Bird Song of the Day
Brown Thrasher, May 2024 Rondeau PP–South Point Trail East, Chatham-Kent, Ontario, Canada. Same location as yesterday, but different birds and even more lively.
In Case You Might Miss…
- January 6 pardons.
- DOGE Executive orders.
- Improving surgical masks (many methods).
In Case You Might Miss…
- January 6 pardons.
- DOGE Executive orders.
- Improving surgical masks (many methods).
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
Capitol Seizure
“Trump pardons roughly 1,500 criminal defendants charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack” [NBC News]. “President Donald Trump on Monday issued roughly 1,500 pardons and commuted the sentences of 14 of his supporters in connection with the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when thousands of them stormed the building amid his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him. Trump commuted the sentences of individuals associated with the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, who were convicted of seditious conspiracy [despite being riddled with informers]. He then issued ‘a full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021,’ a category that included people who assaulted law enforcement officers.” • This from Julie Kelly was something I didn’t know:
Here is the raindrop theory–
“UNITED STATES OF AMERICA v. JOHN DOUGLAS WRIGHT” (PDF) [Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, Criminal Action No. 21-341, United States District Court for the District of Columbia]. Kollar-Kotelly was “previously presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.” From page 24:
It would have been interesting to apply the “raindrop” theory of the case to the banksters who “collectively” caused the Great Financial Crash, causing “the unnecessary expenditure of substantial government resources.”
Lambert here: Patient readers, Trump just signed a hundred exective orders (EOs) [apparently only 26? Yes] and held a presser. I don’t have the capacity to synthesize all that material, which is doubtless creating “Shock and Awe” in the political class. The links that follow seem the most salient now, but that may change in the coming weeks. What I will say is that I have skimmed several of the orders, and this latest rollout is an amazing feat of staffwork (hat tip Susie Wiles) that the previous Trump administration couldn’t even have considered. (Some clever people will also have to lay the Executive Orders against Project 2025 and look for overlaps. My guess is that the Trump administration will have put its own distinction twists on a lot of it. Also, I’ll often scatter the EOs under the usual category headings (“DOGE” under “DOGE”) because consolidating 100 EOs in one place would be unwieldy.
Patient readers, I’ll return with a list of the executive orders — I’m frustrated because I don’t know how many have really been signed — after I handle some administrativia. –lambert
UPDATE Here is the list. I took it from the Whitehouse.gov page on “Presidential Actions.” There are four buckets: Executive Orders, Proclamations, Memoranda, and Announcements. (I did this because all the sources I could find were explainers, a level of abstraction away from a simple list of the documents Trump signed, which seems to me to be the obvious base for any further analysis.)
Executive Orders:
- Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness (order)
- Designating Cartels And Other Organizations As Foreign Terrorist Organizations And Specially Designated Global Terrorists (order)
- Reforming The Federal Hiring Process And Restoring Merit To Government Service (order)
- Ending Radical And Wasteful Government DEI Programs And Preferencing (order)
- Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government (order)
- Establishing And Implementing The President’s “Department Of Government Efficiency” (order)
- America First Policy Directive To The Secretary Of State (order)
- Protecting The United States From Foreign Terrorists And Other National Security And Public Safety Threats (order)
- Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential (order)
- Protecting The American People Against Invasion (order)
- Reevaluating And Realigning United States Foreign Aid (order)
- Declaring a National Energy Emergency (order)
- Restoring The Death Penalty And Protecting Public Safety (order)
- Securing Our Borders (order)
- Protecting The Meaning And Value Of American Citizenship (order)
- Realigning the United States Refugee Admissions Program (order)
- Unleashing American Energy (order)
- Clarifying The Military’s Role In Protecting The Territorial Integrity Of The United States (order)
- Holding Former Government Officials Accountable For Election Interference And Improper Disclosure Of Sensitive Governmental Information (order)
- Restoring Accountability To Policy-Influencing Positions Within the Federal Workforce (order)
- Withdrawing The United States From The World Health Organization (order)
- Application Of Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act To TikTok (order)
- Putting America First In International Environmental Agreements (order)
- Ending The Weaponization Of The Federal Government (order)
- Restoring Freedom Of Speech And Ending Federal Censorship (order)
- Initial Rescissions Of Harmful Executive Orders And Actions (order)
Proclamations:
- Guaranteeing The States Protection Against Invasion (proclamation)
- Declaring A National Emergency At The Southern Border Of The United States (proclamation)
- Granting Pardons And Commutation Of Sentences For Certain Offenses Relating To The Events At Or Near The United States Capitol On January 6, 2021 (proclamation)
- Flying The Flag Of The United States At Full-Staff On Inauguration Day (proclamation)
Memoranda:
- The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Global Tax Deal (Global Tax Deal) (memorandum)
- Organization of the National Security Council and Subcommittees (memorandum)
- Temporary Withdrawal of All Areas on the Outer Continental Shelf from Offshore Wind Leasing and Review of the Federal Government’s Leasing and Permitting Practices for Wind Projects (memorandum)
- Restoring Accountability for Career Senior Executives (memorandum)
- Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture (memorandum)
- Putting People Over Fish: Stopping Radical Environmentalism to Provide Water to Southern California (memorandum)
- America First Trade Policy (memorandum)
- Memorandum to Resolve the Backlog of Security Clearances for Executive Office of the President Personnel (memorandum)
- Delivering Emergency Price Relief for American Families and Defeating the Cost-of-Living Crisis (memorandum)
- Hiring Freeze (memorandum)
- Regulatory Freeze Pending Review (memorandum)
- Return to In-Person Work (memorandum)
Announcements:
- President Trump Designates Chairmen and Acting Chairmen (announcement)
- President Trump Announces Acting Cabinet and Cabinet-Level Positions (announcement)
- President Trump Announces Sub-Cabinet Appointments (announcement)
- President Trump Announces Cabinet and Cabinet Level Appointments (announcement)
So this is the scope of the work for today; Trump was busy. Perhaps a connoisseuer of Federal document types can explain why an Executive Order in one case and a Memorandum in another. I did skim some of the EOs; they seem to be of varying quality, some quite specific as to statute and regulation, others more like “good things are good” handwaving. For example, in “Restoring Freedom Of Speech And Ending Federal Censorship”, this:
Sec. 2. Policy. It is the policy of the United States to: (a) secure the right of the American people to engage in constitutionally protected speech;
and:
Sec. 3. Ending Censorship of Protected Speech. (a) No Federal department, agency, entity, officer, employee, or agent may act or use any Federal resources in a manner contrary to section 2 of this order.
Constitutional lawyers in the readership please correct me, but am I right that this is a little thin? Not even a citation to a court case? And “constitutionally” is doing a lot of work. Is there speech that is not constitutionally protected?
* * * “Trump signs order to end ‘government censorship’ of social media” [WaPo]. “President Donald Trump on Monday signed an executive order intended to ‘immediately stop all government censorship,’ a sweeping action that could chill years of efforts to combat the proliferation of false information online. The order bans federal officials from any conduct that ‘would unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen.’ It also prohibits taxpayer resources from being used to ‘unconstitutionally abridge the free speech’ of Americans…. Trump’s order could have an immediate impact on years of efforts to bolster coordination between Silicon Valley and the government to combat misinformation about elections, natural disasters and public health.” • But:
TikTok is dead, free Palestine pic.twitter.com/hQKK0trAlW
— Ozymandias (@martianmarxist) January 21, 2025
However:
so my tiktok didn’t seem the same when i got back on, so i went and muted all ads and turned off personalized ads, and now i can actually see things about Palestine and fascism pic.twitter.com/mwLLfs7shl
— jess (@jesstechnician) January 21, 2025
Eight hours down not long enough to implement the algo changes properly?
* * * “Neo-Nazis Love the Nazi-Like Salutes Elon Musk Made at Trump’s Inauguration” [Wired]. “At this point, Musk put his right hand on his chest before extending it straight out with his palm facing down and his fingers touching, a gesture widely recognized as the ‘Roman salute.’ Adopted by the fascist movement a century ago, it was most famously used by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party in Germany, and is to this day associated with the fascist right, especially in Italy. After he first made the gesture, Musk then turned around to members of the crowd who were seated behind him and, with his back to the camera, repeated the gesture. ‘My heart goes out to you,’ Musk added… One of many examples: “”WE ARE FUCKING BACK” the administrator of a Nazi meme channel on Telegram wrote under a clip of Musk giving the salute.’” • I must confess that when I first saw this take I filed under symbol manipulators looking for symbols and then making leaps in reasoning based on the symbols (which is a very bad habit in the idpol space). I also felt that Musk has been awfully herky jerky lately (and there is the preliminary hand-on-heart gesture, which forms no part of the Nazi salute. But now, apparently, it does:
“It was an accident!! He’s autistic!!” pic.twitter.com/eOCgJ4cPBr
— evan loves worf (@esjesjesj) January 21, 2025
File this, at the very minimum, under “Somebody needs to get this dude under control.”
* * *
DOGE
“ESTABLISHING AND IMPLEMENTING THE PRESIDENT’S ‘DEPARTMENT OF GOVERNMENT’” [Whitehouse.gov]. I normalize all-caps to title caps but in this case I’m not, because all the EOs have this formatting. I hope readers can give this a close reading, but while the pre-inaugural DOGE set a horrid precedent, this version seems not so bad. The EO hijacks the United States Digital Service (USDS), which Obama put in place after Silicon Valley techies saved his bacon my making the ObamaCare website work. That’s a clever idea! ” The United States Digital Service is hereby publicly renamed as the United States DOGE Service (USDS) and shall be established in the Executive Office of the President.” And: “In consultation with USDS, each Agency Head shall establish within their respective Agencies a DOGE Team of at least four employees, which may include Special Government Employees, hired or assigned within thirty days of the date of this Order. Agency Heads shall select the DOGE Team members in consultation with the USDS Administrator. Each DOGE Team will typically include one DOGE Team Lead, one engineer, one human resources specialist, and one attorney. Agency Heads shall ensure that DOGE Team Leads coordinate their work with USDS and advise their respective Agency Heads on implementing the President ‘s DOGE Agenda.” • This shows, at least, somebody was thinking about process. (“Special Government Employees” were what the the pre-inaugural DOGE operatives — the dudes going around interviewing civil servants — should have been.
“‘Everyone wants him out’: How Musk helped boot Ramaswamy from DOGE” [Politico]. “Musk, the tech tycoon and Donald Trump confidant, made it known that he wanted Ramaswamy out of DOGE in recent days, according to three people familiar with Musk’s preferences who, like others for this article, were granted anonymity to discuss them. An ill-received holiday rant on X by Ramaswamy about H-1B visas apparently hastened his demise…. Ramaswamy maintained to confidants as late as Saturday evening that he was actively involved in DOGE, saying he was at work writing executive orders, according to six people who had spoken with him. But a person familiar with the arrangement said he had done almost no DOGE-related work since early December. As recently as last week, Ramaswamy was hoping to achieve some early wins at DOGE before leaving to pursue a gubernatorial bid. Now Ramaswamy and his allies are laboring to put a positive spin on his departure, coming just as Trump takes office.” •
2024 Post Mortem
“The Sad Tale of Moderate Joe Biden” [Ruy Teixeira, The Liberal Patriot]. The interesting part of this article is at the end: “Editor’s note: This is a slightly longer version of an essay that originally appeared in The Free Press, where Ruy is now a contributing writer.” • This dude is nimble!
“Biden Was Just That Bad” [Caitlyn Johnstone, Consortium News]. “From what we are seeing so far, Trump is just returning things to their horrible standard baseline. Trump will go on to do many evil things as president, just as he did during his first term, but none of this will reverse the fact that Biden just spent four years advancing genocide, nuclear brinkmanship and authoritarianism. The Democratic Party plays just as crucial a role in promoting the tyranny and abuses of the U.S. empire as the Republican Party does, and it is nonsensical to think of either of them as a lesser evil. The empire itself must end. It’s possible that Trump’s term will constitute another swing from Bush-level depravity to Obama-level depravity. It isn’t normal for the U.S. empire to be as openly depraved as it has been in Gaza. Normally its evils are much more well-disguised, because it is in the empire’s interests to preserve its image in the eyes of the western public. You only see the really in-your-face acts of monstrosity when a coalition of forces within the swamp are able to seize on a rare opportunity to shove them through, as we saw in the wake of 9/11 and again in the wake of Oct. 7. The rest of the time, the empire likes to be a lot subtler about its abuses, like it was during the Obama administration and the first Trump administration.” • One could, I suppose, consider engulfing Greenland as “subtle” compared to a full-blown war with China. And it’s certainly subtle for Trump!
Realignment and Legitimacy
“Trump rescinds Biden’s census order, clearing a path for reshaping election maps” [NPR]. “Among the dozens of Biden-era executive orders that President Trump revoked on Monday was one that had reversed the first Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of altering a key set of census results. Since the first U.S. census in 1790, no resident has ever been omitted from those numbers because of immigration status. And after the Civil War, the 14th Amendment has called for the population counts that determine each state’s share of U.S. House seats and Electoral College votes to include the ‘whole number of persons in each state.’ Biden’s now-revoked 2021 order affirmed the longstanding practice of including the total number of persons residing in each state in those census results. It was issued in response to Trump’s attempt during the national tally in 2020 to exclude millions of U.S. residents without legal status…. Though it had an opportunity during the first Trump administration, the Supreme Court has yet to rule on whether the president can exclude people who are in the country without legal status from the tally that determines political power in the United States.” • Well, when you frame it that way…
Syndemics
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
Transmission: Nasal Sprays
“Toward a Radically Simple Multi-Modal Nasal Spray for Preventing Respiratory Infections” [Advanced Materials (DougieD). September 2024. “This report introduces the Pathogen Capture and Neutralizing Spray (PCANS), which utilizes a multi-modal approach to enhance efficacy. PCANS coats the nasal cavity, capturing large respiratory droplets from the air, and serving as a physical barrier against a broad spectrum of viruses and bacteria, while rapidly neutralizing them with over 99.99% effectiveness. The formulation consists of excipients identified from the FDA’s Inactive Ingredient Database and Generally Recognized as Safe list to maximize efficacy for each step in the multi-modal approach. PCANS demonstrates nasal retention for up to 8 hours in mice. In a severe Influenza A mouse model, a single pre-exposure dose of PCANS leads to a >99.99% reduction in lung viral titer and ensures 100% survival, compared to 0% in the control group. PCANS suppresses pathological manifestations and offers protection for at least 4 hours. This data suggest PCANS as a promising daily-use prophylactic against respiratory infections.” • Maybe one day it will be on sale…
If you are only permitted a surgical mask:
here is a non-exhaustive thread on the various modifications you can apply to surgical masks to increase their efficacy at preventing airborne illness (95% effective like N95 masks). combining these modifications will increase your mask’s efficacy 🧵
— a southern souliloquoy (@niggasippian) January 18, 2025
Here is one modification:
here is a non-exhaustive thread on the various modifications you can apply to surgical masks to increase their efficacy at preventing airborne illness (95% effective like N95 masks). combining these modifications will increase your mask’s efficacy 🧵
— a southern souliloquoy (@niggasippian) January 18, 2025
Here is another:
here is a non-exhaustive thread on the various modifications you can apply to surgical masks to increase their efficacy at preventing airborne illness (95% effective like N95 masks). combining these modifications will increase your mask’s efficacy 🧵
— a southern souliloquoy (@niggasippian) January 18, 2025
There are a lot more techniques; the thread is worth reading in full.
Vaccines
“Former surgeon general: Vaccine-preventable diseases are still a major threat” [Jerome Adams, STAT]. The Biden Administration vaccine rollout was fantastically destructive, as we see here. “While there’s much to celebrate about the current focus on improving overall health — particularly the incoming administration’s emphasis on the MAHA agenda, which promotes better food safety, nutrition, and physical activity — it’s crucial that we remember these must be priorities in addition to addressing vaccine-preventable diseases, not in place of them. As I’ve said before, you can’t die of early heart disease at 50 if you already died from polio at 5. The reality is that vaccine-preventable diseases are still a major threat, even in the 21st century, and we ignore that at our peril. I hear from pediatricians and health officials across the country on a near-daily basis about their growing concerns over declining vaccination rates. Parents who would have once trusted their health care providers’ recommendations are now questioning vaccines that should be routine, like MMR (measles, mumps, and rubella). What’s even more troubling is that even the parents of long-term patients — children who have received all their vaccines in the past — are increasingly opting to delay or forgo these essential shots due to new doubts, often fueled by misinformation. What’s worse is that the default response to health provider recommendations has shifted. For many parents, the idea of questioning, deferring, or outright rejecting vaccines has become the norm, rather the exception. This undermines the trust that has been built over generations between health care providers and families, and presents a serious challenge for those of us trying to protect the health of all Americans, especially our children. The impact of this growing vaccine hesitancy will, of course, be felt most acutely by children whose parents are trying, in deeply misguided ways, to protect them. While we’re unlikely to see a dramatic rise in deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases in the U.S. in the near term, the personal costs are immense. A single case of measles can lead to weeks of missed school, sporting events, family gatherings, and other milestones. These are costs many Americans felt were unbearable and inexcusable during the Covid-19 pandemic, yet we’re now putting our children at risk of suffering the same disruptions — disruptions that are both preventable and unnecessary.” • As I said, it’s MMR that’s under-assault. Of course, we have already been induced to abandon our children to Covid — thanks, Great Barrington dudes — so everything’s going according to plan.
Elite Maleficence
Perhaps the CDC’s normalization of wasterwater data isn’t as bad as I thought:
Violet Blue’s correction here:
New information that OP is misunderstanding the change. Further info is here: https://t.co/PXobBA9CAg That CDC has eroded public trust on C19 hasn’t helped at all. https://t.co/TVZhOVdLmA
— Violet Blue® (@violetblue) January 19, 2025
Lambert here: I don’t like a lot of this week’s charts. In wastewater, too many red dots concentrated in the Midwest and the Atlantic coast, so I started circling areas in red, again. New York’s weirdly persistent higher hospitalization rate continues. Traveler positivity is up, and worse, the dominant traveler variants are JN* and KP*, which, while present in the national variants, are very low. And in the two death charts, the projected deaths seem to have leveled out, when in the past they decreased. Nothing earth-shattering, but it does make me queasy, and it’s well after the holiday bump.
| Wastewater | ||
| This week[1] CDC January 10 | Last week[2] CDC (until next week): | |
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| Variants [3] CDC January 18 |  |
Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC January 11 |
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| Hospitalization | ||
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data January 16: | National [6] CDC Janurary 16: | |
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| Positivity | ||
| National[7] Walgreens January 13: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic January 4: | |
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| Travelers Data | ||
| Positivity[9] CDC December 30: | Variants[10] CDC December 30 | |
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| Deaths | ||
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC January 11: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC January 11: | |
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LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (CDC) Seeing more red and more orange, but nothing new at major hubs.
[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.
[3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.
[4] (ED) A little uptick.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped.
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out.
[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.
[8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out.
[10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released.
[11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out.
[12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.
Stats Watch
There are no official statistics of interest today.
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 41 Fear (previous close: 37 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 27 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Jan 21 at 2:00:37 PM ET.
Architecture
“The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars” [Ex Urbe]. “Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. Wealthy families built these as mini-fortresses within the city, where they could defend against riots, enemy families (think Montagues and Capulets) and invasion. Signs of wealth and prestige, these all-stone buildings were also fireproof, leading to a terrible but effective tactic: take your family, treasures & goods up into your tower then set fire to enemies’ homes and let the city burn around you while you sit safe above. This was VERY BAD for cities.” Like this:
Caption: “Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over Italy.” • Neat blog.
“On what women want” [Kat Rosenfeld, The Usual Palm Tree]. Reflections prompted by the Neil Gaiman case. “There’s a moment in the Gaiman exposé where the main accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich, sends him a text message asking him how he’s doing. Gaiman says he’s struggling: he’s heard from people close to him that Pavlovich plans to accuse him of rape. ‘I thought that we were a good thing and a very consensual thing indeed,’ he writes. ‘It was consensual (and wonderful)!” she replies. Except: she doesn’t mean it.” But: “[I]n the article we’ve been instructed, explicitly and repeatedly, that you can’t assume a relationship was consensual just because all parties involved gave consent.” And: “The thing is, if women can’t be trusted to assert their desires or boundaries because they’ll invariably lie about what they want in order to please other people, it’s not just sex they can’t reasonably consent to. It’s medical treatments. Car loans. Nuclear non-proliferation agreements. Our entire social contract operates on the premise that adults are strong enough to choose their choices, no matter the ambient pressure from horny men or sleazy used car salesmen or power-hungry ayatollahs. If half the world’s adult population are actually just smol beans — hapless, helpless, fickle, fragile, and much too tender to perform even the most basic self-advocacy — everything starts to fall apart, including the entire feminist project. You can’t have genuine equality for women while also letting them duck through the trap door of but I didn’t mean it, like children, when their choices have unhappy outcomes.”
“New ‘oligarchy’ under fire as elites descend on Davos” [Agence France Presse]. Of course, the elite of the elite are at the Inaugural. “The World Economic Forum kicks off in the Swiss Alpine resort on the same day as the presidential inauguration of Trump, who will not be in Davos but will make an online appearance later in the week…. Some 3,000 participants are expected at the Swiss ski village for the forum ending Friday — including 60 heads of state or government and more than 900 CEOs — for days of schmoozing and behind-the-scenes dealmaking.” A dissenting voice: “‘I don’t want to live in a country with a few rich people and lots of poor people,’ said Morris Pearl, a former managing director at investment giant BlackRock. He is now a member of Patriotic Millionaires, a group that backs raising taxes on the rich. ‘I’m afraid that we’re going to have civil unrest if we don’t change things,’ Pearl told AFP.” • So are they, Morris. So are they.
Yikes:
Take a moment to look at this image.
For the first time in recorded history, the immediate GULF COAST is under a blizzard warning.
This is likely a once-in-a-lifetime event—a generational storm we may never witness again.#WinterStorm pic.twitter.com/Qu1as9i2DH
— Andrew Austin-Adler (@weatherman_aaa) January 21, 2025
These states aren’t exactly set up for blizzard conditions.
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