December 8, 2024

Stuttering Lede, Dec. 8th, 2024

Perhaps the last one this year

“Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put a wall up to keep our people in, to prevent them from leaving us." John F Kennedy

Hopeless self-promotion and the next couple of months

I have finally deleted X from my phone. I’ve locked my account and permanently moved to BlueSky. If interested, follow me here. Here’s what one of the usual meme generators told me about my content on BlueSky so far:

The next few weeks will be very hectic around here for personal reasons, then it’s the holidays and my birthday trip, and then we are starting a major construction project that is expected to take 4-6 weeks and we all know how those estimate work out all of the time. That is to say that I will have a whole lot less ability and opportunity to keep this a regular weekly or more often newsletter. I will do my best to of course still find time and share the highlights of the newscycle but my priority is and will continue to be working on my book and writing for my main blog, if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do.

Without further ado, here’s what happened in the last few days…

US

• The Deeper Reasons Democrats Lost.

• Amid the backdrop that more than a dozen members of Trump's Cabinet are billionaires, a reminder that this is what happened to income inequality in this country once the tax rate for top earners was slashed after 1980. Trickle down does not work and top earners' priority is themselves.

• Oligarchy disguised as Populism”

• Let’s stop calling it DOGE. A federal “Department” has legal significance and must be authorized by Congress - not just by the announcement of a man not yet President and his largest donor. Think “Department” of Homeland Security. Stop diminishing legal structures by adopting their lexicon.

• Stephen Miller: Trump will tell at-home federal workers to return to office.

• Brynn Tannehill‬ ‪writes, “I saw this and I realized I need to tell a true story. Anyway, pull up a chair and hear my story about the last time the Trump administration tried to make everyone stop working remotely.”

• The FTC may soon end its bid to govern AI and change into an… anti-trans agency ??? Because ???? Consumer protection????? FTC Commissioner Andrew Ferguson's pitch to be chair under Trump:

• Democrats praising and legitimizing Musk’s sham department: Whether they think it’s a “savvy” move that will allow them to capitalize on anti-government sentiment or just the manifestation of them being doofuses who are still falling for the “genius”/Silicon Valley myth, it’s utterly disqualifying.

• Elad Nehorai‬ writes, “If you want to see how Republicans and the right plan to use antisemitism accusations as a weapon to target both non-Jewish and Jewish progressives I suggest you read the Heritage Foundation’s plans for Project Esther in detail.”

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• Wanna work for RFK Jr. at HHS? Be prepared for questions about:

  • “I don’t have much interest in having sexual experiences with another person”

  • “As an adolescent, I had bizarre fantasies or preoccupations”

  • “I consistently use my physical appearance to draw attention to myself” h/t @puck.news Questionnaire here: iasassessment.com/session/regi...

• After the LA Times published a piece about Elon Musk that carried a headline owner Patrick Soon-Shiong didn't like, a new rule was implemented: Prior to publishing opinion stories, headlines must be emailed to Soon-Shiong, where he can then choose to weigh in.

• Texas launches an initiative to ban THC.

• Musk and Ramaswamy have already identified $516B dollars in government savings — it includes cutting all of Veteran’s Affairs health care, eliminating the NIH, and ending funding for federal prisons.

• Multiple major health insurance companies (Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield, Caresource, Medica, Elevance Health) have taken down pages on their websites which listed their leadership, following the murder of United Healthcare CEO.

• Satanic Temple starts religious release program in Ohio.

• AOC expected to run for top Oversight Committee role.

• China bans export of critical minerals to US as trade tensions escalate.

Europe

• Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez vowed to add abortion rights and gay marriage to Spain’s constitution so they “can never be undone.”

• France’s government collapsed. Now it finally falls to President Emmanuel Macron to step up and confront a snowballing political and economic crisis.

• Romania’s top constitutional court has annulled the country’s presidential election, after security services warned the vote had been distorted by a mass Russian influence campaign to favor a far-right candidate.

• Financial analyst Alexander Kolyandr explains Russian policymakers’ dwindling options amid growing monetary grief.

Middle East

• Bashar al-Assad flees Damascus to Moscow. The decades long civil war in Syria and with that the despotic Assad regime are over.

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• Human rights organization Amnesty International has released a 296-page report concluding that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.The group joins Holocaust historians, United Nations experts, and a growing number of nations worldwide in doing so.

Women Rights

• Tracking abortion laws across the United States.

• Keira Knightley says she was ‘stalked by men’ after Pirates of the Caribbean and told ‘you wanted this.’

LGBTQA+ Rights

• An appeals court has ruled that Idaho can enforce most of its anti-abortion travel ban, making it the first state in the nation to do so.

• House Republicans have added a provision into the NDAA that would strip necessary health care from the trans kids of service members. These decisions belong with doctors, parents, and nobody else. Last year, they tried to add 50+ anti-LGBTQ+ riders and were defeated.

• Amy Coney Barrett emerged as a potential wild card, with at least one attorney in other LGBTQ+ cases expressing her questioning was curious. In particular, she seemed surprised to learn about the history of anti-crossdressing laws.

• As always brilliant live tweeting of the historic SCOTUS hearing on US v Skrmetti by Elie Mystal.

• More than 10,000 people urged Gov. DeWine to veto Ohio bathroom ban bill.

Tech

• We need a lot more education to deal with disinformation, not more censorship and fact checks.

• One week after the Economist published this chart showing the dude can't stop tweeting in the middle of the night, Elon removes time stamps from tweets.

• We're at peak AI - generative AI models have hit the wall where they won’t improve much further thanks to a lack of training data, killer apps or any kind of sustainable business model.

  The results of a collapse could be catastrophic.

• X has become a hotbed of neo-Nazi content under Elon Musk. Operators of four anonymous accounts that share racist, antisemitic, and neo-Nazi content have been identified. Three live in Texas. Musk has replied to two of them. One works for the Navy.

Gun Violence

• Two children were wounded Wednesday in a shooting at a tiny religious K-8 school in Northern California and the shooter died from a suspected self-inflicted gunshot.

Education

• The issue isn't a lack of national standards (tho they might help). The issue is a lack of parenting around the nation. A lack of discipline & accountability in K12 schools which disrupts learning for all students.

Misc.

• What does it mean for society if young men sense that their

  masculinity is under threat? New research links masculine anxiety to economic insecurity, rigid gender beliefs, and Trump support.

• The almost comically disorganized few hours of martial law under South Korea’s president is a reminder of the autocratic threat in the U.S. and the ways to stop it.

• A pair of iconic ruby slippers that were worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz” and stolen from a museum nearly two decades ago sold for a winning bid of $28 million at an auction Saturday.

• Return-work-mandates are an invisible pay cut.

Humor