Friday Mini-Heap… “I didn’t come here to propose a return to illiteracy in order to recover the knowledge of Paleolithic tribes. I regret all we may have lost, but I never forget that the gains are greater than the losses” — a transcription of part of a 1983 lecture by Italo Calvino on the written word and the unwritten world Epictetus and Epicurus are “resurrected” using AI language, imaging, and video tools to debate the nature of happiness — created by Caleb Ontiveros The subtitle of her first book was “A Little Treatise on the Weakness, Frivolity, and Inconstancy, That Is Wrongly Attributed to Women” — philosopher Gabrielle Suchon wrote it—in 1693—to help women “protect themselves against servile constraint, stupid ignorance, and base and degrading dependence.” Julie Walsh (Wellesley) gives us a tour of her ideas “What is Black existentialism?
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DOJ examines Trump’s actions Donald Trump likes to use variants of “nobody’s ever seen.” It seems Special Counsel Jack Smith and his team of investigators are gathering evidence against him the likes of which nobody’s ever seen (Bloomberg): Officials in several states confirmed they have complied with an early round of grand jury subpoenas from Smith’s office. One set of material reviewed by Bloomberg from a key battleground in Nevada shows Trump’s 2020 campaign representatives lobbing accusations of fraud and mismanagement at local officials in the days after the election. Attorneys working under Smith are also poring over dozens of interview transcripts from the congressional panel that just wrapped up its own Jan. 6 probe, said people familiar with the investigation, who asked not to be named to discuss information not yet public. That includes testimony from White House aides who said Trump knew he lost the election and at least one Republican official who linked the former president to efforts to seat alternate slates of electors in some states he lost.
The pandemic increase in the length of the average workweek has been completely reversed.
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Insurrection Caucus knocks J6 anniversary off front pages Leaders of the GOP’s House Insurrection Caucus are heavily invested in screen time. Not on their smart phones. On your television and social media feeds. Governing is not what they are in Washington, D.C. to do. Accruing power is. Interviews on Fox News and other outlets (even MSNBC these days) builds a national profile, grows online followers, and expands fundraising opportunities. Personal fame, acquired through political performance, is a more rapid, more certain path to power than the drudge work of crafting sound legislation and shepherding it through Congress. The Insurrection Caucus came to be influencers, not legislators. Donald Trump brought celebrity with him to the job of politics. But the 2020 loser is sidelined in Mar-a-Lago awaiting indictments. Republicans lacking his preternatural skills at self-promotion have discovered that keeping the press focused on themselves involves being destructively and performatively anti-establishment. Sex and drugs and rock and roll was for liberals. Trashing hotel rooms does not get press coverage. Trashing Congress does.
It was 2.30am in Bochum before Niels finished setting up his security and self destruct mechanisms on my new laptop, as we sat in my gloomy little box of a room in the Mercure Hotel. About a decade ago, chain hotels universally abandoned the idea of a central bright light to illuminate a bedroom, in […]
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This will be especially welcome to Ruby Freeman and Shay Moss who Trump has inexplicably decided to target again just this week in his usual grotesque fashion. This is from Tuesday: Around midnight last night, for reasons that aren’t yet clear, Donald Trump used his social media platform to launch a new offensive against an old perceived foe. It started with this unfortunate missive: Soon after, the former president published another item, accusing Freeman of election crimes, followed by a third missive, in which the Republican asked, “What will the Great State of Georgia do with the Ruby Freeman MESS?” Trump concluded that he’s battling “the evils and treachery of the Radical Left monsters who want to see America die.” Both items referred to “suitcases” filled with ballots that Trump believes Freeman opened, all as part of the crime that was committed only in his imagination. In case anyone needs a refresher, it wasn’t long after the 2020 elections when the nightmare began for a clerical worker in a county election office in Georgia and her mother.
You think he doesn’t mean it? As president, Donald Trump weighed bombing drug labs in Mexico after one of his leading public health officials came into the Oval Office, wearing a dress uniform, and said such facilities should be handled by putting “lead to target” to stop the flow of illicit substances across the border into the United States. “He raised it several times, eventually asking a stunned Defense Secretary Mark Esper whether the United States could indeed bomb the labs,” according to a new book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman. White House officials said the official, Assistant Secretary for Health Brett Giroir, an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, often wore his dress uniform for meetings with Trump, which led him to falsely think Giroir was a member of the military. Sadly, I wouldn’t be all that surprised if Ron DeSantis and others agree with this one, at least in the campaign.
As I write this McCarthy is still losing. And the numbers haven’t moved. He has 20 hardcore insurrectionists voting against him and one nutball voting present for her own reasons. There is little sign that this is going to end well for McCarthy but he just keeps going. This is happening: If the Dems do this (which I doubt) they’d better extract some serious concession, particularly on things like the debt ceiling. Unfortunately, the Republicans are all liars so how do you ensure that they keep their word? I just don’t know … I think Alexandra Petri’s take is the best: Wow, this is embarrassing! No, not the once-in-a-century mess around electing a speaker of the House! Not the fact that, on Tuesday, after three ballots, none of which succeeded in putting Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in charge, the House had to adjourn speakerlessly. Not the fact that, again, failing to elect a speaker on the first vote has not happened since 1923!
As I have written before, Trump has never had as much juice with the congress as people said he did. After all, he had both the House and the Senate in his first two years and basically only got tax cuts for the rich done, which was the GOP’s Holy Grail. Everything else was just rescinding and withdrawing Obama’s policies and executive orders. They really don’t care about him now. After Kevin McCarthy failed to win enough votes to become House speaker on Tuesday, former President Donald J. Trump held a call with Mr. McCarthy and Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, one of the key Republican members of Congress blocking Mr. McCarthy’s bid. Mr. Trump’s goal was to break the logjam. But if Mr. Trump had wanted Mr. Perry to quickly flip, it wasn’t to be: The next day, Mr. Perry voted against Mr. McCarthy three more times. Mr. McCarthy’s inability to corral enough votes this week has underscored the limits of Mr. Trump’s political potency inside a party that has not controlled the Senate since 2018, lost the White House in 2020 and failed, so far, to identify the next leader of their narrow majority in the House. Even if Mr.
Ron DeSantis’ Surgeon General is a liar Surprise: Joseph A. Ladapo, a professor of medicine at the University of Florida and the state’s surgeon general, relied upon a flawed analysis and may have violated university research integrity rules when he issued guidancelast fall discouraging young men from receiving common coronavirus vaccines, according to a report from a medical school faculty task force. But the university says it has no plans to investigate the matter. Ladapo recommended inOctoberthat men younger than 40 not take mRNA vaccinations for covid, pointing to an “abnormally high risk of cardiac-related death.” Doctors and public health officials swiftly pounced, dismissing the underlying research for its small sample size, lack of detail and shaky methodology.