…fourth be with you [DOT 4/7/23]

…happy fourth of july, folks

Head of school linked to Amy Coney Barrett’s faith group abruptly resigns [Guardian]

…to all those who celebrate

North Carolina voting rights ‘still in five-alarm fire’ despite supreme court ruling [Guardian]

…& everyone else, if wishing has anything to do with it

‘There is no hope’: simmering anger boils over in poverty-riven French district [Guardian]

…so

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a timeline [WaPo]

…I don’t want to take the shine off it

Once, last spring, a Russian spotlight chased a Ukrainian flag across the embassy facade in a slapstick cat-and-mouse game that has since been watched millions of times online. In April, a burly man in jeans and a Baltimore Orioles T-shirt emerged from the embassy and silently obstructed Mr. Wittes’s projectors with an open umbrella in each hand.

It is also the strange new normal around Russia’s main diplomatic outpost in the United States, a scene of near-constant protests, spy games and general weirdness as the most hostile relations in decades between the United States and Russia play out in the heart of Washington. Thousands of miles from the front in Ukraine, the embassy compound has become a battle zone of its own.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/us/politics/russia-embassy-ukraine-war.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/03/world/europe/evan-gershkovich-russia-us-ambassador.html

…but

‘History repeats itself’: Israeli attack turns Jenin into war zone once again [Guardian]

…I don’t make the rules

Alison Bechdel: ‘The Bechdel test was a joke… I didn’t intend for it to become a real gauge’ [Guardian]

…& just yesterday a certain rule of thumb was suggested…which…let’s say I hope is the sort of rule proved by an exception

Reasons to believe American democracy has a bright future [WaPo]

…& while doubtless independence is a fine & noble thing

The Guardian view on Labour’s crackdown on free thinkers: it’s bad for the party and politics [Guardian]

…& unlikely to go out of fashion any time soon.

House Republicans Demand Deep Cuts to Spending Bills They Rarely Support [NYT]

…some things seem like they demand a more communal approach to defining the context

And as a society, we should continue to be defined by what we are willing to accept as a normal condition of American life.
[…]
We the People.
[…]
So on this Independence Day, it’s time to talk about our freedoms — and the lack thereof.
[…]
An entire block was littered with bullet casings Sunday, and many of the neighbors who usually sit on their porches were locked inside, living with a fear they have grown used to. Baltimore police, Scott said, have seized 1,345 illegal guns so far this year.

The freedom from that fear is becoming rare in all corners of the nation.

Because today, the places where innocent people are hit by gunfire are spreading past barriers of economics, politics, race and class. To so many places, we look like a nation at war.

Is nation where bullets fly at schools, parties, parades really free? [WaPo]

…&

Hong Kong police offer hefty reward for intel on political exiles [WaPo]

…to be blunt about it…

Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants. [Wikipedia]

…that foreign & domestic business cuts both ways

The meeting of the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the U.N. body responsible for regulating shipping on the seas, opened on Monday, attended by delegates from 175 governments, who are set for a sharp debate over how ambitious they will be in slashing greenhouse gas emissions from the maritime sector.

The shipping industry — vital for trade, but fiscally conservative; international, but greatly influenced by a small number of magnates in a handful of countries — plays an outsize role in climate change. It is traditionally a dirty sector, as most boats burn a heavy fuel oil.

About 90 percent of the world’s trade travels by ship — a ceaseless movement of 60,000 vessels plying their routes, moving 11 billion tons of goods each year.

Essentially, almost every import in a modern American home and garage arrives by boat — cars, appliances, furniture, clothes — and increasingly a lot of the food in the kitchen, too, like frozen burgers from Argentina or green bananas from Colombia.

Ocean transport contributes about 3 percent of humankind’s greenhouse gas emissions. While that number might not seem like much, if the shipping sector were a country, it would be Germany — and among the top 10 polluters.
[…]
Countries such as Saudi Arabia and Russia, alongside China and Brazil, have generally advocated a slower approach — either because they are major fuel exporters or developing countries opposed to measures that could hinder global trade. Also, change costs money — to the shipper or the buyer.

Previously, the IMO committed world shipping to a 50 percent reduction in warming gas emissions by 2050 — far too little, according to the current scientific consensus.
[…]
But some delegations are clearly opposed to high targets and want to set lower goals — say, a 20 percent reduction in emissions by 2030. They also want the targets to be squishier — “indicative checkpoints,” for example, vs. “levels of ambition.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/07/03/imo-shipping-greenhouse-emissions-climate

…sure…dispensing with the trappings of the british state was (& in some cases remains) pretty enviable

Rishi Sunak is facing transparency questions over private jet travel and thousands of pounds in Conservative party donations after they were recorded as coming from a small company linked to a multimillionaire businessman.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/03/rishi-sunak-faces-transparency-questions-over-jet-travel-and-tory-donations

…not least to some of the…well…I mean…the clue is in the name, I guess…commonwealth…read it over a few times with different inflections & intonations & it’s anything from a left wing pipe-dream to a feudal nightmare…but that’s literally a whole other essay

A student objected to a class, “The Problem of Whiteness,” and tweeted the lecturer’s photo and email address. Hate mail poured in. What should the school do? [NYT]

…& I’m already trying not to write one of those

An Elite School, a Boy’s Suicide and a Question of Blame [NYT]

…thing is…some of the trappings of the british state

Tory group warns Sunak he risks losing election if he doesn’t cut net migration [Guardian]

Defeats for small boats bill in House of Lords as Channel crossings set new record [Guardian]

Sunak U-turn on wind farms in England draws wrath of green Tories [Guardian]

…might could get old fast

On Monday, the newly minted New Conservatives group of 25 MPs elected since the Brexit referendum went public for the first time at an event taking place in the Unherd Club – the Westminster establishment location for anyone who wants to be considered anti-establishment. They claimed to be just like-minded MPs. Men and women merely interested in ensuring their own survival. Though that looks unlikely, given the talent on show.
[…]
“We want to take back control from the establishment,” the Oxford-educated Kruger declared. The levels of denial were terrifying. He genuinely has no idea that he and the Tories are the establishment. That they have been running the country for the past 13 years. It’s as though he believes the government has been under the control of some unspecified blob. The lengths he will go to absolve himself of any responsibility.

Having made the introductory speech, he went on to introduce the person who would be introducing the main speaker. Step forward the formidably dim Miriam Cates. Fresh from her Today programme car wreck that morning in which she didn’t seem to know that social care workers were not part of the NHS nor have any clue how much she thought they ought to be earning. And she is meant to be the brains of the operation.

But hey ho. Cates is the woman many Tories see as the future of the party. Which may just be an indication that most Conservatives see their own extinction as inevitable. Someone you could almost guarantee to reach the wrong conclusion on almost everything. She, too, wanted to take back control. The Tories had made a promise to keep migration to 229,000 and now it was three times that. And the New Conservatives had a cunning plan to reverse that. Just stop foreigners coming in.
[…]
She didn’t seem to have heard of the doctors and nurses going on strike. Her own government’s inflation targets. Or that most Britons didn’t want to do these jobs at any price the government was willing to pay. Her ignorance was total. It would have been shameless, were she on nodding terms with any concept of shame. Still, any Tory fringe event always has an element of comedy, and Cates was happy to oblige. Nor would she be the last laugh on offer.
[…]
Yet again it was the liberal elite who were holding us back, said Hunt. Who also went to Oxford. “I worked in a radish-sorting factory where I was the only Brit,” he claimed nostalgically. Man of the people. Shame he didn’t decide to make that holiday job a full-time career. “People shouldn’t feel that any job is beneath them,” he added. Present company excepted.

Last to speak was the permanently angry James Daly. He’s yet to find an issue on which he doesn’t want to pick a fight. It was all the Blob. The establishment. The Guardian. Another Tory MP who thinks Labour is in power. All he had ever wanted was to be helpful. And the best service he could offer Sunak right now was to spark another civil war. It’s what the party needed. He loved the Conservatives so much he’d do anything to make sure they were never elected again.
[…]
Eventually Kruger called time. It had all been much ado about nothing. The New Conservatives had no more clue than the Old Conservatives. All they had done was highlight yet more divisions within the Tory party. Rats in a sack. Fighting to the death. A theatre of the absurd for which the country is paying.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/03/after-13-years-in-power-who-exactly-do-tory-mps-think-the-establishment-is

…but…others…like the NHS…or the BBC…can be something of a boon…& cheap at the price, I’d argue

How Stalin manipulated the Western press during WWII [WaPo]

…but, then

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/03/a-perfect-storm-scientists-ponder-if-climate-has-entered-a-new-erratic-era

…what price truth?

The tweet, posted early on 2 July had over 1.7m views but it’s false – it’s not from the current riots in France but is actually a still from a film.

BBC Verify examined the image and, searching for previous versions of it on the internet, found it was from the French film, Athena – a fictional account of rioting in a city suburb – made in 2022.
[…]
The person who posted the tweet later clarified that the image was meant to be of an “illustrative” nature, but not before it had been retweeted thousands of times.

He subsequently deleted it.
[…]
Footage of cars falling from the windows of a multi-storey car park has been widely shared online, with the message: “WTF is going on in France…”

This is false – it is old footage and it looks like it has come from another film.
[…]
BBC Verify took images of the video and carried out an online search to see if it had appeared before. The search brought up a tweet from June 2016, which claimed the footage was from the set of the action movie, Fast and Furious 8 – which was filmed in Cleveland, Ohio. Using the information in that tweet, BBC Verify located the footage to a multi-storey car park on Prospect Avenue East in Cleveland.

False posts about French riots spread online [BBC]

…& how much are the lies costing us all, these days?

It should be “completely unacceptable” for banks to close accounts on “political grounds”, a Home Office minister has said, as Conservatives weighed in on a so-called freedom of speech row prompted by claims from Nigel Farage.
[…]
Farage, the former Brexit party and Ukip leader who is now a presenter on GB News, claimed last week that he was considering leaving Britain because he had been told by his bank that his accounts were being shut down.

While he said that the bank had given no reason, he believed it was due to his being designated in the past as a politically exposed person (PEP). These are typically political representatives, and their family members, whose accounts can be treated with extra due diligence by financial institutions.

Farage, who has appeared in the past on Russia Today, also claimed it was because it had been claimed in the House of Commons that he had been in receipt of payments by Russia.

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/jul/03/banks-accused-of-closing-accounts-such-as-nigel-farages-on-political-grounds

…I mean…sure…with the riots & the unattributed movie stills if you’ve seen the movie you might expect to be ahead of the unattributed game…maybe even feel like you’re in on the joke & get to smile wryly at the punchline…but…not least when the example involves a flick named for the goddess of wisdom…context is a bitch

With hard-right Republicans attacking federal law enforcement agencies and unwilling to extend their broad powers, a major warrantless surveillance program targeting foreigners overseas may face new limits from Congress. [NYT]

[…funny story…but “it’s a PEP thing” is, some have been known to suggest, something of a go-to crutch on which to lean when the real answer is “we’re not allowed to disclose the people who’ve been taking an interest in your financial affairs…or the basis on which they consider them of potential interest…but we don’t want to be touching that stuff with a barge pole…have fun exploring other opportunities & don’t let the door hit you on the way out”]

…& we live in a world with entirely too much IRL shitposting to pretend it’s all just meaningless froth we can safely ignore

Who’s Winning the Trump vs. DeSantis Meme Wars? [NYT]

How ‘climate lockdowns’ became the new battleground for conspiracy-driven protest movement [NBC]

…not that some bits mightn’t be showing their age when it comes to holding back the rising tides of the modern day

Before the flood: how much longer will the Thames Barrier protect London? [Guardian]

…but…if one way or another we all need to mend our ways

‘Green amendments’: advocates push for constitutional guarantees in face of climate crisis [Guardian]

…& that includes mending the ways we mend them

The U.S. Constitution hasn’t been meaningfully amended since 1971. Congress sent the Equal Rights Amendment to the states for ratification in 1972, but its derailment rendered the Constitution effectively unamendable. It’s not that people stopped trying. Conservatives, especially, tried.
[…]
The consequences of a constitution frozen in time in the age of Evel Knievel, “Shaft” and the Pentagon Papers are dire. Consider, for instance, climate change. Members of Congress first began proposing environmental rights amendments in 1970. They got nowhere. Today, according to one researcher, 148 of the world’s 196 national constitutions include environmental protection provisions. But not ours. Or take democratic legitimacy. Over the last decades, and beginning even earlier, as the political scientists Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky point out in a forthcoming book, “The Tyranny of the Minority,” nearly every other established democracy has eliminated the type of antiquated, antidemocratic provisions that still hobble the United States: the Electoral College, malapportionment in the Senate and lifetime tenure for Supreme Court justices. None of these problems can be fixed except by amending the Constitution, which, seemingly, can’t be done.
[…]
Troublingly, our current era of unamendability is also the era of originalism, which also began in 1971. Originalists, who now dominate the Supreme Court, insist that rights and other ideas not discoverable in the debates over the Constitution at its framing do not exist. Perversely, they rely on a wildly impoverished historical record, one that fails even to comprehend the nature of amendment.
[…]
From the very start, Americans proposed amendments. After the Declaration of Independence was issued, on July 4, 1776, Lemuel Haynes, a 23-year-old Massachusetts man who was the son of a Black father and a white mother and who had fought in the Continental Army, copied out its opening lines on a manuscript he titled “Liberty Further Extended.” And then he wrote an amendment: “An affrican has equally as good a right to his Liberty in common with Englishmen: Consequently, the practise of slave-keeping which so much abounds in this land is illicit.” (I have left all sources in their original spelling.)

The demand for amendability came from ordinary Americans who insisted that their constitutions be revisable, “to rectify the errors that will creep in through lapse of time or alteration of situation,” as one Massachusetts town meeting put it. When Massachusetts sent a constitution to voters for ratification in 1778, they rejected it by a margin of almost five to one, mainly because, as one town complained, “We don’t find any sufficient provision for any alteration or amendment of this Constitution,” except by the legislature itself, “whereas, it appears to us, at least, of the highest importance, that a door should be left open for the people to move in this matter,” because without such a door the only way people would be able to change the government would be “commotions, mobs, bloodshed and Civil War.”

Amendment is a constitutional mechanism necessary to avoid insurrection. The U.S. Constitution was itself an act of amendment, written in 1787 because the Articles of Confederation were technically amendable but, for all practical purposes, not. At the constitutional convention in Philadelphia, the Virginia delegate George Mason, pointing out that everyone knew the Constitution that they were drafting was imperfect, argued that “amendments therefore will be necessary, and it will be better to provide for them in an easy, regular and constitutional way than to trust to chance and violence.”

How to Stave Off Constitutional Extinction [NYT]

…I forget where I heard it first…but…the unthinkable only stays that way if nobody thinks it

“In recent years, 700,000 children have found refuge with us, fleeing the bombing and shelling from the conflict areas in Ukraine,” [Grigory] Karasin [head of the international committee in the Federation Council, Russia’s upper house of parliament] wrote on his Telegram messaging channel.
[…]
However, Ukraine says many children have been illegally deported and the United States says thousands of children have been forcibly removed from their homes.

In July 2022, the United States estimated that Russia “forcibly deported” 260,000 children, while Ukraine’s Ministry of Integration of Occupied Territories, says 19,492 Ukrainian children are currently considered illegally deported.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/moscow-says-700000-children-ukraine-conflict-zones-now-russia-2023-07-03/

…& even if you never watched the americans…or couldn’t care less about whether the stalinist-era game of press manipulation & other active measures of the cold war…in terms of historical precedent…a lot of kids have been kidnapped in a lot of cultures…when their parents were a big deal they could end up in the proverbial gilded cage as…surety, you might say…that their “hosts” could rely on their folks back home not doing anything…precipitous…& at the other end of the social tapestry…well…we hear a lot about assimilation & cultural appropriation…but if you ask me…those terms have a bunch in common with that commonwealth business…& sometimes the fruit of the poisonous tree are less inadmissible than advertized

I was angry with my friend; 
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe: 
I told it not, my wrath did grow. 

And I waterd it in fears,
Night & morning with my tears: 
And I sunned it with smiles,
And with soft deceitful wiles. 

And it grew both day and night. 
Till it bore an apple bright. 
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine. 

And into my garden stole, 
When the night had veild the pole; 
In the morning glad I see; 
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
[A Poison Tree - William Blake]

…after all…the past is prologue

The election of a president under indictment and facing criminal trial would “create an unprecedented constitutional crisis” and “cripple the operations of government”, Donald Trump said.

But the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, who faces 71 criminal counts in state and federal cases and is expected to face more, was not speaking about himself – or speaking this year.

As reported by CNN, which unearthed the comments, Trump was speaking on 3 November 2016, at a rally in North Carolina during his first presidential campaign, against Hillary Clinton.
[…]
Further indictments are expected, not least in state and federal investigations of Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat by Joe Biden, culminating in his incitement of the deadly attack on Congress on 6 January 2021.

Back before he became president, in Concord, North Carolina, in November 2016, Trump also said Clinton “has no right to be running, you know that. No right.”

He returned to the subject two days later, CNN reported, telling a crowd in Reno, Nevada: “We could very well have a sitting president under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial. It would grind government to a halt.”

The same day, CNN said, Trump told rally-goers in Denver, Colorado, that because Clinton was “the prime suspect in a far-reaching criminal investigation”, it would be “virtually impossible for her to govern”.

In 2023, Trump’s legal problems have not made his campaign grind to a halt, or even slow significantly.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/03/trump-hillary-clinton-president-under-indictment-comments

Among many striking things about the July 2021 audio of Donald Trump seeming to discuss a classified document with guests is how casual it all was. In real time, the now-indicted former president seems to recognize that what he’s doing is not kosher, requesting that it be off the record and drawing an aide to comment with an apparently uneasy laugh, “Yeah, now we have a problem.”

It’s as if those involved were familiar with the dance of Trump being cavalier with sensitive information. Which, even before this latest entry, is indeed what his full record demonstrates.
[…]
On Feb. 8, 2017, Trump appeared at an Oval Office photo op with Intel CEO Brian Krzanich, where an Associated Press photo appeared to show a lockbag with a key in it on Trump’s desk, in the presence of people without security clearances. Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) noted that this raised questions about whether sensitive information was being appropriately safeguarded.

Just three days later, on Feb. 11, Trump turned the Mar-a-Lago terrace into what The Washington Post called an “open-air situation room” following a ballistic missile test by North Korea. Trump and Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe appeared to be discussing a highly sensitive national security issue and reviewing documents using the light of an aide’s cellphone, all out in the open.

The White House claimed at the time that “no classified material” was discussed openly.
[…]
Within days of his taking office, the New York Times reported that Trump was using an old, unsecured Android phone to post on Twitter.

…what is it lisa says to bart in that 24-parody episode…”you’re talking to me on the most hackable device on the planet”…but she means a bluetooth headset…so…totally different thing, I’m sure…not even art imitates life

[…&…that’s the point I’d reached when everything crashed on me…so I’m posting it…but I was so nearly at the tunes I’ll try to get those & a last little bit in once I flog the laptop back to life…because doing this from a phone is…sub-optimal?]

There are many surreal revelations in Jack Smith’s federal indictment of Donald Trump. There are the texts between various Trump underlings and Walt Nauta, the Trump body man who has also been indicted, showing the president directing his employees to move the boxes containing classified information back and forth to various locations around his properties in Palm Beach and Bedminster, New Jersey. There is the annoyed missive from Trump’s wife Melania, trying to make sure the boxes don’t crowd out room for her luggage on a private plane. There is the claim from Trump’s former attorney, compelled to testify against him in an unusual arrangement, that the former president suggested, with a Grinch-like pinching gesture, that the lawyer destroy confidential documents to prevent them from being produced in a subpoena. There is a text message Nauta sent to another Trump underling, showing a box having fallen over in a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, secret documents spilling on to the floor – whoops.

What there is not, conspicuously, is a motive. Over the course of more than a year following his departure from office, it appears that Trump spent considerable effort and resources in transporting the documents with him and keeping them near at hand – and that later, as the federal government began to demand the boxes back, that he then went out of his way to keep and conceal them, going to great length, sparing no expense, and ultimately breaking the law so much that he incurred himself a series of felony charges. Anyone can tell you how this behavior is typical of Trump: how it reflects his pettiness, his contempt for the law, his willingness to sacrifice and endanger others. What no one can tell you is why he did it.

It would be more convenient – legally, for Jack Smith and his prosecutors, and politically, for Joe Biden, for the Democrats, and for the growing number of Republicans who are looking to challenge Trump in the 2024 Republican primary – if we could say precisely why Trump wanted to keep the documents so badly, exactly what he wanted them for. It would be very easy to make a case to a skeptical jury – or to a divided American people – that Trump was a danger and could not be trusted with national secrets again if it could be said that he wanted to keep the documents for any of the straightforwardly dangerous and nefarious reasons that have been speculated: if he was seeking to sell national security secrets to the Saudis, say, or to Israel; if he was hoping, as some have suggested, that he one day might be able to blackmail someone powerful, like the president of France.

It’s very possible that Trump had concocted such a plan. There is much that we do not know about the investigations into Trump, including about the special counsel’s query into his illegal document retention. But we do know that in the past, we know that he has gone further, and risked more, in the pursuit of even more harebrained schemes.

Why was Trump hoarding classified government documents? [Guardian]

…hmmm…”We could very well have a […] president[ial candidate] under felony indictment and ultimately a criminal trial.”…if it really would “grind government to a halt”…has that really hung on to its “quiet part” status that way?

The big idea: why you shouldn’t always try to live in the moment [Guardian]

…still…on the upside…not all mistakes lead to inevitable regret

“To be frank, it was an accident,” says the study’s lead author, Prof Jun Yao. “We were actually interested in making a simple sensor for humidity in the air. But for whatever reason, the student who was working on that forgot to plug in the power.”

The UMass Amherst team were surprised to find that the device, which comprised an array of microscopic tubes, or nanowires, was producing an electrical signal regardless.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/02/it-was-an-accident-the-scientists-who-have-turned-humid-air-into-renewable-power

…& not all aliens have to survive orbital re-entry

It sounds like the stuff of nightmares, but for Scheel it was just another example of the fascinating biology of the ocean’s most enigmatic inhabitants.

Whether immortalised as giant monsters, fetishised in tentacle pornography or celebrated as psychic football pundits, octopuses have long fascinated humans.

Their appearance is undoubtedly captivating. As Victor Hugo noted in his description of an octopus attack: when swimming the animal resembles a closed umbrella without a handle.

But their anatomy is no less intriguing. The brain is located between the eyes, while what looks like a bulbous head is actually the mantle, containing the stomach and anus among other structures. And octopuses not only boast eight arms – which can regrow if severed – but three hearts. And the animals cannot see colour, at least in the way we do, but they can see the polarisation of light.

The crawling tentacles highlight another astonishing feature.

“The movement of the suckers relative to each other is not coordinated by the central brain, as we might imagine in a human, for example,” says Scheel. “Instead, it’s coordinated within each arm.”

As a result, the suckers can work with their neighbours, even when severed from the rest of the animal, provided the tissues still have enough oxygen (and so have not yet died).
[…]
“Maybe the biggest misconception about them is that they’re very alien and very different from us,” he says. “And I think one of the messages I wanted to get across in the book is that all of life, all of animal life in particular, shares a set of universal goals.”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/03/not-so-alien-biologist-busts-myths-and-explores-enigma-of-the-octopus

…my goals are pretty modest, I suppose…not least hereabouts…where they’d include the lofty heights of getting one of these lofted in some semblance of a timely fashion thrice weekly…& generally benefiting from having some voices in my head that were invited…even if some of the ones I’m grateful for don’t always raise themselves that way as often as I swear I can sometimes hear their eyes roll…but…we’re supposed to be celebrating…so…let the good times roll…smoke ’em if you got ’em…&…speaking for myself…it’s time to face the music