Wanting to “watch the world burn” is a type Speaking of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), I won’t this morning. Much. At The Garden of Forking Paths, however, Brian Klass offers study results that might address her type. Movie buffs know Alfred Pennyworth’s speech from The Dark Knight in which he offers Bruce Wayne an explanation of The Joker’s motivations: Some men just want to watch the world burn. Researchers find it is a type, actually. Alfred was right: The researchers—Michael Bang Petersen and Mathias Osmundsen from Aarhus University in Denmark, and Kevin Arceneaux from Sciences Po in Paris—focus on a specific behavior to create a typology of “Need for Chaos” individuals. Specifically, they focus on those who share “hostile political rumors,” which they note, “portray politicians and political groups negatively and possess low evidential value.” In plain speak, they like spreading malicious political lies. Jacob Wohl, for example.
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I have waited for anger to subside before writing about Humza Yousaf as First Minister. The obvious unfairness of the election created a lot of anger. The SNP party machine did everything to get Humza elected, with the now huge payroll vote swinging into action from the start with coordinated endorsements and messages. Central party […]
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I don’t know if this will mean that we have stepped back from the abyss, but it’s at least a tiny positive sign: For the better part of a decade, Donald J. Trump and his allies at Fox News have beguiled some Americans and enraged others as they spun up an alternative world where elections turned on fraud, one political party oppressed another, and one man stood against his detractors to carry his version of truth to an adoring electorate. Then this week, on two consecutive days, the former president and the highest-rated cable news channel were delivered a dose of reality by the American legal system. On Thursday, Mr. Trump became the first former president in history to be indicted on criminal charges, after a Manhattan grand jury’s examination of hush money paid to a pornographic film actress in the final days of the 2016 election. The next day, a judge in Delaware Superior Court concluded that Fox hosts and guests had repeatedly made false claims about voting machines and their supposed role in a fictitious plot to steal the 2020 election, and that Dominion Voting Systems’ $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit against the network should go to trial.
I’m losing my mind with all the handwringing from the Trumpers over the horrors of indicting their Dear Leader. Puh-leeze. A persistent idea undergirds reactions by Donald Trump and the GOP to Trump’s indictment. Sometimes it’s explicitly stated, and sometimes it’s more implicit: Indicting a former president and a candidate in the next election is beyond the pale. It’s even election “interference” or the stuff of banana republics. Trump ceded the moral high ground on this idea long ago. He has advocated for the prosecutions of each of the last four Democratic presidential nominees — every single one since 2004. In two cases, he did it during the campaign, even suggesting they should be ineligible to run. And that’s to say nothing of the many other political opponents he has suggested should be prosecuted. He even, in some cases, actually agitated for that outcome when he held sway over the Justice Department. The “lock her up” chant leveled at Hillary Clinton is the most well-known entry in this long succession.
The GOP view of mass shootings:
Immediately following the news of the grand jury vote, Donald Trump Jr. posted a video response in which he claimed that the mere act of his father being held to the letter of the law was exponentially worse than anything some of history’s worst dictators ever did. “Let’s be clear, folks,” Trump’s namesake told his viewers. “This is like Communist-level shit. This is stuff that would make Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot—it would make them blush. It’s so flagrant, it’s so crazed.
The lawyers: DONALD TRUMP HASN’T surrendered to authorities yet. But his lawyers are already fighting — with themselves. Days after the former president’s indictment at the hands of Manhattan prosecutor Alvin Bragg, some of Trump’s lawyers are taking aim at Joe Tacopina, his co-lead defense attorney in the Bragg case. A source familiar with the matter and another person close to Trump tell Rolling Stone that a number of Trump’s other current lawyers have privately described Tacopina as “dumb” and a “loudmouth.” Tacopina is no stranger to made-for-tabloid drama: He has a lengthy track record of repping high-profile clients, such as Meek Mill and baseball legend Alex Rodriguez, as well as securing hard-to-land wins. But he’s also had some equally high-profile flameouts, including an acrimonious parting with his ex-client, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik. In recent days, as a Trump attorney, Tacopina has also become a more and more familiar face on cable television — and not always to the ex-president’s benefit.
Professor Steve Keen, Distinguished Research Fellow, Institute for Strategy, Resilience and Security, University College London. One of the great ironies of economics is that, while the public regards economists as experts on money, the issue of how money is created is still not settled within economics. In 2014, the Bank of England published a landmark … Continue reading "The schizophrenic understanding of money in economics"
The Taliban is falling behind This story from the L.A. Times about a 9-year-old and her goat got mine: Every day for three months, Jessica Long’s young daughter walked and fed her goat, bonding with the brown and white floppy-eared animal named Cedar. But when it was time for Cedar to be sold and slaughtered at the Shasta District Fair last year, the 9-year-old just couldn’t go through with it. “My daughter sobbed in her pen with her goat,” Long wrote to the Shasta County fair’s manager on June 27, 2022. “The barn was mostly empty and at the last minute I decided to break the rules and take the goat that night and deal with the consequences later.” Long purchased the goat for her daughter to enter into the 4-H program with the Shasta District Fair. Children are taught how to care for farm animals. The animals are then entered in an auction to be sold and then slaughtered for meat in hopes of teaching children about the work and care needed to raise livestock and provide food, as farmers and ranchers do. In her letter, Long pleaded for the fair to make an exception and let her and her daughter take Cedar back.
Nothing systemic here, nope There’s something about these maps. The legacy of slavery is right there in color. The persistence of poverty across the South is too. It is of course more complicated, as Gordon Hansen of Harvard’s Kennedy School explains. Well-heeled fans of The Market often treat workers as pawns, abstractions called human resources expected to move about the board of states in pursuit of work when jobs dry up where in places they call home. Relocating requires financial means the poor often lack. Not to mention people’s attachment to place is often more powerful than economics. (Blasphemy, I know.) Donald Trump considers such people losers. They consider him their champion for reasons that have little to do with The Market. The Market is not some force of nature independent of human control. It is not somehow upset by human attempts to regulate it. That’s the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the financial sector. Jeremy Ney, author of American Inequality substack, is a former researcher at MIT, Harvard, and Federal Reserve, and creator of the Life Expectancy graphic. “U.S.