March 18, 2024

Justice

 The American Psychological Association has adopted a resolution that calls for prohibiting youth from being placed in solitary confinement, except for emergencies where a young person is in immediate danger of serious physical harm to themselves and others. Other highlights of the resolution include limiting emergency placements to the shortest time possible, implementing alternatives to confinement, and emphasizing the importance of monitoring and ongoing mental health support for youth in isolation. The measure passed in a 154-2 vote by APA’s governing Council of Representatives, who cited the serious and lasting effects of solitary confinement on mental health and development. 

Health

Medical Xpress - Middle-aged adults in the U.S. tend to report significantly higher levels of loneliness than their European counterparts, possibly due in part to weaker family ties and greater income inequality, according to research published in the journal American Psychologist. "Loneliness is gaining attention globally as a public health issue because elevated loneliness increases one's risk for depression, compromised immunity, and mortality," said lead author Frank Infurna, Ph.D., an associate professor of psychology at Arizona State University.

Trump

Newsweek - Donald Trump declared hundreds of classified documents as "personal" as he was moving them from the White House to his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida, Trump's former valet has claimed in court. Walt Nauta, and former Mar-a-Lago property manager, Carlos De Oliveira, have pleaded not guilty in a Florida federal court to assisting Trump in hiding classified documents at the estate. Trump has pleaded not guilty to 40 charges over allegations he illegally retained about 300 classified documents, among other presidential records, when he left the White House in January 2021. He is also accused of obstructing federal attempts to retrieve them from his Mar-a-Lago estat

NY Times  -Donald J. Trump’s lawyers disclosed on Monday that he had failed to secure a roughly half-billion dollar bond in his civil fraud case in New York, arguing that doing so was “a practical impossibility.” The filing, coming one week before the bond is due, raised the prospect that the former president might face a financial crisis unless an appeals court comes to his rescue. Mr. Trump has asked the appeals court to pause the $454 million judgment that a New York judge imposed on Mr. Trump last month, or accept a bond of only $100 million. The former president has been unable to secure the full bond, his lawyers said in the court filing on Monday, despite “diligent efforts.” Those efforts included approaching about 30 companies, and yet, they said, he has encountered “insurmountable difficulties.”  The judge in the civil fraud case, Arthur F. Engoron, levied the penalty and other punishments on Mr. Trump after concluding that he had fraudulently inflated his net worth to obtain favorable loans and other benefits. The case, brought by the New York attorney general, Letitia James, has posed a grave financial threat to Mr. Trump.He must post an appeal bond in excess of that amount — possibly more than $500 million to reflect the interest he will owe — to prevent Ms. James from seizing his a

Express - If Trump fails to pay up, the state "could levy and sell his assets, lien his real property, and garnish anyone who owes him money," according to Syracuse University law professor Gregory Germain. Asset seizure is a usual legal strategy when a defendant lacks sufficient cash for a civil penalty. Notably, OJ Simpson's Heisman Trophy was seized and auctioned off in 1999 to meet part of a $33.5 million wrongful death judgment against him.

Brian Krassenstein: So you are suggesting we re-elect a guy who...

- Oversaw less economic output than any of the previous 12 presidents.
- Put America in more debt in 4 years than any president had in 7 years. 
 - Has been indicted on 85 felonies including those under the Espionage Act.
- Had supporters who attempted to overthrow a democratic election.
- Made $7.8 million from 20 foreign governments during his presidency.
- Was the only President since WWII who left the White House with fewer Americans employed than when he started.
- Attempted to bring forth "fake electors" to overturn a fair election.
- Has been found liable of fraud and sexual assault
- Asked Russia for help in his 2016 campaign
- Refused to send federal aid to New York City amid the first COVID-19 wave because the virus was hitting Democratic-voting states hardest.

RBReich: Trump's 2nd-term economic agenda would hurt workers & kids to help the rich. He wants to:

-Cut taxes more for the rich
-Defund the IRS so the rich can cheat
-End student loan forgiveness
-End overtime rules
-Slash school lunches
-Allow child labor

Thirty years ago Barbara Walters called out Trump for his lies

Guardian - Donald Trump’s continuing lavish praise and support for Vladimir Putin are fueling alarm among former intelligence officials and other experts who fear another Trump presidency would benefit Moscow and harm American democracy and interests overseas. Trump praised the Russian president as a “genius” and “pretty savvy” when Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2022, and has boasted he would end the war in a “day”, sparking critics’ fears that if he’s elected again Trump would help Russia achieve a favorable peace deal by cutting off aid to Kyiv. Trump also recently greenlit Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” to Nato members who don’t pay enough to the alliance. Trump views Putin as a strongman,” said Fiona Hill, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution and a national security official in the first two years of Trump’s administration. “In a way they’re working in parallel because they’re both trying to weaken the US, but for very different reasons.”

Middle East

Middle East crisis live: famine ‘imminent’ in northern Gaza, UN report says, as EU foreign policy chief calls area ‘open air graveyard’

Flow: We really are unconscious when we're 'in the zone'

 New Atlas -  By analyzing the brain waves of improvising jazz musicians, researchers now understand how the brain achieves a creative flow state. The findings have practical implications for anyone – not just musicians – wanting to get ‘in the zone’ to generate creative ideas. Flow, commonly called being in the zone, is where a person is totally engaged in performing an activity, up to the point where they are hardly self-conscious or conscious of their surroundings. The phenomenon is often used to describe artists and athletes but is aspired to by business people, researchers, educators and, well, anyone who wants to produce creative ideas and products.  There’ve been many studies on flow, but most have relied on participants’ self-reports. Researchers from the Creativity Research Lab at Drexel University in the US are the first to reveal, in a new study, how the brain gets in the zone by analyzing flow-related brain activity during a creative task.

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Ecology

Financial Times - Since March 2023 oceans have begun to warm to previously unseen levels and now we’ve hit 365 days of consecutive daily highs. Every day of the past 12 months has set a global record... The global average sea surface temperature tipped to the 21.2C record this week. While the cyclical El NiƱo warming effect of the Pacific Ocean is starting to show signs of weakening, global ocean temperatures remain unusually high. 

Guns

NBC - At least 157 people were killed and 270 were injured last year in unintentional shootings by children, according to Everytown, an advocacy group for firearm safety.  The children who pulled the trigger were most often teenagers between 14 and 17 or children ages 5 and under, according to Everytown’s data, which is compiled from media reports. Roughly half of the incidents involved children who shot themselves. In the other half, someone else was injured — usually another child.

March 17, 2024

Politics as show business

 We posted this a year ago - March 17,, 29230 - and things haven't changed much. 

Sam Smith - In my lifetime the worst presidents – Reagan and Trump – repeatedly demonstrated the dangers in using show business as a useful guide in exercising constitutional democracy, and repeatedly the public had responded warmly.We tend to blame the news media for many of the current failures of our system, but the far less noticed fact is that politics has become a form of show business. As just one example, a Pew Research Center survey found that about ten percent of US adults get at least some of their news from TikTok and for those under 30, the figure is 26%.  Because I have few other skills, I shall continue to practice journalism as best I can but I do so in recognition that it has lost much of it status to the art of performing fantasies and providing fictions and fibs. If there are no rules and nothing matters, facts are a pretty dull alternative to show business.

Drugs

A full seven in 10 U.S. adults favor legalizing marijuana, according to Gallup polling. Support for legalization is closer to eight in 10 among 18- to 34-year-olds, a demographic whose support for Biden, who is seeking reelection, has softened since he took office.

Money

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Via David Doney

 

Trump

Ford News - Former Trump officials and Republicans who will not endorse Donald Trump for Presidency.

Vice President Mike Pence -United Nations Ambassador
Nikki Haley -Chief of Staff John Kelly
Defense Secretary Mark Esper 
Defense Secretary James Mattis 
Attorney General Bill Barr 
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson 
National Security Advisor John Bolton
National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster 
Former Speaker Paul Ryan 
Senator Mitt Romney 
Former President George Bush 
Former Vice President Dick Cheney 
Former Vice President Dan Quayle 
Senator Susan Collins 
Senator Lisa Murkowski 
Senator Todd Young
Former Senator Rob Portman 
Former Senator Jeff Flake 
Representative Chip Roy 
Former Representative Liz Cheney 
Former Speaker John Boehner
Former Federal Conservative Judge Michael Luttig

Democracy

 Take It Back -   Two times in the last 25 years, in 2000 and 2016, the person who won the Presidency did not win the popular vote. First it was George W. Bush in 2000, who was handed the win by the Supreme Court which stopped the vote recount in Florida. Then it was Donald Trump in 2016, whose elevation to the Presidency came despite losing the popular vote by 2.9 million votes.... Almost a decade ago, in June 2015, Donald Trump rode down his golden escalator and inflicted himself on the American people. If the popular vote had carried the day in that election, and Trump had never been president... In 2016, despite losing by nearly 3 million votes, just 80,000 votes in just 3 states gave Trump the Electoral College win. It’s terrifying that so few votes can determine a national election in which 158 million Americans voted.  But the Electoral College is built into the Constitution, and we are not likely to get 3/4 of the states to ratify an Amendment to abolish the Electoral College. More than a 1/4 of the states are over-represented by their Electoral College votes, and are not likely to want to give up their advantage, unfair as it may be.

The solution

Here’s how the National Popular Vote Compact works: If enough states agree to assign their Electoral College electors to the winner of the national popular vote, rather than the state’s own popular vote, we can guarantee the presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes nationwide, without needing to amend the Constitution. The compact won’t take effect until enough states have joined to guarantee Electoral College victory to the popular-vote winner. So far, sixteen states and D.C. have already signed on, totaling 205 Electoral College votes out of the 270 needed to secure a national popular vote victory.

GOP

Tensions reached such a boiling point among House Republicans that only about 40 percent of the 218 members of their conference attended their issues retreat in West Virginia, leading to the cancellation of their Friday panel discussions so lawmakers could leave Thursday night instead.

Travel

Washington Post -  Self-checkout lanes at retail stores were first introduced in the 1980s, but, as anyone who’s shopped at a Target or major grocery chain knows, they’ve really taken off in the past two decades. Now, the Transportation Security Administration is adopting the same concept for airport security.  As of March 11, passengers with TSA PreCheck departing from Las Vegas’ Harry Reid International Airport can elect to participate in a new, self-screening pilot program. TSA officers are still checking IDs and performing secondary screenings of flagged luggage, but passengers scan their own bags and themselves with limited additional interaction with agents. See how it works.


Stretching approximately 1,600 miles, the Wild Atlantic Way is the longest uninterrupted coastal driving route in the world.  It extends from the north of the country on the Inishowen Peninsula and continues along the western side of the Emerald Isle, ending in the colorful sea port town of Kinsale. It should take drivers about two to three weeks do the entire route justice, but the trip is broken into 14 stages, allowing those with limited time to pick and complete the portion they want to see the most. Along the way you'll find plenty of charming Irish villages and sweeping sea views, along with famous natural landmarks like the Cliffs of Moher, one of Ireland's top tourist attractions. 

 

A federal government agency we really didn't need

Reason - "I see no reason," the late Sen. Harry Reid (D–Nev.) once declared on the Senate floor, "why those in this country who enjoy drinking tea need someone else to tell them what tastes good." Yet for nearly 100 years that is exactly what the government did, thanks to one of the strangest agencies ever to be a part of the federal bureaucracy. In addition to the usual beverage regulations aimed at ensuring proper storage and safe handling, imported tea was required for decades to pass a literal taste test before it could be sold in the United States. The task fell to a group of Food and Drug Administration appointees, who would gather annually in a converted Navy warehouse in Brooklyn to smell, slosh, sip, and spit the various oolongs, greens, and Earl Greys that tea merchants sought to sell to Americans.This was the federal Board of Tea Experts. The board's members would taste dozens of teas over the course of several days. The process was more an art than a science. According to a 1989 Washington Post profile, there was no uniform method for tasting. Some board members worked in silence while others slurped their tea or gargled it loudly. Some preferred to taste the tea hot; others let it cool first.

Biden

 Behind the scenes, Biden has grown angry and anxious about re-election effort

Workers

 Axios - Many offices in America’s biggest cities aren't even two-thirds full on the busiest days of the weeks. Four years after pandemic lockdowns began, kids are back in school, brick-and-mortar retailers are thriving and travel has rebounded. But remote and hybrid work have lingered.  The shift away from working in offices has touched nearly all aspects of our lives —  from where people live, to how they structure their work-family balance to the way companies run. Offices could get even emptier: Nearly a third of leases are set to expire by 2026, The Atlantic notesPeak office days, typically Tuesdays or Wednesdays, can gauge the return-to-office momentum...Office occupancy is close to 62% on those high-attendance days, but falls to around 35% on Fridays, according to Kastle Systems swipe data from 10 big cities, including New York, L.A., Chicago and Houston... In some cities, developers are turning office buildings into apartments.

Output per worker increased by almost 300% between 1950 and 2018 in the U.S. The standard American workweek, meanwhile, has remained unchanged, at about 40 hours.T is paradox is especially notable in the U.S., where the average work year is 1,767 hours compared with 1,354 in Germany, a difference largely due to Americans’ lack of vacation time. More


How journalism has changed

Sam Smith - I have come to realize that one major reason I didn't do better at Harvard in the 1950s was that I was a fledgling journalist. I thought I was there to learn facts, not theories and ideas. I like to tell folks that the best course I took at Harvard was covering the Cambridge City Council for the student radio station. It wasn't on any course agenda, but it started me on my actual career. So you will understand why I found the article below so interesting.

William Deresiewicz, Persuasion - I was sitting across from the professor as she went over my latest piece. This was 1986, Columbia School of Journalism, Reporting and Writing I, the program’s core course. At one point, in response to what I don’t recall, I said, “That doesn’t bode well for me.” I could have been referring to a lot of things; there were so many, in my time in journalism school, that did not bode well for me. One was the next set of words that came out of her mouth. “‘Bode?’” she said. “I haven’t heard anyone bode anything in a long time.” Another was her comment, on a previous piece, about my use of “agglomerate.” She had circled it and written, “No such word.”

But the most important was the intellectual climate of the school as a whole, in that it did not have one. We were not there to think. We were there to learn a set of skills. One of them, ironically, was asking questions, just not about the profession itself: its premises, its procedures, its canon of ethics. I know, because from time to time I tried, and it didn’t go well. This was trade school, not liberal arts school. When a teacher said something, you were supposed to write it down, not argue.

Mid East

NPR-  Ireland is one of the most pro-Palestinian nations in the world. Public support for Palestinians is higher in Ireland than even some majority-Muslim countries, according to polling data. Ireland was the first European Union member to call for Palestinian statehood in 1980 and the last to grant Israel permission to open an embassy in 1993. A little under a century ago, the Irish and Palestinians were both under British rule. Britain called the Palestinian territory British Mandate Palestine, or Mandatory Palestine. Many Irish people see similarities between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the decadeslong Catholic-Protestant fighting in Northern Ireland known as the Troubles. Ireland's Sinn Fein party is leading the polls ahead of elections later this year or early 2025. Sinn Fein has historic ties to Irish Republican Army militants, who themselves had a decades-long alliance with the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the early 20th century, Ireland was very pro-Israel. Many identified with the Jewish history of being a displaced people and wanted Jews to have a safe place to go. Public opinion flipped with Israel annexing and occupied more Arab land. Read more about Ireland's history with Israel and Palestinians, including a darker chapter during World War II, here

Workers

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March 16, 2024

Ecology

 New Yorker - In early 2023, climate scientists—and anyone else paying attention to the data—started to notice something strange. At the beginning of March, sea-surface temperatures began to rise. By April, they’d set a new record: the average temperature at the surface of the world’s oceans, excluding those at the poles, was just a shade under seventy degrees. Typically, the highest sea-surface temperatures of the year are observed in March, toward the end of the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. Last year, temperatures remained abnormally high through the Southern Hemisphere’s autumn and beyond, breaking the monthly records for May, June, July, and other months. The North Atlantic was particularly bathtub-like; in the words of Copernicus, an arm of the European Union’s space service, temperatures in the basin were “off the charts.” ... “We don’t really know what’s going on,” Gavin Schmidt, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, told me. “And we haven’t really known what’s going on since about March of last year.” He called the situation “disquieting.”

Thursday night’s storms left trails of destruction across parts of Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Arkansas. About 40 people were injured and dozens of homes damaged in one Indiana community. Tornadoes were also suspected in Illinois and Missouri. The Indian Lake area in Ohio’s Logan County appeared to be the hardest hit. Read More.

 In recent decades, Central America has had the highest deforestation rate of any region, losing about 20 percent of its forests from 1990 to 2020, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization.

Hitler and drugs

Time Capsule Tales - Adolf Hitler was “a good patient,” according to his doctors. He was meticulously adherent to the regimen for his chronic sinusitis: cocaine in aerosol form. Hitler’s drug use was of epic proportions. In addition to cocaine, the German Fuhrer also took amphetamines, sedatives, and hormones. In his book Blitzed, German author Norman Ohler describes how the Third Reich was permeated with drugs, including cocaine, heroin and most notably crystal meth, which was used by everyone from soldiers to housewives and factory workers. Ohler also says that Hitler, whose mental and physical health has been the source of much speculation, relied on daily injections of the “wonder drug” Eukodol, which puts the user in a state of euphoria – and often renders them incapable of making sound judgments.

Trump

Folks who knew Trump

  •  Wharton Professor William T Kelley: “Donald Trump was the dumbest god damn student I ever had!” 
  • Trump’s Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly: “He’s unhinged and an idiot! – We have to save him from himself!” 
  • Trump’s Attorney General William Barr: “Trump has become Detached from Reality – if he really Believes this Stuff!” 
  • Trump’s Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis: “Trump acts like and has the understanding of Fifth or Sixth Grader!” 
  •  Trump’s Chief Strategist Steve Bannon: “The President is like an 11-year-old child!” 
  • Trump’s Secretary of State Rex Tillerson: “Trump’s a Fucking Moron!”  - Via James Aymann

DavidCornDC: Dear NY Times: Good morning. How are you? I’m just wondering why in today’s paper there’s no mention of Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s former veep (as you know), saying he won’t endorse Trump. Not on the front page. Not inside. Seems kinda big. Are you okay?

Political Tribune In the midst of the January 6th anniversary of the violent, Trump-fueled attack on the US Capitol, Stephanie Grisham sat down for an interview with CNN’s Jim Acosta, in which they spoke about the events that took place at the Capitol on January 6th, 2021, and Donald Trump’s deep-seated claims and so-called beliefs that he was the true and rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election, despite his clear and repeatedly confirmed loss to Joe Biden...  Speaking with Acosta, Grisham explained, “He knows he’s lying. He used to tell me when I was press secretary, go out there and say it. It doesn’t matter, Stephanie. Say it over and over and over again. People will believe it. He knows his base believes in him. He knows he can basically say anything, and his base will believe what he’s saying.” The former Trump press secretary went on to say that, while his lies and gullible base will likely help him secure the 2024 primaries, she expects it to backfire in his face when it comes to the general election.  “I think this will help propel him into the general, but I think that independents and center-leaning Republicans are not going to be buying this,” Grisham explained. “They’re much, much smarter than that. I think he’s going to get in trouble with it in the general with these kinds of lies.”

NY Times - Jared Kushner, the son-in-law of Donald J. Trump, confirmed on Friday that he was closing in on major real estate deals in Albania and Serbia, the latest example of the former president’s family doing business abroad even as Mr. Trump seeks to return to the White House.

Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, who helped orchestrate the Trump campaign's 2020 fake electors plot, had his law license suspended by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court.

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Politics

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Via Nick Knudsen

 

GOP

Daily Beast - A conservative activist who once called for the murder of President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama is the Republican nominee to be the superintendent of North Carolina’s public schools, CNN reports. Michele Morrow, who has previously called public schools “indoctrination centers” and “socialism centers,” is in contention for the responsibility of her state’s $11 billion school budget. Morrow one commented “Death to ALL traitors!!” in response to an image of Obama in an electric chair. She later defended her statement, alleging that Obama’s drone strike campaign in the Middle East constitutes treason. Morrow has also suggested in a tweet that President Joe Biden should be killed for recommending citizens wear masks. CNN also found that Morrow had posted comments calling for the execution of Hillary Clinton and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Money


 

Meanwhile. . .

The history of St. Patrick's Day.

Workers

Pew Research - Majorities of Americans see the large reduction in the share of workers represented by unions over the past several decades as a bad thing for both the country and working people in the United States.

  • 54% of U.S. adults say the decline has been bad for the country.
  • 59% say this has been bad for working people.

Religion

Pew Research - An 80% majority of U.S. adults say religion’s role in American life is shrinking, and most who hold this view say it’s a bad thing. Many religious and nonreligious Americans alike feel that their beliefs put them at odds with mainstream culture and with people on the other side of the political spectrum. Few overall see President Joe Biden or former President Donald Trump as especially religious.

Youth

 Pew Research - Most U.S. teens (72%) say being disconnected from their phone makes them feel peaceful at least sometimes, though 44% say this makes them anxious. Teens see smartphones as having some negative effects on people their age, but they largely believe the benefits outweigh the harms. Meanwhile, half of parents say they’ve ever looked through their teen’s phone.