HAD THE SCOTS EVEN INVENTED BREAD YET?:

For more than a decade, a prankster spun a web of deception about the inventor of the electric toaster. His lies fooled newspapers, teachers and officials. Then a teenager flagged up something that everyone else had missed.

"I read through Wikipedia a lot when I'm bored in class," says Adam, aged 15, who studies photography and ICT at a school in Kent.

One day last July, one of his teachers mentioned the online encyclopaedia's entry about Alan MacMasters, who it said was a Scottish scientist from the late 1800s and had invented "the first electric bread toaster".

At the top of the page was a picture of a man with a pronounced quiff and long sideburns, gazing contemplatively into the distance - apparently a relic of the 19th Century, the photograph appeared to have been torn at the bottom.

But Adam was suspicious. "It didn't look like a normal photo," he tells me. "It looked like it was edited."

After he went home, he decided to post about his suspicions on a forum devoted to Wikipedia vandalism.

Little did he know that he had just set in motion a chain of events that would lead me to "Alan MacMasters" - not the inventor of the electric toaster, but his real-life alter ego.

WE CAN'T REPLACE DRIVERS FAST ENOUGH:

Over the years, many AV companies--we at Waymo, and others at Aurora, Cruise, Motional, Nuro, and Oxbotica to name just a few--have been making tremendous progress in cities as diverse as Las Vegas and San Francisco in the US and Oxford in England. Given the fundamental complexity of the problem, consolidation in the AV industry is inevitable and will continue. However, building on the shared technical progress by the core of the industry, we will also see rapid and exciting expansion. Riders in San Francisco and the cities of Wuhan and Chongqing in China can already also hail cars with no human driver in the front seat. In the coming year and beyond, we will see the industry enter a new phase as fully-autonomous ride-hailing services expand rapidly to new markets. 

Trucking will also see progress. Autonomous trucks are already hauling thousands of tons of goods for Wayfair, UPS, FedEx, Coca Cola--and even the Girl Scouts of North Texas. In 2023, autonomous big rigs will become a more common sight, especially in Texas and Arizona. AV companies will sign more partnerships with carriers, freight brokers, and major consumer brands. Freight volumes will increase, demonstrating how AVs could help untangle supply chains and backfill the immense shortage of truck drivers. (According to the International Road Transport Union, the world was short more than 2.6 million truck drivers in 2021). If you live in the Southwestern United States, there is a good chance that your new coffee table, sofa, or winter sweater will be transported autonomously.

Ultimately, moving people and goods autonomously will have as much of an impact on our daily lives, economies, and societies as the invention of the car itself.

BEING AN INSTITUTIONALIST REQUIRES CLEANSING THE INSTITUTION:

Having been obliged to play the role of doctrinal enforcer by Pope John Paul, he decided to govern as a pastor and scholar. Indeed, there's no doubt that his passion for writing interfered with his effectiveness as pope. He retreated into his study to write a biography of Jesus of Nazareth while senior curial officials swanned around the Vatican like elderly playboys in Dubai, using the contents of the world's collection plates to buy sex and launder money. He did not attempt to conceal the activities of sex abusers in the Vatican, but his disciplinary actions were ineffective. When he discovered that the retired Cardinal Theodore McCarrick of Washington was a serial abuser of seminarians, he told him to retreat to a life of prayer and then did nothing when "Uncle Ted" ignored him.

The lapidary beauty of Benedict's encyclicals, in which he sought to capture the purifying essence of Christian love, was hard to reconcile with the debauchery of some of the world's most influential cardinals, described in a torrent of leaks to the media.

At some point in 2012 Benedict decided that he did not have the physical strength to reform the Vatican. On 11 February 2013, he gathered together his cardinals and told them -- characteristically in Latin -- that he was resigning the See of Peter. He was the first pope to resign since Celestine XVI in 1294. [...]

He seems to have hoped that the See of Peter would be occupied by Cardinal Angelo Scola, Archbishop of Milan, a moderate conservative committed to dialogue with other faiths but firmly opposed to changes to Catholic teachings on sexual morality. Instead, the cardinals -- sickened by revelations of cocaine-fuelled orgies and Mafioso bribery inside the Vatican -- voted for the Jesuit Cardinal Jose Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires, who promised (but never delivered) fundamental changes to the Church's government.

The new Pope Francis ostentatiously dispensed with some of the papal trimmings that Benedict loved; there would be no more red shoes, and he swiftly withdrew his hand from anyone who tried to kiss the ring on his finger. He cultivated Left-wing journalists who obligingly portrayed him as a humble yet charismatic reformer.

Meanwhile, Benedict shut himself away in a monastery in the grounds of the Vatican, no longer pope but still wearing a modified version of his white cassock and adopting the deeply confusing title of His Holiness Benedict XVI, Pope Emeritus. On rare occasions he would write an essay or book introduction that appeared to criticise some innovation, such as the abolition of compulsory celibacy for Latin-rite priests, that Francis was encouraging the world's bishops to debate.

But for the most part he kept his promise of silence, and there is not a single recorded instance of Benedict criticising Francis. 

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE (profanityish alert):

On 27 December, former kickboxer, professional misogynist and online entrepreneur Andrew Tate, 36, sent a boastfully hostile tweet to climate activist Greta Thunberg, 19, about his sports car collection. "Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions," he wrote. He was probably hoping to enhance his status by mocking her climate commitment. Instead, she burned the macho guy to a crisp in nine words.

Cars are routinely tokens of virility and status for men, and the image accompanying his tweet of him pumping gas into one of his vehicles, coupled with his claims about their "enormous emissions", had unsolicited d[***] pic energy. Thunberg seemed aware of that when she replied: "yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalld[***]energy@getalife.com." [...]

He was hoping to promote himself with his sneer at Thunberg; he managed to raise his visibility just in time to make news of his arrest and the charges international news. By at least one account, his Romanian-brand pizza box in his video helped cue Romanian police to his location. Had he not harassed Thunberg, the news of his arrest and the charges would not have been major news. He went looking for attention; he got it.

Thunberg drily tweeted the morning of the 30th: "this is what happens when you don't recycle your pizza boxes," mocking her own earnest public image. So far it has 2.6 million likes. Beyond the entertainment value of what transpired over the past few days is a serious reminder of the intersection between machismo, misogyny, hostility to climate action and climate science, and the dank underworld of rightwing characters like Tate recruiting white boys and young men to their views.

SO MUCH WINNING!:

Trump's history of inheriting wealth and then losing it was chronicled by The New York Times in 2020, when it obtained decades of Trump's tax information, including much of what was disclosed Friday.

In 2018, after a decade in which the former president declared no taxable income according to tax returns reviewed by the Times, Trump reported taxable income of more than $24 million. He paid almost $1 million in federal taxes, nearly the entire total he paid as president.

That income appeared to be the result of more than $14 million in gains from the sale of an investment his father had made in the 1970s, a Brooklyn housing complex named Starrett City, which became part of Trump's inheritance.

Much of what the committee made public Friday had also been revealed in a report with top line numbers that the committee released last week. But the thousands of pages of tax documents offered new insights into the president's income and spending.

The documents show, for example, that the effect of his inheritance in 2018 was greater than what the Times previously reported: Trump recorded $25.7 million in gains from the sale of business properties that he and his siblings had inherited or taken through trusts, including the sale of Starrett City.

The sales of business properties Trump created himself came at a loss, however, dragging down his net proceeds and somewhat reducing his tax liability, the tax itemization shows. They included a total of $1 million in assets or equipment sold at a loss by two of his business entities, and another $1 million loss for bailing his son Donald Trump Jr. out of a failed business to build prefabricated homes.

Trump also received tens of thousands of dollars in dividends while he was in the White House from trusts that had been established for him when he was young, his tax returns show.

BECAUSE WE'RE RICH:

More people die of strep A than measles, rotavirus, whooping cough, tetanus, and bacterial meningitis (all vaccine-preventable). Why? There is no vaccine.

There are reasons for this absence. First, deaths from strep A in high-income countries fell after antibiotics became widely available and access to health care improved. The vast majority of yearly deaths occur in low- and middle-income countries -- nearly invisible to vaccine manufacturers in developed countries. Second, the US Food and Drug Administration imposed what was essentially a ban on further strep A vaccine testing in humans from 1970 to 2007 because testing of a poorly characterized vaccine in human subjects resulted in worse disease (despite safe testing in hundreds of thousands of people in the decades before). Third, no major vaccine company is working on a strep A vaccine. Finally, funding for strep A research increased from $1 million to $16 million as of last year, but remains chronically underfunded.

Strep A is a master of disguise. We are all familiar with strep throat. In North America and Europe, after a diagnostic test, penicillin is curative. Unfortunately, in under-resourced parts of the world, access to diagnosis and treatment is poor. Some children with untreated strep infections will develop inflammation of the heart and its valves, the joints, the skin, and the brain. Acute rheumatic fever may also develop. Unfortunately, future strep A infections may occur and each return further damages the heart valves. After a few decades, the heart begins to fail -- like the heart failure that we see in older people but in 20- and 30-year-olds. Rheumatic heart disease caused by strep A is a major cause of death in pregnancy and poor pregnancy outcomes (still birth, low birth weight babies) in low- and middle-income countries.

ONCE YOU'VE SOLD OUT TO VLAD, WHO WON'T YOU SERVE?:

MORE DARPA, LESS MAGA:

We need to continue making big bets on vaccines

The Covid-19 vaccine was undoubtedly the big success story of the pandemic. "It proved that a concerted public-private partnership is capable of producing at scale a highly effective vaccine in eight to ten months," Wachter says. This victory was a testament to the unprecedented commitment of federal resources, an expedited Food and Drug Administration approval process, previous research into mRNA vaccines and good fortune that the spike protein was an easy target.

But this success also offers an important lesson. "If you make a big bet, and you're successful with a program, you should keep making big bets," Topol says. By removing the risk for pharmaceutical companies, Operation Warp Speed got the U.S. first-generation vaccines, but the government didn't kick-start a second or third operation to make nasal vaccines or pan-coronavirus vaccines, which could have protected against new variants. This was reportedly because of a lack of political interest and funding. "It's stupid," Topol adds. "If this is the best we can do, it's not good enough."

Indeed, a big part of the promise of mRNA vaccines is that they can be endlessly tweaked, providing a foundation to tackle all sorts of infectious, autoimmune and neurodegenerative diseases. For future pandemics, the U.S. should take advantage of this iterative nature to develop a series of new vaccines and not put all its eggs in one basket with first-generation vaccines, Topol emphasizes. Furthermore, Congress should be thinking of vaccine development as an instrument of national security, opening up its enormous defense budget to pandemic preparedness. After all, big public-private partnerships will always be needed to continue pushing technological boundaries and protecting American's health.

We need to actively crowd out bad information

In 1984, HIV was discovered as the cause of AIDS, but almost 40 years later, scientists still haven't been able to develop an effective vaccine for the virus. For Covid-19, however, "we learned that the biggest problem with vaccines is that people don't take them," Wachter says. Despite high-quality scientific evidence that they are essentially riskless, "the misinformation machine is able to elevate any tiny risk, either perceived or real, to feel almost equivalent to the benefit," he adds.

Part of the challenge is that public health officials are not doing enough to compete for people's attention. "The network that makes a conspiracy theory go viral is very well worked out and very strategic and intentional," Wachter says, "whereas [public health] information networks tend to be like, 'Well, we're just putting out information. Why do we have to even think about spread?'"

For future pandemics, public health officials need to extensively engage their communities to drown out misinformation. "In Massachusetts, in the first 120 days of the pandemic, our governor had over 100 press events," Bharel says. "What we really wanted to do was make our information the trusted source of information, because we knew there was a lot else out there." Consequently, the department worked hard to put out information in different languages, create PSAs with physicians from local communities and creatively engage the public otherwise. In the Commonwealth Fund's Scorecard, Massachusetts came eighth in the U.S. in its response and management of the Covid-19 pandemic.

But Topol thinks holding press conferences and engaging the public isn't enough. "You have to take on the anti-science community, aggressively," he says, "because if you don't neutralize it, it just grows and gets more organized and sponsored and funded." But what would this takedown actually look like? Topol envisions a fact-checking team at the White House or U.S. Department Health and Human Services (HHS) that would be responsible for publicly calling out public health lies spread on major media networks. "These bad actors, whoever they are, need to be identified so that the public knows that these people are making stuff up or lying--and they're twisting and distorting things," Topol says.

Whether or not this fact-checking crew could actually work is an open question, but Topol is emphatic that public health cannot take a hands-off approach to misinformation going forward. "It's harmed millions of people, maybe cost hundreds of thousands of lives in this country already," he says. "And we just let it happen."

ATTACK ILHAN OMAR?:

Vladimir Putin's inner circle is frustrated because they feel that the Russian president is unsure of what to do next with the war in Ukraine, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

Several sources told The Post they believe that Putin does not have a plan for how to continue the full-scale invasion, which was launched just over 10 months ago.

"There is huge frustration among the people around him," an unnamed Russian billionaire, who is in contact with top-ranking officials in the Kremlin, told The Post. "He clearly doesn't know what to do."

YOU MEAN WE CAN KILL DEBATES TOO?:

The Democratic National Committee's rules and bylaws panel has recommended that the New Hampshire primary share the No. 2 slot with Nevada, three days after South Carolina votes. The early Iowa caucuses, which were plagued by vote-counting woes in 2020, would be dropped from the top of the Democratic calendar.

National Republicans, however, have voted to keep their primary scheduling intact, with the Iowa caucuses followed by New Hampshire, Nevada, and South Carolina.

"So now, the national Democrat Party is trying to change our state law," Sununu has said. "If it weren't so serious, it would be an absolute joke."

The DNC panel has given New Hampshire a Jan. 5 deadline to submit a statement of intent to repeal its first-in-the-nation mandate and allow early voting, which it does not currently offer. But with Republicans controlling the governor's office and both chambers of the Legislature, there is no chance of repeal.

If New Hampshire does not comply, the DNC's response is uncertain. But political observers speculated that possible moves could include reducing investment in candidates there or discouraging them from participating in debates.

BUT MAGA ASSURED US THEY WERE THE FUTURE...:

Kari Lake, the one-time TV newsreader who ran for governor, posed for a photo with a Nazi sympathizer and told him on Twitter, "It was a pleasure to meet you, too!" She endorsed and then withdrew her endorsement of an Oklahoma candidate who called Jews "evil." She lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs.

Mark Finchem, who ran for secretary of state, proudly accepted the endorsement of Andrew Torba, the openly antisemitic founder of the Gab social media platform. The Phoenix Jewish Community Relations Council in September criticized Finchem for spreading "antisemitic tropes" by claiming Democrats are controlled by George Soros and Mike Bloomberg, both Jewish megadonors. He lost to Democrat Adrian Fontes.

Blake Masters lost his bid to unseat Sen. Mark Kelly, a Democrat who is married to Gabrielle Giffords, the Jewish former congresswoman who was shot in 2011 and who now leads a gun control group. Jewish Insider uncovered an article Masters wrote in 2006 for a publication in which he cites a "poignant" quote by Nazi official Hermann Goering. The publication is owned by Lew Rockwell, the libertarian who is believed to have written content for Ron Paul that included racist and antisemitic tropes.

THE FISH ROTS FROM THE ORANGE COMBOVER:

A letter from DHS Deputy Inspector General Gladys Ayala that was relayed to reporters reads, "The DHS Inspector General informed the Secret Service on Wednesday evening that the investigation is now criminal and that it should halt all internal investigations on the missing text messages."

"To ensure the integrity of our investigation, the USSS must not engage in any further investigative activities regarding the collection and preservation of the evidence referenced above," the DHS Deputy Inspector General reportedly wrote. "This includes immediately refraining from interviewing potential witnesses, collecting devices, or taking any other action that would interfere with an ongoing criminal investigation."

Ayala penned this brutal letter to current Secret Service Director James Murray. However, reports have recently revealed that Murray is soon to leave his position at the Secret Service to take a job at Snapchat -- the popular social media site that is, conveniently enough, famous for its feature that allows users to erase messages moments after they've been viewed.

THE WAGES OF NOT CARING ABOUT OTHERS:

There have been more than 6.65 million officially reported Covid deaths since the virus was first identified in China in December 2019, according to the World Health Organization.

However countries count Covid deaths differently and methods have changed throughout the pandemic.

Attributing deaths to Covid can be a very difficult exercise, said Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva.

The death of a patient in a hospital in a developed country who had already been diagnosed with Covid could be straightforward but that is often not the case and doctors "usually do no have much information" to guide them, Flahault told AFP.

Instead researchers have sought to compare the total number of deaths from all causes recorded since 2020 to what would have been expected if there had been no pandemic.

Using these figures, researchers from the WHO reported in the journal Nature earlier this month that there were 14.83 million excess deaths from Covid in 2020 and 2021, updating a figure first released in May. 

That is nearly three times higher than the 5.4 million officially reported Covid deaths over those two years.

Research from the US-based Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation estimated in March that the number was an even higher 18.2 million.

But Flahault said that even these figures could "perhaps still be an underestimate".

MARA-WHO?:

At 17 he was the youngest player in the tournament. At that time

his great talent was just a rumor internationally. An injury to

his right knee, suffered in a pretournament tune-up, kept him on

the bench for Brazil's first two World Cup games. The tension

within him grew as he waited for the chance that might not come.

Then the team doctor cleared him to play, and he was inserted

into the lineup for the final game of the opening round. Within

four minutes of his debut he was banging at the door of the

Soviet goal, rattling the woodwork with a terrific shot. Pele

assisted on the second goal in Brazil's 2-0 win. In the

quarterfinals four days later he scored the only goal in a

victory against Wales--"my most unforgettable goal," Pele would

say years later, because it set Brazil on a course for its first

world title and marked his first step in becoming the world's

most famous team athlete.

In the semifinal Pele unveiled all his skills. After France tied

the game at one in the ninth minute--the first goal allowed by

Brazil in the tournament--Pele grabbed the ball out of the net

and sprinted back upfield for the restart. There were still 81

minutes to play, and here was this teenager acting like a

quarterback in a two-minute drill. "Let's go! Let's get started!

Let's quit wasting time!" he shouted, waving his elder teammates

into position. They stared at him, and then, together, they

scored the next four goals, three of them by Pele.

Before he completed his hat trick, Pele was tackled viciously on

his frail right knee. "I went down, my knee hurting like the

devil, and then rolled over to glare at the player with pure

hatred," he would recall. No substitutions were permitted in

those days; had Pele retreated to the sideline, his team would

have played with 10 men and the tackler would have been

rewarded. Pele would have none of that. Minutes later, when he

saw the same defender closing in on him, Pele flipped the ball

over the villain's head--a "hat" move, as the Brazilians called

it--scampered around him and blasted the ball into the net

before it touched the ground.

Over the three concluding rounds of the World Cup, culminating

in Brazil's 5-2 victory over host Sweden in the final, young

Pele would score six of his country's 11 goals. After many of

them he would sob uncontrollably: He could not quite believe

that all would turn out well. To him the game moved slowly, as

in a trance, and each time he achieved his objective it had the

effect of shaking awake the barefoot child from his feverish

dream, which in fact was not a dream at all.

MAYBE JUST DON'T BE CRAZY?:

In 2019, Jim Lyons, a conservative, anti-abortion maverick who served in the Massachusetts House from 2010 to 2018, was elected chair of the state's Republican Party. He aligned the party with Donald Trump and rejected Baker's move to the middle. Many of Lyons's backers said they wanted to remain true to their conservative values, even if it cost them votes in the short term. They called Baker a RINO - a Republican in name only.

The state Republican Party and Baker went their separate ways. Before he decided not to seek reelection, many pundits wondered whether the highly popular governor could win a Republican primary for governor in Massachusetts.

The November election was disastrous for the Republican Party. Democrats maintained their control of the state's congressional delegation, won all the statewide offices, and strengthened their already dominant hold on the Legislature.

The party will hold an election for party chairman in January. Lyons has not said whether he will seek reelection, but other candidates are already jumping into the fray.

Baker, heading off to his new job with the NCAA, has shown little interest so far in the party fight, but in the State House interview he made clear where he stands.

"The point behind a political party is to win elections," he said. "You win elections on your core values and beliefs and your ability to bring that growing independent population - 60 percent of the electorate in Massachusetts - to bring them on to your team, or as many of them as you can get."

Baker said the party needs to broaden its reach, just as he did in the 2014 election. "On economic issues, many criminal justice issues, issues that matter to the broad population, there's a lot of common ground within the Republican Party and among those independents who vote in Republican primaries," he said. "There may be shades of gray, but there's not really big differences. Whether or not Donald Trump was suited to be president, yes, there's differences there. How to handle a woman's right to choose, definitely a difference there. But even there a significant minority of pure Republicans and probably a majority of Republican-leaning independents who vote in Republican primaries support a woman's right to choose. The question there comes down to the old Ronald Reagan maxim that if someone is with you 80 percent of the time, the 20 percent is relevant but it shouldn't be game-deciding."

Baker made clear that he has little patience for Lyons's approach, with its devotion to conservative ideological purity.  "You can't govern if you can't win. It's not supposed to be a debating society," he said.

"If you don't have a party that can raise money and field candidates and compete, then what you really do over time is abdicate the opportunity to engage in the act of governing, which I think is hugely problematic for Massachusetts, and I would argue would be problematic in a state where there's no Democratic Party," he said. "One-party government, one-party rule, loses the value and the balance and the purpose that comes with democracy. There's no accountability there. Who's going to hold anyone accountable in that environment?"

Baker said he is not saying conservative Republicans should change their values. "I've never asked them to accept all of my points of view on issues. There are a number of things that Jim Lyons and I, before our falling out, we're completely aligned on -- fiscal discipline, no new taxes, heavy investments in addiction and recovery services," he said.

"I don't think someone has to agree with me 100 percent of the time," Baker said. "I just don't, and I never have because it's a democracy."

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

The new government was born in legal sin. It took unprecedented speedy personal and retroactive legislation to make the necessary changes to allow its formation. The law named after Aryeh Deri, head of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party and now minister of both interior and health, clears the way to allow him to take office despite his conviction over tax offences and a suspended prison sentence. The law passed despite reservations of the attorney general, herself under personal assault by the right wing, which is eager to see her resign and is threatening to fire her. Deri is Netanyahu's most experienced ally in this coalition.

It took another speedy piece of legislation to allow Smotrich to simultaneously serve as finance minister and within the defence ministry to oversee the West Bank. To both positions, this Jewish supremacist brings the same ideology. As future finance minister, he said his economic strategy would be infused with religious beliefs, as the Hebrew Bible taught that obeying God brought prosperity.

The same strategy will be applied when dealing with Palestinians in the West Bank. During the 2005 disengagement from Gaza, Smotrich was arrested for allegedly trying to light a fire on a major Israeli highway to protest against the pullout. He was arrested and detained by the Shin Bet, Israel's domestic intelligence service, for three weeks. After two years in office, Deri will replace him as finance minister.

Confused? Appalled? It is getting worse. The new national security minister is Itamar Ben-Gvir, a dangerous far-right racist extremist who has faced dozens of charges of hate speech against Palestinians and been convicted of criminal offenses. The very title "national security minister" he demanded is custom made for him, and a new tailored law allows this agent of chaos far more authority over police officers than ever before in the history of the state.

According to the new coalition agreement, he is in fact the new chief of police, a force now subordinated to a politician. His new ministry will also control the border police force in the West Bank, which previously answered to the military. Good luck to both Jews and Palestinians. The new defence minister, Likud's Yoav Gallant, gets about one third of the previous portfolio, the rest is divided between Smotrich and Ben-Gvir.

Until few years ago, Ben-Gvir's ministry was simply the Ministry of Police. Then the name changed to Ministry of Public Security. Ben-Gvir demanded it be changed again, to become the national security ministry, and Netanyahu agreed. Many positions in the new government carry the prefix "Jewish" or "national". For instance, "Jewish identity", "Jewish legacy", "national missions", "Jewish heritage", etcetera. The message of Jewish supremacy is loud and clear, but so is the sense of insecurity that needs to be covered up by new terminology.

Thus, we get a far-right activist from the illegal Jewish settlement in Hebron, Orit Strook, as the first ever minister of national missions, whatever that means. Yitzhak Wasserlauf from Ben-Gvir's Jewish Power party becomes minister of national resilience. Avi Maoz, a blatant homophobe and racist from the Noam faction, is a deputy minister in the prime minister's office in charge of a new unit, the national Jewish identity department.

On top of it, Maoz - known for his offensive comments against members of the LGBTQ community, women and all progressive agenda - gets control over a unit in the education ministry that authorizes meetings between schools and NGOs. To appease Deri, Shas too will get another minister within the education ministry, with yet-unclear authority. For obvious reasons, the now dismembered education ministry was not much sought after and almost forced upon Yoav Kish, a first-time minister from Netanyahu's Likud party.

Likud MPs that felt so victorious in November with their 32 seats and total dedication to their leader turned in December into pictures of bitter resentment and disappointment. They began to refer to Netanyahu's coalition agreements as a "liquidation sale": liquidation of portfolios, power and even dignity, anything to attract his coalition partners. To keep dissatisfied Likudniks locked in with no emergency exit, Netanyahu was quick to pass a law that requires at least one-third of Likud to leave the party if a new faction is to be started. If Netanyahu himself is the hostage of his partners in the new government, Likud's unhappy MPs are now his captives, for better or for worse. It's a government based on balance of horror and on total lack of trust between partners.

TAX WHAT YOU DON'T WANT:

The technology to generate electricity with wind and solar has existed for decades. So why isn't the electric grid already 100% powered by renewables? And what will it take to get there?

First of all, renewables have only recently become cost-competitive with fossil fuels for generating electricity. Even then, prices depend on the location, Paul Denholm of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory told CNBC.

In California and Arizona, where there is a lot of sun, solar energy is often the cheapest option, whereas in places like Maine, solar is just on the edge of being the cheapest energy source, Denholm said. In places with lots of wind like North Dakota, wind power is cost-competitive with fossil fuels, but in the Southeast, it's still a close call.

Then there's the cost of transitioning the current power generation infrastructure, which was built around burning fossil fuels.

"You've got an existing power plant, it's paid off. Now you need renewables to be cheaper than running that plant to actually retire an old plant," Denholm explained. "You need new renewables to be cheaper just in the variable costs, or the operating cost of that power plant."

There are some places where that is true, but it's not universally so.

"Primarily, it just takes a long time to turn over the capital stock of a multitrillion-dollar industry," Denholm said. "We just have a huge amount of legacy equipment out there. And it just takes awhile for that all to be turned over."

MET ONE nATIONALIST YOU'VE MET THEM ALL:

Ignazio La Russa, a senator from Cologno Monzese, a municipality in Milan, wrote alongside a picture of an MSI campaign poster: "In memory of my father, who was one of the founders of the Italian Social Movement in Sicily and who chose the path of free and democratic participation with the MSI throughout his life in defense of his ideas respectful of the Italian Constitution."

Leaders within Italy's Jewish community were dismayed by his decision to link MSI to the post-World War II Italian constitution. The ascendance of far-right leaders who have expressed nostalgia for the fascist period in Italy -- which nearly spelled the near destruction of Italian Jewry -- has Italy's present-day Jewish community worried.

"Today we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the promulgation of the Republican Constitution, the affirmation of our anti-fascist democracy," Noemi Di Segni, president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities, said on Tuesday in an op-ed in La Repubblica. "Yet there are those who believe they are celebrating another anniversary, that of the foundation of the MSI, a party which, after the fall of the fascist regime, placed itself in ideological and political continuity with the RSI, the government of diehard fascists who actively collaborated for the deportation of Italian Jews."

FUN WHILE IT LASTED:

The core problem is that these statistics omit most government transfer payments to households in the bottom quintile, which more than quadrupled in inflation-adjusted terms from $9,677 to $45,389 between 1967 and 2017. In consequence, in 2017, while "the average household with earned income in the bottom 20 percent ... received more than $45,000 in government payments ... Census failed to count nearly $32,000 of those transfers" as income. Transfer payments include benefits like food stamps, the "refundable" Earned Income Tax Credit, housing supplements, Medicare, and Medicaid, with the Census Bureau counting less than a third of such payments made by federal, state, and local governments, which totaled $2.8 trillion in 2017, with over two-thirds going to the bottom 40 percent of households.

Additionally, in counting household income, the Census Bureau's statistics on inequality omit taxes levied on income by all three levels of government, of which 82 percent are paid by the top 40 percent of households. When adjustments are made for these omissions, income inequality proves to be only one-fourth as large as Census statistics indicate. And far from rising by 22.9 percent since 1947 as the Census numbers make it appear, inequality has fallen by 3 percent since 1947. Finally, once all transfers are counted, "the number of Americans living in poverty in 2017 plummets from 12.3 percent, the official Census number, to only 2.5 percent."

Allowing that some few people who are "physically or mentally unable to care for themselves" may have "fallen through the cracks" in the social-welfare system, the authors conclude that "for all practical purposes, poverty due to a lack of public or private support has been virtually eliminated in America." Meanwhile, contrary to the often-heard charge that the rich don't pay their "fair share" of taxes, "households in the top fifth of income earners lose 35.2 percent of their pretax income to taxes of all kinds," while "those in the bottom fifth ... lose only 7.5 percent."

ALL ALONG THE ANGLOSPHERE:

Almost immediately after the announcement, the U.S. spoke in its support with National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan calling the strategy "a reflection of our shared commitment to the region's security and growing prosperity."

Sullivan said in a statement that the strategy "demonstrates the commitment of President Yoon [Suk-yeol] and the Korean people to upholding universal values such as the rule of law and human rights."

"The ROK's goal to expand its cooperation with other allies and partners across the Indo-Pacific will strengthen our shared ability to advance international peace, security, and promote nuclear non-proliferation," the statement said.

U.S. allies Australia and Canada also voiced support. Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said her country looks forward "to working with Korea to advance our shared interests in a stable, peaceful and prosperous Indo-Pacific."

Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly, meanwhile, said that Canada's and South Korea's approaches are "aligned, complementary, and will drive forward our shared priorities."

NEED TO BAN ALL AIR TRAVEL:

An explosion of Covid-19 cases in China could create a "potential breeding ground" for new variants to emerge, health experts have warned.

Antoine Flahault, director of the Institute of Global Health at the University of Geneva, told AFP news agency that each new infection increased the chance the virus would mutate.

"The fact that 1.4 billion people are suddenly exposed to SARS-CoV-2 obviously creates conditions prone to emerging variants," Flahault said, referring to the virus that causes the Covid-19 disease.

Bruno Lina, a virology professor at France's Lyon University, told the La Croix newspaper this week that China could become a "potential breeding ground for the virus".

Soumya Swaminathan, who served as the World Health Organization's chief scientist until November, said a large part of the Chinese population was vulnerable to infection in part because many elderly people had not been vaccinated or boosted.

"We need to keep a close watch on any emerging concerning variants," she told the website of the Indian Express newspaper.

THANKS, LIZ!:

The tightening noose https://t.co/2Z67Iup93e

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 28, 2022

DANCE FOR YOUR DINNER:

I don't agree with Black Republicans. I think they are wrong on their policy prescriptions for America. I think many of them are entirely too tolerant of the systemic racism that plagues our society, even to the point of complicity. I think, when pressed, they too often resort to the victim blaming that runs through that core Republican ethos of "I got mine, why can't you get yours?"

But I can respect Black Republicans. I can recognize Black Republican scholars and politicians as legitimate thinkers who have something to add to the American political discourse. Rank-and-file Black Republicans are not "race traitors." As I see it, part of the "dream" is that Black people get to be just as wrong and myopic as white folks. So I can accept that a person like Tim Scott is a mediocre senator who cares more about the profit margins of Chick-fil-A than uplifting the Black community. He's disappointing, but no more so than the queen of disappointment, Susan Collins.

Unfortunately, the actual Republican Party doesn't seem to respect reasonable and thoughtful Black Republicans as much as I do. Instead, the party has chosen to promote irrational, hateful conservatives and flagrant grifters. The GOP has decided to make people like Herschel Walker, Candace Owens, Larry Elder, and Kanye West the "faces" of Black conservatism in America, and that tells you more about how the Republican Party thinks about Black people than it does about the few Black people who have decided to play into the party's unending desire for minstrels.

THE VIRTUOUS CYCLE:

On a recent cool, sunny morning, Meg Caley could be found at Jack's Solar Garden showing visitors a bed of kale plants. As executive director of Sprout City Farms, Caley has more than a decade of experience farming in unlikely urban spaces in the Denver area. Today, about an hour north of the city, she works alongside researchers on an experimental agricultural method called agrivoltaics.

Agrivoltaics is pretty low-tech. Instead of being placed 18 to 36 inches off the ground, as in traditional solar farms, the solar panels are raised significantly higher to accommodate grazing animals and to allow more sunlight to reach plants growing beneath them. 

The approach could be a boon for both energy generation and crop production. Less direct sunlight helps keep plants cooler during the day, allowing them to retain more moisture and thus require less watering. Having plants underneath the solar panels also reduces the amount of heat reflected by the ground, which keeps the panels cooler and makes them more efficient. Farm workers tending the crops also benefit from cooler temperatures, as do grazing animals. 

FAKE ANTISOCIAL?:

Two minutes before this nod to Nietzsche, Trump truthed out a novel legal defense: "The Fake charges made by the highly partisan Unselect Committee of January 6th have already been submitted, prosecuted, and tried in the form of Impeachment Hoax # 2. I WON convincingly. Double Jeopardy anyone!"

Double jeopardy is the legal principle that a person cannot be charged twice for the same crime. It does not apply to impeachment proceedings, because those are not criminal prosecutions. Trump should probably ask a lawyer to explain this to him, although maybe not the lawyers who were advising him in late 2020 and early 2021, since the committee has referred some of them for criminal prosecution alongside Trump.

THANKS, JOE:

Hydrogen-focused companies see a positive conjuncture. The recent US mechanisms meant to bring the entire supply chain for green hydrogen technology within its borders are pushing European institutions to develop an equally attractive framework to avoid technology providers resettling across the Atlantic.

ORANGE IS THE NEW ORANGE:

Donald Trump knowingly committed dozens of brazen tax frauds during the six years when he ran for office and was President, my analysis of the Congressional report on his tax returns and other documents shows. This explains why he fought all the way to the Supreme Court in a failed effort to keep his tax information secret.

One technique he used at least 26 times between 2015 and 2020 was as simple as it was flagrant. Trump filed sole proprietor reports, known as Schedule C, that showed huge business expenses despite having zero revenue. That created losses which Trump used to offset his income from work and investments, thus lowering his income taxes. Additional Schedule Cs had expenses exactly equal to revenues while only a few showed profits.

What Trump did again and again and again--taking expenses for businesses with no revenue--is so simple that jurors should have no trouble understanding the issues were Trump to be indicted by a federal or New York state grand jury.

Trump knew this was unlawful because he lost two trials over his 1984 income taxes in which he did the exact same thing, a story I broke in June 2016. Both judges, in scathing opinions, ruled that Trump committed civil tax fraud.

That Trump persisted in using the same fraudulent technique in six years of recent tax returns is powerful evidence of mens rea or criminal intent. This device is not Trump's most lucrative tax cheating technique, but it is the easiest for jurors to understand should Trump be indicted on tax charges.

SEND MORE, WE NEED THEM:

Despite the ongoing national debate about immigration policy, the United States remains one of the world's biggest magnets for immigrants. Foreign nationals enter the country via numerous ways, but the general motives are the same: they come to the U.S. seeking better opportunities for themselves and their children.

Immigrants who come to the U.S. have many cities to choose from where to put their roots. Some choose to live in areas where previous immigrants from their home country have already established a community. But these may not always necessarily be the best options.

The recent report "Immigrants and Opportunity in America's Cities" from The George W. Bush Institute-SMU Economic Growth Initiative, reviewed 12 key indicators in America's 100 most populous metropolitan areas to identify the communities where immigrants are thriving.

According to the report, the Boston-Cambridge-Newton metro area, in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, ranks as the 18th best city for immigrants. Boston is home to an estimated 922,623 people who were born in foreign countries, accounting for 18.9% of the total population. From 2010 through 2021, immigration accounted for net population growth of 320,383 people, driving overall population growth up by 7.0%.

Economic prosperity is likely drawing many new Americans to Boston

TRUMPISM IS AS TRUMPISTS DO:

The MAGA brand https://t.co/WhiRE0uwzS

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 27, 2022

IT'S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

NOTHING TO OFFER BUT HATE ITSELF:

It isn't that Abbott didn't anticipate the coming weather. In a December 20 letter to President Biden, he wrote:

With cold temperatures gripping Texas, your inaction to secure the southern border is putting the lives of migrants at risk, particularly in the City of El Paso. With thousands of men, women, and children illegally crossing into Texas every day, and with the expectation that those numbers will only increase if Title 42 expulsions end, the state is overburdened as we respond to this disaster caused by you and your administration. Your policies will leave many people in the bitter, dangerous cold as a polar vortex moves into Texas.

Help us understand the reasoning here. Is the problem that Biden has caused human suffering by letting people be exposed to freezing temperatures? In that case, how is the solution to move people to another freezing jurisdiction and dump them on the sidewalk?

When, in a similar attention-seeking stunt, Gov. Ron DeSantis flew a planeload of asylum seekers to Martha's Vineyard, it was at least in September. To treat human beings as props when there's a real danger of exposure increases the cruelty quotient. The two Republican governors are in a heartlessness duel. Perhaps the next step will be to shoot would-be migrants in the legs as Trump demanded in 2019.

Some Republicans love this performative malice. DeSantis got standing ovations after the Martha's Vineyard gambit, with Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall asking, "How I could get a ticket to drive one of those buses from the border to the Delaware beach?" They know it appeals to a swath of GOP primary voters who dine on a steady diet of hysteria about the border.

TRUMPISM IS A SUICIDE CULT:

More than one-third of parents with children under 18 -- and 28 percent of all adults -- now say parents should be able to decide not to vaccinate their children for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) to attend public schools, even if remaining unvaccinated may create health risks for others, according to new polling by the Kaiser Family Foundation, a health care research nonprofit.

Public sentiments against vaccine mandates have grown significantly since the pandemic, said Jen Kates, a Kaiser senior vice president. A 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center found that less than a quarter of parents -- and 16 percent of all adults -- opposed school vaccination requirements.

The growing opposition stems largely from shifts among people who identify as or lean Republican, the Kaiser survey found, with 44 percent saying parents should be able to opt out of those childhood vaccines -- more than double the 20 percent who felt that way in 2019.

KIDS LIKE FAMILY TIME:

This study explores the effect of in-person schooling on youth suicide. We document three key findings. First, using data from the National Vital Statistics System from 1990-2019, we document the historical association between teen suicides and the school calendar. We show that suicides among 12-to-18-year-olds are highest during months of the school year and lowest during summer months (June through August) and also establish that areas with schools starting in early August experience increases in teen suicides in August, while areas with schools starting in September don't see youth suicides rise until September. Second, we show that this seasonal pattern dramatically changed in 2020. Teen suicides plummeted in March 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic began in the U.S. and remained low throughout the summer before rising in Fall 2020 when many K-12 schools returned to in-person instruction.

ALONG THE ANGLOSPHERE:

Two economists, David G. Blanchflower of Dartmouth and Alex Bryson of University College London, have come up with a new and more intuitive way to measure well-being. The results are striking. If you consider US states as comparable to countries, 16 of the top 20 political units in the world for well-being are in the US -- including the top seven. [...]

The genius of this most recent study is that it considers both positive and negative affect, and gives countries (and US states) separate ratings for the two. In other words, it recognizes there is more than one dimension to well-being. It lists four variables as part of negative affect: pain, sadness, anger and worry. Positive affect consists of four measures: life satisfaction, enjoyment, smiling and being well-rested. So life satisfaction is only one part of the measure. [...]

Measuring both positive and negative affect, the 10 happiest political units in the world are, in order: Hawaii, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Taiwan, Alaska and Wisconsin. Of the top 50 places, 36 are US states (I include the District of Columbia, No. 16). China is No. 30.

The high ratings for many US political units are consistent with a realistic understanding that this remains a troubled nation. Those problems show up in Americans' higher negative affect, which is partially offset by our strong performance on positive affect.

The five least happy places, taking both positive and negative affect into account, are (from the bottom up) Iraq, South Sudan, Armenia, Togo and Central African Republic. The least happy US state is West Virginia (101), due in part to being more tired and worried than most other states. California ranks No. 59, New York No. 73.

SHARED DERANGEMENTS:

Samuel Gregg has written a thorough and convincing case against the new advocates for interventionist economic policy. The Next American Economy serves as a definitive handbook for refuting the arguments now popular on the left and the right for a more planned or politically managed economy.

Given recent ideological and partisan shifts, Gregg argues, America today faces a choice between the path of free markets or state capitalism. The latter he defines as active state intervention into economic life aiming to shape and direct certain activities "to realize very specific economic and political objectives." The interventionist believes that if we apply just the right incentives from this or that government program (tariffs, subsidies, regulation, or corporate governance requirements) economic life can be guided toward a particular vision of justice or achieve specific outcomes.

With Adam Smith at his side (each chapter save the last begins with an epigraph by the great Scotsman), Gregg makes a negative case--refuting the common arguments made on behalf of neo-mercantilism and industrial policy--and a positive one, presenting the case that the true lover of his country ought to embrace the free economy.

IT'S LONG COVID:

"It's extremely unlikely that law enforcement officials or other first responders will experience an overdose after brief, unintentional exposure while caring for individuals who used opioids," said Dr. Leana Wen, an emergency physician and CNN medical analyst.

Wen explained that opioids "are not well-absorbed through the skin except through prolonged exposure" and, outside biowarfare situations, are "not aerosolized and inhaled through the air."

Data also suggests that first responders featured in such stories have likely not suffered a fentanyl overdose. A 2021 research paper published in the International Journal of Drug Policy said the symptoms described in hundreds of accounts of first responders who reportedly overdosed on opioids tend to match the symptoms of panic or anxiety attacks, rather than those associated with fentanyl overdoses. And, critically, it found there are no confirmed cases of an officer having an overdose after touching fentanyl.

When some local outlets in Florida later attempted to question the police narrative about the purported officer overdose, including proof of the drug's presence, they were met with resistance. "No documents or evidence can be shared until the case is closed," including the officer's medical records, the department said.

Despite the evidence being withheld from the public, Wen said it's unlikely that fentanyl was the culprit.

"Reports involving first responders who sought medical care following exposure generally did not find opioids in their system," Wen said. "Much of the time, their symptoms were consistent with panic attacks (i.e. shortness of breath manifesting as gasping for breath-versus opioid overdose results in loss of consciousness that then depresses respiration)."

THE IMMORALITY LAY IN NOT CONTINUING ON TO MOSCOW:

The architect of the mission was 38-year-old Brigadier General Curtis LeMay, who said of the raid, "If we lose the war, we'll be tried as war criminals." The overnight attack killed more than 100,000 people in a firestorm that reached 2,800 degrees Fahrenheit. Author James M. Scott spares none of the gory details in Black Snow, his engrossing, carefully constructed account of the mission and its aftermath. The book is gut wrenching and -- without explicitly saying so -- challenges the notion of American exceptionalism. [...]

Ultimately, Black Snow is more than the story of a horrific episode from a horrific war. It is a cautionary tale. On one side was a severely weakened Japan, whose hubris -- fueled by its emperor, Hirohito -- and misguided sense of invincibility caused it to believe it could defeat the Allies. On the other was the United States, which chose to engage in the large-scale slaughter of civilians -- and eventually drop the atomic bomb -- in the name of ending World War II. While Scott makes clear his belief that Japan had only itself to blame for what befell it, he forces all of us to ponder what is moral and what is not.

THANKS, VLAD!:

Kherson's occupation government, run by Russian military commanders and Ukrainian collaborators, wasted little time pulling down Ukrainian flags, taking over Ukrainian schools, trucking in crates of Russian rubles, even importing Russian families. Perhaps nowhere else in Ukraine did Russia's leader, Vladimir Putin, devote so much money and violence, the carrot and the stick, to bend a city to his imperial will.

But it did not work.

Guided by contacts in the Ukrainian security services, an assembly of ordinary citizens formed themselves into a grassroots resistance movement. In dozens of interviews, residents and Ukrainian officials described how retirees like Yermolenko -- along with students, mechanics, grandmothers and even a wealthy couple who were fixing up their yacht and got trapped in the city for the better part of a year -- became spirited partisans for the Kherson underground. It was almost like something out of a spy movie.

They took clandestine videos of Russian troops and sent them to Ukrainian forces along with map coordinates. They used code names and passwords to circulate guns and explosives right under the Russians' noses. Some even formed small attack teams that picked off Russian soldiers at night, making the fear and paranoia that settled over the city two-sided.

When the Russian army hastily pulled out in mid-November, perhaps the biggest embarrassment so far to Putin's war effort, Kherson became a powerful symbol. To allies questioning Ukraine's resolve, and to Ukrainians themselves who had suffered so much misery and death and needed a glimmer of hope, Kherson showed what was possible.

Now that the Russian forces are gone and people feel free to talk about what they did and even brag a little, one message keeps emerging.

"I never questioned what we were doing," said Dmytro Yevminov, the yacht owner whom Yermolenko recruited into hiding guns and sacks of grenades in various boatyards. "I never knew I loved my country so much."

THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

Strikingly, however, in an age that has seen the theory of evolution almost universally accepted in Britain, and the limits of our knowledge of the universe pushed to ever more incredible extremes, there seems to have been no diminution in the value that we, as a culture, ascribe to human life. Quite the contrary. That we are all of us possessed of certain fundamental rights, simply by virtue of being human, and of a dignity that embraces our entire species, are doctrines so widely accepted in contemporary Britain that many of us barely recognise them as doctrines at all. It is a measure of just how radically these beliefs privilege human beings that they have increasingly come to be described, over the course of the past century, as "humanist".

The term is a vague one; and the fuzziness of the definition has encouraged various attempts to endow it with a greater precision. In 2002, the World Humanist Congress, meeting in the Netherlands, issued what its delegates presented as "the official defining statement of World Humanism". The Amsterdam Declaration proclaimed, "the worth, dignity and autonomy of the individual and the right of every human being to the greatest possible freedom compatible with the rights of others". Religions -- dismissed as "dogmatic" -- were condemned for their ambition "to impose their world-view on all of humanity". Science and its methods, by contrast, were highly praised. Not for humanists any Bronze Age mumbo-jumbo. Ethics were to be derived, not from sky fairies, but "through a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision".

To accept the truth of all these various propositions -- one might almost call them dogmas -- requires, of course, less the exercise of reason than a leap of faith. That science sustains a belief in human rights is hardly an obvious proposition. Implausible too is the conviction of those who issued the Amsterdam Declaration that their own values are where "a continuing process of observation, evaluation and revision" is bound to lead -- so much so that they rank, in effect, as universal. International the Humanists may claim to be, but in truth they are preponderantly Western. The delegates who met in Amsterdam for the first World Humanist Congress came from the Netherlands, the United States, Britain and Austria; only one of the 18 subsequent congresses have been held outside Europe, North America or Australasia; the headquarters of Humanists International is in London. Its understanding of "universal" is, then, a somewhat culturally contingent one. [...]

There is no single text, perhaps, that is more consistently the object of humanist contempt than the book of Genesis. The creation of the cosmos in six days; Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; Noah's flood: here are stories that have long served as prime exhibits in the contention that religion is merely a farrago of childish nonsense. This is why Genesis can pretty much be guaranteed not to feature in round-ups of the ancient texts that humanists are prepared to acknowledge as influences. Yet humanists, no less than Jews or Christians, are indelibly stamped by it. In fact, if there is a single wellspring for the reverence they display towards their own species, it is the opening chapter of the Bible.

THE lEFT IS THE rIGHT:

[W]oodrow Wilson remains one of the most monstrous presidents in our country's history. University students today insist that he was a racist--which he certainly was--but his faults hardly end there. During his tenure, the United States assumed more characteristics of authoritarianism than at any time before or since.

Wilson's presidential campaign pledged to keep the country out of the meat-grinding war across the Atlantic, and he kept that promise for nearly three years until Congress declared war on Germany in April 1917. But American Midnight isn't about the First World War. It's about what happened at home during and after it. The declaration of war in the House of Representatives passed by 373 votes to 50, and while most Americans approved of the decision, there were noisy pockets of dissent, as there are whenever democracies fight wars. Wilson feared that even the mildest bleats of complaint would undermine the morale necessary to sustaining the war effort. The upshot was the Espionage Act of 1917 and the Sedition Act of 1918, which had almost nothing to do with actual espionage. Instead, it declared any kind of anti-war activity to be criminal, and defined "opposition" in ways that few modern critics of pacifists and isolationists would even recognize.

Anyone who "shall willfully make or convey false reports or false statements with intent to interfere with the operation of the military or naval forces of the United States" was subject to arrest. It would be a mistake to assume that the Wilson administration was only going after the purveyors of what we now call "fake news," or to get hung up on the words "with intent to interfere." Ordinary people were rounded up and prosecuted who had no intention of interfering with anyone or anything, and those convicted faced up to 20 years in prison--twice as long as the sentence Vladimir Putin metes out to his Russian subjects for similar offenses today.

A Texas man was jailed for saying, "I wish Wilson was in hell." Andreas Latzko's novel Men in War was banned for describing the war as a "wholesale cripple-and-corpse factory." Police officers arrested playwright Eugene O'Neill at gunpoint on Cape Cod because somebody saw sunlight reflecting off his typewriter and thought he was sending signals to German ships. Filmmaker Robert Goldstein was arrested for co-writing and producing a silent film called The Spirit of '76 about the American Revolution. Regardless of what happened in 1776, the presiding judge said, "we are engaged in a war in which Great Britain is an ally of the United States," and this was not the time for "sowing dissension among our people" or "creating animosity ... between us and our allies." Goldstein was handed 10 years in prison.

It became a federal offense to send "seditious" newspapers and magazines through the mail, which was the only way anyone could subscribe to them in the days before the Internet. Masses magazine, for instance, was deemed "unmailable" after it published a political cartoon that showed the Liberty Bell crumbling. A pamphlet titled "Why Freedom Matters" was banned not for criticizing the war but for criticizing censorship. At least the author of the pamphlet knew why. "Sometimes," Hochschild writes, "as if anticipating the protagonist of Kafka's The Trial, a journalist could not even learn what he or she was accused of." Newspapers and magazines in foreign languages were likewise banned whether they criticized the government or not. Who knew what kind of diabolical speech might appear in a paper that censors couldn't read?

This censorship was accompanied by a repressive clampdown that's hard to even imagine today. President Wilson's special emissary, a former senator named Elihu Root, said, "There are men walking about the streets of this city tonight who ought to be taken out at sunrise tomorrow and shot for treason. There are some newspapers published in this city every day the editors of which deserve conviction and execution." Vice President Thomas R. Marshall said he wanted Congress "to take away the citizenship of every disloyal American--every American who is not heartily in support of his Government in its crisis ... I would annul the citizenship of every such individual and confiscate his property."

The Department of Justice authorized former advertising executive Albert Briggs to deputize civilian vigilantes into the American Protective League (APL), which had 1,200 chapters and roughly 250,000 members. They tapped phones and placed bugs in the homes of those they surveilled. They raided houses and seized documents. They rode trains and listened for "disloyal" speech. The Seattle branch alone investigated more than 10,000 people and arrested more than a thousand, 499 of whom were charged with "seditious utterances." One official described a Midwestern chapter of the APL as "the Ku Klux Klan of the prairies." He meant it as a compliment. The Bureau of Investigation (which later became the Federal Bureau of Investigation) likewise sent spies into legal organizations.

In Chicago, 10,000 APL agents went on a full-bore repression spree. "At movie theaters, vaudeville shows, and a Cubs doubleheader," Hochschild writes, "the raiders made everyone file out of designated exits, where each draft-age man had to show his card. Badge-wearing vigilantes checked every arriving train or steamboat, and combed parks, bars, restaurants, elevated train stations, and nightclubs. They stopped cars to question drivers and passengers and even appeared at the beaches in bathing suits, wading into Lake Michigan to interrogate suspects."

Even after the war ended, state repression and censorship continued unabated. A few senators introduced a bill to put a stop to it but got nowhere. Its failure, remarked progressive Republican Robert La Follette, "ought to make the framers of the Constitution open their eyes in their coffins."

WE BARELY DESERVE OUR IMMIGRANTS:

Eva Galler was in her mid-teens, the oldest of eight children, when the Nazis rounded up the Jews in her Polish town, Oleszyce, set their synagogues alight, and forced them into a ghetto. When they were ordered to the train station, everyone in the ghetto knew they were being taken to an extermination camp at Belzec. Her father urged his three oldest children to save themselves, pushing them through a narrow window from the moving train.

"But my little brother, the youngest, who was three years old, and he started to cry, 'I want to live, too. I want to live, too,'" Eva told an interviewer. "And these words stayed with me the whole life. No matter how I tried to forget."

German soldiers killed Eva's brother and sister immediately, but somehow their bullets did not find her. She waited until she couldn't hear the train anymore, then walked back to her old village, where terrified neighbors took pity on her. The blond, green-eyed 17-year-old survived the rest of the war by posing as a Catholic girl named Katrina.

She and Henry, who had been sweethearts before the war, found each other again, alike the only survivors in their extended families. They eventually settled in New Orleans, built a beautiful life, and were together for more than 70 years. Some of their many grandchildren were named for the brothers and sisters who perished.

The tallest candle in the menorah, called the shamash, or servant, is the one from which all of the other candles are lit. Survivors like Loren's grandparents devoted their lives to that role, telling their painful stories in service to others, in the hopes of banishing from the world the darkness they'd known, one person at a time. Loren said her grandparents shared their tales of bravery, resilience, and hope with more than 500,000 schoolchildren over the decades.

"The stories they passed down to us were overwhelmingly positive," recalled Loren. "They didn't allow their experiences to crush them, but figured out how to move forward."

We are losing our shamashim. Eva died in 2006, Henry in 2012. The youngest Holocaust survivors are now in their late 70s. Soon there will be no one left who saw what happened with their own eyes, who can say "I was there" to those who would erase history, or hope to repeat it.

It falls to the next generations to keep their light alive now, a mission that feels especially pressing in this moment, when Nazis and other haters seem bolder than they've been in a long time.

On a warm day in 2017, Rafael stood on a highway near the Caribbean Sea. He wore olive fatigues, carried a rifle, and was staring down hundreds of his countrymen -- most of them students and young activists from humble backgrounds like his own. They were protesters, resisting the latest power grab by Venezuela's dictator, Nicolás Maduro, and now they were throwing rocks.

Rafael and his fellow soldiers advanced, shooting tear gas as they marched, Rafael recalled. But instead of retreating, the protesters dug in and tossed back Molotov cocktails, which exploded on the pavement.

Rafael, in the second line, behind other soldiers carrying polycarbonate shields, surveyed the scene and realized they were losing control. The protesters were fanning out, coming around their flanks. Soon the soldiers were surrounded on three sides. They ducked as rocks thudded against the shields. Then Rafael heard the order: Shoot.

With his finger on the trigger of his rifle, and protesters bearing down on him, Rafael froze. He couldn't comply.

He wasn't the only one. "None of us fired," Rafael said. After months of brutal crackdowns against protesters -- heads split open by police batons, eyes shot out with rubber bullets, activists assassinated in the streets -- Rafael and his comrades had realized they were on the wrong side of the struggle. "I saw that what the protesters were fighting for was true," he said.

He now faced an impossible choice: stay and serve a murderous regime or desert and risk prison. He chose to run.

Rafael's decision to desert the military would change the course of his life. It would turn him into an exile in his own country and eventually force him to flee for faraway lands. During that flight, he traversed barren deserts and remote jungles. He climbed mountains, forded rivers, and stepped over the corpses of those who fell along the way. He was robbed and then jailed and then robbed and jailed again. All of this he accepted as the price to pursue a dream.

TOOK HIM LONG ENOUGH TO FIGURE THAT OUT:

GOING HIS WAY:

At some point, I plan to publish an in-depth account of how Bing Crosby helped create Silicon Valley. In the meantime, here's an extract:

EVERYTHING BUT THE EXPLOSIVE VESTS:

Partisanship affected outcomes in the pandemic even before we had vaccines. A recent study found that from October 2020 to February 2021, the death rate in Republican-leaning counties was up to three times higher than that of Democratic-leaning counties, likely because of differences in masking and social distancing. Even when vaccines came around, these differences continued, Mauricio Santillana, an epidemiology expert at Northeastern University and a co-author of the study, told me. Follow-up research published in Lancet Regional Health Americas in October looked at deaths from April 2021 to March 2022 and found a 26 percent higher death rate in areas where voters leaned Republican. "There are subsequent and very serious [partisan] patterns with the Delta and Omicron waves, some of which can be explained by vaccination," Bill Hanage, a co-author of the paper and an epidemiologist at Harvard, told me in an email.

But to understand why Republicans have died at higher rates, you can't look at vaccine status alone. Congressional districts controlled by a trifecta of Republican leaders--state governor, Senate, and House--had an 11 percent higher death rate, according to the Lancet study. A likely explanation, the authors write, could be that in the post-vaccine era, those leaders chose policies and conveyed public-health messages that made their constituents more likely to die. Although we still can't say these decisions led to higher death rates, the association alone is jarring.

One of the most compelling studies comes from researchers at Yale, who published their findings as a working paper in November. They link political party and excess-death rate--the percent increase in deaths above pre-COVID levels--among those registered as either Democrats or Republicans, providing a more granular view. They chose to analyze data from Florida and Ohio from before and after vaccines were available. Looking at the period before the vaccine,  researchers found a 1.6 percentage-point difference in excess death rate among Republicans and Democrats, with a higher rate among Republicans. But after vaccines became available, that gap widened dramatically to 10.4 percentage points, again with a higher Republican excess death rate. "When we compare individuals who are of the same age, who live in the same county in the same month of the pandemic, there are differences correlated with your political-party affiliation that emerge after vaccines are available," Jacob Wallace, an assistant professor of public health at Yale who co-authored the paper, told me. "That's a statement we can confidently make based on the study and we couldn't before."

THE PRICE IS RIGHT:

Odd flex by the "macho" Right to point out they are being butt-whipped by a doddering old man. Happy Gilmore never mentions his fight with Bob Barker. https://t.co/cpcgJgLWVl

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 24, 2022

"YEAH, BUT THERE'S A MISSPELLING ON PAGE 742 OF THE 1/06 REPORT!":

If you're a post-liberal populist, particularly of the Very Online variety, watching Putin go belly-up in Ukraine has dashed all sorts of political illusions...Your faith that strongmen are the best, most competent instrument for achieving political prerogatives is shaken. Your belief that woke Western militaries are no match on the battlefield for fascist machismo looks silly. Your hope of a great authoritarian victory over Ukraine that might inspire Americans to embrace nationalism and reject the global liberal order has disappeared along with 100,000 or so Russian soldiers.

IT'S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

The shooter -- named as William M. in the French media -- is a gun enthusiast with a history of weapons offences who had been released on bail earlier this month.

The retired train driver was convicted for armed violence in 2016 by a court in the multicultural Seine-Saint-Denis suburb of Paris, but appealed.

A year later he was convicted for illegally possessing a firearm.

Last year, he was charged with racist violence after allegedly stabbing migrants and slashing their tents with a sword in a park in eastern Paris.

ISLAMOPHOBES OF A FEATHER:

The question of why the Trumpian populist right is so consumed with hatred for Ukraine--a hatred that clearly goes beyond concerns about U.S. spending, a very small portion of our military budget, or about the nonexistent involvement of American troops--doesn't have a simple answer. Partly, it's simply partisanship: If the libs are for it, we're against it, and the more offensively the better. (And if the pre-Trump Republican establishment is also for it, then we're even more against it.) Partly, it's the belief that Ukrainian democracy is a Biden/Obama/Hillary Clinton/"Deep State" project, all the more suspect because it's related to Trump's first impeachment. Partly, it's the "national conservative" distaste for liberalism--not only in its American progressive iteration, but in the more fundamental sense that includes conservatives like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher: the outlook based on individual freedom and personal autonomy, equality before the law, limited government, and an international order rooted in those values. Many NatCons are far more sympathetic to Russia's crusade against secular liberalism than to Ukraine's desire for integration into liberal, secular Europe.

Whatever the reason, the anti-Ukraine animus on the right is quite real and widespread. (When journalist Bari Weiss, who has a largely "anti-woke" following, retweeted a Hanukkah greeting from Zelensky, the responses from her followers in the thread were mostly hostile.) But right now, it also smells of desperation. Ukraine's cause is still massively popular in the United States, with two-thirds of Americans supportive of sending money and arms. Disingenuous laments about the poor Ukrainians exploited by American and European globalists ring hollow and false when the vast majority of Ukrainians are so clearly determined to resist the invasion. And Zelensky, as the smarter among the aid opponents, like Ungar-Sargon, can see, is a genuine hero: patriotic, incredibly courageous and charismatic, and a speaker so compelling that even congressional right-wingers who initially refused to join in the standing ovations (including Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Andrew Clyde) finally rose up during the last portions of his speech.

There's a nineteenth-century Russian fable called "The Elephant and the Pug" in which a pug yaps furiously at an elephant to get attention and show off how tough it is, while the elephant simply ignores it. Zelensky would obviously be the elephant in this scenario; but that would make the Zelensky haters the pugs--and that's frankly a hideous insult to pugs.

THE PERFECT MAGA AVATAR:

Russian troops were losing the battle for Lyman, a small city in eastern Ukraine, in late September when a call came in for the commanding officer on the front line, over an encrypted line from Moscow.

It was Vladimir Putin, ordering them not to retreat.

The president seemed to have limited understanding of the reality of the situation, according to current and former U.S. and European officials and a former senior Russian intelligence officer briefed on the exchange. His poorly equipped front-line troops were being encircled by a Ukrainian advance backed by artillery provided by the West. Mr. Putin rebuffed his own generals' commands and told the troops to hold firm, they said.

The Ukrainian ambushes continued, and on Oct. 1, Russian soldiers hastily withdrew, leaving behind dozens of dead bodies and supplies of artillery to restock Ukraine's weapons caches.

Mr. Putin expected the war in Ukraine to be swift, popular and triumphant. For months, he struggled to come to terms with what instead became a costly quagmire, and found himself isolated and distrustful at the pinnacle of a power structure designed to reinforce his belligerent worldview and shelter him from discouraging news.

Through the summer, delegations of military experts and arms manufacturers emerged from presidential meetings questioning whether Mr. Putin understood the reality on the battleground, according to people familiar with the situation. And while Mr. Putin has since then gone to lengths to get a clearer picture of the war, they say, the president remains surrounded by an administration that caters to his conviction that Russia will succeed, despite the mounting human and economic sacrifices.

"The people around Putin protect themselves," said Ekaterina Vinokurova, a member of his handpicked human-rights council until Mr. Putin removed her in November. "They have this deep belief that they shouldn't upset the president."

The resulting mistakes have shaped Russia's disastrous invasion of Ukraine--from the initial days, when Mr. Putin thought his soldiers would be met with flowers, to recent humiliating withdrawals in the northeast and south. 

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

ALWAYS THE TERROR:

On 9 November this year, the state unveiled the latest version of the National Strategic Review. The document outlines a list of ten strategic objectives in order for the nation to safeguard its sovereignty and reassert its influence.

Second in the list is the objective of a more "united and resilient France". The review goes on to further detail what this broad expression entails: "This effort must be deployed in metropolitan and overseas France, particularly by promoting the spirit of defence and ensuring national cohesion."

Interestingly, strengthening the "resilience of society" - according to the review - is directly linked to the "transmission of republican values". This point deserves a proper analysis. It is a direct answer to an observation expressed in the 2017 version of the review: "National cohesion conditions the legitimacy of the action of the armed forces through the Nation's support for decisions to use force. Today, this cohesion is confronted with the spread of ideologies that challenge the values and principles of the Republic." (emphasis added)

One must be cognizant of the French political context, "the values and principles of the Republic" are mainly used to oppose the constructed notion of "Islamist separatism" - often used to mask the targeting of Islam and Muslims by the state.

This conflict escalated to the closure of numerous Islamic schools and mosques, and fear-mongering over "religious attire" worn by Muslims in public schools - all justified, according to the state, by the need to protect and implement 'Republican values'.

As a natural consequence of this reasoning, Islam and Muslims are overt factors undermining 'cohesion' and 'resilience'. In other words, according to France's policy makers, France's success on the international stage can be undermined by a minority's way of life.

THE FASTER THE BETTER:

With the help of Odus Evbagharu, a political strategist Rosenthal had befriended, Rosenthal began campaigning door to door, where his biggest challenge was convincing people that the district had changed enough that a Democrat could win. "There's a perception of the suburbs that, 'Oh, it's all these white, affluent people," said Evbagharu, who is Black. "So, convincing people that this race was winnable was tough."

But where others saw obstacles, Rosenthal and Evbagharu saw opportunity. "The neighborhoods that we would send Jon to go knock doors in were predominantly Black and brown," Evbagharu said, and Rosenthal "knocked the hell out of those doors." In 2018, he ended up defeating Elkins by just more than 3 percentage points in a midterm election that was so good for Democrats they were convinced that years of Republican dominance in the state could soon be coming to an end. Rosenthal was one of 12 Democratic pick-ups in the Texas state House that year -- where Democrats across the state scored in suburban areas made more competitive.

"It was earth-shaking," said Rosenthal, now 59, who won reelection with 58 percent of the vote in November. Added Evbagharu, 30, who is now chair of the Democratic Party in Harris County, which includes Houston, "the demographics have shifted. It's helping Democrats electorally in the suburbs, and I think that's what you're going to start seeing more of."

In Rosenthal's district as it's currently drawn, the Black population -- a segment of the electorate that went overwhelmingly for Democrats in last month's midterms -- jumped to more than 21 percent, up from just 9 percent in 2000, the largest growth in suburban Black population of any U.S. county. But his district isn't the only one experiencing these demographic shifts. Suburban districts all across the country, especially in the South, are increasingly looking more like Harris County. The expanding Black population in the suburbs is dramatically changing the nation's political battlegrounds -- the neighborhoods where presidential campaigns are won or lost -- and where control of Congress will be decided for the foreseeable future.

DONALD WHO?:

The US population expanded by 1.2 million people this year, with growth largely driven by international migration, and the nation now has 333.2 million residents, according to estimates released Thursday by the US Census Bureau.

Net international migration -- the number of people moving into the United States minus the number of people leaving -- was more than 1 million residents from 2021 to 2022. That represented a growth rate of 168 percent over the previous year's 376,029 international migrants, with every state gaining residents from abroad, according to the 2022 population estimates.

TRANSCENDANT SAPHOOD:

Aristotle pointed out that the best way to arouse or explore human fear and pity in a drama is to have a situation where a relatable character goes from a good to bad fortune by making a mistake.    

In a noir this mistake is often the fear-driven decision to commit a perfect crime that seems like it will bring gain (dispel fear) only to have it (pitifully) blow up in the character's face. 

We can see this clearly in Double Indemnity where an insurance salesman driven by lust and greed makes the mistake of committing a murder that leads to his own regretful pitiful ruin.     

But in It's a Wonderful Life, this exploration of fear and pity is done not in the classic first fear-then-pity sequence of a noir.  

It is done in the opposite way with the pity first and the fear second.

Aristotle said pity is aroused by unmerited misfortune and fear by the misfortune of a man like ourselves.

This describes the life of George Bailey to a T.   

Because from the beginning of It's a Wonderful Life, we see that pity-inducing unmerited good-to-bad fortune is pretty much the constant refrain in everyman George Bailey's life. 

First, he goes half deaf from saving his brother. Then he can't go on a trip-of-a-lifetime because his father dies of a heart attack. Then he can't go to college because his brother has gotten married and accepted a better job rather than taking over the family business as was agreed.  

Then worst of all on Christmas Eve, his uncle loses the Bailey savings and loan deposits, ensuring the ruin of all George Bailey has struggled for in his life before sending George to jail.  

Facing this ruin and feeling that all the difficult pitiful sacrifices in his life have all led to nothing but failure, George snaps.  

Pity turns to fearful despair as George decides to jump off a bridge.

There at the bridge, after he is saved by Clarence, the angel--who has cleverly jumped into the water to be saved by George before he can jump himself--George, still embittered, remarks that it would probably be better had he never been born at all. 

"Okay, George, you've got your wish. You've never been born," Clarence says. 

It is here where we see the terror-laden noir influence within the film come to vivid, seedy underbelly life.  

Because as George and Clarence head back into Bedford Falls, it has suddenly been transformed from a bucolic small town out of a Norman Rockwell painting into what seems to be the redlight strip of a hard-boiled city.     

In place after place, we see a hell-like noir Bedford Falls that would have been had George not made all his sacrifices. 

In this nightmarish Bedford Falls, his vivacious girl-next-door loving wife is a sad depressed spinster and his old beloved boss at the corner drug store is a homeless drunk whom the townspeople mercilessly humiliate.   

With this dark view of a world without George, we see that George is in essence an anti-noir protagonist who could have but did not make the selfish fear-driven mistakes that often lead to a pitiful end.  

IT'S A RICO CASE:

Among the transcripts released by the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S Capitol is one from Cassidy Hutchinson, the former top aide to Trump's chief of staff Mark Meadows. In it, Hutchinson tells the interviewers that what she calls "Trump world" set her up with her first attorney, Stefan Passantino. He refused to tell her who was paying the bills--it was Trump's political action committee--and she worried that "they will ruin my life... if I do anything that they don't want me to do."

Emphasizing repeated references to "loyalty," and "Trump world," Hutchinson told the committee that Passantino urged her not to tell what she knew, prodding her to say she didn't recall events she clearly did. "If you don't 100 percent recall something, even if you don't recall a date or somebody who may or may not have been in the room, that's an entirely fine answer, and we want you to use that response as much as you deem necessary." "Look," he told her, "the goal with you is to get you in and out. Keep your answers short, sweet, and simple, seven words or less. The less the committee thinks you know, the better, the quicker it's going to go. It's going to be painless. And then you're going to be taken care of."

"We just want to focus on protecting the President," Passantino said. "We're gonna get you a really good job in Trump world. You don't need to apply to other places. We're gonna get you taken care of. We want to keep you in the family." Hutchinson told of being scared of what they could do to her. "I'd seen how vicious they can be. And part of that's politics, but...I think some of it is unique to Trump world, the level they'll go to to tear somebody else down. And I was scared of that." [...]

Hutchinson's moral reckoning stands in stark contrast to a court filing yesterday that revealed Fox News Channel personality Sean Hannity pushed the idea on air that Trump had won the 2020 election even though, as he said under oath, "I did not believe it for one second." Dominion Voting Systems has filed a $1.6 billion lawsuit against the Fox News Channel and its parent company, Fox Corporation, for defamation after its frequent declarations that voting systems rigged the election. Testimony like Hannity's makes a strong case that the outlet knew it was lying when it pushed the story that Trump had won the election.

DUDE, THOSE ARE ITS SELLING POINTS:

In a bleak and bitter address, outgoing Prime Minister Yair Lapid on Thursday warned against the agenda put forward by his successor Benjamin Netanyahu's coalition, accusing the Likud leader of being weak and beholden to extremist partners who will send the country down the road to ruin.

He said the next government was not committed to democracy or to the rule of law, and that it would devastate the Israeli education system, disproportionately fund the ultra-Orthodox community, tank the economy, politicize the army, cause an explosion in the West Bank, undermine Israel's international standing, and damage ties with the US and the Diaspora.

WE ARE ALL THIRD WAY:

A new incentive for low- and moderate-income individuals to save for their post-working years could be on its way.

Under a provision included in a legislative proposal known as "Secure 2.0" -- which is included in an omnibus appropriations bill that cleared the Senate on Thursday and awaited a House vote -- a retirement "saver's match" would be implemented, essentially changing how an existing tax credit works.

Should the bill pass, people with income under set limits who contribute to a qualified retirement account -- i.e., a 401(k) plan -- would receive a limited federal "matching" contribution to their nest egg starting in 2027. That amount would be a maximum 50% of up to $2,000 in contributions to a qualifying account (so a maximum $1,000 match per individual).

GDP IS ALWAYS REVISED UPWARDS, OFTEN OVER DECADES:

IT'S WOMEN MAKING THE CHOICE, SON:

The 24-year-old hosts a nightly broadcast with a cult-like following among young white men who believe they have lost their rightful place in the United States. For the last five years, Fuentes has pushed a vision for an "America First" movement that fuses white nationalism, antisemitism, and authoritarianism in calling for a nation dominated by white Christian men.

In tying himself most recently to Trump--a man accused of sexual assault by 19 women, and who bragged about grabbing women "by the [****]y"--Fuentes is advancing one of his latest strategies for cultivating followers: making overtures to men who feel aggrieved by women.

Over the past year, Fuentes has made a point of speaking directly to these men--many of whom identify as "incels"--in numerous appearances on his nightly livestream, far-right podcasts, and Telegram. Historically, incels defined themselves as "involuntary celibate," but the term has become inextricably associated with misogynist incels, men who blame women for their problems and believe women owe them sex.

Fuentes claims to understand them because he is one of them. "I'm an incel, I'm a proud incel," he claimed on his nightly "America First" podcast in January. He'd never had sex, he explained, because, "I'm choosing instead to lead a historical right-wing movement."

SPOILER ALERT--THIS IS THE APOCALYPSE:

Since the United States' founding, Americans have viewed Puritan New England as a prototype of the republic. Observers of American life from Alexis de Tocqueville and John Quincy Adams to Sacvan Bercovitch and David Hackett Fischer have held that studying Puritan institutions, folk-ways, and mores enables us to understand America's republican culture. Some, however, think that relying on the Puritans as a political model overlooks America's historic sins, inappropriately theologizes the nation, and prosecutes endless wars on behalf of global democracy and capitalism. Under this reading, there is little daylight between Winthrop's "city on a hill" and Francis Fukuyama's "end of history." Utopianism may have changed from Calvinist Christianity to liberalism, but the same corrosive and dangerous chauvinism burns on.

But this view fails to do justice to the profoundly nuanced vision actually espoused by the Puritans. They nursed audacious hopes, to be sure, but harbored equally profound apprehensions of failure.

Perhaps as we modern Americans experience a cynical hangover after the giddy confidence of the "unipolar moment," revisiting the Puritans' nuanced notion of what it means to be an exceptional people can bring needed perspective

Of course, I don't mean to deny that there were utopian aspirations in American Puritan thought. Indeed, this aspect of Puritanism is essential to their thinking. Many of Massachusetts's leading lights hoped their community could attain unprecedented holiness. Their goal was to hasten the instantiation of Christ's kingdom on earth, which is prophesied in the apocalyptic book of Revelation. "Where was there ever a place so like unto New Jerusalem as New England hath been?" queried Increase Mather, a prominent minister. "It was once Dr. [Twiss's] opinion that when New Jerusalem should come down from heaven America would be the seat of it . . ."

Disillusioned by the Church of England's reversion to Catholic errors, the English Puritans underwent voluntary exile into the American wilderness and hoped to find a new Promised Land. This bastion of righteousness, the Puritans thought, would emanate hope for Europe. "New England would become a strong light that would reach over to Old England, the Low Countries, perhaps even the whole Latin world, illuminating their darkness and drawing some away," writes A. W. Plumstead. Increase Mather's son, Cotton Mather, invoked imagery from Revelation in asserting New England's status as an exemplary beacon shining upon the darkness and corruption of the Old World: "[I]t shall be profitable for you to consider the light which from the midst of this outer darkness is now to be darted over unto the other side of the Atlantic Ocean."

Clearly the Puritans had lofty hopes for their settlement. But what the scholar E. L. Tuveson terms "apocalyptic Whiggism" (by which he means a progressivist expectation that history will inevitably usher in the reign of Anglo-Saxon civilization, along with its ideas about liberty) is far from the whole story. 

LEAVING THE wEST:

NO WONDER HOUSEWIVES LIVED FOR EVER:

A study recently published in the journal Nature Medicine reported that short, vigorous bursts of movement not associated with traditional exercise -- the kind you'd get from enthusiastically entering a toddler's game of make-believe, perhaps, or hustling for the bus -- confer significant health benefits.

It's called VILPA -- short for "vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity." And while there are a few significant downsides -- no cute "sport"-specific outfit opportunities; no pickleball-style community; no girls' getaway possibilities -- it seems like the kind of win we all need right now.

Study participants who engaged in just three bouts per day (lasting one or two minutes each) showed a 38 to 40 percent reduction in "all-cause" and cancer mortality risk, and a 48 to 49 percent reduction in cardiovascular disease mortality risk.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 25,000 people in the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database. Each wore accelerometers to measure short bursts of nontraditional exercise -- the type that are hard to capture in questionnaires. Study participants were an average age of around 60, and were nonexercisers, although researchers found similar results when they analyzed data from generally moderate exercisers who managed to also get a small amount of vigorous exercise.

"VILPA is like HIIT" -- high-intensity intermittent training -- "but for the lazy and the late," a friend said when I shared the breakthrough.

BECAUSE PETER HATES MEXICANS:

OK, so why does my cousin Peter talk about the Hunter Biden emails as if they're so damning?

In a 2017 email that was uncovered in the laptop dump, a business associate of Hunter's used the phrase "10 held by H for the big guy?" in an email about a partnership that Hunter and his uncle Jim Biden were forming with a Chinese energy conglomerate called CEFC China Energy.

One of the partners in the deal, Anthony Bobulinski, has said that "H" was Hunter and the "big guy" was Joe Biden. That wouldn't be great--a former vice president (and future president) getting in on a business deal with a Chinese energy company! Except there's no real evidence that he did: The draft agreement that circulated afterward did not mention Joe Biden; nor did the signed company agreement. Other business associates have said Joe Biden was not involved in the discussions.

The second allegedly incriminating email was called the "smoking-gun email" by the New York Post. In an April 2015 message, a Burisma executive thanked Hunter for "giving an opportunity to meet your father," reportedly at a dinner that had taken place the previous day. This exchange occurred before the firing of the Ukrainian prosecutor, so it excited Trumpworld because it appeared to prove that Joe Biden had lied when he said during the 2020 presidential campaign that he hadn't known about Hunter's work in Ukraine. But we don't know for sure that the Burisma exec actually did attend the dinner, which took place at Cafe Milano in D.C. and was attended by about a dozen people. (He wasn't on the guest list.) Nor do we know how long Joe Biden was there. (At least one person has said the vice president only stopped by briefly to visit with a leader in the Greek Orthodox Church.) So it doesn't necessarily mean that Joe Biden and the Burisma executive had a one-on-one conversation or that Burisma was discussed at all. In any case, whether or not Joe Biden spoke to the executive, a Republican-led Senate investigation into the Bidens' Ukraine activities found no evidence that Joe Biden took any actions that might have benefited his son.

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

In the next few days, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may announce his new coalition government. It is expected to be the most extreme government in Israeli history, after the electorate decided to turn to the far-right and elect Kahane 2.0 in the form of Itamar Ben-Gvir and place the Religious Zionism leader Bezalel Smotrich in control of the occupied West Bank, which he calls Biblical Judea and Samaria. Meanwhile, far-right Avi Maoz is stuck in the pre-medieval age and trying to reform Judaism to his way of thinking, as legislators change the law to allow corrupt politicians like Aryeh Deri to take ministerial positions.

What do the Palestinians want more than this? Their political opponent is back with a government that looks like a Jewish Daesh in its medievalism. It is as far from modernity as one can imagine. What's more, Netanyahu is doing this in full view of the world. How can he claim that Israel promotes values shared with the West when his ministers and coalition partners are so backward-looking?

This places his allies in an awkward situation from which they cannot escape because the far-right ideology and religious fanaticism that now props up the Israeli leader is incompatible with the West.

THE WINDS OF CHANGE:

The Baker administration on Tuesday announced $180 million in infrastructure funding for projects designed to support the state's burgeoning offshore wind industry.

In a press conference held at the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center Wind Technology Testing Center in Charlestown, Governor Charlie Baker and top climate aides also provided updates on the state's clean energy industry, which has been a priority for Baker during his tenure on Beacon Hill.

"I'm proud of the work we've done over the past 8 years, but it remains an urgent priority for the Commonwealth, for the country, and frankly, for the world," said Baker. "I do believe, however, we are very well positioned to be a major player in this space."

"To get from where we are to where we need to go -- believe it or not -- things have to change," added Baker.

OPEN SOURCE THEM ALL:

The House Ways and Means Committee voted Tuesday to make six years of former President Donald Trump's tax returns public -- potentially ending years of speculation about what they might reveal about his business dealings and personal wealth.

The panel voted along party lines to make the returns available and information could be available as soon as Wednesday -- the day the House Jan. 6 committee is set to issue its final report on the riot at the U.S. Capitol -- which will be the final days of Democratic control of Congress before Republicans take over the House in January.

Later Tuesday, the committee released a 29-page report summarizing its investigation into an IRS policy that mandates audits of returns filed by presidents and vice presidents. The committee found that the IRS had largely not followed its own internal requirement, only beginning to examine Trump's returns after the panel inquired about the process. Just one year of Trump's returns while in office was selected for the mandatory review, and the audit was not complete by the time he left the White House, according to the report.

YEAH, BUT WHAT ABOUT JEWISH SPACE LASERS?:

Now, we could have an interesting discussion (and I actually do think it's an interesting discussion) about whether or not the government should be flagging accounts to review as terms of service violations. Right now, anyone can do this. You or I can go on Twitter and if we see something that we think violates a content policy, we can flag it for Twitter to review. Twitter than will review the content and determine whether or not it's violative, and then decide what the remedy should be if it is.

That opens up an interesting question in general: should government officials and entities also be allowed to do the same type of flagging? Considering that anyone else can do it, and the company still reviews against its own terms of service and (importantly) feels free to reject those requests when they do not appear to violate the terms, I'm hard pressed to see the problem here on its own.

If there were evidence that there was some pressure, coercion, or compulsion for the company to comply with the government requests, that would be a different story. But, to date, there remains none (at least in the US).

WORLD WITNESS:

Argentina lost its first match of this tournament, to Saudi Arabia, in what many people saw as a humiliating result. But what everyone knows about stories is that they're not defined by their beginnings. Stories are defined by their endings, and after that first loss, the Albiceleste played with a raw edge of emotion whose equivalent I can't remember seeing at a World Cup before. They weren't the most talented or experienced team in the tournament, but they were the team that seemed to embrace the pressure of the moment with the most ferocious zeal. They won penalty shootouts in two of their last three matches, and when they taunted the Dutch after the first of those contests, it didn't seem boorish or unsportsmanlike so much as it seemed like an earnest expression of competitive commitment: We are here to win, and we're holding nothing back.

Maybe it was that undisguised emotion that made this story feel so childlike. I've been writing about Lionel Messi, in one form or another, since he was 20 years old and practically a child. I've been writing about Kylian Mbappé since he was even younger than that. Watching them today, with Messi at 35 and Mbappé at 23, I found myself thinking about what it means to grow up, what it means to confront all those compromises and disappointments from which soccer gives us a temporary escape.

Look at Messi now. He's no longer the wide-eyed elf who danced through defenses for Barcelona. He carries some marks of time on him. Not many--not after his singularly blessed and idolized life--but some. You can see in his eyes that he's taken some knocks, that he's aware of the possibility of failure, that he knows life is not always going to give him exactly what he wants. He looks at the ball, before running up to take a penalty, not with blithe confidence but with a sort of chastened determination. Everyone, even Leo Messi, has to learn that reality doesn't revolve around him all the time.

Mbappé, by contrast, looks utterly convinced of his own destiny. He looks certain, the way a child is certain, that he is the hero of the story. He glares fearlessly at every challenge, because being young is like holding a magic feather; it means believing that you are the chosen child of the universe, and if you do your best, you will inevitably be rewarded with a win.

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. I don't know if growing up means learning to see reality through the story you tell yourself about it. But if it does, then it seems to me that this World Cup, and especially this final, held up a mirror to show us precisely how grown-up we are. Because the story felt so innocent, and just beneath the story, the reality was so grim. On the pitch, this was the best World Cup I've ever seen; it was also a tournament that was conceived as a sportswashing exercise, obtained through corruption, constructed with no regard for human life, and staged with contempt for anyone who spoke up for human rights.

THE SEX PISTOL:

It seems fitting to begin at the end. The final recording session Hank Williams had was banged out over a couple hours in a studio in Nashville on September 23, 1952. Four songs, four classics--including "Your Cheatin' Heart." That's just how it was for Hank, even then, at the tail end of drinking himself to death. A little more than three months later, he died in the backseat of a baby blue Cadillac. He was in a bad way on booze and pills and injections, but the circumstances of his death, like his life, remain murky. We'll get to that.

Hank's second wife swore "Your Cheatin' Heart" was about his first wife; his first wife swore he had written it about himself. It hardly matters.

On the one hand, we can say heartbreak is an essentially generic topic for a song, and the lament of the cuckold is a rather sour brand of the form. Still: Just listen. The lilt and longing in Hank's voice. The freakish adrenaline in his delivery. His rubbery tenor, the way the tune yo-yos up and down like something about to snap. It is just one of those songs: Slinks up as lazily as a python; before you know it, you're smothered. Sometimes I think it's the meanest lullaby ever written.

The brief career of Hank Williams became such a definitional anchor for what was then mostly known as hillbilly music and is now known as country that you can catch yourself wondering if the whole genre might have had slightly different preoccupations if Hank wasn't so fixated on cheating and drinking. 

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

"Between 1970 and 2020," according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), "the combined emissions of the six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO, and Pb) dropped by 78 percent." Similar trends have been observed in other developed nations as well. Between 1970 and 2016, the UK reduced its emissions of all air pollutants except ammonia by 60%. The trend is unmistakable to anyone looking carefully at the evidence. Drs. Hannah Ritchie and Max Roser helpfully summed up the situation for Our World in Data in 2019:

"What becomes clear is that far from being the most polluted in recent history, the air in many rich countries today is cleaner than it has been for decades." [...]

One of the best ways to bring a nation out of grinding poverty is to boost its agricultural productivity. The introduction of high-yielding crop varieties during the Green Revolution, led by plant pathologist Norman Borlaug, nicely illustrated how this phenomenon works. According to a July 2021 study, enhanced crops developed between 1965 and 2010 increased food production by more than 40%, saving the world a whopping $83 trillion. [...]

Of course, climate change is the elephant in the room. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have increased in recent decades, which has led the WHO and others to warn about the looming public health impacts of heat waves, wildfires, and other natural disasters caused by global warming. Even here, though, the disaster projections that so often make headlines are out of step with the evidence.

For one thing, improved infrastructure (such as widespread air conditioning) has helped prevent a lot of weather-related mortality. Deaths due to natural disasters more broadly have also plummeted: A century ago, natural disasters commonly killed more than a million people annually. Today, that figure hovers somewhere between 10,000 and 20,000 deaths per year.

Recent research has shown that fossil fuels have generated far fewer GHG emissions than projected by commonly used climate models, a divergence that "is going to only get larger in coming decades," climate researcher Roger Pielke, Jr. explained in November 2020. [...]

What does all this mean? The economist Julian Simon was right: Human ingenuity is the ultimate resource.

OUR WESTEROS:

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

On the country's eastern border, Taliban gunmen trade fire with Pakistani soldiers, killing or wounding scores of people, including women and children, in recent weeks. Islamabad has effectively withdrawn its ambassador, Ubaid Ur Rehman Nizamani, after he was attacked at the embassy in Kabul on Dec. 2. Some commentators say the two countries are now at war. Two Russians were among six people killed in a suicide attack on their embassy in September. Clashes have erupted on Afghanistan's border with Iran. Regional countries that were relieved to see the United States and NATO leave last August now worry about the flow of drugs, migrants, and left-behind U.S. weapons out of Afghanistan as the country nears collapse.

But it's the latest attack that has rattled what appears to be an emerging status quo, as China sniffs the wind for secure investment opportunities in Afghanistan's promising minerals sector and sets itself up as the dominant partner of a Taliban eager to make some progress toward recognition as the legitimate government. All that fell apart on Dec. 12, when gunmen laid siege to a multistory hotel in downtown Kabul used by Chinese businessmen. China's foreign ministry said five Chinese were injured; the Italian-based nonprofit Emergency Hospital said it received 18 injured people and three dead. The hourslong assault happened the day after Taliban leaders assured China's ambassador to Afghanistan, Wang Yu, that Chinese nationals were safe. Wang has since ordered all Chinese to leave the country as soon as possible.

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

IF ONLY HE'D RUN ON BEING MITT INSTEAD OF AGAINST IMMIGRATION AND HEALTH CARE:

Tax what you don't want. https://t.co/BLUooQQeAi

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 20, 2022

THERE IS NO THERE THERE:

The analysis identified 3,544 deaths mentioning long COVID key terms and coded to U07.1, the ICD-10 code for COVID-19, among deaths occurring in the United States from January 1, 2020, through June 30, 2022. The percentage of COVID-19 deaths with long COVID peaked in June 2021 (1.2 percent) and in April 2022 (3.8 percent). The age-adjusted death rate for long COVID was 6.3 per 1 million population for the 12-month period ending in June 2022. The long COVID death rate from July 1, 2021, through June 30, 2022, was highest among adults aged 85 and over...

FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS:

Scientists from HZB could significantly improve on the efficiency of perovskite/silicon tandem solar cells. "This is a really big leap forward that we didn't foresee a few months ago. All the teams involved at HZB, especially the PV Competence Center (PVComB) and the HySPRINT Innovation lab teams have worked together successfully and with passion," says Prof. Steve Albrecht.

WELL, WHEN YOU PUT IT THAT WAY...:

It then laid out how he maintained he had won even as his own lawyers and campaign advisors repeatedly assured him that the conspiracy theories on which he was relying were false. It showed how he contested Democratic candidate Joe Biden's victories in court--losing 61 times--and then pressured state governments to "find" the votes he needed to win.

When those attempts to hand him the election all failed, he turned to trying to steal the election through pressuring state officials to create false slates of electors that chose him, rather than Biden, and then pressured the Department of Justice to get states to turn to those electors by alleging--falsely--that the department thought the election was fraudulent (its leaders had said repeatedly, in no uncertain terms, that the election was not fraudulent). When Justice Department leaders refused, he tried to put a loyalist, Jeffrey Clark, at the head of the department to do as he wished. He was stopped only when the department leaders threatened to resign as a group.

That left him with a plan hatched by right-wing lawyer John Eastman. The plan hinged on the outrageous idea that the vice president, in his capacity as the person to oversee the counting of electoral ballots, could decide not to count the legitimate ballots for which Trump loyalists had submitted competing ballots, enabling him single-handedly to throw the election to Trump over the wishes of the American voters. 

Eastman himself admitted this plan was illegal.

And yet it was Trump's last hope to look like he was playing by the rules. When Trump's vice president, Mike Pence, refused to participate in the scheme, Trump went to his final card--his trump card, if you'll forgive me--his base. 

Exactly two years ago today, on December 19, 2020, when it became clear that his campaign lawyers had lost their legal challenges and the real electors had filed their electoral slates, Trump tweeted to his supporters to urge them to come to Washington, D.C., on January 6, the day those electoral votes would be counted and confirm Biden's election to the White House. Falsely claiming what he knew to be untrue, that it was statistically impossible for him to have lost the election, he told his supporters: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild." 

The right-wing militias he had courted since the Charlottesville, Virginia, Unite the Right rally of August 2017 heard the message. Immediately, they interpreted his tweet as an order to come to Washington to keep him in office, with violence if necessary, and they planned accordingly. Trump appears to have seen their potential violence as a final way to force Pence to do as he wished. When the vice president continued to refuse, Trump whipped up the crowd against his vice president and sent them toward the Capitol, where both houses of Congress and the vice president were all, in an exceedingly rare occurrence, together. 

For 187 minutes, as his supporters stormed the Capitol, Trump watched the chaos on television and did nothing to stop it, communicating only with those continuing to try to stop the counting of the electoral votes. Only when troops had been mobilized and it was clear the insurrection would not succeed did he tell his people that he loved them and they should go home. They promptly did, underscoring that he could have called them off whenever he wished. 

THE POINT IS TO KILL THE VULNERABLE:

A number of recent news articles have reported on Canadians who, driven by poverty and a lack of access to adequate health care, housing, and social services, have turned to the country's euthanasia system. In multiple cases, veterans requesting help from Veterans Affairs Canada -- at least one asked for PTSD treatment, another for a ramp for her wheelchair -- were asked by case workers if they would like to apply for euthanasia.

 

As this article will show, in internal meetings, those close to the system have long talked openly about red flags that many people are choosing euthanasia because they're not getting the "supports and cares" they need. The physicians in charge of the process not only know that this is happening, but they have discussed it in seminars, collected evidence, and then kept it quiet in public.

The safeguards promised by Trudeau and others to prevent vulnerable people from heading down the road to euthanasia turn out to be vague, pro forma, and easy to get around by doctor-shopping. And interviews with patients and their loved ones show that some of them, perhaps many, are making it to the end.

One of the greatest reasons for concern is the sheer scale of Canada's euthanasia regime. California provides a useful point of comparison: It legalized medically assisted death the same year as Canada, 2016, and it has about the same population, just under forty million. In 2021 in California, 486 people died using the state's assisted suicide program. In Canada in the same year, 10,064 people used MAID to die.

Important people -- prominent politicians, physicians, and judges -- promised Canadians that their rights to autonomy would be expanded. But the picture that emerges is not a new flowering of autonomy but the hum of an efficient engine of death.

IT'S A RICO CASE TOO:

NOT QUITE AS PROFITABLE AS tarp, BUT IT'LL DO:

Volatile energy markets have made 2022 a big year for commodity traders. One of the biggest and perhaps most unlikely winners: The U.S. government. 

Emergency releases from the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve are slated to end this month, concluding an unusual attempt to lower gas prices after Russia's invasion of Ukraine sent oil prices soaring. 

Over the release period, Washington sold 180 million barrels of crude at an average of $96.25 apiece, well above the recent market price of $74.29--meaning the U.S., for now, is almost $4 billion ahead.

IT'S ALWAYS SUNNI IN THE VELAYAT:

The origins of the Islamic Republic lie in the Ayatollah Khomeini's treatise "Hokumat-e Eslami," or "Islamic Government" in English. For Khomeini, legitimate government meant the rule of God, as embodied in divine law. The Prophet Muhammad had governed with supreme authority during his lifetime. After him came the 12 imams, whose legitimacy derived from their presumed perfect knowledge of law and justice. In the absence of the imams, this knowledge prevailed within the class of legal scholars and jurists known as "fuqaha" (or "faqih" in the singular). Thus, Khomeini reasoned that the only legitimate government was one led by a jurist. This concept Khomeini called "the guardianship of the jurist," or "velayat-e faqih" in Persian. It is the legal foundation of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The velayat-e faqih is perhaps the slimmest theory of political order that has ever formed the basis of a constitution. It is also utopian, even naïve, in that Khomeini assumed religion would suffice to keep people virtuous and there would be no need for a judiciary, ministry of finance or even a civil service. In this regard, I agree with the historian Ervand Abrahamian that Khomeini is perhaps best seen as a populist radical, not a conservative ideologue.

Khomeini, moreover, made no provision for popular sovereignty. This was rightly seen as a serious deficiency for an Islamic Republic. The late Iranian jurist Mohammad Beheshti and other framers of the constitution drew on the work of the Iraqi Shiite scholar Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and applied a theory of popular sovereignty that they considered acceptable from an Islamic perspective. But this produced an irreconcilable tension. Though Iran ended up with a tripartite constitution with executive, legislative and judicial branches, supreme sovereignty was given both to God, ruling through the supreme jurist, and to the people, who elect the parliament and the president.

From the beginning, in 1979, the new constitution had many critics. The first president of the Islamic Republic, Abolhassan Banisadr, objected on the grounds that the constitution effectively made the supreme jurist an absolute ruler. Others denounced the contradiction between democratic sovereignty and the apparently unlimited power of the supreme jurist. The late Ayatollah Shariatmadari, who favored a quietist approach to politics and was a critic of Khomeini, criticized the clergy's involvement in politics altogether and argued velayat-e faqih would undermine popular sovereignty. Liberal parliamentarians, such as Ezzatollah Sahabi, argued that it would subject the clergy to the sort of criticism normally reserved for politicians, to the ultimate discredit of Islam itself. This argument was prescient, and the tension between popular sovereignty and the supremacy of Islam has not yet been resolved.

At the root of these critiques was the fact that velayat-e faqih is a religious and political aberration, not only in Iran, but in the entire Shiite Islamic tradition. Indeed, the Shiite clergy had never been political in the past. They had always accommodated the civil authority of the day, sometimes despite brutal persecution.

FRANCE IS A nATION, NOT A COUNTRY:

Residents of the banlieues - particularly young people - experience disproportionately high unemployment rates, estimated at close to double the national average in some locations, as well as wide-scale social and political exclusion from mainstream French society.

As a result, there are generations of descendants of immigrants from former French colonies who, although born in France and are French citizens, have acquired the status of what Dr Matthew Moran terms the "internal outsider": "immigrants, and especially those of Maghreb origins, find themselves in a no-man's land at the outer reaches of the Republic - officially and legally citizens, but socially stigmatised and permanently viewed as outsiders".

History has shown that the perceived unity of 1998 was short-lived and the success of the football team was not indicative of the success of the French assimilationist model of integration. The last two decades have witnessed a rise in support for the far-right National Rally party (formerly the Front National), including a shock place in the second round of the 2002 Presidential elections for then leader Jean-Marie Le Pen and increasing support for his daughter Marine who was leader of the anti-immigrant, Eurosceptic party until last month.

Meanwhile, the banlieues have been home to ongoing incidents of social unrest and urban violence since the 1980s, with sporadic but relatively regular riots and civil disturbances. Although France has not since seen wide-scale rioting such as that experienced in 2005, isolated violent incidents in the banlieues have continued, including recent unrest following an alleged rape by a police officer during the arrest of a man in Paris in February 2017 and vicious attacks on police officers on New Year's Eve 2017 and New Year's Day 2018.

Despite initial hopes that the 1998 victory signalled the achievement of the constitutional notion of "one France, singular and indivisible", the experience of those living in France's banlieues remains at odds with France's conception of itself as a united Republican state. According to legendary 1998 defender and most capped French player Lilian Thuram, "football has always been political" in France.

The success of this young French team has once again invited commentary on the disconnect between the hero status of Mbappé and co and the large-scale exclusion and marginalisation of young people from the suburbs. For some residents of the banlieues, football is not only a hobby, it is also seen as a way out of the cycle of poverty and discrimination which has come to characterise these neighbourhoods. As one resident of the banlieues commented, "the only way to make it here is in sport or rap".

MAGA FAMILY VALUES:

The history books will properly cast January 6, 2021, as a day of infamy, a horrific attempt on the part of rogue Americans to overturn a lawful presidential election by force. I happened to be there that day, a witness to federal police being beaten and pepper-sprayed, the kind of scene I might have expected to see in failed states but not in my native country. The spectacle of U.S. citizens busting their way into the U.S. Capitol--some chanting that Vice President Mike Pence should be hanged, others bludgeoning law enforcement officers--was an indictment of its own. Like the photograph of the white women taunting Elizabeth Eckford, one of the nine Black students who were attempting to integrate Little Rock Central High School in 1957, the wide-angle imagery articulates an ugliness that can never be explained away.

It would be easy to view the insurrection only in its aggregate form and overlook the jolting peculiarities of that day. There was an Arizona man named Jake Angeli parading around in the Capitol shirtless, with bison horns on top of his head and a spear in his hand. Another man, identified as 23-year-old Joseph Brody, from Virginia, sauntered down the Capitol corridors in a suit and tie, as if it were any other workday, except that he allegedly was captured on video entering House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's office and destroying equipment after assaulting a police officer. A rapper who went by the name "Bugzie the Don," also from Virginia, made his way into Statuary Hall, where he posed leisurely for a series of photos. And a 35-year-old Southern California woman in jeans and snow boots named Ashli Babbitt, an Air Force veteran and co-owner of a swimming pool cleaning company, attempted to vault herself through a window leading to the Speaker's Lobby, only to fall to the ground, shot to death at point-blank range by Capitol Police lieutenant Michael Byrd.

Amid this kaleidoscopic melee, another strange tableau unfolded, one that might have escaped notice but for the Capitol surveillance cameras. It occurred at 2:25 p.m., just twelve minutes after the first rioter breached the building and about twenty minutes before Babbitt was killed. A slender middle-aged man slipped through a broken window into the Senate wing of the Capitol. He wore a red sweatshirt, camouflage pants, and a black knit cap. Though the marble corridor was already crowded with rioters bustling along in both directions, the man lingered by the broken window. He helped a teenage girl wearing a camouflage coat climb through, taking care that she didn't land on the shattered glass covering the floor. Then the man assisted a second teenage girl who was similarly attired. A third woman followed, slightly older and wearing a Trump flag as a cape. Then came a middle-aged woman, hooded and wearing sunglasses. Finally, a young man clambered through the window. The six of them then proceeded through the U.S. Capitol in tandem, as the American family unit they happened to be.

These were the Munns. Just over an hour earlier, they had stood among tens of thousands of Trump supporters at the Ellipse, watching on the JumboTron as the president had said, "We're going to walk down to the Capitol," adding, "Because you'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength and you have to be strong." They had done exactly that, following other rallygoers all the way to the steps of the Capitol, in an atmosphere that Tom would later describe in an online post as "upbeat and patriotic." Minutes later, his post continued, "everything suddenly became very 'dark.' I do not know how else to describe it. Eventually resulting in our entry of the Capitol Building"--past police barricades, with tear gas swirling and accompanied by a soundtrack of flash-bang grenades, security alarms, and the roar of the mob. Through the broken window, they entered the restricted area of the Capitol while federal legislators were convening to certify the presidential election. [...]

Tom became a prolific political commentator on Facebook, gaining a following of 4,900. He was a fervent Trump supporter and alluded to the far-right political conspiracy theory QAnon, ending some of his posts with the QAnon hashtag #WWG1WGA ("Where We Go One, We Go All"). On election night in November 2020, when the key states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin swung for Joe Biden, the Munns hardly stood alone in their incredulity. As Gerald Cantrell, perhaps Borger's most prominent Republican activist, told me, "Biden didn't win them states. They cheated like a son of a bitch. It's obvious. That was the biggest conspiracy in American history."

Two weeks after the election, the Munns hung a replica of the "Come and Take It" flag in front of their house. In late December, Dawn reposted on Facebook a photograph of a bullet accompanied by the warning "By Bullet or Ballot, Restoration of the Republic Is Coming!" On December 28 Tom reminded his followers that President Trump had recently beckoned supporters to Washington for a rally in his infamous "will be wild" tweet. Wrote Tom, "Our President has only asked two things from us, so far . . . #1 Vote #2 January 6, 2021."

The Munn parents and their eldest daughter, Kristi, decided to take the family's two high school seniors, eighteen-year-old Kayli and seventeen-year-old Kassi, to Washington.

THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

The time has come to ask whether, objectively speaking, Vladimir Putin is an agent of American imperialism. For no American has ever done half as much damage to what Putin calls the "Russian world" as the Russian leader himself has.

This thought came to me recently when I was in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, talking to Ukrainians made refugees in their own country by Putin's war. "I was a Russian speaker until 24 February," said Adeline, an art student from the now Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka, referencing the date of Russia's full-scale invasion earlier this year. Russia has failed to take over Ukrainian culture, she said, so now it has set out to kill it. Several other Ukrainian students told me they find "the spirit of freedom" in Ukrainian literature, but of subservience to power in Russian literature.

Tetiana, a refugee from the ruthlessly bombed and destroyed city of Mariupol, had suffered without heat, light or water in a cellar under constant bombardment, seen her best friend killed by a Russian missile, and then had a traumatic odyssey of escape. Tetiana not merely speaks much better Russian than Ukrainian; her mother is actually from Russia, as are her parents-in-law. The Russian president would consider her a Russian. So I asked her for her message to Putin. She replied that she would like to kill him.

Wherever I turned, in every conversation, there was a total rejection not just of the Russian dictator, not merely of the Russian Federation as a state, but of everything and almost everyone Russian. Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that some 80% of Ukrainians had a positive attitude to Russia in 2013; by May 2022, the figure was just 2%. A university lecturer told me that his students now write "russia" with a small initial letter. "I don't correct them."

EVERY HOME A NODE:

WAIT'LL HE MEETS ABBOTT AND COSTELLO:

[I] find myself drawn to the only genre, apart from comedy, that feels appropriate for this time of year. That is horror -- specifically, British folk horror (the gory American stuff trotted out at Halloween does nothing for me).

These films and television programmes operate in a world of sleeted citadels and misty moorland, candlelit crypts and lurching cadavers, desolate graveyards and village inns, where weary travellers rest for a moment before continuing on their lonely journey into nightmare and torment. The atmosphere is usually dark and thundery, but not always: A Warning to the Curious (arguably the best instalment of the BBC's 1970s "ghost story for Christmas" strand) is made all the better by the parched, sun-drenched landscape of Suffolk in July. The Two Faces of Evil, a sultry tale of possession from the Hammer House of Horror television series, pulls off the same trick.

It's impossible to talk about British horror without mentioning Hammer, much as it is impossible to talk about British humour without mentioning the Carry Ons. They are two sides of the same coin: the fun factory and the fright factory. Low budget and quickly produced, they feature an informal repertory company of performers, and scripts knocked off by pipe-smoking hacks in six weeks or less. We delight when we see booming, baroque Christopher Lee or birdy, emaciated Peter Cushing (an incredibly sweet man in real life, but blessed with a face like a vampire bat's tombstone) in the same way we delight at Sid James' "yak yak yak" laugh or Kenneth Williams sashaying on. It is fitting, I think, that the best send up of the Hammer franchise is Carry On Screaming -- and Screaming is quite possibly the best Carry On.

Perhaps it's because humour and horror rely on the same techniques: shock and surprise, suspense, the pull-back, the reveal -- even deliciously camp costumes. There is a reason why The League of Gentlemen -- Mark Gatiss, Steve Pemberton, Reece Shearsmith and Jeremy Dyson -- was so fascinated with both genres and able to blend the punch of each tradition to achieve laughs and scares simultaneously. [...]

Horror, like comedy, is about the human soul and human reaction: laughter and screams, in the context of creativity and imagination, are more for me than a simple chemical process.

...AND JUSTICE FOR SOME:

THE WILL TO POWER:

South Australia aims to reach 100 per cent "net renewables" within a few years - over a full year - but in the past week it has already done better than that.

THE GREATEST GIFT:

It's a Wonderful Life gives us a "big picture" view of what makes a community strong, real, and vibrant. Even in a time when so many of us have not experienced genuine community life, Frank Capra helps us to recognize it.

The people who live in Bedford Falls are a part of something greater than themselves. To survive, a community or a civil society must have enough people with the humility to know this is the case. Too often in our society today we have people at the top who "have it all" and people at the bottom who are barely surviving. Isn't it time for those of us in the shrinking middle to start acting as if we share a common humanity with the folks at the top and the folks at the bottom?

Strong communities do not just happen. In Capra's vision of genuine community, sacrifices have to be made, personal time must be invested, and sustained effort put into forming friendships.

The marriage of George and Mary Bailey is seen as a foundational structure that frames a way of life in community and civil society. When the hard times come, we have to be able to rely on people we can trust and they must be able to rely on us. This assumes that we must know one another well enough for trust to be possible. Capra grasps these concepts and depicts them brilliantly in the sequences right after George and Mary get married.

George and Mary witness a run on the bank. George explains to the investors that their homes are really an investment in everyone else's home as well. This turns out to be one of the best scenes in classic movie history to explain what the common good is all about. George reassures everybody that: "We can get through this thing all right. We've got to stick together, though. We've got to have faith in each other."

We only see glimpses of life in Pottersville, but what we see is that people are not happy. Ernie is an unfriendly, bitter and divorced man. Nick is no longer a kind bartender but a bully, and Violet is being arrested and dragged to jail.

George has touched many lives by the choices he made every day. It is important to recognize that every single person has a gift to give to others. Their absence leaves a hole in the fabric of society and the world would never be the same without them.

Clarence brings the lesson home: "Strange, isn't it? Each man's life touches so many other lives, and when he isn't around he leaves an awful hole, doesn't he?"

FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS:

In the first part of his book describing and assessing "State Capitalism," Gregg addresses economic problems of state capitalism such as inefficiency, decreased productivity, slower innovation, worse products, and stagnant wages. State Capitalism describes both the status quo and the current trend of the American economy. It refers to the idea that markets should be managed by governments, particularly when it comes to matters of trade, industrial policy, and determining what kinds of investments companies should make. Gregg marshals compelling historical evidence of the detrimental effects of tariffs, of industrial policy, and of departures from traditional profit and loss incentive structures. Then he goes much further.

The Next American Economy recognizes that "Americans are not simply economic beings, and America is more than an economy." The deeper problem with state capitalism involves moral, political, and social corruption. Gregg rightly notes that tariffs make for bad economics and bad politics--encouraging businesses to devote huge resources to lobbying politicians and regulators for favors in order to charge consumers higher prices and face less competition. When companies lobby the government, they put fewer resources towards producing high quality products more efficiently: "Lobbying for tariffs to be applied to one's industry or business is not a cost-free exercise, but the potential payoff is very big." Political connections become more important than productivity.

Gregg argues that advocates of tariffs and industrial policy on the political right are gravely mistaken, not only about the efficacy of those policies, but in their interpretation of the times. With the rise of Trump, alarm bells have not stopped ringing about China. The former president argued that China has been "winning" at trade while the U.S. has been "losing." Not only that, but China has made impressive advances through their industrial policy while the U.S. sat on its hands. According to this narrative, the U.S. needs to get its act together quickly to deal with China's rise by creating significant trade barriers and engaging in constructive industrial policy.

This narrative has gained significant traction in recent years. Supposedly, U.S. policymakers were asleep at the wheel over the past two decades, lulled into somnambulance by the bromides of free market and free trade "extremism." In that time, China has vaulted onto the world stage as the primary U.S. rival--aided and abetted by naïve trade policy. To this narrative Gregg says, "No, no, no!" 

China's rise has been greatly overblown. Their economy has several serious problems: corruption, low levels of innovation, massive amounts of debt, significant misallocations of capital, horrendous demographic trends, and relatively bleak investment prospects. And this should not be surprising! Industrial policy has these effects. China's rise over the past 30 years has been driven largely by its openness to trade and its embrace of certain market principles in its special economic zones. The more China departs from those policies, as President Xi has indicated they will, the greater the problems their economy will face. Any narrative suggesting that emulating Chinese industrial policy will strengthen the U. S. economy is, to quote Macbeth, "a tale told by an idiot."

Yet many on the political right have bought into such a narrative. 

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

The Trump brand https://t.co/FPGxXoQBV0

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 17, 2022

PITY THE POOR LUDDITES:

This long wait has fuelled some misplaced scepticism, best summed up in the old joke: 'Fusion is the energy of the future... and always will be.' Some of those who are sceptical, such as those in the green movement, would prefer it if humanity reined in its ambitions. Abundant clean energy is anathema to environmentalists who want to force society to reduce its energy consumption.

Other sceptics simply don't understand how technological progress works. Every significant breakthrough in history has always started with a small step, which, once achieved, opens the floodgates of progress.

This week's fusion breakthrough is roughly equivalent to when the Wright Brothers first flew 250 metres. We are getting off the ground, but not quite yet flying. The Wright Brothers achieved this milestone in 1903. Within just 10 years, flight was everywhere. After the first step is taken, when we know something is possible, all that is left is a practical engineering problem to be solved. As Turrell puts it: 'Making the leap from flying 250 metres to flying for miles is easier than being rooted to the ground and figuring out how to fly. Psychologically, getting to the first level of accomplishment is everything.' Net energy gain is the same for nuclear fusion. It has broken the credibility barrier.

The engineering challenges ahead remain immense. But this breakthrough will inspire us to meet this challenge.

gREAT rEPLACING THEMSELVES:

In one study, researchers concluded that people living in more-conservative parts of the United States disproportionately bore the burden of illness and death linked to COVID-19. The other, which looked at health outcomes more broadly, found that the more conservative a state's policies, the shorter the lives of working-age people.

The reasons are many, but, increasingly, it is state -- and not just federal -- policies that have begun to shape the economic, family, environmental, and behavioral circumstances that affect people's well-being. Some states have expanded their social safety nets, raising minimum wages and offering earned income tax credits while using excise taxes to discourage behaviors -- such as smoking -- that have deleterious health consequences. Other states have moved in the opposite direction.

ORANGE IS THE NEW ORANGE:

The House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol plans on Monday to vote on issuing criminal referrals against former president Donald Trump for insurrection and at least two other charges, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to discuss it.

It had been widely expected that the panel would recommend charges against Trump for obstructing an official proceeding of Congress and conspiracy to defraud the United States. The panel's members had already argued in federal court that they believed it was likely that he committed those two felonies. But the addition of an accusation of insurrection was a new development.

IT'S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

A Georgia man pleaded guilty today to a federal hate crime and a firearms violation for shooting into two Clayton County convenience stores in an attempt to kill those inside because of their race and ethnicity.

According to information presented in court, on July 30, 2021, Larry Edward Foxworth, 48, of Jonesboro, fired numerous rounds from a Glock pistol through a window and door of a Shell gas station convenience store on Tara Boulevard in Jonesboro. Just minutes later, Foxworth again fired multiple rounds from the same handgun through the windows and door of a nearby BP gas station convenience store. Both stores were open for business and occupied when Foxworth fired the shots. No one was injured in either shooting, but Foxworth admitted that he intended to kill people inside the stores and on the premises.       

Clayton County Police Department officers arrested Foxworth shortly after the second attack. While in police custody at the scene, Foxworth made multiple statements explaining that he was targeting Black people and others who he perceived to be Arab. 

A criminal complaint was unsealed today charging Edward Kelley, 33, of Maryville, Tennessee, and Austin Carter, 26, of Knoxville, Tennessee, with conspiracy, retaliating against a federal official, interstate communication of a threat, and solicitation to commit a crime of violence. Kelley and Carter made their initial appearance in federal court today in Knoxville before U.S. Magistrate Judge Jill E. McCook. Both defendants have been detained. Carter has a detention hearing scheduled for Dec. 21.

According to court documents, Kelley, who is facing charges in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia related to his assault on a law enforcement officer during the breach of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, obtained a list of law enforcement personnel who participated in that criminal investigation. In conversations with a cooperating witness, Kelley and Carter discussed collecting information and plans to kill the individual law enforcement personnel on the list that included an attack on the FBI's Knoxville, Tennessee Field Office

A Minnesota man who idolized the shooter who killed five people at a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs and was allegedly building an arsenal of automatic weapons to use against police was arrested this week after a retired police officer reported his behavior to authorities, according to federal charges.

The warning signs -- strikingly similar to the circumstances that preceded the shooting at Colorado's Club Q last month -- prompted a monthslong federal investigation into River William Smith, and resulted in a far different outcome.

Smith, who also expressed interest in joining neo-Nazi paramilitary groups and fired an AK-47-style rifle in his home in 2019, was charged with federal weapons counts this week. 

Federal investigators have examined email exchanges between three Trump-affiliated attorneys and far-right Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), a key figure in Republican efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, a newly released court order showed.

The revelation emerged after Chief Judge Beryl Howell of the district court in Washington, D.C., granted the Justice Department's request to unseal two previous court rulings -- a memorandum and order from June and a memorandum opinion from September -- declaring that the requested communications weren't protected by any claims of privilege.

The tranche included 37 email exchanges between Perry, coup-plotting Trump attorney John Eastman, and former Justice Department officials Jeffrey Clark and Ken Klukowski; an autobiography draft; and other writing in which Perry and the others discussed subverting the 2020 election.

NO ONE BELIEVES HE'S CONSERVATIVE:

Long before Trump had his Non-Fungible Token (NFT) digital trading card collection, he had acquired a favorite painter, Jon McNaughton. A few weeks ago, McNaughton released a video in honor of Trump's new bid for a second term at the helm of the United States government. It overlays McNaughton's famous images--Trump, head bowed, being blessed by Frederick Douglass; a muscled citizen gripping an American flag and a semiautomatic rifle-with clips from the ex-president's dour announcement speech:  "We will be resisted by ... the Marxist radicals."

What's strange about the montage is how unmistakably Communist the MAGA court artist is in his style. In his techniques and themes, McNaughton's paintings are literally socialist-realist propaganda posters. His image of Trump clutching an American flag imitates a classic North Korean painting. His depictions of lone citizens atop horses, hoisting flags, mimic late Soviet propaganda posters. His depictions of fat-cat elites and languishing common men are near-direct copies of Maoist and Bolshevik propaganda depictions of the "enemies of the state."

Maybe Bolshevik art is the only art MAGA's top painter has ever seen for inspiration. But I don't think it's just a comic coincidence. One of Trump's most popular new NFTs is eeriely--though probably inadvertently-- reminiscent of the iconic Soviet poster "The Victory of Communism Is Inevitable." Of all artistic movements, Trumpist art was likeliest to channel socialist realism because Trumpism as a philosophy has a great deal in common with socialist realism, no matter how much it condemns "radical Marxism" for rally boo-lines. Communism derives its authority from by casting the existing establishment as the enemy, even after it gains power. My father, Charles Fairbanks, former director of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (and a contributor to The UnPopulist), spent a lifetime studying Communism. He recently noted to me that Mao Zedong actively encouraged a people's rebellion against his own government. "That is also what Trump does. It may be startling to realize this parallel because Trump calls himself a conservative. But Trump from the very start has insisted that the American government he wants to run will always be an enemy," my dad wrote.

Soviet Communism undermined itself after it seized power because it had to constantly refresh itself by: one, making incoherent claims of its own victimhood and, two, sowing divisions among genuine communities by identifying new enemies--the rural bourgeoisie, the 'Old Bolsheviks,' the Jews. Likewise, Trump's fanboy, McNaughton, laments that his idol's comeback won't be "easy,"  because literally everyone is Trump's enemy: "He's been trashed by the media, hunted by the Deep State ... and [now] blocked by both Republicans and Democrats."

CHRISTMAS LIGHTS ARE INCIPIENT:

The concept is called hydrovoltaic energy. "A big issue with hydrovoltaic energy harvesting from organic materials is the extremely low power output which it is difficult to power practical devices," says Jonas Garemark, a doctoral student and co-author of the work published in Advanced Functional Materials. "In our work, we can reach microwatts per square centimeter, which provides useful power outputs."

Natural wood contains long, empty channels called lumen that conduct water. These channels can be micrometers to millimeters wide. There has been a lot of research on nanoengineering wood to change its chemical makeup and nanostructure, which impart unique properties such as elasticity,  pliability and transparency. But, says Garemark, "no one has so far attempted to utilize the empty spaces within natural wood.

 

The KTH researchers decided to fill these voids with even smaller porous structures. The thought was that this would speed up the flow of water through the structure and increase the effective surface area between water and wood.

Making the efficient wood-based generator involved a one-step chemical treatment. The researchers immersed a piece of balsa wood in a water-sodium hydroxide solution for 48 hours at -6°C. This causes the cell walls in wood to partly break apart, causing a dense jumble of tiny cellulose fibers to collect in the lumen.

The dense network of fibers creates many smaller pores, which boosts water uptake and surface area charge, just as the researchers predicted. Their measurements showed that the modified wood produced 10 times more electricity than natural wood when soaked in pure water.

WITH HUNTS ARE A FUNCTION OF WITCHES:

It was 1645, when brick-maker Hugh Parsons and his wife Mary were charged with witchcraft. Settlers in New England had been rocked by news of the Civil War back in the old country. And cracks were emerging in the theological system that had been established by the Puritan authorities. Unlike some towns in New England, where entire parishes had upped sticks and emigrated, Springfield's population was a diverse collection of people from different parts of Britain. They came with their own belief systems and habits, and presumably prejudices, carried along with them. The town father, William Pynchon, had to attempt to steer this ship of souls with the assistance of the local minister. 

Life was hard, and many struggled. As back in Britain, infants born in this new world died with depressing regularity. Families faced the vicissitudes of crop survival, and clung to a grim livelihood, believing at least in a Calvinistic predestination. Hugh had a marketable trade, but still found it hard to stay out of debt. He also seems to have been something of a strange fellow. He was constantly dropping in on his neighbors uninvited, for no other reason than to sit at their table and have a smoke. Was he bored? Nosy? Oblivious to social cues? Who knows? 

But this kind of ambiguous behavior could add up in a case about someone being a witch. As for Mary, she was apparently witch-obsessed. She talked of witches, and accused others before settling the blame on her husband. She was a gossip, he was unreliable in business, and their bad marriage apparently annoyed the town. 

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Before he peacefully helped throw off the yoke of Soviet control over Czechoslovakia, Václav Havel's plays needled the Socialist authorities' dreary conformity to Marxist-Leninist ideology. The Garden Party, a 1963 play by Havel uses the absurd experience of a young Czech, Hugo Pludek, to ridicule the empty facade of the drones employed by the Soviet bureaucracy in Hugo's encounters with members of the government's Liquidation Office. 

Hugo's journey through the Liquidation Office's garden party serves as a lesson on bureaucracies' mind-numbing stifling of an individual's true character. The empty-headed opinions, one-liners, and observations made by the party-goers expose the audience to the depths of self-delusion that members of the bureaucracy will display to square the circle of their world. In Hugo's case, the bureaucrats reflected the very conformity expressed by Czechoslovak citizens under Soviet rule. The Garden Party was not an in-your-face, slapstick indictment of the regime. It was a dry, ironic, and subtle impersonation of the soulless Czechs who played their parts like puppets in the Communist government's theater.  [...]

 The bureaucrats in The Garden Party could easily be replaced by the mob that practices the heckler's veto today, as the same empty platitudes expressed by students on college campuses or administrators in positions of power are the same as Soviet bureaucrats. Sloganeering is a stand-in for solutions, the collective muzzles the individual into the system. The Garden Party might serve as a reminder for comics to continue to step outside the boundaries of acceptable language, tone, and styles. That way the cheap conformity that The Garden Party derides is a little weaker throughout America's comedy scene.   

THE rIGHT EXISTS TO AMUSE NORMAL PEOPLE:

The biggest danger of political violence in Germany today comes from right-wing extremists. The group around Reuß was typical of the Reichsbürger in that many of its members had connections to the state security apparatus. There were enough current and former special forces, police officers and politicians that they might well have succeeded, for a while at least, in their plan to shut down large parts of Germany's power supply and storm the Bundestag. The death toll would almost certainly have been high.

The internal security services believe there to be as many as 23,000 Reichsbürger, but say that only around 5 per cent are right-wing extremists. This is baffling. How can there be a moderate version of the claim that the peace agreement signed after the Second World War was illegitimate? What would a centrist version be of the position that German democracy is prima facie invalid, and either the National Socialists or the monarchy should be restored to power? It may be true that only a small percentage of the Reichsbürger are potentially violent terrorists, but that doesn't mean they aren't all right-wing extremists.

As dangerous as they may be, however, we should keep laughing at the Reichsbürger. Reuß's beliefs are both so absurd and so terrifying that to argue against them is to grant them a dignity they don't deserve. What do you say to someone who believes that the Rothschilds and the Freemasons were responsible for the First World War, that the British assassinated Rasputin and the US financed Hitler's rise to power? How do you argue against someone who believes he is destined to rule because of his superior bloodline? How do you argue against people who believe they have found a legal technicality that invalidates the last seven decades of German political life?

Less criminally inclined segments of the German aristocracy (like their British counterparts) are funny too. 'For 850 years,' the head of the Reuß family told RTL, 'we were a tolerant and cosmopolitan dynasty in East Germany' - which can only be true if you overlook a couple of crusaders and a Nazi or two.

Or take the the Hohenzollern. The Franconian branch of the family has spent the last decade in a legal quest to see its property restored. The result has been a glut of historical research proving repeatedly that the family were instrumental in the Nazis' rise to power. The head of the Swabian line meanwhile is too busy playing jazz with his band Royal Groovin' - 'high-carat musicians' who provide 'entertainment with a royal warrant' - to concern himself with his relatives' lawsuits.

NOW REPLACE VLAD WITH TAXES:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Great, now all of MAGA will want the NFT... https://t.co/lxlfAwuuM1

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 16, 2022

THE METRIC LANGUAGE:

English spread across the globe largely as a result of imperialism, as the language was imposed on colonies in Asia, Africa, Australia and the Americas. When these former colonies achieved independence, many chose to retain the use of English, usually to function as a primary working language and neutral medium of communication for their diverse populations. As countries such as India, Nigeria, South Africa, Jamaica and Singapore adopted English as a language, they also adapted it - making significant changes to its pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary, and giving rise to new varieties now collectively known as World Englishes.

Today, the predominance of English as a language of science, technology, business, diplomacy and entertainment has given many people around the world a strong incentive to acquire the language. From Brazil to South Korea, Spain to Indonesia, millions of people are learning English, and they too are making their own mark on its development.

The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has documented many of the words that these new communities of English speakers have added to the vocabulary. Many of these words are borrowings from other languages with which English is in constant contact, such as lepak (to loiter aimlessly) from Malay, deurmekaar (confused, muddled) from Afrikaans, kaveera (a plastic bag) from Luganda, and whāngai (an adopted child and the adoption itself) from Māori, which may be unfamiliar to British English speakers but are words characteristic of Malaysian English, South African English, Ugandan English and New Zealand English respectively.

Speakers of world varieties of English are remaking its vocabulary to better express their identities, cultures and everyday realities.

THE MOUTH OF MADNESS:

Twitter owner Elon Musk's boosting of far-right memes and grievances has injected new energy into the jumbled set of conspiracy theories known as QAnon, a fringe movement that Twitter and other social networks once banned as too extreme.

The billionaire has spread bogus theories about the violent attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband to his 120 million followers, and he called for the criminal prosecution of infectious-disease expert Anthony S. Fauci. He has thrown around baseless accusations about adults sexualizing children, helping stir up an angry online mob against Yoel Roth, a former Twitter safety executive Musk praised in October for his "high integrity."

And on Tuesday, he tweeted a message with an emoji that many people interpreted as saying "follow the white rabbit," possibly harking back to "Alice in Wonderland" or "The Matrix." But many QAnon believers saw the rabbit as a wink to one of their foundational icons, a secret indicator shared in one of QAnon's earliest online prophesies, known as "drops."

Musk mocked the suggestion that the tweet could be interpreted negatively but offered no clarification. Among QAnon promoters, though, the message was clear: Musk was speaking to them.

One QAnon-amplifying account on Telegram with 118,000 followers, known for spreading a bogus claim that Russian fighters were targeting "U.S. biolabs" in Ukraine, said the tweet was only his latest flirtation with QAnon ideology.

"Elon called out Fauci for creating [covid-19], [is] calling out the woke hive mind, is paving the path for 2020 to be nullified and Trump reinstated ... and now he's directly quoting Q," the account said. "Elon is an Anon," the account added, using the term QAnon disciples call themselves.

NUKE 'EM:

"The Biggest Source of Power in Every State and Province" https://t.co/Z3ba163ckC pic.twitter.com/OQYfGPtFUx

— Scott Lincicome (@scottlincicome) December 15, 2022

TRANSITORY IS AS TRANSITORY DOES:

It's impossible to overstate deflationary pressures.
https://t.co/5WkMuN0Rhr

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 15, 2022

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The prosecutor tasked with investigating former president Donald Trump is showing so much hustle, he's prompted former prosecutors to say Smith may be gearing up to indict Trump within the first few months of 2023.  [...] 

Others point out Smith is assembling a top-shelf team of hard-charging lawyers--one that appears to mean business.  

"I don't think they would've left their former positions, both in government and private practice, unless there was a serious possibility that the Justice Department was on a path to charge," Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, told Meet The Press on Sunday. 

"And I think it'll happen in a month," Bharara said. 

Smith has been moving faster than even his famous predecessor, former Special Counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller initially began his two-year probe of the Trump campaign's ties to Russia without an office or a team. 

By contrast, Smith inherited two ongoing investigations that have only appeared to ramp up since his appointment. 

That means Smith is taking over a staff that's already almost twice as big as the team of lawyers that worked for Mueller, according to CNN. 

Immediately after his appointment, Smith promised: "The pace of the investigations will not pause or flag under my watch." And so far, from all outward appearances, it hasn't. 

BECAUSE NO ONE CARES ABOUT RUDY'S OBSESSIONS:

[T]he "Twitter Files" are a desperate attempt to legitimize a well-worn conservative narrative that the suppression of Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell" proved collusion between the so-called deep state and social media companies. Tweets laced with allegations that former Twitter executives purposefully stopped aggressive moderation of child exploitation often subsume the Twitter replies, but the details of the "Twitter Files" do not seem to hold new revelations. Instead, they serve the purpose of demonizing Twitter's former content moderation executives to make it seem like they were prioritizing the moderation of political disinformation above child exploitation. In the crosshairs, quite literally, are a handful of former employees tasked with "Trust and Safety," tech speak for brand management. One of them, Yoel Roth, has fled his home amid death threats.

In fact, what the "Twitter Files" reveal is what we already knew about social media governance from the "Facebook Files": Social media corporations spend a large amount of time and resources discussing how to bend the rules so that politicians and celebrity influencers don't get suspended. To pretend that the "Twitter Files" illustrates internal political bias on behalf of the old regime is to ignore the reality that Musk's new regime is much more politically motivated.

Ultimately, both social media releases are attempts at shaping the mainstream media narratives about the purpose and practice of content moderation on massively large open platforms. But while the "Facebook Files" took months to contextualize and fact-check, Musk is baiting mainstream media companies to cover a manufactured scandal about something that happened years ago and it is still not yielding returns. So far, the media largely isn't taking the bait, showing that news coverage doesn't just happen simply because a billionaire tries to engineer it. Silence is still the editor's best kept weapon in the content wars.

NO ONE HAS IT HARDER THAN THEIR FATHER DID:

BLACK, AS GOD INTENDED:

A french press is under $30, if you can't find one at the thrift store...https://t.co/EbBmSaBIQW

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 15, 2022

...AND CHEAPER...:

It's impossible to overstate deflationary pressures.
https://t.co/eZl5IfmTwS

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 15, 2022

YOU'D THINK THE BORDER WALL WOULD HAVE STOPPED THEM:

"It's a very family-focused neighborhood," said Mary Benoit, a longtime Meadowoods resident. "Everybody has a dog." [...]

To a person, neighbors this week described the Braymans as a typical suburban family. They took their young child for walks and seemed to host friends and relatives regularly. The couple was private but friendly enough, saying hello and stopping occasionally to chat.

Local authorities did not appear to have a problem with the home; records show that police were never dispatched to the Braymans' address following their purchase of the home in summer 2019.

If the young couple stood out for anything, neighbors said, it was the barrage of packages that seemed to arrive, nonstop, at their home.

But as Amy Goodridge, who lives across the street and has spoken with them on occasion, acknowledged, "I'm guilty of that, too."

Suspicions about the goings-on at 30 Ellie Drive began to grow in early October, however, following an incident that quickly came to dominate neighborhood discussion.

Dunican, the Braymans' next door neighbor, was cleaning her son's room one afternoon, she told the Globe, when she looked out the window and saw what appeared to be nearly a dozen FBI vehicles surrounding the Braymans' home. For two hours, she said, agents scoured the home and property. A search warrant application, obtained by the Globe last month, shows that agents were seeking evidence tied to the alleged smuggling scheme.

The search quickly became the subject of neighborhood whispers, residents said. That speculation came into sharp focus only on Tuesday, when the indictment was unsealed.

According to authorities, at least some of the packages that piled up at the Braymans' doorstep were filled with sanctioned US items that experts say are commonly used in war.

WHY DO PEOPLE KEEP GETTING THEIR PCs REPAIRED BY A BLIND GUY IN DELAWARE?:

THE CASE OF the Bhima Koregaon 16, in which hackers planted fake evidence on the computers of two Indian human rights activists that led to their arrest along with more than a dozen colleagues, has already become notorious worldwide. Now the tragedy and injustice of that case is coming further into focus: A forensics firm has found signs that the same hackers also planted evidence on the hard drive of another high-profile defendant in the case who later died in jail--as well as fresh clues that the hackers who fabricated that evidence were collaborating with the Pune City Police investigating him.

On Tuesday, Boston-based forensics firm Arsenal Consulting, which has been working on behalf of the defendants in the Bhima Koregaon case, released a new report revealing their analysis of the hard drive of Stan Swamy, perhaps the most famous of the 16 activists arrested in the case, all of whom have advocated for rights for Dalits--the Indian group once known as "untouchables"--as well as for Indian Muslims and indigenous people. Swamy, an 84-year-old Jesuit priest who suffered from Parkinson's disease, died in a hospital last year after being arrested in 2019 and contracting Covid-19 in jail. Arsenal has now found that evidence found on Swamy's computer was fabricated by the same hackers whom Arsenal found planting evidence on two other defendants in the case, Surendra Gadling and Rona Wilson.

IT'S ALWAYS TRUMPISTS AND THEY ALWAYS BLAME THE LEFT:

While CNN has published many of Meadows' messages from Jan. 5 and the day of the riot, the full log, which stretched from Election Day in 2020 up until Trump's last day in office, Jan. 20, 2021, reveals that the effort to pin the violence on "antifa" extended well beyond the day the Capitol was stormed. It also shows that members of Congress were key proponents of this conspiracy theory despite the fact they were present at the Capitol as Trump supporters brawled with police and smashed through the building. In the wake of a massive FBI investigation that is the largest in the bureau's history and has resulted in hundreds of arrests of people who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, there has been no credible evidence of any widespread far-left presence. 

Ingraham promoted the idea that "antifa" was behind the Jan. 6 attack hours after it took place, telling her audience that the insurgents "were likely not all Trump supporters, and there are some reports that antifa sympathizers may have been sprinkled throughout the crowd."  [...]

As the crowds raged through the Capitol, Donald Trump Jr., the president's son, wrote Meadows to say his father was not doing "enough" to "condemn this shit." He followed that denouncement up with a suggestion the violence wasn't coming from the Trump faithful. 

"I'm not convinced these are trump supporters either btw so we should be looking into that," Don Jr. wrote.  [...]

Less than an hour later, Jason Miller, a Trump campaign adviser, suggested "antifa" could be held responsible via a tweet from the president.  

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

BREAKING: Judge Cannon dismisses the special master proceeding that she never should've initiated

This is sweet vindication for those of us who analyzed from the start this day would come for the rule of law

It also means Trump is once again on the fast track to prosecution pic.twitter.com/D0JGchGOhI

— Norm Eisen (@NormEisen) December 12, 2022

IT'S A RICO CASE:

The Trump Organization was found in criminal contempt by a Manhattan judge following a secret one-day trial in 2021 during a tax fraud investigation, the New York Times first reported Tuesday.

...AND CHEAPER...:

There are a number of pieces of the fusion puzzle that scientists have been steadily improving for decades to produce this result, and further work can make this process more efficient.

First, lasers were only invented in 1960. When the U.S. government completed construction of the National Ignition Facility in 2009, it was the most powerful laser facility in the world, able to deliver 1 million joules of energy to a target. The 2 million joules it produces today is 50 times more energetic than the next most powerful laser on Earth. More powerful lasers and less energy-intensive ways to produce those powerful lasers could greatly improve the overall efficiency of the system.

Fusion conditions are very challenging to sustain, and any small imperfection in the capsule or fuel can increase the energy requirement and decrease efficiency. Scientists have made a lot of progress to more efficiently transfer energy from the laser to the canister and the X-ray radiation from the canister to the fuel capsule, but currently only about 10% to 30% of the total laser energy is transferred to the canister to the fuel.

Finally, while one part of the fuel, deuterium, is naturally abundant in sea water, tritium is much rarer. Fusion itself actually produces tritium, so researchers are hoping to develop ways of harvesting this tritium directly. In the meantime, there are other methods available to produce the needed fuel.

These and other scientific, technological and engineering hurdles will need to be overcome before fusion will produce electricity for your home. Work will also need to be done to bring the cost of a fusion power plant well down from the US$3.5 billion of the National Ignition Facility. These steps will require significant investment from both the federal government and private industry.

It's worth noting that there is a global race around fusion, with many other labs around the world pursuing different techniques. But with the new result from the National Ignition Facility, the world has, for the first time, seen evidence that the dream of fusion is achievable.

IMAGINE AN ALTERNATE REALITY WHERE THE PRESIDENT DIDN'T OPPOSE THEM?:

The Covid-19 vaccines have kept more than 18.5 million people in the US out of the hospital and saved more than 3.2 million lives, a new study says - and that estimate is most likely a conservative one, the researchers say. [...]

The research comes from the Commonwealth Fund and Yale School of Public Health.

Their study, published Tuesday, found that without Covid-19 vaccines, the nation would have had 1.5 times more infections, 3.8 times more hospitalizations and 4.1 times more deaths than it did between December 2020 and November 2022.

As it stands now, Covid-19 has caused at least 99.2 million cases and more than 1.08 million deaths in the US. Just in the past week, there were 2,981 new deaths and 30,253 new hospital admissions, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The study estimates that the vaccinations were also a good financial bet, saving the US $1.15 trillion in medical costs.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Associate Professor Amgad Rezk, from RMIT's School of Engineering, who led the work, says the team's innovation tackles big challenges for green hydrogen production.

"One of the main challenges of electrolysis is the high cost of electrode materials used, such as platinum or iridium," says Rezk.

"With sound waves making it much easier to extract hydrogen from water, it eliminates the need to use corrosive electrolytes and expensive electrodes such as platinum or iridium. As water is not a corrosive electrolyte, we can use much cheaper electrode materials such as silver."

The ability to use low-cost electrode materials and avoiding the use of highly corrosive electrolytes are potential game-changers for lowering the costs of producing green hydrogen, according to Rezk.

NO ONE WILL MISS JOBS:

For example, the best time to invest in computer stocks was after the 1987 Flash Crash. That left promising computer stocks like Microsoft (MSFT) trading for less than 20 cents per share (split adjusted). 

The best time to invest in internet stocks was after the 2000 dot-com bubble burst. That left promising internet stocks like Amazon (AMZN) trading for about 30 cents per share (split adjusted). 

The best time to invest in smartphone stocks was after the 2008 financial crisis, which left smartphone stocks like Apple (AAPL) trading for less than $3 per share (split adjusted). 

And the best time to invest in electric vehicle stocks was after the 2020 COVID crash. That left EV stocks like Tesla (TSLA) trading for about $25 per share (split adjusted).

This pattern is clear. Every time the stock market crashes, a group of emerging technology stocks is left trading at massive discounts. Investors who buy at those prices end up making fortunes over the next several years. [...]

I truly believe AI and automation technologies will represent one of the greatest technological paradigm shifts of our lifetimes. And according to my research, that shift will mostly occur in the 2020s.

That is, over the next decade, we will go from a human-driven world to a robot-driven one. All the while, our society and global economy will be forever transformed.

Like many before it, this technological megatrend will be driven by a convergence of the world's need for automation technologies and the swell of engineers capable of building them.

LOSING IS MAGA METH:

Ronna McDaniel is set to glide to a fourth term as chair of the Republican National Committee next month -- an unprecedented vote of confidence for a leader who has thus far failed to preside over a single positive election cycle.

MAKING THIS A PARTICULARLY IMPORTANT TIME TO HUMILIATE THEM:

The Chinese Dream was symbolised by social engagement, as opposed to the American Dream, which reflected Western individualism. To demonstrate the seriousness with which he took this notion of communal solidarity, Xi directed the authorities to clamp down on corruption and personal aggrandisement within the ranks of the CCP. For him and the country, social improvement was to be a collective effort, and all would reap the benefits. These included the promise that GDP per person would double within Xi's original term of office, that citizens would have access to massively improved welfare provisions, and that China would start to develop a military "capable of fighting and winning wars".

It was all going so well -- until Covid-19 hit. Even when China was initially building a consensus for lockdown, the restrictions were sold as a selfless, patriotic duty. While the Covid-related fatality statistics remained low -- perhaps implausibly low -- people bought the narrative of a paternalistic party protecting its people. But over the last few years, China's lockdowns have done untold damage to people's families, their businesses, and their health. As time dragged on and Chinese citizens gradually realised that the government had no Plan B, they slowly began to withdraw their loyalty.

Until recently, demonstrations of frustration with the state and its armed goons have been curiously middle-class affairs, like the tang ping (lying flat) movement of students who refused to get out of bed. That was a form of passive resistance, and therefore fundamentally unthreatening. The real attack on Chinese authority came when striking workers broke out of the Foxconn plant, and then unemployed youth united with ordinary people and began tearing down Covid barriers and demanding freedom.

During the course of the demonstrations in November, many shouted slogans insisting that Xi Jinping step down, called for an end to CCP rule, and demanded greater civil rights -- a direct challenge to the Communist Party. China has responded by becoming the only country to have overturned Covid policy in response to popular anger, which is ironic given the caricature of Chinese people as passive subjects of their rulers.

The problem now facing the CCP is how to rebuild its popular legitimacy -- and rewrite its national narrative -- as nearly three years of Covid policy end in disastrous failure. What kind of narrative will Xi turn to in order to explain all this away?

For a hint, we can look at the "For a Life of Contentment" report, published last week by the state media's think tank, New China Research. It sets out a strategy to recapture "harmonious" public order by outlining China's place in the world. 

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

On a summer evening earlier this year, I sat talking with a Taliban commander in Afghanistan's Bamiyan valley, a region that has become a crucible for the militant group's claim to have moderated its ideology and style of governance. Bamiyan lies in the heart of the central Hazarajat region, considered home to the Hazara, an ethnic group of Turkic-Mongolic origin with a rich cultural history. After the collapse of President Ashraf Ghani's government in 2021, Bamiyan fell under the rule of the reborn "Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan," as the Taliban refers to the country. The Taliban, most of whom are of Pashtun ethnicity, are now grappling with the monumental task of governing an ethnic group with whom they have deep cultural differences, as well as a history of violence and mistrust. How they handle this challenge may well decide the future of their regime in Afghanistan.

As we sat under the dying evening light, my conversation with the Taliban commander drifted toward the three subjects that have dominated Afghanistan for the last half century: politics, religion and guns. Cradling his Kalashnikov rifle as we spoke, he paused at one point to note the manufacturing date engraved between its trigger and stock. "It was made in 1976," he said. "It is older than me, than you, and almost every one of us here."

The commander was dressed in a shalwar kameez that had seen better days, the cotton thin and frayed to the brink of ruin. His turban was black, his eyes dark, his beard lengthy. Though he held the title of "mawlawi," indicating that he was a religious scholar, his knowledge of Islam seemed rudimentary at best. He was polite and hospitable, as we Afghans usually are. Yet it quickly became clear that he was a village-level mullah who had learned his faith from men of similar schooling. In different circumstances, his ill-informed piety may have been a trivial detail. But the more time I spent with him, the more troubling it became. Under the Taliban, Afghanistan is being run by theocrats who have known little except war. For some, the years of bloodshed have motivated them to reconcile with their enemies and make compromises for the sake of peace. For others, painful memories of their sacrifices during the conflict now fuel a desire to turn their military victory into a full-blown cultural revolution.

The more the mawlawi spoke, the clearer it became which side of the divide he occupied. Once a mid-ranking commander in the Taliban's southern heartlands, he was now an officer in the army of the Islamic Emirate, with responsibility for educating his fellow soldiers about the true nature of their religion. He believed this should have been a straightforward task, and was angry to discover it was not. The more we chatted, the more he revealed his frustration at encountering mundane difficulties he had never imagined during his combat days. In the war against the Americans, he had defined himself against a clear enemy: the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan governments of President Hamid Karzai and his successor Ghani. He hailed from a Pashtun-majority area of Ghazni province and had long been surrounded by insurgents from backgrounds similar to his own.

Now, the mawlawi was stationed in a part of the country dominated by ethnic Hazaras, a minority community with different customs and traditions. Most Hazaras are Shiite, but even the Sunnis among them offend his notion of what it means to be a Muslim, and an Afghan. "Their women, families, and ways of dealing with each other are all opposite to our culture," he told me as he sat on a Persian rug, probably left behind by NATO troops based in Bamiyan before him. "I'm not OK with them -- their thinking has been totally destroyed by the Americans. The culture and freedom they practice is not ours, nor is it practiced in any other part of the country."

Traditionally, the Taliban have drawn their ideological blueprint from an interpretation of Sunni Islam combining classical Hanafi jurisprudence (a school of Islamic law founded by a theologian in 8th-century Iraq named Abu Hanifa, whose family hailed from central Afghanistan) with a 19th-century Hanafi offshoot in the Indian subcontinent known as Deobandism. Their religious practice also incorporates local traditions, which allows them to take a somewhat more pragmatic approach to politics.

Yet the Taliban's pragmatism also lies at the root of some of their most intractable problems. Away from major cities like Kabul and Kandahar, where restrictions on free speech and girls' education have grabbed the attention of the international media, Taliban officials are trying to balance the demands of their most hardline supporters with the complicated reality of ruling over a pluralistic, multiethnic society. This tension is acute in Bamiyan, a province of sandstone cliffs and rolling hills, as well as the site in more recent times of failed uprisings and horrific massacres.

THE DARKNESS BEFORE THE DAWN:

It's true that in modern practice the speaker is most often little more than the leader of the majority party in the House. But the speaker is not supposed to be merely a party leader. The role of speaker is different from that of majority leader. One sees this in the fact that the speaker is an officer of the whole House not of one political party.

And one sees this in the fact the speaker is a constitutional office, mentioned explicitly in Article I and in the Twenty-fifth Amendment. And in the fact that he or she is second in line for succession to the presidency: If there is no president and no vice president to succeed to the office of the presidency, the speaker of the House becomes the acting president.

In his speech and action, Kevin McCarthy has shown no evidence that he cares about the constitutional order. His focus is entirely on the political prospects of his party. His preoccupation is understandable for a party leader. But he now seeks to be elevated from a partisan to a constitutional officer without demonstrating any evident sense of the national responsibility the new role entails.

Quite the contrary.

This is the first election for speaker of the House since the events of January 6th, when a violent mob attacked Congress in an attempt to overturn a constitutional election and the peaceful and constitutional transfer of power.

The new speaker--the first post-January 6th speaker--should not be an election denier. The new speaker should not be any of the 147 representatives and senators who went along with the mob and voted to reject the electors from Arizona and Pennsylvania. The constitutional officer second in line to the presidency should not be someone who tried to overturn the last election for the presidency.

The new speaker will presumably be a Republican, as Republicans (narrowly) won control of the House. But it needn't be a bitterly partisan Republican. And consistent with the role as a constitutional officer for the whole lower chamber, the speaker need not be a sitting member of the House, although there's probably a prudential case for its being someone who is or was recently a member.

There are plenty of Republicans who did not vote to overturn the election results who could serve as speaker. One thinks of sitting members respected by their Republican and Democratic peers, like, Michael McCaul or Patrick McHenry. One can also think of recent Republican members of the House like Barbara Comstock, Charlie Dent, and Will Hurd and, of course, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.

Five or more Trump loyalists seem poised to deny Kevin McCarthy the office he covets as they seek to deepen the Trump influence on governance in America. Surely now is the time for five or more public-spirited Republican House members to seize this opportunity to reach out to Democrats to do the right thing.

HOW DO WE GET THE PRC TO ATTACK INDIA?:

To paraphrase Talleyrand, Putin's war is worse than a crime; it is a fatal mistake that other potential invaders will learn not to repeat. It also reminds us that folly is a feature, rather than a bug, of dictatorships. Without political checks and balances, free media, and an independent civil society, autocrats do not receive the feedback needed to make wise and competent decisions.

In Putin's case, living in a filter bubble has proven exceptionally costly. Russia's economy is in a deep recession, its fiscal revenues have taken a massive hit, and the damage will continue to mount in 2023 after the European Union's oil embargo and the G7's oil-price cap take effect. Lacking cash, Putin has already moved from a strategy of recruiting soldiers for pay to mobilizing them by conscription, undercutting his own popularity and driving hundreds of thousands of educated Russians to flee the country. Making matters worse for him, Russia is losing the war.

Russia's dismal performance is no accident. After the "end of history" 30 years ago, most dictators learned that the old twentieth-century methods of maintaining non-democratic rule no longer worked. In a globalized and technologically interconnected world, open repression is simply too costly. As Daniel Treisman and I show in Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century, most non-democratic leaders have adopted a new strategy: pretend to be a democrat. Hold elections (that are neither free nor fair), permit some independent media (though no outlets with a large audience), and allow some opposition parties, all to create the illusion of a popular mandate to rule.

Putin was a master of this approach for 20 years. But as his regime's corruption and cronyism undermined economic growth, and as digital and social media began to spread, his popularity began to decline. Mindful of this trend, he swiftly annexed Crimea in 2014, which boosted his popularity for a while. Then, in 2022, he tried to replay this strategy on an even grander scale. But he gravely underestimated Ukrainian resolve and Western unity in supporting Ukraine and imposing unprecedented economic sanctions on Russia.

Putin has learned the hard way that it is unwise to start a twentieth-century war in the twenty-first century. And other autocratic and authoritarian regimes will heed this lesson for years to come. One certainly hopes that Russia's Ukraine debacle will deter China from trying to seize Taiwan by force. Senior officials in the Communist Party of China should see that President Xi Jinping's consolidation of power poses many risks to the regime.

Moreover, Putin's war has also caused substantial damage to the global economy, which in turn has contributed to China's unprecedented economic slowdown. Chinese elites are probably asking themselves whether Xi ought to have done more to prevent the invasion or cut the war short. That question joins a long list of others about Xi's zero-COVID policy, his crackdown on private business and the tech industry, and his government's inability to manage the collapse of a real-estate bubble. In a system as opaque as China's, it is hard to predict whether such second-guessing will affect the country's shift toward authoritarianism. But Xi's mistakes have clearly made the "Chinese model" less attractive to others around the world.

Finally, the past year has underscored the importance of solidarity. During the Cold War, the geopolitical West faced a perpetual, existential threat that superseded internal differences and disagreements. But, following the Soviet Union's collapse, there was less to unite Western countries, and many succumbed to domestic divisions. Polarization within and between many democracies deepened, with factors such as rising inequality and the spread of social media accelerating the process. Nonetheless, Western societies came together in 2022 when it counted. While many Western politicians openly praised Putin at the start of the year, almost none do today.

EXTRTEMISTS FORCE US TO WRITE OUT LAWS...:

To be clear, abuse of the ECA didn't start in the 2020 election. The act's provisions were mostly unexplored for well over a century until congressional Democrats began using the process for grandstanding objections to the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections. While these were much more tepid protests and attracted much less support than the 2020 objections, they helped pave the way for the Republicans' escalation.

The Democrats' previous attempts to exploit weaknesses in the ECA no doubt bolstered Republican support for ECA reform. In September, the Senate Rules Committee advanced the Electoral Count Reform Act, the flagship product of the bipartisan working group led by Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Manchin. The bill was voted to the Senate floor on a resounding 14-1 bipartisan vote, including a crucial yes vote from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose support makes it politically easier for other Republicans to back the reform. Only one Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz, opposed the measure, and his arguments, which were confused and unpersuasive, included the idea that Congress could overrule the decisions of state elections officials--a contradiction of his purported conservative, federalist principles.

Under the Senate bill, a number of important changes are made to make the ECA clearer, harder to exploit and more closely aligned with sound interpretations of the Constitution. Federal courts are provided with a streamlined procedure and clearer statutory basis to decide presidential election disputes, including how to handle a rogue governor or secretary of state who refuses to certify the rightful winner of their state's electoral votes, thereby undermining the state's appointment of electors. In addition, the role of Congress is much more explicitly curtailed, reflecting the constitutional principle that it is not within Congress' power to sit in judgment of how each state conducted its popular election. Most crucially, the number of congressional cosponsors needed to raise objections and launch full-scale debate during the electoral count in Congress is raised from the current threshold of just one member of each chamber to one-fifth of each chamber.

The reformed law would also repudiate one of the most dangerous claims made by John Eastman and other Trump allies in 2020: the idea that state legislatures have any power to overturn their state's results after the fact, such as by convening in December to pick a slate of Trump electors even after the state's voters chose Biden in November. Instead, the bill would clearly state the proper constitutional interpretation: that a state legislature's power over the "manner" of choosing electors expires once that method is implemented on Election Day.

On top of these substantive provisions, the law also provides a much-needed reorganization of the rules of congressional procedure contained in the ECA. Gone are the run-on sentences that ramble on for hundreds of words and are nearly impossible to parse. Though it might sound superficial, simply inserting more punctuation, paragraph breaks and clearer language goes a long way to clean up ambiguities that could be exploited in the future. Among these rules changes is an unambiguous declaration that the vice president has no discretionary power over the proceedings, shutting down the argument that Mike Pence could have simply refused to count votes for Biden.

SAMSON WHO?:

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a scalable fabrication technique that allows for the production of paper-thin and lightweight solar cells that can be applied to any surface.

Billed by the MIT researchers as being "much thinner than a human hair", the durable and flexible solar cells are made from semiconducting inks using printing processes that will, one day, be able to be scaled to large-area manufacturing.

The solar cells are one-hundredth the weight of conventional solar panels but able to generate 18-times more power-per-kilogram, and can be glued to most surfaces. As such, MIT claims that the solar cells could be used for everything from wearables through to deployment in disaster emergencies. 

"YEAH, BUT OUR SHIRTS ARE HAWAIIAN, NOT BROWN!":

In February, Jeremy Peters of the New York Times delivered Insurgency, capturing how the party of Lincoln and Reagan morphed into the fiefdom of Trump. Peters caught Steve Bannon rating his former boss among the worst presidents, and likening Trump's history-making 2015 escalator ride to a scene from Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's Nazi propaganda film.

"That's Hitler, Bannon thought." By extension, that makes Mar-a-Lago Trump's Eagle's Nest.

As for Bannon, having burned through a Trump pardon, he awaits sentencing for contempt of Congress and will stand trial next year in Manhattan for conspiracy and fraud. [...]

Baker and Glasser also depicted Hitler as a Trump role model. To John Kelly, his second chief of staff, a retired Marine Corps general and a father bereaved in the 9/11 wars, Trump complained: "You fucking generals, why can't you be like the German generals?"

"Which generals?"

"The German generals in World War II."

"You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?"

According to Baker and Glasser, Kelly used The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, a study by 27 mental health professionals, as an owner's manual.

TAX THE EXTERNALITIES:

The Keystone Pipeline ruptured Wednesday night near a creek in northern Kansas, spilling what its operator, TC Energy, says is about 14,000 barrels of oil. This is equivalent to about 588,000 gallons (an Olympic swimming pool holds about 666,000 gallons). TC Energy says the leak is now contained.

This is the largest land-based crude pipeline spill in the U.S. in nine years. Although the Keystone Pipeline has leaked 22 times before this, this week's spill is bigger than all the others put together. A spill in July 2010 was more expensive-- costing more than $1 billion-- because it affected the Kalamazoo River in Michigan. [...]

The XL Pipeline--the one that folks often confuse with the actual Keystone Pipeline--consists of two new additions to the original pipeline. As planned, they would have added up to 1700 new miles. One addition was designed to connect Cushing to oil refineries in Texas, on the Gulf Coast. That section was built and started operating in January 2014.

THE TRUMP BRAND:

PITY THE POOR LUDDITES:

The US breakthrough comes as the world wrestles with high energy prices and the need to rapidly move away from burning fossil fuels to stop average global temperatures reaching dangerous levels. Through the Inflation Reduction Act, the Biden administration is ploughing almost $370bn into new subsidies for low-carbon energy in an effort to slash emissions and win a global race for next-generation clean tech.

The fusion reaction at the US government facility produced about 2.5 megajoules of energy, which was about 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules of energy in the lasers, the people with knowledge of the results said, adding that the data was still being analysed.

The US department of energy has said energy secretary Jennifer Granholm and under-secretary for nuclear security Jill Hruby will announce "a major scientific breakthrough" at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory on Tuesday. The department declined to comment further.

The laboratory confirmed that a successful experiment had recently taken place at its National Ignition Facility but said analysis of the results was ongoing.

"Initial diagnostic data suggests another successful experiment at the National Ignition Facility. However, the exact yield is still being determined and we can't confirm that it is over the threshold at this time," it said. "That analysis is in process, so publishing the information . . . before that process is complete would be inaccurate."

Two of the people with knowledge of the results said the energy output had been greater than expected, which had damaged some diagnostic equipment, complicating the analysis. The breakthrough was already being widely discussed by scientists, the people added.

"If this is confirmed, we are witnessing a moment of history," said Dr Arthur Turrell, a plasma physicist whose book The Star Builders charts the effort to achieve fusion power. "Scientists have struggled to show that fusion can release more energy than is put in since the 1950s, and the researchers at Lawrence Livermore seem to have finally and absolutely smashed this decades-old goal."

THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO BE SELF-LOATHING ENOUGH TO VOTE MAGA!:

There's plenty of evidence that over time, Republicans have gained ground with Latinos in parts of the country, including Florida. But in the Southwest, an inverse trend has taken hold that could have implications for 2024 and beyond.

In Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico and Colorado, Latinos have stuck with Democrats, and that has helped power the party's gains across a region where Latino population growth has exploded. 

It belies a conventional narrative that Democrats were universally ceding Latino voters to the Republican Party, a story line repeated throughout the run-up to the Nov. 8 midterms. 

Instead, indicators show the GOP in danger of losing Latino voters in this region, a prospect that could mean being boxed out of the Southwest for the long term.

SPARE A THOUGHT FOR OUR NEEDIEST:

The notion that a laptop delivered to the Post by Rudy Giuliani two weeks before the election and rejected by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News and others should not have been treated skeptically is the dicier proposition. Further, the hyperventilating about the assault this represents on the First Amendment is risible. Twitter, a private company, was free to ignore the request. Even if Biden had been president at the time, there would be no violation of the First Amendment. Government officials not infrequently request that journalists refrain from publishing material, often about military secrets. Newspapers sometimes comply and sometimes not. It's only a violation of the First Amendment if the government coerces the journalists.

Nor did Twitter's temporary suspension of the Post's account sway the election. As Cathy Young notes, 1) the ban lasted only about 36 hours; 2) the ban may have heightened interest in the story rather than suppressing it, and in any case, the story was available via a Google search; and 3) the whole narrative about Biden's participation in Ukrainian corruption, the gravamen of the laptop story, is false.

So what is this really about? Consider the timing.

For seven years, the right has been explaining, excusing, avoiding and eventually cheering the most morally depraved figure in American politics. That takes a toll on the psyche. You can tell yourself that the critics are unhinged, suffering from "Trump derangement syndrome," but then Trump will do what he always does -- make a fool of you. You denied that Trump purposely broke the law when he took highly classified documents to Mar-a-Lago and obstructed every effort to retrieve them. And then what does Trump do? He admits taking them! You scoff at the critics who've compared Trump with Nazis. And then what does he do? He has dinner with Nazis! (And fails to condemn them even after the fact.) You despised people who claimed Trump was a threat to the Constitution, and then Trump explicitly calls for "terminating" the Constitution in order to put himself back in the Oval Office.

IT'S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

While some of these incidents may turn out to have non-political (and thus non-terroristic) motivations, the DHS's January memo warning of attacks like these as likely terrorism events was well-grounded. It indicated that conversations among far-right extremists online have increasingly focused on encouraging so-called "lone wolf" attacks involving only a single terrorist. Other online chatter includes efforts to inspire people with minimal training to also target electrical infrastructure, with weapons ranging from improvised incendiary devices, hammers, power saws, and guns.

Electrical infrastructure has become a key target for the most recent iterations of accelerationist neofascist groups like The Base and Atomwaffen SS. One such terrorist cell that targeted the January 2020 pro-gun protests in Richmond, Virginia, discussed targeting the power grid and cell towers in the area to debilitate any police response while disguised as both left-wing activists and as "3 Percent" militiamen, believing it would direct violence towards the groups blamed for the destruction.

A group of Marines who moved to Idaho from North Carolina tried to set up a terror cell that would conduct assassinations and other criminal acts targeting "leftists" and the government, using attacks on the Pacific Northwest power grid as their primary tool. In a propaganda video, the members of the neo-Nazi organization, which called itself "BSN," could be seen practicing with firearms in the vicinity of high-power transmission lines.

The outages in North Carolina were widely celebrated by right-wing extremists, who drew a connection between the attacks and the drag-queen performance held that evening in Southern Pines. One neo-Nazi Telegram post laden with slurs against the LGBTQ community celebrated the "magnificent act of sabotage" as a "beautiful escalation" in a broader culture war.

SITE Intelligence Group, according to Newsweek, also identified a neo-Nazi publication warning that "these attacks will only continue" unless such drag shows cease altogether. At the far-right-friendly message board 4Chan, commenters described specific tactics that further harm the power grid. Others proposed focusing their attacks on taking down the electrical infrastructure in larger cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. since they "are not majority white."

Rita Katz, founder and executive director of the SITE Intelligence Group, told Newsweek that the Moore County attack is consistent with recent online neo-Nazi messaging.

"The sabotage against the North Carolina substation aligns perfectly with directives and methods seen in accelerationist neo-Nazi communities," Katz said. "If this was indeed a far-right terrorist attack, my worry is that it will serve as a proof of concept for other far-right extremists."

Katz also says they see plans to do the same against power stations near prominent news and media companies they consider enemies. Targeting infrastructure, she explained, is "a key objective for accelerationist neo-Nazis, who care less about any distinct outcome and far more about sowing any kind of chaos."

UNSTOPPABLE:

TOO BAD WE DIDN'T FINISH THE WAR:

Even more than science and technology, however, was the role of the United States, which Winston Churchill called "that gigantic boiler." It did not matter that the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor--which sunk four U.S. battleships and killed 2,403 American servicemen--was the most disproportionate engagement of the entire war. Once the American war machine got moving, it was only a matter of time before it would irreversibly change the course of the war. 

The year the United States entered the war (1941), its warship tonnage was about equal to that of the United Kingdom, and a bit more than its primary naval adversary, Japan. The next year, U.S. warship tonnage was almost double that of Japan, and the following year about triple. By the time hostilities ended in 1945, U.S. war tonnage was almost ten times that of Germany and Japan. In 1942 alone, the United States built 47,800 aircraft (remember that Germany in the eight years preceding the war built 30,000); in 1943, America almost doubled aircraft production to 85,900 planes. The Germans, in comparison, built only 24,800 aircraft that year. 

By 1943, the British and American fleets were prevailing in all three oceans. By the middle of 1943, "a giant new productive force was affecting the war," observes Kennedy. The United States, he writes, was a "giant factory of war." America was,

sending toward the battlefields a flow of armaments and weapons far larger than the world had ever seen, all from one single nation that proved capable of doubling its aircraft output in one year and of dispatching a new aircraft carrier virtually every month of the Pacific fighting. This was not just a history of campaign events. This was the history of something far, far bigger. This was about a shift in the global power balances.

America was wealthy--in raw materials, industrial capacity, technological development, and capital resources. And it had a numerical advantage: the U.S. population in 1941 was 133.5 million, compared to Germany's 90 million. Thus the number of US naval personnel, not counting marines, doubled between 1939 and 1941; it more than doubled the following year; by 1945, it was almost thirty times its prewar strength. 

Once the American juggernaut got moving, it proved unstoppable. At the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944, the Americans threw 15 fleet and light fleet carriers and 900 aircraft against 9 Japanese carriers and 750 aircraft. Part of that battle, called the "Great Marianas Turkey Shoot," witnessed the Japanese lose almost half its aircraft, while the Americans lost only 30. It did not matter that American military leadership made several miscalculations in the Pacific, as they did at the Battle of Leyte Gulf. American technological and numeric superiority was simply overpowering.

FIRST THEY CAME FOR THE INSURRECTIONISTS...:

In Twitter Files Part 4, Shellenberger on Saturday continued from Matt Taibbi's latest thread on the banning of former US President Donald Trump's Twitter account, and related conversations leading up to that decision.

The thread of uncovered information about Twitter's content moderation before Musk focused on employees' reactions to the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol, leading up to the banning of Trump instituted on January 8, 2021.

Shellenberger discussed how former CEO Jack Dorsey was out of the country during a series of decisions that would ultimately lead to the permanent suspension of Trump's Twitter account.

He shared screenshots of a conversation on January 7 between Twitter's former safety chief Yoel Roth and an anonymous co-worker where he asked to blacklist the terms "stop the steal" and "kraken" which propped up the conspiracy that Trump won the 2020 election.

A later conversation from January 7 showed that pressure from Twitter employees factored into Dorsey's decision to distribute permanent bans after repeated violations of the community guidelines.

JUNK-IES:

But let's look at who was posting those pics in the first place. The third tweet cited in Taibbi's screenshot, the Internet Archive shows, came from an account that features a logo and slogan indicating the user is a member of New Federal State of China. The NFSC is an organization set up in 2020 by Steve Bannon and Guo Wengui, an exiled Chinese mogul, who has aggressively promoted false claims about Covid vaccines and the 2020 election. 

Other social media accounts used by a person with the same user name--a Chinese phrase that means "fitness training"--along with the same avatar, indicate the user is a member of a group of Guo supporters based on Long Island. A person who previously worked with Guo's organization told me this is a man who uses the name Wenyang and regularly works to help Guo put material online. The source did not know the man's real name, but that is normal for Guo backers, who often collaborate online and use nicknames. Wenyang did not respond to messages I sent to his account.

I have previously reported on various messages and recordings detailing what Guo and Bannon and their backers were up to in 2020. One thing this material shows is that in October 2020, Bannon--working with Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's personal lawyer--arranged for Guo and his followers to spread salacious videos and pictures from Hunter Biden's laptop.

Giuliani has said he got the laptop material from the owner of a Delaware repair shop where Hunter reportedly abandoned it in 2019. Giuliani, after considering various ways to use the material, eventually worked with other Trump backers to seek mainstream media coverage of Hunter's business ventures. Bannon, who was informally advising the Trump campaign, also helped to distribute the sex stuff.

It was natural for Bannon to tap Guo, who has paid Bannon to help him launch Chinese-language media companies. Bannon was even living on Guo's yacht in the summer of 2020 when Bannon was arrested for allegedly defrauding a nonprofit. In October of that year, Bannon instructed employees of his War Room podcast to send Guo backers copies of material from the computer. Vish Burra, then a War Room employee, told me that Bannon put him in charge of that part. "It's your job to get out all the sex pictures," Burra said Bannon told him.

Starting on October 22, 2020, Guo then personally managed minute details of the distribution of pictures and videos. In audio messages he sent to groups of supporters using WhatsApp, which I obtained, he set up a process in which key backers would post Hunter Biden pictures on his streaming website, GTV--a sort of Chinese-language YouTube knockoff--and others would then amplify them. He decreed that much of the material would first be posted by followers living abroad, to help prevent any lawsuits seeking to block the effort.

"Look at the video copied from Hunter's computer," Guo said in a WhatsApp messages to underlings on October 27. (He spoke in Chinese. The messages have been translated.) In another message, referring to various Hunter videos, Guo ordered: "Post one right now, one every hour from now on...I want everyone to fully promote it."

Publicly, Guo was a harsh critic of the Chinese Communist Party. His attacks on China's leaders have helped him amass a devoted following in the international Chinese diaspora. Thousands of such supporters have arrayed themselves into groups, which Guo calls "farms," that are sort of like fan clubs. Organized on the social media app Discord, they follow his directives and promote various claims he makes. Guo's order to promote the Hunter pics went to the heads of a few dozen of those groups, who then tapped additional supporters to further propagate them.

The picture of Hunter in front of the mirror is one of many similar images contained in a Dropbox file called "Salacious Pics Package_EDITED," which was included in the correspondence from October 2020 that I obtained. (Burra told me he had created this file and sent it Guo's team. Despite the file's name, Burra said he did not edit the material in it.) A Guo assistant sent the file to a group of Guo's followers on October 24. Wenyang, it appears, got the picture soon afterward and tweeted it the same day. Other Guo backers also shared it. Two other tweets in the batch the Biden team flagged--one from a prominent Guo backer--included the same image.

Wenyang, that is, seems to have been a small player --Guo's backers call themselves "ants"--in a large, highly coordinated, international effort to post embarrassing images of Hunter Biden in the hopes it would damage his father's campaign.

And it's worse than that. From the start, Guo and his supporters accompanied the pictures of Hunter Biden with repugnant lies. According to multiple people involved in distributing the material, Guo ordered them to claim that the laptop material included images of Hunter Biden having sex with underage Chinese girls. There is no evidence supporting this allegation against Hunter. Guo also told subordinates to assert that the Chinese government had obtained the material and used it to blackmail both Hunter and Joe Biden. That, too, was made up, people involved said. 

Jack Maxey, at the time a War Room employee who helped Bannon distribute the material to Guo, said that he left a few months later, in part due to his disgust over this effort. He has since attacked Bannon for working with Guo. Maxey is a vocal promotor of laptop material related to Hunter's business entanglements. But he argues that cause was damaged by Guo's involvement. "They injected stuff that was not real," 

STRONGER:

The hopes of the two nations attempting to force passage into the tournament's last four will be carried by first-generation migrants, or the sons or grandsons of migrants - legacies of colonial pasts, certainly, but also of the free movement of people in search of a better life. A sentiment those back in Calais will share.

Walker is of Jamaican ethnicity while Kane's father, Patrick, is from Letterfrack, in Ireland's County Galway. Mbappe grew up in the suburbs of Paris, but his father, Wilfried, is from Cameroon and his mother, Fayza Lamari, from Algeria. Griezmann's grandfather, Amaro Lopes, was Portuguese while Dembele's mother, Fatimata, is from Mauritania and his father, Ousmane Snr, from Mali. These two teams seeking a place in the World Cup semi-finals have been shaped by migration.

African connections abound through Didier Deschamps' squad. Aurelien Tchouameni's father, Fernand, is also Cameroonian while Dayot Upamecano's heritage stems from Guinea-Bissau. Jules Kounde's ancestry stretches back to Nigeria, Togo and Benin, while Eduardo Camavinga was born to Congolese parents in a refugee camp in Angola.

But there are also the Hernandez brothers Lucas and Theo, born in Marseille, who boast Spanish heritage, while Heidi and Cleto Areola, reserve goalkeeper Alphonse's parents, moved to France from the Philippines in the 1980s.

At least eight of the team who defeated Poland in the round of 16 are first-, second- or third-generation migrants to France.

Les Bleus are used to this. In 1998, nine members of their 22-man World Cup winning squad - the celebrated "Black, Blanc, Beur" collective ("Beur" refers to a person of North African ancestry) - were either immigrants or the children of immigrants. They were inspired by the vision of Zinedine Zidane, a stellar talent of Algerian Kabyle descent, and the on-field presence of Marcel Desailly, one of the country's finest centre-halves and a player born in Accra, Ghana.

Lilian Thuram, another stalwart of that side who will see his record of 142 caps for the French men's team eclipsed by Hugo Lloris on Saturday, has previously pointed to victory in that tournament 24 years ago as "a very important moment that helped legitimise immigrants" and fuelled the ongoing fight against racism. For a while, footballing success seemed to unite French society. "Football alone cannot eliminate racism," said Thuram, "but it does have an impact."

Old rifts reopened in the years that followed but in 2018, when the French raised the trophy for a second time, their squad featured 20 players either born outside France or whose parents or grandparents hailed from elsewhere, according to research conducted by Remitly Global for their Together We're Stronger campaign, launched in association with London's Migration Museum. France, once again, rejoiced in its multicultural side's success.

Around 89 per cent of the goals mustered by Deschamps' team through their qualifying campaign for the current tournament were scored by migrants, as defined by Remitly's criteria. (By way of contrast, all Canada's goals in qualifying were netted by players of Caribbean, African and South American descent, while 86 per cent of those scored by the United States were supplied by migrants.)

The Tricolores are out again now, with France galvanised by its team's progress. The players are accepted, cherished and celebrated. And yet this hugely diverse squad arrived in Qatar after a fractious presidential election earlier in the year fought between the centrist Emmanuel Macron and the nationalist Marine Le Pen, a member of the National Assembly for Pas-de-Calais.

If she had won, Le Pen's National Rally (RN) party had promised to hold a referendum with a view to introducing far tighter laws on immigration.

Macron eventually prevailed, but RN still captured a record 89 seats in the 577-seat National Assembly - a rather jarring backdrop to Mbappe et al propelling the nation's defence of the World Cup trophy.

The same diversity applies to England's squad, for whom 82 per cent of the goals scored in qualifying came from players who would be classed as first-, second- or third-generation migrants. So, too, would six of their eight scorers in Qatar to date. Harry Maguire was eligible for both the Republic and Northern Ireland, and is one of several players of Irish heritage in the group. Bukayo Saka's mother, Adenike, was born in Nigeria, while others trace their roots to the Caribbean.

The issue of immigration is as divisive as ever in British society.

Concerns about overcrowding and the strain it places on a struggling economy are voiced regularly, fears repeated by those in charge of the country. Senior politicians have described the influx of asylum seekers as an "invasion" at the same time research by the Oxford Migration Observatory suggests the UK receives far fewer applications per capita than at least 10 other European nations.

But should Gareth Southgate's team progress beyond France, even perhaps into England's first World Cup final since 1966, then those same first-, second- and third-generation migrants propelling the team will be feted by the public and politicians alike.

During the team's journey to the European Championship final last summer, the Migration Museum's Football Moves People campaign made a splash both on social media and billboards across the United Kingdom by pointing out how the players boasted family roots which spanned the globe. As their real-time graphics made clear, there were occasions when "England without immigration" would effectively have boiled down to a team of, at most, three or four.

OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

Putin's first decade was a time of comparative stability and prosperity. If he had stopped there, future Russians might have seen him as the man who put their country securely back on the map. But his second decade was marked by increasing repression at home and adventurism abroad. His resentment at the collapse of empire and his determination to Make Russia Great Again were reflected and magnified by the even more virulently nationalist "philosophers" and churchmen who surrounded him.

His obsessions came disastrously together when he became determined to restore what he regarded as the natural unity of the East Slav peoples -- the Ukrainians and the Belarusians -- under unchallenged Russian leadership. He launched his war against Ukraine without giving his generals time to plan it properly, and in the mistaken belief that most Ukrainians would welcome his soldiers as liberators. Matthews tells how the war unfolded in vivid detail. He brings the story right up to September. Though he couldn't include the humiliating Russian withdrawal from Kherson, he does cover Putin's politically risky decision to impose conscription on people who had hitherto supported his war.

Galeotti specializes in Russian military history: an early book was about the Russians' first victory over the Mongols in the fifteenth century. In recent years he has produced an engaging short history of Russia and a usefully skeptical look at Putin the man. His latest book is about the way Putin has used Russia's armed forces over the past three decades. Full of technical detail that may daunt non-specialists, it was mostly written before Putin attacked Ukraine. In places that shows, even though he has added a chapter entitled "Ukraine 2022: Putin's Last War?"

The West habitually overestimates Russia's military capacity, and Galeotti ruefully admits that he contributed to the paranoia by inventing the phrase "the Gerasimov Doctrine" to describe some thoughts by the Russian chief of staff about "hybrid warfare." Overexcited commentators thought the Russians had invented a novel way of threatening NATO. The Russians are of course investigating new techniques and gadgets, such as cyberwarfare and drones. So are the Americans and their allies, and they are likely to be at least as good at it as the Russians. But many of the alleged innovations of hybrid warfare -- disinformation, psychological warfare, political disruption -- have been around since warfare began.

Putin gave his generals substantial resources to reform the demoralized army he had inherited. They drew on the lessons of Russia's two brutal wars in Chechnya at the turn of the millennium, the brief but muddled attack on Georgia in 2008, the almost bloodless annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the successful intervention in Syria which followed. They produced what looked like a lean, well-equipped twenty-first-century force.

There was less to it than met the eye. The Russians have always been good at military theory. But their insights are not always translated into practice, because of political confusion, industrial weakness and deep-rooted corruption. Putin's new army suffers from many of the inherent weaknesses of the old: over-rigid commanders, ill-trained and demoralized soldiers, shaky logistics. It still lacks the means to fight a protracted war even on its own borders, let alone against NATO. Most western observers were nevertheless taken in. British and American intelligence may have predicted Russia's campaign in Ukraine. But they seem to have been as surprised as the rest of us by Russia's blundering incompetence and the nimble determination of the Ukrainians.

nATIONALISM DOESN'T WORK:

A century-old federal law designed to protect the US maritime industry is having a chilling effect in New England in the wake of the Ukraine war, helping drive up home heating oil prices and threatening to cause supply shortages that could become severe enough to trigger rolling blackouts if this winter is much colder than usual.

Known as the Jones Act, the law requires that any goods transported between US ports be carried on domestically built and owned ships manned by American crews. That means foreign tankers can bring shipments to Boston from abroad but not from the Gulf Coast.

NOW GET IT DOWN TO THREE HOURS A DAY:

Unsurprisingly, workers overwhelmingly enjoyed having an extra day back to themselves: They rated the experience at 9.1 on a 10-point scale, and 97% said they want to continue the condensed schedule.

Their self-reported levels of performance went up while burnout and fatigue went down. They had more control over their schedules and also saved an hour per week on commuting, even though in-person work increased throughout the trial period.

And leaders say they're willing to continue because the business didn't suffer. On average, businesses decreased their schedules by six hours, from about 41 to 35 hours per week per employee. Of those that provided data, businesses reported an 8% increase in revenue throughout the trial period, and a 38% increase from the same time period a year prior.

Jon Leland, chief strategy officer at Kickstarter, said it took a few months for the remote tech company with about 100 employees to get everyone down to a 32-hour workweek. Since figuring it out, he says, the company has seen an increase in productivity, which he believes is a direct result of workers feeling less stressed, more focused and more engaged.

TOTALLY UNLIKE DONALD...:

[Jacksonville Sheriff T.K.] Waters said that because the investigation remains active, there is "limited information available to release at this time." The Florida Times-Union reported, citing unidentified law enforcement sources, that authorities were examining allegations of sexual misconduct.

Stermon was president of Jacksonville-area defense contractor Total Military Management. Since 2017, he had given $140,000 in state political contributions, of which $50,000 went to a political committee aligned with DeSantis.

Stermon's abrupt death sent shock waves through Florida's political world, especially Republican circles where Stermon was known as a Republican donor and close DeSantis ally. While in serving in Congress, DeSantis lived in a Flagler County condo co-owned by Stermon when redistricting drew him out of his seat, DeSantis made him a member of his transition team, and DeSantis appointed him to the Board of Governors over the state university system in 2019.

YOU MEAN VOTING WHILE BLACK ISN'T A CRIME?:

A Miami judge has tossed out another voter fraud case brought by Gov. Ron DeSantis' elections police, the third case to fall apart since the governor announced the arrests.

On Wednesday, Circuit Judge Laura Anne Stuzin reached the same conclusion as another Miami judge did in a different voter's case, saying that statewide prosecutors didn't have the ability to bring charges against Ronald Lee Miller.

Because he was convicted of second-degree murder in 1990, Miller, 58, was ineligible to vote. But after his voter registration application was cleared by the Florida Department of State, Miami-Dade's supervisor of elections issued him a voter ID card, and he voted in November 2020.

IT'S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

TURTLES ALL THE WAY DOWN...:

[N]ot everything is lost. Sometimes the path through the dark wilderness ends at another outpost. That is, at a different well-controlled model, this time made out of a completely different set of particles and forces. In such cases, there are two alternative recipes for the same underlying physics, just as with Alice and Bob's dishes. These complementary descriptions are called dual models, and the relation between them a duality. We can consider these dualities as a grand generalization of the famous particle-wave duality discovered by Heisenberg. For Alice and Bob, it takes the form of a translation between Chinese and Italian recipes.

Why is this all so exciting for physics? First of all, the conclusion that many, if not all, models are part of one huge interconnected space is among the most astonishing results of modern quantum physics. It is a change of perspective worthy of the term "paradigm shift." It tells us that instead of exploring an archipelago of individual islands, we have discovered one massive continent. In some sense, by studying one model deeply enough, we can study them all. We can explore how these models are related, illuminating their common structures. It is important to stress that this phenomenon is largely independent of the question of whether string theory describes the real world or not. It is an intrinsic property of quantum physics that is here to stay, whatever the future "theory of everything" will turn out to be.

A more dramatic conclusion is that all traditional descriptions of fundamental physics have to be thrown out. Particles, fields, forces, symmetries -- they are all just artifacts of a simple existence at the outposts in this vast landscape of impenetrable complexity. Thinking of physics in terms of elementary building blocks appears to be wrong, or at least of limited reach. Perhaps there is a radical new framework uniting the fundamental laws of nature that disregards all the familiar concepts. The mathematical intricacies and consistencies of string theory are a strong motivation for this dramatic point of view. But we have to be honest. Very few current ideas about what replaces particles and fields are "crazy enough to be true," to quote Niels Bohr. Like Alice and Bob, physics is ready to throw out the old recipes and embrace a modern fusion cuisine.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

The book, while addressing substantive issue areas, is simultaneously (and just as crucially to the overall project) an exercise in political moderation and a vindication of moderate political theorizing. Atanassow sees this present moment as an "illiberal moment," though illiberalism is not the exclusive province of any one party. Right and Left alike "draw on current dissatisfactions with the political status quo" to contest both concrete public policies and the principles undergirding liberalism, each "[appealing] to democratic ideals" as they go. 

Atanassow argues that "a programmatic resistance to seeing the world through a Manichaean lens of stark binaries distinguishes liberal democracy from illiberal variants." However, is it only liberal democracy and liberal democrats that are capable of a politics of prudence that requires "[weighing] competing, often incommensurable goods and corresponding dangers"? I imagine she would answer no. Therefore, what she ventures as a defense of liberal democracy well-understood is at times something broader. It is a vindication of a certain kind of politics she considers to be under threat. This politics is principled yet admits "the lack of ready-to-hand ideological answers." It understands the trade-offs and "careful consideration and balanced judgment" required to bring theories into contact with political reality. 

THE IGNORANCE OF EACH:

Jeff was a libertarian. But he was not satisfied with libertarian dogma, and he criticized the idea of man as a self-interested rational actor. His great theme was ignorance: not only the public ignorance of electorates but also the individual ignorance of experts bound by the constraints of ideology and groupthink. The state, he said, operated according to the fashionable desires of bureaucrats who were free from democratic accountability.

Such "accountability" was itself a slippery concept. It was hard for either politicians or journalists to determine the meaning of elections and the nature of mandates. Electoral majorities are composites of millions upon millions of people with millions upon millions of concerns, fears, attitudes, hopes, and dreams. Making sense of this cacophony is impossible.

Jeff preferred markets to government not because markets are more rational or more efficient but because they are easier to escape. Markets allow for a greater possibility of exit. And the ability to leave counterproductive, hazardous, or perverse conditions is a guarantor of freedom that also creates opportunities for innovation and improvement. Jeff's classroom at NYU was where I first heard of A.O. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty, and where I first encountered Schumpeter's aphorism, "The picture of the prettiest girl that ever lived will in the long run prove powerless to maintain the sales of a bad cigarette."

PREACH, BROTHER:

From the beginning of his career, Stormzy has unapologetically shared his spiritual journey as a central part of his artistry. On his latest album, This Is What I Mean, Stormzy fuses his spiritual worldview with the day to day issues that are most important to him.

Songs such as Give It To The Water and Holy Spirit continue his conversations about faith in his music.

Stormzy is not alone in making art at the crossroads of popular culture and religion. Other contemporary examples include artists such as Dave and Chance the Rapper. Despite the decline in commitment to organised religion in the UK, religious symbols, ideas and themes remain present in popular music.

The Culture Wars are a rout. https://t.co/Xqzhus13e6 via @YouTube

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 9, 2022

APARTHEID ISN'T WORKING:

Starting in mid-2022, there was a marked increase in the number of attacks by Palestinians against Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as well as in Israel proper. This pattern revealed significant shortcomings in Israel's policies to control Palestinians under occupation and stabilize its rule. Israel's stabilization strategy, inspired by modern counterinsurgency doctrine, has rested on two pillars: the employment of pacification measures to co-opt Palestinians and reliance on the Palestinian Authority (PA) to police its population on Israel's behalf. However, many Palestinians are now fighting back against this approach, while the PA's eroding legitimacy has only hardened the population's refusal to accept its restrictive methods.

This situation will lead to several possible outcomes, all of which contain a multitude of complications for Israel's preservation of the status quo with regard to the Palestinians. In the short term, with the gravitation of Israeli society toward the right and far right, which was reflected in the results of Israel's elections in November 2022, it is likely that there will be an escalation of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli Jews in the occupied territories and within Israel's 1948 borders. This may terminate the Oslo Accords of 1993 and lead to a new stage in Palestinian-Israeli relations, characterized by even more bloodshed, until a new political framework is devised that ends the occupation, achieves Palestinian self-determination, and guarantees rights for all.

Ever since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in June 1967, Israel's principal aim has been to enforce its rule by managing and containing the Palestinian population, suppressing its political ambitions, and deterring Palestinians from supporting resistance activities. In addition to engaging in military interventions, house demolitions, targeted killings, and arrests, Israel has employed two more measured methods to muzzle the Palestinians.

START THE DONATIONS AT BIRTH AND PUT THEM IN AN IRA:

In December, while the world's attention was on the emergence of the omicron coronavirus variant, the German Institute for Economic Research revived a centuries-old idea to help tackle wealth inequality.

Universal Basic Inheritance, or Grunderbe in German, would assign €20,000 ($22,720) to each resident upon reaching 18 years of age. The sum would be earmarked to pay for education or training, a property downpayment or for starting a business -- not to be squandered.

The idea is in a similar vein to the Universal Basic Income, a welfare replacement scheme being trialed by governments around the world, which awards people a minimum monthly income without being means-tested.

"If we really want to create prosperity for everyone in the foreseeable future, then we should reduce the high level of wealth inequality through redistribution; by giving the non-asset owning half of the population a basic inheritance," the German think tank's tax expert Stefan Bach wrote in his proposal.

HE ACTUALLY NEEDS DONALD TO BOW OUT:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) will likely take "a hard look" at launching a third bid for the presidency if President Biden chooses not to run in 2024, a longtime adviser to the progressive senator said on Thursday.

WHO EXACTLY IS SURPRISED THAT TRUMPISM APPEALS TO NAZIS?:

It may have come as a surprise, however, when prosecutors stated that the group was inspired by "QAnon ideology."

Despite QAnon's U.S.-centric narrative focusing on former President Donald Trump, the conspiracy movement has now spread across the globe. German-speaking communities have become the largest non-American audience for QAnon, finding a ready audience in the Reichsbürger movement, which falsely believes that Germany is still an occupied country because, they claim, there was never a formalized peace treaty with Allied forces after World War 2 (there was).

One reason QAnon was adopted so widely in Germany is that there is a strong overlap between QAnon's conspiracy narratives and those shared by the Reichsbürger movement, including the belief that the pandemic was created by the "deep state" as part of a long-running conspiracy to control the population.

Now, experts believe that the merging of the Reichsbürger movement and QAnon could lead to a dramatic increase in the potential for violent extremism committed by conspiracy adherents.

"[This case] could be the most significant QAnon terror group and plot worldwide," Daniel Koehler, director of the German Institute in Radicalisation and De-Radicalisation Studies, told VICE World News on Wednesday about the foiled plan to overthrow the German government.

The plot, which included a plan to violently attack the German parliament building known as the Reichstag, is worrying those tracking the far-right in Germany, given the number of people involved and the fact it included members of the security forces. Far-right experts in the U.S. have voiced similar concerns about QAnon followers, who played a central role in the storming of the Capitol because they believed they had no other option.

 "A hardcore of believers think that now they don't have any chance besides violent action," Miro Dittrich, the co-founder of CeMAS, a think tank specializing in conspiracy ideology and right-wing extremism, told VICE News. "Because if you actually believe that there's a genocide happening against your people by an evil almighty enemy, and you have proof that the government has been taken over and you can't change anything with elections, the militant believers now start doing violent plots." 

To try to understand this bizarre incident and the movement behind it, I reached out to Peter Neumann, a professor of security studies at King's College London and a leading expert on terrorism in Germany. Neumann has been studying the Reichsbürger for over a decade, which he learned of by researching an older movement that existed in America -- so-called "sovereign citizens" who believe that the 14th Amendment (or possibly the end of the gold standard) secretly overturned the US Constitution, and that they are under no obligation to obey America's laws.

"I first took an interest in this when I was teaching at Georgetown, 12 years ago. I learned about the sovereign citizens in the United States," he says. "I didn't know that we had a similar movement in Germany, where I come from."

Recently, Reichsbürger adherents have started taking on ideas from another American conspiracy theory: QAnon, the idea that Donald Trump is leading a secret campaign against a cabal of Satanic pedophiles who run the world. Somehow, according to Neumann, this peculiarly American theory has become a major part of the German extremist landscape.

"The second most used language in QAnon chat rooms on Telegram is German. The second most translated language of QAnon videos and documents is German," he says.

LIBERAL NATIONS OUGHT SIMPLY REFUSE TO SEND TEAMS TO SUCH EVENTS:

Sportswashing has received significant attention recently, particularly due to the rise of the Saudi Arabia sponsored LIV Golf and the imminent Men's football World Cup to be held in Qatar. The chief football writer at The Independent, Miguel Delaney, has conducted an admirable crusade raising awareness of sportswashing, and the Norwegian venue Josimar has published hard-hitting investigative reporting on the scope of the problem. Yet many people--even those interested in sport or politics--still haven't heard of sportswashing and even fewer people have a clear idea of exactly what sportswashing involves and why it is wrong. This is even true amongst sports researchers, as there is little scholarly work on the topic. Our aim here is to set out what sportswashing is and explore why it is wrong.

As we've argued, sportswashing is an attempt to distract from, minimize, or normalize wrongdoing through engagement in sport, not unlike whitewashing, although more specific in its methods, and also related to greenwashing, although not similarly restricted in its scope to environmental sins. This is importantly reputational: sportswashers want other people to care less about their wrongdoing without having to address that wrongdoing through reform and reparation. Whether this is because they want to be seen as desirable destinations for tourism or unproblematic partners for trade, the sportswasher wants to make sure that the bad things they are doing don't negatively affect them.

Thus the allegations against Qatar for hosting the World Cup and Saudi Arabia for setting up the LIV tour and buying Newcastle United. Qatar has an abysmal record on workers' rights. Though there is debate about the exact number, many workers have died directly as a result of constructing stadiums for the World Cup.This isn't just the occasional unfortunate accident, it is the result of awful working conditions. Workers are forced to work in the sweltering heat, and many are immigrants who have few social rights. Though there have been claims that the World Cup (and the attention around it) has in fact inspired reform, there are still serious allegations that working conditions are deeply exploitative. Saudi Arabia's most notable non-sporting news in recent years has been the assassination and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a longstanding critic of the Saudi regime. This was not a one-off event, though, but  part of a pattern of human rights abuses. 

So, the allegation that these states are engaged in sportswashing is that they are getting involved in sports to displace the negative reputation they have received because of these wrongs by creating more positive associations. 

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

The problem with democracies is that they are sclerotic, indecisive, and dithering; by contrast, states ruled by strong and capable dictators are capable of rapid policy change-or so it is argued.  As one prominent critic puts it, democracies "are inherently reactionary and absolutist" compared with dictatorships, which "accept the most daring political and social experiments."[1]  Certain events seem to bear this perspective out: in America, a pioneer of liberal democracy, our representatives regularly struggle to perform basic tasks like agreeing on a budget. In Israel--another liberal democracy, but with very different institutions--such difficulties have led to elections being held with comical frequency.

Meanwhile, it is China's system, rather than a monarchy or the fascist state, which stands as the alternative to liberal democracy. In 2020, The Atlantic ran a defense of China's massive Internet censorship regime, mere months after their heavy-handed and flat-footed response to the COVID-19 outbreak allowed the novel virus to escape and become the world's problem. Yet as liberal democracies struggled with the consequences of this for the years that followed, China was largely praised for its willingness to lock down large population centers to an extent most other countries had little political appetite for.

Now, however, China has failed to vaccinate their vulnerable elderly population to any great degree, while those who have been vaccinated have received a markedly inferior product. Their lockdowns have grown more and more intense as the contagiousness of COVID has increased by leaps and bounds; for this and other reasons, US GDP will actually grow more in percentage terms this year than China for the first time in my lifetime. Russia, meanwhile, has spent the year on a failed and pointless invasion for which they have paid a substantial cost in national wealth, geopolitical strength, military hardware, and human life. [...]

Every society faces crises due to natural disasters or disease, or even due to social change that is on the whole positive, such as economic growth. These crises produce broad unrest among the highly capable "modular" masses, as well as among elites. Liberal democracies have the mechanisms to see the signs of unrest before it erupts, and to act decisively in response to this information. By contrast, the very means by which non-democracies insulate incumbents from competition sabotages their ability to understand and respond nimbly to changing circumstances.

THE LEFT IS THE RIGHT:

Don't subsidize what you do want, tax what you don't. Then let markets pick the winning alternatives. https://t.co/EefR6a9WWv

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 9, 2022

VLAD'S SURRENDER NEEDS TO START WITH CHECHNYA:

There is no Russia. https://t.co/5h7koFxF8y

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 9, 2022

TAX THE EXTERNALITIES:

The massive Keystone Pipeline has been shut down after oil was found to be leaking into a Kansas creek.

IF IT'S ALL IN YOUR HEAD, MESS WITH YOUR HEAD:

After being frozen out for decades, psychedelics are enjoying a renaissance--with early research showing they could create a mental health revolution. For example, recent trials have shown that psilocybin--the active ingredient in "magic mushrooms"--can treat clinical depression at least as well as traditional SSRI antidepressants, with far fewer side effects. 

Likewise, MDMA (also known as ecstasy or molly) has been shown to have dramatic potency in treating PTSD when combined with talking therapy--a finding so significant that it was hailed as one of Science magazine's ten breakthroughs of 2021, sharing the stage with advances on Covid-19 and nuclear fusion. Such is the pace of discovery that new findings are arriving every month. 

TOUGH TO SLEEP AT NIGHT IF YOU HAVE ACONSCIENCE:

Ellis went on to say that after his last appearance on Jesse Watters Primetime he was "disappointed" in himself.

"Look, I got home. I talked my wife about it cause I was disappointed in myself and she was like, 'Let's be honest, like, do you want to be working with these [****]ing people?' She was like, 'I watched the rest of his show -- he's a fucking joke,'" Ellis said of Watters.

"This is still part of the Rundown," Ferrone said, joking that the hot mic conversation would air.

"Still rolling, baby!" someone else chimed in from the audio engineer booth.

Ellis continued, unfazed, by taking aim at Tucker Carlson.

"And then like, Tucker comes on and just screams," he said. "It's so weird."

"They're just trafficking in hate," Ellis added.

"What if they offer you a traffic cop position, direct the hate traffic?" Ferrone asked.

Ellis dismissed the idea, and expressed his fear that the Fox News audience would not understand his political jokes were indeed jokes.

"I think last night I went into a place that I shouldn't have gone to," Ellis said candidly. "No, because last night I was like, yes, the Democrats are like eating children beneath pizza shops. There are people watching that, who don't know that I'm [****]ing with them."

"They're like, 'Finally a young, handsome person is saying it!'" Ellis joked.

"Are you Jesus?" a producer said, ribbing Ellis for being too harsh on himself. "What are you gonna fix everybody? Come on bro. You're there to tell jokes."

"I'm not here to fix people, but I'm certainly not here to like further divide the country," Ellis concluded.

A RACE, NOT A RELIGION?:

Many immigrants to Israel, particularly but not only from the former Soviet Union, obtain citizenship under this aspect of the Law of Return.

The religious parties in the expected new government -- Shas, United Torah Judaism, Otzma Yehudit, Noam and Religious Zionism -- and at least one lawmaker in incoming prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud party support canceling the grandchild clause, thereby restricting immigration only to people born to Jewish parents.

Such a change is viewed positively by those who want to limit the number of immigrants who are not considered Jewish under the Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law, which only recognizes matrilineal descent.

IF ONLY W HAD REACHED BACK:

With the protests sweeping Iran entering their third month, Iranian officials are now formally reaching out to Reformists in hopes of quelling the unrest. 

According to Tasnim News Agency, Secretary General of Iran's Supreme National Security Council Ali Shamkhani held a meeting on Dec. 4 with various political figures in the country, including Reformist figures such as Behzad Nabavi, Gholam Hossein Karbaschi, Hossein Marashi, Abbas Abdi and Masoumeh Ebtekar. According to the article, this is part of a series of monthlong meetings held with various figures in the country, including meetings with artists, students and other notable figures in the country. 

The meetings are taking place in order to reach out to the various groups who have been excluded from the political process in recent years, either through arrest or through bans from running for office. One of the problems for the Islamic Republic, however, is that the current protests are not being led by Reformists, nor are Reformists even protesting in the streets. Reformists operate within the overall vision of the Islamic Republic, and the mostly young protesters with no connections to Reformists want the end of the government in its entirety.

SO YOU'RE SAYING THAT'S NOT HUNTER'S JUNK? (profanity alert):

[L]et's review some basics before we respond to the various wrong statements people have been making. Since 2016, there have been concerns raised about how foreign nation states might seek to interfere with elections, often via the release of hacked or faked materials. It's no secret that websites have been warned to be on the lookout for such content in the leadup to the election -- not with demands to suppress it, but just to consider how to handle it.

Partly in response to that, social media companies put in place various policies on how they were going to handle such material. Facebook set up a policy to limit certain content from trending in its algorithm until it had been reviewed by fact-checkers. Twitter put in place a "hacked materials" policy, which forbade the sharing of leaked or hacked materials. There were -- clearly! -- some potential issues with that policy. In fact, in September of 2020 (a month before the NY Post story) we highlighted the problems of this very policy, including somewhat presciently noting the fear that it would be used to block the sharing of content in the public interest and could be used against journalistic organizations (indeed, that case study highlights how the policy was enforced to ban DDOSecrets for leaking police chat logs).

The morning the NY Post story came out there was a lot of concern about the validity of the story. Other news organizations, including Fox News, had refused to touch it. NY Post reporters refused to put their name on it. There were other oddities, including the provenance of the hard drive data, which apparently had been in Rudy Giuliani's hands for months. There were concerns about how the data was presented (specifically how the emails were converted into images and PDFs, losing their header info and metadata).

The fact that, much later on, many elements of the laptops history and provenance were confirmed as legitimate (with some open questions) is important, but does not change the simple fact that the morning the NY Post story came out, it was extremely unclear (in either direction) except to extreme partisans in both camps.

Based on that, both Twitter and Facebook reacted somewhat quickly. Twitter implemented its hacked materials policy in exactly the manner that we had warned might happen a month earlier: blocking the sharing of the NY Post link. Facebook implemented other protocols, "reducing its distribution" until it had gone through a fact check. Facebook didn't ban the sharing of the link (like Twitter did), but rather limited the ability for it to "trend" and get recommended by the algorithm until fact checkers had reviewed it.

To be clear, the decision by Twitter to do this was, in our estimation, pretty stupid. It was exactly what we had warned about just a month earlier regarding this exact policy. But this is the nature of trust & safety. People need to make very rapid decisions with very incomplete information. That's why I've argued ever since then that while the policy was stupid, it was no giant scandal that it happened, and given everything, it was not a stretch to understand how it played out.

Also, importantly, the very next day Twitter realized it [***]ed up, admitted so publicly, and changed the hacked materials policy saying that it would no longer block links to news sources based on this policy (though it might add a label to such stories). The next month, Jack Dorsey, in testifying before Congress, was pretty transparent about how all of this went down.

All of this seemed pretty typical for any kind of trust & safety operation. As I've explained for years, mistakes in content moderation (especially at scale) are inevitable. And, often, the biggest reason for those mistakes is the lack of context. That was certainly true here.

Yet, for some reason, the story has persisted for years now that Twitter did something nefarious, engaging in election interference that was possibly at the behest of "the deep state" or the Biden campaign. For years, as I've reported on this, I've noted that there was literally zero evidence to back any of that up. So, my ears certainly perked up last Friday when Elon Musk said that he was about to reveal "what really happened with the Hunter Biden story suppression."

Certainly, if there was evidence of something nefarious behind closed doors, that would be important and worth covering. If it was true that through discussions I've had with dozens of Twitter employees over the past few years every single one of them lied about what happened, well, that would also be useful for me to know.

And then Taibbi revealed... basically nothing of interest.

THE IMPORTANCE OF MSIPMURT:

The United States needs to focus on increasing trade ties with Asia to ensure its strategic preeminence in the region, Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong said in Washington on Wednesday. [...]

"Australia too has a big job to do in supporting enhanced American economic engagement in the Indo-Pacific. This has to be a core alliance priority," Wong said, explaining that America had to refocus on showing value to Asian countries "beyond security interests."

"We need to demonstrate that their interest in stability and development is an interest that we, too, share - that we have skin in the game," she said. "Moreover, U.S. policy should be based on a clear understanding of what the rest of the Indo-Pacific wants."

After the Obama administration led negotiations to create the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade pact that grouped U.S. allies, the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the dealings in 2017. Japan then wrangled together 11 remaining countries into a new and pared-down pact called the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership.

"America's decision not to proceed with the CPTPP is still being felt in the region, just as the decision not to proceed with the T-TIP is still being felt by international partners," Wong said, referring to Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, a U.S.-Europe free trade deal that was also nixed by the Trump administration.

THE RESULT OF W NOT RECOGNIZING ALLIES:

The 79-year-old described the slogan "Woman, life, freedom" -- the main chant heard at the protests -- as "a beautiful message that shows movement towards a better future."

"Freedom and security must not be placed against each other," he said in a statement quoted by ISNA news agency Tuesday, on the eve of Students' Day.

"Freedom must not be trampled on in order to maintain security" and "security should not be ignored in the name of freedom," he said.

Khatami also spoke out against the arrest of students who have been at the forefront of the protests that erupted across Iran since Amini's death in custody on September 16.

The imposition of restrictions "cannot ultimately ensure the stable security of universities and society," he said.

In his statement, Khatami also called on officials to "extend students a helping hand" and to recognize the "wrong aspects of governance" with their help before it is too late.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

SEATS DEMOCRATS ONLY HOLD BECAUSE OF DONALD:

That Democrats have so many seats to defend in 2024 is a byproduct of past electoral success. Each class of Senate seats is up every six years,2 so the group of seats up in 2024 was previously up in 2018 and each six-year mark prior to that. In 1994, Republicans enjoyed a wave election in which they gained eight Senate seats. But ever since, Democrats have developed a sizable advantage among this batch of seats: In 2000, Democrats gained four seats amid a razor-tight presidential election; in 2006, they gained six seats thanks to a midterm Democratic wave;3 in 2012, Democrats gained two more thanks to upset wins in North Dakota and Indiana; and in 2018, they lost two net seats but managed to pick up a seat in increasingly competitive Arizona while avoiding more sizable losses by holding onto seats in Montana, Ohio and West Virginia.

But as a result, Democrats now must defend the now red-leaning seats of Sens. Jon Tester of Montana, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Joe Manchin of West Virginia. All three won reelection in 2018, but those elections took place in a heavily Democratic-leaning environment that they can't count on having again in 2024. In addition to those three redder seats, Republicans will surely also target swing-state seats in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

THE TRUMP BRAND:

A group of far-right figures and ex-military officers were planning attacks in Germany to ignite a nationwide chaos that would give them the opportunity to seize power from the government, according to prosecutors.

German officials made the revelation on Wednesday following the arrest of 25 people, who prosecutor's said were preparing a violent overthrow of the state to install as national leader a prince who had sought support from Russia. [...]

Prosecutors said the group was inspired by the deep state conspiracy theories of Germany's Reichsbuerger (Citizens of the Reich) and QAnon, whose advocates were among those arrested after the storming of the US Capitol in January 2021.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

Trump is seldom careful about who he offends -- tossing out jibes, insults, and threats with reckless abandon. He is more than willing to lash out at cultural elites and the people he calls "disloyal Jews" who support Democrats. But Trump has been consistent in his reluctance to offend what he regards as a crucial part of the base that he has nurtured over the years. He is unapologetic about associating with overt neo-Nazis, and unwilling to issue full-throated denunciations of antisemitism. Trump is willing to draw this barrage of opprobrium for one simple reason: He believes that he has tapped into something in the American electorate, especially among evangelical Christians, who have ingrained -- but complicated -- attitudes toward Israel and Jews. [...]

This resurgent antisemitism -- a blend of old-fashioned anti-Jewish sentiment, extreme versions of Christian/evangelical nationalism and a deep investment in conspiracism -- is not, of course, new. But it is arguably more widespread, more virulent and closer to the political mainstream than at any time in recent history. The last few years have been a master class in the extent to which millions of Americans are willing to believe myths, lies and dark theories about cosmopolitan cabals who threaten the fabric of American life. Attacks on George Soros and "globalists" are now standard attack lines on the American right. Inevitably, though, a worldview obsessed with malign global elites will settle on the Jews as a target of choice.

The result has been an ominous upsurge in violence and hate.

In 2021, antisemitic incidents surged by 34 percent, to the highest number since the Anti-Defamation League began tracking anti-Jewish violence. Meanwhile, social media platforms have opened the gates to an alarming explosion of attacks on Jews and Judaism. In the two weeks after Elon Musk took control of Twitter, antisemitic posts spiked by more than 61 percent.

"Elon Musk sent up the Bat Signal to every kind of racist, misogynist and homophobe that Twitter was open for business," Imran Ahmed, the chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate told The New York Times. "They have reacted accordingly."

...AND CHEAPER...:

According to the University of Sydney researchers, the Na-S battery is more energy dense and less toxic, making it an even more attractive alternative to lithium-ion batteries which, though ubiquitous in electronic devices and for energy storage systems, are nevertheless expensive to manufacture and recycle.

The Na-S battery developed by Dr Shenlong Zhao's team has been specifically designed to provide a high-performance solution for large-scale renewable energy storage systems.

"Our sodium battery has the potential to dramatically reduce costs while providing four times as much storage capacity," said Dr Zhao.

"This is a significant breakthrough for renewable energy development which, although it reduces costs in the long term, has had several financial barriers to entry.

"When the sun isn't shining and the breeze isn't blowing, we need high-quality storage solutions that don't cost the Earth and are easily accessible on a local or regional level.

"We hope that by providing a technology that reduces costs we can sooner reach a clean energy horizon. It probably goes without saying but the faster we can decarbonise -- the better chances we have of capping warming.

THE KISS OF DEATH:

The incumbent senator defeated Republican Herschel Walker, a former football star and protege of former president Donald Trump.

IT'LL BE RESOLVED ABOVE OUR PAY GRADE:

It is important to understand that what concerned John Paul in this matter was above all theological, not sociological or political. He sought to understand, and to teach, the truth about how the Church properly understands and relates herself to Jews and Judaism. There were options on the table here--judgments to be made, if the topic was to be addressed at all. And John Paul made his judgments, exercising his full authority to declare the mind of Christ as Christ's Vicar, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church.

One option would have been to say that God's covenant with the Jews had been abrogated when the Jewish people as a whole did not join the Christian Church, but we should be nice to Jews anyway, and avoid speaking disparagingly of their religion, since after all, we've been awfully cruel to them over the centuries, and we'd have a better chance of winning them over by being kind.

This was not the path he took or the judgment he made. This was not the mind of Christ.

Rather, he spoke of the Jews as "the people of the original Covenant." Indeed, his exact words were "our kindred nation of the original Covenant." To make himself even clearer, he formally declared that God's covenant with the Jews "has never been revoked." In 1986, speaking to leaders of the Australian Jewish community during a visit to that country, John Paul went still further, declaring the covenant to be not only still in force, but irrevocable.

The Catholic faith is rooted in the eternal truths of the Hebrew Scriptures and in the irrevocable covenant made with Abraham. We too gratefully hold these same truths of our Jewish heritage and look upon you as our brothers and sisters.

The references to "our Jewish heritage" and to the Jewish people as "our brothers and sisters" are particularly noteworthy.

In one of the most important acts of his long and remarkably consequential pontificate, both those concepts would again be center stage when John Paul made his historic visit, also in 1986, to the Great Synagogue of Rome--the first by any pope--where he made the following profound declaration:

The Jewish religion is not extrinsic to us, but in a certain way is intrinsic to our own religion, With Judaism we have a relationship we do not have with any other religion. You are our dearly beloved brothers, and in a certain way our elder brothers.

Driving the point home, John Paul greeted Jewish rabbis in a meeting in Assisi in 1993 as "our dearly beloved brothers of the ancient covenant never broken and never to be broken."

Benedict XVI and Francis have, of course, stood by the teachings of Nostra Aetate and of John Paul II--the teachings of the Church. So will their successors. These are magisterial teachings--declarations of the mind of Christ.

Obviously, contemporary Judaism and Christianity have important differences--above all the question whether Jesus of Nazareth is or is not the Messiah promised to Israel, the incarnate son of God who suffered and died in atonement for our sins and who by his cross and resurrection triumphs over sin and death. Neither the Second Vatican Council nor John Paul II and his successors deny these differences, paper them over, or treat them as insignificant.

Today it is commonly said that Christianity needs to reappropriate its Jewish dimensions, including the Jewishness of Jesus, and that is undoubtedly part of the truth. But this should not be understood as a matter of taking some parts from the Jewish house next door in order to rehabilitate our Christian house. We live in the same house, of which Christians say with St. Paul that the Jewish Christ is the cornerstone (Ephesians 2:20). To change the metaphor somewhat, we live in the house of the one people of God only as we live with the Jews of whom Jesus was--and eternally is--one. The second Person of the Holy Trinity, true God and true man, is Jewish flesh. As is the eucharistic body we receive, as is the Body of Christ into which we are incorporated by Baptism. It is said that when John XXIII, then papal nuncio in Paris, first saw the pictures of the Jewish corpses at Auschwitz, he exclaimed, "There is the Body of Christ!"

All such insights are but variations on the words of Paul that must, for Christians, be ever at the center of our reflection on the mystery of living Judaism: "But if some of the branches were broken off and you, a wild olive shoot, were grafted in their place to share the richness of the olive tree, do not boast over the branches. If you do boast, remember it is not you that support the root, but the root that supports you. . . . So do not be proud, but stand in awe" (Romans 12:17ff). "Salvation is from the Jews." This people is not, as the aforementioned Bible commentator suggests, a "point of departure" but remains until the end of time our point of arrival. By the appointment of the God whom we worship, we travel together, joined in awe of one another, sometimes in fear of one another, always in argument with one another, until that final point of arrival when we shall know even as we are known (1 Corinthians 13:12).

When we Christians do not walk together with Jews, we are in danger of regressing to the paganism from which we emerged. Rosenzweig saw that gnosticism, pantheism, and assimilation to the idolatry of culture and nation are constant temptations for Christians. In 1929 he was prescient in foreseeing what would happen in Germany:

The nations have been in a state of inner conflict ever since Christianity with its supernational power came upon them. Ever since then, and everywhere, a Siegfried is at strife with that stranger, the man of the cross (des gekreuzigten Mannes), in his very appearance so suspect a character. . . . This stranger who resists the continued attempts to assimilate him to that nation's own self-idealization.

Marcionism was not a one-time heresy. New Marcions are ever at hand to seduce Christianity into becoming a culture-religion, a practical morality, or but another spirituality of self-fulfillment. Christianity does indeed seek to engage culture, provide a guide for living, and propose the way to human flourishing, but, reduced to any of these undoubtedly good ends, it is not Christianity. Liberal Protestant theology beginning in the nineteenth century was much preoccupied with the question of "the essence of Christianity," and, not incidentally, was contemptuous of Jews and Judaism. Christianity is not defined by an essence but by the man of the cross, a permanently suspect character, forever a stranger of that strange people, the Jews. Through Jesus the Jew, we Christians are anchored in history, defined not by an abstract essence but by a most particular story.

With respect to Judaism, Christians today are exhorted to reject every form of supersessionism, and so we should. To supersede means to nullify, to void, to make obsolete, to displace. The end of supersessionism, however, cannot and must not mean the end of the argument between Christians and Jews. We cannot settle into the comfortable interreligious politesse of mutual respect for positions deemed to be equally true. Christ and his Church do not supersede Judaism but they do continue and fulfill the story of which we are both part. Or so Christians must contend. It is the story that begins with Abraham who in the eucharistic canon we call "our father in faith."

There is no avoiding the much vexed question of whether this means that Jews should enter into the further fulfillment of the salvation story by becoming Christians. Christians cannot, out of a desire to be polite, answer that question in the negative. We can and must say that the ultimate duty of each person is to form his conscience in truth and act upon that discernment; we can and must say that there are great goods to be sought in dialogue apart from conversion; we can and must say that we reject proselytizing, which is best defined as evangelizing in a way that demeans the other; we can and must say that Jews and Christians need one another in many public tasks imposed upon us by a culture that is, in large part, in manifest rebellion against the God of Israel; we can and must say that there are theological, philosophical, and moral questions to be explored together, despite our differences regarding Messianic promise; we can and must say that friendship between Jew and Christian can be secured in shared love for the God of Israel; we can and must say that the historical forms we call Judaism and Christianity will be transcended, but not superseded, by the fulfillment of eschatological promise. But along the way to that final fulfillment we are locked in argument. It is an argument by which--for both Jew and Christian--conscience is formed, witness is honed, and friendship is deepened. This is our destiny, and this is our duty, as members of the one people of God--a people of God for which there is no plural.

We can do no better than Paul, who, at the end of his anguished ponderings in Romans nine through eleven, having arrived at the farthest reaches of analysis and explanation, dissolves into doxology:

O The depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and how inscrutable His ways! . . . For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him be glory forever. Amen.

Along the way to the eschatological resolution of our disagreements, Jews and Christians encourage one another to wait faithfully upon the Lord. Not all Jews and not all Christians agree with this way of understanding the matter. For instance, Christopher Leighton writes, "Plurality and difference are the inescapable realities of our existence, and any theological attempt to dissolve our diversity through appeals to a higher truth or a totalizing unity are suspect, even when projected against an eschatological horizon." He goes on to say that "the challenge for Christian theology is to accept, perhaps even celebrate, the gaps, the silences, the distances between us Christians and Jews." That is in some respects an attractive view and should not be dismissed as being no more than interreligious politesse. But it is, I believe, finally inadequate. "Totalizing" is, of course, a pejorative term, but it is precisely a definitive and comprehensive eschatological resolution that we await. Leighton is surely right to say, however, that along the way we should engage the Jewish people "as a mystery in whose company we may discover our own limits and in whose midst we may also discern new and unsuspected insights into ourselves, the world, and God."

It is precisely that spirit of discovery and discernment that marks the Second Vatican Council's "Declaration on the Relationship of the Church to Non-Christian Religions" ( Nostra Aetate ). Note that the declaration is about the Church, not simply about individual or group relations. Here the mystery of the Church encounters the mystery of the Jewish people. "As this sacred Synod searches into the mystery of the Church, it recalls the spiritual bond linking the people of the New Covenant with Abraham's stock." The Church does not go outside herself but more deeply within herself to engage Jews and Judaism. This is consonant with Rosenzweig's observation that Christianity becomes something else when it is not centered in the Jewish "man of the cross." Nostra Aetate continues: "Nor can [the Church] forget that she draws sustenance from the root of that good olive tree onto which have been grafted the wild olive branches of the Gentiles. Indeed, the Church believes that by his cross Christ, our Peace, reconciled Jew and Gentile, making them both one in himself (cf. Ephesians 2:14-16)." Note that the statement that the Church draws sustenance from the Jewish people is in the present tense. It is not simply that she drew sustenance in her beginnings; she now, and perhaps until the end of time, draws sustenance. Also with Muslims and others, Nostra Aetate enjoins understanding, respect, study, and dialogue, but only with reference to the Jews does the declaration say that we are dealing with the very mystery of the Church, and therefore the story of salvation.

At least for Catholics, Nostra Aetate marks the beginning of the present Jewish-Christian dialogue. That dialogue has produced many additional documents, official and unofficial, over the years. One may ask whether and, if so, how there have been advances over Nostra Aetate in Catholic understanding. That question necessarily engages the thought of John Paul II, who, it is universally acknowledged, has made unprecedented contributions to Catholic-Jewish relations. The extended reflection on Jews and Judaism in the Pope's remarkable little book Crossing the Threshold of Hope observes that "the New Covenant has its roots in the Old. The time when the people of the Old Covenant will be able to see themselves as part of the New is, naturally, a question to be left to the Holy Spirit." A purpose of the dialogue, if not the purpose of the dialogue, he adds, is "not to put obstacles in the way" of Jews coming to that recognition.

Note that he speaks of when, not whether, this will happen. As though to leave no doubt on this point, he goes on to discuss "how the New Covenant serves to fulfill all that is rooted in the vocation of Abraham, in God's covenant with Israel at Sinai, and in the whole rich heritage of the inspired Prophets who, hundreds of years before that fulfillment, pointed in the Sacred Scriptures to the One whom God would send in the 'fullness of time' (cf. Galatians 4:4)." Meanwhile, John Paul notes, the Church is carrying out the mission of Israel to the nations. He quotes approvingly a Jewish leader who said at a meeting, "I want to thank the Pope for all that the Catholic Church has done over the last two thousand years to make the true God known." We may recall in this connection that the Council's great Constitution on the Church, authoritatively setting forth her ecclesiological self-understanding, is titled Lumen Gentium, referring to the fulfillment of the vocation of Israel to be a light to the nations.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

U.S. Department of Justice officials are asking election officials in Dane and Milwaukee counties to hand over records of communication between their offices and former President Donald Trump and his allies as part of an investigation into Trump's efforts to keep himself in the White House despite losing reelection in 2020.

The subpoenas to Wisconsin officials seek records of communication with 19 people, including Dane County attorney Jim Troupis, who, while representing Trump, worked to overturn Trump's loss in Wisconsin and in other battleground states following the 2020 presidential election, according to a copy of the subpoena provided by Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell and Milwaukee County Clerk George Christenson

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

Livni, who held the position of minister of foreign affairs from 2006 to 2009, said transferring powers over the occupied West Bank to the "messianic ministers and anarchists" means annexation of the occupied territory "at the cost of a flare-up".

"On the way to a non-Jewish and non-democratic state, and so that we do not feel that this is happening, they will destroy the Supreme Court and teach our children that a state without equality is good," she wrote in a tweet.

Livni, who also led the Israeli opposition from 2013 to 2019, added that it is time to understand that "this is a problem not only for some minority, but for every Jew and Zionist".

"This is not a single problem to appoint someone or enact a law. It is time to connect the dots to see the big picture. The conflict revolves around our comprehensive view of the world in all areas," she continued.

VLAD'S USELESS IDIOTS:

In October 2020, weeks before the general election, the New York Post ran a story about what Rudy Giuliani claimed was a hard drive abandoned by Hunter Biden at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware.

Over 50 retired intelligence pros signed an open letter arguing that L'Affaire MacBook bore all the hallmarks of Russian disinfo. Twitter's former head of safety said this week that the story set off "every single one of my finely tuned [Russian intelligence] hack and leak campaign alarm bells."

Conveniently, the former shop owner who gave the data to Giuliani is legally blind, so he can't say whether the man who dropped off the machines was Hunter Biden. He's also a frothing conspiracy theorist who was unable to tell a straight story about the provenance of the laptop.

We know Vladimir Putin personally directed a campaign of interference in the 2020 elections that focused on feeding anti-Biden propaganda to influential Americans, including members of Trump's inner circle, according to a 2021 report by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

The report doesn't name names, but contains enough clues to identify Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump's personal lawyer, as the useful idiot in chief.

This time, the collusion between Trump and the Russians was right out in the open. With Trump's support, Giuliani spent much of 2019 ostentatiously shuttling to Ukraine and huddling with Kremlin-linked oligarchs, including an active Russian agent who was later sanctioned by Secretary Steve Mnuchin's Treasury Department for interference in the 2020 election.

Data from Hunter Biden's computer were on the market in Kyiv around the time Giuliani went disinfo-shopping. As you recall, Giuliani was searching for dirt in Ukraine because Hunter Biden sat on the board of a Ukrainian energy company, Burisma Holdings, which, according to that ODNI report, was hacked by the Russian spy service known as the GRU in late 2019.

Multiple US intelligence agencies repeatedly and explicitly warned Donald Trump in 2019 that Giuliani's bottomless thirst for dirt on the Bidens made him the target of a Russian intelligence operation. National Security Advisor Robert O'Brien warned Trump that any information Giuliani brought back from his Ukraine junket should be considered "contaminated" by the Russians. Trump reportedly shrugged and said, "That's Rudy." [...]

Republicans have falsely claimed that forensic analyses have proven that the data was found on a laptop that Hunter Biden abandoned at a repair shop in Delaware. These analyses have shown that some of the materials were produced by Hunter Biden. But that's how hack and leak attacks work. [...]

The GRU is notorious for hacking and leaking.

A GRU unit known as FancyBear or APT128 famously deployed this tactic against the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign in 2016. They also targeted George Soros, the World Anti-Doping Agency, scientists investigating the poisoning of a former Russian agent, and countless others. 

IT'S A RICO CASE:

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Former President Donald Trump recently called for the "termination" of the Constitution:

Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.

This is just the latest in a long line of reprehensible norm-breaking statements and actions by Trump. Just within the last few weeks, he also had a congenial meeting with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and anti-Semite Kanye West, and called for instituting the death penalty for drug dealers. Even if you support the War on Drugs (which I do not), this would be barbarically excessive punishment.

The usual excuse for such behavior by Trump is to claim it's all just words and/or that he doesn't really mean it. If nothing else, Trump's effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the resulting attack on the Capitol should give the lie to the notion that he doesn't really mean what he says, and that his abhorrent statements won't lead to action. He and his most committed supporters are more than happy to undermine the Constitution if it gets in their way.

But even when Trump's awful ideas cannot or do not lead to immediate action, they can still cause longterm harm by normalizing the previously unthinkable. In 1993, Senator and former Harvard Prof. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a famous article entitled "Defining Deviancy Down," in which he argued that (mostly) left-wing tolerance for various forms of criminal behavior and social pathology can increase crime and disorder over time, by making such actions more socially acceptable. For years, conservatives loved to cite this article as a warning against excessively permissive liberal attitudes towards criminality. While I don't agree with everything in Moynihan's analysis, the dynamic he identified is a genuine problem. At least on some issues, conservatives who cited it had a valid point.

Much the same point applies to Trump's deviations from constitutional and political norms.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

Former President Donald Trump recently called for the "termination" of the Constitution:

Do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION? A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.

This is just the latest in a long line of reprehensible norm-breaking statements and actions by Trump. Just within the last few weeks, he also had a congenial meeting with neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes and anti-Semite Kanye West, and called for instituting the death penalty for drug dealers. Even if you support the War on Drugs (which I do not), this would be barbarically excessive punishment.

The usual excuse for such behavior by Trump is to claim it's all just words and/or that he doesn't really mean it. If nothing else, Trump's effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election and the resulting attack on the Capitol should give the lie to the notion that he doesn't really mean what he says, and that his abhorrent statements won't lead to action. He and his most committed supporters are more than happy to undermine the Constitution if it gets in their way.

But even when Trump's awful ideas cannot or do not lead to immediate action, they can still cause longterm harm by normalizing the previously unthinkable. In 1993, Senator and former Harvard Prof. Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a famous article entitled "Defining Deviancy Down," in which he argued that (mostly) left-wing tolerance for various forms of criminal behavior and social pathology can increase crime and disorder over time, by making such actions more socially acceptable. For years, conservatives loved to cite this article as a warning against excessively permissive liberal attitudes towards criminality. While I don't agree with everything in Moynihan's analysis, the dynamic he identified is a genuine problem. At least on some issues, conservatives who cited it had a valid point.

Much the same point applies to Trump's deviations from constitutional and political norms.

WASTED ANGST:

The opening question in oral arguments came from Justice Clarence Thomas, who asked Smith's lawyer, Kristen Waggoner, to explain whether or not this case is ripe. In the law, a case is "ripe" when it is ready for litigation.

This question is particularly relevant because Smith does not yet offer wedding websites services and no charges have been brought against her under Colorado's anti-discrimination law.

Rather, Smith is seeking a pre-enforcement judgment from the court declaring that it would be a violation of the First Amendment for Colorado to compel her to provide wedding websites to same-sex couples were she to provide wedding websites to mixed-sex couples.

This feature of the case creates some complications for the justices because courts often rely on the specific factual details in a dispute to reach a decision. But in this case, there are no actual wedding websites designed by Smith for the court to review.

IT'S WHY THEY CONTINUALLY MEWL, "WHATABOUT":

The right has a deep psychological need for the Hunter Biden story. They desperately want Joe Biden to be corrupt and for the whole family to be, in Stefanik's words, "a crime family" because they have provided succor and support to someone who has encouraged political violence since his early rallies in 2015, has stoked hatred of minorities through lies, has used his office for personal gain in the most flagrant fashion, has surrounded himself with criminals and con men, has committed human rights violations against would-be immigrants by separating children from their parents, has pardoned war criminals, has cost the lives of tens of thousands of COVID patients by discounting the virus and peddling quack cures, has revived racism in public discourse, and attempted a violent coup d'etat.

They know it. It gnaws at them. 

AND VICE VERSA:

 As documents regarding the origins of the Iraq war became public, it became clear that it was this--the removal of the government of Iraq--that was the ultimate goal of the war, and the myriad of rationales that had been announced were simply formulated to sell the war to the public, nothing more. 

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

The Manhattan district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, is hiring a former senior Justice Department official with a history of taking on Donald Trump and his family business as the office seeks to ramp up its investigation into the former president.

The official, Matthew Colangelo, who before he became a top official at the Justice Department led the New York attorney general's civil inquiry into Trump, is likely to become one of the leaders of the district attorney's criminal inquiry into the former president.

IF ONLY IT HAD ALL BEEN STOPPED:

Fifty years ago last week, Governor Francis W. Sargent killed the Southwest Expressway, an 8-mile extension of Interstate 95 from Canton to the South End.

The Southwest Expressway threatened to displace thousands and bisect neighborhoods, forever altering their character and compounding air pollution problems. Advocates and government officials from the time said the decision helped Boston maintain its feel, that it preserved an inner core of neighborhoods that the highway would have been irreversibly sliced up.

Experts also see it as a domino that set in motion many important infrastructure projects that define Boston today, including a third harbor crossing that would ultimately become a reality in the Ted Williams Tunnel.

"The sense that much of Boston has of being a historic city with a very dense downtown fabric would have been destroyed," said Alan A. Altshuler, who was state transportation secretary at the time. "It would have been much more like the cities of the Midwest . . . where everywhere you look there are expressways."

Indeed, it's hard to overstate the impact that Sargent's decision had on modern Greater Boston. Today, part of the proposed highway-that-never-was is the Southwest Corridor Park, a treasured 4-mile greenway that stretches from the Back Bay to Forest Hills in Jamaica Plain. The old elevated Orange Line along Washington Street was torn down and relocated to the former highway corridor, which led to the renewal of neighborhoods in the South End and Jamaica Plain.

Years later, Sargent, a moderate Yankee Republican, would be hailed as a "transportation visionary" for setting the framework for how government thinks about transit and for prioritizing citizen participation in transportation planning.

HATING WOMEN (OTHER THAN THEIR MOTHERS) IS STRANGER:

If you had the good fortune or sense not to crawl down this particular rabbit hole over the weekend, fear not, I won't drag you into the depths that I descended. The briefest recap is this. On Friday, Elon Musk tweeted that he was going to reveal how Twitter supposedly covered up the Hunter Biden scandal in October 2020. Matt Taibbi ("the Tulsi Gabbard of Substack," as The Bulwark's Tim Miller icily dubbed him) posted some of the emails found on Hunter's hard drive. Some showed the Biden campaign asking Twitter to refrain from posting certain material.

That's basically it. In some quarters of the right, this is the biggest scandal in the history of the republic, because it allegedly proves that Biden used his governmental power (a neat trick for someone who, at the time, controlled no part of the government) to set fire to the Constitution. "If this isn't a violation of the Constitution's first amendment, what is," Musk tweeted.

What this actually proves is two things about Musk. First, he is a constitutional illiterate. The First Amendment enjoins only the government from suppressing speech. During his 2020 campaign, Biden was a private citizen, so he had no means by which to violate the First Amendment at all. It also proves that Musk knows nothing about how politics and journalism work. Throughout history, media, and now social media, have gotten hold of material that might embarrass a campaign. The campaign learns of it, and the campaign pleads its case that the material is merely prurient and that publishing it would be gratuitous and not in the public interest.

Sometimes campaigns win that argument, sometimes they lose. I've had a few of those kinds of conversations myself over the years. They can get heated. But they never have anything to do with the First Amendment. They're about exercising news judgment and defining what's in the public interest. But it's very easy for cynics to make idiots who don't know what the First Amendment does and does not cover believe that they're about the First Amendment.

Now: Here's the psychotic part. As Miller put it: "The offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign's request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden in the buff." And these photos revealed to the world that Hunter has ... well, you know ... let's just say that he has been blessed by nature. The New York Post reported over the summer on its actual size. You can go look that up if you wish.

So here, clearly, is still one more thing for the right to hate about Hunter. Don't laugh. Men don't talk about it much in polite company, but this is something many men think about to the point of obsession. And isn't it particularly acute among conservative men, all full of that macho swagger? Isn't that swagger a form of compensation, like that bright orange Dodge Charger the 61-year-old balding man suddenly decides he can't live without? And isn't Donald Trump, who still smarts 30 years later from being dubbed "short-fingered" by Spy, the most insecure of all men along these lines? You surely don't forget the time he actually made his penis a campaign issue in 2016. It's not the kind of thing you can unremember.

NEVER WASTE A CRISIS:

The invasion of Ukraine by major oil and gas exporter Russia has triggered an energy crunch and prompted countries in Europe, which were highly dependent on Russian deliveries, to diversify their supplies.

"Renewables were already expanding quickly, but the global energy crisis has kicked them into an extraordinary new phase of even faster growth as countries seek to capitalise on their energy security benefits," said IEA executive director Fatih Birol.

"The world is set to add as much renewable power in the next five years as it did in the previous 20 years," Birol said in a statement.

"This is a clear example of how the current energy crisis can be a historic turning point towards a cleaner and more secure future world energy system."

The amount of renewable power capacity added in Europe between 2022-2027 is forecast to be twice as high as in the previous five-year period, the IEA said.

EU nations could deploy wind and solar power even faster if they were to quickly streamline the process for receiving permits, the report said.

XI WHO?:

With the push towards carbon neutrality growing, and as a worrying trend of rising temperatures and natural disasters caused by global warming continues, solar cells will play a pivotal role in the world's transition to renewable energy.

Now, a research group has laid the path for achieving higher open-circuit voltage in tin sulfide (SnS) solar cells, thus realizing their latent potential as a thin-film solar material.

Thin-film solar cells, which comprise compound semiconductors with strong light absorption, require less raw materials, making them lighter and cheaper to produce.

SnS is one such thin-film solar cell material with environmentally friendly credentials, since it contains no rare or toxic elements. 

OH, THE HUMANITIES...:

Two years ago, Airbus unveiled several possible aircraft concepts - known collectively as "ZEROe" - which are helping to define the world's first zero-emission commercial airliner which could enter service by 2035. While these concepts explore various size categories, aerodynamic layouts and propulsion system architectures, they all have one thing in common: they are hydrogen-fuelled. Three of them have engines which use hydrogen combustion to drive their gas turbines - similar to the way that turbofans and turboprops burn kerosene today, but without the latter's CO2 and particulate emissions.

Meanwhile, a fourth ZEROe concept aircraft, representing a high-wing 100-seat regional airliner, features six eight-bladed propellers attached to engine pods - a configuration recently patented by Airbus. While outwardly resembling turboprop powerplants, these pods actually contain hydrogen fuel cells which produce electricity as the result of an electro-chemical reaction to power electric motors. It is in this context that Airbus has been conducting feasibility studies and laboratory tests to realise a fully working megawatt-class fuel-cell engine and demonstrator which could be tested in flight by the middle of this decade - around 2026.

First announced publicly on 30th November this year at the Airbus Summit, the demonstrator will use Airbus' multi-modal flight test platform - the iconic A380 MSN001. The aircraft will be modified externally to carry the fuel-cell engine pod, while inside the aircraft's rear fuselage Airbus will install a unique cryogenic tank to contain the liquefied hydrogen.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

Covid anti-vax conspirators offer a thriving line in coffee and cookies on the east coast of Australia, running alternative cafes from Cairns to Nimbin and down the spine of the Great Dividing Range to Katoomba and points further south. Local customers complain about big government, big capital and (intriguingly) the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.

A sign in the window of one anti-vaxxer hangout, across from Katoomba's railway station, reads "We stand united against government tyranny!!" Bill Gates smiles threateningly from a silk-screen print, vaccination needle in hand, alongside an advertisement for Chakra group-healing sessions. In this part of town, conspiracy theories and alternative healing are served with coffee and cake on what appears to be a sustainable anti-vax business model. [...]

There's no viable business model for superstitious belief in China, where science and rational planning carry the day and the apparently irrational desires of common people count for little.

But here's the thing. China is opening up again after three years of intermittent but severe Covid lockdowns. Over that period it managed to keep the virus in check but failed to prepare the country's people for a timely transition from epidemic lockdowns to a more flexible model of pandemic management. Why this neglect, if China's government is as rational, capable and forward thinking as it claims to be ? Why lift lockdowns heading into winter rather in the warmer months earlier this year when the virus was less active? As a result of this series of policy failures, China could be heading for a health crisis on a scale the world has not seen since the crisis that shook India in 2020.

Some analysts say the party erred in abandoning its long-held commitment to science by succumbing to an anti-vax syndrome of its own devising. 

WE ARE ALL WOKE:

Taryn Fenske, DeSantis' Communications Director said "woke" was a "slang term for activism ... progressive activism" and a general belief in systemic injustices in the country.

[Ryan Newman, DeSantis' General Counsel, a]sked what "woke" means more generally, Newman said "it would be the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."

FAKING IT:

To make an overly broad generalization, philosophers like Daston and Chang work in the shadow of Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), who taught philosophers of science that one way to understand the nature of science was to look at its history. Kuhn wrote in the opening of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), "History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed."

And what does this history tell us? Well, from Kuhn's perspective, textbook histories a la Sen are essentially comforting myths, ways for scientists to imbue their work with meaning. When scientific work becomes difficult and technical, as it often is, scientists are able to think back to the history stories, putting their work, which often amounts to very little, in the context of a grand tradition. Science history for scientists, in this view, functions as self-help, as motivational propaganda.

In other words, when scientists dislike the philosophers and historians who follow Kuhn, they have good reasons. Even leaving the unflattering caricatures aside, many scientists still generally think of themselves as chasing The Truth, while historians and philosophers of science more often see scientists as working together to fish for serendipitous accidents that somehow prove reliable.

Of course, I'm overstating things for effect, and I should remark that, despite what I've said so far, I'm generally sympathetic to Kuhn and his followers. When Chang shows over and over in Inventing Temperature that "decisive" experiments were far less decisive than their promoters claimed, I believe him. In their rigorous skepticism, philosophers and historians of science have the upper hand. But the goal of science is not just doubt...and here we find our paradox.

Suppose historians and philosophers of science--HSPs, to explicitly construct a strawman--are right. Suppose that science doesn't get at the deep essence of any phenomena, and that science history is filled with abandoned veins of gold. Given this, whose work would a benevolent mentor recommend to a student scientist: the HSP Chang, or the motivational guru Sen?

Though Chang, in this thought experiment, is more nearly right, the student may still benefit more from reading Sen. Why? Because in Einstein's Fridge, Sen gives the impression that empirical study can pay off. No doubt Chang would insist that Inventing Temperature is also a story of empirical studies that paid off, but science students need all the encouragement they can get.

I find myself, with this, circling back to religious analogies--to Pascal's wager, or to Kierkegard's leap of faith--where they may not be entirely warranted. But there does seem to be a connection. The belief in a sturdy framework, whether in religion or science, can be enormously helpful to young investigators as they launch themselves toward unknown depths. Though my own attitudes tend toward agnosticism in all things, this may not be the best attitude for someone aiming to make empirical discoveries. It may be that "mutual incomprehension," too, sometimes has its uses.

OMEGA MALES:

New Israeli research suggests that side effects from COVID vaccines are frequently psychosomatic -- a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.

The more hesitant people are about taking the vaccine, the more likely they are to feel side effects, according to a peer-reviewed study that was published on Monday.

This constitutes a "nocebo" effect, they claimed. In other words, it's the opposite of the placebo effect, which sees a fake intervention deliver positive effects. Here, just the thought of negative effects seemingly causes them to transpire.

The user then rates the severity of their long covid symptoms in the evening on a scale of 0 to 3 (0 representing no symptoms, and 3 representing severe symptoms). Research from the American Heart Association has found that reduced heart rate variability, which corresponds with a more stressed nervous system, is common in people with long covid. 

MERGE IT WITH NAFTA:

It's been a long time coming, but several African nations have started trading a trickle of goods under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement.

Kenya has shipped locally-made car and truck batteries as well as a consignment of Kenyan-grown tea to Ghana in the past months. Rwanda has also exported processed coffee beans to the West African nation.

"It's a positive move," said Nixon Paloma, Group Finance Officer at Associated Battery Manufacturers. The firm is one of only two companies in Kenya taking part in a pilot project called the Guided Trade Initiative.

The initiative gives companies dealing in certain products in selected countries support through the AfCFTA process. The idea is to test -- and prove -- that the AfCFTA system works and get intraregional trade finally rolling under AfCFTA. As well as Kenya, Rwanda and Ghana, it includes Cameroon, Egypt, Mauritius, Tanzania and Tunisia.

SO MUCH WINNING!:

Three people have been killed and at least two nuclear-capable bombers likely damaged in separate blasts at two Russian airfields, state and independent media outlets reported Monday. [...]

Engels serves as a base for Tu-95 and Tu-160 nuclear-capable strategic bombers and is located 500 kilometers east of Ukraine's border. 

Satellite images published last week showed around two dozen Tu-95s and Tu-160s parked at the Engels airfield, which media outlets said were part of Russia's preparations for massive airstrikes on Ukraine.

THAT WAS EASY:

We have just entered the first days of summer in Australia, and it's worth pausing for just a few moments to reflect on the stunning Spring that has all but sealed Australia's leap towards a green energy future.

Never have so many governments, utilities, corporates and investors promised so much in such a short period of time for such an important outcome.

Yes, making promises is different to delivering on them, but the sheer scale of the announcements over the past few months has been extraordinary - from new emissions and renewable targets, new projects, the possibility of opening new manufacturing industries, and a promise to fast-track the closure of Australia's dirty coal plants.

At the same, the country's main grids have set new benchmarks for the penetration of renewables, and shown an extra layer of reliability despite the high levels of wind and solar. And the market operator has also set out new engineering pathways that show that - yes - 100 per cent renewables can be done.

Consider what we have seen in the past three months...

9/11 WAS A SUICIDE BOMBING:

In May 2011, it took al-Qaeda just a few days to formally comment on Osama bin Laden's death, and only until June for them to confirm Ayman al-Zawahiri's ascension to the organization's top job. When Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi was killed in 2019, the Islamic State was even more efficient, taking just days to both confirm his death and announce his successor. But despite the United States announcing that Zawahiri was killed at the end of July, al-Qaeda has thus far neither confirmed his death nor announced who will fill his shoes. Adding to the layers of confusion, they released a new recording by Zawahiri, though it did not contain indications of when it was made, and his image continues to be used across their publications. It is not clear what this silence means for the organization and the wider terrorist threat from al-Qaeda, but it does not seem positive for the group.

Analysts have been monitoring al-Qaeda media for indications of what the group's future hierarchy will look like. Experts and governments do not expect the group to completely collapse or stop targeting the United States and its interests at home or abroad. In recent testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Christine Abizaid, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, outlined her office's assessment that while al-Qaeda's capacity has diminished, the group's North African and Somali affiliates still pose significant threats. Al-Qaeda's behavior over the past three months reinforces this assessment: It is increasingly difficult to believe that the group can exert the same threat given its leadership depletion.

IT'S ALWAYS THE rIGHT:

Former Mesa County, Colorado, elections clerk Tina Peters seems to be running out of allies and legal runway. On Wednesday, 45-year-old Sandra Brown plead guilty to "attempting to influence a public servant, a felony, and official misconduct, a misdemeanor." Ms. Brown is one of two of Peters' employees accused of helping Peters tamper with election equipment. Brown will not be sentenced until after she testifies in Peters' trial next year.

Brown follows Peters' former chief deputy, Belinda Knisley, who pleaded guilty in a similar deal this past August. Peters has pleaded not guilty to 10 counts of violating election laws in service of her MAGA-inspired Big Lie theories.

TO BE FAIR, IT'S A PURITAN NATION:

A more contrarian argument suggests prohibition was actually a success -- pointing at dramatic reductions in alcohol consumption during and after the Prohibition Era, alongside declines in alcohol-related mortality and crime. [...]

Indeed, the history of prohibition might better be told not as the onward march of temperance "fanatics," but rather the corruption, decay and collapse of a truly odious business model.

By contrast, when nationwide prohibition was finally repealed on Dec. 5, 1933, control over the liquor traffic reverted back to the states. And while the states varied in how they regulated the liquor traffic -- through excise taxation, state-run liquor dispensaries or continuing on as "dry" prohibition states -- there was general consensus that regulation was a necessity, lest the corrupt liquor-machine politics return.

Today, the saloons of old are gone, and bars, restaurants and retail stores face strict scrutiny across the United States. Restrictions include minimum ages for purchase and consumption of alcohol, strictly-regulated opening and closing hours of operation, and civil and criminal punishments both for illegal purchasers and sellers. Add to that the restrictions on drunken driving, liquor advertising and even alcohol content, and the booze market is among the most heavily regulated in the country.

Those who don't understand the logic of some of these restrictions -- like forbidding booze sales on election days -- simply lay bare their ignorance of how nefarious and corrupting an institution the liquor business was in the days before prohibition.

For their part, the post-repeal brewers, distillers and retailers presented a new image as trustworthy, responsible and, above all, law-abiding corporate citizens -- completely at odds with their saloon-era predecessors. Against the backdrop of the Great Depression, the reintroduction of a well-regulated alcohol industry promised thousands of good-paying jobs in industry and hospitality, millions of dollars annually in badly needed revenues to federal, state and local treasuries, and a promise not to be a blight on their local communities. And while abuses and improprieties occasionally occur, the modern American alcohol market is night and day different from the systemic economic exploitation, societal parasitism and political corruption of the liquor machine of old.

Ultimately, when it comes to the goal of expelling liquor-traffic corruption from American politics and minimizing its predations against the American people, the Prohibition Era might fairly be considered a success.

SHE DEFINITELY IS THE FUTURE OF TRUMPISM:

Lawyers for failed candidates Kari Lake and Mark Finchem, who ran for governor and secretary of state of Arizona, respectively, will have to fork over some cash thanks to a judge's ruling stemming from a baseless lawsuit the candidates filed in April.  [...]

Tuchi's ruling reads like an elementary civics worksheet, going to pains to reiterate that Arizona's elections already use a paper ballot-based system, contrary to Lake and Finchem's claims and their demands that Arizona implement such a system. 

The judge added that the lawsuit falsely claimed that Arizona's electronic voting systems aren't evaluated by objective experts. 

He concluded that the attorneys -- who were not named in the ruling -- acted "recklessly" and in "bad faith."

"Plaintiffs never put forth sufficient allegations about Arizona's election systems -- let alone sufficient evidence to support any such allegations -- to demonstrate a likelihood that Arizonans' votes would be incorrectly counted in the 2022 midterm election due to manipulation," Tuchi wrote. 

The judge made clear that sanctioning the attorneys didn't clear Lake and Finchem themselves from acting inappropriately -- "far from it," he wrote. (On Twitter, Finchem and Lake both predictably attributed the ruling to a judge appointed by Barack Obama.)

"To sanction Plaintiffs' counsel here is not to let Plaintiffs off the hook," the judge wrote. "It is to penalize specific attorney conduct with the broader goal of deterring similarly baseless filings initiated by anyone, whether an attorney or not."

TIME TO RETREAT TO MAR-A-LAGO:

In its latest intelligence update, the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense (MOD) said on Sunday that recent polling suggests public support for what the Russian president has called a "special military operation" is "falling significantly."

British officials were referring to a poll reportedly commissioned by the Kremlin "for internal use only" and obtained by Russian-language independent news outlet Meduza.

That data, according to the report, indicated that 55 percent of Russians favor peace talks with Ukraine, and only 25 percent claim to support continuing the conflict.

THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE TO LIBERALISM:

The limited Chevron license has important strings attached to ensure the money it generates plays a constructive role in ending Venezuela's woes. The new permit was issued only after representatives of the Maduro regime and the political opposition resumed secret talks in Mexico City, which came after Maduro was reelected nearly four years ago in an election widely recognized as fraudulent. (As a result, the US government does not recognize Maduro as Venezuela's legitimate president.) Once the talks resumed, both parties agreed to establish a fund to be managed by the United Nations. Up to $3 billion dollars in frozen assets from the Maduro regime, now held in foreign banks, will be gradually released to the new fund and can only be spent on basic needs such as medicine, food, and other humanitarian aid for Venezuelans.

One of the most important goals of the negotiations, both for the opposition and for the US government, is to ensure democratic and transparent elections in Venezuela in 2024 -- something that Maduro naturally resists. But his willingness to come back to the table signals that he is in desperate need of relief; he wants more sanctions lifted.

Crucially, the new license prevents any cash payments from going to the Venezuelan government and will allow Chevron to export oil only to the United States. Still, many Republicans opposed Biden's move and suggested it would prop up Maduro's socialist regime. Mike Pompeo, who served under former president Donald Trump as secretary of state, tweeted that he "worked to sanction Venezuela's communist dictatorship. Reversing our sanctions won't help Venezuelans -- but it will help Maduro."

While that's always a possibility, there is no guarantee that Maduro will reap anything from the Chevron license. Nor is there any certainty that the Biden administration will continue to lift those sanctions if this step has unintended consequences. But Maduro does have an incentive now to cooperate with the opposition and the US government: The worldwide energy crisis derived from Russia's invasion of Ukraine offers him a unique opportunity to come out of global isolation. 

Low denomination bills are scarce in the headlong capitalism that is gripping Venezuela. Everybody is thinking about money. Daily life is governed by greenbacks. The country, through Chavism, has moved on from the unsuccessful application of the Socialist Bolivarian revolution to a process of opening up branded in the forges of liberalism. The phenomenon has caused a mirage of economic recovery to appear.

Gone are the days of rigid controls. Up until very recently, Venezuelans hid their dollars because it was a crime to possess them beyond the watchful eye of the state. People had to queue for hours to buy rationed food at regulated prices and bolívars, the local currency, were few and far between. The panorama now is completely different. The use of the dollar as everyday currency, the lifting of price controls and tariff-free imports have changed the reality under which Venezuelans previously attempted to subsist.

The economy, says Luis Vicente León, an economist and president of the polling company Datanálisis, rebels against the established order faster than societies themselves. "What is happening in Venezuela, as it did before in China or Russia, is that people are looking for imaginative solutions to the control and interventionism of the state. When the government experienced problems due to sanctions and international isolation, they started to realize that riding this surfboard that society had created was more of a solution than a problem. And the government jumped on." And exactly the same thing happened with the dollar, which went almost overnight from being demonized to providing some guarantee of a certain stability.

The dollar is now used in almost 70% of commercial transactions, according to some economic observers, and in a distorted economy it has also been infected by inflation: more and more dollars are required to buy the same thing. Ecoanalítica noted that the dollar lost 50% of its purchasing power in Venezuela in 2021 and it forecasts another chunk being taken out of it this year. Life in dollars, in which those who can afford to seek refuge, is also becoming more expensive and retailers have taken to camouflaging prices in non-denominated amounts with the abbreviation Ref, for reference. The price of a pair of imitation shoes brought in via containers on which tax has not been paid in a shop in a commercial center is marked as Ref 30, which is to say, $30.

Nobody knows how many hours Venezuelans waste every time they open their wallet. Even the smallest transactions require a mental calculation of a few minutes to work out if the exchange rate applied by the shop is beneficial, which varies depending on the currency being used and convenience: if the extra tax has to be paid because a buyer only has dollars and their use has spiraled in recent months; if the price has to be rounded up because there are not enough low domination bills or coins for change; or if there is no other choice but to pay more for a product because they are only carrying devalued bolívars. In Venezuela's convoluted economy, everything ends up being more expensive.

Paying for anything in Caracas creates scenes worthy of a Marx Brothers movie. One morning, for example, a woman turns to a stranger in the queue to pay for a parking lot with a dollar in her hand: the parking place costs five bolívars, a few cents more than the dollar at the official exchange rate. The stranger with bolívars on his card pays for her and keeps the dollar, which means she avoids paying 3% more because of the Large Transaction Tax (the difference between large and minimal is obviously irrelevant). Just paying for parking can be an odyssey.

The sui generis capitalism being practiced in Venezuela has created a bubble of expenditure and redistribution in which four million people are living, particularly in Caracas. It is an island of consumerism in the middle of a precarious economy. Traffic in the capital has been restored to the diabolical levels of any major Latin American city whereas previously, due to a lack of gas, the roads were practically empty. Entrepreneurs are opening nightclubs, restaurants, supermarkets, stores and pharmacies. Internationally famous singers are returning to perform. One of the trendiest spots, Bar Caracas, has a price list identical to clubs in New York. That doesn't stop it from being jam-packed from Wednesday to Sunday. Bar Caracas is a terrace in a five-star hotel, the Tamanaco, where businesspeople from around the world stay, with local news on Google alert to try and understand what is happening in Venezuela. They have the feeling that if they get in quickly, before house and business prices start to recover, there is money to be made.

PURITAN NATION:

Its task is ambitious: no less than a rehabilitation of a distinctively--and ecumenically--Protestant social doctrine, one spanning (with variations) the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican strands of the Reformation. To that end, the work focuses on three major domains: (1) law, justice, and punishment; (2) marriage, life, and death; and (3) property, wealth, and poverty. Chapters within those broad categories cover topics such as the role of the civil magistrate, just war theory, procreation, abortion, private property, and environmental care, among others. In so doing, the book manages to sketch out an internally coherent set of principles that, despite their distinguished provenance, rarely find institutional expression among theologically conservative Protestants today.

Much of the content of this Protestant Social Teaching ("PST") resembles Catholic Social Teaching--such as its concern for the protection of unborn life and its contextualization of property rights within the horizon of a sovereign God, among other things. But its form is distinct. Specifically, PST tends to ground its claims in arguments from natural law and the early Christian tradition rather than in encyclicals or other ecclesiastical documents, a structural corollary of the fact that the Protestant tradition has historically rejected a single magisterium as the norming source of doctrine. Despite that difference, the Protestant and Catholic social traditions clearly ended up converging on common themes. Such similarity implies a significant degree of unanimity on the metaphysical underpinnings of Christian thought, a theme stressed by many chapter authors.

Among the volume's individual subsections, Steven Wedgeworth's chapter on the history of Christian views on abortion--ranging widely across sources from Jewish tradition to the writings of Luther and Calvin--is a particularly outstanding contribution. Similarly strong is Allen Calhoun's lengthy exploration of how the Lutheran, Reformed, and Anglican traditions shaped the rise of social-welfare regimes in European countries. Calhoun's work is a devastating rejoinder to claims that the Protestant tradition culminates in a kind of Randian libertarianism, or necessarily guts public forms of poor relief. [...]

If one overarching theme comes through in Protestant Social Teaching, though, it is that the Reformers celebrated by so many churches today shared a far "thicker" vision of society than the American frontier ideal. As Brad Littlejohn stresses in an early chapter, "the Reformers' profound respect for the mystery of God-given civil authority is a jarring but needed wake-up call, one that can help us question our own deep-seated individualism." Theirs was an era of magistracy and hierarchy, not of lone cowboys gazing out upon an untapped wilderness.

REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNANCE:

Iran's attorney general has said that the country's "morality police​​​​​​" will be disbanded, according to media reports on Sunday. 

"Morality police have nothing to do with the judiciary," Attorney General Mohammad Jafar Montazeri was quoted as saying late Saturday by the ISNA news agency. 

THANKS, VLAD:

Russian authorities rejected a price cap on the country's oil set by Ukraine's Western supporters and threatened Saturday to stop supplying the nations that endorsed it.

OPEN THE BORDERS:

Born in Riobamba, an Ecuadorian city nestled in the Valley of the Andes, Menoscal, 82, moved to New York City 55 years ago and opened up two shops that sold New York-themed clothing as well as jewelry. She said she never planned to open up a new store in the Upper Valley but was enticed by an opportunity after visiting Hanover in 1990 on a trip with her son, who was in college in Albany.

"We were (driving around) just looking, but not really looking for a place because I never thought I'd open a store in Hanover," Menoscal said. "But I saw a ski shop (at 34 S. Main St.) that was going out of business and that was really interesting to me because Hanover looked (to be) a great place and there were so many shoppers around."

Menoscal said the shop owner told her he was closing because of family matters. A few months later, Menoscal's new shop, Traditionally Trendy, occupied the space.

Using an approach similar to those she employed at her shops in Manhattan, which are still open, Menoscal wanted to capitalize on the biggest market in Hanover: Dartmouth College. Her store was a go-to shop for Dartmouth-themed apparel including shirts, sweatpants, sweatshirts, scarves, and even baby clothes -- all emblazoned with the college's signature green-and-white stripes or in its dark-green color.

Hanover was a bit more "quaint and quiet" when Traditionally Trendy first opened, Menoscal said, but really hasn't changed much in the 31 years she was in business at 34 S. Main St. One subtle change was that Dartmouth students, whom she often hired (including the last two employees to work there), weren't looking for jobs in town as frequently as when the store first opened.

Beyond that, Menoscal said she found Hanover to be a warm and inviting place. Of Ecuadorian and Spanish descent, Menoscal said friends advised her when searching for retail space in New York that she should be careful where she looked, not every neighborhood would easily welcome a person of her background.

"(In Hanover) everybody welcomed me," Menoscal said. "It was a great experience."

WHAT INSURRECTION?:

Today, one of former president Trump's messages on the struggling right-wing social media platform Truth Social went viral. 

In the message, Trump again insisted that the 2020 presidential election had been characterized by "MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION," and suggested the country should "throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or...have a NEW ELECTION." 

Then he added: "A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great 'Founders' did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections!" 

In other words, Trump is calling for the overthrow of the Constitution that established this nation. He advocates the establishment of a dictator. 

IT'S TWO CENTURIES LATER:

American historiography refers to the period following Andrew Jackson's 1828 presidential victory as "the era of the common man," marking a turning point in the balance of power within American white settler society. Prior to Jackson's rise, the levers of power were pulled by figures who came from the older, privileged segment of that society. This group mostly lived in large cities in the northeastern regions of the United States, yet the population it represented was decreasing in numbers.

Meanwhile, the United States saw the rise of new social groups -- such as young farmers and immigrants from Europe who settled in the Western regions, in the so-called "American frontier" -- who demanded a seat at the table. They advocated a policy of unlimited expansion, which did not recognize the alliances made and treaties signed with the Native Americans, and demanded that the federal government support their takeover of more native land using force and capital. In other words, the younger settler groups -- who did not belong to the old guard that had already established itself on conquered lands -- wanted to continue colonization to serve their own interests.

The rise to power of Jackson -- a Tennessee farmer who was considered a self-made man and the embodiment of the American entrepreneur -- was seen as an expression of "democratization" and a victory for the masses against the aristocratic establishment. This image was, of course, a product of the narrow confines of white American settler society, while "the people" that Jackson claimed to represent, being part of that society, felt entitled to the spoils and privileges that derived from dispossessing the native population.

Indeed, Jackson flaunted his violent record for this purpose: whether as a U.S. Army commander or as president, he was directly responsible for the land expropriation and forced population transfer of native tribes, and actively undermined the validity of treaties that the federal government had previously signed.

The most prominent expression of this brutal policy was the expulsion of the Cherokee, which was carried out in blatant disregard of an explicit ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court -- viewed by Jackson as one of the symbols of the old elite -- which had affirmed the validity of the federal treaties. In 1838, during the tenure of his successor, Martin Van Buren, the U.S. Army expelled 18,000 Cherokees from their land in Georgia. They were forced to walk thousands of miles on foot, without supplies or food, beyond the Mississippi River, on what would come to be known as the "Trail of Tears." Thousands died in the death march.

In this context, even the natives, the direct victims of the supremacist regime, are sometimes compelled to pin their hopes on the old guard and its most prized institutions, since they recognize what is arguably a more serious danger in the anti-elite settlers. The patterns of settler violence are different: while the established elite represents "respectable violence," which becomes regulated through agreements with the natives, the new elite promotes the violence of the individual, the settler pushing further out west, whose ultimate symbol is the sheriff -- the man who enforces "law and order" against the native's resistance to colonization.

THE TRUMP BRAND IS OPPOSITION TO THE rEPUBLIC:

House Republicans revere the Constitution so much they're going to read it aloud at the first session of the new House. Perhaps they could first take a moment to criticize and denounce this dangerous anti-Constitutional appeal by a man they've defended, supported, and cheered on? pic.twitter.com/JKzw1yK4dg

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) December 3, 2022

BECAUSE THEY HAVEN'T ALL ACCEPTED THE eND OF hISTORY:

After World War II, the Korean peninsula was, of course, partitioned between South and North Korea. The two countries share similar geography, so the miracle in South Korea and the utter lack of one in North Korea cannot be attributed to their endowment of minerals or physical access to foreign markets. They have a shared language and culture, so it is hard to say that there was something unique about the South Korean culture or history that prompted the miracle there (or halted it in North Korea). They both were left devastated and poor by the Korean War.

What's left as an explanation is that the set of institutions governing economic activity in the two countries were distinct after 1953. The North adopted a communist ideology and built a set of economic institutions around it. We can see the results of that today. North Korea has failed, by any plausible metric, to advance economically. In addition to the lack of individual freedom, living standards are among the worst in the world, and North Korea continues to suffer from recurring issues such as famine that advanced economies like South Korea left behind years ago.

YOUR NEXT PLANE WILL BE A VOLT:

Companies across the U.S., including several startups, are developing electric air taxis that aim to take cars off the road and put people in the sky.

Commercial airlines, specifically, are investing in this type of technology to make trips to and from the airport shorter and faster for consumers.

In October, Delta Air Lines joined the list of airlines backing EV technology startups, with a $60 million investment in Joby Aviation, a company developing electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs), intended to operate as an air taxi service.

In 2021, when Joby announced its plan to launch its Uber-like air taxis by 2024, it generated criticism from industry analysts on the ability to launch by that date. But Delta's investment in Joby is a five-year partnership to operate eVTOLs exclusively in Delta's network.

United Airlines is also partnering with a Swedish-based startup, Heart Aerospace, to have electric aircraft flying regional routes by 2030, adding to two other eVTOL investments from the airline. One is for $15 million with Eve Air Mobility for 200 aircraft, and another for $10 million with Archer Aviation for 100 eVTOLs.

American Airlines invested $25 million in Vertical Aerospace, a U.K.-based company, with an order for 50 aircraft.

SO MUCH WINNING!:

The initial wave of sanctions had to work around the fact that Western European economies are highly dependent on Russian natural gas for essential, inelastic energy supplies. The goal then became to neutralize the value of the dollars and euros spent on Russian gas by targeting Russian financial institutions and leveraging the global financial centers located in London and New York. That part of the plan worked as intended--Russian companies reported a massive deterioration in credit conditions as sanctions came into effect earlier this year, and conditions have barely improved since then despite the efforts of the Central Bank of Russia.

The second prong of this effort entailed cutting Russian consumers and businesses from critical manufactured goods. While Russia had significant leverage through energy supplies, the country was dependent on imports for many consumer goods and would need semiconductors, vehicles, and other complex manufacturing items in order to wage war effectively. Sanctions could therefore have an outsized influence on Russian industry, consumption, and combat capabilities through targeted trade restrictions. That's exactly what we saw within the Russian business sector, as manufacturing industries with significant foreign economic activity took much larger hits from the initial sanctions and have struggled to recover since.

Indeed, production for key complex goods in Russia has completely tanked--with motor vehicle production down more than 50% and household appliance output shrinking by more than 40%. The manufacturing output of other key goods like computers and electronic equipment is also down 14% from 2019 levels. Impairing output in complex industries was key to hurting Russia's war machine and buying time for Ukrainian forces to mount a strong defense--and it seems to have worked as intended.

However, it has had the added effect of cutting Russian businesses and consumers off from key production goods too. Prices for new domestic and foreign passenger cars in Russia have increased by 25% and 43% respectively since sanctions were imposed at the beginning of this year, and Russian vehicle manufacturing is still struggling to even get production back to 2021 levels amidst input shortages. In fact, prices for all sorts of essential manufactured goods have increased dramatically since the start of this year--bath soap is up 44%, toothpaste is up 40%, diapers are up 22%, menstrual products are up 44%, smartphones are up 6%, and a variety of over-the-counter drugs have seen massive price hikes too.

Russian output declines are not just limited to complex manufacturing industries either--over the last year, real oil and natural gas output has also shrunk alongside manufacturing. Compared to last October, steel and iron production is down 12.3%, fertilizer production is down 9.4%, metal ore mining is down 7%, and coal mining is down 3.3%.

That's one reason why, despite elevated natural gas and oil prices throughout the year, Russian energy revenues have likely declined significantly from their peak. Russia has been forced to sell its crude oil at a discount to buyers in India, China, and elsewhere as sanctions bite--and it also dramatically cut the volume of natural gas sent to Europe.

THE BENEFITS OF CONSENSUAL GOVERNMENT:

The hijab headscarf became obligatory for all women in Iran in April 1983, four years after the 1979 revolution that overthrew the US-backed monarchy.

"Both parliament and the judiciary are working (on the issue)", of whether the law needs any changes, Mohammad Jafar Montazeri said in the holy city of Qom.

Quoted on Friday by the ISNA news agency, he did not specify what could be modified in the law.

The review team met on Wednesday with parliament's cultural commission "and will see the results in a week or two", the attorney general said.

President Ebrahim Raisi on Saturday said Iran's republican and Islamic foundations were constitutionally entrenched.

"But there are methods of implementing the constitution that can be flexible," he said in televised comments.

MOST OF hISTORY HAD eNDED BY 1215:

[T]o rediscover the English conservative political tradition we must ground it in the history of practical politics and rely on conservative thinkers -- such as they are and rarely though they come along -- only for occasional illumination.

◉ ◉ ◉

Above all, we must begin at the beginning. Which is not Burke's Reflections on the Late Revolution in France (sublime though its handful of great passages are) but the works of the Lancastrian jurist and politician, Sir John Fortescue. 

Fortescue's works were written in the second half of the fifteenth century, when the reborn English language first became capable of analytical prose. But -- just as three centuries later -- their trigger was France and her diametrically divergent development from England.

So, like Burke, Fortescue's work is an extended compare and contrast between England and France, to the huge advantage of England, of course. Burke compared febrile revolutionary France to placid and contented unrevolutionary England. Fortescue, the English "dominium politicum et regale" (a political and royal dominion) to the French "dominium regale" (a royal dominion). 

In the former, the king can only make law and impose taxation by the consent of the realm in Parliament; in the latter, the laws lie in the king's mouth and his subjects' property (or at least the property of the vast majority below noble rank) is in his hands.

Fortescue judges by results ("these be the fruits"). The English political system is superior because its protection of property leaves the common people of England prosperous, whereas the French peasantry -- mulcted by unlimited taxation and arbitrary confiscation -- are wretchedly poor. And the law of England is better too, since (among many other things) proof of guilt is by the verdict of a jury and not by confession extorted by unspeakable tortures.

Fortescue is clearly proud of his analysis of the distinction between England and France and claims for it the then unimpeachable authority of (among others) St Thomas Aquinas. But though "dominium regale" and "dominium politicum" do appear in his sources; the crucial middle term, "dominium politicum et regale" does not. 

Instead, it seems clear that Fortescue, like the good conservative that he was, derived his analysis from the observation of current political realties (or, as he put it, "experience and histories of the ancients") and then dignified it with the "shreds and patches" of the scholastic learning he had picked up in his youth at Oxford.

◉ ◉ ◉

But of course Fortescue's obstinate, bullish advocacy of England flew in the face of reality. France had triumphed in the Hundred Years War while defeated England had dissolved into the civil Wars of the Roses. France even offered refuge to the remnants of the dethroned House of Lancaster and its followers, including Fortescue himself. Which meant -- paradoxically -- that it was in France that Fortescue wrote his paean to England.

In short, to an informed, open-minded contemporary, like the Burgundian chronicler, Philippe de Commynes, French absolutist government represented the future and the English parliamentary system a failed and shrinking past. Nevertheless, Fortescue's confidence proved justified. 

Not least because of those very conservative things, attachment to place and force of habit. The Common Law had been taught in the Inns of Court, those quasi-university colleges, for centuries, with each generation handing down its lore to the next. And parliaments, likewise, had met more and more frequently in the same chambers of the Abbey-Palace complex of Westminster.

The result was that the only late-medieval English king seriously to try French methods was Henry VII, who, thanks to the accident of exile, had learned his statecraft in Brittany and France. And his death was followed by a swift and vigorous conservative reaction which reasserted the supremacy of Magna Carta and parliamentary finance.

DEEMING STUFF FROM RUDY RUSSIAN DISINFORMATION IS AN EASY CALL:

The tweet thread, which Taibbi dubbed the "Twitter Files," shows company executives rushing to make a thorny moderation call in a no-win situation. With a presidential election looming, the New York Post reported that a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden held evidence that he had inappropriately attempted to broker a meeting between a business client and his father when Joe Biden was vice president of the US.

Emails and messages in screenshots posted by Taibbi show what one executive called a "whirlwind," as some of Twitter's policy and trust and safety staffers questioned an initial decision to block sharing of the story for violating the platform's policy on distribution of hacked materials. (The provenance of the laptop, and whether all the files on it truly belong to Hunter Biden, remains unclear.)

The screenshots showed one staffer warning, "We'll face hard questions on this if we don't have some kind of solid reasoning." A company lawyer opined it was "reasonable for [Twitter] to assume" the material obtained by the newspaper was stolen. Other screenshots showed Twitter executives fielding advice from a Democratic member of congress and tech industry lobbyists.

What did the world learn about Twitter's handling of the incident from the so-called Twitter Files? Not much. After all, Twitter reversed its decision two days later, and then-CEO Jack Dorsey said the moderation decision was "wrong." Instead, the thread provided fresh fodder for conspiracy theories that have swirled around the laptop saga, including the insinuation--not backed by evidence--that government officials intervened to suppress the Post story. 

Yet the most salient lesson from Taibbi's thread may apply to Musk himself, who has taken to making big moderation decisions at Twitter almost unilaterally.

In the past two weeks Musk reinstated the account of former US president Donald Trump based on the results of a Twitter poll and unblocked a series of other users previously banned from the site for breaching content rules. Musk also championed the return of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, whose account was restricted in October after Ye posted an anti-Semitic tweet. (Restricted accounts still appear on the platform, but its users can't post or interact with them.)

Yet Musk this week announced that Ye would be suspended all over again after tweeting an image of a swastika inside the Star of David. His reasoning, which academics and journalists have called out as unclear, was that the post was a breach of Twitter's rule against incitement to violence.

Like the Twitter staffers who deliberated on the New York Post story in 2020, Musk was caught in a tough spot and appeared to feel under pressure to make a decision. And, as with those past arbiters of Twitter policy, the behind-the-scenes action seemed a little messy.

LEAVING THE WEST:

Next week will mark 30 years since the destruction of the Babri Masjid. Torn down by a mob in full public view, the demolition of the mosque, coming on the back of a massive public mobilization organized by the BJP, shook India's secular foundations. For the first time since 1950, the year India became a republic, a party had openly made national politics about religious identity and introduced majoritarianism into the political mainstream. The Babri Masjid demolition was a turning point for the BJP's political fortunes. Once confined to the margins, the party has steadily grown into an establishment juggernaut, winning absolute majorities in both of India's most recent general elections in 2014 and 2019. Under its leader, India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the party has reshaped Indian culture and politics, using its own interpretation of ancient history as a tool to ramp up polarization between Hindus and Muslims.

Much of the dominance of the Hindu right in India's politics today can be traced back to the movement to destroy the Babri Masjid and build a temple for Lord Rama, a key Hindu deity, where it once stood. Many Hindu nationalists maintain that the mosque stood at the exact spot where Lord Rama had been born. This belief had been popular in the area for decades, starting in the late 19th century. After the 1980s, a campaign initiated by political activists gave it new vigor. The claim that the mosque marked the exact spot of Lord Rama's birth was weaponized to foment anti-Muslim sentiment in general. The campaign was driven by organizations under the umbrella of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), the mother organization of the Hindu right, founded in 1925. The RSS is now India's largest paramilitary and most powerful civil society organization. Several members of the present government, including Prime Minister Modi, have been schooled by it and gone on to serve as pracharaks, or propagandists, for its ideas.

The RSS has been banned three times in independent India. The first time was in 1948, in the aftermath of the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi, the father of the nation. The assassin, Nathuram Godse, had himself been an RSS member. A new and acclaimed biography titled "Gandhi's Assassin" by the Delhi-based journalist Dhirendra K. Jha found no evidence that Godse ever left the organization, though the RSS maintains he had quit the group before he pulled the trigger to kill Gandhi.

The destruction of the Babri Masjid injected momentum into the campaign to turn India into a country for Hindus alone. It set the stage for portraying Islam as a religion and lifestyle alien to India, ignoring the rich history of coexistence and cooperation that have long prevailed on the subcontinent. The year 1992 marked the beginning of a drastically new form politics, aided by powerful private media organizations, which depicts Islam not just as violent but as "foreign" to Indian culture.

IDEOLOGUES HATE FREE ELECTIONS:

Concerns about threats to democracy motivated Democrats and independents to turn out while also helping independents decide to vote for Democrats, according to a voter survey from Nov. 11-16 by Impact Research, a Democratic polling firm.

"The biggest takeaway here is just how important protecting democracy was for voters in this House battlefield immediately coming out of the election," said Molly Murphy, the president of Impact Research, which conducted the survey for Democratic Party-aligned political action committees End Citizens United and Let America Vote.

Six in 10 voters cited protecting democracy as an extremely important reason that they decided to vote in November. This put the issue ahead of inflation (53%), abortion (47%) and crime (45%). When asked to choose the top two issues that motivated them to vote, 50% chose protecting democracy, second only to inflation at 55%.

These findings are largely in line with preelection surveys from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CBS News, NBC News, Quinnipiac University Poll and the Grinnell College National Poll, as well as exit polling from The Associated Press, NBC News and CNN.

The issue of democracy "was really one of the most dominant factors" for Democrats and independents in determining whether they would turn out and "decisive in decision-making in terms of whether independent voters were going to vote for the Democratic candidate or the Republican candidate," Murphy said.

Among Democrats, 73% cited protecting democracy as an extremely important reason that they decided to vote. Fifty-one percent of independents similarly cited it as extremely important, on par with the 53% who cited inflation.

Forty-one percent of voters who cast ballots for Democrats said protecting democracy was one of the top two reasons for voting as they did. It was the top reason among voters surveyed, listed only slightly above abortion (39%) and not liking the Republican candidate (38%).

The issue also likely moved some Republican voters to cross over and cast ballots for Democratic candidates. Sixty-four percent of Republicans who voted this way said their biggest concern was Republican candidates supporting former President Donald Trump and (incorrectly) believing that the 2020 election was stolen from him.

WHEN YOU LET THE TRUMPISTS BACK ON:

Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, slurs against Black Americans showed up on the social media service an average of 1,282 times a day. After the billionaire became Twitter's owner, they jumped to 3,876 times a day.

Slurs against gay men appeared on Twitter 2,506 times a day on average before Musk took over. Afterward, their use rose to 3,964 times a day.

And antisemitic posts referring to Jews or Judaism soared more than 61 percent in the two weeks after Musk acquired the site.

These findings -- from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League, and other groups that study online platforms -- provide the most comprehensive picture to date of how conversations on Twitter have changed since Musk completed his $44 billion deal for the company in late October. While the numbers are relatively small, researchers said the increases were atypically high.

THE MUSCOVITE CANDIDATE:

DEPARTING THE WEST:

Abe Foxman, the past Anti-Defamation League leader who long has said that nothing could separate him from support for Israel, now says the leaders of an extreme party could do the trick if they get their way in coalition talks with incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

"I never thought that I would reach that point where I would say that my support of Israel is conditional," Foxman said in an interview published Friday by The Jerusalem Post. "I've always said that [my support of Israel] is unconditional, but it's conditional. I don't think that it's a horrific condition to say: 'I love Israel and I want to love Israel as a Jewish and democratic state that respects pluralism.'"

"If Israel ceases to be an open democracy, I won't be able to support it," he said.

Roughly six in 10 Israelis are concerned about the future of Israeli democracy, according to a poll released Friday as prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu moved closer to finalizing his next government with a series of hardline Orthodox parties.

Sixty-one percent of respondents to a Channel 12 survey said they're worried about the future of Israeli democracy, while 35% said they were not.

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

The United States Forest Service (USFS) has begun transitioning its fleet of more than 17,000 vehicles from internal combustion to electric power. Right now, the agency is creating best practices and field testing three Ford F-150 Lightnings, which often must operate in remote areas and extreme weather conditions.

The effort will help the USFS comply with Executive Order 14057--Catalyzing America's Clean Energy Economy Through Federal Sustainability--which directs all new federal agency light duty vehicle acquisitions to be zero-emission beginning in 2027, and acquisitions of all other vehicle types to be zero-emissions by 2035. The light duty vehicle category includes anything a normal consumer might buy: pickup trucks, sedans, and vans. Medium and heavy duty vehicles include things like buses, construction equipment, and fire trucks. 

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Being the worst client of all time may reduce the quality of your representation. https://t.co/TZWdbJSmmB

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 2, 2022

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

...AND CHEAPER...:

Airbus has announced that it's strapping an experimental hydrogen fuel cell engine to a modified A380 superjumbo jet, an exciting new foray into the concept of powering commercial passenger aircraft with hydrogen alone.

The company says it's planning to start test flights in 2026 and launch a fully operational first zero-emissions aircraft by 2035 -- an ambitious timeline, considering that we're only starting to understand the potential of the idea.

But moving to hydrogen could dramatically cut the carbon footprint of air travel, which has historically been a massive contributor, representing 2.8 percent of global CO2 emissions. 

THE SLOPE ALWAYS SLIPS:

Conservative political voices--including Texas Senator Ted Cruz--are turning a critical eye on Washington Post theatre critic Peter Marks following his positive review of Bruce Norris' Downstate, currently making an extended Off-Broadway premiere at Playwrights Horizons through December 22. Marks was forced to take his Twitter handle private after the brouhaha set his mentions ablaze.

Pulitzer winner Norris' play is admittedly incendiary, centering on four men, all convicted of sex crimes, who share a group home in Illinois post-incarceration. One day, a man arrives to confront his childhood abuser. Marks' review charges headfirst into the play's tricky subject matter, using the headline, "Downstate is a play about pedophiles. It's also brilliant."

Writes Marks: "Take a deep breath and try to ruminate calmly on the position playwright Bruce Norris takes in his scintillating new play, Downstate: that the punishments inflicted on some pedophiles are so harsh and unrelenting as to be inhumane. Are you still reading? It's almost impossible to broad-brush the perspective at the heart of this impeccably acted drama without sounding as if one is advocating some extraordinary level of consideration for individuals who have committed unspeakable crimes." He goes on to write that the work depicts its characters "not as monsters but rather as complicated, troubled souls," while the "most disagreeable character" is one of the predators' victims. [...]

Marks' review does not condone the actions of Downstate's characters, instead praising how Norris engages the audience: "We learn about what each of them has done, and we are in effect asked to judge for ourselves what magnitude of ongoing torment each deserves." He goes on to describe the play as "a stunning demonstration of the power of narrative art to tackle a taboo, to compel us to look at a controversial topic from novel perspectives."

He closes the piece comparing Norris' play to Ibsen's A Doll's House, calling its depiction of a woman leaving her husband and children in search of freedom and identity as taboo for the time it was written as Downstate is today.

HELP WANTED: BIGOT OF COLOR:

Who do you think you're getting when you try to give your racism a patina of diversity? https://t.co/nwpf3YeqcD

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 2, 2022

LONG PAST TIME TO RECOGNIZE THE NATION OF KURDISTAN:

Wladimir van Wilgenburg is an Erbil-based Dutch journalist and author who specializes in Kurdish affairs. He is the author, with Harriet Allsopp, of The Kurds of Northern Syria: Governance, Diversity, and Conflicts (2019, I.B. Tauris) and has also coauthored, with Michael Knights, Accidental Allies: The U.S.-Syrian Democratic Forces Partnership Against the Islamic State. Diwan interviewed him in early December to discuss the Iranian government's attacks against Kurdish areas in the context of weeks-long protests in the country, as well as the Turkish threat to launch a new military operation against Kurdish forces in northern Syria.

Michael Young: One of the less publicized dimensions of the protests in Iran has been the Kurdish factor. Mahsa Amini, whose death set off the protests, was a Kurd, and the Iranian regime intervened militarily in Kurdish areas after the protests began. Can you explain what the relationship is today between the Islamic Republic and the Kurds, recalling that in 1979, soon after the revolution, there was an uprising in Iranian Kurdish areas?

Wladimir van Wilgenburg: Actually, Mahsa Amini's real name is Jina Amini, but that has not been publicized because there have been restrictions on issuing Kurdish names in Iran. Although Iran's Kurds are not very well-known in the West and do not get the same attention as Kurds in Iraq and Syria, who became well-known through their battles against the Islamic State group, the Iranian Kurds have a long history of struggle for autonomy within Iran and are a strongly nationalist Kurdish movement. One of the main Iranian Kurdish parties, the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDK-I), was established in 1945. One year later, the PDK-I founded a short-lived Kurdistan Republic in Mahabad led by its charismatic leader Qazi Mohammed, which only survived for one year. Another prominent Kurdish party is Komala, a socialist-Marxist party that was established in the fall of 1969 by Kurdish intellectuals. During the revolution against Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi's regime, Iranian Kurds hoped to gain a form of autonomy, but after the Islamist takeover, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was unwilling to give Kurds any rights. Fighting continued between Kurdish rebel forces and the Iranian security forces until 1983. The new Islamic Republic didn't allow free Kurdish political participation, although there are also Kurds serving within the Iranian government and parliament.

Iran also assassinated several Kurdish leaders after 1979, including PDK-I leader Abdul Rahman Ghassemlou in Austria during peace negotiations with the Islamic Republic in 1989, and his successor Sadegh Sharafkandi in Germany in 1992. This caused a leadership vacuum among Iranian Kurdish parties, and further divisions. Eventually Komala and PDK-I both moved to Iraqi Kurdistan in the 1980s, during the Iran-Iraq war. Furthermore, both Komala and the PDK-I have suffered from splits and internal divisions, although both recently reunited--PDK-I before the September 16 protests that erupted after the death of Amini, and Komala after.

Moreover, there is the Kurdistan Free Life Party (PJAK), established in 2004, which is affiliated with Turkey's Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). Another party is the Kurdistan Freedom Party (PAK), established in 1991. PAK is a smaller party, based in Iraqi Kurdistan, which played a significant role in the fight against the Islamic State and against Iraqi forces in Pirde in October 2017, after the independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan in September 2017. There was also much solidarity among Iranian Kurds with the referendum. In 2018, a Cooperation Center was established by five Iranian Kurdish parties to better coordinate their activities.

On September 8, 2018, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps launched the first cross-border missile attack on the PDK-I in Koya, killing at least eighteen people. Moreover, Ramin Hossein Panahi, a Komala member, was executed on the same day. Also, a day before the strike, three fighters of a PJAK-affiliated group were killed in a clash. The strike was seen as a message to the United States, Israel, and Saudi Arabia that Iran could now strike its rivals outside the borders of Iran, and a message to Kurdish parties that wanted to establish relations with the United States. Widespread protests erupted in Iran after Amini's death, and there were large-scale protests inside Iranian Kurdistan. To divert attention from its domestic situation, Iran has hit the PAK, Komala, and PDK-I with drone and missile strikes since September 16 and bombed the borders of Iraq's Kurdistan Region, where there are also Peshmerga fighters of Iranian Kurdish parties.

MY: As you just noted, Iran has also attacked Iranian Kurdish positions inside Iraq. How powerful are these groups in Iraq, and what is their relationship with the Iraqi Kurds, whose two major parties have tended to have good relations with Iran?

WVW: During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, thousands of Iranian Kurds fled to Iraq and a large number of them still live in camps, such as in Koya. Moreover, most Iranian Kurdish parties have bases and camps (including fighters) in the Kurdistan Region. Komala, for instance, has a base near Sulaymaniyah that was hit, while the PDK-I was hit in Koya and the PAK in Pirde (which is closer to Kirkuk) in the recent strikes. Apart from the PKK-affiliated PJAK, which operates in PKK-territory along the borders, the rest of the Kurdish parties are inside areas controlled by Iraqi Kurdish parties--the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK) and the Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP). In general, they have had a good relationship with the PUK and KDP in recent years, although they also had their differences and tensions during the Iran-Iraq war. Iran has demanded the disarmament of the Iranian Kurdish parties, or their removal, and has threatened to launch cross-border operations. The best option for Iran is to have the Iranian Kurdish parties moved abroad, as that is what happened with the Iranian opposition Mojahedin-e-Khalq, which was moved to Albania from Iraq, where it had been based after 1986. But so far, the Iraqi Kurds have not bowed to pressure to remove the parties, and have recently agreed with Baghdad to send more forces to the border with Iran.

THE THIRD IS THE ONLY WAY:

The failure of American entitlement programs to exploit this miracle is a tragedy. The future of American governance is always the past of W. Turn nearly all of SS, unemployment insurance, universal health care, etc. into personal accounts. https://t.co/1lPkOTb0GG

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 2, 2022

...AND CHEAPER...:

It may be grim to think about, but sewage is rich in a substance that's critical for growing food. Ammonia is a valuable core ingredient in fertilizer--but in cities it conversely becomes a cost, as it must be removed from sewage water in expensive treatment plants, to stop it leaching into the surrounding environment.  

Now researchers find that a technology called 'air-stripping' can tackle both these challenges--cleaning wastewater of ammonia, and repurposing it as fertilizer--and all using far less energy at a lower cost than the regular method. 

PURITAN NATION:

In 1825, Lydia Maria Francis was only 23 years old, but she had already written two novels that had made her a literary celebrity. She was fiercely proud of her country's new history and bright promise, and her protagonists exhibited all the virtues Americans confidently claimed. They were principled, independent, and unbiased. They were also fair, just, and honest. Her first novel, Hobomok, caused a small sensation. "I should think more highly of the talent of the woman who could write 'Hobomok,' " one admirer gushed, "than of any other American woman who has ever written." The second, The Rebels, was set in Revolutionary War Boston and included an imagined speech by the American patriot James Otis that was so rousing that schoolchildren began memorizing it and attributing it to Otis himself. These early successes catapulted Francis from her working-class origins as a baker's daughter into the glittering social circles of Boston's literary elite.

Soon it became clear that Francis had talent as a children's author as well. In 1824, she published Evenings in New England, a collection of stories, fables, and riddles for young readers. But Evenings was more than entertainment. It aimed to answer some critical questions. What kind of virtues did the new country need? What kind of stories should shape the character of its children? What, in short, should American children be like? Francis populated her book with both glorious heroes of the Revolution and simple, honest characters from Maine. Her stories guaranteed young readers that honesty, ingenuity, and integrity were their birthright, characteristic of every American from the local farmer to George Washington. The overall message was clear: American children should treasure the ideals of freedom and equality they had inherited and pass them on.

But if American children were to be schooled in basic lessons of fairness, honesty, and justice, some awkward facts needed explaining--namely, that Black humans were being enslaved and Native Americans were being removed. How to explain this to children who were also being told that their country was founded on freedom and equality? Maria Francis had always been direct and headstrong. By page three of Evenings in New England, she had named both issues. In subsequent chapters, she confronted them explicitly. [...]

The following year, Child met the fire-breathing abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and converted to abolitionism. To be an abolitionist in Boston in the 1830s was to be a radical. Politicians and religious leaders warned that such fanatics would destroy America's unity, undermine its religion, and wreck its economy. But given her new skepticism and armed with new facts, Child was undeterred. She had already dedicated her life to the question of what it meant to be an American. Now she was sure. It meant pledging every resource you had to compelling the United States to live up to its founding assertion that all humans were equal. Patriotism demanded that all Americans sacrifice what they had to achieve this goal.

Child quickly settled on what she had to offer the movement: her reputation as a popular novelist and children's author. Three years after her conversion to abolitionism, Child published a book assailing the evils of slavery. In her introduction to An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833), she anticipated her readers' outrage: "Reader, I beseech you not to throw down this volume as soon as you have glanced at the title." She was still, she reminded them, the trusted editor of The Juvenile Miscellany. "If I have the most trifling claims upon your good will, for an hour's amusement to yourself, or benefit to your children," she wrote, "read it for my sake." She offered her readers one more enticement. "Read it," she wrote, "from sheer curiosity to see what a woman (who had much better attend to her household concerns) will say upon such a subject."

What followed was a methodical denunciation of the history, politics, economics, and moral justification of slavery. Child carefully took apart the arguments she herself had once used to defend the institution while providing harrowing accounts of torture and mutilation--enslaved men trying to escape who were torn apart by dogs, enslaved mothers driven to insanity as their children were sold away. She laid responsibility for slavery at the feet of northerners whose prejudices and willingness to compromise with the South made them complicit in this wickedness. Where in all this, Child demanded to know, were the virtues Americans claimed as their birthright? Where was America's vaunted honesty if it shrouded its barbaric practices in patriotic platitudes? Where was its integrity if it egregiously betrayed its ideals? What kinds of citizens would the children of such a country, steeped in willful ignorance and self-serving dishonesty, become? The result, Child promised her readers, would be nothing less than the failure of democracy and the triumph of tyranny.

OH, THE HUMANITIES!:

A consortium led by automotive giant Toyota will receive millions in funding to develop a hydrogen fuel cell pickup truck in the U.K.

In a statement Friday, Toyota said the fuel cell-powered prototype of its Hilux pickup would be developed at its plant in Burnaston, in the East Midlands of England.

SELF-REFERENCE ALERT:

A personal indulgence: The Grandfather Judd was the federal judge who was most responsible for the deinstitutionalization process in the 70s. Here is what he found at Willowbrook, where many of the residents were , at least putatively, voluntary:https://t.co/TnUijZLucd https://t.co/1K51ee9jMh

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 2, 2022

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Always bet on the Deep State
https://t.co/1m82Kn159J

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 2, 2022

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

As Iran warns of a possible cross-border ground operation into Iraqi Kurdistan, an armed faction operating within Iraq has called for Iran-linked armed groups across the region to take the fight to the Saudi capital.

As reported by local media outlets, Kataib Hezbollah issued a statement this week saying, "The optimal solution to deal with the Saudi entity is to establish an alliance from the countries affected by its criminal deeds to transfer the conflicts into the streets of Riyadh." [...]

Kataib Hezbollah is an Iran-linked Iraqi armed group that includes a political wing part of the Coordination Framework alliance now in government. It is suspected of involvement in targeting Saudi Arabia via drone attacks in recent years. An Iraqi group that calls itself Alwiya al-Waad al-Haq claimed responsibility for a drone attack against the Saudi capital in early 2021, saying it had been conducted "solely by Iraqi hands." Many claim this group is linked to Kataib Hezbollah.

According to a 2021 Washington Institute policy analysis, "Iran-backed militias have twice assisted the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in launching small explosive-laden delta-wing drones from Iraq into Saudi Arabia at ranges of 600-700 kilometers [373-435 miles] -- first in May 2019 against the East-West oil pipeline, and again that September against the Abqaiq oil processing plant."

CAIN WINS:

TRANSITORY IS AS TRANSITORY DOES:

It's impossible to overstate deflationary pressures... https://t.co/xOcBFajnd0

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) December 1, 2022

SUBLIME:

You traced this long arc of everyone from Churchill to Sheldon Adelson who got the medal. This month, we saw Trump's arc, from getting the award to unfortunately having dinner with a neo-Nazi. How did that come about?

Oh, I don't know. I mean, I find it deplorable that he had dinner with an overt anti-Semite like Kanye West--Ye, I mean--who only a month ago called for the death of all Jews, for God's sake.

So, how do you understand this? You said that Trump was a huge friend of the Jewish people.

You know what? I can't answer that. It makes no sense. Somebody who's such an extraordinary friend of Israel, whose daughter is an Orthodox Jew, whose grandchildren are Orthodox Jews--I cannot explain why he would want to have dinner with an overt anti-Semite and dinner with a white-supremacist Jew-hater, an ugly, ugly scum like Nick Fuentes. And Trump says, "I didn't know who it was." Even if I take him at his word, that he didn't know who Fuentes was, fine, now he knows. Why doesn't he say, "Fuentes is a despicable scum whose beliefs have no place in the United States of America"?

One possible answer is that he's sympathetic to those views, as evidenced by the fact that he didn't want to distance himself or really go after the people who marched at Charlottesville. And one of those people was Nick Fuentes. That might be an answer.

No, no. I can't believe that. Somebody who's as hostile to Jews and Israel as Fuentes and Kanye are would never do all the extraordinary things for Israel. Trump didn't have to do all those things. It was way beyond the call of duty.

Do you think that there could be people who, for whatever reason, have sympathies with Israel but don't like Jews much?

I think it's highly unlikely. If you like Israel, which is the Jewish state filled with Jews, how can you hate Jews? Can you like Italy and hate Italians? Can you like Spain and hate Spanish people? It's beyond my comprehension that that's a possibility.

THE rIGHT IS THE lEFT:

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURE:

The average cost for a gallon of gas in the U.S. has dropped below the price it was before Russia invaded Ukraine earlier this year, according to AAA.

 [...]

 It's possible that prices could dip below $3 by Christmas, according to GasBuddy, which tracks cheap gas prices.

YOUR NEXT TRUCK WILL BE A VOLT:

Other manufacturers have meanwhile entered the market, from traditional truck makers such as Daimler, Volvo and China's BYD, to startups like US company Nikola.

The competition has also begun to roll out their deliveries, and have many orders of their own waiting to fill.

However, the truck that "the market has been waiting for... is the one from Tesla," says Dave Mullaney, a transportation specialist with sustainability think tank RMI.

Legacy manufacturers have primarily converted their diesel-designed trucks to electric.

"The Tesla, on the other hand, was designed to be electric from the very first design," says Mullaney, who also underlined the company's 15 years of experience in electric vehicles.

If the Tesla vehicle lives up to expectations, "it's going to be a huge difference," Mullaney says.

DEFENDING IS A FUNCTION OF BEING WILLING TO:

Entering the World Cup, there were zero doubts about Dest's talent, but there was a question about whether he would play with enough discipline to get the most out of his substantial gifts.

For club and country, Dest has a tendency to freelance. The right-back, on loan at AC Milan from Barcelona, is a skilled attacker but can sometimes become a bit too enamoured with that side of the game, dribbling into trouble or neglecting his defensive responsibilities in a manner that can cost his team.

None of that has shown up in Qatar. Dest has been rock solid defensively, doing a good job of remaining organized and in touch with his fellow defenders and winning key challenges.

"He was unbelievable," goalkeeper Turner said after the win over Iran. "Free flowing, up and down the field. And what I've noticed the most about him is he always seems to show up defensively in big moments. He's tracking runners in the box really, really well."

Dest has also contributed plenty to the attack, teaming up with McKennie and Timothy Weah to control the right side against England before being involved in a few chances on Tuesday.

His most notable involvement came with the goal. Dest made an excellent run in behind the left side of the Iran defense. McKennie played a lovely ball over the top that Dest got on the end of in the area. Instead of heading the ball toward goal, he smartly angled it towards the onrushing Christian Pulisic at the opposite post, allowing the winger to bury the chance from a few yards out for what turned out to be the winner which brought qualification for the knockout phase.

It came through different players but, remarkably, the goal was a carbon copy of one the U.S. scored way back in the 2019 CONCACAF Gold Cup.

It was a move the U.S. worked on explicitly ahead of the Iran match. They have drilled it repeatedly, drawing Iran to one side of the field, then dropping the ball back to a midfielder who has enough time to pick his head up and hit a diagonal ball to an advancing full-back on the opposite side.

"We talked about it before the game. That exact, exact play was how we were going to score," Ream said. "Credit to Serg, seeing that he could hit the ball back across. And Christian was told before the game. 'Crash that back post'. That's exactly what he did and it happened. Perfect, perfect, perfect setup."

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

ESCAPING THE CULT OF iDENTITY:

The son of militia leader Stewart Rhodes spent years plotting to help his family escape from his father's control. Now that the elder Rhodes faces decades in prison, the rest of the family is rebuilding their lives.

The time had come. It was a dreary February day in 2018. Dakota had it all planned out.

His mother and five younger siblings were in the truck - some of them crouched out of sight on the floor.

They'd bundled into it as much as they could and made up an excuse - ostensibly they were heading to the trash dump just off the main highway, slick with black ice and crusted snow.

But just as they started to pull away, Dakota's father burst out the door of their remote cabin in the mountains of northwest Montana.

Dakota and his mother Tasha stiffened. The leader of the Oath Keepers militia had dominated their lives until that moment. Tasha and Stewart had been married for nearly 25 years, and she was familiar with his manic periods. He'd been up all night on a tear - working out, listening to music, practising Filipino stick fighting, pacing the floor.

It was a pattern of manic activity, Dakota said, that was familiar throughout years of emotional abuse and heightened paranoia.

Would he now stop them from fleeing? Had he noticed his favourite gun was missing? Would he question why John-Boy, the family dog, was along for the ride to the dump? Dakota gripped the wheel while Tasha looked down at her daughters, hidden under the windows, their eyes opened wide.

"Hey," Rhodes growled. "Pick up some steak on your way back."

Dakota and Tasha murmured assent, and drove off towards the highway without a backwards glance. [...]

Militia members have a range of views but are generally concerned with the power of the US federal government, clampdowns on individual freedom and gun ownership - concerns that sometimes tip over into outright paranoia.

...AND CHEAPER...:

A new report from the International Energy Agency has predicted a huge global boom in the sale and uptake of heat pumps, as consumers seek out more energy efficient - and less costly - ways to heat water and their homes.

The IEA says the trend - which in Europe alone could see sales of heat pumps soar to 7 million a year by 2030, up from 2 million in 2021 - is being driven by the global energy crisis, which has sent fossil fuel prices to painful new highs, particularly gas. [...]

"Heat pumps are an indispensable part of any plan to cut emissions and natural gas use, and an urgent priority in the European Union today," says IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol.

"The technology is tried and tested, even in the coldest of climates. Policy makers should be putting their weight behind this technology that is witnessing unprecedented momentum at the moment.

"Heat pumps will be central to efforts to ensure everyone can heat their homes this winter and next, to protect vulnerable households and businesses from high prices, and to meet climate objectives."

Clearly, however, the word is already getting out. Global heat pump sales rose by nearly 15% in 2021, double the average of the past decade, led by the European Union where they rose by around 35%.