…ever wonder about cause & effect?
Russia’s relationship with the world is continuing to evolve rapidly. To assess the global shifts, The Times analyzed years of country-level trade data compiled by the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an online data platform. Because the data is published with a lag, the picture it provides is inherently backward looking. Russia’s ability to trade with the rest of the world could be further curtailed in the coming months as the West introduces new restrictions.
But so far, the data underscores how deeply intertwined Russia is with the global economy, allowing Moscow to generate substantial sums of money as it enters its ninth month of war. Attempts by Western nations to use sanctions and other measures to cripple Russia’s economy have so far had limited effects.
…if you can get it to load there’s a few of these diagrams & it’s sort of morbidly fascinating
As it drags on, the war, and the world’s response to it, are bringing about a remarkable change in international trade flows. Food is in short supply in many countries that rely on wheat and other staples grown outside their borders. Prices for fuel and other products have risen at a time of record inflation. And Russia’s long-standing economic ties with Europe are gradually being unknotted, and new alliances are forming as goods are rerouted to other countries, the data shows.
…speaking of data…the graphics apparently come from The Observatory of Economic Complexity…which is kinda neat…& has a fair bit of data as well as looking like it has a passing familiarity with the folks from informationisbeautiful…so…there’s a rabbit hole for you
Oil and gas are Russia’s most important exports by far, and a major source of government funding. The high price of oil and gas in the last year has inflated the value of its exports, which has helped Moscow offset revenue lost because of sanctions. Gazprom, the state-run Russian energy giant, posted a record profit in the first half of this year, even as shipments to Europe began to slump.
The International Monetary Fund has repeatedly revised its forecasts this year for the Russian economy, saying it would contract by less than the organization had anticipated. The I.M.F. said in October that it expected the Russian economy to shrink by 3.4 percent this year, a much smaller contraction than the 6 percent it forecast in July and the 8.5 percent it expected in April.
[…]
The new bans on oil and petroleum products that European officials will introduce in coming months could represent a major loss for Russia. But the oil that leaves Russia on ocean-going vessels will probably find its way to new markets. Since the invasion of Ukraine, India and China have emerged as much bigger buyers of Russian crude.
[…]
How much money Russia will ultimately generate from its oil sales remains unclear. As demand for its products elsewhere has fallen, Moscow is being forced to sell its oil to India and China at a discounted rate. Western countries are now trying to introduce a price cap that will further limit how much revenue Moscow can earn from each barrel of oil sold.
So far, higher energy prices have offset those effects. Prices for benchmark oils like Brent crude and Urals — heavily traded varieties of crude oil that serve as global reference prices for buyers and sellers of oil — have fallen in recent months. But because energy prices were elevated for much of this year, Russia actually received more money from oil and gas sales in dollar terms from March to July than it had in previous years, according to the International Energy Agency.
[…]
Russia is trying to find buyers elsewhere for its gas. Its exports to China have increased, but it has only one existing pipeline to China that can move a fraction of the volume of its pipelines to Europe. To move gas by ship, Russia would need to build new facilities to liquefy the gas, an expensive and time-consuming process.
Apart from energy, Russia also continues to be a leading exporter of other essential commodities, ranging from fertilizer and asbestos and nuclear reactors to wheat. International car makers still depend on Russia for palladium and rhodium to make catalytic converters. French nuclear plants rely on Russian uranium, while Belgium is still playing a key role in Russia’s diamond trade.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/10/30/business/economy/russia-trade-ukraine-war.html
…but a lot can get lost in translation, I guess…even when it comes to things like keeping the lights on
Taleb’s rant reminded me of a paper that quantified the extent to which GDP statistics have been manipulated in authoritarian regimes and democracies. The author examined the relationship between night-time light emissions (a proxy for economic progress that is independently measurable from satellites) and reported economic growth. The less democratic a country, the greater the GDP growth reported for a given increase in light, ie the more the stats got inflated. The author argues this could mean GDP growth rates being inflated by 15%-30% in the most authoritarian regimes.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/30/satellite-pictures-shine-light-nations-that-inflate-gdp
…for every action…yadda yadda
Musk’s sharing of the conspiracy theory stemmed from a tweet by Hillary Clinton on Saturday. The Democratic former senator shared a Los Angeles Times story about DePape’s apparent far-right leanings.
“The Republican party and its mouthpieces now regularly spread hate and deranged conspiracy theories,” Clinton said, according to the Los Angeles Times. “It is shocking, but not surprising, that violence is the result. As citizens, we must hold them accountable for their words and the actions that follow.”
Musk responded by tweeting that “there is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye,” and shared a link to a post that presented an unfounded conspiracy theory on the hammer attack, the Times reported. This conspiracy post was in the Santa Monica Observer, which the Times described as being “notorious for publishing false news”.
[…]
Musk deleted the response by early Sunday afternoon, according to NBC News. Prior to its deletion, however, it had received in excess of 24,000 retweets and 86,000 likes.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/30/elon-musk-twitter-baseless-conspiracy-theory-paul-pelosi-attack
…shame there isn’t a delete button for the kneejerk reaction that all his money couldn’t buy him out of
…cause…& effect
It should not be controversial to say that America has a major problem with right-wing political violence. The evidence continues to accumulate — yet the GOP continues to deny responsibility for this horrifying trend.
[…]
The same day as the Pelosi attack, a man pleaded guilty to making death threats against Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.). Two days earlier, three men who were motivated by right-wing, anti-lockdown hysteria after covid-19 hit were convicted of aiding a plot to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D). In August, another man died after attacking an FBI office because he was so upset about the bureau’s search of Mar-a-Lago. “We must respond with force,” he wrote on Trump’s Truth Social website.
Then there are all the terrible hate crimes, in cities including Pittsburgh, El Paso and Buffalo, where gunmen were motivated by the kind of racist rhetoric — especially the “great replacement theory” — now openly espoused on Fox “News.”
[…]
The New America think tank found last year that, since Sept. 11, 2001, far-right terrorists had killed 122 people in the United States, compared with only one killed by far-leftists. A study from the Center for Strategic and International Studies last year found that, since 2015, right-wing extremists had been involved in 267 plots or attacks, compared with 66 for left-wing extremists. A Washington Post-University of Maryland survey released in January found that 40 percent of Republicans said violence against the government can be justified, compared with only 23 percent of Democrats.
There is little doubt about what is driving political violence: the ascendance of Trump. The former president and his followers use violent rhetoric of extremes: Trump calls President Biden an “enemy of the state,” attacks the FBI as “monsters,” refers to the “now Communist USA” and even wrote that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has a “DEATH WISH” for disagreeing with him. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has expressed support for executing Nancy Pelosi and other leading Democrats. Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Tex.) has tweeted that “the America Last Marxists … are radically and systematically DESTROYING our country.”
[…]
It’s true that, by calling out GOP extremism, Democrats do risk exacerbating the polarization of politics. But they can’t simply ignore this dangerous trend. And it’s not Democrats who are pushing our country to the brink: A New York Times study found that MAGA members of Congress who refused to accept the results of the 2020 election used polarizing language at nearly triple the rate of Democrats.
So please don’t accept the GOP framing of the assault on Paul Pelosi as evidence of a problem plaguing “both sides of the aisle.” Political violence in America is being driven primarily by the far right, not the far left, and the far right is much closer to the mainstream of the Republican Party than the far left is to the Democratic Party.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/10/30/paul-pelosi-attack-republican-bothsidesism-false-equivalence/
…so…how equal is that opposite reaction?
Of all the counties in Georgia, this was the one where the activists believed they would succeed. Pickens County is small, rural, overwhelmingly White and Republican, an under-the-radar place where election disinformation had flourished and the people who believed it had easily overtaken the establishment GOP.
What they wanted now was a version of what people like them were going for at the grass-roots level all over the country: a way to question the results of a decided election. In their case, they wanted a hand recount of paper ballots cast in the May GOP primary. They wanted to make those sealed paper ballots public records. And they wanted a judge to grant their county election board broad powers to conduct elections in whatever manner it deemed necessary to assuage the doubts of people like them, a ruling that could be applied across all of Georgia’s 159 counties ahead of the midterm elections and beyond.
[…]
Among the many anonymous jobs at the grass roots of American democracy, the county attorney is one of the most anonymous of all. Phil Landrum’s office is a small brick building with a two-chair waiting room and a framed copy of the Magna Carta. His days are usually spent advising county boards on the minutiae of state law, a job that has lately included defending his corner of the nation’s voting system against a barrage of attempts to upend it.
[…]
The activists are making their case in areas they deem friendly — mostly rural, Trump-supporting counties where disinformation is rampant, opposing views are rare, and local officials are usually people they know. And that is what happened in Pickens County.
The momentum had started to build three months before Landrum would stand up in Courtroom A, back in June when a newly organized group of activists launched their campaign at a meeting of the county election board. Typically, only a few people showed up for the meetings, but on that night board members and election staff watched as the door kept swinging open.
[…]
In came about two dozen residents who believed electronic voting machines were corrupted. In came the new chairman of the Pickens County Republican Party, Chris Mora, who had gotten a lawyer to help them with their cause. In came the lawyer, David Oles, who had recently moved to the area, become active in the county GOP, signed up to be a poll watcher, and was now channeling the grass-roots discontent into a demand.
[…]
What the people wanted, he said, was a hand recount of two races from the May GOP primary, the one for governor and the one for secretary of state, whose results they did not trust. Those results had been certified. The ballots were sealed, as required by law to prevent tampering. But as Oles explained it, all the board members had to do was assert their legal authority to unseal the ballots. Then just count them.
[…]
Landrum’s first reaction was that he wasn’t opposed to the idea, either, if that’s what the board wanted to do. He would see what the law permitted.
[…]
He had been the Pickens County attorney for 21 years, the second Landrum to hold the title. His aunt had done it before him. His father had represented the county school board. His grandfather had been a U.S. congressman for the area, and the name Landrum could be found on a brass plaque in front of the historic county jail, on a green sign along a highway, and on a slab of marble in the main cemetery in Jasper, the county seat, where he planned to be buried.
[…]But in the past few years, he’d felt that familiarity breaking down. He noticed what he considered a kind of mob mentality taking hold, heedless of law.
His first brush with it had been just before the pandemic, when some parents were demanding that the county school board forbid a transgender student from using the boy’s bathroom. Landrum advised the board that doing so would be illegal, a position that he said triggered a flood of pressure from friends and some political leaders urging him to just “let it go,” which he did not. Landrum’s photo wound up in Facebook posts suggesting he was part of some larger “deep state” agenda, as well as on a prominent LGTBQ website where he was amused to see it get more likes than that of the drag queen RuPaul.
[…]
“My role is not to represent community values,” he told them. “My role is to tell you what the damn law is.”
[…]
He was not an expert in election law but he knew right away that there were at least two legal questions to address before the board could proceed. One was whether a county board had the authority to conduct a hand recount at this point, given that the results had been certified, and the candidates involved had not challenged them, and the county had conducted an audit that showed no problems.
The second issue was that a hand recount would require unsealing the already sealed ballots, and Landrum started there, reading deeper into Title 21. He flipped to Chapter 2, Article 12, Section 500, which governs what is supposed to happen to ballots after an election is over. He zeroed in on one sentence: Officials “shall hold such ballots and other documents under seal, unless otherwise directed by the superior court.” He zeroed in on five words in that sentence: Under seal. Unless otherwise directed.
So, he decided, a court order would be necessary to unseal the ballots. That seemed to clarify how things should proceed, except that then he received an official request from Mora, the GOP chairman, suggesting a different approach altogether.
Instead of going to a judge, Mora wrote, the county could simply unseal the primary ballots and declare them public records, and let Mora himself do the recount, “so we can prove to the citizens of Pickens County and I that the machines we vote on are true and accurate.”
Landrum had fielded hundreds of open-records requests in his 21 years as county attorney, and to him, this one was easy. The Open Records Act did not apply. The ballots were sealed, sealed records were exempt, and turning them over to the public could be a crime.
Given how straightforward the law seemed to him on this point, Landrum thought it was an odd request, and he found a phone call he received after that odd as well. It was from a state representative he’d known for years, urging him to grant Mora’s request. “He was saying he can’t understand why the records can’t be released,” Landrum said. “He was downplaying the repercussions.”
[…]
It was clear to him that only a court order could unseal ballots. Less clear was what exactly could justify such an order. Landrum suggested to Oles that they go to court to sort it out. He figured Oles would file what he called “a friendly petition,” a chance for two lawyers and a judge to clarify a vague part of the state election code at a time when clarity was critical.
“I thought we were engaging a question of law,” Landrum recalled.
But when Oles filed his petition on behalf of the GOP chairman, Landrum did not find it friendly at all. Instead, to his surprise, the Open Records Act appeal was back on the table.
Starting on Page 5 and going on for six paragraphs, the petition referenced Mora’s rejected request, arguing that the sealed primary ballots were public records, that Mora had been “denied access to the records,” and that the court needed to “enforce the Open Records Act.”
To Landrum, this part of the petition seemed so out of place, so unnecessary — almost tacked on — that he began to wonder whether this was the whole point. He wondered whether the original push for a hand recount was being used as a pretext to get the sealed ballots declared public records, and he began imagining what might happen if a judge agreed.
“They could send an open-records request to all 159 counties in Georgia with that judge’s order stapled to it,” Landrum said. “Any citizen could get those records for any reason. If you have that declaration, then that is your Trojan horse. You’ve gotten under the tent, and you can do whatever you want with the ballots now.”
He kept spinning out the implications, imagining citizens all over Georgia demanding sealed paper ballots, conducting their own hand tallies and coming up with a thousand different results. He imagined county election boards asserting broad authority to do whatever they wished to address the doubts of voters. And as a Southerner, Landrum could not help but see parallels to a time before the civil rights movement, when White officials used the “local authority” argument to create all kinds of rules to keep themselves in power and others out.
[…]
The more he read into the petition, the more he found himself thinking about what had happened four hours to the south, in Coffee County, where local election officials claimed they had authority to allow a Trump-allied forensics team to copy software and other data off voting equipment, and are now under criminal investigation.
[…]
Meanwhile, as Landrum was in his office reading further into the law, the election board members were being barraged with form letters urging them to “officially in public session discuss and vote to conduct a hand recount.”
Then, at the next election board meeting, that is exactly what the board did.
[…]
But when the meeting was over, Landrum told the board why he was not going to be able to do what they were asking, at least not now.
The reason, he told them, was that the petition with the six paragraphs about open records, still pending in court, had to be addressed first. He explained to the board that in his reading of it, the petition was saying that the election board had violated the Open Records Act by not turning over the ballots. He explained that violating the Open Records Act was a crime. He said that either he was going to have to go to court to defend the county, or Mora was going to have to drop his petition, at which point he could do what the board was asking him to do.
But Mora said that he was not going to drop the petition.
…I know I ought not to be surprised at the endless internal contradictions involved in this fuckery…but I had to read that over a few times before I was sure it said what I thought I’d read…if they drop the petition then there would no longer be a legal obstacle to granting them their request…they would achieve the relief sought by their petition…they’d get their recount…but…that isn’t the way they want to force the issue…some might call that odd
And in the weeks that followed, word began spreading to neighboring counties and out into the vast social media maw of the election-denier movement that the person standing in the way of progress in Georgia was a county attorney named Phil Landrum.
One story accused Landrum of “violating his oath” and ignoring “a lawful order” from the election board. Another included his photo along with a post, “The old establishment will do anything to cover up the corruption and protect the system.” A prominent lawyer in the election-denier movement posted the hearing date and location on social media: “Pack the courtroom!” he wrote. At the next election board meeting, a man in the crowd asked the board, “Who is running the Pickens County board of elections? Is it the board of elections? Or is it Mr. Landrum?” Then members of the local GOP began lobbying the county commission to fire him.
As Landrum heard about all this he kept working, a famous quote from Shakespeare’s Henry VI running though his mind, “Let’s kill all the lawyers.”
He’d always thought that people forgot the larger context of the quote. “You’ve got to realize who said that,” he said. “It was an anarchist. That was the first step in the plan.”
…as an aside…I’ve seldom run across invocations of the term anarchy that seem to have really considered the concept in any real depth…though from time to time people to give it the ol’ college try…anyway…back to the seeding of crazy
Afew weeks later, the county attorney sat down at the defense table inside Courtroom A.
A videographer from a website known for spreading disinformation set up a camera.
Now the judge, assigned to the case from Atlanta after all the local judges recused themselves, took his seat.
[…]
He walked to the podium, and aimed his argument at what he described as “an allegation of a violation” of the Open Records Act contained in the petition.
He said that the ballots Mora wanted were sealed, as required by law. He said that sealed records are “not subject to an open-records request.”
“The complaint that alleges that therefore should be dismissed,” he said.
The argument lasted two minutes, and Landrum sat down.
“I’ll hear from the other side,” the judge said, and Oles walked to the podium.
“I’d like to start with what this case is not about,” he began.
…it’s a form of honesty…I guess…just like they preferred to stick with pushing the process through a judicial pantomime rather than withdraw & get the recount they were asking for underway…which it seems like they could have done…their case is pointedly not about following the plain language of the applicable law
And then for roughly 30 minutes the judge listened as Oles argued that the case was not at all about making sealed ballots available to the general public, as Landrum had said, but rather it was merely about making those ballots available to the Pickens County election board for the purpose of a hand recount.
“And why are we interested in these ballots?” he continued, explaining that voters had questions about the ballot marking devices, and the QR codes on the ballots, and the scanners, and the software. “So many reports have been done about the vulnerabilities of the system that our board of elections here in little Pickens County thought it was a sensible thing to do this check.”
Oles argued that the law gave the county election board “very broad authority in how it discharges its obligation to ensure accuracy and integrity” in the voting process.
“There is nothing in here that places a limit on what they’re allowed to do,” he said, adding that he believed it was not the court’s place to “second guess” the board’s decision.
The judge listened. He asked Oles to address Landrum’s specific argument.
“I want to emphasize that we are not asking for these ballots to be released to the general public,” Oles said.
The judge gave him another chance.
“Judge, if you grant the relief that my client is asking for, the very worst that happens here is those ballots would become available to the board for the board to do what it said it was going to do,” he said. “They’re not going to be released to the public. No harm is going to come to anyone as a result of it. But we will have been able to eliminate an important roadblock in the process. So. Thank you, judge.”
[…]
“The lawsuit in front of us is an open-records violation,” [Landrum responded] “The board cannot agree to the commission of a crime.”
“Specifically what they are asking me to do is unseal paper ballots,” the judge said.
“Specifically, they are saying those are subject to the Open Records Act,” Landrum said. “I think once you declare them subject to the Open Records Act, you cannot limit them to anything other than full public access, which is specifically what the legislature said they did not want to do. … If it’s granted to one person, it must be granted to every person.”
…he’s not wrong…but let’s give due credit to the lawyers prepared to argue that isn’t what they’re after when it absolutely is
“The Open Records Act — okay, that count is in there,” Oles said. “We’re not asking for them to be given to the entire world, as counsel seems to fear.”
“I’m not unsympathetic to your situation,” the judge said. “But I try to follow the law, because that’s my oath.”
“Judge, I respect that,” Oles said. “But it seems to me the law does grant you authority to do what it is we’ve asked … and all we’re asking —”
“Okay,” the judge said, cutting him off.
He asked Landrum if he had anything further.
“We’ve been accused of violating the Open Records Act,” he said again. “That is what this case is about and —”
The judge stopped him.
“I’m ruling in your favor,” he said.
“Thank you, judge,” Landrum said.
…I know…I seem to be dragging this out…& honestly there were a bunch of other things I toyed with putting in instead before I allowed this to make me late posting this (again)…but…I dunno…the time it took me to read the thing seemed pretty paltry compared to the hours this essentially anonymous dude put in to holding a pretty important line in the sand…what with the concept of the secret ballot…&…you know…the whole data aggregation privacy nightmare thing…with a side order of cui bono…if obfuscated in as petty & cosmetically low-stakes way as possible to create the thinest of precedent-tipped wedges…& they call them case studies for a reason?
At the county election office, more open-records requests that he would have to review continued to pour in, including an automatically generated request that kept popping into the election supervisor’s inbox every five minutes one day, until there were roughly 1,000 identical requests from 1,000 different people.
And a few days after the hearing, the Pickens County GOP convened their regular meeting, where the featured speaker was a woman gaining prominence in the election-denier movement. The crowd listened as she explained what she billed as a fresh strategy.
“My argument is that the whole 2020 election was illegal,” she began, explaining that she had filed a lawsuit in Wisconsin and was bringing one to Georgia and needed people to sign on as victims. “How many of you are hopeless?”
People raised their hands.
[…]
Meanwhile, Landrum worked on the order. He sent a three-paragraph version to the judge, who sent it back for further elaboration.
[…]
He remembered a conversation he had with a neighbor who was talking about the need for a new civil war.
“I said be careful what you wish for,” Landrum said. “Some of the constructs you want to tear down so badly are the only thing keeping you alive.”
In his office now, he went back to drafting the order, settling on four pages of careful legal prose that ended with, “Respondents’ motion to Dismiss is hereby GRANTED.”
The judge signed it, and the county attorney got back to work, because he knew what was coming.
“November is going to be hell,” he said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/10/30/pickens-county-ga-election-skeptics/
…welcome to november, folks…I’m gonna stick to just the coffee…but if you feel like you might need to irish it up some & you ain’t driving…I’d understand?
[…& if you think this was bad…take solace in the part where I didn’t go all emptywheel about legal ramifications…although…as ever…you could do worse]
I now feel like I must add The Santa Monica Observer to my reading list. I am a big fan of fantasy shading into the macabre, and it sounds like SMO fits the bill. I would like to learn more about 82-year-old, father-of-five, 59-years-married Paul Pelosi’s relationship with his leftist gay lover.
I miss The Weekly World News.
…I miss when it was easy to identify satire from clickbait
https://www.theonion.com/chuck-grassley-facing-toughest-election-challenge-since-reconstruction
…& I wasn’t in any danger of mistaking the onion for just-the-facts
https://www.theonion.com/patriot-honored-to-be-lied-to-by-his-country
…mind you…arguably it might be more fun to live in a world where the moon really was an alien space station
https://www.nationalenquirer.com/photos/moon-alien-space-station-scientists-bizarre-claim/
…especially if the aliens in question turned out to be…say…pan-dimensional beings?
You can still read it online but it’s not as much fun as when it was in print. I had a subscription back in the 80s, it was a Christmas gift from a friend and I greatly enjoyed it. We’d be much better off if the conspiracy nuts were reading it instead of Reddit and Breitbart. Bat Boy 2024!
https://weeklyworldnews.com/
I’m really getting sick of shoddy journalism. Case in point:
Florida Republicans register 9 new voters for every 1 new Democrat in months leading to midterms
It’s a very chirpy article about how Republicans are going to trounce Democrats in Florida because now they have the numbers. However, the reporter omits any reference to independent voters. And in Florida, well, let’s check the numbers.
Data as of September 30, 2022.
Year 2022Republican Party of Florida 5,259,406Florida Democratic Party 4,966,873Minor Parties 260,936No Party Affiliation 3,974,540Total 14,461,755
He completely avoids mentioning almost 28% of registered voters. At all. In addition, independent voters have registered about 150,000 new voters this year, mostly young. That’s in contrast to 125K new Republicans.
https://dos.myflorida.com/elections/data-statistics/voter-registration-statistics/voter-registration-reports/voter-registration-by-party-affiliation/
I’m not sure what the message being delivered here is. “Give up all hope,” maybe? Because that’s the wrong takeaway.
Then I saw this:
Republicans flood the zone with pro-GOP polls, bending models in their direction
Okay, yeah, the message is “give up all hope you’ve already lost.” I may write a letter to the editor of my paper like the other old cranks.
Unless I missed them, they haven’t reported margins of error or p-values for any of those polls. The data are meaningless w/o them.
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/10/31/2132506/-Finally-Some-nonpartisan-senate-polls-and-they-re-pretty-good
This is all a way for the GOP to scream voter fraud if they lose!
https://hartmannreport.com/p/will-america-have-a-free-and-fair
That’s exactly what it is.
Ben Smith had a long article about his former home, the NY Times, in Smith’s new home Semafor.
It’s not worth reading so I won’t link to it — it includes a sour grapes interview with the idiot former Opinion editor James Bennet rationalizing the Tom Cotton send in the troops to shoot to kill op ed he published.
But there is one nugget in it worth citing. In 2019 the NY Times and other outlets like the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal signed a deal with Facebook to be in the “Facebook News” platform, which seemed to be a joke in practical terms, and press critic Dan Froomkin asked if it was just a backdoor PR move.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/06/27/is-facebook-buying-off-the-new-york-times/
One thing Froomkin noted is that the exact payout was vague, only something much more than what Facebook claimed was about $3 million a year.
Smith’s piece offhandedly notes the deal was cancelled recently as Facebook has been run aground by Zuckerberg. And Smith puts numbers to it — $21 million profit annually for the Times, $18.5 for the WSJ, and $14 million for the Washington Post.
That is 10% of the entire net income of the Times, gone in a flash. And this year, profit margins were already shrinking.
It makes it even clearer AG Sulzberger’s strategy is crazy. He commited to expensive purchases (The Athletic for half a billion dollars), continued top heavy salaries for hacks like Bret Stephens and Tom Friedman, and a constipated but expensive campaign coverage model unchanged in 50 years. Meanwhile he has been strangling innovation in reporting that might reach a new generation and squeezing rank and file salaries to the point where a strike is a real possibility.
He’s another Zuckerberg — a soulless robot who cannot break free of his programming even with big new variables staring him in the face. And he’s surrounded himself with hacks like editor Carolyn Ryan who keep his eyes blinkered and his feet taped to the pedals.
…what they lose on the swings they’ll make up from the roundabouts
…which would be
*checks notes*
…wordle?
Yeah, Wordle isn’t the future of the Times, although the purchase price wasn’t too dear.
Bret Stephens’ recent Greenland junket probably cost AG 10% of the cost of Wordle, and at least Wordle brought in some customers. Stephens just sucked up enormous page space to say he’s decades late in looking at the science of climate change and decided we should just stay the course.
Is tax fraud a good reason for impeachment?
So, can I get these parts on Amazon?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/epzkdp/kristina-karamo-qanon-blood-body-parts
How come this lady can say this so clearly but the Dems spend millions on TV commercials and can’t express this?
Hard to say on impeachment. Article II, section 4 of the U.S. Constitution defines the grounds for impeachment and conviction as ‘‘treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors.’’
So I’d say Thomas is guilty. But then it’s got to go to the House to file articles of impeachment and the Senate for a trial. It’ll die a quick death like Trump’s impeachments without overwhelming majorities.
Yeah, this is the problem with the argument people keep making about how impeachment was necessary for Trump–and how it would be necessary for Thomas: because we need to show that people are accountable, and that we can’t just let that shit slide. Of course, the problem here is that this otherwise reasonable argument runs smack dab into the brick wall of reality: not only did Trump slide, but he did so with full legal backing to state that he wasn’t guilty–and the same thing would 100% happen with Thomas as well. Given the choice between letting them skate quietly, or letting them skate with a huge amount of legal backing behind them, I prefer the former. At least, with Thomas, it would give us time to actually get a real Congressional majority to make damned sure he would get tossed for all his illegal shit.
…I don’t mean to sound like I’m disagreeing with what you describe as the reality…since that’s not what I’d be trying to dispute…but I do think it’s not really true to say that the senate refusing to indict the alleged president provided him with “full legal backing to state that he wasn’t guilty”
…no question he did state that…repeatedly & obnoxiously & without legal penalty…but he had zero legal backing for any claim of exoneration…he had a lot of assistance in misrepresenting a great deal of stuff that ranged from the findings of mueller’s investigation to the meaning of the senate’s vote(s) on indictment…with billy barr in the running for most-water-carried…but it’s like some of the stuff he’s tried to claim about how the DoJ should have to give back stuff it seized from him on the basis of “rule 41(g)”…there is a rule 41(g)…but it doesn’t apply until after you get indicted…so he can get his pet judge lady to talk about it while trying to pretend that’s not a sham proceeding but…as the lawyers say “on the merits”…it’s entirely without the “legal backing” part as constituted in context?
…so I guess a lot of what I find frustrating when trying to read up on what the fuck is going on with this stuff is that it seems like not much weight is given to the idea that distinction is of importance…& given the huge number of examples of what’s essentially a pretty simple rhetorical bait & switch I can’t persuade myself it’s because it’s too complicated to get across to people
…sure, not your fox-news-oan-newsmax-infowars true believer types…but enough people to feel like the overton window on that shouldn’t make you right about the reality of how people think the land lies on that playing field?
I’m not going to split hairs about my choice of words so let’s get back to the point: given the choice between quietly letting him get away with it now and waiting for a chance to nail him for real, or very loudly giving people like him an excuse to declare that he did nothing worth getting convicted over and thus giving him and other people like him all the ammunition they need to keep doing what they’re doing and become more emboldened as a result…I’m going with the former.
To amplify your point, perception is frequently reality for large swaths of the population (case in point: the Big Lie). If MAGAts see Trump “beat” a conviction, in their dim minds that means he’s not guilty. There’s not enough intellect there to identify any nuance to any situation. So your assertion that a Thomas “acquittal” would simply give him more latitude and ammunition to pander to insurrectionists and traitors is, well, pretty fucking valid.
This isn’t as much a legal argument as a marketing position. It chafes me to see Captain Combover get away with it, but that’s much less important than the fact that his sycophants see him get away with it, and declare him innocent and persecuted.
Absolutely fucking bingo.
…I’m not trying to split hairs about your choice of words…I’m bemoaning the fact that you accurately describe something which is taken to be reality whilst being diametrically opposed to the underlying facts
…& by extension the idea that mismatch is more readily dismissed as the hair-splitting thing than being acknowledged as a core element of why it seems as though even trying to do something that would seem to be demanded is viewed as worse than a waste of time & effort even in coverage you might think had an interest in exploring those underlying facts
…apologies if my efforts to make that clear were insufficient to the task
There’s not enough coffee in the world.
…but there is still coffee in the world
…& I’ve read enough dystopian sci-fi to be acutely aware that is not a given feature of reality…so I try to be grateful for small mercies?
WTF? Pack the courts now!
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tax-returns-supreme-court/
…yeah, I’d only seen an apnews thing about that so far but there’s a lot to be mad about there?
P.S.
…when it comes to partisan reasoning at least five out of the eight emptywheel links I crammed in at the end of the post there have some overlap on the aforementioned surfeit of things to be mad about?
welp this will be fun
https://nltimes.nl/2022/11/01/energy-price-cap-definitely-temporary-finance-min-says
my flat rate contract expires at the end of this month and i just recieved the prices for my new variable contract… electricity €0.40 pkwh and gas at a mindboggling €2.24 per m3
wich doing some quick and dirty math based on my average yearly consumption will mean my €180 monthly will be somewhere near €650 as of december
thats almost as much as my rent….HA!
there is a higher than average chance ill be needing to be shipped off to the funny farm soon
…I feel like there’s going to be a run on these kind of things all over europe?
https://www.hygger.com/en/index.html
…I think there’s another lot called selk bags or something but either way they might become a sort of unofficial uniform if things keep going the way the winter looks to be?
yeah…that seems likely….i may invest in a couple….. for now i figure the blankies will do if it gets too cold
Yeah, I got a letter recently stating that the contracted rate for electricity is going to fucking double starting in December. We are already looking at finding new and creative ways to dry clothes in the winter without using the dryer. There will have to be other drastic cuts in our electricity usage, but most of those will involve fighting with Mrs. Butcher because they will inconvenience her.
you got a boiler cabinet?
used to have one in the uk….that was a warm little cabinet…dried things like nobodies business
Never heard of it. How does it work?
…I’m guessing it would be like what my grandmother called “the airing cupboard”…in her case it was a walk-in cupboard at the end of a hall that filled a space the width of the hall & about as deep between two bedrooms & it had the hot water tank in it…whether because the tank itself wasn’t as well insulated as it could be or because the walls of the cupboard were it would be very dry & several degrees warmer in there than anywhere else in the house even if the radiators were on…with the exception of either of the rooms with a fireplace if those were going
…I’ve lived in at least one flat/apartment where something similar was produced by a smaller cupboard (like a full height locker in a changing room) with just an uninsulated hot water pipe or two running down the back of it?
its uhh..basically a cabinet or a closet the boiler lives in
enclosed like that its a fantastic drier
mines up in the attic….nowhere near as effective
like so
Ah, in that case, what we already have will work well. We have a hybrid hot water heater, which doesn’t heat the room, but it does dehumidify it–plus our furnace is in the same room, so we’ll be drying our clothes there anyway.