Okay, I’ve been seeing stuff on twitter on Trump’s latest on windpower, but largely ignored it. But this Brian Beutler tweet caught my eye:
Literally everyone in the industry knows what happened here: Trump delivered a demented rant that caromed off in a variety of directions and would be the mockery of the nation if Republicans didn't treat him like a cult leader. We have to do better than headlines like this. pic.twitter.com/vHmINr73Vu
That is a great point. The article actually refers to Trump’s “bizarre” rant, but, come-on, this is so not normal. Seriously, what would you think about anybody you knew who talked remotedly like this. And, for the most part, our press– because it literally doesn’t know how to do otherwise– pretends that this falls in the range off normal politics.
We’ll have an economy based on wind. I never understood wind. You know, I know windmills very much. I’ve studied it better than anybody. I know it’s very expensive. They’re made in China and Germany mostly — very few made here, almost none. But they’re manufactured tremendous — if you’re into this — tremendous fumes. Gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right? So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint — fumes are spewing into the air. Right? Spewing. Whether it’s in China, Germany, it’s going into the air. It’s our air, their air, everything — right? So they make these things and then they put them up.
And this is the “dear leader” that Republicans are staking their party on? You really wouldn’t believe it if it wasn’t actually happening.
What is on the table is a narrative that Democratic presidential candidates can incorporate into their overall message. You can already see this happening. “Today is a sad but necessary day for democracy,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont said in a video statement for his presidential campaign. “The president of the United States is being impeached, and that is the right thing to do because we have got to never forget that no individual in this country, certainly not the president of the United States, is above the law, is above the Constitution.”
This isn’t the relentless focus on personality that undermined the previous campaign against Trump. It’s an important point of information to tie into a larger political case. Sanders makes that completely clear in his conclusion: “I am running for president not just to develop and work on a set of policies that represent working families in this country, not just to take on the greed and corruption of the 1 percent, but also to change the way the presidency functions. And that is, we cannot continue having a pathological liar in the White House.”
Sanders is using impeachment to underscore the themes of his campaign. He’s tying Trump to a broader narrative of corruption and elite impunity, reinforcing the message of impeachment without naming the president or making him the subject of his remarks. He’s showing voters that he’s attentive to the central issue of this election without letting it consume his message. It’s a deft move, and a strong one for an election where many voters will want someone to stand against Trump and make a comprehensive case for a new direction.
2) Linda Greenhouse on the Supreme Court and Trump:
When the first two of President Trump’s appeals seeking to shield his financial records from disclosure reached the Supreme Court last month, I predicted that the justices would take their institutional interests into account and turn the cases down.
I was wrong.
And on reflection, now that the court has agreed to hear those two appeals plus a third, I’m glad I was wrong. Here’s why: The eventual decisions, to come in the months after the as-yet unscheduled arguments in late March or early April, will give the country much-needed clarity about the Supreme Court. With the court in the full glare of an election-year spotlight, we will learn beyond any doubt what kind of Supreme Court we have — and whether its evolution into partnership with a president who acts as if he owns it is now complete.
Those of us who have been warning about this evolution are well aware that it’s a contested claim, subject to ready dismissal as overstatement or ideologically driven fearmongering. So I want to make the case here that for the justices to do anything other than affirm the three decisions at issue by two Courts of Appeals would be to vindicate both the warnings and the president’s disturbing assumption.
3) I’ve been enjoying the TNT marathon of Star Wars movies (yes, I own the DVD’s, of course, but something about just having them on the TV in the background) and I really like this take on the original Star Wars, “The Original Star Wars Is a Great Movie Because It Asks More Questions Than It Answers.” Did not love the new movie, but that’s for another day.
4) Pretty intrigued by the Historians pushback on the 1619 NYT project and the response from the NYT. My sense is that the 1619 Project is a super-important and useful corrective to years of History that under-played the truly fundamental role of slavery and white supremacy in American history. But, that doesn’t mean you cannot go too far in your corrections. I think Andrew Sullivan makes some good points:
There’s no question that Americans have deliberately avoided the brutal truths about slavery, and it is undeniably important that the full horror of that hideous regime be better and more widely understood. A special issue dedicated to exposing the racial terror-state in America before and after Reconstruction is extremely worthwhile. I wasn’t brought up here, but I can easily believe that high-school history literally whitewashes the historical reality, and still minimizes the evil. Taking that on is God’s work. Equally, Hannah-Jones’s essay is deeply moving about the faith in America that African-Americans, with little reason, clung to for so long. Vital too is recognizing that African-Americans are the most American of anyone in this country (apart, of course, from Native Americans)…
This is therefore, in its over-reach, ideology masquerading as neutral scholarship. Take a simple claim: no aspect of our society is unaffected by the legacy of slavery. Sure. Absolutely. Of course. But, when you consider this statement a little more, you realize this is either banal or meaningless. The complexity of history in a country of such size and diversity means that everything we do now has roots in many, many things that came before us. You could say the same thing about the English common law, for example, or the use of the English language: no aspect of American life is untouched by it. You could say that about the Enlightenment. Or the climate. You could say that America’s unique existence as a frontier country bordered by lawlessness is felt even today in every mass shooting. You could cite the death of countless millions of Native Americans — by violence and disease — as something that defines all of us in America today. And in a way it does. But that would be to engage in a liberal inquiry into our past, teasing out the nuances, and the balance of various forces throughout history, weighing each against each other along with the thoughts and actions of remarkable individuals — in the manner of, say, the excellent new history of the U.S., These Truths by Jill Lepore.
But the NYT chose a neo-Marxist rather than liberal path to make a very specific claim: that slavery is not one of many things that describe America’s founding and culture, it is the definitive one. Arguing that the “true founding” was the arrival of African slaves on the continent, period, is a bitter rebuke to the actual founders and Lincoln. America is not a messy, evolving, multicultural, religiously infused, Enlightenment-based, racist, liberating, wealth-generating kaleidoscope of a society. It’s white supremacy, which started in 1619, and that’s the key to understand all of it. America’s only virtue, in this telling, belongs to those who have attempted and still attempt to end this malign manifestation of white supremacy.
5) The Upshot quiz on recognizing famous people was really fun. I got 86th percentile, but would have done a little better if I had not mis-typed one person.
6) Really good column on the problems with actually trying to have a free college plan:
Democratic presidential candidates are fightingover who should be eligible for free college based on income, but a bigger question is how to structure a plan that could work in all 50 states.
The United States has no national system of higher education, and each of the states works somewhat differently. Overlooking this basic fact risks creating a policy that could make things worse instead of better.
All of the leading Democratic presidential candidates want to make college free for at least some students. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren say all public colleges should be tuition-free. Pete Buttigieg has proposed making public college tuition free for families earning up to $100,000, saying at Thursday’s debate that “I just want you to go ahead and pay your own tuition” if “you’re in that lucky top 10 percent.” And Joe Biden has proposed eliminating tuition at community colleges, but not at four-year ones.
But the candidates’ plans generally fail to explain how the federal government should make college free nationwide. States vary widely in how well they fund their public colleges, and how much they charge for tuition. In-state prices for a year at a four-year public college range from about $6,000 in Florida and Wyoming to about $17,000 in Vermont and New Hampshire. States that charge students the most tend to be those that fund their colleges the least.
This creates a problem for federal policymakers who want to make college affordable everywhere. A plan that simply pays whatever colleges are charging would bail out states like Vermont at the expense of states like Wyoming — and encourage states to raise tuition to capture more federal money.
The solution would have to consider states’ investment, and the details matter a lot.
7) Waking up in the dark in winter sucks (fortunately, I don’t do that anymore, but my wife and HS-age son do). Why we should just work shorter hours in winter. Also, some cool natural experiments:
One potentially insightful group to examine includes people who live at the western edges of time zones. Since time zones can cover vast areas, people living at the eastern edges of time zones experience sunrise about an hour to an hour and a half before those living at the western edge. Despite this, the entire population must abide by the same working hours, meaning that many people will be forced to get up before sunrise. This essentially means that people in one part of the time zone are constantly out of sync with their circadian clocks. And while this might not seem like such a big deal, it’s associated with a number of damaging consequences. People living at the western edges experience higher rates of breast cancer, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease—put down by researchers primarily to the chronic disruption of circadian rhythms that arises from having to wake up in the dark.
Another extreme example of social jet lag is experienced in Spain, which abides by central European time, despite being geographically in line with the UK. This means the country is shifted one hour forward, and that the population must follow a social schedule which is not in keeping with their biological timings. As a result, the whole country suffers from sleep deprivation—getting an hour less on average than the rest of Europe. This degree of sleep loss has been linked to increased absenteeism, stress, work-related accidents, and failure at school in the country.
8) As a reader of YA fiction, really enjoyed Laura Miller’s take on the decade in YA fiction and the rise and fall of dystopias.
9) This seems… problematic. “UNC campus police used geofencing tech to monitor antiracism protestors: Police used the technology to collect info from a protest at a Confederate statue on the UNC campus known as “Silent Sam.”
10) Favorite New Yorker cartoons on Instagram this year. I really like this one:
11) I quite enjoyed “A Marriage Story.” And the SNL version of George and Kellyanne Conway.
12) Comic-book based TV/Movies are so not my thing. All the more reason I was super-impressed by Watchmen. James Poniewozik on the show.
13) Damn did I love the New Yorker’s “Classic Christmas movies starring Mitch McConnell.” For example:
14) I really meant to do a post on the horrible Appeals Court ruling on the ACA. But, you should at least read Jon Cohn’s summary:;
The ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans upheld key elements of a controversial, widely criticized decision that a district court handed down last year. The lower court had held that a GOP-controlled Congress rendered the entire statute unconstitutional in 2017 when it eliminated the Affordable Care Act’s tax penalty for people who violated the law’s individual mandate to have health coverage.
The 2-1 decision by the three-judge panel is not a full endorsement of that ruling, because it argues that parts of the Affordable Care Act unconnected to the individual mandate might be constitutional. For that reason, the appeals court remanded the case back to U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth, Texas, to decide which (if any) parts of the law can stay in force.
“In terms of what it does, it decides that the individual mandate is unconstitutional ― and that a big chunk of the ACA may be invalid,” Nicholas Bagley, a University of Michigan law professor, told HuffPost. “But it doesn’t say how much or how little is invalid, and leaves it to Judge O’Connor [to decide].”…
The central issue in the lawsuit is whether, by reducing the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate penalty to zero, Trump and the then-GOP-controlled Congress in 2017 introduced a fatal constitutional flaw into the program — one that requires the courts to wipe it out entirely.
Legal experts from across the political spectrum, including some who were vocal advocates of previous challenges to the Affordable Care Act, have called the argument unfounded and nonsensical. [emphasis mine]
But on the 5th Circuit panel, two Republican appointees, Jennifer Walker Elrod and Kurt Engelhardt, found it persuasive. The third judge, Democratic appointee Carolyn Dineen King, voted to keep the law in place.
15) Sean Illing with a good interview with Suzanne Metzler on anti-government attitudes:
Suzanne Mettler
We’re in this weird situation in which people have to come to rely on government more and more, and at the same time government has required less and less of people. Now, you’d expect this to mean that people’s attitudes toward government have become favorable, but the opposite is true. And this is the paradox I’m grappling with in the book.
It turns out that how much a person actually benefits from government services matters very little in terms of shaping their attitude toward government. And that’s true even when controlling for all sorts of other factors.
Sean Illing
But there was one factor in particular that did make a big difference in terms of predicting someone’s view of government, right?
Suzanne Mettler
Right, and that was people’s attitudes about welfare. About 44 percent of Americans have unfavorable views of welfare. And the people who have very unfavorable views about welfare have strong attitudes about government that are shaped by this view. They believe that welfare is unfair, or that undeserving people are receiving it, and that deserving people like themselves are not getting anything.
There’s a lot of resentment out there from people who have this deeply negative perception of welfare, and this perception determines their view of government more than anything else. They’re blind to their own relationship to government, and so they assume welfare is something “other” people get.
Sean Illing
I have to address the giant elephant in the room. When we’re talking about welfare and people’s perceptions of it, we’re talking about race. And what you often find is that people don’t necessarily object to welfare; they object to welfare going to the out-group, to the “others.” Is this consistent with your findings?
Suzanne Mettler
Yes. Race is significant, and many other scholars have discovered this as well. Across the board, whites had more unfavorable views of welfare than people of color, in large part because they considered welfare something that people of color primarily benefit from.
16) To be fair to Trump, I think this horrible policy could come from many Republicans, “A Trump Policy ‘Clarification’ All but Ends Punishment for Bird Deaths”
Across the country birds have been killed and nests destroyed by oil spills, construction crews and chemical contamination, all with no response from the federal government, according to emails, memos and other documents viewed by The New York Times.
Not only has the administration stopped investigating most bird deaths, the
In one instance, a Wyoming-based oil company wanted to clarify that it no longer had to report bird deaths to the Fish and Wildlife Service. “You are correct,” the agency replied.
In another, a building property manager in Michigan emailed the Fish and Wildlife Service to note that residents had complained about birds being killed while workers put up siding and gutters around the apartment. Not to worry, the agency replied: “If the purpose or intent of your activity is not to take birds/nests/eggs, then it is no longer prohibited.”
And when a homeowners’ association in Arizona complained that a developer had refused to safely remove nesting burrowing owls from a nearby lot, Fish and Wildlife said that, because of the new legal interpretation, it could not compel the developer to act.
“Of course, we just got sued over that interpretation, so we’ll see how it ends up,” the enforcement officer wrote.
The revised policy — part of the administration’s broader effort to encourage business activity — has been a particular favorite of President Trump’s, whose selective view of avian welfare has ranged from complaining that wind energy “kills all the birds” to asserting that the oil industry has been subject to “totalitarian tactics” under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918.
As you know, I’m a practicing Catholic, but a big believer in Christmas as also a secular holiday about, snowmen, evergeen trees, exchanging gifts, etc. What’s not to like? No reason to limit it to practicing Christians. So, Merry Christmas. But, if you are not-Christian and truly opposed to Christmas, just ignore this post. For everybody else, the Greene family Christmas card.
Damn did I love the NYT decade in photos feature. Really like the natural drama in this one:
Eyjafjallajökull, Iceland, April 18
The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull glacier volcano sent ash clouds soaring 18,000 to 33,000 feet into the sky, causing a sweeping shutdown of airspace over northern Europe that left thousands of flights canceled.
1) Okay, nothing particularly new here, but George Conway on Trump is always so good:
As rare as impeachments may be, today’s impeachment of Donald Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors was pretty much inevitable.
It was inevitable because of Trump himself, his very character, whose essential nature many who now support him have long understood. As Senator Ted Cruz put it in May 2016, Trump is a “narcissist at a level I don’t think this country has ever seen.” Just this year, Senator Lindsey Graham tried to excuse Trump’s racist, vitriolic attacks on congresswomen of color as “more narcissism than anything else.” “That’s just the way he is,” Graham said.
Indeed, that is the way he is. As I’ve explained at length in this magazine, Trump’s exceptional narcissism defines him, and it’s what makes him wholly unfit for his job. “The fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist, as one psychologist has put it, “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see.” And that’s Trump, to the point of absurdity, mendacity, even delusion: Calling reporters pretending to be “John Barron,” a fake PR man, to brag about his wealth and sexual exploits; lying about the size of his inauguration crowd; asserting that Robert Mueller’s report provided him with “complete and total exoneration” and found “no obstruction”; claiming that his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was “pitch perfect” and that the whistle-blower “got the conversation almost completely wrong”—not to mention the thousands of other lies that have been cataloged over the course of his presidency. So narcissistic is Trump that he attempts not merely to con others, but to con himself, to assure himself of his greatness. Cruz again nailed it in 2016: Trump is a “pathological liar” who “doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies.”
In essence, Trump thinks everything should be about him, for him, for his benefit and glorification—and he can’t comprehend, and doesn’t care about, anything that isn’t. The American diplomat David Holmes testified that Ambassador Gordon Sondland explained to him that “the president only cares about ‘big stuff’”—clarifying, according to Holmes, that this meant “big stuff that benefits the president.”
And that’s why Trump can’t comply with his duties to the nation, and why he now stands as the third president ever to have been impeached. His own stated view of his constitutional authority can only be described as narcissistic: “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president.” But as the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment report rightly explains, “Impeachment is aimed at Presidents who believe they are above the law, and who believe their own interests transcend those of the country and Constitution.” Or, as then-Representative Mike Pence put it in 2008: “This business of high crimes and misdemeanors goes to the question of whether the person serving as President of the United States put their own interests, their personal interests, ahead of public service.” It was inevitable that, given his boundlessly self-centered bent, this president would do precisely that.
In this framework, the role of the populist leader is to champion the people against the elites. The leader may be rich themselves, but they are on the side of the people and represent the will of the people. The leader loses elections only because the elites thwart this will, and when they win elections, the populist leader embodies the popular will. Small-r republican checks on the power of the leader are simply attempts to subvert the popular will.
This is the argument that dominated Trump’s 2016 campaign and his rallies since election. It also will dominate his 2020 campaign.
And being impeached is perfect fodder for this campaign…
In this framework, the role of the populist leader is to champion the people against the elites. The leader may be rich themselves, but they are on the side of the people and represent the will of the people. The leader loses elections only because the elites thwart this will, and when they win elections, the populist leader embodies the popular will. Small-r republican checks on the power of the leader are simply attempts to subvert the popular will.
This is the argument that dominated Trump’s 2016 campaign and his rallies since election. It also will dominate his 2020 campaign.
And being impeached is perfect fodder for this campaign.
In 2010, the largest reported individual contributors to federal campaigns in American politics were Robert and Doylene Perry, owners of Perry Homes, who donated about $7.5 million to support Republican and conservative candidates. In 2018, the largest reported contributors were casino magnate Sheldon Adelson and his wife, Miriam, who contributed about $122 million in outside money to support such candidates, representing a 16-fold increase over the Perrys’ 2010 contributions, according to data collected by the Center for Responsive Politics. What explains this dramatic shift in American elections, where the wealthiest Americans get to have even greater influence over who is elected and what policies elected officials pursue? The Supreme Court’s 2010 opinion, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission.
In 2010, Citizens United held that corporations have a First Amendment right to spend sums independently to support or oppose candidates for office. Looking at the amount of direct corporate spending in elections over the past decade, one might think that Citizens United was a bust. Few for-profit corporations spend money in their own names boosting or dissing candidates. But this casehelped to usher in a sea change in American elections, and its influence on the decade that followed is hard to overstate. We’ve seen an explosion of outside, often-undisclosed money in elections, candidates skirting campaign finance rules by having shadow “super PACs,” and dangerous foreign interference in our elections. And that pivotal opinion contains all the tools the Supreme Court needs to get rid of remaining campaign contribution limits.
4) Christianity Today shows some actual Christianity and comes out against Trump:
The evangelical magazine founded by the late Rev. Billy Graham published a surprising editorial Thursday calling for President Trump’s removal and describing him as “a near perfect example of a human being who is morally lost and confused.”
“Whether Mr. Trump should be removed from office by the Senate or by popular vote next election—that is a matter of prudential judgment,” said the piece, written by editor in chief Mark Galli. “That he should be removed, we believe, is not a matter of partisan loyalties but loyalty to the Creator of the Ten Commandments.”
Galli, who will retire from the magazine Jan. 3, wrote that the facts leading to Wednesday’s impeachment of Trump are unambiguous.
“The president of the United States attempted to use his political power to coerce a foreign leader to harass and discredit one of the president’s political opponents,” Galli wrote. “That is not only a violation of the Constitution; more importantly, it is profoundly immoral.”
But the editorial didn’t just call out Trump. It called out his devout Christian supporters.
“To the many evangelicals who continue to support Mr. Trump in spite of his blackened moral record, we might say this: Remember who you are and whom you serve,” Galli wrote. “Consider how your justification of Mr. Trump influences your witness to your Lord and Savior.”
Trump lashed out at the magazine in a pair of early-morning tweets Friday, calling Christianity Today a “far left magazine … which has been doing poorly.”
5) Not that you really need it, but Conor Friedersdorf eviscerates the Republican defenses of Trump on impeachment.
6) But, hey, really, who’s to know who’s right here? CJR on the “both sides”! problem:
Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at NYU, listed 12 more snippets from the article as evidence of the Times’s inability to handle what he calls “asymmetrical polarization.” They included “the different impeachment realities that the two parties are living in,” “both sides engaged in a kind of mutually assured destruction,” and “the two parties could not even agree on a basic set of facts in front of them.”
Rosen is right that this sort of language is inadequate: Democrats, for the most part, are engaging with the factual record; Republicans, for the most part, are not. These positions are manifestly not equivalent. Treating them as such does not serve any useful concept of fairness; instead, it rebounds clearly to the advantage of the one side (Republicans) for whom nonsense being taken seriously is a victory in itself. The Times is far from the only culprit. The structure of some TV news shows, in particular, has bothsidesism hardwired into it: a Democrat and a Republican are given equal time to make their unequal impeachment cases, and both face hard questions, to contrive a sense of balance. The questions lobbed at Democrats are often fair, but often pale into triviality when a Republican follows them onand starts sowing conspiracy theories…
The media’s job, done properly, is multidirectional: it holds power to account, and communicates matters of public interest to news consumers. On impeachment, too much coverage seems to have got stuck in a feedback loop: we’re telling the public that politicians aren’t budging from their partisan siloes, and vice versa, with the facts of what Trump actually did getting lost somewhere in the cycle. The cult of “both sides” is integral to this dynamic, and it’s serving the impeachment story poorly. Now, more than ever, our top duty should be to fight for the truth.
7) Former FBI and CIA director William Webster in the NYT, “I Headed the F.B.I. and C.I.A. There’s a Dire Threat to the Country I Love. The rule of law is the principle that protects every American from the abuse of monarchs, despots and tyrants.”
8) Kevin Drum with a massive piece on what we should do about climate change. And here’s his nickel summary:
In my climate piece today I make a detailed case for massive investment in R&D. I want to outline my argument here in the simplest possible terms:
I am all in favor of building out green energy infrastructure on a huge scale. This means primarily solar, wind, nuclear, grid upgrades, and massive electrification of the economy.
However, this is a big political lift and isn’t likely to happen. More to the point, it only barely matters anyway. Electrification can probably solve only about half our global greenhouse gas problem by 2050, and even if the United States (and Europe) cut their carbon emissions to zero today it would barely be a bump in the road to ever increasing global warming.
This is the key: global warming is global. Any serious plan has to include a plausible way to reduce carbon emissions in China, India, southeast Asia, and other non-Western countries, which is where virtually all of the increase in carbon emissions is coming from. However, they have shown no inclination to sacrifice their economic growth by radically reducing their carbon emissions. I know this is a conservative talking point designed to allow them to shrug away any action, but it happens to be true anyway.
There’s really only one way to get all these developing countries to cut carbon emissions: massive R&D that develops new, cheaper ways of providing energy. This has to include not just electric generation, but also things like cement, airplane travel, land use, chemical production, and other things that electrification won’t solve. Importantly, it also has to include some way of removing carbon from the atmosphere, since no matter how much we reduce emissions we’re still going to end up with too much carbon in the atmosphere by 2050.
Then we give away all our new technology for free to everyone.
That’s basically it. Naturally you want some evidence that I’m right about all this stuff, and for that you have to read my full piece in the current issue of the magazine. Click here for all the grim and gritty details.
9) Interesting piece arguing that John Roberts will have far more say in the conduct of the impeachment trial than we realize. And, certainly, better him than McConnell.
10) Now this is cool science, “What a 5,700-Year-Old Wad of Chewed Gum Reveals About Ancient People and Their Bacteria”
When hunter-gatherers living in what is now southern Denmark broke down pieces of birch bark into sticky, black tar about 5,700 years ago, they almost certainly didn’t realize that they were leaving future scientists their entire DNA.
Ancient people used the gooey birch pitch to fix arrowheads onto arrows and to repair a variety of stone tools. When it started to solidify, they rolled the pitch in their mouths and chewed on it, like some sort of primitive bubble gum. Chewing on birch pitch would have made it pliable again for using on tools.
It might have also relieved toothaches because of the antiseptic oils in the gum. It’s possible that children also used it recreationally, much like modern humans do today. When they spat the gum out, the same antiseptic properties helped preserve the DNA in their saliva.
The ancient DNA, described in a paper published Tuesday in Nature Communications, is especially valuable because few human bones from the Mesolithic and Neolithic Stone Ages have been found in Scandinavia. DNA from the chewed-up gum provides clues about the people who settled in the area, the kind of food they ate and even the type of bacteria they carried on their teeth.
11) In light of UNC’s absurd Board of Governor’s settlement with Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Daily Tarheel takes a really interesting look at internal conflict within the organization (which, in many ways is basically a biker gang!)
The members who spoke with the DTH alleged financial improprieties among SCV leadership, referenced intermingling with gangs and hate groups, and described threats and slurs that have been issued toward members who raise questions.
One member said he joined the SCV within the last decade after learning about his family tree and gaining a newfound appreciation for his Confederate ancestors. But he described an increasingly “scary” presence within the group in the time since.
“I do not like Nazis,” he said. “My uncle and my great grandpa went over there to kill Nazis. I don’t like none of that crap, and some of these guys, for some reason, that draws them to something.”
Stone revealed to SCV members in a Nov. 27 email that months of secret dealings with members of the UNC System Board of Governors had preceded a settlement he “never dreamed we could accomplish… and all at the expense of the University itself.”
Disgruntled members are expressing desires to squash the deal and give the money back. A common fear they shared is that the current deal will empower what they see as the SCV’s most problematic wing: the mechanized cavalry, a nationwide special interest group of motorcycle-riding members which Stone has helmed for around 10 years.
The Silent Sam settlement could lead to UNC System money funding a new headquarters and museum that one member predicts will have “racist overtones” and further enable a nefarious transition.
“Kevin Stone is no more interested in Silent Sam and what it stands for than the man on the moon,” the member said. “He sees this money as a pot of gold to build himself and his biker gang a massive headquarters.”
Stone did not respond to a request for comment.
12) NYT on the “fake meat” versus “real meat” wars. We recently started purchasing the “fresh” version of Beyond Beef. OMG, it is so good. Now, this stuff really is revolutionary. Compared to their frozen crumbles, which are adequate, but leave me craving the real stuff, this is the real deal. Put this stuff everywhere and I’d happily be a vegetarian. And, no, of course it’s not health food. But the animals saved and the carbon not emitted doesn’t really care about that.
The meat industry has a warning for consumers: Beware of plant-based meat.
That is the message behind a marketing campaign by the Center for Consumer Freedom, a public relations firm whose financial supporters have included meat producers and others in the food industry. In recent weeks the group has placed full-page ads in The New York Times and other newspapers raising health concerns about plant-based meat substitutes like the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger, which are designed to look, taste and even appear to bleed like real meat.
The ads call them “ultra-processed imitations” with numerous ingredients. “What’s hiding in your plant-based meat?” asks one ad featuring a sad face made of two patties and sausage. Another directs readers to a site that compares plant-based burgers to dog food. In November, the group’s managing director, Will Coggin, wrote an opinion piece in USA Today that labeled fake meats as ultra-processed foods that can spur weight gain, although the research on processed foods has not included plant-based meats. A few days later, the center’s executive director, Rick Berman, wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal criticizing plant-based meats as highly processed and no healthier than meat. Its headline: “‘Plant-Based Meat’ Is All Hat and No Cattle.”
I didn’t actually watch much of the impeachment speeches yesterday because it was honestly too distressing to listen to all the bald-faced, bad-faith lies that Republicans were spouting. Multi-volume books could be written on the preposterous defenses of the president. But, one I noticed emphasized was the do “us” a favor, though. My thought at the time… “are you serious, do you think we are this dumb.” The answer, of course, is that they clearly think Republican voters are that dumb (or, to be fair, blinded by partisan motivated reasoning). We’re honestly supposed to believe that since Trump used first person plural instead of first person singular he was not after personal gain. So stupid. And, as Jonathan Bernstein points out, completely undermined by the reality of how Trump (and many people) talks:
The part that struck me had to do with Trump’s defense against the allegations that led to his impeachment. Democrats have charged that Trump abused his power when he attempted to pressure Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy into investigating former Vice President Joe Biden — Trump’s potential opponent in 2020 — in exchange for official favors. In a crucial phone call with Zelenskiy in July, Trump made a key statement: “I would like you to do us a favor, though.”
To House Democrats, this seemed to be the point at which the president was attempting to coerce a foreign leader into giving him political assistance. But Trump and his allies have insisted on another reading. They emphasize the “us” and claim that Trump was asking, as president, for something that the country as a whole wanted. On Dec. 4, Trump spelled it out on Twitter: “With the word `us’ I am referring to the United States, our Country.” In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi this week, he reiterated the point: “I said do us a favor, not me, and our country, not a campaign.”
This has been a critical part of Trump’s defense. His allies have made the same distinction over and over; Republicans made it a central plank of their case during impeachment hearings. Representative Steve Scalise made the point again in an interview just yesterday. And yet the whole thing rests on the premise that the president wouldn’t use the royal “we” — the first person plural — to refer to himself. And so what does Trump say in Michigan to kick off his rally, just as the House is voting on impeachment?
“It doesn’t really feel like we’re being impeached,” President Trump tells the Michigan crowd. “The country is doing better than ever before…We did nothing wrong. We have tremendous support in the Republican party.”
“We’re being impeached.” “We did nothing wrong.” “We have tremendous support.” No, this doesn’t prove Trump’s intent on the phone call. But it obliterates the idea that he wouldn’t say “us” to refer to himself personally. It certainly doesn’t help his case. Either he was unable to control himself for a few days after making this argument, or he was unable to realize the connection, or he just doesn’t care whether he’s consistent from one minute to the next. Most likely, it was some combination of all three.
And that, right there, is the president of the United States.
Didn’t read the Frank Bruni newsletter till after my post. Endorse this 100%
But I can tell you, as someone who remembers Clinton’s impeachment well, what was different: The two parties weren’t pressing two entirely separate and contradictory sets of facts, not nearly to the extent that they are now. They weren’t promoting two utterly different realities. Truth was twisted, sure. But it remained something of a tether.
For Republican lawmakers now, it isn’t.
This impeachment process has become the grandest test yet of how fully and successfully President Trump can corrupt our discourse with fiction and persuade a consequential share of Americans that no such corruption has taken place. He will almost certainly be acquitted in the Senate, because his approval rating among Republican voters is still well above 80 percent in many polls, and that’s a signal to the party’s leaders that they admonish him at their peril. So they validate his fantasies and his conspiracy theories. They sing the same loopy song.
Let me be clear: Entrenched political tribalism infects the Democratic Party, too. It’s the ruinous virus of this moment, spread with newly efficient ease by an information economy in which we can curate our news so that all we hear is an echo or amplification of what we already believe. It hardens those convictions. They become stone.
And Democrats routinely engage in hyperbole. They do their own selective edits of events.
But what we’ve seen from Republicans during the Trump era in general — and over the past few months in particular — goes well beyond that. There was nothing “perfect” about the president’s phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart. The whistle-blower did not get everything wrong. (Quite the opposite.)
The notion that Trump is concerned about corruption anywhere is ludicrous. And the idea that Ukraine, not Russia, was the major actor in 2016 election interference has no factual backing and is a dangerous mockery of what the Trump administration’s own intelligence officials have determined.
Whatever shape Trump’s trial in the Senate ends up taking, he’ll survive it. We’ve been marching furiously toward a foregone conclusion. But the larger journey doesn’t end there. We’re crossing into a No Man’s Land where reality belongs to the most practiced liar with the most shameless enablers. It’s a place inhospitable to competent governance. To accountability. To democracy, too.
Yes, it sure is good that in some way Trump has been held to account (damn is it good the Democrats took the House in 2018). But, I’m mostly left with frustration about what this has revealed about our current politics (i.e., what has become of the Republican Party).
Republicans have long held their nose with Trump. They’ve looked past the tweets. They’ve given him the benefit of the doubt on things like Charlottesville. They’ve dealt with his unorthodox and unwieldy style and the headaches that come with it. And they’ve gotten their rewards: oodles of judges, two Supreme Court justices and tax cuts.
But the defenses they’ve mounted of him over the past three months — and particularly Wednesday — really solidify the bond. Trump asked a foreign country to investigate his political rival based upon spurious evidence, and he did the same with a conspiracy theory that Ukraine might have interfered in the 2016 election rather than Russia. Numerous members of his own administration have said a White House meeting and military aid were withheld in connection with the push for those probes.
And through it all, the GOP has largely shrugged. It initially defended Trump almost purely on process grounds, but its defenses of him Wednesday were more about how there just isn’t much substance to the allegations against him. They effectively endorsed his actions. They pretended he didn’t actually do the things he indisputably did. They pretended he was actually interested in corruption in Ukraine, against all evidence. They made arguments that strained the bounds of logic to dismiss his actions. They even compared his persecution to Jesus on Wednesday — twice. [emphasis mine]
It’s perhaps no surprise that no Republicans voted to impeach and no GOP senators will likely vote to remove him from office; those are very serious punishments even if they think Trump did something wrong. What’s remarkable about what we’ve just seen, though, is how thoroughly Republicans bear-hugged him.
And Dana Milbank, “The House has impeached Trump. But in a sense, he won.”
But in one sense, Trump won.
Wednesday’s 10-hour impeachment debate on the House floor and the party-line vote that followed proved that Trump’s multiyear campaign against the truth — 15,000 lies and counting — has succeeded. Republicans, united, didn’t spend much time defending Trump on the (unfavorable) merits. Instead, in an appalling spectacle of mass projection, they took turns accusing Democrats of the very offenses Trump committed — with Trumpian language and disregard for reality.
Democrats are the ones, Rep. Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) said, who committed a “stunning abuse of power.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Tom Rice (R-S.C.) said, who “colluded with Russia and Ukraine.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said, who engaged in “the largest and most massive coverup of such a list of crimes against our country.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) said, who committed an “assault on the Constitution.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Tim Walberg (R-Mich.) said, who are “interfering in America’s election.” Democrats are the ones, Rep. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) said, who “have dangerously shattered precedents.”
It was as though Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson had taken over the House floor. [emphasis mine] Even during the most solemn constitutional ritual, Republicans were auditioning for an audience of one — and outbidding each other with conspiracy theories in hopes of scoring a favorable tweet from the boss.
It goes without saying, I think, that a democracy is trouble when we cannot even agree on the most basic political reality. And, of course, in a narrow political sense, when that’s the case, the liars win. When I talk about “American Political Culture” I don’t even talk about “belief in an actual reality” as a shared value as it would seemingly go without saying, not anymore.
And, as for the rule of law, I do talk about that. But this year’s developments are so depressing. The rule of law cannot really exist as a partisan issue. It cannot exist if only one political party is willing to defend it. It cannot exist if the President can do literally anything and be defended by his co-partisans. It cannot exist if one party thinks the Attorney General should use the power of law enforcement to pursue the president’s enemies. And, yet, here we are. Its hard not to be sad and very concerned about the state of American democracy.
As much as I love my NYT, one thing I don’t actually read a lot of is there basic Trump/national politics reporting. Talk about “both sides!” bias to the extreme. Terrific column from Dan Froomkin laying this out in extensive detail. Also worth following the link to the article where there’s a ton of great embedded tweets on the issue.
The New York Times’s three-year struggle to sustain its reporting algorithms, built for two political parties that have comparable relationships to reality, collapsed into sordid heap of nonsense over the weekend.
The two central political truths of the moment are the profound asymmetry between the parties – one relying mostly on facts and the other trafficking almost entirely in deceit and division — and the wildly abnormal nature of the Trump presidency.
But smart, capable Times reporters, corrupted by an editorial regime that prevents them from acknowledging those elemental truths, over the last few days put forth such epically, historically bad examples of pox-on-both-your-houses, boring-what-else-is-new, and self-contradictory political coverage that press critics on social media – including several former Times editors — were appropriately united in despair.
The fault, at the end of the day, clearly lies with New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet, who has frequently defended the Times’s political coverage as appropriately non-confrontational and measured.
This is a collapse of leadership, and a disaster for American journalism at the most critical moment imaginable.
As I tweeted on Sunday, if you’d asked Times editors five years ago whether people who deny basic facts, traffic in conspiracy theories, demonize immigrants and otherwise fight against a pluralistic society should be given equal (or more than equal) time in their news columns, they would have said no.
Trump’s election doesn’t change the truth. What it did change was the way Baquet triangulates. And it shouldn’t have…
It established a new low in “both sides” reporting, which is really saying something. A few sample paragraphs:
Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, described Mr. Trump’s July 25 call with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine one way, saying it “shows that the president tried to get President Zelensky to interfere in the upcoming presidential election.” His Republican colleague, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida, saw it differently: “We saw the call transcript, and there is no conditionality.”
And after Representative Andy Biggs, Republican of Arizona, said it was “clear” that Mr. Trump cared about rooting out corruption in Ukraine, Representative Eric Swalwell, Democrat of California, scoffed: “The president never brings up corruption.”
How can anyone write something like that and not take sides?
Okay, here’s one terrific tweet featured therein:
And, to state the obvious one more time, the NYT would *never* frame a story on *any* other topic that way:
-“Weinstein, accusers, bitterly divided over clashing claims” -“Uighurs, Beijing, struggle to find common ground” -“NFL, brain scientists, trade accusations”
What are the biggest differences between the Clinton and Trump impeachments? Well, if you ask me, for starters:
Clinton’s offense didn’t involve the abuse of power to pervert the electoral process for personal gain.
Members of his party actually listened to the evidence against him and quite a few of them found it persuasive.
The public was soundly opposed to his impeachment.
But no, for Baker, the biggest difference is that this one is boring:
Back in 1998, the impeachment battle felt like the ultimate drama, so intense that the rest of the world seemed to have stopped spinning on its axis, yet so fluid and suspenseful that it was never entirely certain how it would play out.
This time it feels like one more chapter in an all-out clash that has been fought for three years, hugely consequential yet of a piece with everything that has come before, with less suspense and an outcome seemingly foreordained.
So there’s no suspense because the Republicans are paralyzed by unthinking fealty. And relative to everything else, it’s nothing special.
It’s almost like Baker’s saying: Three years of normalizing the Trump presidency, and we’re going to stop now?
There was plenty of false equivalence to go around in Baker’s piece as well. For instance, he actually likened Ken Starr, the obsessive independent counsel who relentless pursued the Clintons for over three years before springing a successful perjury trap, and Rep. Adam Schiff, who led a short, fact-based inquiry into bribery and abuse of power that he really had no choice but to launch.
And yet arguably the most poisonous assertion in Baker’s story was that, compared to the case against Clinton, the case against Trump is “for many Americans a little esoteric.”
There is nothing remotely esoteric – defined as “intended for or likely to be understood by only a small number of people with a specialized knowledge or interest” – about what Trump has done. If only a small number of people understand it, the fault lies with the people whose job it is to help the public understand…
The Times and Trump are inextricably bound. The paper arguably helped him get elected by over-covering Hillary Clinton’s scandals and under-covering Trump’s. Trump rewarded it by calling it the enemy of the people.
Subscriptions surged after the election as readers craved solid reporting. And some Times reporting — particularly investigative and legal — has been outstanding. But its short-lived “Trump Urges Unity Against Racism” headline was emblematic of the credulous stenography and normalization of the Trump presidency that is so prevalent on its front pages.
With impeachment imminent and an election less than a year away, it’s almost a national emergency that it still can’t seem to get the Trump story straight.
The only way that will happen is with changes at the top.
Also, very much on-point, a nice Jay Rosen piece on what’s wrong with the NYT leadership that brought us to this point:
Recently the publisher of the New York Times, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, said something that I believe touched on this anxiety.
We won’t be baited into becoming ‘the opposition.’ And we won’t be applauded into becoming ‘the opposition.’
By “baited” he clearly meant the taunts of people like Steve Bannon and President Trump. By “applauded” he meant, I think, the pressure coming from Times loyalists. For the most part these are people appalled by Trump who want to see him further exposed. They want the Times to be tougher on his supporters and more relentless in calling out his lies. They want Times journalists to see what they see — an assault on democratic institutions, the corruption of the American Republic — and to act accordingly.
But these people are perceived as a threat by the Times newsroom. The fear is that they want to turn the Times into an opposition newspaper. This is not how the Times sees itself. The fear is that they want the Times to help save American democracy. This too is not how the Times sees itself…
The rising power of Times readers has, I believe, unsettled Times journalists. They are both grateful and suspicious. They want the support, they also want to declare independence from their strongest supporters. (And they do not want to open the box that is marked Coverage of Hillary Clinton, 2016.) They are tempted to look right and see one kind of danger, then look left to spot another, equal and opposite. They want to push off from both sides to clear a space from which truth can be told. That would make things simpler, but of course things are not that simple. The threat to truthtelling — to journalism, democracy, the Times itself — is not symmetrical. They know this. But the temptation lives. [emphasis mine]
These are matters of institutional psychology, which I observe from the outside. I am sharing my impressions as a close reader, a subscriber for 30+ years, a loyal critic myself, and a watcher of Times journalists. In any relationship, a shift in power alters the dynamic between the parties. In so many ways since the election, the Times has risen to the occasion and excelled. But it has a problem with its core supporters. Until it is put right, there will be blow-ups, resentments and a lot of misunderstanding.
Really enjoyed this from Derek Thompson as it very much hits home in my recent experience, “The Millennials-Versus-Boomers Fight Divides the Democratic Party: The young left has become a sort of third party.”
So, forget the Boomers, it’s actually Milennials and Gen Z versus everyone else– including Gen X like me (and, I know, many of you).
Young Americans demanding more power, control, and justice have veered sharply to the left. This lurch was first evident in the two elections of Barack Obama, when he won the youth vote by huge margins. And young Americans didn’t edge back to the political center under Obama; they just kept moving left. Obama won about 60 percent of voters younger than 30 in the 2008 primary. Bernie Sanders won more than 70 percent of under-30 voters in the 2016 primary, which pushed Hillary Clinton to the left and dragged issues like Medicare for All and free college from the fringe to the mainstream of political debate.
But upon closer examination, the Democrats aren’t really the party of the young—or, for that matter, of social-justice leftists. In the most sophisticated poll of the Iowa caucus, Joe Biden polled at 2 percent among voters under 30, within the margin of error of zero. Nationally, he is in single digits among Millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996. Yet Biden is the Democratic front-runner for the 2020 presidential nomination, thanks to his huge advantage among older voters—especially older black voters—who are considerably more moderate than younger Democrats.
Bernie Sanders, by contrast, leads all candidates among voters under 30 and polls just 5 percent among voters over 65. In a national Quinnipiac poll asking voters which candidate has the best ideas, Sanders crushes Biden 27 percent to 4 percent among those under 35 and receives an equal and opposite crushing at the hands of Biden among voters over 65: 28 percent to 4 percent.
Age doesn’t just divide Republicans and Democrats from each other, in other words; age divides young leftists from bothRepublicans and Democrats. Democrats under 30 have almost no measurable interest in the party’s front-runner. Democrats over 65 have almost no measurable interest in the favored candidate of the younger generation. This is not a picture of Democrats smoothly transforming into the “party of the young.” It’s evidence that age—perhaps even more than class or race—is now the most important fault line within the Democratic Party.
It might be most useful to think about young progressives as a third party trapped in a two-party system. [emphasis mine] Radicalized by America’s political sclerosis and economic and social inequality, they are a powerful movement politically domiciled within a larger coalition of moderate older minorities and educated suburbanites, who don’t always know what to do with their rambunctious bunkmates.
What would this progressive third party’s platform look like? In one word, justice: Social justice, sought through a reappraisal of power relationships in social and corporate life, and economic justice, sought through the redistribution of income from the rich to the less fortunate.
One can make out the contours of this agenda in “Hidden Tribes,” a 2018 study of the political views of 8,000 Americans, which sorted the country’s voting-age population into seven political groups. The study called the youngest and most left-wing group in the survey Progressive Activists. They accounted for 8 percent of the population and as much as one-third of likely voters in the Democratic Party, due to their higher-than-average engagement in politics…
Compared with the average American, Progressive Activists—“young, secular, cosmopolitan, and angry”—were more likely to be under 30, college-educated, and white; twice as likely to say they never pray; and three times as likely to say they’re “ashamed” of the country. They are motivated by the existential threat of climate change, strongly pro-immigration, and more concerned about police brutality than about crime or terrorism. Perhaps most distinctive, they are attuned to structural challenges in society and skeptical of the individualist strain of the American dream…
Most Americans over 40 support several measures of both social justice and economic justice. But across ethnicities, many Americans have a deep aversion to anything that can be characterized as “political correctness” or “socialism.” And this might be the biggest challenge for the young progressive agenda.
For example, the Democratic presidential candidates who focused most explicitly on sexism and racial injustice have flamed out…
The Medicare for All debate is a microcosm of a larger divide. The young left’s deep skepticism toward capitalism simply isn’t shared by previous generations. According to Gallup polling, Gen X is firmly pro-capitalist and Baby Boomers, who came of age during the Cold War, prefer capitalism over socialism by a two-to-one margin. (You can point out to your parents that Social Security and Medicare are, essentially, socialism for the old, but that’s not the same as converting them into Berniecrats.)…
Assuming Milburn’s analysis is correct, the young progressive movement will have to shed its first adjective in order to gain power. In 2016, voters older than 40 accounted for nearly three-fifths of all primary voters. It is impossible to win a national election by running a campaign of generational warfare that runs counter to, or directly indicts, a majority of the electorate. One way or another, America’s third party will have to grow up.
I found this particularly interesting as ideological disagreements I have with my own students are now far more likely to be with students well to the left of me than with those to the right. Only a matter of time, before I’m accused of conservative indoctrination instead of liberal indoctrination.
So, the most recent Smarter Living email from the NYT really summed up for me what I don’t like about gender pronouns in signatures:
Don’t use a stock signature
We have different relationships with different people, so why should the end of your email be the same for everyone? “Your signature block for work runs the risk of seeming a little clunky if you’re writing your kids or an old friend,” Mr. Shipley said…
“Skip the extraneous stuff,” Mr. Shipley said. “Quotations are generally all downside and no upside — unless you’re Mark Twain or George Orwell or Lydia Davis.”
“Trying to fill a signature with bursts of personality can be tiring. That you’re a Bengals fan, or ‘Rock on, Hanson!’ is maybe too much information,” Mr. Schwalbe said. Inside jokes can be alienating; there’s also the risk of burying important information in an avalanche of the unimportant.
These extras also tend to be more about you than the person you’re writing to, and that’s some of the problem. Stick with a couple of links and some kind of contact information. Keep it simple. [emphasis mine] Don’t use wacky fonts.
Okay, all seemingly good advice. I like it. Yet, in that same email, we get this:
Include relevant pronouns, too: “You’re doing them the favor of letting them know what it is, and it makes life easier.”
Does it though?! I’m Steven. There’s every reason to assume I am he/him unless I say otherwise. And, you know what, if was Terry or Riley it still doesn’t matter. Why do you need my gender pronouns when I’m sending you an email. Are you going to refer to me in the 3rd person in your response? Now, if your’re transgender, I totally get it and would not begrudge this at all. But if you are cisgender Tim or cisgender Molly, what are you really saying when you include your pronouns? I know… you are saying, essentially, “I am a trans ally.” You know what, I am a trans ally. But damn if I think that is one of the most important things about myself that it needs to be included in my “keep it simple” signature. No offense to my trans friends (and, yes, I actually do have a couple), but if I’m going to have a single political statement in my signature, it’s going to be “Donald Trump and his Republican enablers are undermining the rule of law” or “we are heating our planet and we actually need to treat it like the crisis it is” or “everybody needs affordable health care, damnit” or “we need to treat refugees and immigrants with respect and humanity.” You get the picture.
So, go ahead with your he/him she/hers in your signature, but I’ll stick with my basic info and leave the politics out.
Fully Myelinated 
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