ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

The probe was one of several ordered up by Barr scrutinizing the origins of federal investigations into ties between Trump and the Russian government. On Tuesday, a federal jury acquitted a Democratic lawyer who had been charged with lying to the FBI in one of those probes, overseen by special prosecutor John Durham.

In his case, Bash employed a team of two prosecutors, three FBI agents, and one FBI analyst to review unmasking requests made to the National Security Agency, Central Intelligence Agency, and the FBI between March 1, 2016 and January 31, 2017, and to conduct interviews with 20 government employees involved in intelligence briefings. He examined whether anyone in the Obama administration had improper motives when seeking to reveal the true identities of US citizens -- including Flynn -- whose names were not disclosed in classified intelligence reports.

Bash, who left the Justice Department in October 2020, found no such activity.

"My review has uncovered no evidence that senior Executive Branch officials sought the disclosure of" the identities of US individuals "in disseminated intelligence reports for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons during the 2016 presidential-election period or the ensuing presidential-transition period," Bash's report said.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

A jury in Washington DC has acquitted lawyer Michael Sussmann on a single charge of lying to the FBI, dealing a blow to the three-year investigation by special counsel John Durham.

JOB ONE FOR UKRAINE--BLOW UP THE PIPELINES:

The European Union on Monday agreed to ban most imports of Russian oil, the harshest economic penalty yet imposed on Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, and potentially the biggest sacrifice by Europe itself.

The deal is the latest and most far-reaching demonstration that over more than three months of war, in reaction to mounting Russian aggression and atrocities, European leaders have grown willing to take steps they considered too extreme when the invasion began. They have already barred imports of Russian natural gas, cut off Russian banks from global financial networks, frozen Russian assets, and sent advanced weaponry to Ukraine.

After weeks of intense wrangling, EU leaders meeting in Brussels endorsed an embargo on Russian oil delivered by tankers, the primary method, with commitments to reduce imports by pipeline, according to a draft agreement seen by The New York Times.

A RELIGION, NOT A RACE:

[M]any rabbis who attended the inaugural meeting of the Zionist Rabbinic Coalition in Washington, D.C., this week worry that the non-Orthodox movements are moving away from Israel, and they hope the new group can strengthen their peers' commitment to the country. The group's leadership points to the Reform movement, which was less supportive of Israel's offensive in Gaza last May than it was during a similar assault in 2014. And Rabbi Stuart Weinblatt, the coalition's founder, cited an open letter critical of Israel that was signed by 90 rabbinic students during the violence last year as evidence of a problem.

"There was a time when it was understood to be a rabbi meant to be a lover of Israel," Weinblatt, who runs a Conservative shul in suburban Maryland, told the nearly 40 rabbis who gathered for the three-day meeting. "That has become less so today."

There are other reasons to think a shift may be coming in the larger American Jewish community, with 25% of Jewish voters saying in a July survey that they believed Israel was an "apartheid state" and 22% stating it was "committing genocide against the Palestinians" -- both figures that spike among younger Jews.

"I have seen this drift," Weinblatt, who runs a Conservative shul in suburban Maryland, said in an interview. "I've seen the predilection to be critical and it's a trend that's grown in the rabbinic group."

FLAT AND YOUNG:

What is the shape of the Universe? If you had come along before the 1800s, it likely never would have occurred to you that the Universe itself could even have a shape. Like everyone else, you would have learned geometry starting from the rules of Euclid, where space is nothing more than a three-dimensional grid. Then you would have applied Newton's laws of physics and presumed that things like forces between any two objects would act along the one and only straight line connecting that. But we've come a long way in our understanding since then, and not only can space itself be curved by the presence of matter and energy, but we can witness those effects.

It didn't have to be the case that the Universe, as a whole, would have a spatial curvature to it that's indistinguishable from flat. But that does seem to be the the Universe we live in, despite the fact that our intuition might prefer it to be shaped like a higher-dimensional sphere.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Australia set a new record high for wind output early on Tuesday morning, reaching 6,639 at around 2.30am and bringing at least temporary relief from the absurdly high electricity prices, at least in the southern states of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania.

CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

The latest Census Bureau release adds municipality (city) populations to the previously released national, state and county estimates for 2021. This article focuses on the core cities (historical urban municipalities) in the 56 major metropolitan areas (over 1,000,000 residents) as well as the suburbs (outside the core cities).

In this year of record low population growth, there were unprecedented major metropolitan area, core city and suburban losses. About half -- 27 -- of the major metropolitan areas lost population. A higher number of core cities -- 39 -- lost population (70%) of the core cities losing population. The suburbs lost population in 21 metropolitan areas (38%).

The population in the core cities declined by an aggregate 1.25%. The suburbs had a modest gain of 0.25%. But a larger gain occurred outside the major metropolitan areas, at 0.46% (Figure 2), indicating that the already evident dispersion was intensifying.

Overall, the major metropolitan areas lost 267,000 residents between 2020 and 2021, with the core cities losing a total of 617,000. The suburbs gained 350,000, nearly 1,000,000 more than the core cities. Outside the major metropolitan areas, there was a gain of 660,000 (Figure 3).

IF WE HAD FUNCTIONAL INTELLIGENCE SERVICES...:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Sunday denied speculation that President Vladimir Putin was ill, saying there were no signs pointing to any ailment.

Putin's health and private life are taboo subjects in Russia, and are almost never discussed in public.

CAIN BECOMES ABEL:

ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

The U.S. will distribute another 1.25 million cans of baby formula in effort to replenish the country's dire supply in the coming weeks, the Food and Drug Administration says.

That stock will bring the total imported supply of baby formula product to the equivalent of 30 million 8-ounce bottles, since the Biden administration began its effort to alleviate the national shortage.

CAN WE SWAP OUT THE NATIVES?:

Kelin Funes, a senior at Boston International High school, poses for a portrait at school. An honors student and former English learner, Funes will attend UMass Lowell in the fall, with hopes for a career in biotechnology.ERIN CLARK/GLOBE STAFF

The familiar tale about English language learners emphasizes failure: they lag behind other students, drop out at higher rates, and are less likely to pass standardized exams.

But there is a lesser-known flip side to that story, one that advocates are working harder to promote: Former English learners -- students who were once ELs, and shed that status when they mastered English -- often emerge as high achievers, matching or surpassing their peers' performance in school and on standardized tests, including the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System, or MCAS.

Researchers haven't pinpointed the reasons for the higher scores of former English learners on some standardized exams, and they say answers may prove elusive, because test-taking is such a complex task. But a robust body of scientific data has established some brain benefits of bilinguality: Those who regularly use more than one language increase the density of cells that process information, and strengthen their brains' executive control network, used in cognitive tasks requiring focused attention.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Dutch researchers have done the "impossible."

By creating a new kind of superconductor, they have potentially unlocked a technology that could make computers hundreds of times faster -- a breakthrough potentially on the scale of the first electronics revolution. 

"This will influence all sorts of societal and technological applications," researcher Mazhar Ali from the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) predicts. "If the 20th century was the century of semi-conductors, the 21st can become the century of the superconductor."

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

NOW AGREE TO TAX IT:

Top environmental ministers from the Group of Seven major industrial countries agreed Friday to end government financing for international coal-fired power generation and to accelerate the phasing out of unabated coal plants by the year 2035.

The group said that it would aim to have "predominantly decarbonized electricity sectors by 2035."

The commitments on the phaseout of coal plants will particularly affect Japan, which relies heavily on coal-fired power plants.

OPEN THE BORDERS:

Massive supply chain shortages emerged in the wake of pandemic lockdowns that shut businesses around the world and kept workers at home.

There were hopes that supply chain issues would start to abate in the first half of 2022 as the effects of the pandemic became contained in more countries. But other events, such as the war in Ukraine, have added new bottlenecks. And with lockdowns in Shanghai and other key cities across China, pandemic-driven snags are hurting supply chains again.

Whether it was Tesla (TSLA) missing key materials for production, asset manager Aberdeen (AABVF) postponing an acquisition due to a lack of paper, or the current baby formula shortage in the United States, supply chain issues have been hurting both consumers and companies as rapidly reopening economies have overwhelmed the system.

Across a wide spectrum of industries, companies have been trying to get a handle on when supply chain logjams will improve, but it's been a moving target virtually everywhere. 

"No one really knows," says Morningstar senior equity analyst Michael Field, who covers shipping and logistics. "Nearly every company has supply chain issues. The number of companies doing anything about it is far fewer."

Field points to a few bright spots. Labor availability has improved in key areas, such as ports, to help move goods across the world. Companies have been signing long-term contracts with shippers to secure transportation, which was normally a buy-it-as-you-need-it market prior to the pandemic, Field says.

XI WHO?:

PITY THE POOR LUDDITES:

Maggie Grout started the NGO, Thinking Huts, as a teenager, with the aim of 3D-printing schools in countries where some children lack the opportunity to get an education.

She has just printed her first school in Madagascar - only the second 3D-printed school in the world.

Printing schools is fast, once the printer is set up, and saves on building materials.

DAVID ALWAYS BEATS GOLIATH:

In explaining the reasons for Russia's unexpected military weakness in Ukraine, few have expressed it better than The Economist. The magazine noted "the incurable inadequacy of despotic power" and "the cheating, bribery and peculation" that are "characteristic of the entire administration."

Peculation means embezzlement. It's a word rarely used nowadays; these words were in fact published by The Economist in October 1854, when Russia was in the process of losing the Crimean War.

But they might just as easily be about Russia today, under Vladimir Putin, and about the mess of its invasion of its far smaller neighbor. Rarely have the pernicious effects of authoritarianism and endemic corruption been so vividly on display.

Indeed Ukraine's National Agency on Corruption Prevention has cheekily thanked Russian officials for making it "much easier to defend democratic Ukraine" by embezzling "what should have gone to the needs of the army."

THE LOST CAUSE:

The Justice Department has stepped up its criminal investigation into the creation of alternate slates of pro-Trump electors seeking to overturn President Biden's victory in the 2020 election, with a particular focus on a team of lawyers that worked on behalf of then-president Donald Trump, according to people familiar with the matter.

A federal grand jury in Washington has started issuing subpoenas in recent weeks to people linked to the alternate elector plan, requesting information about several lawyers, including Trump's personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and one of his chief legal advisers, John Eastman, one of the people said.

The subpoenas also seek information on other pro-Trump lawyers including Jenna Ellis, who worked with Giuliani, and Kenneth Chesebro, who wrote memos supporting the elector scheme in the weeks after the election.

Trump faced a series of setbacks in Tuesday's primary elections as voters rejected his efforts to unseat two top targets for retribution: Georgia's Republican governor and secretary of state, both of whom had rebuffed Trump's extraordinary pressure to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. But the magnitude of defeat in the governor's race -- more than 50 percentage points -- was especially stunning and raised questions about whether Republican voters are beginning to move on from Trump.

Nearly six years after the onetime reality television star launched what seemed to be an improbable campaign for the White House, the "Make America Great Again" movement Trump helmed isn't going anywhere. But voters are increasingly vocal in saying that the party's future is about more than Trump.

AND THAT'S THE STRICTEST?:

The only exceptions in the Oklahoma law are to save the life of a pregnant woman or if the pregnancy is the result of rape or incest that has been reported to law enforcement.

The bill specifically authorizes doctors to remove a "dead unborn child caused by spontaneous abortion," or miscarriage, or to remove an ectopic pregnancy, a potentially life-threatening emergency that occurs when a fertilized egg implants outside the uterus, often in a fallopian tube and early in pregnancy.

The law also does not apply to the use of morning-after pills such as Plan B or any type of contraception.

THE WAGES OF PETROPHILIA:

The Queensland government earlier this week was boasting of yet another large wind farm deal - this time for the 230MW Banana Range project near Gladstone - saying it took the number of committed wind and solar projects in the state to more than 50.

The problem is, despite the state Labor government's 50 per cent renewable energy target for 2030, the rollout of wind and solar in the deep north has been way too slow.

Queensland has the lowest share of renewables than any other state on the main grid. It stands at just 20 per cent over the last 12 months, compared to 25 per cent in NSW, 35 per cent in Victoria, and nearly 65 per cent in South Australia. Tasmania is at 100 per cent.

And because of its dependence on coal and gas, Queensland is the most exposed to the global surge in fossil fuel prices, and consumers are about to pay dearly for the surge in wholesale electricity prices that are being directly sheeted home to the cost of coal and gas generation.

IT'S NOT JUST IDENTITY:

[A]ccording to Soros, the EU is also a very important market for the Kremlin and Putin needs the gas revenue to support his economy.

"It is estimated that Russian storage capacity will be full by July. Europe is his only market. If he doesn't supply Europe, he must shut down the wells in Siberia from where the gas comes. Some 12,000 wells are involved. It takes time to shut them down and once they are shut down, they are difficult to reopen because of the age of the equipment," Soros said in the letter.

He added that Europe needs to undertake "urgent preparations" before using its bargaining power. "Without it the pain of sudden stoppage would be politically very hard to bear," he said. "Europe should then impose hefty tax on gas imports so that the price to the consumer doesn't go down."

Leon Izbicki, an associate at Energy Aspects, agrees that Russia's gas storage is close to being full.

"Russia went into last winter with record high stocks of around 72.6 billion cubic meters and aims for an even higher underground storage target for winter 2022 of 72.7 billion cubic meters," Izbicki added via email. "While we do not have visibility on Russian underground storage, it seems plausible that Russia could reach this target this summer already."

He added that that Russia lacks flexibility in its gas storage and does not have the means to divert gas from Europe to, for example, Asia due to a lack of pipeline infrastructure.

SHEARERS NEED SHEEP:

By definition, a Ponzi scheme is a fraud in which money from one group of people is secretly used to pay promised returns to another group of people. Think of it this way: You "invest" $1,000 in exchange for my guarantee to double your money in weeks. What you don't know is that I don't have a legitimate business with products or services. Instead, I intend to lure more investors (a.k.a. suckers) and use their money to pay you. Eventually, the scheme collapses when I take the money and run, or when withdrawals outpace the influx of new money.

The scheme's namesake was a dashing, diminutive Italian immigrant who arrived in Boston in 1903 seeking fortune and adventure after partying his way out of the University of Rome. During more than a decade of travels around the United States, he became a hero who donated skin from his back and legs to save a nurse burned in an explosion. He became a two-time felon for, on separate occasions, passing a bad check and helping several of his countrymen sneak into the United States from Canada. After serving time, Ponzi returned to Boston. He failed at several businesses, then cooked up his version of what had been known as "robbing Peter to pay Paul."

During the spring and summer of 1920, Ponzi announced that he could pay double-your-money returns using an obscure financial instrument called International Reply Coupons. Snail mail was king back then, particularly for worldwide communications, and those IRCs could be used to purchase a postage stamp at a fixed price in more than 60 countries.

A witty raconteur with a taste for flashy suits, Ponzi claimed he developed a formula to exploit fluctuating currency exchange rates to turn IRCs into profits. For instance, at the time, a person could buy 66 postal coupons for $1 in Rome, where the lira was depressed after World War I. The same coupons would cost $3.30 in Boston, which theoretically meant Ponzi could triple his money after expenses.

Ponzi coyly refused to explain how he purchased enough coupons to fulfill his obligations or turned them into cash, saying it would enable copycats. On paper, Ponzi's scheme was ingenious and technically legal. In practice, it was impossible. During his rise, reporters focused instead on his mansion in Lexington and on his adoring wife.

Thousands of people emptied their wallets at Ponzi's Boston headquarters and at satellite offices. He became the most talked-about man in America and basked in his status as a champion of working men and women. "The truth is," Ponzi told reporters, "bankers and businessmen have been doing plenty for themselves . . . but they have done little for anybody else."

As he scrambled to make good, Ponzi invested in banks and explored buying a fleet of merchant ships mothballed after the war. But his past and The Boston Post caught up with him, winning the newspaper the first Pulitzer Prize for public service and triggering action by prosecutors. It ended poorly for Ponzi and for those who trusted him with their money.

Afterward, The New York Times was more forgiving toward Ponzi than to investors seduced by the promise of easy money: "They showed only greed -- the eagerness to get much for nothing -- and they had not one of Ponzi's redeeming graces."

...AND CHEAPER...:

Bidders offering to implement offshore wind power projects with the lowest CO2 footpring could have an advantage in Germany's future renewable power auctions that determine who gets to install new wind farms in the country's territorial waters, according to energy policy newsletter Tagesspiegel Background.

Due to rapidly dwindling costs for offshore wind power generation that saw many projects with zero-support bids emerge in recent years, regulators are looking for new ways to rank proposed projects in auctions.

A proposal by Germany's council of federal states (Bundesrat) said projects with the lowest projected emissions and general environmental impact, for example thanks to using local production facilities, could be ranked up in auctions.

Industry alliance WAB said local producers could find themselves at an advantage if emissions resulting in the construction of turbines, groundings or substations are factored into the tender process, as long distances inflate transport emissions.

IDEOLOGY IN ACTION:

[E]liminating this kind of violence requires more than a single-minded approach, according to Ron Avi Astor, professor of social welfare at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a longtime expert on school violence. 

Grid: I feel like we are constantly witnessing mass shootings, and mass shootings at schools, and nothing seems to change to prevent them. Why? What could we do?

Ron Avi Astor: There have been shootings in the United States for a long time. There's been school shootings for decades as well -- not all of them were covered by the media. They were framed as gang killings, or as being in the inner city.

What's happening now is that the media is covering it in a very, very intense way. Everyone in the world -- not just the U.S. -- knows this is happening just a few minutes after it happens, so there's a worldwide consciousness now that never existed before. And that's where we should be -- we should be in a place where we're aware. But with a lot of forms of violence in America, we've had a pretty violent past. The world was not more peaceful 50 years ago or 100 years ago. That's just a myth. It's not true.

The second big piece of this that's obvious is that firearms have progressed to the degree where you can kill a whole lot of people, very fast. And they're mass-produced, and in the U.S. almost anyone who wants one can have one. You have access and availability. In the past if someone wanted to do this, it would be difficult. You'd have a knife, or club, or other weapons that aren't as lethal. So that's the second big piece.

There's a third piece that the media isn't really talking about: We've framed it as deranged individuals [shooting people]; people with mental health problems, people with hate. But we haven't really looked at this as a form of suicide or homicide in the way that we should. The reason why it's important is because the individuals who are trying to do this want exactly what you and I are doing now: They want to shake the world, and they want to have their names live forever.

How we cover shooters and how we talk about the victims is a big piece. The research shows us we should be talking about the victims, and not even say the shooter's name or who they are. Because that actually encourages [shooters] to keep doing it.

The last piece is ideology. If you look at other countries, mass atrocities do happen -- namely for political reasons. They happen all over in South America, in parts of the Middle East, where people feel justified for political, social, economic or other reasons to kill innocent people.

Here in the U.S., we don't talk about this last component very strongly. The fact is that we have a lot of people in this country with ideologies that they believe are true. It could be QAnon, or Aryan Nation stuff -- it could be a lot of different things. And I think we haven't really as a country confronted that last piece as much as we could.

Taking away guns alone wouldn't do it all. It would make a big difference, but we have to do a very deep moment of self-reflection. All of these issues require deep discussion and reflection about our country and who we want to be. Does being free mean that you are free to take a gun and shoot up an elementary school?

DONALD WHO?:

Complete and utter repudiation. That's what a record number of Republican primary voters in Georgia administered to former President Donald Trump this Tuesday. The man Trump blamed for not contesting his narrow 2020 loss in the state, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, won renomination with 74% of the vote.

The man he persuaded to get into the race on the single issue of relitigating the 2020 election, former Sen. David Perdue, finished with only 22%. Kemp not only won far more than the 50% needed to avoid a runoff, he won more than 50% in 158 of Georgia's 159 counties.

On top of that, the man Trump blamed even more than Kemp, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, was renominated with 52% of the vote. His Trump-endorsed opponent, Rep. Jody Hice, carried only a few small counties outside his congressional district.

Last week, based on the results from earlier primaries, I wrote that it's "not exactly Trump's party" anymore. This week's results underline that. Republican primary voters are not Trump's chess pawns, and Trump, for that matter, is nothing like a chess grandmaster.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Sikhs murdered at a temple in Oak Creek for visibly practicing their faith.

Black Americans murdered at a church in Charleston for simply being Black in America.

Jews murdered at a synagogue in Pittsburgh for welcoming Muslim refugees.

Latino shoppers murdered at a Wal-Mart in El Paso for representing America's diversity.

White bystanders stabbed on a train in Portland for defending Muslim women from harassment.

Young liberal activists murdered in Norway for supporting multiculturalism.

Muslim worshippers murdered in places as distant as Christchurch and Quebec City for living in a white-majority nation.

The Great Replacement Theory

Almost every one of the white supremacists behind these terrorist attacks represented a living, walking example of the toxic mix formed when the so-called Great Replacement Theory takes over someone's mind.

The theory, which warns of an ongoing "white genocide" by people of color, continues to radicalize largely young white men here and around the world. White nationalists and white supremacists use "the great replacement" as a mechanism to radicalize and recruit members like Payton Gendron.

We now know that Gendron searched online for communities with large black populations before settling on and targeting the Tops Friendly Market. His semi-automatic gun had the N-word written on the barrel in white paint and the number 14 - a known white supremacist slogan. His anti-Black racism could not have been clearer.

Yet it is also important to note how anti-Muslim extremism and other forms of bigotry inspired almost every step of his attack. According to Gendron himself, he was directly inspired by Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist who murdered 51 Muslims and injured 49 at Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre in New Zealand.

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

AND PEOPLE WONDER WHY TRUMPISTS VALORIZE VLAD?:

According to recent estimates, there are 150,000 Jews in Russia's "core Jewish population," but more than half a million are entitled to receive Israeli citizenship according to the Law of Return.

One senior Russian Jewish leader for the past 30 years said that between 60% and 70% of the members of her community have left or intend to leave Russia.

"Those in the community who are rich, at least 95% of them, have already left Russia in the past few years since the 2014 war," she said in a Zoom call from an unknown western European location. "Among the young Jews, more than 80% have already left. There was an exodus of people in the hi-tech field. I've left Russia because many figures in our community suggested that it wasn't safe for me to stay there any longer."

The leader thinks that we are living in historic times, and said that she wants to be on the right side of history.

"Our children and grandchildren will ask: 'What did you do during the Russian-Ukrainian war?" she said. "Secondly, there was pressure and there is pressure from the authorities for the leaders of all Jewish communities and institutions to speak out in favor of the war and Russia's President Vladimir Putin. We were not prepared to do that."

WELCOMING COMMITTEE:

Millions of Ellis Island immigrants entered New York City expecting to find streets "paved with gold." They found them piled with oyster shells instead.

It's difficult to overstate just how significant oysters once were to life in New York -- it took nonfiction writer Mark Kurlanksky 325 pages to get the point across in his book The Big Oyster -- but one jaw-dropping statistic should put the relationship into perspective: at the beginning of the 17th century, half of the world's oyster population could be found in New York Harbor.

Oysters carts were the original hot dog stands. A few pennies could buy you a dozen. New Yorkers ate them in designated oyster cellars, exported them across the planet and even burned them down (mixing them with sand and water) to build walls of "tabby concrete." During Gilded Gotham's peak, when the ragged and the rich rarely crossed paths, oysters were an equalizer. Everyone ate them.

ALL JOE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

The economic theory behind solar tariffs is simple: Solar cells and panels made abroad are often cheaper, thanks to lower manufacturing costs and generous government subsidies from countries like China. So taxing imported panels should give the US solar industry a fighting chance at survival. 

At least that has been the thinking over the last 10 years and under three different presidential administrations. There's just one problem--the majority of the US solar industry has never supported them, arguing the tariffs have done nothing to bolster domestic production and have actually slowed the pace of decarbonization.

This contradiction has become abundantly clear over the last two months. In late March, the Biden administration quietly announced plans to investigate a complaint from a small solar manufacturer called Auxin Solar, which argued that Chinese firms are circumventing trade restrictions by manufacturing solar panels and cells in Southeast Asia.  

The response from the US solar industry was swift. Trade groups called the investigation a "disaster," "devastating," and a move that would "effectively freeze" solar development at a time when more renewable energy sources are desperately needed. Eighty percent of the solar panels imported into the US come from Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Thailand. If the investigation supports Auxin's complaint, those countries would be subject to additional tariffs on imports to the US Earlier this month, a bipartisan group of 22 senators sent a letter urging President Joe Biden to quickly issue a preliminary finding, or risk "massive disruption" to solar companies unsure if prices for panels are about to skyrocket. 

 

Some negative consequences from the investigation have already come to pass. Two weeks ago, an Indiana utility announced that several solar projects had been delayed due to the upheaval in the market, and that as a result, two coal-fired power plants will now stay open until 2025, instead of 2023. The Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group, estimates that 81 percent of solar installers in the US have seen shipments canceled or delayed. According to an analysis from the Oslo-based energy research firm Rystad, the US was estimated to install around 27 gigawatts of solar capacity in 2022; now that number could be as low as 10 gigawatts.

But the Auxin case is only the latest event to raise questions about the effectiveness of solar tariffs. The US has multiple layers of overlapping tariffs on solar panels manufactured in China, Southeast Asia, and most other foreign countries. At the same time, 86 percent of American solar jobs are in installing panels, not creating them. If tariffs increase the cost of the technology, they could slow growth and increase costs for the rest of the industry. Many analysts argue that tariffs are responsible for US solar prices being 43 to 57 percent higher than the global average.  

MUZZLE-LOADERS SUFFICE:

THE rIGHT'S HATRED OF THE CDC DID NOT START WITH THE DESANTIS FLU:

Guns took more than 36,000 U.S. lives in 2015, and this and other alarming statistics have led many to ask whether our nation would be better off with firearms in fewer hands. Yet gun advocates argue exactly the opposite: that murders, crimes and mass shootings happen because there aren't enough guns in enough places. Arming more people will make our country safer and more peaceful, they say, because criminals won't cause trouble if they know they are surrounded by gun-toting good guys.

After all, since 1991 Americans have acquired 170 million new guns while murder rates have plummeted, according to the National Rifle Association of America (NRA). Donald Trump, when running for president, said of the 2015 shooting massacre in San Bernardino, Calif., that "if we had guns in California on the other side, where the bullets went in the different direction, you wouldn't have 14 or 15 people dead right now."  [...]

 An ideal experiment would be an interventional study in which scientists would track what happened for several years after guns were given to gun-free communities and everything else was kept the same. But alas, there are no gun-free U.S. communities, and the ethics of doing such a study are dubious. So instead scientists compare what happens to gun-toting people, in gun-dense regions, with what happens to people and places with few firearms. They also study whether crime victims are more or less likely to own guns than others, and they track what transpires when laws make it easier for people to carry guns or use them for self-defense.

Most of this research--and there have been several dozen peer-reviewed studies--punctures the idea that guns stop violence. In a 2015 study using data from the FBI and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for example, researchers at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard University reported that firearm assaults were 6.8 times more common in the states with the most guns versus those with the least. Also in 2015 a combined analysis of 15 different studies found that people who had access to firearms at home were nearly twice as likely to be murdered as people who did not.

This evidence has been slow to accumulate because of restrictions placed by Congress on one of the country's biggest injury research funders, the CDC. Since the mid-1990s the agency has been effectively blocked from supporting gun violence research. [...]

By far the most famous series of studies on this issue was conducted in the late 1980s and 1990s by Arthur Kellermann, now dean of the F. Edward Hébert School of Medicine at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, and his colleagues. In one, published in 1993 in the New England Journal of Medicine and funded by the CDC, he and his colleagues identified 444 people who had been killed between 1987 and 1992 at home in three U.S. regions--Shelby County, Tennessee, King County, Washington State, and Cuyahoga County, Ohio--and then collected details about them and their deaths from local police, medical examiners and people who had been close to the victims. They found that a gun in the home was associated with a nearly threefold increase in the odds that someone would be killed at home by a family member or intimate acquaintance. [...]

The initial work by Kellermann and his colleagues was criticized for not using enough statistical controls. So they went on to publish other studies confirming the link between guns and more violence. In one, they found that a gun in the home was tied to a nearly fivefold increase in the odds of suicide. (More Americans die from gun suicides every year than gun homicides.) In another, published in 1998, they reported that guns at home were four times more likely to cause an accidental shooting, seven times more likely to be used in assault or homicide, and 11 times more likely to be used in a suicide than they were to be used for self-defense.

HOW THE RIGHT GROOMS CHILDREN:

In the last 23 years, more than 300,000 children have witnessed gun violence at school, a profoundly traumatizing experience. @washingtonpost's database: https://t.co/1bYFSPGse6

— The Marshall Project (@MarshallProj) May 24, 2022

TRUMPISM IS RACISM:

A new Yahoo News/YouGov poll shows that more than 6 in 10 Donald Trump voters (61%) agree that "a group of people in this country are trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants and people of color who share their political views" -- a core tenet of the false conspiracy theory known as the "great replacement."

HOW CONSERVATISM WORKS:

IT CAN ONLY MAKE THEM SOUND GHOULISH:

Data from the latest New Hampshire Journal/Praecones Analytica poll show that while New Hampshire voters are more focused on the abortion issue, their fundamental stance -- supporting abortion in the early weeks of pregnancy while opposing it in the final months -- hasn't changed.

A PEOPLE WHO THINK THEMSELVES A NATION ARE ONE:

Going as far back as the late 1990s and early 2000s, social science researchers like myself have emphasized how Ukraine's population, as a whole, was connecting less and less with Russia. At the same time, a discrete Ukrainian national identity was beginning to emerge.

This process sped up in 2013 and 2014, when the Russian-friendly President of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, chose to sign an agreement with the Russian-led Eurasian Economic Union rather than with the European Union. Yanukovych's decision sparked massive protests, known as the Maidan Revolution, which forced Yanukovych to flee the country.

Putin's subsequent actions to seize Crimea and aid separatist activities in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine accelerated the weakening of the country's attachment to Russia and the yearning among Ukrainians to look westward to Europe.

Volodymyr Kulyk, one of the most important scholars on Ukrainian identity and public attitudes about Russia, argued in 2016 that the blurry line dividing those who identified with the West from those who supported close ties to Russia "shifted eastward" after 2014.

Political scientist Elise Giuliano, a specialist on the politics of ethnic identity, provided evidence in a 2018 article that the majority of ethnic Russians in the Donbas did not support the actions of the pro-Russian separatists seeking to secede from Ukraine.

Growing support after 2014 across Ukraine for an overarching, civic national identity - based on Ukrainian citizenship rather than ethnic identity - was the most crucial change. It offered a means to unite ethnic Ukrainians and ethnic Russians in Ukraine.

My latest research examines the strength of a citizenship-based, civic national identity in Ukraine and how it relates to ethnic identity and language.

Quantitative and qualitative survey data offer evidence of how weak Ukrainians' attachment to Russia and how strong their attachment to Ukrainian citizenship had already become before 2022, even among ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking Ukrainians.

Most respondents viewed a civic national identity based on citizenship as an important part of their self-identity. More participants in the survey saw this kind of national identity as an important or even very important part of who they are than felt that way about the regions they live in, the language they speak or their ethnic identities.

Comments from respondents about the importance of being a Ukrainian citizen included statements like "Because I love my country"; "I do not betray my country"; and "I am proud of Ukraine, and I am a patriot."

The results also underscore that it is not contradictory for people to perceive this kind of national identity as an important part of their identity while also feeling the same way about their ethnic identity, spoken language or region. In Ukraine at least, ethnic identity and a multiethnic, civic national identity are not the incompatible rivals they're sometimes thought to be.

And so I wasn't surprised to read about Oleksandr Vilkul's staunch defense of Ukrainian sovereignty. A powerful politician in southeastern Ukraine, Vilkul had long espoused support for the rights of Russian speakers and closer ties with Russia. In early May 2022, The New York Times reported that the Russians approached Vilkul with an offer to align with the invading Russian forces.

Vilkul's response?

"Get lost."

TRUMPISM IS PUTINISM (profanity alert):

According to an interview with the New Yorker, the independent researchers who uncovered the Alfa Bank/Trump link decided to hand over what they found to Eric Lichtblau, a reporter at the New York Times, in August 2020. A month later Sussmann brought data suggesting this connection to a friend who was working at the FBI. Sussmann claims it was provided to him by Rodney Joffe, a tech executive and data scientist who was his client at the time.

In the intervening month, Lichtblau had been sharing the data with other cybersecurity experts. He told the New Yorker in 2018 that those conversations led him to believe that "Not only is there clearly something there but there's clearly something that someone has gone to great lengths to conceal."

In late September 2016, Lichtblau had determined that he had enough information to write a story about the servers. On September 21, he reached out to Alfa Bank's lobbyists in D.C. about it. Two days later the Trump domain that had been the recipient of the Alfa Bank DNS lookups disappeared from the internet. Within a week the connection stopped.

What a coincidence!

As this reporting was underway, Lichtblau was called by an FBI official who asked him to come to the bureau's headquarters. During that meeting the FBI asked Lichtblau to delay his story about the servers, as it might interfere with their ongoing investigation into the potential relationship between the Russians who were interfering in our elections and domestic contacts possibly associated with Trump.

The Times decided to honor this request after what executive editor Dean Baquet described as "a really intense debate," since the paper had not determined the underlying reason for the server connection.

For the next month the Alfa Bank affair went dark. In the meantime the Clinton campaign was hit with a barrage of stories about the information in the emails that had been hacked by the Russians. Trump famously asked Russia to continue the hack, if they were listening and he would reference the leaked emails over 160 times on the campaign trail.

During this period the New York Times was not shy about covering the hacked materials. On October 10 the Times published "highlights" from the Clinton campaign emails. The word Russia does not appear in this article. The same day, the Times ran another article about the topic: "Hillary Clinton's Campaign Strained to Hone Her Message, Hacked Emails Show." The only time the word Russia appears in this article is in reference to a quote from Clinton's spokesman.

So throughout the final month before the 2016 election the paper of record sat on evidence of potential ties between Trump and Russia, doing nothing with it at the FBI's behest--yet it reported extensively on the emails resulting from the Russian operation and how they were harming the Clinton campaign.

Meanwhile, the same FBI that had pressured the Times to avoid making public any information relevant to their investigation of ties between Trump and Russia did not show that same circumspection when it came to Clinton. The Comey letter to Congress about reopening the investigation into Clinton's email server was published on October 28.

Sure doesn't seem like all the players in this pro-Hillary cOnSpiRaCy were on the same page.

Alfa Bank came back into the picture on October 30, 2016, after a frustrated Harry Reid penned an outraged letter to the FBI charging that the bureau was withholding information about the ties between Trump and Russia related to the email hacks.

The next day, on Halloween, Slate's Franklin Foer provided some of that evidence, reporting on the data initially presented to Lichtblau--which had been shared with him by the Clinton campaign, though he developed additional sources, including one of the original data scientists.

In June, 2016, after news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a group of prominent computer scientists went on alert. Reports said that the infiltrators were probably Russian, which suggested to most members of the group that one of the country's intelligence agencies had been involved. They speculated that if the Russians were hacking the Democrats they must be hacking the Republicans, too. "We thought there was no way in the world the Russians would just attack the Democrats," one of the computer scientists, who asked to be identified only as Max, told me.

The group was small--a handful of scientists, scattered across the country--and politically diverse. (Max described himself as "a John McCain Republican.") Its members sometimes worked with law enforcement or for private clients, but mostly they acted as self-appointed guardians of the Internet, trying to thwart hackers and to keep the system clean of malware--software that hackers use to control a computer remotely, or to extract data. "People think the Internet runs on its own," Max told me. "It doesn't. We do this to keep the Internet safe." The hack of the D.N.C. seemed like a pernicious attack on the integrity of the Web, as well as on the American political system. The scientists decided to investigate whether any Republicans had been hacked, too. "We were trying to protect them," Max said.

Max's group began combing the Domain Name System, a worldwide network that acts as a sort of phone book for the Internet, translating easy-to-remember domain names into I.P. addresses, the strings of numbers that computers use to identify one another. Whenever someone goes online--to send an e-mail, to visit a Web site--her device contacts the Domain Name System to locate the computer that it is trying to connect with. Each query, known as a D.N.S. lookup, can be logged, leaving records in a constellation of servers that extends through private companies, public institutions, and universities. Max and his group are part of a community that has unusual access to these records, which are especially useful to cybersecurity experts who work to protect clients from attacks.

Max and the other computer scientists asked me to withhold their names, out of concern for their privacy and their security. I met with Max and his lawyer repeatedly, and interviewed other prominent computer experts. (Among them were Jean Camp, of Indiana University; Steven Bellovin, of Columbia University; Daniel Kahn Gillmor, of the A.C.L.U.; Richard Clayton, of the University of Cambridge; Matt Blaze, of the University of Pennsylvania; and Paul Vixie, of Farsight Security.) Several of them independently reviewed the records that Max's group had discovered and confirmed that they would be difficult to fake. A senior aide on Capitol Hill, who works in national security, said that Max's research is widely respected among experts in computer science and cybersecurity.

As Max and his colleagues searched D.N.S. logs for domains associated with Republican candidates, they were perplexed by what they encountered. "We went looking for fingerprints similar to what was on the D.N.C. computers, but we didn't find what we were looking for," Max told me. "We found something totally different--something unique." In the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, a domain linked to the Trump Organization (mail1.trump-email.com) seemed to be behaving in a peculiar way. The server that housed the domain belonged to a company called Listrak, which mostly helped deliver mass-marketing e-mails: blasts of messages advertising spa treatments, Las Vegas weekends, and other enticements. Some Trump Organization domains sent mass e-mail blasts, but the one that Max and his colleagues spotted appeared not to be sending anything. At the same time, though, a very small group of companies seemed to be trying to communicate with it.

Examining records for the Trump domain, Max's group discovered D.N.S. lookups from a pair of servers owned by Alfa Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia. Alfa Bank's computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day. There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the total number was notable: between May and September, Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization's domain more than two thousand times. "We were watching this happen in real time--it was like watching an airplane fly by," Max said. "And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?"

Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization's domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump's ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince's meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was "incidental.") In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren't aware of any of this. "We didn't know who DeVos was," Max said.

The D.N.S. records raised vexing questions. Why was the Trump Organization's domain, set up to send mass-marketing e-mails, conducting such meagre activity? And why were computers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health trying to reach a server that didn't seem to be doing anything? After analyzing the data, Max said, "We decided this was a covert communication channel."

...AND CHEAPER...:

Veronika Grimm is an economics professor at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and one of Germany's three special advisors to the federal government, called Economic Sages.

"We need to diversify and decarbonise our energy sources faster than initially planned," she says. To help achieve that goal, Ms Grimm wants the nation to "ramp-up" its use of hydrogen.

Hydrogen can store vast amounts of energy, replace natural gas in industrial processes, and power fuel cells in trucks, trains, ships or planes that emit nothing but vapour of drinkable water.

Ms Grimm's enthusiasm is gaining traction, caccording to the International Energy Agency (IEA), an energy research group, dozens of countries have published national hydrogen strategies, or are about to.

SUCH SNOWFLAKES:

"Solitary Confinement"

The concept for this painting was given to me by my friend @DineshDSouza. Over 600 American citizens have been detained since January 6, 2021 for the storming of the US Capitol. Many have been placed in solitary confinement. pic.twitter.com/ovEUQjq01B

— Jon McNaughton Art (@McNaughtonArt) May 23, 2022

IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

The famous Stroop test offers some helpful evidence. This test measures how difficult people find it to identify the colour a word is written in when that word is the name of another colour. For instance, picture the word "red" written in blue ink. It takes people longer to say that the ink is blue than when the ink is the corresponding red colour (You can take the test for yourself here.)

When hypnotised participants were told they were no longer able to read, the letters became meaningless shapes - and so they got quicker at identifying the colour of the mismatched words, because they were no longer distracted by the words on the page.

There also appear to be differences in brain activity when someone is asked to "fake it", compared with when they are experiencing an involuntary response. In one small experiment, researchers studied 12 healthy participants in a positron emission tomography (PET) scanner, to measure metabolic activity in parts of the brain. In one set of tests, they were given the instruction to fake being unable to move their leg. In another set of tests, the same people were hypnotised and given the suggestion that their leg was paralysed. The brain imaging studies showed distinct brain regions were activated in each of the two conditions.

A later study expanded on the same hypnotism vs. faking it question, this time using an MRI scanner, which gives more detail when looking at soft tissues. This time, the researchers saw the motor cortex - part of the brain which controls body movements - showed activity in the patients under hypnosis. This suggests the hypnotised people were really preparing to try to move their limb, despite achieving no more movement than the group who were faking limb paralysis.

So, are there any hallmarks of the hypnotised brain that can explain the peculiar sensation and experiences of a hypnotic response? It's an emerging area of research, but there are a couple of candidates.

Part of the story can be found in the brain's salience network, says Spiegel. This network helps us identify which aspects of our environment are worth paying attention to - sifting out relevant information from the swathes of sensory data that our brains are inundated with every second of the day. In one experiment, he and his colleagues hypnotised both "highs" and "lows" while scanning their brains. The highs had lowered activity in the salience network during hypnosis. "When that happens, you're less worried about what else might be going on," says Spiegel. "It allows you to disconnect from the rest of the world."

That might go some way to explaining the feeling of intense focus during hypnosis, but what about the strange sensation that your body is doing things of its own accord?

The best evidence points to the brain's default mode network, says Terhune, a set of brain regions that are most active when we are at rest. "It's believed to be integrally involved in self-related mentation - daydreaming, mind-wandering and so on," says Terhune.

One part of this network in particular - the anterior medial pre-frontal cortex - is thought to play a crucial role in hypnosis. "This region seems to be involved in self-related processing, metacognition [thinking about thinking], and the ability to control your own thoughts," says Terhune. "Those are processes that might be dampened in response to hypnotic induction."

With temporarily impaired activity in the default node network, it may become harder to think about yourself as a conscious agent. This might be at the root of the remarkable sensation that you are not an entirely autonomous over your own body.

The relevance of this part of the default mode network in hypnosis has been found in many studies, but Terhune adds a note of caution: "Sometimes we don't know what the causal ingredient is." For example, the medial pre-frontal cortex is also involved making inferences about other people's mental states. It could be that while you're being hypnotised, you also happen to be thinking about the experimenter and what they're thinking.

"But that's the best line of evidence," Terhune sums up. "It's a reduction in self-related processing and metacognition."

While academic experimenters tease out the details of why hypnosis works the way it does, clinicians are making use of its effects - as they have been doing for centuries.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

The Eleventh Circuit ruling focuses on whether Florida's law -- which heavily restricts suspensions, fact-checking, and content removal involving political candidates and media enterprises -- plausibly violates the First Amendment. Florida's defense of the law characterizes web platforms as quasi-governmental public spaces or "common carriers" akin to a phone company, making their moderation calls (in its line of reasoning) ineligible for First Amendment protection. The ruling, delivered by Circuit Judge Kevin Newsom, disagrees.

"Platforms are private enterprises, not governmental (or even quasi-governmental) entities," declares Newsom's opinion. "No one has a vested right to force a platform to allow her to contribute to or consume social media content." The court also determines that "social media platforms aren't 'dumb pipes'" -- in other words, they're not common carriers. Instead, they're digital spaces that are actively curating a community by creating terms of service and deciding how to deliver and prioritize content. In Newsom's words, "when a platform selectively removes what it perceives to be incendiary political rhetoric, pornographic content, or public-health misinformation, it conveys a message and thereby engages in 'speech' within the meaning of the First Amendment."

As Mike Masnick at Techdirt lays out, the ruling tears apart much of the legal logic that's underpinned conservative attempts to restrict social network content moderation. It also addresses a particular concern that cropped up after the recent shooting in Buffalo: whether these laws would force platforms to carry a video of the mass murder. The answer, it concludes here, is yes. "SB 7072 would seemingly prohibit Facebook or Twitter from removing a video of a mass shooter's killing spree if it happened to be reposted by an entity that qualifies for 'journalistic enterprise' status," writes Newsom.

That's not the end of the problems, either. In one section, the ruling notes that "the provision is so broad that it would prohibit a child-friendly platform like YouTube Kids from removing -- or even adding an age gate to -- softcore pornography posted by PornHub, which qualifies as a 'journalistic enterprise' because it posts more than 100 hours of video and has more than 100 million viewers per year."

PITY THE POOR LUDDITES:

For the first time, offshore wind energy in Germany is being used to stabilise the country's electricity system in case of grid fluctuations.

The offshore wind farm Riffgrund 1, operated by Danish energy company Orsted, will act as a so-called secondary reserve for the grid, meaning "offshore wind power is just as reliable as power coming from conventional plants," Orsted Germany head Jörg Kubitza said.

Offshore wind turbines are among the most reliable renewable power technologies and have become economically competitive system stabilisers, which had previously been the domain of conventional power plants, Kubitza added.

UKRAINE'S WAR OF INDEPENDENCE:

Shmotolokha is the son of Ukrainian World War 2 refugees and his wife grew up in Lviv, a city in western Ukraine. He met Heegaard, operations manager for the Footprint Project, in 2019 when they worked together on a solar microgrid project in Colorado. 

To date, the two have mainly worked on projects in the U.S., and never before in Ukraine. Leveraging their contacts network to establish transport routes into the country, and supported by disaster relief nonprofits on the ground, they began by sending LED lighting equipment and headlamps to hospitals, before expanding the program to include portable solar microgrids, which can recharge the LED kit as well as other essential medical and communications equipment. They also sent microgrids to a refugee camp in Moldova, a country bordering Ukraine which suddenly found itself hosting tens of thousands of people fleeing the war.

It's these last items, the solar microgrids, which are being touted as a game-changer in disaster relief settings. Unlike diesel generators, which are traditionally used to provide emergency backup power but which can only produce energy in real time, solar microgrids such as those deployed by Heegaard and Shmotolokha can produce and store energy independently from the main grid without relying on dwindling supplies of fossil fuels.

Heegaard and Shmotolokha say they have now shipped more than two dozen 2kWh portable solar battery systems to 13 hospitals in cities all over Ukraine. In areas under heavy Russian bombardment, such as the city of Kharkiv, these solar microgrids are helping save lives.

"[The hospitals there] have intermittent power, they're in the middle of operations and the lights are going out," says Shmotolokha.

It's not necessarily the case that these hospitals don't have traditional generators, adds Heegaard. "But if you can't access diesel then that fossil fuel generator becomes a giant, redundant paperweight."

Medical professionals in Ukraine with solar-powered kit. Credit: Footprint Project.

And because a solar microgrid is a clean source of energy, there are a number of other benefits.

"Noise, fumes and localized air pollution -- none of that exists with solar," says Heegaard, who explains that solar microgrids are therefore perfect for refugee camps. "Refugee partners we're working with are dealing with folks who have PTSD from the conflict and trying to sleep next to a really loud [diesel] generator isn't helpful."

In a conflict where power sources may be targeted, a solar microgrid has the additional advantage of being less detectable than a diesel generator, both because it's quieter and because it gives off less heat. It also negates the need to store large amounts of highly flammable fuel.

THE W SHAPED HOLE IN THE PARTY:

Reagan promised "Morning in America" as a metaphor for national renewal. His 1980 acceptance speech envisioned the American people themselves putting the nation on a path to prosperity, referencing the "shining city upon a hill" repeatedly over two terms.

Reagan-era platforms and policies focused on reduced taxes, energy independence, deregulation and strengthening families. His successors -- regardless of party -- embraced many of his policies: Bill Clinton recognized that "it's the economy, stupid," and "the era of big government is over."

CITIES WERE A MISTAKE:

SELF-GOVERNANCE ISN'T SUPPOSED TO BE EASY:

Alito's draft stressed that abortion is "a profound moral issue." He recognizes that he is fighting against an instinct in American politics that has had the republic by the throat for at least the last century. This is the idea that if an issue is morally significant enough, it is necessarily a constitutional one, to be decided on the basis of this or that "fundamental right" that just must be somewhere in the Constitution.

Though the United States was conceived in a struggle for local, republican self-government, we have come to view our Constitution as nothing less than a universal arbitrator and guarantor of political morality--a document that does not simply reflect particular moral commitments of its authors and ratifiers, but embodies moral principles to be applied as circumstances require. We look for constitutional meaning in "majestic generalities" seen as wild cards that can be used to encode whatever moral principle is needed into law.

Of course, the content of that political morality is a matter of some debate. This moral reading of the Constitution has its advocates on the left and the right. The former see individual autonomy in the document's penumbras, the latter sometimes see natural law, natural rights, or (more recently) generic authorizations to promote the common good. Those, like Alito, who would defer to the people's legislatures are, to the left, little Hitlers and, to the right, Stephen Douglas.

But what really underlies all these tendencies is the sense that the people cannot be trusted on the really important issues, especially if it is likely that they will settle these issues differently in their different states. Let them decide on transportation funding, on regulating dog food, or on the height of buildings in their city. On such relatively uncontroversial questions, wrong answers can be tolerated, and difference of opinion managed. But the answer to any question of great moral weight must be discovered once for all in the Constitution and handed down to a public that must be ruled.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

A few minutes after taking the stage to declare victory in Australia's election Saturday, Anthony Albanese, the incoming Labor prime minister, promised to transform climate change from a source of political conflict into a generator of economic growth.

"Together we can end the climate wars," he told his supporters, who cheered for several seconds. "Together we can take advantage of the opportunity for Australia to be a renewable energy superpower."

With that comment and his win -- along with a surge of votes for candidates outside the two-party system who made combating global warming a priority -- the likelihood of a significant shift in Australia's climate policy has suddenly increased.

How far the country goes will depend on the final tallies, which are still being counted. But for voters, activists, and scientists who spent years in despair, lamenting the fossil fuel industry's hold on the conservatives who have run Australia for most of the past three decades, Saturday's results amount to an extraordinary reversal.

A country known as a global climate laggard, with minimal 2030 targets for cuts to carbon emissions, has finally tossed aside a deny-and-delay approach to climate change that most Australians, in polls, have said they no longer want.

"This is the long-overdue climate election Australia has been waiting for," said Joëlle Gergis, an award-winning climate scientist and writer from the Australian National University. "It was a defining moment in our nation's history."

THE BROWN V. BOARD OF ED NOT CHOSEN:

In the years following the Supreme Court ruling, and well into the 1970s, white resistance to the decree decimated the ranks of Black principals and teachers. In large measure, white school boards, superintendents, state legislators -- and white parents -- did not want Black children attending school with white children. And they certainly did not want Black teachers educating white children and Black principals leading schools and supervising white teachers. The scheme devised to quickly eliminate Black educators: the closure of Black schools. Even prior to Black school closures, black principals and teachers received letters from district superintendents erroneously telling them that the desegregation decree was responsible for their firings, dismissals and demotions. Less-qualified white teachers, many of whom didn't have credentials, were hired in their stead.

As early as 1952, NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall knew that Black educators' jobs would be threatened given the racist strictures and customs of the Southern and border states. He was correct. After Brown, the NAACP litigated thousands of cases on behalf of displaced Black educators and pressured the Nixon administration, the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, the FBI and Congress to investigate and remedy the illegal and discriminatory treatment of Black principals and teachers. Though some litigants prevailed winning back pay and reinstatement, most never got their jobs back.

Today, the nation, not to mention our public education system, is still living with the fallout: traumatized Black school children; roughly $1-2 billion in salary losses and the largest orchestrated brain drain ever experienced in the U.S. public education system. What's more, many of the beliefs and levers that were used to eliminate Black principals and teacher leadership after Brown are still in effect today. When I read and watch contemporary news accounts of (mainly white) parents objecting to the teaching of Black history and a more truthful accounting of American history; threatening to burn books; and physically intimidating school board members, I think about resistance to the Brown legal decision. The tactics being used now come from the exact same script.

BUILDING A CHURCH BUREAUCRACY SEEMED LIKE SUCH A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME...:

They were right. I was wrong to call sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) a crisis. Crisis is too small a word. It is an apocalypse.

Someone asked me a few weeks ago what I expected from the third-party investigation into the handling of sexual abuse by the Southern Baptist Convention's Executive Committee. I said I didn't expect to be surprised at all. How could I be? I lived through years with that entity. I was the one who called for such an investigation in the first place.

And yet, as I read the report, I found that I could not swipe the screen to the next page because my hands were shaking with rage. That's because, as dark a view as I had of the SBC Executive Committee, the investigation uncovers a reality far more evil and systemic than I imagined it could be.

The conclusions of the report are so massive as to almost defy summation. It corroborates and details charges of deception, stonewalling, and intimidation of victims and those calling for reform. It includes written conversations among top Executive Committee staff and their lawyers that display the sort of inhumanity one could hardly have scripted for villains in a television crime drama. It documents callous cover-ups by some SBC leaders and credible allegations of sexually predatory behavior by some leaders themselves, including former SBC president Johnny Hunt (who was one of the only figures in SBC life who seemed to be respected across all of the typical divides).

And then there is the documented mistreatment by the Executive Committee of a sexual abuse survivor, whose own story of her abuse was altered to make it seem that her abuse was a consensual "affair"--resulting, as the report corroborates, in years of living hell for her.

NEVER WASTE A CRISIS; BUT WHY WAIT FOR ONE:

The plan commits to partnerships with renewable businesses and a rapid rollout of solar and wind energy projects, combined with renewable hydrogen deployment in the short term. This includes approval for the first EU-wide hydrogen projects by the summer.

Additionally, a hydrogen accelerator is planned to build 17.5 gigawatts (GW) of electrolyzers. This would fuel the EU industry with 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen by 2025. Also in development is a modern regulatory framework for hydrogen.

However, the most significant commitment is to solar energy, with a 28-page dedicated EU Solar Strategy setting out the details. 

Simply put, Europe is going ALL in.

Kadri Simson, the EU Energy Commissioner, told the press at public launch of the plan:

By 2030, the share of wind energy in power production capacities will double from the current 33% to 67%. Solar energy will be the biggest source of electricity in the EU by then, with more than half of it coming from rooftops.

Rooftop solar is compulsory for all new public and commercial buildings with usable floor areas larger than 250 square meters by 2026.  Current builds must install solar panels by 2027, and residential buildings by 2029.

Even better, the process will be expedited, with rooftop solar permits to be granted within three months. 

There's also a commitment to agrivoltaics (solar energy in farming), floating solar initiatives, and repurposing abandoned industrial or commercial setups and land for solar projects.

GULLIBLE GOOBERS (profanity alert):

There was just one problem. Salazar's claims were easily disprovable. Hours after the video was recorded, Trump campaign staffers reviewed some allegations about Dominion that were almost identical, and it took them less than a day to discover they were baseless. The staffers prepared an internal memo with section headings that read: "Dominion Has No Company Ties To Venezuela," "Dominion And Smartmatic Terminated Their Contract In 2012" and "There Is No Evidence That Dominion Used Smartmatic's Software In The 2020 Election Cycle." Independent fact-checkers came to the same conclusions. Dominion later released a statement calling a version of these allegations that Powell pushed in a lawsuit, "baseless, senseless, physically impossible, and unsupported by any evidence whatsoever." A lawyer for Smartmatic wrote to ProPublica: "There are no ties between Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic -- plain and simple." He added that "Salazar's testimony is full of inaccuracies," strongly denied that Smartmatic's technology was designed to steal Venezuelan elections, and said the company, which operates worldwide, has "registered and counted over 5 billion votes without a single security breach." (Salazar did not respond to requests for comment.)

Salazar's story was just one of many pieces of so-called evidence that members of the coalition have offered as proof that the 2020 election was rigged. That unfounded belief has emerged as one of the most potent forces in American politics. Numerous polls show that over two-thirds of Republicans doubt the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Millions of those Republicans believe foreign governments reprogrammed American voting machines.

ProPublica has obtained a trove of internal emails and other documentation that, taken together, tell the inside story of a group of people who propagated a number of the most pervasive theories about how the election was stolen, especially that voting machines were to blame, and helped move them from the far-right fringe to the center of the Republican Party.

Those records, as well as interviews with key participants, show for the first time the extent to which leading advocates of the stolen-election theory touted evidence that they knew to be disproven or that had been credibly disputed or dismissed as dubious by operatives within their own camp. Some members of the coalition presented this mix of unreliable witnesses, unconfirmed rumor and suspect analyses as fact in published reports, talking points and court documents. In several cases, their assertions became the basis for Trump's claims that the election had been rigged.

Our examination of their actions from the 2020 election to the present day reveals a pattern. Many members of the coalition would advance a theory based on evidence that was never vetted or that they'd been told was flawed; then, when the theory was debunked, they'd move on to the next alternative and then the next.

The coalition includes several figures who have attracted national attention. Retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who served briefly as national security adviser to Trump before pleading guilty to lying to law enforcement about his contacts with Russian officials, is the most well known. Patrick Byrne, the former CEO of Overstock.com who left his position after his romantic relationship with the convicted Russian agent Maria Butina became public, is the coalition's chief financier and a frequent intermediary with the press. Powell, who represented Flynn in his attempt to reverse his guilty plea, spearheaded efforts in the courts.

Before Powell arrived at the plantation, Wood had filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta against Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger that sought to stop him from certifying Biden's victory. Soon after Powell showed up, Wood submitted an anonymized declaration from Salazar as evidence of how the election was corrupted. He then filed an emergency motion that sought access to Dominion machines in Georgia to "conduct a forensic inspection of this equipment and the data therein." The case was eventually dismissed, but it would serve as a template for the series of high-profile lawsuits that Powell would file in Arizona, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia.

Salazar's declaration was central to the four lawsuits, and it went further than the assertions he had made in the video. His claim that he could show "the similarity" between anomalies in Venezuelan and American elections expanded to become an allegation that "the DNA of every vote tabulating company's software and system" in the United States was potentially compromised.

Wood told ProPublica, "I was not involved in the vetting, drafting or filing any of the lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell," though his name appears as "of counsel" in all four. A judge sanctioned him in the Michigan case, writing that "while Wood now seeks to distance himself from this litigation to avoid sanctions, the Court concludes that he was aware of this lawsuit when it was filed, was aware that he was identified as co-counsel for Plaintiffs, and as a result, shares the responsibility with the other lawyers for any sanctionable conduct."

All the lawsuits would fail, with judges excoriating the quality of their evidence. It wasn't just the evidence in the lawsuits that was flawed. In fact, much of the evidence that members of the coalition contributed to the stolen election myth outside the courts was also weak. Yet the coalition's failure to prove its theories has not hindered its ability to spread them.

This is the story of how little untruths added up to the "big lie."

IT'S BEEN A WALKOVER FOR A CENTURY:

Earlier this year, as Russia's massive troop buildup on Ukraine's borders grew steadily more ominous, there were suggestions that the only way for Ukraine to avoid being conquered by Moscow was to submit to "Finlandization." That was a reference to Finland's policy of abject neutrality during the Cold War, when Helsinki was barred from joining NATO or otherwise aligning itself with the West, scrupulously avoided any criticism of the Soviet Union, and deferred to Moscow on most major policy questions. In return, Soviet troops stayed on their side of the 830-mile border with Finland, and Finns kept their democratic form of government.

Before Russia unleashed its war on Ukraine in February, a number of prominent figures, among them French President Emmanuel Macron and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, held out the prospect that a Finlandized Ukraine might satisfy Vladimir Putin and defuse the worsening crisis. "Wise Ukrainian leaders," wrote former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, "should pursue a posture comparable to that of Finland."

But a funny thing happened on the way to Ukraine becoming Finlandized. Finland became Ukrainized.

THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

A disproportionate share of the Russian soldiers killed in Ukraine have come from the country's minority ethnic communities, many of which are already blighted by poverty and targeted by official discrimination.

As the conflict drags on, ethnic activists hope that the colonialist overtones of Russia's brutal invasion, which has also seen economic appropriation of Ukrainian resources and summary killings of unarmed men, could fuel discontent among non-Slavic groups - and even provide the political momentum to change the current structure of the Russian Federation.

"There will be a window of opportunity, and we will use it to get maximum rights and freedoms for our republic of Bashkortostan. We will try to become a sovereign state equal to others in the global arena," said the Lithuania-based Gabbasov, who fled Russia in 2020.

Rafis Kashapov, a veteran Tatar rights activist and co-founder of the Free Idel-Ural movement that seeks independence and integration for a group of ethnic regions in central Russia, echoed Gabbasov's comments. 

"We believe that the Russian invasion of Ukraine will bring about the fall of the empire," he told The Moscow Times in a telephone interview. 

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

When the pandemic forced schools into remote learning, Washington-area science teacher Rebecca Bushway set her students an ambitious task: design and build a low-cost lead filter that fixes to faucets and removes the toxic metal.

Using 3D printing and high-school level chemistry, the team now has a working prototype - a 7.5cm (three-inch) tall filter housing made of biodegradable plastic, which they hope to eventually bring to market for $1 apiece.

"The science is straightforward," Bushway told AFP on a recent visit to the Barrie Middle and Upper School in suburban Maryland in the US, where she demonstrated the water filter in action.

"I thought, 'We have these 3D printers. What if we make something like this?'"

CREATIONISM:

The first thing that presents itself is a wish, that "I had, explicitly, declared to the public my ideas of the natural rights of mankind. Man, in a state of nature (you say), may be considered as perfectly free from all restraints of law and government; and then, the weak must submit to the strong."

I shall, henceforth, begin to make some allowance for that enmity you have discovered to the natural rights of mankind. For, though ignorance of them, in this enlightened age, cannot be admitted as a sufficient excuse for you, yet it ought, in some measure, to extenuate your guilt. If you will follow my advice, there still may be hopes of your reformation. Apply yourself, without delay, to the study of the law of nature. I would recommend to your perusal, Grotius, Puffendorf, Locke, Montesquieu, and Burlemaqui. I might mention other excellent writers on this subject; but if you attend diligently to these, you will not require any others.

There is so strong a similitude between your political principles and those maintained by Mr. Hobbes, that, in judging from them, a person might very easily mistake you for a disciple of his. His opinion was exactly coincident with yours, relative to man in a state of nature. He held, as you do, that he was then perfectly free from all restraint of law and government. Moral obligation, according to him, is derived from the introduction of civil society; and there is no virtue but what is purely artificial, the mere contrivance of politicians for the maintenance of social intercourse. But the reason he ran into this absurd and impious doctrine was, that he disbelieved the existence of an intelligent, superintending principle, who is the governor, and will be the final judge, of the universe.

As you, sometimes swear by Him that made you, I conclude your sentiment does not correspond with his in that which is the basis of the doctrine you both agree in; and this makes it impossible to imagine whence this congruity between you arises. To grant that there is a Supreme Intelligence who rules the world and has established laws to regulate the actions of His creatures, and still to assert that man, in a state of nature, may be considered as perfectly free from all restraints of law and government, appears to a common understanding, altogether irreconcileable.

Good and wise men, in all ages, have embraced a very dissimilar theory. They have supposed that the Deity, from the relations we stand in to Himself and to each other, has constituted an eternal and immutable law, which is indispensably obligatory upon all mankind, prior to any human institution whatever.

This is what is called the law of nature, "which, being coeval with mankind, and dictated by God himself, is, of course, superior in obligations to any other. It is binding over all the globe, in all countries, and at all times. No human laws are of any validity, if contrary to this; and such of them as are valid derive all their authority, mediately or immediately, from this original." Blackstone.

Upon this law depend the natural rights of mankind: the Supreme Being gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beatifying that existence. He endowed him with rational faculties, by the help of which to discern and pursue such things, as were consistent with his duty and interest; and invested him with an inviolable right to personal liberty and personal safety.

Hence, in a state of nature, no man had any moral power to deprive another of his life, limbs, property or liberty; nor the least authority to command or exact obedience from him, except that which arose from the ties of consanguinity.

Hence, also, the origin of all civil government, justly established, must be a voluntary compact between the rulers and the ruled, and must be liable to such limitations as are necessary for the security of the absolute rights of the latter; for what original title can any man or set of men, have to govern others, except their own consent? To usurp dominion over a people in their own despite, or to grasp at a more extensive power than they are willing to intrust, is to violate that law of nature which gives every man a right to his personal liberty, and can therefore confer no obligation to obedience. "The principal aim of society is to protect individuals in the enjoyment of those absolute rights which were vested in them by the immutable laws of nature, but which could not be preserved in peace without that mutual assistance and intercourse which is gained by the institution of friendly and social communities. Hence it follows, that the first and primary end of human laws is to maintain and regulate these absolute rights of individuals." Blackstone.

If we examine the pretensions of Parliament by this criterion, which is evidently a good one, we shall presently detect their injustice. First, they are subversive of our natural liberty, because an authority is assumed over us which we by no means assent to. And, secondly, they divest us of that moral security for our lives and properties, which we are entitled to, and which it is the primary end of society to bestow. For such security can never exist while we have no part in making the laws that are to bind us, and while it may be the interest of our uncontrolled legislators to oppress us as much as possible.

WHEN TRUMPISTS THINK AMERICA WAS GREAT:

The passage and signing of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act set a number of precedents in United States immigration law. First, it barred an entire nation's population from entering the US, as well as from obtaining citizenship, based on ethnic (then "racial") origin. Secondly, it superseded any and all laws regarding Chinese immigration, some of which had been passed by individual states (most notably California). The period of exclusion of Chinese immigrants by the US didn't truly end until 1965.

IT'S NOT NUCLEAR PHYSICS:

As Europe struggles to decarbonise its economy and wean itself off Russian oil and gas, one of the world's sunniest and most arid nations is pitching itself to the continent as an answer to its problems.

A delegation from sub-Saharan Africa's driest country has been touring Europe to tout their nation as a potential powerhouse of clean energy.

They say Namibia can produce so much solar power it will soon be self-sufficient in electricity -- and, by the end of the decade, could become an exporter of so-called green hydrogen.

"We came to Europe saying we have this amazing sun," said James Mnyupe, economic adviser to the Namibian presidency.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

A notorious Hungarian racist who has called Jews "stinking excrement", referred to Roma as "animals" and used racial epithets to describe Black people, was a featured speaker at a major gathering of US Republicans in Budapest.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Quoting Carlson accusing Hunter Biden of getting "lucrative jobs ... because he had an important father", the Post said the Fox News host did so without "disclosing that he had once enlisted Biden to help get his son into a prestigious private university".

On the same January 2020 show, Carlson said: "In America today, there's nothing illegal about paying de facto bribes by handing fake jobs to the unqualified family members of powerful people. And since it is perfectly legal, naturally, Hunter Biden isn't the only one shamelessly cashing in on his family name."

In another email reported by the Post, Susie Carlson wrote: "Tucker and I would be so grateful if you could write a letter or speak to someone in the Georgetown Admission's [sic] Office about Buckley."

Biden reportedly agreed to write to the university president and said: "I will do anything you would like me to do."

According to the Post, Tucker Carlson wrote: "I can't thank you enough for writing that letter to Georgetown on Bucky's behalf. So nice of you. I know it'll help. Hope you're great and we can all get dinner soon."

SAID NO ONE, EVER:

In case you missed it, there was a fleeting internet controversy involving Yumi Nu, the conventionally attractive plus-size model who graced the cover of this year's Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition, and Jordan Peterson, the based high priest of Generation Incel.

As is often the case with internet controversies, both sides behaved insufferably and wasted the opportunity to have a constructive dialogue about justice-oriented body positivity and representation in the fashion industry.

It's time we address the elephant in the room. (No pun intended.) Full-figured, aesthetically challenged male bodies continue to be woefully underrepresented on the covers of magazines and other platforms that claim to promote "inclusive" beauty standards. That needs to change.

READ YOUR HOFFER:

Over the past several years, a half-dozen white supremacists committed acts of violence under the belief that their country belongs to white people and they must suppress any risk of replacement by force. This delusion led Anders Breivik to kill 77 people in Norway in 2011 and inspired Frazier Glenn Miller Jr. to kill three people outside of a Jewish community center in Kansas in 2014. Elliot Rodger espoused the same notion in 2014 when he killed six people in Santa Barbara, California.* So did Dylann Roof before he killed nine parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. Patrick Crusius, who killed 23 people in a Walmart in El Paso in 2019, and Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 worshippers in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019, also composed and shared lengthy white supremacist screeds.

I've read each manifesto as part of my work as a professor and researcher at the University of Connecticut on the intersection of "race," knowledge, media, power, religion, and science. In particular, I focus on whiteness and racism. While there is a diversity of ideas represented under the umbrella of white supremacy, two prominent logics weave their way throughout each manifesto. First, for example, Gendron writes:

White people are failing to reproduce, failing to create families. ... Mass immigration will disenfranchise us, subvert our nations, destroy our communities, destroy our ethnic ties, destroy our cultures, destroy our peoples.

This is a voice of victimhood, weakness, and panic. But second, and simultaneously, Gendron like many others, proclaims an inherent white racial superiority:

I believe the White race is superior in the brain to all other races. ... The brilliance and creativity found in White's is incomparable to all other races, therefore I believe that White's are superior.

These two tales form the DNA of the white supremacist manifesto. It is a double helix of equal parts inadequacy and superiority, a uniform blend of peril and power. How do two seemingly antagonistic ideas so easily commingle?

FREELOADERS:

[H]e smiles from ear-to-ear as he caresses his loyal canine companion of two years, whose name "Negro" means "Black" in Spanish.

"He has also crossed everything just like us, he eats the same we eat, he's also a migrant," he told AFP in the town of Tecun Uman in eastern Guatemala, the sixth country stop on his north-bound route. [...]

On their long trip, the man and his best friend have often had to rely on charity, sometimes sharing their food.

When shelters did not allow animals, they slept on the street.

Why put himself through this? "We had to flee," Rodriguez said of his life in Venezuela.

"The salary is not enough, you buy everything in dollars and what they pay you in bolivars is nothing."

On the penultimate stretch of his journey, Rodriguez clambers onto a boat made of old tires and planks, a trip for which he paid just over $1.

He clutches Negro in his arms as a man pushes a long oar along the river floor, and ten minutes later, they are across.

The dog, seated quietly between his master's legs during the crossing, quickly jumps off and onto dry land, now in Mexico.

"We have crossed mountains, rivers, streams... we are no longer afraid of anything," said Moises Ayerdi, a 25-year-old Nicaraguan migrant who made the same trip.

He said he had left his home, wife and three-year-old daughter because he was the target of political persecution by President Daniel Ortega's government.

"Our feet hurt, we arrived here sick... We are used to it. We will continue. Just like we crossed Honduras, Guatemala, we will cross Mexico," he vowed.

EVERY TEAM SHOULD WEAR 101:

Angell served in the U.S. Army and worked at Holiday Magazine before migrating to The New Yorker. He began writing actively about baseball in 1962, when his first Spring Training feature, "The Old Folks behind Home," appeared in The New Yorker. William Shawn, the magazine's editor at the time, wanted more sports-related content to complement the short stories, poetry, analysis pieces and movie reviews that typically filled the magazine. Angell, who grew up in New York and started following the Yankees and Giants during the 1930s, was happy to comply. 

Angell demonstrated his perceptivity immediately. Explaining why the New York Mets, who compiled an abysmal 40-120 record in their inaugural 1962 season, prompted rabid fan enthusiasm that the perennial champion Yankees rarely inspired, he wrote, "There is more Met than Yankee in every one of us." 

In his most famous passage, from his signature piece, "The Interior Stadium," Angell presented an impossible yet intoxicating notion: "Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young." 

In his review of the 1975 World Series, Angell defended the loyalty of fans everywhere: 

"It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team. ... What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift." 

Angell described great ballplayers in terms everyone could understand. For example, he relished Mays' baserunning: "... Seeing him drift across a base and then sink into full speed, I noticed all at once how much he resembles a marvelous skier in midturn down a steep pitch of fast powder. Nobody like him." 

Sandy Koufax's pitching astounded Angell as much as the hitters the left-hander bedeviled. "...(T)he fastball, appearing suddenly in the strike zone, sometimes jumps up so immoderately that his catcher has to take it with his glove shooting upward, like an infielder stabbing at a bad-hop grounder. I remember some batter taking a strike like that and then stepping out of the box and staring back at the pitcher with a look of utter incredulity -- as if Koufax had just thrown an Easter egg past him." 

Angell even profiled the ball itself to explain the game's appeal: "Pick it up and it instantly suggests its purpose; it is meant to be thrown a considerable distance -- thrown hard and with precision. ... Feel the ball, turn it over in your hand; hold it across the seam or the other way, with the seam just to the side of your middle finger. Speculation stirs. You want to get outdoors and throw this spare and sensual object to somebody or, at the very least, watch somebody else throw it. The game has begun." 

Angell summoned his powers of description to detail Jeter's mannerisms as he settled into the batter's box: "The between-pitches bat tucked up in his armpit. The fingertip helmet-twiddle. The left front foot wide open, out of the box until the last moment, and the cop-at-a-crossing right hand ritually lifted astern until the foot swings shut." 

Ever the fan's voice, Angell didn't hide his sentiment if he favored a particular team. An example of this accented his coverage of the classic Red Sox-Yankees one-game playoff for the 1978 AL East title, which New York captured, 5-4. The Red Sox had the potential tying run on third base when Carl Yastrzemski, Boston's hero of heroes, popped out to end the game. Angell's bitter conclusion read, "I think God was shelling a peanut."

THERE'S ONLY ONE REASON THEY EVER MENTION HIM:

The Minnesota Republican Party apologized for screening a video that depicted liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros as a puppet master controlling two Jewish Democrats, saying that those responsible were not aware that the imagery had antisemitic connotations.

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

Let's take a quick look at some of the top-rated American TV programs of the 1974-5 season. The highest rated program, All in the Family, was an American remake of a British program called Till Death Do Us Part. The second-highest rated program, Sanford and Son, was a remake of a British series called Steptoe and Son. At number three was Chico and the Man, which was inspired by a comedy bit performed by Cheech and Chong and also bore a strong resemblance to Sanford and Son. In fourth place came The Jeffersons, a spinoff of All in the Family. In fifth place we have M*A*S*H, which was a spinoff of a Robert Altman film, which was itself based on a Richard Hooker novel. In sixth place comes Rhoda, a spinoff of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In seventh place is Good Times, a spinoff of Maude, which was itself a spinoff of All in the Family (which, of course, was based on a British series). In eighth place comes The Waltons, a spinoff of a 1963 film called Spencer's Mountain, which was based on a 1961 novel by Earl Hamner, Jr. In ninth place comes the aforementioned Maude. Not until we come to the tenth-highest rated program, Hawaii 5-0, do we arrive at a wholly original piece of intellectual property.

The next few years would bring us hit series like Laverne & Shirley (a spinoff of Happy Days), Mork & Mindy (ditto), The Ropers (a spinoff of Three's Company, which was a remake of the British program Man About The House), Alice (a sitcom based on Martin Scorsese's 1974 film Alice Doesn't Live Here Any More), The Dukes of Hazzard (a spinoff of the 1975 film Moonrunners), Lou Grant (a Mary Tyler Moore spinoff), Phyllis (ditto), Flo (a spinoff of Alice), Archie Bunker's Place (a re-working of All in the Family), House Calls (based on a 1978 film of the same name), Trapper John, M.D. (a spinoff of M*A*S*H), Benson (a spinoff of Soap)--

I could go on like this for another couple of pages, but you get the point. Almost all of the shows I've just mentioned were official spinoffs, reboots, or reworkings of an existing show. Others were outright rip-offs. The master of this dubious craft was producer Glen A. Larson, whom Harlan Ellison once dubbed Glen A. Larceny, because so many of the series he created and/or produced plundered somebody else's work. Larson's Alias Smith & Jones was a rip-off of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It Takes a Thief, which Larson produced, was a variation on Hitchcock's film To Catch a Thief. Battlestar Galactica was a rip-off of Star Wars (which was a loose remake of Akira Kurosawa's samurai classic The Hidden Fortress). BJ and the Bear was a mash-up of films like White Line Fever, Smokey and the Bandit, and Any Which Way but Loose (and inspired its own spinoff, The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo). Switch was a mash-up of the film The Sting and The Rockford Files. Automan was a rip-off of the film Tron.

To be a TV junkie in the 1960s and '70s was to live in a permanent state of déjà vu. Dusty's Trail, a sitcom that aired in 1973 and 1974, was created by Sherwood Schwartz, who created Gilligan's Island, both of which starred Bob Denver. The former was essentially a rip-off of the latter, but set on the Oregon Trail rather than a desert isle. The Munsters, a sitcom featuring tropes from horror fiction but set in American suburbia, debuted on CBS on September 24th, 1964, just six days after the debut of ABC-TV's The Addams Family, a show with a nearly identical premise. As Allan Burns, co-creator of The Munsters, later noted, "We sort of stole the idea from Charles Addams and his New Yorker cartoons." Likewise, The Big Valley was just Bonanza with a female lead. And The Jetsons was just The Flintstones set in the future rather than the past.

An industry practice known as script recycling was rampant in the 1960s and '70s. I was a television super-fan in the 1970s, and I corresponded with many of the most successful TV writers of the era including Alvin Sapinsley, Stirling Silliphant, and Roland Kibbee. I read the writing credits of every TV show I watched. I kept track of episode titles. And I frequently saw writers recycling virtually the same script over and over again for different TV series. This was much easier to get away with back before home entertainment made it possible to review TV episodes over and over again.

WELL, THAT TRIAL WAS AS POINTLESS AS EXPECTED:

[B]aker conceded on Thursday that he'd made an "inconsistent" statement about the critical fact of Sussmann's statements there on at least one prior occasion, and that his memory on the point had evolved over time. By the end of the day, Baker's overall testimony provided significant fodder for Sussmann's defense and perhaps enough uncertainty to produce the reasonable doubt that could lead to Sussmann's acquittal.

THUS THE ELLIS ISLAND MODEL:

THERE ARE A LOT OF WINNERS, JUST NEITHER OF THEM:

One thing is certain: simply hoping that China will stop encroaching on Indian territory will do India little good. After all, India got into this situation precisely because its political and military leadership failed to take heed of China's military activities near the frontier. On the contrary, while China was laying the groundwork for its territorial grabs, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was bending over backwards to befriend Xi. In the five years before the first clashes flared in May 2020, Modi met with his Chinese counterpart 18 times. Even a 2017 standoff on a remote Himalayan plateau did not dissuade Modi from pursuing his appeasement policy.

Seeking to protect his image as a strong leader, Modi has not acknowledged the loss of Indian territories. India's media enables this evasion by amplifying government-coined euphemisms: China's aggression is a "unilateral change of status quo," and the PLA-seized areas are "friction points." Meanwhile, Modi has allowed China's trade surplus with India to rise so rapidly - it now exceeds India's total defense budget (the world's third largest) - that his government is, in a sense, underwriting China's aggression.

But none of this should be mistaken for unwillingness to fight. India is committed to restoring the status quo ante and is at its "highest level" of military readiness. This is no empty declaration. If Xi seeks to break the current stalemate by waging war, both sides will suffer heavy losses, with no victor emerging.

In other words, Xi has picked a border fight that he cannot win, and transformed a conciliatory India into a long-term foe. This amounts to an even bigger miscalculation than Modi's policy incoherence. The price China will pay for Xi's mistake will far outweigh the perceived benefits of some stealthy land grabs.

In a sense, China's territorial expansionism represents a shrewder, broader, and slower version of Russia's conventional war on Ukraine - and could provoke a similar international backlash against Xi's neo-imperial agenda. Already, China's aggression has prompted Indo-Pacific powers to strengthen their military capabilities and cooperation, including with the United States. All of this will undercut Xi's effort to fashion a Sino-centric Asia and, ultimately, achieve China's goal of global preeminence.

Xi might recognize that he has made a strategic blunder in the Himalayas. But, at a time when he is preparing to secure a precedent-defying third term as leader of the Communist Party of China, he has little room to change course, and the costs will continue to mount.

AFTER ALL, IT ALLOWS AMENDMENT:

If the leaked draft of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization opinion is any indication, the future of conservatism in the courts is not common good constitutionalism. As constitutional theorists have overwhelmingly emphasized, this and similar approaches to constitutional interpretation--if one may call them that--appeal to few legal minds, particularly those of judges. There is almost zero indication that basing legal decisions on aspirational conceptions of a flourishing, moral wonderland will gain any traction now or later, and rightly so--such "methods" are almost completely detached from the actual, written law. These metaphysical visions should be relegated to the fields of political philosophy or political thought. It is time for constitutional theorists to move on and stop beating a legless horse.

The future of conservatism in the courts still lies in text-based originalism. But it is true that the current approaches to originalism often rely on an undisciplined hodgepodge of original sources. Indeed, originalism comes in forms that variously give greater or lesser weight to the convention debates, the Federalist, contemporary public perceptions, records from the state ratifying conventions, private letters, Anglo-American common law, historical events, congressional and executive action, early case law, and so on. This is all well and good, but it is unclear which sources deserve the most weight once the text itself becomes vague or ambiguous.

If jurists and scholars crave certainty and legitimacy in the judiciary, then the ultimate goal should be to arrive at a clear method of interpretation that consistently assigns weight to different categories of original sources on a hierarchical scale. Crystallizing text-based originalism into a more coherent and universally applicable method of constitutional interpretation would help to secure the legal principles that define and balance the American forms of liberty, order, justice, and power. We are not alone in this venture. The ghosts of giants still stand among the pillars of our libraries, waiting for us to rediscover their immortal remains. Some scholars just need to get back on their shoulders and start looking around.

With that in mind, originalists should, within the framework of the Blackstonian method of statutory interpretation, rely first on the earliest case law--rather than the latest precedents--when trying to determine the meaning of constitutional text. In other words, if the words of the Constitution are unclear or ambiguous, and if the context of those words fails to produce clear meaning, then the first non-textual step in determining meaning should be a close examination of the first eras of legal interpretation of those words, particularly in the federal judiciary.

WHEN THE LEMMINGS MEET THE CLIFF:

NPR examined COVID deaths per 100,000 people in roughly 3,000 counties across the U.S. from May 2021, the point at which most Americans could find a vaccine if they wanted one. Those living in counties that voted 60% or higher for Trump in November 2020 had 2.26 times the death rate of those that went by the same margin for Biden. Counties with a higher share of Trump votes had even higher mortality rates.

The scale of the preventable loss of life is staggering. According to a recent analysis by Brown University, nearly 320,000 lives nationwide could have been saved if more people had chosen to get vaccinated. The Brown analysis also shows a partisan split in how those preventable deaths are distributed. States that went most heavily for Trump - including Wyoming and West Virginia - have among the highest rates of preventable deaths, while states that voted heavily for Biden - such as Massachusetts and Vermont - had among the lowest.

NOW FINISH WWII:

[R]ussia is not a great power. By 2014, its GDP had collapsed, dragged by a steep fall in gas and oil prices, only to return to the level of ten years earlier in 2020. For Ukrainians, choosing a modest Russian loan over an association agreement with the European Union no longer made sense (if it ever had); when pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych chose the Russian loan, it triggered the Maidan revolt.

Moscow responded by pulling out the stick: annexing the Crimea and creating two puppet republics carved into the old Soviet Rust Belt, the Donbass. It does not take great skills of psychological penetration to understand that Russia had lost whatever sympathy it still enjoyed in Ukraine, and why the new regime in Kyiv would seek economic, political, and military protection elsewhere. It does not take great psychological penetration skills to understand why Ukraine preferred to forge an agreement with an economic bloc (the U.S., the EU, and the U.K.)) with a combined GDP of almost $40 trillion (in 2020) over doing so with Russia, with its GDP of just $1.5 trillion (a little less than South Korea, a little more than Spain).

The United States has a vested interest in the continuation of this war, possibly at low intensity. But the Russian war on Ukraine will not solve America's problems.

From a geopolitical point of view, Russia is stuck in a vicious circle: In order to develop economically, it must recover its imperial dimension; but, in order to succeed in that, it has to spend resources that it does not have.

To play in a bigger league, Russia generally bluffs, giving the rest of the world an impression of power. When it succeeds, it is not only thanks to disproportionate military strength and elusive diplomacy, but also because its rivals almost never ask to see what cards it's holding.

In the days preceding the invasion of Ukraine, massive military mobilization and deliberately misleading communication seemed to portend success: Russia was again, overwhelmingly, at the center of the world--feared and flattered. The control of Crimea and of the two puppet republics seemed likely to be recognized (de facto, even if not de jure). Finally, NATO, strongly divided, would most likely have accepted (more likely without saying it) the outcome to lighten its presence at the borders of the former USSR.

All analysts then skeptical about the possibility of a Russian attack (including the present author) were led by this simple observation: If Russia invades, it risks not only losing what it has, in actuality, already obtained, but much more. But obviously, Moscow wanted more: to regain control of all of Ukraine. It goes without saying that the unconditional surrender of Ukraine could not be obtained at the negotiating table; not even the two NATO countries (France and Germany) most open to Moscow's needs would have allowed it. Military action thus became the only possible recourse.

But this time, as happens at the poker table, when you have very little or nothing in your hand, you lose your entire stake.

With the invasion, Moscow achieved a long series of results opposite to what it had, at least in words, set for itself: It created a stronger national cohesion in Ukraine, losing most of its residual support among the Russian-speaking population. It reunified and reinvigorated NATO, labelled as "brain dead" by Emmanuel Macron a couple of years ago, increasing the alliance's popularity throughout Europe, and prompting Finland and Sweden to want to join. The Russian war caused a surge in NATO's military presence on the borders of the former USSR; allowed Germany to accelerate its rearmament; stimulated the opening of a debate on nuclear weapons in Japan; alienated many in China, Iran, and India (even if the Chinese, Iranians, and Indians cannot say it openly); alarmed Turkey; and was heavily condemned by the U.N. General Assembly (141 in favor, 4 against, and 35 abstentions).

Last but not least, Russia showed the world its embarrassing military paucity. It devalued all the bluff of armaments, the alleged backbone of the illusory Russian power.

All these consequences make the United States the real, and only, winner of this war, at least at the current stage of the conflict in early May.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Ørsted and ARK Nature will test the potential of rewilding principles in restoring vital ocean biodiversity and will begin with an effort to restore shellfish reefs in the North Sea, where a marine field lab will be established .

Shellfish reefs are crucial to ocean ecosystems as they play host to reef builders such as oysters and mussels, and also provide food, shelter, and breeding grounds for a range of other species, and improve water quality.

Ørsted says its offshore wind projects under construction or planned for the North Sea could provide much needed locations to host shellfish reefs.

"When it comes to tackling the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, there's a real need for speed," said Rasmus Errboe, head of region continental Europe at Ørsted.

"We need urgent action - but that speed must not come at the expense of nature, and Ørsted believes it doesn't have to. With this new collaboration, I'm excited to add to our existing, ambitious global biodiversity programme.

"Together with ARK, Ørsted will implement innovative new restoration projects and study how rewilding can contribute to improving the health of our oceans, and how the offshore wind sector can enhance that contribution."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

But there is another loss here too, and it's a loss to the political culture of the Left. For as the progressive wing has embraced the ever-evolving permutations of identity politics so enthusiastically, it has also -- and probably non-coincidentally -- made it impossible for anyone on its own side to laugh at these permutations, or at identity politics generally. In the reductive algebra of progressive offence-seekers, mocking identity politics is equated with mocking minorities. Of course, all politics is tribal, and no political party or movement, Right or Left, can easily tolerate mockery, especially from within its own ranks. But this is not just an understandable dislike of being laughed at by those on the same side as oneself. It is a positive taboo against it, with all the enforcing of speech codes, wilfully reductive misunderstandings, and attempted humiliation of miscreants that this implies.

And yet there is so much to laugh at! Last week alone gave us the Head of Trans Inclusion at Stonewall, on a hefty salary to oversee Stonewall's many trans-related programmes, asking to be accompanied by a support worker, his mother, and a support dog during cross-questioning at Allison Bailey's employment tribunal. (The judge instructed him not to discuss the case with his mother during a break; whether he was allowed to discuss it with the dog wasn't mentioned).

We also were treated to the spectacle of 61 mainly Labour MPs, holding placards at the behest of nameless LGBTQ+ campaigners, and passing on the bonkers message to the general public that confused adolescents shouldn't be given any therapy in their hasty rush to get rid of various body parts. Brass Eye's Chris Morris -- famous for getting celebrities to unwittingly humiliate themselves on camera in the name of various confected moral panics -- couldn't have done any better if he'd tried.

Lots of people on the Left want to mock events like these -- they are, after all, preposterous. But they also know that the pinched-mouthed censors on their own side would reduce any attempts at humour to, at best, unkindness, and, at worst, hatred towards trans people. The same goes with relevant adjustments for any mockery of BLM, or indeed of any activist movement claiming to speak on behalf of a minority. And this needlessly forces those uncomfortable with the simplistic logic of identity politics to pick a side.

Those with enough rebellious spirit will eventually seek to break free from their suffocatingly humourless companions, making the Left less diverse and less robust. Worse than that, freed from exposure to that particularly bracing form of critique that is trenchant piss-taking from people whose opinions you care about, the Left's representatives are likely to carry on doing ridiculous things in public, to the befuddlement of the voter. Until progressives are better able to take a joke -- or even to understand one -- I predict that Labour will give us lots more to laugh at in the next few years. And the amusement will all be that of the Tories.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

The simple act of sprinkling rock dust--an abundant byproduct of mining--on farmland could capture 45% percent of the carbon dioxide required to help the UK meet its 2050 net-zero targets.

This new figure from a recent study adds to a growing body of evidence looking at the power of minerals to draw down carbon, while also replenishing agricultural soils. 

OTHER THAN THAT, HOW'S TRUMPISM WORKING OUT FOR VLAD?:

The United States is unlikely to extend a license that allows Russia to pay U.S. bondholders, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said on May 18.

Moscow faces deadline on May 25 when the license allowing it to make payments to U.S. bondholders is due to expire. Failure to make the payments could put Moscow closer to defaulting on its debt.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

It's the brand: he stopped a white man from being Replaced by a black woman... https://t.co/JfrGX20BKv

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) May 18, 2022

NO ONE FLIES AEROFLOT:

Even as the Kremlin prepares to take full control of the ruins of Mariupol city, it faces the growing prospect of defeat in its bid to conquer all of Ukraine's eastern Donbas because its badly mauled forces lack the manpower for significant advances.

Russian President Vladimir Putin may have to decide whether to send in more troops and hardware to replenish his dramatically weakened invasion force as an influx of modern Western weaponry bolsters Ukraine's combat power, analysts say.

IT'S THE "HOUSING BUBBLE" BUT NOT INDUSTRY WIDE:

Once with more than $11 billion of assets under management, the Structured Alpha funds lost more than $7 billion as COVID-19 roiled markets in February and March 2020.

Allianz Global Investors US LLC was accused of misleading pension funds for teachers, bus drivers, engineers, religious groups and others by understating the funds' risks, and having "significant gaps" in its oversight. read more

Investors were told the funds employed options that included hedges to protect against market crashes, but prosecutors said the fund managers repeatedly failed to buy those hedges.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

For the uninitiated, "The White Replacement Theory" claims that there is a grand plan to replace the white population of Western countries with people of color. "Since many white supremacists, particularly those in the United States, blame Jews for non-white immigration to the U.S. the replacement theory is now associated with antisemitism," the Anti-Defamation League explains. In other words, white supremacists believe Jews are masterminding a plan to replace whites.

The "white replacement theory" is becoming a more and more mainstream belief in America -- and it is colliding with other dangerous ideas, like the claim of election fraud.

A new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll found that a whopping 32% of Americans believe that "a group of people is trying to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains." This figure includes nearly half of Republicans polled.

I urge you to re-read that.

"A similar share (29%) also express concern that an increase in immigration is leading to native-born Americans losing economic, political, and cultural influence," the Associated Press reported.

The AP spelled out why those two beliefs -- "replacement" and loss of power -- are so dangerous. "These two key measures tap into the core arguments of Replacement Theory, a decades old idea, which posits that there is a group of powerful people in this country who are trying to permanently alter the culture and voting strength of native-born Americans by bringing in large groups of immigrants -- the study indicates about one in five (17%) adults agree with both of these central tenets."

VLAD WHO?:

Extraordinary exchange on Russian state TV's top talk show about Ukraine. Military analyst & retired colonel Mikhail Khodarenok tells anchor Olga Skabeyeva "the situation for us will clearly get worse...we're in total geopolitical isolation...the situation is not normal." pic.twitter.com/ExMwVDszsk

— Steve Rosenberg (@BBCSteveR) May 16, 2022

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The Justice Department has asked the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack for transcripts of interviews it is conducting, which have included discussions with associates of former president Donald Trump, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

The move, coming as Attorney General Merrick Garland appears to be ramping up the pace of his investigation into the 2021 Capitol riot, is the clearest sign yet of a wide-ranging inquiry at the Justice Department.

The House committee has interviewed more than 1,000 people so far, and the transcripts could be used as evidence in potential criminal cases, to pursue new leads, or as a baseline text for new interviews conducted by federal law enforcement officials.

NOTHING UNITES THE LEFT/RIGHT MORE FIRMLY THAN HATRED OF AMERICA:

On the policy level, national conservatives mostly support the Trumpist alternatives to Reaganism in areas ranging from trade and immigration to internationalism and the role of government. They are open to "big government" measures in both the economy (e.g., industrial policy) and culture (e.g., social programs to bolster the traditional family). Because they have no principled objections to the use of state power, they inveigh against systems of thought--especially libertarianism--that espouse such principles. Indeed, they deny that libertarianism has anything to do with conservatism, rightly understood. And because national conservatives' anti-Enlightenment creed leads them to reject natural rights, they are partial to illiberal majoritarianism, with Viktor Orbán's Budapest as their new Rome. (Some "integralist" members of the movement might prefer the original Rome as the head of an established Catholic Church in America.)

THE ESSENTIAL FRENCHNESS OF TRUMPISM:

Such racially driven, anti-immigrant thinking is hardly new, but in name at least, the Great Replacement Theory has a more recent history. And it's not an American concept. It's an import to this country -- from France.

In 2011, the French philosopher Renaud Camus published a book in which he claimed that native white Europeans were being "replaced" in their countries by nonwhite immigrants from Africa and the Middle East. White Europeans, he wrote, were "being reverse colonized by Black and Brown immigrants, who are flooding the Continent in what amounts to an extinction-level event."

He called his book "Le Grand Remplacement" -- French for "The Great Replacement."

Camus had been influenced by another French author, Jean Raspail, whose 1973 novel, "The Camp of the Saints," described the demise of white, Western society at the hands of mass migration from other parts of the world.

Later, Camus spoke publicly about "remigration" -- a word that carries the same meaning in English and French, and refers to the idea that the much-feared "replacement" could be avoided by returning migrants to their countries of origin. Camus became an influential member of the European New Right party and an icon of its youth wing, Generation Identity. The latter was founded in 2003 in southern France as a white nativist group that stands for an ethnically pure population in Europe.

"The theory had existed in other forms," Josh Lipowsky, senior research analyst for the nonprofit Counter Extremism Project, told Grid, "but [Camus' book] really brought it to the forefront, and we saw several groups latching on to it."

Today, Camus' theory is central to several far-right parties on the continent, and his general idea -- that an invasion of nonwhites risks existential damage to white-majority nations -- has captured the imagination of politicians and the media in the U.S. as well. [...]

Technically, Camus can claim authorship of the term, but the "great replacement" is just a modern phrase for a strain of racism that has existed for centuries. Fears of racial mixing, fear of new arrivals -- none of it is new. Adolf Hitler and other leaders of the Third Reich predicated their actions on fears that Jewish people were a danger to the Aryan nation that they craved. One might say National Socialism was an ideology built, in a sense, on the Nazis' own "replacement theory."

OPEN THE BORDERS:

Under fire from parents and politicians, President Biden's administration announced steps Monday to ease a nationwide shortage of baby formula, including reopening the largest domestic manufacturing plant and increasing imports from overseas.

The Food and Drug Administration said it was streamlining its review process to make it easier for foreign manufacturers to begin shipping formula to the United States.

"We are hopeful this call to the global market will be answered and that international businesses will rise to the occasion to assist in bolstering the supply of products," said FDA Commissioner Robert Califf, in a statement.

COME BACK, WHOOPI; ALL IS FORGIVEN:

Is being Jewish a race? A national origin? An ethnicity? A religion? All four?

The answer is: It's complicated.

To begin with, in late 1800s America, "race" was often used to include groups such as Jews, Arabs, Swedes, Italians, and the like. That's important, because the Civil Rights Act of 1866 provided that "All persons" have the same rights "to make and enforce contracts ... and to the full and equal benefit of all laws," "as is enjoyed by white citizens." And in Shaare Tefila Congregation v. Cobb (1987), the Supreme Court held that this covered discrimination against Jews (even though most of us would today be generally viewed as "white") and not just against, say, Blacks or Asians:

[T]he question before us is not whether Jews are considered to be a separate race by today's standards, but whether, at the time [the Civil Rights Act of 1866] was adopted, Jews constituted a group of people that Congress intended to protect. ... Jews and Arabs were among the peoples then considered to be distinct races and hence within the protection of the statute.

This view of Jews as a race was also of course the view held by the Nazis as late as the 1930s and 1940s, but it was common even among non-antisemites in 1800s America--the term "race" was often used more broadly then that it is now.

THE POINT OF THE LAW IS THE INEQUALITY:

The law enshrines Israel as the Jewish national state but has been fiercely criticized as discriminating against minorities, and especially against Druze citizens, many of whom serve in senior positions in the Israeli military and other state agencies.

Also on Sunday, Defense Minister Benny Gantz announced his intention to advance his proposal to create a new basic law to establish the principle of individual equality before the law.

Holding quasi-constitutional status as basic laws, the nation-state statute requires an absolute majority of at least 61 votes to change and Gantz's equality bill would require the same to be passed.

Interior Minister Ayelet Shaked of the Yamina party was quick to strike down both ideas, threatening to pull a "veto" if necessary to block them.

Justice Minister Gideon Sa'ar similarly slammed the reform effort, stating in his New Hope party's faction meeting that: "Israel is a Jewish and democratic country. Therefore - the Nation-State Law - that anchors Israel's identity as a Jewish country - will not be repealed and will not change."

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE DAYS WHEN THERE IS NO GRAVITY?:

"What goes up, must come down" - this is the immutable Newtonian logic underpinning gravity batteries. This new field of energy storage technology is remarkably simple in principle. When green energy is plentiful, use it to haul a colossal weight to a predetermined height. When renewables are limited, release the load, powering a generator with the downward gravitational pull.

A similar approach, "pumped hydro", accounts for more than 90% of the globe's current high capacity energy storage. Funnel water uphill using surplus power and then, when needed, channel it down through hydroelectric generators. It's a tried-and-tested system. But there are significant issues around scalability. Hydro projects are big and expensive with prohibitive capital costs, and they have exacting geographical requirements - vertiginous terrain and an abundance of water. If the world is to reach net-zero, it needs an energy storage system that can be situated almost anywhere, and at scale.

Gravitricity, an Edinburgh-based green engineering start-up, is working to make this a reality. In April last year, the group successfully trialled its first gravity battery prototype: a 15m (49ft) steel tower suspending a 50 tonne iron weight. Inch-by-inch, electric motors hoisted the massive metal box skyward before gradually releasing it back to earth, powering a series of electric generators with the downward drag. 

The demonstrator installation was "small scale", says Jill Macpherson, Gravitricity's senior test and simulation engineer, but still produced 0.33kW of instantaneous power, enough to briefly sustain around 750 homes. Equally encouraging was what the team learned about their system's potential longevity.

"We proved that we can control the system to extend the lifetime of certain mechanical components, like the lifting cable," says Macpherson. "The system is also designed so that individual components can be easily replaced instead of replacing the entire system throughout its lifetime. So there's real scope for having a decades-long operational life."

While the Gravitricity prototype pointed upward, the company's focus is now below ground. Engineers have spent the last year scoping out decommissioned coal mines in Britain, Eastern Europe, South Africa, and Chile. The rationale, explains managing director Charlie Blair, is pretty straightforward: "Why build towers when we can use the geology of the earth to hold up our weights?"

WHEN DOJ IS THE PROSECUTION AND THE DEFENSE:

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Xi wanted to come to Mar-a-Lago and cement his relationship with Trump. But he couldn't lose face. The Taiwan call had to be walked back. Otherwise, Xi would be seen as conceding on a core issue for China right off the bat.

Trump wanted the problem with Xi fixed as well. He had never intended to offend Xi with the call. Trump saw the two countries as two giant corporations and Xi as his opposing CEO. You need a good relationship with the other CEO to have productive negotiations, at least at the start. Trump also looked up to strongman rulers like Xi: He was jealous of Xi's power but at the same time sought Xi's validation. But most of all, for Trump, a close personal relationship with Xi was the prerequisite for getting what he wanted--a deal.

So Kushner, working with the Chinese ambassador, devised a plan to break the impasse. On the evening of Thursday, February 9, after most White House staff had gone home, Kushner called Bannon and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to the president's residence. There, Trump took a phone call from Xi. And, as Kushner had arranged, his father-in-law promised Xi directly that he would accept no more phone calls from the leader of Taiwan.

In the official White House statement about the call, Matt Pottinger secured a small but largely symbolic victory. The original draft had stated that Trump would commit to honoring "the one China policy." But Pottinger made sure the statement read, "President Trump agreed, at the request of President Xi, to honor our one China policy" (emphasis added). That edit maintained America's historical position of ambiguity as to whether the United States agrees with Beijing on its claims regarding what it considers a renegade province.

Regardless, the call showed that Trump had conceded Xi's main point: that the Taiwan call was wrong and would never happen again. "That removed the obstacle for the Mar-a-Lago summit," Pillsbury said. Kushner had delivered the meeting that Trump had sought, putting the president's son-in-law firmly in the driver's seat of U.S.-China policy.

OKAY GROOMERS (everything alert):

8chan's proprietor is Jim Watkins--an American but often Philippines-based pornographer, pig farmer, and internet forum entrepreneur. Over the years, Watkins and his team took special steps to keep the Q posts coming and purportedly verify their provenance, ensuring the poster's continued access to their followers. While 8chan's historic association with child sexual abuse material is familiar to close observers of the QAnon conspiracy, Mother Jones has reviewed a little-known archive documenting conversations in the moderation channel of Pink, an earlier internet forum, that capture Watkins, the site's administrator, pushing for a hands-off approach to the moderation of child porn-related content there. Entries in the archive, created between 2004 and 2018, show he was slow to address concerns about child pornography and sometimes dismissed advice from moderators seeking to stop the spread of potentially illegal content. They repeatedly record moderators of Watkins' forum coming to him for advice on how to handle issues related to child sex abuse material and pedophilic content, and Watkins responding with blasé indifference. 

Frederick Brennan, the original founder of 8chan, alerted Mother Jones to the logs' existence and put me in touch with researchers at the QOrigins Project, who have made a more user-friendly backup of the archive. "Ali we probably need to talk," Brennan, a former associate and now adversary of Watkins, first messaged me on Signal in March, explaining that he had been looking back at Pink records housed on the Internet Archive. "I was investigating Jim for something I thought was innocuous today, helping somebody who makes memes of him find more of his old photos. While doing that I discovered a few things...long conversations from circa 2009 and before between Jim Watkins and the Japanese users of BBSPINK. Almost all of the discussion keeps going back to child porn." 

MIND THE GAP:

Even the idea that life seems to be have no overall purpose or meaning doesn't make life absurd, unless you already expect life to have some such meaning. Which, perhaps unfortunately, we do. Remember what Camus said. You can't call the world absurd just because it seems to lack any rhyme or reason from our point of view. What's absurd is that, even knowing this, we can't give up on demanding reasons, meaning, something.

Nagel has a slightly different take. The tension is between thinking what we do is important, but knowing that from a more objective perspective that it's not. He says, "We cannot live human lives without energy and attention, nor without making choices which show that we take some things more seriously than others. Yet we have always available a point of view outside the particular form of our lives, from which the seriousness appears gratuitous. These two inescapable viewpoints collide in us, and that is what makes life absurd. It is absurd because we ignore the doubts that we know cannot be settled, continuing to live with nearly undiminished seriousness in spite of them." [...]

Anyway, I think situational irony is meta-absurdity. The absurd thing is that we expect, demand, and crave meaning from life, even though we are always aware, at least peripherally, that from a larger perspective, we can't really believe, or at least can't prove, that life actually has any meaning.

VS iDENTITY:

As Latter-day Saints, our scriptures teach of many anti-Christs who teach damnable philosophies, and then murder to try and make them come to fruition. This murderer then joins a list of anti-Christs-a man who pulls people away from Jesus by perverting the gospel of peace.

President Russell M. Nelson's well-timed words the day after the attack reminds us that we are all children of God. This senseless murder took the lives of ten children of God.

Rather than allow ourselves to be desensitized to the racism around us by the constant calls of those who have diluted this idea, we should each work to root out the hate, racism, and identity politics that motivated this killing from our nation, communities, and our own hearts.

HIS IDEOLOGY IS SO OPAQUE...:

A preliminary investigation found Gendron had repeatedly visited sites espousing white supremacist ideologies and race-based conspiracy theories and extensively researched the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the man who killed dozens at a summer camp in Norway in 2011, the law enforcement official told AP.

Federal agents served multiple search warrants and interviewed Gendron's parents, who were cooperating with investigators, the law enforcement official said.

Portions of the Twitch video circulating online showed the gunman firing volley after volley of shots in less than a minute as he raced through the parking lot and then the store, pausing for just a moment to reload. At one point, he trains his weapon on a white person cowering behind a checkout counter, but says "Sorry!" and doesn't shoot.

Screenshots purporting to be from the broadcast appear to show a racial slur targeting Black people scrawled on his rifle, as well as the number 14 -- likely referencing a white supremacist slogan.

In September of 2021, the newspaper's editorial board wrote about the conspiracy theory.

"Back in 2017, white supremacists marched in Charlottesville, Va., carrying torches and chanting, 'You will not replace us' and 'Jews will not replace us.' Decent Americans recoiled at the undeniable echo of Nazi Germany," began the editorial, which was illustrated with a photo of the notorious Charlottesville tiki torch march.

"That rhetoric has been resonating ever since in the right wing, repackaged lately in what's known as 'replacement theory,' espoused by conservative media figures like Fox News' Tucker Carlson. And it has seeped into the mainstream political discourse in the Capital Region, where Rep. Elise Stefanik has adapted this despicable tactic for campaign ads," the editorial board wrote.

Stefanik, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, is the third-ranking Republican in Congress.

Tucker Carlson pushing Great Replacement Theory, all in one place, courtesy of the @MehdiHasanShow on @MSNBC.

Watch/share/be disgusted:pic.twitter.com/uwOeYkWHSW

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) May 16, 2022

IT SHOULDN'T REQUIRE HEROISM TO GO TO CHURCH...:

Between 30 and 40 members of the Irvine Taiwanese Presbyterian Church were gathered for lunch after a morning church service at Geneva when gunfire erupted shortly before 1:30 p.m., officials said. When deputies arrived, parishioners had the gunman hog-tied and in custody.

"That group of churchgoers displayed what we believe is exceptional heroism and bravery in intervening to stop the suspect. They undoubtedly prevented additional injuries and fatalities," Hallock said. "I think it's safe to say that had people not intervened, it could have been much worse."

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

"There is a clear contradiction between the nation-state law in its current form and the praise given to Lt. Col. Mahmoud Kheir el-Din," Liberman said in a tweet.

"We have an opportunity to fix the nation-state law and formalize the Declaration of Independence as a Basic Law," he argued, calling on the opposition and coalition to reevaluate the contested law and "to do what's necessary rather than settling for words like 'brothers in arms' in regard to the Druze community."

The law has drawn criticism for discriminating against minorities and especially against Druze citizens, many of whom serve in senior positions in the Israeli military and other state agencies.

Last year, he said in an interview with Channel 12 that the law should not have been enacted and should be amended to reflect "word for word" the 1948 Israeli Declaration of Independence, applying the value of "equality" to Israel's Basic Laws.

ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

"[Haitians] contribute mightily to the city," said Louijeune in an interview as she got ready to host the festivities. "When we talk about getting our kids to school on time, a lot of that is Haitian bus drivers. And essential workers who make sure our kids have food in school, and a younger generation of engineers and doctors. . . . Whether it's Haitian teachers, Haitian DJs, or Haitian nonprofit leaders, I want to create spaces where we can all come together and where we feel like a strong, fortified community."

And yet, even as Boston's Haitians gathered to celebrate for the first time in person since 2019, there was a major cloud hanging over their heads: the future of their homeland.

Haiti has become a dangerous and chaotic place to live. Conditions on the ground, which are worsening, have been pushing thousands of Haitians to flee and embark on risky journeys to seek refuge in other countries, primarily in the United States through the southern border.

Louijeune has not only been representing and advocating for the local Haitian diaspora and recent arrivals from her country; she has also raised her voice to push the US government to take more constructive foreign and domestic stances toward Haiti, such as ending the dreadful Title 42 expulsions. Since President Biden's inauguration, more than 20,000 Haitians have been sent back to a country that cannot keep them safe. These expulsions represent an astonishing American moral failure.

nATIONALISM ISN'T WORKING:

Russia's offensive in the Donbas region in Ukraine's east "has lost momentum and fallen significantly behind schedule," British military intelligence says.

Russia has now likely suffered losses of one-third of the ground combat force it committed in February, the British Ministry of Defense said in a regular bulletin on May 15. [...]

Britain said that despite small-scale initial advances, Russia had failed to achieve substantial territorial gains in Donbas over the past month while sustaining consistently high levels of attrition.

Russian forces are increasingly constrained by degraded enabling capabilities, continued low morale, and reduced combat effectiveness, the ministry said.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

In an alleged manifesto posted online before the attack, Payton Gendron, 18, also directed intense hatred at Jews, expressed support for Nazism and subscribed to the antisemitic and racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which says Jews are plotting to replace white Americans with non-whites.

GOBBLEDYGOOK IS NOT CONSTITUTIONAL PRECEDENTIAL:

Third, the Roe precedent has already been overturned--by the Court.

The Roe Court rendered "a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy" as a "right of personal privacy." Nineteen years after Roe, a fractured 5-4 Court in Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey (1992) changed the constitutional foundation of the abortion right from "privacy" to "liberty."

Casey's change in the law of abortion is based on the Court's own admission in Roe that it did not know where the abortion right came from: "The Constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy." Continuing its admission, the Roe Court said that it did not know "whether" "the right of privacy" is "founded" in the 9th or 14th Amendments. Regardless, it is "broad enough" to "encompass" the decision of a woman "whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." In Casey, the unusual three-person  opinion for the Court opinion jointly authored by Republican appointees Kennedy, Sandra Day O'Connor, and David Souter, held that "the controlling word in this case is liberty."  The abortion decision is "in some critical respects . . . of the same character as the decision to use contraception," citing its contraception decisions, Griswold (1965) and Eisenstadt (1972). The right of Roe concerned "personal autonomy and bodily integrity," they said. In Griswold, the Court--as in Roe--had been likewise adrift regarding the source of the constitutional contraceptive right it invented. In that case, the right was said to exist in something it called the "penumbras" of the "specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights."

After its discussion of the first and second trimesters of pregnancy, the Roe Court, had issued a five-paragraph order--in the style of sample legislation--regulating abortion by trimesters. In explicit repudiation of Roe, the Casey Court announced that "we reject the rigid trimester framework of Roe" and substituted what has remained the standard  up to this day: that states may not restrict abortion before "viability" but may do so after viability, as long as a woman at any state of pregnancy retains the absolute right over abortion until birth if she alleges a "threat" to her life or health, including mental health--with the latter having nothing to do with any diagnosed psychological or psychiatric condition but only with what a woman alleges concerning her mental health. And with regard to health and mental health, the Court continued to follow the rule of Roe and its companion case Doe v. Bolton.

Unlike the pending Mississippi case, the validity of Roe was not expressly contested by the Casey plaintiffs, who were seeking only to overturn, inter alia, the parental consent and spousal notification provisions of a new Pennsylvania law. However, the three co-authors were sufficiently provoked by the incessant state challenges to Roe that had caused the Court to deliver eleven major abortion decisions in the nineteen years since 1973 and were obviously made uneasy by the four dissenters who were expressly rejecting Roe that they went into an extended and free-wheeling discourse on jurisprudence, precedence, American society itself, and the role of the Supreme Court in society, and the danger of causing a "loss of confidence in the Judiciary," if the Court were to overturn Roe. As such, Casey's meanderings-about in social philosophy resembled the same kind of serpentine visioning that the Court had previously delivered in Roe.

That Roe was essentially "unworkable" and bad precedent had already been alleged by two justices who supported the right to an abortion. In her dissent in the 5-4 Thornburgh (1986) decision, an earlier 1986 case having to do primarily with "informed consent" to abortion, Justice O'Connor, one of the eventual Casey joint authors, said that "the Court's abortion decisions have already worked a major distortion in the Court's constitutional jurisprudence" and had an "institutionally debilitating effect." Those decisions, with their "unworkable scheme for constitutionalizing the regulation of abortion," have created an "expansive role" for which "the Court is not suited." Seven years later, however, these criticisms by O'Connor did not lead her in Casey to abandon, but only to re-calibrate, the abortion right.

Even Justice Ginsburg, when she was a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, had herself sharply criticized the legal and constitutional basis for Roe: "Roe v. Wade sparked public opposition and academic criticism, in part, I believe, because the Court ventured too far in the change it ordered and presented an incomplete justification for its action." ("Some Thoughts on Autonomy and Equality in Relation to Roe v. Wade," North Carolina Law Review 63 (1985): 375-386, at 376.)

TRUMPISM IS AS TRUMPISTS DO:

Saturday's attack was live-streamed on Twitch and screenshots from the recording showed horrific scenes, including a woman who is shot in the head as she walks outside the store. In other screenshots, victims can be seen on the floor of the supermarket.

"It's like walking onto a horror movie, but everything is real. It is armageddon-like. It's so overwhelming," a police official at the scene told The Buffalo News.

A 106-page online manifesto, believed to have been uploaded by the shooter, explained that he was motivated by a conspiracy theory that white people are being replaced by other races. In the document, he says he is 18 years old and a self-described white supremacist and anti-semite.

THE ANGLO/CONSERVATIVES VS THE FRENCH/RIGHT:

[I]nstead of concentrating its fire solely on left-wing elites, as Reaganite, conservative populism had done, the Trumpist brand of populism did something more: It simultaneously assailed right-wing elites, including the Buckley-Reagan, fusionist conservative movement described earlier. In particular, nationalist and protectionist Trumpism broke dramatically with the Reaganite internationalism of the Cold War era and with the pro-free trade, supply-side economics ideology that Reagan embraced and that had dominated Republican Party policymaking since 1980. It thus posed not just a political challenge to the liberal establishment, and a factional challenge to the Republican establishment, but also an ideological challenge to the separate and distinct conservative establishment, long headquartered at Buckley's National Review. The distinctiveness of Trumpism in 2016 was that it assailed three establishments simultaneously.

In short, as a body of populist sentiments, Trumpism boldly objected to the fundamental tenets of nearly every component of mainstream conservative thought described in this essay. At the heart of Ronald Reagan's political philosophy was a single value: freedom, especially individual freedom--the "right," in Reagan's words, of "each individual ... to control his own destiny" and "work out" his own happiness without subjection to "the whims of the state." "America is freedom," he declared in his Farewell Address. At the heart of Trumpist populism, however, is a rather different yearning: for solidarity and security, especially for those who feel forgotten, disrespected, or left behind. If Reaganite conservatism, at least in theory, has been skeptical of the power of government to manage the economy and create prosperity, at the core of Trumpist populism is a willingness to use governmental power to improve the lot of people whose plight has been overlooked by arrogant elites.

It would be difficult to overstate the shattering impact of the Trumpist upheaval on conservative activists and networks during the past six years. The once ascendant conservative community in America--a community built on ideas--has increasingly become a house divided over ideas, with contentious factions engaged in an often rancorous tug of war. At such hubs of dissident conservative discourse as The American Conservative magazine, the Claremont Review of Books, and the website American Greatness, demands for a fundamental reconfiguration of the right are frequent: a right in which two of its former pillars--free-market libertarians and neoconservatives--would be marginalized if not entirely absent. The once dominant and implicitly ecumenical philosophy of fusionism has been denounced by a chorus of right-wing critics as a "dead consensus," afflicted with "Zombie Reaganism" and what they bluntly deride as "free market fundamentalism." In some right-wing circles, free-market capitalism has even been portrayed as an enemy of the "common good."

Meanwhile, the institutional custodians of fusionism--particularly those inside the Beltway--have been openly mocked by some on the right as "Conservatism, Inc.," as if the conservative establishment were just another business trying to make money. Fusionism, some critics assert, was perhaps a necessary contrivance during the Cold War but is now irrelevant.    

And so a determined quest for yet another formulation of conservatism has begun: for what one might call "Trumpism without Trump." Not so long ago, leading conservative thinkers of the Reagan era and its afterglow routinely associated their philosophy with the principles of limited government, low taxation, free trade, and entrepreneurialenterprise. In 2022, however, growing numbers of populist/nationalist insurgents on the right are criticizing these principles as outdated and even unconservative dogmas. Ditching the anti-statist rhetoric of Reaganite populism, they are calling instead for the unabashed and energetic wielding of government power in pursuit of their agenda. In their hostility to globalism and transnational progressive elites, and their dismay about economic and social disintegration at home, some of them are looking to Old World nationalists and social conservatives for inspiration and intellectual support.

Indeed, one of the most striking intellectual currents in America in the past decade has been the growing Europeanization--more precisely, continental Europeanization--of American conservatism. Interest in Europe, of course, is nothing new on the American intellectual right. One thinks at once of Russell Kirk's magisterial volumes The Conservative Mind (1953) and The Roots of American Order (1974) and his extolling of Edmund Burke as the father of Anglo-American conservatism. One thinks also of the contributions of Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, and Ludwig von Mises to the classical liberal and libertarian strands of the conservative alliance that evolved after 1945. In the realm of political philosophy, the émigré scholars Leo Strauss and Eric Voegelin and their students have done much to remind conservatives of their European heritage all the way back to Plato and Aristotle.         

Until recently, the American right has tended to identify most with what Kirk in one of his last books called "America's British culture," and with such British luminaries as Burke, Adam Smith, and (in our time) Margaret Thatcher.It has steadfastly preferred the American Revolution to the French Revolution, and the relatively moderate Scottish Enlightenment to the more radical and anti-Christian manifestations of the Enlightenment across the English Channel.While often critical of classical liberal purism, it has tended over the years to align itself with the liberty-oriented conservatism of the Anglosphere instead of the more statist brands of the right found in the past two centuries on much of the European continent.

It is all the more striking, then, that in the past half dozen years since the Trumpist explosion, a number of conservative intellectuals and celebrity figures in the United States have sought out right-wing political leaders and anti-liberal thinkers on the continent like Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary for guidance in fashioning an alternative political path. This fascination for non-American models is a measure not only of the seekers' intellectual curiosity but of their estrangement from what some of them perceive as an enfeebled American right--and American regime--riddled with "Lockean liberal" error and its allegedly inevitable, soul-corrupting consequences.

NOT OF THE WEST:

The US and EU led an international outcry Saturday after Israeli police charged the funeral procession in Jerusalem of Palestinian journalist Shireen Abu Akleh and beat pallbearers who almost dropped her coffin.

Thousands of people packed Jerusalem's Old City on Friday for the burial of the veteran Al Jazeera journalist, two days after she was killed in an Israeli army raid in the occupied West Bank.

Television footage showed the pallbearers struggling to stop Abu Akleh's casket from falling to the ground as baton-wielding police officers charged towards them, grabbing Palestinian flags from mourners.

The United States said it was "deeply troubled" by the scenes, while the European Union said it was "appalled" by the "unnecessary force".

THANKS, GUNWALKER:

A federal operation underway since 2019 has seized tens of thousands of illegal gun silencers smuggled into the United States from China, leading to the arrests of felons and domestic extremists, authorities say. 

The effort by four federal law enforcement agencies, dubbed Operation Silent Night, has seized 42,888 illegally imported silencers and 4,868 firearms as of March, and has led to 204 arrests, according to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report.

THE HEISENBERG PRIMATE:

What about the heart-warming stories of human-ape understanding? Human handlers interacted with the apes for thousands of hours, and occasionally the human interpretation of a string of signs would stand out as interesting. But, this makes the interesting sign combinations look more like generous interpretations of anecdotes that were cherry-picked, or fed to the ape by human handlers, and not a conscious thinking pattern.

What's more, the meaning of the signs was very easy to over-interpret. Is water bird the intellectual combination of two concepts to indicate a waterfowl? Or is it just rote repetition that a lake and a bird are nearby, combined with generous and wishful human interpretation? Studies in the field generally focused on picking unusual instances out of thousands of hours footage, rather than systematically studying whether apes expressed meaningful ideas. When Terrace did this, he found that interesting sentences began to look like drops in the ocean.

Most of that footage demonstrated the apes producing word salads that contained signs for food or affection they desired. Usually these sentences were very short, and in no sense grammatical. Terrace noted that nearly all Nim's sentences were two or three words long; extended sentences were very rare. The general pattern was: Nim or me followed by eat, play, tickle, banana, grape, or the like. Human children begin with short sentences. But they rapidly develop the ability to form longer sentences, conveying meaningful thoughts, asking questions, and expressing new ideas. Nim never did any of these things.

Nim once formed a sixteen-word sentence: give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you. If that sounds to you more like the nonsense babbling of a parrot, or what your dog might say to you if he saw that you had an orange, and much less like the thoughts of a child, you can see the problem.

This situation was amusingly summed up by another famous researcher. Here is Noam Chomsky, on Nim Chimpsky:

"The ape was no dope. If he wanted a banana, he'd produce a sequence of irrelevant signs and throw in the sign for banana randomly, figuring that he'd brainwashed the experimenters sufficiently so that they'd think he was saying 'give me a banana.' And he was able to pick out subtle motions by which the experimenters indicated what they'd hope he'd do. Final result? Exactly what any sane biologist would have assumed: zero."

Chomsky adds in a final dig:

"Then comes the sad part. Chimps can get pretty violent as they get older, so they were going to send him to chimp heaven. But the experimenters had fallen in love with him, and tried hard to save him. He was finally sent off to some sort of chimp farm, where he presumably died peacefully -- signing the Lord's Prayer in his last moments."

Likewise, Terrace ultimately concluded that: "[Nim] was unable to use words conversationally, let alone form sentences."

Koko the Impostor had a nipple fetish

Similar giant flaws appear to run deep through the stories of most signing apes. Former handlers have given accounts of concerning issues in studies of several animals. Let's focus on the example of Koko the gorilla. Koko's global warming message was obviously pieced together from a great many pieces of different footage, and no one seriously believes that a gorilla understands anthropogenic climate change. This brilliant lecture hilariously details many further problems with the study of Koko. No actual data was published of Koko's signs. Instead, years of apparently random utterances were sifted through, and dubiously interpreted, to find heart-warming stories. The rest of the gibberish signing was ignored.

A transcript of a text message session with Koko demonstrates this issue. Read on their own, Koko's words don't make much sense. However, her interpreter comes up with explanations for them. Here's an example, quoted from the text session:

(Handler): Koko, do you like to talk to people?

(Koko): Fine nipple.

(Handler): Yes, that was her answer. "Nipple" rhymes with "people," OK? She doesn't sign people per se, so she may be trying to do a "sounds like..." but she indicated it was "fine."

Is that a fair interpretation? Did the gorilla understand and use rhyming in the English spoken language to play a clever conversational word game? The entire transcript is rife with apparently meaningless responses that may or may not be interpretable. The transcript also broaches the topic of Koko's apparent nipple fetish, which eventually caused legal problems.

ALL HE HAD TO DO WAS NOT BE DONALD:

According to a recent Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) policy brief, a feasible reduction of trade barriers "could deliver a one-time reduction in [CPI] inflation of around 1.3 percentage points." The study is conservative, focusing only on trade restrictions that can plausibly be lifted in the short term, and its authors are careful to emphasize that the result would be a one-time outcome. The proposed reduction of trade barriers would not solve the problem of rising prices; but it would make today's high prices lower.

US consumers would welcome such short-term relief. If the Biden administration finds it necessary to sell oil out of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve despite its commitment to addressing climate change, why shouldn't it also recognize the need to reverse Donald Trump's tariffs? In 2021, according to the PIIE brief, these duties still applied to more than half of US imports "subject to high tariffs, penalty duties, or severe quotas."

Perhaps more importantly, openness, whether it is free trade or immigration, also contributes to consumer welfare in indirect ways. Though these effects are often hard to quantify, they are of first-order importance, which is why economists often turn to first principles when debating them.

One of the most important benefits of free trade is that it exposes domestic firms (and labor markets) to greater competition, which induces them to keep prices low and to innovate constantly to stay ahead of the curve. Similarly, immigration eases labor-supply shortages, and high-skilled newcomers can boost productivity and innovation. Forward-looking countries understand this and embrace immigration. The United Kingdom, for example, has adopted a new skilled-worker visa program that welcomes graduates of top global universities.

It is deeply misguided to restrict trade and immigration at a time when rising domestic prices are of paramount concern. Now that everyone is fixated on inflation, it is worth considering why inflation was so low these past two decades, despite full employment in the United States (prior to the pandemic) and despite ultra-expansionary monetary policies. Globalization (now a loaded term) arguably had a lot to do with it, as did automation (another loaded term).

AT LEAST THEY'RE FINALLY FOLLOWING THEIR HEARTS:

[S]chumer decided to tap into his party's dark id. The legislation he coughed up wouldn't just codify Roe into federal law. It would go much further, permitting abortions at any point during a pregnancy right up until birth. It would have wiped out state laws that prohibit abortions even after Roe's "viability" threshold. The only requirement for a grisly late-term abortion would be that "in the good-faith medical judgment of the treating health care provider, continuation of the pregnancy would pose a risk to the pregnant patient's life or health."

It's "health" that clangs so loudly there. Such an elastic term could be read to cover just about anything, including mental health, a feeling of regret or the weariness that accompanies any pregnancy. The message is clear: find a creative enough doctor and a late-term abortion is yours.

Schumer's bill is thus light years past Bill Clinton's "safe, legal, and rare," and even further gone from the pro-life noises that Democrats like Joe Biden and Jesse Jackson once made. And even then Schumer wasn't finished. His bill would also demolish state-level parental notification laws, which polls find are overwhelmingly popular. It would even wipe out so-called conscience protections, which allow doctors to abstain from performing abortions if they have a moral objection.

When it comes to abortion, the most extreme of the first-world nations is Canada, which has no federal prohibitions whatsoever. Yet at least Up North conscience rights are generally accepted and the provinces have some regulatory latitude. Schumer's bill would take the United States beyond even that. The new frontier of virtually unlimited abortion would be more in line with China than anything in the West.

FINISH THE JOB:

Thus far, the National Security Council has stubbornly refused to end its policy of incremental assistance and adopt a strategy for supplying continuous aid to Ukraine. Such elevated support could prove to be a deciding factor on the battlefield. As it stands, the United States has missed one opportunity after the other to help precipitate a decisive Ukrainian victory and stop Russia from making gains in the Donbas. Instead of foreclosing the possibility of a Russian success, Washington's strategy of metering incremental military aid to Ukraine--based on a flawed assessment of the risk of escalation and the potential consequences of a Russian defeat--has provided Moscow with the time and space to continue its war, even as it now shifts to defending the territory it has seized since February 24.

Ukraine has already demonstrated that it can successfully hit operational military targets in Russia, such as rail lines, airfields, depots, and materiel stockpiles, in a restricted and responsible manner. With new long-range firing capabilities delivered by the United States, Ukraine would be able to strike farther into Russia and destroy militarily relevant targets, thus reducing Moscow's capabilities and limiting its potential for further offensive attacks. Ukrainian forces have given Washington good reason to trust in their restraint and have refrained from conducting strikes on strategic targets or civilian targets that could stoke escalatory tensions with Russia. Given such evidence, the United States has little reason to wring its hands over shipping additional and more powerful weapons to Ukraine that could undermine Russia's war effort.

The war has reached a critical inflection point, with Russia on its heels after a disastrous start and now seeking to consolidate control over the east of Ukraine. Even in the face of Russia's humiliating military blunders, Russian President Vladimir Putin is unlikely to accept a cease-fire or peace deal on unfavorable terms. He continues to believe that Russia has the resources and equipment necessary to win a war of attrition. He could be wrong--the Ukrainian military has performed masterfully, and the Ukrainians themselves have rallied in extraordinary numbers to repulse the Russian attack--but he may not reach this conclusion until months down the road. By that time, more Ukrainian cities will have been reduced to rubble, and untold numbers of Ukrainians will have been raped, maimed, slaughtered, deported, or displaced.

Short of direct intervention, the United States can prevent further massacres of Ukrainian civilians and further destruction of the country only by supplying more lethal aid. That effort starts at home by training and preparing the Ukrainians to use advanced NATO military equipment and simultaneously replenishing U.S. allies' capabilities as they transfer Soviet-era systems to Ukraine. The United States must also continue to pressure European leaders who have been overly cautious and indecisive in their military support for Ukraine's defense, including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. They must come to understand that there can be no return to business as usual with Russia as long as Putin rules from the Kremlin.

Ukrainian forces successfully prevented an attempted Russian river crossing in the Donbas, the British Ministry of Defense said in its regular intelligence update on May 13.

The Ministry said images suggest that Russia has lost armored equipment and the deployed pontoon bridging equipment while attempting to cross the Siverskiy Donets river west of Severodonetsk, the report said, adding that Russian forces have failed to make any significant advances in the area.

Russian commanders are therefore subjected to increasing pressure from their superiors and are employing increasingly risky strategies on the battlefield, the report indicated.

Ukraine also said it had damaged a Russian Navy logistics ship near Snake Island, a strategic outpost in the Black Sea.

Ukrinform, the Ukrainian national news agency, quoted Serhiy Bratchuk, a spokesman for the regional military command that includes Odesa, as saying in a Telegram post that the ship had been set on fire.

The agency reported that the Russian Navy had "lost" the Vsevolod Bobrov in the purported strike off Snake Island.

...AND CHEAPER...:

According to TransitionZero, the carbon price needed to incentivise a switch from coal-fired generation to renewable energy and battery storage is -$62/tC02 in 2022, as compared to a carbon price of $235/tCO2 for natural gas.

"Despite some regional variation, our analysis shows a clear deflationary trend in the cost of switching from coal-to-clean electricity and calls into question the 615GW of gas and 442GW of coal proposed and under construction globally," said Matt Gray, co-founder and analyst at TransitionZero.

"Independent of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, this trend will accelerate - presenting governments with an economic opportunity to protect electricity consumers from continued fossil fuel volatility.

VLAD WHO?:

The consequences of Russia's challenge to the established European security order, however, go beyond likely Finnish and Swedish NATO membership. Ukraine, together with Georgia and Moldova, has already been pushed into submitting a bid for EU membership.

These bids might take years to come to fruition. But they signify a trend not only of further alignment, but also of deeper division within Europe. As the antagonism between east and west grows, it reduces the space for states to exist in-between rival powers.

This, in turn, is also likely to have implications for other neutral states. Switzerland has increasingly aligned with the EU on Russian sanctions. Austria and Ireland have long participated in the EU's common security and defense policy.

The strong and united western response to Russia's aggression against Ukraine is only going to further consolidate this trend.

IDENTITARIANS OF A FEATHER:

[E]ven in the face of true evil, the stubborn idiocy of the culture war's principal champions appears impenetrable. Unable to view the world through any other lens than the culture war of their own making, activist-pundits both on the Left and Right scramble to make the reality of a square peg fit into the round hole of their ideological myopia. The resulting nonsense would have made even the fictional propagandists of George Orwell's 1984 proud: it is not Putin who is at fault for his own invasion of Ukraine, but the "warmongering" Western powers that supported Ukraine's right to national sovereignty; it is not the dictator Putin who is hell-bent on totalitarianism, but liberal Western globalists advocating for free trade and collective defence; our own politicians and media cannot be trusted, but Putin (and Tucker Carlson) apparently tells it like it is. Or, as Orwell's fictional totalitarians put it: "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."

Despite their ritualistic play at ideological arch-enmity, the hard Left and the populist Right are remarkably unified in their prevarication or even open support for Putin. But perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised. Just like the still-sane majority was never divided over the things that truly matter, the ideological fringe-dwellers always agreed on the most important issues, too--but in all the wrong ways. The real argument of the culture war was never between the hard Left and the populist Right. The real argument was about whether the Western world is something we ought to cherish, value, and fight for. The culture warriors' attitude to Putin shows us what we perhaps knew all along--they think the West belongs on the scrap heap of history.

The hard Left, to their credit, have at least always been honest about this. In their monomaniacal view of the world, the West is uniquely violent, exploitative, racist, and hell-bent on imperial domination. So much so that there is hardly any unfortunate event in modern history that they cannot explain with the West's wickedness. The sacrifices made to defeat Hitler or end slavery are quickly forgotten. So, no wonder the UK's Jeremy Corbyn still blames NATO for Putin's invasion and the Democratic Socialists of America implore the US government to stop supplying Ukraine's military with the weapons it needs to fight the Russians--conveniently ignoring the Ukrainian democratic socialists' direct appeals to the US to do so. Oliver Stone recently tweeted "some Sherlock Holmes clues to what's really going on in Bucha," linking to Russian propaganda articles claiming the massacre was faked by Ukrainian forces. So much for the Left's solidarity with the victims.

Of course, many on the hard Left still claim to be opposed to Putin and support Ukraine, but their ideological blinders quickly lead them into a land of absurdities. Many leftists across Europe beat their chests about the importance of humanitarian aid for Ukraine, while they still vehemently oppose supporting the country with more weapons. Since they clearly don't think Ukraine is worth defending, perhaps the aid they talk of can be delivered with the help of the Russian army. And in the US, Ilhan Omar achieved an improbable feat of simultaneously claiming that she "support[s] giving Ukraine the resources it needs to defend its people" and also saying that giving Ukraine the weapons they asked for would be "likely disastrous." Did she imagine Ukraine might do better with a large shipment of pink knitted pussy hats?

The reason for such absurdities is that the hard Left thinks the only good the West might really hope to do is retreat entirely from the world stage and rid it from its permanently nefarious influence. Never mind that the power vacuum would be filled by Xi Jinping's China and Putin's Russia. The eminent British historian Tom Holland might also point out something else the leftists are quick to forget: the very values by which they judge the West as distinctively evil are themselves uniquely Western. You cannot reject Western values without also rejecting anti-racism, anti-slavery, social justice, or anti-imperialism.

The supposedly "conservative" populist Right is trickier because its members claim to be the most unadulterated defenders of Western values, patriotism, tradition, and cultural inheritance. Their fanboying of Putin prior to his invasion, mindless parroting of Kremlin propaganda, and limp-wristed prevarication after he launched his war reveal just how much of a sham this always was. Instead of a robust defence of the West, we get self-described American "conservatives" such as Candace Owens arguing that Putin's invasion isn't a big deal because "Ukraine wasn't a thing until 1989," Tucker Carlson being so effective at making Putin's case that his monologues get featured on Russian state TV, and Ted Cruz complaining the US military is "emasculated" compared to Russia's. In Europe, populists like Farage and Le Pen are desperately trying to make everyone forget their years of warm words for Putin. Meanwhile, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has refused to let military aid for Ukraine pass through Hungary and used his election victory as an opportunity to describe Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as one of his "opponents."

The reality, of course, is that the populist Right was never interested in the West's values or intellectual tradition--because this is the very tradition they hate: liberal universalism, individual liberty, freedom of speech, democracy, freedom of religion. The populist Right is interested in the idea of tradition only as a symbol of authoritarianism and old-fashioned machismo for its own sake. They cannot bear to see the West stand up to Putin because he is the one that embodies the values they really care about--not the West.

NATIONALIST ECONOMICS ISN'T:

Unfortunately, the infant formula crisis isn't simply another case of a one-off event causing pandemic-related supply chain pressures to boil over. Instead, U.S. policy has exacerbated the nation's infant formula problem by depressing potential supply. First, as my Cato colleague Gabby Beaumont-Smith just documented, the United States maintains high tariff barriers to imports of formula from other nations--all part of our government's longstanding subsidization and protection of the politically powerful U.S. dairy industry. Imports of formula from most places, such as the European Union, are subject to a complex system of "tariff rate quotas," under which already-high tariffs (usually 17.5 percent, but it depends on the product) increase even further once a certain quantity threshold is hit. 

We even restrict imports of formula from most "free trade" (scare quotes intended!) agreement partners, including major dairy producing nations like Canada. In fact, a key provision of the renegotiated NAFTA--the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA)--actually tightened restrictions on Canadian baby formula to ensure that new investments in Ontario production capacity by Chinese company Feihe would never threaten the U.S. market:

Canada agreed that, in the first year after the agreement takes hold, it can export a maximum 13,333 tonnes of formula without penalty. In USMCA's second year, that threshold rises to 40,000 tonnes, and increases only 1.2 per cent annually after that. Each kilogram of product Canada exports beyond those limits gets hit with an export charge of $4.25, significantly increasing product costs....

Canada wanted to attract investment for a baby formula facility because it uses skim milk from cows as an ingredient. Healthy consumer appetites for butter leave provincial milk marketing boards with a surplus of skim. Baby formula looked like a smart use for it, and Canada didn't have any significant infant formula production before Feihe arrived.

Expanding this plant, or building a second infant formula plant somewhere else in Canada, look like less attractive business propositions under this new trade deal.

The bolded part is especially important today: Because USMCA effectively capped possible exports of infant formula to the United States, it discouraged investment in new Canadian capacity--capacity that we sure could use right now. The same goes for other potential Canadian suppliers--indeed, that's the whole point of the USMCA restrictions. As Big Dairy's trade associations stated in supportive public comments after the agreement's text was completed:

A particularly critical additional element of USMCA in this area is the export surcharge that is intended to discourage exports of Canadian SMP, MPC and infant formula beyond specified quantities. Properly administered, this provision will be an essential tool in constraining Canada's ability to dump unlimited quantities of dairy products onto global markets.... Canada must ensure that these surcharges function as intended to discipline the export expansion of these product areas."

Export expansion! Heaven forbid!

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

On the front lines, Ukraine on Wednesday said it had pushed back Russian forces in the east and shut gas flows on a route through Russian-held territory, raising the spectre of an energy crisis in Europe.

Ukraine's armed forces general staff said it had recaptured Pytomnyk, a village on the main highway north of the second-largest city of Kharkiv, about halfway to the Russian border.

Britain's ministry of defence said in its daily update on the military situation on Thursday that Ukrainian forces had retaken several towns and villages. read more

In the hamlet of Vilkhivka, less than 30 km (20 miles) south of the Russian border, a grizzled pensioner recounted how Russian troops had used him and other villagers as human shields before retreating after fierce fighting. read more

"Can they really be called real soldiers after that?" he spat. "They are m[******], not military men!"

The advance appears to be the quickest that Ukraine has mounted since it drove Russian troops away from the capital Kyiv and out of northern Ukraine at the beginning of April.

If sustained, it could let Ukrainian forces threaten supply lines for Russia's main attack force, and put rear logistics targets inside Russia within range of artillery.

THERE IS NO LEBANON:

High abstentions among Sunnis - as well as a fragmentation of the Sunni vote as a result of Hariri turning his back on politics - could play into the hands of Hezbollah and its allies, who collectively won 71 of 128 seats when Lebanon last voted in 2018, according to some political experts.

"Because of what Saad Hariri did, Hezbollah now has two-thirds of the parliament within its sights," said Ibrahim al-Jawhari, a political analyst who served as an adviser to former prime minister Hariri, referring to the threshold that would shield the group and its allies from vetoes.

Hezbollah gains would reverberate far beyond this small country of about 7 million people. Israel, Lebanon's neighbour to the south, sees the group as a national security threat and has waged war against it in the past. Washington, London and much of Europe have classified it as a terrorist organization.

Such a political shift in the movement's favour would affirm Lebanon's position within the regional sphere of influence of Iran, which is waging a proxy battle with Sunni arch-rival Saudi Arabia across the Middle East and is at loggerheads with the United States. read more

Hezbollah is an organisation that occupies a unique place in Lebanese society. It commands a paramilitary wing that some experts estimate has a more potent arsenal than the national army, while also running hospitals and schools - earning it the frequent description of a "state within a state".

The group itself has said it expects the make-up of the new parliament to differ little from the outgoing one and that it neither wants nor expects a two-thirds majority. Its main Christian ally, for one, is widely expected to lose seats.

Yet any expanded grip on parliament could give Hezbollah more sway over presidential elections later this year and over economic reform bills required by the International Monetary Fund, and even allow for amendments to the constitution.

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

Dario Feiguin, a rabbi for nearly 40 years, recently officiated at his first interfaith wedding -- a practice forbidden by the Conservative movement that ordained him. The Jewish groom is a close friend of his daughter. The bride has no religious affiliation.

"I saw their love and commitment to each other and realized that my moral obligation is to keep the door open," said Feguin, whose synagogue, Congregation Kol Shalom on Bainbridge Island, is part of the Reform movement.

Feiguin is one of a growing number of Conservative rabbis -- members of the denomination's Rabbinical Assembly -- who are deciding to preside at interfaith weddings. The issue has been decided in the Reform movement, the largest stream of Judaism in the U.S., which allows it. And it remains strictly prohibited within Orthodox Judaism.

But the question is increasingly divisive within the RA, which has some 1,600 members worldwide. Some rabbis have resigned from the RA over it. Others have been kicked out for officiating at interfaith ceremonies, though Rabbi Jacob Blumenthal, CEO of both the RA and the United Synagogue for Conservative Judaism, the movement's umbrella organization, said he does not know how many. Others, like Feigun, are hoping to remain part of the movement even though they have broken its prohibition over marrying a Jew to a non-Jew.

MEN VS LAST MEN:

[H]is deterministic concept of the friend-enemy distinction, his insistence on its universal applicability, and the danger of fascism are not the only reasons to disagree with Schmitt's vision. We should also disagree with it because it doesn't work. The sort of spiritual meaning and community the state provides is the febrile, astroturf, empty community of demagoguery and passion. It is both false and unsustainable.

Fukuyama not only understands this; as McAleer rightly notes, he warns against it in his 1992 book in the section on The Last Man. But Fukuyama didn't stop there. He gave us a book-length treatment of something similar in what may actually be his finest work, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018). "The modern concept of identity places a supreme value on authenticity, on the validation of that inner being that is not being allowed to express itself," he argues. Fukuyama argues these are the psychological roots behind identity politics, nationalism, Islamism, and more. Nationalism, for example, is "based on an intense nostalgia for an imagined past of strong community in which the division and confusions of a pluralist modern society did not exist." Humans' need for recognition and validation is a pre-political insight of psychology and spirituality that has enormous political consequences. McAleer in his critique implies Fukuyama was too enamored of systematic and mechanistic thinking. That may be true of the earlier work, but the latter is hardly that.

But it is fair to ask if Fukuyama has sufficient grounds on which to answer the psychological and spiritual challenges he rightly identifies. Fukuyama wants us to reaffirm the value of democratic equality and reject the siren calls of identity politics and nationalism. But why should we? If liberal democracy is spiritually empty--if recent history has rendered a verdict of its own--why stick with it? Of course, the alternatives we know about are terrible, but what should keep us from trying to find new ones?

We should not try to find new political options that are more spiritually fulfilling because politics is not supposed to be spiritually fulfilling. Liberalism is spiritually empty by design; the emptiness is a feature, not a bug, of the ideology. But Fukuyama leans too heavily on the optimistic, Enlightenment version of liberalism, which has lost sight of one of the main selling features of liberal thought. Because of its optimism, Enlightenment liberalism bleeds too easily into the progressivism of the contemporary left--which is just the latest intolerant political religion to try to take over our public square.

The right answer is a chastened liberalism that remembers its other roots: the Christian belief in original sin, fear of what mankind is capable of doing to itself, and a distrust of concentrations of power. Reinhold Niebuhr's Christian Realism was one version of what that might look like, and he articulated the best case for democracy from more pessimistic grounds. McAleer recognizes that there is a gap or a missing piece in Fukuyama's thought but misidentifies it. The gap is that Fukuyama does not make use of the resources afforded by religious thought. It is an odd omission, considering that Fukuyama, in speaking of identity, recognition, thymos, and resentment, is addressing essentially spiritual questions.

But the gap leaves room for the next generation of thinkers to appreciate the best of Fukuyama's thought--including the vision and sweep of The End of History, the staggering ambition and learning of his two-volume magnum opus on The Origins of Political Order and Political Order and Political Decay, and the deep psychological insight of Identity--and still see room for more.

IT'S A UNIPOLAR WORLD:

As heavy fighting continues to rage in eastern Ukraine, Finland has said it intends to apply to join NATO "without delay," in a major policy shift that sees the Nordic country, which shares a long border with Russia, abandoning decades of neutrality.

"NATO membership would strengthen Finland's security. As a member of NATO, Finland would strengthen the entire defense alliance. Finland must apply for NATO membership without delay," Finnish President Sauli Niinisto and Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in a joint statement on May 12.

IT'S A START...:

The Biden administration has canceled one of the most high-profile oil and gas lease opportunities pending before the Interior Department. The decision, which halts the potential to drill for oil in over 1 million acres in the Cook Inlet in Alaska, comes at a challenging political moment, when gas prices are hitting painful new highs.

JUST BEG OUR WAY BACK INTO THE TPP:

Former president Barack Obama had proposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership, billing it as a high-standards deal that would let the United States lead the emerging trade order in Asia.

His successor Donald Trump trashed the deal, calling free trade unfair to US workers. Biden, seeing the shifting US political mood, has made clear he is in no rush for trade deals -- and China is now seeking to enter the Trans-Pacific Partnership's successor.

BECAUSE PUTINISM IS TRUMPISM:

Nearly five dozen House Republicans voted against a $40 billion aid package to help Ukraine fight off the violent Russian invasion of their country.

The aid package still passed the House by a vote of 368-57, with every Democrat voting in favor of helping Ukraine beat back Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose violent invasion has led to nearly more than 2,400 civilian deaths and thousands more injuries, according to the United Nations.

The bill includes both military funding to help the Ukrainians fight back against their Russian aggressors, as well as humanitarian aid to help the struggling citizens in the war-torn country.

THE GND IS TOO CAUTIOUS:

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS::

A Florida circuit court judge signaled Wednesday that a new congressional map championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis is likely unconstitutional, siding with Democrats and voting rights groups who said the map would illegally suppress Black voters in northern Florida.

Judge J. Layne Smith, a DeSantis appointee to the 2nd Circuit Court of Florida, said during a hearing that he intended to issue an order granting an injunction that would prevent the map from going into effect. Smith said the map violates the state constitution "because it diminishes African Americans' ability to elect the representative of their choice."

NOW RAISE GAS TAXES $2 A GALLON AND INCREASE AS NEEDED TO MAINTAIN THAT LEVEL:

At last, consumers are starting to see some relief: The rate of inflation for consumer prices declined in April, according to highly-anticipated Labor Department data published Wednesday. [...]

The slowdown is partially driven by energy prices, which declined 2.7% in April after rising 11% percent in March. Gasoline prices fell 6.1%, as did used vehicles and clothing, which dropped 0.4% and 0.8%, respectively.

Falling prices on these products is good news for consumers -- especially for gas prices, which have nearly doubled in the last year. The CPI numbers suggest that despite recent gas price surges, there are limits to how quickly those prices can grow.

RIGHTS, BUT LAWS:

My use of the term "classical liberalism" is best summed up by the political theorist John Gray, who describes it in the following terms:

Common to all variants of the liberal tradition is a definite conception, distinctively modern in character, of man and society.... It is individualist, in that it asserts the moral primacy of the person against the claims of any social collectivity; egalitarian, inasmuch as it confers on all men the same moral status and denies the relevance to legal or political order of differences in moral worth among human beings; universalist, affirming the moral unity of the human species and according a secondary importance to specific historic associations and cultural forms; and meliorist in its affirmation of the corrigibility and improvability of all social institutions and political arrangements.

I would further define classical liberalism in terms of the institutions with which it is closely associated, and without which it has no real effect. The most important is a rule of law that imposes constraints on the exercise of state power and protects a sphere of individual autonomy. Most successful liberal societies have constitutions that create checks on executive authority like separation of powers, federalism, and press freedoms.

Classical liberalism is further associated with a certain mode of cognition, the scientific method, which postulates an objective world independent of subjective human consciousness, which can nonetheless be perceived and manipulated through the experimental method. This cognitive mode makes possible the technological world that is the enabler of modern economic growth.

Classical liberalism as I have defined it is different from democracy, yet closely related to it. It is possible to have liberal autocracy, like Germany in the late 19th century or perhaps Singapore today. These are or were countries with a strong rule of law, but which do not hold regular free and fair elections.

It is also possible to have illiberal democracies that do hold regular elections, but do not observe liberal constraints on state power. This characterizes Viktor Orbán's Hungary, and is the aspiration of populist politicians from Recep Tayyip Erodoğan in Turkey to Narendra Modi in India to Donald Trump in the United States.

That being said, liberalism and democracy are closely associated with one another historically in something we properly label "liberal democracy" that combines a strong rule of law with free and fair elections. Liberalism by itself often produces a high degree of economic inequality, and, if unconstrained by a democratic state through regulation and effective social policy, liberalism becomes hard to sustain. I consider social democratic countries like Sweden and Denmark to be fundamentally liberal societies despite the fact that they have expansive welfare states, because they also have a strong rule of law and protect individual rights.

Similarly, democracy without liberal rule-of-law constraints often becomes undemocratic, as legitimately elected leaders scheme over time to keep themselves in power regardless of popular will. This has been going on in Hungary, where Orbán's Fidesz party has been gerrymandering the electoral system to make it hard for the opposition to win power. Something similar is happening in the United States as Republican state legislatures seek to manipulate the way that votes will be counted in future elections.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

Another way to gain insights on this bygone era is to simulate it on computers. The early stages of reionization are relatively simple to re-create because the universe was relatively dark and uniform then, explains Aaron Smith, an astrophysicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who helped develop THESAN. As primordial matter sorts itself into galaxies and stars, however, complex interactions between gravity, light, gas and dust become increasingly difficult to model.

"Since modeling light is quite complicated and computationally expensive, there are only a few cosmological simulations that focus on exploring this epoch," says astrophysicist Rahul Kannan of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who helped develop THESAN. "Each of these cosmological simulations have their own advantages and disadvantages."

THESAN is designed to simulate the early universe to an unprecedented extent. Some cosmological simulations, such as the Cosmic Dawn (CoDa) simulations and the Cosmic Reionization on Computers (CROC) project, have modeled large volumes at relatively low resolutions, while others, such as the Renaissance and SPHINX simulations, are more detailed but do not span great distances. In contrast, THESAN "combines high resolution with large simulated volumes," Kannan says.

"Usually there's a trade-off between studying in detail galaxy formation and cosmic reionization, but THESAN manages to do both," says astrophysicist John Wise of the Georgia Institute of Technology, who did not work on THESAN.

THESAN's developers built it on the back of an older series of simulations called Illustris-TNG, which have been shown to accurately model many of the properties and populations of evolving galaxies. They next developed a new algorithm to model how the light from stars and galaxies interacted with and reionized their surrounding gas over the first billion years of the universe--details that previous simulations have not successfully incorporated at large scales. Finally, the THESAN team included a model of how cosmic dust in the early universe may have influenced the formation of galaxies.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

 The status quo has drawn criticism from both left and right. Into this fray, Adrian Vermeule wades in his new book, Common Good Constitutionalism (2022), an ersatz hybrid of progressive and pseudo-conservative sentiment.

Vermeule teaches law at Harvard, one of the nation's most elite universities. He specializes in administrative law--a Progressive Era innovation that some critics contend violates the Constitution's separation of powers--and constitutional theory. Constitutional "theory" often has even less to do with the Constitution than constitutional "law." Oddly, for a subject taught in law schools, the field is dominated by moral philosophers, exemplified by John Rawls and Ronald Dworkin. The attraction of constitutional theory, from the legal scholar's standpoint, is that the canvas is blank, the inquiry is unhindered by text or history, and the only limits are the scholar's ambition and ingenuity. Vermeule, who holds an endowed chair at Harvard Law School, exudes plenty of both.

Each theorist has his own personal preferences, and Vermeule is no exception. He is an ardent devotee of the administrative state (having co-written a bold defense of it in 2020's Law & Leviathan) and a recent convert to Catholicism, which coincides with his turn toward what some observers call "integralism," a movement that "seeks to subordinate temporal power to spiritual power--or, more specifically, the modern state to the Catholic Church." Vermeule's embrace of integralism aligns him with so-called post-liberals led by Patrick Deneen on the Catholic right, as well as some quirky proponents of "natural law" jurisprudence. (Deneen enthusiastically blurbed Vermeule's book.)

In the 1970s, the nascent field of constitutional theory was dominated by liberal law professors seeking to provide cover for the activist decisions of the Supreme Court during the 1960s under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren (which, unfortunately, continued under his successor, Warren Burger). The left's defense of extra-constitutional rights was termed advocacy of "a living Constitution," suggesting that the document is (or ought to be) malleable enough to be putty in the hands of liberal judges. Decades later, libertarian and even conservative scholars got into the act, hoping to inspire judicial activism in a different direction. [...]

Vermeule's jargon-laden critique, incorrectly perceived as coming from "the right," has attracted attention for its man-bites-dog novelty. Vermeule aims to discredit originalism altogether and replace it with his bespoke legal order. The moral framework of Vermeule's integralism (summarized in a 2020 essay he wrote for The Atlantic, entitled "Beyond Originalism") is hostile to the libertarian bent of the Supreme Court's current jurisprudence on free speech, abortion, sexual liberties, and related matters.

Despite charges that Vermeule advocates "a kind of reactionary substantive due process," he is not conservative in any meaningful sense. He represents an odd hybrid of conventional progressivism (support of federal power, administrative agencies, economic regulation, labor unions, and environmental protection) and traditional morality typically associated with social conservatives (opposition to abortion, LGBTQ rights, same-sex marriage, pornography, etc.). Coincidentally, his "constitutional theory" mirrors those views. As Robert Bork wrote in 1982, "the judge who looks outside the Constitution always looks inside himself and nowhere else."

THAT WAS EASY:

PEREMOHA DAY:

Many observers expected Russian troops to escalate their attacks in an attempt to blast their way to some sort of battlefield achievement before the annual Victory Day parade, as a gift to Vladimir Putin. Since it was clear that major prizes like Kyiv, Kharkiv and Odesa are beyond Russia's reach -- likely for good -- Mariupol was the logical target.

But even that battered city has proven too tall a task for Russia. Ukrainian forces in the city's Azovstal steel plant somehow remain in the fight, and Russian troops surrounding the complex have opted not to risk heavy casualties trying to storm it.

The other expectation for the Victory Day celebration in Moscow's Red Square was that Putin would make a major announcement about the war in Ukraine. Some anticipated a declaration that the country was at war, opening the door for a general call-up of reservists. Others expected Russia's leader to declare victory and give himself a way out of an operation that has been bungled from the start.

That didn't happen either. (It must be emphasized that no Russian officials promised any major announcements on Victory Day -- only outside observers.)

"When May 9 came, it was quite clear that things were not as usual," said Johan Norberg, senior military analyst at the Swedish Defence Research Agency and a leading expert on the Russian Army.

One inescapable indication that something was off was the cancellation of the parade's planned Russian Air Force flyover, said Norberg. The Kremlin blamed supposedly inclement weather, but anyone watching footage of the parade could see that the sun was glinting off Putin's bald head as he waved to the thousands of soldiers lined up in tight rows.

SIMPLE AESTHETICS:

Across these four studies, the results consistently supported both the social mattering and cosmic mattering hypotheses, but also suggested that the cosmic mattering hypothesis was by far the stronger of the two explanations. In other words, the correlation between religiousness and perceived meaning in life was statistically accounted for by both forms of perceived mattering - but perceived cosmic mattering accounted for a much larger proportion of that association. This suggests that the primary reason why religiousness is associated with perceived meaning in life is because it is also associated with perceptions of cosmic significance.

It's worth reiterating that these studies were conducted in the US, where most religious people are adherents of Abrahamic monotheisms (Judaism, Christianity and Islam). Things might look very different in other cultures. But, if these findings are correct - at least in this Western context, where being religious typically means believing in a creator God - they raise the question of whether secular Western society is in a position to reproduce the existential benefits of religion.

Unfortunately, the data suggest a pessimistic answer. If religiousness were associated with perceived meaning in life primarily because of the social resources that come from religion, then new forms of social organisation could be developed to step in for religious ones. In fact, a number of 'atheist churches' have already been established with this goal in mind. Such communities are likely to be very beneficial for their members. Yet our research suggests that these secular substitutes will be less powerful sources of perceived meaning than religious faith because they are unlikely to support perceptions of cosmic significance.

Is it possible to cultivate a sense of cosmic significance without adopting religious beliefs? One might contribute to science (ie, attempt to comprehend the Universe), or work to protect Earth from the climate crisis or other global threats. These are enormously important and good things to do with one's life. Yet the impacts of such endeavours are confined to the comparatively humble scale of our planet - which, again, is a very small part of the cosmos overall. Moreover, even if one's efforts were successful, these secular sources of significance are likely to require an enormous amount of hard work, dedication and opportunities that are not available to everyone. Hence, religion might be a unique source of perceived meaning in life.

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM ALL:

 It was Nixon-era Treasury Secretary John Connally who famously said the "dollar is our currency, but it's your problem." And doesn't Asia know it 50 years on as the region witnesses the dollar skyrocketing in unexpected ways?

The US currency was supposed to be on life-support right about now. With inflation surging, Washington's debt topping US$30 trillion, politics as polarized as ever and governments from China to Russia to Saudi Arabia searching for alternatives, it was almost certain to tank.

The opposite is happening as capital zooms out of the yuan and yen into greenbacks. This makes Connally's 1971 maxim more relevant than ever. In fact, the gravitational pull toward the dollar now threatens to unnerve Asia's biggest economies.

DONALD WHO?:

Multiple embarrassing traffic stops. A credible accusation of insider trading. Photos of him sporting hoop earrings and a bra. A video of his hand near the crotch of a male staffer. Another video showing him jokingly but nakedly humping the upper body of potentially the same man--his cousin. And possibly more to come.

Few in politics have seen anything like the ever-worsening public relations trainwreck that has consumed the political career of Rep. Madison Cawthorn (R-NC). The unrelenting pile-up of damaging stories, insiders say, is the clear handiwork of political players determined to take out the 26-year old MAGA hero in the May 17 primary election.

With a field of hungry Republican primary opponents eyeing the divisive freshman's seat, the sources of the coordinated stories seem clear: the attacks are coming from inside the house.

"It's definitely a hit job that I'm happy to be a party to," a veteran North Carolina operative involved in the race told The Daily Beast.

"Most of the GOP universe has come around to align against this guy," he added. "You're seeing a full-court, state-based, establishment pushback against him. Get this guy out. Take him out. We're gonna see if we can pull it off in eight days."

IT'S ADMIRAL POINDEXTER'S WORLD:

One of the more striking pieces of journalism from the Ukraine war featured intercepted radio transmissions from Russian soldiers indicating an invasion in disarray, their conversations even interrupted by a hacker literally whistling "Dixie."

It was the work of an investigations unit at The New York Times that specializes in open-source reporting, using publicly available material like satellite images, mobile phone or security camera recordings, geolocation, and other Internet tools to tell stories.

The field is in its infancy but rapidly catching on. The Washington Post announced last month it was adding six people to its video forensics team, doubling its size. The University of California at Berkeley last fall became the first college to offer an investigative reporting class that focuses specifically on these techniques.

Two video reports from open-source teams -- The Times' "Day of Rage" reconstruction of the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot and the Post's look at how a 2020 racial protest in Washington's Lafayette Square was cleared out -- won duPont-Columbia awards for excellence in digital and broadcast journalism.

DEPENDENT NO MORE:

Take a stroll around Chicago's Bronzeville neighborhood on a sun-filled spring afternoon and it's pretty much guaranteed you'll come across Romanesque-style greystones, classic brick three-flats and the sound of children deep in an after-school game of kickball echoing from the back alleys. What you might not be expecting is the brightly-colored mural emerging out of a vast, vacant lot along South Michigan Avenue -- and, more significantly, the massive electrical battery that lies behind that painted cinder block wall.

That battery is but one part of the Bronzeville Community Microgrid, which combines rooftop solar, natural gas-fired generators and batteries to produce and store energy at a local level. Once fully operational, it will, in effect, render the entire neighborhood "energy independent," giving it the ability to disconnect from and reconnect to Chicago's citywide grid at will.

This will earn it the accolade of becoming the country's first neighborhood-scale microgrid, (although its founders, Commonwealth Edison, or ComEd, point out that there could be other initiatives in the works of which they are unaware), with energy experts suggesting it could serve as a model for utilities and communities across the U.S.

Earlier this year, the project, which is funded in part by a $4 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, passed efficacy tests demonstrating that the basic design of the system works, although it still faces a number of engineering and permitting hurdles. Once those have been cleared, the microgrid will be able to power more than 1,000 homes, businesses and public institutions such as hospitals.

A SIMPLE QUESTION OF REPUBLICAN LIBERTY:

To understand the problem with Roe we have to consider it from a different perspective than the usual one. The question is not "should abortion be legal," or even, perhaps "under what conditions should it be legal." The question is who should decide such questions. If we believe that we are "created equal," then abortion is, in America in 2018 at least, an issue on which "we the people" ought to be able to legislate.

Just about everyone agrees that abortion involves conflicting rights claims--between a woman and a gestating baby. Supporters of legal abortion like to simplify their argument as a defense of "a woman's right to control her body." Yet except for a few fanatics, such as Professor Peter Singer of Princeton, who goes so far as to assert that one may even kill a child after it has been born with no moral qualms, everyone recognizes that there are two persons involved. Almost everyone concedes that, barring serious health concerns, abortion ought not to be legal late in a pregnancy.

Most Americans believe abortion should be, as a general rule, prohibited after three months. That would be a common international standard. In France, for example, it is legal at will only for twelve weeks, after that it is legal only is two doctors agree that bringing the baby to term would have serious health consequences. In the U.S., by contrast, late term abortion is, in law, much easier to obtain.

Brain waves begin at roughly day forty. That might square with the idea of a "person" being present once there is a functioning brain that has the potential for consciousness. Basic biology suggests that a baby is an embryo for eight weeks and a fetus for the remaining seven months of pregnancy. That would seem to be a plausible line. The "pro-life" view is that life begins at conception (a unique life with human DNA exists at conception. To kill it is to take a human life.) Many Americans disagree. Many who consider themselves "pro-choice" would suggest that when the baby is viable outside the womb it should enjoy legal protection.

In short, the question, as everyone who is not an intellectual or a fanatic concedes, is about competing rights claims of gestating baby and the woman who is carrying that baby. Alternatively, we might say the debate is about at what point in development a baby rightfully deserves legal protection. The question is, therefore, precisely the kind of question that, in a democratic republic, belongs to "we the people." When the issue is how one person should life his or her own life, or how they ought to associate with others, our republican premises suggest we should, as a rule, trust individuals. But when we're talking about the life and death of another person, there is obviously, a case where the law might be involved.

To understand why this issue belongs to "we the people," acting in our legislative capacity, it might help to ponder the question of human equality. As little reflection shows that if we take seriously the proposition that we are created equal, then this issue is one that belongs in the political arena. [...]

Equal citizens cannot abdicate the responsibility to think seriously about the great questions of right and wrong. But we humans are not isolated individuals. We tend to live in communities and those communities have laws. When it comes to making laws with regard to, say, the engineering standards for bridges, we are not equal. Most of us would be unable to do the math. But when deciding how to negotiate competing rights claims of two people, things are different. To deny that the average citizen can be trusted to participate in discussions about difficult moral questions, and to deny that such questions ought to be in the political arena, and have legislative consequences, is to point back to the world of aristocracy--where the "better sort," academics, judges, or some other distinct class, have the right, even the duty, to tell the rest of us how to behave.

THE PROBLEM FOR ROE FUNDAMENTALISTS... (language alert):

Ask Americans whether Roe should be overruled, and the answer seems pretty straightforward: Polls consistently find that a majority think the Supreme Court should keep the ruling in place. But Americans' views on abortion are hardly clear-cut. Majorities also support a variety of restrictions on abortion -- including limits on abortion in the second trimester -- that openly conflict with the Supreme Court's rulings. For example, a 2020 Kaiser Family Foundation poll found that 69 percent of Americans favored laws requiring abortions to be performed only by doctors who had admitting privileges at a nearby hospital, even though the court ruled in 2016 that those laws place an unconstitutional burden on women's right to abortion. [...]

Overall, perspectives on abortion tend to fall into three main camps. The first camp is a relatively small chunk of Americans (about 10 to 15 percent) who think abortion should be illegal in all cases. The second camp is a larger minority (about 25 to 30 percent) who want abortion to be legal in all cases. And the third camp is the majority of Americans (about 55 to 65 percent), who fall into a gray area, telling pollsters that they want abortion to be legal in some or most cases. That final category is all over the place, as it includes both people who think abortion should be legal only in cases of rape, incest and when the mother's life is at risk, as well as people who think abortion should be legal with only limited restrictions, perhaps for minors or for abortions in later stages of pregnancy.

WHAT SYSTEMIC RACISM?:

Whitehead is part of a trend in pushing a radical-right political agenda to American police forces. He's one of five police trainers identified by Reuters whose political commentary on social media has echoed extremist opinions or who have public ties to far-right figures. They work for one or more of 35 training firms that advertised at least 10 police or public-safety training sessions in 2021, according to a Reuters analysis of scheduling data from policetraining.net, the main site where local departments connect with trainers. The news organization also reviewed materials describing classes by specific training companies.

The five trainers have aired views including the belief in a vote-rigging conspiracy to unseat Trump in the 2020 election. One trainer attended Trump's January 6, 2021, rally at the U.S. Capitol that devolved into a riot, injuring more than 100 police officers. Two of the trainers have falsely asserted that prominent Democrats including President Joe Biden are pedophiles, a core tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory. Four have endorsed or posted records of their past interactions with far-right extremist figures, including prominent "constitutional sheriff" leader David Clarke Jr. and Proud Boys leader Joe Biggs, who is being prosecuted for his involvement in the Capitol riots.

Whitehead adheres to the constitutional sheriff philosophy, which holds that county sheriffs should ignore any law they find unconstitutional. The growing movement claims sheriffs are the supreme law enforcement authority in their jurisdictions - more powerful even than the U.S. president. A spokesperson for the Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association disputed the characterization of its views as extreme and said it was neither right- nor left-wing.

In interviews, Whitehead and the other four trainers also said their beliefs are neither extreme nor far-right. Some said posts that appeared to urge the overthrow of the U.S. government were intended as humorous or figurative. They said they keep their politics separate from their training, which they said focused on officer safety.

Whitehead was listed in a database of members of the Oath Keepers, a far-right anti-government group, that was leaked in September by the nonprofit Distributed Denial of Secrets, which says it aims to publish data in the public interest. The members list included some 15 other people who identified themselves as law enforcement trainers and dozens more who said they were retired officers or trainers, or firearms instructors, according to a Reuters review of the data. The anti-government militia group focuses on recruiting police and military personnel, according to some experts who track extremism, and claims to have thousands of members. Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes was charged with seditious conspiracy for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riots. 

THAT WAS EASY:

April was a milestone month for utility-scale wind and solar generation in the U.S. For the first time, the two renewable resources generated more electricity than coal or nuclear power.

According to data from the Energy Information Administration, utility-scale wind and solar produced 57.73 million megawatt-hours (MWh) during the month, while coal and nuclear both generated less than 56 million MWh.

DIE NADEL AND THE DAMAGE DONE:

After immigration to the United States tapered off during the Trump administration -- then ground to a near complete halt for 18 months during the coronavirus pandemic -- the country is waking up to a labor shortage partly fueled by that slowdown.

The U.S. has, by some estimates, 2 million fewer immigrants than it would have if the pace had stayed the same, helping power a desperate scramble for workers in many sectors, from meatpacking to homebuilding, that is also contributing to supply shortages and price increases.

"These 2 million missing immigrants are part of the reason we have a labor shortage," said Giovanni Peri, an economist at the University of California at Davis, who calculated the shortfall. "In the short run, we are going to adjust to these shortages in the labor market through an increase in wages and in prices."

IN OTHER WORDS, NOT A RIGHT:

Relatively few Americans hold an absolutist view on the legality of abortion, a Pew Center report released Friday shows.

The report, one of the most comprehensive surveys on abortion attitudes in years, found that 61 percent of Americans believe abortion should be legal in some circumstances and illegal in others. Nineteen percent, or about 1 in 5 Americans, think abortion should be legal in all cases, and 8 percent say it should be illegal without any exceptions.

The Center has surveyed the public on abortion for decades, and the latest survey shows that support for legal abortion has remained steady since the Center began surveying people in 1995. Still, the Center's researchers found that most people's attitudes are nuanced and contingent upon a variety of circumstances, such as how far along a person is in their pregnancy and whether the pregnancy endangers a pregnant person's life.

''People don't want to give a simple yes or no answer,'' Senior researcher Besheer Mohamed said. ''Their views are complicated. They're nuanced. And so giving folks a chance to really express that was a big part of our motivation for this.''

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

The Battle of Donbas is raging high, but it's not going the way Russia wanted it to. 

Almost 20 days in, the much-anticipated and feared grand offensive falls short of expectations. 

It is still not even close to achieving its ultimate goal -- the encircling and crippling of the core Ukrainian military group in the region. 

Amid fierce hostilities, Russia has only managed to achieve limited territorial gains at significant cost. 

Slow and painful, the offensive has gradually stalled amid weak Russian reserves and strong Ukrainian defenses. 

THANKS, VLAD!:

Putin's war has shaken a fundamental assumption of Vietnam's defense posture: that Russia would remain a reliable supplier of weapons systems it needs to deter Chinese aggression. It has done grave damage to what was a mutually convenient Russian relationship with Vietnam.

That is a tie that dates from Soviet-era aid to the Hanoi communist regime when it fought to secure Vietnam's independence and then to unify the country under Communist rule. Russia is still honored in Hanoi as the orchestrator of generous economic aid during the postwar decade when Vietnam struggled to build a Soviet-style command economy. Now fast forward a few decades: after successfully rebranding Vietnam's economy as "market-Socialist" but wary of Chinese ambitions, the nation's leaders chose to rely on Moscow for relatively inexpensive high-tech weapons systems, including frigates, fighter-bombers, attack submarines, and coastal defense missiles.

Xi Jinping's "China dream" has been Vietnam's nightmare, a threat that Hanoi has managed by building deterrent capability, practicing deference, and emphasizing mutual economic interest. It's an ancient strategy that has proven effective when China acts grandiose, and a set of policies that has enabled modern Vietnam to sustain a modestly constructive relationship with its giant neighbor.

Now, however, Hanoi's no longer assured of having in hand a suite of weapons systems built in Russia. For the foreseeable future, it will be almost impossible for Vietnam to buy arms from Moscow without triggering so-called 'secondary sanctions.' Hanoi seems to have figured that out. Chính reportedly agreed on April 30 with Fumio Kishida, Japan's new prime minister, that "in any region, changing the status quo by means of force is quite intolerable."

AWARENESS IS THE ENEMY:

In one example that caught the state's attention, a reviewer noted that a high school statistics book included lessons on race that could violate the rule.

They pointed to pages that discussed "racial profiling in policing" and "discrimination in magnet school admission," along with one instance in which the book mentioned there were "too many" white police officers in the NYPD compared with the racial makeup of the community. [...]

One second-grade book from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt was penalized on its alignment to state standards because "attempts at multicultural teaching" were evident in its text. The example given was "types of housing for different groups of people."

Similarly, a McGraw Hill LLC book for fifth graders was rated as "very poor" for its social emotional learning lessons. The reviewer noted that one question "asks students to think about social and emotional learning competencies, including relationship skills and social awareness."

THE HARD PART WAS LURING VLAD INTO THE WAR:

The Ukrainian edge? Their mobile forces, determined fighters, smart leadership, superior intelligence and targeting, and, coming soon, a surge of heavy weapons, arriving after months of delay.

Most of the weapons and real-time intelligence are coming from America, supplemented by some from NATO allies, such as Britain's state-of-the-art Starstreak missile. These modern weapons will be crucial in the upcoming fight because they allow Ukrainian forces to take out enemy tanks and artillery from positions beyond the reach of Russian counter-fire.

The key now is getting these weapons to the battlefront (a complex logistical task, performed under enemy fire) and making sure Ukrainian fighters know how to use them. The operators' training is happening now and the supplies are moving across hundreds of miles in Ukraine, undeterred by Russia's attacks on road and rail junctions such as Lviv.

Even with these new weapons, it's still guesswork as to whether Ukraine can actually defeat the Russians. So let me guess: Ukraine will win. It will be a hard fight, and the victory may be incomplete. But the odds now favor Ukrainian victory for several reasons.

The Russian army, which already demonstrated its deficiencies in the fight for Kyiv, is now badly damaged and low on morale. It is essentially stalled in its latest push to take more territory and take out Ukrainian formations by moving west from areas it currently holds in Luhansk and Donetsk (the Donbas region). That drive would have been supplemented by Russian forces around the northeastern city of Kharkiv, which has short logistical lines because it is close to the Russian border. But that move failed to take the city. Its forces are being driven back from surrounding territory, and utterly failed to move south and encircle more Ukrainian forces.

Across the whole eastern region, Russia's latest push has achieved only modest gains. And even those are tenuous. When Russia redeploys its forces after taking territory, Ukrainian fighters often take it back.

Air power should have helped Russia, but it didn't. Russia has never established air superiority despite a much larger air force. Ukraine's skies are still contested space. That's especially impressive given that the US has not supplied Ukraine with modern air defense systems, and denied them the Soviet-era MiG fighters held by NATO members that were once inside the Warsaw Pact.

Russia's aviation problems go even further. To fight effectively, their air force should be tightly connected to ground operations. But it isn't. Put bluntly, Russia cannot conduct modern, combined-arms warfare, which melds air power, cyber resources, battlefield intelligence, tanks, artillery and drones. That kind of combat is the backbone of NATO strategy, and Ukraine is using it effectively, even though it is not a member.

THAT CAN'T BE A REAL QUESTION:

At a time like this, why would anyone want a new tax that's designed to make things more expensive?

COMPLIANCE IS A TAX:

For many Americans, doing your taxes isn't all that complicated. It's just data entry.

The actual work of doing your taxes mostly involves rifling through various Internal Revenue Service forms you get in the mail. There are W-2s listing your wages, 1099s showing miscellaneous income like from one-off gigs, 1098s showing mortgage interest or tuition payments, etc.

But here's the thing about those forms: The IRS has them, too. For many people, the IRS has all the information it needs to calculate their taxes, send taxpayers a filled-out return, and have them sign it and send it right back to the IRS if everything looks in order.

This isn't a purely hypothetical proposal. Countries like Denmark, Belgium, Estonia, Chile, and Spain already offer such "pre-populated returns" to their citizens. And a new paper estimates that at least 41 percent of American households -- some 62 million tax filing units -- could have their entire tax returns handled this way with no further intervention necessary.

The paper is by four economists: Lucas Goodman and Andrew Whitten at the Department of the Treasury's Office of Tax Analysis, Bruce Sacerdote of Dartmouth, and Katherine Lim of the Minneapolis Fed. 

THAT WAS EASY:

RBG WINS:

Democrats know that the political dimensions of the (possible) overturning of Roe via Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization are opaque. Indeed, while most polls find the public opposed to overturning Roe -- as they likely would be to any 50-year-old decision that our media and culture have treated as sacred writ -- they also embrace a mess of contradictory opinions on the matter.

As a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll found, a majority support Roe, yet 75 percent also claim to be "either somewhat or very dissatisfied" with Roe, including 66 percent of those who self-identify as "pro-life" and 62 percent of those who self-identify as "pro-choice." One imagines that a majority of voters have little idea what overturning Roe entails.

Once voters get past the question of whether Roe should be overturned, they may find out that establishment Democrats have staked out a maximalist position -- one the media have largely obscured. The specifics of recent bills, such as the one passed in Colorado, which make abortion legal on demand into the ninth month, are deeply unpopular.

On the other hand, Florida's 15-week abortion ban, likely the template for many other red states moving forward, aligns with the middle ground. Gallup finds that 67 percent of American believe abortion should be either completely banned (19 percent) or in place with limitations (48 percent) after the first trimester. The 20-week ban that House Republicans supported a few years ago also polls well. A Hill-Harris poll found that 55 percent of registered voters thought heartbeat bills were either "too lenient" (21 percent) or "just right" (34 percent).

Democrats such as Congressional Campaign Committee chairman Patrick Maloney, who promises to make abortion the central issue in the 2022 midterms, are probably misjudging the priorities of the American people. As long as Democrats fail to nix the filibuster, abortion becomes a state-level issue should Roe be overturned. It's the Left that argues for a national abortion mandate through judicial fiat. Once voters realize that very little will functionally change in their states, in the short term at least, they will likely turn back to worrying about inflation and energy prices.

THE TRUMP BRAND:

OTHER THAN THAT, HOW'S IDENTITARIANISM WORKING OUT?

Amid the burnt-out ruins of what was once a city of half a million people, the Russians can celebrate this Pyrrhic victory. But who, other than the dictator's most fanatical followers, will be impressed by such a spectacle? Putin's triumph is as empty as his threats.

Nothing demonstrates this more clearly than the decision by Finland and Sweden to end their long-standing neutrality by joining NATO. Though the fast-tracking of the Scandinavians may be galling for Ukrainians, it represents a strategic defeat for Russia of historic proportions. Other vulnerable states, such as Georgia and Moldova, may join the queue. If the aim of the invasion of Ukraine was to intimidate the neighbours (and members) of the Russian Federation, it has utterly failed.

The most that can be said with any certainty at this point is that even at home, Putin no longer enjoys the nimbus of invincibility that was carefully cultivated by his propaganda machine. The catastrophe he has visited upon Ukraine is now threatening to engulf his own regime. Russians are watching aghast as one humiliation follows another: the retreat from Kyiv, the sinking of the Moskva and now the failure to break through in Donbas. The President may not care about the young soldiers left dead or missing on the battlefield, now estimated at 25,000 by the usually accurate Ukrainian military. But their families assuredly do.

Meanwhile the noose is tightening on Russia. Western sanctions grow ever tougher, with the EU now imposing an embargo on Russian oil. Even spiritual leaders are no longer exempt from sanctions: Kyrill, the Patriarch of Moscow, is now being targeted as one of the Kremlin's most odious toadies. Pope Francis may not be the only significant figure to voice criticism of NATO, but he is almost alone in wanting to visit Moscow to listen to Putin's tirades. Others prefer to make the pilgrimage to Kyiv, where the Orthodox Church has broken with Moscow. Even Lukashenko, Putin's ally in Belarus, is offering only verbal support. Russian isolation is anything but splendid.

It is getting lonely in the Kremlin. The Chief of Staff, General Gerasimov, dispatched last month to take charge the front, is reported to have been wounded in a devastatingly accurate missile strike on the Russian command HQ that killed dozens of other senior officers. Nine generals are known to have died so far in this war. A purge of unreliable army and intelligence officers is under way. The siloviki, or strongmen, of the Russian elite are rumoured to be considering a coup.

NOW HOW DO WE LURE XI INTO ATTACKING TAIWAN?:

Land

The impact of the fourth industrial revolution on this oldest domain of war has already been dramatic. As noted, the balance between offense and defense in land combat has shifted through the ages. Since the last year of World War I, the offense has dominated conventional ground combat. (Irregular warfare has followed its own pattern.) However, emerging technologies are shifting the balance in conventional warfare back to the defense.

Since new systems allow units to remain passive and yet see the battlefield clearly, the defense will have a distinct advantage. Electro-optical and electronic warfare sensors can provide a great deal of information that, combined with external sensors such as satellites and drones, can allow the defenders to visualize the battlefield without revealing their own positions. The defenders will not have to emit signals until they choose to fire. And they will have the advantage of fighting from prepared positions. While most current systems must be manned to operate, autonomous and remote-control systems are being developed worldwide. As these systems mature, defenders can be located at a distance from their weapons and thus not be at risk even after firing. Recent events have shown ground forces will be subject to attack by the emerging families of swarming drones.2 Inexpensive autonomous drones are flying now and can be mass produced using advanced manufacturing techniques. It is not unreasonable to expect a defender to be able to launch hundreds or even thousands of loitering munitions against each brigade-size attack.

In contrast, attackers will have to move if they intend to execute anything but strike missions against the defender. The very act of moving will create a signature. While attackers will retain the traditional advantage of selecting the time and place of attack, the advantage of physically massing either offensive or defensive forces is declining as weapons ranges increase dramatically. Mass can be achieved by assembling long-range fires rather than massing forces. This favors the defender since attackers may well be forced to pass through restrictive chokepoints, while defenders can disperse to the maximum effective range of their weapons. However, as the Azerbaijanis demonstrated against the Armenians, the offense can remain dominant if the attacker adopts modern concepts and weapons while the defender relies on 20th-century weapons and concepts.

Sea

Today, land-based antiship systems are dominating the surface of the sea out to ever increasing ranges. These land- and air-launched ballistic and cruise missile systems, vertical takeoff and landing drones, and attack aircraft cued by ubiquitous surveillance systems have the enormous advantage of hiding in the cluttered land environment. Their surface ship targets must operate in much more open environments. Land-based systems also have the advantage of both range and magazine depth. And if emerging laser and microwave systems prove effective, land-based forces will have an enormous advantage in power generation capacity. The adage, attributed to Admiral Horatio Nelson, "A ship's a fool to fight a fort," remains true--but now extends to ever greater ranges from shore.

Geography as well as oceanography can enhance the power of land-based systems. The sea has chokepoints that have been major factors in conflicts between major powers since the Peloponnesian War. Even today, control of straits such as Hormuz or Malacca can allow a power to determine what resources flow to an opponent. In these confined waters, land-based defenses can gain an even greater advantage by employing many less expensive, shorter range antiship systems and smart sea mines (essentially tethered torpedoes).

Extended range land- and air-launched cruise missiles mean many naval fights will include land-based participants. As Captain Wayne Hughes, USN, demonstrated in his work, the first fleet to conduct successful pulse attacks against an opposing fleet gains a major advantage. Land-based systems can provide more missiles at less cost for each pulse attack.

IMAGINE IF WE WERE AT WAR WITH VLAD?:

U.S. intelligence has helped Ukraine kill some of the 12 Russian generals who died on the frontlines of the Russia-Ukraine war, The New York Times reported late Wednesday.  [...]

The Biden administration changed a classified directive last month that lifted geographic limits on actionable information on potential targets in Ukraine, the Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press reported.

"We have opened up the pipes," Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a U.S. Senate panel Tuesday.

NO WONDER THE TRUMPISTS HATE MEXICANS:

There can be confusion over the origins of Cinco de Mayo. Some think it's a holiday celebrating Mexican independence from Spain (that's actually September 16), or the 1810 Mexican Revolution (November 20), or that it was dreamed up to sell more beer and guacamole.

Cinco de Mayo actually marks the unlikely defeat of elite French forces by an undermanned Mexican army in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862. In fact, this underdog Mexican victory may have played a part in preventing French Emperor Napoleon III from helping the Confederacy win the American Civil War. 

THANKS, FEDERALIST SOCIETY!:

In Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the Court located the right to an abortion in the due-process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This amendment prohibits any state from depriving "any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." Prior courts have used this provision of the Constitution as the textual hook to protect not just procedural rights but unenumerated substantive rights, including rights to interracial marriage, same-sex marriage, and contraceptives.

In his draft opinion, Alito calls this approach "controversial" (after all, the due-process clause says nothing about substantive rights) but accepts the conceptual approach anyway. He notes that Court precedent has protected "two categories" of substantive rights.

The first category is the list of liberties guaranteed by the first eight amendments in the Bill of Rights. That category doesn't apply to abortion, which isn't mentioned in the Bill of Rights. The second category refers to those rights "deeply rooted in [our] history and tradition" and "essential to our Nation's 'scheme of ordered liberty.'"

Alito's opinion represents a thorough dismantling of the idea that--prior to Roe--abortion rights were rooted at all in American history and tradition, much less "deeply rooted." In fact, the deep roots that exist are of state regulation and prohibition of abortion. The draft opinion concludes with a 31-page appendix listing statutes that criminalized abortion in "all states of pregnancy" when the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868.

The draft opinion also rejects the idea that the right to an abortion is an "integral part of a broader, entrenched right." Alito distinguishes the long line of cases recognizing the rights to interracial marriage; to obtaining contraceptives; to engaging in private, consensual sexual acts; and to same-sex marriage by noting that abortion "destroys" what Roe and Casey call "potential life" and what the Mississippi law at issue in the current case "regards as the life of 'an unborn human being.'"

It's the impact on the unborn child that sets apart Dobbs, the case on which Alito wrote his draft opinion, from, say, Obergefell v. Hodges, the Court's ruling on same-sex unions. Gay marriage involves consenting adults. No unborn child consents to his or her own destruction.

The inherent weaknesses of Roe's approach have long been recognized even by the strongest defenders of abortion rights. In 1992, for example, Ruth Bader Ginsburg criticized Roe as a "breathtaking" precedent during a speech at New York University.

Her lecture addressed "measured third-branch decision making," and she spoke words that have proved remarkably prescient. "Doctrinal limbs too swiftly shaped, experience teaches, may prove unstable," she said. And what was a prime example of a too-swiftly shaped doctrinal limb? Roe v. Wade. "A less encompassing Roe, one that merely struck down the extreme Texas law and went no further on that day ... might have served to reduce rather than to fuel controversy."

JUST ANOTHER "CONCERNED PARENT":

A North Carolina member of the Oath Keepers on Wednesday pleaded guilty to seditious conspiracy and obstruction of an official proceeding in connection with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

GLOBALIZATION IS ANGLOFICATION::

As a Muslim child growing up in England, I along with many of my friends suffered from a strange annual ailment that invariably flared up a month or so before December and was quite debilitating. Only recently an American Rabbi friend revealed she was a fellow survivor, proffering a fitting title for it - 'Christmas Envy.'

Today, there are still captive communities all over the country that can't escape the weeks of relentless build-up before the mother of all holidays unleashes a national blast of joy, bursting with shots of bonhomie and endless festivities. The schadenfreude remains acute while observing beautifully boxed gift sharing and glittering decorations that illuminate homes, public buildings, community parks and city centers.

For many Muslims, western holiday celebrations like Christmas once felt like the kind of universal affirmation we could never attain. But, today, it's a markedly different story. Celebrating Muslim holidays like Ramadan and Eid is now a burgeoning business. In the ultimate act of anointment, Muslims are being courted by major retail stores selling our themed holiday decor.

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

The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) -- a regional bloc of China, India, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan -- is Beijing's umbrella organization for this part of the world and represents a balance of power between Beijing and Moscow, the region's two hegemons.

The SCO has struggled at times with finding an overriding mission, and fallout from the war risks derailing that further, especially as Beijing must now navigate between backing Russia and embracing many SCO members' desire for more distance from Moscow.

"Due to its size and geography, China's role [in Central Asia] will grow [following the war], but the SCO won't have many success stories to point to," Temur Umarov, a fellow at the Carnegie Moscow Center, told me. "Beijing is also now seen as a supporter of Russia and as a country that isn't doing much to restrain Moscow when many [SCO members] are seeing it as a potential threat."

Why It Matters: China's footprint in Eurasia and the future of the SCO are just one example of repercussions from the war that could hinder wider Chinese goals.

While China grapples with a sustained economic slowdown due to COVID-19 lockdowns, the war has pushed up costs for Chinese businesses and contributed to fading overseas demand for their exports.

TRUMPISM IS PUTINISM:

Former President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security delayed and altered an intelligence report related to Russian interference in the 2020 election, making changes that "appear to be based in part on political considerations," according to a newly released watchdog report.

The April 26 Homeland Security inspector general's assessment provides a damning look at the way DHS' Office of Intelligence and Analysis dealt with intelligence related to Russia's efforts to interfere in the US, stating the department had deviated from its standard procedures in modifying assessments related to Moscow's targeting of the 2020 presidential election.

The conclusion that Trump's appointee appeared to have tried to downplay Russian meddling in a key intelligence report is the latest example of how his aides managed his aversion to any information about how Russia might be helping his election prospects.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

The Trump brand https://t.co/8I9SBxfXM1

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) May 4, 2022

ACTUALLY, "AI DISCOVER":

A group of scientists at the University of Texas at Austin have created a modified enzyme that can break down plastics that would otherwise take centuries to degrade in a matter of days. 

The researchers, who published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Nature last week, used machine learning to land on mutations to create a fast-acting protein that can break down building blocks of polyethylene terephthalate (PET), a synthetic resin used in fibers for clothing and plastic that, per the study, accounts for 12 percent of global waste.  

THE WRONG SENATOR FROM DELAWARE BECAME PRESIDENT:

THE LACK OF ANY CODE OF ETHICS SAVED CLARENCE TOO:

[C]hemerinsky raised concerns that the investigation itself could be damaging to the high court.

"My concern with the leaks investigation is that it is unclear whether any law has been violated, it is unlikely to be successful, and so interferes with the working of the Court," he said. 

MAKE GAS TAXES CONFISCATORY:

 When the price per gallon goes up, our behavior changes. We drive less. We consider getting more efficient -- or even electric -- cars. We carpool. We take subways and buses. We work from home if we can. We ride bikes. Heaven forbid, we might even walk.

This isn't just theory. A think tank at San José State University in 2014, for example, observed that demand for light rail transit climbed 9.34 percent when the price per gallon exceeded $4. More than a decade ago, the Federal Highway Administration noted that in the first 10 months of 2008, Americans reduced their driving by 3.5 percent -- 90 billion miles! -- as prices at the pump rose above $4. (Yes, really. For all of our complaints now about $4-plus gas, it's not a new problem.) And a March 2022 survey by the American Automobile Association found things hadn't changed much: at $4 per gallon, 59 percent of respondents said they would "make changes to their driving habits or lifestyle." If gas were to hit $5 nationally, as it already has in some places, the number rises to 75 percent.

And when prices drop? Logically, all of that happens in reverse. We drive more, buy bigger cars, and no longer cram into public transit. And we make fun of those silly people on bikes.

So here's my big question: If climate change is such an extreme catastrophe -- one that the United Nations says will continue to render portions of the world "uninhabitable" -- and if burning fuel is a major contributor to this, why are politicians (including, and sometimes most loudly, the left wing) trying so hard to make the price of gasoline go down?

TOUGH TIMES FOR PUTINISM/TRUMPISM:

The somewhat ramshackle Russian armed forces over the course of its misbegotten campaign have sustained many reverses. The worst by far was the passing by the US Congress of the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act of 2022-2023, mandating $33 billion (£26 billion) for various forms of assistance. Most of that help will take the form of weaponry and training to enable the Ukrainian army to destroy Russia's military equipment and kill its soldiers.

To place this in context, the entire Russian defence budget for the current year is $65.9bn. Some believe that the Lend-Lease Act is an open-ended commitment by 'the arsenal of democracy' to Ukraine which might encourage Russia to the negotiating table.

Battlefield success

Finally, how will the west and Ukraine achieve their objectives? The first imperative on the battlefield, of course, is to secure success in the current main effort in the Donbas region. Russia is making local gains there, but is unlikely to achieve the breakthrough necessary to destroy Ukrainian forces.

UK-based military strategist Mike Martin argues that the current push is likely to 'culminate' - or run out of momentum - in the next two to three weeks. After that, it seems likely that the Russian army will be in no state to resume the offensive any time soon. This will remain so, even if Vladimir Putin announces a mass mobilisation, as some - including the British defence secretary, Ben Wallace - believe he will.

Russia will find it very difficult to replace the troops and equipment it has lost in the short and medium terms. Indeed, British defence intelligence estimates that some of Russia's more effective units will 'take years to reconstitute'. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian army's reserve system has allowed it to draw on human replacements far faster than Russia.

Bolstering Ukraine's defences

Further, a remarkable transformation is taking place in Ukraine's army amounting to its de facto military integration into Nato. As western equipment filters through to the frontline, Nato-standard weaponry and ammunition will be brought into Ukrainian service. This is of far higher quality than the mainly former Soviet weapons with which the Ukrainians have fought so capably. The longer this process continues and deepens, the worse the situation will be for the already inefficient Russian army and air force.

We have already seen the effect of superior Nato weapons systems on Russia's tanks and aircraft. The die will really be cast for the Russians when they lose their traditional dominance in artillery. Recent transfers from Nato states, such as the Netherlands and France, in addition to US guns and artillery detection radar have been designed to accomplish exactly this. Similar processes are likely to take place with anti-aircraft weapons.

In the air itself, it is questionable whether introducing western fighter aircraft will take place in the short term, given the lead times for supply and lengthy training requirements of at least six weeks. It is clear though that such transfers are no longer ruled out.

In addition to guaranteeing a usually far higher quality of weaponry, commonality between Nato and Ukrainian equipment will ensure a broader set of suppliers and a far more efficient logistics system. It will also enable something rarely spoken about, a systematic training regime. Extensive systems for training Ukrainian troops are being set up in Poland and many other Nato states.

Prepare a counter-attack

All of this is likely to produce a situation, perhaps as early as June or July, when the Ukrainian army can counterattack to regain some of the ground it has lost. Some analysts, including this author, believe that a reequipped Ukrainian army may be in a position to do this very successfully indeed.

THE FIRST RULE OF TEXTUAL CONSTRUCTION IS THAT THERE IS A TEXT:

The opinion also identifies the right reading of the Constitution with its meaning as enacted. One might quibble that the Due Process Clause, in which the term "liberty" appears, was meant to trigger only procedural rights, and that any further inquiry into the content of these rights for substantive purposes is thereby superfluous. But Justice Alito is careful to note that much the same analysis of tradition would be mandated by the Fourteenth Amendment's grant of privileges or immunities to all citizens, which clearly offers a fount of substantive rights. Many scholars have argued that it protects liberties that were deeply rooted at least at the time of enactment and perhaps even rights that become deeply rooted thereafter. But because the right to abortion is not so rooted, that clause can provide no foundation for it.

The opinion's careful analysis of text therefore represents not only the overruling of Roe but also a sea change in the appropriate method of reasoning about the Constitution. What was notable about Roe was that it failed to locate the abortion right in the text of the Constitution or even in previous precedent. As law professor John Hart Ely said about Roe, "it is not constitutional law and gives almost no sense of an obligation to try to be." (Not surprisingly, Alito quotes Ely.) But Roe was also the culmination of decades of loose thinking about constitutional interpretation, as expressed in cases that ignored the original meaning of text and were driven by what the justices thought of as good policy. If the Dobbs decision follows this draft opinion, then its most important legacy will be the restoration of a more rigorous method of reasoning to the heart of constitutional law. And it represents a triumph for the conservative legal movement in its decades-long fight to restore the original meaning as the centerpiece of constitutional interpretation.

Alito's opinion does not imply that precedent will become irrelevant. After showing that the Constitution as originally enacted does not include a right to abortion, Alito analyzes various factors that the Court has canvassed in deciding whether to overrule Roe. But even here, he emphasizes that the quality of the reasoning of the precedent up for overruling remains key. And that factor will push the Court to consider the precedent's connection to a plausible interpretation of the Constitution's meaning.

THE UNTWISTING OF THE PANTIES:

[L]eaking a Supreme Court decision doesn't actually seem to be a crime--at least not by any clear and undisputed definition. "Right now, it's unclear whether the leaker broke any law at all," says Trevor Timm, a First Amendment-focused lawyer and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. "Even the people claiming this act is beyond the pale and the FBI must investigate haven't pointed to a definitive law this leaker allegedly broke."

Timm cites a lengthy Twitter thread published late Monday by the well-known UC Berkeley legal scholar Orin Kerr, who responded to the leak Monday night by pointing out that a Supreme Court draft doesn't meet any of the obvious criteria that would make it an illegal document to hand to a journalist: Most important, it's not classified, so leaking it doesn't open the leaker to prosecution under the Espionage Act. "As far as I can tell, there is no federal criminal law that directly prohibits disclosure of a draft legal opinion," Kerr concluded.

Of course, if the source is someone who hacked into a computer of, say, a Supreme Court justice or law clerk--or swiped the paper off their desk--the leaker could be prosecuted with computer fraud and abuse or theft, Kerr points out. But otherwise, despite the historical rarity of Supreme Court leaks and the politically radioactive nature of this one, Kerr argues there's no slam-dunk argument to federally prosecute the leaker.

Instead, Kerr suggests that any federal prosecutor seeking to make a case against Politico's leaker might have to resort to a far shakier statute, known as 18 U.S.C. § 641. That broad statute forbids the theft or misuse of government-owned "things of value"--a broadly written law seemingly designed at a surface level to prevent embezzlement or graft by those with access to the government's property. But whether it applies to information--and what kind of information, given to whom--remains an open question in federal law, with different circuit courts fundamentally disagreeing in their rulings.

"Legal scholarship provides little clarity regarding § 641's interpretation; only a few scholars have even recognized § 641's application to information," reads a Columbia Law Review article about the statute's use for prosecuting leakers, written by Jessica Lutkenhaus, an attorney focused on criminal defense at the law firm Wilmer Hale. "The circuits disagree about whether § 641 applies to information, and, if it does, what its scope is: What information constitutes a 'thing of value'?"

Sharing information is arguably fundamentally different from stealing "a thing of value," Freedom of the Press Foundation's Timm points out. "You can't steal a government Jeep or take something tangible or physical from government offices," Timm says. "But copying something can be construed as different from stealing something. You copy it, and the original thing is still there, and you just leave with papers that didn't exist before."

PAYING OFF DEBTS:

Tulsa County District Court Judge Caroline Wall ruled against a motion to dismiss the suit filed by civil rights attorney Damario Solomon-Simmons in 2020. The Tulsa-based attorney said after Wall announced her ruling that it is critical for living survivors Lessie Benningfield Randle, 107, Viola Fletcher, 107, and Hughes Van Ellis, 101.

"We want them to see justice in their lifetime," he said, choking back tears. "I've seen so many survivors die in my 20-plus years working on this issue. I just don't want to see the last three die without justice. That's why the time is of the essence."

The packed courtroom, which Wall noted may have been over capacity, erupted in cheers and tears after she handed down her ruling.

Solomon-Simmons sued under Oklahoma's public nuisance law, saying the actions of the white mob that killed hundreds of Black residents and destroyed what had been the nation's most prosperous Black business district continue to affect the city today. The lawsuit also seeks reparations for descendants of victims of the massacre.

"In public nuisance cases, it is clear either criminal acts or destruction of personal property" constitute a nuisance, said Eric Miller, a Loyola Marymount University law professor working with the plaintiffs. Miller said that racial and economic disparities resulting from the massacre continue to this day.

THE rIGHT IS NOT CONSERVATIVE:

I reached out to French because he grasps what's really driving the cultural right at this moment and why the tendencies it is unleashing are cause for profound concern. An edited and condensed version of our exchange follows.

Greg Sargent: In recent days you've strongly dissented from some current obsessions on the right. You're deeply skeptical of laws limiting classroom discussion of race, sexual orientation and gender identity. You've attacked DeSantis's use of state power to punish Disney for expressing its views on one such law.

What is it that you see as alarming in this as an overall trend?

David French: Look back at the last 20 years of the conservative legal movement, and you'll see a host of lawsuits brought against speech codes on campuses. You'll see a long-term effort to vindicate the free speech rights of private corporations. You had a long-running effort to protect the free speech and free exercise rights of public school teachers.

In about a 12-month span, you've seen a dramatic reversal. You see an increasing effort on the part of red-state legislators to adopt speech codes, most applying to K-through-12 schools. You have seen an effort to regulate the speech of private corporations.

What you're beginning to see is a broader embrace of state power to punish enemies and reward friends.

The root of it is a kind of cultural panic, a thought that conservative political views, religious views and cultural views are in retreat everywhere. That the culture wars are irretrievably lost. That all that's left to the right is the exercise of raw political power.

Sargent: You are rare among conservatives in this sense: Unlike those who constantly bewail the supposed hegemony of liberal cultural power, you are willing to say that conservatism itself retains a great deal of cultural power.

French: What do cultural conservatives care about? They'll say they want intact families, less teen sex and teen pregnancy, less divorce, less abortion, more kids being raised in two-parent families.

On every one of those fronts, I say, "Good news!" Divorce has been decreasing. The percentage of kids being raised with their parents is increasing. The abortion rate is lower. If you look at these markers of cultural health, time and again you'll see they're actually improving.

That is not to say that society is as healthy as anybody wants it to be. But to hear the cultural right talk about the United States of America, it's been a march to chaos. The opposite is true.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Renewable power has been growing worldwide, but sources like wind and solar aren't available consistently, creating a need for storage solutions. Today, most large-scale energy storage uses lithium-ion batteries, which are expensive, or pumped hydropower, which is only available in certain places. Cheap energy storage systems that can be deployed anywhere could unlock new potential for renewable power.

Energy Dome thinks carbon dioxide could have a role to play. The company says its demonstration plant, where it has designed and begun trials, will soon be able to safely and cheaply store energy using carbon dioxide sourced from commercial vendors. 

Compressing gases to store energy isn't new: for decades, a few facilities around the world have been pumping air into huge underground caverns under pressure and then using it to generate electricity in a natural gas power plant. But Energy Dome turned to carbon dioxide because of its physics.

THERE IS NO AFGHANISTAN:

Everywhere you turn in Afghanistan, there are problems. The economic situation is apocalyptic, with poverty nearly universal. With no work to speak of, Afghans are literally selling their children to scrounge up what little cash they can. More than 22 million Afghans don't have enough to eat. Per capita incomes fell by one third in the months after the Taliban planted their flag in Kabul, canceling out all of the economic progress Afghanistan had made over the previous fourteen years (much of it thanks to a war economy).

The hundreds of thousands of young Afghans who enter the workforce every year don't have much work to do, forcing a critical choice: stay put and try to eke out a living at home or leave their families and migrate in the hope of greener pastures. By the end of this year, Afghanistan's $20 billion GDP will have contracted by a third. Of course, when a country is so reliant on foreign aid for so long, an economic depression is inevitable once that aid dries up.

The relative peace Afghans experienced in the first months after the end of the war is becoming more precarious. The Taliban have always thought of themselves as hard-edged security men who prize law and order, tolerate no dissent, and unapologetically punish anyone who dares to challenge their rule. A take-no-prisoners approach has helped the Taliban consolidate power; what was left of an organized opposition movement frittered early on, as Taliban forces squelched holdouts in the Panjshir Valley.

Bombings on soft targets, however, are more frequent today than they were last fall. The last two weeks have been especially bloody, with IS-K militants attacking multiple mosques and killing dozens of worshippers. Last Friday, fifty Afghans were killed after a suicide bomber struck a mosque in Kabul, which came a week after another strike against a Sunni mosque in Kunduz killed thirty-three. With every attack, confidence about the Taliban's strength is further called into question.

The Taliban is experiencing headaches on the diplomatic front as well. The group's nearly three-decade-long relationship with Pakistan is under strain, as Pakistani Taliban militants based in Afghanistan increase their pace of attacks across the border. Pakistani forces stationed in the tribal regions are finding themselves under fire, and Islamabad is getting irritated with the lack of cooperation from its former partners. Last month, Pakistan took matters into its own hands, conducting airstrikes against two Afghan villages. Those strikes killed dozens of civilians, eliciting an angry diplomatic protest from Taliban officials and threats from the Taliban defense minister.

The Taliban's relationship with its neighbor to the west, Iran, is also delicate. The stabbing of several Iranian clerics at one of Shia Islam's holiest mosques by an Afghan immigrant has resulted in a wave of anti-Afghan sentiment among Iranians. Afghan refugees and migrants in Iran have been beaten and assaulted in retaliation. Afghans have responded to these images with anger; the Iranian consulate in Herat was attacked by stone-throwing Afghans, forcing Tehran to suspend consular services in the country for ten days. Iran and the Taliban have sent additional reinforcements toward their shared border, even as diplomats on both sides seek a de-escalation.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

According to Reasons to Believe astrophysicist Jeff Zweerink, the new research raises new questions, showing us that "the more we learn, the more we realize how much more there is to learn." CT asked him why physics isn't finished and what that can teach Christians who, like the psalmist, "consider your heavens, the work of your fingers" (Ps. 8:3).

What do black holes tell us about God?

It's not like, "Black holes, therefore God." But the theory of the universe that we have--the theory that said black holes should exist before anyone knew to even think about them--is predicated on the idea that our universe ought to be understandable. It ought to be coherent. It ought to be the same out in the distant reaches of the universe as it is here.

That points to the Creator. That tells us something about the Creator.

Look at how we get to black holes in the first place. Albert Einstein, back in 1915, recognized that as you move through the universe, from big stuff to small stuff and very fast stuff to very slow stuff, the laws of physics seemed to change. The way electromagnetism behaved was different from the way gravity behaved, and Einstein looked at that and said that doesn't make sense. The laws of physics ought to be the same no matter how you look at them.

It was that philosophical idea that led him to develop his general theory of relativity. And if general relativity is right, then there should be these things called black holes.

The insight or genius of general relatively is that space and time, instead of being abstractions or kind of empty spaces, are now understood as these dynamic quantities. As energy moves through space and time, it actually warps space and time, and they could become so warped that they would rupture. If you get a star that's massive enough, the gravitational pull is so strong that it collapses on itself and that's a black hole. So people started thinking about black holes theoretically and eventually found evidence. We even found that in the center of our galaxy there is this massive black hole.

The connection here is that when we look at creation, we expect to see an orderly, coherent creation. For Einstein, it is a philosophical idea that ultimately derives from the notion that there is a unified order. And that's what you would expect if there is a God who created it.

EDUCATION IS TOO IMPORTANT TO BE LEFT TO PARENTS:

Some people oppose school-based financial education because they believe teaching kids about money is the parents' responsibility ― and frankly, it should be. But what about the kids whose parents or guardians don't have the personal finance skills or experience to adequately instruct their children? Where can they go to learn the basics of personal finance?

As we have increasingly turned our attention toward improving financial equity and inclusion, school-based financial education will play an important role in leveling the playing field for future generations of American consumers, particularly those students growing up in historically underserved communities. By introducing these students to a financial system they may not have previously been exposed to, giving them reliable information, and offering them a chance to develop critical thinking skills, we can help prepare them to make smart financial decisions throughout their lives.

Public support is widespread. Eighty-eight percent of adults in a recent survey by the National Endowment for Financial Education said their state should require either a semester or year long financial education course for graduation, and 80% wished they had been required to take a semester or year-long course during high school.

More states are adding requirements, with Georgia earlier this week becoming the latest to mandate a personal finance course in high school. In March, Florida became the largest state to require personal finance in high school.

While financial education in the classroom is crucial for less advantaged students, it is valuable for all.

ALL OVER BUT THE DYING:

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Esper enraged Trump by publicly stating in June 2020 that he opposed invoking the Insurrection Act -- an 1807 law that permits the president to use active-duty troops on U.S. soil -- in order to quell protests against racial injustice.

Michael Bender -- then with The Wall Street Journal, now with the N.Y. Times -- reported last year in his book, "Frankly, We Did Win This Election," that Trump repeatedly called for law enforcement to shoot protesters during heated meetings inside the Oval Office.

ALITO?:

The Supreme Court has voted to strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, according to an initial draft majority opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito circulated inside the court and obtained by POLITICO.

The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision - Planned Parenthood v. Casey - that largely maintained the right. "Roe was egregiously wrong from the start," Alito writes.

"We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled," he writes in the document, labeled as the "Opinion of the Court." "It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives."

*"Roe was egregiously wrong from the start. Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people's elected representatives."

*"In the years prior to [Roe v. Wade], about a third of the States had liberalized their laws, but Roe abruptly ended that political process. It imposed the same highly restrictive regime on the entire Nation, and it effectively struck down the abortion laws of every single State. ... [I]t represented the 'exercise of raw judicial power'... and it sparked a national controversy that has embittered our political culture for a half-century."

*"The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation's history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973."

*"In some States, voters may believe that the abortion right should be more even more [sic] extensive than the right Casey and Roe recognized. Voters in other States may wish to impose tight restrictions based on their belief that abortion destroys an 'unborn human being.' ... Our nation's historical understanding of ordered liberty does not prevent the people's elected representatives from deciding how abortion should be regulated."

VASSAL STATE:

The Russian Finance Ministry's U-turn on Friday came after it initially attempted to make payments on its dollar-denominated bonds in Russian rubles on April 4. Major ratings agencies suggested this would constitute a first foreign debt default since 1917 if Moscow did not manage to meet its obligations in foreign currency by the end of the month-long grace period on May 4.

Timothy Ash, senior EM sovereign strategist at BlueBay Asset Management, on Tuesday expressed surprise that the OFAC had seemingly waved through the payments after its prior tough messaging.

"OFAC is keeping all options open. It still has the option of not extending the general license on May 27, and can act any time to stop Western institutions from processing bond repayments," he told CNBC via email.

Ash said the latest developments had shown both that Russia wants to pay its foreign creditors and has the resources to do so, beyond those frozen by sanctions.

"OFAC can force Russia into default at any time. OFAC is still in the driving seat," he added.

THERE IS A ROTH EFFECT. THERE IS NO BIDEN EFFECT:

Who would've thought an old guy in a suit emerged as the fifth  Sex Pistol.

Jack Bogle was a Punk Rocker. Conflicted financial salespeople are the epitome of poseurs.

The Clashs' Joe Strummer said it best; Punk Rock isn't something you grow out of. Punk rock is an attitude, and the essence of that attitude is give us some truth.

Led Zeppelin played 11-minute songs while Punk condensed the rage of disaffected youth into a two-minute thrash.

The message was simple, honest, and pure rebellion.

Jack Bogle expunged investing fluff.  You get what you don't pay for regarding returns--no need for the five-minute drum solo.

Bogle exposed the old Hustler's adage to the public - The game's sold, never told.

Eric Balchunas hits it out of the park in his terrific new book, The Bogle Effect.

Bogle may have looked like a latter-day Henry Fonda, but his message and style had more in common with punk rock. Just as punk was a reaction to disco and style over substance, launching low-cost index funds was reacting to the financial industry's frothy status quo. Both were about being the opposite of what they saw around them. Rolling Stone magazine describes punk rock as "a negation, a call to streak, brutal simplicity." if that doesn't describe Bogle's life's work-and cheap index funds don't know what does. 

Bogle's North Star was addition by subtraction.

Vanguard slashed fees to the bone. They were calling out the investment poseurs and making them play their game. Firms entered the new arena kicking and screaming. They had no other choice. The cost savings Bogle unleashed through the aptly named Bogle Effect transferred trillions of dollars from salespeople into the hands of the investing public.

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

Lack of understanding of the other country has been one of the major obstacles to improving the relationship, and something that the United States has repeatedly failed to understand is the Iranian desire to be treated with dignity and respect. This is something that Iranian officials have insisted on many times, and in most instances Washington has ignored them. Fixing that is not a panacea for all the problems in the relationship, but if we look back over the record of U.S.-Iranian engagement it is remarkable how much diplomatic progress can be made when the United States has been willing to show a minimum of respect for Iranian concerns and interests and how quickly otherwise productive talks collapse when Washington sends signals of disdain and contempt instead. 

For example, nascent U.S.-Iranian cooperation in Afghanistan was effectively torpedoed by George W. Bush's combative rhetoric and the decision to label Iran as part of an "axis of evil" alongside one of Iran's most hated enemies. An attempt to cultivate a better relationship during the Clinton administration was derailed by Madeleine Albright's use of language that the Iranian leadership took as insulting.

By contrast, nuclear negotiations succeeded once the United States was willing to show flexibility on the question of Iran's domestic enrichment and allow Iran a face-saving compromise. When the United States has been willing to treat Iran as an equal and not as a vassal to be dictated to, it has found a receptive audience for its proposals. When it has sought to strangle Iran into submission through coercive measures, it has been met with predictable intransigence.  

The book details how the United States has been obsessed with Iran out of all proportion to the threat Iran's government poses to America. This obsession reached its apogee during the Trump years, but as the authors explain Trump's obsession was just an intensified version of the longstanding U.S. view.

Mutual obsession is another example of how narratives have shaped the relationship: "These culturally driven preferences can also be glimpsed in the obsessiveness each country exhibits towards the other." This obsessiveness creates what the authors call "the narrative trap" that repeatedly sabotages promising moments of diplomatic understanding. The fact that the successful negotiation of the JCPOA was followed almost immediately by the U.S. repudiation of the agreement and intensified economic warfare is a testament to how deeply-ingrained the pattern of hostility and mistrust is. The Biden administration's apparent inability to escape the same trap is further proof of its power.

BRING IT TO BEIJING:

China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Pakistan is being targeted by an intensifying Balochistan insurgency that has so far claimed dozens of lives including three Chinese teachers last week in a daring suicide attack carried out by a female operative of the insurgent Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA).

Shari Baloch, a 31-year-old teacher, mother of two and a post-graduate philosophy student, blew herself up in front of a van carrying Chinese teachers near the Confucius Institute in the southern seaport city of Karachi on April 26, killing at least three Chinese nationals along with their Pakistani driver.

The banned Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and its lethal guerrilla cell, Majeed Brigade, have claimed the responsibility for the suicide attack, which killed four in Karachi.

Hours after the BLA operative detonated the explosive-laden bag in front of the approaching van, the militant group told an international news channel that the female operative targeted the Confucius institute, which they believed was a "symbol of Chinese economic, cultural and political expansionism."

"It will give a clear message to China that its presence in Balochistan will not be tolerated," the BLA representative told the news channel. [...]

Many say that the attack marks a certain intensification of the decades-old Baloch insurgency that is locked in a violent stalemate with Islamabad and by association Beijing as the financier of various China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) related infrastructure projects in Balochistan province.

DID DONALD EVEN EXIST?:

Last June, the USICA passed easily in the Senate by a vote of 68-32. USICA's trade section would reinstate 2,200 exemptions for China that the Trump administration stripped away. Specifically, the USICA takes a sledgehammer to Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows the president to respond to breaches by foreign countries of U.S. trade agreements or other foreign trade practices deemed improper. 

Trump used Section 301 to place tariffs on a large number of Chinese imports to the tune of an additional 25 percent in response to intellectual property theft. Despite the political establishment and corporate media's pearl clutching, the tariffs on Chinese imports were popular, which is likely why the Biden administration has done little to undo them, though it has handed out just over 350 tariff exemptions for certain Chinese goods.

Section 301 is the chief executive's main tool in the kit to decouple the American economy from China, but the USICA would render it virtually inoperable, while giving large handouts to Chinese importers. Under the USICA, Chinese firms would be allowed to claim "lost profitability" via tariffs on goods to get an exemption from Section 301 tariffs. It would also refund Section 301 tariffs paid in 2021 if a Chinese good lost its exemption at the end of 2020. If this refund provision remains in the final bill, the U.S. Treasury will be forced to send billions of dollars to Chinese firms within 90 days of the bill becoming law.

USICA would also present the U.S. Trade Representative with a number of regulatory hoops to jump through in order to deny tariff waivers for products made in China. Failure to navigate this obstacle course in a timely manner would automatically give reprieve to the Chinese importer. The Trade Representative is also explicitly directed to look at the impact of passing up cheap Chinese imports.

Because of this regulatory burden and other factors, the USICA would empower the World Trade Organization to serve as the de facto authorizer of any Section 301 tariffs imposed by the president.

YOU JUST HAVE TO WANT IT:

Less than two weeks after notching up a record 97.6% of instantaneous renewables on its grid, California has passed a major new milestone, with 100% of the state's electricity supplied by renewable sources for a short period over the weekend.

THE rIGHT EXISTS TO AMUSE NORMAL PEOPLE:

There have always been conspiracy theories: the moon landings were fake, Elvis is alive, Paul is dead. But as disinformation has sprouted across the internet, more malicious conspiracy theories have entered our homes, workplaces and even the halls of Congress. So you might not be surprised to learn that more than a million people have become followers of a conspiracy theory that birds aren't real. That's right. The birds you think you see flying in the sky are actually government surveillance drones. Sound insane? It's meant to. The Birds Aren't Real movement is, thankfully, pure satire, intended to mirror some of the absurdity that's taken flight across the country.

OR, TO PARAPHRASE THE OLD TRUISM...:

To begin, it is worth considering the work of historian David Starkey, who argues that the essential class distinction is not the one Marx drew, of proletarians and their bourgeois oppressors. Instead, it is between manual workers, whose trade is material, and the professions, whose work is knowledge--and it dates back to antiquity. This was the key dividing line in Roman society, differentiating slaves from citizens. The slaves did the manual labour (craftsmen, porters, servants), while the liberal (i.e., free) arts of the professions (statecraft, oratory, literature) were reserved for free men. The same distinction between the learned literate and the masses can be traced all the way through ecclesiastical Christianity to the modern professions of law, medicine, and academia, all of whose structures are based on that of the medieval clergy. On this model, credentialled, learned authorities profess revealed knowledge to the untrained layman. Today, these secular clergy are reverentially known as "experts". But it is in the nature of these professions, which, being based on ideas, always begin at least one step removed from material reality, to get carried away with their own dogmas. This is especially true where there is no worldly authority against which to verify their claims. If an architect or engineer is a fraud, his buildings are likely to fail. In academic peer review, only the initiated have the credentials required to judge.

That class is a function more of outlook than income was clear to Orwell, as he explains in his 1937 book The Road to Wigan Pier, which depicts both the privations of working-class life and the British class system as a whole.

Orwell describes how the "lower-upper-middle-class" (Orwell's own), generally professionals in the "Army, Navy, Church, Medicine [or] Law", understood and aspired to all the many customs of the upper classes (hunting, servants, how to order dinner correctly) despite never being able to afford them. Thus, "To belong to this class when you were [only] at the £400 a year level was a queer business, for it meant that your gentility was almost purely theoretical." This same dynamic applies today (though the bourgeois values aspired to now are quite different): a poor librarian is far less likely than a wealthy plumber to have voted for causes like Brexit or Trump, which are both populist and, thus, lower-class.

Themselves men of letters, both Orwell and Dalrymple understand that this class distinction is frequently signalled through language. "As for the technical jargon of the Communists," writes Orwell, "it is as far removed from the common speech as the language of a mathematical textbook." Such contorted academic prose means little to the ordinary worker, for whom, Orwell argues, Socialism simply means "justice and common decency." Indeed, Orwell laments that "the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents" because of their distance from everyday concerns and inability to speak plainly. Summarising the problem, he quips: "The ordinary man may not flinch from a dictatorship of the proletariat, if you offer it tactfully; offer him a dictatorship of the prigs, and he gets ready to fight."

A lifelong socialist, Orwell was repeatedly frustrated by the symptoms of this intellectual snobbery--why do the revolutionaries have such disdain for the ordinary punter? Dalrymple, meanwhile, in his essay "How--and How Not--to Love Mankind," takes aim at its roots. Here, Dalrymple compares the life and work of Marx to his now lesser-known contemporary, Russian novelist and playwright Ivan Turgenev. Though their lives closely resembled one another's, Dalrymple argues, "They nevertheless came to view human life and suffering in very different, indeed irreconcilable, ways--through different ends of the telescope, as it were. Turgenev saw human beings as individuals always endowed with consciousness, character, feelings, and moral strengths and weaknesses. Marx saw them always as snowflakes in an avalanche, as instances of general forces, as not yet fully human because utterly conditioned by their circumstances."

The problem, for Dalrymple, is abstraction. As Kant understood in his Critique of Pure Reason, theory alone, unchecked by experience, is always liable to overextend itself. This intellectual narcissism is portrayed archetypally in literature by Milton's Satan in Paradise Lost. Cast out of Heaven and bent on revenge, he declares bitterly: "The mind is its own place, and in it self / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n."

Thus, preferring his mind's eye to reality, the idealist intellectual creates glittering cathedrals in the sky; it is only when construction begins that problems start to arise. Marx's mechanical theory of society reduces real individuals, with their hopes and fears, beliefs and desires, to mere abstract "classes". He subordinates reality--messy, limited, and all too human--to a perfect model in which utopia is the only possible outcome. As Dalrymple puts it: "Marx's eschatology, lacking all common sense, all knowledge of human nature, rested on abstractions that were to him more real than the actual people around him."

WORKOUT:

It's Ramadan, and Shazma Gaffoor hasn't eaten or drunk for seven hours when we speak. She still has another two hours to go until she can break her fast.

The practice of fasting from dawn to dusk is central to this Muslim holy month and its purpose is to to develop God-consciousness, or Allah's awareness ("Taqwa" in Arabic).

Many of the world's religions incorporate some kind of purification ritual into their practice -- whether it's baptism, bathing before prayer, or engaging in sweat lodges as some Indigenous Americans do.

And fasting too is common across faiths. Jews have Yom Kippur, Christians observe Lent, Hindus commonly fast on a new moon day, and Catholics traditionally don't eat meat on Fridays.

But the Ramadan fast is definitely one of the more challenging purification rituals practised in Australia today.

"It's just like a workout," says Shazma. "It's an amazing mechanism. Your body just remembers it, just goes with it.

"I feel quite full now that my stomach has shrunk. You become very comfortable and you get used to it."

As well as developing godliness, fasting also helps cultivate concern for those less fortunate than yourself.

"There are people who live like that ... not knowing where they're going to have the next drink of water. That's a reminder of it, when the stomach rumbles," she says.

"There's the control. We can walk to the fridge and grab a drink but we choose not to. Many don't have that choice."

BETWEEN THEIR INVESTMENT IN KEYSTONE AND NORDSTREAM THERE ARE SOME POOR TRUMPISTS:

The EU will propose a phased out ban on Russian oil imports as part of a fresh round of sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, sources said on Sunday.

The European Commission, which draws up sanctions for the bloc, is currently preparing a text that could be put to the 27 member states as early as Wednesday, diplomats said.

Several diplomats said the ban on oil was made possible after a U-turn by Germany, which had said the measure would do too much harm to its economy.

OUR BOLSHEVIKS:

ALL THAT JAZZ #64

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

Peden, who goes by "Intel Crab" on Twitter, scours the internet for satellite images, flight trajectories and TikTok videos. He then shares his findings with his 255,000 followers, posting analyses of troop movements or the exact coordinates of a missile attack.

Kyle Glen also has two lives. During the day, the Welshman works in the field of medical research. In the evening, he also conducts "open source intelligence," OSINT for short. "Open source" because the sources the Twitter sleuths work with are all publicly accessible.

The core piece of this detective work is geolocation, because it's so simple and effective. Whenever they get a hold of a video or image of a conflict, OSINT hobbyists comb through the material for landmarks and particularities with which to determine the exact location of the shown event. This allows them to verify the accuracy of the material or to debunk false reports.

Back in 2014, the OSINT network Bellingcat used only freely accessible sources such as satellite and cellphone images to prove that the passenger plane MH17 was shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft unit.

Since then, the community has grown even more resourceful. At the start of the war in late February, OSINT fans tracked the movements of Russian military convoys using videos from Tiktok. Others signed up on dating portals like Tinder to catfish members of the Russian military near the border in Belgorod, using false personal profiles to deceive them into revealing information.

"OSINT has really taken off in the last six months," says Glen, who notes that after eight years of never being asked for interviews by the mainstream press, it's now happening every day.

Governments and intelligence agencies also appreciate the value of this new type of swarm intelligence. Through a Ukrainian government app called Diia, citizens can now upload geotagged images and videos of Russian troop movements. "We receive tens of thousands of messages a day," Ukrainian Digital Transformation Minister Mikhailo Fedorov recently told The Washington Post. "They are very, very useful."

"STABILITY" IS THE DENIAL OF DEMOCRACY:

The eruption of renewed violence between mainly peaceful Palestinian demonstrators and the Israeli military and police culminating during the simultaneous celebrations of Easter, Passover, and Ramadan in and around East Jerusalem's Al-Aqsa Mosque has once again reminded the world that the decades-old conflict has not gone away. The Israeli bombing of Gaza in response to rocket fire from the embargoed enclave only highlighted the conflict's persistent relevance.

The recent clashes, in which many more Palestinians than Israelis were killed or injured, triggered mildly angry responses from some Arab and Palestinian leaders, including King Abdullah of Jordan and Mahmoud Abbas, the aging president of the Palestinian Authority. Abdullah asked Israel to stop what he called "all illegal and provocative actions," while the Arab League and even Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates condemned Israel's raid on the mosque, as did Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan despite his recent efforts to improve relations with Israel. Other observers warned of another Palestinian intifada. 

The latest events in Palestine expose the fragility of recent gains in normalizing Arab-Israeli relations. If the current tensions devolve into greater violence, then those Arab states that have normalized relations with Israel could feel pressure to reverse course, while those that are already quietly cooperating with Israel, notably Saudi Arabia, may reconsider. 

AIN'T GONNA WORK ON MAGA FARM NO MORE:

Dutch dock workers are refusing to unload a tanker with a consignment of Russian diesel in the port of Amsterdam, a day after a similar action by dockers kept the ship from entering Rotterdam port.

VLAD WHO?:

Early in the war Washington worried that aggressively equipping Ukraine's army with anything but "defensive" weaponry risked embroiling the US and NATO in a direct conflict with Russia.

Now, the Pentagon has shed those earlier inhibitions and is shipping offensive weapons like heavy artillery, helicopters and attack drones.

Rather than hiding it, the Pentagon also began openly talking this week about how it is training Ukrainian troops, including inside Germany, to use the weapons they are receiving.

And instead of saying, as it did in February, that it wants only to help Ukraine survive, Washington now says its goal in the war is to debilitate Russia for the long term.

"We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can't do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine," US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said after a visit to Kyiv last week.

HE WAS A TORY, JUST AS BILL WAS A REPUBLICAN:

It is often forgotten now, but Thatcher's route to victory in 1979 was built upon the votes of millions of ex-Labour voters. As early as 1975, in her first speech to the Conservative party conference, she had tried to win over the "moderate" trade unionists in Britain: "Go out and join the work of your union", she argued, "go to its meetings -- and stay to the end to learn the union rules as well as the far left know them". And as industrial discontent continued to grow in the 1970s, she argued that most trade union members were aligned with her politics: "First and foremost, they are members of families: mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, who share our values". [...]

Thatcher worked hard to detach the Labour Party of the 1970s, from the idea of the Labour Party of the past. "There used to be a Socialism in this country, a Socialism which valued people" she claimed.  The modern Labour Party, by contrast, was "officious jargon-filled intolerant socialism". And when the votes were finally counted in 1979, the all-important C2s -- the so-called skilled working class swung to the Conservatives by 11%. Rock-solid Labour seats such as Birmingham Northfield, Basildon and Hertford & Stevenage were won over by her arguments. 

It was those voters, the new Conservatives, who Blair believed Labour had to appeal to in the run-up to 1997. John Smith had skillfully manipulated Conservative divisions over Europe and the economy to Labour's advantage. Moreover, he had begun to tap into an obvious mood for change: "I see decline all around me", Smith said in one speech, "graffiti on the walls and a sense of decline and decay; people in sort of huddled ghettos of the poor and the disadvantaged". However, turning conservative discontent with the government into hard, election day votes for Labour had been the party's historic problem. 

Blair, as a candidate, was uniquely placed to reach into those so-called "no-go" areas. As far back as 1982, when he was the unknown candidate fighting the Beaconsfield by-election, he had worked on ways to frame Labour's message to connect with the more affluent, middle-class voters. "You have millions of people out of work which is costing the country a fortune", he argued. "And then you have plant and machines lying idle. It does not add up".

In the 1980s, as the Conservatives firmly established themselves as the party of the new homeowners and the small investors, Blair still found ways of framing their values as Labour's values. When, in 1988, the investment firm Barlow Clowes was involved in a major "bond washing" scheme - that impacted ordinary people's savings -- Blair demanded the government step in to support them. "These are not get rich quick speculators", he argued. "They are Britain's new class of investors, the married couple with an accumulated nest egg, the young couple left a small inheritance, the mineworker or the steelworker left redundant". 

It was an unorthodox approach that soon attracted the attention of Conservative supporting newspapers. As early as 1990, Blair was already being spoken of as a potential future leader in the Sunday Telegraph. "Blair is a throwback to an earlier type of politician", Martyn Harris told his Conservative voting readers. "To the clear-eyed public schoolboy who came down from Oxbridge brimful of social conscience but unhampered by ideological baggage or practical experience".

By 1994, Blair was said to be the person who could reach parts of the electorate that other Labour politicians couldn't. The development of New Labour, the new constitution, the new approach to policy and the new ways of campaigning and communicating were signs that the party had, in Alastair Campbell's words, "changed the party in order to change the country". But perhaps the biggest signal of change was how former Conservatives now lined up to support them.  

In a reversal of what had happened in the 1970s, Conservatives switched their allegiances in droves. In Westminster, Tory MP Alan Howarth crossed the floor, claiming there was "an arrogance of power and a harshness of power within the government which is damaging to our democracy". When Howarth was later selected as the Labour candidate in Newport East, Blair used it to symbolize a change in Labour's approach: "He came over to the Labour Party because he believed Labour had changed". It allowed Blair to pitch his message to the "moderate" and "sensible" Conservative voters: "I think tradition is all that is keeping a significant number of Tories from jumping ship."

As a consequence, Blair won much more favourable press coverage than his predecessors. One of the journalists who offered his support was the heavyweight Daily Mail columnist Paul Johnson. Johnson had been on the left in the 1960s when he had edited the New Statesman. But in the 1980s, he had emerged as the Mail's harshest attack dog against Kinnock's Labour Party, stoking the flames of a culture war each week. But as the Tory party lost its grip on law and order and drifted towards sleaze, he announced that Britain would be safe with Blair. "By instinct and conviction", Johnson argued, "Blair is an old-fashioned English patriot".