Just thought you should know. And plan accordingly.
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Kevin Drum wrote a post that reminded me that I need to avoid social media right now like the plague — and should probably ignore stories about social media too. His very wise post about a story I posted yesterday is much more reasoned than mine was. Here’s the latest trend story from the New York Times. It’s about—God help us—”TikTok economics”: This is the most tiresome thing ever. When are newspapers going to learn the obvious: social media doesn’t represent anything in the real world? I mean, how likely are you to post a TikTok about how your life is fine and everything is pretty good? Not very. That’s just the nature of H. sapiens, who love to performatively gripe and complain a lot more than we like to performatively say that things are OK. The way to account for this bias is to actually ask people how they feel. Then you’ll get equal responses from everyone.
I don’t know if you’ve heard about Elon Musk’s raging antisemitism but it’s causing Xitter to lose massive numbers of advertisers and even more people are leaving the platform because of it. Here’s the basic outline of what happened: The Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society “likes to bring invaders in that kill our people … Screw your optics, I’m going in.” Those were the last words posted online by Robert Bowers before he massacred worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue in 2018. It was the single deadliest anti-Semitic attack in American history. In previous postings, Bowers explained the grievances that led him to commit mass murder. He shared meme after meme asserting that Jews were conspiring to flood the country with brown people in order to oppose and displace the white race. “Open you Eyes!” declared one. “It’s the filthy EVIL jews Bringing the Filthy EVIL Muslims into the Country!” On Wednesday night, the world’s wealthiest man affirmed this same conspiracy theory on X, formerly Twitter, the social-media site he owns.
Former First Lady Rosalynn Carter, a passionate champion of mental health, caregiving, and women’s rights, passed away Sunday, Nov. 19, at 2:10 p.m. at her home in Plains, Georgia, at the age of 96. She died peacefully, with family by her side. Mrs. Carter was married for 77 years to Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States and the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize recipient, who is now 99 years old. “Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” President Carter said. “She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.” She is survived by her children — Jack, Chip, Jeff, and Amy — and 11 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren. A grandson died in 2015. “Besides being a loving mother and extraordinary First Lady, my mother was a great humanitarian in her own right,” said Chip Carter. “Her life of service and compassion was an example for all Americans.
It turned out to be a vape pen Our new Christian Nationalist Commander Mike Johnson has released all the January 6th footage which shows not every minute of the insurrection was violent, thus proving that there was no violence at all. Or at least that’s what the right wingers seem to think. Here’s an example of how it’s going: As expected, new conspiracies are being launched based on the J6 footage released by Speaker Mike Johnson, each one crazier than the next. The hottest one making the rounds claims that someone in a MAGA hat is flashing a police badge inside the Capitol. This feeds the conspiracy that J6 was orchestrated by FBI agents dressed as Trump supporters, advanced by several Members of Congress. Just this past week, Rep. Clay Higgins claimed that busses of FBI agents disguised as Trump supporters came in “ghost busses.” And now, a US Senator gets in on the action: The new conspiracy, latched onto this morning by Utah Senator Mike Lee and several others, is that one of the J6ers inside the Capitol must be holding an FBI badge because, I guess, it supposedly looks like a badge.
California Gov. Gavin Newson is sending a warning shot at Florida’s Ron DeSantis over abortion ahead of their anticipated clash on Fox News later this month. On Sunday, Newsom is debuting a new TV ad that accuses the Republican governor and presidential candidate of pushing policies that criminalize women and doctors who pursue abortions after six weeks. The ad, narrated by Newsom, shows pictures of a woman and a doctor under a “Wanted” sign and states that their possible arrest is “by order of Governor Ron DeSantis.” DeSantis signed Florida’s six-week abortion ban into law this year, upending his state’s status as an abortion haven in the South as he sought to boost his conservative bonafides in the presidential primary. Democrats, meanwhile, have capitalized politically since the Supreme Court overturned abortion protections, with anger on the left fueling better-than-expected results at the ballot box.
Kicking the 14th Amendment down the road Whistling past a graveyard. Tiptoeing through a minefield. Neither the courts nor election officials nor Congress want to touch ruling Donald Trump ineligible to serve as president. Colorado Politics: A Denver judge on Friday found Donald Trump remains eligible for the state’s 2024 presidential ballot even though he engaged in an insurrection, joining courts elsewhere that have rejected attempts to disqualify the leading Republican candidate. District Court Judge Sarah B. Wallace determined the provision of the 14th Amendment barring insurrectionists from holding office does not apply to presidents and, therefore, does not disqualify Trump. “While the Court agrees that there are persuasive arguments on both sides, the Court holds that the absence of the President from the list of positions to which the Amendment applies combined with the fact that Section Three specifies that the disqualifying oath is one to ‘support’ the Constitution whereas the Presidential oath is to ‘preserve, protect and defend’ the Constitution,” Wallace wrote.
Fight the wind or ride the balloon Thomas P.M. Barnett’s “The Pentagon’s New Map” (2004) outlined how the sources of conflict in the world are concentrated in the non-integrating “gap” areas under cultural stress and disconnected from the broader economy. As in Barnett’s past work, “America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse” (2023) looks to a future worth creating. The cultural stress in the U.S. these days, Barnett tells James Fallows on his podcast this week, is connected to America “losing its whiteness.” But that’s more connected to climate change than Americans of the Baby Boom generation care to admit. Fallows writes: Barnett is crystal-clear about climate change as a central driver of world politics, economics, and strategic tensions. And he emphasizes two related aspects of particular importance to the United States. —One is climate’s role as driver of migrations—mainly south-to-north around the world, since that’s more feasible than east-west migration across the broad oceans.
If she can do it there, she can do it anywhere Greg Sargent on the latest accomplishments of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer: Few Democrats would deny that the party must win back working people. Yet one of the party’s long-term conundrums is whether they can pursue ambitious efforts to combat climate change without threatening those very workers’ wages or jobs. In coming days, Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is set to sign a package of bills that would transition the state to 100 percent clean electricity by 2040. The bills — which also include robust provisions for workers — are among the most ambitious efforts undertaken by any state to move toward a carbon-free future in a manner that is actively good for working people. Significantly, Democrats are testing this approach in a swing state in the heart of the industrial Midwest. […] Climate action tends to expose cracks in the Democratic coalition precisely because it aggravates existing tensions between the goals and interests of environmentalists and workers.
Not that some of us didn’t see it coming… Over the past few years people have argued over whether or not Trump and his movement were fascist. (I came down on the side of yes, quite some time ago..) But others made the point that the word has a specific meaning and Trump didn’t necessarily fit it perfectly. Tom Nichols, Never Trump conservative, was one of those people. In this piece he correctly describes him as a lazy, narcissistic, gadfly who doesn’t really care about anything but himself. He points out that he “had only two consistent issues: hatred of immigrants and love for foreign autocrats.” He writes: “Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill” He warned that the indiscriminate use of the word word could blind us to the time when it might actually become accurate. He says that time has come: For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric.