…not enough [DOT 31/5/22]

take another...

…some things are…or certainly seem to be…sort of grounded in inadequacy

White supremacy is, essentially, an ecosystem built around the idea of never having to fight fair. A full-bodied commitment — culturally, politically, spiritually — to the retention of the privilege to be cowards. They’re learning to read? Let’s kill them. Can’t (legally) kill them anymore? Let’s burn down the schools. Can’t burn down the schools anymore? Let’s ban books. They want to vote? Let’s kill them. Can’t (legally) kill them anymore? Let’s make them take “literacy” tests. Literacy tests are outlawed? Let’s gerrymander the districts. The gerrymandering wasn’t enough? Let’s say the elections are rigged. They’re building community wealth? Let’s kill them. Can’t (legally) kill them anymore? Let’s redline them and deny them loans. Can’t (legally) deny them loans anymore? Let’s give them loans at subprime rates.
[…]
Because a coward won’t fight you unless you’re not looking. Unless they can swarm you. Unless they can cheat you. Unless they are armed and wearing armor, and you are in the produce aisle or on the pew. They punch sometimes, sure. But only if you’re sleeping.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/magazine/2022/05/26/damon-young-buffalo-shooting-cowardice-is-point-white-supremacy-too/

…sometimes perhaps unintentional…if arguably institutional

Before U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet made her long-awaited tip to China last week, the Biden administration and the human rights community urged her not to let Beijing turn the visit into a propaganda win for the Chinese Communist Party. But Bachelet ignored those warnings. Her trip ended up helping China deny its genocide against Uyghur Muslims and other repressive policies, harming the cause of human rights accountability in the process.

On Saturday, Bachelet completed her six-day trip to China, the first in 17 years by someone with her title, with a statement to the media that summed up a visit many observers view as a tragic failure. As Human Rights Watch U.N. director Louis Charbonneau rightly observed, she grotesquely praised China’s “tremendous achievements” in human rights by pointing to poverty alleviation — which is exactly how Beijing defines human rights these days. The United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which Bachelet is supposed to be following, calls for a higher standard.
[…]
Perhaps Bachelet was too busy hobnobbing with Chinese officials to notice that a huge cache of leaked documents from the Xinjiang police files were released last week. They show the faces of thousands of prisoners thrown into the camps for such “crimes” as traveling abroad, studying Islam or growing a beard. Critics say that Bachelet allowed the Chinese authorities to stage-manage her trip so thoroughly that Beijing will be able to use it to deflect responsibility for its atrocities.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/29/michelle-bachelet-trip-china-xinjiang-uyghur-fails-genocide-accountability/

…but in too many cases…you have to assume there’s every intention to have it be that way

On Sept. 14, 1989, a disgruntled employee entered the Standard Gravure printing plant in downtown Louisville and, armed with an AK-47 and other guns, killed eight and wounded 12 others before taking his own life — in what remains the deadliest mass shooting in the state’s history.

At the time, mass shootings had not yet become the staple of American life that they are now, and McConnell said he was “deeply disturbed,” declaring, “We must take action to stop such vicious crimes.”

But he also added: “We need to be careful about legislating in the middle of a crisis.” And in the days and weeks after, he did not join others in calling for a ban on assault weapons like the AK-47 used by the shooter.

The Standard Gravure massacre provided an early glimpse of how McConnell — now the Republican Senate minority leader — would handle mass shootings and their aftermath over the next three decades, consistently working to delay, obstruct or prevent most major gun-control legislation from passing Congress.

McConnell would go on to follow a similar playbook time and time again during his seven terms in Congress, offering vague promises of action, often without any specifics, only to be followed by no action or incremental measures that avoided new gun regulations. As a Republican leader, he also helped dissuade his conference — as after the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. — from supporting gun legislation and, as majority leader, refused to bring up significant gun-control measures for a vote.

…I know the competition is fierce…but is mitch maybe in the running for “the worst”…yes…yes he is

“If there’s any one individual in the United States to blame for our inability to put things in place to prevent gun violence, it’s Mitch McConnell,” said Peter Ambler, the executive director of Giffords, a group devoted to fighting gun violence. “McConnell understands he’s hostage to that extreme base that just doesn’t tolerate any departure from any of their views.”

Many Republicans say that McConnell is less a singular obstacle than a savvy leader who is able to his read his conference and make decisions that help his senators and protect them politically. “McConnell knows where his members stand and makes the tough calls to protect their interests,” a senior Republican aide said, explaining McConnell’s overall motivations in addressing gun violence and gun legislation.
[…]
“Mitch is really Machiavellian,” Sloane said in an interview with The Washington Post last week. “He’s single-handedly held up any kind of gun legislation that’s meaningful.”
[…]
“His staffers had no idea what to do with us,” Brown said. “McConnell didn’t have the human decency to sit down with John Lewis.”

Instead, a McConnell staffer ushered the group into a conference room and met with them for over an hour. Brown said that the staffer clearly seemed moved by Lewis, telling him that she held him in high esteem, and by the victims of gun violence, who recounted their stories one after another.

“She was moved to tears, but it didn’t change a thing,” Brown said, saying the staffer essentially told the group “that it was just the wrong time to bring this bill forward.”

Doug Andres, a McConnell spokesman, said McConnell had been unable to meet with the group at the time because it was a surprise visit and he already had constituent meetings planned. He said the staffer simply explained to the group that then-President Donald Trump was unlikely to sign the bill they were pitching, and McConnell was not going to advocate for legislation he knew would fail.
[…]
Almost immediately after Sandy Hook, then-President Barack Obama tasked then-Vice President Joe Biden with putting together a robust policy response. McConnell — then the Senate minority leader — downplayed the effort.
[…]
Then, later that month — after Obama signed 23 executive orders on guns in response to the tragedy that left 20 kindergartners dead — McConnell recorded a robocall and sent it out to gun owners in his state.

“President Obama and his team are doing everything in their power to restrict your constitutional right to keep and bear arms,” McConnell said in the recording. “Their efforts to restrict your rights, invading your personal privacy and overstepping their bounds with executive orders, is just plain wrong.”
[…]
When Manchin-Toomey finally came to the Senate floor for a vote in April 2013, McConnell pushed his conference to oppose the bill, which ultimately failed 54 to 46, falling short of the 60 votes needed for passage.

“McConnell whipped hard against it. McConnell is obsessed with protecting his right flank,” said Adam Jentleson, who at the time worked for then-Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.), explaining why McConnell helped tank the background check bill. “It’s why he’s been able to survive as leader for so long.”
[…]
“When the going gets tough, Mitch McConnell has always been absent from the fight,” said Dudley Brown, the president of the National Association for Gun Rights, a hard-line alternative to the NRA. “He has never stood up when it was really tough.”

…not that he’s the only one who you could say that shit about

At the time, Trump offered messaging whiplash. In a meeting with Democratic and Republican lawmakers two weeks after Parkland, he called for “comprehensive” gun legislation and chided Republicans for being “petrified” of the NRA. But the next day, he hosted an NRA lobbyist in the Oval Office, declared the meeting “great” on Twitter and seemed to lose interest in working on gun legislation.
[…]
That Thursday, Aug. 8, McConnell went on Louisville’s WHAS-AM radio to say he had spoken with Trump and was ready to take action. The president, he said, was “anxious to get an outcome, and so am I.”

“What we can’t do is fail to pass something,” McConnell said. “What I want to see here is an outcome.”
[…]
But a special session was never called.
[…]
By the time McConnell brought the Senate back in session, his focus had shifted. In his first remarks on the Senate floor, McConnell made no mention of the gun issue. Just over a week later, The Post reported on a whistleblower complaint about Trump’s communications with a foreign leader, eventually leading to Trump’s first impeachment for his efforts to withhold military aid to Ukraine — drawing Trump’s attention away from guns.
[…]
This past Wednesday, the day after the devastating Uvalde elementary school shooting, McConnell — now the Senate minority leader again — took to the Senate floor to declare himself and the nation “sickened and outraged by the senseless evil” that left at least 19 students and two teachers “murdered for no apparent reason at all.”

He did not mention guns or any possible legislation, instead focusing on the “innocent young lives” that were prematurely extinguished.

“Words simply fail,” McConnell said.

…words may indeed fail…not least my own when it comes to accurately expressing my feelings about mitch…but the only thing simple about this is that…in common with a tyrannical minority of pre-emptively callous but paradoxically thin-skinned individuals who function much like a metastasized cancer when it comes to america’s body politic…mitch seems entirely invested in that kind of failure…for them it’s the very definition of “a feature not a bug”

[…]most Republicans signaled in recent days that major legislation remains unlikely.
[…]
After a vigil for the Uvalde victims, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) stormed away from an interview when a British reporter asked him why mass shootings happen “only in America.” Cruz accused the reporter of having a “political agenda.”
[…]
On Friday, Trump — still the de facto leader of the Republican Party — joined other Republican officials in delivering a defiant response to the Uvalde massacre at an NRA annual meeting in Houston, arguing that new gun restrictions were pointless.
[…]
John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, latched onto McConnell’s declaration on the Senate floor that “words simply fail.”

He said he agrees completely.

“I don’t want to mince words. The Republican senators are what is costing American lives. And McConnell is the head of the Republican Senate,” Feinblatt said. “I am encouraged that McConnell gave the green light to Cornyn. That is what I would call step one.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/05/28/mcconnell-guns-mass-shootings/

…a journey of a thousand steps may famously begin with the first…but…to mix metaphors on account of feeling like I’m drowning in this kind of bad news…treading water doesn’t count…but if you don’t keep your head above water that’s a whole other problem

When the American Psychological Association surveyed more than 2,000 people about their stress levels just days after back-to-back mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, in 2019, the findings laid out the toll of seemingly ceaseless, random violence.

A third of the respondents said they would no longer go to certain public places for fear of becoming a casualty of a mass shooting. Almost as many said they could not go anywhere without worrying about being shot. Twenty-four percent said they had made changes in their lives due to their fear of a mass shooting.
[…]
The assaults on Americans’ psyches have only intensified since then, with a two-year-plus pandemic that has taken 1 million U.S. lives; street battles in the struggle for racial justice; a war in Ukraine that has renewed fears of a nuclear conflict; a roller-coaster economy; an insurrectionist riot at the U.S. Capitol; visibly worsening effects of climate change and many more mass shootings. Those culminated in the massacre Tuesday of 19 children and two adults in a Uvalde, Tex. elementary school, just 10 days after the slaughter of 10 Black shoppers and workers at a Buffalo supermarket.

Experts say the unrelenting developments are taking a toll on our mental and physical health and how we interact as a society. The targeting of churches and schools has been particularly distressing to many people who have long regarded them as spaces safe from the tumult of the world.

…hard to deny that sort of thing has been pretty universal…or that there’s a divergence when it comes to the slowly swelling ranks of the pack of “lone wolves” who collectively have targeted precisely such places…which makes at least some things stand to reason

The notion that people of color feel more vulnerable is supported by the APA survey, which was incorporated into the organization’s annual Stress in America report. Hispanics, Blacks, Asians and Native Americans all reported more stress from mass shootings than Whites.

A Quinnipiac University poll and a Pew Research Center survey, both conducted in 2018 after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., showed the same results, with Blacks and Hispanics more fearful of mass violence than Whites, and younger people more worried than older respondents.
[…]
The surveys, experts said, affirm their belief that repeated exposure to shocking acts of violence that happen with horrific regularity in this country, alone among its peers, is affecting people’s health.

“It’s clearly having a significant negative impact, and particularly on our mental and our physical health,” said Vaile Wright, senior director for health-care innovation at the APA, who works on the Stress in America surveys that have been conducted each year since 2007.

When acts of mass violence “are repeated in this way, they start to feel more and more overwhelming, and a sense of hopelessness starts to set in,” she said.

Human bodies are not meant to be so frequently in a state of agitation, she said. The result is hyper-vigilance, anxiety and an inability “to be in the moment.” Some people may become desensitized to violence as a defense, she said.
[…]
[Joshua Morganstein, a psychiatrist and chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Psychiatric Dimensions of Disaster] suggested that people monitor their consumption of news about horrific events such as the Uvalde shooting. It is not being callous to turn off the news, he said — it can be necessary for mental health.
[…]
Mass shootings in which four or more people are killed account for fewer than 1 percent of the roughly 20,000 firearm homicides in the United States each year, according to Jillian Peterson, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minn. Suicides by firearms make up about 60 percent of all gun deaths each year.

“The most dangerous thing you will do today is ride in a car,” said Joel Dvoskin, a clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. “And in fact we’ve made that safer.”

But Beverly Kingston, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado, said society is only now beginning to ask “how do we heal collective trauma? How do we acknowledge our society is built on top of layers of trauma?”

“I worry about our collective trauma getting in the way of what we could be doing to create a better society,” she said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2022/05/26/mass-shootings-trauma-effects/

…speaking of which…at the risk of an unfortunate pun…I’d argue we’d be wise to be wary of magic bullets, too

Many of the UK’s top scientists working on carbon capture technologies do not believe they will be developed and scaled up in time to reach net zero and limit global heating to 1.5C.

Experts speaking at a Greenhouse Gas Removal Hub event in London warned that these techniques, including direct air capture, biofuels, biochar, afforestation and advanced weathering, are not a silver bullet and should make up just a fraction of the efforts to decarbonise.

The researchers were polled by event organisers on whether they believed the carbon removal targets would be met. Of 114 scientists in the audience, 57% said they were “not confident” the UK would meet the 2030 goals in the net zero strategy of 5m tonnes of engineered greenhouse gas removal, and 30,000 hectares a year of tree planting; 25% said they were quite confident, and 11% said there was no chance.

The scientists are taking part in a £70m government-funded competition to find the best ways to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. These technologies are due to begin removing vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by 2030, with the hope being that the winning methods could be scaled up and ready for market in two years’ time.

The government appears, on the whole, to be confident that carbon capture methods will be developed fairly rapidly. The Department for Transport has stated, for example, that greenhouse gas removal (GGR) technologies will enable Britons to take “guilt-free flights” by the end of next year, but those involved in the programme were less optimistic.
[…]
Gideon Henderson, the chief scientist at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), said: “GGR is hard and expensive. And we cannot afford to see it as a surrogate to compensate for continued emissions in sectors that can be decarbonised. It is not an excuse not to decarbonise, so we must drive down emissions anyway.”

By far the most popular technology based on applications to the programme was direct air capture. This process involves removing carbon from the air, usually using giant fans, and heating it to a very high temperature. This carbon can then be stored in geological formations or combined with hydrogen to create synthetic fuels.

While ministers like this idea, those leading the programme believe it may not be the answer, due to the energy intensity required and how expensive it is.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/may/30/greenhouse-gas-removal-not-a-silver-bullet-to-achieve-net-zero

…that one goes on to list a few things that might complement or seem like a better idea than the direct air capture thing depending on how you think that last part might look in the face of how the whole energy market thing is going presently

The European Union has agreed to an embargo on most Russian oil imports after late-night talks at a summit in Brussels.

The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, hailed the deal as a “remarkable achievement”, after tweeting on Monday night that sanctions will immediately impact 75% of Russian oil imports, “cutting a huge source of financing for its war machine”.

Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, said the ban “will effectively cut around 90% of oil imports from Russia to the EU by the end of the year” because Germany and Poland had committed to renounce deliveries via a pipeline to their territory.

Michel added that the package also included removing access to Swift payments for Russia’s largest bank, Sberbank; banning three more Russian state-owned broadcasters; and further sanctions against “individuals responsible for war crimes in Ukraine”.
[…]
Under a compromise plan that was discussed at the summit, Russian oil transported through the Soviet-era Druzhba pipeline for Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia would be exempt from the EU embargo.
[…]
Volodymyr Zelenskiy had earlier appealed to EU leaders to show unity against Vladimir Putin. At a summit in Brussels, EU leaders had been attempting to find a way to placate the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, who has been holding up a deal on the latest sanctions against Putin’s war machine.
[…]
The EU had stalled over its latest sanctions against Russia for nearly four weeks since the Von der Leyen, proposed a complete ban on Russian oil by the end of the year.
[…]
The German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, said earlier he was confident there was a “good solution” on the oil embargo. Germany, along with Poland, has pledged to phase out Russian oil by the end of the year. Officials close to the talks say the decision of these two large economies to forgo oil from the northern leg of the Druzhba pipeline means the EU oil embargo would cover 93% of Russian oil supply by the end of the year.

As yet there is no end date on the exemption for the southern leg of Druzhba, covering Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, landlocked countries that are heavily dependent on Russian oil.
[…]
Italy, the Baltic states, the Netherlands, Belgium and other countries that import oil on tankers had initial reservations about an exemption for pipeline oil that would give an advantage to those countries that can continue to import cheaper Russian oil. But there was growing willingness to accept an imbalance on the EU’s internal market to secure agreement on sanctions.
[…]
As EU talks went on, it emerged Russia would cut off gas supplies to the Netherlands on Tuesday, in the latest escalation of the energy payments row with the west. The Dutch-backed trader GasTerra revealed the move after the company refused to meet the Kremlin’s demand of paying Gazprom in roubles. About 15% of Dutch gas comes from Russia.

Some EU leaders are already talking about a seventh round of Russia sanctions targeting gas. But some argue the EU rushed too quickly into an oil embargo. “We talked about oil, under pressure from [the] Baltics and Poland before having done our homework,” a senior EU diplomat said. “Under the pressure of this war we have maybe taken some steps too soon and we are now facing the consequences.”
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/30/eu-nears-compromise-agreement-for-partial-ban-on-russian-oil

…things tend to look grim when you’re under pressure

Several Tory MPs told the Guardian they believed the threshold of 54 letters withdrawing support for Johnson was close to being crossed – or may have been already. This would trigger a secret ballot on whether they still have confidence in the prime minister.

…which sounds a bit more clandestine than it really is…the secret part is they can vote against him without publicly putting their name to it…how secret that ballot is from the whips I guess we all just have to imagine

It is understood that Sir Graham Brady, the chair of the 1922 Committee, will have to use his own judgment about whether to announce the milestone being passed straight away if it occurs while parliament is off this week, or wait until Monday, when the House of Commons returns after the Queen’s jubilee celebrations.

…& as ever when there’s blood in the water…from a certain point of view the thing to do is to throw in as much chum as you can muster

With Johnson’s future in the balance, No 10 has begun launching a number of rightwing, nationalistic policies in recent weeks. These include the return of imperial measures, plans to override the Northern Ireland protocol, a hint about expanding grammar schools, a review of fracking, and repeated promises to tear up more EU regulation.

A cabinet minister told the Guardian that Johnson appeared to be trying to stop the right of the party turning against him in the event of a leadership challenge, citing policies such as the review of fracking – which is electorally unpopular but appeals to a minority in parliament.
[…]
One Tory cabinet source said the imperial measures policy was “absolutely bananas”, while another cabinet source said they had “no idea which muppet had come up with that idea”, as “this is not what the government’s overall strategy is about”.
[…]
[Will] Tanner, a former No 10 aide and the director of Conservative thinktank Onward, said: “My view is that while it’s understandable that the prime minister and Downing Street would want to demonstrate their commitment to rightwing policy issues, to satisfy some of his backbenchers at a moment where clearly the prime minister is worried about his future, those issues are not going to win the Conservative party the next election.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/30/johnson-lurch-to-right-adds-momentum-leadership-vote

…& I guess if you can’t find parallels then perhaps it’s just a bigger echo chamber

Have we reached the apex of national division? Or do these terrible chasms open up so fast that, as you hurl yourself towards the next, you forget the last – like an 80s video game? Half the country is wondering how much public contempt a government can survive before it perishes; the other half is rejoicing over a return to imperial measurements – and not a moment too soon. How else could the Queen go gladly into her platinum jubilee, if she weren’t confident of a return to the standards of [checks Wikipedia] 1826, a full 100 years before her birth? Where else would we reasonably find a spirit of national optimism and modernity, except in the late Regency era?

…I guess it’s not less dumb than the have-less-doors-&-more-guns thing…either way it does seem like it’s intended to serve a similar function?

Personally, I have no problem with imperial measures. I learned to cook from a 1940s oven manual, full of very detailed, thrifty and complicated recipes, all in ounces – intended to get women out of the factories and back into the kitchen. It became one of my few party tricks, being able to multiply almost anything by 28 to get it in grams, to which I added being able to multiply anything by 2.2, then divide it by 14, to get kilos in stones and pounds. It’s only fun because it makes no sense; otherwise it would just be arithmetic.
[…]
What we’re witnessing is the hard limit of “dead cat” politics meeting nostalgia. In the Lynton Crosby school, where you explode the national debate with loaded, combustible but ultimately meaningless policy announcements, there’s often an element of longing for the past. “Why can’t we go back to a time when men were men, women knew their place, criminals were locked up for ever and migrants migrated somewhere else? Here are the ideas for people who feel that way.” Schools mustn’t “pander” to transgender people; let’s put gunboats in the Channel and lock up the Royal National Lifeboat Institution; death to the “woke warriors” of the National Trust, etc. These announcements are known as “red meat”, which isn’t inaccurate, since there usually is an element of spitefulness that only someone accessing their inner hyena would enjoy.
[…]
This is an ultimately silly notion, whose only redeeming feature is that it’s not of very high consequence, and that puts it squarely in Dad’s Army territory, of faffing, busywork and self-importance. But the only reason people feel affectionate towards this Dad’s Army sensibility is that it is meant to be funny. The “dead cat” school of messaging relies on nobody having any sense of humour. The politics of unkindness simply cannot survive contact with a joke; it melts, like throwing water on a witch. But at least we might finally be reaching the endgame, where they have run out of mean ideas that can’t be laughed at.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/30/are-imperial-measurements-red-meat-to-tory-voters-or-more-like-spam

…it’s just…in the “cui bono?” sense…I’m not sure I remember the last time any of this was really funny

The pact posited no binding ceasefire, no power-sharing requirements, and no political roadmap. In return for some mumbo-jumbo about al-Qaida, Trump pledged total, unconditional US and Nato withdrawal within 14 months.

This was not peacemaking. This was capitulation. The Taliban could hardly believe their luck.

Trump hoped to benefit politically from “bringing the troops home”, even though the vast majority had already left. He was otherwise wholly indifferent to the fate of the Afghan people.

Military men in the US and UK were aghast. So, too, were diplomats, politicians, aid agencies and analysts familiar with Afghanistan. But their warnings of looming catastrophe were ignored.

Despite being hobbled by official secrecy, two damning reports this month, one by a US public watchdog, the other by the UK parliament’s foreign affairs committee (FAC), lay bare the almost unbelievable incompetence of the two governments.
[…]
Twenty years of nation-building, at a cost of tens of thousands of US, British and Afghan lives, were blown away in a few shameful days. Johnson and Raab should have resigned then, but didn’t. There’s still time, guys.

The report of the US special inspector general (Sigar) blamed the calamity on Trump as well as his successor, Joe Biden, and the then Afghan president, Ashraf Ghani.

Biden was certainly at fault. He should have insisted on renegotiating Doha and kept some US forces at Bagram base, outside Kabul. European Nato allies should have voiced their misgivings more forcibly.

But responsibility lies primarily with the man who set this lethal geopolitical car crash in motion. While boasting of his prowess as a dealmaker, Trump caved to a gang of feudal warlords, who promptly defaulted to tyranny.
[…]
In two years’ time, Trump or a Trump-endorsed Republican clone could win back the White House. His reactionary, disruptive America First agenda may once again dictate the way the US deals, or fails to deal, with the big global challenges of the day.
[…]
Trump made a fool of himself trying to charm the nuclear-armed North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un. His photo-op summitry boosted Kim’s prestige for zero return. Kim has lately been firing off ballistic missiles like there’s no tomorrow. The way he’s going, there may not be.
[…]
While some of his problems are self-inflicted, Biden’s struggle to repair the global damage wrought by Trump’s four-year rampage has been made infinitely more difficult by Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Trump obsequiously courted Vladimir Putin. He obligingly trashed Nato and the EU. And he clashed with Putin’s arch-foe – Ukraine’s leader, Volodymyr Zelenskiy – whom he notoriously (and impeachably) pressured in a bid to discredit Biden.
[…]
Now Putin’s brutal imperialism threatens in turn to damage Trump’s arch-foe – Biden – by derailing his international and domestic priorities and, if Russia wins, discrediting American global leadership.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/29/donald-trump-toxic-legacy-helps-putin-ukraine-afghanistan-korea

…it’s maybe a far cry from “perfect is the enemy of good”…except perhaps in the sense that to some the less awful choice failing to produce their perfect outcome is somehow a justification for ceding the ballot box to the infinitely more awful option…which in terms of the kind of luxury many of those people would otherwise be swift to scorn as privilege is tough to beat…but that’s a whole other thing that’s seemingly harder to figure out…after all…this stuff is obvious

As the Republican party primaries play out across the US, the most sought after endorsement is still that of former president Donald Trump. But when it comes to the most vital part of any American campaign – money – another figure is emerging on the right of US politics who is becoming equally significant.

Peter Thiel, the PayPal founder and former CEO referred to as the “don” of the original PayPal Mafia, a group that included Elon Musk, is establishing himself as a serious power player in American rightwing politics by wielding the power of his vast fortune.
[…]
Earlier this year Thiel stepped down from the board of Meta, where he was an early investor, and a long-serving adviser to CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “He wanted to avoid being a distraction for Facebook,” according to a person close to Thiel. With his resignation effective this month, the source told Forbes Thiel “thinks that the Republican Party can advance the Trump agenda and he wants to do what he can to support that”.
[…]
Thiel has so far helped Trump in that cause. By some estimates, Thiel has donated $25m to 15 other 2022 candidates for the House and Senate towing the Trump election fraud line.[…incidentally I could have sworn it was “toeing the line…but what with the trolling/trawling thing…I guess towing is appropriate?]
[…]
“Thiel is one of the conservative mega donors that has the ability to shore up candidates that might need additional support. His spending is targeted, and his ability to spend millions can be impactful,” said Sheila Krumholz at OpenSecrets.
[…]
As an undergraduate, he founded the conservative Stanford Review and in 1995 Thiel co-authored The Diversity Myth, a book sought to question the impact of multiculturalism and “political correctness” at California’s higher education campuses.
[…]
In 2003, he co-founded Palantir Technologies, a firm to assist US intelligence agencies with counter-terrorism operations. Last week, Palantir and global commodities trader Trafigura announced a new target market to track carbon emissions for the oil, gas, refined metals and concentrates sector. BP is among its customers, Reuters reported.
[…]
“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” Thiel said of the action. “I saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting attention by bullying people even when there was no connection with the public interest … I thought it was worth fighting back.”
[…]
Moira Weigel, a professor of communications at Northeastern University and a founding editor of Logic magazine, argued in the New Republic last year that Thiel does not really matter: “What matters about him is whom he connects.”

At the moment, Thiel is busy connecting some of the most rightwing politicians in recent US history.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/may/30/peter-thiel-republican-midterms-trump-paypal-mafia

…in at least some ways, anyway

The property, at the top of a rise on the road out of the small city of Fairmont, bears a large sign: “Manchin Professional Building”. Nameplates announce the offices of accountants, financial advisors and insurers. But there is no mention of the most profitable and influential company registered at the address – the Democratic senator’s own firm, Enersystems.

Manchin was recently revealed to have quietly made millions of dollars from Enersystems over the past three decades as the only supplier of a low grade coal to a high-polluting power plant near Fairmont. That came as news to Hilsbos and just about everyone else in the city.
[…]
In 2020, Manchin earned nearly half a million dollars from the company, and $5.6m over the previous decade.
[…]
For years, Manchin has justified voting against curbs on the burning of fossil fuels and other measures to tackle the climate crisis on the grounds that they were bad for West Virginia with its economy and culture rooted in coal mining. Last year, he used his vote in a hung US Senate to block President Biden’s $3.5tn economic plan in part because he said he was “very, very disturbed” that its climate provisions would kill the coal industry.
[…]
Christopher Regan, a former vice-chair of the West Virginia Democratic party who worked as an aide to Manchin, recalled a time when the senator painted prominent Republican officials in the state as “involved in self-service as opposed to public service”, a line Regan then promoted.

“This thing with the coal plant turns that around on him. What’s he doing? Is this for West Virginia? Or is this just strictly for his own narrow pecuniary interest?” he said.
[…]
In 2010, Democrats had a firm grip on the West Virginian legislature. Today, the Republicans are in control and they hold the governor’s office.

All of West Virginia’s congressional seats have fallen to the Republicans, leaving Manchin as the last Democrat holding statewide office. Manchin won his Senate seat in 2012 with nearly 61% of the vote, beating the Republican candidate by more than 24 points. Six years later, his margin of victory was just three points and he took less than half the vote after openly criticising Donald Trump in a state where the then president was hugely popular and remains so.

For all that, Greg Thomas, a prominent West Virginia Republican operative and Manchin opponent, does not think the coal plant revelations will damage the senator with most voters.

“No one here cares about environmentalists protesting Joe Manchin’s personal financial holding. It’s gotten to the point where it’s like, who cares if he does? We assume they’re all corrupt.”
[…]
“His popularity in West Virginia is coming back after it dropped over his fights with Trump. Pushing back against Biden has helped. His position on energy issues has been big, he said.
[…]
Manchin’s approval rating among West Virginia voters has surged to 57% from just 40% early last year – and is even higher among Republicans.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/may/31/joe-manchin-hold-climate-policy-hostage-to-benefit-his-financial-interests

…but when things that ought to disqualify you from office are the very things that drive the votes you court there’s a sorry devaluation of a particular suffix

You’ll be hearing a lot about Watergate in the next several weeks, as the 50th anniversary of the infamous June 17, 1972, burglary at the Democratic National Committee headquarters approaches. There will be documentaries, cable-news debates, the finale of that Julia Roberts miniseries (“Gaslit”) based on the popular Watergate podcast (“Slow Burn”). I’ll be moderating a panel discussion at the Library of Congress on the anniversary itself — and you can certainly count on a few retrospectives in this very newspaper.
[…]
Yet thinking about Watergate saddens me these days. The nation that came together to force a corrupt president from office and send many of his co-conspirator aides to prison is a nation that no longer exists.
[…]
“The national newspapers mattered in a way that is unimaginable to us today, and even the regional newspapers were incredibly strong,” Garrett Graff, author of “Watergate: A New History,” told me last week. I have been immersed in his nearly 800-page history — a “remarkably rich narrative,” former Post executive editor Leonard Downie Jr. called it in a review — which sets out to retell the story.

Graff depicts Watergate not as a singular event but as the entire mind-set of the Nixon presidency — “a shaggy umbrella of a dozen distinct scandals,” as he told me. By the time the break-in captured the attention of most Americans, they were essentially “walking into the second or third act of a play.”
[…]
Americans read this coverage in their local papers; many cities still had two or more dailies at that point. Later, they were riveted by the proceedings of the Senate Watergate Committee, whose hearings were aired live on the three big television networks during the summer of 1973. Graff reports that the average American household watched 30 hours of the hearings, which were also rebroadcast at night by PBS. (“The best thing that has happened to public television since ‘Sesame Street,’ ” one Los Angeles Times TV critic noted.)

Still, “we forget how close Nixon came to surviving Watergate,” Graff told me. “Even at the end of the hearings, there was no guarantee that Nixon was out of office.”

What changed that? The increasing public awareness of the president’s wrongdoing and the coverup. “The sheer accumulation of the lies,” he said, “at a time when the idea that a president could lie to America was unthinkable.”

…funny what winds up qualifying for nostalgia, I suppose

Our media environment is far more fractured, and news organizations are far less trusted.

And, in part, we can blame the rise of a right-wing media system. At its heart is Fox News, which was founded in 1996, nearly a quarter-century after the break-in, with a purported mission to provide a “fair and balanced” counterpoint to the mainstream media. Of course, that message often manifested in relentless and damaging criticism of its news rivals. Meanwhile, Fox News and company have served as a highly effective laundry service for Trump’s lies. With that network’s help, his tens of thousands of false or misleading claims have found fertile ground among his fervent supporters — oblivious to the skillful reporting elsewhere that has called out and debunked those lies.
[…]
Not everything was good about the media world of the 1970s. It was almost entirely White and male, barely open to other views or voices. This was long before the democratizing effect of the Internet, which has elevated the ideas of people of color, women and other marginalized groups.

But it was a time when we had a news media that commanded the trust of the general public, a necessity in helping bring Nixon to justice. That, at least during his presidency, was never possible with Trump.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/05/29/media-watergate-50-trump-journalism-fox/

…so…yeah…much as I’d be delighted if the mid-terms went to the dems in a plethora of landslides…& the public hearings for the jan 6th committee opened some eyes & changed some minds…I wish I had a bit more faith that things will go that way…because as morbidly fascinating as this media circus might be…when it comes to the all-too-real smoke blown by the likes of manchin…some of the consequent landslides are far from metaphorical

Heavy rains lashed Pernambuco last week, triggering landslides on Friday that wiped away housing in poor neighbourhoods or favelas built on hillsides that are prone to such natural disasters.
[…]
Experts say climate change contributes to more intense rainfall, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has classified Recife’s metropolitan region as one of the world’s most vulnerable cities. The low-lying metro region is set at the delta of three rivers, features floodplains and a network of dozens of canals and is home to about 4 million people.

In March, Recife became the first Latin American city to sign on for participation in a programme that will create insurance against climate disasters created by a network of local and regional governments and financed by German development bank KfW.

The state’s civil defence authority said the flooding had displaced 5,000 people from their homes, and reinforced its alert about the continuing risk of landslides. Rain has continued, albeit with less intensity.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/31/dozens-dead-in-brazil-floods-and-landslides-with-many-more-missing

…whichever way you cut it it’s an expensive sort of circus…& to be honest things aren’t looking too hot on the bread front

Highlighting the challenge for low-income households, figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed prices for some low-cost groceries increased at a much faster rate than general inflation in the year to April.

The price of pasta jumped the most from a basket of 30 basic food items compiled by government statisticians, with an increase of 50% from a year earlier – more than five times the headline rate of inflation of 9% for the same period.

The figures also highlighted above-average-inflation price rises for crisps (up 17%), bread (16%), minced beef (16%) and rice (15%).
[…]
The ONS decided to compile the experimental data, tracking price changes for the lowest-cost everyday groceries sold by supermarkets online, after the anti-poverty campaigner Jack Monroe highlighted the risks facing the poorest households in Britain from much faster increases in the price of budget brand items.
[…]
Monroe, who held talks with the ONS over compiling the data, welcomed the publication of the figures, saying they backed up her own research and evidence from January. “The hikes in the value brands and basics have been much higher than average inflation stats,” she tweeted.

“As I have said for 10 years now, and as many others have pointed out before + alongside me, it’s FAR more expensive to be poor. And now the literal experts in data gathering and statistics are helpfully, methodically, forensically backing that up. This feels like huge progress.”

Analysis from the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests the increase in gas and electricity bills expected this October could lead to average annual inflation rates of as high as 14% for the poorest 10th of households, compared with 8% for the richest. This is because lower-income families spend a larger share of their budgets on basics such as food and energy than richer households.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/may/30/pasta-bread-and-crisps-among-biggest-uk-food-price-increases

…but that’s probably enough out of me today…except…well…this might be good news for some of us?

People who drink coffee – whether with or without sugar – appear to have a lower risk of an early death, although experts caution the finding may not be down to the brew itself.
[…]
Previous studies have suggested the beverage may be beneficial to health, with coffee drinking associated with a lower risk of conditions ranging from chronic liver disease to certain cancers and even dementia.
[…]
The study, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, is based on data from more than 171,000 participants of the UK BioBank – which has collected genetic, lifestyle and health information from more than 500,000 people since it began in 2006, including details of participants’ coffee-drinking habits.
[…]
After taking into account factors including age, sex, ethnicity, educational level, smoking status, amount of physical activity, body mass index and diet, the team found that, compared with those who did not drink the brew, people who consumed unsweetened coffee had the lowest risk of death.

The greatest reduction, a 29% lower risk of death, was seen for those drinking between 2.5 and 4.5 cups a day.

Reductions in the risk of death were also seen for coffee sweetened with sugar, at least for those drinking between 1.5 and 3.5 cups a day. The trend was less clear for people who used artificial sweeteners.
[…]
Naveed Sattar, a professor of metabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow who was not involved in the work, cautioned that the findings – while intriguing – were not clear-cut.
[…]
In an accompanying editorial, Dr Christina Wee, deputy editor of the journal, agreed the findings were not conclusive. But, she added, it did appear that drinking coffee, whether unsweetened or with modest amount of sugar, was probably not harmful for most people.
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2022/may/30/coffee-drinkers-may-be-at-lower-risk-of-early-death-study-suggests

…so I guess at least I don’t have to feel bad about going for a refill on the coffee before I get to the tunes?

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12 Comments

  1. Mitch will die soon, but so will we the human race.

    Thanks Mitch, you turtle lookalike bastard.

  2. The thing abut Watergate is that it was an incredibly stupid self-own by the trending-toward-psychotic paranoid Nixon. What the burglars were charged to do was to break into the DNC offices in the hotel/residential/business complex known as “the Watergate” to dig up dirt on Democrats, chief among them Nixon’s 1972 Presidential election opponent, George McGovern. No decent poll gave McGovern a snowball’s chance in hell of winning, too liberal, the meltdown of his running mate Ed Muskie (google “The Canuck Letter” for funsies) and his last-minute replacement by the awe-inspiringly uninspiring Sargent Shriver (husband of Eunice Kennedy), and other stuff.

    The only hope Muskie had was that the voting age had been lowered to 18 recently, and this was the first presidential election they could participate in. The excitable media, always up for covering any campaign in exhaustive detail as a riveting horserace, even when they are doomed, made much of the 1972 “Youthquake.” As it was, most stayed home. Nixon carried 49 states and won by 18 million votes, 60.7% versus 37.5%.

    Why in the WORLD did Nixon risk everything and pull a stunt like that when the odds were so much in his favor? His paranoid lunacy and his believing everything he read in the papers, who were hostile and dismissive of him. If he had just sat back and coasted to victory it is he, not Gerald Ford, who would have presided over the American Bicentennial.

    A fun fact: America has only had two Quaker Presidents and Nixon was one of them. Can you name the other?

    …………………….answer below…………………………..

    Herbert Hoover. Not a great track record.

    • …I know I seem to have been bemoaning this for what that graph suggests is an unfashionably long time…but…I feel like that’s a lot less unprovoked than the stuff I’m reacting to?

      https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/memorial-day-weekend-marked-dozen-mass-shootings-us

      …on the other hand this is likely the last of these you’ll hear out of me until next week…I think the degree to which I’m currently meant to be in too many places at once looks like making it implausible that I’ll manage one of these on thursday…or over the weekend

      …which makes this part unhelpfully short notice…but if anyone with the available time & the ability to concoct something above the line felt they could fill in for either of those slots I’d be exceedingly grateful?

      • I can help out RIP. I’ve never done a DOT – but I’m game. What time is it supposed to post?

        • …they’re due up at 06:00…but can be pre-prepped & scheduled if you sleep like a real person

          …I try to let meg have 1st pick of the weekend days since she does more of them but thursday is a for-sure opening

          …also, thank you kindly

          • @SplinterRIP – Roger that – Thursday and I’ll check with Meg about the weekend day -unless someone else wants to do it.

  3. Thanks for including the Uyghur article. It’s telling that there hasn’t been more mainstream coverage of China’s ongoing systematic genocide.

    • …it is…though it was at least nice to see that the pacific islands seemed to have declined to sign up to china’s let-us-worry-about-that proposals just recently…basically they continue to have a really dreadful record with stuff like that…or tibet…or whatever…& largely it doesn’t get much traction

  4. as you mentioned we got cut off from ze russian gas…which according to the gubment will cause no problems for businesses or the general population whilst simultaniously saying its going to make storing enough gas for winter harder and considering ramping up the coal power output coz needs must

    me finks i better save me pennies for winter coz this gubment doesnt know its arse from its elbow

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