James.galbraith

[The defendant had been barred from presenting his defense, as a sanction for his persistent violation of court orders, including one that he had expressly consented to.]

The opinion (in Hoffman v. Clark, written by Judge Greer, joined by Presiding Judge Vaitheswaran and Judge Schumacher) is long and complex, but here's an excerpt:

"Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it; so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late…." This concern became central in a case that started as a relatively common dispute between an employer and a former employee. Jerry Hoffmann is the chief executive officer of Hoffmann Innovations, Inc., which does business as DIY AutoTune. They are our plaintiffs. Scott Clark, who worked for DIY AutoTune, was fired by Hoffman in August 2016. Clark then started his own company, RealTuners, LLC. They are our defendants.

Less than a year later, Hoffmann initiated a lawsuit, raising a number of claims addressing Clark's new company and a noncompete agreement Clark had signed; actions Clark allegedly took using confidential information and trade secrets from DIY AutoTune; and statements Clark had made on social media disparaging Hoffmann and his products and services.

A few months into the litigation, the parties asked the court to file a consent agreement "in an effort to narrow the scope of litigation and avoid additional causes of action." The consent agreement prohibited all parties from making any disparaging statements "about adverse [p]arties to this case, their services, products, employees or abilities—whether verbally or in writing, including via online postings and websites, regardless of the truth or the falsity of such statements."

Between January 2018, when the consent order was filed, and August 2019, when the jury trial began, Hoffmann brought twelve successful motions for sanctions against Clark. Hoffmann repeatedly asked the court to strike Clark's answer and counterclaims as a sanction, and the court gave that remedy after Hoffmann's fourth successful motion for sanctions. For this reason, the jury trial in August 2019 was limited to the determination of whether Clark caused damages to Hoffmann and the amount of any damages. The jury awarded Hoffmann and Hoffmann Innovations a total of $11,000,000 in damages [of which about $10.5M were for libel -EV], and the court awarded Hoffmann attorney fees….

Clark's amount of interference with the judicial process was great. He knowingly and purposely violated the consent order a number of times, he mocked the court and the ongoing litigation in the public, he refused to turn over discovery he was repeatedly ordered to produce, and, by the end, he stopped attending all hearings and even skipped trial—apparently because he did not want to serve the jail time he was ordered to serve for his repeated violations.

Clark even posted that he had "decided to stop participating and start making fun of them again." As he made clear to his followers, Clark refused to recognize the power of the court and did as he wished throughout the proceedings.

Clark's culpability is also great. While it is possible some of his earliest actions were due to a lack of understanding about the confines of the consent order he agreed to, leading up to the trial, Clark made clear that he understood what was expected of him and just chose not to comply.

For example, Clark's posts made it clear he knew he was supposed to turn himself in to serve a jail sentence for one of his contempts, but instead he chose to go on the run. As we noted before, Clark understood what he was expected to turn over regarding Facebook information in response to the court's discovery order and just blatantly told the court it was "not ever going to happen." Clark was repeatedly ordered to attend contempt hearings in person, and he repeatedly participated by telephone so he could not be jailed for his actions, telling the court as much from the phone.

The case is the biggest threat to abortion rights to arise since Amy Coney Barrett joined the Court.

The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a challenge to a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. That means that Dobbs will be the first abortion case to be fully briefed and argued before the Supreme Court since Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation last October.

Barrett is an outspoken opponent of abortion, and she joined a Court that almost certainly already had five votes to roll back abortion rights before her confirmation gave Republicans a 6-3 majority on the Supreme Court.

Last June, four justices voted to uphold a Louisiana anti-abortion law that was virtually identical to a Texas law that the Supreme Court struck down in 2016. Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts cast a surprising vote in that June case, June Medical Services v. Russo, to strike down Louisiana’s law. But Roberts’s opinion emphasized that he disagreed with many of the Court’s seminal abortion rights decisions, and that he only voted the way he did in June Medical out of respect for the principle that the Court should not simply ignore a ruling that it handed down just a few years earlier.

With Barrett on the Court, the four dissenters in June Medical no longer need Roberts’s vote to make significant incursions on reproductive freedom. And the legal issue in Dobbs is sufficiently distinct from the one in June Medical that Roberts is unlikely to vote with his liberal colleagues again on those grounds.

The legal issue in Dobbs is straightforward. A 2018 Mississippi law prohibits all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, “except in a medical emergency or in the case of a severe fetal abnormality.” Notably, this law applies even before the fetus is viable — meaning that it is capable of surviving outside the uterus. But, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed, “a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.”

Notably, the Supreme Court decided to focus its argument in Dobbs on a single question — “Whether all pre-viability prohibitions on elective abortions are unconstitutional” — which suggests that the Court could use this case as a vehicle to end the rule providing that an abortion patient gets to make the final decision whether to “terminate her pregnancy before viability.”

A conservative federal appeals court struck down the Mississippi law, with even Judge James Ho, a staunch opponent of abortion, conceding that existing Supreme Court precedent “establishes viability as the governing constitutional standard.”

Now that the case is before the justices themselves, however, Dobbs gives the Court’s new majority a vehicle it could use to toss out this longstanding rule. Indeed, it potentially gives them a vehicle to overrule Roe v. Wade in its entirety and permit outright bans on abortion.

The Court’s new majority, moreover, has already signaled that it is eager to roll back protections for abortion rights. Earlier this year, the Court handed down a decision permitting the Food and Drug Administration to impose limits on an abortion-inducing drug that it does not impose on any other medication.

The Court did not publish a majority opinion in that earlier case, FDA v. American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, so the American College decision did not make any explicit changes to the Court’s existing abortion rights doctrine. Nevertheless, the Court’s anti-abortion decision in American College may well foreshadow what’s to come.

The people who brought you Game of Thrones are merging with the people who bring you 90 Day Fiance.

Five years ago, one of the world’s biggest phone companies announced it was buying one of the world’s biggest media companies. Now it wants a do-over: AT&T wants to combine WarnerMedia, the company that owns HBO, CNN, and the Warner Bros. movie studio, with Discovery Inc., the cable TV programmer that owns the Food Network and HGTV.

The short version: The people that brought you Game of Thrones and the people that brought you 90 Day Fiancé are getting together.

This won’t affect you, the person who likes to watch those shows, very much in the near future. But it underscores the upheaval in the media industry, as companies that used to dominate the landscape are scrambling to catch up with the new media giants — which are tech companies.

We’ll do the longer version, including the rationale for this, in a minute.

But first, let’s just take a second to marvel at the things you can do if you run a really big, really valuable phone company: You can tell the world that the future of your business involves combining your business — selling subscriptions to broadband and wireless phone service — with someone else’s media business, and spend tens of billions of dollars doing that. And then you can announce, with a shrug, that you’ve changed your mind.

That’s what AT&T is doing now. In 2016, the phone company said it was going to pay more than $100 billion (including debt) to buy what was then called TimeWarner, and spent years fighting the Trump administration in court to get the deal done.

The deal raised eyebrows from the get-go, because TimeWarner had already been through a disastrous merger with an unrelated company — that would be AOL — during the first dot-com boom, and supposed synergies between those two never materialized.

But if you asked AT&T executives to explain why merging a media company with a non-media company would be different this time around, you would get bristly non-answers. Now we’re getting the real answer: Adding TimeWarner to AT&T didn’t help AT&T sell more wireless or broadband plans. And it didn’t help TimeWarner compete against Netflix and the rest of the internet.

Which is why AT&T is essentially unmerging WarnerMedia, and merging it with an actual media company, where there might actually be some synergies.

If this undoing sounds familiar, there’s a good reason. We’ve seen it happen twice this year alone.

In February, AT&T announced that it was unmerging with DirecTV, the satellite TV business it bought in 2015 for $67 billion, and is now worth something less than $16 billion.

And last month, Verizon announced that it was unmerging with AOL and Yahoo, two former internet powerhouses, in a deal that valued those companies at $5 billion — about half of what Verizon had paid for them a few years earlier.

All of which is to say: Next time someone gives you grief at work for screwing something up, you can tell them that at least you didn’t waste tens of billions of dollars on a failed media M&A strategy. (You should also consider working as an M&A lawyer or banker, where you get paid to do these deals whether they make any sense or not.)

So. Merging WarnerMedia with AT&T didn’t work. Will merging with Discovery work? Mmmmmmaybe.

• At the very least, it helps WarnerMedia, which is trying to compete with Netflix and Disney for a share of the streaming video subscription market, add weight and heft. Both WarnerMedia and Discovery have their own streaming video subscription services — HBO Max and Discovery+ — and putting both of them under the same roof can be more efficient. And there isn’t a ton of overlap in the services: HBO Max is HBO shows plus WarnerMedia movies plus an assortment of other stuff. Discovery Plus is a collection of reality TV shows. The new company can market the two services separately, but it will undoubtedly roll out a merged version one day.
• Both companies also own large cable TV operations — WarnerMedia’s Turner group includes CNN, TNT, and Cartoon Network; Discovery has everything from the Travel Channel to Animal Planet. Those businesses are in permanent decline — as WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar has said publicly — but in the meantime, they still reach tens of millions of people and throw off a lot of cash. And combining the backroom operations of those networks can save more money along the way.
• Wall Street is very excited about companies like Netflix, and now Disney, that can argue that they are streaming video companies. But it never bought AT&T’s argument that it was a streaming video company — it valued it as a slow growth/no growth phone company that happened to own some media stuff. But now, in theory, investors who want to invest in WarnerMedia can do that, so maybe the new company will end up being worth something like the money AT&T sunk into it to begin with.

Let’s pause here and note that this merger isn’t a forgone conclusion, because AT&T and Discovery are proposing it in 2021 — a time when regulators around the world are newly interested in slowing or stopping big companies from getting bigger, just for the sake of getting bigger.

AT&T had to spend a couple years fighting to get its WarnerMedia deal done, but that fight seems like it had a lot to do with the fact that Donald Trump didn’t like CNN. (Trump and his regulators had no problem with Rupert Murdoch selling most of his Fox empire to Disney.) Now AT&T and Discovery will have to explain why combining two of the biggest video programmers in the world won’t eventually result in less choice and/or higher prices for consumers, to a much more skeptical audience.

Free preview: AT&T and Discovery will say they need to do it to compete with Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, TikTok, and anything else on the internet. And the truth is, they’re right. A deal like this would have been jaw-dropping a few years ago. Now, it’s going to seem inevitable, and also not that big a deal.

Especially to someone like you, who is likely spending your screen time on a combination of paid services like Netflix, and free ones like TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. It’s possible, one day, that if you pay for HBO Max, or Discovery+, you’ll see some effect from this.

Maybe you’ll get a discount for buying both services — or maybe the merged company will raise prices on both services, because they can. Perhaps you’ll see some crossover content, like a Food Network show dedicated to red sauce recipes from The Sopranos. But unless you work at WarnerMedia, Discovery, or their competitors, this is a megamerger you may not ever notice. Which tells you everything you need to know.

The wave of riots sweeping Israeli cities reflects the damage done by a decade of divisive right-wing government.

Bat Yam is an Israeli seaside suburb, nestled just south of Tel Aviv. It’s primarily known for its pretty beachfront.

On Wednesday night, Bat Yam erupted in violence. A mob of Jewish extremists surrounded a man they presumed was an Arab and pummeled him mercilessly. Kan, Israel’s public broadcaster, aired live footage of the unnamed man being beaten with a flagpole flying the Israeli flag.

“We are watching a lynching,” Kan reporter Daniel Elazar said during the broadcast.

What happened in Bat Yam is not an isolated incident. The current fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza has led to an eruption of violence in Israeli cities, with dueling Jewish and Arab mobs roaming the streets, destroying property and beating innocents.

In the city of Lod, the epicenter of the communal violence, an armed Arab mob torched three synagogues on Tuesday. In retaliation, Jewish mobs lit Arab buildings aflame on Wednesday. The violence has continued since, in Lod and other places like Bat Yam. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that troops may be deployed to quell the fighting, a striking threat given that Israel is currently at war in Gaza.

While fighting between Israel and Hamas is unfortunately common, this kind of street violence inside Israel’s internationally recognized borders is not. Nothing at this scale happened in the prior three Gaza wars; in fact, nothing like this has happened since a wave of ethnic rioting in October 2000. Even then, the centers of the current violence — so-called “mixed cities” like Lod, with high proportions of both Arab and Jewish citizens — were relatively calm.

“I don’t think that, since the creation of the state of Israel, we’ve seen this kind of domestic violence,” Ami Ayalon, the former director of the Shin Bet (Israel’s FBI equivalent), tells me. “We are not far from... not a civil war, but a level of violence that I don’t know if we can control.”

Ultimately, the current violence is the result of the longstanding marginalization of Israel’s Arab minority.

Arabs, who make up 20 percent of Israel’s population, have in some ways grown more integrated with their Jewish neighbors in recent years. But at the same time, the Israeli Jewish leadership has grown more right-wing and nakedly racist, with Netanyahu labeling the Arab political parties an “existential threat” in 2019 and subsequently choosing to partner with the Jewish supremacist party Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power) in the March 2021 elections.

His government passed a law defining Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people in 2018, implicitly defining Arabs as second-class citizens. The government has largely ignored festering problems in the Arab community, including longstanding discrimination and poverty, leading to the rise of Arab organized crime and a shocking spike in murders.

And Netanyahu’s decision to allow the continued Jewish colonization of the West Bank — territory meant to be part of a future, sovereign Palestinian state — has convinced large numbers of Arabs, many of whom identify as “Palestinian citizens of Israel,” that the state is incapable of seeing them as full and equal citizens.

“If I had to sum it up in one sentence: yes, Netanyahu is completely to blame,” said Yaël Mizrahi-Arnaud, a research fellow at the Forum for Regional Thinking, an Israeli think tank.

The violence on Israeli streets during this conflict represents all of these trends coming to a head. It is the toxic intersection of both the enduring problem of Arab Israelis’ marginal status and the past 12 years of rule by a hard-right government — one that has done its best to fray the ties that bind Israel’s diverse society together.

Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images

How Arabs became Israeli

Prior to Israel’s creation, communal violence between Jewish immigrants and Arabs residents was far from unheard of.

In 1921, mobs of Arabs in the city of Jaffa attacked Jews, fearing that Jewish immigration to the then-British colony of Palestine would displace them — sparking Jewish retaliation. British colonial authorities dispersed the Arab mobs with gunfire; by the end of it, about 100 people had died.

The underlying cause of this conflict, as is typically the case, was dual claims to the land. Most of the Jews coming to Palestine were European migrants, looking to carve out a space free from persecution. Indigenous Arabs saw these migrants’ dream of a Jewish state as a threat to their own status.

In theory, the creation of Israel was supposed to resolve this conflict: The 1947 UN plan for the land partitioned what’s now Israel into two similarly-sized blocs, one for Jews and one for Arabs.

Universal History Archive/UIG/Getty images

But by the time Israel formally declared independence in 1948, the partition plan had collapsed into bloody Arab-Jewish fighting — both armed warfare and communal rioting. By the end of the fighting, roughly 700,000 Palestinians had been displaced — a shattering event that Palestinians today refer to as the “Nakba,” or catastrophe.

But over 150,000 Arabs remained inside Israeli-controlled territory, posing a question for Israel’s founders: How should a Jewish state treat non-Jews inside its territory? For many years, the answer was “not well:” Until 1966, much of Israel’s Arab population was formally placed under military rule and subjected to formal legal discrimination. But that year, Israel ended military rule and opened up Israeli life to Arabs — who have since become a significant part of Israeli society.

Many Arab citizens of Israel still live in separate communities; as a whole, they suffer from discrimination and structural disadvantage. About 36 percent of Arabs live under the poverty line, compared with about 18 percent of Jewish Israelis. Israel has one of the highest rates of college attainment in the world, but only 9 percent of Arab Israeli men have an undergraduate degree.

Discriminatory land-use laws and communally motivated development — Jews moving into heavily Arab neighborhoods like Tel Aviv’s Jaffa in a bid to change the demographics — make them feel under siege and alienated from the state. A 2020 poll by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI), a nonpartisan think tank, found that only 35 percent of Arabs agreed “the regime in Israel is democratic toward Arab citizens.”

Yet, in other ways, Arab Israelis have increasingly become integrated with mainstream Israeli society. Jews and Arabs have more contact than ever before, and surveys find increasing evidence that Jews and Arabs see each other as citizens engaged in a shared endeavor. The IDI poll found that 81 percent of Arabs believe that “most Arab citizens of Israel want to integrate into Israeli society and be part of it.”

And outright communal violence between Jews and Arabs has been rare. The October 2000 riots began with pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the very beginning of the Second Intifada — the bloodiest conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in modern history. For the rest of that war, and during all subsequent wars, Jewish and Arab citizens have lived together inside Israel — not in harmony, exactly, but in relative peace.

Until last week.

How the riots happened

The violence of the past week does not have one single cause. It’s the convergence of multiple trends and events at one time, a kind of perfect storm that produced the current cycle of violence.

And Netanyahu, more than anyone else, bears responsibility for this dark convergence.

First, and most obviously, the past few years of Israeli politics have seen an increase in anti-Arab incitement. During the 2015 elections, for example, Netanyahu ran a nakedly discriminatory campaign — warning his Jewish followers that Arabs were coming out “in droves.”

His governing coalitions have included anti-Arab politicians like Avigdor Lieberman — who has proposed transferring parts of the Arab population out of Israel and into a hypothetical Palestinian state. Racist organizations like Lehava, whose members were recently seen chanting “Death to Arabs” on Jerusalem’s streets, have grown in strength; far-right Jewish terrorists have been emboldened.

The rising anti-Arab incitement is reflected in legislation. Adalah, a group that focuses on Arab civil equality in Israel, counted more than 65 discriminatory Israeli laws passed between 1948 and 2020. Of these, roughly half were enacted since Netanyahu’s current stint in office began in 2009.

The most high-profile of these is a new Basic Law (the rough equivalent to a constitutional amendment) defining Israel as “the nation-state of the Jewish people.” The law had little immediate practical upshot but immense symbolic significance, all but explicitly slotting Arabs into second-class citizenship.

“The [nation-state] law says very clearly that a Jewish American has a better position in the state of Israel than me,” Aida Touma-Suleiman, an Arab member of the Knesset (Israel’s parliament) from the Joint List, an Arab political faction, told me last year. “We are not second-degree citizens. We are maybe fifth- or sixth-degree.”

The Netanyahu government’s anti-Arab governing agenda has radicalized elements of both the Jewish and Arab populations.

A 2017 paper by Sammy Smooha, a professor at the University of Haifa who studies Jewish-Arab relations, compared original opinion polling of both Jews and Arabs in 2015 and 2017. On 54 out of 154 questions posed to Arab respondents, their attitudes toward coexistence had darkened (they only improved on 20). Similarly, 36 out of 94 questions posed to Jewish respondents indicated declines (with only four indicating improvement).

Smooha’s conclusion was clear: “The government policy of de-democratization and widening the divide [between] Arabs and Jews has succeeded.”

Under conditions of worsening mistrust, Jewish and Arab extremists alike are going to feel more empowered to engage in violence against the other group. That this happened at the same time as Arabs became more integrated into the Jewish mainstream is not entirely an accident.

Oren Ziv/picture alliance/Getty Images

“The attacks on Palestinian citizens in Israel are, in part, a racist pushback against their accelerated economic integration, greater political, cultural and media presence,” writes Yair Wallach, a senior lecturer in Israeli studies at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. “Palestinians are more visible than they were ten years ago, and this scares the racists.”

Second, the Arab community has been especially unsettled in recent years by an explosion in violent crime — a problem the Netanyahu government has done little about.

After a crackdown on Jewish organized crime in the early 2000s, Arab syndicates took over the bulk of illicit trade in Israel. The result has been escalating violence in Arab communities that, in recent years, has reached epidemic proportions. In 2019, Arabs were the victims of 71 percent of all murders in Israel.

The crime wave has deepened the alienation of a section of Arabs from the Israeli state, which has failed to adequately address it. At the same time, it has made some Arabs — particularly a subsection of young men — more accustomed to violence and better equipped to acquire weapons. The riots in places like Lod were a depressingly predictable result.

“The deepest problem of the Arab sector is the problem of crime and violence. And there was no clear and particular government policy in order to solve this problem,” says Arik Rudnitzky, an expert on Jewish-Arab relations at IDI. “To some extent, we’ve reached this Judgment Day when the illegal weapons were directed against Jewish citizens.”

Third, and finally, the events that kicked off the current round of fighting between Israel and Palestinian militants in Gaza — conflict over Jerusalem — were a dangerous series of conflicts that Netanyahu permitted to escalate. And, exactly the sorts of things that would provoke Palestinian citizens of Israel.

In April, Israeli police in Jerusalem blocked off the Damascus Gate, a popular gathering place for Arabs during Ramadan, sparking protests. An attempt by Jewish settlers to evict longtime Arab residents of Sheikh Jarrah, an Arab neighborhood of East Jerusalem, inflamed tensions, leading to violent clashes with Israeli police. Arab youth attacked ultra-Orthodox Jews in the city, and Jewish extremists assailed Arab residents. All of this culminated in a violent Israeli police raid on the al-Aqsa Mosque, Jerusalem’s holiest site for Muslims, located on the Temple Mount (the holiest site in the world for Jews).

The Arabs in East Jerusalem are, in many ways, distinct from the Arabs in the rest of Israel — for one thing, most aren’t Israeli citizens. But Jerusalem is important to all, the religious and nationalist center of the Palestinian imagination. The fighting in the city inflamed Arab sentiment inside Israel, which combined with a growing identification with the Palestinian cause — what Palestinian politics expert Khaled Elgindy calls “a new pan-Palestinianism” — to enrage the Arab population.

In short, there’s no single reason that the calm between Israeli Jews and Arabs has broken in such horrible fashion. But Netanyahu has been Israel’s prime minister since 2009; through overt acts and selective inaction, he pushed Israel’s Jewish and Arab citizens apart — making the violence of the past week possible.

The unraveling of Israel

It’s not clear how long the violence on Israeli streets will last, or how it will end. But experts are already warning that, even if it ends quickly, the consequences could reverberate for years.

Over the past several months, there’s been a growing willingness on the part of Israeli Arab political parties to be part of the political mainstream. Ra’am, an Islamist Arab party led by Mansour Abbas, has been in negotiations with both Netanyahu and his leading rival — the centrist Yair Lapid — to form the next government of Israel.

Mathematically, both men need Abbas to form a majority government in the Knesset. As a result, even right-wing parties like Netanyahu’s Likud were warming to the idea of formally partnering with an Arab party as part of a governing coalition — an extraordinary and unprecedented development in Israeli politics. It was a sign that, amid the worsening problems in Jewish-Arab relations, some things might be getting better.

But the communal violence on Israel’s streets may have shattered this consensus. Naftali Bennett, a far-right political leader and a swing vote in the current Knesset negotiations, recently ruled out joining a coalition with Abbas — claiming that his party could not support the action (presumably, military and police deployments) necessary to restore order to the streets.

At a time when Arab-Jewish cooperation at the highest levels of Israeli politics seems more necessary than ever, Arabs are once again being excluded from the Israeli government — a reversal of fragile advances that could last beyond the current fighting.

“There have been seven decades of distrust and discrimination against Israeli Arabs and we finally saw these green shoots of progress,” said Michael Koplow, the policy director of the Israel Policy Forum. “I’m worried that is going to be eradicated.”

This, ultimately, is the situation that Netanyahu has created.

Even when he attempts to reach out to Arabs, such as by trying to include Abbas in his coalition, events set into motion by his divisive style of governance conspire to block him. His populist “de-democratization” of Israeli society, as Smooha puts it, aimed to pit Israelis against each other — scapegoating Arabs and Jewish leftists for the country’s problems.

Ahmad Gharabli/AFP/Getty Images

This has been an effective means of marshaling right-wing and center-right voters to his political cause, helping him in stay in office for over a decade. But it has come at a tremendous cost: an attack on the civil agreements undergirding Israeli society, the basic norms of mutual toleration and respect required for democratic coexistence.

The outbreak of communal rioting represents a political failure — an inability or unwillingness by the state to foster civil trust and restrain violent extremists. The rioters are morally responsible for their own actions, but those actions are a symptom of deeper fault lines in Israeli society.

Israel’s political system already suffers from a profound contradiction: It is a democracy for Israeli citizens and a military dictatorship for Palestinians. This dual identity exerts profound stress on the entire system’s stability. By pushing on the social fault lines within Israel, Netanyahu has exacerbated communal tensions in exactly the area where it is most under pressure by the occupation — Jewish-Arab relations.

As a result, the country’s social bargain is unraveling. And innocent Jews and Arabs alike are suffering.

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Graphene aluminum-ion battery cells from Brisbane-based Graphene Manufacturing Group "are claimed to charge up to 60 times faster than the best lithium-ion cells and hold three time the energy of the best aluminum-based cells," writes a transportation correspondent for Forbes: They are also safer, with no upper Ampere limit to cause spontaneous overheating, more sustainable and easier to recycle, thanks to their stable base materials. Testing also shows the coin-cell validation batteries also last three times longer than lithium-ion versions. GMG plans to bring graphene aluminum-ion coin cells to market late this year or early next year, with automotive pouch cells planned to roll out in early 2024. Based on breakthrough technology from the University of Queensland's Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology, the battery cells use nanotechnology to insert aluminum atoms inside tiny perforations in graphene planes... GMG Managing Director Craig Nicol insisted that while his company's cells were not the only graphene aluminum-ion cells under development, they were easily the strongest, most reliable and fastest charging. "It charges so fast it's basically a super capacitor," Nicol claimed. "It charges a coin cell in less than 10 seconds." The new battery cells are claimed to deliver far more power density than current lithium-ion batteries, without the cooling, heating or rare-earth problems they face.... Aluminum-ion technology has intrinsic advantages and disadvantages over the preeminent lithium-ion battery technology being used in almost every EV today. When a cell recharges, aluminum ions return to the negative electrode and can exchange three electrons per ion instead of lithium's speed limit of just one. There is also a massive geopolitical, cost, environmental and recycling advantage from using aluminum-ion cells, because they use hardly any exotic materials. "It's basically aluminum foil, aluminum chloride (the precursor to aluminum and it can be recycled), ionic liquid and urea," Nicol said.

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"As a neuroscientist long experienced in the field, I recently completed a painstaking analysis of 30 years of research on human brain sex differences..." reports Lise Eliot in a recent article on The Conversation. "[T]here's no denying the decades of actual data, which show that brain sex differences are tiny and swamped by the much greater variance in individuals' brain measures across the population." Bloomberg follows up: In 2005, Harvard's then president Lawrence Summers theorized that so few women went into science because, well, they just weren't inherently good at it. "Issues of intrinsic aptitude," Summers said, such as "overall IQ, mathematical ability, scientific ability" kept many women out of the field... "I would like nothing better than to be proved wrong," Summers said back in 2005. Well, sixteen years later, it appears his wish came true. In a new study published in in the June edition of Neuroscience & Behavioral Reviews, Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at Rosalind Franklin University, analyzed 30 years' worth of brain research (mostly fMRIs and postmortem studies) and found no meaningful cognitive differences between men and women. Men's brains were on average about 11% larger than women's — as were their hearts, lungs and other organs — because brain size is proportional to body size. But just as taller people aren't any more intelligent than shorter people, neither, Eliot and her co-authors found, were men smarter than women. They weren't better at math or worse at language processing, either. In her paper, Eliot and her co-authors acknowledge that psychological studies have found gendered personality traits (male aggression, for example) but at the brain level those differences don't seem to appear. "Another way to think about it is every individual brain is a mosaic of circuits that control the many dimensions of masculinity and femininity, such as emotional expressiveness, interpersonal style, verbal and analytic reasoning, sexuality and gender identity itself," Eliot's original article had stated. "Or, to use a computer analogy, gendered behavior comes from running different software on the same basic hardware."

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Long-time Slashdot reader jhylkema writes: Just 12 people account for the lion's share of anti-vaccination propaganda posted to three of the leading social media outlets, according to a study from a London-based group opposed to online hate and disinformation. A study (PDF file) conducted by the Centre for the Countering of Digital Hate identified the "Disinformation Dozen" people, including RFK Jr., Joseph Mercola, and Sherri Tenpenny... In its study, the group blasts the social media companies for allowing their platforms to be abused and calls for them to be de-platformed. "Living in full view of the public on the internet are a small group of individuals who... are abusing social media platforms to misrepresent the threat of Covid and spread misinformation about the safety of vaccines," the study said in its introduction. "Facebook, Google and Twitter have put policies into place to prevent the spread of vaccine misinformation; yet to date, all have failed to satisfactorily enforce those policies." Some misinformation spreaders complain they're being censored, NPR reports, adding that "After this story published on Thursday, Facebook said it had taken down more of the accounts run by these 12 individuals." But the study concludes anti-vaccine misinformation has already spread to an audience of 59 million followers. And yet "Analysis of a sample of anti-vaccine content that was shared or posted on Facebook and Twitter a total of 812,000 times between 1 February and 16 March 2021 shows that 65 percent of anti-vaccine content is attributable to the Disinformation Dozen... "Analysis of anti-vaccine content posted to Facebook over 689,000 times in the last two months shows that up to 73 percent of that content originates with members of the Disinformation Dozen of leading online anti-vaxxers."

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fahrbot-bot shares a report from Gizmodo: When pressed for oxygen, some fish and sea cucumbers will use their lower intestines to get a little extra out of their environment. Now, a team of Japanese researchers say that mammals are also capable of respirating through their rectal cavity, at least in a lab setting. The team's research is published today in the journal Med and describes the capacity for mice, rats, and pigs to survive longer and have more strength in low-oxygen circumstances when given oxygen gas or an oxygen-rich liquid through their rectums, in a process similar to an enema. While fish like loaches and catfish use a similar method to gain additional oxygen in the natural world, this doesn't appear to be an evolutionary adaptation for mammals. In other words, mammalian bodies can't naturally do this, but with a little push from modern science, it becomes possible. Previous research has seen oxygen injected directly into mammalian bloodstreams, prolonging the lives of rabbits, but the rectal approach to the low-oxygen problem is novel. The experiment, while disturbing, was designed to find new ways to save the lives of people whose lungs are failing. These treatments prolonged the animals' survival in a low-oxygen setting by staving off respiratory failure. Mice were given both the gas and liquid oxygen delivery methods, while the rats and pigs only received the liquid treatment. In a lab-controlled hypoxic setting (a chamber that was 9.5% oxygenated), mice without the supplemental oxygenation died after about 11 minutes. With the treatment, three-quarters of the tested mice survived for nearly an hour in the same lethal conditions. ScienceAlert adds these details: Initially, their research subjects were mice, who were thankfully anesthetized for the next part. The researchers developed an oxygen ventilation system to be inserted anally; they induced hypoxia via tracheal intubation, and compared mice ventilated intestinally to control mice who received no ventilation. Of the control mice, not a single one survived longer than 11 minutes. This was in marked contrast to the mice receiving intestinal oxygen, 75 percent of which survived for 50 minutes.

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Hovertext:
I think Stoic philosophy would be more popular if it all came out of the mouth of a happy pixie.

Today's News:

A grand jury decided not to indict police officers involved in the shooting death of Trayford Pellerin, a Black Louisiana man, who was walking away from police with a knife when they shot him 11 times. The jury was instructed to only consider the charge of second degree murder and no lesser charges, according to the Daily Advertiser. Lafayette Parish District Attorney Don Landry said during a news conference on Tuesday that before shooting Pellerin, officers gave 39 orders to him,10 of them to drop a knife police said he was holding, and Pellerin did not comply. "Trayford Pellerin could have dropped the knife, and he would have lived," Landry said.

Ron Haley, an attorney for Pellerin’s family, said that is no certainty. “And we've seen in this country that even when people do comply with police they still end up dead," he said at a separate news conference. The attorney told reporters videos Landry showed of Pellerin during the press conference depicted "a person having a mental health issue." Haley and his clients are pushing for greater transparency in the investigation of Pellerin’s death.  

"There are places in this country that we are wanting accountability," Haley said. "In Louisiana, we are so far behind that we just want the transparency part." The attorney said his clients had to wait nine months before body-camera footage of Pellerin’s death was publicly released.

Rebecca Kavanagh, a criminal defense attorney unassociated with the case, said in a Twitter thread that grand jury proceedings are always secret, but the district attorney in this case "has shown an extraordinary lack of transparency." She cited as an example the fact that the names of the involved police officers have not been released in the incident.

“It's been devastating for the Pellerin family,” Kavanagh tweeted. “They are pushing for federal criminal charges and are also suing the city. They say they will not settle until the DA turns over all the evidence about Trayford's killing to them.”

Both Haley and Kavanagh brought attention to the lack of media coverage of Pellerin’s case when compared to that of Jacob Blake, who was partially paralyzed when a police officer in Kenosha, Washington, shot him repeatedly at point-blank range on Aug. 23, 2020, after commanding Blake to drop a knife later found on the driver’s side of Blake’s car.

"I have never been able to work out why some police shooting cases get a lot of media traction and others, like Mr. Pellerin's, are more of a blip on the news cycle," Kavanagh said. "I don't know if there's only room for one Black police shooting victim in the wider public consciousness at the same time--so once Jacob Blake was shot, it was time to move on. Of course some never get reported at all."

“I do know Louisiana leads the nation in lack of transparency when it comes to police shootings and that families like the Pellerin family deserve so much better,” the attorney added.

Pellerin, who a toxicology report revealed had methamphetamine and THC in his bloodstream when he was killed on Aug. 21, 2020, was shown on surveillance video leaving a convenience store with a knife before ultimately being shot outside of a gas station. Both a clerk and an unidentified woman called 911 on Pellerin to report he was leaving with a knife after having earlier been spotted “hollering and throwing things,” KATC News reported. The 911 caller did, however, report that she saw Pellerin put the knife in his satchel.

When officers arrived, they reported that Pellerin had the knife in his hand and they ordered him to drop it. When he didn't and continued approaching the gas station’s entrance, officers fired at Pellerin, hitting him 11 times in 2.4 seconds, Landry said.

He called Pellerin's death "a tragedy for all those who loved him" and a "tragedy for our community" before repeatedly complimenting the officers who killed him. The district attorney said officers were trained in "the best methods and technique" and that there were seven times officers had legitimate reasons to use deadly force. He said at two points, officers tried to use Tasers on Pellerin but neither prong affected him, one of which may’ve landed on Pellerin’s satchel. "The officers in this case responded to a dangerous situation," Landry said. "I think it is very clear that the officers in this matter have been severely impacted by the event (that) took place."

Try being the family of the man killed. "I'm tired of the excuse of failure to comply as a reason to kill Black people in this country," Haley said. “Failure to comply is a misdemeanor not a death sentence.”

His co-counsel Chase Trichell told the Daily Advertiser last October the federal lawsuit will answer "many questions (that) have not been answered." "This lawsuit will enable the family, the attorneys, the community, the protestors, everybody here in Lafayette and around the country to get answers to questions that the family rightfully deserves," Trichell said. "We’re going to begin the discovery process, we’re going to take depositions, we’re going to issue subpoenas. We’re not going to stop until our clients have been satisfied and finally get answers."

A stay has been ordered in the federal suit to halt proceedings, so the next step is to seek removal of the stay and contact the Department of Justice to determine whether Pellerin’s civil rights were violated, KLFY local news reported.

Pat yourself on the back if you sized Donald Trump up in two minutes, like a normal person. You could have instead been Ethan Nordean, who wasted years of his life and squandered his precious freedom for a guy who’d likely feed him to alligators—or a marginally more reptilian creature such as Roger Stone—if he ever showed up at one of his golf courses.

Nordean is a “sergeant-at-arms” (FYI: All of these military titles are pretend) of the Proud Boys Seattle chapter, and he’s had it with his supreme golden clod. Nordean has been charged with conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, and aiding and abetting in connection with his alleged assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, and he’s none too happy with his Amazing Disappearing Messiah.

Take a look, and try not to laugh too hard:

For the nontweeters:

“Alright I’m gonna say it. FUCK TRUMP! Fuck him more than Biden. I’ve followed this guy for 4 years and given everything and lost it all. Yes he woke us up, but he led us to believe some great justice was upon us...and it never happened, now I’ve got some of my good friends and myself facing jail time cuz we followed this guys [sic] lead and never questioned it. We are now and always have been on our own. So glad he was able to pardon a bunch of degenerates as his last move and shit on us on the way out. Fuck you trump you left us on [t]he battle field bloody and alone.”

Ouch.

But wait! I thought Trump was going to join the insurrectionists at the Capitol building on Jan. 6. That’s what he said, anyway. And as every true Proud Boy knows, Donald Trump is always true to his word.

Of course, as Nordean suggests, Trump could have pardoned Nordean and his confederates, and he probably would have if there had been anything in it for him—like if Nordean had a relative who worked at KFC and could slip him a few bonus pieces of Extra Crispy in his buckets. But, alas. This is just some fool who sacrificed everything important in his life for what he saw as a righteous cause. Trump hates suckers like that.

From USA Today:

Prosecutors say Nordean, along with other Proud Boys members, planned to push through police barricades and force themselves inside the building that day.

[...]

In a court filing Thursday, prosecutors detailed communications sent through the instant messaging app Telegram that they say show additional evidence that Nordean and other Proud Boys members conspired to breach the Capitol. Prosecutors included the anti-Trump diatribe in which Nordean seemed to acknowledged he and others are facing criminal charges because they followed Trump's lead.

Okay, get this through your cartilaginous skulls, Trumpers: Donald Trump doesn’t care about you. He never did. Do you still check your bank account every 30 minutes to see if the Nigerian prince has deposited your money? It’s over, y’all. You’ve been scammed, and that’s all there is to it.

This does give me some hope, though. Trump lost the 2020 election by 7 million votes, and it doesn’t look like he’s picked up a single voter since then. On the other hand, people like Nordean are slowly waking up.

Let’s hope they’re all out of their comas by the 2022 midterms, at least.

It made comedian Sarah Silverman say “THIS IS FUCKING BRILLIANT” and prompted author Stephen King to shout “Pulitzer Prize!!!” (on Twitter, that is). What is it? The viral letter that launched four hilarious Trump-trolling books. Get them all, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Just $12.96 for the pack of 4! Or if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

The flood of Republican-controlled states cutting off the federal unemployment benefits supplement will lead to nearly 2 million people losing payments before the September cutoff passed by Congress. The nearly 1.4 million people in the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance and the Pandemic Emergency Unemployment Assistance programs will lose everything they’re currently getting, while people on traditional unemployment insurance will lose the $300 a week above their state’s regular benefits.

“These changes have the potential to drastically scale back assistance to jobless workers far too early in the recovery,” Andrew Stettner, senior fellow at The Century Foundation, told CNN. “Nationally, there are still 16.8 million workers on one of the unemployment programs, and the nation is still short 8 million-plus jobs from the start of the pandemic.”

According to Stettner’s calculations, the early cutoffs will strip billions of dollars from jobless workers. If every state that has announced it’s refusing the federal supplement did so starting on June 12, it would be $10.8 billion, but several states have announced later cutoff dates.

The Republican message is that this is what’s needed because too many people are sitting home living large on unemployment aid and are too lazy to work. In reality, writes Adam Chandler at The Washington Post, “In the past year alone, study after study has debunked the myth that the emergency benefits and occasional payments provided by the government are disincentivizing people from returning to the labor force en masse.”

Back when the federal government was adding $600 a week to unemployment benefits—a measure passed by a Republican Senate and signed by Donald Trump—a study by Yale economists found “no evidence that high UI [unemployment insurance] replacement rates drove job losses or slowed rehiring.” Also last summer, University of Massachusetts economist Arindrajit Dube looked at unemployed workers without a college degree. “Overall,” he concluded, “these findings do not provide evidence supporting the claim that the [Federal Pandemic Unemployment Compensation] has held back the labor market recovery.”

And, Chandler notes, even these supposedly lavish unemployment benefits are not eradicating hunger: “According to a Census Bureau survey last month, nearly 1 in 3 Americans on unemployment said they were still failing to cover routine expenses such as food, housing and medical treatments.”

So studies show that the emergency benefits aren’t keeping lazy people from looking for work. Surveys show that people are not living large, or even necessarily making ends meet. But history gives us a context for the persistent claims that that’s what’s going on, as AFL-CIO economist William Spriggs pointed out:

Republicans can’t reproduce those conditions, but they can use low or no unemployment benefits to force people back into minimum-wage and unsafe jobs—and the present-day effort also echoes the past in the disproportionately Black and Latino workers it targets, after 14 months in which Black and Latino people have disproportionately suffered and died as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.

So far, Montana, South Carolina, Arkansas, Alabama, Mississippi, North Dakota, Missouri, Iowa, Idaho, Tennessee, Wyoming, South Dakota, Utah, Georgia, Arizona, and Ohio have announced cutoff dates ranging from June 12 to July 10. More states could follow, raising the number of people in economic pain as a direct result of Republican lies about the unemployment situation.

Inflation is defined as the rate at which prices for goods and services are rising. It’s a serious issue that has a real impact on people’s lives. Too big or quick a rise disproportionately harms the economically vulnerable, who find themselves unable to pay the rent or buy food.

Republicans, however, are using the fear of inflation in an unserious, yet dangerous way. They are lying by brandishing it as a weapon against the Biden-Harris administration’s plans to invest in American jobs and American families.

To say that Republicans have had a hard time making a coherent case against Biden’s progressive economic proposals is an understatement the size of the twice impeached former president’s upcoming debt obligations.

Earlier this year, when Republicans attacked the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan (ARP) that passed Congress without a single vote from their caucus, they said it would push the economy into overdrive and cause significant inflation. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, for example, criticized the COVID-19 relief package in late February on these grounds: “There are a lot of warning signs that have not been worrisome in the past but now are certainly blinking yellow. At some point, we’ve got too much liquidity going into the system. The economy is recovering very, very well.” Not one very, but two, mind you. Likewise, in March South Dakota Sen. John Thune intoned that Biden’s spending plans would “unleash inflation,” while Florida Sen. Rick Scott thundered about an inflation-induced “day of reckoning.” Frightening indeed.

Yet, on the other hand, the recently proposed American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan—which would spend $4 trillion over ten years, and pay for it by making the wealthiest individuals and corporations pay their fair share of taxes—are bad ideas according to Republicans because, wait for it, the economy is too weak, even after the ARP’s passage. Here’s Missouri Rep. Ann Wagner: “Why, as this country begins to reopen and recover economically, would the Biden administration be proposing tax policy which would in the end hurt the American family and millions of struggling small businesses?”

When an article in The Hill, about as straightforward a source on national politics as there is, makes fun of your head-spinning political spin, that’s not a good sign. Even if we were to take this ridiculousness seriously, the notion that a plan that’s revenue neutral over the long term, and actually spends more than it takes in right now would harm rather than stimulate the economy in the short term is dumb—even for the Party of Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert.

In recent days the Republicans have gone back to bleating about the dangers of inflation if Biden’s plans become law. After the 46th president laid them out in detail in his address to Congress last Wednesday, Maine Sen. Susan Collins—whose reactions are in no way predictable—expressed grave concern: “I worry that it would ignite inflation, which is very harmful to our economy.” Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn made a similar prediction, and added: “the wallets of Americans from every walk of life are hurt by Biden’s tax plan.” That’s simply incorrect, as Daily Kos’s Dartagnan laid out in a recent post contrasting who will benefit from the Biden plan (the 99%) as compared to Trump’s policies (the Trump family and assorted other richies).

On a related note, when not fearmongering about Biden’s proposals and inflation specifically, Republicans just resort to lying about the plan itself, as Louisiana Sen. John Cassidy did on Meet the Press this past Sunday. The president’s plans total $6 trillion—not $7 trillion, as Cassidy said, but that’s only the smaller of the lies he told. The senator also condemned “the $7 trillion in spending the administration has proposed for this year alone,” expressing concern about the deficit. The American Rescue Plan spends most of its money this year (it is a COVID relief package, after all), but the American Jobs Plan and American Families Plan spread out their spending over a decade. Cassidy said all the money (plus the nonexistent trillion he tacked on) would be spent in one year, and liked the lie so much he repeated it twice in 30 seconds. For those optimists hoping that host Chuck Todd caught the lie and questioned Cassidy, I’m sorry to disappoint you.

Here’s the thing: this whole Republican “concern” about inflation—or budget deficits, for that matter—is, as defined by professional economists, little more than bullshit. For example, Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist. He’s been calling out the right-wing’s faux hand-wringing about inflation for a dozen years. Do you remember when conservatives slammed President Obama’s 2009 stimulus package, and the subsequent proposals he made for additional investments because they would cause inflation? Here’s Krugman writing in December 2010: “For two years we’ve been warned that inflation, even hyperinflation, was just around the corner; instead, disinflation has continued, with core inflation—which excludes volatile food and energy prices—now at a half-century low.” Inflation has remained low in the years since—sitting for a decade right around or under the Federal Reserve’s 2% annual target.

The only thing that does change is the timing of when Republicans start pretending to worry about inflation—namely, whenever Democrats are proposing to spend money on regular people. Notice that when their party was in the White House and getting the credit, spending trillions wasn’t a problem at all (see CARES Act, The). Eric Levitz, in New York magazine, characterized conservatives who spent like drunken sailors while the Insurrectionist-in-Chief sat in the Oval Office and then started wagging their fingers about fiscal responsibility as follows: “the Republican position here is roughly akin to that of a cannibal who gobbles up toddlers by the dozen each weekend, then dutifully observes “meatless Mondays,” so as to safeguard his credibility as a vegan.”

The same partisan-centric timing, by the way, defines Republicans’ predictably inconsistent deficit peacockery. When Trump passed his Rich Man’s Tax Cut in late 2017, at a time when the economy was already running at basically full steam thanks to the boom he inherited from his predecessor, President Obama, we heard nary a peep from conservatives about its potentially inflationary impact. Federal Reserve officials, however, warned about just that in the months prior to the tax giveaway’s passage, but the Trumpists took that warning as seriously as they do the threat of climate change. The point is this, Republicans don’t really care about inflation. One positive from all these years of whiplash we’ve gotten from their constant reversals is that even the “both sides are the same” media might finally be catching on.

Nevertheless, there are signs that prices are rising right now. Famed investor Warren Buffett recently told shareholders in his company, Berkshire Hathaway: “We are seeing substantial inflation. We are raising prices. People are raising prices to us, and it's being accepted.”

Republicans may be completely insincere when they talk about inflation, but we in the reality-based community actually want to understand what’s happening. We take facts seriously, and incorporate them into our thinking when developing policy. There are centrist Democrats like former Obama and Clinton top official Lawrence Summers also talking about inflation possibly being stoked by the Biden proposals. On the other hand, Austan Goolsbee, another Obama alum who is not serving in the Biden White House, pushed back against those concerns. At least on the Democratic side it’s an honest debate.

Furthermore, as per Daniel Alpert, senior fellow in finance and macroeconomics and an adjunct professor at Cornell Law School, the financial markets do not expect Biden’s plans to spark inflation: “Just look at the mechanics: Demand for interest-bearing Treasury bonds—safe assets that are issued whenever the government creates more debt—remains very high, meaning that interest rates are near historic lows and inflation expectations are mild. For now, there’s no hint of the currency debasement feared by inflation hawks.” There’s a lot of jargon in there, but I’ve bolded the key part for those who want to cut to the chase.

Okay, but why are prices rising at this moment, and could it mean that—like a stopped clock that’s right twice a day—Republicans are actually correct that Biden’s plans are a bad idea right now? The answer is no, and let’s explore why that is.

There are multiple reasons why prices are rising. One is that, for now at least, they are rising off artificially low levels. Prices dropped severely last spring when large parts of the economy shut down due to COVID-19. The government measures inflation based on where prices stand in the present compared to where they were a year ago. A big drop a year ago followed by a return to where things were before the drop registers as a huge increase today, but in reality all it means is that we’re back to the level of a year ago. This is known as the “base effect.”

We’re also seeing price increases because of pent-up demand. People weren’t spending for a long time because they were afraid to, given job losses thanks to the pandemic. Now, with hiring on the mend and the sizable stimulus checks people received from Biden’s American Rescue Plan, they are spending again. All that demand means companies are having a hard time keeping up—and thus they are charging more for what they sell.

Additionally, there’s another reason for these climbing prices, and this one is very much on the economic policies of The Man Who Lost An Election And Then Tried To Steal It. Currently, there are significant disruptions in the supply chain, which refers to the ”series of steps involved to get a product or service to the customer.” For example, if a company can’t make a complex product—like a car—because one of its components is in short supply, then that means the supply chain is delaying things.

When that happens, companies start paying more for the component(s) they can’t get enough of, and thus the final product’s price goes up as well. As the New York Times explained, there’s one thing making this whole problem a lot worse than it otherwise would be: “Intensifying the supply chain problems are hefty tariffs that Mr. Trump imposed on Chinese imports, along with steel and aluminum from Europe and other parts of the world.” Simply getting rid of Trump’s tariffs isn’t so easy for Biden, however, given that they were implemented during a trade dispute, thus a unilateral surrender could be seen as a sign of weakness. Either way, Biden’s plans to invest in infrastructure and the care economy will have nothing to do with inflation being caused by Trump’s tariffs.

It’s important to note that the White House is very much paying attention to inflation, and has been for a while now, as the New York Times reported in April. Even before President Biden took office, some of his closest aides were focused on a question that risked derailing his economic agenda: Would his plans for a $1.9 trillion economic rescue package and additional government spending overheat the economy and fuel runaway inflation?

To find the answer, a close circle of advisers now working at the White House and the Treasury Department projected the behaviors of shoppers, employers, stock traders and others if Mr. Biden’s plans succeeded. Officials as senior as Janet L. Yellen, the Treasury secretary, pored over the analyses in video calls and in-person meetings, looking for any hint that Mr. Biden’s plans could generate sustained price increases that could hamstring family budgets. It never appeared.

Those efforts convinced Mr. Biden’s team that there is little risk of inflation spiraling out of the Federal Reserve’s control.

The White House put out a memo in that same month, written by top economic advisers Jared Bernstein and Ernie Tedeschi, which laid out its thinking: “We think the likeliest outlook over the next several months is for inflation to rise modestly … and to fade back to a lower pace thereafter as actual inflation begins to run more in line with longer-run expectations.”

Sec. Yellen has spoken out as well recently on the matter of potential inflation. On Meet the Press Sunday, May 2, she discussed the American Families Plan and American Jobs Plan with the aforementioned Mr. Todd, stating: “I don't believe that inflation will be an issue but if it becomes an issue, we have tools to address it. These are historic investments that we need to make our economy productive and fair.” This is an important point—if prices rise, the government does not become suddenly helpless. Plus, these are necessary investments. Doing nothing is not an option.

On Tuesday, Yellen caused a stir in the markets when she predicted that “very modest” interest rate increases might end up occurring, but then clarified later in the day that an increase in rates was “not something I’m predicting or recommending,” and added that she did not envision there was “going to be an inflationary problem.”

Conservative pundits like Washington Post columnist Henry Olsen pounced on Yellen’s comments, using them to attack Biden’s investment plans. “The signs of looming inflation are all around us,” he all but shouted to the rooftops. The signs were always looming in 2009-10 too, but the inflation never actually arrived. Investors made clear what they glimpse on the horizon, and it’s not inflation: a month ago, investors were seeing a 15% likelihood that the Fed would raise interest rates by the end of 2021. On Friday, after the monthly jobs report was published, the likelihood had fallen to 7%.

The aforementioned Krugman ripped the “hair-trigger media response” to Yellen’s initial comments, and explained that what she said only caused a stir because commentators were acting like schmucks—to use another academic term. For anyone who wants to go full economist, Krugman also put out an even wonkier analysis of why inflation is under control right now, and why fears of future inflation are not a legitimate reason to criticize Biden’s plans.

The White House, as well as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, believe that the price increases occurring right now will not require the Fed to hike interest rates in a major way and thus slow down the economy in order to tamp down inflation. As Powell stated in January when talking in general terms about bold government action, we need to think big: “I’m much more worried about falling short of a complete recovery and losing people’s careers and lives that they built because they don’t get back to work in time.” He added: “I’m more concerned about that and the damage that will do, not just to their lives but to the United States economy.” Last Wednesday a number of top Fed officials and policymakers made public statements emphasizing that they and Powell are on the same page regarding the temporary nature of recent jumps in prices.

Inflation absolutely can hurt people. In the 1970s and early ‘80s, high inflation in the U.S. meant that people on fixed incomes had real trouble making ends meet as prices rose and their incomes stagnated. But what can also hurt is not fixing real problems. When one party disingenuously seeks to exacerbate anxiety about inflation as a reason never to take action to help large numbers of Americans, we need to recognize and call out those zombie lies for what they are.

At the end of the day, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats are aiming to do big and necessary things for the American people, while Republicans are always the party of no—unless we’re talking about tax cuts for the rich. In that case the fear of inflation or deficits or whatever other boogeyman they’ve been screaming about just conveniently fades into the background.

Ian Reifowitz is the author of  The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh's Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)

Police officers are actually using a genetic trait found in one in 13 Black people to excuse beating Black suspects to death, The New York Times found in an analysis of 25 years of law enforcement and medical records. Law enforcement officers, their attorneys, and medical examiners have been using the sickle cell trait to avoid accountability in at least 46 cases in which a Black person died in custody, the newspaper reported on Saturday. The sickle cell trait, which George Floyd carried, was actually brought up in a failed motion to dismiss the case against Derek Chauvin, the former Minneapolis police officer who a jury found murdered Floyd. “The fact that Mr. Floyd had sickle cell trait is significant, as well,” Chauvin’s attorney Eric Nelson wrote in the motion. “(...) People suffering from sickle cell ‘can develop high blood pressure in their lungs. This complication usually affects adults. Shortness of breath and fatigue are common symptoms of this condition, which can be fatal.’

“Put simply, Mr. Floyd could not breathe because he had ingested a lethal dose of fentanyl and, possibly, a speedball,” Nelson wrote. “Combined with sickle cell trait, his pre-existing heart conditions, Mr.Floyd’s use of fentanyl and methamphetamine most likely killed him.” Only, a jury found Chauvin kneeling on Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes actually killed him. In cases without viral video of police violence, however, the deaths of Black men and women remain hidden.

Sickle cell is a red blood cell disorder that causes the cells to harden, grow sticky and form a shape similar to a farm tool known as a "sickle," according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). They can clog blood flow lead to serious problems such as “infection, acute chest syndrome and stroke,” the agency reported. People with the sickle cell trait, however "usually do not have any of the symptoms of sickle cell disease,” the CDC maintains.

In a lesser known case the The New York Times highlighted, Lamont Perry, 32, was chased into the woods of Wadesboro, North Carolina, over an alleged probation violation from a misdemeanor assault case and left with brain swelling and a fractured right leg. He ultimately died in police custody after those who lived in the area told his family officers returned from their encounter with Perry with blood on their shoes and pants. A medical examiner ruled that Perry, who had traces of cocaine and alcohol in his bloodstream, had died in 2016 of “cocaine toxicity in the setting of sickle cell trait,” The New York Times reported.

In the case of the youngest victim the Times documented in its investigation, Martin Anderson, 14, was said to have suffered “complications of sickle cell trait” after encountering police in 2006 in Panama City, Florida. Martin was in a juvenile boot camp ran by the Bay County Sheriff's Office when he collapsed after being forced to run, ABC-affiliated news station WJHG reported. In the moments after his collapse, seven deputies were shown on body-camera footage holding the child down as a nurse watched. All eight officials in the case were acquitted of aggravated manslaughter charges in Martin's death, The New York Times reported in 2007.

“You kill a dog, you go to jail,” civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who represented the boy’s parents, said at the time. “You kill a little black boy, and nothing happens.”

These are just about half of the Black people whose deaths in police custody were associated in some way with the sickle cell trait, theThe New York Times found: 

-Ronell Mason, 24, was said to have suffered “acute sickling crisis due to sickle cell trait” in 1995 in Norfolk, Virginia.

-Rafael Herrera, 27, was said to have suffered “sickle cell crisis” in 1997 in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

-Darryl Daniels, 30, was said to have suffered “sickle cell crisis due to sickle cell trait” and  “physical exertion in hot ambient temperatures and cocaine abuse” in 1998 in Reno, Nevada.

-Andre Stenson, 34, was said to have suffered a “heart defect and ‘sickle cell trait’” in 1998 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

-James Treadwell, 26, was said to have suffered a “massive sicklemia due to sickle cell trait hemoglobinopathy” in 1998 in Charleston, West Virginia.

-Eddie Bagby, 24 was said to have suffered “aspiration of gastric contents”; “pepper spray exposure”; “complicated by bronchial asthma and sickle cell crisis due to sickle cell trait” in 1999 in Wrightsville, Arkansas.

-Cleathern Miles, 28, was said to have suffered “complications from sickle cell crisis” in 1999 in Burlington County, New Jersey.

-Mario Mallett, 29, was said to have died suffered “acute exhaustive mania”; “acute sickle cell crisis”; and “hypothermia” in 2001 in Milwaukee.

-Anthony Williams, 28, was said to have suffered “respiratory arrest following exposure to pepper spray”; and “sickle cell trait” in 2003 in Minneapolis.

-Raymond Sterling, 21, was said to have suffered “exertion of a chase and struggle combined with his sickle-cell trait” in 2003 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

-Melvin Samuel, 28, was said to have suffered “positional asphyxia complicated by obesity and sickle cell crisis” in 2004 in Houston County, Georgia.

-Christopher Hernandez, 19, was said to have suffered “Methyl​enedioxy​methamphetamine (MDMA, Ecstasy) and cocaine”; “sickling of red blood cells (sickle cell trait)” in 2004 in Fort Myers, Florida.

-Martez Wilson, 21, was said to have suffered “exercise-induced sickle cell crisis in an individual with sickle cell trait” in 2015 in Douglasville, Georgia.

-Carlos Harris, 39, was said to have suffered “sickled red blood cells diffusely occluding vessels” in 2016 in Mansfield, Texas.

-Jamar Ferguson, 25, was said to have suffered “complications of sickle cell trait” in 2017 in Milwaukee.

-Jason Pierce, 40, was said to have suffered “widespread red blood cell sickling” in 2017 in New Orleans.

-Jeffrey Melvin, 27, was said to have had “complications of sickle cell trait and extreme exertion during his confrontation with police and associated taser deployment” in 2018 in Colorado Springs.

-Jeremy Lawrence, 28, was said to have suffered a “sudden death associated with stress of physical exertion, acute methamphetamine toxicity, and sickle cell trait” in 2018 in Harris County, Texas.

-Everett Palmer, 41, was said to have died with a contributory factor listed as “probable sickling cell disorder” in 2018 in York, Pennsylvania.

-Robert Miller, 38, was said to have died in connection with “slides of multiple organs demonstrate sickle-shaped red blood cells” in 2019 in Fort Worth.

-Darren Boykin, 23, was said to have “died as a result of complications of sickle cell trait” in 2019 in Texarkana, Texas.

-Dean Smith, 25, was said to have suffered “sickle cell crisis due to cardiomegaly due to multiple drug intoxication from cocaine and ethanol” in 2020 in Evansville, Indiana.

-Gamel Brown, 30, was said to have suffered “cardiovascular abnormalities”; “blood loss due to cutting wounds”; and “sickle cell trait” in 2020 in Owings Mills, Maryland.

-Larry Ross, 37, was said to have suffered “coronary artery atherosclerosis”; and “sickle cell trait” in 2020 in Cambridge, Maryland.

Despite there being laws in place against it, companies that value homes for sale or refinancing often discriminate. Multiple cases have been reported in which people of color have noted that their homes were valued for less money based on a racial bias the appraiser had. In many situations, these homeowners even noted that during a second appraisal, staging their home to look like one owned by a white family increased the value significantly. In a recent incident, a Black homeowner in Indiana put this theory to the test.

After suspecting that she was low-balled in not one but two home appraisals, Carlette Duffy decided to ask a white friend to take her place during a third appraisal. The decision nearly doubled her home’s value. From being appraised at $125,000 and $110,000, Duffy’s home was valued to $259,000, the Indianapolis Star reported. "I had to go through all of that just to say that I was right and that this is what's happening," Duffy said. "This is real."

After receiving her third appraisal, Duffy filed a complaint with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development against the mortgage lenders and appraisers, alleging they discriminated against her on the basis of race. The lawsuit hopes to spark a federal investigation into companies violating fair housing laws by allowing race to impact their appraisals and lending practices. Alongside the two appraisers, identified as Tim Boston and Jeffery Pierce, CityWide Home loans, Freedom Mortgage, and some of the two companies’ employees are the responders.

According to the complaint, Duffy did not understand why she was assigned the lower values until she read the appraisal report. "The wording in it just it sent out red flags," Duffy said. "It said there were comps within the half mile, but it said the quality of construction of the other homes were far more superior to the quality of construction of my home."

Duffy even said she provided the appropriate paperwork to counter the appraisal amount given to her home; however, CityWide said no change would be made despite this documentation.

In order to see if her appraisals were actually as data-driven as the appraisers argued, for her third appraisal Duffy did not declare her race or gender during the application and only communicated via email. As the time for the appraisal drew nearer, she told the lender she would be out of town and that her brother would be home. Her friend’s white husband then filled in as her brother.

“I staged my home to look as ethnically neutral as possible,” she said. “I was just numb to it, and I think it was more so numb just because it was me just going through the process like I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy. I’m not crazy.” Duffy shared that she even took down pictures of herself and removed African American art and any books that might indicate her race.

"I get choked up even thinking about it now because I was so excited and so happy, and then I was so angry that I had to go through all of that just to be treated fairly," Duffy told Fox 59.

This isn’t an isolated case. Multiple incidents have been reported in which Black homeowners have been discriminated against and been given significantly lower appraisals than their white counterparts. Additionally, studies have found that homes in neighborhoods where there is a higher population of Black people are valued at about half the price of those with no Black residents, according to Brookings Institution.

In a similar incident to Duffy’s, a California couple went viral after unveiling that their home was undervalued by more than $500,000 before their second appraisal during which they had white friends pose as the owners, ABC 7 News reported.

"It's almost when people see Black neighborhoods, they see twice as much crime than there actually is. They see worse education than there actually is," said Andre Perry, a senior fellow for the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. "I think this is what's happening when appraisers, lenders, real estate agents see Blackness. They devalue the asset. They devalue the property."

In another incident, a biracial couple in Colorado decided to only have one of them present during an appraisal after they suspected racism played a part in the interaction. During the first appraisal of Gwen and Lorenzo Mitchell’s home, an appraiser signed the value of $405,000. The couple was surprised at this number as other homes in the area were significantly higher.

“Because I’m Black, we realized he picked the houses from the Black side of Park Hill,” Lorenzo told The Washington Post. “That was the first red flag.”

The couple then scheduled a second appraisal with Gwen, who is white, arranging to be home alone. That appraisal gave a $145,000 higher value for the home.

“We didn’t change the house at all,” Gwen said “We didn’t paint any walls or mow the lawn or do anything different.”

While Duffy is satisfied with her third appraisal, what she went through to get it is beyond disheartening and is an example of the systemic oppression Black Americans continue to face nationwide.

“I want to see the system changed,” Duffy said. “I don’t know if we can, but I’m up for the fight.”

Florida man Rep. Matt Gaetz is in deep doo doo, as the scientists say. He is facing allegations that he paid for sexual liaisons with a variety of women, some of whom were potentially underage. He may have also broken the law having young women cross state lines for money and sex. His buddy Joel Greenberg seems to have cut a plea deal after admitting to all kinds of bad and illegal deeds, and claims to have basically acted as a pimp for Mr. Gaetz. The story is lurid, filled with the kind of stuff that MAGA types like Gaetz have been projecting onto the entire Democratic Party establishment for about a decade now.

Now, The Daily Beast has released an explosive report detailing Rep. Gaetz’s experience during a 2019 Orlando, Florida, GOP fundraiser. According to the report, Gaetz’s old buddy Greenberg will identify a paid escort, named Megan Zalonka, as one of 15 women Gaetz paid for sex during his fun times with Greenberg, and Zalonka’s story includes sex and drugs with Mr. Gaetz. Ms. Zalonga also had a scandal-level shady taxpayer-funded gig with Greenberg.

The Daily Beast report alleges that Zalonka made many thousands of dollars partying with Gaetz and Greenberg at the fundraiser, and it is not just Greenberg who can give testimony about the debauched times the two men spent.

On Oct. 26, 2019, Gaetz attended the “Trump Defender Gala” fundraiser as the featured speaker at the Westgate Lake Resort in Orlando. Two witnesses present recalled friends reconvening at Gaetz’s hotel room for an after-party, where Zalonka prepared lines of cocaine on the bathroom counter. One of those witnesses distinctly remembers Zalonka pulling the drugs out of her makeup bag, rolling a bill of cash, and joining Gaetz in snorting the cocaine.

The Daily Beast says that hotel stay was written off by Gaetz as a campaign expense. I thought it was Hillary Clinton that was selling pizzas or something? I guess it was the “Trump Defenders” instead. Gaetz’s folks are mum on this story and Zalonka has hired an attorney, who told the news outlet that she “is not speaking to any media outlet.” The Zalonka connection goes back to why Greenberg resigned in disgrace from his position as Florida tax collector. According to The Daily Beast:

Zalonka, who is an amateur fashion model and the communications director for the American Medical Marijuana Physicians Association, received $4,000 on Venmo from Greenberg during his first year in office in 2017—mostly in $500 installments. And Greenberg, who is married, listed various explanations for why he paid Zalonka. In the memo fields of his Venmo payments, he paid her $500 for “Stuff,” another $500 for “Orher stuff” [sic], and $1,000 for “Pool.” On a single day in November, he paid her $500 for “Food” and another $500 for “Appetizers.”

After that, Zalonka seems to have begun a more lucrative business relationship with Greenberg, where she had a government job and was paid but never seemed to work—and no one knew what “services” she provided. Two sources told The Daily Beast that Gaetz and Zalonka had an ongoing financial arrangement that included sex amongst other things, though the newspaper could not confirm that the two had slept together.

It’s starting to become clear why Donald Trump and Kevin McCarthy are trying to stay far away from Matt Gaetz right now. Gaetz will say he didn’t do it, but considering that Matt Gaetz has made a career of never saying anything that is actually true, it’s going to be hard for him to be believed.

The Big Lie is now the Republican Party’s only platform. They have zero policy ideas. They have proven over decades that they cannot run a government competently. In fact, one of the things that the COVID-19 pandemic makes clear is how deep the Republican Party’s failures are as a leadership group. Besides racism, the number one thing that GOP officials care about is billionaire money and how they can use our Democratic system of checks and balances to narrow the rights of millions of citizens. The number one directive for all GOP officials at this time is to push draconian voter suppression legislation in the hopes of maintaining their minority rule under the guise of our democracy. On top of that, for every unsubstantiated claim conservatives, MAGA types, and GOP officials have made of massive, radical leftist voter fraud, there seems to be a very easily verifiable account of actual Republican-perpetrated voter fraud.

Denver’s FOX 31 has been reporting on the very disturbing case of Colorado man Barry Morphew, who after a year-long investigation has been arrested and charged with the murder of his 49-year-old wife Suzanne Morphew. Suzanne went missing on Mother’s Day weekend of 2020, and the Chaffee County, Colorado, mother’s disappearance was thoroughly investigated before Barry’s arrest. On Thursday, Colorado prosecutors filed new charges that include “allegedly forging public documents and a misdemeanor mail in ballot offense.” Morphew is alleged to have murdered his wife and also sent in a forged ballot using her name—to benefit Donald Trump.

According to FOX 31, FBI officials asked Morphew why he committed voter fraud, and his reply was exactly as delusional as the rest of the Big Lie movement:

“Just because I wanted Trump to win…I know she (Suzanne) was going to vote for Trump anyways,” he told investigators. He also said he thought the “other guys'” were cheating so he would “give him (former president Trump) another vote.”

The GOP base’s defense of illegal activity is that they assume the “other guys” are cheating. Morphew also told the FBI that “I didn’t know you couldn’t do that for your spouse.” If prosecutors are to be believed, Barry Morphew murdered his wife, and assumed sending in her ballot after he forged it was legal cause people were cheating. 

Back in the reality of our real world, the conservative movement and their scam artists have yet to provide any evidence of massive liberal-led voter fraud. The millions of taxpayer dollars thrown into the toilet of the GOP’s voter-fraud distraction sideshow have yielded nothing but a calcification of the racist-and-afraid MAGA base’s pig-headedness. Because reality does not resemble their claims whatsoever, the anti-democracy movement’s allegations have gotten more conspiratorial and ludicrous.

The Republican Party, having fed this logically incongruous position for so long, has a mush-minded base willing to believe anything, for the most part. No matter who tells them they are wrong, whether it is their own former heroes or people they pretended to venerate, as soon as you say they are mistaken because facts and the real world contradict their beliefs, you are out.

There is voter fraud and election malfeasance in our country. But time and time again it has been proven to be led by Republican operatives. Whether it’s slews of racist robocalls working to misinform the voting public on their privacy rights, or GOP operatives secretly spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to push out fake candidates to split votes in tight districts, the real evidence of anti-democratic pushes shows they are all perpetrated by conservatives. 

A Montana man will not be forced to register as a sex offender in relation to a 1994 conviction under sodomy laws ruled unconstitutional in 2003 for having consensual gay sex with two 16-year-old boys, per a federal judge.

In a ruling Tuesday, U.S. District Court Judge Dana Christensen ruled that the state’s requirement that Menges remain on the sex offender registry was unconstitutional and that LGBTQ people engaging in consensual sexual activity do not pose a threat to public safety.

“Montana has no rational basis for forcing Menges to register as a sexual offender on the basis of a 1994 Idaho conviction for engaging in oral or anal sex with a 16-year old male when he was 18, but not forcing those to register as a sexual offender who were convicted in Idaho in 1994 at the age of 18 for engaging in vaginal sex with a 16-year old female,” Christensen said in his ruling.

Randall Menges, 45, was 18 years old and living in Idaho in 1994 when he was convicted for having gay sex under Idaho’s Crimes Against Nature law. The statute, like other sodomy laws, criminalizes consensual anal and oral sex and historically have been used to indirectly criminalize LGBTQ communities. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the 2003 case Lawrence v. Texas that sodomy laws were unconstitutional.

Menges served seven years in prison with additional probation time and was forced to register as a sex offender in Idaho. That requirement continued when he moved to Montana roughly a decade after his conviction. Despite repealing its sodomy laws in 2013, Montana still required those with sodomy convictions in a state that required them to register as sex offenders to do the same in Montana.

The Montana Attorney General’s Office filed an appeal shortly after Christensen’s ruling.

“This order weakens our state’s sex offender registry law and opens it up to more attacks from out-of-state lawyers who are more interested in politics than the safety of Montana children,” Montana Attorney General Office press secretary Emilee Cantrell told The Missoulian.

“I’m grateful to the court for putting an end to my nightmare,” Menges told The Missoulian following the decision. “It is unconscionable that in 2021, Montana would still put people convicted of having gay sex on the sex offender registry,” said Matthew Strugar, one of Menges’ attorneys. “This kind of overt, state-sanctioned homophobia would have been surprising 30 years ago. Today, it is shocking and it is unconstitutional.”

The Montana Attorney General’s Office, which served as the defendant in Menges’ lawsuit, opposed Menges’ request throughout the case, citing the statute honoring the requirement to register practices in other states with sodomy laws still on the books. The Montana Attorney General’s Office filed an appeal shortly after Christensen’s ruling.

“This order weakens our state’s sex offender registry law and opens it up to more attacks from out-of-state lawyers who are more interested in politics than the safety of Montana children,” Montana Attorney General Office press secretary Emilee Cantrell told The Missoulian.

Menges’ fight doesn’t end with Tuesday’s ruling or the subsequent appeal. The Butte, Mont. citizen is also a plaintiff in a lawsuit questioning the constitutionality of Idaho’s Crimes Against Nature law. Strugar and the American Civil Liberties Union are part of that lawsuit as well.

Gay Sex Previously on Towleroad

Screenshot of photo by Tom Bauer/The Missoulian

A day after US President Joe Biden said the US plans to disrupt the hackers behind the Colonial Pipeline cyberattack, the operator of the Darkside ransomware said the group lost control of its web servers and some of the funds it made from ransom payments. From a report: "A few hours ago, we lost access to the public part of our infrastructure, namely: Blog. Payment server. CDN servers," said Darksupp, the operator of the Darkside ransomware, in a post spotted by Recorded Future threat intelligence analyst Dmitry Smilyanets. "Now these servers are unavailable via SSH, and the hosting panels are blocked," said the Darkside operator while also complaining that the web hosting provider refused to cooperate. In addition, the Darkside operator also reported that cryptocurrency funds were also withdrawn from the gang's payment server, which was hosting ransom payments made by victims. The funds, which the Darkside gang was supposed to split between itself and its affiliates (the threat actors who breach networks and deploy the ransomware), were transferred to an unknown wallet, Darksupp said. This sudden development comes after US authorities announced their intention to go after the gang.

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schwit1 shares a report from New Atlas: UCF researchers say they've trapped a sustained explosive detonation, fixed in place, for the first time, channeling its enormous power into thrust in a new oblique wave detonation engine that could propel an aircraft up to 17 times the speed of sound, potentially beating the scramjet as a hypersonic propulsion method. [...] Rotating detonation engines, in which the shockwaves from one detonation are tuned to trigger further detonations within a ring-shaped channel, were thought of as impossible to build right up until researchers at the University of Central Florida (UCF) went ahead and demonstrated a prototype last year in sustained operation. Due for testing in a rocket launch by around 2025, rotating detonation engines should be more efficient than pulse detonation engines simply because the combustion chamber doesn't need to be cleared out between detonations. Now, another team from UCF, including some of the same researchers that built the rotating detonation engine last year, says it's managed a world-first demonstration of an elusive third type of detonation engine that could out-punch them all, theoretically opening up a pathway to aircraft flying at speeds up to 13,000 mph (21,000 km/h), or 17 times the speedThe UCF team claims it has successfully stabilized a detonation wave under hypersonic flow conditions, keeping it in place rather than having it move upstream (where it could cause the fuel source to explode) or downstream (where it would lose its explosive advantage and fizzle out into a deflagration). [...] Where a detonation typically lasts only a matter of micro- or milliseconds, the UCF team managed to sustain this one experimentally until the fuel was turned off after around three seconds. That's long enough to prove the device works [...]. The paper is open-access at PNAS.

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Why are so many Republicans treating their own vaccinations like a shameful secret?

When Trump left office things didn't get better. They got worse.

Last month we checked in on Arizona’s two senators, and lo and behold, it turned out that freshman Sen. Mark Kelly was quite popular (48% favorable-41% unfavorable), while pain-in-the-butt Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was in the dumps (29-40). Her numbers had collapsed among Democrats and independents after her anti-$15-minimum wage efforts, while Republican voters weren’t much inclined to pick up the slack. It was a curious strategy for Sinema—acting like West Virginia Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin, despite representing a purple (and Joe Biden) state. At least Manchin has a plausible excuse: Donald Trump won his state by almost 40 points. 

Weeks later, Republicans are reacting in glee to Sinema’s continued efforts to stymie Joe Biden’s Democratic agenda. And voters in her state remain unimpressed. 

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell is certainly thrilled with having Sinema as a valued ally, so much so that he’s spending money praising her efforts. And what she is enabling is the continued Republican-led partisan erosion of our cherished Democracy. Click on that link and go read that piece. Seriously. I’ll wait. 

In short, McConnell is working feverishly with his party to rewrite the nation’s election laws to subvert the right of people to vote, all for partisan gain because Republicans have given up pretending that this is a “center-right country.” They know it’s not, and they’re not bothering trying to move public opinion in their direction. That would require compromise and a step away from Donald Trump’s iron-grip control of a party he doesn’t even like. It’s much easier to systematically disenfranchise entire groups of people than it is to convince them to vote for Republicans. 

And Sinema is right there, happily enabling this travesty of democracy.

And it’s not just McConnell praising Sinema’s help. So is Karl Rove. 

What is Sinema fighting for? Not for her voters in Arizona, where her favorabilities remain significantly underwater at 25-44, lower than her 29-40 ratings last time we checked in. 

And if you’re wondering if Republicans in Arizona are rewarding her, well she’s gone from 17% favorable among them, to 18%. To be fair, her unfavorability rating among Republicans has declined, but let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that means they’ll vote for her. McConnell will happily praise her today, and then spend tens of millions attacking her when she faces reelection in 2024. 

But ultimately, the dynamic to watch is Sinema’s relationship with Arizona Democrats, because at her current trajectory, she’s almost guaranteed to face a primary next time around.

Sinema once sported nearly 70% approval ratings among Democrats in her state. Now, that’s down to 34%, with more Democrats disapproving, at 39%. That presents a key opening for a serious primary campaign, in a state in which an unabashed liberal—see Mark Kelly—can win a general election. This isn’t West Virginia. We don’t need to be glad that Joe Manchin exists, as infuriating as he is. Arizona can and should do better. 

Yet despite those woeful ratings, Sinema doesn’t feel the need to reach out to key Democratic organizers in her state, or anyone else for that matter, as this brutal headline explains: “Kyrsten Sinema doesn’t feel the need to explain herself.”

Trish Muir, the chair of the Pima Area Labor Federation, a local council of the AFL-CIO in the Tucson area, which is historically home to Arizona’s Democratic base, said that the federation’s members “are not just liberal Democrats” and from “all walks and all political beliefs” but have nevertheless been unable to get Sinema’s attention.

“Outside of calling her general office number, I don’t know how to get ahold of this woman,” Muir said, noting that she is in regular contact with Arizona’s other Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, who “has my cell phone number.”

It’s not even that Sinema is doing McConnell and the GOP’s dirty bidding for them; it’s that she somehow believes that actively ignoring the Democratic base in Arizona helps her politically! 

The election calendar is Sinema’s best friend. She doesn’t face reelection until 2024, giving her ample time to rebuild her ratings closer to E-day. No one should ever underestimate the voter’s ability to quickly forget past transgressions. Sinema is an expert at reinvention, from Code Pink socialist radical to Joe Manchin Lite. What’s to say she doesn’t flip into something more aligned with her state’s rapidly changing politics? 

But right now, she is McConnell’s best bud in the Democratic caucus, and we shouldn't ever forget that when it most counted, Sinema stood on the wrong side of history. 

The push for Washington, D.C., statehood continues against the long odds of both the filibuster and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin's opposition on a very thin pretext. The Biden administration is now reported to be quietly promoting an idea to handle one of the least stupid hurdles raised for statehood.

“Admitting D.C. as a state is comfortably within Congress’ power—arguments to the contrary are unfounded,” a White House lawyer told The New York Times. “But we also think there are ways to allay the concerns that have been raised, and that’s why we’re working with Congress to make the bill as strong as possible.”

Republicans have raised a lot of very stupid reasons to oppose statehood for Washington, D.C.—car dealerships, FFS—but that least stupid concern is that the 23rd Amendment to the Constitution gives the District of Columbia three electoral votes for president. The current plan for statehood shrinks the federal district to the area immediately around the White House, Capitol, Supreme Court, and National Mall—an area with very, very few residents. If the 23rd Amendment couldn’t be quickly repealed, the White House is embracing an idea first proposed by two Columbia Law School professors, Jessica Bulman-Pozen and Olatunde Johnson, to award those three electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote.

That means that if a Republican could win the popular vote—admittedly something that has only happened once in the past eight presidential elections—those electoral votes would offset those from the newly created state of Washington, Douglass Commonwealth. It also means, though, that if a Democrat won the popular vote while narrowly losing the electoral vote, the result could be tipped in favor of the popular vote. In practice, it would probably get Republican-controlled states to move really fast to repeal the 23rd Amendment.

In proposing the idea last year, Bulman-Pozen and Johnson explained that the popular vote plan “would better accord with the text of the 23rd Amendment, which provides that this district ‘shall appoint’ electors ‘in such manner as Congress may direct.’ Although a congressional directive to appoint no electors, as H.R. 51 would currently have it, complies with the Constitution, a congressional directive to affirmatively appoint electors is a better fit with the text.”

Beyond that, they argued, “The fix we propose would be unlikely to influence an election, but it would introduce into American law—for the very first time—a truly national vote. With a revised H.R. 51, the moment of statehood could also be a broader moment of nationhood.”

But of course, Republicans don’t really care about the 23rd Amendment. They care about Republican electoral chances and Republican ability to govern through minority rule. Adding senators to represent an overwhelmingly Democratic area would get in the way of Republican minority rule in the Senate. Adding Electoral College votes contingent on the national popular vote would be more likely to weigh against them than for them. So they don’t want it, and they’re entirely happy to oppose full political participation for a number of people larger than that in either Vermont or Wyoming to keep the playing field tilted in their favor.

Statehood for Washington, D.C., has a steep hill to climb, given the filibuster as well as the opposition of Manchin and the silence of a few other key Democrats. But it is also a cause that has gained momentum in recent years, and its proponents are doing the right thing by continuing to build the case and solidify the legal arguments. When its political moment comes, every piece must and will be in place.

On Wednesday, Republicans in the House showed that they were completely done with even pretending to be concerned about threats to democracy. First, with the expulsion of Rep. Liz Cheney from Republican leadership, Republicans made it clear that the Big Lie is now not just acceptable, but a required part of Republican canon. Then at the House Oversight hearing, Republicans fully embraced the Jan. 6 insurgency, declaring it a “normal tourist visit” and engaging in a session of ugly gaslighting that denied there was an insurrection, denied there were Trump supporters involved, and denied that there was any violence. Where Republicans are going could be best seen in the statements from Rep. Paul Gosar, who flipped the truth on its head and declared that even investigating what happened on Jan. 6 represented an assault by the “deep-state” on “law-abiding citizens.”

There’s absolutely no doubt: When it comes to be even the slightest bit embarrassed about supporting either Trump’s outrageous lies concerning the election, or the deadly attack on the Capitol in which insurgents attempted to find and execute congressional leaders, Republicans are more than done. Far from condemning efforts to end democracy, they’re embracing them. They’re all in. 

So it shouldn’t be a surprise that efforts by a member of the D.C. Metro Police to talk to Republican leader Kevin McCarthy are not going well. Officer Michael Fanone has been trying to get in touch with McCarthy for weeks. He wants the Republican leader to see what actually happened to him on Jan. 6, to see how the crowd of Trump supporters really acted. Fanone tried again this week, hoping that since it’s National Police Week, McCarthy might give him a few minutes. Instead McCarthy’s staff hung up on Fanone.  But last night, CNN released Fanone’s body camera footage.

In an interview two weeks ago, Fanone said, “I experienced the most brutal, savage hand-to-hand combat of my entire life. Let alone my policing career, which spans almost two decades. It was nothing that I had ever thought would be a part of my law enforcement career, nor was I prepared to experience."

“I experienced the most brutal, savage hand-to-hand combat of my entire life.”

Footage shot by one of the insurgents (starting around five minutes into the video below) shows Fanone being dragged down the Capitol steps after he was tased, beaten, and pulled away from a group of officers protecting a tunnel that led to Congressional chambers. As one man shouts, “I got one,” and the crowd exhorts his capture, another Trump supporter waves a “thin blue line” flag over Fanone’s unconscious form.

At that time, Fanone indicated that he wanted his body camera footage released, and it was this footage that he wanted to show to McCarthy. Only McCarthy refuses to talk to him. 

The body camera shows the exultant Trump supporters after Fanone has been tased and dragged from the building. Over and over, he tries to get through to the people who are carrying him away, crying out for his life and reminding them that he has a family as he is beaten and mocked. Part way down the Capitol steps, one person begins to shout, “Don’t hurt him,” and, “We’re better than this.” For a moment, it seems as if they’re listening to Fanone’s pleas and cries of pain. But then the assault resumes. Eventually Fanone is recovered by other officers and brought to safety behind the front lines of the assault.

By the time he’s recovered, the camera may still be running, but Fanone himself is unconscious.

Throughout the incident, Trump supporters are grabbing at Fanone’s gear, stripping away his protection, and attempting to make off with his gun. In several sections the camera is blacked out because Fanone has been flipped over face down while insurgents continue to beat him with fists and clubs. 

These are the images of what the GOP is now selling as “a normal tourist visit” from “patriotic Americans.” This is the event where even bothering to investigate is an effort by the “deep state” to repress the rights of “law-abiding Americans.”

Republicans are not just ignoring Jan. 6, they’re endorsing it. On that day, with insurgents still occupying the Capitol and searching for victims, Donald Trump sent out a tweet.

“These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!”

At the time, every line of that tweet seemed monstrous. Now Republicans have embraced it from beginning to end. Expect them to demand a statue—not for Fanone and the others who defended the Capitol, but for the people who dragged him screaming down the stairs.

Farmworkers in Washington state will now have the right to overtime pay, following Gov. Jay Inslee’s signature of a new law on Tuesday. United Farm Workers (UFW), among the advocates that championed the the Tomás Villanueva Overtime Protection Bill, said the state is now only the second in the nation “to remove the racist exclusion of farm workers from national overtime pay laws.” 

Ana Cruz, a UFW farm worker activist and UFW Foundation organizer, celebrated news of the new law, which phases in full overtime pay for excluded farmworkers by 2024. “Farm workers deserve overtime pay,” Cruz said in a statement. “Today’s bill signing puts an end to 83 years of racist exclusion of farm workers from Washington state’s overtime pay laws.”

The law, which Inslee said during the signing ceremony that he would name after local farmworker and activist Tomás Villanueva, follows a recent Washington Supreme Court decision finding “the overtime exemption for dairy workers violated the state Constitution,” Yakima Herald reports. “Dairy workers had been paid overtime since the court ruling last fall; the new law removes the exemption for all agriculture workers.”

The bill’s historic nature won attention from President Joe Biden. “For too long—and owing in large part to unconscionable race-based exclusions put in place generations ago—farmworkers have been denied some of the most fundamental rights that workers in almost every other sector have long enjoyed, including the right to a forty-hour work week and overtime pay,” he said in a statement.

“I was proud to stand with farmworkers during the Obama-Biden Administration, when California passed the nation’s first farmworker overtime bill, and I am proud to stand with the farmworkers of Washington State today,” the president continued, using the statement to support legislation that would extend these necessary rights to farmworkers all across the country.

The UFW said that for months, UFW worker leaders in Washington state “held meetings and town hall conversations with lawmakers and stakeholders in the legislative session to garner support for the legislation. After intensive collaborative negotiations, the bill had passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.” It’s a monumental victory for farmworkers and their advocates in the state, but too many continue to remain without vital protections.

“Farm work is difficult work,” Cruz said. “During my five years as a dairy worker, I saw firsthand how much workers sacrifice. Injuries are constant in dairies. Many of us worked 16-hour shifts with no overtime pay. Agriculture is Washington’s second-largest industry. Washington ranks number two in the nation in the number of farm workers. Our state’s 230,000 farm workers help generate $7.9 billion each year. Farm workers feed all of us.”

“Thank you to Senator Karen Keiser and all of our allies who were committed to making this happen,” Cruz continued in the statement. “Most importantly, a massive thank you to all the workers who never gave up the fight to be treated as equal as other workers.” Inslee said in a tweet following the signing that “[t]he  COVID-19 pandemic has brought a new focus on the challenges faced by frontline workers. The bills I am signing today represent an acknowledgement of the lessons we’ve learned and offer hope for a stronger path forward.”

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