…coming up short [DOT 4/12/21]

…so on the one hand I’m out of practice…& on the other hand it’s the weekend…so for once this might be relatively short…but alas, not overly cheerful

The parents of a boy who is accused of killing four students at a Michigan high school have been taken into custody after the pair went missing in the wake of being charged as part of the investigation into the mass shooting.

Jennifer and James Crumbley were charged with four counts of involuntary manslaughter but authorities on Friday said the whereabouts of the Crumbleys were not known, prompting a search.
[…]
The parents were charged due to the issue of access to weapons. “The parents were the only individuals in the position to know the access to weapons,” the Oakland county prosecutor Karen McDonald said on Thursday.

The gun “seems to have been just freely available to that individual”.
[…]
The semi-automatic gun was bought legally by the teenager’s father last week, according to investigators.

The parents were summoned to the school a few hours before the shooting occurred after a teacher found a drawing of a gun, a person bleeding and the words “help me” and “blood everywhere” and a laughing emoji, McDonald said at a press conference on Friday morning.
[…]
Parents in the US are rarely charged in school shootings involving their children, even though most minors get guns from a parent or relative’s house, according to experts.
[…]
There is no Michigan law that requires gun owners keep weapons locked away from children. McDonald, however, suggested there was more to build a case on.

“All I can say at this point is those actions on mom and dad’s behalf go far beyond negligence,” she had told local station WJR-AM.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/03/michigan-high-school-shooting-parents-manslaughter-charges

…because some things are tragic in ways that make us say things like “it shouldn’t happen”

There are many reasons for dismay over the Supreme Court argument in the Mississippi abortion case, but it was the nonstop gaslighting that really got to me.

First there was Justice Clarence Thomas, pretending by his questions actually to be interested in how the Constitution might be interpreted to provide for the right to abortion, a right he has denounced and schemed to overturn since professing to the Senate Judiciary Committee 30 years ago that he never even thought about the matter.

Then there was Chief Justice John Roberts, mischaracterizing an internal memo that Justice Harry Blackmun wrote to his colleagues as the Roe v. Wade majority was discussing how best to structure the opinion Justice Blackmun was working on. The chief justice was trying to delegitimize the place of fetal viability in the court’s abortion jurisprudence, where for nearly 50 years, viability has been the unbreached firewall protecting the right of a woman to choose to terminate a pregnancy.
[…]
And then there was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who rattled off a list of “the most consequential cases in this court’s history” that resulted from overruling prior decisions. If the court had adhered, for example, to the separate-but-equal doctrine of Plessy v. Ferguson rather than overruling that precedent in Brown v. Board of Education “the country would be a much different place,” he told Ms. Rikelman. “I assume you agree with most, if not all, the cases I listed there, where the court overruled the precedent,” Justice Kavanaugh continued. Why then, he asked, should the court stick with a case it now regarded as wrongly decided?

More gaslighting: The superficial plausibility of Justice Kavanaugh’s analogy between Plessy v. Ferguson and Roe v. Wade dissolves with a second’s contemplation. For one thing, Plessy negated individual liberty, while Roe expanded it. For another, Justice Kavanaugh’s list could have been 1,000 cases long without casting any light on whether today’s Supreme Court should repudiate Roe v. Wade.

But the justice’s goal was not to invite contemplation. It was to normalize the deeply abnormal scene playing out in the courtroom. President Donald Trump vowed to end the right to abortion, and the three justices he put on the court — Neil Gorsuch, to a seat that was not legitimately Mr. Trump’s to fill; Amy Coney Barrett, whose election-eve nomination and confirmation broke long settled norms; and Justice Kavanaugh — appear determined to do just that.
[…]
Justice Barrett’s performance during Wednesday’s argument was beyond head-spinning. Addressing both Ms. Rikelman and Elizabeth Prelogar, the U.S. solicitor general who argued for the United States on behalf of the Mississippi clinic, Justice Barrett asked about “safe haven” laws that permit women to drop off their unwanted newborn babies at police stations or fire houses; the mothers’ parental rights are then terminated without further legal consequences. If the problem with “forced motherhood” was that it would “hinder women’s access to the workplace and to equal opportunities,” Justice Barrett asked, “why don’t safe haven laws take care of that problem?”

She continued: “It seems to me that it focuses the burden much more narrowly. There is, without question, an infringement on bodily autonomy, you know, which we have in other contexts, like vaccines. However, it doesn’t seem to me to follow that pregnancy and then parenthood are all part of the same burden.”

I’ll pass over the startling notion that being required to accept a vaccine is equivalent to being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. “Gaslighting” doesn’t adequately describe the essence of what Justice Barrett was suggesting: that the right to abortion really isn’t necessary because any woman who doesn’t want to be a mother can just hand her full-term baby over to the nearest police officer and be done with the whole business. As Justice Barrett, of all people, surely understands, such a woman will forever be exactly what she didn’t want to be: a mother, albeit one stripped of her ability to make a different choice.

I will give the gaslighting prize to Justice Kavanaugh and his suggestion that the court should simply adopt a position of “neutrality” with respect to abortion. Abortion is a contentious issue with important interests on both sides, he said to Solicitor General Prelogar. “Why should this court be the arbiter rather than Congress, the state legislatures, state supreme courts, the people being able to resolve this?” he said. “And there will be different answers in Mississippi and New York, different answers in Alabama than California because they’re two different interests at stake and the people in those states might value those interests somewhat differently.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/opinion/abortion-supreme-court.html

They lied.

Yes, I’m talking about the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, and the abortion rights those justices have now made clear they will eviscerate.

They weren’t just evasive, or vague, or deceptive. They lied. They lied to Congress and to the country, claiming they either had no opinions at all about abortion, or that their beliefs were simply irrelevant to how they would rule. They would be wise and pure, unsullied by crass policy preferences, offering impeccably objective readings of the Constitution.
[…]
We went through the same routine in the confirmation hearings of every one of those justices. When Democrats tried to get them to state plainly their views on Roe v. Wade, they took two approaches. Some tried to convince everyone that they would leave it untouched. Others, those already on record proclaiming opposition to abortion rights, suggested they had undergone a kind of intellectual factory reset enabling them to assess the question anew with an unspoiled mind, one concerned only with the law.

Unfortunately, that lie was and is still enabled by the news media. Even in the face of what we saw at the court on Wednesday — when at least five of the six conservatives made clear their intention to overturn Roe — press accounts continued offering euphemisms and weasel words, about “inconsistencies” or “contradictions.”

But sometimes the right puts its purposes in the open. There was a particularly striking exchange between Laura Ingraham and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) on Fox News, where Ingraham grew inexplicably enraged over the mere possibility that Roe might not be overturned.

“If we have six Republican appointees on this court,” she said, “after all the money that’s been raised, the Federalist Society, all these big fat-cat dinners — I’m sorry, I’m pissed about this — if this court with six justices cannot do the right thing here,” then Republicans should “blow it up” and pass some kind of law limiting the court’s authority.
[…]
In other words: We bought this court, and we’d better get what we paid for.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/03/supreme-court-conservatives-lied/

…& yet

With everything else going on — the likely imminent demise of Roe v. Wade, the revelation that Donald Trump knew he had tested positive for the coronavirus before he debated Joe Biden, and more — I don’t know how many readers are aware that the U.S. government was almost forced to shut down this weekend. A last-minute deal averted that crisis, but another crisis is a couple of weeks away: The government is expected to hit its debt ceiling in the middle of this month, and failure to raise the ceiling would wreak havoc not just with governance but with America’s financial reputation.

The thing is, the federal government isn’t having any problem raising money — in fact, it can borrow at interest rates well below the inflation rate, so that the real cost of servicing additional federal debt is actually negative. Instead, this is all about politics. Both continuing government funding and raising the debt limit are subject to the filibuster, and many Republican senators won’t support doing either unless Democrats meet their demands.

And what has Republicans so exercised that they’re willing to endanger both the functioning of our government and the nation’s financial stability? Whatever they may say, they aren’t taking a stand on principle — or at least, not on any principle other than the proposition that even duly elected Democrats have no legitimate right to govern.
[…]
Furthermore, actions by Republican-controlled state governments, for example in Florida and Texas, show a party that isn’t so much pro-freedom as it is pro-Covid. How else can you explain attempts to prevent private businesses — whose freedom to choose was supposed to be sacrosanct — from requiring that their workers be vaccinated, or offers of special unemployment benefits for the unvaccinated?

In other words, the G.O.P. doesn’t look like a party trying to defend liberty; it looks like a party trying to block any effective response to a deadly disease. Why is it doing this?
[…]
What seems to be happening instead goes beyond cold calculation. As I’ve pointed out in the past, Republican politicians now act like apparatchiks in an authoritarian regime, competing to take ever more extreme positions as a way to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause — and to The Leader. Catering to anti-vaccine hysteria, doing all they can to keep the pandemic going, has become something Republicans do to remain in good standing within the party.

The result is that one of America’s two major political parties isn’t just refusing to help the nation deal with its problems; it’s actively working to make the country ungovernable.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/02/opinion/republicans-government-shutdown.html

…it’s not like we don’t know who’s pulling this shit

Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) are often derided as fringe figures, based on their dabblings in QAnon conspiracy-theorizing and Greene’s previous trutherism about everything from Sept. 11 to mass shootings.

But it may prove more accurate to regard them as a vanguard of sorts, as leading indicators of the future direction of a certain kind of right-wing politics that will continue gaining adherents and intensity.

That’s the message that emerges from this important new Post piece on the intra-GOP war that Boebert and Greene have touched off. The Terrible Two have lobbed days of bigoted attacks on Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), prompting Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) to issue a lonely denunciation of them. A flame war ensued, and GOP leaders are struggling to broker peace.
[…]
Indeed, it’s hard to see all this as “fringe” in another way, if you look at the larger bundle of political tendencies on display here. For a window into this, listen to that podcast discussion, which devolved into an extraordinarily paranoid, angry and hateful affair.

In it, Greene and Bannon tell a story: Everything the right does is justified as a rearguard response to a totalitarian left that comprises everyone from the likes of Omar all the way to mainstream media organizations and the most centrist of Democrats.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/12/03/boebert-greene-gop-war-ilhan-omar/

…or that they don’t know that it’s shit they shouldn’t get away with

Former president Donald Trump this week asked a federal judge to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against him by E. Jean Carroll — a writer who says Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1990s — citing a new state law intended to protect free speech.
[…]
In his filing, Trump argued the same law should also protect the most powerful person in the country — since, at the time when Carroll filed suit, he was still president. Her lawsuit says that Trump defamed her by denying her allegations that he assaulted her in a department store dressing room in the 1990s.

In the filing, Trump said that Carroll’s sole purpose in filing the suit was to retaliate for truthful comments, “maliciously inhibiting his free exercise of speech.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/12/02/trump-jean-carroll-defamation-antislapp/

…but somehow that doesn’t seem to get us to a place where we can do enough about it

Much of Brazil’s vast northeast is, in effect, turning into a desert — a process called desertification that is worsening across the planet.

Climate change is one culprit. But local residents, faced with harsh economic realities, have also made short-term decisions to get by — like clearing trees for livestock and extracting clay for the region’s tile industry — that have carried long-term consequences.

Desertification is a natural disaster playing out in slow motion in areas that are home to half a billion people, from northern China and North Africa to remote Russia and the American Southwest.

The process does not generally lead to rolling sand dunes that evoke the Sahara. Instead, higher temperatures and less rain combine with deforestation and overfarming to leave the soil parched, lifeless and nearly devoid of nutrients, unable to support crops or even grass to feed livestock.

That has made it one of the major threats to civilization’s ability to feed itself.

​​“There is a huge body of evidence that desertification already affects food production and lowers crop yields,” said Alisher Mirzabaev, an agricultural economist at the University of Bonn in Germany, who helped write a 2019 United Nations report on the topic. “And with climate change, it’s going to get even worse.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/world/americas/brazil-climate-change-barren-land.html

…& it seems as though as far as some people are concerned we might as well wait until the guns can sort it out for themselves

Speaking at a meeting in Geneva focused on finding common ground on the use of such so-called lethal autonomous weapons, a US official balked at the idea of regulating their use through a “legally-binding instrument”.

The meeting saw government experts preparing for high-level talks at a review conference on the Convention of Certain Conventional Weapons from 13 to 17 December.
[…]
The United Nations has been hosting diplomatic talks in Geneva since 2017 aimed at reaching an agreement on how to address the use of killer robots.

Activists and a number of countries have called for an all-out ban on any weapons that could use lethal force without a human overseeing the process and making the final kill order.

In November 2018, the UN chief, António Guterres, joined the call for a ban, but so far countries do not even agree on whether there is a need to regulate the weapons.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/dec/02/us-rejects-calls-regulating-banning-killer-robots

…but there’ll be a brain drain along before you know it…& all this stuff will still be there next week…so hopefully that hasn’t entirely taken the shine off your weekend