HIGH COSTS FOR LOW RETURNS:

Our "private" health care is bad economics. https://t.co/ruQMfjhCA9

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) February 1, 2023

GONNA NEED A BIGGER CELL:

The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James says former President Donald Trump and three of his adult children lied in the answers they submitted to the court in response to James' $250 million lawsuit accusing them and the Trump Organization of large-scale financial fraud.

Both the former president his children "falsely deny facts they have admitted in other proceedings," deny knowing things " that are plainly within their knowledge," and use defenses "repeatedly rejected by this Court as frivolous and without merit," Kevin Wallace, senior enforcement counsel in the Attorney General's office, said in a letter to New York Supreme Court Justice Arthur Engoron.

Witch hunts are a function of witches.https://t.co/yPqmMIKbA4 via @CBSNews

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) January 31, 2023

IT'S ALWAYS THE rIGHT:

All four residents of The Villages charged with voting twice in the 2020 election have now admitted to the crime, court records show.

John Rider, 62, recently entered into a pre-trial intervention program that will allow him to avoid potential prison time if he successfully completes court-ordered requirements and refrains from violating the law.

PITY THE POOR SNOWFLAKES:

Republican voters' hostility to teaching Black history in school did not happen overnight but has been building over the past two decades. As Michael Tesler, a political science professor at the University of California at Irvine noted in a 2018 analysis for The Washington Post, in 2000, the percentage of Americans who thought too much Black history was being taught in public schools was in the single digits for Democrats and in the single digits for Republicans. Tesler noted that "Democrats haven't changed in the past two decades. Republicans, however, are now 30 points more likely to say schools should teach less black history."  

For that analysis, Tesler also cited a February 2018 poll which found that a third of people who'd voted for Donald Trump in 2016 believed "American children should solely be taught about Western civilization and European / US History."

Why do so many white Republicans oppose teaching about Black history and racism? Recent polls that find white Republicans are increasingly describing themselves as being equally subject to discrimination as people of color. In 2015, only 38% of white Republicans responded that white people face a lot of discrimination. That's the year that Trump lauched a presidential campaign that was also a white grievance campaign. More recent polls suggest a massive change. Last year, CNN referred to the work of Emily Ekins of The Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. She found that 73% of those who voted for Trump in 2020 believe "today discrimination against whites has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities."

This rise of perceived white victimhood in the GOP helps explain why DeSantis is publicly defending the ban on the AP African American studies course, claiming that somehow the course "is somebody pushing an agenda on our kids."

W'S SECOND BIGGEST MISTAKE:

OCHA said in a newly released report that "the longstanding restrictions on the movement of people and goods to and from Gaza have undermined the living conditions of over two million Palestinian residents."

"Israel continues to reduce access to livelihoods, essential services, and housing, disrupt family life, and undermine people's hopes for a secure and prosperous future (...) the situation has been compounded by the restrictions imposed by the Egyptian authorities at the Rafah crossing," OCHA's report added. 

Since 2007, Israel has imposed its illegally tightened blockade on the Gaza Strip, home to more than 2.3 million people, after the Islamic Hamas movement, which won the legislative elections in 2006. 

Moreover, it launched five large-scale military wars against the population, killing and wounding thousands of Gazans and destroying most of the local official and civilian facilities as well as the frustration. 

A KNOWLEDGE PROBLEM:

The national intelligence director did not mince words: the government has an over-classification problem. 

"Over-classification undermines critical democratic objectives, such as increasing transparency to promote an informed citizenry and greater accountability," said Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, during a conference at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library in Austin last week. It also undercuts "the basic trust that the public has in its government" as well as "negatively impacts national security," Haines said. This was not the first time she's spoken on these issues. 

THE MAGA BRAND:

Trump has repeatedly heaped praise on Putin over the years, and even called him a "genius" last year after he launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine that has faced multiple setbacks over the past 11 months while costing the lives of tens of thousands of Ukrainians.

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM ALL:

[E]ven without this poor resource allocation, China's chip development still would be hindered by the country's lack of long-term vision.

In 2019 I interviewed a data and AI scientist at Huawei, China's largest and most powerful telecommunications company, which at the time was poised to take over the global rollout of 5G. He told me that despite Huawei's achievements, a hunger for quick success pervaded the company. While Ren Zhengfei, the company's founder and CEO, would publicly encourage new research, he was likely to cut off funding if there were no notable achievements within a project's first two years. This pattern has led to the most consistent innovation at Huawei taking place only at the application level. The company rewards innovations that can make money immediately, but long-term research that might lead to world-changing innovation isn't being done.

This isn't unique to Huawei. It is the norm of Chinese society under communist control. Great innovation comes from free and curious minds. Such minds need nurturing, and, despite all its dazzling skyscrapers and smart cities, China today is incapable of doing so.

China's test-oriented education discourages creativity and independent thinking. The Communist Party uses propaganda to instill a sense of loyalty and gratitude in the people, to the detriment of faith, which encourages broader inquiry. 

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

Rodion Romanovitch Raskolnikov is a murderer. We know that from the start of Crime and Punishment. The suspense of Raskolnikov's story comes not from whether or not his crime will be discovered and brought to justice (it will--we know that, too). The suspense comes from whether or not Raskolnikov will turn away from his guilt and shame towards his redemption, which is by no means certain. The story is about how this might be.

Fyodor Dostoevsky's great novel chronicles Raskolnikov's violent psychological collapse. The young student's moral flaw isn't that he lacks a conscience or a soul, nor is it that he has been infected by the new philosophies of nihilism and radical atheism, though of course he has. Instead, Raskolnikov kills because he becomes obsessed with looking inward for his self-identity; he longs to find within himself a unique man. Dostoyevsky shows us that looking for truth within is itself the source of moral horror: Raskolnikov commits a double murder on principle in an attempt to become what he believes he is: a man apart, self-created and self-affirming. The young murderer implodes under the weight of his own idea of himself. [...]

Dostoevsky shows Raskolnikov to be even more alienated from others while serving his time in Siberia. He is even more heartless to Sonia, who has followed him there. And he is even less remorseful about the murders than he was before his confession. Raskolnikov's redemption is not about apology nor even about taking responsibility, for both these things serve as a kind of psychological balm that he craves as an antidote to anxiety. It feels good not to have to hide his secret. The emotional and psychological rapture Raskolnikov feels at the moment of public confession comes from no longer having to fear detection. It is a relief from his guilt. Confession is therapeutic, but it is not redemptive.

Ultimately, the murderer wishes to reveal his guilt because concealing it is exhausting. Raskolnikov's shame is deeper than his guilt, as shame always is. His shame has to do with not being seen rather than with avoiding detection. He feels guilt for what he did, but his shame is of a more subtle nature. Raskolnikov is intensely and personally ashamed of the self-knowledge he works so hard to avoid. It is the knowledge that the man he wanted to be--a desire so profound that he killed for it--was nothing more than an illusion in the first place, a wish-fulfillment fantasy played out in a grotesque experiment. He feels guilt that he came to resemble the grotesquery he created, but he is even more ashamed to admit that his sought individuation is itself the moral horror.

What would he expect to find within himself, other than what he already wanted to see there? The young man's inward search for truth, untethered from any external relations, is what he believes will free him. Instead, he finds himself trapped in a suffocating nightmare and lost in an expansive wasteland. The uncomfortable truth that Raskolnikov discovers is that one's inner self may be dark: cruel, evil, petty, and arrogant to the point of inhumanity. The hideous truth that Dostoevsky reveals is that perhaps one's inner self is even usually this way.

IMPORTING THE SUPERIOR AMERICANS:

Hispanic Protestant churches are growing in the United States, and many of these congregations are relatively new, identify as evangelical and largely include people who are new to the country, according to a recently released survey.

The study, conducted by evangelical research firm Lifeway, found that less than 9% of Hispanic congregations trace their history prior to 1950, with most (54%) having been established since 2000, including 32% founded in 2010 or later. Half of the churches (50%) are in a large metropolitan area with a population of 100,000 or more, and in the average Hispanic Protestant church, 35% of the congregation is under the age of 30, the survey found. 

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

Titled Mapping The Net Zero Economy, the report looked at the parts of the UK that have benefited most from policies aimed at curbing greenhouse gas emissions.

Scotland and English regions, such as Tyneside, Teeside, Merseyside and the Humber, had all done better than average, with the green economy being stronger and contributing more to growth than in London and the South East.

Green jobs also pay significantly more, the report says, with the average wage (£42,600) significantly above the national average (£33,400).

"The net zero economy is addressing levelling up and the UK's productivity problem," says Peter Chalkley, the director of the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit (ECIU) who commissioned the research.

PURITAN NATION:

YOUR NEXT PLANE WILL BE A VOLT:

The aviation industry is attacked regularly for being unsustainable and a notorious culprit in contributing to the overheating of our planet. And as the world races to stave off the effects of warming temperatures, it's crucial to find leaner and greener alternatives to jet fuel. 

So when ZeroAvia announced that its zero-pollution 19-seater had a successful maiden flight, it was a monumental milestone toward finding more sustainable options for air travel.

The magnitude of the flight was not lost on ZeroAvia's CEO, Val Miftakhov.

"This is a major moment, not just for ZeroAvia, but for the aviation industry as a whole, as it shows that true zero-pollution commercial flight is only a few years away," Miftakhov explained in a press statement. "This is only the beginning -- we are building the future of sustainable, zero climate impact aviation."

...AND CHEAPER...:

[T]he former coal plants are also ideal sites for solar farms because they're already wired to the electrical grid. With the right setup of solar panels and battery storage, they could continue supplying power to the state -- but this time in an affordable, clean way. This helps keep the cost of electricity low while reducing the amount of air and water pollution for state residents. 

RIGHT TO DISTRUST NYC; WRONG TO ANNOUNCE:

Late that [Octyober], Giuliani told Fox News that the trailing Republican nominee had "a surprise or two that you're going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I'm talking about some pretty big surprises."

Just two days later, then-FBI director James Comey revealed the bureau had reopened its probe into Clinton's emails, based on the possible discovery of new communications on a laptop belonging to disgraced New York politico Anthony Weiner. The news jolted the campaign with a particularly strong boost from the New York Times, which devoted two-thirds of its front page to the story -- and the notion it was a major blow to Clinton's prospects.

It was later reported that Comey was motivated to make the unusual announcement about the laptop because he feared leaks from the FBI's New York field office, which, according to Reuters, had "a faction of investigators based in the office known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton." Indeed, Giuliani bragged immediately after that he had sources in the FBI, including current agents. [...]

There are many reasons for Trump's victory, but experts have argued the FBI disclosures were decisive. In 2017, polling guru Nate Silver argued that the Comey probe disclosure cost Clinton as many as 3-4 percentage points and at least one percentage point, which would have flipped Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin and handed her the Electoral College.

WHY THE DISTANT FUTURE HAPPENS SO FAST:

The energy transition may well be determined by the phenomenon of S-curves. This is because the future energy system will be characterised by manufacturing technology, not extractive fossil fuel projects.

The S-curve is a well-established phenomenon where a successful new technology reaches a certain catalytic tipping point (typically 5-10% market share), and then rapidly reaches a high market share (i.e. 50%+) within just a couple more years once past this tipping point.

Manufacturing technologies improve quickly by S-curves, scalable learning-by-doing techniques based on thousands and thousands of repeated parts and assembly.

Extraction projects are almost the opposite: one-off large scale complex efforts that are difficult, potentially impossible, to replicate and improve.

THE AIR THAT THE rIGHT/lEFT FINDS NOXIOUS:

[L]iberalism served in Röpke's lecture as a synonym for the integration of Greco-Roman, Jewish and Christian, and Enlightenment ideas, culture, and institutions that, he believed, constituted the civilization of the West. Nazism--and Bolshevism, for that matter--should, Röpke maintained, be recognized as an insurrection against that particular complexion of concepts, expectations, and institutions.

As a distinguished free market economist, Röpke was well aware of the role played by the hyperinflation that had economically undermined and politically radicalized parts of the German middle class in the early 1920s, as well as the Great Depression in propelling the Nazi Party to power. "The present world crisis," he said, "outranges all standards of the past." The economic downturn that began in 1929 had driven Germany to the political abyss by shattering the relative stability that Weimar had attained by 1926.

Röpke, however, was neither an economic determinist nor a philosophical materialist. The political situation in which Germany found itself should not, he claimed, be understood as the country's entry into "a new historical era" of the type predicted by Marxist dialectics.

The deeper cause for many Germans' embrace of the Nazis, in Röpke's view, was the turning of those whom he called "the masses" but also a fair number of professors against very specific values in the name of "Germany's awakening" and "the purification of the German soul." The delicate and sophisticated arrangements of capitalism and liberal constitutionalism, Röpke argued, relied upon some decidedly non-materialist foundations that many Germans had either been persuaded to reject or never really internalized.

Individuality, Liberty, and Reason

One such premise of liberalism to which Röpke's lecture devoted particular attention was every person's individuality. Liberalism, he said, involved a belief in "every individual's human dignity" and "the profound conviction that man must never be degraded into an object." That, Röpke said, was why liberalism rejected the oppression of people because of their race or religion. A coherent conception of tolerance itself was impossible, he noted, without an in-principle affirmation of every individual's inherent dignity--not least because it ruled out treating one's political opponents as "enemies" who belonged to a different group, and who would ultimately have to be reduced to the status of non-citizens or expelled from the body-politic altogether.

It was no coincidence, Röpke argued, that the National Socialists submerged everything into the Volksgemeinschaft ("people's community," "folk community," or "racial community"). For the Nazis, what mattered was the group: in their case, the racial collective.

On one level, this was the Nazi alternative to the German Communists' emphasis on one's class above all else. It wasn't for idle reasons that Nazi party members addressed each other as "Comrade." Yet just as Marxism's class-identity obsession pulverized any concern for the individual, so too did the Nazi fixation with race dismiss the concept of each individual person's intrinsic worth as bourgeois prattle.

For Röpke, defense of the individual was tied to two other ideas that liberalism, as he understood it, emphasized. One was the priority of liberty. By liberty, Röpke meant more than "to be free from something." Liberty also involved being "free for something." That "something," he said, was nothing less than "civilization"--"the very air" without which we "cannot breathe."

Liberty in this sense thus went together with what Röpke called a belief in reason. And reason properly understood, for Röpke, far exceeded empirical rationality and utility calculations. Ultimately, reason concerned "the absolute pursuit of truth." If societies wanted to be free, he added, they had "to accept reason as the common denominator." For reason, combined with respect for freedom and each individual's dignity, was indispensable for the liberal constitutionalism and rule of law that inhibited the type of arbitrary power that the Nazis would take to new levels. To violate the rule of law, Röpke underscored, was to behave in an inherently unreasonable manner, not least because it invariably involved choosing to treat individuals as things and to crush their liberty. Therein lay the path to "servilism" and the "total state."

But where did Röpke ultimately locate the roots of these liberal ideas? Significantly, Röpke did not immediately point to the Kantian philosophy that was so influential among German liberal thinkers of his time. Rather, he urged his audience to look, first, to "the Greek and Roman Stoa" (Stoic philosophers), then "Christianity," the subsequent development of "natural law," and finally enlightenment thought--all of which, taken together, rejected "the principle of violence in favor of the principle of reason." From this standpoint, Röpke explained, "Liberalism is at least two thousand years old."

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

THE TRUMP BRAND:

States often mentioned in the media as crime havens, like California & New York, have not graced the top 10 once.

The top 10 murder rate states are increasingly dominated by Trump-voting states.https://t.co/ZBsOJdqtZr pic.twitter.com/ndlwHF608B

— Third Way (@ThirdWayTweet) January 30, 2023

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg will present evidence to a state grand jury today concerning Donald J. Trump's 2016 payment of hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels, which may lead to a criminal indictment of the former president, sources told the New York Times.

The impaneling of the grand jury, which will soon received witness testimony and other evidence, indicates that the district attorney is close to a decision about charging Trump.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS SPECIES:

It's the whole point of Darwinism.https://t.co/DJGaTkYalO

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) January 30, 2023

THE RIGHT VS ADAM SMITH:

THE PETROPHILES SURE HATE CAPITALISM

Coal in the US is now being economically outmatched by renewables to such an extent that it's more expensive for 99% of the country's coal-fired power plants to keep running than it is to build an entirely new solar or wind energy operation nearby, a new analysis has found.

The plummeting cost of renewable energy, which has been supercharged by last year's Inflation Reduction Act, means that it is cheaper to build an array of solar panels or a cluster of new wind turbines and connect them to the grid than it is to keep operating all of the 210 coal plants in the contiguous US, bar one, according to the study.

"Coal is unequivocally more expensive than wind and solar resources, it's just no longer cost competitive with renewables," said Michelle Solomon, a policy analyst at Energy Innovation, which undertook the analysis. "This report certainly challenges the narrative that coal is here to stay."

SEND MORE BUSES!:

[T]he Massachusetts economy is being hampered by a trend that predates COVID: More people are exiting the workforce than are jumping in.

Last month, there were 112,000 fewer people in the labor force -- those with jobs or looking for one -- than at the peak in June 2019, a drop of 2.9 percent.

Driving the decline are retiring baby boomers, the oldest of which are now 77. And looking forward, Massachusetts has relatively fewer young people moving toward working age. Residents under 18 years old make up 21 percent of the population, ranking it near the bottom of all states.

The demographics, combined with little or no growth in the labor force both here and nationally, mean the state's supply of workers could be strained in the years ahead unless immigration increases.

SINOPHOBIA IN FANCY DRESS:

On Jan. 30, 2020, Republican Sen. Tom Cotton addressed military leaders at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing and presented a startling idea. At that time, the novel coronavirus was spreading around China and had killed hundreds of people, though it had not yet been identified in the U.S. Chinese officials said the virus had originated at a seafood market in Wuhan.

Cotton charged that China was "lying" about the origins of COVID-19. He raised another possibility: "I would note that Wuhan also has China's only biosafety level-four 'super laboratory' that works with the world's most deadly pathogens to include, yes, coronavirus." What if the virus had instead originated there? [...]

Over the past 50 years, the rate of outbreaks of infectious disease has more than quadrupled. At least 55 of those outbreaks have killed hundreds or thousands of people and have had the potential to become pandemic. But with only one possible exception--the "Russian flu" pandemic of 1977-78--every single one of these was either a previously unknown disease originating in animals (e.g., HIV/AIDS, Ebola, SARS, MERS, novel strains of flu) or an exacerbation of a previously endemic disease (e.g., dengue, malaria, cholera). Regardless of where the COVID-19 pandemic came from, it's clear that the threat of pandemics in general comes from spillover of novel viruses from wild animals or factory-farmed animals to humans.

IT'S ALWAYS MAGA:

As you may have heard, protesters have occupied the wooded site of an old federal and state "prison farm" in Atlanta (one of the city's last green spaces) which is being developed into a police training facility. According to law enforcement spokesmen, on the morning of January 18,  one of the protesters, Manuel Téran, shot and wounded a Georgia State Patrol officer. In return, if it was a return, police shot them (Téran used "they" pronouns) repeatedly and fatally. There's no video, and no witnesses have emerged except law enforcement officers. These are classic conditions in which no one can know what happened, and I don't think any clear or plausible account has been offered.

Police arrested at least 19 "Cop City" protesters over the last couple of months and charged them, astonishingly, with "domestic terrorism." They held these protesters under a Georgia statute that defines domestic terrorism as follows (summarizing a bit): Any attempt to violate the laws of this state or of the United States which is intended to cause bodily harm or death or "disable or destroy critical infrastructure" and which is intended to intimidate people or alter the policy of government and "to further any ideology or belief." This may be committed solo or "as part of a command structure involving an identifiable set of other individuals."

That's vague enough to permit the arrest of anyone who's engaged in almost any act of civil disobedience for any reason. This, in the home town of MLK. But the statute does require underlying criminal conduct. So, for example, if someone commits a murder, they'll charge him as a domestic terrorist if the murder's ideologically-oriented or intended to intimidate others. But the underlying crimes of the 19 arrested in the Weelaunee forest (as the occupiers call it, after the indigenous people who once lived there) are things like trespassing and criminal mischief.

A review of the arrest warrants, according to the website Grist,"shows that none of those arrested and slapped with terrorism charges are accused of seriously injuring anyone. Nine are alleged to have committed no specific illegal actions  beyond misdemeanor trespassing.

BROTHER, CAN YOU SPARE A PARADIGM?:

...AND CHEAPER...:

Yu's idea is one of several recent innovations that aim to make 200-year-old heat pump technology even more efficient than it already is, potentially opening the door for much greater adoption of heat pumps worldwide. To date, only about 10 percent of space heating requirements around the world are met by heat pumps, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). But due to the current energy crisis and growing pressure to reduce fossil fuel consumption in order to combat climate change, these devices are arguably more crucial than ever.

Since his 2020 lockdown brainstorming, Yu and his colleagues have built a working prototype of a heat pump that stores leftover heat in a small water tank. In a paper published in the summer of 2022, they describe how their design helps the heat pump to use less energy. Plus, by separately rerouting some of this residual warmth to part of the heat pump exposed to cold air, the device can defrost itself when required, without having to pause heat supply to the house.

The idea relies on the very principle by which heat pumps operate: If you can seize heat, you can use it. What makes heat pumps special is the fact that instead of just generating heat, they also capture heat from the environment and move it into your house -- eventually transferring that heat to radiators or forced-air heating systems, for instance. This is possible thanks to the refrigerant that flows around inside a heat pump. When the refrigerant encounters heat -- even a tiny amount in the air on a cold day -- it absorbs that modicum of warmth.

A compressor then forces the refrigerant to a higher pressure, which raises its temperature to the point where it can heat your house. It works because an increase of pressure pushes the refrigerant molecules closer together, increasing their motion. The refrigerant later expands again, cooling as it does so, and the cycle repeats. The entire cycle can run in reverse, too, allowing heat pumps to provide cooling when it's hot in summer.

The magic of a heat pump is that it can move multiple kilowatt-hours of heat for each kWh of electricity it uses. 

...AND CHEAPER...:

Much of the DOE research has focused on materials -- such as finding new ways to build cheap batteries that can store a lot of energy. The moves, summarized in "Powering the Future," a report NREL released last week, could help reduce battery reliance upon scarce imported materials by changing battery designs to limit their need for cobalt, graphite and nickel.

The use of silicon -- a hard, brittle, crystalline element that is abundant in the United States and throughout the world -- "is likely to be the next new big thing," said Matt Keyser, head of the Electrochemical Energy Storage Group at NREL in Golden, Colo.

Because silicon can store four to five times more electricity than graphite -- which is normally used in batteries -- the move would reduce the size and weight of battery packs. That could encourage the use of batteries in larger aircraft "because you want to be able to store as much energy in the smallest mass that we can," Keyser said.

Another promising outcome is that the size of EV batteries would remain the same, but drive ranges would increase by 30 percent to 40 percent.

BLM IS WORKING:

Across the country, even as fatal police encounters have continued apace, many cities have revisited how they investigate and talk about those cases, reflecting the reality that cameras are everywhere and that episode after episode of police violence, often involving Black people, has led to distrust of official accounts. Charging decisions that once took months or longer now sometimes happen within days or weeks. City leaders more freely call out police misbehavior when they see it. Body camera footage is more routinely made public, whether it exonerates the officers or raises questions.

"I think we are seeing a whole new world," said Quinton Lucas, the mayor of Kansas City, Missouri. While the default not long ago was to keep video private, he said, "I think people are understanding slowly but surely -- particularly police chiefs -- that this is not the sort of thing that can stay secret."

In Memphis, the release of videos came after grief-stricken statements from Nichols' family, who had pushed for them to be made public. The family also commissioned an independent autopsy and shared a photo of Nichols in the hospital, his face swollen and bruised.

Ben Crump, a lawyer representing Nichols' family, praised the swift timeline but suggested that race may have played a role. The five accused police officers are Black. "We want to proclaim that this is the blueprint going forward for any time any officers, whether they be Black or white, will be held accountable," Crump said. "No longer can you tell us we got to wait six months to a year."

THE ONE THING THE ISRAELI rIGHT GETS RIGHT:

Allison Kaplan Sommer of Haaretz, among Israel's most respected publications, interviewed Brookings Institution's Benjamin Wittes, one of America's leading legal experts, for his views on the proposal. It is a genuinely thoughtful and informative conversation comparing and contrasting the Israeli and the U.S. judicial systems that elucidates just how much these reforms will weaken a longstanding and vital check on the Israeli government's power and erode Israel's standing abroad. [...]

Allison: In the 2019 interview, Ben, I will quote you as describing the Israeli system as being "super weird." I don't know if that's a technical legal term.

Benjamin: Yes. Let's pinpoint two aspects of the weirdness. One is the one that everybody talks about, which is that there is no written constitution and so all of the constitutional arrangements are amendable by the Knesset with a mere majority vote. Here I don't mean a 61-vote majority like the proposed override, but a majority of whoever happens to be present can change a basic law. If you think about that in contrast to say the United States, it's when the Supreme Court of the United States makes a First Amendment ruling, it would require a constitutional amendment to change it. That requires 2/3 of both houses and then 3/4 of state ratification.

It's a dramatically difficult thing to amend the US Constitution. By contrast, to amend the Israeli non-constitution is a relatively trivial matter and happens all the time. On the other hand, and this is the vulnerability and this is the feature, the weirdness that people don't talk about the Israeli Supreme Court with respect to as much, it is a uniquely powerful institution. It has not just the authority of judicial review, which a lot of countries have a judicial review mechanism. But it is the court of original jurisdiction over any challenge to the lawfulness of government policy with no standing requirements and almost no barriers to adjudication.

You don't like who's been named cabinet minister, you file a petition in the Supreme Court. You don't like the route of the separation barrier, you go straight to the Supreme Court. All of these fights that in other judicial systems would play out in the political process in the first instance, and then only get to court adjudication after years of policymaking, start out with litigation in Israel. I think that puts the court in the firing line of politics in a way that's unusual. I think the court in Israel is more contentious right now even than the court in the United States.

Allison: The court has a huge amount of power, and basically, this proposal wants to take away almost all of its power. We're talking about a zero-sum game here, right?

Benjamin: Right. It has a huge amount of power. The foundation of that power is paper-thin. It's like you've built this giant weapon, which you can think of as, if you hate the court, as an offensive weapon, or you can think of, if you're a defender of the court, as a defensive weapon. It's extremely powerful.   But it's built on a pillar of sand. If you think about it, the court itself is merely a creature of the Knesset. The Knesset could abolish it if it wanted to. It's this very strange interaction between a system of almost pure or maybe pure parliamentary supremacy and a court that reserves for itself and that the political system has allowed it to have these really unusual authorities to intervene in government policy.

Allison: When you've got this growing small but now powerful group of ideologues who visit Washington and meet with the Federalist Society and really have a very strong ideological bent, and they're in a system in which the political echelon is allowed to take away the court's power and now they're in political power, it's inevitable that this is going to be something that is high in their priority list and that they're going to do. It's easy pickings.

Benjamin: I think that's right. I do think the purported marriage with American judicial conservatives is almost entirely fictitious, not in the sense of it hasn't happened, but that it's a lot of legal nonsense. The Israeli legal system is entirely different from the American legal system. To the extent the court has behaved this way, it has behaved this way with Knesset's tolerance over a long period of time.

Whereas the US Congress, the states that the US Supreme Court has sometimes been imperious towards, they don't really consent to the court's engagement with them that way.

DEPRAVED GHOUL IS THE TRUMP BRAND (profanity alert):

In the immediate wake of a man breaking into Nancy Pelosi's San Fransisco home and viciously attacking her husband, the right-wing media, Republicans, and their conservative followers got into formation to do what they do best: spread baseless rumors about the assault and mock the victim. 

Tucker Carlson fueled conspiracy theories that Paul Pelosi and his attacker, David DePape, were lovers. Elon Musk, who'd become the owner of Twitter just three days prior, shared a story with his 112 million followers from a website known to traffic in false information, that the man was a prostitute with whom Pelosi had gotten into a dispute. (He later deleted the tweet but not before writing, "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye.") Donald Trump Jr. retweeted a "Paul Pelosi" Halloween costume made up of simply underwear and hammer, writing: "The internet remains undefeated." Representative Claudia Tenney commented "LOL" on a photo of a group of men holding hammers beside a gay pride flag, before deleting the tweet. Charlie Kirk, the conservative YouTube host, said on his podcast he hoped an "amazing patriot" would go bail out DePape, "ask him some questions," and become a "midterm hero."

On Thursday, Fox News host Sean Hannity had a guest on his show who speculated that set-to-be-released footage of the attack would "not help the prosecution" and raise "more questions than it answers."

On Friday, footage of the attack was released. In addition to being deeply difficult to watch--viewers can see the moment when DePape beats the 82-year-old Pelosi with a hammer--it also makes the gang at Fox News and beyond not only look very stupid but like the depraved ghouls they are. 

SIC SEMPER MAGA:

Czechs favored Petr Pavel, who held a senior position at NATO, over Andrej Babis, who has loomed large in the country's business and political landscape for the past decade. Pavel led by 58 percent to 42 percent, with 97 percent of ballots counted.

"It's good that we will have a president who made it his goal to unite citizens," Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala said during a news conference after congratulating Pavel. "I'm looking forward to cooperation with Petr Pavel."

Although the position of president is largely ceremonial, the role is symbolically important. Pavel's win cements a shift away from populist politics -- at least for now. The race was also being watched as something of a bellwether, as Russia's war in Ukraine reshapes electoral politics across Europe.

Pavel could show the continent "that populists can be beaten," said Jiri Priban, a professor of law and philosophy at Cardiff University in Wales. "It is a very strong message for transatlantic relations and also for constitutional democracy -- a system which is under strain."

Pavel replaces president Milos Zeman, who has sought to stretch the power of the presidency since he was elected a decade ago. He appointed an unelected caretaker government (though it failed to win parliamentary approval), refused to nominate judges and professors who displeased him and blocked political appointments, all while cozying up to China and Russia.

INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE:

THE dRAGON HAS NO TEETH:

As China limps out of the COVID-19 pandemic like the last straggler among nations, its ruling Communist Party appears uncharacteristically subdued. The Wolf Warriors have gone quiet; the mood is almost reflective. Beijing has been taking sober stock, realising the vulnerability of its position. Never has the Party faced so many different troubles at once.

On January 17th, authorities admitted that the country's population has finally begun shrinking, and much earlier than the UN or the CCP had predicted--indeed, much earlier than anyone had predicted, with the exception of the lone prophetic demographer Yi Fuxian. For context, this is the first time that the Chinese populace has declined since 1961, when tens of millions died in history's worst-ever famine. Today there is no comparable cataclysm; just the slow march of demographic inevitability, set in motion 43 years ago by Deng Xiaoping's one child policy (the largest social experiment in human history), and moving ever since with the cold certainty of implacable Mother Nature.

The Communist Party actually saw what was happening a full decade ago, but its two-child and three-child remedies floundered. The birthrate continued to drop (more steeply following the new policies), and the trend may have been further exacerbated by Xi Jinping's "Zero-COVID" policy and its deleterious effect on the nation's psychology. Nightmare stories circulated, like the report of a pregnant woman who lost her baby due to draconian COVID regulations. She was left bleeding onto the sidewalk in the dead of winter outside a hospital in Xi'an, her child sentenced to death by her expired test result.

These stories proved hard to forget. The Chinese people learned that they can enjoy no certainty about the future and that Xi's obsession with order leads, paradoxically, to chaos. Young couples realised that if their hypothetical children survived, they would enter a hopeless world of stagnant growth and failing services--a twilight of locked-down apartments and testing booths. Who would bring a child into such a world?

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

[T]here are some common themes for how to accomplish this energy transition -- ways to focus our efforts on the things that will matter most. These are efforts that go beyond individual consumer choices such as whether to fly less or eat less meat. They instead penetrate every aspect of how society produces and consumes energy.

Such massive changes will need to overcome a lot of resistance, including from companies that make money off old forms of energy as well as politicians and lobbyists. But if society can make these changes, it will rank as one of humanity's greatest accomplishments. We will have tackled a problem of our own making and conquered it.

Here's a look at what we'll need to do.

Make as much clean electricity as possible

To meet the need for energy without putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, countries would need to dramatically scale up the amount of clean energy they produce. Fortunately, most of that energy would be generated by technologies we already have -- renewable sources of energy including wind and solar power.

"Renewables, far and wide, are the key pillar in any net-zero scenario," says Mayfield, who worked on an influential 2021 report from Princeton University's Net-Zero America project, which focused on the U.S. economy.

The Princeton report envisions wind and solar power production roughly quadrupling by 2030 to get the United States to net-zero emissions by 2050. That would mean building many new solar and wind farms, so many that in the most ambitious scenario, wind turbines would cover an area the size of Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska and Oklahoma combined.

How much solar and wind power would we need?

Achieving net-zero would require a dramatic increase in solar and wind power in the United States. These maps show the footprint of existing solar and wind infrastructure in the contiguous United States (as of 2020) and a possible footprint for a midrange scenario for 2050. Gray shows population density of 100 people per square kilometer or greater.

Such a scale-up is only possible because prices to produce renewable energy have plunged. The cost of wind power has dropped nearly 70 percent, and solar power nearly 90 percent, over the last decade in the United States. "That was a game changer that I don't know if some people were expecting," Hidalgo-Gonzalez says.

Globally the price drop in renewables has allowed growth to surge; China, for instance, installed a record 55 gigawatts of solar power capacity in 2021, for a total of 306 gigawatts or nearly 13 percent of the nation's installed capacity to generate electricity. China is almost certain to have had another record year for solar power installations in 2022.

Challenges include figuring out ways to store and transmit all that extra electricity, and finding locations to build wind and solar power installations that are acceptable to local communities. Other types of low-carbon power, such as hydropower and nuclear power, which comes with its own public resistance, will also likely play a role going forward.

Renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind and hydropower, account for a larger share of global electricity generation today than they did in 2015. The International Energy Agency expects that trend to continue, projecting that renewables will top 38 percent in 2027.

Get efficient and go electric

The drive toward net-zero emissions also requires boosting energy efficiency across industries and electrifying as many aspects of modern life as possible, such as transportation and home heating.

Some industries are already shifting to more efficient methods of production, such as steelmaking in China that incorporates hydrogen-based furnaces that are much cleaner than coal-fired ones, Yu says. In India, simply closing down the most inefficient coal-burning power plants provides the most bang for the buck, says Shayak Sengupta, an energy and policy expert at the Observer Research Foundation America think tank in Washington, D.C. "The list has been made up," he says, of the plants that should close first, "and that's been happening."

To achieve net-zero, the United States would need to increase its share of electric heat pumps, which heat houses much more cleanly than gas- or oil-fired appliances, from around 10 percent in 2020 to as much as 80 percent by 2050, according to the Princeton report. Federal subsidies for these sorts of appliances are rolling out in 2023 as part of the new Inflation Reduction Act, legislation that contains a number of climate-related provisions.

Shifting cars and other vehicles away from burning gasoline to running off of electricity would also lead to significant emissions cuts. In a major 2021 report, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine said that one of the most important moves in decarbonizing the U.S. economy would be having electric vehicles account for half of all new vehicle sales by 2030. That's not impossible; electric car sales accounted for nearly 6 percent of new sales in the United States in 2022, which is still a low number but nearly double the previous year.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Tire manufacturer Goodyear has made a pledge to create a tire made from 100% sustainable materials by the year 2030. And while other such pledges don't always necessarily come to fruition, it appears that Goodyear is well on its way. 

At this year's Consumer Electronics Show (CES), the company unveiled a prototype tire made from 90% sustainable materials. That's up a whopping 20% from the already impressive prototype tire the company revealed at last year's CES, which was made from 70% sustainable materials. [...]

In addition to the sustainable materials, Goodyear says that the new tires have a lower rolling resistance, which means better gas mileage and longer electric vehicle ranges. Combine that with the reduced carbon footprint and they truly sound like the tires of the future.

TISH, YOU SPOKE TRUMP!:

France is becoming more and more right-wing, according to a leading liberal think tank in the country. The report from Fondapol (the Foundation for Political Innovation) examined the results of last year's presidential and legislative elections, as well as in-depth polling data taken around the same time. Its conclusion: the French are getting angrier -- and their anger is making them more right-wing. [...]

One of the most intriguing findings of Fondapol's study is that 17 per cent of voters for the two most extreme left-wing parties (LO & NPA) view Marine Le Pen as "far left" herself (13 per cent view her as "left" and 9 per cent as "centre"). More broadly, a third of voters close to left-wing parties viewed the arrival of Le Pen's Rassemblement National in the National Assembly as "a good thing".

IT'S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

The New Jersey man who admitted to spraying U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick with pepper spray during the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack was sentenced to 80 months in prison on Friday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom packed with Sicknick's colleagues and fellow officers. 

IF ONLY TRUMPISTS WERE CAPABLE OF SHAME:

The video shows officers walking to Pelosi's door, which opens to show attacker David DePape holding a hammer and grabbing Pelosi. After an officer asks what's happening, DePape says that "everything's good." Officers then see DePape's hammer and tell him to drop it.

"Um, nope," DePape says. He then hits Pelosi in the head, prompting police to rush in and subdue him.

WELL, THERE ARE SOME PLACES WHERE VIOLENCE IS WORSE:

The murder rates in Trump-voting states from 2020 have exceeded those in Biden-voting states every year since 2000, according to a new analysis by ThirdWay, a center-left think tank.

Why it matters: Republicans have built their party on being the crime-fighting candidates, even as murder rates in red states have outpaced blue states by an average of 23% over the past two decades.

Four reliably-red states consistently made the top of the list -- Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri.

IT'S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

The teenager's online videos were referenced several times by the gunman behind the supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York last May, as well as the suspect in the mass killing at a Colorado gay club in November. 

Harris' previous convictions include aggravated criminal damage for defacing a Manchester mural of George Floyd, who was killed by a police officer in Minnesota in 2020. 

Judge Patrick Field KC told the court on Friday that Harris created a series of videos glorifying acts of murder with specific instructions to emulate them, according to BBC News.

"In these videos you expressed and repeated vile antisemitic, racist, misogynistic and homophobic views," he told Harris at the sentencing. "You intended to encourage terrorism, and it's plain that what was being encouraged was lethal, racist and antisemitic violence, as well as violence against the gay community."

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

A new, detailed exposé by the New York Times's Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner digs into what exactly happened with the nearly four-year Durham investigation, which is purportedly about to conclude, and it isn't pretty. Anecdote after anecdote portrays Durham and Barr as believing in conspiracy theories without evidence but with clear political motives to bolster one of Trump's favorite arguments: that he was the victim of a nefarious plot.

Basically, Durham and Barr wanted to prove that the Trump-Russia investigation was manufactured in bad faith by either "deep state" officials or the Clinton campaign (or both), with the goal of hurting Trump politically. Again and again, Durham pursued various versions of this theory, and again and again, he fell short of proving his case.

If Barr and Durham started off with suspicions but found upon investigation that they were baseless, that's not necessarily so terrible. Yet both men kept on saying or implying publicly that the "'deep state'/Clinton campaign hit job" theory was true -- Barr in public statements where he said this outright and Durham in court filings and trial questioning that seemed designed to advance a narrative he couldn't actually prove.

Bizarrely enough, when checking out one of these theories -- that Italian officials were somehow involved in launching the Trump-Russia investigation -- Durham and Barr were instead presented with evidence linking Trump himself to potential financial crimes. "Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham decided that the tip was too serious and credible to ignore," the Times reporters write. Barr kept this new investigation of Trump in Durham's hands, and it's unclear what became of it.

...TOLD BY AN IDIOT:

My biggest "wow" from the Times story was how closely Barr followed the minute details of what Durham was doing.

This paragraph in particular:

While attorneys general overseeing politically sensitive inquiries tend to keep their distance from the investigators, Mr. Durham visited Mr. Barr in his office for at times weekly updates and consultations about his day-to-day work. They also sometimes dined and sipped Scotch together, people familiar with their work said.

And this one too:

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham traveled abroad together to press British and Italian officials to reveal everything their agencies had gleaned about the Trump campaign and relayed to the United States, but both allied governments denied they had done any such thing. Top British intelligence officials expressed indignation to their U.S. counterparts about the accusation, three former U.S. officials said.

This seems to go against the whole notion of a special counsel. The whole point of the attorney general naming one -- as Merrick Garland has in both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden classified documents investigations -- is to provide a level of independence from the Justice Department, to avoid the appearance of impropriety or bias.

But in Barr's case, he appeared to be directly leaning on Durham -- pressuring him to find what turned out to be a nonexistent conspiracy theory about the origins of the 2016 Russian meddling.

Then there's this: During one of their trips to Europe together, Barr and Durham were told by Italian officials of possible financial crimes committed by Trump. Rather than hand that off to another investigator, Barr had Durham look into it -- even though it was nowhere close to the remit of his special counsel appointment.

As the Times wrote:

Mr. Durham never filed charges, and it remains unclear what level of an investigation it was, what steps he took, what he learned and whether anyone at the White House ever found out. The extraordinary fact that Mr. Durham opened a criminal investigation that included scrutinizing Mr. Trump has remained secret.

In fact, it was worse than that. The news that Durham's probe now included a criminal component wound up leaking out. But, the assumption was -- again because Durham was tasked with investigating the origins of the 2016 FBI probe into Russia not looking into Trump-- that the criminal probe was tied to wrongdoing on that front. Neither Barr nor Durham saw fit to correct the record that the criminal investigation had to do with Trump.

Like, what?

There's more in the story -- including how Durham came to rely on Russian-produced memos of alleged hacks of Americans that made claims about, among other things, how then Attorney General Loretta Lynch was going to shut down the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails.

You really should read the whole story. It is a stunner -- exposing just how off the rails the Durham probe has gone, with a major assist from Barr.

SOMETIMES IT'S THE CRIME AND THE COVER-UP:

Special Counsel John Durham, appointed by then-Attorney General Bill Barr, uncovered possible financial crimes by Donald Trump but made no attempt to prosecute them, The New York Times revealed in a massive, bombshell report published Thursday after a months-long investigation.

"Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it," the Times' Charlie Savage, Adam Goldman, and Katie Benner report.

The "potentially explosive tip linking Mr. Trump to certain suspected financial crimes" came during a trip Barr and Durham, his special counsel, took together. 

...AND CHEAPER...:

Like wind and solar power, nuclear generates electricity without burning fossil fuels. But the mining and manufacturing processes behind wind turbine blades, solar panels, and uranium pellets do have carbon footprints. Considering this, an analysis by Our World in Data concluded that nuclear generates 3 tons of greenhouse gasses per terra-watt hour (TWh) of electricity produced, while wind generates 4, and solar 5.

Then there's safety: The same analysis estimated the fatality rate for nuclear at 0.07 deaths per TWh, higher than wind, 0.04, and solar, 0.02. But lower than natural gas, estimated at 2.8 deaths per TWh, and much lower than coal power, at 24.6. Though risks can be complicated, and estimating deaths can often be speculative, there's now plenty of evidence that, with climate impacts and other elements factored in, nuclear is way safer than many alternatives.

Yet, in a poll conducted by The Economist and YouGov, a market research company, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, 47 percent of Americans said they didn't think nuclear power plants were safe.

To be clear: nuclear power has real downsides. Uranium mining is destructive and toxic. Spent fuel has to be carefully and expensively sealed and stored. And, however small, there is the risk of radiation releases and meltdowns. The small amount of radiation that escaped from Three Mile Island -- long dismissed as harmless by experts and the government -- has led to localized increases in several kinds of cancer, according to a 2022 paper published in the journal Risks Hazards Crisis Public Policy. Wind and solar power may well be cheaper and less risky. But that doesn't mean nuclear power is as bad as people think it is.

Rather than actual statistical risk, the majority of citizens rely on risk perception, according to Paul Slovic, a professor at the University of Oregon and an expert on risk and decision making. In a 1987 article published in the journal Science, Slovic writes, "For these people, experience with hazards tends to come from the news media." He cites a study from 1980, in which various groups were asked to rank 30 activities and technologies in order of risk. College students and members of the League of Women Voters assigned number 1, the highest risk, to nuclear power, ahead of hand guns and smoking. Experts ranked nuclear power at 20; motor vehicles at 1, smoking at 2, and hand guns at 4.

Slovic blamed this massive gap on "extensive unfavorable media coverage," "deep anxieties," and a "strong association between nuclear power and the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons."

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THE ONE ECONOMY:

What California does matters far beyond state lines.

California is close to being the world's fourth-largest economy and has a history of adopting environmental requirements that are imitated across the United States and the world. California has the most ambitious zero-emission requirements in the world for cars, trucks and buses; the most ambitious low-carbon fuel requirements; one of the largest carbon cap-and-trade programs; and the most aggressive requirements for renewable electricity.

In the U.S., through peculiarities in national air pollution law, other states have replicated many of California's regulations and programs so they can race ahead of national policies. States can either follow federal vehicle emissions standards or California's stricter rules. There is no third option. An increasing number of states now follow California.

So, even though California contributes less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions, if it sets a high bar, its many technical, institutional and behavioral innovations will likely spread and be transformative.

UPDATING TRIUMPH OF THE WILL:

The film offers a counterfactual history in which Godse's assassination attempt fails and he gets an opportunity to duke out his ideological disagreements with Gandhi--particularly Gandhi's vision of a pluralistic India that respected the equal rights of all faiths. Its purpose seemingly is to present Godse and Gandhi as intellectual and moral equals.

To appreciate just how repugnant this exercise is, imagine if a confederate sympathizer and a Lincoln skeptic made a film Abe Lincoln-John Wilkes Booth: A Debate. Gandhi's great grandson has already condemned Santoshi and vowed not to see the film because, he points out, in 2002, Santoshi made a film about Bhagat Singh, a revered freedom fighter (whom the British had executed in 1931), that also "demolished" Gandhi. But Santoshi's latest film deserves to be taken seriously because it offers a revealing glimpse into the tactics and arguments that the Hindu nationalist movement is deploying to ditch the country's founding ideals and impose its alternative illiberal vision under which Hinduism is the official religion of the country and faiths it considers "non-indigenous"--read Islam and Christianity--are relegated to second class status. That would mean that over 200 million Indians who belong to these faiths would have less space to practice them if not face outright discrimination.

However, to accomplish its ends, Hindutva--as Hindu nationalism is called--needs to rewrite history to knock down India's founding liberal heroes and build up its nationalistic alternative icons. The timing couldn't be better for this exercise, given that the movement has at its disposal the powerful weapon of internet-driven propaganda and a poorly educated, susceptible young population--nearly half of India's population is under 25--that is easily brainwashed.

And Indian cinema seems eager to assist.

Indeed, since Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an avowed Hindu nationalist, arrived on the scene, the Indian movie industry has changed considerably. In the pre-Modi era it delighted in tedious message-movies like Amar, Akbar, Anthony that spouted interfaith platitudes. Now, just as much of India's news media has become unabashedly jingoistic and pro-government, many mainstream filmmakers have fallen in line with Modi's aims as they churn out nonsensical pseudo-patriotic fare. Santoshi's celluloid comeback is in that company.

From the preview and reviews, it seems that Santoshi is attempting a clever trick in Gandhi Godse. He does not reject Gandhi, he simply builds up Godse. But Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party has not been that subtle in the past. When the party was last in power in the mid-1990s as part of a coalition government, a play called Mi Nathuram Godse Boltoy (I'm Nathuram Godse Speaking), staged in Gujarat, channeled the feelings of many Hindus that Godse was a patriot who did the right thing in killing Gandhi. It presented Godse as sticking up for their rights while Gandhi traitorously handed over the country to Muslims during India's partition. It was a calculated effort to present Godse's case in the best possible light in his defense trial. (India has the death penalty and Godse was executed in 1949.)

Likewise, within a year of Modi's election as prime minister in 2014, the BJP-ruled state of Rajasthan considered naming a bridge after Godse. In 2019, Pragya Singh Thakur, a BJP member of Parliament and a militant Hindu accused of terrorism, who recently counseled her fellow Hindus to keep sharp knives at hand to "cut off the enemy's head," called Godse "a patriot."

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

One of the enduring mysteries surrounding the chaotic attempts to overturn Donald Trump's defeat in the 2020 presidential battle has been solved: who made a secret $1m donation to the controversial election "audit" in Arizona?

The identity of one of the largest benefactors behind the discredited review of Arizona's vote count has been shrouded in secrecy. Now the Guardian can reveal that the person who partially bankrolled the failed attempt to prove that the election was stolen from Trump was ... Trump. [...]

In the end, the Cyber Ninjas audit not only lacked credibility, it also spectacularly failed to meet its goal. In September 2021, the firm released the results of its investigation and found that Biden had indeed won Maricopa county by 360 more votes than the official count.

YEAH, BUT RACE!:

Violent crime rates in some major cities declined last year but have yet to recover from a 2020 surge associated with the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a report released Thursday.

The report, by the nonpartisan Council on Criminal Justice, examined trends in 35 cities and found that while homicides, gun assaults, and reports of domestic violence declined slightly in 2022 compared with the year before, some property crimes have worsened. In some cities, car thefts in particular have spiked, the report found.

Nationwide, crime has been steadily declining for most of the last quarter-century, starting in the early 1990s.

PITY THE POOR FLATLANDERS:

Moving company northAmerican Moving Services ranks New Hampshire as America's "Cheapest Place to Live" based on the overall value for Granite Staters compared to residents of other states. Its report says New Hampshire offers a "high quality of life at a lower price point."

The company looked at average household income, median home price, average housing cost, average grocery costs, average utilities, inflation costs, and state income taxes for the rankings and determined New Hampshire is the best in the nation.

"These states offer a high quality of life at a lower price point, making them an excellent choice for anyone looking to stretch their budget further," the report states.

Being first among 50 is something New Hampshire is getting used to. Last year alone, the Granite State was named first in overall freedom by the Cato Institute, first in public safety by U.S. News, and first in economic freedom by the Fraser Institute.

In his State of the State address this month, Gov. Chris Sununu touted New Hampshire's leading economy and free society as a model for the rest of the country.

RHYMES WITH FRUCTURE:

What emerged was a picture of glaring, though unsurprising, disparities.

According to the most recent report, released Monday, Roxbury had the highest coronavirus levels in the city -- more than three times those of Roslindale/West Roxbury and Charlestown, which had the lowest levels. Allston/Brighton, Mattapan, and Dorchester also had above-average counts.

Public health experts said there were many reasons for the differences. "The most likely factors include vaccination and booster rates, access to care, systemic health inequities, the number of residents working in jobs that put them in close proximity to others, and the number of residents that live in crowded conditions," said Dr. Kathryn Hall, the Boston Public Health Commission's deputy director.

IT'S A START...:

The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) today asked six former presidents and their vice presidents to look to see if they have any presidential records, including documents marked classified, in their possession. It sent the letters to representatives for former presidents Donald Trump, Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Ronald Reagan and former vice presidents Mike Pence, Joe Biden, Dick Cheney, Al Gore, and Dan Quayle. It did not make a similar request to former president Jimmy Carter because although he was the one who signed the Presidential Records Act into law, it did not go into effect until he left office.

This request illuminates the crucial importance in our society of disinformation: deliberate lies or misdirection to convince people of things that are not true. 

At this point, documents bearing classification markings have turned up in the possession of Trump, Biden, and Pence. The NARA request suggests the possibility that other high-ranking officials also have documents that they are unaware they hold.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

It became a regular litany of grievances from President Donald J. Trump and his supporters: The investigation into his 2016 campaign's ties to Russia was a witch hunt, they maintained, that had been opened without any solid basis, went on too long and found no proof of collusion.

Egged on by Mr. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr set out in 2019 to dig into their shared theory that the Russia investigation likely stemmed from a conspiracy by intelligence or law enforcement agencies. To lead the inquiry, Mr. Barr turned to a hard-nosed prosecutor named John H. Durham, and later granted him special counsel status to carry on after Mr. Trump left office.

But after almost four years -- far longer than the Russia investigation itself -- Mr. Durham's work is coming to an end without uncovering anything like the deep state plot alleged by Mr. Trump and suspected by Mr. Barr.

Moreover, a monthslong review by The New York Times found that the main thrust of the Durham inquiry was marked by some of the very same flaws -- including a strained justification for opening it and its role in fueling partisan conspiracy theories that would never be charged in court -- that Trump allies claim characterized the Russia investigation.

Interviews by The Times with more than a dozen current and former officials have revealed an array of previously unreported episodes that show how the Durham inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes as it went unsuccessfully down one path after another even as Mr. Trump and Mr. Barr promoted a misleading narrative of its progress.

Mr. Barr and Mr. Durham never disclosed that their inquiry expanded in the fall of 2019, based on a tip from Italian officials, to include a criminal investigation into suspicious financial dealings related to Mr. Trump. The specifics of the tip and how they handled the investigation remain unclear, but Mr. Durham brought no charges over it.

Mr. Durham used Russian intelligence memos -- suspected by other U.S. officials of containing disinformation -- to gain access to emails of an aide to George Soros, the financier and philanthropist who is a favorite target of the American right and Russian state media. Mr. Durham used grand jury powers to keep pursuing the emails even after a judge twice rejected his request for access to them. The emails yielded no evidence that Mr. Durham has cited in any case he pursued.

There were deeper internal fractures on the Durham team than previously known. The publicly unexplained resignation in 2020 of his No. 2 and longtime aide, Nora R. Dannehy, was the culmination of a series of disputes between them over prosecutorial ethics. A year later, two more prosecutors strongly objected to plans to indict a lawyer with ties to Hillary Clinton's 2016 campaign based on evidence they warned was too flimsy, and one left the team in protest of Mr. Durham's decision to proceed anyway. (A jury swiftly acquitted the lawyer.)

Now, as Mr. Durham works on a final report, the interviews by The Times provide new details of how he and Mr. Barr sought to recast the scrutiny of the 2016 Trump campaign's myriad if murky links to Russia as unjustified and itself a crime.

PITY THE POOR MALTHUSIANS:

More than 96% of the water in the world is seawater, which contains too much salt for humans to drink. Removing that salt and turning seawater into drinkable fresh water could provide access for billions of people who currently don't have it.

Methods to get fresh water from salt water already exist, but they use huge amounts of energy and leave behind unwanted leftovers. For example, brine -- a super-salty liquid containing all the minerals and impurities removed from the seawater -- can damage sea life when it's dumped back into the ocean.

But Manhat wants to change that with help from its floating stills. These devices use a transparent structure -- similar to a greenhouse -- to warm the surface of the ocean beneath them and then trap the resulting water vapor. 

The device doesn't collect salt or brine over time, so it's safer for sea life. And since it floats on the water, it doesn't take up space on land. This makes it ideal for coastal areas and small countries with little land to spare for water purification.

Making clean water more easily accessible will benefit people around the world who are currently at risk of illness from unsafe water sources. It could also help address drought in many areas, including the U.S.

FIRE UP THE NEXT EXCUSE:

"So far the data that we have seen suggests the absence of a safety risk for the bivalent boosters in age 65 years and older," Richard Forshee, deputy director of the FDA's biostatistics office, told the agency's independent vaccine committee.

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

If Britain's great flaw is the class system, America's might be its obsession with classifying official information. There's a reason "that's classified, sir" is a stock phrase in so many Hollywood films. Americans tend to revere elite secrecy in the same way British snobs worship aristocracy. You can own lots of land in America and still be a hick. If you've gotten hold of sensitive state files, however -- well, son, you've made it.

This fetish for high-bureaucratic privilege might explain why Donald Trump took so many classified papers to his billionaire's lair in Mar-a-Lago, much as a pirate might squirrel away treasure in a trove. Trump's favorite film is Citizen Kane and no doubt his acquisitive mind thrilled at the thought of possessing certain noir secrets which the plebs can't afford to know. Rosebud!

IMAGINE THE GOP NOMINATES NORMALS?:

Even though almost every competitive race went the way Senate Democrats needed them to last fall, in the 118th Congress, they enjoy only a fragile 51-49 majority. Further, they had three big things going for them in the midterms: a favorable map, a shockingly poor batch of low-quality GOP opponents, and a Supreme Court decision that revved up left-leaning activists across the country.

As important as all three of these factors were in Democratic Senate victories, the most significant one was the map--and that will look drastically different next cycle.

In 2024, nearly half of the Democratic caucus--23 senators--is up for re-election. Of those, 8 are considered vulnerable: 5 in battleground states (Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Virginia) and the other 3 in solidly red states (Ohio, Montana, West Virginia). Republicans, on the other hand, have only 11 senators up for re-election in the 2024 cycle, and all of them represent states Trump won in 2020.

SEEMS A BIGGER PROBLEM THAT TINY TRUMP IS FRINGE:

In 2021, Jon Ward wanted Florida's largest medical association to take a stance against the Covid-19 vaccine.

The move by the Panama City dermatologist, also a well-known conservative activist, sent many members of the 25,000-person Florida Medical Association reeling, with one doctor likening it to a comedian telling an off-color joke. Instead, the members did the opposite of what he asked and crafted a resolution that was pro-vaccine.

"It was such an inflammatory resolution that we decided to flip it on its head," said a second FMA member who attended the meeting. "We totally made it hostile to what he wanted."

Now Ward is creating fresh controversy in the state's medical community after appearing alongside Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis at several events, where Ward rejected Covid-19 vaccines and most pandemic-era mitigation efforts.

LIKELY WORSE NOW THAT WE'VE RELAXED:

We are part of a team of researchers at Boston University, University of Minnesota, University of California San Francisco and other institutions who have been tracking Covid-19 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic.

A major goal for our team has been to assess whether the undercounting of Covid-19 deaths has occurred, and if so in which parts of the country.

One way to examine the issue is to look at what population health researchers call excess mortality. It's a measure that, in this case, compares the number of deaths that occurred during the pandemic to the number of deaths that would have been expected based on pre-pandemic trends.

Excess mortality captures deaths that arose from Covid-19 directly or through indirect pathways such as patients avoiding hospitals during Covid-19 surges. While determining a cause of death can be a complex process, recording whether or not someone died is more straightforward.

For this reason, calculations of excess deaths are viewed as the least biased estimate of the pandemic's death toll.

As a general rule of thumb - with some important caveats that we explain below - if there are more Covid-19 deaths than excess deaths, Covid-19 deaths were likely overestimated. If there are more excess deaths than Covid-19 deaths, Covid-19 deaths were likely underestimated.

In a newly released study that has not yet been peer-reviewed, our team found that during the first two years of the pandemic - from March 2020 to February 2022 - there were between 996,869 and 1,278,540 excess deaths in the US.

Among these, 866,187 were recognized as Covid-19 on death certificates. This means that there were between 130,682 and 412,353 more excess deaths than Covid-19 deaths.

TAKEN IS MY BUSINESS?:

One so desperately wants them not to screw this up. (already worried that Neeson is too physically imposing for the role...)https://t.co/9xSaqrjR9A via @openculture

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) January 26, 2023

AVOIDING FIRST WORLD MISTAKES:

An international team of researchers looked at data from about three million rivers across the world to figure out where hydroelectric dams could be sited with minimal environmental impact.

Their analysis, published in the new journal Nature Water, shows that 124,761 potential locations meet the strict environmental requirements. Over 4,600 of these hydroelectric dams could generate an additional 5.27 Petawatt-hours of energy per year, which is a fifth of the world's present electricity use, while being profitable

Two-thirds of global unused hydropower potential that the researchers calculated is distributed across the Himalayas. And Africa's unused profitable and environmentally sound hydropower resource is four times larger than what the continent has developed so far. This study could help countries better plan their hydroelectricity strategies while considering environmental and societal impact.

In 2020, hydroelectricity produced about 17 percent of the world's power. It is the third-largest source of electricity, after coal and natural gas, and the single largest source of renewable electricity.

LIE BACK AND ENJOY IT:

But 2022 was also a milestone in another sense -- as the first year when investment in decarbonizing energy surpassed $1 trillion. The  year-on-year increase of more than $250 billion from 2021 was the largest jump yet.

THE HINDU CHRIS RUFO:

The film had already been banned, the social media posts censored. Now, the students huddled without light or electricity around glowing smartphones to watch what their government had deemed to be subversive foreign propaganda.

China? No. They were in India, ostensibly the world's largest democracy, and watching the BBC.

The Indian government over the past week has embarked on an extraordinary campaign to prevent its citizens from viewing a new documentary by the British broadcaster that explores Prime Minister Narendra Modi's alleged role in a deadly 2002 riot that saw more than 1,000 people - mostly Muslims - killed.

THE rIGHT/lEFT IS NOWHERE MORE SIMILAR THAN IN THE HATRED OF THE rEPUBLIC:

The pseudonymous Founder Cato hit this concern squarely on its head when writing that "government, to an American, is the science of his political safety," meaning that government exists to protect an individual's liberty from predation, including from the government, while supporting those private institutions that allow them to flourish.

Instead of common good by diktat, early Americans believed that a minimalistic set of laws focused on ensuring a basic set of rights within society would allow civil society to order itself into appropriately arranged groups and thereby achieve whatever measure of good it could. They predicated this plan upon the people's ability to exercise self-restraint in following the law and wisdom in drafting it and dedication to the principle of self-government (both of the literal self and community), which was the challenge (still highly controversial as the Common Gooders demonstrate) of popular sovereignty. The coordinated functioning of this ideal is ordered liberty.

How do we know the above story is correct? Beyond history and primary-source indicators, the Republic's four causes demonstrate it. The government is a restrained body, with governing institutions possessing increased authority, not as one ascends the federal system, with most power concentrated in the fewest hands, but as one goes down to the lowest levels. That is the doctrine of delegated powers where states, the smallest sovereign unit, are left to manage their individual common goods. This structure is opposite to what we would expect from a government oriented toward the Common Good, which should be strong to support those policies. One that merely orders liberty, however, should be weak so as not to overwhelm its citizens.

The fact that the Constitution speaks of limitations and is short; separates rather than concentrates powers; makes legislation difficult and forces compromise; reinforces federalism; constricts the power of judges from making decisions through recognizing juries; forces the Executive to consult the Senate and approves only the House to create budgets, indicates weakness rather than strength. If the state were a crusading agent of goodness, this is the opposite structure one would create. If one wished to create a power that could only draft broad laws, would allow citizens to resolve conflicts on their own, and only enact decisions after consensus, it is ideal. That ideal is ordered liberty.

The fact that the people ratified the Constitution, as indicated by the Preamble; elect their representatives through its power; can change the Constitution; there aren't distinctions in power or dignity among the citizenry; there aren't qualifications for office based on virtue or even knowledge; the poorest or the richest, the most vile or the most virtuous, remain eligible for office, are proofs that the American government isn't itself a steward of the good but a protector of the interests of the people to achieve (or not) that good for themselves, which is ordered liberty.

That all of these things add up, when exercised by a virtuous citizenry, to the common good, despite none aiming directly at it. This is the final proof that our order's end, its final cause, isn't that good itself, but the ordered liberty enabling people to obtain it. In other words, while the end of our government is liberty, the end of liberty is the common good. Insofar as our government is built to achieve the good, it does so only by enabling liberty. As history has shown, and the greatness of our Republic proves, ensuring liberty is the best way to achieve all the goods, be they common or particular.

THE GREATEST TRAGEDY OF THE 21ST CENTURY WAS ARIEL SHARON'S COMA:

The expert on decision-making said that he believed that the mass public protests against the government's policies could have an impact, along with international pressure.

"Public pressure sometimes has results and longevity. But public pressure in Israel will not be the only thing that will happen -- international pressure will increase. Some people in the government don't care, but Israel is ostracizing itself from the world to which it belongs. This is no small thing," he said.

REWARDING 21ST CENTURY WORKPLACE SKILLS:

Ethan Mollick has a message for the humans and the machines: can't we all just get along?

After all, we are now officially in an A.I. world and we're going to have to share it, reasons the associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania's prestigious Wharton School.

"This was a sudden change, right? There is a lot of good stuff that we are going to have to do differently, but I think we could solve the problems of how we teach people to write in a world with ChatGPT," Mollick told NPR.

TINY TRUMP:

According to five Republicans familiar with the discussions, the governor's top lieutenants have quietly recruited a network of conservative social media influencers as part of a broader attempt to circumvent the mainstream press and appeal directly to GOP primary voters nationwide.

And who are, according to the three Republicans who received the initial pitch, among the ranks in DeSantis' digital army?

Jack Murphy, a podcast host and self-described "alpha-male giga chad" involved in a quasi-professional cuckolding porn scandal. John Cardillo, a former Newsmax TV host and unregistered arms dealer who allegedly stiffed the Ukrainian government for $200,000 worth of body armor plates. Christian Walker, Herschel Walker's right-wing influencer son who helped tank his father's Senate campaign. David Reaboi, a Hungary-loving and Qatar-hating bodybuilder with longstanding ties to John Bolton. And Caleb Hull, an ex-Trump digital strategist who has said some very, very racist things.

This is the DeSantis A-team...

TRUMPISM IS A SUICIDE CULT:

A new CDC study has found that the Covid-19 bivalent booster reduces the risk of symptomatic infection from the most common subvariant circulating in the U.S. right now by about half.

Additional new data, set to be published on the CDC website on Wednesday, also shows that individuals who received an updated vaccine reduced their risk of death by nearly 13 fold, when compared to the unvaccinated, and by two fold when compared to those with at least one monovalent vaccine but no updated booster.

THINK YOURSELF HEALTHY:

TREE OF LIFE:

As the stranger and I sat on a green vinyl couch, surrounded by leather-bound books, he finally started to make eye contact. I learned that his name was Richard "Mac" McKinney, that he had served 25 years in the military, and that he had a wife and daughter. Over the next few weeks, Mac began making regular visits to the mosque, joining us for meals and sharing stories about his family and his time in the military.

I continually looked for ways to help him feel valued by entrusting him with responsibilities around the mosque: leading meetings, participating in prayers, even standing by the door as our resident security guard. I could tell this gave him a sense of purpose. Not long after that, he joined our community of about 200 by becoming a member of the mosque.

It wasn't until months later that I heard unsettling rumors. Some congregants claimed they'd heard that when Mac first came to the mosque, he was on a reconnaissance mission. That he'd built a bomb to blow up the mosque and murder us.

I knew immediately what I needed to do. I invited Mac to my house for a meal of traditional Afghan food: homemade bread, chicken, kebabs, rice, eggplant, a green yogurt dip seasoned with cilantro and lime. He devoured the food. When he was done, I looked him in the eye.

"Is it true, Richard?" I asked. "Were you planning to kill us?"

He looked down. He was ashamed but answered honestly. He confessed that when he had first arrived at the mosque, he had planned to murder us by blowing up the building with an IED he had built himself.

"What were you thinking, Brother Richard?"

He explained that in the military, he had been at war with Muslims for years, and that he had developed a deep hatred in his heart. But he went on to say that the way we had treated him, with compassion and kindness, had changed his mind. He said we had given him a place to belong. We had shown him what true humanity is about.

...IF YOU CAN KEEP IT:

The common quip that the United States is a 'republic not a democracy' suggests in part the intellectual dimension of this legacy. In addition to the liberalism derived from Locke, Hobbes, and Montesquieu, the Founding Fathers drew considerable inspiration from republicanism, a political tradition stretching back through Italian city-states to the "utmost height of human greatness" (Federalist No. 34), the Roman Republic. 

At this moment of discontent with liberalism and growing flirtation with populism and post-liberalism, it is worth looking back at republicanism in the hope its teachings can help reinvigorate liberalism.

Republicanism is a heavily furcated tradition. Ancient republicans, their early modern students, and the neo-republicans differ in their emphases and their phrasing, each in dialogue with the politics of their times. Quite consistent, though, is a belief in the importance of non-domination, the public good, and continuity. The republican tends to view liberty, the ability to "live under ... [no master] at all" (Cicero's The Republic II.XXIII) and "[enjoy] what one has," (Discourses on Livy I.16) as achieved through the state, not despite it. A good state is therefore one that facilitates liberty and resists the fall into tyranny. In looking to republicanism to aid liberalism, a productive place to begin is with the thinker John Adams referred to as the "first who revived the ancient politics," Niccolò Machiavelli, and his dissection of republics in the Discourses on Livy.

HE DOESN'T SEEM TERRIBLY COMPETENT:

 The money, $49,910, was actually a reference to rental payment for a Washington, D.C., office space used by Hunter Biden. But the story of the document is more absurd, involving Biden family favor trading, scorned relatives, and an ultimately failed effort to get Hunter Biden's troubled cousin a new probation officer.

The Washington Free Beacon traced the origin of the document to an attachment in a July 27, 2018, email from Hunter Biden to a luxury apartment complex in Los Angeles. The background check document was part of a rental application, and--though his communications with the building's property manager indicated the apartment would be for him--text messages and emails on Hunter Biden's laptop reveal it was in fact for his down-on-her-luck cousin, Caroline Biden, the daughter of Joe Biden's brother Jim and his wife, Sara.

The president's niece pleaded guilty in 2017 to buying more than $100,000 worth of makeup with a stolen credit card. While she managed to skirt a grand larceny charge and the prison sentence it carried, she was sentenced to two years of probation--time she wanted to serve in Los Angeles.

She texted Hunter Biden on July 26, 2018, from a New York City probation office, telling him she urgently needed a California address so her lawyer could transfer her probation there.

Keeping Caroline Biden out of prison was a Biden family affair and Hunter Biden was at the center of the effort. 

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

The Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) released its fourth quarter of 2022 (4Q2022) Quarterly Energy Dynamics report today. 

It is a stark and welcome reminder that the green energy transition in Australia is well established and accelerating beyond expectations.

While rampant hyperinflation of all things fossil fuels caused mass disruption in 2022, the underlying trends are clear - and the burgeoning of renewables and decline of coal and gas in the grid ultimately spell permanent price relief.

YOU CAN'T SEE THE TEARS ARE REAL, I'M CRYING:

Virologist Stuart Neil of King's College London says that, despite such allegations, "there is no evidence that Sars-CoV-2 is the product of laboratory engineering or any sort of experimental fiddling". The leading theory now backed by most scientists is that the virus arose in wild bats and found its way into animals (perhaps via a pangolin or a civet cat) sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan. The bat populations most likely to have harboured the virus are in southern China (probably Yunnan province), far from Wuhan--but that is no big mystery, for the market was, before being shut down in January 2020, partly supplied by wildlife farms in that region. Such long-distance transmission of a viral pathogen is nothing unusual, says Robert Garry of Tulane University Medical Center in New Orleans--it happened with the Ebola virus in Africa, for example. Zoonotic transmission from wild animals sold at Chinese markets is also how Sars is thought to have entered the human population.

Last July, a detailed study of the early epidemiology of Covid-19 offered compelling support for this picture. A team of scientists led by biologist Michael Worobey of the University of Arizona reported that most of the earliest human cases centred around the Huanan market. In the section where live wild animals were sold, samples containing the virus were taken from carts, drains and a metal animal cage. It was already known that 27 of the 41 people initially hospitalised in Wuhan had had direct exposure to the market, while 55 of 168 of the first known cases were also associated with it. Worobey and colleagues also found that the residential addresses of 155 of those first cases pointed to the market as the epicentre of infection. "There are no other epidemiological links to any other place in the city," said Kristian Andersen of the Scripps Research Institute in California, a co-author of the study. 

A parallel study of the Sars-CoV-2 genome suggested that there were at least two events, probably sometime in November 2019, when the virus jumped between species. Many experts feel that the conclusion is now rather clear. "The science is largely pointing in one direction, and that is that the pandemic began naturally," virologist Angela Rasmussen of the University of Saskatchewan told the BBC last November. 

What, then, sustains the lab-leak theory? Among scientists, the idea that Sars-CoV-2 was engineered has tended to rely on a different kind of evidence: claims that the biochemical nature of the virus bears signs of the kind of artificial tampering that might be expected in GOF experiments. One early line of argument concerned a part of the spike protein that attaches to human cells in the first stage of attack. Called the furin cleavage site (FCS), it acts like a kind of switch that flips the virus into infectious mode, and is thought to be a key factor in making Sars-CoV-2 highly transmissible. FCSs are found in other coronaviruses in the wild, but the original Sars virus does not have one--if somebody was trying to modify it, this would be the obvious change to make. In May 2021, Nobel laureate virologist David Baltimore was quoted as saying that the FCS looked like a "smoking gun" for an engineered origin--an imprudent suggestion that he later withdrew, in view of the fact that the FCS could have hopped to Sars-CoV-2 from some other virus in the wild. 

The somewhat unexpected FCS was noticed as soon as the genetic sequence of Sars-CoV-2 was known in early 2020. Fauci discussed what this might mean for the idea of an engineered origin on 1st February, in a confidential teleconference and subsequent emails with NIH director Francis Collins, head of the Wellcome Trust Jeremy Farrar, the UK government chief scientific adviser Patrick Vallance, and other experts. Although conspiracy theorists have asserted that these scientists then tried to bury the issue, emails released last November show a conventional story. The participants took seriously the idea that the FCS might imply a lab origin, sought expert advice, notified the WHO, and concluded that a lab origin was "largely incompatible with the data" but that more study was needed. In other words it was science as normal, conducted with open minds and commendable rapidity.

There was another flurry of lab-leak rumours last October, when a trio of scientists (none of them virologists) released a preprint--a paper not yet peer-reviewed--claiming that a certain kind of genetic sequence called a restriction site recurs in the Sars-CoV-2 genome at suspiciously regular intervals. This, the authors argued, suggests that the viral genome might have been artificially constructed by joining together short segments of roughly equal size. Several experts initially took the idea seriously. Systems biologist Francois Balloux of University College London told the Economist that "I couldn't identify any fatal flaw in the reasoning and methodology"--only to later withdraw that view. Others pointed out that there were statistical reasons why a sequence like this may arise naturally. Andersen called the pattern "random noise", while virologist Edward Holmes, who was part of the team that first announced the genome sequence of Sars-CoV-2, called the preprint's claims "nonsense".

Such false alarms ought to recommend caution about what a natural or engineered virus "must" look like, or what nature can and can't produce. "If you've been a virologist for any length of time, nothing surprises you about what a virus can do," says Neil. There is a frighteningly vast reservoir of wild coronaviruses; we know next to nothing about the overwhelming majority of them. The genomes of such viruses are immensely diverse, precisely because they are in a sense "randomly engineered" by natural selection in the wild. If two coronaviruses infect the same host, they can exchange their genetic material. This "recombination" helps the virus to increase its diversity and thereby its potential to spread: occasionally it will, by chance, make a much more effective virus. It is not at all hard to see how the FCS could have arisen this way. Recombination also explains why it is hard to identify a natural source for a virus like Sars-CoV-2: every segment of the genome will probably have come from a different progenitor.

OPEN SOURCE IT ALL:

It's been a problem off and on for decades, from presidents to Cabinet members and staff across multiple administrations stretching as far back as Jimmy Carter. The issue has taken on greater significance since Trump willfully retained classified material at his Florida estate, prompting the unprecedented FBI seizure of thousands of pages of records last year.

It turns out former officials from all levels of government discover they are in possession of classified material and turn them over to the authorities at least several times a year, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of classified documents.

THERE IS NO MAX:

The share of renewables in South Australia reached an "extraordinary" peak of 91.5 per cent last November, when the grid was isolated by broken transmission lines, in what the Australian Energy Market Operator describes as a glimpse into Australia's energy future.

THAT WAS SIMPLE:

Remember that in order to release energy, you need some way to make electric charges flow, but that doesn't necessarily mean that in order to store energy, you need to move electric charges into place so that they can easily flow. Electrical energy can be stored, but it can also be generated on-demand from all sorts of other forms of potential energy, including electrical, chemical, nuclear, and even gravitational potential energy. And it's that very last storage method -- of gravitational potential energy -- that just might lead to the ultimate type of energy-storage device: a gravity battery.

Perhaps the first type of potential energy we learn about is also the simplest and most straightforward: gravitational potential energy. Whenever anything with a mass drops from a higher elevation to a lower elevation in Earth's gravitational field, including:

a ball rolling down a hill,

a book falling off a shelf,

a human falling from a standing to a prone position,

or a skydiver jumping out of an airplane,

you're witnessing an example of gravitational potential energy being converted into energy-of-motion, otherwise known as kinetic energy. We know, from experience (and from measurements), that balls rolled down hills reach the bottom in motion, with a large amount of kinetic energy. We know that books falling off shelves, humans falling down, or skydivers jumping out of airplanes all gain energy, and at the moment they hit the ground, their energy-of-motion (or kinetic energy) gets converted into many other types of energy: heat, sound, vibrations, etc.

The key is to realize that the "useful" energy that's released from the energy of motion all derives from the same source: an object that was previously raised up, in an energy-requiring move, against the gravitational pull of Earth.

Whenever you raise a mass to a higher elevation against the resistive force of Earth's gravity, you are performing work and increasing the weight's gravitational potential energy. When you release the raised weight, that potential energy gets converted into kinetic energy, which can be used to do work and can be converted into other forms of energy.

(

Gravitational potential energy -- wherever you have it -- can just as easily be converted into electrical energy. For example, imagine the following setup:

you have a vertically-oriented chain with gears at the top and bottom,

with platforms affixed to the chain at various intervals,

and then you place a mass on one of the platforms near the top.

What happens next?

The mass falls, causing the chain to move and the gears to turn. Now, if you connect the gears to a turbine, the turbine will spin when the chain moves. If you use that spinning turbine to generate power, it will take that mechanical energy that went into the motion of the gear-chain-platform-mass system and convert it into electrical energy, which can now be distributed anywhere throughout a connected power grid.

In other words, just by having some masses that were raised up to some height, previously, you can generate power at any time -- in any amount (if you have enough raised masses) -- simply by moving the masses onto the high-elevation platforms, turning gravitational potential energy into mechanical energy and then into electrical energy.

A RACE, NOT A RELIGION:

Ben-Gvir's move was nonetheless condemned not only by foreign diplomats, who warned against attempts to change the "status quo," but also, and perhaps even more forcefully, by Israel's Orthodox authorities, who consider ascending the Temple Mount a violation of halacha (Jewish law). Rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, Israel's Sephardic Chief Rabbi, wrote an open letter to Ben-Gvir stressing the "stringency of the ban" on ascending the Temple Mount and warning that doing so could "lead the many to sin." Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem Shlomo Moshe Amar, wrote that he was "astounded by how a Torah-keeping minister in Israel could violate the law of the Torah in public." An editorial published by the Ashkenazi Haredi newspaper Yated Ne'eman denounced Ben Gvir's act as a "serious halachic violation that contravened the rulings of generations of great Torah sages." (Almog Cohen, an MK from Ben-Gvir's party, responded with a pun on the newspaper's name, stating that it was not loyal--ne'eman--to the Jewish state.)

Ben-Gvir and the Jewish Power party he leads are, at least on paper, Orthodox religious nationalists, committed at once to the strictest adherence to religious law and to the idea that the founding of the secular state of Israel is part of the opening stages of the messianic age. Yet over the last several decades--beginning with the Oslo Peace Process in the 1990s and culminating with Israel's 2005 unilateral disengagement from the Gaza Strip--Israeli religious Zionism has undergone a series of crises that have led to a break with the Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law, especially on the issue of the Temple Mount. "[Religious Zionist] identity is now based more on mythic ethnocentrism than on Torah study," Shalom Hartman Institute Research Fellow Tomer Persico writes in his essay, "The End Point of Zionism." "Ethnocentric consciousness is replacing halachic sensibility." Indeed, there is perhaps no starker example than the Temple Mount to illustrate how the messianic ethnonationalism of Israel's right-wing religious Zionists has overwhelmed their putative commitment to Jewish law--a dynamic that could have disastrously violent consequences now that they are in power.

IN LAW, THIS IS CALLED AN ADMISSION AGAINST INTEREST:

"We collectively believe and know, America is a promise ... It is a promise of freedom and liberty," Harris said. "Not just some, but for all. A promise we made in the Declaration of Independence, that we are each endowed with the right to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Be clear, these rights were not bestowed upon us, they belong to us as Americans."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

They didn't vote for it, they don't like it and they're working to undermine it -- but Republicans are reaping the benefits of Democrats' climate law.

In the five months since the Inflation Reduction Act became law, companies have announced tens of billions of dollars in renewable energy, battery and electric vehicle projects that will benefit from incentives in President Joe Biden's signature law, aimed at expanding domestic manufacturing in clean energy and reducing dependence on Chinese imports.

In fact, roughly two-thirds of the major projects are in districts whose Republican lawmakers opposed the Inflation Reduction Act, according to a POLITICO analysis of major green energy manufacturing announcements made since the bill's enactment.

The dynamic has prompted a tricky balancing act for the GOP: Tout the jobs and economic benefits coming to their states and districts, but not the bill that helped create them. The results are also potentially awkward for Democrats who expended political capital and more than a year of wrangling to enact the bill, only to see Republican lawmakers and governors sharing in the jobs and positive headlines it's creating -- although Democrats say they also see longer-term benefits for the nation in building GOP support for alternatives to fossil fuels.

Republicans insist their positions on the bill and the jobs are not in conflict.

SIC SEMPER SATANISM:

You all know what the sin of Satan is said to have been. It was resistance to God and rebellion against his creator, and its cause was pride, the sin of sins. Satanic pride, any pride, is, theologically speaking, a perverse will, literally a will that turns things awry. In particular, it overturns the relation of the creature to his creator. Satan rebels because he cannot bear to be derivative and subordinate, and least of all to be more remote from the center of knowledge than Christ. He communicates that terrible impatience to Eve in the Garden when he tempts her with the fruit of knowledge and promises "Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil,"--in Latin, this is the scientia boni et mali.

Now, as it happens, the men of the generation around 1600 Anno Domini--the generation which was most pointedly responsible for modernity and in whose writings its roots are to be most explicitly seen--these men were also unspeakably proud. I am thinking of names probably familiar to you: of Galileo Galilei, of Rene Descartes and of Francis Bacon, an Italian, a Frenchman and an Englishman. You need only glance at the engraving published as the frontispiece of the most accessible translation of Descartes' works to see how haughty he looks.

Nonetheless, anyone who reads their books must be struck with the sober and restrained character of their writing. They keep claiming that they are not revealing great mysteries or setting out momentous discoveries. They present themselves as merely having found a careful, universally accessible method, which, once they have set it out, can be used by all mankind. All that is needed is the willingness to throw off old prejudices and preoccupations, all that Bacon calls our "idols;" we are to throw off the nonsense of the ages and to apply sober human reason to clearly-defined problems. In other words, these initiators of modernity are preaching rebellion against the traditional wisdom, but in measured, careful, sometimes even dull words, so dry that students often get rather bored with reading them. That is, they get bored partly with the measured dryness with which this tremendous rebellion is announced, partly because the Baconian-Cartesian revolution is so much in our bones, has been so precisely the overwhelming success its authors expected it to be that we, its heirs, hardly recognize the revolutionary character of its original declarations of independence.

But the overweening pride of these first moderns was not essentially in the fact that they were aware of opening a new age. That was too obvious to them and they were of too superior a character to glory much in it. Their pride was the pride of rebellion, though not, perhaps, against God. Interpretations differ about their relations to faith, and I think they worshipped God in their way, or at least had a high opinion of him as the creator of a rationally accessible world, and they co-opted him as the guarantor of human rationality. Their rebellion is rather against all intermediaries between themselves and God and his nature. They want to be next to him and like him. So they fall to being not creatures but creators.

YOU BETTER THINK...:

Aristotle wasn't a rigid system builder; he was an inquirer, a man in pursuit of knowledge, restlessly in search of answers to every conceivable question. Indeed, one of his translators has commented in frustration at his "excessive tentativeness or caution", noting how often in his works Aristotle uses the word "perhaps".[1] In his studies of animals, Aristotle is quite explicit about this: every theory is open to refutation by further observation, he says. Nor was he enamoured of the idea of intellectual authority figures, famously commenting that, although he was a friend of his teacher Plato, he was a greater friend of the truth.[2] He put forward ideas that he thought were true - or at least the most plausible - based on observation and argument, but it is difficult to imagine that he would have expected anyone to believe anything he said simply because he had said it.

The one thing Aristotle was emphatic about, though, was the importance of doing philosophy. According to him, we are rational animals, which is to say that we are animals, but we differ from other animals in having the power of reason. That's our defining characteristic. It's what makes us who we are. It is what he calls our function (ἔργον, ergon). Aristotle thinks that many things have functions and that those things are only really what they are in the fullest sense when that function is being used. To use an example that Aristotle himself quite liked, eyes are for the sake of seeing; that is their function. If someone had eyes but never opened them, the capacity of sight would never be used - in his terminology, their potential for seeing would never be actualized. Insofar as their very existence as eyes is defined in terms of their function, the ability to see, there is a sense in which eyes that never get the opportunity to see fail to be eyes in the fullest sense.

The same applies to a human being who fails to use their capacity for reason. In order fully to be a human at all, one must do philosophy, Aristotle argues:

The function of the soul, either alone or most of all, is thinking and reasoning. Therefore it is now simple and easy for anyone to reach the conclusion that he who thinks correctly is more alive, and he who most attains truth lives most, and this is the one who is wise... Thus we attribute living more to the one who is awake rather than to the one who is asleep, to the one who is wise more than to the one who is foolish.[3]

In the case of sight, being able to see obviously brings with it a wide range of practical benefits, such as not bumping into things; it enables us to do many things. Aristotle comments that the same applies to philosophical thinking - it can be practically beneficial in a variety of ways, but in both cases the benefits are merely welcome by-products. Even if someone gained no practical benefit from seeing, they would still prefer to be able to see than not, he comments, and the same applies to philosophical thinking. We do it for its own sake, but it also benefits us in various ways.

Despite this focus on the intrinsic importance - indeed, the necessity - of philosophy as an activity, Aristotle also stresses that it is only through philosophy that it will be possible for us to live a happy life. I

ABSURDER THAN THAT:

According to existentialism, as the role of God in modern life receded to be replaced by a secular, scientifically-informed view of reality, the resulting loss of a transcendent moral framework has left us bereft of moral guidance leading to anxiety and anguish. The smallness of human concerns in a vast, uncaring universe engenders a sense that life is inherently meaningless and absurd. There seems to be no ultimate purpose in life. Thus, our individual intentions are without foundation.

As Camus wrote:

The absurd is born in this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world. (From the Myth of Sisyphus)

And so, for Camus, human suffering is like the toils of Sisyphus condemned to endlessly roll the boulder up the mountain only to have it roll down again--life is a series of meaningless tasks and then you die.

A RACE OR A RELIGION?:

To respond to the original question above, we need consider the core ideology with which the bulk of the normative religious Zionist community was indoctrinated: the triad of the People of Israel (Am Yisrael), in the Land of Israel (Eretz Yisrael) according to the Torah of Israel (Torat Yisrael).

When these seemingly unassailable values are signposts of individual conscience and commitment, they are innocuous enough, and may even be a source of inspiration and a call to altruistic action. However, assigning these values to a modern nation-state with aspirations to craft public and foreign policy is very dangerous, and that is what this "youth movement" ideology has unwittingly done. It betrays a total lack of understanding concerning the nature of the State of Israel as it was conceived of by its founders and indeed by the vast majority its inhabitants.

I wish to look at each of these principles separately and show how they stand in direct conflict to the Zionist project and undermine the State of Israel, but I must first establish why I, a religious Zionist myself, believing we answer to a "Higher Authority," also believe the nature of the state should be determined by the original conception of its founders and the majority of its inhabitants, even though Israel's secular institutions (like the Supreme Court and the Knesset) and its processes (like democracy, international law, and negotiated agreements) are all humanly legislated.

Rabbi Isaac HaLevi Herzog, the first chief rabbi of Israel, recognized clearly the nature of the state. Relating to freedom of worship and minority rights, such as the right to vote and be elected to office, he wrote,

The foundation of the state itself is a partnership of sorts. It is as if, through negotiations, we reached agreement with gentiles that they would allow us to establish a joint government which grants the Jews superiority in certain areas and that that state shall be called in our name. (Constitution and Law in a Jewish State According to the Halacha, vol. 1, 20)

Rabbi Herzog understood that the foundation of modern Israeli sovereignty is not derived from God's promise to Abraham or similar biblical narratives. He acknowledged that this modern state was different from the Israelite sovereignty (Malkhut Yisrael) in the days of David and Solomon, as well as the earlier state, when the Israelites entered the land of Canaan. Rather, the sovereignty is legally and halachically based upon the outcome of the negotiations which the Zionist movement (as the recognized representatives of the Jewish people) conducted with international bodies. The status of the international agreement, Rabbi Herzog maintained, is that of treaty between the nations and Israel; a brit or a covenant - not that of biblical Israelite dominion.

Rabbi Yehuda Amital, the rosh yeshiva and founder of Yeshivat Har Etzion, shared this view. I often heard him invoke Maimonides' reading of the Israelite covenant with the Canaanites of Giv'on (see Joshua 9), which emphasizes the prohibition to violate covenants with gentile nations (Laws of Kings 6:5), in the context of Israel's obligation to guarantee human and civil rights to all its citizens. Rabbi Amital maintained that the guarantee protection of democratic rights to non-Jewish minorities in Israel's Declaration of Independence was halachically binding, as a covenant with the non-Jewish inhabitants of the country.

HOW WE BEHAVE WHEN WE'RE INNOCENT:

Mr. Biden's personal lawyers, led by Bob Bauer, told the Justice Department they had no basis to believe official records had gone anywhere but the Penn Biden Center after it notified them on Nov. 10 that it was scrutinizing the classified files. The lawyers stopped conducting their own review of how the documents could have gotten there and told the department what steps they had taken up to that point, the people said.

The Biden legal team also said they would inform the Justice Department if any government records from his vice presidency were later located elsewhere or they learned a reason to believe such files might be in another location. Soon after, Mr. Garland assigned John R. Lausch, a U.S. attorney in Chicago who had been appointed by Mr. Trump, to determine whether a special counsel should be installed.

Mr. Biden's lawyers initially hoped the Justice Department's preliminary inquiry would be brief. But as weeks passed, they decided as a matter of due diligence -- and not because of any new information -- that it made sense to check the boxes in the garage, too, the people said; the lawyers did not inform the Justice Department ahead of time.

On Dec. 20, once they found several classified records in those boxes, they notified the Justice Department, which prompted discussions about whether any further such files might be in the main residence.

Against that backdrop, Mr. Biden's personal lawyers decided they would search several work and storage areas inside the living area of the house, the people said; this time, they told the Justice Department of the plan and said they would let the government know of the results.

After finding a classified page in one of those rooms on Jan. 11, they stopped searching and alerted the Justice Department. When law enforcement officials came to retrieve that page, five more classified pages were discovered in the same area.

Everyone involved understood and agreed that the discovery of those six pages meant that the government would have to conduct its own search of the work and storage areas in the house that the Biden legal team had identified, the people said. But the Biden legal team invited the F.B.I. to also search every room in the residence -- including bathrooms, bedrooms and the utility room, the people said.

The rationale, the people said, was that an independent search by the F.B.I. would allow a swift and definitive determination of whether any more classified files were inappropriately stored at the house.

TAX THE EXTERNALITIES:

A large-scale shift to induction would go a long way toward reducing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. Researchers estimate that annual methane leaks from gas stoves in U.S. homes warm the climate by an amount similar to the CO2 emissions of half a million cars.

More importantly, gas-powered kitchens often act as a barrier to broader home electrification, said Chad Asay, director of the Advanced Energy Center, a demonstration space for climate-friendly home technologies in Santa Rosa, California. Many American homes rely on three categories of gas-powered appliances: stoves, water heaters, and HVAC equipment. Gas water heaters and HVAC equipment have a larger climate impact than gas stoves, and homeowners are typically open to considering swapping them out for more-efficient electric models.

But kitchen equipment is another story. Since many people can't envision giving up their gas stoves, their gas lines remain connected, and fossil fuel-powered water heaters and HVAC appliances stay online longer than they otherwise might.

"Really, the cooking is the crux," Asay said. "If you get people to understand that it's not hard to get off of gas in cooking, the rest of living an all-electric lifestyle is very easy for them to understand."

NO-SWEAT SHOPS:

[T]he population decline will also make automation an absolute necessity - as has happened in Japan. It will widen China's already large lead in the deployment of industrial robots and the industrial internet of things, helping to create an enormous market for service robots.

This process is already well underway. Over the past decade, installations of industrial robots in China have increased by 10.7 times, according to the International Federation of Robotics (IFR). Compare that with 68% growth in Japan, 67% growth in the US, 20% growth in Germany and 19% growth in South Korea.

In just a few years, China has become the world's largest user of industrial robots by a very wide margin. In 2021, China accounted for 52% of total worldwide installations. Trailing far behind, Japan accounted for 9%, the US for 7%, South Korea for 6% and Germany for 5%. Viewed by region, Asia accounted for 74% of the total, Europe for 16% and the Americas for 10%.

At the end of 2021, the total worldwide installed base of industrial robots was almost 3.5 million units - with more than one million, or close to 30%, deployed in China. That compares with 12% in Japan, 10% in South Korea, 9% in the US and 7% in Germany.

PITY THE POOR FLATLANDERS:

NORTH WOODSTOCK, N.H. -- There are several challenges with attempting to build a fully functional pub out of snow and ice, but Brent Christensen is the right man for the job. He is also the wrong man for the job, considering he's a Mormon from Utah and doesn't drink.

"What do you think?" he asked me a few times as he worked out the layout of the bar he was constructing inside a giant igloo. I suspect he was asking to be nice, and not because I was familiar with bars, or that I had already bragged that I once tried to build a snowman that was a scale model of one of those heads on Easter Island (uncompleted).

Before meeting Christensen, I felt myself drawn to what he had done. I love an overboard dad, especially when they carry a joke too far, and I can think of few who went as far as Christensen.

"I was just trying to amuse my kids, and then ..." he gestures here toward the 20-million-pound ice castle under construction a couple of dozen yards away in this White Mountains village. "It got out of hand."

Christensen is the man behind Ice Castles, the mega-popular attraction that is celebrating its 10th winter in New Hampshire. What started with some ice caves and slides in his Utah yard has since grown into a winter amusement empire with hundreds of employees at Ice Castles in five states -- each of them constructed entirely of snow and ice using a now-patented method that Christensen stumbled upon in 2011.

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

The vehicle's sleek, futuristic design looks more like a spaceship than a car -- and its aerodynamic shape means that it can "slip through the air" using only 30% of the energy that other electric vehicles need as they drive. 

Its efficient design -- inspired by racecars and fighter jets -- also means that a single charge can support up to 1,000 miles of driving at a time.

The car weighs 65% less than other comparable vehicles thanks to its lightweight composites. But that doesn't sacrifice safety, as the vehicle's safety cell is "much stronger than steel." 

The vehicle -- which the website specifies is not a car, but technically an auto-cycle or a motorcycle -- has only three wheels, which minimizes energy lost through friction, and it can continuously charge thanks to its large array of solar panels.

IT'S ALWAYS SUNNY...:

The research, published in the journal Applied Physics Letters in April of 2022, found that through the process of "radiative cooling," existing commercial solar panels could be modified to generate power even in the dark of night. 

So how does this radiative cooling work? The solar panels radiate heat toward outer space at night, and this creates a difference in temperature between the panels and the air. 

By installing a thermoelectric generator onto the panels, that temperature difference can be harnessed to produce electricity. Basically, these panels can generate electricity thanks to how cold outer space is.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Tarrio and his fellow self-described "western chauvinists" believed a Democratic Biden presidency would threaten the group's very existence, therefore they engaged in seditious conspiracy, headed a mob that forced its way into the Capitol and tried to drive a stake through "the heart of our democracy", prosecutor Jason McCullough contended.

Tarrio and his four co-defendants have pleaded not guilty to their alleged roles in the attack, which has been linked to nine deaths, including the suicides of law enforcement officers who protected the Capitol and were left traumatized. An attorney for Rehl, Carmen Hernandez, has insisted that her client went to the nation's capital on 6 January not to riot but to exercise his free speech rights in protest of Trump's loss to Biden.

Meanwhile, an attorney representing Tarrio, Sabino Jauregui, argued that his client and the others were simply on trial because "it's too hard to blame Trump," whose full-throated defense to any prosecution would be mounted by an "army of lawyers".

"It's easier to blame ... the Proud Boys," Jauregui added, saying his client and his fellow co-defendants were mere "scapegoats".

Similar arguments have been made before by others among the nearly 950 people who have been criminally charged with having participated in the Capitol riot, including about 540 who have been convicted. Those hefty numbers notably do not include Trump, though the former president has been recommended for prosecution by a congressional committee which investigated the attack.

Just days ago, a judge ruled that a woman who helped attack the Capitol was indeed merely following orders from Trump, who fired up his supporters with false claims that he had been robbed of victory over Biden by electoral fraudsters.

YOU CAN NEVER HAVE ENOUGH ENESCU:

Carolyn Widmann, sister of the eminent German composer Jörg Widmann, frames her solo recital around meditations by J S Bach and the mediaeval nun, Hildegard of Bingen. In between, she plays substantial pieces by two of the 20th  century's  foremost virtuosos, the Romanian George Enescu and the Belgian Eugène Ysaye. At the heart of the album lie three two-minute miniatures by the living English composer George Benjamin.

By doing so she draws the ear into every era of western music -- monastic, classical, romantic and modern -- transacting connections that are not normally accessible. Widmann is a serious thinker and a fabulous player in her 50s. Her instrument is a 1782 Guadagnini.

MEMO TO CONGRESS--THEY'RE IN YOUR GARAGE TOO:

Bob Bauer, the president's personal attorney, said in a statement that during the search, which took place over nearly 13 hours Friday, "DOJ took possession of materials it deemed within the scope of its inquiry, including six items consisting of documents with classification markings and surrounding materials, some of which were from the President's service in the Senate and some of which were from his tenure as Vice President. DOJ also took for further review personally handwritten notes from the vice-presidential years." [...]

Bauer said that investigators had full access to Biden's home during the search, which included "personally handwritten notes, files, papers, binders, memorabilia, to-do lists, schedules, and reminders going back decades."

YET THE MALTHUSIANS PERSIST:

MAGA DOES NOT LIVE ON HUNTER PICS ALONE:

PERFORMANCE ART FOR A RACIST AUDIENCE:

Republican Doug Ducey ordered the huge line of shipping containers to be placed at the frontier between the United States and Mexico, during the final months of his administration, in what he said was a bid to stem illegal immigration. [...]

Ducey's container wall effort began in the middle of 2022, and quickly ran into opposition, with critics slamming it as a cynical political move that would damage the environment and make no difference to the number of illegal border crossings.

Opponents said the corrugated containers, which snaked like a huge cargo train for four miles (seven kilometers) through federal lands, divided an important conservation area.

They also pointed out that the terrain is so difficult to traverse that people traffickers have never really used it.

In practice, the double-stacked containers were ill-suited to keeping people out -- their rigid shape means they didn't always line up, leaving gaping holes between boxes easily big enough for a person to fit through.

In some areas, the terrain was too steep to accommodate them, and workmen had to leave spaces.

"It's just political gamesmanship," said Bill Wilson from nearby Sierra Vista, as he watched the wall being dismantled on Friday.

"It's a travesty and a waste of government money, tax money, time and effort," the 77-year-old told AFP.

THAT WAS EASY:

One-in-five new cars sold in California in 2022 was a zero-emission vehicle, the state said Friday, as the largest car market in the United States charges towards its goal of electrifying its fleet.

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

If anyone doubts that the architectural establishment has become totally irresponsible and out of touch with reality, the September 2022 issue of the RIBA Journal (cxxix/8) carried a thoroughly objectionable piece stuffed with innuendo linking critics of the disastrous mess Modernism has made of towns and cities on a global scale with neo-Nazism, racism, etc. Elsewhere, in that publication of the same date, which purports to be the journal of a "professional" body, but seems to be a vehicle for sneering, worthless pseudery, we are informed that the barmy art-school, called Bauhaus, "provides a powerful example of both cross-disciplinary collaboration and design addressed to social purpose", when it does no such thing, and never did. Chillingly, Ursula von der Leyen "has instituted the "New European Bauhaus"--an integral part of the European Green Deal to make the EU climate neutral in 2050". The energy-guzzling buildings of Modernism, and the insistence on wasteful, failing "industrialised" components in building (the ghastly results of which are obvious on every side), promoted by the Bauhäusler, are no sane models for the future, and nor were the "teachers" at the Bauhaus, with their adherences to weird cults, ridiculous affectations of dress, abolition of capitals (architectural and typographical) for ideological reasons, and nihilism. 

It should be remembered that somebody who had been closely involved with German Modernism in the 1920s and 1930s said the Bauhaus was bankrupt in purpose and ideas before it was disbanded by its last Director (the odious Miës van der Rohe) and his colleagues, and that its widespread adoption in the educational establishments in the USA through the efforts of Alfred Hamilton Barr (1902-81), Philip Cortelyou Johnson (1906-2005), and others associated with the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, from the 1930s, was "Hitler's Revenge", no less. And she should have known! The connections of Modernism with Nazism, anti-Semitism (i.e. racism), and cultural nihilism are clear. The truth is the opposite of what the pernicious stuff published in the RIBA Journal has claimed.

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

The U.N. team met with the Taliban in the capital of Kabul and the cities of Kandahar and Herat. It did not release the names of any of the Taliban officials. The meetings focused on the restrictive measures the Taliban have imposed on women and girls since they took power in August 2021, during the final weeks of the U.S. and NATO forces' pullout after 20 years of war.

The team, headed by U.N. Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed, found that some Taliban officials "have been cooperative and they've received some signs of progress," said U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq. "The key thing is to reconcile the (Taliban) officials that they've met who've been more helpful with those who have not."

Haq stressed that "there are many different points of authority" among the Taliban and that the U.N. team will try to get them to "work together to advance the goals that we want, which include most crucially, bringing women and girls back to the full enjoyment of their rights."

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

After last night's sanction of almost a million dollars in a frivolous lawsuit, Trump dropped a similar lawsuit today against New York attorney general Letitia James. That lawsuit has been widely interpreted as his attempt to make James abandon the $250 million civil lawsuit against Trump and the Trump Organization. But it, like the one that yesterday cost him and his lawyer close to a million dollars, was assigned to Judge Donald Middlebrooks, and as MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin put it, Trump "folded. That decision was perhaps driven by lawyers who can't afford a massive sanctions award either reputationally or financially. But it's weird to see Trump basically concede."  [...]

Representative Bill Foster (D-IL), an award-winning physicist who holds a PhD from Harvard, trolled Santos today in a way that powerfully demonstrated the current difference between the two parties. In response to the news that House speaker Kevin McCarthy has put Santos on the House Science Committee, Foster tweeted: "As the only recipient of the Wilson Prize for High-Energy Particle Accelerator Physics serving in Congress, it can get lonely. Not anymore!... I'm thrilled to be joined on the Science Committee by my Republican colleague Dr. George Santos, winner of not only the Nobel Prize, but also the Fields Medal--the top prize in Mathematics--for his groundbreaking work with imaginary numbers."

ONLY THE USUAL SUSPECTS WERE SURPRISED:

 In Putin's Wars, Mark Galeotti, a British scholar and journalist highly regarded by experts on Russian military matters, attributes the unexpected battlefield outcome to Russian weaknesses as well as Ukrainian strengths (greatly abetted by NATO weapons and American intelligence resources), but he lays out a persuasive, detailed case that Russia's deficiencies are more severe and more deeply rooted than many Western officials and pundits had detected.

Galeotti notes that Moscow overloads its army with weapons but allots too little money and attention to the mundane stuff of logistics--spare parts, food, water, and the trucks to transport them--thus leaving supply lines vulnerable and making offensive operations unsustainable. Junior officers receive rote training, so they're unprepared to take the initiative--a deliberate policy to keep them from rebelling against senior officers, though as a consequence, campaigns can plunge into chaos if they don't go as planned. Combine all this with widespread hazing of enlisted men, ramshackle barracks, poor nutrition, and low pay, and it should have been foreseeable that while today's Russian soldiers might be roused to defend the motherland, they're lackluster at invading other countries.

Up to a week before the invasion, I was predicting that for all these reasons Putin would not go through with it. I thought he might send in troops to occupy Ukraine's eastern Donbas region, a slice of which Russian Special Operations Forces and Moscow-backed separatist militias already controlled, but trying to conquer all of Ukraine--next to Russia itself, the largest country in the former Soviet Union, with a population of 40 million people--seemed a losing proposition. My military analysis, it turned out, was spot-on; I went wrong in overestimating Putin's rationality.

Galeotti dissects the many ways that Putin miscalculated his military's strength. 

SO IT WILL BE SOONER:

The ongoing war in Ukraine has disrupted the global power supply, and many countries are investing in alternative forms of power that are independent of international interference. Meanwhile, countries, companies, and organizations that already wanted to shift to clean energy and protect the environment are using this as an opportunity to make the change more quickly. 

For example, Vanuatu, a small Pacific Island nation, has approached the International Court of Justice to determine whether nations are responsible for changing their own climate policies to protect other nations from climate change. This is a pressing question for Vanuatu, as increasing temperatures and rising sea levels are presenting a nationwide emergency.

Overall, these shifts have led the IEA to predict that clean energy will grow much more rapidly in the near future -- potentially increasing as much in the next five years as it has in the last 20. That growth marks a 30% increase from the IEA's projections from just a year earlier.

BEAUTY IS OBJECTIVE:

If God is knowable, then he has a face. So it is also with human beings. But the buildings characteristic of modern architecture do not have faces. Or, if they do, they are best described as still largely functioning to display a kind of facelessness.

Witness the faceless skyscrapers whose façade of windows simply mirrors their surroundings. Rather than offer their own distinctive face to the public sphere, they offer only a kind of obsequious anonymity. They mirror a narcissistic city back to itself.

Moreover, a cult of uniformity prevails, at least insofar as no true architectural plurality flourishes. The lack of individually distinctive faces on modern buildings is what makes us experience them as ugly. At most, they offer gimmicks and flashy forms of the incongruous and the unexpected. But this is merely a variant on the selfishly uniform godlessness that is at the root of their genesis.

What do we see, in contrast, in the classical architectural models? Perhaps it seems doubtful we can find anything in those ancient structures that might teach us how to build today. In particular, what sorts of faces do classical buildings have?

In his new introduction to The Aesthetics of Architecture, Sir Roger Scruton writes: "The Roman building types--arch, aedicule, engaged column, pilaster, vault and dome--can all be seen as attempts to retain the sacred presence of the column, in the full context of civic life."

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

The rise of robotics and artificial intelligence might help usher in a second, even greener Green Revolution. Robots are already harvesting crops, weeding, and collecting data to improve soil management. Soon, they will be as common in farm pastures and greenhouses as they are in medical labs or Amazon warehouses. The hope is that AI can help meet food and climate goals by adding more precision to agriculture, thus allowing farmers to grow more and waste less.

AI-powered programs, like IBM's Watson, combine data on weather patterns, crop yields, and market prices to advise farmers regarding the best time to plant, the precise amount of fertilizers to use, and when to harvest for peak ripeness. Researchers at Microsoft and Wageningen University in the Netherlands are growing cucumbers with the help of algorithms, combining the efforts of humans and AI to boost yields while using fewer natural resources.

In California, a state that grows irrigated fruits and vegetables at a large scale, such technologies mean real savings in seasonal labor requirements. For example, a $150,000 "grape-gobbling robot" can sort two tons of grapes in 12 minutes, replacing 15 human workers - as well as reducing the use of fertilizers, pesticides, and water, while producing higher yields.

In the past, agricultural automation was characterized by large industrial farms using heavy machinery to boost yields. Mechanization on this scale increased producers' dependence on fossil fuels and the unbridled use of chemicals. The steep cost also meant that small farmers, especially in poorer countries, lacked access, creating an uneven playing field.

Digital technologies are changing this to benefit both large-scale and small-scale farms. Farmers have taken a page from ride-sharing apps like Uber, using GPS tracking devices and fleet-management software that allows small producers to share assets required for agricultural mechanization. Some companies, like TROTRO Tractor in Ghana and Tun Yat in Myanmar, allow small farmers to share the cost of renting a tractor they could not afford alone.

Digital support can also upgrade traditional mechanization, even if it is not advanced technology. For example, GPS devices that track cattle ("smart collars") and transmit data about animals' health and movements can determine the amount of feed to dispense and automate the feeding process, improving productivity.

THE SINGULAR ACHIEVEMENT OF VLAD'S WAR...:

The reality few dare to speak out loud is that each time a nuclear power plant goes offline, carbon emissions jump. And the magnitudes are not small. Recent research from the Breakthrough Institute shows that, at a minimum, premature nuclear shutdowns since 2012 have added 138 million metric tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. That's close to the total yearly emissions from 37 African countries with a combined population of 455 million. At conferences the world over, negotiators from rich countries continue to press African delegates to curb their carbon emissions, then fly back to homes made cozy by coal-fired power plants that had to be brought on stream so zero-emissions nuclear plants could be taken off the grid. It's galling.

How did we get into this absurd situation?

Anti-nuclear sentiment is for the most part a holdover from a previous age of activism. In the 1960s and 70s, the original wave of boomer green campaigners cut their teeth in agitating against nuclear weapons. Cold War era fears about the bomb bled over into distrust of nuclear power, and for the first generation of green activists, protesting nuclear weapons and protesting nuclear power were two sides of the same coin: a rebellion against a science-military-industrial complex they were sure would destroy the planet. To these people, "nuclear" came to mean the opposite of "ecological." It was an aesthetic judgment as much or more than it was a political judgment, and one reached before the full scale of the climate disaster humanity was heading into had become clear.

Largely due to that early association with nuclear weapons, the fears nuclear energy generates in the public have always been out of all proportion to the actual risks it poses.

MISREADING BREXIT:

Truss correctly diagnosed the root of Britain's problems--two decades of anaemic growth and a productivity crisis caused by structural issues crippling our economy. With a refreshing intellectual honesty and political conviction that has become rare in Britain, she entered office laser-focused on unlocking growth. She planned ambitious supply-side reforms to incentivise enterprise through the tax system, abandoning our national preoccupation with redistribution. She also intended to overhaul burdensome regulation in housing and childcare, areas she had explored for years as an advocate of freedom courted by think tanks in the UK and USA. 

These were good ideas, yet she made monumental unforced errors, including her failure to "roll the pitch" to ensure that voters, the media, her party, and financial markets were sufficiently briefed on her policies. She did the right things in the wrong order, announcing tax cuts and spending increases before any of the reforms or budget cuts needed to fund them. Coinciding with rising interest rates globally, her policies and subsequent lack of leadership and poor communication made her position untenable.

Critics of Truss were gleeful in celebrating her downfall, claiming the "free-market libertarian experiment" has now been discredited for a generation and comparing it to failed ideologies like communism. This is a wilfully dishonest attempt to reframe what happened and what free marketeers believe. In her 50 days in office, Truss did not have the chance to implement anything remotely libertarian. Her signature policy was a huge unfunded and untargeted intervention in the energy market that capped consumer bills for two years. Free-market economists counseled against this. Totally uncosted but estimated at £150bn, it seems more likely that it was this policy that spooked financial markets rather than the proposed £45bn of tax cuts that never made it to Parliament.

The UK is facing a lost generation of growth. Poland, a country whose young used to come to Britain in search of prosperity, is projected to overtake us in economic output by 2030. Average household incomes (£37,000) are lower than in every American state. This year real-term wages are expected to hit 2006 levels while the tax system discourages hard work through marginal tax rates that exceed 70%. There is fear of a "brain drain" with increasing numbers of young people making enquiries about moving abroad in despair at a lack of opportunities, declining living standards, and an ever-rising tax burden. Truss made mistakes, but those celebrating the return of "the adults in the room" must accept that they have been in charge for decades and their tax-and-spend orthodoxy has resulted in managed decline.

Americans and Brits alike should be careful not to learn the wrong lessons from the Truss premiership. Those who value freedom will reflect on its missed potential to prioritise economic growth, reduce the size of government, and promote choice and competition for citizens. The current situation was in no way inevitable and stems more from political naivety and incompetence than poor policy. Truss capitulated to her own party as well as the media, despite most of her tax cuts being popular with the public and business. She performed her first U-turn within weeks of taking office and from then on, her backbenchers knew that with enough pressure they could dilute or reverse her attempts at reform. The same is true of her successor. Truss asked us to take risks but was unable to assure the public and markets. Britain is now doing the opposite of what Truss intended, with Sunak leading us to further decline.

The Conservatives should not assume that there is no demand from voters for a pro-liberty, pro-enterprise agenda.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Solar power exploded in India in the first half of 2022, saving the country $4.2 billion and cutting coal usage by more than 21 million tons.

The findings come from a November 2022 report conducted by energy think tank Ember, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, and the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.

YOUR NEXT TRUCK WILL BE A VOLT:

It's a new hydrogen-diesel hybrid engine affectionately known as "baby number two" that could help to decarbonise some of Australia's heaviest industries.

The test rig is large - it has its own room adjoining a lab and looks at first glance like many other large motors, but beneath its metallic skin could lie game-changing technology.

Engineers at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) say they have successfully modified a conventional diesel engine to use a mix of hydrogen and a small amount of diesel, claiming their patented technology has cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by more than 85%.

WHAT PART OF THE NATIONAL LAW DO THEY NOT UNDERSTAND?:

In the latest public petition lambasting the new government's plan to overhaul the judiciary, 17 of Israel's leading law firms warned Thursday that the proposed reforms won't fix the system and instead will harm Israel's reputation and its economy.

"We ... want to warn against harming the resilience and independence of the justice system and the system of checks and balances at the basis of the democratic regime we are so proud of, alongside the State of Israel being a Jewish state," the lawyers wrote.

THE rIGHT'S GONNA NEED MORE SABOTS:

An international team of researchers, led by Dr. Shenlong Zhao from the University of Sydney, has developed a new battery that has the potential to significantly reduce the cost of transitioning to a decarbonized economy.

The battery has four times the energy capacity of lithium-ion batteries and is much cheaper to produce. The team used sodium-sulfur, a type of molten salt that can be extracted from seawater, to create the battery, making it a more cost-effective alternative to lithium-ion batteries.

THE MUSIC OF THE SPHERES PLAYS IN MONO:

Quantum cosmology implies that the fundamental layer of reality is made neither of particles nor of tiny, vibrating, one-dimensional objects known as "strings," but the universe itself--understood not as the sum of things making it up but rather as an all-encompassing unity. As I will argue, this notion that "all is One" has the potential to save the soul of science: the conviction that there is a unique, comprehensible, and fundamental reality. Once this argument holds sway, it will turn our quest for a theory of everything upside down--to build up on quantum cosmology rather than on particle physics or string theory (currently the most popular candidate for a quantum theory of gravitation). Such a concept further implies the need to understand how it is possible that we experience the world as many things if everything is "One," after all. This is ensured by a process known as "decoherence," which is essential to virtually any branch of modern physics. Decoherence is the agent protecting our daily-life experience from too much quantum weirdness. And it realizes the rest of Heraclitus's tenet: "from One all things."

As a consequence, we will have to work out how such a notion changes our perspective on philosophy's deepest questions--"What is matter? " "What is space? " "What is time? " "How did the universe come into being?"--and even on what religious people call "God" (since for centuries, the concept of an all-encompassing unity was identified with God). We will also have to confront why monism is not more popular, if it follows so straightforwardly from quantum mechanics. Why does it sound so bizarre to us? Where does our intuitive, deprecative reflex come from? To really understand this bias, we have to venture into the history of monism.

The One is the story of both a serious crisis in physics and the half-forgotten concept that has the potential to resolve it. It explores the idea that "all is One," that matter, space, time, and mind are all just artifacts of our coarse-grained perspective onto the universe. Along the way it narrates how the concept evolved and shaped the course of history, from ancient times to modern physics. Not only did monism inspire the art of Botticelli, Mozart, and Goethe, but it also informed the science of Newton, Faraday, and Einstein. Even now, monism is becoming a tacit assumption underlying our most advanced theories about space and time. This is a story full of love and devotion, fear and violence--and cutting-edge science. In no small way, this is the story of how humanity became what it is.

BAD FAITH IS THE TRUMP BRAND:

A federal judge on Thursday imposed nearly $1 million in sanctions on former President Donald Trump and his lawyer for filing a since-dismissed "frivolous" lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and many others, which had claimed they tried to rig the 2016 presidential election in her favor by smearing Trump.

"We are confronted with a lawsuit that should never have been filed, which was completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and which was brought in bad faith for an improper purpose," wrote Judge John Middlebrooks in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida in his order sanctioning Trump and his attorney Alina Habba.

YOU HAVE TO TRY TO BE A CRIMINAL:

[E]xamination of both the presidency and historical prosecutions for mishandling classified records actually makes the opposite case: Mr. Biden's mishandling of a limited number of classified files, which upon discovery were promptly turned over to the National Archives and proper authorities, should make the reasoning, and necessity, of prosecuting Mr. Trump all the more clear.

Mr. Biden's handling of the issue -- especially given the more detailed timeline recently released by his team -- shows how an official who finds misfiled or improperly stored classified files should react. Mr. Biden's behavior stands in sharp contrast to that of Mr. Trump, who spent months fighting with the National Archives over the files and repeatedly assured the Justice Department that he had turned over all files, even when he was still -- apparently knowingly -- holding onto scores of classified files. He failed to comply with a legal subpoena, and only then did the F.B.I. move to search his Mar-a-Lago residence.

Mr. Biden's scandal so far feels more like an administrative error; there's no evidence he even knew the documents were misplaced or in his possession, and when discovered they were promptly and properly returned to authorities. The government didn't know they were missing (which itself is a bit of a mystery, since classified documents are usually tightly controlled, which is how the National Archives knew Mr. Trump had missing documents in the first place), and Mr. Biden didn't try to hold onto them in the face of a legal process ordering otherwise.

In a tweet, the former Missouri Senate candidate Jason Kander compared Mr. Biden to a shopper who "realized he mistakenly failed to pay for an item in his cart" when he left a store and an alarm went off. Mr. Biden, the analogy goes, went back in and returned the items. By contrast, Mr. Trump apparently stuffed items in his pockets, and when the store alarm sounded "he ran to his car and peeled out."

You could add to the Trump part of the analogy that he led the police on a low-speed pursuit, and then insisted the stolen items were his all along.

THERE'S A REASON NO ONE MINDS A BIDEN INVESTIGATION:

How will the Department of Justice decide whether charges are merited against the former and current president for mishandling of government documents? The DOJ will determine whether there is sufficient evidence satisfying each element of the relevant federal criminal statutes -- and how like cases have been treated by the Department in the past. That is, they will look to DOJ charging precedent, including when charges were and were not brought.

Analysis of these precedents was previously examined by a team of Just Security legal experts, including the co-authors, with regard to the facts known about the former president. We concluded that prosecuting Donald Trump would not only be called for by that precedent, but compelled by it. In fact, many who engaged in significantly less egregious conduct have been subject to criminal prosecution. (Our model prosecution memo can be found here).

In light of the Biden government documents contretemps, it is also useful to reexamine DOJ precedent to see how the facts currently known about the Biden documents stack up. Because of its apparent factual and legal similarities, the DOJ's prosecution decision regarding former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is a precedent particularly worthy of comparison.

The Justice Department decision to decline prosecution of Gonzales points to a similar outcome for President Joe Biden.[1] Indeed, certain facts in the Gonzales case were more egregious and incriminating, including evidence of his specific knowledge and personal handling of highly classified material outside of an appropriate classified facility.

THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS:

Netanyahu is creating circumstances in which not only will the often strong working relationship between Israel's government and America's be severely tested, it may become impossible for the Biden administration to view the current Israeli government as sharing interests - or even as an ally. [...]

Ironically, Bibi has caused this once unthinkable chasm by signing on to a global movement that actually has prominent adherents in the U.S. The origins of the movement are, of course, in Moscow.

Central to the efforts of Vladimir Putin to try to weaken and destabilize his opponents in the West has been identifying the moral and ethical weak links among his adversaries and supporting them as they place their narrow self-interests above foundational ideals like democracy, the rule of law, human rights and tolerance for social diversity.

Netanyahu, like Trump and the American right, like Orban and Bolsonaro, like Modi, Le Pen and Italy's neo-fascists, has for years now promoted an ethno-nationalist authoritarian agenda that is now calling into doubt all the values that once bound Israel and the U.S.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

Since LIV requested an expedited court process and promised Saudi co-operation, it's likely the judge will compel discovery from Al-Rumayyan and his Fund, a ruling that would have unappetizing implications for LIV players who might hope to avoid having their affairs spreadeagled for lawyers. The court may also draw negative inferences from a Saudi refusal to comply -- potentially ruinous for LIV's antitrust lawsuit. But co-operating with discovery -- even if the court sets strict parameters -- is a considerably worse option for the Fund and Al-Rumayyan.

In the U.S. legal system, discovery can be permissive to the point of invasive, and comes with crossfire risks. Former Raiders coach Jon Gruden was fired for racist and homophobic emails unearthed during discovery in a workplace suit involving the Washington Commanders. In this case, discovery could expose to unwanted scrutiny both known and stealth investments by the Saudi fund. Even if discovery is confined to the golf sphere, tugging at threads could unravel things the Saudis would much rather protect.

For example, LIV has become explicitly politicized with its attachment to Donald Trump, staging events at the former president's golf courses as he publicly urged PGA Tour players to "take the money" from his Saudi partners. Scrutiny of the relationship between the Fund and Trump would be unwelcome in Riyadh and Palm Beach. Federal law prohibits foreign governments from attempting to influence U.S. domestic politics, and discovery risks highlighting how inherently political the Saudi fund's investments are.

The Public Investment Fund -- which is ultimately controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman -- invested $2 billion in a private equity company owned by Trump's son-in-law, Jared Kushner, over the objections of its own advisors. The LIV project was thought inviable by the Fund's consultants, McKinsey and Company, yet another couple of billion dollars has been torched there. If the Saudi fund is making investments that are economically irrational, discovery might unearth motives that are grounded not in profit nor sportswashing, but in politics.

JUST ANOTHER "WHITE MESSIAH" SCRIPT:

New York Times Columnist, Thomas Friedman, has called on US President, Joe Biden, to "save Israel" from turning into an "illiberal bastion of zealotry". The Pulitzer prize-winning Jewish-American journalist, who has long been seen as one of the most influential pro-Israel liberal voices in the US, made the appeal in his column in the NYT on Tuesday. It is the latest in a series of articles which suggest that Friedman's love affair with the apartheid state has become extremely strained.

IT'S NOT AS IF PLANTS WORK...:

Plants are excellent at absorbing sunlight and using its energy to split water. Scientists have been trying to mimic photosynthesis to make hydrogen fuel from water using different techniques. One relies on special semiconductor materials that absorb sunlight and produce electricity to split water in a battery-like electrochemical cell. But those need corrosive electrolytes that are not environmentally benign.

A more direct approach is to use semiconductor catalysts that trigger a water-splitting reaction when they are energized by the sun. But the solar-to-hydrogen efficiencies of such photocatalytic systems have been pretty low so far, with the best reaching just below 3 percent.

Mi and his colleagues found a way to boost this efficiency via two pathways. One was to use concentrated sunlight. The other was to harness higher-wavelength visible light and heat-producing infrared light that is usually wasted by conventional catalysts.

The key advance that lets them harvest more sunlight is the catalyst they use: nanowires of indium gallium nitride grown on a silicon wafer. Unlike traditional catalysts, which break down under concentrated sunlight, the nanowires are self-healing and in fact become more efficient at producing hydrogen over time. The nanowires can also absorb a very wide spectrum of sunlight. They harvest higher wavelengths of visible light to trigger the water-splitting reaction. The infrared heat they absorb, meanwhile, accelerates the reactions and keeps the hydrogen and oxygen separate, boosting efficiency.

X FACTORS:

XBB.1.5 and XBB.1 are the omicron subvariants with the greatest immune-evasive properties. Therefore, one of the most contentious issues surrounding XBB.1.5 relates to the degree of protection afforded by currently available mRNA vaccines, including the latest bivalent booster formulations.

Researchers from the University of Texas determined that first-generation and bivalent mRNA booster vaccines containing BA.5 result in lackluster neutralizing antibody responses against XBB.1.5. A report (yet to be peer reviewed) from investigators at the Cleveland Clinic found that bivalent vaccines demonstrate only modest (30 per cent) effectiveness in otherwise healthy non-elderly people when the variants in the vaccine match those circulating in the community.

Furthermore, some experts believe the administration of bivalent boosters for the prevention of COVID-19 illness in otherwise healthy young individuals is not medically justified nor cost-effective.

In contrast, public health experts from Atlanta, Ga. and Stanford, Calif. reported that although the neutralizing antibody activity of bivalent booster vaccines against XBB.1.5 is 12 to 26 times less than antibody activity against the wild-type (original) SARS-CoV-2 virus, bivalent vaccines still perform better than monovalent vaccines against XBB.1.5.

However, investigators from Columbia University in New York found that neutralizing antibody levels following bivalent boosting were up to 155-fold lower against XBB.1.5 compared to levels against the wild-type virus following monovalent boosting.

This suggests that neither monovalent nor bivalent booster vaccines can be relied upon to provide adequate protection against XBB.1.5.

How can you protect yourself against XBB.1.5?

The rapid evolution of SARS-CoV-2 continues to pose a challenge for the management of COVID-19 illness using available preventive and therapeutic agents. Of note, all currently available monoclonal antibodies targeting the spike protein of SARS-CoV-2 are deemed to be ineffective against XBB.1.5.

Antiviral medicines such as remdesivir and Paxlovid may be considered for the treatment of eligible infected patients at high risk of progressing to severe disease.

Standard infection control precautions including indoor masking, social distancing and frequent handwashing are effective measures that can be employed for personal and population protection against XBB.1.5 and other subvariants of concern.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

The Court ruled 10-1 to disqualify Aryeh Deri, a longtime lawmaker and leader of a haredi Orthodox party, from his role as health and interior minister, citing his conviction last year for tax fraud. Deri had also previously served nearly two years in prison for taking bribes two decades ago.

If Deri pulls the 11 lawmakers from his Shas Party out of the ruling coalition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would lose his majority. 

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

A new report from LUT University in Finland has found that a 100% renewable energy and storage mix would save the UK more than £120 billion ($A211 billion) by 2050 compared with the UK Government's current net zero strategy.

The report, commissioned by advocacy group 100percentrenewableuk, suggests 100% renewables and storage would also result in 20% lower cumulative carbon emissions than the current strategy, which includes both nuclear power and fossil fuels with carbon capture and storage (CCS).

Convenor of the report and energy specialist Dr David Toke says a 100% renewable system would provide more benefits than just savings, shoring up the UK's energy security against future crises.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Solar power is becoming an increasingly important source of energy worldwide. At present, photovoltaic systems are predominantly being used in Germany. For sunny countries, solar tower power plants are a valuable addition. They store heat and can generate electricity at any time - even when the sun is not shining. 

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

As always, the whole thing is worth listening to, but it is the section on the value of "appropriation" that surprises. https://t.co/wirkdIFhLN via @YouTube

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) January 18, 2023

THE TRUMP BRAND:

Fittingly, since he was the flight officer on Capricorn One.
https://t.co/H8gy02KNfv

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) January 18, 2023

...AND CHEAPER...:

Here's how the $1-billion project in California's Kern County will work: The developer, Hydrostor, will drill three shafts thousands of feet below ground, and send down miners to dig out a series of rows and columns. When the project is ready to go in 2028, the underground caverns will have a collective volume equivalent to two football fields about 100 yards high.

During times of day when electricity is cheap -- such as sunny afternoons when California has more solar power than it needs -- Hydrostor will use that low-cost energy to push air down into the caverns. Think of it like storing sunlight in a bottle.

When Hydrostor's customer, Central Coast Community Energy, needs to draw on the stored power -- on a cloudy January day, for instance -- the company will open a valve and funnel the high-pressure air through a turbine, generating electricity.

It's not the only long-duration storage technology on the market. But Hydrostor President Jon Norman says it's ready to go.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

On the eve of Donald Trump's last day in office as President, Trump sent a memo to his attorney general, and also the directors of National Intelligence and the CIA, directing them to declassify thousands of pages of highly classified government papers pertaining to the FBI's investigation into the Russian Federation's covert intervention into the 2016 US presidential election to help elect Trump and defeat Hillary Clinton.

But Trump was stymied in his efforts to make the records public, leading the outgoing president to rage to aides that the documents would never see the light of day.

Now, sources close to Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation tell me that prosecutors have questioned at least three people about whether Trump's frustrations may have been a motive in Trump taking thousands of pages of classified papers from the White House to Mar-A-Largo, in potential violation of federal law. One of those people was compelled to testify before a federal grand jury, the sources say.

The sources say that prosecutors appear to believe the episode may be central to determining Trump's intent for his unauthorized removal from the White House of the papers.  Insight into the president's frame of mind--his intent and motivation, are likely to be the foundational building blocks of any case that the special counsel considers seeking against Trump.

Towards that end, the Special Counsel has zeroed in on conversations and communications between the Justice Department, the White House counsel, then-White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, other then-senior White House aides, and Trump, in the final days--and even the final hours of his presidency.

WE ARE ALL DESIGNIST:

The German physicist Werner Heisenberg attributed this fuzziness to an inherent property of matter he described with what he called the Uncertainty Principle. Put simply, the principle states that we cannot pinpoint the position of an object with arbitrary precision. The more we try to ascertain where it is, the more elusive it becomes, as the uncertainty in its velocity increases. [...]

The reason for the mystery is that the central equation of quantum mechanics, the Schrödinger equation, is different from the usual equations found in classical physics. When you want to compute the path a rock will follow when thrown, Newton's equation will describe how the position of the rock changes in time from its initial position to its final resting point. You would expect that the equation for the motion of an electron would also describe how its position changes in time. But it does no such thing. 

In fact, there is no electron in Schrödinger's equation at all. There is instead the electron's wave function. This is the quantum object that encapsulates fuzziness. By itself it does not even have a meaning. What does have meaning is its square value -- its absolute value, as it is a complex function. This value issues the probabilities that the electron may be found in this or that position in space when it is detected. The wave function is a superposition of possibilities. All possible paths leading to different outcomes are there. But once a measurement is made, only one position prevails. 

"WHAT WERE LABOR COSTS?":

ChatGPT recently passed all three parts of the U.S. Medical Licensing Examination, although just barely, as part of a recent research experiment.

As the researchers note, first-year medical students often spend hundreds of hours preparing for Part 1, while Part 3 usually is taken by medical school graduates. [...]

The big surprise was that ChatGPT could perform so well without ever having been trained on a medical dataset.

THE rIGHT EXISTS TO AMUSE NORMALS:

A group of prominent Michigan Republicans are encouraging Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to jump into the 2024 presidential race -- a significant and thinly veiled shot at the only announced Republican candidate: former President Donald Trump.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won re-election despite punishing schools closures, and state Democrats gained their first trifecta in about 40 years. Democrats picked up seats in the state Senate, flipping it to 20-18 Democrats from 22-16 Republicans. They also flipped the state House to 56-54 Democrats from 56-53 Republicans (with a vacancy). Republicans had a supermajority in the state Senate and a trifecta only four years ago.

SYSTEM OF A DOWNBEAT:

"It's a general belief that musicians should synchronize as best they can when they play together. This is true, of course, to some extent," says Geisel.

But since the 1980s, some scientists and music scholars have claimed that the swing feel is actually created by tiny timing deviations between different musicians playing different types of instruments. To test this theory, Geisel and his colleagues took jazz recordings and used a computer to manipulate the timing of the soloist with respect to the rhythm section.

"We had experts -- professional and semi-professional jazz musicians -- rate how swinging these different versions of a tune were," he explains.

The song they manipulated was a recording of "Jordu," a jazz standard written by Duke Jordan. In one version, for example, the piano soloist started at the exact same time as the rhythm section. In another version, the soloist's downbeats started just the tiniest bit behind the rhythm section, but their offbeats were not delayed.

Even so, the jazz musicians who rated the clips picked up on it.

"They noticed a difference and they could feel the difference," Geisel says. "They told us that they could hear friction between the rhythm section and the soloist, but they were amazed that they could not identify what was going on exactly. "

Geisel says the expert musicians were nearly 7.5 times more likely to rate the version with the downbeat delays as having more of a satisfying swing feel.

In another part of the experiment, the researchers also analyzed a database with over 450 recordings of jazz soloists, including performances by the likes of Dizzy Gillespie, Joshua Redman and Charlie Parker. They found that almost all of them were using tiny downbeat delays relative to the rhythm section. "There were very few exceptions," Geisel says.

He says these tiny timing delays aren't random. They're systematic, though musicians are probably just doing it intuitively.

JUST FAITH:

 Perhaps the times cry out for a resurrection of the lost literary genre of religious apologia. Strauss, Spinoza and Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith (Kodesh Press, 2022) takes up this challenge on behalf of Judaism. Edited by Jeffrey Bloom, Alec Goldstein, and Gil Student, it is a collection of essays by seventeen thoughtful Orthodox Jews--rabbis, laymen, and academics--addressing what exactly attaches them to their religion and inspires them to continue to believe in it. The answers are necessarily more or less specific to Judaism, but since the questions apply to all religions, all believers are likely to find something instructive in this volume.

The essayists respond to an argument by the political philosopher Leo Strauss defending the respectability of Jewish Orthodoxy. In Spinoza's Critique of Religion, Strauss argued that philosophy or reason (as represented by Spinoza) is unable to decisively refute revelation or orthodoxy, because philosophy and revelation alike begin with unproven assumptions. Hence the choice between Spinoza (or, perhaps, any philosophy) and Jewish Orthodoxy (or, perhaps, any orthodoxy) "is ultimately not theoretical but moral." So, according to Strauss's argument, faith in revelation is respectable because philosophy rests on no more ultimate certainty.

Strauss's argument is intentionally minimalist; its aim is to persuade rationalists to take religion seriously. Yet by grounding philosophy and religion equally in moral choice, the argument threatens to undermine both. Taken in isolation, Strauss's argument itself approaches postmodern relativism. Only Rabbi Mark Gottlieb's essay considers the fuller complexity of Strauss's position, offering careful and original scholarship that partially exonerates the master of flirting with relativism. Gottlieb concludes that Strauss rests his admiration for Judaism on the scholarly "theological-legal" aristocracy it establishes. The other essayists focus on the narrow argument; all agree that orthodoxy so defended is rather defenseless. A single unspoken point of agreement emerges amid the dizzying plurality of views: today it is postmodernism--rather than science or rationalism--that constitutes the greatest obstacle to faith.

THANKS, VLAD!:

The fossil-fuel induced energy crisis of 2022 - sparked by Russia's invasion of Ukraine - has sparked the biggest ever jump in new construction starts for wind, solar and storage projects.

According to new data released by Rystad Energy, the capacity of new construction starts jumped 42 per cent, from 286 gigawatts (GW) in 2021 to 406GW (ac) in 2022.

Rystad says the huge leap in new construction was driven by high energy prices as consumers and governments sought alternatives to the soaring cost of coal and gas generation.

YOU ARE THE GRID:

New research published Tuesday found that electric car batteries could help boost short-term grid storage in times of increased demand or lower supply, either by setting up "vehicle-to-grid" or "second use" schemes.

"Harnessing this potential will have critical implications for the energy transition," said the study published in Nature Communications.

A "vehicle-to-grid" approach would allow drivers to connect car batteries to the grid for short term-storage when needed, the authors said.

For example, commercial fleets could inject power into the grid when at a depot.

"Second-use" schemes would allow drivers to sell or donate car batteries once they can no longer be used to power vehicles, which is generally when their capacity falls below 70 to 80 percent.

Even a low level of participation from drivers could make a big difference, the researchers said.

"Low participation rates of 12 to 43 percent are needed to provide short-term grid storage demand globally," study co-author Chengjian Xu, of Leiden University in The Netherlands, told AFP.

"Short-term grid storage demand could be met as early as 2030 across most regions", he added, saying this was a conservative estimate.

By 2050, it would exceed the storage capacity required to help limit global warming to well below 2C, as outlined by the International Renewable Energy Agency.

IT'S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

Before the Jan. 6, 2021, rally on Jan. 6, MacAndrew tweeted at him "that she too felt that '[t]raps had been set' in the '#RiggedElection' of 2020," District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in the 18-page opinion. "And at the 'Stop the Steal' rally, then-President Trump eponymously exhorted his supporters to, in fact, stop the steal by marching to the Capitol.

"Defendant marched to the Capitol where, she testified, she understood that only Congress had the power to fix the election's outcome and that Congress was likely in session while she was around and in the Capitol," Kollar-Kotelly said.

"Every step of the way, from the western boundary of Capitol grounds, to the West Lawn, to the Upper West Terrace, to the interior of the Capitol itself, she saw sign after sign that her presence was unlawful," Kollar-Kotelly said. "Nevertheless, heeding the call of former President Trump, she continued onwards to 'stop the steal.'

"Having followed then-President Trump's instructions, which were in line with her stated desires, the Court therefore finds that Defendant intended her presence to be disruptive to Congressional business."

NOT ALLIES:

KNOWING YOUR ALLIES:

White House Coordinator for the Middle East and North Africa Brett McGurk and Iran's Quds Force commander Esmail Qaani both arrived in Baghdad on Monday, with the timing of the visits raising questions about the ongoing US-Iran rivalry in Baghdad.

Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani received McGurk in his office on Monday evening. According to the prime minister's media office, the meeting focused on strengthening relations between Iraq and the United States.

This comes prior to Iraqi Foreign Minister Fuad Hussein's visit to Washington in February for meetings of the Higher Coordinating Committee of the Strategic Framework Agreement between the two countries.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Just consider that 16,500 cars can store as much energy as all of the battery storage installed in the US by the end of 2020.

The ability to send power from vehicles is the key transformation. In 2023, as people realize the value of the car as an energy-storage device, they will install bidirectional chargers in their homes and businesses. This will enable a truly transactive energy network. Picture electrons flowing in and out of people's personal batteries by the gigawatt. This will be the first truly intelligent energy network, and it only works if it's electric--just imagine transacting volatile, explosive gasoline, sloshing in and out of vehicles' tanks.

In practical terms, this means realizing new value from an asset that sits unused 97 percent of the time. Just as people run transportation businesses off their cars--like Uber or Amazon groceries--car owners will be able to run their own power-trading business. Local communities will combine the power of their privately owned vehicles to safeguard their neighborhood's power supply in case of emergency, or to enable local power generation from solar and storage, slashing everyone's power bills. 

Other changes will occur, some of which will be unexpected. In 2023, networked electric vehicles will begin to make semi-autonomous decisions about selling power to the grid where needed. Communities will orient themselves around using--or excluding--these networked capabilities, creating new business models in storing, moving, and selling energy to companies; their neighbors; and other devices, like electric bikes and boats. People will also use their mobile power source to invent new sports and entertainment pastimes. Giving hundreds of millions of people the ability to store and move large amounts of electrical energy will power a Cambrian explosion of creativity.

THANKS, VLAD!:

NEWSFLASH...CHRISTIAN BELIEVES MAN IS FALLEN!:

Benedict shared with skeptics, postmodernists, and existentialists the suspicion of the modern trust in the benevolence of the human will. He was ready to admit that humans are messy and the natural world unpredictable. 

SETTLE IT ON THE PLAYGROUND LIKE NORMAL ADOLESCENTS:

On the first day of Congress this year, Jan. 3, the mounting tension between Greene and Boebert reached its boiling point. According to multiple sources, the two women were nearly in a screaming match in the Speaker's lobby ladies room just off the House floor.

"Greene questioned Boebert's loyalty to McCarthy, and after a few words were exchanged, Boebert stormed out," a source familiar with the fight told The Daily Beast.

According to another source familiar, while in the bathroom, Greene asked Boebert, "You were OK taking millions of dollars from McCarthy but you refuse to vote for him for Speaker, Lauren?"

The first source said Greene was in a stall and, upon coming out, confronted Boebert about taking money from McCarthy for her re-election and then turning against McCarthy when it came time to vote. The Colorado Republican was allegedly unaware that Greene was also in the bathroom at the time.

"That's when Lauren said, 'Don't be ugly,'" the first source said, before she--in the words of this source--"ran out like a little schoolgirl."

ALWAYS AND ONLY A FUNCTION OF WAGE GROWTH:

Indeed, core services represented nearly all of the positive contribution to monthly inflation in December--just barely not enough to offset the massive negative monthly contribution from energy and the small negative monthly contribution from core goods. The price declines in energy and goods are a positive sign for the US economy--mostly reflecting improved supply situations in motor vehicles, fossil fuels, and other tradeable goods, but for the same reason that American monetary policymakers (generally) ignored these prices on the way up, they will be also be ignoring them on the way down. More relevant to them is the extremely high growth in core services prices--the more cyclically-driven items which are up more than 7% over the last year, growing at the fastest pace since 1982. In particular, being cognizant of the lags in official measurements of housing prices, Federal Reserve officials have emphasized the importance of prices for "core services ex-housing," which they believe give a more up-to-date picture of the wage-driven parts of inflation that must come down to ensure long-term price stability. Even as headline inflation falls, they will not believe their job is done until core services inflation returns to normal levels.

In the open studio of a renovated 36,000-square-foot factory in Los Angeles' Chinatown, a series of Shima Seiki automated knitting machines emit quick, whirring sounds. Around the machines, automated guided vehicles transport materials including spools of yarn in a Crayola box of colors, while robot arms fuss with uppers and outsoles rolling down the conveyor lines. Desks are buzzing with teams crowding over computers animatedly discussing design plans. This is the headquarters of KX Lab, a brand-new manufacturing facility making knit sneakers, through mostly automated techniques, in the heart of one of America's most important urban sprawls.

WHAT'S THE ENGLISH WORD FOR RENEWABLE:

SUBTRACTING THE INTELLIGENT IS SUPER ON-BRAND FOR MAGA:

Former CIA Director Michael Hayden once cracked to me that the House Intelligence Committee was known around Langley as "the land of broken toys"--a well deserved sobriquet for its long record of partisan bickering.

With the exception perhaps of Mike Rogers, the Michigan Republican who provided bipartisan leadership of the panel from 2011 to 2015, the committee has been periodically rent by partisan warfare over the past three decades, hamstringing its ability to provide sober, discreet oversight of U.S. intelligence agencies. In contrast, its Senate counterpart is widely considered a more contemplative overseer of the spy agencies under the leadership of Mark Warner (D-Va.) and Marco Rubio (R-Fla.).

Rogers was succeeded in 2015 by MAGA Republican Devin Nunes, a leading adherent of Trumpian "deep state" conspiracy theories, who in turn was succeeded by Democrat Adam Schiff, who not only chaired the panel's highly charged investigation of Team Trump's ties to Russia but was a leading figure in both his impeachments and the Jan. 6 committee. [...]

After Nunes' departure to run Trump's TRUTH Social media operation in Jan. 2022, however, a manner of bipartisanship re-emerged between Chairman Schiff and the panel's new Republican ranking member, Mike Turner of Ohio. Last month, they guided the FY 2023 Intelligence Authorization Act, part of the National Defense Authorization Act, to congressional approval by a vote of 350 to 80.

Alas, with Kevin McCarthy's hand on the tiller and Turner ensconced as HPSCI's new chair, the committee seems to be tacking back to the status quo ante. One of McCarthy's first moves as speaker was to deny Schiff and fellow Democrat Eric Swalwell seats on the committee (and boot Ilhan Omar from Foreign Affairs), an obvious retribution for the Democratic majority last year voting to strip Georgia MAGA Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments after she appeared to endorse violence against Democrats. 

THE TWITTER FILES REVEAL A FAILURE TO CENSOR:

ANIKA COLLIER NAVOLI was at her "wits' end." Twitter's safety policy team had gathered via video conference to walk through what they expected to see the next day, Jan. 6, 2021, and began to argue. 

Safety policy staff had clashed repeatedly with Twitter's management over whether to take a tougher stance on incitement to violence by Donald Trump and his legions of election deniers. She and colleagues were seeing worrying signs and feared what might happen the next day. "There might be someone getting shot tomorrow," one employee warned, according to a deposition given to the Jan 6. Committee.  

When the meeting ended Navaroli, a senior safety policy specialist on Twitter's trust and safety team, Slack-messaged a colleague with a defeated summary. "When people are shooting each other in the streets tomorrow, I'm going to try and rest in the knowledge that we tried." 

Twitter had, once again, refused to codify the coded-incitement-to-violence policy, one that had already been drafted by its employees. Staff had tried to put such guidelines to paper in hopes that their superiors would respond to the encouragement to violence coming from Trump's Twitter account and those of his supporters. The company would later tell the Jan. 6 Committee that it put the policy into place the moment rioters breached the capitol -- a claim characterized as misleading by the committee in an unpublished committee staff report obtained by Rolling Stone. The last-minute enforcement, after weeks of neglect and pushback, left the Twitter moderators with little understanding of where and how it would apply, staff wrote.

IT'S ALWAYS THE TRUMPISTS:

Albuquerque police had been investigating the shootings that began on Dec. 4, when Bernalillo County Commissioner Adriann Barboa's home was targeted.

Police said multiple shots were fired at the home of former commissioner Debbie O'Malley a week later and then at the home of state Sen. Linda Lopez on Jan. 3 and also at the office of state Sen. Moe Maestas on Jan. 5.

It later emerged that the campaign headquarters of Raúl Torrez, New Mexico's newly elected attorney general, and the house of incoming N.M. House Speaker Javier Martinez, had also been targeted last month.

Background: After losing his election by a wide margin, Peña tweeted that he wasn't conceding the race. Police allege that he also visited three of the targeted officials' homes unannounced to complain the election was fraudulent.

Flashback: Peña in November posted online a photo of himself with the comment: "This is one of the last pictures I have of the Jan 06 trip. I lost that phone at the Trump rally in Phoenix, July 2021. Make America Great Again!"

NATIONALISM!:

There were 1.41175 billion people living in China at the end of 2022 -- a drop of about 850,000 compared to the previous year's end, according to data from Beijing's National Bureau of Statistics Tuesday.

A total of 9.56 million people were born in the country in 2022 and 10.41 million people died, per the NBS.

DON'T IT MAKE YOUR RED EYES GREEN:

The project will be a joint effort by two corporations, Air Products and AES Corporation, which will invest about $4 billion into building and running the factory. 

"The new facility in Texas will be, by far, the largest mega-scale clean hydrogen production facility in the U.S. to use wind and sun as energy sources," said Seifi Ghasemi, the CEO of Air Products, in a press release. "It will be competitive on a world-scale while bringing significant tax, job and energy security benefits to Texas."

Beyond bringing half a billion dollars in tax benefits to Texas and at least 1,600 jobs, the facility will help us prevent further heating of the planet.

It is estimated that the factory could help us avoid more than 55 million tons of planet-warming carbon pollution in its lifetime. 

As this technology gets cheaper, more and more companies will ideally begin producing this clean-burning fuel. 

For sectors aiming to lower their environmental impact, green hydrogen represents an especially promising source of energy.

FLY THE FRIENDLY FIELDS:

If you love traveling but don't love the environmental impact of flying, you're in luck -- research is paving the way toward fueling flights with plants.

Researchers at Arizona State University recently demonstrated that all air travel in the U.S. could soon be powered with biofuel -- fuel made from fresh plant matter instead of oil.

Currently, U.S.-based aircrafts use billions of gallons of jet fuel every year, and that number is expected to reach 30 billion by the year 2040. Switching the entire aviation industry to biofuel would massively reduce the amount of oil consumed each year. And this study lays out one way to do it.

Researchers backed by the U.S. National Science Foundation proposed planting a grass called miscanthus on "marginal agricultural lands" -- land with poor soil quality that is difficult or impossible to use for food crops. They picked out 57.3 million acres of existing land for the project. 

Miscanthus was the plant of choice because it's hardy and will need very little care, relying only on natural rainwater with no need for artificial irrigation. The plant can then be harvested and processed into biojet fuel, enough of it to power every plane in the country.

Switching to biofuel would reduce the amount of heat-trapping gas produced by American planes, which currently create more than a quarter of the world's aviation-based carbon dioxide emission. The researchers found that planting that much grass would also affect the local weather. 

WARMTH PRODUCES MORAL LASSITUDE:

WE CAN'T REPLACE MAGA FAST ENOUGH:

The court documents for the other two men suggest the alleged conspiracy came crashing down when Kenna, the first of the three to be arrested, was pulled over in late November. During the seemingly routine traffic stop, police found that he was wearing body armor and had a ghost gun on him--which was what he initially was arrested for--and that he also had with him a diary that allegedly outlined their plans in great detail. 

"I'm going to fulfil my destiny one way or another. And It's going to take bold action to do so. I have already set in motion a plan to start it all off," it read, according to court documents. "I'm writing a 'screenplay' on a movie about 3 guys that rob a small bank and set off with a large amount of cash and get set up for things to come so as to keep their families safe and sound, protected."

If you have any information regarding neo-Nazi organizing, the Wolves of Vinland, or Active Clubs we would love to hear from you. Please reach out to Mack Lamoureux at mack.lamoureux@vice.com, @macklamoureux on Twitter or securely on Wire at @mlamoureux.

A little less than a month later, Brown was arrested. Authorities were able to identify Tiereny through a multitude of means, including phone records that indicate Kenna's wife texted Tierney a PDF of her husband's criminal complaint. 

"Damn," was all Tiereny responded with. 

According to anti-fascist researchers and court documents, the three men were members of a small but violently minded neo-Nazi group called Aryan Compartmentalized Elements (ACE). ACE, Kenna, and Brown were written about by Corvalis Anti-Fascists before their arrests and, at one point, Brown even shared the article written about himself among the group. 

IT'LL NEVER FLY, ORVILLE:

3D printing is taking home construction to new heights. In Houston, a giant printer is building what designers say is the first 3D-printed two-story house in the U.S.

The machine has been pouring a concrete mix from a nozzle, one layer at a time, in hot weather and cold, alongside a sparse on-site workforce, to create a 4,000-square-foot home.

While construction 3D printing has been around for over a decade, the technology has only started to break ground in the U.S. homebuilding market over the last couple of years, said Leslie Lok, the architectural designer for the project. Several 3D-printed homes have already been built or are currently in the works across a handful of states.

Lok, who co-founded the design firm Hannah, says her team aims to eventually scale up their designs to be able to efficiently 3D print multifamily homes.

A RELIGION, NOT A RACE:

George Washington pioneered in the struggle for human rights when he praised the Continental Army on April 18, 1783, for having "assisted in protecting the rights of human nature, and establishing an Asylum for the poor and oppressed of all nations and Religions." Washington made his position on human rights specific to the Jews in his letter of August 17, 1790, to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island, declaring that "the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean [conduct] themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support." For Washington, no one in America should be "afraid" of being "of the Stock of Abraham" because "All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship." Washington's advocacy for Jews clearly contrasts painfully with his notorious position as a major slaveholder.

America was a beacon of hope and change for Jews a century before Washington assured the Jews of Newport that they could enjoy "their inherent natural rights" in this new nation. The first Jewish settlers in what would become the United States arrived in 1654 to what is now New York from Brazil, where they were the descendants of Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in 1492 and 1496. In the years that followed, Jews invested in the idea of America as a foundation for creating and cultivating their sense of home, identity, and security. Values and ideals, as much as the natural landscape of open frontiers and endless skies and the promise of economic opportunity, made America a place where Jews could feel at home and safe.

For the Jewish people, with a history through the ages of persecution, oppression, and alienation, liberal democracy in America opened the possibility of unprecedented safety and freedom even during decades of severe discrimination and prejudice against them in America. For Jews with so much at stake, the commitment to American liberal democracy became a kind of civic religion. Emulating the rhetorical strategy of the prophet Jeremiah and the New England Puritans, as elucidated by Sacvan Bercovitch, Jews often thought and spoke of America in moral and religious terms of reckoning, renewal, and redemption.

For generations, Jews have understood the American story as undergoing perennial renewal in response to the ceaseless demand of ethical and moral leadership. For such Jewish writers, thinkers, activists, and leaders in the New Covenant, the American narrative becomes, in Philip Gorski's phrase, a "covenant narrative" designed to secure a democratic future.

SOUNDS LIKE TEDDY ROOSEVELT:

The mayor of New York traveled to the Mexican border city of El Paso on Sunday and declared that "there is no room in New York" for busloads of migrants being sent to America's most populous city.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

In 2015, then-President Reuven Rivlin gave a famous speech in which he called Israel a society of "four tribes."

There are secular or moderately religious Jews, who constituted the vast majority of the country's founders and until today make up most of its political, economic and cultural elite. Though estimates vary, around half of Israel's Jewish population consider themselves secular, and 19% are marginally observant.

Then there is the group usually called National Religious, or Religious Zionist. These Israelis combine Orthodox Judaism with commitment to political Zionism, and now constitute the core of the settler movement in the West Bank. They constitute around 20% of Israel's Jewish population, or about 15% of its total population.

A third group is called Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox in English. Unlike other Orthodox Jews, who are integrated into mainstream neighborhoods and workplaces, many Haredi groups try to separate themselves to an extent from secular society.

Originally, they did not support the creation of the State of Israel, which they believed should come about only through the Messiah. Today, however, Haredi communities are politically associated with right-wing parties.

The fourth group Rivlin mentioned are Israeli Arabs, or as they increasingly call themselves, Palestinian citizens of Israel.

These four groups rarely interact in everyday life. Each has its own school system, and they marry and socialize within each other - which Rivlin warned could weaken the country.

IF YOU DON'T GET THE dEEP sTATE RIGHT...:

Brazil has continental dimensions, equivalent to those of the United States. This, as we have seen, creates important challenges to a republic. Unfortunately, Brazilian statesmen never dedicated enough thought to these questions.

Although it is also the offspring of western civilization, the Brazilian republic (like other Latin American republics) was not, like the Greek cities, spontaneously established. Neither was it carefully designed by statesmen who had cautiously studied the flaws of republics, and the methods that might improve them.

When the Brazilian monarchy fell to its own weaknesses in 1889, a republic was declared, and the leaders of the new regime grabbed some ideas from the American and French constitutions to write Brazil's own. Unlike America, Brazil was never a federation. As in the old monarchy, the country's provinces were never given the option of joining or leaving the new regime.

Brazil has continental dimensions, equivalent to those of the United States. This, as we have seen, creates important challenges to a republic. Unfortunately, Brazilian statesmen never dedicated enough thought to these questions, either at the launch of the regime, or at any later time across the subsequent 132 years. They should have discussed federalism, checks and balances, and electoral rules. None of these issues received the attention they deserved.

To safeguard the integrity of a republic, there must be proportionality between the population and the number of representatives each state is allotted in the House. In the United States, this principle has consistently been observed. In Brazil, it has always been neglected as a second-tier issue. Even though written rules establish a soft proportionality, the ratios have rarely been enforced throughout the years, and distortions have grown over time. Today, the three most populous states are home to 40% of the country's population, but hold only 32% of the House's seats. The three least populous states have 1% of the population, and 5% of the seats. Also, unreasonably for a geographically large republic, house districts were never created, or even seriously considered, within Brazilian states. Instead, representatives are elected through a complicated statewide proportional partisan scheme. Generally, fewer than 10% of total representatives are selected by the voters they are meant to represent. Following expensive, statewide electoral campaigns, representatives end up financially indebted, and lacking a direct bond to their electors. These conditions make them vulnerable to capture by various interest groups.

In Brazil, high-ranking officials maintain, since colonial times and to this day, the right to be judged by the Supreme Court-the so-called privileged forum. No other modern state retains such a comprehensive mechanism for differentiating the political class from the rest of the population. The origins of this institution can be traced to the "Ordenações Manuelinas," the law code edited by King Manuel I of Portugal in the early 16th century. It encourages patrimonialism and engenders a sense of impunity in politicians. These two features have long been embedded into the social fabric of the country. In recent years, it has become increasingly clear that this system also undermines the separation of branches of government, because it nullifies the constitutionally provisioned limitation of the power of the Supreme Court by the Senate. It is difficult for the Senate to check the courts when so many senators have judicial liabilities. [...]

Brazil, like many of its Latin American peers, has multiple characteristics that leave it highly vulnerable to populist movements: extensive territory, weak rule of law, and resources and economic activity sufficient to sustain a rent-seeking political class. Perhaps most importantly, a large fraction of its population depends on state entitlements for survival.

THE ONLY EXISTENTIAL THREAT IS INTERNAL:

Tens of thousands of Israelis demonstrated in Tel Aviv on Saturday evening to protest plans by the new government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to overhaul the legal system.

"We are in the grip of a profound division that is tearing our nation apart. This conflict worries me deeply, as it worries many across Israel and the Diaspora," Herzog said in a statement on Twitter.

"The foundations of Israeli democracy, including the justice system, are sacred and we must strictly safeguard them, even at a time of fundamental arguments and debates about the relationship between the different branches of government," he added.

The president has come under fire for avoiding clarifying his position on the proposed judicial reforms.

"I respect the criticism towards me, but I am now focused on two critical roles that I believe I bear as president at this hour: averting a historic constitutional crisis and stopping the continued rift within our nation," Herzog said.

The study -- which surveyed 1,092 Jewish Israelis, mostly online, and 219 Arab Israelis by telephone, in May and June (with some elements also collected in October) -- showed that 49% of Jewish Israelis agree with the idea that Jews should have more rights in Israel than non-Jews do.

The figure ties the record 49% who expressed the same sentiment in 2013, and continues a steady rise in the percentage of Jewish Israelis agreeing with the idea, which fell as low as 27% in 2018. High levels of support were seen among right-wingers and the ultra-Orthodox, while the lowest levels were among the left-wing and secular.

The percentage of Jewish Israelis who said a Jewish majority should be needed to make "fateful decisions" on foreign and domestic affairs remained mostly steady at 80% and 60%, respectively.

"It is apparent from the 2022 Index that the increased fragmentation of the public's positions on policy has reached a point where it is no longer clear whether there remains a shared Israeli base on questions of principle, or even on practical questions regarding the country's day-to-day conduct," said Tamar Herman, director of the Viterbi Family Center for Public Opinion and Policy Research at the Israel Democracy Institute. "Over the past two decades, there has also been an erosion of public attitudes regarding basic principles of democracy, especially among Jewish Israelis, regarding civil equality."

Compared with results from 2019 (28%), fewer Jewish Israelis (18%) last year believed that there is a good balance between the Jewish and democratic elements of the state.

OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING:

[T]he U.S. government is awash in literally trillions of pages of classified documents, and the proper handling of those documents is a challenge for all who use them as part of their daily government work. In my 30 years in Washington, I have spoken to a number of officials who have accidentally taken classified documents home with them, perhaps tucked away in an otherwise innocent looking stack of papers or file folder. Because the penalties for doing so are so severe, the reaction is often deep anxiety bordering on panic.

You work to make sure it never happens but sometimes it does. And when it does, there is a proper way to handle the problem--which is precisely the way the Biden team has appeared to handle it. You inform the proper authorities within the organization with which you are or were associated. And you return the documents immediately.

The handling and care of such documents is hammered home to all who work in the government. The fear of a mistake and its consequences therefore are also common. That is why while the story of the discovery of the Biden documents hits close to home and makes uncomfortable the current and former officials with whom I have spoken, the way former President Trump treated the classified documents discovered at Mar-a-Lago makes them angry.

Because based on what we currently know about them, the two cases could not be more different. Despite GOP efforts to suggest the two are the same, they could not be more different. Trump expressed a desire to hold on to the documents. He was told he could not. He took them anyway. He was repeatedly told he had to return them and he refused. He lied about whether he had them. He resisted government efforts to reclaim them. He has argued they were his documents and did not belong to the government. He has argued he declassified them although evidence suggests he did not. He flouted the law and very likely broke it. There is zero evidence nor is there even the slightest hint Biden did anything of the sort.

Merrick Garland and John Lausch announce the appointment of a Special Counsel to investigate the discovery of classified documents held by President Joe Biden at an office and his home, on Jan. 12, 2023, in Washington, DC.

Ultimately, it is likely that the parallel special counsel investigations into these cases will reveal just that. Fortunately, Attorney General Merrick Garland has made the decision to treat the two cases in the same way to show that he is being even-handed...but also because in the end, it will underscore the differences between the two cases. [...]

One of the reasons so many officials have feared the circumstance in which Biden now finds himself is because so many encounter classified documents in their day-to-day work. Classifying so many documents makes the likelihood of errors higher. But it also makes it harder to share or find information necessary to policymakers. And the cost of classifying trillions of pages of documents is billions of dollars a year. Further, in our system, classified documents are seen by many to be "more important", more attention-grabbing, than unclassified ones--which leads to excess classification which leads to valuable information being harder to access and utilize.

Experts have sounded the alarm about this problem for decades, and every few years there is even a call to fix it--but it never happens.

LEAVING THE WEST:

Samir Aslan did what any father would do. When Israeli soldiers broke into his home at Qalandiya refugee camp last week to arrest his son, he rushed to protect him. The 41-year-old Palestinian was shot and killed. His death received scant notice, so frequent are such incidents. A reported 224 Palestinians were killed last year in the occupied West Bank, which suffered almost daily army raids. 2023 is shaping up to be even worse.

The main reason is a new ultranationalist, hard-right religious coalition government in Jerusalem that includes racist, anti-Arab ministers determined to annex all the Palestinian territories. Yet the response to this alarming, destabilising development from Israel's western allies has been strangely muted. A few have issued veiled warnings. None has imposed the sort of sanctions or boycotts levelled in the past on political extremists in other countries.

The coalition's objectionable plans raise a broader, uncomfortable question for the US and Europe reaching beyond the too-familiar abuses and impunity of military occupation. In short, can Israel still be considered a reliable, law-abiding ally that shares a set of common values and standards with the western democracies? 

FUNNY HOW THAT WORKS:

High rates of infant mortality, chronic malnutrition, unsustainably high school-dropout rates and bleak investment opportunities. This was Bangladesh in a nutshell in the early 2000s: a nation plunged in a confluence of climatic, financial, and economic calamities. Fast-forward two decades and the state has earned the moniker "Asian Tiger" for being the fastest-growing and most promising Asian economy.

Over the years, Bangladesh's Human Development Index (HDI) has risen steadily as a consequence of an upward trend in the metrics making up the index, including life expectancy, predicted years of schooling, mean years of schooling, and per capita gross national income (GNI). [...]

Expeditious growth in all sectors has indeed earned the country pride of place in the medium human development group, yet the issue of rising income disparity continues to be a major concern, despite its impressive record of lifting 25 million people out of poverty in the last 20 years.

THE POINT IS TO DEHUMANIZE:

Survivor Joan Salter, 83, said the language was similar to Nazi rhetoric in an exchange with Braverman while the lawmaker was meeting constituents.

"In 1943, I was forced to flee my birthplace in Belgium and went across war-torn Europe and dangerous seas until I finally was able to come to the UK in 1947," Salter said after introducing herself as a child survivor of the genocide.

"When I hear you using words against refugees like 'swarms' and an 'invasion,' I am reminded of the language used to dehumanize and justify the murder of my family and millions of others," she said. "Why do you find the need to use that kind of language?"

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

...AND CHEAPER...:

The team at Ray C. Anderson Foundation saw the green spaces that run alongside the highway as the perfect opportunity for their sustainability project. Now, a solar farm with 2,600 panels soak up the sun on a stretch of highway in West Georgia.

The five-acre site is a triangular area of land where an exit ramp meets the road. It used to be a barren, unused space. Now, the team has transformed it to provide enough power for more than 100 homes.

"What it is today is a field of clean, green energy," said Allie Kelly, the Ray's Foundation executive director. Not only does the space harness solar energy, but the panels stand higher than normal ones so wildflowers can also grow.

Alongside the project, the foundation teamed up with mapping company, ESRI, to develop a free digital tool to help transportation departments recognize potential solar projects in their areas. It works by identifying land where solar would work best, allowing planners to make a virtual mock-up of the solar installation so that it doesn't block a view or sit too close to the highway.

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE:

"I believe that a strong, independent court allows for the existence of all other institutions in a democracy," Netanyahu said in his speech.

"I ask that you show me one dictatorship, one undemocratic society, where a strong independent court system exists. There's no such thing," Netanyahu said.

"In fact, the difference between countries in which rights are only on paper and those in which there are actual rights -- that difference is a strong, independent court," he said.

Netanyahu went on to detail the actions he said he had taken to protect the independence of the judicial system.

"This is the reason that I am doing, and will continue to do, everything I can to protect the court system [so that it remains] strong and independent," he said.

The premier said that while there had been attempts to weaken the independence of the judicial system -- some of them the very same, or similar to, changes he is promoting now -- he had made sure they were not enacted.

"Over the past few months alone, I have shelved every law that threatened to harm the independence of the system -- from the attempt to hold hearings for judges in the Knesset, through limiting petitions to the court, to changing the composition of the committee for selecting judges," Netanyahu said.

"I will continue to operate this way. Every time a bill comes across my desk that could harm the independence of Israeli courts, we'll take it off the table," Netanyahu said.

Social media users quipped that Netanyahu's 2012 speech could be used as the keynote for the mass protest on Saturday evening in Tel Aviv, where demonstrators plan to take to the streets for the second consecutive weekend to warn against the government's plans.

THE MOST SHAMEFUL MOMENT IN OUR RECENT HISTORY...:

Abbas and Idris were in Israel as part of a worldwide tour to raise awareness about China's campaign against their people, which some describe as a genocide. Worldwide, Uighurs number around 12 million; about 80 percent live in Xinjiang, which they also call East Turkestan, making them China's fifth largest minority. Since 2017, according to estimates, Chinese authorities have sent more than 1.8 million Uighurs to forced labor camps, leaving their families in the dark about their whereabouts or well-being.

"The Chinese regime sometimes publishes names of people who died of diseases in the camps, but since they were taken in 2017 I have not received any information about my parents," Idris said. "If I knew they had passed away, I would go into mourning, and cry for them. Not knowing makes it very difficult for me."

China initially denied the existence of internment camps in Xinjiang but later changed tack, describing the compounds as vocational training centers for Uighurs who could otherwise be lured into Islamic extremism. Critics describe the education doled out at the camps as political indoctrination; Beijing, which has little appetite for dissent, has long been vexed by separatist groups from the region and has justified its campaign by pointing to a series of terror attacks carried out by Uighur extremists over the last decade.

Witnesses and survivors of the camps say arbitrary detention is just the first of a long list of potential crimes against humanity carried out at the centers, which also include forced labor, rape, sexual abuse, involuntary medical treatment, torture, unsanitary conditions and more.

"These people in the camps, they are not charged with any crimes and they are subject to constant mental and physical torture," Abbas said.

FRUGALITY PAYS:

Japanese companies are working to halve the country's food waste by 2030 by turning it into a number of commodities including biodiesel, concrete, and even furniture. A recent Washington Post article profiled three companies upcycling Japan's food waste. 

First off, Takachiho Amaterasu Railway is using fuel made in part from lard used in ramen and spent tempura cooking oil.

"By implementing the biodiesel, we wanted people to become more conscious about environmental issues as well as biodiesel," Hiroyoshi Saitoh, Takachiho Amaterasu Railway's managing director told the Post. 

Fabula, a Tokyo-based start-up, is turning food scraps into concrete. It dries food scraps, including cabbage, orange and onion peels, tea leaves, and coffee grounds. The dried food scraps are compressed into molds at high temperatures forming a cement. 

Cement is a leading producer of greenhouse gas emissions, accounting for 8% of global emissions. So by using up food scraps, Fabula makes a dent in two industries at once.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

In a new bull market, you tend to see things like housing, airline, copper, and industrial stocks lead the rally. Meanwhile, energy, utility, and healthcare stocks tend to lag. 

That's exactly what we're seeing today. 

Year-to-date, industrial stocks are up 5%. Housing stocks are up 10%. Copper stocks jumped 16%, and airline stocks are up a whopping 18%. Meanwhile, energy stocks are up less than 3%. Utility stocks have risen less than 2%, and healthcare stocks have gone nowhere.

A graph following the change in the current rally's leading and lagging stocks

That's typical "new bull market" price action. 

We are seeing this price action because the incoming economic data is strongly suggesting that inflation is dying. 

Inflation is the enemy of the stock market. Typically, when it rises sharply, stocks plummet. Conversely, when inflation falls sharply, stocks tend to rocket. 

Inflation is collapsing right now. 

Yesterday, we learned that in December, consumer prices fell month-over-month. They dropped 0.1% from November. Monthly drops in the consumer price index are exceptionally rare. They only happen about once every few years. But when they do, they always signal that inflation is dying. 

JEEPERS. REALLY THOUGHT THE INCELS WERE THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST:

That was not a surprising outcome--it was a predictable one. In fact, the only surprising thing about the meme-stock bubble is that it happened at all. Historically, stock-market bubbles have tended to be responses to technological or social change, with investors succumbing to hype around new technologies or new trends and becoming convinced that they'll change everything. The most obvious example of this is the internet bubble of the late '90s, when simply having a dot-com at the end of your company name was enough to send your stock soaring. But the same was true of so-called story-stock bubbles in the past, like the uranium-stock bubble of the late 1950s, or the bowling-stock bubble of the early '60s, which happened when investors became convinced that bowling was going to become the favorite American pastime.

The meme-stock bubble, by contrast, was not inflated by hype about the future. On the contrary, the companies involved were, for the most part, struggling companies in legacy businesses, with no obvious prospects for dramatically improving their businesses. All that meme-stock companies really had in common was their stocks were cheap and they were heavily shorted (which created the conditions for meme-stock traders to potentially engineer massive short squeezes, sending their stock prices higher). At heart, the meme-stock bubble wasn't about a brighter future. It was about trying to collectively game the system. 

Along the way, though, many meme-stock investors convinced themselves that these beaten-down companies were actually hidden gems whose businesses would soar once the short sellers stopped holding them down. So, we were told that GameStop was going to reinvent itself by making a big move into digital gaming and e-commerce, Blackberry was going to leverage its brand name to become a major player in cybersecurity, and, most improbable of all, that Bed Bath & Beyond was sitting on a multi-billion-dollar baby business (Buybuy Baby).

But none of these rosy futures has panned out. GameStop is still a money-losing retailer whose main business is selling physical games at old retail stores. AMC was smart enough to use the precipitous rise in its stock price to raise a big chunk of capital, which helped it avoid bankruptcy. But its core business challenges--competition from streaming, and owning thousands of movie theaters at a time when moviegoing habits seem to have shifted permanently--have not gone away. And Bed Bath & Beyond said this week that its revenue fell by 33% from a year ago, suggesting that it's falling into the death spiral that has killed many retailers in the past: shrinking sales force, job cuts, and store closings--which leads to further losses and drives customers away, leading to further shrinking sales, and so on into oblivion.

And that, ultimately, is what's so striking about the meme-stock bubble: It had almost no impact on the real world.

THE TELL IS THAT THE TRUMPISTS HATE THEM BOTH...:

TRUMPISM IS A SUICIDE CULT:

Boy, their teaching the woke a lesson, huh? https://t.co/FECWLplOyJ

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) January 14, 2023

WHATEVER IT TAKES TO ROPE IN THE RUBES:

For a non-scientist who is unsure about the impact of carbon emissions, Kemp has thrown himself into the task of constructing a clean-energy economy with impressive ferocity. A former real estate developer who wears cowboy boots with his suit and scrunches his brow in the fashion of George W. Bush, the 59-year-old Kemp has emerged as a curious figure on the American right: a conservative hardliner whose enthusiasm for tax cuts and guns is matched by his passion for charging stations and battery recycling.

While national Republicans are bereft of a positive vision -- still reeling from the chaos of the Trump presidency and the misery of a disappointing midterm election -- Kemp is a rare actor in his party trying something shrewd and new. Where many Republicans have ignored climate as an issue or ridiculed people who care about it, Kemp has moved aggressively to claim the economic opportunities associated with fighting climate change and then take credit for them on the campaign trail.

His approach is essentially an inversion of greenwashing, the corporate public-relations practice of giving an environmentalist sheen to activities that are anything but. The Georgia governor does the opposite, championing a set of policies that aid the energy transition while insisting his motivations have nothing to do with controlling emissions.

To Kemp, his agenda does not qualify as climate action: "It's just letting the market work."

The green-manufacturing market is working fast in Georgia. Hours before I sat down with Kemp on Wednesday, on the eve of his inauguration to a second term, the Korean conglomerate Hanwha announced plans for a massive solar-panel facility in Georgia. It was the latest in a multibillion-dollar series of economic development trophies Kemp has claimed in the energy sector, including immense investments linked to the electric-vehicle supply chain from companies like Hyundai, Rivian and SK Battery.

In his Thursday inaugural address, Kemp vowed that by the end of his new term, Georgia would be "the electric mobility capital of America." He is headed next week to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, aiming to spread word of Georgia's economic trajectory and its electric-mobility prowess to the globalist conclave. Chuckling, he calls himself the "Georgia redneck going to Davos."

I am more interested in how he sells this agenda to voters on the American right, many of whom are likelier to associate electric cars with Al Gore than with, well, Brian Kemp.

"I'm fulfilling my promise of creating good-paying jobs for our state," Kemp says. "I'll tell you, there are a lot of conservatives that are driving electric vehicles. I'd also tell them: you need to go out and drive one because it'll snap your head back."

He points to the F-150 Lightning, Ford's electric pickup, predicting: "You're gonna have a lot of Republicans driving that truck.

IT WAS CUTE WHEN THE TRUMPISTS THOUGHT VLAD HELD THE WHIP:

European countries depended on Russian energy products, especially natural gas, for their basic economic health and welfare, hence why energy was largely excluded from the original sanctions against Russia. Then, as the country's military offensive in Ukraine began deteriorating, Russia began drastically reducing the amount of natural gas it sent to Europe in a bid to inflict economic pain on its foes and to gain the leverage necessary to reduce EU support for Ukraine. Today, the EU is being forced to decouple from Russian energy as gas exports to the EU have fallen by nearly 90% compared to pre-pandemic levels.

However, thanks to a rapid buildout of liquefied natural gas capacity, new sources of energy imports, reduced consumption, and fortuitously warm weather, the EU has significantly improved its energy outlook since this summer--and the worst possibilities for this winter look to have been avoided. The energy crisis is still a significant drag on European growth and a massive contributor to inflation, and markets still anticipate elevated natural gas prices until 2026, but the situation now poses less of an existential risk. Critically, European economies have been able to buy themselves more time--the most valuable resource in their efforts to become independent of Russian energy.

Before 2022, Germany received more than 150 million cubic meters per day of Russian natural gas from the Nord Stream pipeline and had no capacity to import any seaborne liquefied natural gas (LNG). Today, the opposite is true: nothing flows through the Nord Stream pipeline after its apparent sabotage earlier this year, but Germany has just started importing LNG through the newly built terminal at Wilhelmshaven and has more LNG import capacity on the way.

The trend is the same across the continent--Europe (in the above chart, including the UK) has been able to replace practically all of the lost Russian energy imports by drawing record amounts from global LNG markets and getting some assistance through rising pipeline imports from Norway, North Africa, and other areas.

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

Electric vehicle maker Tesla is cutting prices in the United States and throughout Europe again, according to listings on the company's website on Thursday night in the U.S.

A MODEL OF REPUBLICANISM:

Attorney General Merrick Garland on Thursday appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigation into classified records found at President Joe Biden's personal office and home in Delaware.

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

The Michigan State researchers behind the invention of TLSCs believe that, if fully deployed, transparent solar technologies could supply as much as 40% of the U.S.'s electricity demand, or about as much as nontransparent solar panels. 

And because the technology is still relatively new, proponents believe there will be gains in efficiency and adoption similar to those seen with other green technologies. 

"Traditional solar applications have been actively researched for over five decades, yet we have only been working on these highly transparent solar cells for about five years," Michigan State professor Richard Lunt said in 2017. "Ultimately, this technology offers a promising route to inexpensive, widespread solar adoption on small and large surfaces that were previously inaccessible."

They could be here sooner than you think. 

In December 2022, a team of Swiss scientists created the most efficient transparent solar cells yet. The newly adapted DSCs -- also known as Grätzel cells, after one of the project's leaders, professor Michael Grätzel -- use a layer of hydroxamic acid to increase the absorption of light and power conversion. They can achieve a conversion rate north of 15%. 

Additionally, companies like SolarWindow Technologies and Ubiquitous Energy are aiming to install electricity-generating glass on everything from cars to skyscrapers, maybe as soon as 2023.

THE UNSUSPECTING FROGS:

It is striking that in the same year that Tesla's stock price dropped by about two-thirds, destroying more than $700 billion in market value, the global market for electric vehicles -- which for so long the company seemed almost to embody -- actually boomed.

Boom may not even adequately communicate what happened. Around the world, E.V. sales were projected to have grown 60 percent in 2022, according to a BloombergNEF report prepared ahead of the 2022 U.N. climate conference COP27, bringing total sales over 10 million. There are now almost 30 million electric vehicles on the road in total, up from just 10 million at the end of 2020. E.V. market share has also tripled since 2020.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

A new round of subpoenas were sent to former President Donald Trump's associates in recent weeks as part of special counsel Jack Smith's criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election, sources familiar with the probe tell CNN.

Amid the extensive requests for information are new questions from federal investigators about who is paying for legal representation for subpoena recipients.

The subpoenas, as described to CNN, asked individuals not only how their legal bills were being footed but also to provide a copy of the lawyer retention agreement if the bills were being covered by anyone other than themselves.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Carbon dioxide emissions and plastic waste are two of the biggest threats that society faces today. Researchers from the University of Cambridge report an innovative solution to tackle both seemingly insurmountable problems. They have developed a method, powered fully by sunlight, to turn plastic bottles and carbon dioxide into sustainable fuels and useful chemicals.

The solar-drive conversion of carbon dioxide and plastics into useful products "provides a potential sustainable route towards a circular economy," write chemistry professor Erwin Reisner and colleagues in a paper published in the journal Nature Synthesis. 

SOME CONVENTIONALITY WOULD HAVE BEEN WELCOME (profanity alert):

Tellingly, the song that had first piqued his interest in playing guitar was Les Paul and Mary Ford's groundbreaking 1951 hit How High the Moon, a single that was as much about Paul's electronic manipulation of sound through multitracking as it was about his guitar playing. When Beck's mother dismissed it as "all tricks", it only served to fire his enthusiasm further.

Throughout his tenure with the Yardbirds, Beck seemed as interested in the sonic possibilities of new technology as he did in demonstrating his instrumental prowess, "making all the weirdest noise I could". The result was a succession of tracks that propelled the Yardbirds to the forefront of pop's avant garde: Over Under Sideways Down, Lost Woman, Hot House of Omagararshid, He's Always There. When Jimmy Page joined, briefly creating a lineup with two lead guitarists, their sound got more extreme still. The single that coupled Happenings Ten Years Time Ago and Psycho Daisies was impossibly potent and sinister, so far-out even by the standards of 1966 that it succeeded in alienating their fans - it barely scraped the charts in the UK - and the critics, one of whom derided it as an "excuse for music".

Not long after its release, Beck acrimoniously departed the Yardbirds. "They kicked me out ... f[***] them," he waspishly noted during the band's 1992 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Producer Mickie Most attempted to fashion him into a pop star, a role to which Beck was entirely ill-suited, although the union produced the hit single and wedding disco perennial Hi Ho Silver Lining. His real future, however, lay on its B-side, an instrumental called Beck's Bolero that he had recorded with Page, bassist John Paul Jones and the Who's Keith Moon back in May 1966. It was epic, heavy and quite astonishingly prescient, pointing towards the direction rock would follow in the post-psychedelic era a year before the Summer of Love.

It still sounded ahead of the curve when it turned up on Beck's solo album Truth two years later. By then, Beck had recruited singer Rod Stewart: with his bluesy vocals playing off Beck's incendiary distorted guitar, Truth's eclectic set of material - a reworking of Shapes of Things, plus versions of Greensleeves, Ol' Man River and Willie Dixon's I Ain't Superstitous - presaged the sound of Led Zeppelin, the band Jimmy Page formed from the wreckage of the now defunct Yardbirds. Truth beat Led Zeppelin's eponymous debut into the shops by six months.

Perhaps the Jeff Beck Group, which Truth's follow-up, Beck-Ola, was billed under, could have followed Zeppelin's path to superstardom. But there were problems, not least with maintaining a steady lineup. Stewart departed after Beck-Ola - an attempt to replace him with the then-unknown Elton John only got as far the rehearsal studio - taking bassist Ronnie Wood with him to form the Faces. Pianist Nicky Hopkins left, too: drummers came and went.

The fact that Beck couldn't keep still musically may also have hindered their commercial progress. Beck-Ola was very much in the "heavy" style of Truth - Spanish Boots is particularly fantastic - but subsequent releases dabbled in funk, jazz and soul. Both 1971's Rough and Ready and 1972's Jeff Beck Group have their moments - I've Been Used and Jody on the former, Ice Cream Cakes and Going Down on the latter - but the NME critic who noted that the band's musical skill frequently "far exceeds that of the material" had a point. In addition, it was hard not to be struck by the sense that Beck wasn't that bothered about being famous, hence Beck-Ola's self-deprecating sleeve note: "It's almost impossible to come up with anything totally original - so we haven't."

By 1973, Beck had formed a new band with bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice. They might have had a hit single with Superstition, a song Stevie Wonder had given to Beck in return for performing on Talking Book - you can hear his beautifully delicate and sympathetic playing on its penultimate track, Lookin' for Another Pure Love - had Wonder not changed his mind and released it as a single himself, complete with the iconic opening drum beat that Beck had come up with. The pair worked together again on Beck's largely instrumental 1975 solo album Blow by Blow, on which the guitarist changed course again, this time to dextrous jazz-rock fusion. Its successor, Wired, featured a version of Charles Mingus's Goodbye Pork Pie Hat.

By now, no one could predict where Beck was going to head next. 

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

A Georgia special grand jury has finished its work investigating whether former president Donald Trump and his allies committed crimes when trying to overturn the 2020 election results.

While special grand juries cannot themselves issue indictments, they can recommend district attorneys do so. This and other recent news about Trump's mounting legal problems has led to a number of legal experts and political observers saying that Trump could soon be indicted.

Trump, meanwhile, faces several other criminal investigations that could also result in indictments. The Department of Justice is investigating Trump for retaining government documents in violation of several federal laws.

And the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol referred Trump to the Department of Justice in December 2022, citing multiple likely criminal violations in his role of orchestrating an attack on the Capitol. The Department of Justice's special counsel is now investigating.

WHAT A DIFFERENCE INNOCENCE MAKES:

Biden said one of the classified records was found in his "personal library" and that he is "cooperating fully" with the DOJ on the issue.   

WHY SHOULD ISLAMOPHOBES OPPOSE GENOCIDE?:

In justifying the Iraq War to the American people, George Bush in part invoked a grandiose framing centered around the liberation of the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein's tyranny.

This Wilsonian impulse to spread freedom was a staple of Republican foreign policy rhetoric for years, central to the military adventurism that became commonly associated with the Global War on Terror (GWOT).

However, with the emergence of Donald Trump, this line of thinking experienced a formidable challenge, a GOP presidential candidate seemingly willing to question the assumptions and platitudes that had dictated his party's foreign policy for years. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump distanced himself considerably from his fellow Republican candidates with his pronounced willingness to condemn the Iraq War, while promising a presidency that would end the endless wars. 

WELL, THAT WAS TRANSITORY...:

Commodities have largely erased last year's spike.

Amid all the mixed economic data and recession forecasts, some actual good news hit the wires Wednesday: UK gasoline prices have now erased the spike that followed Russia's invasion of Ukraine. That adds to the growing list of commodity prices that have settled near or below pre-invasion levels--a big disinflationary force. Here we will round up a few to highlight the shifts. It may take time for this improvement to flow through to consumer prices--and Consumer Price Index inflation data--but in time it should, easing one of 2022's primary fears.

THAT WAS EASY:

In Argentina there are around 900 wind turbines, which, thanks to the wind, generate 10% of the country's total electricity consumption or, in other words, the equivalent of supplying more than 2.7 million homes. They are grouped into 57 wind farms that are distributed mostly in Chubut, Buenos Aires, Santa Cruz, La Rioja, Córdoba, Neuquén and Río Negro.

In the last four years, these towers of more than 110 meters high began to proliferate on the side of the routes, a postcard that in Europe has more time, but that in Argentina gained momentum from 2018 with the Renew incentive programs . Now, without State tax benefits, it is the large consumer goods, automotive companies or banks that finance the construction of wind farms, with the aim of making their businesses more sustainable.

SO NOT LONG:

Most symptoms from long COVID clear up within a year for people who had mild initial infections, a large Israel study said Thursday, with the findings welcomed as "reassuring."

...AND CHEAPER...:

That peculiar piece of meat -- likely to be the first of its kind ever sold in the US -- comes from a radical sort of food technology now in development, in which meat is produced by culturing muscle cells in vast tanks of nutrients. A similar effort -- to culture mammary cells -- is also underway and may soon yield real milk without cows. [...]

Conceptually, cellular agriculture is straightforward. Technicians take a small tissue sample from a chicken, cow or other animal. From that, they isolate individual cells that go into a bioreactor -- basically a big vat of nutrient solution -- where the cells multiply manyfold and, eventually, mature into muscle, fat or connective tissue that can be harvested for people to eat.

Products in which these cells are jumbled together, as in ground meat, are easiest to make, and that's what most cellular meat companies are developing, at least initially. But Upside has a more ambitious goal: to create chicken with whole muscle fibers. "We've figured out ways to produce that textural experience," says Eric Schulze, Upside's vice president of product and regulation. He declines to explain exactly how they do it.

Cellular meat is cultivated in tanks at Upside Foods, a company now developing products for commercial use. Cultivation facilities such as this use large amounts of electricity, so their environmental impact depends greatly on whether they draw electricity from sustainable sources.

The process takes two to three weeks from start to finish, regardless of whether they are making chicken or beef. That's much faster than the eight to 10 weeks required to raise a fryer chicken, or the 18 to 36 months needed for a cow. "We're doing a cow's worth of meat in 21 days or less," says Schulze.

...AND CHEAPER...:

It was an engineering problem that had bugged Zhibin Yu for years -- but now he had the perfect chance to fix it. Stuck at home during the first UK lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, the thermal engineer suddenly had all the time he needed to refine the efficiency of heat pumps: electrical devices that, as their name implies, move heat from the outdoors into people's homes.

The pumps are much more efficient than gas heaters, but standard models that absorb heat from the air are prone to icing up, which greatly reduces their effectiveness.

Yu, who works at the University of Glasgow, UK, pondered the problem for weeks. He read paper after paper. And then he had an idea. Most heat pumps waste some of the heat that they generate -- and if he could capture that waste heat and divert it, he realized, that could solve the defrosting issue and boost the pumps' overall performance. "I suddenly found a solution to recover the heat," he recalls. "That was really an amazing moment."

Yu's idea is one of several recent innovations that aim to make 200-year-old heat pump technology even more efficient than it already is, potentially opening the door for much greater adoption of heat pumps worldwide.

LOVE STORY:

For all its heightened specificity in presenting the minutiae of the tasks and knowledge needed to properly run a military ship at this time, Master and Commander never gets bogged down by the details. Thanks in large part to Russell Boyd's nimble cinematography and Lee Smith's taut editing, the film moves along briskly while Crowe's masterful blend of arrogant professionalism, brash humor and a persistent sense of fun and adventure keeps the film fleet of foot even in the most dire of circumstances. Meanwhile, Paul Bettany's Dr. Stephen Maturin, a scientist and Jack's longtime friend, highlights the film's themes of male camaraderie (the two jam sessions he and Jack have in the Captain's quarters are quite moving in their sheer simplicity and emotional directness) and serves as a lone voice of reason when it appears Jack's pride may be extending further than his national duty.

The film's harmonizing of the epic and the intimate reaches its peak in the third act during a stopover in the Galapagos Islands, during which Maturin is finally allowed to indulge his fascination with entomology and zoology and studies the extremely unique forms of life that inhabit the remote area. It's a compelling detour primarily because it captures the rapturous experience of making massive discoveries (in a way that feels both historically accurate and otherworldly) better than any film since aside from Terrence Malick's The New World. But the filmmakers also beautifully dovetail this sequence into the final battle as Maturin's discussion of a bug he discovered that can naturally camouflage itself (it appears to be something akin to a Walking Stick) sparks a new tactic that Jack uses in the impending battle with the Acheron.

It's this type of intensely careful attention to detail and the ability to meld such small moments into a cohesive and quietly thrilling whole that makes Master and Commander such a singular film.

THE MAGA BRAND!:

PRINT THE DELUSION:

Cervantes' Don Quixote tells the story of a man who becomes so obsessed by novels dealing with Knight-errants, (wandering Knights doing great deeds in the name of some unattainable beauty) that he decides to become one himself. The books are just fanciful romances but Quixote takes them as true histories, they "fit" with his mind, fulfill a need he has. He goes out into the world in the name of Dulcinea del Toboso, a simple country girl whom he reinvents in goddess-like perfection, to perform great deeds. [...]

[I]llusion, irrationality and emotion play vital roles in our lives. "If it is love, it is madness, if it isn't madness, it isn't love." That's true. Consider as well that at the very end of the second and last volume of Cervantes' masterpiece, when Don Quixote comes to his senses, and realizes that he's been acting under a delusion, he immediately dies. This makes me wonder if Cervantes was expressing an unspoken truth--that it's our illusions that keep us alive.

ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

The good news is that messages composed by AI (and supervised by humans) were "rated significantly higher than those written by humans on their own" and response times improved by 50%.

PUT TO SHAME BY LATIN AMERICA:

ALL iDENTITY, ALL THE TIME:

Sociologist Andrea Szabó, who has spent a lot of time studying the voting bases of Hungary's large parties, classifies various Fidesz voters as follows: The most committed ones belong to the hardcore base. They voted for Fidesz in at least two elections and remain committed to the party. Moreover, the last election shows that their number is growing: In 2010, 1.1 million of Hungary's population of roughly 10 million strong fell into this group. Today it stands at around 1.3 to 1.5 million. These voters are committed to the party, and even more so to Viktor Orbán, for reasons of identity. Their commitment is strong and unwavering, and it remains unaffected by economic changes or other difficulties.

"For these voters, Fidesz imparts identity and strength," Szabó says. It makes them feel pride in who they are regardless of what their economic situation is. "The party constantly broadcasts messages of success, which always gives them something to be proud of."

Surveys show that this group appreciates the freedom fighter and the charismatic national leader who is willing to stand up to the big guys--i.e., the West, the European Union and the U.S.--to defend Hungary's interests.

In addition to this hardcore base, Fidesz also attracts sympathizers. Perhaps everyone has heard some version of the argument, "I know Fidesz isn't perfect, but at least they're protecting us from migrants." The commitment of this group is weaker; one might say that their Fidesz identity is in the process of development. 

GIVEN THE OVER-CLASSIFICATION PROBLEM...:

Aides to President Joe Biden have discovered at least one additional batch of classified documents in a location separate from the Washington office he used after leaving the Obama administration, according to a person familiar with the matter. [...]

Biden aides have been sifting through documents stored at locations beyond his former Washington office to determine if there are any other classified documents that need to be turned over to the National Archives and reviewed by the Justice Department, the person familiar with the matter said.

The search was described as exhaustive, with the goal of getting a full accounting of all classified documents that may have inadvertently been packed in boxes when Biden cleared out of the vice president's office space in January 2017.

NO WONDER THEY'RE SO WORRIED ABOUT THEIR MASCULINITY:

The Sneetches terrify the Right. What snowflakes. https://t.co/Iqe8f5P3ge

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) January 11, 2023

WHY THE TRUMPISTS HATE IT:

The tiny New College of Florida is hardly a household name, but it has a lot of heart--so much that students there once rescued the rising star of the white nationalist movement from his bigotry.

R. Derek Black, the son of the founder of Stormfront and the godson of David Duke, was widely considered the heir to the movement, speaking at white nationalist conferences through his childhood and co-hosting a radio show with his father. He lived a secret double life while he attended New College--until he was outed on a student-wide email thread.

Instead of ostracizing Black, some of the students tried to change his mind. And in a fascinating turn of events, chronicled in detail by Washington Post reporter Eli Saslow, they succeeded. Black renounced his former ideology and now speaks out publicly against it. He's now a doctoral student at the University of Chicago researching proto-racism in early medieval intellectual history. [...]

Among DeSantis' six new appointees to the 13-member board are writers and editors for right-wing publications and academics associated with the ultraconservative Hillsdale College. The most famous appointee is Christopher Rufo, a vocal transphobe who has supported DeSantis' anti-LGBTQ policies, blasted queer people as "groomers," and rallied the outcry against "critical race theory." On Jan. 4, Rufo tweeted, "Gov. DeSantis is going to lay siege to university 'diversity, equity and inclusion' programs." The new board members have made it clear they plan on turning New College into a new Hillsdale. DeSantis' communications director told the Sarasota Herald-Tribune they are there to combat "trendy, truth-relative concepts above learning" and Rufo said they plan to make it into a "classical liberal arts institution," and to "create an institution where academics can thrive, without self-censorship."

To make sense of DeSantis' campaign to remake such a small and progressive school and how its students and alumni are processing the news on a more personal level, Slate spoke with one of its most strangely notable graduates. This interview, which was conducted Monday, has been condensed and edited for clarity. [...]

There's literally a whole book written about this, but can you briefly explain what your experience was like as a student there?

I thought I could have these two lives. I spent the first semester there slowly realizing what a cataclysm it was going to be once people recognized my background. Students were deeply invested in the idea that this was going to be a space where you don't leave anyone out or let anybody feel threatened. And so once my white nationalist identity became known, it was going to become this deeply, deeply upsetting thing to everybody on campus.

And that's ultimately what happened. While I was studying abroad my second semester, an upper year student identified me on the student forum. This became this massive discussion thread with thousands of posts among the students. I came back to school that next fall essentially a pariah. But I also rejoined this community that I'd already spent a lot of time in. I felt like I had betrayed a lot of people I'd gotten close to by not sharing that part of who I was with them and having them discover this through a big campus discussion. I ultimately came to recognize the harm and really engage on an intellectual level with articles and statistics about race and immigration. Ultimately, I condemned white nationalism at the end of my experience there and created an enormous rift from my own family that was never closed.

GORSUCHIAN:

Powell carefully and correctly links this path to the US institutional structure. The Fed has independence, in return for sticking to its mandate. 

In a well-functioning democracy, important public policy decisions should be made, in almost all cases, by the elected branches of government. Grants of independence to agencies should be exceedingly rare, explicit, tightly circumscribed, and limited to those issues that clearly warrant protection from short-term political considerations.

"WE'VE ESTABLISHED WHAT YOU ARE, NOW WE'RE HAGGLING OVER THE PRICE":

The tax returns reveal that Trump had foreign bank accounts from 2015 to 2020. These include a bank account in China from 2015 to 2017, which reportedly is connected to Trump International Hotels Management business in China. The tax returns also showed that Trump had business dealings in Azerbaijan, Brazil, Canada, the Dominican Republic, Georgia, Grenada, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Israel, Mexico, Panama, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Qatar, South Korea, St. Maarten, St. Vincent, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom.  [...]

Looking at the list of Trump's tax returns, the bank account in China immediately jumps out. The existence of the account had been previously revealed by The New York Times -- but only in 2020, years after it would have become public had Trump released his returns. Given Trump's many business connections to China, and allegations that Trump asked Chinese President Xi Jinping to help him win re-election, it would be perfectly reasonable for Congress to want to look into this account.

The far-flung nature of Trump's many accounts also begs the question of what countries the transactions were coming from. The Russian government's role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election is well established. We also remember that Trump's own lawyer Michael Cohen detailed how Trump lied about his business dealings in Russia, including a planned Trump Tower in Moscow. And there is extensive documentation of Trump and his company partnering with Russian oligarchs -- a status few reach without the support of Vladimir Putin's government.

THE SOURCE OF THE rIGHT'S VLADOPHILIA:

Religious groups and NGOs have reported ongoing abuses committed by the authorities. Members of groups designated "extremist", "terrorist", or "undesirable" have been subjected to investigation, detainment, imprisonment, torture, physical abuse, and/or seizure of property. 

Among the groups suffering this type of repression are Islamic groups Hizb ut-Tahrir, Tablighi Jamaat, and followers of Muslim theologian Said Nursi. 

WHAT THE lEFT/rIGHT OPPOSES:

Suppose I ask, "Which of the ancient pagan philosophers believed that if you are talking about liberty apart from virtue, you're not talking about liberty at all, but license, and license enslaves?" I don't have to go to Saint Martin. I can go to the pagans he witnessed to. Well, it's a trick question. They all did. Even the Epicureans did, and they had least cause to, as they believed that life was all about securing pleasure and avoiding pain. So did the authors of Scripture. Think of the sad final sentence of the book of Judges: "In those days there was no king in Israel, and every man did what was right in his own eyes" (21:25). In other words, there was no real society, but confusion and injustice. "What is liberty without wisdom," said Edmund Burke, "and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint." It is a rope to hang yourself with.

But if we look at the Latin libertas, the origin of our word, we don't find any notion of doing whatever you like. Libertas is what you inherit from your fathers, the condition of a liber, a free-born citizen: hence the word liber came to refer to a free-born child, one who would grow up to share in the laws and the goods of a free self-governing land.

EXACTLY THE AVATAR THE rIGHT WOULD CHOOSE:

Beijing is planning to reorient its foreign policy away from Moscow fearing a decline in Russia's economic and political clout as a direct result of its disastrous invasion of Ukraine and Putin's eventual downfall, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous Chinese officials and regional experts. 

...AND CHEAPER...:

Oceans of Energy's Offshore Solar Farm system is the world's first such technology to be proven in high wave conditions. A 0.5MW demonstration system has been operating in the often-tumultuous North Sea since 2019, using lightweight structures resting directly on the water's surface for support.

IT'S A RICO CASE:

Allen Weisselberg, a longtime executive for Donald Trump's business empire, was taken into custody Tuesday to begin serving a five-month jail term for dodging taxes on $1.7 million in job perks -- a punishment the judge who sentenced him said was probably too lenient for a case "driven entirely by greed."

Weisselberg, 75, was promised the short sentence in August when he agreed to plead guilty to 15 tax crimes and to be a witness against the Trump Organization, where he worked since the mid-1980s. His testimony helped convict the former president's company, where he had served as chief financial officer, of tax fraud.

HATING THE rEPUBLIC:

The committee is the culmination of a growing antipathy among Republican lawmakers -- and, crucially, their grassroots base -- toward federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

That sentiment reflects years of public grievances by former President Trump and his allies, who allege career government officials have unfairly targeted conservatives.

DOJ investigations into the events surrounding the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and Trump's handling of sensitive documents after leaving office -- both now under the purview of special counsel Jack Smith -- have more recently stoked GOP fury.

Some right-wing Freedom Caucus members have also championed the cause of defendants in Jan. 6 cases, alleging mistreatment and political persecution by federal prosecutors.

POLITICAL ZIONISM IS ANTI-JEWISH:

When faced with the coexistence of Zionism and antisemitism, liberals and centrists tend to describe the two beliefs as either unrelated or in tension. In October, an MSNBC commentator tried to reconcile Trump's antisemitism and his Zionism by suggesting that he "didn't necessarily understand his own policies" toward the Jewish state. A Politico essay in December described the Christian right's support for Israel and distrust of American Jews as ideological "contradictions."

But these positions are not contradictions at all. Trump's fondness for Israel and antagonism toward American Jews stem from the same impulse: He admires countries that ensure ethnic, racial, or religious dominance. He likes Israel because its political system upholds Jewish supremacy; he resents American Jews because most of them oppose the white Christian supremacy he's trying to fortify here. This synthesis isn't unique to Trump. Since Zionism's birth in Europe more than a century ago, it has attracted support from Christians who supported a Jewish state at least in part because they feared Jews would undermine the ethnic and religious purity of their own countries. That tradition remains alive in both Europe and the United States today, where research suggests that antagonism towards the Jews in one's own nation correlates with support for Israel, which offers Jews a nation of their own.

THANKS, DARPA!:

Lewis: COVID vaccines cost billions to develop and deliver. But for at least one big city that used them, they had an incredible rate of financial return. 

Fischman: We usually talk about vaccines saving lives. But in New York City, hit hard by the pandemic early on, they saved the town from a gigantic economic hole too, Tanya. Vaccines saved the city about $28 BILLION dollars, which is what it would have lost without vaccines. Or, as you said, every dollar spent on shots saved ten dollars that would have been spent without shots.

Lewis: Where did the savings come from?

Fischman: A few different places. Long hospitalizations that weren't needed, emergency room visits avoided, and workers who stayed healthy instead of calling in sick.

Lewis: Hmm. But how did they know about things that didn't happen? And how can you count those things?

Fischman: I wondered about that too. It turns out scientists do know enough to build a model of events without vaccines. We know how effective the shots are at keeping people out of the hospital, and we have estimates of how many people in New York were infected. So from that scientists can figure out how many infected New Yorkers would have been hospitalized if vaccines didn't exist. And there's data on numbers of unvaccinated people who turn up in emergency rooms versus vaccinated people. 

Lewis: That makes sense. So what were the actual dollar figures?

Fischman: The direct costs of COVID-related healthcare--hospitals and suchlike--were about 7 and a half billion dollars with vaccines. Without them, the cost jumped to 33 billion.

Costs like the value of lost workdays came to almost 2 billion dollars with vaccination. Without it, the dollars lost due to lost productivity more than doubled, to over 4 billion, the researchers reported in a recent issue of the journal JAMA Network Open.

Lewis: But the vaccines themselves cost a lot for city and federal governments to get and distribute. To be fair, that has to be accounted for.

Fischman: It was almost 5 billion dollars, including money the feds gave to the city for running the vaccine campaign and buying the actual shots. 

The math of these calculations gets complicated, but at a basic level, New York spent that 5 billion and, as a result, kept at least 28 billion. Also business or school shutdowns would have been even longer, and cost even more money, if vaccines weren't around. 

So yes, vaccines save millions of lives, which are hard to put a value on. But they are also an incredibly strong return on investment.

FAILING HIS OWN TEST:

You remember, when Trump said that paying zero federal taxes, "makes me smart."

Either smart, or a bad businessman who racked up huge losses, as we all suspected.

Even as he was spouting on the stage, sitting in the Mazars accounting office in Woodbury, 20 minutes from Hofstra, was his 2015 return (he had a six month extension so it wasn't due until Oct. 15). Mazars, which dropped Trump as a client last February and warned that the documents should not be relied on, soon submitted the 539-page return with a 1040 with all its schedules and 159 separate statements. It was stamped received by the IRS's Kansas City Submission Processing Center on Oct. 20 and is now public.

He's not such a rich man. His adjusted gross income was negative, mostly from a Net Operating Loss carryover of $105,157,825. He had to pay the IRS $707,123. No wonder the fraud didn't want Americans to see.

ALL THAT AND CHEAP ABUNDANT POWER TOO...:

Before he joined the Civilian Climate Corps, Robert Clark assumed building and electric work was all low-skilled labor, akin to "working at McDonald's," he said. That was before he learned to install electric heat pumps, maintain electric vehicle charging stations and perform 3D image modeling of spaces about to get energy upgrades. 

The apprenticeship program has been life-changing, Clark said. Before joining, he struggled to find work, in part because of a felony conviction for burglary. "It's a no-brainer," he said of joining the Civilian Climate Corps, which pays him $20 per hour to learn skills and receive the certifications that he needs to get work. He hopes to go back to school to become an engineer.

Clark is one of 1,700 New Yorkers who has gone through the Civilian Climate Corps, which was developed by BlocPower, a Brooklyn-based building electrification startup, and the city of New York. 

The program, launched in 2021 with $37 million from the Mayor's Office of Criminal Justice, has a heady dual mandate: develop a workforce that can help the city meet its ambitious climate goals and bring those jobs to neighborhoods affected by gun violence. 

"The labor supply is a big problem, but it's also a massive opportunity," said Donnel Baird, CEO and founder of BlocPower. Baird grew up in Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, where he said many Black and low-income families like his own would turn on their gas stoves in the winter to make up for inefficient heating systems. 

"We are going into the lowest-income communities, where folks are at risk of gun violence -- personally, their families, their communities -- we're training them on the latest, greatest software to install green infrastructure in urban environments, in rural environments," Baird said in 2021. "That's going to solve not only crime rates in low-income communities in New York City," he added. "It's [also] going to solve the business problem of the shortage of skilled construction workers across America."

JUST THE lEFT/rIGHT TRYING TO JUSTIFY THEIR RADICALISM:

The federal government significantly and intentionally misreports income distribution, sparking bad policies and political divisions.

That's the argument former senator Phil Gramm and two other economists, Robert Ekelund and John Early, lay out in their compelling and essential new book, "The Myth of American Inequality: How Government Biases Policy Debate."

Using 2017 figures as their reference, their sprawling and statistics-heavy work (blessedly) rests on one key observation: While the U.S. Census Bureau reports that the average income of the top 20% of American households that year was 16.7 times greater than the average income of the bottom 20% of households, the real number, they argue, is 4.1 times. This massive discrepancy is explained by a straightforward accounting trick: The Bureau didn't count two-thirds of the $2.8 trillion in transfer payments given mostly to the poor and working class or the $4.4 trillion taken  through federal, state, and local taxes, "82% of which are paid by the top 40% of household earners."

The net result, they report, "is that, in total, the Census Bureau chooses not to count the impact of more than 40% of all income, which is gained in transfer payments or lost in taxes."

IDEOLOGY IS MURDER:

New Omicron-fighting COVID booster shots have delivered an 81 percent reduction in COVID hospitalization to Israelis aged 65-plus, according to recently released research.

WHO DIDN'T EXPECT DONALD TO KILL HIS BOTS?:

According to the Daily Beast, Hardaway briefly returned to her show the following month and dismissed unverified online reports that she had been hospitalized with COVID-19. She filmed her final episode on Dec. 15.

The sisters lost their gigs with Fox News in 2020 for spreading conspiracy theories about coronavirus, including claims that the virus was "deliberately" spread by "deep-state snakes" and that a vaccine would be used for population control.

DYE GONNA BE DRIPPIN':

Special counsel Jack Smith's team has subpoenaed Donald Trump's former attorney Rudy Giuliani, asking him to turn over records to a federal grand jury as part of an investigation into the former president's fundraising following the 2020 election, according to a person familiar with the subpoena.

REPUBLICAN GOVERNANCE ISN'T VERY HARD:

A source familiar with the situation told NBC News that Attorney General Merrick Garland asked the US Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, John Lausch, to review how classified material ended up at the Penn Biden Center.

That task was intentionally assigned to Lausch, who was appointed to the prosecutor's office by Trump appointee, to avoid any conflict of interest, the source told NBC.

...AND CHEAPER...:

Utility-scale solar notched up its biggest month ever in Australia in December of 2022, delivering 1509GWh of renewable power over that period, compared to the previous high of 1296WGh set a year earlier in December 2021.

The new record was revealed in the latest monthly renewables data from Rystad Energy, detailing the best performing large-scale solar and wind energy assets around the country.

Senior analyst in renewables research at Rystad, David Dixon, says it was also a "standout month" for utility-scale PV in New South Wales, with the state's monthly generation of both solar and wind topping 1000GWh for the first time, to reach 1,122GWh; 654GWh from solar, 468GWh from wind.

THE REST IS COVERED BY GARRY MADDOX:

Indonesia is a nation of more than 10,000 islands, so supplying the whole country with electricity is a huge challenge.

More than a million people are not connected to the electricity grid at all.

"Those people who don't have electricity are living on remote islands, so in this situation it's hard to connect a cable to them and it's hard to install other expensive solutions such as wind turbines," says Luofeng Huang, a lecturer in mechanical engineering at Cranfield University.

Solar power is one option to provide those islands with energy. It has become much cheaper in recent decades - the International Energy Agency (IEA) says that it is becoming the cheapest option for new electricity power plants.

But solar farms take up lots of space - space that might be better used for housing, farming and business.

So scientists and engineers are working on ways to install solar panels on the ocean surface, providing power to those living onshore nearby.

"Floating solar is very convenient because it can just be put on top of the water, and if you need more electricity you can put on more solar panels," says Mr Huang.

Floating solar is already in use at a number of sites around the world, but on lakes, rather than the sea.

PATHETIC IS THE TRUMP BRAND:

For the radical fringes of the movement, the outcome marked a disappointing end to what has been a sad time. Their leader, Bolsonaro himself, is hardly a source of inspiration. Moody and largely silent since his narrow second-round election defeat at the end of October, the former army captain has quit the country. Deprived of the political immunity he once enjoyed, the former president reportedly fears being a target of legal action and has gone to ground in Florida, a US state much favoured by other anti-communist conservatives from Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America.

Nor have the much-lauded soldiers been much use. For more than two months thousands of activists have been squatting in informal camps set up outside barracks from where they have fruitlessly urged intervention. Many of the campers have drifted away. Many of those who remain are conspiracist fantasists. Some harbour the illusion, for instance, that Gen Augusto Heleno, perhaps the most hardline of Bolsonaro's military allies, is already exercising power from behind the scenes and that Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the winner in October, has already been deposed.

In the real world, meanwhile, Lula has steadily begun to organise a new government. At a cost, he has struck an alliance with the self-seeking centre and centre-right politicians of the Centrão, or big centre, in a bid to ensure congressional support. Workers' party loyalists occupy key cabinet posts, but jobs have been found for leaders from a range of more conservative allied parties, including some with very dubious credentials. Lula has taken action to reverse some of the most damaging measures of the Bolsonaro era by, for instance, tightening controls on the use of weapons.

THANKS, GIPPER!:

A gaping hole in the layer was discovered by scientists in 1985. Just two years later, the Montreal Protocol was signed - with 46 countries promising to phase out the harmful chemicals.

The deal later became the first UN treaty to achieve universal ratification, and almost 99% of banned ozone-depleting substances have now been phased out.

The Antarctic ozone hole continued expanding until 2000, after which its area and depth began improving slowly.

Now, a report co-produced by the UN, US and EU agencies says the Montreal Protocol is working as hoped.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Attorney General Merrick Garland has assigned the U.S. attorney in Chicago to review classified documents found at the Penn Biden Center for Diplomacy and Global Engagement in Washington, two sources with knowledge of the inquiry told CBS News. The roughly 10 documents are from President Biden's vice-presidential office at the center, the sources said. CBS News has learned the FBI is also involved in the U.S. attorney's inquiry.

The classified material was identified by personal attorneys for Mr. Biden on Nov. 2, just before the midterm elections, Richard Sauber, special counsel to the president confirmed. The documents were discovered when Mr. Biden's personal attorneys "were packing files housed in a locked closet to prepare to vacate office space at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C.," Sauber said in a statement to CBS News.

THE TRUMP BRAND:

People who supported or helped organize the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol are now voicing their approval of Sunday's violent attack on Brazil's Congress after they spent months boosting conspiracies about stolen elections in the South American country.

Former White house adviser Steve Bannon and Stop the Steal founder Ali Alexander were among the most prominent voices cheering on the thousands of people who attacked government buildings in Brazil, while QAnon supporters said they stood in solidarity with the Brazilian rioters while simultaneously spreading fresh conspiracies about who was behind the attack.

Even though former President Jair Bolsonaro has denounced the violence, and the attacks have led to mass arrests, Bannon posted multiple messages on the fringe, extremist platform Gettr to show his support for those involved.

THE TIGHTENING NOOSE:

A special grand jury in Georgia that has been investigating former President Donald Trump and others for possible crimes related to their efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss in that state has completed its work, according to a court filing.

The end of the state grand jury's work eight months after its members were seated means it will now be up to Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis to decide whether to file criminal charges in the case.

The grand jury, which has been gathering evidence and hearing testimony in Atlanta, has written a final report on its findings.

THE ABRAHAM ACCORDS IN ACTION:

Osman's plight is better understood in the context of the ever-expanding global reach of Egypt's authoritarian regime. Since coming to power in 2014, Sisi's repression has reached unprecedented levels, with experts estimating tens of thousands held as political prisoners and Egyptian civil society activists are under constant threat of imprisonment, travel bans, and asset freezes, forcing many to flee the country. Sisi's long arm of repression has even extended to silencing critics beyond Egypt's borders in what academics call "transnational repression." Indeed, Egypt is third, after China and Turkey -- and even surpassing Russia -- in a ranking of countries that commit transnational repression.

Osman isn't the first example of Egypt's attempts to repress Americans abroad. In June 2020, the regime arrested the family of U.S. human rights activist Mohamed Soltan after he filed a lawsuit in a U.S. court against former Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem el-Beblawi for condoning torture practices during Soltan's unjust imprisonment in Egypt. A year ago, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced the arrest of an Egyptian spy in New York who collected information about Sisi's political opponents in the United States. The suspect even sought to leverage his connections with local U.S. law enforcement officers to assist him in his endeavor. Sisi is clearly willing to threaten the lives of U.S. citizens and their families to silence any and all criticism.

UAE as a Facilitator of Transnational Repression 

Although the UAE freed Osman, traveling there has turned into a nightmare for democracy advocates and critics, as well as their family members, from all over the world. A few months before Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered, the UAE authorities arrested his wife, Hanan Elatr, while she visited her family there, interrogated her about Khashoggi and his exile activism, and planted the powerful spyware Pegasus on her phone. Similarly, In August 2022, Asim Ghafoor, a U.S. citizen and former lawyer of Khashoggi, was released after spending a month in UAE prisons on vague charges related to financial corruption.

Furthermore, in 2018, the UAE helped hack, arrest, and forcibly fly prominent Saudi women's rights activist Loujain Al-Hathloul back to Saudi Arabia, where she was tortured. The UAE also aided China's repression of Uyghurs by extraditing them to China and allowing high-ranking Chinese officials to run "black sites" on UAE soil, where they were coerced into spying for the Chinese Communist Party. 

Absence of Accountability

Osman's case reflects an important feature of the U.S.-Egypt relationship and the U.S. relationship with its allies in the Middle East and North Africa in general: the United States has consistently avoided holding Egyptian or other officials of the region's regimes   accountable for their violations, even against U.S. citizens. For instance, Egypt ignored calls by former Vice President Mike Pence to release Mostafa Kassem, another U.S. citizen, from prison after he was wrongfully arrested in 2013. He died in January 2020 after a long hunger strike and six years behind bars. Although members of Congress called on then-President Donald Trump to impose sanctions on the Egyptian regime, Sisi, once dubbed by Trump as his "favorite dictator," suffered no consequences.

As a presidential candidate, Biden had promised to take a different path during his presidency, saying Sisi will get "no more blank checks," vowing to place human rights at the center of his foreign policy, and pledging to counter transnational repression. After nearly two years, the Biden administration has failed to turn these pledges into actual policies regarding Egypt or the broader region. The United States has been unable or unwilling to hold these authorities accountable for their violations of human rights and democratic norms. This paved the way for such regimes to further export their repression and even target U.S. citizens without fearing any form of accountability.

THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

The sharp crack of sniper fire rang out across the snowbound valley. Soldiers in white camouflage crouched low, shooting at the hill opposite to provide cover as four men evacuated a casualty.

The action was part of a live-fire training exercise for new recruits on a recent morning outside the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv. But there was an unusual element to the event. While a Ukrainian army officer was giving the orders, the trainees were members of a volunteer Chechen battalion that also mixed in some Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians.

Ukraine's military commanders have long said they do not lack soldiers for the war, but they have nonetheless welcomed to their ranks thousands of volunteers, including foreign citizens. Many of them, like the Chechens, are refugees from Russia itself. Others have come from surrounding nations, like Georgia, that have a history of opposition to Russia and the leadership of President Vladimir Putin.

"We saw what was happening," said Muslim Madiyev, a gray-bearded deputy commander of the Chechen battalion, wearing ear protectors to muffle the sound of gunfire as he watched the training exercises. "Ukraine has no shortage of men, but we have to join and be a part of this war."

THE ORIGINAL OPPONENT OF ANTI-CRT RULES:

In spite of his principles, due to the various structural and economic calamities of the end of the Era of Good Feelings, John Quincy Adams had been unable to devote his energy towards the fight for abolition. That changed with the imposition of a gag rule in 1836, which prohibited any discussion of slavery within the House of Representatives. Immediately, the elderly Quincy rose up from his seat and shouted, "Am I gagged or am I not?"

It would have been easy for Quincy, as a somewhat misguided Stoic, to dismiss his initial reaction as a moment of fleeting passion, accept the status quo, and go quietly about the rest of his tenure. But that would not do. Instead, Quincy spent nearly a decade rallying support against the gag rule. He filed hundreds of petitions challenging the measure, took on an immense emotional burden that flared his chronic depression, and received several death threats for his trouble.

However, he persevered, and these efforts came to fruition in 1844 when the gag rule was repealed by a vote of 108-80. When combined with his defense of the 35 survivors of the Amistad slave ship, the picture painted of Quincy is one of a passionate statesman who recognized that politics is innately tied with self-interest, but, especially in his old age, did not allow it to prevent him from doing what is right. His efforts were central to the abolitionist movement that would eventually culminate in the 13th Amendment.

Contemporary conservatives can learn from Quincy's example. While doing the right thing may not always get you a Fox News job or lucrative consulting positions, it can earn the respect of both your countrymen and your fellow legislators -- and if there is any interest in governance at all, that respect is far more valuable than any number of social media likes.

THE BLESSINGS:

Populism and nationalism are each their own thing, however, and the mix with conservatism only comes about haphazardly, awkwardly, and with no small amount of peril. At root, conservatism is about conserving the best of the past, conserving all things humane, and promoting the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Perhaps most importantly, conservatism is a term demanding the recognition of the mores, norms, habits, customs, and traditions of association (family, church, etc.), and community. It means conserving the philosophy of Socrates and Aquinas, the literature of Chaucer and Shakespeare, the imagination of Virgil and Dante, and the politics of Aristotle and Cicero.

As the debate rages across the internet, there's no reason not to go back to the founder of post-war conservatism, Russell Kirk (1918-1994).

"'Conservatism,' as a term of politics, signified originally the guardianship of ancient liberties," Kirk wrote in Continuity in its introductory issue, 1982. This definition--one to which Kirk gave a lifetime of thought--is the most succinct one he ever offered. While it's not a complete way of thinking, it is a good one.

NOT A HIGH BAR TO CLEAR...:

Former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro denounced the "depredations and invasions of public buildings" in Brasilia, after his supporters stormed key government buildings Sunday, reported CNN.

Bolsonaro tweeted that "peaceful demonstrations, respecting the law, are part of democracy."

"However, depredations and invasions of public buildings as occurred today, as well as those practiced by the left in 2013 and 2017, escape the rule," he continued.

"Throughout my mandate, I have always been acting according to the Constitution, respecting and defending the laws, democracy, transparency and our sacred freedom," added Bolsonaro.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel has re-opened her criminal investigation into fake electors who signed a certificate claiming former President Donald Trump won the state in the 2020 election when he did not, she said on Friday.

Nessel, a Democrat who previously referred the matter to federal prosecutors, told reporters that she is "a little worried" that more than a year has passed since she referred cases related to the false slates of electors to the Justice Department and believes there is "clear evidence" to support charges against the fake electors from Michigan.

"What we have seen from the January 6 committee is an overwhelming amount of evidence. I thought that there was already a substantial amount of evidence in that case. But now, there is just clear evidence to support charges against those 16 false electors, at least in our state," Nessel said.

NO ONE HATES JUST MEXICANS:

An Iranian-American microbiologist and self-described "late bloomer", Roosh discovered the PUA community during his senior year of college and "took to [it] like a fish to water", later using his writing to share this information with like-minded readers eager to get more women to sleep with them. He also self-published a host of pickup and travel guides about the rough and at times nonconsensual sex he had around the world. In 2012, he founded Return of Kings, a site that published articles with headlines such as "The Intellectual Inferiority of Women" and "When Her No Means Yes", as well as a 2015 piece (which he characterised as satirical) in which he proposed that rape be legalised in non-public settings. His doctrine of "neomasculinity" holds that "a woman's value significantly depends on her fertility and beauty", while "a man's value significantly depends on his resources, intellect, and character". 

While Roosh had clearly begun to move pickup artistry into a more politicised dimension -- probably because he sought common cause against his critics rather than any deeply held political principles -- it was his successors who drove it into full embrace with the Online Right. Roosh, in fact, has had a fairly complicated relationship with the supposed "white nationalist" elements of what journalists were all rushing to lump together as the "alt-Right", at times defending neo-Nazi Richard Spencer and at others characterising white nationalism as "a frustrated mob that wants to control the sexual choices of all men". He also feuded with Right-wing activists, such as Lauren Southern, for adding little to the Right besides physical attractiveness. And this stance, combined with his own lack of charisma and decidedly non-"alpha" pedigree, has limited him to fringe status. In recent years, Roosh distanced himself from both the alt-Right and PUAs, removing many of his books from print, and banning PUA and casual-sex talk from his website's forums in 2019 after converting to the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

Mike Cernovich, by contrast, made a far smoother transition from being a PUA to a member of the Online Right, even as he also gradually drifted toward "trad" stances on various issues. His career began as a stock libertarian concerned with "false rape" accusations (he was on the receiving end of such an allegation, and advised secretly filming sexual encounters and building up a texting paper trail to ward them off). But from there, he progressed to investigations of "alpha male" masculinity -- he once even praised former president Barack Obama's "Alpha Male status" -- via his Danger and Play advice blog. The site had a broad brief, ranging from nutritional supplements to male body image, but it also offered tips for becoming more dominant in the bedroom, including choking a woman during sex. Owing to a "seven-figure" divorce settlement from his first wife, Cernovich was able to devote considerable time to these online ventures. 

By this point, the worlds of PUAs and the Online Right had begun to blur; there was simply no way for self-proclaimed PUAs to find fair harbour on the Left or in non-aligned spaces. Cernovich, unlike Roosh, made a fairly rapid and shrewd transition from the alt-Right fringe to something of a "happy warrior" for the far-Right mainstream. Piggybacking on the success of his 2015 book Gorilla Mindset ("a book about embracing your gorilla nature to find dominance and power"), he rushed out MAGA Mindset: Making YOU and America Great Again to capitalise on the 2016 primary success of Donald Trump. From there, he achieved great acclaim fanning the fires of various paedophilic conspiracies and other more conventional Right-wing issues, playing a key role in the early days of Pizzagate and generally using "trolling tactics to build my brand", as he told The New Yorker.

TRADITION!:

The Sacred Wood turned the attention of the literary world to the "metaphysical poets" of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and to the Elizabethan dramatists--the lesser predecessors and the heirs of Shakespeare, whose raw language, rich with the sensation of the thing described, provided a telling contrast to the sentimental sweetness that Eliot condemned in his immediate contemporaries. There is also an essay on Dante, discussing a question that was frequently to trouble Eliot--that of the relationship between poetry and belief. To what extent could one appreciate the poetry of the Divine Comedy while rejecting the doctrine that had inspired it? This question was a real one for Eliot, for several reasons.

Eliot was--like his fellow modernists and contemporaries, Ezra Pound and James Joyce--profoundly influenced by Dante, whose limpid verse-form, colloquial style, and solemn philosophy created a vision of the ideal in poetry. At the same time, he rejected the theological vision of the Divine Comedy--rejected it with a deep sense of loss. Yet in his own poetry the voice of Dante would constantly return, offering him turns of phrase, lightning flashes of thought, and--most of all--a vision of the modern world from a point of view outside it, a point of view irradiated by an experience of holiness (albeit an experience that he did not then share). And when Eliot did finally come to share in this vision, he wrote, in the last of the Four Quartets, the most brilliant of all imitations of Dante in English--an imitation which is something far finer than an imitation, in which the religious vision of Dante is transported and translated into the world of modern England.

One other essay in The Sacred Wood deserves mention--"Tradition and the Individual Talent," in which Eliot introduces the term which best summarizes his contribution to the political consciousness of the twentieth century: tradition. In this essay Eliot argues that true originality is possible only within a tradition--and further, that every tradition must be remade by the genuine artist, in the very act of creating something new. A tradition is a living thing, and just as each writer is judged in terms of those who went before, so does the meaning of the tradition change as new works are added to it. It was this literary idea of a living tradition that was gradually to permeate Eliot's thinking, and to form the core of his social and political philosophy.

Prufrock and The Sacred Wood already help us to understand the paradox of T. S. Eliot--that our greatest literary modernist should also be our greatest modern conservative. The man who overthrew the nineteenth century in literature and inaugurated the age of free verse, alienation, and experiment was also the man who, in 1928, was to describe himself as "classical in literature, royalist in politics, and Anglo-Catholic in religion." This seeming paradox contains a clue to Eliot's greatness as a social and political thinker. For Eliot recognized that it is precisely in modern conditions--conditions of fragmentation, heresy, and unbelief--that the conservative project acquires its sense. Conservatism is itself a modernism, and in this fact lies the secret of its success. What distinguishes Burke from the French revolutionaries is not his attachment to things past, but rather his desire to live fully in the concrete present, to understand the present in all its imperfections, and to accept the present as the only reality that is offered to us. Like Burke, Eliot recognized the distinction between a backward-looking nostalgia, which is but another form of modern sentimentality, and a genuine tradition, which grants us the courage and the vision with which to live in the modern world.

TO INFINITY...AND BEYOND:

Based in Tel Aviv, Israel, Electreon Wireless knows that charging infrastructure can be a big deterrent for consumers who are considering buying an electric car. Many drivers worry about battery range or are put off by longer charging times and lines at public chargers. 

Electreon is working to allay these fears with its wireless-charging technology, which uses magnetic frequencies from coils embedded in the road to charge specialized receivers that can be installed on electric cars, trucks, forklifts, and more. A receiver costs around $3,500 per installation, according to Axios, but Electreon claims the price can get closer to $1,500. 

This technology won't simply increase the average electric car's range, either. Electreon sees an opportunity for wireless charging to be used for electric buses, long-haul trucks, machines in busy warehouses and distribution centers, and in dense, urban environments. All of these scenarios would benefit from increased range and faster charging times, while saving space that traditional, above-ground chargers take up. 

DIE NADL AND THE DAMAGE DONE:

Sasse has long been a frequent critic of the way the Senate does business, calling it a "performative" body where there's no real debate. When senators take to the floor to speak, the C-SPAN cameras never pull back to show that the rest of the chamber is completely empty. No lawmakers are listening.

Sasse said he's also troubled by today's political polarization, with the major parties increasingly controlled by people on the left who think an ever-bigger government can solve all the nation's problems and those on the right who believe a "strongman" is the answer.

"Like we literally ran a guy for president who said, 'I alone can fix it' -- one of the most anti-conservative statements a human can possibly make about the role of the state," Sasse said.

Of course, Sasse was referring to Trump, with whom Sasse had a complicated relationship from the start.

Sasse never endorsed Trump when he first ran in 2016. In fact, both times Trump was on the ballot, Sasse says he wrote in the name of Trump running mate Mike Pence instead.

While Trump and Sasse often agreed on policy, Sasse also was one of few Republicans in Washington willing to publicly criticize the president.

Sasse particularly expressed concerns about Trump's authoritarian streak. The grievance politics Trump and his supporters espoused also didn't fit with Sasse's view of conservatism.

"The reason you believe in conservatism is because we're grateful for all that we've inherited," Sasse said.

Sasse did vote with Trump 85% of the time, though Sasse says that was due to the fact they were simply in policy agreement, not a reflection of some kind of loyalty to the president.

"I'm gonna flip it on you and say he supported my policies," Sasse said. "I felt the same way since before he was in public life."

Arguably the most consequential votes Sasse took in the Senate were those to confirm Trump's three conservative justices to the Supreme Court. Sasse last week revealed the personal role he played in the battles to confirm Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

Right after Trump was elected, it was still unclear whether the political maverick many conservatives still didn't trust would follow through on his pledge to appoint reliable conservatives to the court.

So Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell asked Sasse to join the Judiciary Committee to advocate for staunch conservatives. Sasse was not an attorney, but he had deep interest in constitutional law.

Said Sasse: "Mitch came to me and said, 'Listen, we don't know if Trump's gonna keep his word on these judges. Why don't we put you on the Judiciary Committee, and if he doesn't do what he says he's gonna do, you can take (the nominees) down. ... And if he keeps his word, being the champion of a lot of these judges will be meaningful to people.' "

Sasse said he immediately became the "founding member of the Amy Coney Barrett for Supreme Court Fan Club." From the start, he frequently called Trump to lobby him to nominate her. He said he subsequently got to know Trump "quite well."

"One thing that's sort of lost on the public is he's actually quite funny when you spend time with him, and he would answer his phone and say, 'Ben, is this about that lady professor from Notre Dame again?'" Sasse recalled.

The third time around, Trump did nominate Barrett. And in contentious battles in the Senate, all three nominees were confirmed.

Also among Sasse's most consequential votes were the ones that followed Trump's two impeachment trials in the Senate.

In Trump's first trial, Sasse voted to acquit. Unlike many Republicans who argued Trump had done nothing wrong, Sasse said it was clear Trump had some personal motives when he held up military aid to Ukraine, because the president was seeking to get Ukraine's president to announce an investigation against his opponent, Joe Biden.

But Sasse noted the aid was ultimately paid without any political favor, and he also questioned the national political fallout that would result from removing a president just nine months before he stood for reelection.

After Trump subsequently lost that election, Sasse became one of congressional Republicans' most vocal critics of Trump's false claims of election fraud and his efforts to overturn his loss.

And then after Trump's efforts to cling to power sparked the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, Sasse called Trump's actions that day "wicked." He ultimately joined just six other Republicans in Trump's second impeachment trial voting to convict.

YELLOW IS THE NEW ORANGE:

Supporters of Brazil's far-right ex-president Jair Bolsonaro have pushed through police barricades and stormed into the national Congress building Sunday in a dramatic protest against President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva's inauguration last week.

THERE'S NO SUCH THING AS QUALITY:

You probably already know that "truffle-flavored oil" is not made from truffles. It is a cheap oil with added synthetic truffle flavor.

There are several reasons why this is terrible. Synthetic garbage sold as a luxury gourmet item gives customers the idea that truffles have an intense gas-like aroma.

It is a scam because it deceives customers; that is, it falsely represents a product that has nothing to do with truffles and puts all restaurateurs who try to work honestly in an unfavorable position: if you don't flavor truffle dishes with added aromas and flavors that the guests are used to, the naive guests will think you're being cheap and trying to save on their meal.

What you don't know is that almost everything else named "truffles" is a lie: we don't just mean truffle-flavored chips, ketchup, or chocolate (you can surely taste the artificial aroma), but also tartufata, jar packaged truffles, cheese, and truffle sausages, as well as the vast majority of pasta and "truffle" frittatas in restaurants.

Quimet & Quimet is one of the tourists' favorite tapas bars in Barcelona. Their secret? "Truffle" honey on almost everything. Machneyuda is the biggest hit restaurant in Jerusalem. Their secret: truffle oil in polenta. Every metropolis is packed with stalls selling burgers "with truffles." Many well-respected pizzerias serve pizzas "with truffles."

Almost all the restaurants in Croatian Istria serve dishes with a fake truffle aroma, though they shave the decorative truffles on top. Even the otherwise fantastic Eataly offers products "with truffles." But all that flavor doesn't come from truffles.

There is no shame in not knowing that. As the best truffles are extremely difficult to find, most chefs and journalists are unaware of this. Even the "experts" hand out awards for this aromatized garbage with only bits of decorative truffles. Almost everything with the truffle label that is available in stores or served in restaurants is a lie and a fraud.

SIMPLE ECONOMICS:

[A] new solar-powered EV recently broke a world record for the shortest time for an EV to go 1,000 kilometers (approximately 621 miles) on just a single charge. 

In late 2022, the Sunswift 7 -- an insanely sleek and lightweight race car that weighs only a quarter of what a Tesla weighs -- was granted the Guinness World Record designation after traveling 1,000 kilometers in just under 12 hours. 

The Sunswift 7, which was designed and built in part by students at Australia's University of New South Wales, is powered by solar panels on its roof -- as well as batteries. 

...AND CHEAPER...:

IT ALL BEGINS WITH HATING HUMANS:

[I]s this Malthusian principle also linked to Planned Parenthood? According to George Grant, a biographer of Margaret Sanger (the founder of Planned Parenthood), the answer is unambiguously yes. Detailing her escape from the US during a time when her publications may have put her in federal prison for breaking the Comstock laws, Sanger found herself in England.

Grant writes, "As soon as she came ashore, Margaret began to make contact with the various radical groups of Britain. She began attending socialist lectures on Nietzsche's moral relativism, anarchist lectures on Kropotkin's subversive pragmatism, and communist lectures on Bakunin's collectivistic rationalism. But she was especially interested in developing close ties with the Malthusians."[7]

Grant explains how the path could go from Malthus's pen to the neo-Malthusian world of Sanger. "Malthus's disciples--the Malthusians and the NeoMalthusians-believed that if Western civilization were to survive, the physically unfit, the materially poor, the spiritually diseased, the racially inferior, and the mentally incompetent had to somehow be suppressed and isolated perhaps even eliminated. And while Malthus was forthright in recommending plague, pestilence, and petrification, his disciples felt that the subtler and more 'scientific' approaches of education, contraception, sterilization, and abortion were more practical and acceptable ways to ease the pressures of the supposed overpopulation."[8]

And Margaret Sanger was "all in," as they say.

Not surprisingly, Margaret immediately got on the Malthusian bandwagon. She was not philosophically inclined, nor was she particularly adept at political, social, or economic theory, but she did recognize in the Malthusians a kindred spirit and a tremendous opportunity. She was also shrewd enough to realize that her notions of radical socialism and sexual liberation would never have the popular support necessary to usher in the revolution without some appeal to altruism and intellectualism. She needed somehow to capture the moral and academic "high ground." Malthusianism, she thought, just might be the key to that ethical and intellectual posture. If she could argue for birth control using the scientifically verified threat of poverty, sickness, racial tension, and overpopulation as its backdrop, then she would have a much better chance of making her case. So she began to absorb as much of the Malthusian dogma as she could. Margaret also immersed herself in the teachings of each of the Malthusian offshoots. If a little bit of something is a good thing, then a lot is even better. There was phrenology, Binetism, and Craniometricism. There was Oneidianism, Polygenesis, Recapitulationism, Lambrosianism, Hereditarianism, Freudianism, and Neotenism. From each group she picked Up a few popular slogans and concepts that would permanently shape her crusade. . But Eugenics left the most lasting impression on the malleable mold of her nascent worldview of radicalism. Eugenics was perhaps the most revolutionary of the pseudo-sciences spawned by Malthusianism.[9]

Thus, the "birth" of Planned Parenthood stems from the exact same theoretical framework as Scrooge: it stems from the thought of Thomas Malthus.

EVERYWEHERE AND ONLY A FUNCTION OF WAGES:

Brian Adams, Lara Loewenstein, Hugh Montag, and Randal J. Verbrugge published published "Disentangling Rent Index Differences: Data, Methods, and Scope" where they created the New Tenant Repeat Rent (NTRR) Index and All Tenant Repeat Rent (ATRR) Index. Using the same underlying BLS microdata that composes the housing component of the CPI, the NTRR uses information on lease turnover to track rent growth in units that change tenants. The ATRR covers all housing units but attributes rent changes to when they happened, as opposed to the official CPI data which tracks price changes when units are surveyed.

The paper helps identify the relationship between NTRR, ATRR, and the official CPI--in particular, it says the ATTR leads the official CPI data by about one quarter and the NTRR leads the official CPI by about a year. This is a critical signal for monetary policy, as the NTRR caught the weakness in housing price inflation in 2006/2007 long before official CPI data. Given the NTRR readings in 2022, we can currently expect year-on-year rent inflation to peak in Q1/Q2 of this year and begin decreasing in Q2/Q3.

Also, this data helps confirm some of the signals that private-sector rental data have been showing since June of this year. Similar repeat-rental datasets from ApartmentList and Zillow have been showing rapid decelerations in year-on-year rent growth since this summer, and the NTRR data affirms this while suggesting a later and lower peak for housing inflation. [...]

NTRR data also helps affirm the relationship between monetary policy, labor market dynamics, and the cyclical components of inflation. Growth in Gross Labor Income (GLI), the sum of all wages and salaries in the economy, is highly correlated to cyclical growth in the rental components of CPI, but previously we could only see this relationship with a time lag and a gap in growth rates. With the NTRR, we can see the relationship much more clearly--cyclical economic strength influences GLI growth, which then drives movements in rents for new tenants, which then gets passed on to CPI housing indices with a one-year lag.

A WORTHY NOBEL:

I always tried to read with the greatest possible detachment - the objectivity which I felt befitted a Marxist. I even made it a rule to stop reading any novel the minute I felt I was being carried away by it.

That night I did not try to curb my wish for escapism. On the contrary, I was delighted to be able, for a few hours, to exchange the drabness of my own life for the lives of other people.

By the time I at last finished the book and laid it down, it was midday. My eyes were filled with tears. I was hardly conscious of feeling tired, after a whole night without sleep. It was not until I had finished the book that I looked at its title - Quo Vadis?, by a certain Sienkiewicz. The Petit Larousse informed that he was a Polish novelist who had won the Nobel Prize in 1905. I had never heard of him.

I expect that most of my readers know Quo Vadis?, so that it will not be necessary for me to describe its plot at any length. It is a historical novel, very much in the style of the late nineteenth century, and set in the age of Nero, when a savage persecution of Christians was raging in the imperial capital. The followers of Christ, one after another, were flung to the lions in the circus, or set on fire and left to blaze like torches, to light up the festivities in the Emperor's gardens. Some, like their Master, were crucified. The apostle Paul was put to death, and Peter, the Prince of the Apostles, began, as once before, to waver. He let himself be persuaded that he would be serving the best interests of the Church if he fled. But, when he had left the city walls behind him, he met Christ, walking towards Rome. "Where art Thou going, Lord?" he asked in consternation: "Quo vadis, Domine?" Christ's reply was uncompromising: "As you, Peter, are deserting My flock, I am going to Rome, to be crucified for the second time." No more was needed to make the apostle repent of his cowardice. He turned back, took his place once more at the head of the community, and, not long after, was crucified. On his own plea, as a mark of humility, he was fastened to the cross head downwards.

If I had not been so totally ignorant of everything connected with Christianity, it is quite likely that Sienkiewicz's novel would have made less impression on me. Even as it was, there were many things in it which I did not understand. Why, for instance, was it so important that Peter should die in Rome? Again, I did not see the true significance of his meeting with Christ. These were matters I was as yet unable to understand, for they belonged to the supernatural order whose very existence was a closed book to me. What I found so enthralling in Quo Vadis? was the picture it gave of the life of Christian communities in the first century. I felt suddenly as if everything for which I had been confusedly longing ever since I was fifteen, and had vainly sought in Communism, was not, at all, to be found only in some imaginary utopia. The early Christians had made it come true.

The fact that the book was a novel, not a work of strict historical accuracy, did not at once strike me. As soon as I did realize that it was, after all, a work of the imagination, I made up my mind to find out at all costs whether, and to what extent, Sienkiewicz had respected the truth of history, or whether this was just another bit of propaganda writing on the pattern of the books meekly turned out by Communists at the orders of the Politburo. I knew, for instance, how very little resemblance there was between the kolkhoz of the Russian novel and the kolkhoz of real life. Had the Polish novelist also been turning out clever propaganda with only a very flimsy basis of reality?

...AND CHEAPER...:

[P]lastic bags aren't the only items being mixed in with asphalt. An area outside of Sacramento, California has started removing parts of its Highway 99, replacing it with an asphalt compound comprised of hard-to-recycle printer ink cartridges. 

Meanwhile, the Missouri Department of Transportation (MoDOT) is partnering with the University of Missouri, Columbia to create a durable asphalt mix out of plastic pellets from bottles. In a press release, MoDOT's Chief Engineer, Ed Hassinger, explained the goal of the pilot program:

"Our best-case scenario is that [plastic infusions] make the asphalt more resilient and durable and get rid of a waste stream that no one can do anything with," Hassinger said. 

These plans could have a major impact on the amount of plastic waste sitting in our trash. Hawaii's pilot project is testing an asphalt mixture with up to 50% recycled materials, meaning the future of pavement in the Aloha State could keep millions of plastic products from clogging up landfills. 

Considering the fact that tens of millions of tons of plastic end up in landfills every year -- an amount that comprises roughly 86% of all plastic waste in the United States -- it's crucial that we find creative ways to use it. 

Besides helping the environment, utilizing plastic-asphalt mixtures could save states and their taxpayers a ton of money, all while limiting the amount of road work. 

GREATEST WAR EVER:

[T]he combination of a failed war abroad and a brittle, strained system at home is increasing the likelihood of some sort of implosion with every passing day. Regardless of whether this will be good or bad for the West, it's an outcome policymakers should prepare for.

There are various scenarios for what might happen in Russia after defeat in Ukraine becomes even clearer. Most likely is Russian President Vladimir Putin's departure from office, followed by a vicious power struggle among the extreme right-wing nationalists who want to continue the war effort and destroy the existing political hierarchy, authoritarian conservatives who have a stake in the system, and a resurgent semi-democratic movement committed to ending the war and reforming Russia. We don't know who will win, but we can confidently predict that the power struggle will weaken the regime and distract Russia from what remains of its war effort. In turn, a weakened regime, in conjunction with a malfunctioning economy, will invite disgruntled Russians to take to the streets, perhaps even with arms, and encourage some of the non-Russian political units comprising the Russian Federation to opt for greater self-rule; leading candidates include Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Chechnya, Dagestan, and Sakha. 

In terms of improving the capabilities of Australia's warships, CNN reported this week that the maneuverable and sea-skimming NSM would double the range of Australia's warships to 185 kilometers.

CNN also notes that Australia could deploy HIMARS in Southeast Asia or the Pacific, as the US Marine Corps has been exercising with the system under the presumption that it may need to be deployed somewhere in the region in the event of hostilities including a potential clash over Taiwan or in the South China Sea.

This missile sale aligns with US efforts to create a "missile wall" in the Pacific. Asia Times has reported on US missile projects such as the Typhon, OpFires and Long Range Hypersonic Weapon (LRHW) projects, which may be deployed in the First and Second Island Chains to deter China's expansion into the Pacific.

AND PEOPLE THINK THEY SHOULD BE ALLOWED GUNS?:

On Monday night, a Ring surveillance camera captured two men dressed in black with masks covering their faces walking up to Servicio de Inmigracion in Bakersfield, California. The two men proceed to dump the accelerant over the side of the building and parking lot in front. 

As one of the men continued to spread the fuel, the second squatted over a puddle of the accelerant and tried to light it on fire, the video shows. The fire ignited violently t and the man sprinted away with his leg on fire. The second man panicked and fell down twice, and like his comrade, sprinted away from the scene of the crime on fire. 

The man could be heard screaming as he ran into the night. 

BLAMING THE VICTIMHOOD:

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

"All of it was fuelled by lies about the 2020 election, but on this day two years ago, our democracy held because we the people...did not flinch," Biden said.

"History will remember your names..remember your courage and remember your bravery," Biden said.

The honorees also included former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers and Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, who resisted pressure to overturn the 2020 election results in their states, Capitol Police officer Eugene Goodman, who diverted rioters from the Senate floor while lawmakers were evacuating, and Georgia election worker Ruby Freeman, who was falsely accused by Trump of election fraud.

The White House on Friday added two names to the list, both of whom took their own lives in the aftermath of January 6, US Capitol Police officer Howard Liebengood and Washington police officer Jeffrey Smith.

Freeman was forced to flee her home last year after death threats from angry Trump supporters.

Trump on Wednesday targeted Freeman by name again to his nearly five million followers on his social media platform.

Biden said Freeman and others fought back against "predators and peddlers of lies" about the 2020 election won by Biden.

THEY NEVER TIRE OF LOSING:

The New York Times reports that Beryl A. Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court in Washington, ruled that the former president's lawyers have to hand over the names of private investigators whom they claimed conducted searches of Trump properties for additional classified documents.

According to the Times, the Department of Justice wants the names of the investigators so it can question them personally on their findings.

"The fact that the Justice Department sought a formal order for the investigators' names suggests an increasing breakdown in trust between prosecutors investigating the documents case and Mr. Trump's legal team," the paper writes. "And the request comes as a special counsel has taken over the inquiry into whether Mr. Trump willfully retained sensitive records or obstructed the government's efforts to retrieve them."

IT'S ALWAYS THE rIGHT:

IT'S IMPOSSIBLE TO OVERSTATE DEFLATIONARY PRESSURES:

Maybe we should start the new year with some good news: Inflation has fallen dramatically.

No, that's not a prediction; it's a fact. With one month remaining in 2022 (in terms of available data), inflation in the second half of the year has run vastly lower than in the first half. In fact--and this is astonishing--it's almost back down to the Federal Reserve's 2% target. Even more astonishing, hardly anyone seems to have noticed.

ONE ECONOMY TO RULE THEM ALL:

America! We do recession different. https://t.co/5GSm2syP1j

— brothersjudd (@brothersjudd) January 6, 2023

JOBS maga WON'T DO:

THAT WAS EASY:

Great Britain produced a record amount of wind-powered electricity in 2022, according to the National Grid.

More electricity came from renewable and nuclear power sources than from fossil fuels gas and coal, the second highest after 2020. [...]

Sources like wind and solar are also significantly cheaper and should lead to cheaper bills in the long-run.

OF COURSE, IT SHIFTED IN 1865:

A year later, the script reads differently. China's economy has turned sluggish, pulled down by expanding state intervention in the economy, waves of COVID-related lockdowns, a property sector slowdown and softening international demand for Chinese exports. Beijing's messy exit from its zero-COVID policy has exacerbated domestic stressors. Even as China remains the largest trading partner for most of the world, its economic lustre has dimmed amid declining economic growth.

China's international image in most of the developed world has also suffered. Part of this owes to China's rhetorical support for Russia amid Moscow's barbarism in Ukraine. China's plummeting image is also attributable to its hardening authoritarianism at home, its nationalistic 'wolf warrior' diplomacy and its growing military activity along its periphery, including in the waters and airspace around Taiwan.

By comparison, Biden's political position has strengthened. At home, the Biden administration secured passage of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, which together add up to over US$1 trillion in government spending. Though elements of these investments favouring domestic manufacturing have generated friction with US trading partners, they represent a generational investment in US innovation. Technology companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix, Intel and IBM announced investments in semiconductor production in the United States exceeding US$100 billion.

The United States also strengthened its position abroad. Transatlantic unity deepened under the stress of the joint response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Coordination strengthened in other purpose-driven groupings, such as the Quad and AUKUS. The G7 bolstered its relevance as its members acted with greater cohesion on global challenges, including financing Indonesia and Vietnam's clean energy transitions. US-ASEAN ties were elevated to a comprehensive strategic partnership. The United States' relationships with Pacific Island countries also advanced, including through the release of the White House's Pacific Partnership Strategy.

ALWAYS BET ON THE dEEP sTATE:

Sandra Garza, the longtime partner of the fallen U.S. Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick, filed a lawsuit Thursday against former President Trump and two other defendants charged with assaulting Sicknick during the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Driving the news: The lawsuit, filed by lawyers for Garza and Sicknick's estate, seeks $10 million in damages. It alleges wrongful death and conspiracy to violate civil rights. Sicknick suffered two strokes and died of natural causes after clashing with rioters during the Jan. 6 attack.

AIN'T TOO PROUD BOY TO BEG:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said no way.

Putin is trying "to use Christmas as a cover to at least briefly stop the advance of our guys in Donbass and bring equipment, ammunition and mobilize closer to our positions," Zelenskyy said in a statement to his countrymen. "Everyone in the world knows how the Kremlin uses lulls in the war to continue the war with new force."

YOUR NEXT CAR WILL BE A VOLT:

Electrified transport is powered with electrons which can derive from various domestically produced sources, increasingly wind and solar, rather than depending on imported fuels.

European policy is facilitating the need for an electrified vehicle fleet to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and meet climate goals. The EU will ratify the provisional political agreement (agreed in October 2022) to ban ICE vehicle sales in the EU by 2035, signalling the long overdue demise of this 100+ year old technology. 

But market dynamics may force this demise far sooner; if emissions concerns started this transformation of transport, economic preferences will likely finish it.

The past year has proved that consumer demand for BEVs is still strong, despite headwinds such as inflation and supply constraints of some models, even conservative scenarios still see 50% of sales being BEV by 2027. 

This has led to waiting times of up to 18 months for some new BEVs in Europe. Whilst global vehicle production has been hampered by the on-going semiconductor shortage, the shift from an industry or policy 'push' to a consumer 'pull' is an important tipping point in the development of the BEV market. 

Examining the UK market in more detail we see all the elements of the global shift in transport technology from fossil fuels to electricity.

Even as the UK car market dampened slightly over 2022, demand for BEVs has remained strong and sales have grown, with fossil fueled car sales taking most of the blow of these contractions, demonstrating the strength of consumer need  for BEVs. The overall new car market shrank by 3% over 2022, with fossil fuel sales down by 8%, but new BEV registrations still grew 38%. 

YOUR NEXT LYFT WILL:

Stellantis, which makes Jeep and Chrysler vehicles, said Wednesday it will manufacture an electric air taxi with Archer Aviation -- one of several eVTOL companies nearing commercialization.

It also plans to invest $150 million in Archer, following an initial $75 million investment in 2021.

Stellantis, which has been providing Archer with engineering expertise, will now help it launch a new manufacturing facility in Covington, Georgia, starting in 2024.

The plan is for Stellantis to become the exclusive manufacturer of Archer's newly revealed eVTOL, called Midnight.

Details: Midnight, which can carry four passengers plus a pilot, is designed for back-to-back hops of around 20 miles, with approximately 10 minutes of charging between flights.

Its first route, starting in 2025, will link a Manhattan heliport to Newark Liberty International Airport, in partnership with United Airlines -- also an Archer investor.

THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

DON'T IT MAKE YOUR BROWN GUYS BLUE:

The leading energy production companies from Norway and Germany agreed on Thursday to set up facilities to provide Germany with blue hydrogen, during a visit to Oslo by German Economy Minister Robert Habeck.

Norway's state-run Equinor and Germany's RWE will invest in new power plants in Germany that will initially burn Norwegian natural gas but will eventually move over to low-carbon blue hydrogen, and finally zero-emissions green hydrogen.

NOT YOUR FATHER'S TALIBAN:

Afghanistan's ruling Taliban killed eight Islamic State militants and arrested nine others in a series of raids targeting key figures in a spate of attacks in Kabul, a senior Taliban government spokesman said Thursday.

Zabihullah Mujahid, spokesman for the Taliban government, said the raids in the capital city and western Nimroz province on Wednesday targeted IS militants who organized recent attacks on Kabul's Longan Hotel, Pakistan's embassy and the military airport.

THERE ARE NO THEMS, JUST US:

[I]n bestowing honours on Ephraim Mirvis, Marie van der Zyl, Jonathan Arkush, Mark Gardner and Rachel Riley, we are saying not only that these Britons have made exemplary contributions but that we as a nation wish to be known by their example.  

This is understandable. Mirvis, who received a knighthood, is the Chief Rabbi, the spiritual figurehead of Orthodox Judaism in Britain and the Commonwealth. Throughout a life of service he has taught but also lived the Torah, with an emphasis on achrayut, a Hebrew term for the responsibility one bears to others. As Chief Rabbi, Mirvis has conscientiously pursued interfaith relations with Christians and Muslims and has spoken against China's treatment of the Uyghurs.  

Van der Zyl, awarded an OBE, is president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews. Along with her predecessor Jonathan Arkush, who also becomes an OBE, she led the Board through one of the most testing periods for modern British Jewry: the Labour anti-Semitism scandal. Gardner becomes an MBE for his work as chief executive of the Community Security Trust (CST), a group that supplies Jewish schools and synagogues with safety equipment including CCTV cameras, security doors and anti-ramming bollards. TV host Riley, also given an MBE, has been recognised for her efforts on behalf of Holocaust education.  

They are not the only British Jews to be acknowledged on the New Year Honours list but they have in common a commitment to confronting anti-Semitism and a record of making people in power take notice of the problem. In recognising their efforts, the honours committee is expressing admiration for their public service and an affinity with the cause of fighting anti-Semitism. This is all well and good but it's not enough. It's not enough to give recognition or solidarity to Jews then go back to letting them tackle anti-Semitism on their own. Anti-Semitism and its suppression is not a 'them' thing but an 'us' thing. 

SUNUNU 2024!:

"Should we really be surprised that a bunch of morons in Congress are holding things up? Of course not," Sununu said Wednesday.

THE TRUMP BRAND:

One of the most prominent and most troubled of Putin's Western boosters is the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, who doesn't hold back on his admiration for Putin's war in Ukraine, and considers him to be a beacon of hope for the white race. Earlier this year, before he was fanning the flames of Kanye "I like Hitler" West's anti-Semitic meltdown, Fuentes made comments about sex with women that eerily echo the ideology of the Kremlin.

Fuentes also refers to himself as an incel, although he also states that he deliberately stays away from women, because he is heterosexual. One might think this makes him voluntarily celibate, but Fuentes explains: "The only really straight heterosexual position is to actually 'incel'. . . What's gayer than being 'I like cuddles, I need kisses?'"

It's not that Fuentes is opposed to sex with women per se. He is opposed to asking for affection. Incels frequently complain that, as women have been given more choice over their personal lives, men must now woo them rather than dragging them off to a cave.

Viewing all sexual contact as inherently transactional, incels decry the fact that they don't have the upper hand in the transaction. Genuine affection doesn't figure into their calculus, so it makes sense that people like Fuentes refer to sex with women as "gay." In their language, "gay" = "weak." And the officially homophobic Russian regime would readily agree.

Fuentes is not the only prominent weirdo in Putin's thrall. Fox News host Tucker Carlson is a much more famous and powerful Western Putinist. Blinded by Carlson's excellent ratings--his ability to both inspire and direct rage makes him infinitely watchable for both his admirers and detractors--we often forget that he has some strange ideas about masculinity.

It's not that Carlson is wrong about the existence of a crisis of masculinity in the United States. His instincts are correct--young men are having way less sex, for example. It's a notable societal shift, and simply laughing it off is foolish. It's just that Carlson's approach, which includes pushing "testosterone-boosting" gimmicks such as testicle tanning and not-so-subtly inviting conservative men to take their rage out on immigrants, is crazy. That's all in addition to his history of misogyny: Carlson once claimed that making uniforms more appropriate for female service members was "a mockery of the U.S. military."

Modern-day Russian fascism is similarly misogynist. Putin is known for his misogynist remarks. His government all but encourages domestic violence. His soldiers use mass rape as a weapon of war. His sneering pet propagandist, Margarita Simonyan, the head of RT, took to social media to make coy little comments about how Russians will enjoy Kyiv again soon, and will chase after "dark-browed Oksanas," a turn of phrase specifically aimed at advertising the sexual availability of Ukrainian women as seen by imperialist would-be conquerors from Russia.

This is not just a twisted vision of women; it's a twisted vision of humanity that has no room for happiness or affection. Affection can make you vulnerable, and vulnerability is anathema to Putinism, which first rose out of an aggrieved, anti-Western revanchism and a feeling of failure that over time turned into seething resentment.

Resentment is the key link between Putin, the serial philanderer, and the likes of Fuentes and Carlson. 

IDEOLOGY IS MURDER:

In its new report, a task force of the University of Florida College of Medicine's Faculty Council cites numerous deficiencies in the analysis Ladapo used to justify his vaccine recommendation. A summary said the work was "seriously flawed." The report's authors say Ladapo engaged in "careless, irregular, or contentious research practices."

The report, which was shared on Tuesday night with medical school faculty members and obtained by The Washington Post, is the first formal challenge to Ladapo from his academic colleagues. It was referred to the university's Office of Research Integrity, Security and Compliance, a UF spokesman confirmed on Tuesday. Under university guidelines, the referral could have compelled the state's flagship university to consider a formal investigation of Republican Governor Ron DeSantis's surgeon general.

IT'S JUST IDENTITY ALL THE TIME FOR THESE CHARACTERS:

The protracted fight lays bare both the power of the hard right and the depth of its disdain for the transactional political style of McCarthy, a California Republican. But the battle is also revealing the limitations of Trump's ability to reel in his allies and the burn-it-all-down political style he nurtured as his party's standard bearer. It's an indication that, following his own defeat in 2020 and those of key candidates he endorsed in last year's midterms, he has lost control of the forces he unleashed.

"Donald Trump was a model for never apologizing, never backing down, disrespecting institutions and traditions, the politics of contempt," said former representative Carlos Curbelo, a Florida Republican. "Frankenstein created a bunch of mini-Frankensteins and they are all grown up and independent now."

To be sure, the defiance on display from the House's antiestablishment wing predates both Trump's presidency and his entry into national politics as a candidate. It has roots in the Tea Party backlash to the Obama presidency...

THE TRUMP BRAND:

Around midnight last night, for reasons that aren't yet clear, Donald Trump used his social media platform to launch a new offensive against an old perceived foe. It started with this unfortunate missive:

"Wow! Has anyone seen the Ruby Freeman 'contradictions' of her sworn testimony? Now this is 'BIG STUFF.' Look what was captured by Cobb County police body cameras on January 4, 2021. ... Now it gets really bad."

Soon after, the former president published another item, accusing Freeman of election crimes, followed by a third missive, in which the Republican asked, "What will the Great State of Georgia do with the Ruby Freeman MESS?" Trump concluded that he's battling "the evils and treachery of the Radical Left monsters who want to see America die."

Both items referred to "suitcases" filled with ballots that Trump believes Freeman opened, all as part of the crime that was committed only in his imagination.

In case anyone needs a refresher, it wasn't long after the 2020 elections when the nightmare began for a clerical worker in a county election office in Georgia and her mother. Trump and some of his rabid followers decided that Shaye Moss and her mother, Freeman, who had taken a temp job helping count ballots, were directly and personally responsible for including fake ballots in Georgia's election tally.

In fact, unhinged Republicans claimed to have proof in the form of a video in which Moss and Freeman could be seen doing their jobs. What conspiracy theorists said were "suitcases" of bogus ballots were really just standard boxes used locally to transport actual ballots.

The video -- which showed nothing nefarious or untoward -- nevertheless made the rounds in conservative media and in far-right circles, with Republicans insisting that the images showed election fraud, reality be damned. Trump even put it on screen during one of his post-defeat political rallies. In fact, the former president went after the two Black women, by name, repeatedly, which in turn led Republican activists to threaten the women's lives and show up at their homes.

YOU'RE SOAKING IN IT:

To date, China (14 GW), Turkey (3 GW), Iceland (2 GW) and Japan (2 GW) are the leaders in developing deep geothermal energy, heating more and more city districts and greenhouses. In Germany, the city of Munich enjoys inexpensive geothermal heating and has set its sight on using the technology to make the sector climate neutral by 2035.

The German government is also looking at further developing deep geothermal energy to create a nationwide climate-neutral heat supply by 2045.  According to studies, deep geothermal energy could generate around 300 terawatt hours of heat annually from an installed capacity of 70 GW -- more than half the future heat demand of all buildings.

Increasingly, however, geothermal energy is also being harnessed from sources close to the earth's surface using heat pumps. In boreholes just 50 to 400 meters deep, a closed pipe system carries water from the surface to underground and then back, heating it 10 to 20 degrees C. A heat pump then uses this energy to output water at 30 to 70 degrees C, which is then used to heat buildings.

Researchers believe using this shallow geothermal energy in Germany offers heating potential similar to deep geothermal energy. In Germany, these two technologies alone could satisfy the entire future heating demand for buildings.

hISTORY eNDS EVERYWHERE:

[W]e asked Anne Stevenson-Yang. She has lived in China for more than 25 years and is one of the most renowned Western experts on the country. [...]

The situation in China looks pretty disorganized after the abrupt lifting of the Zero-Covid policy. What are you hearing from your contacts on the ground?

There isn't a lot of information coming out of China, which makes it very hard to figure out what's going on. We never have any information about domestic politics, and now there is such a scarcity of information generally that I can only connect very few data points. But I have to say I think there has been some kind of quiet internal revolt against Xi Jinping's personal rule.

What do you specifically mean by that?

Going into the 20th Party Congress, everybody expected that there would be a Standing Committee balanced between Xi allies and others. As we know, that didn't happen. They all turned out to be Xi allies. But then, the protests broke out, and for the very first time I ever heard of in China, at least since 1949, people generally criticized the government and the CCP and demanded that Xi step down. That's truly new and highly dangerous for the party.

How did China's national leadership perceive Xi Jinping's power grab?

Think of all the ways in which Xi must have offended the blooded elites: Xi seems to have inserted his own slate of «selectees». The former president was escorted out of the big party meeting in front of cameras and in front of his own son, and no one even looked at him, much less stood up to assist. There had been a couple of arrests and harsh sentences for very high-ranking officials. That's why I think that these recent developments must have been a bridge too far for Xi's supporters.

RINOS!:

Pelosi's successor as the leader of House Democrats, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn, has made clear he gets it. He named Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington, a former tech executive and former chair of the House's moderate New Democrat Coalition, to lead the DCCC going into the 2024 campaign. Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger will look out for the interests of "frontliners" in swing districts like her own in a newly created Democratic leadership position called "battleground leadership representative." And Rep. Pete Aguilar, a California centrist known for working across the aisle with Republicans, will move up to the No. 3 position of caucus chair.

Spanberger, a former CIA case officer, promises to be a watchdog with teeth. DelBene calls her "a fiercely independent voice" and several supportive colleagues noted last month that she has "never been shy about voicing concerns, sharing perspectives from on the ground, and suggesting strategy or messaging improvements to Caucus Leadership." No kidding. After Democrats won their very narrow majority in 2020, she predicted House Democrats would "get f--king torn apart in 2022" over socialism, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and defunding the police. If anyone can head off calls to cut police budgets and "abolish ICE," it's Spanberger.

The most successful messages in tight races often are boring, as writer Matt Yglesias put it in a recent analysis. I'd add that they're also basic. The progressive firm Data for Progress makes these points repeatedly in an extensive study of what worked in tight races last year. The top five persuasive messages out of 135 studied came from at-risk Democratic Senate candidates who won.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada was responsible for two of them, including what Data for Progress called "the single-most overperforming Democratic message out of the 135 we tested." It was a template for how Democrats should handle the GOP crime offensive. "I worked hand-in-hand with law enforcement to crack down on crimes and keep our communities safe," she said, and described how. Cortez Masto also offered a simple but effective economic message: "My number one priority is improving our economy," she said, and explained what she was doing for businesses and families.

Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona highlighted his work to ban surprise medical billing, lower prescription costs and protect Social Security. Sen. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and then-Lt. Gov. John Fetterman of Pennsylvania scored with China competition messages stressing jobs at home.

"Fighting inflation and lowering costs starts with making more stuff in America and bringing jobs home. We don't need to be outsourcing any more jobs and production to China," Fetterman said. The Hassan version: "I helped pass legislation to support manufacturing and strengthen our ability to outcompete China. I'm working to bring good-paying jobs home and to support the next generation of entrepreneurs right here in America. Reducing our reliance on other countries and bringing jobs back to America is a win, no matter what party you are in."

As the Hassan message and others cited by Data for Progress suggest, bipartisanship is a winner in races requiring persuasion. GOP Rep. Liz Cheney's endorsement helped reassure uncertain voters about Spanberger in Virginia and Rep. Elissa Slotkin in Michigan. Georgia Sen. Raphael Warnock talked about working with Republican Sen. Ted Cruz to get a highway from Texas to Georgia, and even made an ad about it.

The electoral success of centrists last year followed the 2020 win by Biden, a classic deal-cutter with mainstream instincts. The shifting dynamic is apparent in who is worried.

ENERGY GROWS ON TREES:

About eight years ago, a major paper producer in Finland realised the world was changing. The rise of digital media, a fall in office printing and the dwindling popularity of sending things by post - among other factors - meant that paper had embarked on a steady decline.

Stora Enso, in Finland, describes itself as "one of the largest private forest owners in the world". As such, it has a lot of trees, which it uses to make wood products, paper and packaging, for example. Now it wants to make batteries as well - electric vehicle batteries that charge up in as little as eight minutes.

The company hired engineers to look into the possibility of using lignin, a polymer found in trees. Around 30% of a tree is lignin, depending on the species - the rest is largely cellulose.

"Lignin is the glue in the trees that kind of glues the cellulose fibres together and also makes the trees very stiff," explains Lauri Lehtonen, product manager for Stora Enso's lignin-based battery solutions.

Lignin, a polymer, contains carbon. And carbon makes a great material for a vital component in batteries called the anode. The lithium ion battery in your phone almost certainly has a graphite anode - graphite is a form of carbon with a layered structure.

Stora Enso's engineers decided that they could extract lignin from the waste pulp already being produced at some of their facilities and process that lignin to make a carbon material for battery anodes. The firm is partnering with Swedish company Northvolt and plans to manufacture batteries as early as 2025.

MAD MONK:

Four months after Bird's death, his one-time personal assistant Miles Davis seduced everyone at the Newport Jazz Festival, performing a tune called "Round Midnight," written by someone who had been part of the Minton's scene but was still an underground figure: Thelonious Monk, who had only a handful of records under his belt and, then approaching forty, was still playing on other people's dates. Indeed, he was the pianist behind Miles for the Newport performance, which would help the younger musician sign with Columbia records, putting him on the road to stardom. An oft-told anecdote has the two sharing a car back to New York. "You weren't playing the tune right," Monk says, to which Miles replies that he is just jealous, at which point Monk orders the car to pull over and takes the ferry to the city alone.

The Newport set came about midway through Monk's career, which was long by the standards of jazz. Over three decades he played on more than a hundred records, collaborating with artists as different as Sonny Rollins and Gerry Mulligan, John Coltrane and Clark Terry, Art Blakey and Oliver Nelson. From the first, he was revered by fellow musicians, even those who would later do away with harmony and structure, aspiring toward a kind of "free" jazz. "Of all the bop greats Monk's influence seems second now only to that of Charlie Parker," Amiri Baraka wrote in 1967. Monk was also a committed teacher, including to Rollins and Coltrane, who both spent mornings practicing at his tiny apartment on West Sixty-Third.

Commercial success, however, had a way of eluding Monk. His career began with sporadic recordings on the Blue Note and Prestige labels, made through the 1940s and 1950s, none of which sold well. Already struggling to support his family, his financial troubles worsened in 1951 when he was arrested--with his friend, the great bebop pianist Bud Powell--on drug charges and was left without his cabaret card for a half dozen years, preventing him from playing in nightclubs. Switching to the Riverside label in 1955, he found new momentum but only reached a wide public in 1962, when he was signed by Columbia records, joining a roster that included Miles Davis and Charles Mingus. After that, his profile dramatically grew; two years later he even appeared on the cover of Time. By his death in 1982, he had become a respectable pillar of the music's evolution, as seen in Ken Burns's 2001 PBS documentary Jazz. But neither a cult reputation as a pioneer of bebop nor American canonization quite does justice to Monk, who was simply one of the most imaginative composers of the twentieth century, a judgment that in my view does not require the qualifiers "jazz" or "American."

What made Monk a great composer was his way of putting a tune together, and the stamp he put on pianism--his unique approach to chord voicing, phrasing and accent--was inseparable from his being a great thinker in song form. Like his hero Duke Ellington, he had a gift for reconciling musical experiment with the immediacy of pop, finding freedom in the constraints of a verse-chorus-bridge grammar that might otherwise default to clichés. Inventing a set of private aesthetic laws, he worked out their possibilities over the course of his career with admirable stubbornness and conviction. If the axioms were laid down at Blue Note (1947-1952), revised here and there at Prestige (1952-1954), the Riverside years (1955-1961), which I'll zoom in on in what follows, showed what kinds of proofs could be argued from them.

NO ONE EVER MEANS, "NEVER AGAIN":

According to the Palestinian legal centre Adalah, Netanyahu's declaration went further than the 2018 Jewish National State Law, which defines self-determination as unique to the Jewish people within the "State of Israel". Critics slammed the law as racist, because it denied the 20 per cent of Israel's population who aren't Jews the same rights as those granted to Jews. By declaring that the guiding principle of the new government is the preservation of Jewish supremacy in every inch of historic Palestine -- "the Land of Israel" -- including territories which are supposed to become a future Palestinian state, an Israeli prime minister has for the first time announced publicly that state policy in Israel will pursue the vision of Jewish extremists like the late Rabbi Meir Kahane. Although seen as a religious fanatic, the views of the founder of the proscribed terror group the Jewish Defence League (JDL) have become mainstream in Israeli politics.

Unsurprisingly, Netanyahu's announcement provoked a backlash. Several Jewish leaders in the US warned Israeli officials that racist and extremist steps taken by the far-right government would greatly harm support for Israel from American Jews. Representatives of several mainstream US Jewish organisations which are said to be the "backbone of the pro-Israel community in the US" attended the meeting at which the warning was issued.

Jewish Voice Peace, a left-leaning US organisation, outlined the ramifications of Netanyahu's announcement. "The new Israeli government is making Jewish supremacy official," the group said on Twitter. "This means increasing Israel's displacement, harm and possible expulsion of Palestinians. More land theft, greater restriction of movement, increased imprisonment, and more surveillance and censorship."

JVL described the shift as a "brazen and horrifying effort to ensure the state of Israel protects Jews exclusively" and accused the new Israeli government of entrenching forms of settler colonialism and Jewish supremacy. "The Israeli government's commitment to and reliance on settler colonialism has been evident since its beginning," it continued, while labelling Netanyahu's remarks as the "clearest iteration" of Israel's practice of the crime of apartheid.

American academic Marc Lamont Hill, the author of Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics, also reacted to Netanyahu's comments. The former CNN commentator was fired in 2018 for a speech at the UN where he called for justice and equality in historic Palestine. "We have an opportunity to not just offer solidarity in words but to commit to political action, grassroots action, local action, and international action that will give us what justice requires and that is a free Palestine from the river to the sea," said Lamont Hill. Predictably, his comments were denounced as anti-Semitic by Israel and supporters of the apartheid state who called for him to be fired from his job at Temple University in Philadelphia where he is professor of media studies.

"In these remarks, Netanyahu is declaring ALL areas of historic Palestine to be Israel including the West Bank and East Jerusalem," added Lamont Hill. He shared Netanyahu's tweet while also appearing to compare reactions to the Israeli prime minister's remarks with his comments at the UN about establishing justice between the river and the sea. "He's claiming everything from the Jordan RIVER to the Mediterranean SEA. Is this a call to genocide? Is this a clear cry to eliminate Palestinians?" asked Prof. Lamont Hill.

THERE IS NO BOTTOM:

Kevin McCarthy will do anything to be speaker of the House, make any promise, and cut any deal. What's worse is what he won't do: Draw any moral line in the marble he walks on. There's no level beneath which he will not sink. [...]

In addition to letting MTG say what she feels, McCarthy isn't even trying to keep the Oath Keeper sympathizer Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana in line. In 2020, when Higgins threatened to "drop any 10 of you [blacks protesting police brutality] where you stand" in a Facebook post, Democrats warned McCarthy that the violent rhetoric was getting out of hand. McCarthy reportedly told Higgins, a former police officer and sheriff's deputy, to cut it out or risk losing committee assignments. This fall, Higgins tweeted a picture of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's hands pressing her forehead and a caption: "That moment you realize the nudist hippie male prostitute LSD guy is the reason your husband didn't make it to your fundraiser." The tweet was removed, and there were no reports that the wannabe speaker chastised Higgins, who may well chair the Homeland Security Committee now led by Representative Bennie Thompson. 

A new sign of how low McCarthy would sink came when Representative-elect George Santos was exposed as an aerobic fabulist. According to an investigation and the New Yorker's own admissions, he fabricated almost the entirety of his campaign biography, except for the "a," the "and," and the "the." There's no record Santos went to NYU, worked at Goldman Sachs, helmed an animal rescue effort, or had the wherewithal to loan his campaign $700,000. He desecrated his mother's grave, telling various stories about how and when she died. On top of all that, Santos  said he had family who had escaped the Holocaust. He fabricated being Jewish, saying he meant "Jew-ish." Santos claims to be gay, but now that a sleeping press and braindead Democrats have discovered he was once married to a woman, even that claim seems suspect.

Santos may be dishonest, but he is not dumb. What was the first thing the bespectacled Long Islander did to keep his seat upon learning the Times would be running the story? Appeal to McCarthy, not on the merits--there are none--but on his ambition. Santos tweeted the night before the bombshell that he would back McCarthy for speaker. That did it. Santos will take his seat, protected by the silence of McCarthy. 

Adding to McCarthy's woe is a split over his candidacy between the two wildest members of his caucus: Greene and Representative Lauren Boebert. Boebert moved into a slight lead in the crazy races when she dispatched a holiday card last year featuring a fully armed family in front of the Christmas tree. Boebert's main reason for withholding support for McCarthy is his objection to a motion that would allow any one member to force a vote to oust him. Even someone as dim as McCarthy knows he'd be signing his own demise if he agreed to let one caucus lunatic initiate his decapitation. 

Boebert's so-far implacable stance against McCarthy has led her to depict Greene as an extremist. She explained more in an interview with the Daily Caller. "I've been asked to explain MTG's belief in Jewish space lasers, why she showed up to a white supremacist's conference, and to explain why she is blindly following Kevin McCarthy."

HOWDY, NEIGHBORS:

LOWELL -- Scarcely any of the 40 Afghans who trooped off planes at the Manchester, N.H., airport on an unseasonably warm day on Nov. 18, 2021, had ever heard of Lowell.

Among the dazed and weary refugees at the airport was an irrepressibly optimistic former US military interpreter called Noori. His wife, Samya, and two young daughters, Taqwa and Zahra, were at his side. They were exhausted, but they were safe.

Noori recalled that he didn't know a single person in New England. He didn't have a job. Or a car. Or an apartment. Or a winter coat. But he had his family.

And here he was, finally in America. Outside the doors of the airport lay the land of prosperity and opportunity, and the big, fast cars from the American movies of his youth.

For about a decade Noori, 33, had worked, first alongside US Marines in the hills of Helmand Province and then in classrooms teaching English, to make his country more like that shimmering vision of America. But in Afghanistan at least, that vision melted away as soon as the United States withdrew its forces a year ago.

After a harrowing escape and a grueling journey halfway around the world, Noori and his fellow Afghans quickly found that life in Lowell is no Hollywood movie.

"We thought that in America all the facilities of life were going to be provided for you," he said. "It's true that it has, if you work [for it]."

Noori and several hundred other Afghan refugees who have been resettled in Lowell have set about doing what they could not in their own country.

They're building lives in peace while forging a united community that is, slowly, bridging the divides of language and creed that have riven Afghanistan for decades.

"The United States of America did not build a nation in Afghanistan, and now the Afghans who are here are trying to build a new nation here in the United States," said Jeff Thielman, president of the International Institute of New England, which resettled many of the Afghans.

And in the past year, Noori has gone from being just another Afghan in the crowd to a community leader, always eager to help his compatriots even as he navigates his own obstacles in the new country he's proud to now call home.