August Links
The title implies I'll be doing these monthly. We'll see.
Finally someone figures out how to do what we all know needs be done: invade Canada. Also this is a startling fact: 70% of Canada lives in the colored zones below.
In case Canada is too small potatoes, you may not be aware that we have economically eclipsed the European Union to a stunning extent over the last fifteen years. “In 2008 the EU’s economy was somewhat larger than America’s: $16.2tn versus $14.7tn. By 2022, the US economy had grown to $25tn, whereas the EU and the UK together had only reached $19.8tn.” (Source, maybe paywalled.) Fiscal and monetary policy matters!
The law professor I admired most at UChicago was a guy named Will Baude, a former Supreme Court clerk for Chief Justice Roberts, a Federalist Society member, and a darling of the academy. He has co-authored with another prominent FedSoc professor what could fairly be described, at risk of paradox, a bombshell law review article: The Sweep and Force of Section Three. As of my typing, it has been downloaded 20,000 times since it was posted online two days ago. It’s doing numbies, as the kids say. It’s easy to see why: it makes a lucid, thorough (126 pages!) case that Donald Trump is prohibited from running for president again under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment. Section Three prohibits anyone “who, having previously taken an oath, . . . as an officer of the United States . . . to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same[.]” The article’s argument is made on originalist grounds and strikes me as very compelling (as Baude’s articles tend to be). If you want to get to the main action of the article, look at pages 62-69 and 111-120; if you want a summary, here’s a good NYTimes article by Adam Liptak.
Some of you may be quick to dismiss the possibility that the Supreme Court would do anything about this; I won’t affirmatively predict otherwise, but I would also say not so fast. The extent to which SCOTUS votes in kneejerk conservative fashion is frequently overstated (examples 1 and 1A, 2, 3, 4, and (extra relevant) 5), and also Supreme Court Justices are exactly the type of fancy-lad Republicans who privately dislike Trump (though admittedly many of that ilk have often shamefully gone along for the ride with him). I don’t think anyone thinks it’s likely that Trump will be barred from running again on these grounds, but I suspect the general sentiment is that the chances are like 1% whereas I think it’s more like 20%.
State-level Democratic Secretaries of State and Attorneys General should absolutely push the issue, in my view. It’s not just red meat for their base. It bolsters the crucial principle that undermining elections should be strenuously challenged. And they would have the virtue of being right on the legal merits it seems, or at least having a very serious argument to make.
Thought this was good advice from Ray Bradbury, or at least sounded like good advice to a person who doesn’t show a thing about writing fiction but thinks it sounds like a cool thing to do.
In other wise-sounding advice news, John Mayer continues to be my biggest mancrush.
Unfortunately for Oregon Congresswoman/my former family friend and boss Val Hoyle, she maybe made an uh-oh in who she hired as the head of the civil rights department at Oregon’s Bureau of Labor & Industries when she was running. The woman she hired to root out workplace racism, Carol Johnson, is now suing for “$17,000 in economic damages and $2.3 million in non-economic damages” ($2.3 million sounds awfully economic!) because she herself was subjected to workplace racism. Bad if true!
Only there are a couple problems with her story: for example, she claims she resigned in part because somebody mailed her “a bag of feces,” but a subsequent investigation found “the timeline of when she complained about the frightening package and when it was actually mailed to her home don’t jibe, the investigator wrote. Instead, the dates suggest the package was sent about seven weeks after she said it was and well after she had resigned, the investigation report indicates. A photograph of the package, which Johnson submitted as part of her complaint to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, showed the package from vendor Poop Senders, which mails anonymous packages of cow manure and other animal waste as ‘the ultimate gag gift,’ was postmarked Aug. 15 of that year. That date was much later than when Johnson first reported the package to a coworker in June and weeks after she tendered her resignation on July 20, citing racially motivated hostilities from employees who reported to her.” Another incident: the woman claimed that an employee yelled at her and wasn’t punished, but what apparently actually happened was: “The woman Johnson said yelled at her was a mother of three young children who’d just returned from parental leave when COVID-19 reached Oregon and was panicked she would lose her job over Johnson’s refusal to let her work from home and with flexible work hours. Multiple employees said the woman was sobbing and emotional but did not ‘yell’ at Johnson and was correct to expect, and was granted by Hoyle, more flexibility amid the pandemic.”
June hogs were Chinook salmon in the Pacific Northwest that weighed 80 pounds and were the size of a child. They went extinct for a number of reasons, among many damming of their rivers.
Relatedly: Oregon is moving forward with a half-billion-dollar project to remove four dams, the largest dam removal in the nation’s history.
More Oregon news: you may have heard that my people have recently been deprived of our birthright to not touch icky gas nozzles. Except not really, because every gas station will still have to have half their pumps operated by an attendant. But here’s the real story: “Prices must be the same at both self-serve and staffed gas pumps.” Kind of defeats the whole point, doesn’t it? It would be like if a state allowed delivery from a restaurant but not takeout, then it legalized takeout, except you still had to pay the delivery charge if you picked up your food. I guess you could argue we’re letting people have the joy of not needing to interact with the gas station fella if they don’t want while still protecting those precious gas attendant jobs. Seems dumb though.
Speaking of birthright: did you know Jews can get an all-expenses-paid trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma? It’s called Tulsa Tomorrow, it was set up by a local Jewish billionaire who had a grand vision of revitalizing Tulsa with the circumcised, and other than an application fee we chosen people can get a free trip out of it. Plus if you decide to move there it sounds like there are sinecures up for grabs. Tulsa baby!
I knew very little about the upheavals in Israel over the court reforms happening there other than “there are upheavals in Israel over court reforms happening there,” so I can’t speak to the perspective presented in this article other than that I found it very interesting and contrary to the vibes I inferred from seeing headlines in the American press.
Interesting read on Putin’s rise to power from my favorite blog. Knew about the false-flag bombings but I wish it were more generally known. Had not heard a huge part of his early political success was him coming across as too bland to be a threat to anyone.
An old essay from that blog (at its earlier site) that I recently re-read and found insightful all over again.
Good overview of what led to the WGA strike.
RIP Angus Cloud. He was great on Euphoria.
In don’t-rinse lessons I’ve recently learned:
You don’t need to prerinse your dishes, per Wirecutter. “Every dishwasher company, detergent company, and independent expert we’ve talked to says that prerinsing is unnecessary—as does the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of our sources even said that you might get better results without prerinsing because modern enzymatic detergents work better when they can cling to food. When you skip the prerinse, you’ll also save a bunch of water, energy, and effort.
We’ve also confirmed this conclusion with our own tests, over and over and over again. In one round of testing, we ran 12 different dishwashers loaded with some of the crustiest, most stubborn food stains. With zero prerinsing on our part, they almost always did a great job. We repeated the tests a handful of times for each model and got the same results. We did encounter a couple of exceptions: Some models struggled when we used discount, store-brand detergent, but they did better when we tried a stronger, brand-name formula.”
You’re not supposed to rinse out your mouth after you brush your teeth to keep the fluoride in there doing its thing. I did not know this and I might ignore it but it seems to be consensus.
A few of the best songs I’ve come across lately: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.
Good podcast episodes I’ve listened to lately: British historians’ perspective on the American Civil War, Josh Barro is always good.
Good stuff I’ve watched lately: Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (I knew it was a scandal but goddam!) (bootleg copy here), Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog rocks) (on Amazon Prime here), Oppenheimer, Apocalypto (“Say what you want about Mel Gibson but the son of a bitch knows story structure!”), The Deepest Breath (on Netflix here).
Not so good stuff: I rewatched Broadchurch, it was alright but more melodramatic than I remembered, and I rewatched Utopia (original British version), it was more repetitive than I remembered.
A couple parting images, though not technically links.
Sendai Daikannon, the tallest statue in Japan:
Allegedly a 2,300-year-old agate bowl discovered in southern Egypt, though I can’t find online confirmation:
I know you are way too old for me to tell you what to do (this was always true) but you are not moving to Tulsa. Guess who.