CAN'T WAIT TO SEE THE TRUMPIST HEADS EXPLODE:

A case about birthright citizenship for residents of American Samoa could prompt the U.S. Supreme Court to reconsider longstanding rulings Justice Neil Gorsuch blasted as resting "on a rotten foundation."

At issue are decisions known as the Insular Cases from the early 1900s that deprive Puerto Rico and other U.S. territories of full constitutional protections. Although the justices appear to no longer consider the decisions, which Gorsuch has previously said are based on "ugly racist stereotypes," good law, lower federal courts continue to rely on them when dealing with U.S. territories.

The justices ruled 8-1 on April 21 in United States v. Vaello Madero that the federal government could continue to exclude Puerto Rico from a Social Security benefit program. Gorsuch joined the opinion after noting no party asked the justices to overrule the Insular Cases. Now, in a petition filed Wednesday, individuals seeking citizenship in the American Samoa case explicitly ask the court to do just that.

The American Samoa case, Fitisemanu v. United States, "is exactly the opportunity the court needs to reconsider the doctrine and overrule it," said Columbia Law professor Christina Ponsa-Kraus. [...]

Gorsuch, who joined the court a year after it declined to hear the Tuaua case, has emerged as a potential ally, notably calling out what he sees as racist legacies affecting both American Indians and U.S. territories.

In an argument about tribal sovereignty on Wednesday, for example, Gorsuch admonished Oklahoma's counsel for seemingly giving short shrift to the state's acrimonious history with the tribes within its borders.

"Counsel, it's easy enough to say that standing at the podium in Washington, D.C.," Gorsuch said. "But the history and the reality should stare us all in the face."

It's the latest tribal case where Gorsuch could part ways from his five fellow conservatives by seeking to hold federal and state governments to their promises in what he sees as recompense for past behavior.

"Unlawful acts, performed long enough and with sufficient vigor, are never enough to amend the law," Gorsuch wrote for a 5-4 majority in an antecedent case about tribal sovereignty. "To hold otherwise would be to elevate the most brazen and longstanding injustices over the law, both rewarding wrong and failing those in the right."

THE TRUMP BRAND:

Raskin goes off on Marjorie Taylor Greene: Gentlelady talked about a massive invasion. We had a massive invasion of our own chamber and she continued to be a cheerleader for the insurrection pic.twitter.com/SOAPOxWkht

— Acyn (@Acyn) April 28, 2022

STARTING TO QUESTION THE WISDOM OF nATIONALIST ECONOMICS:

THANKS, VLAD!:

If Europeans can reduce their gas consumption quickly as the heating season winds down and gas power plants are replaced with other sources, they can slow the onset of pain. Fuller use of liquefied natural gas imports from coastal terminals could also help.

In the longer run, the European Union is working to increase energy efficiency in existing buildings, which are already efficient compared with US buildings. It also aims to fill gas storage caverns to 90% capacity during the off-peak seasons when gas demand is lower, and ramp up local production of biomethane - which can substitute for fossil gas. Biomethane is derived from agricultural waste or other organic, renewable sources.

Building more import terminals to bring in liquefied natural gas from the US, Canada or other friendly nations is also an option. However, creating new fossil fuel infrastructure would conflict with efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to slow climate change.

Ramping up wind, solar, geothermal and nuclear power plants as quickly as possible to displace the continent's natural gas power plants is a key priority for the EU. So is replacing natural gas heating systems with electric heat pumps, which can also provide air conditioning during the continent's increasingly frequent and intense summer heat waves.

These solutions align with the EU's climate objectives, which suggests that Russia's gas cutoffs might ultimately accelerate European nations' efforts to shift to renewable energy and more efficient use of electricity.

JOIN THE CLUB, SEAN (profanity alert):

In another revealing text, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo texted Meadows with a heads up about the questions she planned to ask Trump on air in late November 2020, a practice that's frowned on by journalists. She indicated that she would provide a platform for Trump's lies about the election and pleaded with Meadows: "Pls make sure he doesn't go off on tangents. We want to know he is strong he is a fighter & he will win."

In mid-December 2020, Hannity urged Meadows to continue joining forces. "You also need to spend at least half your time doing business with us," he texted Meadows.

"I agree. We can make a powerful team," Meadows responded.

Meadows and Hannity also worked in tandem to help spin Trump's false tale of a rigged election.

But Hannity's enthusiasm appeared to flag on Dec. 22, when he began bashing the "lunatics" supporting Trump.

"You fighting is fine," he texted Meadows. "The [***] lunatics is NOT fine. They are NOT helping him. I'm fed up with those people."

SELF-DETERMINATION IS A TOUGH TASKMASTER:

[F]ar from increasing the radiological exposure of the public, nuclear power plants reduce it. Coal contains radioactive constituents. Worldwide, coal-fired power stations release some 30,000 tons of radioactive radon, uranium, and thorium into the atmosphere every year. They also emit millions of tons of highly toxic chemical ash containing mercury, arsenic, and selenium, not to mention over 10 billion tons of CO2 per year. In addition to 10 million tons of CO2, a single 1,000 MWe coal-fired power plant produces 200,000 tons of ash annually and, as well as several hundreds of tons of mercury and other chemical poisons, sends some 27 tons of radioactive material--half radon, the other half uranium and thorium--right up the chimney. The amount of uranium and thorium emitted to the environment as pollution by coal-fired power plants would be more than enough to fuel every nuclear power plant in the country to produce equivalent power without any of the CO2, toxic gas, or radiological emissions.

Natural gas is much cleaner than coal, but it contains radioactive radon. Not much, to be sure, typically about 0.03 microcuries per cubic meter. But that adds up. A 1000 MWe natural gas power plant sends about 8 curies of radon into the environment every month. That's just about the same as what the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant let loose just once--during its world-famous meltdown in March 1979!

END THE LOAN GUARANTEE AND MAKE PUBLIC EDUCATION FREE:

 It was also in 1992 that President George H. W. Bush signed the Higher Education Act, creating the precursor of the Federal Direct Student Loan Program, the current system. Students could take on tens of thousands of dollars in easily available credit, repayable after they left college.

Demand for a college education soared, while the financial impacts for students and their families were deferred. The public was persuaded that "more people going to college" was an unmitigated good. Under the veil of that notion, universities realized a grand opportunity to make money, funded by the federal taxpayer. This is on top of the enormous endowments, donations, and research grants that colleges also enjoy. Elite colleges have capitalized on parents' eagerness to have their children admitted to the very best schools, which families view as a ticket to success in life.

All this, while higher education's nonprofit status -- requiring schools to invest surpluses back into the university -- makes them tax exempt. It's a crass act of profiteering. In 2018, the approximately 4,000 American colleges and universities took in a combined $1.068 trillion in revenue, tax free. That averages out to about $250 million per school.

THE SPIRIT MOVES:

Górecki, born in 1933, started out writing dissonant, complex and uncommercial music, as was expected of avant-garde composers at the time. His change of heart in the mid-70s - towards a simpler, more spiritually inclined style - was not a ploy to hit the mainstream. In fact, this shift simply alienated him from his peers: the Third Symphony was a flop on its 1977 premiere. But in 1985, David Drew of the music publishers Boosey & Hawkes chanced upon Górecki at a Warsaw music festival. Back home, he listened, rapt, to an early Polish recording of the Third Symphony.

Thanks to Drew's enthusiasm, in 1989 the London Sinfonietta organised a weekend-long concert series featuring music by both Górecki and the Soviet composer Alfred Schnittke. Robert Hurwitz, then president of the US label Nonesuch (part of the Warner stable), flew over for the weekend. He too had already heard and enjoyed a recording of the Third Symphony - and, considering that version "perfectly fine", had no plans to record it again. He was more interested in other works on the bill: "The Third Symphony was kind of a bonus for the weekend," he says.

An overwhelmingly powerful live performance - the work's London premiere - with the soprano Margaret Field and conducted by David Atherton, changed his mind. The critics agreed.

"The most imposing work [of the programmes] was Górecki's Symphony No 3, which drew together many strands in his musical personality. An impressive individual musical statement," wrote the Guardian's Meirion Bowen. "The astonishing Third Symphony ... at almost an hour of very slow music, could have become a trial, and for some it evidently did. I can only say that I found it made an intensely physical impact, with its relentless tread and its piercingly simple melodic lines," wrote Nicholas Kenyon in the Observer.

"It really did feel like a major event," says Janis Susskind, who has worked at Boosey for 40 years and is now managing director. "You could just see the planets coming into alignment, that there was potential for getting this remarkable symphony to a bigger audience."

Nonesuch's subsequent recording featured the Sinfonietta (which, as was the norm for such projects, was paid a one-off fee rather than receiving royalties), with the conductor David Zinman and the emerging US soprano Dawn Upshaw, whose piercingly pure vocal tone contrasted with earlier renditions.

"After the sessions, I thought: 'This is better than I anticipated,'" Hurwitz recalls. "'I think it could be a success; we might even sell 25,000 copies.'"

SPEND THE MONEY ON RESETTLING NEW AMERICANS AFTER WE OPEN THE BORDER:

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

A second member of the Oath Keepers facing a seditious conspiracy charge for his role in the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol pleaded guilty Friday and is preparing to cooperate with prosecutors.

Brian Ulrich, one of 11 Oath Keepers facing the gravest charges to emerge from the Jan. 6 attack, pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of Congress' electoral vote-counting session. He follows Joshua James, an Oath Keeper who provided personal security to Roger Stone, who pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy last month.

THE iDENTITY CAUCUS:

Interviews with more than 40 Republicans -- including 30 lawmakers, 16 of them in the Freedom Caucus -- paint a picture of a group that shapeshifted as the GOP itself realigned during Trump's presidency, becoming more populist and nationalist, but less bound by policy principles.

"CONCERNED PARENTS" ARE NEITHER:

By wide margins - and regardless of their political affiliation - parents express satisfaction with their children's schools and what is being taught in them.

The nationally representative poll of 1,007 parents of school-aged children follows up on a similar survey NPR and Ipsos conducted about a year ago. In both polls, parents answered questions about the impact of the pandemic on their children, academically and socially, and about their schools' performance during this time.

This year's responses showed positive trends as the nation continues to recover from the worst of the pandemic. Compared to 2021, a growing margin of parents say their child is "ahead" when it comes to math, reading, social skills, and mental health and well-being. Fewer parents say their child is "behind" in those areas. In fact, in 2022, almost half of parents, 47%, agree with the statement: "the pandemic has not disrupted my child's education." That's up from 38% in 2021, and is a view at odds with that of most education researchers, who see big disruptions in indicators like test scores, college attendance, and preschool enrollment.

Education is a concern, but most parents say their own kids' school is doing well

For decades, voters have expressed concern in polls about the state of K-12 education in the U.S. But when you zoom in closer, parents seem to like their own kids' school, and they like their kids' teachers even more.

I HAVE ALWAYS DEPENDED ON THE KINDNESS...:

Russia built a self-proclaimed fortress around its economy in the run-up to war--but there was a crack. Moscow depended on foreign middlemen to ferry its most strategic and lucrative export around the world: oil.

Now the most-important middleman, Trafigura Group, is joining several competitors in cutting off Russian giant Rosneft Oil Co. from global oil markets. In a high-stakes move that goes farther than official Western sanctions, the Swiss commodities trader plans to stop exporting Rosneft's crude altogether. It will cut its business with the state producer to a sliver of prewar levels, supplying only some refined products such as diesel into Europe, according to a spokeswoman.

Trafigura and other traders were already poised to lose a big chunk of their Russian business on May 15, when sanctions go into effect that bar them from selling Rosneft oil to countries outside the European Union and Switzerland. In also deciding to cut exports to Europe, long the biggest buyer of Russian oil, they are getting ahead of EU countries that are discussing a full ban.

Vitol, Trafigura's biggest competitor in oil, also plans to retreat from the Russian market, according to people familiar with the decision. Glencore PLC, a mining and trading giant with a long history in Russia, suspended its contract to export Rosneft oil in March, people familiar with the decision said.

WHAT BELTWAY?:

A new Morning Consult poll released Thursday found all of the 10 most popular governors are Republicans. New Hampshire's Chris Sununu is among them at number six.

Sununu and his fellow northeastern GOP governors- Charlie Baker of Massachusetts (#1), Maryland's Larry Hogan (#3), and Vermont's Phil Scott (#2) -- have dominated the top of the Morning Consult rankings for years. In fact, Sununu's sixth-place finish is a bit lower than usual for the three-term incumbent.

According to the new poll, Sununu has a 63 percent job approval, while 32 percent disapprove, for a net +31 point approval rating. No member of the all-Democrat federal delegation comes close to matching those numbers.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

[A] new study to be published Friday in the journal Science finds that though some dog behaviors are indeed associated with particular breeds, breed plays less of a role overall than that conventional wisdom holds.

"We found things like German shorthaired pointers were slightly more likely to point, or golden retrievers were slightly more likely to retrieve, or huskies more likely to howl, than the general dog population," says Kathryn Lord, a researcher at the UMass Chan Medical School and an author of the study.

Researchers surveyed the owners of more than 18,000 dogs and analyzed the DNA of about 2,100 animals to see if physical traits and behaviors can be correlated with dog breeds.

Is your dog bilingual? A new study suggests their brains can tell languages apart

Overall, the study found that about 9% of the variation in an individual dog's behavior can be explained by its breed.

THAT WAS EASY:

The Chilean government went into full crisis-management mode. The first, obvious step was to end Chile's dependence on Argentinian gas. We accelerated construction of a liquefied natural gas terminal and began building a second facility. LNG storage capacity could not be built overnight (the first Chilean facility would not be completed until 2009), but once vaporizers were installed, regasification could proceed while ships provided temporary storage.

We also accelerated the expansion of solar and wind power. When the Argentine gas shock came, what had been viewed as an opportunity to be seized in the future suddenly became an urgent imperative. The government passed the first law in Latin America regulating renewable energy and started providing risk-mitigation guarantees to new private suppliers, so that smaller hydro, solar, and wind projects could come online.

But, because not all new energy supplies could be green, the government also reluctantly pushed for some industrial plants and electricity generators to be converted back to burning diesel. This was dirty and expensive, but it was deemed acceptable as a short-run measure to bridge the supply gap while new hydro, solar, and wind facilities were built.

Even then, the new supply sources were not enough to keep total energy consumption at pre-crisis levels, so the government launched a national energy-efficiency campaign. It distributed low-consumption light bulbs, provided funds to improve insulation in homes, extended summer daylight savings hours, and worked with electricity companies to provide transitory subsidies to firms that lowered consumption. Total electricity use fell by 10% over the course of 2008.

Crucially, the Chilean government was able to resist political pressures to cap the domestic price of electricity and oil. Trying to reduce consumption while artificially holding down prices would have made no sense. To offset the impact of higher energy prices on family budgets, we provided poor households with cash transfers and subsidies roughly equal in value to their additional energy expenses. Because the Chilean public sector had very low public debt and massive dollar reserves, these additional expenditures did not involve any macroeconomic or financial dislocation.

Aside from its greater economic might, Germany today has three advantages that Chile lacked. 

UNFAIR TO SANITATION WORKERS:

What's disorienting about McCarthy's machinations is that what the House Republican leader is trying to defend and explain away is his temporary display of honesty. After the ugliness and the deaths of the attack on the Capitol, McCarthy--and the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, whose private comments about Trump have also been leaked--came to their senses. McCarthy and McConnell said they were fed up with Trump and remarked how he could be removed, with McConnell asking a reporter about the Twenty-fifth Amendment and both men discussing impeachment.

So McCarthy and McConnell knew that Donald Trump was bad for their party.

They knew that Trump was bad for the country.

They knew that he was to blame for Jan. 6th.

And they talked about getting rid of him.

Yet neither man publicly called on Trump to resign. Neither man voted to impeach or convict Trump. In public, they attacked the proposal for an independent Jan. 6th commission. They said they would support Trump as the 2024 nominee. And their various fundraising apparatuses are now in overdrive praising and promoting the former president.

That makes them garbage men.

"ALEXA, WHY DOES CRT EXIST?"

For nearly 400 years, Harvard's most famous motto has been a single word, Veritas, or truth. In the spirit of that slogan, university officials said, Harvard on Tuesday published the first full accounting of the institution's historical ties to slavery.

In a sweeping report, the university also acknowledged its complicity in 19th-century "race science" and 20th-century racial discrimination, and announced the creation of a $100 million fund to address the legacies of slavery, including inequalities in educational outcomes, that persist to this day.

"Harvard benefited from and in some ways perpetuated practices that were profoundly immoral," Harvard president Lawrence Bacow wrote in a letter to the university community about the report. "Consequently, I believe we bear a moral responsibility to do what we can to address the persistent corrosive effects of those historical practices on individuals, on Harvard, and on our society."

IT'S OUR WAR:

America helped foil Moscow's efforts to take Kyiv and repelled its advances elsewhere by sharing such detailed intelligence that Ukraine knew exactly when and where Russian bombs would fall, it has emerged.

In an unprecedented information-sharing operation, US spy agencies divulged the co-ordinates of Russian forces and aircraft to Ukrainian troops, allowing them to pre-empt attacks.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

A New York judge has determined that Cushman & Wakefield, one of the world's largest real estate firms, broke its own rules to appease the Trump Organization and the former American president's chronic practice of inflating the value of his properties.

Judge Arthur F. Engoron's surprising assertions were included in his court order on Wednesday, in which he formally directed Cushman & Wakefield to turn over documents to the New York attorney general's office.

nATIONALIST ECONOMICS IS ODD:

Abbott's political theatrics, according to Perryman, not only affected the Texas economy, but the U.S. economy in general. Texas isn't necessarily the final destination for Mexican goods that enter the U.S. via the Lone Star State, and those trucks often make their way to the Midwest and other parts of the U.S. to deliver a variety of fruits and vegetables.

The economic losses, Perryman reports, will be difficult or "impossible" to make up.

In a report published on April 20, Perryman explains, "The recent slowdowns due to additional inspections disrupted these patterns, resulting in not only spoilage of perishable items, but also, production delays. Given the strained capacity at the border in normal times, it will be difficult and, in many instances, impossible to 'catch up.'"

FAILED hIS OWN TEST:

The whip is held high in Christ's hand, and a man in a loose yellow robe braces for the blow. Other merchants cower or scramble to gather their possessions. Their bodies are contorted, their clothes bright, their faces full of fear. Nearby, Pharisees debate the coming violence, but Christ himself looks calm, serene, without a trace of anger in his face. We don't see the blow land. And so we must imagine exactly how hard he strikes, since the moment El Greco depicts in Purification of the Temple is itself bloodless. No bruises, no scars, no bleeding flesh. We picture the righteous rage that lifted the whip, not the aftermath.

As a young man standing before this painting in the Frick Museum during the winter of 2006, I found it comforting. I was on leave visiting family, about to head to Iraq with the Marine Corps. I imagined that this painting, and the story from the gospels behind it, allowed my decision to serve in the military to sit comfortably with my faith. Here was Christ, "turn the other cheek," "blessed are the peacemakers" Christ, doing violence. [...]

"To think, moreover, of the Son of God taking the small cords in his hands and plaiting a scourge out of them for this driving out from the temple," Origen says, "does it not bespeak audacity and temerity and even some measure of lawlessness?" Jesus was no brawler. To fully imagine this scene means imagining a Christ at odds with the one we repeatedly encounter in the rest of the gospels.

FREEDOM V. LIBERTY:

When I try to explain the aspirational genius of the American founding, I always refer to two documents--one of them one of the most famous documents in the English language, the other far more obscure. They're by the famous "frenemies" of the American founding, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams.

The first, of course, is Jefferson's Declaration of Independence. The second is Adams's very short Letter to the Massachusetts Militia, dated October 11, 1798. In two pairs of sentences these documents define the American social compact--the mutual responsibilities of citizen and state--that define the American experiment. Here's the first pair, from the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The first sentence recognizes the inherent dignity of man as human beings created in the image of God. The second sentence, nearly as important, recognizes the unavoidable duty of government to recognize and protect that dignity. While the sole purpose of government isn't to protect liberty, a government that fails to protect liberty fails in an essential function. 

Now let's move to the two sentences from Adams--two sentences that help explain our broken nation and our broken politics. We've weathered many of the challenges that Jefferson worried about, including the threat of tyranny. And now we're facing the crisis that concerned Adams.

Writing eleven years after the ratification of the Constitution, Adams wrote to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts to outline the responsibilities of the citizens of the new republic. The letter contains the famous declaration that "our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." But I'm more interested in the two preceding sentences:

Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.

Put in plain English, this means that when public virtue fails, our constitutional government does not possess the power to preserve itself. Thus, the American experiment depends upon both the government upholding its obligation to preserve liberty and the American people upholding theirs to exercise that liberty towards virtuous purposes. [...]

And if you think that most-partisan cohort is seething with anger because they suffer from painful oppression, think again. The data is clear. As the More in Common project notes, the most polarized Americans are disproportionately white and college-educated on the left and disproportionately white and retired on the right. 

The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who've ever lived. They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.

iDENTITY IS THE OPPOSITE OF CHRISTIANITY:

THANKS, VLAD!:

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has forced the European Union to accelerate the pace of our energy and climate policy. Since the Kremlin has increasingly used energy as a tool for political influence, we must deprive it of its leverage by radically reducing our dependence on fossil-fuel imports from Russia.

The geopolitical rationale for doing so overlaps with the imperative to tackle climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's latest report on mitigation underscores the urgency of that task. Total greenhouse-gas emissions must peak by 2025 if we are to avoid a catastrophic increase in global temperatures. Moreover, the economy-wide shift to clean energy must be managed carefully to account for the inevitable social and economic consequences; it must be a "just transition."

The EU and the European Investment Bank have a vital role to play in this transition. Investments in renewables, energy efficiency, and innovative technologies such as green hydrogen are important tools for dealing with Russia's aggression and helping to save the planet from dependence on fossil fuels. Every euro we spend on the energy transition at home is a euro we keep out of the hands of an authoritarian power that wages aggressive war. Every euro we spend on clean energy enhances our freedom to make our own decisions. Every euro we spend helping our international partners accelerate their own decarbonization strategies is an investment in resilience and in the fight against climate change.

Since Russia's invasion on February 24, the EU has been accelerating its energy transition plans to help end Europe's reliance on Russian fossil-fuel imports as soon as possible.

IT'S NOT ABOUT CRT, JUST iDENTITY:

By a 42 point margin, Americans back K-12 teaching on "the legacy of slavery and racism and how this history impacts our laws, institutions, and society to this day." Presented with a brief definition of CRT, even Republicans overwhelmingly reject a ban.https://t.co/AE9ilN0Mvu pic.twitter.com/Aa7tkLl978

— Jeffrey Sachs (@JeffreyASachs) April 26, 2022

Q IS A FALSE FLAG OP:

The Republican Party has spent months, if not years, inciting a pedophilia panic in America, convincing thousands of their followers that everyone from teachers to the executives at Disney are grooming children for sexual deviance or abuse. But behind the scenes, their own officials are going down for actual links to pedophilia in ways that go far beyond meaningless culture war conspiracies. 

Take 78-year-old Ray E. Holmberg, North Dakota's longest-serving state senator, the former chairman of the body's powerful Legislative Management Committee, and a grandfather of five. Holmberg announced on Monday that he is resigning from his position after a report on April 15 alleged he had exchanged 72 text messages with a man accused of serious child pornography crimes. The suspect, Nicholas James Morgan-Derosier, is currently awaiting federal prosecution on charges of possessing thousands of images of child pornography and allegedly kidnapping two children from their homes with the intent of sexually abusing them. 

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

Solar and wind power are on track to become the new baseload electricity supply for global energy markets as early as 2030, and to relegate thermal generation from coal and gas to the role of back-up, a major new report has found.

In its 2022 Global Energy Perspective, leading global consultancy McKinsey & Company says renewable energy is on track to account for 50% of the world's power mix by 2030, and around 85% by 2050, thanks to the increasing cost competitiveness of new solar and wind capacity.

DAVID ALWAYS BEATS GOLIATH:

As Florida legislators were rushing through passage of a bill to repeal the special district that governs Walt Disney World last week, they failed to notice an obscure provision in state law that says the state could not do what legislators were doing -- unless the district's bond debt was paid off. 

Disney, however, noticed and quietly sent a note to its investors to show that it was confident the Legislature's attempt to dissolve the special taxing district operating the 39-square mile parcel it owned in two counties violated the "pledge" the state made when it enacted the district in 1967, and therefore was not legal. 

The result, Disney told its investors, is that it would continue to go about business as usual.

IT'S NOT A pROGRESSIVE PARTY:

[E]ven after the 2020 election, many Democrats still seemed to think Biden's primary win was a one-off. Maybe, they figured, it was a fluke that reflected Democratic voters' desire to find the most electable candidate to defeat the Bad Orange Man, not the voters' actual preference for the old guard.

The recent elections in San Francisco demonstrate that it might not have been the fluke they imagined.

Here, many Democratic regulars have become actively hostile to the new order that was imposed during the Trump years, and they are banding together to do something about it.

Their coalition is made up of older black voters, elder millennial HENRYs, Asian Americans, working-class union Democrats, wine moms, and Gaybraham Lincoln drag queens. Together they have majority power in the city, and they are trying to put an end to the leftward lurch by reasserting the more practical liberalism of the late-aughts glory days.

And so far, it's working.

Democrats in D.C. and across the country should probably take note.

Last week, there was a special election to fill the empty assembly seat in San Francisco's Flamin' 17th. It's a majority-minority district that runs from the city's Italian North Beach neighborhood to the Haight-Ashbury of the Grateful Dead; then across the Castro, where naked gays occasionally roam the streets; through the Hispanic-turned-hipster Mission neighborhood; all the way down to multicultural South San Francisco.

While I haven't done a full head-count myself, there are likely fewer Republicans in this district than there are homosexuals. Gavin Newsom won a Bashar al-Assad-like 89.5 percent of the vote there in 2018.

In other words, the 17th is not a haven for red dogs or crypto-conservatives. Peter Thiel left S.F. for L.A., after all.

So how did Matt Haney, a basic white guy in navy slacks, win the seat in a landslide?

Given the deeply liberal electorate, Haney's campaign can't be considered "centrist" in any meaningful sense of the word. But it is noteworthy that he won with the support of those who had been pushing the recalls of the left-wing school board members and D.A. Chesa Boudin.

Haney wasn't a natural vehicle for this backlash to San Francisco's new progressive establishment. He had been a career politician in the city. During his time on the city's board of supervisors and board of education, he would have best been described as a progressive left Democrat. He even got swept up in the faddish political moment as one of the officials who in 2016 pushed to rename George Washington High and other schools, which prompted a backlash among residents.

But during this year's special election, Haney recognized the political winds were shifting.

He ran a successful campaign for the broad middle of the Democratic party, finishing first in a primary whose third-place finisher, Bilal Mahmood, ran even more to the center--and then swamped the DSA-friendly challenger, David Campos, in a run-off.

Haney was able to pull off these wins by falling back on a politics reminiscent of his first boss--Barack Obama.

CLEANSING THE AUGEAN STABLES:

Under the Bill as introduced, all social media sites in the world with a substantial UK readership will indeed have to take steps, by age verification or otherwise, to protect children from a wide variety of unsuitable content. But they will have to go a great deal further.

Machinery will be required to flag and remove posts alleged to contain illegal matter: something that sounds like sweet reasonableness itself, until you realise that illegality extends to pure speech crimes such as harassment. It also covers offences under the Public Order Act, ranging from verbal attacks on religion or sexuality to abusive words likely to cause distress.

The effects of this exercise in legislative overkill are predictable

In the case of the largest sites -- Facebook, Twitter and the like -- there is now a new and highly controversial "legal but harmful" duty. Subject to a few protections for news providers and the like, sites will have to take steps to remove, or to limit access to, a wide swathe of material otherwise entirely lawful. Taboo content will be determined by government regulation (via a list that can at any time expand at the whim of a minister), if deemed "harmful to adults". Content will be censored if it "presents a material risk of significant harm to an appreciable number of adults in the United Kingdom", even if that harm is not specified.

Any breach of these duties is liable to be met with a very sizeable fine from Ofcom. In the last resort, a court order may block access.

NO SLEEP 'TIL MOSCOW:

Russia reported a series of blasts in the south of the country and a fire at an ammunition depot on Wednesday, the latest in a spate incidents that a top Ukrainian official described as payback and "karma" for Moscow's invasion.

Without directly admitting that Ukraine was responsible, presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak said it was natural that Russian regions where fuel and weapons are stored were learning about "demilitarisation".

MET ONE nATIONALIST YOU'VE MET THEM ALL:

[E]ven that understates the sheer weirdness of the man described in a 2017 book on the rise of Russia's new nationalism as "a former dissident, pamphleteer, hipster and guitar-playing poet who emerged from the libertine era of pre-perestroika Muscovite bohemia to become a rabble-rousing intellectual, a lecturer at the military academy, and ultimately a Kremlin operative." (The author, former Financial Times Moscow bureau chief Charles Clover, had extensive conversations with Dugin and still failed to crack the enigma.)

For instance: Dugin has had a lifelong obsession with the occult, ranging from the legacy of magician and huckster Aleister Crowley (a 1995 video shows him reciting a poem at a ceremony honoring Crowley in Moscow) to much more sinister Nazi occultism. His first appearance on Russian television, in 1992, was as an "expert commentator" in a shlocky documentary that explored the esoteric secrets of the Third Reich, which he claimed to have studied in KGB archives. Hе now rails against Ukrainian "Nazis" but once penned a poem in which the apocalyptic advent of an "avatar" culminates in a "radiant Himmler" rising from the grave. (While he later tried to disown this verse, it was posted on his website under a name he has elsewhere acknowledged as his pseudonym.) Dugin's oeuvre also includes a 1997 essay proposing that the notorious Russian serial killer Andrei Chikatilo, who gruesomely murdered more than fifty young women and children between 1978 and 1990, should be regarded as a practitioner of Dionysian "sacraments" in which the killer/torturer and the victim transcend their "metaphysical dualism" and become one. He talks casually and cheerfully about living in the "end times." He preaches national and religious revival but can also, according to Clover, make such quips as, "There are only two real things in Russia: Oil sales and theft. The rest is all a kind of theater."

Many details of Dugin's life are obscure, no doubt due to some extent to deliberate mystification on his part. It has been claimed, for instance, that his father was either a colonel or a lieutenant general in the GRU, the fearsome Soviet military intelligence agency, and used this position both to protect him and perhaps to facilitate his access to the military and intelligence elites. Extremism researcher Anton Shekhovtsov, who has delved into Dugin's background, asserts that the reality is far more prosaic and that Dugin père was an officer in the Soviet, later Russian, customs service. According to Clover, Dugin has claimed that his rebellious youthful antics--which included involvement, at 19, in an underground circle that dabbled in mysticism with a neofascist slant--caused his father to be transferred from the GRU to the customs service; but Clover also quotes Dugin as saying that his father never supported him and that they barely had a relationship. (Dugin's parents were divorced when he was 3 years old.)

Expelled from college for his unorthodox activities (which included the translation and samizdat publication of Pagan Imperialism by Italian far-right intellectual Julius Evola, another fascist with a mystical bent), Dugin made a living for a while as a language tutor and freelance translator. But he clearly wanted more, and the changes under Mikhail Gorbachev--which included a drastic relaxation of state control over intellectual and political life--opened up new avenues. In 1988, Dugin got involved in Pamyat ("Memory"), a "patriotic" and "anti-Zionist" movement notorious for its anti-Semitism, but was eventually expelled for murky reasons (Satanism, according to some). He also traveled to Europe and cultivated ties with far-right figures such as French counter-Enlightenment author Alain de Benoist. Interestingly, despite benefitting from the reforms, Dugin sympathized with the hardline coup against Gorbachev in August 1991 and reportedly even tried to get weapons so that he could volunteer to fight for the coup plotters' "State Emergency Committee."

DID DONALD EVEN EXIST?:

The Energy Department finalized two rules Monday requiring manufacturers to sell energy-efficient lightbulbs, effectively putting a ''sell-by'' date on older, inefficient bulbs that don't meet the new standards. The move will speed the pace of a lighting revolution that is already well underway, driving down electricity use, saving consumers money, and slashing greenhouse gas emissions from the power sector.

The new rules, which reverse a Trump-era policy, expand energy-efficiency requirements to more types of lightbulbs and ban the sale of those that produce less than 45 lumens per watt -- a measure of how much light is emitted for each unit of electricity. This will eventually prohibit most incandescent and halogen lightbulbs and shift the country toward more efficient and compact fluorescent and LED bulbs.

WHERE'S BOSTON CORBETT WHEN YOU NEED HIM:

It has been clear for more than a year that ultraconservative members of Congress were deeply involved in attempts to keep Trump in power: They joined baseless lawsuits, spread the lie of widespread election fraud, and were among the 147 Republicans who voted on Jan. 6, 2021, against certifying President Biden's victory in at least one state.

But in a court filing and text messages obtained by CNN, new pieces of evidence have emerged in recent days fleshing out the degree of their involvement with the Trump White House in strategy sessions, at least one of which included discussions about encouraging Trump's supporters to march to the Capitol on Jan. 6, despite warnings of potential violence. Some continued to push to try to keep Trump in office even after a mob of his supporters attacked the complex.

"In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall law," Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Georgia Republican, wrote to Meadows on Jan. 17, 2021, misspelling the word "martial."

The revelations underscore how integrated Trump's most fervent allies in Congress were into the effort to overturn the election on several fronts, including a scheme to appoint pro-Trump electors from states won by Biden -- even after they were told such a plan was unlawful -- and how they strategized to pressure their fellow lawmakers go along.

The fake electors scheme, the question of how demonstrators at Trump's rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6 were directed toward the Capitol, and the plotting in the White House and on Capitol Hill about the potential for Vice President Mike Pence to block or delay certification of the results are at the heart not just of the inquiry by the House select committee on Jan. 6 but also of an expanding criminal inquiry by the Justice Department.

"If there was a level of coordination that was designed not just to exercise First Amendment rights, but to interfere with Congress, as it certified the electoral count, then we're in a whole different universe," said Joyce Vance, a law professor at the University of Alabama and a former US attorney. "There's a difference between assembling and protesting, and trying to interfere with the smooth transfer of power."

Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to Meadows, told the House committee that she recalled at least 11 members of Congress who were involved in discussions with White House officials about overturning the election, including plans to pressure Pence to throw out electoral votes from states won by Biden.

BOY, THE rIGHT IS BAD AT PICKING AVATARS:

The longer Ukraine's army fends off the invading Russians, the more it absorbs the advantages of Western weaponry and training -- exactly the transformation President Vladimir Putin wanted to prevent by invading in the first place.

The list of arms flowing to Ukraine is long and growing longer. It includes new American battlefield aerial drones and the most modern U.S. and Canadian artillery, anti-tank weapons from Norway and others, armored vehicles and anti-ship missiles from Britain and Stinger counter-air missiles from the U.S., Denmark and other countries.

If Ukraine can hold off the Russians, its accumulating arsenal of Western weapons could have a transformative effect in a country that has, like other former Soviet republics, relied mainly on arms and equipment from the Soviet era.

"INCONCEIVABLE!":

"A.I. is growing like crazy and taking over large parts of the data center," Ayar Labs CEO Charles Wuischpard told Reuters in an interview. "The data movement challenge and the energy consumption in that data movement is a big, big issue."

The challenge is that many large machine-learning algorithms can use hundreds or thousands of chips for computing, and there is a bottleneck on the speed of data transmission between chips or servers using current electrical methods.

Light has been used to transmit data through fiber-optic cables, including undersea cables, for decades, but bringing it to the chip level was hard as devices used for creating light or controlling it have not been as easy to shrink as transistors.

PitchBook's senior emerging technology analyst Brendan Burke expects silicon photonics to become common hardware in data centers by 2025 and estimates the market will reach $3 billion by then, similar to the market size of the A.I. graphic chips market in 2020.

IT'S A HOMOCENTRIC UNIVERSE:

In a philosophical sense, we're taught to doubt and question everything. Even the reality of ourselves and our own experiences are up for debate, as we have to make certain assumptions about how trustworthy our sensors -- and our own senses, for that matter -- actually are in order to arrive at any satisfactory conclusions. Sure, certain things might appear real, but isn't it possible that those appearances are deceiving, and that quantities or concepts that we take for granted might be nothing more than very convincing illusions?

From a physical, scientific perspective, however, these sorts of questions take on a different meaning. We've learned lots of surprising and counterintuitive lessons from our investigations of time. Time is relative, not absolute. Time always marches forwards, not backwards, but we still lack an explanation for the arrow of time. Thermodynamically, the Universe has an arrow of time, which "flows" in the same direction as increasing entropy. And when we investigate the Universe on a fundamental level, it turns out that time may not be fundamental at all.

But existence itself? It's very, very difficult to take that property away from time and to still wind up with a Universe consistent with what we observe.

...AND CHEAPER...:

A team of researchers based in Europe has developed a hydrogen fuel cell that switches out rare and costly platinum and replaces it with iron, lowering one of the key barriers to a technology that many hope can help decarbonise heavy transport, shipping and aviation.

Hydrogen fuel cells convert hydrogen to electricity with water vapour as the only by-product, making them a sustainable alternative - as long as the hydrogen is sources from renewables - for portable power, particularly in vehicles.

Currently, however, fuel cells rely on a catalyst made of platinum, which is expensive and scarce - according to the researchers - and accounts for around 60% of the cost of a single fuel cell.

TIRED OF FREEZING IN THE DARK:

The restructuring of the Texas electric generation market continued in the first quarter of 2022, with wind and solar producing a record 34 per cent of the power dispatched by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, also known as Ercot.

The new market share record is particularly impressive in light of the sharp increase in overall electricity demand across Ercot.

DONALD WHO?:

The Biden administration on Monday reversed a Trump administration plan that would have allowed the government to lease more than two-thirds of the country's largest swath of public land to oil and gas drilling.

CRAZY IS ALWAYS ITS OWN WORST ENEMY:

IT'S A START:

New Hampshire's number of new births seems to have rebounded from a slump in early 2021, staving off fears of a pandemic-related "baby bust."

In fact, according to CDC data, New Hampshire saw more births in the first nine months of 2021 than in 2020, a statistic that sets the state apart from the rest of the country.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Jurors have heard -- and rejected -- an array of excuses and arguments from the first rioters to be tried for storming the U.S. Capitol. The next jury to get a Capitol riot case could hear another novel defense this week at the trial of a retired New York City police officer.

Thomas Webster, a 20-year veteran of the NYPD, has claimed he was acting in self-defense when he tackled a police officer who was trying to protect the Capitol from a mob on Jan. 6, 2021. Webster's lawyer also has argued that he was exercising his First Amendment free speech rights when he shouted profanities at police that day. Jury selection began on Monday and is expected to last most of the day.

Webster, 56, is the fourth Capitol riot defendant to get a jury trial. Each has presented a distinct line of defense.

An Ohio man who stole a coat rack from a Capitol office testified he was "following presidential orders" from Donald Trump. An off-duty police officer from Virginia claimed he only entered the Capitol to retrieve a fellow officer. A lawyer for a Texas man who confronted Capitol police accused prosecutors of rushing to judgment against somebody prone to exaggerating.

Those defenses didn't sway the juries at their respective trials. Collectively, a total of 36 jurors unanimously convicted the three rioters of all 17 counts in their indictments.

Webster faces the same fate if a federal judge's blistering words are any guide. U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta, who will preside over Webster's trial, has described his videotaped conduct as "among the most indefensible and reprehensible" that the judge has seen among Jan. 6 cases, with "no real defense for it."

JUST A "CONCERNED PARENT":

Targeting propaganda at young people is not new to Russia. When the Bolsheviks took power in 1917, they introduced patriotic-military education to prepare the next generation for war. During the Brezhnev period from 1964 to 1982, the focus of attention turned to Soviet Union's victory over the Nazis in what Russia still calls the 'great patriotic war'.

There was a strong psychological dimension to Soviet patriotic-military education during the cold war. Heroic stories of self-sacrifice during the great patriotic war were used to develop children's devotion to the motherland. Whether through activities in youth groups or in more formal educational settings, a clear message was delivered to young people: they had a responsibility to preserve the memory of the victory that their parents and grandparents had achieved.

Since the collapse of the USSR, the memory of the great patriotic war has become even more important to education in Russia. Young people have not only been charged with preserving the state's version of history, they are also expected to be vigilant and denounce efforts by others to 'falsify' and 'diminish' Russia's historical role in the world.

SEXUAL DEVIANCE IS MORE OR LESS A QUALIFIER FOR TRUMPISTS:

Former Trump administration White House adviser Kellyanne Conway said she heard last year about "some kind of sexual allegations" against GOP Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster -- but she's working to get him elected anyway.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

Our team at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found that a staggering 1,400 gigawatts of proposed generation and storage projects have applied to connect to the grid - more than all existing U.S. power plants combined. The majority are now solar projects, and over a third of those projects involve hybrid solar plus storage plants.

While these power plants of the future offer many benefits, they also raise questions about how the electric grid should best be operated.

As wind and solar grow, they are starting to have big impacts on the grid.

Solar power already exceeds 25% of annual power generation in California and is spreading rapidly in other states such as Texas, Florida and Georgia. The "wind belt" states, from the Dakotas to Texas, have seen massive deployment of wind turbines, with Iowa now getting a majority of its power from the wind.

This high percentage of renewable power raises a question: How do we integrate renewable sources that produce large but varying amounts of power throughout the day?

That's where storage comes in. Lithium-ion battery prices have rapidly fallen as production has scaled up for the electric vehicle market in recent years. While there are concerns about future supply chain challenges, battery design is also likely to evolve.

The combination of solar and batteries allows hybrid plant operators to provide power through the most valuable hours when demand is strongest, such as summer afternoons and evenings when air conditioners are running on high. Batteries also help smooth out production from wind and solar power, store excess power that would otherwise be curtailed, and reduce congestion on the grid.

VLAD WHO?:

North Macedonia suddenly finds itself on the front lines of Russia's war on Ukraine. As the newest member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), joining in March 2020, the small Balkan nation of 1.8 million has boldly censured and joined sanctions on Moscow - despite being heavily reliant on Russian energy supplies.  

President Stevo Pendarovski, in power since May 2019, is now bidding to bring North Macedonia into the European Union (EU), which certain EU members including Greece and Bulgaria have opposed.

A recent International Republican Institute poll showed that 79% of the North Macedonian public favors EU membership, which would pull the new country closer to the West and further from Russia.

Pendarovski is already speaking the EU's language. In February, the North Macedonian leader billed Russia's invasion of Ukraine as "an attack on the democratic order and a threat to the stability of Europe." On March 28, his nation joined several other European countries by expelling Russian diplomats from Skopje.

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with Asia Times' correspondent Kourosh Ziabari, Pendarovski spoke candidly about war, peace, oil and his nation's long push to finally become an EU member.

XI WHO?:

While Indonesian foreign policy remains on a neutral track, the country's military is tilting ever more towards the United States and the West with preparations underway for its biggest-ever combined arms exercise next August that for the first time will skirt the South China Sea.

The Indonesia-US Garuda Shield maneuvers, which began in 2009, are being expanded this year to accommodate eight other countries, including Australia, Canada, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, Britain, Papua New Guinea and Timor Leste. 

They will also involve land, sea and air components focused on southern Sumatra and East Kalimantan but with plans for an amphibious landing in the Natuna islands, south of where Chinese Coast Guard and Chinese research vessels breached Indonesia's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) last year.

"BACK TO FREEDOM":

Less than three months ago, former power company head Robert Golob did not have a party to contest elections.

Today, he looks set to become the next prime minister of Slovenia after a small Green party he took over garnered more than a third of votes in Sunday's parliamentary elections and delivered Europe's latest rebuke of right-wing populists. [...]

Golob has promised to restore "normality", having billed the elections as a "referendum on democracy".

In Jansa's latest stint in office, tens of thousands of protesters have staged regular rallies, accusing the three-time premier of using the pandemic to attack media freedom and the judiciary and to undermine the rule of law.

An ally of nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and admirer of US ex-president Donald Trump, Jansa has also clashed with Brussels over media freedom and rule-of-law issues.

Golob has told AFP that he wants the country to "return" to being "West-orientated".

NOT BY BLOOD:

The Love of Country

So first, and most simply, Burke is very concerned with the love of country--we might say with nationalism as a kind of patriotism, which he takes to be essential to a healthy political life. He thinks this sentiment runs very deep in most people. As he put it at the Warren Hastings trial in 1794: "Next to the love of parents for their children, the strongest instinct both natural and moral that exists in man is the love of his country." This is real love, a passion more than a reflection, and it's connected to the fact of having grown up amid the sights and sounds and smells of the place. "The native soil has a sweetness in it beyond a harmony of verse," Burke says.

This kind of patriotism is very visceral. It literally is about soil sometimes. Though not about blood. Burke thinks there is a metaphorical connection between blood ties and national ties, but only as a metaphor. Key to the strength of British national feeling, he writes in 1790, is that "we have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections."

But notice the distinction: The image of a relation in blood, not the reality of a relation in blood. The image, and with it a crucial part of the love of country, is achieved by treating our country as an extension of our family, and by seeing it as a source of what we have in common with those with whom we have the most in common. It's precisely a way of extending our sense of who we are as a people beyond blood ties.

This deep love of country has great political significance in Burke's view. It is crucial to what holds a people together, and to why people respect the law, and the authority of their government. When the French tried to tear up the sources of this national sentiment and replace them with abstractions about the rights of man, as Burke puts it, they left the law with no support except the power of the state.

That ended any prospect for a free society in France. Love of country is therefore absolutely necessary for the freedom of a free society.

And yet, the key to this love of our country is not just that the country is ours. "To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely," Burke famously wrote in the Reflections on the Revolution in France. And what makes it lovely is what he called its "distinct system of manners"--that is its ways and habits, its most cherished commitments. Or we might say its national character.

National Character

This is the second of Burke's ideas about nationalism that might help us think more clearly: that there is such a thing as a national character, and that it is somehow at the heart of the life of the nation.

That character is a product of common experience, formed over history, and holding us together in time. It is the sum of the things we do and believe, and something like the nation's personality. A society's political life is an expression of its national character, and can only really function as long as it is somehow aligned with that character.

This character of the British people constantly arises in Burke's approach to the French Revolution, for instance. The British will not ultimately be tempted by the example of France, he writes, because "Thanks to the cold sluggishness of our national character, we still bear the stamp of our forefathers. We have not (as I conceive) lost the generosity and dignity of thinking of the fourteenth century."

National character is particularly important to how Burke thinks about political revolutions and transformations--and not only in France. It's how he understands the events of the Glorious Revolution, and how he thinks about the Polish uprising against the Russians and about indigenous uprisings in India. These revolts, all of which Burke defends, arose in defense of the character of each of those nations.

And this is crucial to his thinking about America, too. Burke comes to believe that the Americans should be allowed their independence because he thinks the British have tried to govern them in a way that ignores and insults their national character. As he put it to parliament, "In this character of the Americans, a love of freedom is the predominating feature which marks and distinguishes the whole."

A failure to govern a people in accordance with its national character is not only imprudent but also a kind of injustice. This is key to what he saw happening in France. He suggests that the French Revolution was not a popular uprising in defense of the national character but a kind of elite coup against it. It was an effort to extinguish the nation through a politics of abstraction imposed on the people by a small minority of radicals.

"These pretended citizens," Burke says of the revolutionaries, treat France like a conquered country, not like their own country. They "condemn a subdued people, and insult their feelings," he says, and "destroy all vestiges of the ancient country, in religion, in polity, in laws, and in manners."

Notice that these invaders who would destroy all vestiges of the national character are French, not foreigners. Burke several times over his decades of political writing suggests that the character of a nation needs to be defended by the people not just from foreign conquest but from domestic corruption or decadence.

IDEOLOGY ABOVE ALL:

It was left to the EHRC to point to "the possible need to consider a differentiated approach in relation to sexual orientation and being transgender so as to ensure, in particular, that clinicians and therapists are not prohibited from providing appropriate care and support for individuals with gender dysphoria". The professional bodies themselves did not think to consider the potential impact on their members' ability to do their jobs properly.

The EHRC also highlights the need for a clear definition of "being transgender" -- which is not a clinical diagnosis -- and clarity on which forms of communication would be caught by a ban on "talking conversion therapy". Professionals must be able to offer legitimate professional services which "should include support to reduce distress and reconcile a person to their biological sex where clinically indicated" without being afraid of being caught by a ban.

In between the consultation closing and the government's U-turn, the NHS-commissioned Cass Review of the Tavistock Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) published its interim report.

If the signatories to the MOU2 had not previously considered the impact of a "transgender conversion therapy" ban on their members, there was no excuse not to do so now. The Cass report was unequivocal about the significant impact the MOU2 has had, referencing several times the concerns of therapists who "feel under pressure to adopt an unquestioning affirmative approach". This is at odds with normal standards of paediatric practice.

This passage from the report is worth quoting in full:

"Some secondary care providers told us that their training and professional standards dictate that when working with a child or young person they should be taking a mental health approach to formulating a differential diagnosis of the child or young person's problems. However, they are afraid of the consequences of doing so in relation to gender distress because of the pressure to take a purely affirmative approach. Some clinicians feel that they are not supported by their professional body on this matter."

The Cass report is a stark exposure of a service that has utterly failed in its duty of care to children. What has led to these failings? The report states:

"From the point of entry to GIDS there appears to be predominantly an affirmative, non-exploratory approach."

And the conclusion:

"A fundamentally different service model is needed which is more in line with other paediatric provision."

Pause for thought for the professional health bodies? Time for a reassessment of the MOU2? No. The professional bodies have doubled down.

JUST A SMIDGE OF TREASON:

Speaking at a Thursday event hosted by the Georgetown University's Center on Faith and Justice, Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, who is also a member of the committee investigating the Capitol riot, accused former President Donald Trump of attempting to organize a coup to circumvent Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election and stay in power. During the talk, he called special attention to a tense moment involving Pence, NBC News reported.

After being taken to an undisclosed portion of the Capitol during the riot, Pence's Secret Service agents, whom Raskin suspected were reporting directly to Trump's security detail, asked him to enter an armored limousine. The intent, some have theorized, was to drive Pence away from the building, preventing him from certifying the election results, after he had signaled his unwillingness to go against his duties and keep Trump in power.

"[Pence] uttered what I think are the six most chilling words of this entire thing I've seen so far: 'I'm not getting in that car,'" Raskin said. "He knew exactly what this inside coup they had planned for was going to do."

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

Driving an electric car for a year costs almost £600 less than its petrol equivalent after fuel prices surged more than electricity costs, research by the comparison website Compare the Market has found.

Electric vehicles were already cheaper to run, according to figures shared with the Guardian, but the gap has widened significantly amid turmoil in global energy markets caused by the war in Ukraine.

SUCH SNOWFLAKES:

For Vladimir Putin, no other country is greater, or more unfairly persecuted, than Russia - which stands against constant threat from Western influence.

Such rhetoric has only increased in recent months. "They sought to destroy our traditional values and force on us their false values that would erode us, our people from within, the attitudes they have been aggressively imposing on their countries, attitudes that are directly leading to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature," he declared on 24 February this year.

"The collective West is attempting to splinter our society," Putin emphasised again in March, while also expressing fear of the insiders who were turning against his country. "But any people, the Russian people especially, are able to distinguish true patriots from bastards and traitors and will 'spit them out'."

Such words seem designed to appeal to citizens' 'collective narcissism' - a phenomenon that is of increasing interest to social psychologists. Much like individual narcissism, it involves a fragile sense of unparalleled superiority that is dependent on others' admiration, and extremely hostile to anything that threatens to puncture the ego. The difference is that collective narcissism concerns people's feelings of fragile superiority towards their group's status, rather than their own. And they respond extremely aggressively to anything that may threaten their feelings of grandiosity.

Multiple studies over the past decade show that collective narcissism can predict people's voting intentions for populist movements, their prejudices against outsiders, and their tendency to fall for misinformation and conspiracy theories.

IT'S A START...:

Now, Ukrainian officials are leading a growing movement calling on the US and its allies to make Russia pay to repair that staggering damage, by seizing the hundreds of billions of dollars in Russian assets frozen by Western sanctions.

The money -- about $300 billion in Russian central bank foreign reserves and tens of billions of dollars more in oligarch wealth around the world -- would be used to rebuild devastated Ukrainian cities, offset the economic damage in the country and elsewhere, compensate families for the death of loved ones, and even pay for weapons to defend against the invasion.

"Those monies that were blocked and frozen have to be used to rebuild Ukraine after the war as well as to pay for the losses caused to other nations," Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a remote address to world finance officials gathered in Washington on Thursday. "If there is starvation started in some regions [of other countries] due to Russia's war, those frozen assets can be used to pay for the assistance and compensation."

NOT TANNING?:

The two exchanged messages before deciding they should meet in person to size each other up. "Hope your [sic] for real," texted Graham. Where there is bravery and conviction, there is often also bravado and theater. The Reddit threads (and the Polish-Ukrainian border, for that matter) teem with people -- both well-meaning and exhibitionist -- who say they're eager to help Ukraine but never act on those words.

Within minutes, they were cracking military jokes and sharing stories from their seven-month tours in the Middle East. And within days, they had landed in Poland on tickets booked by Graham's wife. Graham, a father of three, requested that his last name not be used out of fear that harassment might be directed at his family.

In Poland, a local businessman shuttled them five hours to the Ukrainian border, where agents at the checkpoint scoffed at their small survival knives. "Go get some Russians," they said, handing them a larger and sharper one. Graham -- bright-eyed and silver-haired -- and LeBlanc -- tattooed and broad-shouldered -- rambled east toward the conflict zones.

LeBlanc came from a family of service. His father was a Marine and his sister enlisted in the Navy at the same time that he joined the Marines. She likely would have boarded that same plane to Poland had she not just given birth to a baby girl.

Meanwhile, Graham's mom, Michele, often wondered what drew him to the Marines. The closest relative with military experience was her father, who served in the Korean War, but somehow landed a cushy role downhill skiing in the Alps for the Army.

"I'm the type of person who doesn't even like people owning guns," she said. "This is all really foreign to us. But how do you ask your kid not to do something that he feels deep down inside is the most intense and purposeful thing he's ever done in his life?"

If Michele couldn't stop her son from going, at least she could try to help keep him safe. She posted a long-shot call for help on Facebook, soliciting contacts in Poland and Ukraine. By chance, a former colleague said she knew of an Irishman posted outside Lviv.

Twenty-three years in the Royal Air Force and five tours in Afghanistan and Iraq had landed Aaran Leyland -- red-headed, bushy bearded, and brash -- in a series of security consultant gigs, most recently for Northrop Grumman. Days after the Feb. 24 Russian invasion, he hugged his 9-year-old daughter goodbye and boarded a plane to Poland wearing a black T-shirt that read "Not Today Jesus." He felt driven, he said, by a fiery vision of blowing up Russian tanks in Kyiv.

Why would these men, with stable livelihoods, loving families, and no past connection to Ukraine, drop everything to join a war oceans away?

"This may be happening in Ukraine, but it is the world's fight. I'm young and I started my own business. I have a nice place to live. I have nice stuff. Everything I want. And it's just like, well, everybody should have that, everybody should be free," said LeBlanc. He joined the Marines at age 19, anchored by a similar belief.

IF SUNUNU OR AYOTTE WERE RUNNING IT WOULD BE OVER:

Incumbent first-term Senator Maggie Hassan entered the midterm year as the most vulnerable Democrat in the country. She won in 2016 by barely more than 1,000 votes, her approval ratings are consistently around 35 percent, and Democrats are expected to get crushed this year in swing areas like New Hampshire. Democrats are already hanging onto the slimmest of margins in the Senate. [...]

Hassan has her own problems. Last week, she took a bold stand on immigration that many in the Democratic base felt sounded Republican. Hassan has tried to brand herself as a political moderate, but rarely has the base gotten this upset with her.

While many Democrats have disagreed with the Biden administration's decision to quickly eliminate the Title 42 regulations preventing the processing of asylum claims on the Southern border due to the pandemic, she took it a step further. She went to the border, cut a digital video there, and said that parts of the border wall should still be built.

Open letters to Hassan from Latino groups began popping up on the Web. Then a Democratic state representative gave a speech against it that made the rounds. Hassan needs to lock down every Democratic vote she can get this November.

NOT SO PRO-LIFE AFTER ALL:

Firearms surpassed car accidents as the No. 1 killer among children and teens, according to startling new data released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Friday.

Gun deaths in that age group saw a 29.5% jump from 2019 to 2020, which was more than twice as high as the relative increase in firearm deaths seen in the general population, according to the CDC.

THEY SHARE A HATRED OF AMERICA:

Mike Pompeo, Donald Trump's former secretary of state, left critics bemused on Thursday with an apparent slip-up on Fox News that some commenters viewed as a rare moment of honesty.

"Why does the left act as if conservatives are a bigger threat to America than the" Chinese Communist Party? Fox News' Laura Ingraham asked Pompeo.

"Because, in fact, we often are," replied Pompeo...

BECAUSE THEY ARE EASTERN:

Foggo offered a damning assessment of Russian military performance so far across all four axes of its initial full-scale attack on Ukraine, adding that "they ran out of fuel, they ran out of food, didn't have sustainment of ammunition, and they got hit pretty hard, particularly in the battle [for] Kyiv."

Putin launched the war on February 24 against Ukraine and its government, which Moscow has overtly and covertly opposed since unrest ousted a pro-Russian presidential administration in 2014, citing a need to "demilitarize" and subdue its much smaller post-Soviet neighbor.

"They're kind of stuck on fighting the last war, World War II," dominated by tank movements across Europe, Foggo said of what he's seen from the Russian war planners. "Can they figure out in a very short period of time how to act like a Western army, and inculcate leadership in noncommissioned officers which don't exist, using weapons systems that are not exactly state of the art?" he asked. "Certainly not before May 9."

Putin has suggested publicly that it is crucial to achieve military aims in Ukraine by the May 9 holiday marking the anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany in 1945.

XI WHO?:

The quasi-alliance between China and Russia has rightly been gathering much attention as the backdrop to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. But scant attention has been paid internationally to another important strategic shift - that of the move of South Korea's new president to strengthen cooperation with Washington and perhaps to join the Quad, currently composed of the United States, India, Japan, and Australia in facing up to China's goals of hegemony in the western Pacific region.

Whilst not directly related to the Russia-China entente, the Korean move underlines the indirect consequences beginning to flow from China's moves to confront the US and its allies. [...]

The invasion has probably benefited Taiwan, not the mainland, in three ways. First, by drawing attention to some similarities between Russia's claim on Ukraine (all or part) and Beijing's on Taiwan. Second, by making supply of weapons to Taiwan less of an issue than in the past as others seek to counter China's relationship with Russia. Third, by the way that Ukrainian resistance to attack across a land border shows the even greater difficulty that China would face with a seaborne invasion. Missiles, unless nuclear-tipped, are not a substitute for boots on the ground and are willing to be killed for the fatherland.

KNOWING YOUR ENEMIES:

Former president Donald Trump on Thursday offered his most explicit statement to date that he threatened not to defend NATO allies from attacks by Russia.

Appearing at an event held by the Heritage Foundation in Florida, Trump claimed that he told fellow NATO leaders that he might not abide by NATO's Article 5 collective-defense clause if those countries didn't pay more for the alliance.

"[A fellow leader] said, 'Does that mean that you won't protect us in case -- if we don't pay, you won't protect us from Russia' -- was the Soviet Union, but now Russia," Trump said. "I said, 'That's exactly what it means.' "

YOU CALL IT TRAFFICKING; THE TRUMPISTS CALL IT DATING:

Romanian police raided the home of prominent pro-Trump online personality Andrew Tate this month as part of a human-trafficking investigation, bringing new attention to Tate's ties to leading figures in the American MAGA movement.

Before the April 11 raid, Tate was best known as a kickboxer and vocal Trump supporter in the online far right. On social media, Tate portrayed himself as a wealthy cigar-smoking playboy, prompting one admirer to dub him the "king of toxic masculinity."

But Tate's treatment of women had an ugly side. In 2016, he was booted off the British version of Big Brother over a video of him hitting a woman with a belt. This March, Britain's Daily Mirror tabloid profiled him and his brother Tristan Tate and their Romania-based business which used webcam models to trick men into sending the brothers tens of thousands of dollars. In one video on his YouTube channel, Andrew Tate said "40 percent" of the reason he moved to Romania was because Romanian police were less likely to pursue sexual assault allegations.

Tate's unsavory activities didn't stop him from building links with the stars of the Trumpian right.

THE RIGHT IS THE LEFT:

The "great eastern offensive" isn't doing at all well after several days. There are additionally reports of Chechen troops shooting Russian troops who rioted over lack of pay and other matters.

Russia's hired private armies are also getting into pretty bad shape. 20,000 mercenaries including the Wagner Group are involved in the Ukraine campaign. The Wagner Group has reportedly been severely diminished by casualties, although even the number of Wagner Group mercenaries deployed isn't clear from reports.

Hiring mercenaries rather than using Russian troops is indicative of serious and obviously endemic problems in the Russian military. If this is how Russia manages combat capacity on its own doorstep, what happens if Russia does get involved in a war with the West?

PEOPLE OBSESSED WITH CHILD SEX TURN OUT TO BE OBSESSED WITH CHILD SEX:

Richard Solon Mack, 44, is the son of Richard Mack, founder of the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association. The CSPOA, according to the Anti-Defamation League, "is an anti-government extremist group whose primary purpose is to recruit sheriffs into the anti-government 'patriot' movement." The movement and its founder have rubbed shoulders with conspiracy movements like QAnon, which falsely alleges a widespread pattern of child sex-trafficking.

On Tuesday, the younger Mack was arrested on four counts each of incest, sodomy of a child younger than 12, and sexual abuse of a child younger than 12.

SEEMED OBVIOUS SHE WASN'T A TRUMPIST:

The central issue in her case was whether she had known she was ineligible to vote when a probation officer filled out and signed a form indicating she was done with probation for a 2015 felony conviction and eligible to cast a ballot. Even though the probation officer admitted he had made a mistake, and Moses said she had no idea she was ineligible to vote, prosecutors said she knew she was ineligible and had deceived him.

THE KOOL-AID KAUKUS:

LIBS OF TIK-TOK IS FAN SERVICE:

Former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon hosted 2022 Nebraska gubernatorial candidate Charles Herbster on his podcast after eight women accused him of sexual misconduct, including a GOP state senator.

THANKS, VLAD!:

The European Commission is assessing whether the European Union could achieve a higher target of a 45% share of renewable energy by 2030, instead of its proposed 40%, to accelerate its shift from Russian fossil fuels following the invasion of Ukraine.

"We are working on it full speed to take account, first of all the proposal of going from 40% to 45%, but also in the context of higher energy prices," Mechthild Woersdoerfer, deputy director-general of the Commission's energy department, told a meeting of EU lawmakers on Wednesday.

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

Balkh province's police spokesman Asif Waziri said Abdul Hamid Sangaryar was a key operative of IS.

"He was the mastermind of yesterday's attack on the mosque," Waziri told AFP. The interior ministry also reported the arrest of Sangaryar, an Afghan national.

"He played a key role in several attacks in the past and had repeatedly managed to escape, but this time we arrested him in a special operation," Waziri said.

JUST DON'T SAY WE'RE AT WAR WITH VLAD:

Newly disclosed "Ghost" drones that are part of America's latest arms package for Ukraine were developed by the U.S. Air Force for attacking targets and are destroyed after a single use, the Pentagon said on Thursday.

The United States and its allies have ramped up arms shipments to Kyiv ahead of Russia's announced offensive in eastern Ukraine, as Moscow tries to salvage its nearly two-month old campaign. [...]

The Pentagon said the Ghost drones are well suited for the coming fight in Ukraine's Donbas region, which officials have described as flat terrain reminiscent of the U.S. state of Kansas.

"It was developed for a set of requirements that very closely match what the Ukrainians need right now in Donbas," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said, without elaborating.

THE SOLUTION TO POVERTY IS WEALTH:

The Biden presidency began on January 20, 2021, with hopes that aggressive relief around COVID-19 -- especially for middle-class families with kids -- and efforts to prop up the job market in areas like restaurants and retail would prevent a recession. Now, with virtually zero fanfare, two studies have shown that -- even in a time of rising inflation -- lower-income Americans arguably gained more last year than any time since LBJ's "War on Poverty" in the 1960s.

Researchers have discovered the combination of the booming job market and the impact of occasionally bipartisan federal relief that started under Donald Trump in 2020 and grew with 2021′s Biden-backed $1.9-trillion relief package have meant sweeping and unexpected economic gains for the Americans who'd been so often left behind during four decades of rising income inequality.

"This has been a success story for middle-class families," said Shaefer, whose UM center this month reported that lower-income Americans have on average 50% more money in the bank (even adjusted for inflation) than at the start of the pandemic and that 2021′s expanded Child Tax Credit brought a notable reduction in food insecurity. The number of Americans with bad credit scores is at the lowest in 16 years, possibly ever.

IT WOULD BE BETTER TO INCREASE THE DISTRICT TO ALL OF FLORIDA:

Reedy Creek spans 25,000 acres in Orange and Osceola counties and includes Disney's four theme parks, two water parks and sports complex. It also includes the two small cities of Bay Lake and Lake Buena Vista, which had a combined population of 53 people in 2020, all either representatives or employees of Disney.

To fund the government services of Reedy Creek, Disney effectively taxes itself. While the precise tax flows of Reedy Creek are unclear, Scott Randolph, the tax collector for Orange County, said the Reedy Creek district collects roughly $105 million annually in general revenue.

On top of the $105 million, Disney also pays local property taxes. Public records show Disney is the largest taxpayer in central Florida, paying over $280 million in property taxes to the counties between 2015 and 2020.

If the special district is dissolved, Orange and Osceola counties would have to provide the local services currently provided by Reedy Creek. And, the $105 million in revenue would disappear, meaning county and local taxpayers would be on the hook for part or all of the added costs.

"If you dissolved Reedy Creek, that $105 million in revenue literally goes away, it doesn't get transferred," Randolph said.

The reason: Reedy Creek is what's known as an "independent tax district" meaning the tax revenues it generates are in addition to its local tax obligations, rather than a replacement of them. If the district is eliminated, the tax payments to Orange and Osceola counties would not increase, Randolph said. [...]

But legislators and tax experts warn the bill creates an even larger potential problem for taxpayers in the form of bonds totaling more than $1 billion.

Reedy Creek has bond liabilities of between $1 billion and $1.7 billion, according to the district's financial filings. Under Florida statute, if Reedy Creek is dissolved, those liabilities are transferred to the local governments -- either Bay Lake or Lake Buena Vista, or more likely, Orange and Osceola counties.

State Senate Minority Leader Gary Farmer, D-Fort Lauderdale, tried to amend the bill to include further study of the bond debt, but the amendment failed on a voice vote.

Farmer said the bond debt could total more than $2 billion and that tax authorities are increasing their estimates as they learn more about Reedy Creek's outstanding liabilities.

"This is a very real impact, the extent of which we don't fully understand yet," Farmer said.

If the liabilities of $1.7 billion or more are transferred to Orange and Osceola counties, he said, the debt could amount to $1,000 per taxpayer.

"If the counties are left holding the bag, the state might have to come to their aid," Farmer said. "So it's not even just a tax issue for these two counties. It affects every taxpayer in the state of Florida."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

THESE GUYS SURE DO HATE THE eNLIGHTENMENT THAT THEY EMBRACE:

'Tradition, wholeness, collectivity.' In many ways, Dugin is an unlikely conduit for such ideas. Born in Moscow in 1962, the descendant of a long line of Russian military officers, Dugin was by all accounts a precocious, rebellious youth, who bristled against the stifling conformity of life in Soviet Russia. 'The Communist Party owned all of us', he was later to reflect. '[It] owned the mind, the spirit, the emotion, the body. Everything was under control, except one thing. The innermost part.' (1) Perhaps in an attempt to liberate 'the innermost part', the young Dugin immersed himself during the 1980s in the dissident bohemia of Moscow's notorious Yuzhinsky Circle. 'They would have wild sex parties, and drinking binges that lasted for multiple days', explains Teitelbaum. 'Their interests were anything anti-establishment - rock music, drugs, alcohol and eventually mysticism was part of that as well.'

It was during this period that Dugin first encountered Traditionalism. This, as political scientist Marlene Laruelle puts it in a 2006 essay on Russia's radical right, remains 'Dugin's main intellectual reference point and the basis of his political attitudes as well as his Eurasianism'.

Traditionalism is a relatively obscure school of thought that originated in the work of a French intellectual called René Guénon (1886-1951). The 'tradition' this thinking refers to consists of supposedly universal truths which are manifest in all the major world religions. It was Guénon's contention that man had fallen away from the truths of revealed religion. As he argued in The Crisis of the Modern World (1927), the past three or four hundred years of modernity represented the very opposite of progress. They were a regression, a late stage in the spiralling decline through the Hindu 'yugas' - a version of Hesiod's ages of gold, silver, copper and iron - towards a new dark age. Modern man, committed to rationalism and materialism, and now thoroughly estranged from the spiritual truth, was entirely lost.

Guénon's deep disillusionment with modernity was far from unusual during the 1920s. Much of Western high culture at the time, from the modernist avant-garde to the dark imaginings of conservative revolutionaries, was shot through with a shared sense of moral, political and spiritual exhaustion. What perhaps separated Guénon from many of his contemporaries (though not all) was his solution - a turn towards non-Western culture, and the religions of the East, which he saw as being closer to 'tradition' and the truth.

Julius Evola, Guénon's Italian follower and an unabashed Mussolini supporter, gave Guénon's otherwise quietist philosophy a political urgency. Rather than seek solace in religions of the East, Evola called for a restoration of spiritual values in the West - and appealed, like many of his fascist contemporaries, to a hierarchical Medieval world as a vision of a future society.

It's clear that the Traditionalist critique of modernity continues to resonate deeply with Dugin. Like Guénon and Evola (whose work Dugin has translated into Russian), Dugin sees the modern world, from the Enlightenment onwards, as a further fall away from the truth, a dark age.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

WHEN YOU MISTAKE A FRAUD CRISIS FOR A BUBBLE:

The housing market crash that began in 2006 was devastating to many homeowners. But it was also a huge problem for builders. Many had overextended themselves and got caught holding the bag when housing prices eventually fell more than 30%.

That period left some serious scars. So builders pulled back in a big way. Housing starts in the U.S. went from 2.3 million in January 2006 to 490,000 by January 2009:

We simply stopped building enough homes in this country following the housing crisis.

There were roughly 210 million people in the United States in the early 1970s, and they were building more than 2 million houses a year. There are now 330 million people, and last year there were less than 1.3 million houses completed.

This number is now moving in the right direction, but years of underbuilding have taken a toll. A massive flood of new homes is required to catch up to current demand.

Mike Simonsen of Altos Research notes we now have the lowest inventory of listings on record. As recently as 2015, there were as many as 1.2 million homes for sale in the United States. That number is now closer to 260,000 for the entire country.

SELF-DETERMINATION IS NOT RACISM:

Far from ushering in a clampdown on immigration, Home Office immigration figures for 2021 showed that Brexit Britain issued a total of 239,987 work-related visas - 25% higher than the figure for 2019. What was particularly noteworthy was the sharp uptick in successful applications from non-EU migrants. Indeed, since the end of free movement only 10% of last year's work-related visas were issued to EU nationals. The number of foreign students has also sharply increased, hitting a record high of 416,000 - up by more than a half compared with 2019.

While his predecessor Theresa May's preference was to both significantly reduce EU migration and place strict limits on non-EU migration, Johnson appears remarkably relaxed over the latter - curiously for a politician often described by his opponents as some kind of tub-thumping nativist. 

And while Home Secretary Priti Patel has come under fire from various quarters over the Rwanda asylum plan, she reacted to the latest figures by saying that 'immigration has enriched our nation through the ages and continues to do so' and that people from the world over are 'contributing to our country in many ways across our economy, society and culture'. 

The relatively liberal attitude towards non-EU migration is a fundamental pillar of the UK's post-Brexit internationalist identity - fostered by a New York-born prime minister who represents a Leave-voting, ethnically diverse seat in west London. 

THEY CAN'T BE REPLACED FAST ENOUGH:

Last month, the American Mind, the Claremont Institute's web magazine, published an article called "The Decline is Real." Brimming with male sexual anxiety, the piece discusses some research suggesting that testosterone levels and sperm levels are falling in Western populations. It edges up close to replacement theory. [...]

But the problem with the piece is less its content than the author's background. The American Mind has made something of a habit of publishing pseudonymous writers: "Peachy Keenan," "The Huntsman," "Horatius," "Rebecca," "Privata," and others. So it is, too, with the article worried about Western man's sperm count--but its pseudonymous author, "Raw Egg Nationalist," stands apart for having recently published a book with a Nazi publishing house. As in: a publishing house that is infatuated with Adolf Hitler.

I wish I were joking or exaggerating. What Raw Egg Nationalist's American Mind byline doesn't tell you is that his Raw Egg Nationalism Cookbook is published by Antelope Hill Publishing. Antelope Hill is a small publishing house that translates and publishes books like A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, by Richard Walther Darré, described in this way on the Antelope Hill site:

Richard Walther Darré, an Obergruppenführer in the SS, was the leading "Blood and Soil" ideologist of Germany and served his people as Reich Minister of Food and Agriculture. This book, A New Nobility of Blood and Soil, was massively popular in the Third Reich and led to a strengthening of the agrarian and agriculturalist movements. Highly influential on Hitler, the principles in this book are foundational to the National Socialist worldview.

Antelope Hill, we learn, is proud to present this new translation of Darré's book, which is the first English-language edition. A Daily Beast article from January referred to Antelope Hill as "openly fascist"; a blog that tracks reactionary racism labeled it "a white supremacist publishing company"; and Amazon has faced calls to stop selling its products. The Antelope Hill Twitter and Instagram feeds contain promotional material that playfully celebrates "uncle Hitler." To celebrate Hitler's birthday yesterday, Antelope Hill offered a discount on all its books, and an even bigger discount on a collection of Hitler's speeches, with the cutesy discount code "birthday_boy":

THE IREDEEMABLE FRENCHNESS OF THE rIGHT:

The real differences between France and the UK emerged when foreign affairs came up. Imagine a transgender Jeremy Corbyn, who rejects the EU because he wants socialism in one country and has no time for NATO either. At times, however, she also sounds like a more extreme Donald Trump, demanding the mass deportation of foreigners, the banning of the hijab or Muslim headscarf in all public places and the closing down of hundreds of mosques. On the headscarf, which is already banned in classrooms, Macron was hardly exaggerating when he warned: "What you are saying is very serious. You are going to cause a civil war. I say this sincerely."

Even more shocking was their debate about the war in Ukraine. Macron seized the initiative by accusing Mme Le Pen point blank of being in the pay of Putin. She was forced to admit that her party had indeed taken out a loan from a state-controlled bank in Moscow. The Russian President, he said, was "your banker". No matter how often she protested her patriotism, insisting that "I am a free woman", she could not escape the impression that she was soft on Russia, if not in Putin's pocket.

Yet the truth is that Macron himself has hardly been in the vanguard of support for Ukraine. His approach until very recently was to keep talking to Putin and France has, along with the other two big EU countries Germany and Italy, lagged far behind the UK and US in offering heavy equipment to Kyiv or pushing for tougher sanctions on Moscow. There seemed to be little difference on these issues between the two candidates, although Mme Le Pen was more vociferous in opposing a ban on oil and gas imports from Russia.

Neither of them mentioned Russian atrocities in Ukraine, let alone genocide -- although Zelensky now says that more than 600,000 Ukrainians are believed to have been deported to Russia. The discussion in Paris seemed to be taking place in a parallel universe, with little sense of an existential crisis for Europe. Nor would a challenger from the Left, such as Jean-Luc Melenchon, have been much better at putting Macron on the spot. The main concern for both politicians seemed to be to reassure voters that France would never be dragged into the conflict.

The implication was that the moral burden of stopping Putin in his tracks could be safely left to other people: the Ukrainians themselves, the other East Europeans and of course les Anglo-Saxons. If Marine Le Pen really is the Pétain de nos jours, then Macron's ambition is to be the De Gaulle -- who did in fact remove France from NATO's military command, as Mme Le Pen also proposes to do. Macron rebuked her sharply for even mentioning the General's name.

DEFINITELY NOT TANNING THEM TO PLEASE WOMEN (profanity alert):

"Oh, [***]," she said as we walked into a small ballroom where the party was already underway. The room was pitifully quiet, lit in strip-club red, and the sparse crowd was almost entirely male, with a cash bar off in the corner that seemed unable to produce drinks fast enough to buoy the mood. "We have a thing we say," she said. " 'This is what the people at The Washington Post think we're doing.' Well, this is exactly what the people at The Washington Post think we're doing."

A portly guy running for Congress in Georgia made his way to the front of the room to give a speech heavy on MAGA buzzwords and florid expressions of fealty to Donald Trump.

"This is sad," Milius said. No one cheered or even seemed interested. But this was not Trumpworld, even if many of the people in the room saw Trump as a useful tool. And these parties aren't always so lame. NatCon, as this conference is known, has grown into a big-tent gathering for a whole range of people who want to push the American right in a more economically populist, culturally conservative, assertively nationalist direction. It draws everyone from Israel hawks to fusty paleocon professors to mainstream figures like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. But most of the media attention that the conference attracts focuses on a cohort of rosy young blazer-wearing activists and writers--a crop of people representing the American right's "radical young intellectuals," as a headline in The New Republic would soon put it, or conservatism's "terrifying future," as David Brooks called them in The Atlantic.

But the people these pieces describe, who made up most of the partygoers around me, were only the most buttoned-up seam of a much larger and stranger political ferment, burbling up mainly within America's young and well-educated elite, part of an intra-media class info-war. The podcasters, bro-ish anonymous Twitter posters, online philosophers, artists, and amorphous scenesters in this world are variously known as "dissidents," "neo-reactionaries," "post-leftists," or the "heterodox" fringe--though they're all often grouped for convenience under the heading of America's New Right. They have a wildly diverse set of political backgrounds, with influences ranging from 17th-century Jacobite royalists to Marxist cultural critics to so-called reactionary feminists to the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, whom they sometimes refer to with semi-ironic affection as Uncle Ted. Which is to say that this New Right is not a part of the conservative movement as most people in America would understand it. It's better described as a tangled set of frameworks for critiquing the systems of power and propaganda that most people reading this probably think of as "the way the world is." And one point shapes all of it: It is a project to overthrow the thrust of progress, at least such as liberals understand the word.

This worldview, these worldviews, run counter to the American narrative of the last century--that economic growth and technological innovation are inevitably leading us toward a better future. It's a position that has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right-ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic. No one is leading this movement, but it does have key figures.

One is Peter Thiel, the billionaire who helped fund NatCon and who had just given the conference's opening address. Thiel has also funded things like the edgelordy and post-left-inflected New People's Cinema film festival, which ended its weeklong run of parties and screenings in Manhattan just a few days before NatCon began. He's long been a big donor to Republican political candidates, but in recent years Thiel has grown increasingly involved in the politics of this younger and weirder world--becoming something like a nefarious godfather or a genial rich uncle, depending on your perspective. Podcasters and art-world figures now joke about their hope to get so-called Thielbucks. His most significant recent outlays have been to two young Senate candidates who are deeply enmeshed in this scene and influenced by its intellectual currents: Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, running for the Republican nomination in Ohio, and Blake Masters in Arizona.

Thiel has given more than $10 million to super PACs supporting the men's candidacies, and both are personally close to him. Vance is a former employee of Thiel's Mithril Capital, and Masters, until recently the COO of Thiel's so-called "family office," also ran the Thiel Foundation, which has become increasingly intertwined with this New Right ecosystem. These three--Thiel, Vance, Masters--are all friends with Curtis Yarvin, a 48-year-old ex-programmer and blogger who has done more than anyone to articulate the world historical critique and popularize the key terms of the New Right. You'll often hear people in this world--again under many layers of irony--call him things like Lord Yarvin, or Our Prophet.

 

I was looking around the party for Vance, who hadn't arrived yet, when Milius nudged me and pointed to a table off to our left. "Why is it that whenever I see Curtis, he's surrounded by a big table of incels?" she asked with apparent fondness. I spotted Yarvin, a slight, bespectacled man with long dark hair, drinking a glass of wine with a crowd that included Josh Hammer, the national conservatism-minded young opinion editor of Newsweek, and Michael Anton, a Machiavelli scholar and former spokesman for Trump's National Security Council--and a prominent public intellectualizer of the Trump movement. Other luminaries afoot for the conference included Dignity author Chris Arnade, who seemed slightly unsure about the whole NatCon thing, and Sohrab Ahmari, the former opinion editor of the New York Post, now a cofounder and editor at the new magazine Compact, whose vision is, according to its mission statement, "shaped by our desire for a strong social-democratic state that defends community--local and national, familial and religious--against a libertine left and a libertarian right." It is a very of-the-moment project.

TO BE FAIR, PUTINISM/TRUMPISM IS FRENCH:

Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny stepped abruptly into France's tight presidential campaign Wednesday, urging voters to back incumbent Emmanuel Macron and alleging that far-right challenger Marine Le Pen is too closely linked to Russia.

Le Pen has faced scrutiny before over a 9 million euro ($9.7 million) loan that her party received in 2014 from the First Czech-Russian Bank.

Questions about Le Pen's ties to Moscow arose during her presidential bid five years ago that she lost to Macron, and they have emerged again amid Russian President Vladimir Putin's war in Ukraine. She reiterated during a debate between the two candidates Wednesday evening that the Feb. 24 Russian invasion was "inadmissible."

The tweet by Navalny's team, hours before the critical debate, threatened Le Pen's relatively smooth ride toward Sunday's runoff against Macron.

During the debate, Macron attacked Le Pen as being dependent on Russia.

"You are speaking to your banker when you speak of Russia, that's the problem, Madame Le Pen," Macron said.

WITCH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

What everyone agrees on is that something unusual happened at Tall el-Hammam, an ancient settlement near the Dead Sea.

In a layer of ancient earth, archaeologists claim to have found evidence of an apocalyptic event: Melted rooftops. Disintegrated pottery. Unusual patterns in the rock formations that can be associated with intense heat. For another three to six centuries after 1650 B.C., the settlement's 100 acres lay fallow.

But when Steven Collins, the principal archaeologist at Tall el-Hammam, considered the scientists' evidence in an article that ran last year in the respected scientific journal Nature, he claimed that the incineration matched with the place and timing of the biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah.

...AND CHEAPER...:

STARTING TO QUESTION nATIVIST ECONOMIC THEORY...:

Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's short-lived policy of requiring state troopers to conduct secondary inspections of trucks crossing into Texas from Mexico cost the United States almost $9 billion in just 10 days, Axios reported Tuesday.

STARRING FDR, AS GOLIATH:

The 1945 Tucson Badgers were incredibly confident coming into their game on April 18, and why shouldn't they have been?

They were reigning, six-time high school state champions. They'd won 52 straight games. They were sending ace Lowell Bailey to the mound -- a senior who had a 0.00 ERA in 1944, just the fourth U.S. high school pitcher (up to that point) to finish a season without giving up any runs.

"He was a star pitcher," Joan Bailey, widow of Lowell, told me in a call. "He was really a big deal -- I mean, they all were. They were the state champions. Probably a little cocky."

But the Badgers may have underestimated who they were playing that day.

Their opponents were the Butte Eagles, a high school team that played at the Gila River Relocation Center -- one of 10 incarceration camps Japanese-Americans were forced into during WWII. They built and maintained their own fields, they installed seating, they took pride in playing America's pastime ... even when their lives in this country had been brutally uprooted.

"I look at it as kind of David versus Goliath," Kerry Yo Nakagawa, founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project told me. "Here was this All-Star team inside an incarceration camp against this powerhouse Badgers team. It was almost like a Hollywood script."

CROCODILE FEARS:

The insincerity of their racism demonstrates their contempt for the base. https://t.co/Vv14C7q4gZ via @vicenews

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 20, 2022

IT'LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

BIDENOMICS:

IT'S NEVER A SURPRISE THAT PEOPLE ARE SHEEP...:

IT'S ALMOST LIKE "CONCERNED PARENTS" ARE JUST HYSTERICS:

I teach at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. We're a school of nearly 8,000 students between grad and undergrad. We're historically a regional school for southern Massachusetts, and though we've had some academic milestones in recent years, we bear more of a resemblance to the majority of the roughly 5,300 institutions in American higher education than, say, Oberlin, Yale, Berkeley, or the University of Virginia.

Think of how many of those 5,300 schools you've actually heard of. Now think how many you've seen mentioned in conversations about what does, or should, happen in a college classroom. U.S. News and World Report's top 25 colleges--where, inevitably, most of these stories are set--have around 250,000 undergraduates enrolled per year. There are roughly 16 million undergraduates around the country at any given time. Those other 5,275 schools with millions and millions of students are where the vast majority of college learning in America happens. Whatever side you take on various arguments about speech at elite universities, you're participating in a conversation that willfully ignores this truth.

A large portion of our student body at UMass-Dartmouth is first-generation college students. Many are first- or second-generation immigrants, and many others come from white working-class families. This combination reflects the makeup of the university's surroundings but also higher education across the country. By 2016, more than half of all college students in the United States were the first in their family to go, and by 2020 more than a quarter were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. It is impossible for classroom conversations not to reflect that diversity of background. And all of this is saddled with the weight of the unfamiliarity of the college experience, the enormous promise that our culture heaps onto the achievement of getting into college followed immediately by the anti-intellectual skepticism increasingly associated with the actual practice of higher learning. Plus, just for good measure: the debt.

For a professor at a school like mine, the tension created by these circumstances defines the job. The trick isn't convincing students to drop their dogmas. It's convincing them that the stuff we're talking about could matter in lives already complicated by many other things--that they could create a space of excitement or pleasure, one worth the commitment. I think their sense of the purpose of college is constantly shifting, and often under stress. My conceptions of my own teaching, my values and goals, are always under scrutiny and changing as well. Each class is an act of enormous shared challenge and, ultimately, faith.

I teach in an English department, primarily creative writing and journalism classes. My courses are all built around discussion. What I find most foreign in accounts of "free speech" on campuses is the depiction of militancy among students, a monolith of kids who, in these representations, apparently show up at age 18 secure in their views and voice and the power of that voice in an academic setting. Instead, what I observe to be the biggest hurdle for my students is the challenge of allowing themselves to speak, which means feeling at home, engaged, and empowered enough to validate their own perspective as worthy of the discussion. At the beginning of each semester, there is reticence to get into debates in class, but it isn't coming from some sense of political fear and self-silencing. It's an act of negotiation, the students coaxing themselves toward a feeling of agency, security, investment, and hopefully community. In my experience, students work really hard to make others feel welcome because they're going through the same process. They are, by and large, far gentler with one another's ideas than their own.

MANNERS, NOT RIGHTS:

For years one side has claimed that certain incidents were infringements of freedom of speech, of association, or even of rule of law. These incidents were less "shut your mouth" and more "fire this person immediately," or, further, "join me in calling for this person to be fired." They involve using speech to call for social sanctions, the manner of which can take many forms. A business can be boycotted, an employee--rather than facing termination--may be subject to an embarrassing internal investigation, or reprimand, or on the harsher end, demoted or transferred to a position with fewer prospects for career growth. Publishers can retract articles or papers, or terminate book deals. Brands can terminate sponsorship deals and advertisers can withdraw their buys. Invitations to events can be rescinded or never sent in the first place. Friendships can end. The very mechanisms which sustain and fulfill us in commercial and civil society, and indeed in private life, are also the very mechanisms that can be used to influence our actions--or simply to hurt us.

This of course is to cast it all in a negative light, but the entire problem is that it's not possible to characterize these things as illiberal or immoral or even undesirable in general terms. Ending an abusive relationship isn't immoral. Ending a friendship with someone who unpleasantly dominates all conversations with QAnon conspiracy theories is not illiberal. Firing an employee who pressures their direct reports to donate to particular political causes or campaigns is not undesirable. One side calls the demand for and delivering of social sanctions illiberal, or infringements of the liberty of the sanctioned, while others respond by pointing out, correctly, that freedom of speech, of association, and of contract, are all that has been exercised by the sanctioners in these cases.

There is no coherent formulation of rights which renders any of these illiberal.

MET ONE nATIONALIST YOU'VE MET THEM ALL:

In backing up his argument, Lowry refers to the U.N. definition of genocide: "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group."

But Lowry stops short of citing what constitutes such "acts." So allow me to quote the rest of the U.N. definition:

1) Killing members of the group;

2) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

3) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

4) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

5) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The first two points are undeniably happening--Russian forces are killing Ukrainians and causing them serious bodily and mental harm. The third point is arguably happening as well. And although Lowry asserts that Russian forces are not "making cultural and ethnic distinctions in their brutality," note that the definition of genocide includes national identity. There is no question that Russia is acting "with the intent to destroy" Ukrainians as a national group. We know this because Russia has been quite clear about it.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

It is in the second half of his book, "The Road to Wigan Pier," where Orwell deals with a broader question: If socialism is the way toward providing a fairer, more decent life for those with the least, why has it not succeeded politically? His answer -- one that unsettled his Left Book Club's publisher -- was that there was a deep cultural chasm between the advocates of socialism and those they were seeking to persuade.

"I am," Orwell wrote, "making out a case for the sort of person who is in sympathy with the fundamental aims of Socialism ... but who in practice always takes flight when Socialism is mentioned.

"Question a person of this type and you will often get the semi-frivolous answer: 'I don't object to Socialism, but I do object to Socialists.' Logically it is a poor argument, but it carries weight with many people. As with the Christian religion, the worst argument for Socialism is its adherents."

Orwell, himself a socialist, argues first that "Socialism in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the [relatively well-off] middle class." In its language, it is formal, stilted, wholly distant from the language of ordinary citizens, spoken by people who are several rungs above their audience, and with no intention of giving up that status.

"It is doubtful whether anything describable as proletarian literature now exists ... but a good music hall comedian comes nearer to producing it than any Socialist writer I can think of."

In the most provocative segment of the entire book, Orwell also cites "the horrible, the early disputing prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw toward them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England." And he notes the prospectus for a summer Socialist school in which attendees are asked if they prefer a vegetarian diet.

"That kind of thing is by itself sufficient to alienate plenty of decent people. And their instinct is perfectly sound, for the food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcass; a person out of touch with common humanity."

Why is this account, outmoded as some of the language is, relevant to the Democratic Party's condition today? Because ultimately, too many otherwise persuadable voters have become convinced that Democrats neither understand nor reflect their values.

REVOLUTION WOULD BE ACCEPTABLE:

IT'S WHO THEY ARE:

Top members of the Oath Keepers now facing seditious conspiracy charges chatted for days about providing security for some of the highest-profile figures associated with Donald Trump's effort to overturn the election, according to a newly released trove of text messages.

Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and top allies like Florida Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs discussed plans to provide security for figures like Roger Stone, Alex Jones, Ali Alexander and Michael Flynn on Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, describing potential partnerships with other groups and security details.

VLAD WHO?:

...AND CHEAPER...:

[A] pilot program recently detailed by the US Department of Energy (DOE) is particularly intriguing. If it works, it could help solve multiple problems at once, using an often-overlooked solution: geothermal energy.

Geothermal energy works on a simple premise: The Earth's core is hot, and by drilling even just a few miles underground, we can tap into that practically unlimited heat source to generate energy for our homes and businesses without creating nearly as many of the greenhouse gas emissions that come from burning fossil fuels. However, drilling doesn't come cheap -- it accounts for half the cost of most geothermal energy projects -- and requires specialized labor to map the subsurface, drill into the ground, and install the infrastructure needed to bring energy to the surface.

But the US, in the wake of an oil and gas boom, just so happens to have millions of oil and gas wells sitting abandoned across the country. And oil and gas wells, it turns out, happen to share many of the same characteristics as geothermal wells -- namely that they are deep holes in the ground, with pipes that can bring fluids up to the surface. So, the DOE asks, why not repurpose them?

"STOP ME, BEFORE I KILL AGAIN":

It's been a tougher than usual few weeks for Republican "election integrity" claims. New voter fraud allegations have been leveled against -- that's right -- prominent Trump administration officials.

The cases have revealed, once more, the cynical sham at the heart of the GOP's Big Lie. But in addition to the glaring hypocrisy, these allegations and others reinforce our two unequal justice systems: One for white conservatives who plead guilty and get off easy, another for Black parolees who vote only after being assured they can, then receive harsh prison sentences.

Earlier this month, the Associated Press reported that Matt Mowers, a Trump aide running for the US House from New Hampshire, voted twice during the 2016 primaries. He cast one ballot in New Hampshire's primary when he was working on Chris Christie's presidential campaign, then voted again that June when he re-registered at his parents' home in New Jersey. His actions may have violated several federal laws, though the statute of limitations has expired.

These reports followed news that former Donald Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows and his wife, Debbie, registered and voted from a trailer home in rural North Carolina, where they never lived, while they actually resided in tony Virginia suburbs.

Yet the Big Lie's rot runs deeper still. It has been repeated so relentlessly that a majority of Republicans reject reality and believe that Donald Trump defeated Joe Biden, who "won" only because of rampant fraud perpetrated by Democrats. Republicans can't produce any evidence to substantiate this.

But the actual arrests for voter fraud? Much like Meadows and Mowers, they share things in common: In every example I could find of voter fraud in the 2020 election in the conservative Heritage Foundation's database, when the voters' politics are known, they turn out to be Republicans (or conservatives).

IMAGINE NOT BEING A CELEBRANT?:

Following the difficult COVID years and with the memory of the 2013 attack still lingering, Monday seemed like the day the city needed -- and deserved. The sky was clear, a crisp breeze blew, and the temperature was 50 degrees, although it felt even warmer in the sun.

In Kenmore Square, an MIT fraternity, Phi Sigma Kappa, with its stereo system blaring, threw a party that spilled onto the sidewalk. "This is the day to live for," said one fraternity brother. Nearby, spectators cheered as runners streamed by, with the roar of the crowd at Fenway at times forming a raucous counterpoint.

All along the route, the atmosphere was, once more, festive.

In Hopkinton, even before the starting gun sounded, the party was in full swing at Todd and Laura Wauters's house on Grove Street, near the Athlete's Village. By 9 a.m., around 25 friends had gathered in the front yard to cheer on the hundreds of runners heading to the start.

"It's a great time," Todd said as speakers blasted "More Than A Feeling" by Boston and the party guests offered runners coffee and the use of the bathroom.

Just past mile 12, in Wellesley, college students lined Central Street to form the "Scream Tunnel." The scene lived up to the name with dozens of students yelling at the tops of their lungs and cheering on runners by their first names, which they read off their race bibs.

Olivia Fennell, a senior at Wellesley College, said that both of her mothers went to Wellesley and told her stories of cheering on Marathon runners.

"It feels like carrying on a tradition," Fennell said. "And I think this year especially, people are really excited to be out, having fun after not having it for years. There's definitely a real sense of community and enthusiasm for being a part of it."

A SANE GOP COULD, LIKEWISE, STEAL A MARCH:

An investment in hydrogen hubs unveiled by Scott Morrison today could open the door to Australia producing green steel and other critical metals for export, a national energy expert says.

Mr Morrison was campaigning in Perth today, announcing a $140 million injection for two hydrogen hubs in Western Australia, which he says will create 3,600 new jobs in the state.

The money will go towards BP Australia's H2Kwinana clean energy hub south of Perth and the WA government's Pilbara Hydrogen Hub in the state's north. 

Both major parties made energy-related announcements in the mining state today, with Labor pledging $3.2 million to install a wind turbine training facility in a TAFE in Perth's east.

PEEK-A-BOO:

Open Source everything. https://t.co/VSbSWqYcEm

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 18, 2022

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Critics of Fox News host Tucker Carlson were taken aback by the striking homoerotic nature of the trailer for his upcoming "documentary" about what he calls the "collapse" of testosterone levels in men.

The steamy trailer for the first episode of his new season of "Tucker Carlson Originals" features a series of shots of half-nude, muscular (white) men. They're pumping rubber, chopping wood, grilling, firing a gun -- and wrestling -- accompanied by the soaring, thumping musical theme "Thus Spoke Zarathustra," which was widely popularized in the 1968 film "2001: A Space Odyssey."

Oddly, many of the men's faces are blurred out or hidden. In one scene, a naked man stands with arms outstretched and genitals illuminated behind what one observer said looks like a Tesla recharging station.

Daily Beast journalist Justin Baragona quipped in a tweet that the trailer would get Carlson "arrested" if he aired it in a classroom in Florida, where it's now illegal to address sexual orientation in lower grades in schools.

"DESTINY CALLS":

These turbine leases are the lynchpins in a multipronged, mutually beneficial arrangement that makes Iowa one of America's most prolific producers of renewable energy. The system brings together farmers, energy companies and the federal government to capitalize on two of Iowa's most prominent resources: strong winds and vast expanses of land. The result is thousands of megawatts of green energy, reliable income streams to offset bad harvests, and substantial private sector profits aided by generous federal tax credits. 

"It's just like another crop," Leng says of his turbines from behind his desk at the Primghar Savings Bank, which he's owned since 1994. "It's diversification. If the weather doesn't cooperate and we don't have enough corn and soybeans, we might have enough wind."

According to the U.S. Department of Energy's 2021 Wind Energy report, some 57 percent of the power generated in Iowa last year came from wind -- the highest share in the nation. And Iowa is second only to Texas - which produces more wind power than most countries -- in the total amount of wind power it is capable of producing. A politically conservative state that voted for Donald Trump twice over, Iowa is a trailblazer in the clean energy sector. And the bulk of all this wind power was captured in what Iowa is known best for: corn fields.  

Since 2005, when federal tax breaks incentivized energy companies to invest heavily in wind, agents from these companies have fanned out across the Hawkeye State, visiting Iowa's rural farms and ranches to convince the owners to install turbines, many of which soar well over 200 feet in height, among the rows of their crops. 

Nowhere is MidAmerican's presence more evident than in O'Brien County, centered smack dab in the middle of Northwest Iowa's economically lucrative Wind Belt. While already profitable for cash crops -- its loose black dirt means bragging rights for century farms -- O'Brien County has the capacity to produce up to 752 megawatts of energy (enough to power roughly 150,400 homes), making it one of the top-producing wind power counties in the United States. 

For 18 years, energy behemoths like MidAmerican, Invenergy in Chicago and Mortensen in Minneapolis have flocked in droves to places like O'Brien, Ida County and Palo Alto County, touting property tax benefits to county auditors, and offering cash-in-pocket -- $10,000 to $15,000 per tower -- to farmers who sign on the dotted line. With sustained winds that often clock 30 m.p.h., O'Brien County is to wind what Saudi Arabia's Ghawar Field is to oil and natural gas.

For Jablonski, who was one of those energy company agents on the ground in the early aughts, the trifecta of benefits is a no-brainer: "The better the wind resource, the more wind generation, the more renewable energy for our customers."

AMIDST THE DEATH OF HUNTING:

In the broadest sense, what we see in our backwoods and backyards today is a result of something called the North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, which eliminated commercial hunting and put states in charge of implementing policies to restore populations to optimum levels, and then keep them there.

For so-called game animals, this success has been remarkable. In 1900, when commercial hunting was essentially outlawed nationally, there were only 500,000 white-tailed deer left in the United States. Today there are 30 million. Massachusetts has an estimated 93,000, despite its small size and the country's third-highest population density. That's far more than we've ever had, specialists say, even before European colonization.

Turkeys, which disappeared from the state sometime around the Civil War thanks to a loss of habitat and overhunting, were re-introduced to Massachusetts in the 1970s, beginning with 37 birds released in the Berkshires. Today, there are 35,000 of them, so ubiquitous, even in urban areas, that they dropped off many people's point-and-shout list, something that has already happened with hawks and rabbits.

Back when those turkeys were released in the 70s, they didn't have to worry too much about black bears. There were only 100 of them in the state. Fast-forward to today and MassWildlife, the state's conservation agency that has overseen the science-based rebound, estimates there are 4,500 in Massachusetts. And with increased sightings in the suburbs, they are definitely moving east.

And while it was hunters who got us into a lot of problems, it was their dollars that got us out, funding the recovery of the game species through the sale of licenses, tags, and stamps, as well as a 1937 federal law that placed an 11 percent excise tax on hunting weapons, including guns, ammunition, and archery equipment. In 1950, Congress placed a similar tax on fishing and boating equipment to fund the recovery of sport fish.

That money has allowed states to conserve huge swaths of land as "wildlife management areas," which also allow non-game animals to thrive, said Eve Schlüter, assistant director of the state's Natural Heritage & Endangered Species Program, a subdivision of MassWildlife that focuses on conserving native plants and animals, with an emphasis on 432 species that are listed as endangered.

THE FUTURE OF EVERY POLICY IS THE PAST OF W:

Hydrogen has potential uses beyond vehicles, too: It can make synthetic fuels and store power for the electricity grid; it can also clean up industries that are notoriously hard to decarbonize, like steel manufacturing.

These promising use cases have driven interest and investment in hydrogen as fuel in the past, which is why you may have heard about it before: Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama touted hydrogen and invested government money into researching and developing the fuel. But the hype faded each time as high production costs, practical challenges, and a limited infrastructure for hydrogen-powered vehicles got in the way. For hydrogen-powered cars to truly take off anywhere, they'll first require a vast network of fueling stations, pipelines, and producers -- essentially a hydrogen economy -- to compete and win against fossil fuels. The US has never gotten close to building something like this.

But for now, the momentum behind hydrogen energy is once again building as its demand grows and the technology behind it improves. According to 2018 data, hydrogen fuel cells have dropped 60 percent in price since 2006, while their durability increased fourfold.

In 2021, Toyota sold more than 2,600 Mirais in the US, a record. Other hydrogen cars have entered the market too, including the Hyundai Nexo and the Honda Clarity. As of March 1, more than 12,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been sold or leased in the US. Meanwhile, Delta Airlines and Airbus in March signed an agreement to develop hydrogen-powered aircraft. New hydrogen production plants are in the works in the US. In February, President Joe Biden signed an executive order pledging close to $10 billion to boost hydrogen production, infrastructure, and research.

Overseas, China announced plans to produce as much as 200,000 tons of carbon-free hydrogen per year to help run a fleet of 50,000 fuel cell-powered vehicles by 2025. The United Kingdom is aiming to double its hydrogen production. Globally, hydrogen production and transportation has received more than $80 billion in investment.

In a moment when the urgency of the climate crisis cannot be understated, hydrogen is getting another chance to help clean up the planet.

CLEANER/CHEAPER/FASTER:

Twelve start ups out of 270 applicants have been recognised by BloomergNEF as potential game changers in the shift to clean energy.

The latest announcement of the decade-old BNEF Pioneers program identifies a range of different technology proposals, from grid storage to aviation to carbon removal and a group of "wild cards."

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

A 100 percent clean energy power grid is tantalizingly close in California. A new Bloomberg report published this week said the state came closer than ever to its goal of having a carbon-free grid within 25 years and that it ran off more than 97 percent renewable energy for a short period of time earlier in April.

LIE DOWN WITH ISLAMOPHOBIC DOGS...:

A Jewish group affiliated with French presidential candidate Marine Le Pen's National Rally party called on her to remove campaign posters in which she is making a gesture used by white supremacists.

The poster features Le Pen leaning on a desk in a dark blue suit with the slogan "for all French people." One of her hands is gripping the desk, while her left thumb and index finger made a circle, while the other fingers are fanned out on the desk. 

YEAH, BUT WHAT ABOUT THE GUYS WHO LIKE SUBMITTING TO VLAD?:

Europe can limit its dependence on Russian energy through diversification "in a relatively short time," Italy's Prime Minister Mario Draghi said in an interview with Corriere della Sera published on Sunday.

"We no longer want to depend on Russian gas, because economic dependence must not become political subjugation," he said. "To do this, we need to diversify energy sources and find new suppliers." [...]

As it stands, Russia supplies around 40 percent of Italy's natural gas and 45 percent of the EU's imported gas.

JUST "CONCERNED PARENTS":

[Michael] Jensen, the principal investigator for the Profiles of Individual Radicalization in the United States (PIRUS) project at the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), compiled the network map from "several thousand pages of court documents and countless social media posts." He found a total of 244 defendants with extremist connections, and created a visualization of those ties--as well as those between rioters--with the map.

"That's approximately 30 percent of all defendants. While that's not a majority, a 30 percent rate of affiliation with extremism/extremist beliefs among a collective of apparently "ordinary" individuals is an astounding number," Jensen writes on Twitter.

Indeed, while 30 percent still is not a majority, it is not a small minority either. He continues:

Of these 244 defendants, 108 were members of at least one extremist organization. 136 self-identified as members of extremist movements or publicly praised extremist groups and their beliefs. These defendants form nearly 700 dyadic relationships to extremist groups/movements and other defendants with extremist affiliations. These aren't ordinary relationships--or, at least, they shouldn't be.

Moreover, the "ordinary people" argument misses what the visualization shows--that J6 involved a number of influential defendants who acted as bridges in a larger network, facilitating the flow harmful ideas from one movement to another. Sure, the J6 defendants are "ordinary" in the sense that most of them have families, neighbors, and jobs, but who really believes that those are the things that distinguish extremists from everyone else?Jensen points to the work of another expert at American University's Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, in coming to terms with the reality that far-right extremism has been mainstreamed, and how that has happened, primarily through online radicalization--how "people radicalize in a vast and ever-expanding online ecosystem, a process that often involves no contact with particular organizations":

Jensen points to the work of another expert at American University's Polarization and Extremism Research & Innovation Lab, Cynthia Miller-Idriss, in coming to terms with the reality that far-right extremism has been mainstreamed, and how that has happened, primarily through online radicalization--how "people radicalize in a vast and ever-expanding online ecosystem, a process that often involves no contact with particular organizations":

As ordinary individuals encounter these ideas, whether through custom-tailored propaganda or through more grassroots efforts amplified by social media, they assemble them into their own personalized belief systems. This is a far cry from more traditional models of radicalization in which people gradually adopt an identifiable group's ideological framework--such as fascism or neo-Nazism--that calls for violent solutions against a common enemy. These more coherent processes involve initiation rites, manifestos, leaders, and a chain of command that guide beliefs and actions. Those elements are largely absent from today's patchwork, choose-your-own-adventure mode of radicalization.

Miller-Idriss's point is that "Extremism has gone mainstream; so must the interventions needed to address it." And as Jensen observes, it's likely that the "ordinary people" narrative surrounding J6 only makes this problem worse.

"It depicts aligning with extremist groups, even if indirectly, and/or adopting their beliefs and attempting to violently end democracy as something "ordinary" people do," he writes. "It's not."

THE OPPOSITE OF CONSERVATISM:

The shock of 2016 was so profound for many conservatives that they could not see past their revulsion of a man who challenged and disrupted the tenets of Meyer's fusionism. Their instinct was to oppose him, often ferociously, as he chased the Republican presidential nomination, captured it, and went on to an unexpected general-election victory. Continetti takes a different approach. A chronicler rather than a combatant, he seeks to understand Trump and the pull of his populism--and to interpret the 45th president not as an alarming aberration from conservative orthodoxy, but as the logical product of a movement that always has wrestled with populist urges in a lineage that includes Joseph McCarthy, the John Birch Society, Reagan Democrats, Pat Buchanan, and others.

Continetti blends intellectual and political history to reimagine the mainsprings of conservative success, with populism serving as a source of energy for conservatives as well as a threat to the high principles that many of them hold dear. 

IF LIBERALISM WEREN'T CHRISTIAN IT WOULDN'T WORK:

If Christianity's promise was apolitical and fully otherworldly, it would be a quietistic religion offering no visible hope or aid to those groaning under the oppression of worldly masters. Perhaps this line of theological argument is beginning to sound familiar? It should -- antebellum slaveowners used to make such arguments to justify owning, torturing and killing other human beings. They too were good secular liberals.

The hope that Christianity offers to the subjugated is not just otherworldly, but rather offers an immediate and direct remedy to the woes of this world. Its offer is precisely political in the classical sense of the world. Christians are given membership of a political community -- the local parish and the universal Church -- which treats them as worthy of full human dignity, as future and present citizens of the Kingdom of Christ.

Christians are required to look for the coming Kingdom

The first Christian Roman emperor Constantine, and the Church which embraced him after his victory over his pagan rivals, are seen by many liberal Christians as perverting a pure, otherworldly Christianity with political power. But when Eusebius praised the "victorious Constantine" and the cross as a "victorious sign", he was not reducing Christianity to a pagan ode to victory -- but rather articulating an already existing Christian theopolitics.

As he notes when speaking of the churches Constantine has built, they are "trophies of his [Christ's] victory over death". For Eusebius, physical churches, the empire, the emperor and the Cross itself are all outward signs of a hidden victory over death embodied by the resurrected form of Christ:

He soon recalled his body from the grasp of death, presented it to his Father as the first-fruit of our common salvation, and raised this trophy, a proof at once of his victory over death and Satan, and of the abolition of human sacrifices, for the blessing of all mankind.

Though Christians must reject utopianism, the Church is a political community. We are not merely permitted but required to look for visible signs of the coming Kingdom, and strive towards it in our lives. Without the living, theopolitical hopes of Christianity, the ethical miracle ending terrible practices like human sacrifice and infanticide would never have come about.

What those like Hobson are really calling for is not the end of theopolitics, but rather the subordination of Christian theology to the state, no less surely than it is enslaved in Russia. As Hobson writes: "This is not a sell-out to a secular ideology, for the liberal state has Christian roots. It echoes the kenosis of Christ." He wants Christian theologians to baptise liberalism, lending what influence they have to the triumphant progress of the liberal project.

The issue with this perspective is not that Hobson is wrong to say that liberalism has Christian roots, or even that in some sense Christians ought to defend liberalism. There is much that is good in liberalism, and much owed to Christianity. Christians should defend these goods.

The issue is that he thinks we should abandon Christianity as a theopolitical project altogether and hand the moral authority of the Church over to the dubious hands of liberal ideologues.

JUST FUND THEM UNIVERSALLY:

Health savings accounts are tax-advantaged accounts available to Americans with high-deductible health insurance policies. Federal law established them in 2003. Since then, HSAs have grown quickly as employers have adopted high-deductible plans for their workforces to save money.

HSAs offer a three-tiered break on income taxes: contributions are tax-free, as are investment earnings and withdrawals for eligible medical expenses.

When used optimally, they're among the most efficient ways to save and build wealth, according to financial advisors.

However, Black and Hispanic savers, women and low-income individuals aren't using the accounts as effectively as others, such as men, higher earners, and white and Asian savers, according a new report published by the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

REPLACING CHRISTIAN WITH cHRISTIANIST iDENTITY:

 A few years ago a group of Catholic post-liberals founded a website, which has expanded into books and podcasts, called The Josias. Josias is Latin for Josiah. (The Hebrew original, Yoshiyahu, most likely means "healed by God.") The first editor of The Josias, Edmund Waldstein, is a Cistercian monk in Austria who -- judging by his own contributions to his journal -- is a sophisticated theologian, as are some of the other contributors. I have now read a good deal of The Josias and I can report that, except when it surrenders to a genuinely foul invective about what it abhors -- abhorrence is one of its main activities -- its writings have all the rigor, and all the charm, of dogmatics. In its way it reminds me of orthodox Marxist discourse, in which fine points of doctrine are scrupulously examined without any interest in the scrupulous examination of their philosophical foundations. The difference between theology and philosophy is that philosophy inspects the foundations, whereas theology merely builds on them. How serious can thinking be when its own premises are protected from it?

As in all doctrinaire writing, the writings of these post-liberals, of all post-liberals, has a settled and self-congratulatory tone, and expresses the mutual admiration of a quasi-conspiratorial fraternity. (Are there are any women among them?) They are the club of the just. The motto of The Josias is non declinavit ad dextram sive ad sinistram, "to incline neither right nor left." This may sound like an invigorating assertion of intellectual independence, until one recalls that it is also the title of the definitive historical study of the rise of fascist ideology in France. "Neither right nor left" was the motto of a crack-up, of a philosophical desperation. The purpose of The Josias, its founding editor has written, is "to become a 'working manual' of Catholic political thought." But not all Catholic political thought. It is the organ of a particular school, known as integralism. Here is Father Waldstein's explication of the concept: "Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man's temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power." Or in the less reflective words of an American integralist, "the state should recognize Catholicism as true and unite with the Church as body to her soul."

Premises, premises. The Catholic post-liberals are animated by a crushing sense that we, America and the West, have fallen. The feeling of fallenness is not theirs alone: it is one of the few things that unites this disunited country, though we differ in our preferred heights. For the integralists, whose very name suggests that the rest of us are disintegrated, what we have lost is the magnificent unity of church and state. That is the fissure that infuriates them, that they wish ruthlessly to repair. They are wounded holists; yet another bunch of moderns with a burning hunger for the whole. They detest "the personalization of religion," as if there are no religious collectivities and religious institutions and religious movements in our liberal polity, as if social domination and political control are necessary conditions of spiritual fulfillment. It is important to understand who were the authors of the abomination that the American integralists wish to repeal. Whereas some of them can live with aspects of Karl Marx -- neither right nor left, remember -- it is finally James Madison whom they cannot abide. He, after all, was the diabolical author of the separation, and Jefferson, and Mason, and the other founding fathers of the American dispensation. (And Roger Williams, the founding grandfather, whose banishment from the highly integrated Massachusetts Bay Colony marked the inauguration of the separation.) Integralism as an ideology originated in late nineteenth-century Europe, particularly in France, in the Action Francaise of Charles Maurras (the American integralists remind even the editor of First Things of Maurras, and also of the Catholic phalangists of Franco's Spain); but now Maurras has been pitted against Madison. What a villain Madison was!

I call these Christians Christianists, in the way that we call certain Muslims Islamists. Christianism is not the same as Christianity, just as Islamism is not the same as Islam. (There are Jewish parallels in Israel.) Christianism is a current of contemporary Christianity, of the political Christianity of our time, a time in which religions everywhere have been debased by their rampant politicization. The Christianists, who swan around with the somewhat comical heir of an avant-garde, are in one respect completely typical of their day: they are another group in our society that judges governments and regimes and political orders by how good they are for them. This selfishness, which is a common feature of identity, is as tiresome in its religious versions as it is in its secular ones; it is an early form of contempt, and extremely deleterious to the social unity that the Christianists fervently profess to desire.

ALONG THE ANGLOSPHERE:

The trends we have looked at thus far highlight the resilience of global connectedness during the pandemic. Record levels of international trade and strong rebounds for most other types of international activity hardly endorse the idea that the war in Ukraine might be the last straw for an era of globalization already hobbled by the pandemic, the U.S.-China trade war, and the UK's exit from the EU. The war does imply a setback for the growth of international flows, but nothing close to a retreat to a world of self-contained national economies.

Could the war, nonetheless, have a large effect on the geography of international flows? Yes, but the pivotal country to watch in this context will be China, not Russia. To gain some perspective, consider how much of the world's trade -- and other flows -- takes place between countries on different sides of the current conflict.

On March 2, 2022, the United Nations General Assembly voted on a resolution condemning the invasion and demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine. The 141 countries that voted in favor of the resolution (plus Taiwan, which is not a UN member but has aligned with the countries voting in favor) conducted 61% of world merchandise trade among themselves in 2020, and 70% of the world's combined trade, capital, information, and people flows took place within this group of countries. The high proportion of international flows among this set of countries, which includes the U.S., EU, Japan, and South Korea, suggests some limits on the extent to which this conflict itself could reshape the geography of globalization.

THE ONE STORY:

The Battle of The Pelennor Fields, the passing of Sauron and the demise of his Dark Tower Barad-dur, and the Crowning of the King all joyously acclaim this defeat, this wondrous triumph of good over evil which is none other than the Eucatastrophic Joy of Easter. With the miraculous appearance of the Rohirrim in the hour of Gondor's despair, appearing with the cock's crowing and the coming of the dawn (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings 829), Tolkien first hints at this Easter Joy, for "morning came, morning and a wind from the sea; and darkness was removed, and the hosts of Mordor wailed, and terror took them, and they fled, and died, and the hoofs of wrath rode over them" (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings 838).

Yet though these glimpses of joy appear throughout this final volume of the story, particularly with Aragorn's works of healing in Minas Tirith, it is not truly until the Ring is destroyed and the hosts of the West gather in the Field of Cormallen that Tolkien unveils the Easter Joy thathis story contemplates, starting, fittingly, with Sam saying "Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue? What's happened to the world?" (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings 951). So the mystery of Death's defeat first truly appears, for something miraculous has happened to the world, something that has made the sadness of Death untrue. This feeling of wonder and joy continues to well up in Sam, so that Gandalf's laughter "fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears", and so that he "feel[s] like spring after winter, and sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!" (Tolkien Lord of the Rings 952). Indeed, how else can we respond to the mystery of Death's Defeat than first with tears, then with joy? Here with Sam, then, is the first true tiding of Easter Joy.

Yet it is far from the last. As Gandalf informs Sam and Frodo, "in Gondor the New Year will always now begin upon the twenty-fifth of March when Sauron fell, and when you were brought out of the fire to the King. He has tended you, and now he awaits you. You shall eat and drink with him" (952). The date of March 25 is, in several very old Catholic traditions dating back to even before St. Augustine's time, the exact date of Christ's Crucifixion; it is also the date of his conception, the Solemnity of the Annunciation. Tolkien's choice of this date for the defeat of Sauron is far from coincidental, as T.A. Shippey has already argued, somewhat contemptuously, in his Road to Middle-Earth (Shippey, Road to Middle-Earth 151-2). Shippey dismissively states that Tolkien used the date to turn the 'eucatastrophe' of his story into a "forerunner or 'type' of the greater one of Christian myth" (Shippey, Road to Middle-Earth 152). While strictly true, it is a far cry from the whole truth. Tolkien's use of the date is not some artificial mechanism by which he links his tale to the Christian myth to come, but a deliberate placement of his tale in history, and not just history, but salvation history, making his story not an allegory for the Resurrection but a moment in time and myth which prefigures that highest joy, by participating in and reflecting upon that same grief and joy, which is the Death and Resurrection.

SO FAR...:

All comedy is conservative. https://t.co/eCTzmxoKhD

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 16, 2022

AND 100 TRILLION YEARS FOR FUSION:

NORMALCY:

The couple paid $150,439 in taxes on $610,702, for a tax rate of 24.6 percent, the White House said.

In publishing their tax information, the president and first lady -- the first to work outside the White House, as a professor -- are bringing back a custom dating back to the 1970s but interrupted by previous president Donald Trump.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Since Dunbar is emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Oxford, his book is "firmly grounded in our current understanding of evolutionary theory". Those who sign up to religions, he points out, "can incur serious costs in terms of self-imposed pain, celibacy and even self-sacrifice". This raises obvious moral issues, but it also makes little evolutionary sense for creatures struggling to survive and reproduce. So do religions offer some countervailing benefits to individuals or communities? Or are they "the maladaptive byproduct of traits or cognitive processes that evolved for other perfectly respectable biological purposes", like the lower back pain we have to put up with in return for the advantages of walking upright?

Here, Dunbar surveys the key evolutionary explanations for religions, the evidence that they make people healthier and happier and their role in building a sense of cohesion (which apparently means that religious communities tend to be larger and longer-lasting than their secular equivalents). He also makes use of "nearly two decades of research... on the nature of sociality and the mechanisms of community bonding in primates and humans".

HATING GREENS DOESN'T STOP THE WIND:

According to the US Energy Information Administration (EIA), "on Tuesday, March 29, wind turbines in the Lower 48 states produced 2,017 gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity, making wind the second-largest source of electric generation for the day, only behind natural gas."

While wind power wasn't the largest source of electricity that day, wind power has ranked in front of coal and nuclear energy on a number of separate occasions, but never both on the same day, reports USAToday.

CONSOLATION:

There was one piece of music that was played over and over during the period after 9/11 on classical music radio stations. It was Lux Aeterna by Morten Lauridsen. In this choral piece, the overwhelming cascade of voices coalesces and moves deeply into our lament, yet the music rises above the nadir of our common despair and somehow reframes our hopes.

Several years after 9/11, I had an opportunity to reflect on Lauridsen's composition and honor him. I was appointed to the National Council on the Arts by president George W. Bush and worked on the nominations for the 2007 National Medal of the Arts. The council selected Lauridsen as one of the award recipients. I was the table host designated to welcome him to the list of great artists and arts advocates including the likes of Andrew Wyeth and Henry Steinway. Lauridsen's legacy will be known with other great composers who've received this high honor, such as Aaron Copeland and John Williams.

As Lauridsen looked around the room, he said, "What am I doing here?" I responded: "Sir, millions of people sing your songs; I think you deserve this honor."

Lauridsen composes music that the vocal range and singing capacity of a typical community choir can handle; in other words, he makes his music accessible to all. Perhaps that accounts, in part, for the popularity of his music in the classical and choral music world. But how is it that this communal music can carry the weight of our common curse yet manage to infuse hope in us?

My dear friend James Jordan, the master choral director of Westminster Choir College, told me that Lux Aeterna is "a work of sound art that is humanly honest, because of its Gregorian chant roots." It makes sense that some of the text of this choral work was first created out of a community--a community of ordinary saints seeking to renew their daily faith through their monophonic plainchants. Such an integrated, authentic song from a community many centuries past does not fit neatly into our contemporary categories like "secular" or "sacred" or "Christian music." And precisely because it does not, it is a song for eternity that resonates in all areas of human experience, lifting all of us to the heavens in worship.

MONEY SPENT ON NAVIES IS WASTED:

HATE SOME NEIGHBORS:

Illiberal thinkers have much to say about the great goods we could gain if the wheels of government power were employed in the service of particular lofty ideals. These appealing visions are a distraction from the more fundamental question: would that use of power be just? It is widely recognized today that giving second-class status to religious minorities, the suppression and prosecution of heresy/blasphemy as a civil crime, or widespread control of dissenting public speech, is unjust. Those protections that illiberals want to weaken or qualify, however, embody what many take to be obligations of justice and charity toward our fellow man (I think rightly and in keeping with Catholic teaching). Their arguments that communal flourishing is better achieved by ignoring those obligations in certain circumstances, if there are such obligations, would be nothing more than garden-variety consequentialism dressed up in the language of the common good.

It would be naïve in the extreme to fail to recognize, once certain measures are made legally permissible, that the same can and will be used against citizens of all stripes, including integralist Catholics. Employing liberal institutions to good ends can be difficult, and the effort forces us to ponder many prudential questions. We cannot expect perfectly to achieve that peace which God alone can give within the political institutions of a fallen world, but we owe it to our compatriots both to try to make the world a better place and to abide by fair terms of cooperation and justice in doing so. These aims are compatible in light of a Christian politics that aims to make friends of our enemies.

A political view that rejects this tends to portray all differences in terms of friend/enemy distinctions, which are insurmountable except by the use of power. This vision of political life is deeply in tension with Christian principles, even when its advocates promise to build the Kingdom of God on earth. We should accordingly qualify MacIntyre's warning about modern dignity. What is needed is not the rejection of dignity, but rather its establishment on better foundations.

BOY, THE rIGHT SURE DOES HATE WOMEN:

When fresh allegations of domestic violence were lodged against former Missouri Gov. Eric Greitens last month, one of his Republican rivals for the state's open Senate seat, Representative Vicky Hartzler, stepped up and called for him to end his campaign.

Then she moved on to an issue perhaps more resonant with Republican primary voters: transgender women in sports.

"Eric Greitens is a toxic candidate unfit to hold office," Michael Hafner, a spokesman for Ms. Hartzler's Senate campaign, said, before declaring the central message of her campaign: "Missouri family values, freedom, and taking back our country."

In Missouri, Georgia, Ohio and now Nebraska, Republican men running for high office face significant allegations of domestic violence, stalking, even sexual assault -- accusations that once would have derailed any run for office. 

THE FUTURE ALWAYS HAPPENS WHILE YOU'RE SWEARING IT CAN'T:

The pipeline of solar, wind, and storage projects in interconnection queues across the United States has soared to a record 1,300GW, according to new research published this week by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).

The Berkeley Lab study - which analysed electricity markets accounting for 85% of all US electricity load - identified over 1,400GW worth of total generation capacity seeking interconnection.

This included 676GW of solar capacity, 275GW of wind capacity, and 427GW of storage.

"The sheer volume of clean energy capacity in the queues is remarkable," said Joseph Rand, a senior scientific engineering associate at Berkeley Lab. "It suggests that a huge transition is underway, with solar and storage taking a lead role."

PUTINISM IS TRUMPISM:

Ukraine's successful defense has required several factors, including the bravery and skill of its armed forces and continued Russian bungling. But it has also relied on a unified and energetic response from its western allies, which has included moral solidarity, economic sanctions, intelligence sharing, and a massive infusion of weapons. If Trump still occupied the Oval Office, none of these would be occurring.

A month ago, Trump's close friend and supporter Sean Hannity tried repeatedly to coax him to call Vladimir Putin a bad person or admit his slaughter of civilians was wrong. Trump kept refusing. After Trump declined the first opportunity, Hannity offered another: "You came under some fire when you said that Vladimir Putin is very smart. I think I know you a little bit better than most people in the media, and I think you also recognize he's evil, do you not?"

After Trump declined again and boasted of his closeness with Putin, Hannity tried suggesting Russia was an "enemy" Trump was strategically keeping close. Trump declined that opportunity, too, saying, "I got along with these people. I got along with them well."

Last night, Hannity tried again. Referring back to their previous conversation, he asked Trump if Russia's invasion was "evil." Trump declined, instead ranting about the weakness of NATO...

OPEN THE BORDERS:

The Department of Labor reported last month that there were 11.3 million job openings in February, a number that has remained at historic highs for months. We should be opening our doors wider so that those seeking refuge in the United States can come here and help fill those jobs. Not all those who will likely gather at the southern border as Title 42 restrictions are lifted will fit the bill, but enough will that it could improve employment conditions in many areas. Even among Central American families who comprise the largest group of asylum seekers, adult family members will be eager to work if given the chance. College graduates in the Ukrainian and Afghan refugee population as well as truck drivers, electricians, plumbers, roofers, and others with needed skills would be a welcome addition to many communities. With hundreds of thousands of Russia's most highly educated, employable, and liberal-minded citizens fleeing for countries with freer societies and brighter futures, surely some of them would be welcome in the offices of American companies struggling to hire.

Though policymakers don't like to talk about it, unauthorized immigration has played an important role in the labor market for the last several decades. Americans intuitively understand this. A 2020 Pew poll found that 77 percent of Americans believed that undocumented immigrants fill jobs Americans don't want--and this was during the height of the pandemic when unemployment was rising. Certainly it would be better if Congress came together to fashion a sensible immigration reform bill that included better border security to keep out drugs and dangerous criminals, but let in needed workers.

In the meantime, the numbers of asylees and refugees likely to be admitted in the coming months will help ease inflationary pressures on wages and supply chain backlogs that labor shortages have created. The challenge for Democrats will be to accelerate the process so Americans can start to feel the economic benefits before the midterm elections, and to talk about those benefits rather than panicking.

FOR THE CHRISTIAN, LIFE IS A COMEDY:

 The early Christian tradition of risus paschalis - Easter laughter - is alive and well in congregations around the world. Historically-minded preachers hark back to the view, first offered by the Church Fathers, that Jesus's resurrection represents the ultimate practical joke, played by God on the devil: the triumph of life over death, of good over evil.

But what interests me more, as someone who researches the cultural history of joking and laughter, is the controversial status Easter laughter once held. In late medieval Europe, priests provoked the laughter of their congregations on Easter Day by telling crude jokes, making obscene gestures and putting on slapstick comedic performances. According to one contemporary witness, preachers often spiced up these occasions by pitting husbands and wives against each other.

Ironically, the most detailed accounts of this practice survive in the writings of its staunchest critics across northern Europe. By expressing their outrage in letters and theological treatises, those who tried so desperately to cancel this popular custom preserved knowledge of it for posterity.

One such opponent was Johannes Oekolampadius, a preacher in Basel who was gently teased by fellow pastors for giving rather dull sermons. In one letter (dated 1518), Oekolampadius launches into a bitter rejection of the immorality of priests who tell jokes. He accuses them of behaving like comedians, resorting to the basest techniques to get their congregations to laugh, with a repertoire including offensive hand gestures and animal noises (such as a cow in labour).

Obviously, testimony like Oekolampadius's is biased, but the excesses he describes did eventually lead to at least one pope trying to put a stop to this kind of entertainment taking place in church.

Cancel culture, it turns out, is not a modern phenomenon, especially when it comes to joking and laughter. Theoretical discussion as to what constitutes a good or a bad joke, what is permissible or morally reprehensible, is as old as the practice of joking in public.

NOT MAGNIFICENT (profanity alert):

"It's sort of odd to look back and see it as magical, because it felt like a lonely few months at the cabin, where I plugged in the laptop and f[****] around," Vernon told The AV Club after the album's release -- and for his second album, Bon Iver, first released in 2011 and now re-released for its 10th anniversary -- he destroyed that mythological cabin and let the world in. Though the overall atmosphere of For Emma remains intact -- it's still gentle, occasionally a little bit glitchy for indie-folk-this is something much, much bigger. Gone were the gentle spatterings of drums and horns that made their way into For Emma, occasionally reminding you of a world outside of the cabin. Bon Iver is comparatively maximalist, with Vernon (supplying about 20 different instruments and sound sources, like choir recordings and handclaps) joined by 10 other musicians, each of them manning boatloads of different instruments themselves. We get the equivalent of an orchestra spread out over these songs, with every woodwind, string, and percussion instrument you could want thrown into the mix. Want some saxophone? Not to worry -- Colin Stetson is here, and outside of his flute and clarinet, he's got three different kinds of saxes. This is also where Vernon's streak of collaborations with the likes of Sean Carey (otherwise known as S. Carey) began, and where you'll find a few of Vernon's Volcano Choir compatriots. Bon Iver teems with life, with all of the other organisms in Vernon's sphere all perfectly matched with the album's aesthetic.

The ever-present desire to rejoin the world at large is baked into the DNA of this album; hell, just look at the cover, which gives us the painted image of a cabin, but also surrounds it with an expanding world that you can't quite make out the exact shapes of, but that you know are there. The fact that every song on Bon Iver is named for a place feels like the exact move someone might make when they want to escape their loner legacy by invoking the scope of the world. He invokes Wisconsin, but also Australia, Texas, Canada, Michigan, Washington. He also plays with the layered meanings of everything; with "Towers," he gives us a nondescript location that makes us imagine something grand, but in the song, the "towers" refer to the inside of a honeycomb. Then there's beloved single "Holocene": it's named for a bar in Portland, OR, but it's also named for the geological epoch, the song's double meaning helping to center a location far away from April Base Studio (the veterinary-clinic-turned-recording-studio Vernon converted in Fall Creek, WI), but a period of time too grand to even fully fathom. "Holocene" joins a long, long legacy of songs that grapple with the understanding that any one life is insignificant in the grand scheme of time itself, giving us a brief thesis statement that seems to perfectly capture where Vernon's mindset was at the time: "And at once, I knew/ I was not magnificent."

THE TRUMPISTS MIGHT HAVE PICKED THE WRONG SIDE OF hISTORY, HUH?:

Russia's Defense Ministry said on April 14 that a fire on the Moskva missile cruiser caused ammunition to blow up, but Maksym Marchenko, the Ukrainian governor of the region around the Black Sea port of Odesa, said the ship had been hit by two Ukrainian-made Neptune anti-ship cruise missiles.

"Neptune missiles guarding the Black Sea caused very serious damage," he wrote in a post on Telegram as the war launched by Russia entered its 50th day.

A RACE, NOT A RELIGION:

Churches in Jerusalem are up in arms against Jewish "radicals" who are settling in the Christian Quarter and threatening a fragile religious balance in the ancient Holy City.

"We have a major problem here," said Greek Orthodox Patriarch Theophilus III in Jerusalem's Old City, which is split into historic Jewish, Muslim, Christian and Armenian quarters.

"Jerusalem also has her Christian character, and that is what is threatened," he told AFP, as Christian worshippers readied for Easter celebrations.

The patriarch charged that hardline Jewish settlers, known for a push to take over properties of Palestinian families, are also waging a campaign for control of Christian-owned lands.

"Those radicals are driven by their ideology," Theophilus III said. "Their ideology is the syndrome of messianism, when they claim 'we want to redeem the Holy Land from the profanes'."

The nationalist settler group Ateret Cohanim has worked to "Judaise" east Jerusalem -- a Palestinian sector illegally annexed by Israel according to the UN -- by purchasing real estate through front companies and then moving Jewish settlers in.

JUST DON'T SAY WE'RE AT WAR WITH VLAD...:

U.S. President Joe Biden announced an additional $800 million in military assistance to Ukraine on Wednesday, expanding the scope of the systems provided to include heavy artillery ahead of a wider Russian assault expected in eastern Ukraine. read more

The package, which brings the total military aid since Russian forces invaded in February to more than $2.5 billion, includes artillery systems, artillery rounds, armored personnel carriers and unmanned coastal defense boats, Biden said in a statement after a phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

Biden said he had also approved the transfer of additional helicopters, saying equipment provided to Ukraine "has been critical" as it confronts the invasion.

JUST PARDON THEM INSTEAD:

Last month, the national movement to end immigration detention achieved two major campaign victories that invite our attention and signal opportunities ahead. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) will no longer incarcerate immigrants at the Etowah County Jail in Alabama and will reduce the use of three other jails in the south.

A couple days later, President Joe Biden released his 2023 budget request to Congress, which calls for a reduction in the capacity of immigration jails by 9,000 beds or 26 percent of the current funded level (34,000 beds). This was the first time in the history of the modern immigrant incarceration system that a president reduced the request to this degree.

For 40 years, the trajectory of immigration jails in the United States has been expansion: more beds, more money. President Biden's budget request signals that we've finally moved the needle in the opposite direction, as a result of years of popular organizing and advocacy by people in detention and communities across the country. It can feel hard to celebrate given the continued harsh realities of immigration enforcement, but we can't lose sight of our ability to score significant wins like these.

THE rEPLACEMENT CAN'T HAPPEN FAST ENOUGH:

Right-wing figures like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Fox News hosts Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have spent the last month boosting the conspiracy theory that anyone opposed to anti-LGBTQ legislation is a "groomer" or a "pedophile." This has already led to real-life protests, but on far-right forums like Patriots.win and Gab, there's been a significant spike in ultra-violent rhetoric, with users posting threats against specific teachers, Disney employees, and lawmakers, according to a new report from public-interest research group Advance Democracy, Inc. which shared its findings exclusively with VICE News.

And now, these extremists are taking things a step further: They're doxxing school officials and calling for their execution. 

THE rIGHT HAS ALWAYS AND ONLY EVER BEEN ABOUT iDENTITY:

However strong the conservative consensus of the mid-1990s may have appeared at the dawn of the Republican Revolution, it soon came under sustained criticism from intellectuals excluded from Kristol's "more comprehensive conservatism."

The most coherent challenge came from the so-called paleoconservatives. Their main cause was the dramatic reduction of immigration. Their champion was the syndicated columnist, author, former White House official, and cable-television personality Patrick J. Buchanan. He had built his reputation as a smart, plainspoken pundit before making a transition into electoral politics. After a surprise showing as a protest presidential candidate in New Hampshire in 1992, Buchanan galvanized that year's Republican National Convention with a speech both describing and advocating a "culture war" in the United States.

Buchanan launched his second run for the presidency on March 20, 1995. In his announcement, he singled out Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, the GOP front-runner, for supporting American membership in the World Trade Organization. Buchanan pledged to withdraw from the WTO and the newly minted North American Free Trade Agreement. He said he would remove U.S. troops participating in UN peacekeeping missions, build a wall along the southern border, and bar immigration for at least five years. "When I raise my hand to take the oath of office," he said, "this whole New World Order is coming crashing down."

Buchanan's invocation of a sinister global conspiracy hinted at his populism's dark side. He was a well-known opponent of the neoconservatives, and he laced his rhetoric with anti-Semitic tropes cleverly masked for plausible deniability precisely because he was so intelligent. He flirted with racists, anti-government extremists, and conspiracists. The chief theoretician of Buchanan's movement, the newspaper columnist Samuel T. Francis, was fired from an editorial position at the Washington Times in 1995 after it was revealed that he had told an audience, "The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people."

THE CALL ALWAYS COMES FROM INSIDE THEIR HOUSE:

Former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has been removed from the voter rolls of North Carolina amid an investigation into whether he illegally registered to cast his ballot in that state for the 2020 presidential election.

The Macon County, North Carolina, Board of Elections told NBC News that Meadows was removed from the list of voters on Monday after reviewing documentation that indicates he lived in Virginia and last voted there in the 2021 election, which included races for governor, attorney general and the state's legislature.

NO ONE EVER MEANS, "NEVER AGAIN":

Since the war began, Germany has been the key country to watch in terms of how the West would respond -- and not only because of its history. As Europe's largest economy and arguably its dominant political actor, Germany is in a unique position to bring pressure to bear on Russian President Vladimir Putin's government. And Germany sends $220 million a day to Moscow in the form of payments for Russian oil and gas. That is sparking a fierce debate within and outside Germany about what more the country should be doing to punish Putin and his war machine.

Some of Germany's allies have long been frustrated with its reluctance, under multiple governments, to more directly confront the Kremlin. In the weeks leading up to the invasion, Germany had been derided as the "weak link" in the Western alliance and mocked for sending Ukraine helmets while other countries were providing anti-tank missiles.

All that seemed to change when Putin sent his forces into Ukraine. On Feb. 27, three days into the war, Chancellor Olaf Scholz gave a speech in which he called the invasion a zeitenwende -- translated as "turning point" or "revolution" -- in German foreign policy. While Germany was still open to negotiations with Russia, he said, "not being naive also means not talking simply for the sake of talking." And some of the steps taken by Germany in the early days of the war really were revolutionary. The government canceled the $11 billion Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which would have doubled exports of Russian gas to Germany. Scholz boosted defense spending to 2 percent of GDP, in line with NATO's target for members, and added 100 billion euros in new spending on military investments -- more than double its entire defense budget for 2021. Germany also began supplying anti-tank and air defense missiles to Ukraine, overturning a long-standing policy of not sending weapons into conflict zones.

"It would have been hard to imagine Germany doing these things and saying these things even two months prior," Steven Keil, a fellow for security and defense policy at the German Marshall Fund, told Grid. "But what was a significant shift for Germany wasn't necessarily enough for the rest of the trans-Atlantic community."

Indeed, it appears the zeitenwende has its limits. One crucial limit in particular: It will not stop sending all those oil and gas payments to Moscow. Germany has opposed proposals to impose an embargo against Russian gas exports, which Finance Minister Christian Lindner said would "inflict more damage on ourselves than on [Russia.]" The Germans did agree to a plan to phase out imports of Russian coal but pushed to extend the wind-down period by a month. For all its strong rhetoric, Germany is still effectively subsidizing Russia's war with energy payments.

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

"No biblical narrative has been more important in US history than the Exodus," writes Stephen Prothero, a scholar of religion and history at Boston University. "In fact, the Exodus story may be the American story -- the narrative Americans tell themselves to make sense of their history, identity, and destiny."

After the Second Continental Congress voted, on July 4, 1776, to approve the final text of the Declaration of Independence, it moved to its next order of business: the designation of an official national emblem. A committee comprising Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson was named "to bring in a device for a seal for the United States of America." Two of them proposed images drawn directly from the Passover story.

Franklin focused on a scene described in Exodus 14. According to his notes, which are in the Library of Congress, he suggested a seal showing "Moses standing on the Shore, and extending his Hand over the Sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm Pharaoh who is sitting in an open Chariot, a Crown on his Head and a Sword in his Hand. Rays from a Pillar of Fire in the Clouds reaching to Moses, to express that he acts by Command of the Deity." To accompany that image, Franklin drafted a motto: "Rebellion to Tyrants is obedience to God."

Jefferson had a different notion, one inspired by an earlier passage in Exodus. Adams, in a letter to his wife, Abigail, recorded that Jefferson's idea was for a seal showing "the Children of Israel in the Wilderness, led by a Cloud by day, and a Pillar of Fire by night."

Time and again, Americans caught up in great causes invoked the Exodus account of the Jews' redemption from Egypt. To abolitionists and enslaved Africans in the South, the Passover story could not have been more relevant. Harriet Tubman, who personified the heroism of the Underground Railroad, was reverently called "Moses" by her admirers and followers. In aching spirituals like "Go Down, Moses," Black Americans identified their experience with that of the Jews in Egypt and with the biblical assurance that deliverance would come.

NOW HIKE GAS TAXES AND CRUSH DEMAND:

Inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), was 8.5% over the last year--the highest since 1981. The monthly inflation rate was 1.2%--the highest since late 2005--driven mostly by a jump in gasoline prices. Under the hood, however, the data looks more encouraging; core CPI (which measures inflation excluding food and energy prices) increased by only 0.3% this month thanks to a drop in durable goods prices.

Last month, I wrote that the commodity price increases caused by the Russian invasion of Ukraine had not fully shown up in February's CPI report. That shock has showed up significantly in this month's report, with gas prices alone driving more than half the 1.2% monthly increase in the CPI. The good news is that there are reasons to be optimistic; gasoline price increases should abate, used vehicle prices declined significantly, and consumers continue to slowly renormalize their spending patterns.

Gas prices jumped 18.3% in March, the highest monthly increase since June 2009. Nominal gas prices are at their highest level ever, increasing nearly 50% over the last year alone. There are many reasons for this--an inability for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to hit its (lower than pre-pandemic) quotas, a push from domestic oil and gas shareholders to reign in production after years of unprofitability, and of course a drop in Russian exports of crude oil and natural gas.

A RACE, NOT A RELIGION:

Opposition politician Bezalel Smotrich said Tuesday that it would be right for synagogues to turn away members of Israel's governing coalition, saying their political affiliations should place them beyond the pale of communal religious life. [...]

The opposition is seeking to siphon off enough right-wing Knesset members to form an alternative government headed by Netanyahu or at least force the government to topple, especially focusing in on Bennett's Yamina party. The party's base, and many of its MKs, hail from the religious nationalist community in which synagogues are often a cornerstone of public life; Bennett is Israel's first skullcap-wearing prime minister.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

Compact is the political project of two religious traditionalists and a left-wing populist. Matthew Schmitz is a Catholic convert who was, until recently, senior editor at the conservative religious magazine, First Things. Edwin Aponte was previously the founder and editor of the Bellows, a Marxist webzine that stands for "working-class populism for the future." Sohrab Ahmari is perhaps the most prominent of the three, having worked as an editorial writer at the Wall Street Journal, then senior writer at Commentary, and finally as opinion editor at the New York Post from 2018.

During his short career as a writer and journalist, Ahmari has already undergone more political transformations than most intellectuals manage in a lifetime. Born in Tehran and raised in Utah after his parents divorced and his mother fled theocratic Iran for the US, Ahmari began his ideological journey by renouncing Shia Islam, devouring Nietzsche and the existentialists, and then embracing Trotskyism. This, he later wrote, "assuaged my own class anxieties," but it did not provide spiritual satisfaction. Nor did "Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Frankfurt School, post-structuralism, queer theory or any of the other fashionable philosophies I tried on, each in turn." So, for a while, Ahmari became a liberal Reaganite foreign policy hawk. As a passionate and eloquent supporter of those struggling for democratic freedoms in the Middle East and beyond, he co-edited (with Nasser Weddady) a stirring collection of essays entitled Arab Spring Dreams: The Next Generation Speaks Out for Freedom and Justice from North Africa to Iran.

The convulsions catalyzed by Donald Trump's election to the US presidency in 2016 produced another unexpected shift. Ahmari had converted to Catholicism the same year (a move he documented in his 2019 religious memoir From Fire by Water: My Journey to the Catholic Faith) and quickly ditched his NeverTrumpism in favor of the GOP's new populism. "To hell with liberal order," he tweeted when he discovered that drag queens were allowed to read stories to children in America's public libraries. "Sometimes reactionary politics are the only salutary path." Today he is a Catholic social conservative preoccupied with the decline of religious piety, social cohesion, moral standards, and traditionalist codes of dress and conduct. He takes particular exception to the sexual deviance and "degeneracy" that he now believes is the logical outcome of Western liberalism, and has developed a corresponding sympathy for the authoritarian systems he once despised. "I'm at peace with a Chinese-led 21st century," he declared in 2021. "Late-liberal America is too dumb and decadent to last as a superpower. Chinese civilization, especially if it recovers more of its Confucian roots, will possess a great deal of natural virtue."

Whether this is merely the latest passing phase of a dilettante or the final destination of a person temperamentally suited to political extremism and religious fanaticism remains an open question. Either way, Compact looks likely to reflect Ahmari's present obsessions. The magazine's masthead currently lists eight regular columnists including Christopher Caldwell, a contributor to the Trumpist Claremont Review of Books, and Tablet columnist Lee Smith. Once a fellow at the Hudson Institute and the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Smith is now warning readers of Compact that "Ukraine is the Ruling Class's Latest Propaganda Ploy," and that America's oligarchy "is at war with the American people." Caldwell's essay, meanwhile, offers a defense of the new far-Right populist governments and parties in Europe, including the illiberal Orbán regime in Hungary.

THE FULL MAGA:

Many of the videos that James uploaded included references to violence, including at a set group of people he believed had maligned him, in addition to broad societal and racial groups that he appeared to hate.

In another video posted last week, James, who is Black, rants about abuse in churches and racism in the workplace, using misogynistic and racist language.

After talking about community violence, James said, "We need to see more mass shootings. Yeah. ... We need to see more, there has to be more mass shootings to make a n***er understand. ... It's not about the shooter; it's about the environment in which he is, he has to exist."

That speech was a common theme throughout James' videos, in which he repeatedly espoused hatred toward African Americans.

HAMAS IS THE POPULAR GOVERNMENT OF THE NATION...:

Last March 6, Palestine's Official Gazette posted a decree from President Mahmoud Abbas that replaced an old law from Jordanian days on procedures for lawsuits involving state bodies.

The dry, technical language appearing in a dry, technical publication somehow provoked a storm of political and legal criticism. Abbas' authority to issue decrees that are treated as laws by official Palestinian bodies is contested by those who view the suspension of parliamentary life as illegitimate, resented by others who regard the ad hoc way laws are issued as autocratic, and irrelevant for those who see the Palestinian leadership as feckless and bereft of strategy. Without much of a state operating in practice, why rewrite laws for litigation? But those are familiar questions. What was so controversial about this jumble of legalistic phrases?

The move suggested the institutional interment of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The state covered by the decree-law is the "State of Palestine" with Abbas as its president. Among its many branches, agencies, and ministries are the PLO and all its associated bodies, as if they are part of the Ramallah-based Palestinian bureaucracy. Therefore, the law seemed to fold the only authoritative structures uniting Palestinians and speaking authoritatively for them as a people into an appendage of an office rooted in the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), a circumscribed and autocratic structure that limps along, stricken by inertia.

LIFE IS A HIGHWAY:

Key contracts totaling more than £1.5 billion ($1.95 billion) have been awarded for a major interconnector project that will link Germany and the U.K., as countries around the world attempt to shore up their energy supplies amid the ongoing crisis in Ukraine.

The NeuConnect project is centered around subsea cables that will enable 1.4 gigawatts of electricity to pass in both directions between the U.K. and Germany -- Europe's two largest economies. The interconnector measures 725 kilometers, or just over 450 miles.

Those behind NeuConnect have dubbed the privately-financed venture an "invisible energy highway" and have described it as "the first direct link between the UK and German energy markets." [...]

For Germany, it says "the new link with Britain will help ease current bottlenecks where wind turbines are frequently powered-down due to an excess of renewable energy being created."

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

In criticizing originalism, Vermeule borrows rather liberally from what he calls "progressive constitutionalism"--the view that the Constitution should be read with its purposes and principles in mind. He argues that progressives get some important things right about the nature of legal interpretation. Indeed, throughout his book, Vermeule relies heavily on Ronald Dworkin, the most influential American legal philosopher of the 20th century and a liberal critic of originalism. Dworkin argued that our legal system comprises much more than the Constitution, statutory texts, administrative regulations, and executive orders. All those different types of laws are created against the backdrop of often unwritten legal principles, which are drawn from our best understanding of political morality. When judges interpret the law, they are always trying to explain its meaning in a way that is justified by those principles.

Vermeule thinks that Dworkin was right about the importance of moral principles in understanding the law. He just thinks Dworkin had the wrong principles.

BUBBLE BOY:

The Russo-Japanese War was a rude awakening for the Tsar of All the Russians. He reeled at the news that the tiny island nation -- approximately two per cent of Russia's land mass -- could defeat the Empire. His subjects, high and low, took note. Yet, Nicholai neither addressed his military shortcomings nor the social unrest they triggered, with fatal results twelve years later.

Although the current Russo-Ukraine War is far from over, Moscow's initial assault has, in military parlance, reached its "Culmination Point". Whilst being sold as "the end of Phase One", Putin's legions, because of their own logistical shortcomings, Ukraine's splendid defence, President Zelensky's inspirational leadership, and aided by the supply of Western munitions, cannot continue with their current plan of operations. Exhausted, they have paused to re-plan, reinforce and resupply. Tsar Vladimir the First has reached his "Tsushima moment" for many of the same reasons his predecessor was literally sunk by his supposedly inferior opponents, the Japanese.

Just as Ken Adam's Jewish family fled Nazi persecution in 1934, nine years earlier the Russian Jews, Judah and Anna Asimov, fled the unrest of Communist Russia, landing in New York in 1923. Their brilliant son, Isaac, born near Smolensk in 1920, but better known for his Foundation and Robot series of science fiction, once observed that "the easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists".

Faced with his own Tsushima, Vladimir Putin still has a chance to recalibrate his nation and his army. However, on past form, the real-life Ian Fleming villain, wrapped in his billions, lurking in his professional Neanderthal cave, surrounded by his men in black, will likely conform to Asimov's astute assertion of denial, and burrow deeper into the lair he has built for himself.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

State and local officials denounced a Rockville Centre woman for delivering an antisemitic tirade during a public meeting at the Long Island village last week. 

In the video, taken during the Rockville Centre Board of Trustees Meeting on April 4, Michelle Zangari is seen for eight minutes warning about Orthodox Jews opening synagogues and moving into Rockville Center. 

Zangari was particularly concerned that the village would come to resemble the nearby Five Towns, an area with a large Orthodox Jewish population. "I'm asking you to amend the [zoning] code," Zangari said. "So a synagogue cannot be on every residential street like they are in the Five Towns. Please believe me and other Five Towns transplants who know what can happen because we watched it."

TRUMPISM IS PUTINISM:

The time is coming "to again help our partner Trump to become president," state TV host Evgeny Popov recently declared. On Thursday's edition of the state television show The Evening With Vladimir Soloviev, Putin's pet pundits offered an update on plans for 2024.

"We're trying to feel our way, figuring out the first steps. What can we do in 2023, 2024?," Russian "Americanist" Malek Dudakov, a political scientist specializing in the U.S., said. He suggested that Russia's interference in the upcoming elections is still in its early stages, and that more will be accomplished after the war is over and frosty relations between the U.S. and Russia start to warm up. "When things thaw out and the presidential race for 2024 is firmly on the agenda, there'll be moments we can use," he added. "The most banal approach I can think of is to invite Trump--before he announces he's running for President--to some future summit in liberated Mariupol."

Dmitry Drobnitsky, an omnipresent "Americanist" on Soloviev's show, suggested that Tulsi Gabbard should be invited along with Trump. Dudakov agreed: "Tulsi Gabbard would also be great. Maybe Trump will take her as his vice-president?" Gabbard has recently become a fixture of state television for her pro-Russian talking points, and has even been described as a "Russian agent" by the Kremlin's propaganda machine.

OKAY, GROOMERS!:

In Jan. 2004, when Jayson Boebert was 24, he was arrested for exposing himself to two young women at a bowling alley. His future wife Lauren Roberts, 17, was also there. Boebert pled guilty to "public indecency and lewd exposure" and spent 4 days in jail and 2 years on probation. https://t.co/Zze2p7spxY

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 11, 2022

THANKS, UR!:

The investigation focuses on Hunter Biden's well-compensated work for foreign interests over the past decade or so, particularly for businesses or tycoons in Ukraine, China, and Kazakhstan. The main legal questions appear to be whether Hunter violated tax laws, committed money laundering, or acted as an unregistered foreign lobbyist.

Ethical questions have long swirled about Hunter's foreign consulting and investment work, which he began as his father was set to become vice president and continued amid tumultuous years for Hunter and the Biden family. Critics have argued he was at the very least trading on his father's name, or that foreign interests were paying him exorbitantly in hopes of pleasing his father. President Trump became obsessed with all this as Joe Biden prepared to challenge him for reelection, and Trump's allies have tried hard to make charges of Hunter's purported corruption stick to Joe -- so far without success.

But prosecutors' inquiry into Hunter reportedly dates back in some form to the Obama administration. Recent stories reference some doubts and differing opinions from investigators about the strength of the case, so it's not a certainty that he'll be indicted. And by all accounts, the investigation is focused on Hunter Biden, not Joe Biden.

THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS:

Two former top officials in the Trump White House have secured billions of dollars from the Saudi government, in the form of investments in their new private equity funds, the New York Times reports.

Driving the news: Jared Kushner's firm, Affinity Equity, scored a $2 billion commitment from Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund, while former Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin's Liberty Strategic Capital secured $1 billion.

ENERGY EPIPHANY:

A leading energy executive who once described rooftop solar tariffs as a hidden "scam" has now concluded that Queensland's nearly 4.5GW of distributed PV has helped displace 1GW of coal and gas generation and has proven to be "welfare enhancing."

Paul Simshauser, a former AGL chief economics who is currently CEO of the Queensland state-owned transmission network operator Powerlink, and remains a professor of economics at Griffith University, pointed to his newly published paper "Rooftop Solar PV and the Peak Load Problem" on LinkedIn late last week.

The extensive and highly technical paper, published on Science Direct here, examines the supply-side impacts of rooftop solar in Queensland, an energy market market historically dominated by coal plants, but where household solar uptake now leads the world at 41.8% penetration.

WHERE THE WAR ENDS:

Basheer was a young Taliban fighter barely out of his teens when the Islamic State group took over his village in eastern Afghanistan, nearly eight years ago. The militants rounded up villagers identified as members of rival extremist group the Taliban and killed them, often beheading them, forcing their families to watch.

Basheer escaped and lived in hiding during the following years when IS controlled several districts in Nangarhar province. Over time, he rose in the Taliban ranks.

Now known as Engineer Basheer, he is the Taliban intelligence chief in eastern Afghanistan, with a leading role in the campaign to crush IS. He hasn't forgotten the atrocities he saw in his home district of Kot.

"I can't explain their cruelty in words, whatever comes into your mind, they have done more than that," he told The Associated Press in a recent interview at his headquarters in Jalalabad, the capital of Nangarhar.

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

The controversial central figure, Saudi-backed President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, last Thursday agreed to "irreversibly" relinquish power to an eight-member transitional council, which will temporarily be in charge of Yemen's political, military and security sectors during the transition period until the election of a new president.

According to the presidential decree, the newly formed council will have all executive powers and the authority to hold talks with Yemen's Iran-backed Houthis and find a solution to the incessant violence. 

Possibly, the dramatic development can be attributed to growing Saudi frustration with Hadi, an unpopular figure, who, as Annelle Sheline at the Quincy Institute has pointed out, "had effectively empowered the Houthi rebels and others who opposed his rule."

A second reason could be the groundswell of opinion in the US Congress for ending American support for Saudi-led military actions in Yemen.  

The two-month-long ceasefire agreement during Ramadan brokered by the United Nations is an uneasy truce predicated on a delicate balance of forces on the ground. The Zaydi Shia Houthis control the capital city Sanaa and most of northern Yemen, bordering Saudi Arabia.  [...]

Also, the framework of discussions drawn up by UN special envoy Hans Grundberg of Sweden in effect ignores the existing Security Council resolutions that have called for Houthi disarmament and territorial surrender. Interestingly, Washington seems to be backing Grundberg's pragmatic approach toward the Houthis. 

Fundamentally, the regional alignments and priorities are changing. Saudi Arabia could be looking for an exit from the costly war and the United Arab Emirates has already rolled back its involvement.

nATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

[T]he FSB's bosses never believed an invasion would happen. And so, Russia being Russia, they siphoned the cash off into yachts in Cyprus and numbered Swiss accounts.

Imagine the scene when, toward the end of 2021, Putin called his spy chiefs in and asked them to confirm the bribes had been disbursed and that key Ukrainian institutions would throw in their lot with the Russian invader. The terrified FSB leaders assured him that, yes, all was well while desperately trying to find a way out of the hole they had dug for themselves.

Running away was not an option. Their former colleague Alexander Litvinenko had fled to London, accusing the FSB of having orchestrated the Moscow theater hostage crisis and apartment bombings. But living in London did not protect him. He was assassinated with polonium in 2006. Another former agent, Sergei Skripal, had moved to the sleepy English town of Salisbury, but he was poisoned with Novichok in 2018 by two GRU operatives. He survived, though an innocent bystander was killed. If even living under the queen's peace was no guarantee of safety, what could the corrupt FSB officers do?

It looks as if they did the only possible thing in their position. They sought to prevent the invasion from happening so that their embezzlement should not come to light. The way they appear to have done so is to have told their Western counterparts what was being planned, hoping that, once Putin knew that his plot had been uncovered, he would drop it. Hence the detailed knowledge that Britain and the United States had about what was coming -- knowledge that their governments made public and that Putin lamely denied.

In the event, of course, the invasion went ahead anyway. But the same structural problem continued to plague it -- namely that, in authoritarian states, people tell their bosses what they want to hear. It soon emerged that much of the money set aside for the modernization of the Russian military had also been diverted into private bank accounts. Tanks lacked basic spare parts. Weapons systems failed. But, again, no one wanted to be the bearer of bad news.

This brings us to a counterintuitive truth. Democracies, supposedly soft, decadent, and convulsed in culture wars, often turn out to be better at fighting than brutal dictatorships. This is not because their people are braver or more virtuous -- it's because they have systems in place that allow for greater transparency and speedier error correction.

DOMINION IMPOSES OBLIGATION:

Titled They Shall Inherit The Earth, the study examines the attitudes of millennial and older Gen Z Christians.

It found that three in five are very concerned about climate change, and two thirds want their local church to take action.

But it also found that 35 per cent of church leaders say they rarely preach on environmental matters, citing the politicisation of the issue as a key challenge.

This figure doesn't surprise Jessica Morthorpe.

She's the founder and director of the Five Leaf Eco Awards, an ecumenical program helping faith groups achieve sustainability goals like establishing community gardens, water tanks, and constructing giant crosses made of solar panels.

A large christian cross made of solar panels sits on the roof of a church

A church powered by a cross made of solar panels.(Supplied by Five Leaf Awards)

To her, though, caring for creation is pushback against the politicisation of religion.

 "Climate change has become this incredible political hot-button issue, which is just devastating," she says.

"That has therefore influenced the reception of churches to the issue, rather than churches starting with the Bible, and starting with what God has actually said about creation and a need to care for it."

Hattie feels a similar way.

"The issue of climate change needs to be depoliticised within the church," she says, "to the extent that we approach it from the perspective of our Christian duty to act justly."

CONSERVING:

[H]e runs through some of the differing types of definitions. Some examples are the dispositional types (think Samuel Huntington) the traditionalist types (think Michael Oakeshott) and, what I have coined, the sociologist types (think Karl Manheim). Neill then concentrates on what he believes are the two core aspects of conservatism. The first of these is the "extra-human" forces, or in other words, factors outside of human agency. This perhaps could be rephrased in a more Burkean or Kirkean style as the providential nature of human society, or perhaps in a more Scrutonian way as the transcendental order or authority. The second core aspect, according to Neill, is the concept of natural evolution of institutions, for example based on trial and error.

"X-RAYS OF DIZZY DEAN'S HEAD SHOW NOTHING":

IF YOU CAN'T BEAT 'EM....GET RID OF THE CONSTITUTION:

A coup. That's what Donald Trump Jr. was advocating for in a text message to his father's then-chief of staff Mark Meadows that laid out ways to subvert the Electoral College process and keep his father in power.

There are many alarming -- and even bone-chilling -- aspects of Trump Jr.'s November 5, 2020, text message.

But the most jaw-dropping is that the text was sent just two days after the 2020 election, when the result was still too close to call. That Trump Jr. was already pushing for several strategies -- from pressing Republican state legislators to put forward slates of fake "Trump electors," to firing the FBI Director and replacing him with a loyalist who would do Trump's bidding -- reveals the level of preparation and dogged determination within Trump's inner circle to keep him in power, no matter the outcome. [...]

Just last week, US District Court Judge David Carter wrote an opinion in response to Trump's former lawyer John Eastman, who asked the judge to withhold certain documents requested by the January 6 House select committee. In it, Carter wrote that Trump and Eastman had "launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history." But there's one line in particular that truly resonates upon reading Trump Jr.'s text messages: "It was a coup in search of a legal theory."

EASY BREEZY:

The wind farm will be able to produce 471 gigawatt hours per year -- enough to meet the demands of 148,000 households -- after it becomes fully operational in a month.

These types of projects have popped up across Spain in recent years, making it Europe's second-biggest wind power producer after Germany for installed capacity and the world's fifth biggest.

Wind power became the main source of electricity production in Spain last year, accounting for 23 percent, ahead of nuclear (21 percent) and gas (17 percent), according to national grid operator REE.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS (racial epithets alert):

The post attributed to Hampton, Virginia Electoral Board Chair David Dietrich was added to the platform in February 2021 and is just coming into public view for some reason.

The post appeared to be prompted by an effort by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, to expunge White supremacists and other far-right elements in the United States military.

Dietrich specifically mentioned Austin, who is Black, and claimed the measure was in fact a plot "to remove conservative, freedom-loving Americans from the roles."

He added, "These so-called 'leaders' are so vile and racist, there's no way to describe them other than in terms their own people understand. They are nothing more than dirty, stinking ni***rs.

"We are being forced into a corner by these enemies of the People. If it is a civil war they want, they will get it in spades. Perhaps the best way to pull us back from the brink is a good public lynching."

OKAY, GROOMERS!:

Prominent Republicans have slammed critics of Florida's new sex education bill that critics call "Don't Say Gay" as "groomers" and "pedophiles."

But some Florida Republicans are meanwhile accepting financial contributions from the old campaign committee of an ex-congressman who sent sexually explicit messages to underage boys working as congressional pages.

Former Republican Rep. Mark Foley, who resigned his West Palm Beach district seat over the 2006 messaging scandal, has made $118,250 in donations and sponsorship to the Republican Party of Palm Beach County since 2010 through his ex-campaign committee Friends of Mark Foley for Congress. 

ALL JOE HAS TO DO IS NOT BE DONALD:

By one calculation, the U.S. workforce today has 2 million fewer immigrants than it would have if immigration had continued at pre-pandemic levels. That gap is especially being felt in low-paying industries, such as leisure and hospitality, food services retail, and health care. 

"Sectors that are especially reliant on immigrant workers had significantly higher rates of unfilled jobs in 2021," economists Giovanni Peri and Reem Zaiour of the University of California, Davis, wrote recently.

Immigrants are especially crucial in health care, where they make up a disproportionate share of workers. One in five nurses, one in four health aides, and nearly one in two housekeepers and gardeners is an immigrant, according to research coauthored by Williams College economic professor Tara Watson.

The immigration drop coincides with other demographic trends that are squeezing the workforce. Americans are retiring in droves as baby boomers, the largest generation of workers, reaches retirement age -- a longstanding demographic shift that sped up during the pandemic.

The past year has seen the slowest population growth since America was founded, and a major reason is the immigration decline. 

ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, THEY WERE DEFRAUDING FELLOW RACISTS:

An ally of former President Donald Trump, who also led the campaign effort to raise funding to build the border wall, has agreed to enter a guilty plea on fraud charges amid accusations that he misappropriated funds for the project. The case is in connection with the We Build the Wall border project.

In addition to the fraud charges for attempt and conspiracy to commit wire, Brian Kolfage, a right-wing propagandist on social media, has reportedly agreed to enter a guilty plea for tax fraud for falsifying information on his 2019 taxes, according to court documents filed in the federal Southern District of New York.

THANK, VLAD!:

The visit of German Vice-Chancellor Robert Habeck to the UAE on March 21 marked the start of a new partnership between two emerging heavyweights in the business of hydrogen. But more important, it underscored the role that this "future fuel" could play in curbing climate change and freeing countries from current geopolitical bottlenecks.

Hydrogen offers three key attractions over traditional fossil fuels: It is versatile; it burns clean, is non-toxic and emits zero carbon dioxide; and it has diverse potential sources. It can replace natural gas in power, industry and chemical manufacture, and oil in long-distance transport. As Russia's war on Ukraine drags on, and European and Asian natural-gas prices reach record highs, hydrogen gains in attractiveness.

THE STROM THURMOND EFFECT:

On Thursday, the Department of Justice announced Ruben Verastigui has been sentenced to 151 months in prison on a federal charge of receipt of child pornography.

A Washington, D.C., resident, 29-year-old Ruben Verastigui has spent his entire career in conservative circles, including as an aide to the Trump re-election campaign and stints as a digital strategist for the Senate Republican Conference and the Republican National Committee.

YEAH, BUT IVERMECTIN TREATED THE RIGHT'S WORMS...:

A new study published Friday found COVID-19 vaccinations have prevented 2.2 million deaths in the United States.

The Commonwealth Fund study said 17 million hospitalizations were averted by the vaccines between December 12, 2020, and March 31, 2022.

More than $899 billion was saved in healthcare costs due to the vaccines, according to the Commonwealth Fund study.

The study found there would have been 66 million more COVID-19 infections without the vaccinations.

OPEN-SOURCE IT ALL:

Since Russia began its unprovoked war on Ukraine on Feb. 24, images of Ukrainian farmers pulling destroyed or abandoned Russian military hardware with their tractors have captivated followers on social media. The resilience and tenacity of Ukrainians in their David and Goliath fight against Russia has endeared governments and civilians alike in an unprecedented and coordinated display of support for Ukraine.

These and similar images are one type of open-source intelligence, or OSINT, that are increasingly used by intelligence analysts, investigators and journalists to track and trace what is happening on the ground in real time. OSINT includes any publicly available source, much of which can be found online on social media platforms and in videos, webinars and speeches as well as tools such as satellite imagery that can be used in combination to triangulate data and verify facts.

Since the war began in Syria, the field of OSINT has evolved from being a niche interest of online amateur sleuths on the fringes to a mainstream method of investigation and research. Thanks to OSINT, the scale of Russia's troop build-up on Ukraine's borders and details about the type of military hardware it was using was known months before the invasion. Since then, data has been collected for a range of categories including materiel losses, targets, casualties and potential war crimes as well as the quality and quantity of equipment and supplies on both sides.

TRUMPISM IS PUTINISM:

On its website, Infowars touted remarks by Tucker Carlson foreign policy muse Douglas Macgregor. Macgregor told a YouTube podcast that he was "extremely suspicious" at the "brilliant timing" and unanimous condemnation in the media of Russia's actions in Bucha, likening the condemnation to the lies used to sell the Iraq War. In the same podcast, Macgregor later said of the Bucha massacre that "it's hard for me to believe that this was a deliberate act done by the Russian military" and that "I looked at both sides of this and I couldn't come away with a certain conclusion one way or the other. There were things that didn't make a lot of sense."

During the April 4 broadcast of Human Events Daily with Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate conspiracy theorist claimed "we can't tell what happened" in Bucha and "both sides have their grievances." The comments were boosted by The Post Millennial, a right-wing blog. Posobiec has a history of boosting Russian-backed conspiracy theories about the war in Ukraine.

Former presidential candidate Ron Paul claimed on the April 5 edition of the Ron Paul Liberty Report that he's "very suspicious of what we're hearing, just who has been doing what." His co-host Daniel McAdams repeated denial narratives, saying, "We do not know what happened in this small town," and went on to describe a timeline of events that implied Russian forces were not behind the massacre.

During a livestream on Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, militia-linked radio host Pete Santilli claimed the massacre was faked and the CIA was behind it. The episode also included a video sourced from Infowars that supposedly proved the massacre was faked.

On CrossTalk, a Christian nationalist show hosted by QAnon conspiracy theorist Lauren Witzke and Edward Szall, the co-hosts claimed Russian forces in Bucha were "helping the Ukrainians; they weren't abusing them, they weren't doing terrible things to them," as evidenced by images of food packaging alongside the dead.

Witzke also claimed to have heard rumors Ukrainians are accepting help from Russian forces and said she has "nothing but respect for Putin. And you know what, it's a daggum shame that they're doing this crap to people, that they're murdering people, just so they can paint him as this horrible leader, this tyrant." The episode, which was cross-posted to the "Stew Peters Network" page on Rumble, is titled "Ukrainian War Crimes in Bucha Exposed: Zelensky's MI6 Nazi False Flag Murdered Kids."

BUT SURELY IT'S A COINCIDENCE...:

Life is rife with coordination problems. Consider passing someone on the street going the other way. You both have a shared incentive to coordinate about which side of the sidewalk to walk on, so that you don't bump into each other. Even though the other person is a complete stranger, there is no particular reason she would try to deceive you. In such circumstances, people will send signals (eg, stop before making a sudden exaggerated movement toward one side) to successfully coordinate. Mathematical models show that these costless signals can be crucial in helping people solve otherwise thorny coordination problems.

Coordination is crucial in the moral domain too. Imagine you live in a society that practises slavery, and you think you are the only one morally revulsed by it. Should you speak out about your concerns? If you think that everyone else is indifferent, you might be afraid that others will think you are weird, that the people benefiting from the system will punish you, and that you stand no chance to make a difference anyway.

The paradox is that, even if many people are in this situation - everyone is concerned but convinced that no one else is - they might fail to act, despite having the majority opinion. But speaking up can start a chain reaction. The more individuals raise their voice to denounce what they see as a moral problem, the more the initially silent people realise they are not alone and speak up in turn.

When everyone can expect everyone to know, it is harder for you to claim ignorance as a defence

Loud and public signals are especially effective as establishing common knowledge of a moral norm ­making sure that everyone knows about the moral norm, that everyone else knows that everyone knows about the moral norm, that everyone knows that everyone knows that everyone knows (and so on). Psychology experiments have demonstrated that common knowledge is a powerful determinant of social behaviour: people are much more likely to coordinate on a joint action when everyone knows that everyone knows that working together will generate good outcomes.

In addition to fostering coordination, common knowledge prevents people from hiding behind the veil of plausible deniability. To get away with selfish behaviour, we often pretend to ignore its consequences. If you can plausibly say that you didn't know about the poor working conditions of people in sweatshops, people will judge you less harshly for buying cheap clothes. But if many people virtue signal by campaigning for better workers' rights, the issue rises to common awareness - and, when everyone can expect everyone to know, it is harder for you to claim ignorance as a defence.

Viewing morality as a coordination game suggests that public opinion can undergo rapid shifts, as society coordinates on new moral norms. And this is indeed what we observe: public opinion on a variety of subjects - such as racism and gay rights - has shifted dramatically in a progressive direction over the past few decades (sometimes within a few weeks).

In sum, virtue signalling can be a powerful force for social change, by creating common knowledge around a moral issue that people would otherwise ignore (out of complacency or selfishness). Importantly, this works even when there is no guarantee the people who are sending the signals are particularly virtuous or committed to the cause.

I DON'T THINK THAT WORD MEANS WHAT HE THINKS IT MEANS:

It is happening at a shocking rate. More than once a week, a Russian general is killed in Ukraine. When Lt. Gen. Yakov Rezantsev was killed in a Ukrainian strike on the Chornobaivka air base near Kherson -- a city the Russians had captured and held in the early days of the war -- it brought the total to seven, according to Western and Ukrainian officials. Rezantsev had reportedly told his troops on Feb. 28 -- four days after the Russian invasion began -- that the war was nearly over.

In two decades in Vietnam, the U.S. lost nine generals, most of whom were killed when their helicopters were shot down. During the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, one American general died; he was shot by an Afghan soldier. World War II might offer the closest comparison to what is happening to the Russians in Ukraine. According to Aleksander Maslov's book, "Fallen Soviet Generals," roughly six or seven generals died each month during that war. That's about where Russia is now.

Overall Russian casualty figures are high as well; two weeks ago, NATO officials estimated that between 7,000 and 15,000 Russian troops had been killed in Ukraine. But generals don't usually operate near the front lines. As commanders, they direct their juniors from a distance. And they are more closely guarded and protected than their soldiers. In short, they shouldn't be in the line of fire.

"Inconceivable," David Petraeus, a four-star general and former CIA director, told Grid.

ALL JOE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

The International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) is filing a lawsuit on behalf of a separated Somali family which it hopes will see them be reunited in the US. 

It is the second lawsuit of its kind in less than a month and the NGO says these cases reflect a legacy of the previous Trump administration's controversial Muslim ban.

"It's part of the same problem - the Muslim ban," Mariko Hirose, IRAP litigation director told The New Arab.   

"This administration really needs to take a close look at what the Trump administration did with the Muslim ban and make sure all the effects are repealed."

HE MAY NOT HAVE BEEN ON THE SOVIET PAYROLL...:

Le Carré told us, in no uncertain terms, that Britain had had it. That our game was up. He even encouraged us to sympathise with, if ultimately reject, the calculation made by Bill Haydon, that for anyone raised to manage an Empire, our role overseas was now so trivial, our hopes of influence so futile and embarrassing, that a Cold War traitor was something to be.

The final scene, of Smiley's unfaithful wife openly laughing at George's incomprehension at the mysterious failure of his marriage, and the world at large, was many things, but feel good it certainly was not. This was a Captain going down with his ship. Sure, Haydon had got his comeuppance, but there was no hero whose fate we could choose in his stead. The alternative, it seemed, was to take our pills and not make a fuss.

We remain a destination that millions are willing to literally risk their lives for

And yet. Even as the series went to air, a new Government was settling into Number 10. On the horizon, invariably overcast but settled throughout the 70s, a storm was coming. The nation was about to be offered an alternative after all -- or rather, the stern admonition that there was no alternative, none at all. Whatever else she wrought in the next decade, by the time Margaret Thatcher limped off stage with her own wounded back eleven years later, the Cold War had been won -- a victory in which Britain's role was recognised pretty much everywhere other than in Britain itself, as having been as crucial as that of Ronald Reagan, Lech Wałęsa and Pope John Paul II himself.

Britain may never again know the power and might that Bill Haydon grew up believing to be his birthright. But as I write, we have somehow shrugged off the greys and browns, the tonal palate of the 70s casserole recipe book which seem to have defined the George Smiley era. The red stars which hover in extraordinary abundance over London's night skyline, are those of commerce, investment and the future. Baffling as it seems to many of us, we remain a destination, a society that millions of migrants and refugees around the world are willing to literally risk their lives (and France) to come to and be part of.

nATIONALISM IS THE UNIVERSAL ENEMY:

A long-time Social Democrat lawmaker in the Swedish city of Uppsala who now edits a party newsletter in Stockholm, Gustavsson says Moscow's decision to attack Ukraine has scrambled the security picture facing Russia's neighbors and it is now time for Sweden to join the defense alliance. 

"It is a whole new chapter," Gustavsson said. "We need to reconsider how we position ourselves."

Stalwart Social Democrats like Gustavsson -- who started his political career in the party's youth wing -- are in sharp focus because they could hold the key to what happens next with NATO membership in both Sweden and Finland. 

While center-right opposition parties in both countries swung behind joining the alliance -- and its central concept of mutual defense -- several years ago, Social Democrats in the two countries remained skeptical, blocking any move toward accession. 

If the likes of Gustavsson back a U-turn on NATO in large numbers, that could give Sweden and Finland's Social Democrat prime ministers a mandate for a once-in-a-generation remaking of security policy -- if they choose it.

At the same time, public sentiment has been shifting.

In Sweden, support for joining NATO among the population as a whole has risen from around 35 percent to 46 percent over the past month. In Finland, it has spiked to over 60 percent. 

Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said on Saturday that talks on potential NATO membership in her country should be concluded "this spring."

IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR ANGLO:

[M]ultiple non-white ethnic-minority groups are ahead of their white British peers in terms of academic attainment. In the 2020/21 academic year, England-based pupils of Chinese (69.2), Indian (62.0), Bangladeshi (55.6), Black African (52.2) and Pakistani origin (50.5) achieved, on average, better "Attainment 8" results in than their white British peers (50.2). Exposing the crudely homogenising nature of the terms "Black" and "White", Black Caribbean-heritage pupils are behind their co-racial counterparts of African heritage by 8.2 points (44.0), while Irish-origin ethnic-minority pupils are notably ahead of their co-racial British peers by 5.5 points (55.7).

But there are multiple patterns at play that challenge tired orthodoxies surrounding social class and material deprivation. It is true that within every single ethnic group, pupils on free school meals (FSM) have a lower average Attainment 8 score than co-ethnic counterparts who are not on free school meals. However, there are pupils on free school meals in certain ethnic groups who are outperforming non-free school meal pupils in others -- and in some cases, the differences are striking. 

Chinese-origin pupils on free schools are an astonishing 13.4 points ahead of white-British pupils not on free school meals (66.5 and 53.1 out of 90 respectively). Making a complete mockery of the utterly useless "BAME" acronym, Bangladeshi-origin pupils on free school meals are, on average, a higher-achieving group than their Black Caribbean-origin peers who are not on free school meals (51.5 and 46.8 out of 90 respectively).

There is no doubting that the white British working-class pupils -- especially boys -- are struggling on the whole in our school system. White British pupils in England who are on free school meals have an average Attainment 8 score of just 35.8 out of 90. Indeed, the "free school meals" effect is the strongest within the white British ethnic group -- a gap of 17.3 points. But the reality of the matter is that are a number of cases which demonstrate that economically deprived non-white ethnic minorities are outperforming relatively "well off" peers in the white British mainstream. What are the reasons for this? 

There is no doubt that a robust school culture based on hard work and discipline can lift educational standards. But it is time to recognise that much of the shaping of youth educational outcomes and personal development does not take place in public institutions -- but is influenced by family life, parental approaches and community-based relationships. 

NO ONE BELIEVED THAT PARADIGM ANYMORE ANYWAY:

The result has been described as "shocking" by Prof David Tobak, who is the project co-spokesperson.

The discovery could lead to the development of a new, more complete theory of how the Universe works.

"The world is going to look different," he told BBC News. "There has to be a paradigm shift. 

THE BLIND HATRED LEADING THE BLIND TECH:

Late in the 2020 presidential campaign, trailing in the polls, Donald Trump and his allies worked to make a campaign issue out of a trove of files on a laptop that his opponent's son, Hunter Biden, had apparently abandoned at a Delaware repair shop. The effort to publicize compromising emails, images, and videos from the device involved prominent Trump confidants including Rudy Giuliani and Steven Bannon. But it also featured an unexpected player: Guo Wengui, a fugitive Chinese tycoon who was working with Bannon to build a small empire of Chinese-language media outlets, nonprofits, and other ventures.

Mother Jones obtained scores of WhatsApp audio messages Guo sent to supporters, along with underlying material from Biden's hard drive that Guo's assistant distributed at his behest. Previous reports have noted the role of Guo allies and companies in publicizing sex tapes and other material involving Hunter Biden. But the WhatsApp messages, and sources who were involved in the effort, reveal that Guo--who has been accused in lawsuits of fraud and rape and of secretly acting as an agent for the Chinese Communist Party--played a larger role than previously known in ensuring that explicit images and videos from the laptop appeared online, and in spreading lies about them. (Guo has denied the allegations made in the lawsuits against him.)

Guo stage-managed an October 2020 effort to disseminate videos and pictures showing Hunter Biden engaged in sex acts and using drugs. After Giuliani, then President Trump's personal lawyer, gave him material from Hunter Biden's laptop, Guo issued detailed instructions to two WhatsApp groups that included dozens of Guo's supporters. Guo directed these supporters to package, post, and promote hundreds of explicit images and other material about Biden on websites Guo controlled, people involved in the effort said.

The material Guo publicized seems to be real, but he instructed supporters to couple it with false claims that it came from Chinese sources, and that the Chinese government had used it to obtain leverage over Hunter Biden and his father, Joe Biden. "We have to express...The Chinese Communist Party used these to threaten Hunter and [Joe] Biden," Guo told supporters in an October 24, 2020, message. (Mother Jones is quoting English translations of messages that were originally in Chinese. Multiple people independently verified the translations.)

People who helped Guo publish the material online said that it quickly became clear to them that he was lying about China's role. "They tried to link the Biden family to the [Chinese Communist Party]," said a person involved in the effort, who shared Guo's WhatsApp messages with Mother Jones and requested anonymity. "They wanted to help Trump win."

...I'M MELTING...:

The Right are such snowflakes. #allcomedyisconservative https://t.co/r7dmIAfJ7F

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 7, 2022

Q IS THE COVERUP:

Do they not remember Dennis Hastert--who was House Speaker for eight years--went to prison for abusing four boys and attempting to defraud a bank out of $3.5 million to keep one of them silent?

Have they forgotten former Rep. Mark Foley, who tried to seduce teenage boys whom he met when they were congressional pages? What about Judge Roy Moore, who pursued girls as young as 13 when he was in his thirties so flagrantly that, according to numerous sources, he was banned from a local mall? (Even after the allegations against Moore were made public, then-President Donald Trump still backed him in his losing race for U.S. Senate from Alabama.)

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee "forgave" Josh Duggar, family values activist and star of 19 Kids and Counting after he admitted to molesting five young girls, two of them his own sisters. There's no record of Huckabee's forgiveness, or not, when six years later Duggar was arrested on child pronography charges for content the arresting agent called among the "worst of the worst" he'd ever seen, featuring as it did a baby just 18 months old.

Sitting Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, a MAGA favorite, was once an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State University in the 1990s. Members of those teams charged Jordan with refusing their appeals to stop Dr. Richard Strauss from sexually abusing them (Jordan denies these charges). Team captain Adam DiSabato testified before the Ohio legislature that Jordan called him "crying, groveling, begging me to go against my brother, begging me, crying for a half-hour. That's the kind of cover-up that's going on there." According to the AP, there were 2,200 instances of fondling and 127 instances of rape attributed to Strauss, who died in 2005. When a lawsuit against Ohio State, brought by nearly 300 plaintiffs, goes to trial, the congressman may be called to account under oath for his actions, or lack of them.

OPEN THE BORDERS:

Hit by regular power cuts and with popular sites like Twitter and TikTok blocked, the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan hardly seems a likely candidate for a tech boom.

But with Russia's invasion of Ukraine driving an exodus of IT specialists to former parts of the Soviet Union, authorities in Uzbekistan are hoping to speed up plans to modernise an economy best known for its vast production of cotton.

It took only one day after Russia's February 24 invasion of Ukraine for Uzbekistan to launch a one-stop government relocation programme for IT specialists and companies.

Offering visas, housing and child care support to individuals, and registration assistance and tax exemptions to companies, the programme has already attracted some 2,000 foreign IT specialists, the government said.

THANKS, VLAD!:

Germany wants to fight the climate crisis and its heavy dependence on fossil fuel imports by speeding up the rollout of renewables with a massive overhaul of key energy legislation.

In the "biggest energy policy reform in decades," the coalition of Social Democrats (SPD), Greens and Free Democrats (FDP) proposes to lift the rollout of wind and solar power "to a completely new level" in a draft law amounting to more than 500 pages.

It aims to free up new land for green power production, speed up permit procedures, and massively increase wind and solar additions to achieve a nearly 100-percent renewable power supply by 2035.

After little more than 100 days in office, Germany's new government has presented what it calls the "biggest energy policy reform in decades" to massively increase the buildout of renewable energies.

A RACE, NOT A RELIGION:

Ukraine's Ambassador to Israel Yevgen Korniychuk walked out of a briefing to foreign ambassadors given by Defense Minister Benny Gantz and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid on Wednesday, after Gantz supposedly called the Russian invasion a "conflict" and even-handedly discussed Israel's ties with both parties.

"Mr. Gantz started to talk about the Ukraine-Russia conflict, and that they are talking with both Ukrainian and Russian friends or colleagues," Korniychuk told The Times of Israel.

"Listen, if on the 42nd day of the war, with the bloodshed and massacre that Russia has been doing against innocent Ukrainian people, you are still calling this a conflict, there is really nothing to talk about," Korniychuk continued.

THE MINIMUM SHOULD BE A FREE TRADE AGREEMENT:

Members of the Iranian parliament submitted a letter to the country's President Ebrahim Raisi on April 5, calling on him to take a tougher stand in the currently paused indirect talks with the United States over the revival of the 2015 nuclear deal.

Drafted by hard-line lawmaker Mahmoud Nabavian, the letter received signatures from 190 members, more than two thirds of the conservative legislative body. 

According to Iranian media outlets, the document specifically urged Raisi to seek "more robust guarantees" from Washington before any new accord, which Tehran and world powers have been intensely negotiating in multiple rounds over the past year.  

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

The JET tokamak is the largest and most advanced magnetic fusion reactor currently operating. But the next generation of reactors is already in the works, most notably the ITER experiment, set to begin operations in 2027.

ITER - which is Latin for "the way" - is under construction in France and funded and directed by an international organization that includes the U.S.

ITER is going to put to use many of the material advances JET showed to be viable. But there are also some key differences. First, ITER is massive. The fusion chamber is 37 feet (11.4 meters) tall and 63 feet (19.4 meters) around - more than eight times larger than JET.

In addition, ITER will utilize superconducting magnets capable of producing stronger magnetic fields for longer periods of time compared to JET's magnets. With these upgrades, ITER is expected to smash JET's fusion records - both for energy output and how long the reaction will run.

ITER is also expected to do something central to the idea of a fusion powerplant: produce more energy than it takes to heat the fuel. Models predict that ITER will produce around 500 megawatts of power continuously for 400 seconds while only consuming 50 MW of energy to heat the fuel.

This means the reactor produced 10 times more energy than it consumed - a huge improvement over JET, which required roughly three times more energy to heat the fuel than it produced for its recent 59-megajoule record.

JET's recent record has shown that years of research in plasma physics and materials science have paid off and brought scientists to the doorstep of harnessing fusion for power generation. ITER will provide an enormous leap forward toward the goal of industrial-scale fusion power plants.

THERE'S A REASON FOX DOESN'T DO NEWS ANYMORE:

Consider the actual science. A recent large, double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial (considered the gold standard in research) from Brazil confirmed what dozens of studies have already found. In brief: Ivermectin does not help reduce hospital admissions or emergency room visits for patients with Covid. In fact, the data is so compelling that one could argue any doctor that prescribes this medicine for a patient should have their credentials re-evaluated.

Ivermectin is an anti-parasitic that has been in use for animals since the 1970s and was eventually found to have clinical use in humans for treating lice, scabies and other parasitic diseases. Its use against Covid was born out of the early days of desperation during the pandemic when we were throwing any possible treatment for Covid as physicians, nurses and public health officials were trying to understand the very basic elements of the virus.

Laboratory-based studies in nonhuman subjects showed some promise in a paper that was later withdrawn. The drug's popularity really took off in December 2020, when Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., chaired a hearing during which he accused the government of silencing health professionals and doctors who recommended alternative cures for Covid. The hearing garnered over a million views on social media platforms, lending instant credibility to the claims made by doctors who have no support from any reputable medical organization, including the American Medical Association and the American Pharmacists Association.

A cottage industry has since developed, with millions of dollars flowing to telemedicine companies who offer sympathetic videos that seem reasonable with no discussion of risks or benefits ... all for $89 out of pocket.

There is black and white evidence that ivermectin not only does not help Covid patients, but also that when the product intended for animals is taken by humans, it can cause harm, including a dramatic increase in calls to poison control centers nationwide. But the damage is done.

Unfortunately, for now the business of lies is winning.

JUDGES MAKE BAD LEGISLATORS:

The Journal's findings are roughly in keeping with what years of survey data have consistently shown: On the whole, Americans want abortion to be legal early in pregnancy or when there is a medical emergency, but they are against an unlimited right to abortion once a fetus is further along.

Contrary to what many abortion rights advocates may believe, an abortion limit of 15 weeks does not amount to a "near-total ban." Indeed, it would not affect most abortions. The overwhelming majority of abortions in the United States -- 93 percent, by the estimate of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- are performed within the first 13 weeks of pregnancy. If the high court sustains Mississippi's law, it may put a dent in the extremely permissive abortion regime that Roe authorized, but it won't make abortion in America rare or illegal.

It would, however, make America less of an outlier among its international peers.

The United States is one of only seven nations that permit elective abortion past 20 weeks of gestation until fetal viability. As Chief Justice John Roberts remarked during the Dobbs oral argument in December, "we share that standard with the People's Republic of China and North Korea." (The other four are Canada, Singapore, the Netherlands, and Vietnam).

Of the 198 countries whose abortion laws were analyzed in a 2014 study by the Lozier Institute and a 2017 report by the Guttmacher Institute, roughly two-thirds allow abortion for specified grounds. These vary widely, from the very restrictive -- for example, in cases of rape or incest -- to the broadly permissive, such as mental well-being or socioeconomic concerns. The remaining countries, about 60 in number, permit abortion for any reason, but only for a specified gestational period, which in most cases is 12 weeks.

Among the nations of Europe, 13 countries prohibit abortion on demand entirely and allow a pregnancy to be terminated only in "exceptional cases," according to the European Centre for Law and Justice, which filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the Dobbs case. Of the remaining 34 countries where abortion can be accessed without having to give a reason, "eight states permit it only through the first 10 weeks of pregnancy, Estonia through 11 weeks, and a further 20 states through 12 weeks."

In short, the abortion laws of nearly every European country impose stricter gestational limits than the 15-week standard of the Mississippi law.

ON TO MOSCOW:

Nothing in Russia works well, even without a nuclear war. How much worse would it be with a totally unreliable, ineffectual military and a police state sucking up whatever's left? Any food and medicine would be distributed to the guys with the guns.

This is where the delusions become suicidal. If an undamaged Russian nation can't even manage logistics for 200,000 troops, how do they manage supporting 140 million nuked people? It's an absurd idea at best and likely to be fatal for a large number of people at worst.  

"Z" now means "Zero". That's the sum total of what's been achieved and that's the future unless some sanity finds its way back into Russian national thinking. In less than two months, Russia has gone from a menacing revived superpower to a repulsive global psychopath trapped in a series of self-inflicted impossible positions it can't even address, let alone manage.

SOUNDS LIKE TUCKER:

Some of these people said America brought 9/11 on itself. Some made excuses for al-Qaeda and for the Taliban, chanted 'We are all Hezbollah' and think of Hamas as a progressive liberation movement.

This is also the part of the left that spent years ignoring or denying the overwhelming evidence of antisemitism in the Labour Party, and that parroted the Kremlin's conspiracy theories over who really used chemical weapons against civilians in Syria and Salisbury. No wonder they find it so easy to pivot to questioning the evidence of Russian atrocities in Bucha.

Take David Miller, who was a professor at Bristol University until he was sacked last October following various antisemitic comments about Jewish students. He was on Kremlin propaganda channel RT recently, claiming that the bombing of the Mariupol theatre never happened: apparently it was a 'false flag' designed to trick the watching public that the Russians are the bad guys.

Miller also appeared on Iran's Press TV alongside the rapper Lowkey and former Labour MP Chris Williamson to discuss just how pro-Nazi, exactly, the Ukrainian state and its Jewish president is. According to Lowkey the mainstream media has 'weaponised the Jewish heritage' of President Zelenskyy to mask Ukraine's Nazism. Lowkey's previous work has included conspiracy theories about 9/11 and memorable lines about Israel like 'every coin is a bullet if you're Marks & Spencer' and how buying coffee from Starbucks funds 'the Zionist lobby'.

For this, he gets to be a patron of the Stop The War Coalition and of Jeremy Corbyn's Peace & Justice Project.

ESCAPING THE BUBBLE:

Brockman and Kalla, journalist Sravasti Dasgupta reports in The Independent, conducted an experiment in September 2020 and published the results in late March. The researchers explained, "Of 763 qualifying participants, we then randomized 40 percent to treatment group. To change the slant of their media diet, we offered treatment group participants $15 per hour to watch seven hours of CNN per week, during September 2020, prioritizing the hours at which participants indicated they typically watched Fox News.... Despite regular Fox viewers being largely strong partisans, we found manifold effects of changing the slant of their media diets on their factual beliefs, attitudes, perceptions of issues' importance, and overall political views."

According to Dasgupta, the experiment, "found changes in attitudes and policy preferences about COVID-19, evaluations of then-President Donald Trump and Republican candidates as well as elected officials." The researchers also "found that participants became more likely to agree that if Donald Trump made a mistake, Fox News would not cover it." [...]

Brockman and Kalla said of their project, "We found large effects of watching CNN instead of Fox News on participants' factual perceptions of current events -- i.e., beliefs -- and knowledge about the 2020 presidential candidates' positions. They discovered changes in attitudes about Donald Trump and Republicans as well as a large effect on their opinions about COVID."

THAT WAS EASY:

Wind and solar generated 10% of global electricity for the first time in 2021, a new analysis shows.

Fifty countries get more than a tenth of their power from wind and solar sources, according to research from Ember, a climate and energy think tank.

nATIONALISM IS AS nATIONALISTS DO:

The first vote, taken on March 2, was on a resolution that endorsed sanctions against Russia, reaffirmed Ukrainian sovereignty over territory seized by Russia, advocated military aid to Ukraine, and pledged to support the Ukrainian resistance. All six members of the progressive "Squad"--Reps. Jamaal Bowman, Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib--voted for the resolution. So did Rep. Barbara Lee, the Democrats' foremost opponent of military spending. Not one Democrat voted against the resolution. But three Republicans did: Reps. Paul Gosar, Thomas Massie, and Matt Rosendale.

On March 9, the House passed a bill to suspend oil and gas imports from Russia. Five of the seven Democratic leftists voted for the suspension. The two who voted against it--Bush and Omar--were joined by 15 Republicans who also voted no. In addition to Gosar and Massie, this time the list included Reps. Andy Biggs, Dan Bishop, Lauren Boebert, Madison Cawthorn, Scott DesJarlais, Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Glenn Grothman, Clay Higgins, Bill Posey, Chip Roy, and Tom Tiffany.

On March 17, the House passed a bill to end favorable trade relations with Russia and its accomplice in the war, Belarus. Eight Republicans voted against the bill. Every Democrat, including the seven leftists, voted for it.

Several Republicans have gone further. Cawthorn and Gosar are pushing legislation that would prohibit the U.S. military from deploying "by reason of the situation in Ukraine" any more troops than are stationed at the Mexican border. No sensible military planner would want more troops guarding a friendly border than deterring an imminent threat to our most important alliance, but that's what this bill would do: It would block deployments to NATO countries in Eastern Europe. It's a gift to Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, 10 Republicans have signed on to a bill that would bar any delivery of military aid to Ukraine until "a border wall system along the United States-Mexico border is completed." The cosponsors include Reps. Bob Good, Jody Hice, Mary Miller, Ralph Norman, and Randy Weber. (Don't bother trying to square this demand with Trump's insistence that he has basically built the wall, except for a couple of tiny spots.)

Altogether, that's 21 Republicans who have opposed, or at least sought to constrain, aid to Ukraine or sanctions on Russia. That's a group three times the size of "the Squad," which Republicans claim is in control of every aspect of Democratic policy. Imagine how much power those 21 Republicans would wield in a GOP-controlled House.

THERE IS NO BEAR IN THE WOODS:

This wouldn't be the first time that Russian or Soviet troops have refused to cooperate with orders in a conflict. During the Russo-Japanese War, Russian troops on the battleship Potemkin famously mutinied in June 1905. Much of the Russian fleet had been destroyed in the Battle of Tsushima the previous month and the Russian navy was left with some of its most inexperienced recruits. Facing deplorable working conditions, including being served rancid meat, 700 sailors mutinied against their own officers on one of the most powerful battleships in the world.

In the Second World War, Joseph Stalin tried to ensure troop obedience by implementing a zero-tolerance policy towards surrender. 'Order number 227', issued in July 1942, dictated that any soldier that retreated was to be immediately killed by special units. By some estimates, these units killed as many as 150,000 of their own troops. And yet, no other Allied army had as many defections, with over 1.4 million Soviet POWs choosing to fight alongside German soldiers.

Several decades later, the USSR's conflict with Afghanistan brought further challenges for the Red Army. The Soviet army was comprised of conscripts who had no training in guerrilla warfare, and felt little identification with their mission. Draft resistance among recruits from the Central Asian and Baltic republics was common, even though draft dodging was a serious crime. Many Soviet soldiers were disillusioned with the atrocities they were forced to commit against innocent civilians.

Desertion was also widespread in Russia's first conflict with Chechnya (1994-96), where many were sent to fight in one of the harshest conflict environments without ever having fired a shot in training.

MET ONE nATIONALIST...:

Zionism in bed with anti-Semitism is quite the clarifying sight. https://t.co/kgEJXKGpIo

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) April 5, 2022

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

To most people, a solar farm or a geothermal plant is simply a power producer. Scientists and engineers see far more potential.

They envision offshore wind turbines capturing and storing carbon beneath the sea, and geothermal plants producing essential metals for powering electric vehicles. Electric vehicle batteries, too, can be transformed to power homes, saving their owners money.

With scientists worldwide sounding the alarm about the increasing dangers and costs of climate change, let's explore some cutting-edge ideas that could transform how today's technologies reduce the effects of global warming, from five recent articles in The Conversation.

THE LONG WAR IN A NUTSHELL:

Beliefs about the essential goodness or badness of human beings have been at the heart of much political theory. A recent book by the political philosopher Lea Ypi succinctly expresses the conflicting approaches. Speaking of her mother she's says:

"Everyone, she believed, fought as a matter of course, men and women, young and old, current generations and future ones. Unlike my father, who thought people were naturally good, she thought they were naturally evil. There was no point in trying to make them good; one simply has to channel that evil so as to limit the harm. That's why she was convinced socialism could never work even under the best circumstances. It was against human nature."

This negative view of human nature is associated with philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the more positive view with Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

THE ARSENAL OF FREEDOM:

Putin built his army on oil and gas earnings, and he's made Europe cower by threatening to turn off the energy spigot. Both can be addressed in part by the massive application of technology. The simple heat pump, for instance, which is basically a highly efficient air conditioner that also works in reverse, uses electricity to take the ambient heat from the outside air to warm a home.

Which means that if the United States delivers millions of heat pumps to Europe before October, then Putin's energy weapon would be much less potent. That's why five senators -- including both Massachusetts senators, Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren -- wrote to the White House last week asking President Biden to invoke the Defense Production Act and get America's air conditioner factories churning out the machines for immediate export.

As they put it, "With guaranteed federal contracts and other financial incentives, U.S. manufacturers will have the support they need to ramp up their production of electric heat pumps and key components -- creating thousands of jobs, boosting local economies, saving money for consumers, reducing unhealthy emissions, and destroying President Putin's oil and gas-based business model."

IT BEGINS WITH HATING AMERICA:

In a series of rhetorical questions, Carlson asked: 

Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle-class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?

"These are fair questions," he continued, coming to his point. "And the answer is no."

Carlson's defense of Putin immediately drew wide condemnation from liberals, who compared it to the way Donald Trump speaks about the Russian dictator. But another common theme of Carlson's is not so obviously illiberal. In early 2019, for example, he announced that 

Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You'd have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.

Carlson is hardly the only Republican striking this note nowadays. Republican Senator Josh Hawley regularly joins the show to denounce Big Tech monopolies. Senator Tom Cotton recently echoed Carlson's hostility to free markets in a speech in which, even while claiming the mantle of Ronald Reagan, he argued against "open borders, unfettered trade, and globalization," summing up with the peroration: "We are a nation with an economy, not an economy with a nation." In January, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy joined the new Republican rhetorical war on Big Business when he ripped into the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, saying it had no place in today's GOP. 

OPEN THE BORDERS:

Ten states recently hit the lowest unemployment rates they've seen since the Bureau of Labor and Statistics began keeping track of individual state data in 1976.

In February 2020, before the pandemic, unemployment was at 3.5%. The current rate is only slightly higher, at 3.8%.

The labor force is on track to grow only about 0.3% a year in the coming decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office, compared to over 1% as recently as 2005.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

One more promising study suggests that it might also be about the type of honey. Local honey will have a variety of pollen sources, each of which may not be enough to have substantial microbial communities to train the eater's immune system. Finnish researchers decided to test the effect of birch pollen honey--regular honey, but with added bee-collected birch pollen. Birch pollen is one of the dominant season allergy sources in Finland, so the scientists gathered volunteers who were allergic to the tree and prescribed them either regular honey or birch pollen-enriched honey. A third control group ate no honey. Those who got the extra birch pollen had significantly reduced symptoms and more symptom-free days, even more than those who got regular honey.

The one problem with this study is that the control group didn't get a placebo. They were simply advised not to eat any honey-containing foods during the study period. It's very possible that both forms of honey produced a strong placebo effect. The differences between the regular honey and birch pollen honey group weren't statistically significant, so this study may be a fluke. Or, the extra pollen may really have helped. We're still not sure.

All this being said, like all naturopathic remedies, you may genuinely feel better taking honey. These studies prove that the results you see are most likely the placebo effect--but the placebo effect can be helpful. If you believe the honey helps, then the honey helps. All that matters in the end is that you feel better, and if eating a tablespoon of honey is what enables you to spend summer days outside in the grass, you should go for it. Honey is delicious. Worst case scenario, you're consuming a natural sweetener that's less of a blood sugar rush than table sugar. Best case scenario, you help your allergies. It's no surprise this particular remedy has a lot of buzz.

SEEMS NOT TO BE REALLY CLEAR ABOUT HOW MARKETS WORK:

[O]ther times [California's extra jurisdictional power-grabs] involves regulations, like California's sweeping consumer privacy legislation or auto emissions standards. In all these cases, California took advantage of its status as the largest state economy in the country to effectively impose national law from Sacramento.

The Supreme Court's opportunity to rein this in comes in the form of yet another regulation on out-of-state businesses -- requiring pork producers selling into California to comply with requirements on the size of pig enclosures. By agreeing to hear the case of National Pork Producers v. Ross, the Court gave itself the opportunity not only to put California back within its own jurisdiction, but also to create a stronger precedent nationwide that a state's authority ends where its borders do.

At issue in this case is not the merits of regulations on the size of pig enclosures, but California's ability to impose them. The law being challenged requires all pork sold into California to abide by certain size requirements for pig enclosures. 

Note the way the law is written -- had California attempted to regulate pen sizes for California producers, there would be no constitutional issue. But since California imports 99.87 percent of its pork, the state no doubt determined that it would be far more impactful to regulate sales into the state.

As a state that represents roughly 15 percent of the national pork market, California leaves out-of-state producers with two bad choices. Either they must make costly alterations to their pig enclosures, or cut out a major market. Whichever option they choose, pork producers in Iowa will lose money as a result of a law passed in a state halfway across the country.

NEVER MIND hE LACKS THE THREE OMNIS...:

Belief in God is, naturally, the major and most consequential component in all theistic belief systems -- including their sense of ethics. While theologians and lay people alike have expended considerable time and effort trying to understand the nature of God, one question that has, regrettably, often been overlooked or neglected is what kind of God is ethically worth believing in.

Like other monotheistic traditions of the Axial Age, in the Islamic tradition -- to which I belong and with which I identify -- the question asked by theologians regarding the concept of the nature of God was primarily framed in terms of what kind of God is worthy of worship. Moreover, the answer to that question has predominantly placed the emphasis on the Divine attributes of omniscience and omnipotence. Such approaches to the concept of God which emphasise transcendent attributes -- whether they be in the Jewish, Christian, or Islamic tradition -- not only tend to come at the expense of conceptions of Divine relational love, but are also unable to exonerate God from failing to prevent the occurrence and persistence of evil. This amounts to endorsing what I would refer to as unethical conceptualisations of the Divine.

But what does it mean for one's concept of God to be ethical? It means, at very least, a refusal to conceptualise the Divine in ways that would allow us to ascribe to the nature of God characteristics that we would find offensive if we encountered them in human beings. According to this litmus test, any belief in the Divine that conceptually allows for the existence of an evil that God could in theory prevent but, for whatever reason, permits to take place, or a belief in Divinely sanctioned misogyny, can never be ethically (and therefore theologically) justified.

THAT TAIWAN IS PERMANENTLY FREE AND THE DRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

Another issue which has contributed to Russia's military woes is the low quality of its conscript force. Indeed, Ukraine has even turned images of Russian POW conscripts being allowed to call their mothers into a weapon in its information warfare. While some militaries, such as Israel, have managed to maintain a high-quality conscript force, a full-time professional force is generally considered to hold numerous substantial advantages, which is why most of the Western world now uses a voluntary recruitment model. Despite the copious hyper-masculine recruiting videos which so excited certain Western politicians, Russia has struggled to attract enough voluntary recruits to move away from its current system of 12-month conscription.

Despite some recent success in recruiting a higher-quality, more-educated voluntary force, the PLA has likewise failed to move away from conscription. It presently requires about 660,000 two-year conscripts, many lacking even partial high-school education, to fill out its ranks.  [...]

[W]hile the outward manifestation of many of the issues faced by the Russian military appear to be logistical in nature, the true heart of the issue may be corruption. There are reports that before the invasion Russian military officers sold off their fuel and food supplies, and that these corrupt practices may be responsible for the stalling of a Russian tank column outside Kyiv. In this regard, the PLA has much to fear. Corruption has plagued the PLA for decades, with some PLA officers bluntly stating in 2015 that it could undermine China's ability to wage war. Reportedly, more than 13,000 PLA officers have been punished in some capacity for corruption since Xi Jinping took power, including more than a hundred generals. This was a particular problem in the logistics sector, where there are more opportunities for corruption and links to the civilian economy.

Yet, despite the reorganization of the PLA and widespread prosecution of corruption cases, it still appears to be a major issue. Anti-corruption efforts are ongoing, with Chinese Gen. Zhang Youxia recently calling for innovative measures to keep up the fight. But the fact that Fu Zhenghua, the man brought in to take down the corrupt former security chief Zhou Yongkang, is himself now under investigation for corruption does not bode well for the long-term effectiveness of China's efforts. The troubled invasion of Ukraine provides a stark real-world example to Xi, the CCP, and PLA about the impact corruption can have on military effectiveness, and will no doubt cause them to redouble their anti-corruption efforts with a newfound urgency. However given its similar authoritarian system and emphasis on career advancement through patronage, systemic corruption may be baked into the system.

Finally, there is the strategic issue of Beijing's reaction to the global sanctions that have hit the Russian ruble and economy. The swift and severe economic retaliation of the U.S., EU, and others took Moscow by surprise. Even more unexpected was the rapid withdrawal of almost 500 global corporations, pushed on by an effective effort at naming and shaming them into acting to protect their own brands. A longer-term effort targeting essential elements of Russia's defense industry will hamstring it for years.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE (expletive alert):

"He's (expletive) crazy!" Sununu said in salty remarks that roasted members of both parties as well as the Washington journalists who cover them. The governor added: "The press often will ask me if I think Donald Trump is crazy. And I'll say it this way: I don't think he's so crazy that you could put him in a mental institution. But I think if he were in one, he ain't getting out!"

Sununu also spoke of being left astonished by an encounter with Trump when the former president was visiting New Hampshire for a political rally.

After greeting Trump at the airport, Sununu said Trump insisted he ride with him to the venue. Sununu said that Trump spent most of the ride obsessing over his polling numbers, but at one point broke his train of thought to point out that all the people holding American flags along the motorcade route were his fans.

Trump pointed to one man with a flag and sign before Trump returned to the topic of polling, Sununu recalled.

"I can't help but notice the guy he pointed at, the sign he's holding says, '(expletive, Trump!)," Sununu joked.

THE WORLD CAN'T ACTUALLY GET MORE UNIPOLAR:

In all my many travels to the Mideast over the years, I have never heard this level of frustration from Mideast government officials with American policymakers.

That said, they are watching Ukraine with fascination, because a Ukrainian victory -- with a strong, united West behind it -- would force a rethink about U.S. commitment and competence and shift the trajectory of declining transatlantic influence and relevance.

THE WAGES OF nATIONALISM:

Between 50,000 and 70,000 tech workers have left the country since late February, Sergei Plugotarenko, the head of the Russian Association of Electronic Communication, told a parliamentary hearing on March 22 dedicated to helping the IT industry weather the economic crisis triggered by the war and sanctions.

He warned that a "second wave" of as many as 100,000 IT specialists could leave next month.

WHO LOST ISRAEL?:

The UAE, like Saudi Arabia, has yet to launch a successful foreign military venture or successfully impregnate its territory against attacks by foreign adversaries. The UAE partially withdrew from the seven-year-old Yemen war without achieving its military objectives despite leaving local proxies behind, while Saudi Arabia is looking for a face-saving end to the conflict.

The Saudi-led coalition on Tuesday declared a one-month ceasefire during the holy month of Ramadan during a summit of the leaders of the Gulf Cooperation Council that groups Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and Oman. Yemen's Houthi rebels refused to join the meeting because it was held in Riyadh, the capital of one of the war's main protagonists.

Meanwhile, the two Gulf states have been unable to protect their infrastructure and oil facilities from missile and drone attacks by the rebels and potentially by Iran itself.

Israel's importance to the Arab states was highlighted by the fact that the first-ever such gathering, particularly on Israeli soil, was convened by the Jewish state rather than the UAE, for example, and held in the home of David Ben Gurion, a founder and the first prime minister of Israel.

To be sure, the Ukraine crisis has brought the Middle East's significance back to the fore, whether it relates to the diversification of the supply of oil and gas to Europe, the Middle East's impact on security beyond its borders, or stability in an era of defiance and dissent with the rise of the spectre of food riots in various Middle Eastern countries because of a spike in commodity prices.

By agreeing to attend a gathering in the home kibbutz of Mr. Ben Gurion, whom Palestinians hold co-responsible for their plight, Arab foreign ministers were further underlining Israeli power in the region.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Here's a reality that the insurrectionists who besieged the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, are now learning: When you physically attack a public institution and commit crimes against civil authorities, the criminal charges -- such as "seditionist conspiracy" -- you inevitably face are just the beginning. Just wait 'til the civil courts, where the people you have harmed get to sue you for damages, weigh in.

Just ask Stewart Rhodes and his compatriots in the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys, who already face those daunting criminal charges. This week they were added to the federal civil lawsuit filed late last year by D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine seeking to hold those groups, as well as others involved in the violent attack on the Capitol, financially culpable for the millions of dollars in damage they caused, including injuries to Capitol Police officers.

"We're committed to bankrupting the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys who conspired in the attack," Racine tweeted.

WE'LL NEVER KNOW HOW MANY BIG MACS HE PANIC-ATE:

Just days before the US Capitol riot, White House officials started providing fewer details about then-President Donald Trump's calls and visits, the person in charge of compiling those activities for the official record told the House select committee investigating January 6, 2021, according to two sources with knowledge of the probe.

The committee interviewed Trump's presidential diarist roughly two weeks ago. That interview has not been previously reported, nor has the testimony describing a noticeable drop-off in information provided by Oval Office staff leading up to January 6.

Other witnesses also have told the panel there was significantly less information being shared with those involved in White House record-keeping during the same time period, according to three sources familiar with the investigation.

One source described how White House record-keepers appeared to be "iced out" in the days leading up to January 6.

"The last day that normal information was sent was the 4th," said another source familiar with the investigation. "So, starting the 5th, the diarist didn't receive the annotated calls and notes. This was a dramatic departure. That is all out of the ordinary."

HOPEFUL SKEPTICS:

So why do we choose to believe in a framework where suffering and violence seem to be the world's most fundamental realities? How can pain and suffering coexist with these small joys that we experience daily?

 

Dostoevsky's answer to the second question is based on his conviction that hope is an essential part of the human spirit. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan Karamazov curses God to his brother, Alyosha, for the murder of innocent children. He writes a short story--"The Grand Inquisitor"--spurning God for enslaving humans in a world of suffering by making them dependent on faith. Nonetheless, Ivan declares he will always love life's small beauties, although it defies his own intellect:

I have a longing for life, and I go on living in spite of logic. Though I may not believe in the order of the universe, yet I love the sticky little leaves as they open in spring. I love the blue sky, I love some people, whom one loves you know sometimes without knowing why. I love some great deeds done by men, though I've long ceased perhaps to have faith in them, yet from old habit one's heart prizes them.

Despite the violence and heartache he witnesses in the world, he yet experiences--perhaps irrationally--a love of sticky little leaves because he innately believes them to be good. Ivan cannot extinguish the hope he has from the objects the world presents to him, a small but potent joy in the deepest core of his being.

Humans thus believe in bringing about a better world, despite rationality or external circumstances. In the wake of the somber aftermath of capitol riots and stark political polarization that divide our society, Amanda Gorman's poem was still met with resounding approbation at President Biden's inauguration. She declared, "For there is always light, / if only we're brave enough to see it / if only we're brave enough to be it." The very fact that this desire to see light exists proves that darkness has not overcome our world entirely. And we not only wish to hope, but we do hope. The human spirit holds belief in a better day as its impetus for living. It is natural for us to want to believe in the goodness of the world because it makes us feel joy.

Swift had a healthy skepticism toward any political science that promotes the centralization of governmental power, and any technology that undermines, rather than promotes, human well-being. And he was disenchanted with Enlightenment thinkers like Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, who prioritized the individual vis-a-vis the "social contract"--separating and alienating him as a result.

The genius of Gulliver's Travels is that it offers illuminating commentary regarding society and human experience by making you a dispassionate observer. Through this literary buffer, you are able to contemplate with greater acumen our own contemporary weaknesses and failings. You see the inconsequence of so many vain strivings. As the king of Brobdingnag says, "How contemptible a thing was human grandeur, which could be mimicked by such diminutive insects as [Gulliver]."

This does not mean that you should become a cynic or misanthrope, as many readers have interpreted Gulliver's development over the course of the novel. The Brobdingnagian king concludes the "bulk" of humanity "to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

Maybe he's right. But the race that produced Swift's satire also gave us Shakespeare's sonnets.

However deep our faults and intractable our problems, Swift's humility in the face of technology, science, politics, and human nature would serve us well today.

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

Now that the threat of terrorist attacks by Islamic extremist groups on  United States soil has receded--along withthe disturbing post-9/11 war fever--one might think the "clash of civilizations" idea would finally be dead. Alas, it's back again, thanks to Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin's attempt to unify Ukraine and Russia (the fierce Ukrainian resistance to this reunification suggests that the people considered part of the same "civilization" do not concur that they are in it.) 

JUST SAY, NO:

The Taliban's supreme leader on Sunday ordered a ban on poppy cultivation in Afghanistan, warning that the hardline Islamist government would crack down on farmers planting the crop.

Afghanistan is the world's biggest producer of poppies, the source of sap that is refined into heroin, and in recent years its production and exports have only boomed.

"All Afghans are informed that from now on cultivation of poppy has been strictly prohibited across the country," said a decree issued by Supreme Leader Hibatullah Akhundzada.

The decree was read out by government spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid at a gathering of reporters, foreign diplomats and Taliban officials.

"If anyone violates the decree the crop will be destroyed immediately and the violator will be treated according to the sharia law," it added.

THE ABYSS STARES BACK; IT DOESN'T ANSWER:

In among the least surprising pieces of news ever, Donald Trump's social-media app Truth Social is turning out to be a huge flop. The site, which wants to be a conservative version of Twitter (which booted Trump from its site after the riot at the Capitol on January 6), debuted a little more than a month ago, but downloads of its app at the Apple Store have plummeted to an estimated 60,000 a week, according to mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower. Though there's supposedly a waitlist with a million names on it, the site itself, according to Forbes columnist John Brandon, looks like the proverbial "ghost town." Donald Trump, Jr. is assiduously posting away on the site. But it feels like he's mostly yelling into the void.

OTHER THAN THAT, HOW ARE YOU ENJOYING nATIONALISM?:

Reports have emerged in recent days that Russian troops in Ukraine, stalled in their advance and suffering numerous military setbacks, have sabotaged their own equipment, refused to fight and carry out orders, and even, in one report, run over their own commander.

NATO estimates that as many as 15,000 Russian soldiers may have been killed in less than two months of fighting, or the equivalent of all of the Soviet soldiers killed in nine years in Afghanistan. Morale is reportedly incredibly low. In this situation, the conditions are ideal for the Russian military to implode. [...]

With possibly up to one-fifth of Russia's original invasion force "no longer combat effective", Putin has ordered another 134,000 conscripts aged 18-27 who may have little idea what they are getting themselves into.

But reports continue to emerge of Russian conscripts feeling as though they have been duped into fighting. They are open to anti-war messages, which Ukraine's intelligence agencies are understood to be trying to exploit.

Not only has Russia failed to win over the hearts and minds of the Ukrainian people, but it now appears to be struggling to win over the hearts and minds of its own military.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

The Left's nervous breakdown began in February 1956, with Nikita Khrushchev's "secret speech" to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. In the speech, titled "On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences," Khrushchev revealed to the world many of the Stalin regime's crimes. But Soviet Russia's crimes would not end with Stalin: Before the year's end, Khrushchev himself would order tanks into Hungary to suppress the Budapest uprising--described by the Communist Party as a "fascist counter-revolution." In fact, it was a student-led workers' rebellion against Hungary's Soviet government.

Much like Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022--also based on false accusations of "fascism"--the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 was predicated on a strategic miscalculation. Soviet troops "expected a police action," as Hobsbawm puts it, but instead "found themselves faced with a revolution, which quickly spread from Budapest to the rest of the country." Rather than giving way to a superior military power, "brave and ingenious urban guerrillas succeeded in fighting to a standstill Soviet troops," before being ruthlessly suppressed by another onslaught of Soviet troops in early November.

The invasion--which killed thousands of Hungarians and forced hundreds of thousands more to flee the country--compelled the Soviet Union's western apologists to come to grips with the imperialist ambitions of this totalitarian regime. Besides its geopolitical consequences, the events of fall 1956 fractured and ultimately transformed not just the British communist party but the politics of the Left in the West more generally. [...]

Conservatives in the West have always had an ambivalent relationship with liberalism, seeking a balance between rights and responsibilities, individualism and community, tradition and progress. During the Cold War, however, this precarious balance was stabilized by a common enemy, Soviet communism, in contrast to which political and economic liberalism appealed even to those traditionalists who might otherwise be wary of liberalism's underlying principles. Yet, with the exhaustion of Cold War ideologies, and the breakup of the Soviet Union, the fissures within this "fusionist" agenda became apparent once again. 

Since 2016, many of those affiliated with "post-liberalism," "national conservatism," and "the New Right" have come to believe that the Right's association with liberalism was a Faustian bargain. Liberalism, on this telling, is a totalizing force that, in its inexorable expansion outwards, erodes community and tradition, leaving a hollowed-out polity of atomized individuals bound together by nothing but procedural norms that masquerade as morally neutral. Traditional conservative principles such as prudence, moderation, and devolved authority are no match against this Leviathan, so that strength, national identity, and even centralized, federal action come to be seen as necessary bulwarks against liberalism, Left or Right. 

In this context, it is no surprise that some politicians, pundits, and intellectuals affiliated with the New Right have come to see such nationalist strong men as Viktor Orban or even Vladimir Putin as fellow travelers. They applaud these leaders' willingness to "stand up" against the moral perversities of liberalism--Orban champions what he calls "illiberal democracy"--and unabashedly defend their countries' own national interests against the liberal cosmopolitanism they see embodied in the European Union and NATO. Thus, in the days and hours leading up to the Ukrainian invasion, Steve Bannon praised Putin for being "anti-woke," while Tucker Carlson opined that Putin posed no threat to Americans and characterized the tensions between Russia and Ukraine as a "border dispute." 

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Among the small minority of Americans who opine about politics for a living, there are several bespoke ideological camps that despise liberals more than each other.

The Catholic integralists of First Things magazine, "post-left" Marxists of various niche podcasts, and contrarian crypto-libertarians of Substack share few policy objectives. But they do harbor a common antipathy for "liberalism" (even if they lack a common definition of that word).

More concretely, these politically homeless media personalities are united by (1) a mutual alienation from the dominant ideological tendencies of their rarified, white-collar world (i.e., liberalism), (2) a recognition that liberalism enjoys cultural power in excess of its popular support, and (3) the delusion that their own esoteric misgivings about liberalism reflect those of a silent (or latent) majority. [...]

The newly launched periodical is a joint venture between right-wing and left-wing critics of "the ideology of liberalism" and the "overclass" that perpetuates it. It was founded by the heterodox religious conservatives Matthew Schmitz and Sohrab Ahmari, in partnership with the (post-)post-left "labor populist" Edwin Aponte. This odd throuple has filled out their journal's masthead with a motley crew of commentators, spanning the ideological gamut from the authoritarian religious conservative Adrian Vermeule to the absolutist civil libertarian Glenn Greenwald. It is genuinely hard to name anything that unites this group beyond some mutual antipathies.

NO SLEEP 'TIL MOSCOW:

Ukrainian military helicopters carried out a targeted strike on an oil storage facility on Russian soil, the region's governor claimed Friday.

"There was a fire at the petrol depot because of an air strike carried out by two Ukrainian army helicopters, who entered Russian territory at a low altitude," Vyacheslav Gladkov, governor of the Belgorod region that borders northeastern Ukraine, wrote in an early-morning Telegram post.

MET ONE nATIONALIST...:

[W]hite Christian nationalism continues to play a central role in perpetuating Donald Trump's stolen election lie, so understanding its continued threat and its sometimes peculiar symbols is crucial. One such symbol, the blowing of shofars as a gesture of pro-Trump Christian triumphalism, is a troubling example of how many in the movement have arrogated Jewish ritual as a weapon for their nationalistic ends.

White Christian nationalism was the most visible religious affiliation on display in the January 6 riots. Participants marched with signs proclaiming "Trump is President, Christ is King," one held a Bible in the air while a mob overran police to charge into the Capitol building, and another shouted, "Here we are in the name of Jesus!" Even the so-called QAnon shaman prayed in Jesus' name in the ransacked Senate chamber.

There was also the incongruous sight of Israeli flags, a sign of how potent Christian Zionism is among many Trump supporters--even as one rioter wore a "Camp Auschwitz" sweatshirt and another, currently under criminal indictment, is a Hitler admirer who federal prosecutors say "took the time to make what is likely a Nazi gesture towards the Capitol after violently assaulting and confronting law enforcement."

And then there were the shofars. In covering Christian nationalism and Messianic Judaism for nearly two decades, I have seen the increasing use of shofars at church services, prayer rallies and political events. But shofars' deployment in the service of the January 6 rioters marked a new and bizarre twist in this phenomenon--one that centers Donald Trump as a salvific figure in an ultimate victory over liberal democracy.

WHY WE NEED A COMMON CORE:

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

For much of the past three quarters of a century, the U.S. intelligence community has had one job that was more important than all others: assessing the capabilities of the Russian military. In all that time, the most significant deployment of that military is what we have seen during the past month, as part of the invasion of Ukraine.

While U.S. intelligence has gotten a lot right associated with this war, like virtually every other country in the world, we have been surprised that Russia has been so strikingly unsuccessful in achieving its initial goals since the current operation began on Feb. 24.

Many (including those in Moscow, judging from the current logistical issues Russian forces are facing) expected Russia to achieve air and sea superiority hastily which, in turn, would give Russia a big advantage in pursuing its objectives on the ground.

Clearly, that has not happened. Over a month into the invasion Russia still has not achieved air superiority, most of its major ground offensives are stalled, and Russian troops have been pushed back in key locations, including around the outskirts of Kyiv. There is now talk that Russia will be narrowing its military goals.

This raises the question: If the intelligence community was so successful at predicting the invasion, as well as key Russian tactics, how did it get this core question that has been so central to its mission so wrong?

VLAD WHO?:

Russia is in no position to make demands. Nobody in the West is talking about ending sanctions at all, let alone anytime soon. Sanctions could and probably will go on for at least a decade. Oil and gas are the only working Russian major trade options except for trading with China. Oil can be eliminated as a revenue source simply by lowering the price.

Russia, trying to maintain income and currency values and some sort of credible trading position, is at the mercy of these famously fickle markets. Oil futures look like there will be a progressive 20% slide in the next year or so. The futures market prices aren't set in stone, but they are a barometer of pressure on prices.

That leaves gas as the other Russian income stream, and this market is even less reliable in terms of prices, with or without conditions on payment. Russia is not the only supplier of gas in the world. Germany is stuck with having to manage current needs, but that can change, pretty quickly when alternative sources are in place.