drove economists to slash their economic growth forecasts for Russia. The developments also pushed investors to dump their Russian stock and bonds, triggering the biggest one-day stock market decline in the nation's history and sending the ruble to a record low.

As U.S. President Joe Biden warned that Putin was turning his country into a "pariah" state, international organizations canceled major sporting events scheduled to be held in Russia this year, a possible sign of the economic isolation that lays ahead.

Foreign companies could pull out of Russia amid greater country risk, further hurting the economy's competitiveness and modernization, economists said. U.K. oil giant BP is now under greater pressure to exit its investment in Russian state oil giant Rosneft.

The sanctions largely target state-owned banks and enterprises that Putin has relied on over the years to enhance his power and strengthen the armed forces. Nonetheless, Russians' living standards will inevitably be collateral damage as the targeted sanctions take effect, economists said.

"The bottom line is that these sanctions will have a significant impact on Russia's overall economy, and average Russians will feel the cost," the International Institute of Finance said in a statement on February 24.

GLORIOUS:

The German government says it will supply 1,000 anti-tank and 500 Stinger antiaircraft missiles to bolster Ukraine's defenses in the face of an unprovoked onslaught by Russian forces, in a significant shift in Berlin's policy regarding the war.

Germany also said on February 26 that it would allow the Netherlands to ship hundreds of German-made anti-tank weapons to Ukraine.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

A priceless exchange of a brave Ukrainian citizen with Russian army stuck out of fuel. ENGLISH SUBTITLES.

[Thanks to my Ukrainian friend for transcription and translation] pic.twitter.com/Rar3WRXEwD

— Ali 🇺🇦🕊 (@aliostad) February 26, 2022

BOY, HE'S REALLY GETTING HIS BEHIND KICKED:

It has been a long time since the threat of using nuclear weapons has been brandished so openly by a world leader, but Vladimir Putin has just done it, warning in a speech that he has the weapons available if anyone dares to use military means to try to stop Russia's takeover of Ukraine.

THE BEARLESS WOODS:

Watching Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine play out, it seems the Russian president has vastly underestimated and misunderstood Ukrainians and their president.

Putin, a one-time KGB operative who in 2004 said "there is no such thing as a former KGB man," has made clear that he lives in a world of the past. The world that existed before the end of the Cold War, a world in which the territories of the former Soviet Union, potentially even the countries of the former Warsaw Pact, are run out of Moscow. A world he is trying to rebuild today.

But the USSR is not Russia, and when you live in the past, you lose touch with the present.

Putin has lost touch with ordinary Russians, despite exercising immense control over what they watch, listen to and read. But to an even greater degree, Putin has lost touch with what Ukrainians think.

It's the classic mistake of every tyrant: Surround yourself only with sycophants, suck-ups and yes-men, and you never get a reality check in your echo chamber. Eliminate dissenting politicians, and you assume that means you've eliminated dissent.

TRUMPISM IS FRENCH:

Muslims in France are struggling to decide on who to vote for, and even whether it is worth voting in the upcoming elections. This has been mainly due to French political candidates expressing varying degrees of Islamophobia and openly racist views which they continue to reiterate time and time again.

The current French President, Emmanuel Macron, came to power in 2017, representing the La Republique En Marche party. Macron once vowed to be a President 'for all the people in France' but, throughout his tenure, he ostracised Muslims by being the first ever European country to ban the full face veil in 2011. He went on to pass legislation forbidding the wearing of hijab in certain public settings, all under the guise of secularism.

Macron's anti-Muslim policies did not stop there as, in 2020, he made a speech announcing that he would crack down on what he calls "Islamist separatism" and would be banning foreign imams from teaching Islamic classes in the country. "Political Islam has no place in France," stated Macron, who went on to mention how he felt that "Islam is facing a crisis".

There is no doubt that the anti-Muslim rhetoric made by Macron was said in an attempt to appeal to far-right voters and appease the President of the National Rally, Marine Le Pen. But, frustratingly, Muslims in France are having to bear the brunt of such rhetoric, which only serves to heighten fears and divisions in the country. 

NEVER WASTE A CRISIS:

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST (profanity alert):

Seth began studying consciousness in the mid-Nineties, a time when advances in computing and brain imaging were giving scientists new tools for understanding the mind. In 1994, the Australian philosopher David Chalmers outlined the challenge ahead: in a talk at the inaugural Science of Consciousness Conference in Tuscon, Arizona, Chalmers set out what he described as "the hard problem of consciousness". How can objective, physical matter give rise to the unique, subjective experience of consciousness? How could anyone adequately describe the inimitable feeling of being you, with reference only to your brain and biology?

Philosophers and scientists have tried to tackle this hard problem in different ways. Panpsychists argue that consciousness is a fundamental quality of all matter - that a deckchair exhibits a different kind of consciousness from you or I, but is conscious nonetheless. At the other extreme, illusionists argue that consciousness is only imaginary. Seth, whose academic background spans physics, psychology, computing and neuroscience, says he has come to another, more satisfying conclusion.

His research has led him to radical positions: the way you see yourself and the world is a controlled hallucination, Seth argues. Rather than passively perceiving our surroundings, our brains are constantly making and refining predictions about what we expect to see; in this way, we create our world. He points to the example of #TheDress, the viral photo of a cocktail dress that to some people appears gold-and-white, and to others as blue-and-black. In his Ted talk, Seth twice plays an audio clip of a high-pitched, distorted voice that is so incomprehensible it could be speaking any language or none at all. Then he primes his audience with the sentence: "I think Brexit is a terrible idea." When he plays the clip again, the words are so immediately discernible it's hard to imagine how they couldn't have been.

Sometimes the term hallucination confuses people (Seth wishes there were a better word): it might suggest that perception is arbitrary, or that things don't exist. In fact, if our brains are working properly, we're constantly updating our predictions based on feedback from our senses - which is why ordinary perception is a "controlled hallucination", not a fever-dream. That said, Seth told me as we strolled across campus in search of a sandwich, he's open to the idea that the physical world doesn't exist in the manner we think it does.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

By televising his Russian Security Council meeting on Monday, we got an insight into the way Vladimir Putin welds power over Russia. Putin sat distanced from other members of the Council, enthroned behind a desk. He came across as high camp Bond villain with each Council member challenged to give an opinion. It was clear there was only one right view, and that was Putin's, no matter what it was.

The most absurd moment came from Sergei Naryshkin, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, who fluffed his lines and became the designated scapegoat. I was surprised Putin didn't casually flick a switch to drop poor Naryshin into a pool of hungry piranhas.

This type of power is so foreign to spectators in the West it appears almost cinematic in its ridiculousness. Putin becomes more than a man, he is a Tsar, a sort of demi-god. We see a mad, King Lear figure, from whom all power flows. We cannot compute this, as we have no such centre of Western power. Political leaders, liberal elites, military big wigs, Big Tech, the media, banking institutions, industrialists and woke academics are all said to be where 'real power' resides. 

Forty-eight hours before he launched his attack, on 21 February Vladimir Putin summoned the most senior members of his regime to an extraordinary, televised meeting in the Kremlin. Sitting behind an enormous white desk in the great gilded Hall of the Order of St Catherine, he called them up, one at a time, to a lectern and asked them whether they supported the decision to recognise the independence of the separatist territories in eastern Ukraine.

Some were enthusiastic. Nikolai Patrushev, the security council's secretary and one of Putin's closest allies, claimed that Nato and the United States were using Ukraine to try to "destroy the Russian Federation". Others, such as the prime minister Mikhail Mishustin, who is meant to be overseeing Russia's economic development, looked decidedly uncomfortable but said they agreed.

Then it was the turn of Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia's foreign intelligence service and ostensibly one of the country's most powerful men. But standing in front of Putin, he stuttered and stammered, struggling to formulate the correct response. The Russian president drummed his fingers on the desk and smirked. "I will support the decision to recognise," Naryshkin ventured. "I will support, or I support?" Putin cut in. "Speak directly!" The exchange went on like this for several minutes before he was finally satisfied and allowed his spy chief to sit back down.

It was a theatrical display of raw political power that was clearly designed to show that Putin wields absolute, personal control. The footage was pre-recorded, so Naryshkin's humiliation could have been edited out. Instead, the full, excruciating encounter was broadcast at prime time on Russian state television. The wider meeting functioned as a loyalty test, requiring every senior official and any potential future rivals to state on camera that they supported Putin's decision.

"Probably deep down he knows he's risking something," said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of authoritarian political systems and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. "The way I read this is that he is taking a big gamble, so he wanted to stage this performance to force these people to show that they agree with him and reaffirm that they are his lackeys."

Sitting alone at the end of an absurdly long table or marooned behind a vast desk in a palatial hall, Vladimir Putin's idea of social distancing has gone beyond the paranoid and into the realm of the deranged. His distance from reason and reality seems to have gone the same way. In little more than forty-eight hours, Putin's sensible, peace-talking statesman act flipped into something dark and irrational that has worried even his supporters.

As Putin's hour-long address announcing official recognition of the breakaway republics of Donbas went out on Monday, a producer on Kremlin-controlled TV texted me: "Boss okhuyel [the boss has wigged out]."

Indeed. Putin's rambling and uncharacteristically emotional address to the nation and the bizarrely staged Security Council meeting that preceded it carried the distinct whiff of the dying days of the USSR. The ministers standing by to publicly agree (some more convincingly than others) with the boss; the formulaic tropes about protecting Russian-speaking people from "genocide"; the clichés about the "illegitimate" government in Kyiv. The spectacle resembled nothing so much as Leonid Brezhnev's slurred 1979 announcement that the Soviet Union had to fulfill its "internationalist duty" to protect the people of Afghanistan.

THE TOOTHLESS DRAGON:

Several Chinese public banks are limiting financing to purchase raw materials from Russia for fear of Western sanctions following the invasion of Ukraine, Bloomberg news agency reported on Saturday.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Saul Griffith, an entrepreneur and MacArthur Grant recipient, has a solution that is similarly straightforward. We have to electrify everything that we do. And we have to power the electrification of modern life with zero-carbon sources such as solar, wind, and nuclear. This clean-energy shift would not only power the world, but also disempower autocrats like Russia's Vladimir Putin, who uses his country's natural gas and coal exports to threaten his trading partners as he wages war against his neighbors.

So far, so simple. But it's the details that make his book Electrify Everything one of the most quietly revolutionary policy books I've ever read. Griffith is allergic to thinking small. He condemns the "1970s mentality" of energy efficiency, which says we can save the planet with a bit more recycling and a few more stainless-steel water bottles. Rather than guilt Americans over their living standards, he proposes that we can keep our luxurious lifestyles without destroying the planet if we all--governments, companies, and individuals--get a small number of big decisions just right.

GOING BETTER THAN EVEN WE THOUGHT IT WOULD:

Two until now major pro-Russian voices in the European Union, Czech President Milos Zeman and Hungary's Prime Minister Viktor Orban, didn't mince their words in criticizing Moscow's most aggressive action since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

Their countries experienced comparable brutality -- the Czech Republic, as part of Czechoslovakia, in 1968 and Hungary in 1956.

Zeman called Thursday's invasion "an unprovoked act of aggression."

"Russia has committed a crime against peace," he said in an address to the nation.

Zeman had previously made news by calling Russia's 2014 annexation of the Ukrainian Crimean Peninsula "a fait accompli."

Many in the Czech Republic reviled Zeman as a "servant of Kremlin" after he sided with Russia and cast doubt on the findings of his own security and intelligence services on the alleged participation of Russian spies in a huge 2014 ammunition explosion.

Western leaders, wary of sending troops into Ukraine, have so far avoided denying access to SWIFT. However, the U.K., Canada and the Netherlands are now publicly advocating for it, while Democratic and Republican lawmakers in Washington have escalated their calls in recent days for expelling Russia.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte said Friday that the Netherlands supports barring Russia. The EU "took a big step forward concerning SWIFT," he said at a press briefing in The Hague. "We drew a clear picture based on a proposal from the French on what the pros and cons are to make sure we can decide to add it at a later stage."

The U.K. has been on the record saying it wants to take action on this. British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told the BBC on Friday that "we'd like to do the SWIFT system." He was also clear there were still some holdouts: "These are international organizations and if not every country wants them to be thrown out of the SWIFT system, it becomes difficult."

VLAD WHO?:

Kazakhstan, one of Russia's closest allies and a southern neighbor, is denying a request for its troops to join the offensive in Ukraine, officials said Friday.

Additionally, the former Soviet republic said it is not recognizing the Russia-created breakaway republics upheld by Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, as a pretext for its aggression in Ukraine. 

IT'S ALWAYS THE GOP:

SING OUT, SISTER:

"I must begin these very brief remarks by thanking God for delivering me to this point in my professional journey," she said. "My life has been blessed beyond measure, and I do know that one can only come this far by faith."

Jackson's words marked the beginning of what promises to be a historic confirmation process: If approved by the US Senate, Jackson, 51, who currently serves on the D.C. Court of Appeals, would be the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court.

"If I'm fortunate enough to be confirmed as the next associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, I can only hope that my life and career, my love of this country and the Constitution, and my commitment to upholding the rule of law and the sacred principles upon which this great nation was founded, will inspire future generations of Americans," she said.

FLAILS IN UKRAINE, XI HARDEST HIT:

China abstains from the Security Council vote condemning the invasion of Ukraine. Russia isolated. For what it's worth.

— Blake Hounshell (@blakehounshell) February 25, 2022

WHY DID YOU THINK THEY OPPOSE IMMIGRATION?:

Many noncitizens within and seeking to come to the United States are people of color from the developing world who are directly affected by the comprehensive federal immigration law. That law employs the terms "alien" to legitimize harsh treatment. Those deemed as aliens are subject to discrimination that never could be lawful with respect to U.S. citizens, including detention and removal from the country. A report submitted by the ABA Commission on Immigration in support of the resolution offers many examples of how immigrants of color have been injured by racial bias in enforcement.  

The need to address racism in this area should not be especially surprising. Historically, racism has deeply influenced immigration and immigration enforcement.  

The first comprehensive federal immigration law was forged by virulent racism against Chinese immigrants. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 prohibited the immigration of most Chinese people to the United States.  

From 1792 to 1952, being white was a prerequisite for the naturalization of immigrants.  

Passed by Congress in 1924, the discriminatory national origins quotas system, which remained in place until 1965, favored immigration from Northern Europe and greatly restricted the migration of people of color to the United States.  

In 1954, the U.S. government removed hundreds of thousands of persons of Mexican ancestry from the country in an initiative officially known as "Operation Wetback."  

That racism, unfortunately, is not simply just a part of history. Donald Trump kicked off his successful 2016 presidential campaign by referring to Mexican immigrants as "criminals" and "rapists." As president, he crudely said the United States should not allow noncitizens from "shithole" countries such as Haiti and El Salvador to remain in the United States, issued three versions of the Muslim ban, put in place a policy of separating Central American parents and children and much more.    

Although President Trump's racial vitriol was unlike that of any other modern president, others pursued policies similar to his. More than 90 percent of the record 400,000-plus noncitizens removed from the country during the Obama years were from Latin America. It was under President Biden's watch that Haitian migrants on the U.S./Mexico border were chased on horseback by Border Patrol officers and immediately returned to Haiti. And Biden has continued Title 42 mass expulsions of migrants from the Trump era, a decision that led former Yale Law Dean Harold Koh to resign from a post in the State Department. 

Moreover, the ordinary operation of the U.S. immigration removal system reflects no less than systemic racism. The Supreme Court has held that "Mexican appearance" may be considered by Border Patrol officers in making immigration stops, a move that has contributed to racial profiling in ordinary immigration enforcement. Moreover, police reliance on racial profiling of Blacks and Latinos in routine criminal law enforcement leads to disparate arrests of Black and Latino immigrants. Racial profiling in turn feeds noncitizens of color directly into the immigration removal system. It, therefore, should be no surprise that year in and year out Latinos and Blacks are severely overrepresented in the noncitizens removed from the United States.  

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

HE'S THEIR NATURAL ALLY:

White nationalist livestreamer Nicholas Fuentes has made no secret where his loyalties lie in the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

"I wish Putin was president of America," he mused to his 45,000 subscribers on Telegram on Wednesday morning. 

Fifteen hours later, Russian forces invaded Ukraine. And Fuentes, who's hosting a far-right conference in Florida Friday night, was psyched. 

"I am totally rooting for Russia," he wrote the following morning. "This is the coolest thing to happen since 1/6." 

"UKRAINE WILL BE DESTROYED"; added Fuentes, who describes himself as a "Christian Nationalist," which claims the U.S. is a fundamentally Christian nation. "I never doubted you [Putin], my Czar."

Over on his platform, Gab CEO Andrew Torba also expressed his support for Putin. 

"Lol Putin is brilliant. Western Media, which is obsessed with 'muh Nazis' will have a tough time spinning this one," wrote Torba, who's sponsoring Fuentes' "America First Political Action Conference" (AFPAC) this year. "What he really means is Ukraine needs to be liberated and cleansed from the degeneracy of the secular western globalist empire."

Since Russian's invasion of Ukraine Wednesday night, far-right personalities have declared Russia a beacon of anti-wokeness and Putin a strong ethnonationalist. In their mind, Ukraine is just a corrupt pawn in a vast "globalist" conspiracy.

VLAD WHO?:

Don't accept his surrender until,l you bleed him. https://t.co/jlUGzQeqMH

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 25, 2022

IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

Predicting how potential justices will rule when they get their Supreme Court robes is a tricky business. According to one prominent metric of Supreme Court ideology, though, Jackson looks pretty moderate. As the chart below shows, her Judicial Common Space (JCS) score would place her toward the middle of the current Supreme Court, slightly to the right of Justice Elena Kagan and well to the right of Justice Sonia Sotomayor. According to those scores, she's also a middle-of-the-road judge on the court where she's currently serving.

THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT:

A NATURAL GORSUCH ALLY:

[T]here are a couple of cases likely to receive a fair amount of attention at her confirmation hearing.

The first is Jackson's lengthy opinion in Committee on the Judiciary v. McGahn, a case where she ruled against the Trump administration's attempt to stonewall a congressional investigation. In McGahn, Jackson rejected the Trump administration's claim that "a President's senior-level aides have absolute testimonial immunity" from a congressional subpoena, after a House committee subpoenaed former Trump White House counsel Don McGahn.

Jackson's opinion in McGahn may be best known for one of its most widely quoted lines: "Presidents are not kings," Jackson wrote, and "they do not have subjects, bound by loyalty or blood, whose destiny they are entitled to control." But the actual holding of her opinion was quite narrow. Though Jackson concluded that senior presidential aides must appear before a congressional committee that subpoenas them, she also held that "the specific information that high-level presidential aides may be asked to provide in the context of such questioning can be withheld from the committee on the basis of a valid privilege."

Thus, such a senior aide must physically appear before the committee, but the actual substance of their testimony may be quite thin if the committee probes matters that are protected by executive privilege.

Unfortunately, the case descended into a partisan food fight on appeal. A three-judge panel of the DC Circuit initially determined that Jackson lacked jurisdiction to hear the case, with two Republican judges rejecting Jackson's approach and one Democratic judge in dissent. That decision was repudiated by the full DC Circuit, in a decision that also broke down along party lines. The full court then sent the case back to the same three-judge panel to resolve two lingering questions not addressed by the full court -- and the panel once again voted along party lines to dismiss the case.

Eventually, after Biden took office, McGahn agreed to testify in 2021.

In December 2021, Jackson also joined a unanimous DC Circuit decision holding that Trump cannot prevent the House investigation into the January 6 attack on Congress from obtaining certain records from the Trump White House. That decision, in Trump v. Thompson, was upheld by the Supreme Court.

Biden's decision to name Jackson to the Supreme Court will surprise no one who pays attention to the judiciary. Obama interviewed Jackson for the cursed Supreme Court nomination that eventually went to then-Judge Merrick Garland in 2016 -- a rare honor for a judge who, at the time, only served on a trial court. Jackson was also the first Biden nominee confirmed to any court.

Both the Obama and the Biden White Houses, in other words, sent loud signals that Jackson was a serious contender for the top Court.

So, when Jackson appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last April, Republican senators must have known that this hearing was one of their few chances to rough up a potential Supreme Court nominee before a vacancy even opened on the Supreme Court. Yet, the Judiciary Committee's Republicans did not present a coherent narrative against Jackson at her last confirmation hearing, and many of them didn't even seem to try.

HATING MEXICANS IS THE GATEWAY DRUG:

For decades, the Republican Party's stance on Russia's dictators and expansionist tactics was rock-solid: From Dwight D. Eisenhower to Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, Russia -- then the Soviet Union -- was America's chief enemy, untrustworthy, anti-freedom. It was, in Reagan's famous formulation, the "evil empire."

This week, while many Republicans blasted Russian leader Vladimir Putin's all-out assault on Ukraine, former president Donald Trump and some of his allies urged the United States to stay out of the conflict and praised Putin, even presenting him as a "peacekeeper," as Trump put it.

"Don't look for consistency in Republican policy," said Craig Shirley, a Reagan biographer and longtime Republican political consultant. "The Republican Party right now is a little schizophrenic. Anti-communism and love of freedom used to be the glue that held the party together, but now the attitudes toward Russia have gotten all mixed up with domestic politics."

THE CASE FOR AND AGAINST MASKING IN A NUTSHELL:

The amiably eccentric Queen Christina of Sweden, having abdicated her throne to become a Catholic, wrote to a friend: "Dignity does not consist in possessing honors, but in deserving them." Customs and outward forms signal that one's duty is greater than one's self, and neglect of them is an exercise in egotism.

NEVER WASTE A CRISIS:

WHEN THE $11 billion Nord Stream 2 project was announced in 2015, it promised a brave new energy future for Europe. Criss-crossing under the Baltic Sea from western Siberia to make land in Germany, it assured Germany--and the tight-knit European energy market, through which natural gas supplies cross borders with ease--guaranteed supply. Nord Stream 2 was built to bypass Ukraine, in a move designed by Russia to add economic pressure to the country following a partial invasion of the country's east in 2014. Russia's gas supply contracts through Ukraine are up for renewal in 2024, and Russia seems minded to ditch them, and the supply to the country entirely. It wouldn't be anything new for Russia, which has long used its position as the world's energy supplier to threaten other countries.

But political expediency--and the need to ensure steady supplies of gas--trumped geopolitics and protecting Ukraine's sovereignty. Europe's domestic gas production was declining--dropping 9 percent between 2014 and 2015 according to the European Commission --and the continent recognized it needed to become more reliant on Russian gas imports. The project went ahead, and in the intervening seven years the vast pipeline was built beneath the Baltic Sea.

It all turned out to be a waste of time and money. Ahead of Russia's full-blown invasion of Ukraine, launched in the early hours of February 24, the plans for Nord Stream 2 have been placed on ice. The big question is what that means for Europe's energy security. "This is an inflection point," says Thierry Bros, professor at Sciences Po, a university in Paris. "The crisis is a good wake-up call for Europe, and Europe's naivety." It's also a blow to Russia, which relies on the income from gas and oil to support its own economy and, by extension, its war efforts.

MET ONE nATIONALIST YOU'VE MET THEM ALL:

.

Speaking at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser shortly before Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Donald Trump heaped praise on the despot. Putin was "very smart," Trump said with apparent admiration. "I mean, he's taken over a country for $2 worth of sanctions. I'd say that's pretty smart," Trump said. "He's taking over a country, literally, a vast, vast, location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and just walking right in."

Trump's long-standing affection for Putin has hardly been the stuff of secrets. In the same speech, Trump bragged that he knows the Russian leader "very well ... almost as well as anybody in this room," suggesting that their very special relationship might have prevented war--this in spite of the evident pride that Trump took in Putin's decision to launch an invasion that will likely lead to the deaths of thousands and the potential collapse of a nascent European democracy, flawed though it may be.

But Trump's comments were arguably tame compared to those of many in the right-wing media. His suggestion that his cozy relations with Putin might have averted war was a dubious bit of magical thinking--one that ignored the many ways he either enabled Putin or undermined NATO--but at least the former president was willing to countenance the notion that peace was preferable. By contrast, on Fox News and in other corners of the right-wing media, hosts aggressively cheered Russia on, while using the invasion as a hackneyed and pathetic attempt to hype the culture war--and to continue to boost Putin as a natural ally while denigrating vulnerable democracies.

THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS:

In a speech earlier in the day to an army officers' graduating class, excerpts of which he posted on Twitter, Bennett articulated the philosophy that undergirded his reluctance to take sides. "These times teach us that, to our regret, wars between armies are not a thing of the past," he said. "The world is a lot less stable, and our region changes daily." He did not mention Russia.

The omission frustrated Natan Sharansky, a former Prisoner of Zion , or political prisoner, of the Soviet Union who has served as an Israeli Cabinet minister and headed the Jewish Agency for Israel.

Speaking to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency after a day of appearances on Israeli media, Sharansky said he felt like Don Quixote fending off journalists and others who wondered why Israel should get involved.

"On all the panels and all the interviews I was usually in the minority of one who says that we have to take the world's position," he said.

Sharansky said he understood what concerned his interlocutors: He would want Israel to supply Ukraine with the anti-missile defensive systems that served Israel well during wars with Hamas and Hezbollah. His critics ask how that would play in Russia, which hs been keeping Syria, Israel's enemy, from procuring similar systems.

That didn't make it any less important for Israel to provide a moral voice, he said. "I felt quite embarrassed in the last days that at this critical moment of the future of the world -- at this moment of moral clarity Israel is not ready to say it clearly," he said. 

THIS TIME IS DIFFERENT:

All three former Minneapolis police officers who watched Derek Chauvin murder George Floyd in May 2020 will face prison time for their part in the fatal arrest that kicked off a summer of protests against police brutality and overreach.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Protests against Russia's invasion of Ukraine spread around the world Thursday ... including across Russia. By the end of the day, reports had more than 1,600 people arrested at protests in more than 50 Russian cities, with more than 900 of them in Moscow.

The protests in Russia were noteworthy because a brutal response was expected and explicitly threatened, with the government warning of "severe punishment for mass riots." As the arrest numbers show, that response did materialize.

Some prominent Russians also spoke out, The Washington Post reports:

Comedian and television presenter Maxim Galkin wrote on Instagram, "There can be no excuse for war! No war!"

Ivan Urgant, a presenter and actor on state television, posted on Instagram, "Fear and pain. NO WAR."

Liberal political analyst Vladimir Pastukhov called the attacks on Ukraine "the mistake of the whole nation," of Russia in a commentary on Echo of Moscow radio website.

Protests also popped up across Europe and beyond. Hundreds of people showed up outside United Kingdom Prime Minister Boris Johnson's office, The New York Times reports.

THE REAL FUN HASN'T BEGUN:

Rao: Russia's massed military forces near Ukraine apparently number around 190,000. This is not that much more than the coalition forces during the surge in Iraq. But Ukraine is a bigger and more populous country. Can Russia actually control the entire landmass of Ukraine?

Petraeus: That's correct. Ukraine is not only bigger but some 50 percent more populous than Iraq, and the Iraqi population included many millions--Kurds, Christians, Yezidis, Shabak, and many of the Shia--who broadly supported the coalition forces throughout our time there. Only a minority of the Iraqi population comprised or supported the Sunni extremists and insurgents and Iranian-supported Shia militia. Though they did, to be sure, prove to be very formidable enemies.

Can Russia actually control the entire landmass of Ukraine? That question has to be one of those that is most unsettling in the back of President Putin's mind and in the minds of his senior leaders. I was privileged to serve as the commander of the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq and the first year there. Frankly, the fight to Baghdad, while tougher than many likely assessed it to be from afar, was pretty straightforward. But once the regime collapsed, we had nowhere near enough forces to prevent the terrible looting early on, and later we did not have enough to deal with the insurgent and extremist elements when they increased the violence dramatically in 2006 until we received the additional forces during the 18-month surge, together with the accompanying change in strategy and development of increasing numbers of reasonably competent Iraqi forces.

Let's not forget that most Iraqis did initially welcome our liberation of the country from the brutal, kleptocratic Saddam Hussein regime. Russians cannot expect to be applauded as they invade Ukraine.

[L]et's say that Russia captures the capital, ousts the popularly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and installs a puppet leader with the mandate to haul Ukraine back into Moscow's orbit--all reasonable expectations. Then what? Ukraine has been an independent country since 1991; As Tim Judah notes in a dispatch from Ukraine for the New York Review of Books, "Most young Ukrainians, who have no memory of the Soviet era...are now just like other Europeans." There is no appetite for resuming a supplicant's status to an empire to the east. Even among the older generation, three decades of independence, combined with Putin's new aggression, have intensified a sense of Ukrainian nationalism and a longing to join the West.

As a result, after the main fight is over (whenever that happens), those 150,000 Russian troops in or around Ukraine will have to remain as an occupation force. They will face resistance--not just from Ukrainian soldiers, who will have access to weapons, but from civilian insurgents, who have training in arms as well and who will surely receive supplies (and perhaps more) from U.S. and other intelligence agencies. Without Russian occupiers, the new Quisling regime would be overthrown at once. Even with the occupiers, its edicts are unlikely to be obeyed. The notion that Putin could control Ukraine, in the way that his Kremlin predecessors did in Cold War times, seems improbable.

HAMPSHIREMEN:

Britain's Royal Navy had a problem -- England lacked trees large enough to become masts for its ships, so, in the early 1720s, the Crown claimed all of the tall white pines in northern New England, marking them with the King's Broad Arrow (three slashes in the shape of an arrow). Eventually, the law expanded to forbidding settlers from cutting down trees more than one foot in diameter. For decades, the edict was mostly ignored. In 1766, Gov. John Wentworth decided it was time to crack down, and sent his deputy surveyor John Sherburn to search sawmills in New Hampshire. He found six offending mills in Goffstown and Weare. The Goffstown mill owners paid a fine. The Weare owners refused.

Ebenezer Mudgett, the leader of the Weare mill owners, was arrested by Sheriff Benjamin Whiting and Deputy John Quigley on April 13, 1772. Mudgett said he'd pay up in the morning, and they let him go. Then Mudgett spent the night with the townspeople planning what would be known as the Pine Tree Riot.

At dawn, Mudgett burst into Whiting's room at the Pine Tree Tavern, saying he'd brought the money, and by money, he meant 20 other men who beat Whiting. Quigley suffered the same fate, and both men were run out of town.

CLOSED SYSTEMS PRODUCE BAD OUTCOMES:

Putin has fallen into the autocrats' trap. Isolated, he is no longer able to weigh up reality as it is, but sees his fears instead. He is obsessed with what he perceives as the threat from Ukraine's westward drift, and with turning back the clock to reset the post-Cold World order. His speech  Thursday -- ranging from Russia's weakness at the time of the collapse of the Soviet Union, to Iraq, Yugoslavia and a chilling warning against Western intervention -- was hardly the product of a cool, rational mind. It could not have contrasted more sharply with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy's earlier moving appeals for peace, made directly to ordinary Russians. U.S. President Joe Biden called Russia's actions a "premeditated war."

Hubris, paranoia, military adventurism -- a heady combination, and one that has been fatal for dictators and their regimes. And Putin is starting a war Russians do not want, for which they will pay the cost.

Political scientist Daniel Treisman, in his study of autocrats' last acts, found that most regimes come to an end through mistakes, whether because they ignored change or, like Argentina's General Leopoldo Galtieri, embarked on an ill-advised war. He invaded the Falklands in 1982, assuming Britain would not fight and that his population would unite behind him. He was misguided, and the blunder was terminal.

THANKS, COVID!:

MAKE THE MANDATE SEASONAL:

Two years of wearing masks, avoiding crowds, and trying not to catch COVID-19 had a welcome, if unplanned, byproduct: many people caught fewer colds and stomach bugs. But that could soon change. At the end of the month, Massachusetts will no longer require masks in schools and has dropped its recommendation that healthy vaccinated people wear masks indoors. Doctors say that means we should brace ourselves for the return of common infections many people have blissfully dodged for the past two years.

"You will see a lot of anecdotal reports that the primary care offices and urgent cares are a little slammed," said Dr. Christina Hermos, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at UMass Memorial Children's Medical Center.

Social measures to prevent the spread of the coronavirus have disrupted the transmission of many common pathogens around the world, most notably the flu. The flu virus barely made an appearance last winter and is still markedly lower than normal this season. Viruses that cause common colds and stomach flu have also been curtailed, to varying degrees.

But as people resume social activities, doctors and scientists don't expect the respite to last.

NOW TAKE OUT OIL INFRASTRUCTURE:

The key index of Russia's main stock exchange tumbled 20 percent after a delayed opening as investors feared the effects of Western sanctions following Moscow's decision to attack Ukraine.

The RTS index was down 20.16 percent on February 24 after reopening following a suspension implemented by authorities.

The ruble crashed more than 9 percent on currency markets, prompting the Russian central bank to intervene to "stabilize" markets.

OF COURSE IT IS:

The Lexington Herald-Leader reported that the phrase came up Tuesday during a hearing in the Kentucky General Assembly, when a government official reported the state had leased two properties from a private company for $1 each for use following recent devastating storms.

State Sen. Rick Girdler, a Republican who chairs the Capital Projects and Bond Oversight Committee, asked if there were any questions.

State Rep. Walker Thomas, also a Republican, marveled at the $1 figure, and wondered, laughing, if the state could "Jew them down on the price."

"We got a representative up here who [wants to] see if you can Jew 'em down a little bit on the price," Girdler said. "That ain't the right word to use," Girdler continued. "Drop 'em down, I guess."

Both representatives soon apologized. Thomas explained that the phrase was second nature.

OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

[A]s Russia floods Telegram, TikTok, and its own state-controlled media with stories of Ukrainian aggression, people on the internet are using open source intelligence tools that have proliferated in recent years to debunk Russia's claims. Internet sleuths are debunking the Kremlin's disinformation and justification for war in real time.

Amid all this, Eliot Higgins and Bellingcat are collecting the data, fact checking it, archiving footage, and amplifying the messages online. Higgins and Bellingcat are old hands at this. They've been tracking conflict online and sifting through the morass of multiple sources and bad information for eight years now.

They've gotten good at it. "It used to be days or weeks until we had fact checks," Higgins told Motherboard over the phone. "Now we're getting it within an hour. That helps with the rapid news cycle. The question of whether these will be authentic or not is being answered very quickly. We didn't have that back in 2014."

Higgins told Motherboard that eight years of building a group of people dedicated to sorting through images and videos of war on the internet had sped up how quickly people can learn the truth behind what they see online. "There's already a network and community," he said. "We've existed for a long time and are familiar with open-source investigation.

According to Higgins, a lot of the disinformation out of Russia has been easy to debunk. On Feb. 18, the heads of the Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics announced emergency evacuations of their breakaway republics, citing sudden Ukrainian aggression. Metadata in the videos revealed they'd been filmed two days earlier, suggesting the emergency evacuation had been planned in advance.

"They basically manufactured a refugee crisis so they could put them in camps across the Russian border, so they could then be filmed by Russian state media to show evidence of this refugee crisis that they were claiming is part of this genocide that is going on," Higgins said.

IT'S NEITHER:

THE FRANCHISE SHOULD, INDEED, REQUIRE PAYING TAXES...:

Scott, a business owner and former Florida governor, didn't elaborate in his plan about what, exactly, his proposed tax hike would include.

"All Americans should pay some income tax to have skin in the game, even if a small amount," Scott wrote in the plan. "Currently over half of Americans pay no income tax."

Tax experts took notice, pointing out that Scott's suggestion was reminiscent of comments then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney made during the 2012 election when he derided "47 percent" of Americans who "pay no income tax" and "should take personal responsibility and care for their lives."

"I suspect it was not a well-vetted part of that platform that he put out," said Ryan Ellis, president of the conservative Center for a Free Economy and an IRS enrolled agent who previously worked as Americans For Tax Reform's tax policy director.

"Had it been -- internally to the Senate, and externally to the conservative tax world and other friends of Rick Scott and the NRSC -- I don't think it would have survived."

IT'S ALWAYS THE rIGHT:

Three white supremacists planned to attack the country's power grid in an attempt to incite a race war--and they were ready to die for their cause. According to their plea deals, the trio all wore "suicide necklaces" filled with fentanyl around their necks in case they were caught.

IN CASE YOU WONDERED WHY VLAD GAVE DONALD SO MUCH MONEY:

President Biden said Wednesday he will reverse last year's decision to waive sanctions on the entity and corporate officers behind the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a day after Germany froze certification of the Kremlin-backed project.

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN REPUBLICANS AND NATIONALISTS:

Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) called out fellow House Republicans on Tuesday for criticizing President Biden's response to Russia invading Ukraine.

Meanwhile, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) criticized former President Trump, saying by calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a genius, he "aids our enemies."

CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

In the new Urban Reform Institute report, we identified the fifty high­est‑growth large counties in terms of net domestic migration from 2015 to 2019. These areas grew their population at 7.5 times the rate of the country's other 3,100 counties during this period and gained 1.8 million net domestic migrants. Out of the fifty, all but seven are located in combined statistical areas (CSAs) of more than 500,000 residents. And each of these outer counties are within or close to a two-hour commute time of a central core county. Key areas include Atlanta, Dallas-Fort Worth, and Orlando.

The key demographic headed to these places is young people in prime family formation years. From 2015 to 2019, these counties saw an increase in twenty-five- to thirty-four-year-olds of 12.8 percent, almost four times the 3.4 percent growth rate in the other counties. The high­est‑growth counties also have a far higher rate of school-age children (five- to fourteen-year-olds) per household than the rest of the nation--0.66 compared to 0.43 for the other counties. The highest growth counties have 3.5 times as many school-age children per household as, for example, Manhattan and San Francisco and 75 percent more school-age children per household than other counties in the United States.

This migration is not a repeat of the "white flight" that drove peripheral growth a half century ago. To be sure, during the great mass suburbanization of the mid-twentieth century, many communities--Levittown and Lakewood are well-known examples--excluded ethnic minorities, providing planners and "smart growth" advocates a rationale to claim that single-family neighborhoods are inherently racist ever since. This assertion is seriously out of date, however. Over the past decade, non-Hispanic whites accounted for less than 4 percent of growth in suburbs and exurbs, while Latinos accounted for nearly half, with Asians, African Americans, mixed race, and other groups making up the balance.

These areas tend to be particularly attractive to well-educated immi­grants. The wildly popular Woodlands planned community near Houston is roughly 30 percent Hispanic, African American, and Asian. In Irvine, California, arguably the most successful planned development, a majority of the population is nonwhite and over 40 percent Asian. In the Tres Lagos development in McAllen, Texas, three-quarters of all buyers are middle-class Hispanics, notes developer Nick Rhodes, for houses that average under $200,000. "We have a young population that is looking for larger homes and safety," suggests the twenty-seven-year-old Rhodes. "These are people who cannot afford Irving or even Dallas but want parks and good schools."

SUPER ON-BRAND:

IT'S ALWAYS THE rIGHT:

The man who allegedly opened fire on racial justice protesters in Portland over the weekend, killing one and injuring others, has been identified by local activists and news media as a 43-year-old machinist who regularly ranted about "wanting to go shoot commies and antifa." 

Alleged gunman Benjamin Jeffrey Smith had lived in northeast Portland for about a decade. His former roommate told local news outlets The Oregonian and Oregon Public Broadcasting that he'd become increasingly "radicalized" over the Trump years, and recalled hearing him yelling "racial slurs in his room and deriding women."

TOUGH TIMES FOR TRUMPISTS:

Three white men charged in the killing of Black man Ahmaud Arbery in the southern US state of Georgia were found guilty of federal hate crimes on Tuesday.

Travis McMichael, his father Gregory McMichael, and his neighbor William "Roddie" Bryan were found guilty of violating Arbery's civil rights because of his race, as well as attempted kidnapping.

The McMichaels were also convicted of a federal firearms charge in the deadly 2020 encounter. The federal hate crime conviction carries a maximum penalty of life in prison.

All three men had already been convicted of state murder charges and sentenced to life in prison.

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

Most of California's rain and snow falls north of Sacramento during the winter, while 80% of its water use occurs in Southern California, mostly in summer. That's why canals snake across the state - it's the largest such system in the world. We estimate that about 1%-2% of the water they carry is lost to evaporation under the hot California sun.

In a 2021 study, we showed that covering all 4,000 miles of California's canals with solar panels would save more than 65 billion gallons of water annually by reducing evaporation. That's enough to irrigate 50,000 acres of farmland or meet the residential water needs of more than 2 million people. By concentrating solar installations on land that is already being used, instead of building them on undeveloped land, this approach would help California meet its sustainable management goals for both water and land resources.

Shading California's canals with solar panels would generate substantial amounts of electricity. Our estimates show that it could provide some 13 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, which is about half of the new sources the state needs to add to meet its clean electricity goals: 60% from carbon-free sources by 2030 and 100% renewable by 2045.

Installing solar panels over the canals makes both systems more efficient. The solar panels would reduce evaporation from the canals, especially during hot California summers. And because water heats up more slowly than land, the canal water flowing beneath the panels could cool them by 10 F, boosting production of electricity by up to 3%.

These canopies could also generate electricity locally in many parts of California, lowering both transmission losses and costs for consumers. Combining solar power with battery storage can help build microgrids in rural areas and underserved communities, making the power system more efficient and resilient. This would mitigate the risk of power losses due to extreme weather, human error and wildfires.

YOU'VE GOT TO WANT IT:

When the recent COVID-19 wave fueled by the omicron variant hit the U.S., no one expected it would lead to the number of deaths it did.

As of Wednesday, the nation is reporting 2,200 new COVID daily deaths on average. While this is lower than the 3,400-peak seen last winter, it's still three times higher than the number of average fatalities recorded two months ago.

MORE: COVID hospitalizations and deaths surge in Los Angeles County

Additionally, last winter, vaccines had only just started to roll out, children were not yet eligible and the conversation surrounding boosters was far off.

With around 60% of Americans fully vaccinated during the most recent wave, daily deaths from omicron are still relatively high, which begs the question: Who is dying of COVID-19 when there is such strong vaccination coverage?

Infectious disease doctors say it is still mainly unvaccinated people, most of whom are in their 30s and 40s with no underlying health issues, who are dying.

DONALD WHO?:

Last year, shortly after Republican Ed Durr was elected to New Jersey's state senate, one of his old tweets resurfaced in which he denounced Islam. Last week, the same man introduced a resolution to officially recognise two Muslim holidays. 

This change of heart occurred, according to a recent report by Politico, after Selaedin Maksut, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations-New Jersey held a meeting with the politician in November.  

Maksut reportedly didn't expect anything specific to emerge from the meeting, particularly from someone who had described Islam as a "false religion" and a "cult of hate". In the end, it made Durr a champion for an important cause of America's Muslim community - recognising Eid Al-Fitr and Eid Al-Adha holidays.  

"I was really touched that it came from an organic thought, that he took it seriously when I was describing my work, and he took that opportunity to extend that olive branch," Maksut said, according to the Politico report. 

COME ONE, COME ALL:

In a normal refugee resettlement process, the State Department determines where people go, Kinney said. The department tries to locate them in communities with people from their country and culture, he said, and then, local resettlement agencies are told to expect a certain number of people from a particular country.

With the Afghan crisis, the process was different. For one, Kinney said, things moved much faster than they typically do. Then, there were negotiations between national and local agencies about how many refugees a given local agency could take on. For Ascentria, New Hampshire's lack of housing was one constraint. Being short-staffed was another.

Kinney said the pace of the Afghan resettlement has been unprecedented.

"We will have resettled more refugees in the last 120 days than we did in the last three years combined," he said. And it wasn't easy because much of the infrastructure agencies like Ascentria depend on had been dismantled during the Trump administration, when the country accepted only around 15,000 refugees per year, down from the 90,000 to 100,000 typically accepted. That left Ascentria scrambling to hire and train new staff to meet the needs of new arrivals.

For Wazir, it took 11 years in a refugee camp in Uzbekistan before she and her family were able to come to the United States. The time in the refugee camp was hard. They lived with the constant fear that a police officer might come to their apartment at night and take them to jail. There were times when they were instructed not to open the door if someone knocked. Wazir was enrolled in school there but was misunderstood by other school children, who called her a Taliban kid and ran from her in fear on her first day in the school. She was 7 years old at the time.

"It's hard to grasp those moments," she said. "It sticks with me. We might forget the good stories of our lives, but the bad ones stick with you."

It was her father's idea to come to New Hampshire. He wanted to be in the countryside, a calm and peaceful place where his daughter could go to school without fear that something would stop her from pursuing her dream. He wanted a place that was convenient, accessible, and on the smaller side. "The biggest dream was for me to go to school and be able to stand up for myself," Wazir said. It's a dream she has been able to realize in New Hampshire.

ALL THAT EFFORT AND MONEY VLAD WASTED ON DONALD...:

A Republican lobbyist was earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote one of Vladimir Putin's top geopolitical priorities at the same time he was helping to shape Donald Trump's first major foreign policy speech.

In the first two quarters of 2016, the firm of former Reagan administration official Richard Burt received $365,000 for work he and a colleague did to lobby for a proposed natural-gas pipeline owned by a firm controlled by the Russian government, according to congressional lobbying disclosures reviewed by POLITICO. The pipeline, opposed by the Polish government and the Obama administration, would complement the original Nord Stream, allowing more Russian gas to reach central and western European markets while bypassing Ukraine and Belarus, extending Putin's leverage over Europe.

HEY, IT'S A LIVING:

After Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole is the best remembered of the singers who dominated American popular music between the end of the big-band era and the advent of rock 'n' roll. Chiefly known today as a performer of romantic ballads, he had a dark, grainy baritone voice with which he sang in a style at once intimate and unmannered. While Cole's reputation went into a temporary eclipse as a result of his early death--a lifelong chain smoker, he died of lung cancer in 1965, three decades before Sinatra gave his last public performance--he was restored to prominence in 1991 when his daughter Natalie, herself a talented pop singer, released a single of "Unforgettable" in which his original performance of the song, recorded 40 years earlier, was electronically superimposed on her own to create a "virtual duet." The record put Cole back in the limelight, and he has been there ever since.

Comparatively few of Cole's latter-day fans, however, know that he was more than a singer. In fact, he had started out as a jazz pianist of the highest distinction, the leader of the King Cole Trio, a "cocktail combo" (as such small groups were known in the '30s and '40s) that featured both his singing and his playing. To this day, singer-instrumentalists such as Diana Krall and John Pizzarelli continue to model their groups on the King Cole Trio's stylish, tightly routined records, and Cole's own brilliant playing left its mark on any number of younger pianists, among them Ahmad Jamal, Oscar Peterson, George Shearing, and Bill Evans, who called him "probably the most underrated jazz pianist in the history of jazz."

Had Cole continued to lead the trio, he would be generally acknowledged as one of the most important jazz pianists of the 20th century. But the ballads he sang with his trio were so enthusiastically received by the public that he started cutting vocal records accompanied by studio orchestras, and these proved even more successful than their jazz-oriented predecessors. As a result, the King Cole Trio disbanded in 1951, and it was as a pop singer, not a jazz instrumentalist, that Cole was known thereafter and to this day.

Incredibly, Cole's singing was as extraordinary as his playing. With the sole exception of Louis Armstrong, he is the only major jazz musician to have been identically distinguished and influential as both an instrumentalist and a vocalist. Moreover, his appeal, like that of Armstrong, crossed racial lines, and did so at a time when much of America was still segregated, a fact that led to his being assaulted on stage by a group of white supremacists during a concert he was giving in Birmingham in 1956. 

DON'T LET HIM OFF THE HOOK:

VLAD WHO?:

Fyodor Gorozhanko, a former member of Navany's team, said at the trial being held inside a penal colony in the Vladimir region, some 200 kilometers east of Moscow, that investigators imposed pressure on him and tried to instruct him what to say during the trial.

Gorozhanko made the statement on February 21 during the resumption of the trial on embezzlement charges that Navalny rejects as politically motivated.

Gorozhanko said that, before the start of the trial, an investigator handed him the text of his testimony to doublecheck if he remembered it by heart.

"Although I am a witness called by the prosecution, I am actually making a statement now as a defense witness. I consider all Navalny's actions legal and corresponding to the current legislation," Gorozhanko said, adding that the case against Navalny is absurd.

UKRAINE NEEDS TO JUST BLOW IT UP:

Ukraine views the Putin-backed project as an existential threat to its security, as it would deprive the country of billions of dollars in gas-transit fees and allow Russia to deliver gas directly to the heart of Europe.

WINNING THE WoT:

On a prominent podcast two years ago, a Saudi academic spoke of the need to rewrite the history of his country by disconnecting the story of the state from the fight against un-Islamic practices initiated by a tribal-religious alliance between Muhammad bin Saud and Muhammad bin Abdel Wahhab in 1744. As long as the two stories are connected, Khaled al-Dakheel argued, the Saudis are stifled by Wahhabism both at home and abroad. Dakheel, whose book on the subject was until recently banned, said the Saudis should emphasize that the kingdom had been established 17 years before Wahhabism entered the political equation. In his words, to Saudi podcaster Abdulrahman Abumalih:

We've written the state history improperly, which is why most Saudis don't know the history of the Saudi state or the Arabian Peninsula, unfortunately. You've reduced it all to polytheism. You've told people that the whole story was about polytheism: Sheikh Muhammad bin Abdel Wahab came to fight polytheism, Muhammad bin Saud joined him, and together they fought polytheism. ... By doing so, you've dwarfed the state. We should instead teach the history of the state, which is bigger than that. We haven't studied the history of our state; we've only been taught the words of Ibn Ghannam and Ibn Bishr (the biographers of Wahhabism) and we're still doing it.

Dakheel's revisionist remarks were not particularly rare for Saudi intellectuals to make against Wahhabism. However, talk about the need to revisit the historical connection is remarkable, and its timing was unlikely to be spontaneous. It came against the backdrop of unprecedented statements and moves made by the crown prince, Muhammad bin Salman, or MbS, involving the role of Wahhabism in the country, from restraining the clerics to announcing initiatives to revise and update religious texts.

The latest of these moves to marginalize Wahhabism is the setting of a new official date to mark the founding of the Saudi state ("youm al-ta'sees" in Arabic) on Feb. 22, in addition to the usual national day ("al-youm al-watani") on Sept. 23. The national day in September celebrates the formation of the nation under the name of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in 1932, while the new date celebrates Muhammad bin Saud's takeover of Diriyah, now widely referred to as "the founding capital," in 1727. The new date marks the official beginning of the new dynamic that Dakheel called for.

What makes this story more significant than a simple political decision to rewrite the national narrative is that the fate of Wahhabism is no longer up to Saudi Arabia, just as the interests of Saudi Arabia is not tied to Wahhabism any longer. Wahhabism's decline as a movement has been many years in the making, and this has something to do with the political shift pushed by bin Salman -- but only to a certain degree. The decline preceded him and would have happened without these political changes, if not at the same speed or so quietly. This distinction matters, because it means that other factors contributed to the waning power of Wahhabism both in the kingdom and in the wider region, and it is this internal decay and the surrounding environment that make Wahhabism's current troubles deep and permanent.

OBVIOUS BEDFELLOWS:

"Let me simplify matters by saying that in my parlor politics as well as in open-air statements . . . I content myself with remarking that what is bad for the Reds is good for me," Nabokov told the New York Times in 1968. Nabokov, of course, was not answering this question off-the-cuff over a telephone line, but in a carefully composed written response to queries sent in advance. Which is perhaps why the continuation of his answer went into more detail without giving too much away:

I do not have any neatly limited political views or rather that such views as I have shade off into a vague old-fashioned liberalism. Much less vaguely--quite adamantically, or even admantinely--I am aware of a central core of spirit in me that flashes and jeers at the brutal farce of totalitarian states, such as Russia, and her embarrassing tumors, such as China. A feature of my inner prospect is the absolute abyss yawning between the barbed-wire tangle of police states and the spacious freedom of thought we enjoy in America and Western Europe.

What Nabokov did not reveal to the paper was that, by this point, he had been such an avid reader of National Review that William F. Buckley had given him and his wife, Vera, a lifetime subscription. ("The National Review has always been a joy to read . . . and your articles in the Herald Tribune counteract wonderfully the evil and trash of its general politics," Nabokov wrote Buckley in 1973.) A couple of years later, in August 1970, Vera Nabokov sent a check for $49.95 (nearly $360 in today's dollars) to cover a two-year subscription to the magazine. "As long as I am alive, you will receive National Review with my compliments because you made the mistake of being so generous with me," Buckley replied a month later.

The Buckley-Nabokov friendship dated to the late 1950s, around the time of the American publication, and astounding success, of Lolita. The novel's triumph after several frustrating years of limbo, including its original, error-filled, argument-inciting 1955 publication by the Olympia Press, was the culmination of the Nabokovs' time in the United States, a far cry from their imperiled emigre status escaping the Nazis in 1940. Lolita meant freedom, not just from tyranny, but from having to earn a living in academia. The novel's success eventually afforded Vladimir and Vera the means to leave Ithaca, New York, where Nabokov taught literature at Cornell University, for Montreux, Switzerland, in 1961.

The Montreux Palace Hotel was about an hour's drive from Gstaad, where William F. and Patricia Buckley wintered in the early parts of the year. There was skiing, dedicated time to write--in later years Buckley would work on his Blackford Oakes spy thrillers exclusively during his time there--and choice friends across ideological spectra and the arts, most notably the actor David Niven and the economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

The Nabokovs were not part of this circle. But Bill and Pat made it a point to visit the other couple whenever they were in residence at Gstaad, and corresponded regularly when they were elsewhere. WFB wanted Nabokov to come on Firing Line as a guest, but Nabokov demurred, "because he would need to memorize everything he would then say," Buckley told his longtime editor at Doubleday, Sam Vaughan, in 1996. "I said, come on, your extemporaneous talk is absolutely lapidary. He said no, he had never spoken in public in his entire life, including lectures to students, without first memorizing what he was going to say."

The conversation between Buckley and Nabokov revolved around, as Buckley described it in his moving obituary of Nabokov, "the literary scene, the political scene, inflation, bad French, cupitidous publishers, the exciting breakthrough in his son's career, and what am I working on now?" Buckley thrilled to receive a copy of Transparent Things, Nabokov's last novel published during his lifetime. (There would be some discussion of the work-in-progress that eventually saw the light of day as The Original of Laura, too.)

At one meal, Buckley remarked that Nabokov seemed to be rather pleased with himself.

"I am," Nabokov said. "I finished my OSS."

"What's OSS?"

"Obligatory Sex Scene."

Buckley would send Nabokov copies of his own books; he even modeled a character--the father of a Soviet spy--featured in his second Blackford Oakes novel, Stained Glass, after Nabokov. "I told him I was going to do it," WFB told an interviewer in 1978. (Nabokov was, apparently, amused, but not that amused.)

He also brought or sent other people's works, including, oddly, two paperbacks by the historical fiction writer Mary Renault. After sending Nabokov an Ezra Pound anthology edited by Hugh Kenner, the author replied: "Though I detest Pound and the costume jewelry of his verse, I must say Kenner's approach is very interesting."

Buckley would later send the Nabokovs inscribed copies of two books, The Governor Listeth and American Conservative Thought in the Twentieth Century, for which the couple thanked him profusely--as well as for WFB's "rare understanding of the Soviet atmosphere" in his NR articles about Russia: "The more such observant travelers as you the better."

AS EVER...:

The fundamental problem the Church must confront is that, like any organisation, it needs rules of process to function and yet also faces an eternal gap between what rules say and the expectations people have of them. It needs capacity to transcend its own protocols in favour of wider considerations such as popular perceptions or the need to provide mercy to souls.

The risk of simply deferring to a theological logic, as the ecclesiastical authorities appear to have done in Father Arango's case, is that the conclusions themselves only invite fresh doubts. Can changing one's pronouns really be enough to invalidate the liturgy? That's not very "twenty-first-century". And what of the fact that the Church itself has revised its liturgies regularly over the years? If certain words were good enough at one historical moment, why aren't they in another now? Do any changes in canonical formulations have implications for Christian souls who received the sacrament under previous, now defunct, ones?

In the past theologians were very good at incorporating people's concerns about rules into their understandings of God and his works. Hence both Purgatory and Limbo emerged as concepts which grappled with the ethical problem of what to do with those for whom a theological fate of being condemned to Hell seemed manifestly unjust.

We live in a new age of legalism in the Western World in which process rules -- such as those surrounding the baptismal formula -- sometimes have seemed to acquire a new theological importance far beyond their value as means to ends. But the Church, as an aspirant to higher truths, surely also needs to exercise compassion in how it applies its rules.

Perhaps tellingly, the Church still has no official doctrine on Limbo for infants so it may be wishful thinking to hope for full satisfaction for Father Arango's disenchanted parishioners. And yet they have praised him for his gentleness and diligence even as they accept that, in resigning, he has taken the right course.

CAPRICORN 2?:

Sunday marks 60 years since NASA astronaut John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth. 

On Feb. 20, 1962, the "Mercury Seven" member set out on the agency's three-orbit Mercury-Atlas 6 mission aboard the spacecraft he named Friendship 7.

New images released to Fox News show the mission - and Glenn - in remarkable detail.

The pictures, created by "Apollo Remastered" author Andy Saunders, were made using source footage provided by Stephen Slater, who headed up the archive research and production for "Apollo 11."

Saunders, who has previously shared remastered images of the Apollo 15 moon landing, regularly posts new images on Twitter and Instagram.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

A Rhode Islander recently released from prison has been identified as the previously unidentified congressional candidate who received hacked information from Russian operatives during the 2016 campaign.

Documents newly posted to the Federal Election Commission website show Republican H. Russell Taub acknowledged sending a Twitter message to the account "Guccifer 2.0" seeking assistance in his unsuccessful bid to unseat Democratic Congressman David Cicilline that year.

Robert S. Mueller, the special counsel who investigated Russian interference in the 2016 election, identified Guccifer 2.0 as a handle used by Russian operatives associated with the GRU, a Russian spy agency, to distribute hacked material on prominent Democrats. Mueller's team later revealed in an indictment that an unnamed candidate for Congress had sought assistance from Guccifer, but did not identify the individual as Taub.

MAKE DEMANDS OF HIM:

Now is certainly not the moment for Boris Johnson to join his French and German counterparts by pressuring President Zelensky of Ukraine to make concessions. It was reported last week that both Emmanuel Macron and Olaf Scholz, on their recent visits and meetings with Volodomyr Zelensky, have urged him to accept not only the renunciation of NATO membership but the Russian interpretation of the Minsk II process in the Donbas dispute. That process is based on a ceasefire under conditions agreed under duress in 2015. It is seen by the Russians as requiring recognition of their puppet "republics" -- something that Zelensky could never accept, either de facto or de jure. Indeed, he was elected in 2019 on a platform of rejecting it. Such an interpretation of Minsk II amounts to allowing a Trojan horse into Ukraine.

Over the weekend, Zelensky reiterated his insistence on the territorial integrity of Ukraine in his magnificent address to the Security Conference in Munich. Boris Johnson politely rejected the charge of appeasement made by Zelensky, but that is precisely what Macron and Scholz are proposing. Boris should impress upon Biden the need to support Zelensky rather than undermining him. Only by showing solidarity with Ukraine will the West keep those Russian tanks on the right side of the border.

As Mrs Thatcher told George H.W. Bush after Saddam invaded Kuwait: "This is no time to go wobbly, George." Boris will choose his words more carefully, but Joe Biden needs to hear the same unambiguous message from the British this time -- and pass it on to the Kremlin. If Putin invades Ukraine, he will rue the day.

YES, IT'S STILL iDENTITY POLITICS WHEN YOU DO IT:

Undermining biological realities and legitimate callings.

One of the dangers of "identity" is to pit the body against the self. Like the Gnostics of old, modern critical scholars like Simone de Beauvoir view of the body as "something to be overcome" through technology rather than something good and God-given to be embraced.

In contrast, Christianity has always offered a middle ground between absolutizing the body and dismissing the body. On the one hand, Galatians 3:27-28 relativizes our this-worldly situatedness as less important than our union with Christ ("You are all one in Christ"). On the other hand, 1 Corinthians 7:17 teaches each person is assigned a particular place to live, a gender, and set of life circumstances to steward faithfully rather than flee: "let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him."

Since "identity" tends to be used as a vacuous category, it places a premium on choice through the negation of other identities such as man, brother, father, and son. Thus "identity in Christ" is often used to wrongly undermine legitimate biblical callings, such as gender and nationality. Scripture teaches that we are born into relationships of mutual obligation, as sons, daughters, fathers, and mothers, regardless of our personal choices. To insist, "I'm not American because my identity is in Christ" ignores the boundary lines of geography and time that God has allotted for us (Acts 17:26) and calls good (Ps. 16:6). To say, "I'm a stay-at-home mom but I identify as a creative writer and thinker" downplays the legitimacy of motherhood as a divinely sanctioned vocation (Gen. 3:20; Titus 2:4-5).

If identity is chosen, what place is there for any other obligation than being faithful to yourself? In contrast, Scripture teaches that we are embedded in given relationships of mutual obligation to faithfully steward and embrace.

Preaching a therapeutic gospel

The modern use of identity as dignity catechizes us to seek recognition and see the self's sense of worth as the primary goal worth pursuing. As Carl Trueman explains in his book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, "The question of identity in the modern world is a question of dignity."[15]

But rather than starting with God's glory and holiness, the contemporary "therapeutic gospel" often makes God a servant of man's sense of well-being and Christ's atonement primarily a statement of man's worth and loveliness.

This is one of the dangers of the baptismal testimony that says, "I used to find my identity in sports" but I now find my identity in Christ." To modern ears there is nothing scandalous, objectionable, or surprising about such a personal narrative. It fits the modern mold of life as a quest for personal fulfillment and self-discovery, and is most likely to earn the condescending encomium, "Good for you!" That leads straight into the third danger.

Subjectivizing faith as feeling rather than objective reality

To say that "I now find my identity in Christ" falls into the trap of reducing morality to feelings and emotions. Following Alasdair McIntyre, Trueman discusses how "emotivism presents preferences as if they were truth claims."[16] But the Bible always talks about our position (to use a theological term) in objective rather than subjective terms. When Paul wants to emphasize who the Corinthians are, he tells them, "you are not your own" (1 Corinthians 6:19). And because reality is given or assigned, it places obligations on us: "you were bought with a price, so glorify God in your body" (v. 20).

POOR JOE, HE WAS DOING SO WELL UNTIL NOW:

President Biden agreed "in principle" to hold a summit with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, the White House confirmed on Sunday evening.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

The most striking feature of Jonathan Franzen's new book, Crossroads, is its sexual conservatism. The novel is an ambitious, almost six-hundred-page first installment of a family trilogy which has an equally ambitious title, A Key to All Mythologies. Yet for all the statements it makes--about altruism, about the dangers of over-indulgence in navel-gazing individualism, about the inefficacy of social justice, about mental illness, about faith in God and redemption, about liberalism and religion--it's sex where Franzen seems to have the most to say.

Crossroads is both formulaic and moralistic, and it's not very de­manding from a literary perspective. I remarked to a friend while read­ing it, without any irony, that it reminded me of Harry Potter. Or maybe, more generously, A Christmas Carol. Yet I don't mean to sug­gest that it's a bad book.

Crossroads is a great book. It's well-written, cinematic, and entertaining. And its clear, unambiguous lessons are lessons that readers need to be reminded of--in some cases, long to be reminded of. In a world filled with uncritical messages about the importance of introspection, self-expression, and sexual liberation, Crossroads calls into question whether all this freedom to look inward has done us all that much good.

The conclusion it comes to is clearly no.

NO ONE MISSES OFFICES:

More people are choosing to work from home because they want to, even if their office is open and they're less concerned about Covid risks, according to new findings from Pew Research Center.

According to a January survey of 5,889 workers, 61% of people working from home today say they're not going into their workplace because they don't want to, and 38% say their office is closed. It's a reversal from October 2020, when 64% of people were working from home because their office was closed, and 36% were doing so out of preference.

Even as more offices open up, "people are making a conscious choice to work from home, rather than just out of necessity," says Kim Parker, Pew's director of social trends research.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

When Thurgood Marshall arrived at the Capitol for his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on a July day in 1967, the 58-year-old lawyer was the most celebrated legal advocate in the civil rights movement. He had braved death threats and successfully argued more than two dozen cases before the Supreme Court, including decisions that ensured Black voters could cast primary ballots in Texas and ended government-mandated segregation in public schools.

But that wealth of experience and proof of surpassing talent did not stop Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator from South Carolina, from treating Marshall like a none-too-bright schoolboy, as he quizzed the judge for an hour with more than 60 arcane historical and legal questions dating from events in the 19th century.

Who drafted the 13th Amendment? What was the name of the committee that reviewed the 14th Amendment in 1866, and who were its members? What was the objection to the first section of its original draft? Thurmond's barrage of "gotchas" felt never-ending.

"I don't know, sir," Marshall replied again and again, as the senator pressed on.

The esoteric probing was Thurmond's way of hinting that "Marshall wasn't intellectually up to the job," said Harvard Law School professor Mark Victor Tushnet, who clerked for Marshall and has written two books on him.

Whisper campaigns grow as President Biden nears choice for Supreme Court

It was a strategy some other segregationist senators also deployed against Marshall at the time. And it's one that, more than a half a century later, the first Black woman to be named to the Supreme Court may well face, too -- though, likely, in an updated form. Thurmond's unabashed racism has given way to something subtler, but no less insidious: The claim that a justice nominated in part because of his or her race is presumptively less qualified, that the bar must have been lowered.

THERE'S STILL TIME TO TEACH JOE THE ICKY SHUFFLE:

On the phone from Kiev, Colonel General Ihor Smeshko says he is not inclined to read too much into the Russian army's logistics. He was head of Ukraine's domestic intelligence service and later a candidate for president. 'From the military point of view, Russian Federation has prepared everything needed to start the war,' he said, but he still did not want to believe that the 'tsar' in the Kremlin had committed to the 'full craziness' of an invasion. 'It would be the beginning of the end of Russian Federation.'

It may seem odd to talk about Russia collapsing when it's the Ukrainians digging trenches, but Vladimir Putin's regime faces two dangers. The first is economic sanctions. The second is casualties and the reaction if coffins start to arrive back from Ukraine. The Ukrainians are prepared to fight and have anti-tank weapons from the US and Britain. Russian convoys would be vulnerable to ambush. This might not be like the quick and relatively bloodless Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.

One estimate is that Putin would need half a million troops if he were serious about invading Ukraine.

W-H-I-N-Y:

According to clinical psychologist Dr Patapia Tzotzoli, the appeal of Wordle is that it conforms to the theory of self-determination.

"The theory suggests we can become self-determined when our three innate psychological needs - autonomy, competence and connection - are met," she says. "Wordle enables autonomy because we choose to take a few minutes out of our day to play it. It offers competence because we can solve a puzzle and fare better than others. And in terms of connection, it fosters a sense of belonging to a wider community. It hits all the right notes to activate our motivation to keep going back."

But the more popular it becomes, the more complaints it provokes. The agitated talk of caulk followed immediately after the doubling-up crisis of the previous day. One of the appeals of Wordle is that everyone tackles the same word, at least within the English-speaking world - there are now versions in more than 90 languages. Players know that when they are struggling to get "knoll" or "siege" it's a specific struggle shared with millions of others. This is the "connection".

But last week there was a sudden disconnect. Instead of a single answer, there were two: aroma and agora, depending on whether or not you were using the old or new URL. The NYT decided to drop agora because it was too arcane (excuse me, caulk?) and replace it with aroma, but some unrefreshed browsers got the original choice instead.

Cue outrage of the kind more normally associated with gross infractions of the moral code, like flashing the Queen or swearing at David Attenborough. The judgment doing the rounds on Twitter was "scandal". And many players felt that the one-word-a-day contract had been irrevocably broken.

Things came to a head last week with a deceptively simple word: shake. That was exactly what many users were left doing with their heads. To complete the puzzle in four guesses seems to be the par score for Wordle. Doing it in three is a jolt of satisfaction, in two is smugly pleasurable, and in one is pure luck. But failing to do it within the allotted six is a wretched study in self-recrimination.

That was the result for large numbers of players when they were lured into writing "shame", "shape", "shave", "shade", "shale" or "share", but not "shake". Disillusioned - or perhaps simply defeated - players began to announce that they were off to Quordle, a more taxing version of the game which involves completing four grids simultaneously.

WAG-THE-DON:

ROSTOV-ON-DON -- If hundreds of thousands of refugees from Eastern Ukraine's Donbas are about to descend on the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don, you can't tell from looking.

After authorities in the breakaway Donetsk and Luhansk People's Republics on Friday ordered the evacuation of the elderly, women and children amid unsubstantiated claims that a Ukrainian attack is imminent, Rostov -- the closest major Russian city to the region -- should in theory be gearing up for an influx of people.

But despite local authorities declaring a state of emergency in Rostov, when The Moscow Times visited the southern city on Saturday, there was little evidence of war fever or refugees. 

PARENT BETTER:

School mask mandates have become something of a political lightning rod in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic--and, in recent weeks, the dominos have started to fall as one state after another has announced plans to lift their mandates.

Some parents and teachers have cited concerns that masks harm kids by impairing their ability to breathe, slowing their social and emotional development, and causing them anxiety. But experts say that the science doesn't back up those worries.

It's understandable why there might be confusion, says Thomas Murray, a pediatrician at the Yale University School of Medicine. There's no question that masking reduces the spread of disease, but the evidence is less cut and dry about how masking affects kids emotionally and developmentally over the age of two. To answer that definitively would require that researchers asking people to shed their masks for a randomized trial, the gold standard in science, which would be unethical. So, most masking research is based on retrospective real-life observations that can be more easily cherry-picked to argue one side or the other of the debate over mask mandates.

"But we do have this human experiment that's been going on with kids wearing masks at school, and we know that we haven't seen those fears of health risks realized," says Theresa Guilbert, a pediatric pulmonologist who is a member of the American Academy of Pediatrics Section on Pulmonary and Sleep Medicine.

She and other experts say most evidence suggests that masking doesn't harm children--and that it benefits them in more ways than one. Not only do masks protect kids from COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases, but studies show that schools with mask policies in place are more likely to stay open, which decades of research show is particularly critical for kids' mental health and development. [...]

How masks affect mental health

Similarly, while some argue that school masking mandates are harmful to a child's mental health, experts say the evidence suggests the opposite. Guilbert says the most significant signal of the pandemic's toll on mental health came early in the pandemic. Back then children who were doing remote learning experienced increased levels of anxiety and depression because they weren't at school with their peers.

Gilliam and Murray, the Yale researchers, were also concerned about how school shutdowns were affecting the mental health of kids and their stressed-out parents alike. With that in mind, they decided early in the pandemic to investigate the most effective strategies for keeping schools and early childcare programs open.

In May 2020, the researchers surveyed 6,654 childcare professionals in all 50 U.S. states to find out which COVID-19 mitigation tactics they were using, including social distancing, symptom screening, and masking. Then, a year later, they followed up to see if those programs had been forced to close. Their resulting analysis shows that childcare facilities with mask requirements for kids older than two were 13 percent more likely to have remained open than those where kids were not masked.

As with many of the other studies on masking in schools, Gilliam and Murray concede that their study is limited: It's based on real-world observations and could not control for other factors--like, say, whether the adults and children who masked also avoided travel throughout the same period. But it still provides more compelling evidence that masking policies have more potential to help rather than hurt a child's mental health.

"We can't wear masks forever, but you can't have kids missing 10 days of school every so often because of quarantine," Murray says.

Gilliam says blaming masks for the depression and anxiety in kids stems from a natural desire to protect them. But he suspects it's not the masking that causes stress in classrooms. "It's the trauma of COVID that the masks were intended to prevent," he says. "When you have an ache and a pain, it's the cut on your arm not the Band-Aid that went over it that's causing the problem. The purpose of the mask is to reduce all the other traumas--traumas that we know for an absolute fact harm children."

THE HARD PART IS TRICKING HIM INTO INVADING:

At the crucial gathering in Munich, Johnson warned of a protracted battle after any invasion that Russia could not contain.

He said: "A lightning war would be followed by a long and hideous period of reprisals and revenge and insurgency, and Russian parents would mourn the loss of young Russian soldiers, who in their way are every bit as innocent as the Ukrainians now bracing themselves for attack.

"If Ukraine is overrun by brute force, I fail to see how a country encompassing nearly a quarter of a million square miles - the biggest nation in Europe apart from Russia itself - could then be held down and subjugated for ever."

MITCH WILL EAT HIM ALIVE:

The GOP-controlled Florida Senate and its Republican president, Wilton Simpson, bucked DeSantis recently on a series of high-profile priorities for the governor. They have refused to go along with DeSantis' proposed congressional maps, resisted fulfilling his $100 billion-plus state budget and rejected his attempts to reign in tech and social media companies.

In a sign of how personal the clash has become, Republicans haven't agreed to fund a $100 million request from the governor's wife for cancer research. DeSantis' wife, Casey, was diagnosed with breast cancer last year and recently completed chemotherapy.

According to more than a dozen state lawmakers, members of the governor's administration and Florida political operatives, the conflicts stem from DeSantis using hard-nosed tactics to strong-arm the Legislature, disagreements between lawmakers and the governor's new chief of staff and DeSantis' lobbying campaign to pressure Simpson to pass a long-stalled anti-union bill. That effort peaked after conservative groups contacted by the governor's team bought $75,000 in ads against Simpson in his own district.

YOU CAN EVEN PRETEND IT'S nATIONALISM/pROTECTIONISM...:

It's called the Canadian Free Trade Agreement (CFTA). Look closely and you'll see that the name of the trade deal doesn't say who Canada signed it with. That's because Canada didn't sign CFTA with any other country. Rather, Canada signed CFTA with itself. And that's what makes CFTA so interesting: It seeks to increase commerce inside of Canada by lowering inter-provisional trade barriers. The U.S. can learn a lot from CFTA.

Free trade is difficult to achieve within countries, let alone between them. Canada is a big country geographically, which adds to the costs of trade. But there are also provincial policies that get in the way. According to one estimate, the tariff equivalent of these policies is a staggering 6.9 percent. To cut these costs, Canada's Agreement on Internal Trade (AIT) came on line in 1995, just seven months after the World Trade Organization (WTO) made its debut. These trade deals are complementary.

By 2015, the amended AIT included 18 chapters on topics from government procurement to investment. AIT had some design flaws, made worse by an abundance of provincial carve-outs. Still, by 1998, the International Monetary Fund concluded that the AIT had made real progress in liberalizing inter-provincial trade. 

CFTA is more comprehensive than the AIT. For one thing, the provinces agreed to a "negative list" approach, meaning exceptions were negotiated, not treated as the default. 

NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

WE WERE PROMISED THE YELLOW MENACE!:

The Justice Department's abandonment of a high-profile prosecution of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering professor for allegedly hiding his ties to China was triggered by a senior Energy Department official declaring that the professor's actions were harmless, a newly disclosed government report suggests.

IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

In interviews this week, Senate Democrats suggested that they would also like to see a broad bipartisan vote. While they stressed that winning over Republicans shouldn't be the deciding factor for Biden, they argued that it would send a signal to the public that the high court isn't as politicized as many perceive it to be.

"For the institution, it's important because the Supreme Court has become so polarized that a bipartisan vote might well help to begin to restore some of the credibility it has lost," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). "But I don't think that ought to be a decisive question to the president."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

The State Department on Friday approved a long-awaited $6 billion deal to sell Poland 250 Abrams tanks, an announcement that comes as more U.S. troops and aircraft flood into the country in the face of a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced the deal early Friday while in a Warsaw press conference alongside his Polish counterpart Mariusz Blaszczak.

"What Mr. Putin did not want was a stronger NATO on his flank, and that's exactly what he has today," Austin said.

YEAH, BUT, BENGHAZI!:

An update on Red Covid: The partisan gap has continued to grow -- with Covid deaths higher in heavily Republican areas -- during the Omicron wave, but that gap is growing more slowly than before.

🧵 https://t.co/LURR9Am2hR

— David Leonhardt (@DLeonhardt) February 18, 2022

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Two words, taboo for many in France because they evoke a conspiracy theory embraced by white supremacists, have been haunting the French presidential campaign.

"Great replacement" rolls off the tongue of presidential candidate Eric Zemmour, an outsider with views to the right of the far-right who has made the term the underpinning of his campaign. But when mainstream conservative presidential candidate Valerie Pecresse pronounced them at her first major rally last weekend, politicians and pundits screamed foul, saying she had crossed a red line.

The "great replacement" is the false claim that the native populations of France and other Western countries are being overrun by non-white immigrants -- notably Muslims -- who are allegedly supplanting, and one day will erase, Christian civilization and its values. The claim, rooted in racist ideology once used to persecute Jews and newly popularized by a French author, has inspired deadly attacks in recent years from New Zealand to El Paso, Texas.

A DEMONSTRATION OF HOW POWERFUL WOKEISM IS PROBABLY ISN

I'm calling it: Wokeism has peaked. Yes, it will remain a highly influential movement, and it will probably continue to spread globally. But in the U.S. at least, wokeism and the woke will ebb.

By wokeism, I refer to a movement that, on the positive side, is highly aware of racism and social injustice, and is galvanized toward raising awareness. On the negative side, it can be preachy, alienating, overly concerned with symbols and self-righteous.

The turning point for the fortunes of the woke may be this week's school board election in San Francisco, where three members were recalled by a margin of more than 70%. 

For many Asian Americans in the city, especially the large Chinese American community, the results were an affirmation of the group's voting power, coming with a high degree of organizing, turnout and intensity not seen in many years. In an election where every registered voter received a ballot, overall turnout was relatively low at 26 percent; turnout among the 30,000 people who requested Chinese-language ballots was significantly higher at 37 percent.

NO ONE READS BLOGS:

Blogs nowadays are a little bit like cathode-ray tube televisions--obsolete, still out there in large numbers, and exhibiting a lifespan longer than many would have thought. When I say "blogs," I don't just mean spaces where writers regularly hold forth in a conversational tone. I mean true blogs: those old-fashioned publications, usually written solo and hosted on Blogger.com or Tumblr or early versions of WordPress, complete with a "blogroll" that often stretches back many years, a friendly, chaotic comments section, and retro widgets like pageview counters and ancient social media icons.

Although the vast majority of blogs stopped publishing or disappeared long ago, among the survivors are some of quite high quality. The depth of their archives, and the hundreds of thousands of words contained therein, are a testament to how seriously their writers take their hobby. And it is mostly a hobby. If writers on these legacy platforms found ways to make their work pay, it was no thanks to the platforms themselves. [...]

Quite often, a reader can only venture a guess as to why a blog has ended. 

THE UNNATURAL rIGHT:

Israelis who recovered from COVID-19 and were vaccinated with a single dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine are far better protected against reinfection than those who only have natural immunity, a large-scale Israeli study suggested.

The study, published this week in the Annals of Internal Medicine, reported those who were vaccinated after infection were 82 percent less likely to contract the virus following their initial bout.

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

Throughout the 21st century, the U.S. government has shifted away from oil-friendly policies and embraced more green technology.

But we're still very reliant on oil... In 2019, road transport made up 70% of America's oil consumption. So there's lots of room for more sustainable approaches.

And that's why electric vehicles ("EVs") have become such a hot topic... and a top national priority.

Now, boosting the U.S. EV industry will take some effort... To make that happen, we need to electrify roads, involve the private sector, and get a little government support.

The $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill aims to transform U.S. transportation in just that way... $5 billion is earmarked for a massive network of EV charging stations across the country. The Biden administration has also promised to increase the number of EV charging stations from 100,000 to 500,000.

This government push has already sparked a wave of private-sector spending...

The Australian EV-technology developer Tritium is set to break ground later this year on a factory that will build EV charging stations in Lebanon. The new plant is expected to produce about 30,000 charging stations each year. [...]

And that's just the beginning...

Siemens, a multinational technology leader, plans to begin manufacturing alternating-current ("AC") chargers in the U.S. this year. Ultimately, the company aims to produce over 1 million EV chargers by 2025.

Another example is Electrify America, the largest ultra-fast direct-current ("DC") charging network in the U.S. This company is investing $2 billion over 10 years in Zero Emission Vehicle ("ZEV") infrastructure. It plans to have more than 1,800 charging stations in the U.S. and Canada by 2026.

To be clear, I'm not in love with the government picking winners and losers in this or any other industry. That said, anyone who has driven a Tesla knows how spectacular it is. In 2020, Teslas made up 79% of all EVs sold in the U.S. So it's likely that consumer demand for these cars will remain strong.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Former President Donald Trump, as well his children Ivanka and Donald Jr., must sit for depositions in the New York attorney general's civil investigation of their business practices, a New York judge ruled Thursday.

INVASION WOULD HAVE BEEM PREFERABLE, BUT HUIMILIATION WILL DO:

One hundred and thirty thousand troops is a lot: but not enough to subdue a country as large as Ukraine with highly motivated and experienced armed forces, even though they are technologically inferior to the modernised Russian army.

So what exactly is Vladimir Putin's military buildup for? It has failed as intimidation of a West afraid of war. It united the West instead of dividing it, prompting the UK, Poland and the United States to supply significant quantities of equipment and the EU and United States to offer financial support. Though Olaf Scholz, the German Chancellor, can't bring himself to say Nord Stream 2 will be cancelled, he stood beside president Biden announcing it would be cancelled for him.

The unified NATO response to Russia's demands was solid, and would restore an arms control architecture that was allowed to collapse during the Trump administration (Moscow, naturally, rejected it). Publicising intelligence about imminent Russian moves has robbed Putin of operational surprise as surely as satellite pictures have robbed him of strategic surprise.

2017:

On Friday night, as CNN's Katelyn Polantz and Evan Perez explained in a Monday article, special counsel John Durham "accused a lawyer for the Democrats of sharing with the CIA in 2017 internet data purported to show Russian-made phones being used in the vicinity of the White House complex, as part of a broader effort to raise the intelligence community's suspicions of Donald Trump's ties to Russia shortly after he took office."

The accusation was couched in what Polantz and Perez described as "vague, technical language" in a court filing. It was not accompanied by any indictments or other prosecutorial steps. But pro-Trump media outlets noticed the filing and started to share it on Saturday.

The fact that this supposed "bombshell" had been buried in a motion related to claims about attorneys having a conflict of interest, and not an indictment, was the first sign that the story was not what right-wing outlets said. The second was that the initial stories never actually went beyond the technical language to explain what purportedly happened.

But the ideological outlets that blew the filing way out of proportion weren't incentivized to apply journalistic analysis to the filing. They were incentivized to do the opposite.

Among Trump loyalists, Durham's investigation into the origins of the FBI's Russia probe is a shot at vindication. Right-wing TV and radio shows regularly hype Durham as a hero who is trying to right the perceived wrongs of "Russiagate." Key word: Perceived. Even though government and media investigations confirmed dozens of links between the Trump campaign and Russia, and the candidate welcomed the Kremlin's interference in the 2016 election, Trump boosters insist the issue was a "hoax" that was hyped by media outlets and intelligence officials to hurt Trump.

So in this pro-Trump media bubble, any scrap of information that supports the "hoax" hypothesis or the idea that Trump was right when he said he'd been spied on, no matter how irrelevant or incomplete, is turned into a big story.

In this case, the "entire narrative appeared to be mostly wrong or old news," Charlie Savage of The New York Times concluded in a point-by-point news article on Tuesday.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

He became in due course what I would call a conservative of the old school, bearing the intellectual markings of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. He possessed in ample measure, besides, the much-admired light touch of these twain: their ability not to see in every event the impending end of the world, and, correspondingly, the need for government action.

Conservatives in the old days could smile. They could make fun of long faces and tightly, grimly fastened lips. Conservatism, we often heard in those days, was enjoyment. It didn't center on lecturing the happy and idiotically smiling as to their moral defects and indifference to Suffering and Poverty. P.J. O'Rourke was too loose-jointed a thinker to go around trying to reorder other people's lives according to some stuffy, invented design. (Think of the New York Times editorial page.)

O'Rourke no more approved of government regulation of the economy than he did of make-your-own-rules morality, such as the Sixties had tried to cram down the national throat. He understood that there were rules, expectations, duties; they kept civilization together. It was hardly a complete shock that in 2016 he held his nose and voted for Hillary Clinton rather than Donald Trump, whom he (like so many others) found a moral boob.

GOOSING THE TRANSITION:

An abundance of low-cost solar power during the middle of the day has accelerated the demise of Australia's largest coal generator while creating a market for big batteries to thrive.

On Thursday, Origin Energy announced that it would bring forward the closure of the 2,880MW Eraring coal fired power station - Australia's largest - to 2025, seven years ahead of its original schedule.

Origin cited the changing daily dynamics of wholesale electricity prices for the diminishing profitability of the Eraring coal plant, with high levels of solar output during the day pushing prices to such lows that the long-term operation of the coal plant was becoming unsustainable - necessitating the company to lodge notice of closure with market regulators.

NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

For the vast majority of the global workforce, things are significantly better today than they were at the beginning of the 20th century. Compared to then, jobs are less physically demanding, less dangerous, less boring, more intellectual, and more likely to appeal to people's interests and motivation. While there is much progress to be made in diversity and inclusion, organizations were less diverse and inclusive in the past.

Today, there is also much more choice when it comes to careers (though as we know more choice makes it harder for people to choose, often resulting in anxious career uncertainty). Still, by yesterday's standards, most of today's career problems are #firstworldproblems. For example, 100 years ago it would have been very rare for someone to return home from work and respond to the "How was work today?" question with: "Not great. I didn't really experience a sense of purpose, so perhaps I should quit." Thirty years ago, it would have been rare for someone to leave their job because they were not allowed to work from home or bring their dog to the office.

All these improvements to working conditions mean that employers are more eager than ever to provide consumer-like experiences. They want to cater to workers' unique psychological values and preferences and promise it all: meaningful, ethical, profitable, and intellectually stimulating careers, with more flexibility, freedom, and status. Employees are now in the driver's seat, as they help shape company policies, including talent decisions and cultural norms, as well as pressure leaders on moral issues. 

And yet, there is little indication that workers are generally happier, or even more satisfied with their jobs and careers. For example, engagement levels and job tenure have remained stagnant for years, and a growing number of workers decide to quit, not just their bosses, but employment altogether.

GET TO NORMAL AND ADD COVID TO THE MENU OF REQUIRED VACCINATIONS:

...AND CHEAPER...:

The United States currently produces almost no electricity from wind farms in ocean waters. That's about to change -- fast.

State leaders have spent years laying the groundwork: requiring their utilities to purchase set amounts of offshore power by certain dates, investing in ports and transmission infrastructure and setting up workforce training programs.

As a quickly growing list of projects enters the permitting and construction phases, many states are betting on offshore wind to be a crucial source of renewable power -- and an economic driver that will create thousands of manufacturing and maritime jobs.

"There's been an extraordinary ramp-up in activity," said New Hampshire state Sen. David Watters, a Democrat. "The industry is really maturing, the cost is coming down dramatically and states are figuring out the policies they want to support to encourage the industry."

THE PURITAN NATION'S DEMOTIC ART::

It seems counterintuitive, perhaps, that Christians within the Reformed tradition who hold to the doctrine of predestination would place so much emphasis on persuasive preaching. If salvation is predestined, why even bother to try to persuade anyone? But, as Parry explains, the Calvinistic view of predestination is not the same as "a deterministic fatalism that denies any role whatsoever for human agency." Rather, the Puritan divines believed, as Parry shows, that "God uses temporal means to accomplish his eternal purposes." Persuasive preaching and writing are just such temporal means.

It is impossible, of course, to cover nearly anything within Puritan history without addressing the complicated question of how Puritan is defined. Parry sketches out this problem and offers that, for the purposes of his analysis, Puritanism consists of both a movement not only "to protest against perceived external corruption" but also one "focused on the internal spiritual condition of individuals." In this respect, the persuasive powers of these Puritan preachers and writers were, Parry shows, concerned not only with conversion but with ongoing sanctification, too.

While the Puritans are famous for their "plain style" of preaching and writing, Parry demonstrates that this approach "was not an abandonment of eloquence," but rather, and more interestingly, "a concealing of eloquence." Such a rhetorical strategy prioritizes "the transparent communication of truth over the ostentatious display of learning and eloquence." Thus, the book explores the relationship between rhetoric and what was termed at that time "practical divinity," meaning pastoral teaching and care that attempts to help ordinary people apply doctrine and theology in their everyday lives, first in being converted, and then in living holy lives. For Puritan divines seeking to so persuade those under their influence and care, that meant using language in ways that would transform a person's reason, imagination, and will.

Though underappreciated today, this intricate relationship between rhetoric and theology is one about which our Puritan forebears have much to teach us. To examine the persuasive appeal of a range of rhetorical strategies, Parry considers closely the works of a small but representative group of Puritans. The group includes those well-known to most readers--Richard Baxter, John Bunyan, John Milton--as well as the lesser known but equally exemplary preachers Richard Sibbes and William Perkins.

Those passingly familiar with writers like Bunyan and Milton--both of whom despite producing massive bodies of didactic treatises and essays are best known for their imaginative works--might wonder how such a commitment to truth over style applies to them. Parry answers this question insightfully and delightfully.

A further question is not just how, but why, imaginative works of literature can be so theologically, as well as aesthetically, persuasive. Parry explains, "It is also the pastoral impulse to persuade their readers into saving truth that leads some Puritan writers to deploy the somewhat undercover modes of imaginative fiction." Indeed, it is one of the great ironies of literary history that Puritan writers--in their suspicion of fiction--wrote instead allegories, epics, and spiritual autobiographies that laid the groundwork for the most significant and influential literary genre of the modern era: the novel.

...AND CHEAPER...:

THE INSIDE OF a tokamak--the doughnut-shaped vessel designed to contain a nuclear fusion reaction--presents a special kind of chaos. Hydrogen atoms are smashed together at unfathomably high temperatures, creating a whirling, roiling plasma that's hotter than the surface of the sun. Finding smart ways to control and confine that plasma will be key to unlocking the potential of nuclear fusion, which has been mooted as the clean energy source of the future for decades. At this point, the science underlying fusion seems sound, so what remains is an engineering challenge. "We need to be able to heat this matter up and hold it together for long enough for us to take energy out of it," says Ambrogio Fasoli, director of the Swiss Plasma Center at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland.

That's where DeepMind comes in. The artificial intelligence firm, backed by Google parent company Alphabet, has previously turned its hand to video games and protein folding, and has been working on a joint research project with the Swiss Plasma Center to develop an AI for controlling a nuclear fusion reaction.

IT'S A RICO CASE:

Donald Trump received bad news last week: Mazars USA LLP, the accounting firm he has used for years, broke up with him. The company sent a letter to the Trump Organization stating it could no longer work with Trump's company, could not finish preparing his taxes this year, and was not willing to stand by a decade's worth of financial statements it helped prepare. This was a major blow to the Trump Organization, which is the subject of two investigations in New York looking at whether Trump cooked the books on the valuations of his holdings. Mazars' decision could help the Manhattan district attorney and New York State attorney general in their ongoing legal battles with Trump. It also could cause major problems for Trump's firm in terms of dealing with current or future lenders (Trump is $590 million in debt). On top of this, the Trump Organization recently received another kick in the pants: a DC Superior Court judge added Trump's company back to the ongoing Trump inauguration scandal lawsuit.

This case involves one million dollars in alleged grift related to Trump's 2016 inauguration. In November, a DC Superior Court judge knocked out part of the case, which was filed in 2020 by Karl Racine, the attorney general of Washington, DC, and ordered that the New York City-based Trump Organization be dropped from the lawsuit due to jurisdictional issues. That left the Trump's inauguration committee, a nonprofit known as the Presidential Inaugural Committee (PIC) with no current purpose, as the defendant. But on Monday, a new judge handling the case restored Trump's company as a defendant.

YOU HAD HIM AT DARWINIST:

ORGANIC:

With Cold as Weiss, the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio showcase Dan Weiss as their new drummer. Weiss has a reputation for being pretty out-there as a percussionist, what with his album-long drum solos Tintal and Jhaptal being released on the Pi label in addition to his status as a bandleader for the hard-hitting Starebaby ensemble. If Delvon Lamarr's trio is a modern take on Booker T. & the M.G.'s, Dan Weiss doesn't exactly strike one as an Al Jackson, Jr. And yet here he is, holding down the fort on nine new soulful recordings on an album named after him. And like any professional drummer worth their weight in tuning keys, he fits right in.

Apart from the addition of Weiss, Jimmy James remains the trio's guitar player. Blended together, the three musicians carry on the Delvon Lamarr Organ Trio trajectory that was established on 2018's Close but No Cigar. The rhythms are light, the grooves are funky and the blues licks are still lowdown and grimy. Cold as Weiss is less the band moving forward and more the band plugging away to establish its identity as everyone's go-to for organ-driven funky soul-jazz.

THAT WAS EASY:

The state released its new guidance on the same day Mayor Michelle Wu said improving COVID-19 metrics could prompt Boston to soon relax its own mandate on vaccines in some indoor settings.

The state Department of Public Health's new advisory no longer recommends that healthy, fully vaccinated residents wear masks in indoor public settings, effectively pulling back guidance Governor Charlie Baker's administration had released in December when he urged all residents to do so. The change comes a week after Baker said the state would ease its mask mandate in schools.

The Baker administration now recommends that vaccinated people mask up if they have a weakened immune system, are older or have an underlying medical condition that makes them at higher risk for severe disease, or if they live with someone who falls in those categories.

The Tuesday guidance also said it is "important" for those who are not fully vaccinated to still wear face coverings. The recommendations closely hew to a mask advisory the state released last July after the Delta variant emerged.

SERPICO IS NOT THE VILLAIN:

Last September, the prosecutor indicted cybersecurity attorney Michael Sussmann for allegedly having lied to the FBI. Soon thereafter, evidence emerged that Durham's indictment itself was misleading, relying on selective quotes and omitting relevant details from their proper context. In December, Sussman's lawyers disclosed evidence that raised additional doubts about the reliability of Durham's charges.

Indeed, the whole case is terribly odd. Sussman met with the FBI nearly six years ago to discuss alleged connections between the Trump Organization's computers and the Kremlin-linked Alfa Bank. According to Durham, he claimed he wasn't acting on Clinton's behalf when he secretly was. Sussman's defense team said he never claimed not to have clients, and it didn't much matter who he worked for anyway.

It was against this backdrop that prosecutors had another court filing late last week, which Trump and the right seized on in ways that don't stand up well to scrutiny. From the Times' article:

The filing was ostensibly about potential conflicts of interest. But it also recounted a meeting at which Mr. Sussmann had presented other suspicions to the government. In February 2017, Mr. Sussmann told the C.I.A. about odd internet data suggesting that someone using a Russian-made smartphone may have been connecting to networks at Trump Tower and the White House, among other places. Mr. Sussmann had obtained that information from a client, a technology executive named Rodney Joffe. Another paragraph in the court filing said that Mr. Joffe's company, Neustar, had helped maintain internet-related servers for the White House, and that he and his associates "exploited this arrangement" by mining certain records to gather derogatory information about Mr. Trump.

The former president and conservative media went from zero to hyperventilating with surprising speed, overlooking all kinds of relevant details. Even putting aside the fact that Durham has an unfortunate habit of presenting provocative ideas that don't stand up well to scrutiny -- which helps explain why news organizations were cautious about pouncing on the so-called "controversy" -- in this matter, there's still no evidence of "infiltration," "hacking," or "spying," all words used by Trump and conservative media this week.

What we actually have is a superfluous story about cybersecurity researchers at Joffe's company examining malware in the White House -- from Obama's term, not Trump's -- and there doesn't appear to be any connection between Joffe's firm and Clinton.

Maybe Durham and his team didn't realize their court filing would be exploited as part of a public-deception campaign launched by Trump and his media cohorts. Perhaps Durham and his team knew what would happen and didn't care.

Either way, when your weird uncle who consumes conservative media all day sent you all-caps emails about Trump being "spied" on, he was pushing a story with no real basis in fact. The original "Spygate" story was a sad joke, and its third iteration is no better.

HE HAD IT EASY, BEING CONSERVATIVE:

He started writing in the alt-weekly world. His big break came when he took over National Lampoon. From there he became one of the best magazine writers of the '80s.

P.J. was most famous for being a funnyman, but early on he did all kinds of writing. He reported. He did longform. He wrote books. And this is a big part of why writers admired him so much: P.J. could hit to all fields with power. And while he became a star, with the kind of career that most of us only dream of, he came up the hard way. He did not emerge fully formed from William Shawn's head like Athena. He worked for it.

Let me put it this way: If you're a writer and you look at Joan Didion, you see an untouchable prodigy, someone who might as well be from another planet.

But when you looked at P.J. O'Rourke you saw a craftsman and you thought to yourself, "If I work hard enough and hit the ball cleanly, on every at bat, every day, for a few decades . . . well, then maybe I could be like P.J."

So that's one reason we loved him.

Another is that he was a professional's professional.

Here's a secret of the trade: The better a writer is, the easier he is to edit.

Bad writers will haggle with editors over every comma. The best writers (a) need very little editing and (b) are perfectly open to edits because they see and appreciate when a phrase or a thought has been improved.

P.J. was a joy to edit. Collegial, professional. The kind of writer who makes you a better writer once you get to look under the hood at his process. The kind of writer with whom it is a privilege to work.

I suspect that the biggest reason P.J. was beloved by his peers and colleagues was his openness and kindness.

MAKING VLAD A LAUGHINGSTOCK:

Zelensky took it all in and did what he knew best: he told his nation of more than 40 million people to relax and plan a party.

"What should we do? Only one thing -- keep calm," he said last month.

"We will celebrate Easter in April. And then in May, the same as always -- the sun, holidays, barbeques," he said. "And before long, it's summer."

Then he declared February 16 -- the day some US officials picked as a possible start for President Vladimir Putin's assault -- a national "unity day" holiday on which people should come out with flags and balloons. [...]

The standoff with Russia over Ukraine's dream of joining NATO -- aspirationally written into the constitution but unlikely to happen in the coming decades -- could well define Zelensky's presidency for the coming years.

He came to power attempting to open lines of communication with Putin that could finally resolve the bloody separatist conflict after claiming more than 14,000 lives.

The two held a Parisian summit a few months after Zelensky's election that Putin hailed as an "important step".

But Zelensky read from a different script at his own post-summit media event.

"My counterparts have said it is a very good result for a first meeting. But I will be honest -- it is very little," he said.

Relations between the two men have been deteriorating ever since.

Putin has accused Zelensky's government of "discriminating" against Russian-speakers and reneging on past promises for settling the eastern conflict.

Zelensky's offer of a three-way summit with Putin and US President Joe Biden fell on deaf ears in Moscow last month.

But some analysts think Zelensky's stature has grown in the past few weeks.

"If Russia doesn't escalate and reduces its posture near Ukraine, it will likely be a little embarrassing for the US intelligence community, but it will also bolster Zelensky's position," the Foreign Policy Research Institute's senior fellow Rob Lee said.

"He didn't back down and NATO defence support increased."

A RACE, NOT A RELIGION:

Herzog was speaking at a conference to mark the 40th anniversary of the death of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, the late, legendary head of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva and one of the principal spiritual leaders of the national religious movement.

During his speech, Herzog addressed the recent death of Omar As'ad, who suffered a fatal heart attack after Israeli troops bound and gagged him, then left him at a construction site in the middle of winter during a raid. He said As'ad's death needs to be a "warning sign" to Israeli society.

"The words of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda are even more relevant today," Herzog said, noting As'ad's death. "Jewish morality cannot accept this or be indifferent to this."

Herzog's comments were met with loud boos and whistles and several people walked out of the hall to applause to protest his remarks.

THE ROT WAS NOT IN DENMARK:

IT'S ALL JUST PHILOSOPHY:

Bohr announced that resolving the wave-particle paradox required a new view of reality, in which both notions shared a role in explaining experimental phenomena. In experiments designed to observe waves, waves you would find, whether electrons or light. In experiments designed to detect particles, you'd see particles. But in no experiment could you demonstrate both at once. Bohr called this viewpoint the principle of complementarity, and it successfully guided the pursuit of quantum mechanics during the following decades.

More recently, as philosopher Slobodan Perović recounts in From Data to Quanta, Bohr's success has been questioned by some physicists and philosophers and even popular science writers (SN: 1/19/19, p. 26). Complementarity has been derided as an incoherent application of vague philosophy expressed in incomprehensible language. But as Perović's investigations reveal, such criticisms are rarely rooted in any deep understanding of Bohr's methods. Rather than Bohr's philosophy contaminating his science, Perović argues, it is his opponents' philosophical prejudices that have led to misstatements, misunderstandings and misrepresentations of Bohr's physics. 

[Q]uantum theory's success forces physicists to accept a number of uncomfortable truths. For example, it allows "spooky action at a distance" between entangled particles. This occurs when two particles become so deeply linked that a measurement on one instantly determines the state of the other, regardless of the distance between them.

Since then, physicists have studied spooky-action-at-a-distance in detail; it is straightforward to observe in a quantum optics laboratory. It is now even exploited in technologies such as quantum cryptography.

Another uncomfortable conclusion is that the quantum universe is governed by probabilistic behavior. At any instant, lots of different things could happen but the thing that actually happens is determined by probability, essentially on the roll of a dice.

This thinking forces physicists to the conclusion that our deterministic experience of the universe is an illusion. Indeed, there is little debate among physicists that the foundation of reality is fundamentally and weirdly probabilistic.

Except among a small group of theoretical physicists led by the Nobel Prize winner, Gerard 't Hooft. For them, the idea of determinism - that one thing leads to another - is sacrosanct. They say the probabilistic properties of quantum mechanics can all be explained by a set of hidden laws that sit beneath the surface of quantum mechanics.

Nobody has observed these laws at work but that hasn't stopped 't Hooft from trying to formulate what they must look like. 

DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?:

THE INESCAPABLE FRENCHNESS OF TRUMPISM:

In a 40-minute phone conversation, Trump advised Zemmour to "stand his ground, hang in there and keep his spirits up", spokesman Guillaume Peltier told the France 2 broadcaster.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Roosevelt explained his view of Asians in series of articles in the 1920s, shortly before he was elected governor of New York. Writing in Asia magazine in 1923, he sympathized with what he said was the widespread view "that the mingling of white with oriental blood on an extensive scale is harmful to our future citizenship."

Two years later, in an article for the Macon Daily Telegraph (for which he was a regular columnist), FDR asserted:  "Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results." The future president warned that "Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation into the American population."

Following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, some of President Roosevelt's military advisers began pushing for mass detention of Japanese Americans on the grounds that, as Secretary of War Stimson put it, "their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust [them]." FDR's belief that "Japanese immigrants are not capable of assimilation" contributed to his willingness to take such a radical step.

Roosevelt's perspective also helps explain why he authorized the roundup of Japanese Americans, yet never contemplated similar action against German Americans or Italian Americans, although they, too, had family ties to countries which America was fighting in the war.

"Orientals" were not the only ethnic group whom FDR viewed with automatic suspicion. He harbored similar sentiments concerning Jews. There are more than a dozen documented instances in which Roosevelt made unflattering statements about Jews in private conversations with friends or political allies in the 1930s and 1940s.

His remarks about Jews focused on several specific themes: that Jews possessed certain innate and distasteful characteristics; that it was undesirable to have too many Jews in any single profession, institution, or geographic locale; and that America should be an overwhelmingly white and Protestant country.

Thus President Roosevelt accused the publishers of the New York Times of using "a dirty Jewish trick" to resolve a tax problem. He told Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, America's foremost Jewish leader, that Jews in Poland were to blame for provoking antisemitism because they dominated the Polish economy. In a conversation with Sen. Burton Wheeler (D-MT), Roosevelt expressed pride that "there is no Jewish blood in our veins."

DONALD WHO?:

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell may be a rock star on the fringe right, but Gov. Chris Sununu tells NHJournal he is not impressed.

"New Hampshire isn't interested in debunked political conspiracy theories from some infomercial guy. Our citizens can sleep easy knowing that our elections were safe, secure, reliable, and accurate - just as they are every year," Sununu said Monday.

That stands in stark contrast to Lindell, who claims the Granite State presidential election was stolen by Chinese computer hackers and corrupted vote-counting machines that switched more than 50,000 votes.

DON'T LET THEM OFF THE HOOK:

The tone of the crisis over Ukraine shifted Monday as Russia's top diplomat endorsed more talks to resolve its standoff with the West, and Ukrainian officials hinted at offering concessions to avert war -- even as Russian warships massed off Ukraine's Black Sea coast and Russian ground troops appeared poised to strike.

In stage-managed, televised meetings, the Kremlin sent its strongest signals yet that it would seek further negotiations with the West rather than launch immediate military action. State television showed Foreign Minister Sergey V. Lavrov telling President Vladimir V. Putin there was still a diplomatic path ahead. Minutes later, it showed Defense Minister Sergei K. Shoigu telling Mr. Putin that what he characterized as "large-scale drills" around Ukraine were coming to an end.

"I believe that our possibilities are far from exhausted," Mr. Lavrov said, referring to Russia's negotiations with the West. "I would propose continuing and intensifying them."

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The accounting firm Mazars has fired the Trump Organization as a client after saying that a decade's worth of statements of ex-President Donald Trump's financial condition "should no longer be relied upon," the New York Attorney General's office revealed in a court filing Monday.

The letter by Mazars, which for years prepared Trump's income tax returns, was cited by AG Letitia James' office as it asked a state judge to order the Trump Organization, Donald Trump Jr. and his sister Ivanka Trump, and others to comply with subpoenas seeking documents and testimony.

WHY WOULD hISTORY NOT eND IN CITIES?:

At a time when all cities are struggling to come to terms with a new reality, in The Long Crisis: New York City and the Path to Neoliberalism, Ben Holtzman provides an important and timely analysis of how one of them was transformed by a concerted socio-economic project. New York City's current crisis may be shaped by COVID-19, but as Holtzman shows, it is defined by a long-term shift towards urban governance based on the neoliberal deification of the market, entailing the dismantling of public services and redefinition of public space.

In a compelling passage, Holtzman relates how a 21st century New Yorker might live in a market-rate condominium that was formerly a rent-regulated apartment, enter the subway through a privately owned "public" atrium, walk down a street policed by private security guards and managed by local businesses, then play basketball in a privately run "public" park. People in many other places will recognise this hegemonic grip of private commercial interests over daily city life.

In The Long Crisis, Ben Holtzman, an Assistant Professor of History at Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY) who studies the social and political history of cities, traces the advent of marketized urbanism to the socio-economic crisis of the 1970s when New York City was virtually bankrupt.

VLAD WHO?:

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

A court in Russia has handed lengthy prison sentences to members of a hacker group whose leader claimed he was recruited by the country's Federal Security Service (FSB) to hack into the servers of the U.S. Democratic Party.

MAKE MASKS PERMANENT, BUT SEASONAL:

The state Department of Public Health reported that 1,638 people tested positive for the flu in Connecticut as of Jan. 15. Last season, as of July 17, 181 people had tested positive for flu. But, in the 2018-19 season -- before the start of the pandemic -- 10,619 people in the state tested positive for flu.

Passalacqua said the lower rates of strep, ear infections and other lessons show that behavioral changes can make a big difference

"We should consider that, when we put on a mask, wash our hands or make the decision not to go out when not feeling well, we're doing something much greater than preventing the spread of COVID," she said.

At least one expert had a slightly different theory about why strep and ear infections, in particular, are seeing modest numbers.

Dr. Howard Selinger, chair of family medicine at the Frank H. Netter MD School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University, said said social distancing and other COVID-related measures might make a difference, but he pointed out that strep and ear infections are bacterial infections -- as opposed to COVID and the flu, which are caused by viruses.

Strep throat is caused by bacteria called group A streptococcus. The two most common bacterial causes of ear infections are treptococcus pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae.

"Bacteria do not spread quite as easily as viruses," Selinger said.

Add that factor to preventative measures such as mask-wearing and hand-washing, and a drop in infections is a likely result, he said.

Saul said he doesn't expect the possible positive impact of mask-wearing on non-COVID illness to lead to an extension of mask mandates, but it will certainly encourage him to wear a mask for the foreseeable future.

"I think in the winter months, even if we're not required to wear masks, I will continue to wear one," he said. "I think a lot of health care people will."

THANKS, COVID!:

Public discontent with America's pandemic-battered economy obscures the good news: Even after inflation, most of the country has been coming out ahead.

Red-hot demand for labor means lower-income workers can command wage increases that outpace rising prices. So can middle-income workers who switch jobs.

Relief checks approved by lawmakers of both parties and sent out by Presidents Donald Trump and Joe Biden have given the majority of households a cushion. Those higher up the income scale have seen handsome increases in the values of their homes and investment assets.

Even those who fault Biden's policies for exacerbating inflation risks acknowledge that, right now, the pandemic economy continues to offer large, underappreciated rewards.

"For most people," concludes Michael Strain, who directs economic policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute, "the current economic situation is good."

YOU CAN rATIONALIZE ANYTHING:

Walker's 1829 pamphlet, an "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," was a revolutionary document that lit a fire under the growing abolition movement, which found a home in Boston, and terrified Southern slaveholders.

America had never read anything like it.

"My object is, if possible, to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded, and slumbering brethren a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty," Walker wrote.

Walker's call for freedom, abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "startled the land like a trump of coming judgment."

Walker, who died in 1830 at age 34, is not widely known today, although a plaque marks his home on Joy Street. But when the "Appeal" was published, its message was a clarion call for free Black people, who embraced its demand for civil rights, and the enslaved, who were read clandestine copies smuggled into Southern ports by Black sailors who had passed through Boston.

Government officials in Georgia were so alarmed by the "Appeal" that they offered a $10,000 bounty for Walker's capture; $1,000 if dead.

The "Appeal" made a broad intellectual and moral case for racial equality, assailing an America that embraced religion but also could rationalize the immorality of slavery.

WE ALL WANT TO CENSOR SOMETHING:

Trotter wrote the lyrics and much of the music, which ranges from hip hop to R&B to jazz to folk. And he plays Dr. Junius Crookman, inventor of the Black No More machine, which will turn any Black person white -- for $50. Trotter says, the doctor believes "this Black No More device is the solution to race relations in America. I think the line is 'to solve the American race problem as we know it.' But yeah, you know, I don't think a solution is ever reached."

And that is the Twilight Zone-like premise of Black No More, which features a script by Academy Award-winner John Ridley. The 1931 novel, by George Schuyler, has a take-no-prisoners attitude toward not just white supremacists and politicians, but thinly veiled figures from the Harlem Renaissance, which choreographer Bill T. Jones finds offensive. "When I read the novel, I must admit I was kind of pissed off about it," Jones says. "Yeah, I like bad boys, too. I don't like smart asses, of course, and particularly when they're Black ones making fun of Black people."

So, the challenge for the creative team, especially the writers, was to move the story from broad satire to something with a beating heart, says director Scott Elliott: "I think that what they've come up with is a really fascinating morality tale."

nATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

The TPP, however, was aimed at more than just lowering trade barriers. It was also an attempt by the United States--along with like‐​minded allies--to help shape the rules governing trade in the Asia‐​Pacific region. As Asia's center both geographically and economically, China is already assured of having a significant say in such matters. The TPP was meant to ensure the United States had a prominent seat at the table when such rules were being hammered out--before it opted to push away.

In other words, U.S. losses from its TPP withdrawal have not just been economic but geopolitical. And if the TPP was deemed a useful tool in countering China's influence during the years it was being negotiated, it would be even more of an asset now given the bilateral relationship's increasingly acrimonious nature.

Other countries have been less short‐​sighted in their trade policies. Following U.S. withdrawal, the remaining TPP members went back to the negotiating table and struck a new deal: the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans‐​Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). As a result, these countries often have easier access to each other's markets than what Americans enjoy. That's a boon to consumers and businesses in CPTPP members who enjoy cheaper imports and expanded export opportunities.

Indeed, the CPTPP has proved so alluring that China and Taiwan have both applied to join while South Korea has taken initial steps toward becoming a member. Even the United Kingdom wants in.

Other notable trade liberalization initiatives have taken place in recent years as well. In late 2020, 15 countries of the Asia‐​Pacific region concluded the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP). Entering into force on January 1 of this year, the RCEP--which notably includes China--contains tariff reductions and regulatory harmonization measures meant to spur trade between member countries. And in 2018, Japan and the European Union signed a trade deal that took effect the following year.

Amidst such trade integration, the United States has largely been left on the outside looking in. This means that not only has the country foregone the TPP's projected benefits but the competitiveness of U.S. firms has been eroded owing to the lack of preferential market access enjoyed by their foreign counterparts.

As a result, a 2017 PIIE analysis calculated that the TPP/CPTPP's net impact on the United States had swung from a $131 billion gain to a $2 billion loss. The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, meanwhile, found that RCEP will shrink U.S. exports by over $5 billion as trade is diverted away from U.S. firms and toward foreign competitors subject to lower tariff rates under the agreement.

THAT WAS EASY:

As anti-renewables scare campaigns reach fever pitch in the lead-up to the federal election, Australia has quietly passed a major solar milestone, notching up 25GW of installed capacity - more PV per capita than anywhere else in the world.

The stunning achievement, which was notched up over the course of 2021, was marked on Monday by the Australian PV Institute, or APVI. By the beginning of 2022, Australia's cumulative tally had in fact jumped to 26.9GW.

BISECTUAL:

P.D. James is unyielding in her suspicion of the human capacity "to be good without God", as our unbelieving friends claim. Her twenty novels give fictional life to St. Augustine's estimate of evil as the ruin of God's good creation by disordered desire: by a perverted love of the wrong things, or the wrong persons, or the wrong places, or to the wrong extent. In her memoir Time to be in Earnest, James quotes Adam Dalgliesh, her own master sleuth, on the unwitting Augustinian wisdom that an older detective sergeant once taught him: "All motives can be explained under the letter L: lust, lucre, loathing and love. They'll tell you that the most dangerous is loathing but don't you believe it, boy: the most dangerous is love."

In her only novel that doesn't feature Dalgliesh, The Children of Men, her terrifying book of 1992, James gives vent to some of her own worst fears. It's not the coming of Nietzsche's "overman" that James fictionally investigates in this apocalyptic novel. She prophesies, instead, the arrival of Nietzsche's "last man". Thus spake Zarathustra in 1883: "Alas, the time is coming when man will no longer shoot the arrow of his longing beyond man ... The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest." The chief sign of the approaching end in James's novel is not writhing misery but coddling comfort.

A complex admixture of good and evil lies at the moral and religious heart of James's fiction. She depicts villains who are not entirely criminal and victims who are not wholly innocent. Most of her murderers kill for honourable reasons -- usually to avenge some prior injustice. Like the rest of us, they commit evil in the name of good. They thus leave us with a troubling sense of our complicity in the hidden crimes of our own lives. Murder, James contends, is the unique crime. It "carries an atavistic weight of repugnance, fascination and fear". We are at once repelled and attracted to depictions of this supreme offense because the line dividing good and evil does not separate the noble from the savage, the blameless from the guilty. It bisects every human heart. "Few people opening their door to two grave-faced detectives with a request that they should accompany them to the police station", she remarked, "would do so without a qualm of unease, however certain they may be of their complete innocence."

IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham on Sunday predicted that if President Joe Biden were to nominate South Carolina federal judge Michelle Childs to replace retiring Justice Stephen Breyer on the Supreme Court, Childs would likely win more than 10 Republican votes in the Senate.

"She's somebody, I think, that could bring the Senate together and probably get more than 60 votes," Graham said on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos." "Anyone else would be problematic," he added.

LOCKE WHO?

The Roman Republic was at the back of the minds of the framers of the American Constitution; it was their hope that the chief magistrate of these United States would conduct himself with "the high old Roman virtue," becoming an exemplar of pietas, gravitas, constantia, firmitas, comitas, disciplina, industria, clementia, frugalitas, and severitas.

George Washington, a grand gentleman of the old model, suffused with the unbought grace of life, set high the standard for these virtues. Eight decades later, there appeared a public man of an origin very different from Washington's, who nevertheless has come to stand as Washington's equal in republican virtue.

From a disaster greater still, we were saved by the presidential dignity of Lincoln, from whom few had expected any dignity at all. [...]

There have lived few Americans more abundantly graced with the theological virtues, charity most of all. The New Testament shines out from his acts of mercy, and the Old from his direction of the war. We all know the deep piety of his Gettysburg Address; and in some of his letters there looms a stern justice, at once Christian and classical.

Prudent amidst passion, Lincoln never was a doctrinaire; he rose from very low estate to very high estate, and he knew the savagery that lies close beneath the skin of man, and he saw that most men are good only out of obedience to routine and custom and convention. The reckless fire-eater and the uncompromising Abolitionist were abhorrent to him; yet he took the middle path between them not out of any misapplication of the doctrine of the Golden mean, but because he held that the unity and security of the United States transcended any fanatic's scheme of uniformity.

Here, he was like Edmund Burke; yet it is improbable that he read much Burke, or any other political philosopher except Blackstone; his wisdom came from close observation of human nature, and from the Bible and Shakespeare. The Radical Republicans detested him as cordially as did the Southern zealots. In his conservative object, the preservation of the Union, he succeeded through the ancient virtue of prudentia.

Lincoln was a conservative statesman on the intellectual model of Cicero.

IT'S NOT JUST THE eARTH THAT'S FLAT:

WE'VE KNOWN ABOUT gravity since Newton's apocryphal encounter with the apple, but we're still struggling to make sense of it. While the other three forces of nature are all due to the activity of quantum fields, our best theory of gravity describes it as bent spacetime. For decades, physicists have tried to use quantum field theories to describe gravity, but those efforts are incomplete at best.

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research develop­ments and trends in mathe­matics and the physical and life sciences.

One of the most promising of those efforts treats gravity as something like a hologram--a three-dimensional effect that pops out of a flat, two-dimensional surface. Currently, the only concrete example of such a theory is the AdS/CFT correspondence, in which a particular type of quantum field theory, called a conformal field theory (CFT), gives rise to gravity in so-called anti-de Sitter (AdS) space. In the bizarre curves of AdS space, a finite boundary can encapsulate an infinite world. Juan Maldacena, the theory's discoverer, has called it a "universe in a bottle."

But our universe isn't a bottle. Our universe is (largely) flat.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Last month, after years of prodding, state regulators approved a $16 million project that Magavi and Schulman proposed to demonstrate that there's a financially viable, technically sound way to heat and cool the vast majority of the state's homes and businesses without fossil fuels. The project uses linked heat pumps and subterranean pipes that can harness steady underground temperatures to heat and cool buildings.

That project, which will be installed by National Grid, follows the state's approval of a similar geothermal project -- also based on their ideas -- proposed by Eversource, which plans to spend $10 million starting this year to connect about 100 homes and businesses in Framingham with a network of ground-source heat pumps.

If both projects work -- heating and cooling air at reasonable costs -- Magavi and Schulman hope the utilities will stop spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year replacing their aging system of gas pipes, and instead direct that money to installing geothermal energy throughout the region. Eventually, they believe, such emissions-free systems could replace the need for gas and oil in most homes.

The plan, Magavi and Schulman say, will also save state residents money in the long run. Every ratepayer dollar spent on investing in the utilities' thousands of miles of gas pipes, which leak substantial amounts of methane that contributes disproportionately to global warming, will likely saddle future generations with unnecessary debt for what will largely become useless infrastructure as the state moves away from fossil fuels.

State law now requires emissions in Massachusetts to be reduced 50 percent below 1990 levels by the end of the decade and effectively eliminated by 2050. That means utilities must find new ways of heating and cooling buildings, which are among the largest sources of greenhouse gases. The sooner they stop investing in oil and gas, the more the utilities can spend on clean energy.

THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

At this historical juncture someone with a strong personality and formidable political skills--someone like Xi Jinping, in fact--was capable of dominating with considerable aplomb the Party nomenklatura. On top of that was Xi's personality: he's more ruthless than anyone else. That is to say, Xi Jinping took advantage of the limitations of his opponents as well as the Party as a whole and simply terrorised everyone into submission. If this had happened twenty, let alone thirty, years ago, Xi would never have got very far and the Eight Elders would have dispatched him in no time.

It is obvious that no individual or group within the Party can rein Xi Jinping in. Thus, Xi will be the architect of his own defeat. His style of governance is simply unsustainable; it will generate ever newer and greater policy missteps. That he has been able to get this far is a testament both to Xi's obduracy and also his inertia, a kind of helplessness fueled by the fact that he will not back down on any front. The truth of the matter is that he has never really been bolstered by sincerely held core beliefs; he is sustained by his political instincts. Some people in the Party have his measure. They make a show of total compliance and they even encourage his willfulness. They commandeer access to him and have proved masterful at putting the best face on the consequences of his political follies. In reality, they are guiding him towards an impossible predicament while letting all the frustrations and fury that his policies create focus on him and him alone. When the time comes he will bear sole responsibility for the quagmire at the heart of China's cyclical authoritarian politics.

Xi Jinping cannot escape his fate. Even as he has pursued his ideal vision of totalitarian control various other forces have used him for their own ends. ----Within the Party people encourage his worst instincts with the aim of creating political opportunities for themselves. Europe has taken advantage of the Sino-American conflict to increase its market share. The other new economies have encouraged a split with the West for the sake of benefitting their supply chains. America, too, has been using Xi Jinping's aggressive approach to further its interests in Asia. And then there are China's own democracy activists: they hope Xi Jinping will get a third term in office since they believe it will hasten the collapse of the Communist Party.

Of course, it is quite possible that Xi Jinping actually believes that he has the wherewithal to transform the world; even then, faced with stark realities of the prevalent vested interests it is inevitable that what he does [in particular in the economic realm] will be overturned lock, stock and barrel.----China has been in the process of integrating with the world for decades and no single individual can turn back the tide. The Communist Party simply won't allow the vision of one man to engage in a new cold war with the rest of the world. If Xi really does undermine the shared interests of large groups in society this will result in mass disaffection. That's why his situation is so precarious at the moment, because it is easier for people to oppose Xi rather than opposing the Communist Party itself. Over time, elites on both sides will collaborate and foment the kind of political crisis that will create a rift between Xi and the Party. Then he will be faced with mass disaffection and people piling on to bring him low. He will end up as a votive offering placed on the altar of political reconciliation.

WANNA BET?:

Speaking after new phone talks between Putin and Biden, the Kremlin's top foreign policy advisor Yury Ushakov told a conference call: "Hysteria has reached its peak."

THERE IS NO SYRIA:

Hundreds of people took to the streets of Sweida on Friday to demand better living conditions after the government earlier this month excluded a large number of people from its subsidies programme in a country where 90 percent of the population live in poverty.

Calls for protests in the southern city as well as other government-controlled areas such as Tartus and Latakia had been spread in the media following the implementation of the cuts.

DAVIS:

As a teenager, Mabry went to New York City to study at the Fashion Institute of Technology; she brought along a notebook full of songs. She worked as a model for the Wilhelmina agency, appearing in Glamour and Seventeen magazines and as a pinup in Jet magazine. She also worked as a club hostess, and she savored the city's 1960s nightlife and met figures such as Andy Warhol and Jimi Hendrix.

Her first single, in 1964, was "The Cellar." According to Danielle Maggio, an ethnomusicologist and adjunct professor at the University of Pittsburgh who wrote her dissertation on Ms. Davis, the song was named after a private club at Broadway and West 90th Street. Ms. Davis became its master of ceremonies, disc jockey, and hostess, and the club drew artists, musicians, and athletes.

In 1967, the Chambers Brothers recorded one of her songs, "Uptown." South African trumpeter Hugh Masekela, then her boyfriend, produced a 1968 single for her, "Live, Love, Learn."

She met Miles Davis at a jazz club and became his second wife in 1968. A photograph of her is the cover of Davis's 1969 album, "Filles de Kilimanjaro," which includes a tune titled "Mademoiselle Mabry." Ms. Davis introduced her husband to the music of Hendrix and Sly Stone, catalyzing his move into rock and funk.

While Davis was working on a later album, he considered calling it "Witches Brew"; his wife suggested "Bitches Brew," the title that stuck. She also persuaded him to trade the dapper suits of his previous career for flashier contemporary fashion. "I filled the trash with his suits," she recalled in the film.

Davis encouraged her to perform. In 1969, he produced sessions for her, choosing musicians including Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter from Davis's quintet and Mitch Mitchell and Billy Cox from Hendrix's Band of Gypsys. His label, Columbia Records, rejected the results, which remained unreleased until 2016.

The marriage was turbulent and sometimes violent before ending in 1969. "Miles was pure energy, sometimes light but also dark," Betty Davis recalled in the film. "Every day married to him was a day I earned the name Davis."

She kept the name as she returned to songwriting. Material she wrote for the Commodores brought her an offer to record for Motown, but she turned it down because she insisted on keeping her publishing rights.

Ms. Davis subsequently moved to London -- where a new boyfriend, Eric Clapton, offered to produce an album for her... 

LAST BEST HOPE:

ALL JOE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

Yet one unexplored reason behind the tight labor market is another type of shortage: immigration flows. The United States has been admitting fewer immigrants in recent years due to policy restrictions put in place because of the pandemic. But the slowdown began earlier, with the relentless war on immigration set in motion by the Trump administration.

Giovanni Peri, an economics professor at the University of California at Davis, whose work focuses on the intersection of labor economics and immigration, recently calculated that the US economy is missing 2 million working-age immigrants.

"The net inflow of immigrants into the United States has essentially halted for almost 2 years," he wrote last month. Peri told me he started to see the downward trend since before the pandemic, "the effect of some [immigration policy] restrictions. And then, in the beginning of 2020, you start seeing a pandemic travel ban. For two years COVID-19 has been a huge cause of this."

Peri said that roughly 1 million of the 2 million lost immigrants would have been college educated. "Some of them are scientists who used to come in large numbers. And now those doors have been closed by the pandemic," Peri said. "Not only are we not finding people to walk the dogs, we're also not having [immigrants] in the labs, in the clinics, in the engineering centers that push technology forward. We have fewer of them, and that's a potentially massive effect for economic productivity in the longer run."

The industries that rely on immigrant workers have higher rates of unfulfilled jobs. "Sectors like food or hospitality have massive shortages, in the order of 15 to 20 percent of jobs not filled relative to the total," Peri said.

It's hard to quantify how many of those 2 million immigrants didn't come due to the pandemic restrictions and how many didn't due to the policy decisions from the Trump era. But perhaps the main legacy of the former president is how he dramatically altered America's immigration system: Trump signed more than 400 immigration-related executive actions.

Yet President Biden hasn't exactly rushed to open the doors to let more immigrants come in. 

THERE IS NO SYRIA:

In Syria's largely agricultural and remote Suweida province, rumblings of discontent have broken out into protest.

Demonstrations in the province erupted again last week over the regime's decision to end subsidies for hundreds of thousands of families, creating further hardship on middle-income and other families who have been pushed deep into poverty.

The main road from Damascus to Suweida was blocked by protesters calling for better economic conditions and more daringly, the implementation of UNSC Resolution 2254, which would lead to free elections in Syria. Such defiance is usually dealt with ruthlessly by the regime and there are signs that Assad intends a similar solution to the crisis in Suweida. [...]

There has been a more visually Druze component to the protests, one expert on the religious group that forms a majority in Suweida told me but who could not be named due to the nature of their job. 

"They were singing songs about Druze dignity and so forth, the classical Druze narrative. That is striking for me," they told me. 

This could point to more widespread support for the movement, particularly with a member of the Sheikh Al-Aql - the generally pro-regime Druze clergy - voicing sympathy for protesters on the condition they remain peaceful.

"The protests are different from any time before due to the participation of various groups of people - the poor, civilians, clerics, university students, and political opponents," journalist Rayan Maarouf, editor-in-chief of As-Suwayda 24 monitoring group told The New Arab.

"There are various demands related to political change - the implementation of Security Council Resolution 2254 and the call for a civil and democratic state. There are other demands related to living and economic conditions, accountability for the corrupt in the government, and a fair redistribution of national wealth."

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

Duke Energy Corp. intends to close the rest of its coal plants by 2035 and more than double its renewable capacity by 2030 as part of a massive -- and expensive -- clean energy push.

SCRATCH A TRUMPIST FIND A VLADIST:

Russian extremist groups are actively training foreign white nationalists, the report states. One Russian neofascist group, the Russian Imperial Movement, has overseen paramilitary instruction for European extremists at its Russia-based camps, and has tried to recruit Americans to train there, according to the report.

The State Department designated the Russian Imperial Movement as a terrorist group in April 2020. The organization "actively supplies paramilitary training to foreign nationals for possible future attacks in their respective home countries or on the battlefields of Ukraine," according to a May 2021 Customs and Border Patrol bulletin obtained by Yahoo News.

Another Russian extremist group with foreign connections, the neo-Nazi Rusich Reconnaissance and Sabotage Group, sent members to fight in eastern Ukraine in 2014 and 2015, according to the intelligence community assessment.

Rusich recently hinted on social media about its plans to return to eastern Ukraine, according to the New America Foundation. Rusich is closely aligned with Russia's paramilitary Wagner Group, according to New America.

Members of the Russian extremist group Rusich Reconnaissance and Sabotage Group

An Instagram post showing members of the Russian extremist group Rusich Reconnaissance and Sabotage Group on a Russian tank, September 2021. (@rusichvpk/Instagram)

While the report describes the Russian government's support for these extremist groups as "indirect and passive," this is a "distinction without a difference," said a former senior CIA official.

"When you look at the number of Russian neo-Nazis that are actively infiltrating, or looking to digitally infiltrate U.S. groups," said the former official, "at some point, if it's so pervasive, and the Russians aren't doing anything to stop it, is that really materially different from the big stamp coming down from the sky and saying, 'We approve?'"

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

The trucker protest over Covid restrictions has been worse than the pandemic itself for small businesses in Canada's capital, as they were preparing for an easing of health rules when the convoy rolled in, shopkeepers say.

Ontario province, which includes Ottawa, had lifted a lockdown of restaurants and bars and increased capacity limits on retailers when up to 15,000 protesters and hundreds of trucks converged on the downtown area at the end of January.

Local small businesses were really excited for crowds to flood back to Byward Market -- Ottawa's main shopping and cultural district -- and make it lively again, said Inaas Kiryakos, owner of clothing and jewelry store Milk.

But with downtown streets blocked by the big rigs and police checkpoints, and officials warning people not to venture into the area, foot traffic dried up.

Most stores closed temporarily. Others reduced their operating hours. A dozen surveyed by AFP estimated their losses in the thousands of dollars per day while business associations warned the total could top tens of millions.

"This convoy is worse than Covid," Kiryakos said.

CAN YOU SPELL DIRECTED VERDICT:

[A]bout a half hour in, the wheels came off.

Palin's own attorney asked her to shift her focus forward from 2011 to 2017, when a New York Times editorial revived that false connection between Palin's rhetoric and the Giffords shooting (thereby provoking this lawsuit). Palin responded by saying the Times had "lied" about it "again." A lawyer for the Times objected, for obvious reasons: No one--including Palin in her filed complaint--has ever alleged that the New York Times got this wrong on any other occasion aside from that one editorial.

Palin's lawyer tried to help her clean it up. Judge Jed S. Rakoff invited her to clarify what she meant. But Palin doubled down, saying, "My view was the Times took a lot of liberties" in the wake of the Giffords shooting and that the paper had "led the charge" against her back then. Confused looks sprouted on everyone's faces. Reporters exchanged glances. Palin grew flustered, recognizing that something had curdled but not exactly sure what she'd screwed up. And here she reverted to the caricature: that fidgety posture and those looping, meaningless sentences. "I don't have the specific references in front of me," she said, desperately scrambling to recover.

The judge and all the lawyers seemed to agree, in what felt like silent assent, that an immediate sidebar had become necessary. [...]

She described a gradual diminution of her celebrity over the past decade, and claimed that by 2017, when the Times resuscitated those incitement accusations, she didn't have the same kind of power to fight back as she'd had in 2011. "I didn't have the PAC up and running and being aggressive," she said. "I didn't have any TV contracts. I didn't have that platform." She described the Times as a "Goliath" to her David. "There I was up in Wasilla, Alaska," she said, "going up against those who buy ink by the barrel, and I had my number two pencil on my kitchen table."

This was a good line. It was clearly one she'd prepped in advance. And it was, of course, a bit of an exaggeration. Palin isn't the superstar she once was (only a handful of paparazzi waited outside the courthouse to photograph her this morning when she arrived with her reported beau, former New York Rangers hockey star Ron Duguay), but she still has more than a million followers on Twitter and more than four million on Facebook.

When a lawyer for the Times cross-examined Palin, he first asked whether that initial round of false accusations, back in 2011, had in fact hurt her reputation much. She acknowledged that she continued to make appearances on Fox News, and even signed a new contract with the network in 2013. She was also the featured character in multiple reality television shows.

Then the lawyer brought up The Masked Singer. Palin appeared on this prime-time show in 2020, well after the story she's suing over ran in the Times. In the run-up to this trial, her attorneys filed a motion to bar any showing of the video in the courtroom. Now, Palin tried to bar any mention of the incident. "Objection," she said, in an earnest way that made it sound like she actually thought she had the ability, as a witness, to object. The courtroom burst into chuckles. Judge Rakoff informed her that this was a power not accorded to her. Forced to talk about the show, Palin said it was "the most fun 90 seconds of my life" and, when asked how much she was compensated, allowed that it had "paid some bills."

Later, the Times' lawyer asked what kind of mental anguish Palin had endured as a result of the publication of the Times editorial. She said she lost a little sleep, but admitted she'd never seen a doctor about it, or taken any medication. She never hired a PR firm to restore her allegedly tarnished image. She'd also never consulted a pastor, or a therapist. "I've never operated that way," she said. "I holistically remedy issues that are caused by stress. Meaning running, hot yoga, those kinds of things."

ANYTHING HE'S EVER ACCUSED ANYONE OF HE'S ACTUALLY DONE:

Documents ripped up, stuffed down the toilet or carted off to Florida -- the list of former US leader Donald Trump's alleged flouting of laws on preserving presidential papers grew longer and more bizarre Thursday.

Trump's shredding of many previously accepted norms of presidential decorum was part of his populist attraction to Republican supporters. But now the National Archives, which is in charge of preserving presidential records, reportedly wants Trump investigated over, among other things, his habit of literally tearing up White House papers while in office.

According to The Washington Post, the Archives requested the Justice Department open a probe into Trump's practices.

This came after the government records office confirmed Monday that it had recovered 15 boxes of documents from Trump's Florida estate, taken with him when he left Washington following his reelection defeat.

According to a report in The Washington Post on Thursday, citing anonymous sources, these documents included highly classified documents marked top secret and meant only for a small number of people with the necessary clearance.

Also reportedly in the pile of White House materials taken to the Mar-a-Lago complex was official correspondence with North Korea's leader Kim Jong Un  -- "love letters," as Trump described them at the time. Similarly included in the Florida stash was a letter outgoing president Barack Obama had left for Trump in the Oval Office.

THANKS, COVID:

We have grown used to masks now, those of us who wear them. It took a while. The first time I looped one self-consciously around my ears, it felt all wrong, like wearing a piece of underwear in public.

But on a good day, wearing a mask brings strangers oddly closer. For one thing, I've noticed we've begun to wave to each other. I wave at the man behind the fish counter, older couples braving sidewalk ice arm in arm, dogs in fake fur, any child in a stroller in a grocery aisle. Not a single one of them is known to me.

Everyone except the dogs waves back. It's a friendly acknowledgment of our mutually undesirable circumstance, as if the waves were holding their own conversation. "Neither of us finds the situation ordinary," one says. "Whoever you are, we have this in common." So, hello stranger, and goodbye.

TAX THE EXTERNALITIES:

Traffic-related pollution is likely a major driver of pediatric asthma, according to a new study from George Washington University. The research, which evaluated more than 13,000 cities around the world, suggests urban areas pose a higher risk for this condition and states that "mitigating air pollution should be a crucial element of public health strategies for children."

The results, published in The Lancet Planetary Health, found that nitrogen dioxide (NO2), a gas commonly found in vehicle exhaust, is the cause of nearly 2 million new cases of pediatric asthma per year. Two-thirds of these cases occurred in urban areas where emissions are high. 

IDEOLOGY VS. RESULTS:

Researchers at Vanderbilt University studied 3,000 low-income Tennessee children who had all applied for a pre-K program. Some were accepted and others were not. Both groups were followed from age 3 or 4 until the sixth grade. Earlier results from this cohort were published after the kids completed the third grade. They found that while the pre-K kids scored better on literacy and other measures in kindergarten, those gains quickly eroded, and by grade 3, the non-pre-K kids had caught up and surpassed the pre-K cohort. The results were worrying enough that one of the study's authors cautioned about the national rush to implement universal pre-K. "You have school systems that are pushing pre-K when they have demonstrably failing K-12 systems," Dale Farran warned. "It makes me cringe."

Now Vanderbilt has published the follow-up looking at how the children did up to grade six and the news is even worse. The gap between the pre-K and other kids continues to widen, with the pre-K group scoring worse on reading, writing, and science and also showing higher rates of disciplinary problems.

A lot of the enthusiasm for universal pre-K grew out of two very small studies of extremely high-quality programs, the Perry preschool project in Michigan and the Abecedarian preschool in North Carolina. But those programs were staffed by college graduates, and the kids scored better than controls on a number of measures. There are studies out there finding some salutary effects of various other programs as well. The problem, as I noted in my 2018 book Sex Matters, is that scaling up quality preschool programs is very hard. Decades of research on Head Start has failed to find durable academic benefits. And in Canada's Quebec province, the adoption of universal pre-K in 1997 led to serious negative outcomes when the kids reached adolescence. Teenagers who had been placed in daycare showed marked increases in anxiety, aggression, and dissatisfaction with life compared with those who had spent their early years in parental or other care. Even more worrying was the sharp increase in criminal activity noted among the teenagers who had participated in the program compared with peers in other provinces.

APPLIED DARWINISM:

In July 1912 800 delegates met at the Hotel Cecil on the Strand in London for the First International Eugenics Congress. Some of the foremost figures of the day - including the former and future British prime ministers Arthur Balfour and Winston Churchill - were there. The delegates represented a wide spectrum of opinion. Not only right-wing racists but also liberals and socialists believed eugenic policies should be used to raise what they regarded as the low quality of sections of the population.

The Liberal founder of the welfare state, William Beveridge, wrote in 1906 that men "who through general defects" are unemployable should suffer "complete and permanent loss of all citizen rights - including not only the franchise but civil freedom and fatherhood". In Marriage and Morals (1929), Bertrand Russell, while criticising American states that had implemented involuntary sterilisation too broadly, defended enforcing it on people who were "mentally defective". In 1931 an editorial in this magazine endorsed "the legitimate claims of eugenics", stating they were opposed only by those "who cling to individualistic views of parenthood and family economics".

The timing of the 1912 congress may be significant. In May 1912 a private members' "Feeble-Minded Control Bill" was presented to the House of Commons. The bill aimed to implement the findings of a royal commission, published in the British Medical Journal in 1908, which recommended that "lunatics or persons of unsound mind, idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded or otherwise should be afforded by the state such special protection as may be suited to their needs". The recommended measures included segregating hundreds of thousands of people in asylums and making marrying any of them a criminal offence. Curiously, the commission specified the number of people requiring this "protection" as being exactly 271,607.

The bill failed, partly as a result of intensive lobbying by the writer and Catholic apologist GK Chesterton of the Liberal MP Josiah Wedgewood. Despite continuing agitation by eugenicists, no law enabling involuntary sterilisation was ever passed in Britain. In 1913, however, parliament passed the Mental Deficiency Act, which meant "a defective" could be isolated in an institution under the authority of a Board of Control. The act remained in force until 1959.

Adam Rutherford, who reports these facts, writes that "though wildly popular across political divides...plenty of people vocally and publicly opposed the principles and the enactment of eugenics policies in the UK and abroad". This may be so, but very few of the active opponents of eugenics were progressive thinkers. During the high tide of eugenic ideas between the start of the 20th century and the 1930s, no leading secular intellectual produced anything comparable to Chesterton's Eugenics and Other Evils (1922), a powerful and witty polemic in which he argued for the worth of every human being.

By no means all Christians shared Chesterton's stance. As Rutherford points out, the dean of St Paul's Cathedral and professor of divinity at Cambridge, the Reverend WR Inge (1860-1954), wrote in favour of eugenic birth control, suggesting that "the urban proletariat may cripple our civilisation, as it destroyed that of ancient Rome".

While Christians were divided on eugenics, progressive thinkers were at one in supporting it. The only prominent counter-example Rutherford cites is HG Wells, whom he calls "a long-standing opponent of eugenics". Given the statements welcoming the extinction of non-white peoples in Wells's 1901 book Anticipations, this seems an oversimplified description.

Awkwardly for today's secular progressives, opposition to eugenics during its heyday in the West came almost exclusively from religious sources, particularly the Catholic Church. Eugenic ideas were disseminated everywhere, but few Catholic countries applied them. The only involuntary sterilisation legislation in Latin America was enacted in the state of Veracruz in Mexico in 1932. In Catholic Europe, Spain, Portugal and Italy passed no eugenic laws. By contrast, Norway and Sweden legalised eugenic sterilisation in 1934 and 1935, with Sweden requiring the consent of those sterilised only in 1976. In the US, more than 70,000 people were forcibly sterilised during the 20th century, with sterilisation without the inmates' consent being reported in female prisons in California up to 2014.

For the secular intelligentsia in the first three decades of the last century, eugenics - "the deliberate crafting of a society... by biological design", as Rutherford defines it - was a necessary part of any programme of human betterment. This was how eugenics was understood by the Victorian polymath Francis Galton (1822-1911), who invented the term, a conjunction of the Greek words for "good" and "offspring". Controlled breeding, aimed at raising the quality of the human beings who were born, was the path to the human good.

ALL ENGINEERING PROBLEMS ARE TEMPORARY:

IT'S A MYSTERY:

As Stanford professor and FiveThirtyEight contributor, Hakeem Jefferson, tweeted, "Conservatives didn't get upset when Trump promised to nominate a woman to the bench because the qualifier 'white' was simply implied." He later added that it's the misogynoir, or unique biases Black women experience, not the pledge, that is the problem.

Recent polling data certainly seems to support Jefferson's argument. Take, for example, Republican responses to the two YouGov polling questions about the importance of nominating a woman and the importance of nominating a Black woman to fill vacated SCOTUS seats in 2020 and 2022, respectively.

The chart above shows that more than half of Republicans and over three-quarters of Democrats thought it was important to have a female justice replace Ginsburg in a September 2020 YouGov/Yahoo Poll conducted a few days before Trump nominated Amy Coney Barrett to fill her seat. But while a similarly large share of Democrats said it's very or somewhat important to have a Black woman replace Breyer in a January 2022 YouGov survey, only 13 percent of Republicans said the same about Biden nominating a Black woman.  

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

The share of Australia's electricity consumption supplied by renewable energy projects continued to grow to new highs in 2021, delivering lower energy prices for consumers while the market share of coal and gas generators slumped to historic lows.

New analysis published by the Climate Council shows that renewable energy sources supplied five times as much electricity into the grid compared to the amount supplied by gas generators.

VLAD WHO?:

Japan is offering Europe part of its liquified natural gas imports over fears supplies will be disrupted by tensions surrounding a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine, Tokyo's trade minister said Wednesday.

Multiple gas shipments are already being diverted to Europe by private Japanese firms and will arrive this month, Koichi Hagiuda said, declining to give details of how many boats or how much LNG is involved.

WHICH IS WHY WE SHOULD TAX ONLY CONSUMPTION:

The typical American family is earning more than ever before. But for many it probably doesn't feel like that - at least as much as it should - because all of the income gains and then some have been offset with higher spending.

You could say higher spending is the goal. But all new luxuries become necessities in due time as expectations reset. I suspect part of the reason people don't feel better off is because financial progress is better measured by wealth, not income. And wealth is just the accumulation of income you haven't spent. So a lot of people are the financial equivalent of the exerciser who burns 500 calories then immediately offsets it with dessert and is frustrated by the lack of progress despite working so hard.

I get why it happens. Spending more when your income rises is as tempting as eating more after you exercise. It feels earned and justified. People's lifestyle expectations are driven by their peers, so when everyone spends more you feel entitled to do the same.

But all wealth relies on the ability to receive an extra dollar and say, "I could spend this, and spending feels great, but I'm not going to." It's the same as turning down a big meal after working out, and it's just as hard. All great things are hard.

THE MONOPOLAR WORLD:

It took several decades, but Greece has finally welcomed in the United States -- at Russia's expense.

Nearly 40 years ago, Greek people were marching in the streets against U.S. military bases in the region. Banners declared: "Out with the bases of death!" Across the nation, surveys showed most Greeks felt closer to Russia, a fellow Christian Orthodox nation that had helped the Greeks fight off Ottoman rule in 1821, than they did to the U.S.

Even in the 2000s, Greek-U.S. relations remained frosty. Athens flirted with strengthening its ties to Moscow.

That's all changed.

In recent years, U.S.-Greece relations have grown much tighter -- tighter than ever, officials on both sides proclaim. And much of that cooperation has directly affected Russia.

Greece has granted the U.S. open-ended access to four pivotal military bases, frustrating Russia. It has started receiving U.S. liquefied natural gas at a port near Athens, providing an alternative to Russia. And U.S. corporate giants have been establishing Greece as a regional hub -- JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Pfizer, Amazon, Cisco, Tesla and Deloitte have all made significant moves in the country recently.

WELL, HE DOES HATE HISTORY:

Two years ago, President Donald Trump signed what he called a "historical trade deal" with China that committed China to purchase $200 billion of additional US exports before December 31, 2021. Today the only undisputed "historical" aspect of that agreement is its failure. One lesson is not to make deals that cannot be fulfilled when unforeseen events inevitably occur--in this case, a pandemic and a recession. Another is not to forget the complementary policies needed to give an agreement a chance to succeed.

In the end, China bought only 57 percent of the US exports it had committed to purchase under the agreement, not even enough to reach its import levels from before the trade war.[1] Put differently, China bought none of the additional $200 billion of exports Trump's deal had promised.

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

U.S. officials say the disclosures are carefully vetted and represent only a small amount of the information America and its allies have gathered as Russian leader Vladimir Putin amasses troops along Ukraine's border. The goals, they say, include preemptively exposing -- and thus derailing -- Russian lies that could lead to a war while also putting America and its European allies on the same page.

"We believe ... that the best antidote to disinformation is information," Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Monday during an appearance before reporters. It's an approach that could prove a blueprint going forward as countries increasingly rely on manipulating the information space to further their geopolitical aims.

Among supporters of the effort is Michael Hayden, a former director of both the CIA and the National Security Agency, who said being more public-leaning on intelligence is something he's advocated for years given the changing threat landscape. "It's very different now -- the Information Age is very important," Hayden said.

Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said approvingly that "leaning in" on intelligence disclosures has given the Russians "fair warning." "I think that's, again, put the Russians back a little bit," he said.

PITY THE POOR PETROPHILES:

A vandal has seemingly chopped off the cables to all eight stalls of a brand new Tesla Supercharger station in Oakhurt, California -- a depressing reminder, perhaps, that the anti-electric car movement is still somehow alive and well.

It's far from the first Supercharger to have been vandalized. Cables have been cut into many times before. Some have even gone so far as to stuff raw meat into chargers. And then, of course, there are all the other instances of combustion engine truck drivers "ICE-ing" charging spots by physically blocking them.

SEEN ONE OCCUPY YOU'VE SEEN THEM ALL:

Justin Trudeau, week-long COVID isolation done, spoke in an emergency debate in Parliament Monday night, failing to extend an olive branch to the anti-mandate protesters occupying Ottawa. Instead, he said they should leave, the Globe reports: "Individuals are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy and our fellow citizens' daily lives. It has to stop. The people of Ottawa don't deserve to be harassed in their own neighbourhoods. They don't deserve to be confronted with the inherent violence of a swastika flying on a street corner, or a confederate flag, or the insults and jeers just because they're wearing a mask."

Candice Bergen, who has met with the convoy protesters, unlike Trudeau, said Trudeau is making things worse: "Does he regret calling people names who didn't take the vaccine? Does he regret calling people misogynist and racist and just escalating and poking sticks at them and being so divisive to individual Canadians?"

EXACTLY THE SORT OF WUSS THE rIGHT GENERALLY WORSHIPS:

"No one has ever said that Russian troops will remain on the territory of Belarus, this has never been discussed," Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Putin, told Tass. "We are talking about allied exercises, and, of course, it is understood that upon completion of these exercises, the troops will return to their permanent places of deployment."

WOULD HAVE BEEN FUN TO WATCH UKRAINE WIN:

Darn, he figured it out. https://t.co/3YIq7THISJ

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 8, 2022

NORMALCY, WITH NUTTERY:

 The new data shows Americans are coming to terms with living with COVID. But it also reveals an utter lack of consensus on how to live with it.

People are divided about evenly into four camps on how to proceed: drop all mandates and requirements, keep some, keep most, or add even more.

Half support stores or restaurants requiring customers to show proof of vaccination to enter.

TAX, DON'T REGULATE:

Beginning with the Great Depression, the Civil Aeronautics Board (CAB), set airline routes, flight, schedules, and even prices. The result was 10 airlines enjoyed a de facto government-protected 90% of the air travel market: a monopoly with extra steps. This supposedly "pro-consumer" regulatory system made flying unaffordable for many Americans.  Consequently, Carter signed the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978, ending the CAB's power to control air travel. The result was new airlines entering the market offering lower prices and expanded routes. Deregulation made air travel affordable and accessible for every American. Whereas less than 30% of the public had flown commercially in 1976,  60% of Americans were booking at least one round trip flight per year by the turn of the century.

Further, Carter also pushed Congress to deregulate trucking and railroads. Before President Carter signed the Staggers Rail Act of 1980, the rate of return on railroad investments was only 2.7%, compared to more than 10% for comparable industries.  This caused many railroad companies to file for bankruptcy.  Following the passage of the Staggers Act, railroads could compete on price, which consequently strengthened the industry while benefiting consumers. Economists with the American Consumer Institute found that "From 1980 to 2020, taking account of inflation, the industry's productivity has increased 159%, shipping volumes have increased 57%, revenues have dropped 13%, and prices have plummeted 44%."

One of President Carter's key allies in his deregulatory push was none other than the Senate's "liberal lion" Edward Kennedy. Thanks in large part to his then-staffer and future Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, Sen. Kennedy recognized the New Deal-era regulations were helping big business monopolize the American transportation sector to the detriment of consumers. As Justice Breyer, said of airline regulations ".... all the groups you'd think regulation was good for, and would want it--the consumers, the unions, even Ralph Nader--the economists, different people--they all say it's bad? Who are the only people who like it? The airlines! They love it!"

Sen. Joe Biden supported President Carter's deregulatory efforts. (Yes, he has been in Washington longer than most Americans have been alive.) Unfortunately, President Biden seems to have forgotten how Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Ralph Nader, and other liberals showed how free market means can achieve progressive ends. 

THE MIRACLE OF FORGIVENESS:

In Tennessee, his past was erased. His new friend introduced him as a budding white-supremacist leader. Damien was soon hanging out with highlevel members of the Aryan Nations and their wealthy financial backers.

One of them, the well-known music producer Jonathan David Brown, quickly became a kind of father figure to him, paying his expenses and inviting him to spend weekends on a big farm he owned outside of Nashville. Among the local skinheads, Damien was perceived as a kind of golden child, which he found intoxicating.

On the evening of June 9, 1990, Brown introduced him to Leonard William Armstrong, grand dragon of the Tennessee White Knights of the KKK. Brown vouched for Damien, telling Armstrong he was an up-and-coming leader and "our guy." With other skinheads, they went into downtown Nashville and as a group harassed some Black men who happened to drive by; Damien told them that he "had a ticket for them to go back to Africa." Afterward, Armstrong asked Damien to drive him to an undisclosed location. It turned out to be the West End Synagogue.

The shooting led to another turning point. Aware of the FBI's interest, Brown arranged for Damien to flee Tennessee, paying his expense as he lived on the road with a girl he was dating. After Damien returned to Tennessee toward the end of 1990, he fell into disputes with Brown and Armstrong, and set off on his own: In the space of a few months, he went to Hawaii to reconcile and live with his father, joined the Navy, underwent basic training, and was sent to a base in Virginia.

At about this time, he also reconciled with his mother and stepfather. In 1991, while he was living in Virginia, the law finally caught up with him. He was about to deploy to the Persian Gulf for his first of two tours of duty, but his use of his Social Security number as part of the deployment process allowed law enforcement to track him down.

He made a deal to return to Tennessee after six months of deployment to testify against Armstrong, who was sentenced to three and half years in prison, and Brown, who was sentenced to more than two years plus additional penalties. Damien served six months probation, and as a minor when the synagogue shooting took place was dealt with as a juvenile and his record was sealed.

Another re-invention followed: Damien would come to pretend he had never been a white supremacist. This was tricky at first. On Damien's first day of basic training, a Black drill instructor spotted the white-supremacist tattoos on his body and said, "Well, Robert E. Lee, looks like you and I are going to have some fun together." At graduation, after Damien had finished first in his class, that same drill instructor approached Damien's mother and stepfather and acknowledged what a tremendous transformation he had undergone.

By the time he was twenty years old, he was completely done with white supremacism. He spent several years in the military. Following his discharge, he pursued a love of auto racing and worked in NASCAR as a mechanic. He then taught himself to code and went on to become an extremely successful entrepreneur. A software company that he founded, Banjo, became a high-growth start-up that, over a period of years, attracted almost a quarter of a billion dollars in financing.

As Banjo's CEO, Damien gave well-received speeches at industry conventions and was touted as a success in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and elsewhere. In his public appearances, he told an inspiring story about his difficult past, including his homelessness and gang activity, but omitted any mention of white supremacism.

But in April 2020, some three decades after the incident at the West End Synagogue, the technology-news website OneZero ran an investigative report detailing Damien's past, complete with a photo from a 1992 newspaper report showing him giving a Heil Hitler salute. Other media picked up the story, and weeks later, Damien resigned as Banjo's CEO, publicly apologizing for his actions. He withdrew for a year to take stock of his life and explore his past.

And that's how I came to know Damien Patton.

In April 2020, when the news about Damien broke, a friend of mine in Silicon Valley texted me and asked if I was available to talk. I found myself spellbound. I was the head of ADL; would I be willing to talk to him?

I agreed without hesitation. ADL as an organization has long tried to exemplify the Jewish concept of teshuvah, or repentance. Everyone has the ability to atone for misdeeds and seek forgiveness. All of us have the duty to help in that endeavor if we can and not write anybody off out of hand.

I quickly researched Damien online, discovered coverage of the allegations, and followed the trail on social media. I called my general counsel, a longtime ADL employee, and asked if he had heard of this story. He went into the files and, sure enough, found a hard-copy ADL bulletin from 1990 in which we had written about the incident.

I spoke to Damien late that same day. It wasn't an especially long conversation. I offered to speak with Damien again when he returned to Salt Lake City, where he lived with his wife and where Banjo was headquartered.

He agreed. A few days later, when we connected via Zoom, he rarely looked at the camera. His eyes were glassy and his mind seemed elsewhere.

Despite that difficult conversation, Damien and I struck up a friendship and began talking to each other on the phone almost every week--a relationship that, as of this writing, remains ongoing.

When people learn of my relationship with Damien, many of them ask why I have invested so much time in it. The answer is simple: I genuinely like Damien and believe that his contrition, his repudiation of white-supremacist ideology, and his desire for forgiveness are genuine. 

THE WAR HASN'T EVEN GONE UNDER THE PETTIS:

[F]or activist and author Kimberly Latrice Jones, it's not all that complicated. She cut through the bullshit when she appeared on The Breakfast Club podcast on Monday, offering what she thinks is the real reason why the anti-CRT craze has taken hold: White parents want to avoid having difficult conversations with their children about race.

"The truth is, Ruby Bridges, who integrated school, is only in her sixties," Jones, who co-authored the 2019 book I'm Not Dying With You Tonight, said. "So what it is is that you don't want your kids, your grandkids, to know that you spit at her. You don't want your grandkids to know that you witnessed lynching. You don't want your grandkids to know that some of those family heirlooms that's in the will are things from atrocities that happened to Black people."

"We want to be convinced that it was so long ago," she concluded. "It was last night. It's today."

BELLICHICK IS JUST BETTER AT FOOTBALL:

BECAUSE UKRAINE WOULD WIN:

Intercepted communications obtained by the US have revealed that some Russian officials have worried that a large-scale invasion of Ukraine would be costlier and more difficult than Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Kremlin leaders realize, according to four people familiar with the intelligence.

Three of the sources said those officials include intelligence and military operatives.

The officials have also grumbled about their plans being discovered and exposed publicly by western nations, two of the sources said, citing the intercepted communications.

WHO KNEW JOE HAD IT IN HIM:

FORESHADOWING:

Pride comes before a fall. It's a lesson parroted to us by parents and peers and, once again, Amos is ahead of the curve in his prophetic words.

In chapter 6, we move from generalities about Israel's sins as a nation to God explaining the real root of the evil among his people: pride. God swears by himself, the highest authority, and he names his abhorrence, his disgust, his loathing at their pride.

Pride is the sin which says you have no sin. It makes you feel untouchable, for you perceive yourself as strong and mighty. It whispers that you are better than others, invincible. Deserving of special treatment. Pride refuses to repent.

...AND GOES ON...:

Leaving his own indelible mark on the 20th century, Joplin was an innovator whose deceptive, irregular rhythms and nuanced harmonic language helped define the trajectory of American music during a time of rapid change and flux. His short life (he died before age 50 in 1917) is almost a case study in the transformations of his time. He was born in northeast Texas just four years after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, one of the first Black Americans born into the promise of freedom. A natural-born musician, Joplin absorbed a wide mix of influences, from the plantation melodies his parents played on the violin and banjo to the classical training he received from a generous local piano teacher. By the time Joplin was in his teens, in the 1880s, he was making a living as an itinerant musician, shaping a brand new American sound.

Joplin became the "King of Ragtime," a pioneer of a genre that permanently altered American culture. It exploded onto the scene in 1893, thanks in part to the World's Columbian Exposition, an expansive fair in Chicago visited by some 27 million people. While the fair itself was segregated, the saloons, cafés and brothels surrounding the fairgrounds resonated with the melodies of traveling ragtime musicians, including Joplin, who was there with his own band. The St. Louis Dispatch described this new national craze as "a veritable call of the wild, which mightily stirred the pulses of city-bred people."

Ragtime introduced mainstream America to the simple but radical trick of syncopation in rhythm - that displacement of the beat which causes a propulsion, a swinging of the hips, a feeling that anything might happen. Joplin's innovations in ragtime laid the foundation for much of 20th century American music: first blues, jazz and swing, then R&B and rock-and-roll. Nothing would ever be the same again.

WHO GETS FIRED FROM FIVE GUYS?:

Henshaw grew up with a pastor father whose voice can briefly be heard on the last track, "Joy." He's duly given props to gospel stars Kirk Franklin and Jonathan McReynolds in interviews, but he has also copped to a surprisingly eclectic set of pop, rock and jazz influences that surface on Untidy Soul and meld to stunning effect. The first song, "Thoughts & Prayers," turns the idea of gospel music on its head, delivering a powerful self-indictment rather than praise to God. "Bow my head, said my prayers/ I'm the good one, ain't I?/ Washed my hands of all my sins/ I'm the good guy, ain't I?" he asks himself. But he regretfully concludes that "there's blood on my hands after all" because he perhaps didn't offer more than the traditional "thoughts and prayers" when he could have.

On "Grow," a lush, souful song is built around the mature and measured sentiment of "If it hurts, baby/ Oh, we let it hurt, baby/ 'Cause it'll never work, no/ Unless we try, oh/ Together we'll grow." Henshaw neatly performs the trick of taking a song about toughing out the hard parts of a relationship and making it into an earworm (seriously, check out that shimmering chorus). Henshaw gets lighter and breezier on the bop "Chicken Wings," in which he proclaims, "The heart wants what it wants/ And what it wants is me, you and some chicken wings." He brings the joy and charisma of a "Happy"-era Pharrell to this goofy little number with a killer hook: "To fulfill this craving, don't need reservations." It's so uplifting and fun, you're sorry it's over in less than three minutes.

BUT MUTI MADE IT LOOK SO EASY...:

[A]fter two months at the helm of a three-party coalition, the Social Democrat is under fire on multiple fronts, accused of failing to show leadership, sending muddled messages and taking too soft a line with Moscow in its showdown with Ukraine and the West.

Berlin's decision not to deliver defensive weapons to Ukraine, and its moves to block allies from sending arms as well, have incensed some allies, particularly in Eastern Europe. A reluctance to state clearly that the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline would be hit by sanctions if Moscow attacks Ukraine also angered many, particularly in Washington.

"Berlin, we have a problem," Germany's ambassador to the U.S., Emily Haber, wrote in a leaked diplomatic cable at the end of last month, warning that a growing number of politicians in Washington were branding Germany an "unreliable partner." Haber even appeared on Fox News -- not natural terrain for a career diplomat -- as part of an effort to push back against the bad press.

Back home, the chancellor has been heavily criticized for being largely absent while his government got hammered by allies and international media for seemingly failing its first big foreign policy test.

THE HARD PART IS GETTING RUSSIA TO INVADE:

In my visits to Ukraine as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's military commander, I found its troops and government officials to be fiercely proud of their language, heritage and national sovereignty. Ukrainian troops deployed to Afghanistan under my command, and also participated in several other NATO missions. What they may have lacked in training and equipment they made up through determination and toughness.

The Ukrainian collective memory stretches back through many involvements with Russian troops in the interwar years of the 20th century, during the famines and fighting of World War II, and during the Cold War years of the Soviet Union. As Timothy Snyder points out in his book "Bloodlands," the Ukrainians suffered greatly and at the hands of Russians over the past century. They can and will fight. And the Western democracies can help.

The U.S. has been on both sides of insurgencies, of course. It fought a long war in Vietnam that it ultimately lost to the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong. More recently, the Taliban simply outlasted U.S. patience in Afghanistan.

On the other hand, Washington supported a successful insurgency, ironically, against the Soviets during their occupation of Afghanistan -- American Stinger missiles may have been the key technology that helped turn the tide. Allied support to the French resistance in World War II was a crucial element in undermining German control over the population in the months leading up to D-Day.

This kind of support can be done clandestinely, led by the Central Intelligence Agency. But in the situation of a democracy overrun by an authoritarian neighbor, there seems little value in hiding the ball. If the U.S. makes the decision that it will support a potential Ukrainian resistance movement, it should be laying the groundwork immediately, while Russian tanks are still parked on the other side of the border.

This means getting supplies into the hands of Ukrainian special forces, who would be a central part of such a resistance force. They would need the ability to move out of the population centers, organize and live off the land, communicate collectively, and above all inflict damage on the occupiers.

This implies a need for transportable explosives, light but lethal handheld missiles to use against Russian tanks and close-air support, and plenty of conventional ammunition and hardware including sniper rifles, high-end optical sights and night vision devices. Cyberwarfare support would be a must. And trainers in-country -- both military and CIA.

One key would be for the Zelenskiy government to get out of Kyiv before the Russians consolidated control. The government-in-exile should be welcomed in a NATO capital, and provided full support from the alliance administratively and diplomatically. It should continue to function via its system of ambassadors worldwide, and communicate effectively with the resistance leadership within the country. The model of Charles de Gaulle's Free French government -- despite occasionally being a challenge to the World War II allies -- would be suitable.

JUST GET YOUR SHOTS:

The risk of death involving Covid-19 is 93% lower for people who have had a booster or third dose of vaccine compared with unvaccinated people, new research suggests.

Mortality rates for coronavirus deaths were found to be "consistently lower" across all age groups for those who had received an extra dose compared with those who had received no doses, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The research used age-standardised mortality rates, which take into account differences in age structure and population size, to allow for comparisons between vaccination groups.

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

In his final weeks in office, President Donald Trump stunned the international community in formally recognizing Western Sahara as part of Morocco. Morocco has occupied much of its southern neighbor since 1975, when it invaded and annexed the former Spanish colony in defiance of the United Nations Security Council and a landmark ruling of the International Court of Justice.

Most observers believed that, as with some of Trump's other impetuous foreign policy decisions, President Joe Biden would reverse it soon after coming to office. However, much to the disappointment of bipartisan congressional leaders, career State Department officials, major U.S. allies, North Africa scholars, and the human rights community, he has refused to do so. [...]

For the Moroccans, the U.S. recognition has only solidified their insistence that self-determination is out of the question. 

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

On the banks of the River Humber in northern England, the winds of change are blowing through Hull, where factory workers busily craft turbine blades in a green revolution.

Hull, known for a once-thriving fishing industry, the poet Philip Larkin, rugby league, and the city's eponymous football club recently bought by Turkish TV personality Acun Ilicali, is home to Britain's biggest wind turbine blade plant.

That has placed Hull at the centre of the UK government's long-term plan to slash carbon emissions, tackle climate change and cut rocketing household energy bills.

German-Spanish giant Siemens Gamesa is rapidly expanding its facility to meet booming demand and keep the country's much-trumpeted 2050 net-zero target on track.

The need for cheaper sources of energy became increasingly urgent this week, as the government scrambled to head off a cost of living crisis, faced with runaway electricity and gas costs that are fuelling decades-high inflation.

GOING GREEN:

What is it about these silly games that compels us so? Why do I experience a little rush of joy, each day, when I remember there's still the Wordle to do? Alan Connor, author of Two Girls, One on Each Knee, a history of the crossword, notes that the pandemic has provided the perfect conditions for an upsurge of interest in word games of all kinds. "It's no surprise that those who have had more time alone should see the appeal in losing themselves in a puzzle for a spell, but it also works for those who've been run off their feet: a puzzle is, at least, something you can feel you've finished."

Connor sees Wordle as a "charming gateway" to the world of "moving letters around for the sheer pleasure of it", but it is far from the only distraction we have turned to. The crossword setters and puzzle compilers he knows report that they've never had so much interest. Publications from the Sun to the Telegraph to the New Yorker have upped their puzzle content in recent months - and this was from a position of strength. On the 100th anniversary of the crossword in 2013, Connor commissioned a YouGov survey on the popularity of the crossword and found that three in 10 British adults attempted a crossword each week and more than one in five made their decision to buy a newspaper based on the particular crossword culture of the publication. The solution to the clue that forms the title of his book is PATELLA, by the way.

Like so many word puzzles, Wordle is really a numbers game masquerading as a letters game, according to mathematician Alex Bellos, Guardian puzzle compiler and author of the Language Lover's Puzzle Book. "You'll find that the people who are really brilliant at word games are mathematical. It's quite often maths graduates who win the international Scrabble competitions and set cryptic crosswords."

The crucial strategy is that of "exhaustion", he says - which is maybe why I'm so good at it. No, not that sort of exhaustion: "You have a finite number of solutions and you have to exhaustively look at every permutation and combination. It's a natural instinct for mathematicians. You also have to be drawn to the non-human, a bit like a robot, working through letters in every different position."

Yet really successful puzzle games seem to share certain irresistible human elements, too - competition, status-seeking and superstition. Everyone Bellos knows has now arrived at a favourite first word, he says. "They are probably quite protective of them, too. They're almost like lucky charms."

JUST A "CONCERNED PARENT":

Archeologist and historian Kelley Fanto Deetz resigned on Friday from a position as Virginia's Executive Mansion's director of historic interpretation and education.

Deetz had worked with a broader team aiming to tell the story of descendents of workers who once lived and worked at the site, which is the oldest continuously occupied, purpose-built governor's residence in the U.S. Former First Lady Pam Northam was a driver in the project and helped hire Deetz, but the archeologists' position has been unclear since Gov. Glenn Youngkin was inaugurated.

Deetz declined to comment on the decision beyond confirming it. 

Deetz previously told VPM she'd arrived at the mansion last month to find Youngkin's team had converted a planned educational space for mansion visitors- and former laundry and sleeping quarters for enslaved workers - into a family room. Period cooking supplies on loan from Monticello and other sites had been cast aside in the historic kitchen, Deetz said. Her office had also been emptied.

NOTHING MORE BECOMES THE AMERICAN PEOPLE...:

Something serious appears to have prompted Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., to label a fellow Republican, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, a "con artist" and "one of the worst human beings." Perhaps it was Hawley's public questioning of the need to defend Ukraine from a Russian invasion. Maybe it was when Hawley this week urged President Joe Biden to cave to Russian President Vladimir Putin's demand that Ukraine be officially denied membership in NATO. Or maybe it was when Hawley falsely asserted that Biden is to blame for Ukraine's predicament.

There once was a time when Hawley had presidential aspirations, but a badly timed fist-pump on Jan. 6, 2021, along with his appeasing advocacy of Russian supremacy just about closes the lid on his presidential dreams. We thought Hawley should've resigned his Senate seat for his role in the Capitol insurrection, but the idea that the United States should kneel down to Russia over Ukraine underscores how grossly unfit Hawley is to continue in office.

EMOTION, NOT THOUGHT:

As Covid-19 continues, we have started using a new vocabulary in our struggle to understand its effects: "brain fog," "breakthrough cases," "long haulers," "Covid rage." Thucydides, too, pushed language to better understand the full effects of the pandemic on the life of his city. It led him to an important insight into a critical moment in the politics of his own day. His terminology also raises serious questions for our own time, for he knew that political decision-making may be more deeply impaired by a pandemic than citizens recognize.

Thucydides did not hesitate to explore such effects. He did this by recounting a matter ostensibly only loosely related to the pandemic.

By the end of its second year, the war was going so badly for Athens that its legislative assembly voted to send a delegation to Sparta to sue for peace. This was a total repudiation of Pericles's strategy and of his leadership.

Pericles believed--and Thucydides clearly shares his view--that the Athenians' decision was not based on a cool-headed assessment of the strategic situation, but on an impulsive reaction to the pandemic, which had left the citizenry vulnerable to its unspoken and unrecognized emotional effects. That, above all else, was what needed to be brought into the open and forthrightly addressed.

Pericles knew that he would have to deal with these emotions if his city were to avoid what he regarded as a disastrous blunder. So, using his authority as a general, he convened another session of the assembly to focus attention on what he regarded as the underlying causes of the blunder. It would do little good, he realized, to describe the economic consequences of a capitulation or conjure up an image of Spartan troops imposing a narrow oligarchy on a once proudly democratic city. Instead of these obvious rhetorical strategies, he would have to deal with the emotions underlying the decision.

Here Thucydides stretches his language, adopting, or perhaps coining, a remarkable phrase to describe this remarkable rhetorical strategy. Its intent was, he says, to "lead the enragement of their judgment onto gentler and less fearful ground."

The phrase is built on a Greek term, orge, often translated as anger or rage, but which includes as well a loss of ability to restrain any of a number of intense emotions and drives. It implies that the Athenians were not just angry; their emotions had taken over, affecting their ability to make sound judgments. Even worse, Thucydides indicates, they were not aware of what was happening to them.

They had good reason to be angry--at the war, at Pericles's strategy, at the terrible pandemic. But that pandemic had left the citizenry vulnerable to something worse, hotheaded decision-making. That's what a pandemic does, as Pericles explains in his speech to the Athenian Assembly: "A great disruption falling on you suddenly has impoverished your understanding." For, he explains, "something so swift, unexpected and unaccountable enslaves one's judgment." That, Pericles asserts, "is what has happened to you."

To speak in such a confrontational way risked intensifying the assembly's anger, but Pericles pushed on with a powerful speech. Yet, it was only partially successful. The Athenians, apparently recognizing the force of his analysis, decided to stick with his strategy, but in their continuing anger imposed a fine on him, large enough to remove him temporarily from office.

Pericles was willing to undergo personal risk for what he believed was the good of his endangered city. A demagogue would be more self-serving, recognizing in the distress caused by a pandemic an opportunity for advantage and self-gratification. Demagogues, ancient and modern, know how to exploit such situations, then pretend they had nothing to do with the outcome. A few inflammatory speeches--nothing need be explicit--can turn a crowd into an angry mob, provided conditions are right.

Thus, while a pandemic in ancient Athens may seem inconsequential when we are trying to cope with a pandemic of our own, Thucydides's analysis of the political consequences of the Athenian pandemic raises pressing questions for American politics today, most important, perhaps, whether the Covid-19 pandemic can affect the body politic as gravely as it does the health of its individual citizens.

The crowd attacking the U.S. Capitol building on January 6 is an obvious example of such "enragement of judgment." Yet, it presented itself as a political act, an exercise of a constitutional right to freedom of expression. Clearly, however, it was mob violence driven by blind rage. Thucydides would see behind such enragement the pandemic's erosion of civilized norms--not that the pandemic caused the riot, in some narrow sense, but by heightening and exacerbating emotions, thereby it helped provide the conditions, the tinder, for such an unprecedented flare-up.

VLAD WHO?:

The emerging deals were on display this week, with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan traveling to the Ukrainian capital to send a sharp message to Moscow: His country would help expand Ukraine's supply of armed, long-range Bayraktar drones -- a powerful weapon the Kremlin has warned Kyiv not to use.

The growing cooperation with Turkey is just one element of a broader Kyiv effort to develop smaller security and political pacts, given that Ukraine is facing a lengthy and uncertain path to NATO membership -- if it happens at all. The country is also working to cement a new partnership with the U.K. and Poland, highlighted this week when leaders from the three countries met in Kyiv. 

Ukraine's potential NATO membership is at the heart of the current standoff between Russia and Western allies, with Russia claiming it won't remove more than 100,000 troops massed along Ukraine's border until it gets -- among other things -- a hard guarantee that Ukraine will never join the military alliance. 

And while NATO and the U.S. have flatly rejected that demand, the stance has been understood more as a principled defense of NATO's "open door" policy rather than a concrete encouragement of Ukraine's membership.

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has acknowledged that reality in describing why he is pushing for stronger ties with individual partners. The willingness, in particular, of Poland and Turkey to confront Russia gives Ukraine some reassurance, helping to offset worries in Kyiv that other regional players, including Hungary and Germany, might be too soft on Moscow because of their economic or political interests.

LIFT THEM ALL:

KEYSTONE KREMLIN:

THE DESANTIS FEW:

Three members of the National Socialist Movement, including Kissimmee-based leader Burt Colucci, were arrested after a scuffle during a demonstration at Waterford Lakes last weekend made national headlines, the Orange County Sheriff's Office announced Friday afternoon.

Colucci and Joshua Terrell of Indiana were charged with battery evidencing prejudice after video showed the two attacking a Jewish man who confronted them as they shouted antisemitic slurs by Alafaya Trail and Waterford Lakes Parkway. The battery charges, normally first-degree misdemeanors, are being upgraded to third-degree felonies under Florida's hate crime law.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATION:

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

To compare changes across species over time, the researchers used metrics called darwins and haldanes (after the British scientist JBS Haldane). These are statistical measures that offer a way to compare the vastly different types of information in the database--from the height of birch trees growing near smelting operations in Russia to how the acidification of Swedish lakes is affecting frog survival rates.

The new analysis found that rates of phenotypic change were higher in populations affected by human activity than those that were not. But the researchers were surprised to find little evidence isolating climate change as the cause of phenotypic change.

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM ALL:

The US added hundreds of thousands more jobs in January than economists expected, showing a labor market recovery that didn't flinch at the sight of omicron.

The 467,000 new jobs, led by the ongoing rebound in the leisure and hospitality sector, was much larger than the 125,000 jobs economists broadly expected. (Some even feared a decrease because the data were collected in the first two weeks of the month during omicron's peak.)

Meanwhile, the readings for November and December were revised upwards by more than 700,000 jobs, showing that the recovery leading up to the omicron wave also was stronger than what economists initially thought.

...AND CHEAPER...:

With Navitas' technology, an electric vehicle could charge at a consumer's home in a third of the time it currently takes.

As an example: "It will take about 10 hours to fully charge a Tesla. You can say, 'Well, that's overnight. I'm sleeping. It's no big deal,'" Sheridan said. "But there's times when you don't have 10 hours to get on the road."

If that same new technology is used inside the electric car, the car's range could be increased by close to 30%, or the size of the battery could be decreased by 30%, both advantages in their own way.

RIGHT AGAIN, PAT:

Eight long years ago, Patrick J. Buchanan, founding co-editor of TAC, provocatively wrote: "Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind's future, is he one of us?"

IT HAD BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE WE NEEDED TO BE ASHAMED OF AMERICA:

Mohammed Saleh never got a chance to say goodbye to his son.

In 2018, Saleh petitioned for a visa so his son -- Ayman, who lived in Aden, Yemen, and was 20 at the time -- could come to the United States to seek treatment for a congenital heart condition. He wanted to hold Ayman, take him to his doctor appointments, and give him a chance at life. That opportunity didn't exist in Yemen, where less than half of all health facilities were functioning after years of civil war.

The last time Saleh saw his son was during a visit to Yemen in June 2019. He still hoped then they could reunite in New York, where Saleh has lived for nearly three decades.

But then-President Donald Trump's ban on travel from several Muslim-majority countries, issued in January 2017, meant Ayman's visa application was delayed indefinitely. Saleh begged lawyers and advocates for help, but the ban made legal recourse all but impossible.

Ayman's application was still being processed when he died at a Yemeni hospital in May 2021, during Islam's holy month of Ramadan.

A year-long HuffPost investigation found hundreds of cases of Trump's ban changing the lives of Muslims, both inside the United States and around the world. Families have been ripped apart. Educational and employment opportunities have been denied, maybe forever. People have missed milestones like birthdays, funerals and weddings. Some gave up on coming to the U.S. and instead relocated to another country, while others have been trapped in war zones.

HuffPost collected data throughout 2021 on people who have been affected by the Trump-era travel ban, which included reaching out to American organizations that work with Muslim communities, putting out open calls on social media, and contacting lawyers and activists. An abridged and anonymized version of our data lives here, and our charts were built with Datawrapper.

The State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs published monthly and quarterly reports after the 2017 Supreme Court ruling, which included cumulative data on versions of the ban that were implemented between Dec. 8, 2017, and Jan. 20, 2021. However, that data is somewhat limited because it does not show monthly breakdowns of denials in 2017 and 2018.

The State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs tallied 41,876 visas denied between December 2017 and January 2021, but no single agency or organization has collected comprehensive data on how tens of thousands of people, many of whom were American Muslims, were affected. But over the last year, HuffPost collected 874 stories of people who, like Saleh, are still feeling the impact of Trump's travel ban five years later.

In an attempt to account for the ban's far-reaching implications, HuffPost spoke to lawyers, immigration groups and advocacy organizations; interviewed dozens of families; and sifted through nearly a hundred lawsuits. These numbers are not comprehensive due to legal and practical limitations -- including the fact that not all impacted individuals could or did seek legal help -- but the analysis is the first of its kind and provides an in-depth glimpse into the physical, mental and economic toll of those denials.

THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

Kadyrov has long used social media to promote himself and his government, as well as to attempt to smear or humiliate his opponents. According to various reports, the Chechen government has invested heavily in promoting the online presences of Kadyrov's relatives and allies, reportedly paying popular singers and other performers large sums for promotion. In October 2020, the rapper Morgenshtern reported that he'd been given 400,000 rubles ($5,230) to promote the account of one of Kadyrov's close allies.

But more recently, and particularly with the advent of 1ADAT, Kadyrov's opponents have gained a toehold on the Internet, which sociologist Yevgeny Varshaver argues is a particularly powerful tool in societies, like those of the North Caucasus, with powerful social codes of "honor" and "dishonor."

"The rituals of honor and shame take on a second life on the Internet," Varshaver told RFE/RL, "because the Internet has a vast audience and that means the stakes are higher, the wins are more substantial, and the losses are more painful. Any viral video can be seen by millions and there is no taking it back, if you don't count the second typical use of the Internet [in such societies] -- [coerced] apologies."

"It is no surprise that in societies where 'honor' is the main currency, such incidents -- in which the number of spectators is maximized -- acquire fundamental importance," he said.

The anonymous leaders of 1ADAT seem to understand this. The channel they have created has a large number of anonymous contributors, and the anonymity seems to make many of them far bolder than bloggers who write -- even from self-exile outside Russia -- under their own names.

1ADAT's anonymity also means that many of its contributors live inside Chechnya and closer to the issues and symbols that push the buttons of residents there.

According to statements attributed to 1ADAT's leaders, the channel comprises a small leadership team that makes strategic decisions and a large base of volunteer administrators and contributors. Every leader, the channel says, "has been held captive by Kadryov's forces and has endured their torture."

In terms of content, the channel is a mixture of serious reports of alleged crimes and abuses by the authorities and insulting and humorous GIFs and memes targeting Kadyrov and his associates. The latter have made the channel extremely popular among youth in the North Caucasus, many of whom are motivated to contribute themselves.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

2021 was a banner year for renewables in China. On Dec. 25, 2021, China connected its largest wind farm--134 turbines off the coast of Shanghai--to the power grid. The project will generate enough electricity annually to power 900,000 households. In 2021, according to calculations by Carbon Brief, China added nearly 17 gigawatts (GW) of offshore wind capacity, for a total of 26 GW, or more than what the rest of the world built in the last five years combined. In addition, it has 21 GW of onshore wind power.

China's solar power generation likewise continued to climb. The country installed 54.9 GW of solar power in 2021, bringing the total solar capacity to over 305 GW, about 30% of the global total of installed solar power.

DONALD WHO?:

A winning message would emphasize inflation and parental rights, they said -- not the 2020 election, which Trump falsely insists he won. Strengthening the party would require opening it up to new voters -- not punishing Republicans who have disagreed with Trump, they added.

The sentiments echo those of local GOP leaders, who said late last year that they were ready to move beyond the 2020 election, even if Trump wasn't. They wanted to put issues like border security, the Afghanistan troop withdrawal and education front and center. [...]

The model campaign that Republican donors and strategists here are studying and hoping to re-create in their own states is that of Republican Glenn Youngkin, a political novice who won the Virginia governor's race last year over former Gov. Terry McAuliffe.

"The most important thing that struck me was [Youngkin] talked to the voters about what they wanted to talk about," said Michael Whatley, the chairman of the North Carolina Republican Party.

By keeping Trump at a distance and emphasizing local issues, Youngkin prevailed in a state that President Joe Biden won by 10 percentage points.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

A Republican bill that would have overhauled elections in Arizona -- including giving the state legislature the power to reject election results -- proved to be too much even for state GOP leaders this week.

Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, quietly doomed House Bill 2596 on Tuesday with an unusual parliamentary maneuver.

The speaker assigns all new bills to a committee for consideration before they can have full House votes, a choice that often has a great effect on a measure's chance of success. But on Tuesday, Bowers took the unprecedented step of ordering all 12 House committees to consider the elections bill, virtually ensuring it will never reach the floor.

The bill's lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. John Fillmore, referred to the move as a "12-committee lynching" in an interview with CNN affiliate KPHO/KTVK.

WHY DID WE ALLOW THEM TO GO IF NOT TO CALL OUT THE PRC?:

U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on Thursday the United States has a moral duty to condemn China's rights abuses but she urged U.S. athletes not to risk angering the "ruthless" Chinese government, a day before the opening of the Beijing Olympics.

NEVER WASTE A "CRISIS":

Admirers and appeasers of Putin -- who can be found across the political spectrum -- often repeat a well-worn cliché that he plays chess while his foes play chequers. He captured Crimea, crushed Chechen rebels, weakened Ukraine and grabbed effective control of Belarus, while detaching a chunk of Georgia and breakaway republics in the Donbas. He intervened in Syria to shore up his fellow dictator Bashar Assad. He supposedly interfered in the US election and has since made sinister moves in African states. "Putin has run rings around whoever was in the Oval Office, getting away with invasions, hacking, human rights abuses, assassinations, shooting down passenger airliners," complained one US columnist last month.

But is Putin really such a grandmaster on the geo-political chessboard? Certainly he seems to have a clear strategy to restore Russian pride after the collapse of the Soviet empire -- an event he has called "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century." Early in his presidency, he flirted with joining his now mortal enemy, Nato. Now his armed forces build up menacingly on the border of Ukraine. Yet one thing has been made abundantly clear to me after a fortnight back reporting in the country -- and that is the failure of this supposed Machiavellian mastermind, whose goal of rebuilding Russia's empire and shattering Nato lies in tatters, even as he terrorises his neighbour and keeps everyone guessing over the next move in his game plan.

DON'T TOSS DONALD'S ACORN!:

Earlier this week, President Joe Biden revoked a Trump-era order that placed limitations on the kinds of art that could be displayed in federal buildings. Under the previous ruling, all art commissioned by the Art in Architecture program had to depict prominent American historical figures and events or "illustrate ideals upon which our nation was founded."

ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

ONE OF THE WORST ASPECTS OF THE OCCUPATION...:

The head of Islamic State group, whom the US declared dead in a special-forces raid Thursday, was nicknamed the "Destroyer" and presided over massacres of Yazidis before assuming the leadership.

Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurashi, also known as Amir Mohammed Said Abd al-Rahman al-Mawla, took over the jihadist network two years ago after founder Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi blew himself up in a US special forces raid in October 2019. [...]

Born in the northern Iraq town of Tal Afar and thought to be in his mid-40s, his ascension in the ranks of the extremist group was rare for a non-Arab, born into a Turkmen family.

Serving in the Iraqi army under Saddam Hussein, the late dictator toppled by the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, Qurashi joined the ranks of Al-Qaeda after Hussein was captured by US troops in 2003, according to the Counter Extremism Project (CEP) think-tank.

THEY HAVE TO BE LUCKY EVERY DAY, WE ONLY ONCE:

A US special forces raid in northwestern Syria early Thursday killed the top leader of the so-called Islamic State group, Abu Ibrahim Al-Hashimi Al-Qurayshi, President Joe Biden said.

"Thanks to the skill and bravery of our Armed Forces, we have taken off the battlefield Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi -- the leader of ISIS," Biden said in a statement. He said all Americans involved in the operation returned safely.

A CULT, RATHER:

As religion scholar J.Z. Smith writes, "'Religion' is not a native term; it is created by scholars for their intellectual purposes and therefore is theirs to define." For Smith, categorizing certain traditions or cultural institutions as religions creates a comparative framework that will hopefully result in some new understanding. With this in mind, comparing Bitcoin to a tradition like Christianity may cause people to notice things that they didn't before.

For example, many religions were founded by charismatic leaders. Charismatic authority does not come from any government office or tradition but solely from the relationship between a leader and their followers. Charismatic leaders are seen by their followers as superhuman or at least extraordinary. Because this relationship is precarious, leaders often remain aloof to keep followers from seeing them as ordinary human beings.

Several commentators have noted that Bitcoin inventor Satoshi Nakamoto resembles a sort of prophet. Nakamoto's true identity - or whether Nakamoto is actually a team of people - remains a mystery. But the intrigue surrounding this figure is a source of charisma with consequences for bitcoin's economic value. Many who invest in bitcoin do so in part because they regard Nakamoto as a genius and an economic rebel. In Budapest, artists even erected a bronze statue as a tribute to Nakamoto.

There's also a connection between Bitcoin and millennialism, or the belief in a coming collective salvation for a select group of people.

In Christianity, millennial expectations involve the return of Jesus and the final judgment of the living and the dead. Some Bitcoiners believe in an inevitable coming "hyperbitcoinization" in which bitcoin will be the only valid currency. When this happens, the "Bitcoin believers" who invested will be justified, while the "no coiners" who shunned cryptocurrency will lose everything.

A path to salvation

Finally, some Bitcoiners view bitcoin as not just a way to make money, but as the answer to all of humanity's problems.

"Because the root cause of all of our problems is basically money printing and capital misallocation as a result of that," McCook argues, "the only way the whales are going to be saved, or the trees are going to be saved, or the kids are going to be saved, is if we just stop the degeneracy."

This attitude may be the most significant point of comparison with religious traditions. In his book "God Is Not One," religion professor Stephen Prothero highlights the distinctiveness of world religions using a four-point model, in which each tradition identifies a unique problem with the human condition, posits a solution, offers specific practices to achieve the solution and puts forth exemplars to model that path.

This model can be applied to Bitcoin: The problem is fiat currency, the solution is Bitcoin, and the practices include encouraging others to invest, "stacking sats" and "hodling" - refusing to sell bitcoin to keep its value up. The exemplars include Satoshi and other figures involved in the creation of blockchain technology.

THE BETTER ARGUMENT WAS THAT THE LAW WASN'T BEING ENFORCED:

RECOGNIZE THE NATION AND DEMAND ELECTIONS:

Russian President Vladimir Putin has met with Ramzan Kadyrov, the authoritarian, Kremlin-backed leader of the North Caucasus region of Chechnya, amid a public outcry over open threats made by the volatile region's leadership to kill the family of a human rights lawyer.

WERE hE NOT A MORAL BEING hE'D BE UNWORTHY OF FAITH:

    

In his preface to Fear and Trembling (1843), Søren Kierkegaard (writing under the pseudonym, Johannes de silentio) says he hopes no one will read his book. Further, he predicts his wish will be granted because of the reading proclivities of his contemporaries, whose one requirement of a book is that it can be consumed during the afternoon nap.

With this new (and beautifully rendered) translation of Fear and Trembling by Bruce Kirmmse, professor emeritus of history at Connecticut College, W.W. Norton & Company is hoping to entice, if not new readers, then at least new purchasers of Kierkegaard's classic retelling of the biblical narrative of Abraham and Isaac. Continued fascination with the work (interest that Norton believes justifies this, the sixth, English translation) is both predictable and somewhat surprising.

On the one hand, Fear and Trembling is a literary masterpiece. It showcases Kierkegaard at the height of his rhetorical powers. He paints Abraham's trial in such vivid color that the reader feels anew the real tragedy of his ordeal. In addition to the poetic force of his writing, Kierkegaard is a subtle philosopher, a supreme ironist, evident in the way he deftly teases out the implications of Abraham's status as the "father of faith." He argues that if Abraham's readiness to sacrifice Isaac is truly praiseworthy--as each of the great Abrahamic religions assume--then faith involves a "teleological suspension of the ethical." The person of faith must be prepared to put the commands of God above the demands of ethics.

ALL THAT WAS REQUIRED WAS CAUTION, COURTESY & PATIENCE:

Emboldened by falling case counts, the Biden administration is plotting a new phase of the pandemic response aimed at containing the coronavirus and conditioning Americans to live with it.

The preparations are designed to capitalize on a break in the monthslong Covid-19 surge, with officials anticipating a spring lull that could boost the nation's mood and lift President Joe Biden's approval ratings at a critical moment for his party.

Biden and his top health officials have already begun hinting at an impending "new normal," in a conscious messaging shift meant to get people comfortable with a scenario where the virus remains widespread yet at more manageable levels.

MAYBE STICK TO HOCKEY AND HORSIES?:

So much for America's shift from the Atlantic to the Indo-Pacific. By demanding concessions that have shocked a divided and rudderless Europe, Russian president Vladimir Putin has united the west behind US leadership. It has been years since that sentence could be written with a straight face. Russia has brought about what it fears -- a west that is displaying something approaching resolve.

IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

He's made his support of Childs plain in TV interviews, saying, "I can't think of a better person for President Biden to consider for the Supreme Court than Michelle Childs. She has wide support in our state. She's considered to be a fair minded, highly gifted jurist. She's one of the most decent people I've ever met. It would be good for the court to have somebody who's not at Harvard or Yale." (Her law degree is from the University of South Carolina.) [...]

Graham's argument is extremely similar to those Democrats are making for Childs's candidacy. They say that Childs's state-school law degree, along with her undergraduate degree from the University of South Florida, is badly needed to diversify the court from the standard Harvard or Yale judges. House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, a fellow member of the South Carolina congressional delegation and one of the most influential African American Democrats in the country, has been making the same case and has predicted that Senator Tim Scott could also end up supporting Childs. Scott so far has stayed mum on the nomination.

Clyburn had breakfast with Graham and Scott on Wednesday morning, and in an interview with The New Republic predicted that if Biden picked Childs, she would have both South Carolina senators' votes, too. "I don't think it's that unusual for Graham. He's supported Biden's picks before," Clyburn said. "It might be kind of unusual for Scott who has had very positive things to say about Childs, and I predict if she's the nominee he'll vote for her. But I suspect there are starting to be several other Republicans who will vote for her."

The prospect of one of Biden's picks having at least two Republican votes--and maybe more from the most moderate Republicans in the Senate--makes Childs an especially appealing prospect for Democrats. That extra padding would allay reasonable Democratic concerns of one of the 50 members of their caucus going rogue and opposing Biden's nominee (Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema have made clear they can't be counted on for major party votes).

Every person on a shortlist for a Supreme Court nomination receives a high level of scrutiny over their past rulings. For Childs, that's meant coverage of her "tough-on-crime" sentences that have been overturned by other courts. [...]

Childs is also facing opposition from progressives over rulings that liberals see as anti-union and pro-employer. As a result, the Bernie Sanders-aligned Our Revolution group is urging Biden not to pick Childs.

THERE IS NO MERCY RULE:

"We are constantly urging our American partners to stop escalating tensions on the European continent," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

FUN WHILE IT LASTED:

A slowdown in China's steel production is curbing demand for bulk ships to transport iron ore, driving a steady decline in global freight rates from October's peak.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

FOR THE PAST two weeks, observers of North Korea's strange and tightly restricted corner of the internet began to notice that the country seemed to be dealing with some serious connectivity problems. On several different days, practically all of its websites--the notoriously isolated nation only has a few dozen--intermittently dropped offline en masse, from the booking site for its Air Koryo airline to Naenara, a page that serves as the official portal for dictator Kim Jong-un's government. At least one of the central routers that allow access to the country's networks appeared at one point to be paralyzed, crippling the Hermit Kingdom's digital connections to the outside world. 

Some North Korea watchers pointed out that the country had just carried out a series of missile tests, implying that a foreign government's hackers might have launched a cyberattack against the rogue state to tell it to stop saber-rattling. 

But responsibility for North Korea's ongoing internet outages doesn't lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks--and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.

Just over a year ago, an independent hacker who goes by the handle P4x was himself hacked by North Korean spies. P4x was just one victim of a hacking campaign that targeted Western security researchers with the apparent aim of stealing their hacking tools and details about software vulnerabilities. He says he managed to prevent those hackers from swiping anything of value from him. But he nonetheless felt deeply unnerved by state-sponsored hackers targeting him personally--and by the lack of any visible response from the US government.

So after a year of letting his resentment simmer, P4x has taken matters into his own hands. 

THE DESANTIS FLU:

[T]here's still a long way to go. But that improvement is happening quickly.

Yes, but: Deaths are still on the rise. The virus is killing roughly 2,600 Americans per day, on average.

That's a function of two things: Deaths are always the last number to move, in any wave, and so it makes sense for Omicron deaths to be accumulating now.

But those deaths were almost entirely preventable. The overwhelming majority of people dying from COVID were unvaccinated.

The risk of dying from COVID is 60 times higher for unvaccinated people than it is for people who are vaccinated and boosted, according to the CDC's most recent data.

A more recent study in the U.K. suggested that a booster cuts the risk of death by about 95%, compared to being unvaccinated.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

The results in Table 2 show that 2016 turnout was by far the strongest predictor of 2020 turnout. However, after controlling for 2016 turnout, the data show that states that mailed absentee ballots directly to voters had a significantly higher turnout in 2020 than other states. Similarly, states that allowed the use of drop boxes for absentee voting had significantly higher turnout than those that required voters to put their absentee ballots in the mail. Finally, early in-person voting had a small negative impact on turnout but this effect was not statistically significant.

It should be emphasized that although some of these effects on turnout are statistically significant, all of them are quite small -- no greater than 2 or 3 percentage points. The most important development regarding turnout in the 2020 election is that it increased everywhere and by a rather substantial amount. Voters were highly motivated to participate in the 2020 election, just as they were in the 2018 midterm election before the pandemic hit the United States and many states changed their voting procedures. Turnout surged in 2020 in all types of states regardless of their partisan inclination and regardless of their voting rules.

The other major question about the effects of voting rules and procedures involves their impact on party performance. Did any of these voting procedures favor one party's candidate over the other party's candidate? In order to answer this question, I conducted a second regression analysis, this time with the Democratic vote margin in the 2020 presidential election as the dependent variable and various election rules and procedures as independent variables. I included the 2016 vote margin in each state as a control variable because there has been an extremely high degree of continuity in the outcomes of presidential elections at the state level in recent elections. In fact, the correlation of .993 between the Democratic presidential margin in 2016 and the Democratic presidential margin in 2020 was the strongest for any pair of consecutive elections since at least the end of World War II. Almost 99% of the variation in Joe Biden's margin in 2020 is explained by Hillary Clinton's margin in 2016. [...]

The results displayed in Table 3 show that after controlling for the Democratic margin in the 2016 election, none of the election rules included in the regression analysis had any discernible impact on the Democratic margin at the state level in 2020.

PROTECTING OTHERS BIT IS THE PART THEY HATE:

Masks are most effective at preventing the person wearing them from spreading the virus to others, explains Sandra Bliss Nelson, an infectious disease specialist at Mass General Hospital, but "as we have gotten towards more transmissible variants with a higher prevalence of airborne spread, protecting the wearer has taken more priority."

The idea, of course, is that masks filter the virus out of the air before that air is breathed in, which is especially important if the pathogen is believed to be aerosolized. Much of the research behind masking in healthcare comes from decades ago when tuberculosis outbreaks were common, explains Lisa Brosseau, a retired public health scientist who consults for the University of Minnesota's Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy.

SYSTEMIC (profanity alert):

 The suit says that Dolphins owner Stephen Ross offered to pay Flores $100,000 for each game the team lost in 2019, in a bid to tank to secure the no. 1 pick in the upcoming NFL draft. According to the suit, Flores refused the offer, leading the Dolphins to wins in three of the season's final five games and netting the franchise the no. 5 pick in the draft instead. Ross "was 'mad' that Mr. Flores' success in winning games that year was 'compromising [the team's] draft position,'" the suit says.

The suit also says that after the 2019 season Ross urged Flores to break the NFL's tampering rules to recruit a "prominent quarterback." Flores, according to the suit, refused. The suit then details how in the winter of 2020 Ross "attempted to 'set up' a purportedly impromptu meeting [on his yacht] between Mr. Flores and the prominent quarterback. Mr. Flores refused the meeting and left the yacht immediately."

According to the suit, Flores was subsequently "treated with disdain and held out as someone who was noncompliant and difficult to work with" as a result. That description matches up with the narrative following his recent ouster from Miami, which stunned fans and players given that the team had just won eight of its final nine games to cap off back-to-back winning seasons for the first time since 2002 and 2003.

"We vehemently deny any allegations of racial discrimination and are proud of the diversity and inclusion throughout our organization," the Dolphins said in a statement on Tuesday.

That leads to Flores's experience with the Giants. The 40-year-old was expected to be one of the NFL's most in-demand head-coaching candidates in this cycle, given his on-field record of success with the Dolphins. Flores interviewed with four of the nine teams that had vacancies. But that doesn't mean those teams gave him a fair shake. The lawsuit says that the Giants only interviewed Flores to satisfy the league's Rooney Rule, which calls for teams to interview at least two external minority candidates for open head-coaching jobs. According to the suit, the Giants had already decided who they were hiring before they interviewed Flores.

The lawsuit includes a text thread between Flores and Patriots head coach Bill Belichick that shows how the Giants had selected Bills offensive coordinator Brian Daboll as their new head coach before Flores's interview. Three days before Flores's interview with New York, Belichick texted Flores: "I hear from Buffalo & NYG that you are their guy." Flores asked whether Belichick had meant to text Daboll, to which Belichick replied: "Sorry - I f[****] this up. ... I think they are naming Daboll."

CAN'T GET RID OF SANCTIONS FAST ENOUGH:

A "highly confidential" state document leaked to RFE/RL's Radio Farda warns that discontent is rising in Iran, with society in a "state of explosion."

The document highlights the clerical establishment's concerns over potential social unrest due to the deteriorating economy, which has been crushed by crippling U.S. sanctions and years of mismanagement.

SHE DARED DISAGREE WITH HITLER?:

The Holocaust was about race -- and this is crucial -- but, "race" as the Nazis defined it.

Let me say it one more time, for those of you who have not been listening.

The Jews are not a race, though it was once fashionable for Jews, philosemites and antisemites to think so. Any visit to Israel would dispel that notion. Actually, you don't need a twelve hour plane flight to learn that. Go into any synagogue, and you will see Jews of all colors and races. Come to my religious school. Look at how the students look. Jews are not a race. 

But, the Nazis thought that Jews constituted a race, and they applied the most sadistic version of pseudo-science to that definition. Tragically, horrifically: they got that idea from some American thinkers, who had created their own version of race science, which considered Anglo-Saxons and Nordics to be socially superior -- as in, the (now missed and lamented, by some) WASP hegemony over American social structures.

The Holocaust was about race -- the Jewish race, as the Nazis defined it.

THE RIGHT IS THE LEFT:

At least with Donald you could plausibly argue he was being blackmailed into being a Putin lackey. For Mr. Hawley it appears to be pure ideology. https://t.co/NP1qwO4WO2

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 2, 2022

YOU HAVE TO ADMIRE THE SORT OF COURAGE...:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has refused to condemn a Nazi rally that took place in Orlando over the weekend, claiming that those asking him to condemn the Nazi rally are trying to "smear" him.

G.I.JOE:

President Biden is directing the Pentagon to deploy more than 3,000 American troops to bolster the defense of European allies in the first major movement of U.S. forces in Russia's military standoff with Ukraine, U.S. officials said.

Mr. Biden is sending roughly 2,000 troops from Fort Bragg, N.C., to Poland and Germany this week and repositioning about 1,000 troops that are part of a Germany-based infantry Stryker squadron to Romania, on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's eastern flank closest to Russia, the officials said.

In addition, the Pentagon expects to make other moves of forces inside Europe, and has ordered several thousand more troops to be on standby to deploy, beyond the 8,500 troops given similar orders last week, the officials said.

THERE IS NO CHINA:

Tracing their ancestry to the sixth century C.E., when they migrated to the Mongolian steppes, the Uyghurs are a Turkic people whose language is closest to Uzbek. Islam is the group's dominant religion; around the 16th century, Uyghur religious leaders founded several Islamic city-states in what was then referred to as East Turkestan. It wasn't until 1884 that the region was made an official province of China and renamed Xinjiang, which translates to "New Frontier."

When the Qing Dynasty collapsed in 1911, several Uyghur leaders led successful attempts to create independent Muslim republics in western China. But with the rise of the Communist Party in 1949, China officially claimed Xinjiang once more.

The Chinese government has encouraged members of the country's ethnic majority, the Han, to settle in Xinjiang since 1949. At the time, Han Chinese people made up just 6.7 percent of the region's population. By 1978, that number had jumped to 41.6 percent. Today, the 12 million Uyghurs living in Xinjiang still represent a slight majority, but the Han population is in the majority in many cities, including the capital of Urumqi. Though Xinjiang is the largest region in the country and the largest economy among non-coastal provinces, the majority of Uyghurs still live in rural areas and have been largely excluded from this development.

When did China begin its crackdown on Xinjiang?

Muslim Uyghurs have faced prohibitions on their religious and cultural practices since the formation of the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. In light of this oppression, Uyghurs began migrating out of the region as early as the 1960s. Periodic calls for Uyghur independence from China gained traction in the 1990s, when the collapse of the Soviet Union led to the formation of independent Central Asian states like Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. No equivalent liberation arrived for the Uyghurs.

The 1990s also marked the beginning of China categorizing Muslim Uyghur activists as terrorists. The country's Communist Party grew increasingly worried after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996. Although several hundred Uyghur fighters in Afghanistan had some relationship with Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in 1998, there is little evidence of widespread extremism in Xinjiang, notes scholar Sean Roberts. Fears of domestic attacks increased after 9/11, when the U.S. adopted the rhetoric of the global "War on Terror."

In July 2009, ethnic riots erupted in Xinjiang's capital of Urumqi, resulting in the deaths of nearly 200 people and many more injuries. The Chinese government reported that the majority of the dead were Han Chinese, while Uyghur groups claimed that the number of Uyghur casualties was drastically undercounted. Either way, the 2009 event marked a turning point in the Communist Party's behavior toward the Uyghurs, according to Australian scholar Michael Clarke, editor of the forthcoming book The Xinjiang Emergency: Exploring the Causes and Consequences of China's Mass Detention of Uyghurs.

"The hardline taken today builds on historical precedence within the party's governance of Xinjiang," Clarke says. "They've always carried out anti-religious campaigns and controlled ethnic minority cultural expression. What's been different is the intensity and duration of the campaigns to stamp out what they see as being the roots of deviancy."

NEVER HELP AN ENEMY WHILE HE'S DESTROYING HIMSELF:

[W]hile Putin manufactured the Ukraine crisis believing he held a clear advantage vis-à-vis the West, he committed an error that can prove dangerous even for a skilled martial-arts practitioner: he underestimated his opponent.

While Biden and NATO have said they will not intervene directly on behalf of Ukraine, this is not the same as accepting Russian dominance. In fact, the US has organized a comprehensive response. It has sent arms to Ukraine to increase the costs to Russia of any invasion and occupation. There are plans to fortify NATO member countries closest to Russia. Substantial economic sanctions are being prepared. And rerouting gas to Europe would partly offset the possible loss of Russian supplies.

All of which is to say that Putin's initial thrust failed to score a decisive blow. Those who say that Russia's president has the West where he wants it have things backwards. Putin has placed himself in an unenviable position: he must either escalate or find a face-saving way to back down.

THE SOLUTION TO POVERTY IS WEALTH:

When a San Francisco-based nonprofit started a basic-income pilot last year--giving a small group of people experiencing homelessness $500 per month for six months--it didn't expect that the cash would be enough to help people find housing in a city where the average one-bedroom apartment rents for more than $3,000 a month.

The group predicted that the money would help reduce stress and improve food security, and it did. But two-thirds of the people who were unhoused when the pilot began also now have permanent housing. (The number has grown since the program first ended, when only a third had moved into new housing.)

"There's a level of incredulity, like, how did this happen?" says Kevin Adler, founder and CEO of Miracle Messages, the nonprofit. "That's an important narrative to be able to realize--our unhoused neighbors are often more tapped into resources, housing options, networks that might be able to open up, but just are lacking a little bit of funds. For me, it's yet another testimony of the importance of seeing the agency and the intrinsic dignity of each of our unhoused neighbors."

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

Wireless EV charging is expected to grow to $827 million worldwide by 2027, says Meticulous Research.

Most of that growth will be for "static" wireless charging systems for places like parking garages, taxi stands, and bus or truck depots.

Major U.S. players include WiTricity, WAVE, Momentum Wireless Power, Mojo Mobility, HEVO and Plugless Power, per the research firm.

Electreon claims leadership in the market for "dynamic" wireless charging -- systems that allow vehicles to suck up juice while in motion.

It has ongoing pilots in Germany, Italy and Sweden, and will soon launch a plug-free charging network for 200 public buses in Tel Aviv. 

How it works: Wireless EV charging systems use magnetic frequency to transfer power from coils buried underground to a receiver pad attached to the car's underbelly.

An EV can pull into a designated parking place with an underground charging pad and add electricity the same way a smartphone charges wirelessly.

Along an electrified road, vehicles with wireless charging capability can suck up energy as they drive, but for all other cars, it's an ordinary road.

VAN'T REPLACE THEM FAST ENOUGH:

But then there are your crazies--like your Trump-loving veteran who wants to "stop the steal," your gun-loving veteran who is part of the Three Percenters militia who wants to add Republicans as a federally protected class because of the gays, and your state representative who tweets out things like "Fauci should spend the rest of his life rotting away in a federal prison" and who is pals with Laura Loomer, the far-right fringe conspiracy theorist best known for chaining herself to Twitter headquarters after being banned from the platform.

And while the primary is still nearly seven months away, the crazies are getting an early start in stirring things up. Over the weekend, a handful of Floridians protested outside an extended-stay hotel in Maitland, Florida (just outside Orlando) that they believed to be occupied by masses of illegal immigrants brought there by President Biden on buses.

Why?

Because Loomer filmed a video of the men in question getting off the buses. The video was amplified on far-right social media sites by the likes of Roger Stone. On Twitter, a failed inventor who goes by the name J. Hutton Pulitzer shared the video. (Pulitzer was last in the headlines for helping the Cyber Ninjas--remember them?--look for bamboo in supposedly fraudulent ballots.)

This came to the attention of Anthony Sabatini, the state representative vying for the 7th District congressional seat. Sabatini promoted Pulitzer's post of Loomer's video, apparently without doing any research of his own. (You can always rely on those big-brained Claremont types--Sabatini was a Claremont Institute fellow last year--to see an internet video and immediately know all of the answers. Or maybe Loomer's word was good enough for him.)

Sabatini then took a potshot at Florida House Speaker Chris Sprowls, whom he called Speaker "Strawberry Shortcake," wondering why nothing had been done about the "hundreds of illegals" being "shipped" into the district. He then encouraged followers to sign his campaign's petition calling for Florida to deport illegal immigrants under powers he believes the Tenth Amendment leaves to the states.

Jeremy Liggett, the Three Percenter militia candidate in the 7th District race, also promoted the claims about the "hundreds of illegal immigrants" that "Joe Biden dumped" in the district and encouraged people to protest outside of the hotel.

One problem with all this: The supposed illegal immigrants staying at the hotel are actually in the United States legally on H-2A visas. We know this thanks to Christopher Heath, a reporter from WFTV, who did some actual reporting.

AND THEN WONDER WHY EVERYONE IS CONDESCENDING:

On Sunday night, a candidate in the GOP primary for Texas House District 136, which includes a large portion of the suburbs north of Austin, tweeted a curious allegation. That candidate, Michelle Evans--an activist who works with the local chapter of conservative parents' group Moms for Liberty and who cofounded the anti-vaccine political action committee Texans for Vaccine Choice, back in 2015--tweeted that "Cafeteria tables are being lowered in certain @RoundRockISD middle and high schools to allow 'furries' to more easily eat without utensils or their hands (ie, like a dog eats from a bowl)."

She was responding to a tweet from right-wing Texas provocateur Michael Quinn Sullivan, who had shared a video of a woman speaking at a December school board meeting in Midland, Michigan, claiming that schools there have added "litter boxes" in the halls to allow students who identify as "furries" to relieve themselves. Sullivan retweeted the video, adding, "This is public education." (It isn't; the claims made by the speaker in the video have been shown to be untrue.) 

As in the debunked Michigan example, the claim about Round Rock ISD is false. Jenny LaCoste-Caputo, Round Rock ISD's chief of public affairs and communications, told Texas Monthly, "This is not happening. Our tables don't even have the option of lowering." She added, "You win the award for strangest media question of the year!"

ELECT POORLY, GET BAD GOVERNANCE:

Unlike most other states that safely endured the February 2021 storm, Texas had stubbornly declined to require winterization of its power plants and, just as critically, its natural gas facilities. In large part, that's because the state's politicians and the regulators they appoint are often captive to the oil and gas industry, which lavishes them with millions of dollars a year in campaign contributions. During the February freeze, the gas industry failed to deliver critically needed fuel, and while Texans of all stripes suffered, the gas industry scored windfall profits of about $11 billion--creating debts that residents and businesses will pay for at least the next decade.

Since last February, the state has appointed new regulators and tweaked some of its statutes. But despite the misery, death, economic disruption, and embarrassment that Texas suffered, little has changed. The state remains susceptible to the threat that another winter storm could inflict blackouts as bad as--or even worse than--last year's catastrophe. Despite promises from public officials to rectify these problems, we remain largely defenseless and can only hope we aren't thrashed by another Arctic blast. Even as forecasters predict a relatively warm winter on average, there is compelling evidence that such extreme weather phenomena are becoming more common. To understand the danger, it's worth examining how close the Texas grid came last year to a meltdown that could have left much of the state without power for several weeks, or even months.

VLAD WHO?:

Among the less-discussed points was that Nato should not admit any new members - including Sweden and Finland. This backfired in both nations, with politicians and leading officials rushing to affirm that it is their country's sovereign decision whether to join Nato and that Russia should have no say in the matter.

The previous US ambassador to Stockholm once quipped that Stockholm is "a closer partner to Nato than many members of the alliance." Although Sweden has been formally a non-aligned country since the Napoleonic Wars, it cooperates extensively with America and Nato. It has hosted large-scale Nato military exercises, for example.

The country has always generally supported the US-led world order and its security policy rests on the assumption that, should it be invaded, Nato would rescue it. Sweden is a member of the EU and Nordefco, a military alliance of Nordic countries which includes three members of Nato; thus, the assumption that any attack would trigger a cascading effect which would eventually bring the transatlantic alliance on board. For this reason, its security policy could be described as "neutral and alliance-free, but on Nato's side".

Nevertheless, there are signs that Stockholm may reconsider its position and join Nato. In 2020, the Swedish parliament approved a new security policy that created the "Nato option," i.e. an authorisation to join the alliance should the government deem it necessary, and a 40 percent increase to the defence budget. It also removed nearly all mentions of "alliance-free" from official policy statements; the current position is "not join any alliance without Finland." In 2022, parliament, now controlled by the opposition, will most likely raise defence spending even more.

More importantly, political opinion is changing. Most opposition parties, including the right-wing populists, either support the Nato option, or support joining the alliance outright -- and they could win the next election.

Equally important, polling indicates that voter support for joining Nato has more than doubled since the 90s and sits at around 30 percent.

EITHER CHRISTIAN OR NATIONALIST, NOT BOTH:

As the bishop of El Paso, Texas, one of us is all too familiar with the hate and violence this conspiracy theory has inspired: On Aug. 3, 2019, a white terrorist killed 23 people in a shooting at a Walmart in El Paso. In his manifesto, the shooter mentioned the great replacement theory and said he feared a "Hispanic invasion of Texas."

It was another in a string of violence tied to the theory: the August 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, during which Heather Heyer was killed; the October 2018 synagogue attack in Pittsburgh that claimed 11 lives; the March 2019 terrorist attacks on mosques in New Zealand that left 51 people dead.

The theory has moved from the so-called fringes of society to even some members of Congress, as well as prominent television commentators. But it is far from new: Its roots date to the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when it helped give rise to national socialism in Germany and its murderous horrors.

In 1916, Madison Grant, a eugenicist, conservationist, and promoter of scientific racism, wrote The Passing of the Great Race. The book promoted the superiority of the white, Nordic, Aryan "race" in Northern Europe and warned that it was being threatened by "inferior" races.

Grant was also a major proponent of immigration restriction-his ideas had a part in the restrictionist 1924 Immigration Act. Even more to the point, his ideas caught on in Germany: Adolf Hitler called Grant's book "my bible."

...AND CHEAPER...:

Sparc Technologies has been working to commercialise a new 'photocatalyst' technology developed by researchers at the University of Adelaide and Flinders University, which can split water using direct sunlight using the catalyst material, avoiding the need to generate the electricity required by conventional electrolysis.

The process of 'photocatalytic' water splitting uses an innovative material to split water into hydrogen and oxygen with using sunlight, potentially reducing the cost and the amount of land needed for renewable hydrogen production.

By developing the process of "thermo-photocatalysis", the venture has the potential to eliminate the need for large-scale solar or wind farm developments in the production of renewable hydrogen, reducing costs and making production more flexible.

PUNCHING DOWN:

After leaving the EU, the U.K. has deployed its so-called Magnitsky sanctions -- which allow the government to stop targets from entering the country, channeling cash through British banks or profiting from the economy. The U.K. has promised economic sanctions of unprecedented strength against Russian individuals and companies and has not ruled out targeting Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In recent weeks, Britain has also sought to undercut Putin's plans by releasing intelligence suggesting Russian security agencies were trying to replace Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. Addressing the House of Commons last week, U.K. Foreign Secretary Liz Truss said Britain would "continue to expose [Russia's] playbook, including false-flagged operations and also disinformation and cyberattacks."

While London has long talked tough on Russia, by releasing intelligence in anticipation of Putin's attacks rather than blaming him afterward, the British government is keen to show that it can now do things differently from the rest of Europe.

The approach has been welcomed across the Atlantic, with the White House also being forward about pointing out what it sees as Russian disinformation.

LEGISLATORS MAKE BAD EXECUTIVES:

Hours before the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan's capital on Aug. 15, 2021, senior Biden administration officials were still discussing and assigning basic actions involved in a mass civilian evacuation.

Outsiders were frustrated and suspicious the administration was having plenty of meetings but was stuck in bureaucratic inertia and lacked urgency until the last minute.

While the word "immediately" peppers the document, it's clear officials were still scrambling to finalize their plans -- on the afternoon of Aug. 14.

For example, they'd just decided they needed to notify local Afghan staff "to begin to register their interest in relocation to the United States," the document says.

And they were still determining which countries could serve as transit points for evacuees.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban met with Russia's Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin on Tuesday, pledging cooperation with Moscow for years to come in a trip criticised by his EU allies.

Orban travelled to Moscow despite Hungary's opposition accusing him of betraying national interests in doing so and with fears growing in the West of a Russian attack on Ukraine.

LEAVING THE WEST:

A lengthy report by Amnesty International Tuesday accusing Israel of apartheid may complete the term's transition into the mainstream discourse around the Jewish state. Once made only by the most strident activists, the claim that Israel is ruling over Palestinians in a manner similar to how white South Africans dominated that country's Black majority has now gained the imprimatur of major human rights groups inside and outside Israel.

Amnesty International's report, released Tuesday, follows a similar Human Rights Watch finding last spring that aligned the two leading international rights groups with eight Israeli nonprofits and most of Palestinian civil society in accusing Israel of imposing some degree of "apartheid" on millions of Palestinians.

"There's been an incredible shift in the conversation," said Omar Shakir, the Israel and Palestine director at New York-based Human Rights Watch who authored its April report. "There is certainly a consensus in the international human rights movement that Israel is committing apartheid."

The growing adoption of the term may help fuel the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement aimed at Israel and modeled after the campaign that helped force apartheid South Africa to eventually accept majority rule. It also challenges the framework that liberal American Jewish institutions and many human rights groups have long used to describe Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza: as a stain on an otherwise liberal democracy. [...]

Kenneth Bob, president of the liberal Zionist group Ameinu, said he was alarmed that the Israeli government did not appear primed to change its treatment of the Palestinians in response to mounting international outcry.

"I can go through and dissect the words," said Bob, who said he rejected the claim that Israel was guilty of apartheid within its 1967 borders. "On the other hand, I think what American Jews should do is point out to Israel that the problem is the policy and not the words."

Bob said that in coming years younger American Jews, who hold overwhelmingly more critical views toward Israel than their parents and grandparents, will take leadership positions at synagogues, Jewish day schools and other institutions and shape perceptions of Israel based on what they see taking place on the ground.

In a July poll by JEI, 38% of American Jewish voters under 40-years-old said that Israel was guilty of apartheid and an additional 15% were unsure, compared with just 13% of those over 64 who said the same.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

The California Department of Justice has threatened to hold the leaders of Black Lives Matter personally liable if they fail to fork over information about the charity's $60 million bankroll within the next 60 days, according to a letter obtained by the Washington Examiner.

The move came just days after a Washington Examiner investigation found that BLM has had no known leader in charge of its millions since its co-founder resigned in May and that the Los Angeles address it lists on its tax forms is wrong.

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

News of the deal comes just days after reports that Turkey, Qatar and the Taliban had agreed on resolving outstanding issues over jointly running Kabul's airport.

The Qatari foreign minister and Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hammad Al Thani visited Washington this week for meetings with top US officials.

President Joe Biden announced a decision to elevate Qatar to the official status of major non-NATO US ally yesterday, lauding the Gulf country's support for US foreign policy initiatives, including evacuations from Afghanistan.

Doha has stood in as an intermediary for US-Taliban diplomatic communications as the two do not share formal ties.

The Gulf state has enjoyed increasingly warm relations with the Biden administration after more than three years of diplomatic isolation by Arab neighbors.

The previous US administration under President Donald Trump worked more closely with Saudi Arabia, which led the Gulf Cooperation Council's blockade of Qatar starting in 2017. The rift was formally ended early last year by US-brokered talks.

"IGNORABLE ME":

[P]utin believes Russia's requests have fallen on deaf ears. He told reporters: "We are carefully analyzing the written responses received from the United States and NATO."

"But it is already clear that fundamental Russian concerns ended up being ignored," he said, before adding the Kremlin is still poring over the US and NATO's feedback.

KEYSTONE KREMLIN:

The pipeline has now taken center stage during an escalating crisis between Russia and the West over Ukraine.

The US and NATO say Russia has amassed more than 100,000 troops at its border with Ukraine, ready to invade. Moscow has denied this.

The West has threatened to impose fresh sanctions on Moscow, this time targeting Russian banks.

One theoretical possibility is to exclude them from the SWIFT global payment system, which is responsible for 35 million daily financial transactions worth some $5 trillion (€4.4 trillion).

Another proposal is to further delay formal approval for Nord Stream 2 to begin operations as leverage to force Russia back from the brink of war.

In a recent twist, Berlin is no longer ruling out shelving the pipeline project. 

...AND CHEAPER...:

[R]ecycling lithium-ion batteries has only recently made commercial inroads. Battery manufacturers have hesitated over concerns that recycled products may be lower in quality than those built from newly mined minerals, potentially leading to shorter battery life or damage to the battery's innards. Consequences could be serious, particularly in an application such as an electric vehicle.

But new research published in Joule has hit upon what experts describe as a more elegant recycling method that refurbishes the cathode--the carefully crafted crystal that is the lithium-ion battery's most expensive component and key to supplying the proper voltage. The researchers found that batteries they made with their new cathode-recycling technique perform just as well as those with a cathode made from scratch. In fact, batteries with the recycled cathode both last longer and charge faster. The team's approach and successful demonstration are "very unique and very impressive," says Kang Xu, an electrochemist at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory, who was not involved in the study.

AS IN ANY:

The federal government's tendency to over-classify data is harming national security and "erodes the basic trust that our citizens have in their government," said Avril Haines, U.S. director of national intelligence, in a letter to two senators.

Haines' letter follows sustained pressure from Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Jerry Moran, R-Kan., to reform the country's declassification system, which they--along with privacy and government transparency advocates--have long argued is overly broad and antiquated.

"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, be that sharing with our intelligence partners, our oversight bodies or, when appropriate, with the general public," Haines said. "This reduces the Intelligence Community's capacity to effectively support senior policymaker decision-making, and further erodes the basic trust that our citizens have in their government. It is a fundamentally important issue that we must address."

BUT STILL OUTPERFORM STOCK ACCOUNT MANAGERS:

After dozens of grueling hours of investigation, FiveThirtyEight can confirm that Punxsutawney Phil is a charlatan. A groundbreaking analysis1 has revealed the Pennsylvania-based groundhog who makes annual predictions about the arrival of spring is not nearly as reliable a prognosticator as those close to him claim. Phil, arguably the world's most well-known rodent weather predictor, has been forecasting when spring will arrive annually on Groundhog Day since 1887. But when comparing his predictions to historical weather data, he's only right about a third of the time. [...]

In an effort to be generous in our interpretation (and following the lead of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's (NOAA) previous groundhog analysis), our analysis has an early spring bias -- only one month needs to have had an above-average temperature for a year to count as an early spring, even if it's only a slight increase in temperature. Though a half-degree above average is hardly a delightfully early eruption of spring by most standards, it qualifies by our metric.

If we look at Phil's predictions nationally (as Dunkel encouraged), they were accurate only 36 percent of the time (judging by national average temperatures). But how can just one marmot know a whole nation's weather? Looking at a more granular level -- by region -- doesn't help much. Phil's accuracy ranged from 50 percent in the Southwest and South to just 36 percent in the West. Even in the Northeast, where Phil's home state of Pennsylvania is located (and where one might expect him to best forecast weather patterns), he was only 39 percent accurate. That's similar to what other organizations have found about Phil's record, such as Time, the Washington Post and NOAA (though our analysis uses different weather data and compares Phil to other prognosticators). 

But perhaps -- perhaps! -- the accuracy of a soothsaying animal meteorologist doesn't matter. Michael Venos, a database administrator from Roxbury, New Jersey and the creator of countdowntogroundhogday.com -- a database of, among other things, animal prognosticators' historical predictions2 -- told FiveThirtyEight that Groundhog Day isn't about being right or wrong. It's about fun. 

"I don't know if I should say this, but I don't put a lot of stock in whatever they predict," Venos said. "To me it's definitely just the fun of the ceremony and finding out about all the different, strange [traditions]."