Yeah. It Was Incitement

Many legal experts who have, until now, opined that Trump's remarks on the Ellipse did not rise to level of incitement to riot, have now changed their view, 

“He is trying to bring in not just the guns, but the people with the guns, into the mob,” left-leaning Fordham Law Professor Shugerman told TPM. “It’s not a slam-dunk case yet, but up until yesterday, most of what we had was political speech.”

The difference for Shugerman, too, came with Trump’s alleged “take the f-ing mags away” remark.

“Those three sentences give you mens rea,” he added — the legal term for when a person has knowledge that they’re doing something that violates the law.

Even Andrew McCarthy of the National Review, typically more interested in condemning those investigating Trump, conceded that Hutchinson’s testimony pointed to the former President being “culpable” for the riot.

“It’s a vibe shift,” Rozenshtein laughed.

At the time, per Hutchinson’s testimony, Trump had been informed that men armed with AR-15s and “spears” were gathering near the Ellipse. Hutchinson testified that Trump then ordered the armed men to be allowed into the crowd with their weapons. He then directed the crowd to the Capitol.

Shugerman also believed before Hutchinson’s testimony that Trump hadn’t met the bar for a crime. But he said that after hearing Hutchinson’s testimony, he saw two elements of a criminal charge for incitement potentially met: intent, and a bad act.

“Some speech is performative, but if a president give an order to do something, that’s an order,” Shugerman said. “This is not just political speech anymore — an order to take away metal detectors is a concrete act.”

 

Imagination Fails

 No matter how bad we think Trump is, the real truth is always worse. 

This seems surreal. But it’s all too real. This happened. What we learned today in the committee hearing is that the president of the United States knowingly fomented, and was eager to lead, an armed mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. 

The threat of violence was known far in advance. We now have eye and ear witness testimony plus other strong evidence of proof that the threat of bodily harm on a branch of government wasn’t an unfortunate byproduct — it was a driving force. 

Sometimes fate shines a bright spotlight on people who have been far outside the public’s consciousness. Before reporters last night identified today’s star witness as Cassidy Hutchinson, an aide to White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, how many Americans had heard her name? Now she will forever occupy a place of import in American history. 

There are some who are dismissing Hutchinson’s courage. They note that she was a loyal acolyte of the Trump White House. She kept these secrets until compelled under oath to testify. What choice did she have, the argument goes, but to speak? 

There is some merit to all of this, but I would not dismiss what it means to stand up and tell these truths to a global audience when we have seen such vindictiveness and threats leveraged from the former president and his enablers and henchmen. Hutchinson's story is beginning. We will see where she goes. And let us not overlook how stark her example stands in contrast to the cowardice of all who have remained silent — mostly senior men of privilege and power. 

There will be time for much more thoughtful analysis to put what we are learning now in real time into greater context. For now, however, we must remember how close we came to never learning the full story. 

The Necessity of Hope

 Rebecca Transfer has good words.

Today is wretched and plain. And it is not the bottom, as many people may feel it is. It will get worse; we will go lower. As the Court’s dissent insists, correctly, “Closing our eyes to the suffering today’s decision will impose will not make that suffering disappear.”

And so, with all this laid out, ugly and incontrovertible, the task for those who are stunned by the baldness of the horror, paralyzed by the bleakness of the view, is to figure out how to move forward anyway.

Because while it is incumbent on us to digest the scope and breadth of the badness, it is equally our responsibility not to despair.

 “What does it mean, the opposing imperative of honoring the feeling of being shattered, while gathering up whatever is left to work harder?”

It means doing the thing that people have always done on the arduous path to greater justice: Find the way to hope, not as feel-good anesthetic but as tactical necessity.

The prison abolitionist Mariame Kaba reminds us that “hope is a discipline.” It is also a political strategy and a survival mechanism. As Kaba has said, “It’s less about ‘how you feel’ and more about the practice of making a decision every day that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other, that you’re still going to get up in the morning. And you’re still going to struggle … It’s work to be hopeful.”

 “How can we keep going when the progress accumulated over our lifetimes has been reversed?” But we go forward because that progress was made against forces that will never stop trying to reverse it.

The failure to communicate that is a failure of our leaders, many of whom came of age in a period of progressive victories that they seemed to believe — due to naïveté or willful blindness — would continue to move in one expansive direction. It is no accident that many who believed this came from or moved into classes of power and privilege, where they could remain insulated from the erosions that have been grinding away this whole time, right under their noses.

This stubborn belief in a kind of Forever Progress has undergirded a political message that there was nothing to worry about. It has prevented a proper understanding of this country’s history and its foundational power imbalances. And now it is the shattering of this belief that pulls people toward despair.

But despair is poison. It deadens people when the most important thing they can do is proceed with more drive and force and openness than they have before. Which is why the work ahead is insisting on hope, behaving as if there is reason for hope, even if you feel, based on the ample available evidence, that there is not.

To be as clear as humanly possible: Insisting on hope does not equal a call to dumb cheer, empty aphorism, and baseless optimism. That is the kind of garbage disregard for reality that landed us here. Fatuous overconfidence is what permitted those in power to tell those with their hair on fire that their fear was theatrical, unhinged, overdramatic.

Which is why we must retain the clarity of today’s horror, and never let anyone tell us that things are better than they are. Start with the presumption that your worst fears reflect reality and then learn from those who are already well acquainted with the world we actually live in. There are plenty of people who have not been blind to this country’s long backward motion, to the fact that restrictions have been tightening and rights have been dismantled.

People who have been staring at these realities have built networks and mechanisms. They run clinics and funds and have experience helping people get the care they need when that care has been denied and obstructed by the state. They have developed the medicines, pioneered the delivery systems, and familiarized themselves with the laws. They need support and money and energy.

One of the people doing this work, Debasri Ghosh, the managing director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, said to me in a conversation last week, “Beyond abortion, I have been thinking a lot about how so many of us in this movement, particularly Black and brown and Indigenous folks, have ancestries and histories of resistance. We have this lineage of fighting back against hard-won rights being regressed, fighting back against going backwards. It is important for us to be able to tell those stories much more broadly. And we have to look to that ancestral wisdom to be able to find a path forward.” This is the muscle memory of those who have never had the comfort that their rights would remain intact.

This country’s history has been built on days like today. Bad days. It has shown itself capable of reform. Or rather, its people — those willing to give their lives and every scrap of hope they could muster — have reformed it by force.

So today is surely a day to weep and mourn and rage and be very, very afraid, and to understand that many of us will not live to see today’s calamity reversed. And in so acknowledging, we go forward with the will of those who came before, and those who have never stopped putting one foot in front of another, to some finer tomorrow, distant but always possible.

Perfect Storm for Inflation

 Peter Coy analyzes the roots of the current inflation.

it’s not a simple story of businesses driving up prices to earn more money, Mike Konczal, one of the paper’s authors, who is the institute’s director of macroeconomic analysis, told me. “Is greed the sole or main reason for inflation?” he asked. “I’d say no. It’s part of the mix of explanations that should be under consideration.”

What is the chief cause of today’s high inflation — strong demand, supply shortages or rising profit margins? Those who cite strong demand blame the Biden administration, Congress and the Federal Reserve for overstimulating the economy. Those who cite supply shortages point fingers at disruptions caused by anomalies such as the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Foes of corporate bigness focus on the excess-profits theory.

There’s some evidence for all three explanations, according to the paper, “Prices, Profits and Power: An Analysis of 2021 Firm-Level Markups,” by Konczal and Niko Lusiani, the director of the Roosevelt Institute’s corporate power team.

Supporting the strong-demand theory of inflation is the fact that increases in markups were widespread among many types and sizes of companies, suggesting that economywide strength in the demand for goods and services was an important factor in price increases, the authors found.

At the same time, markups increased more sharply in industries that experienced disruptions, indicating that supply chain problems were also a factor in inflation. Among the sectors with big markups were real estate, mining, quarrying and oil and gas extraction. (The biggest markup increase that the authors found was in finance and insurance, which is a bit strange, since that sector wasn’t obviously bottlenecked.)

The third explanation, rising profit margins, isn’t an alternative but rather a supplement to the demand and supply explanations. It says that companies seized the opportunity of strong demand and weak supply to increase their profits. Supporting that theory is the authors’ finding that, after adjustments for size, companies that increased prices before 2021 were the most likely to increase prices in 2021. That indicates that they had a position in the market that made it easier for them to impose price increases and make them stick.

It's the gas!

A key element of the global inflation right now is the price of gasoline.

And as a major oil-producing country, our prices haven't gone up near as much as other developed countries. It's tough everywhere and blaming it on the White House is just silly.

Source: Kiplinger: Gas Prices Around the World

Superworm eats styrofoam

Australia has a larva that eats styrofoam.

A plump larva the length of a paper clip can survive on the material that makes Styrofoam. The organism, commonly called a “superworm,” could transform the way waste managers dispose of one of the most common components in landfills, researchers said, potentially slowing a mounting garbage crisis that is exacerbating climate change.

In a paper released last week in the journal of Microbial Genomics, scientists from the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, showed that the larvae of a darkling beetle, called zophobas morio, can survive solely on polystyrene, commonly called Styrofoam.

Now, the researchers will study the enzymes that allow the superworm to digest Styrofoam, as they look to find a way to transform the finding into a commercial product. Industrial adoption offers a tantalizing scenario for waste managers: A natural way to dispose and recycle the Styrofoam trash that accounts for as much as 30 percent of landfill space worldwide.

In 2015, researchers from Stanford University revealed that mealworms could also survive on Styrofoam. The next year, Japanese scientists found bacteria that could eat plastic bottles. In April, researchers from the University of Texas found an enzyme which could digest polyethylene terephthalate, a plastic resin found in clothes, liquid and food containers.

[Ed. Note: I know from personal experience that styrofoam can be easily dissolve with a petroleum solvent like, say, gasoline. I guess the trick is really to get all the styrofoam separated from all the other stuff.]

Our Mass Hysteria

Charles Blow dissects Trumpism.

we are now living in an age of political mass hysteria, one that, while led by Donald Trump’s election lies, encompasses the fanatical campaigns casting trans people as groomers, history teachers as indoctrinators and Covid precautions as politically toxic.

This all raises, to me, a profound and frightening series of questions: Can a lie, in periods like this one, simply be stronger than the truth? I have faith that history will properly diagnose this moment, and that many who now occupy high places will be brought low by it. But, in the present, without the perspective that time and distance can provide, is fantasy more seductive than reality?

Is it, on a base level, more exhilarating to destroy something than to hold it together?

It’s not only that Trump desired to deceive; his followers desired to be deceived. The havoc Trump unleashed landed on fertile ground, receptive and wanting.

For many Republicans, the truth — that the country was becoming more brown and less white, that the electorate was moving away from them, that they were losing control over American culture — was no longer tenable. Untruth, therefore, grew more alluring.

For conservatives, lies that offered comfort became more digestible than truths that demanded adaptation.

the more these Republicans are condemned for their Trump fixation, the tighter they will cling to it, just as soldiers close ranks when they come under attack. Many of them are titillated by the vexation of liberals: Anything that leaves liberals straining for explanation and flummoxed is wanted and worth it.

For them, Trump provided another way to recast racism as patriotism. For them, he gave derangement direction. For them, he made mass hysteria chic.

Roe v Wade Tactic

 The minority justices could "killer bee" SCOTUS by denying it a quorum.

Five of the nine Supreme Court justices are prepared to overturn Roe v. Wade and wrest from hundreds of millions of Americans the fundamental right to access abortion. The four justices in the minority can and must stop that from happening. Chief Justice John Roberts, along with Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor, should recuse themselves in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization and deny the Supreme Court a quorum, preventing the end of Roe.