Month: January 2023

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

Did an FBI Spy Scandal Impact the 2016 Election?

Historian and authoritarianism expert Timothy Snyder rightly argues that we need to pay more attention to what happened with the FBI in 2016 because “[w]e are on the edge of a spy scandal with major implications for how we understand the Trump administration, our national security, and ourselves.”

I am surprised by how little the arrest last week of former FBI agent Charles McGonigal has entered into the public discourse. But I agree with Synder that the potential implications are immense. He writes: 

“On 23 January, we learned that a former FBI special agent, Charles McGonigal, was arrested on charges involving taking money to serve foreign interests. One accusation is that in 2017 he took $225,000 from a foreign actor while in charge of counterintelligence at the FBI’s New York office. Another charge is that McGonigal took money from Oleg Deripaska, a sanctioned Russian oligarch, after McGonigal’s 2018 retirement from the FBI. Deripaska, a hugely wealthy metals tycoon close to the Kremlin, “Putin’s favorite industrialist,” was a figure in a Russian influence operation that McGonigal had investigated in 2016. Deripaska has been under American sanctions since 2018. Deripaska is also the former employer, and the creditor, of Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, Paul Manafort.

The reporting on this so far seems to miss the larger implications. One of them is that Trump’s historical position looks far cloudier. In 2016, Trump’s campaign manager (Manafort) was a former employee of a Russian oligarch (Deripaska), and owed money to that same Russian oligarch. And the FBI special agent (McGonigal) who was charged with investigating the Trump campaign’s Russian connections then went to work (according to the indictment) for that very same Russian oligarch (Deripaska). This is obviously very bad for Trump personally. But it is also very bad for FBI New York, for the FBI generally, and for the United States of America.”

Former FBI Director James Comey broke Justice Department policy and notified the public about the laptop emails because he believed that some FBI New York field office agents were so hostile to Hillary Clinton that they would leak the information. And the New York Times had reporters all too willing to amplify those leaks. 

The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Will Bunch goes into this part of the scandal:

“It was arguably the most consequential “October Surprise” in the history of American presidential elections. In the waning days of the 2016 race, with polls showing Hillary Clinton clinging to a lead over Donald Trump, two last-minute stories broke that rekindled on-the-fence voters’ ethical doubts about Democrat Clinton and quashed a budding scandal around her GOP rival.

Except the “October Surprise” was no surprise to one key player: Rudolph Giuliani, the ex-New York mayor and Trump insider who later became the 45th president’s attorney. Late that month, Giuliani told Fox News that the trailing Republican nominee had “a surprise or two that you’re going to hear about in the next few days. I mean, I’m talking about some pretty big surprises.”

Just two days later, then-FBI director James Comey revealed the bureau had reopened its probe into Clinton’s emails, based on the possible discovery of new communications on a laptop belonging to disgraced New York politico Anthony Weiner. The news jolted the campaign with a particularly strong boost from the New York Times, which devoted two-thirds of its front page to the story — and the notion it was a major blow to Clinton’s prospects.

It was later reported that Comey was motivated to make the unusual announcement about the laptop because he feared leaks from the FBI’s New York field office, which, according to Reuters, had “a faction of investigators based in the office known to be hostile to Hillary Clinton.” Indeed, Giuliani bragged immediately after that he had sources in the FBI, including current agents.”

We should demand to learn more about why Giuliani was so confident about information he shouldn’t have had.

The FBI and the New York Times have always had a bunch of explaining to do about how they handled this email disclosure. The new indictments of former agent McGonigal about his alleged connections to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska make getting answers to them more urgent.  

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Enshittification Explains the Internet

Parker Malloy shared this fantastic post from Cory Doctorow that explains so much about why the internet is so awful. As Malloy points out, “It’s a great piece of writing that helps explain the bait-and-switch platforms play on users and business partners alike.”

Doctorow explains the life cycle of social media companies and why they all end up in the same horrible place. He writes, “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Doctorow demonstrates how we have seen this happen with Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Each of these companies followed the same enshittification lifecycle, and now TikTok is headed in the same direction. 

“This is enshittification: surpluses are first directed to users; then, once they’re locked in, surpluses go to suppliers; then once they’re locked in, the surplus is handed to shareholders and the platform becomes a useless pile of shit. From mobile app stores to Steam, from Facebook to Twitter, this is the enshittification lifecycle.”

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The AR-15 for Kids

Intelligencer’s Matt Stieb writes about the new child version of the AR-15. “At a gun expo in Las Vegas last January, Eric Schmid, the founder of WEE1 Tactical, demonstrated his company’s first offering: the JR-15, a play on the popular AR-15 assault rifle designed to look just like its deadly cousin, but 20 percent smaller. “It fits the kids really well,” he told a visitor to his booth. “That’ll give them the confidence to hold this thing the way they should have confidence holding it — no drop down in the front trying to manage a weight that’s not right for them. It just fits ’em, fits ’em really well.”

That’s vital for a well-regulated militia. 

Banning Your Enemies with Facial Recognition

Madison Square Guardian Chief Executive Officer James Dolan has long earned a reputation as one of the worst owners in professional sports. 

But it isn’t enough just being the failson owner that continues to put awful teams on the court (New York Knicks) or ice (New York Rangers). Oh no, there’s more. Dolan is now topping those failures by using facial recognition technology at Madison Square Garden to ban attorneys working for firms suing him from attending events. 

Gothamist’s Jake Offenhartz provides the details: “Dolan has come under fire for his use of the surveillance technology to remove attorneys working for law firms with active litigation against MSG Entertainment, a holding company he runs that also oversees Radio City Music Hall and the Beacon Theatre.

In one highly publicized case, a mother chaperoning her daughter’s Girl Scout troop was removed from a Christmas Spectacular performance after cameras matched her face with a database of photos of lawyers working for banned firms.

But as he faces public indignation, lawsuits, state legislation and an inquiry from New York Attorney General Letitia James, Dolan is digging in and doubling down on his grudges, as he has often done in the past.”

The abuse of facial recognition technology is something about which we all should be concerned. As the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Adam Schwartz notes, “Face recognition technology is a special menace to privacy, racial justice, free expression, and information security.”

That is one of the reasons why authorities must stop Dolan now. And we must put proper regulations in place as soon as possible to protect our rights in public spaces. 

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. 

In this edition, Valenti explains how Kansas politicians continue to ignore the will of the state’s voters to propose other ways to enact a total abortion ban. “When questioned about the overwhelming voter response to the 2022 ballot measure, one of the bill’s sponsors, Rep. Randy Garber, said that he simply didn’t believe the vote was representative of public opinion.”

This dynamic is also happening in other states. “Republicans in Missouri are also eager to circumvent voters’ wishes—a House panel in the state pushed forward bills yesterday to make it harder to pass ballot measures and change the state constitution. And in Nebraska, Democrats are accusing their conservative counterparts of bending legislative rules in order to fast-track abortion restrictions.”

The Disappearance of Ashtrays

I am old enough to remember how ubiquitous ashtrays were in public spaces and homes. Given the horrible health impact of smoking, it is a significant improvement that ashtrays are not needed as much today. I hadn’t thought about how much has changed—and how beautiful some of them were—until I came across this article by Clive Thompson. 

He writes, “To our contemporary eye, perhaps the most surreal thing was that kids in elementary school would, as part of arts and crafts, routinely make an ashtray for our parents. If your class was doing a segment on clay or ceramics, everyone would have to figure out, huh, what should I make? A pencil-holder? A paperweight? (Perhaps an even more mystifying artifact, to the youth of today.) Nope. Instead, easily two-thirds of the class would decide that hey: Mom needs another ashtray.”

Yep. I made a couple of these in school. 

Marie Kondo Embraces The Joy of Some Chaos

If you are feeling anxious about the clutter in your house or workspace, understand that you are not alone. The Washington Post’s Jura Koncius profiles Marie Kondo and explains how her priorities have changed since the birth of her third child. 

“In the chill of January, we often examine how we are living. And right now, many of us are revisiting the tidying principles of Japanese lifestyle queen Marie Kondo.

But the ever-organized Kondo, it seems, is a bit frazzled since giving birth to her third child in 2021. Like most of us, she’s having trouble keeping up with all of it. Never fear, though: She is still sparking joy. It’s just that, these days, that doesn’t hinge on having a tidy house. Her new rituals turn inward, to more thoughtful things than a drawer full of perfectly folded T-shirts or an Instagram-worthy spice cabinet.”

Kids make organizing a house more difficult? Who could have guessed?

Quick Pitches

The Wall Street Journal’s Andrew Beaton and Joshua Robinson explain the power of the chess world’s newest antagonist: “Mittens—or technically the chess bot known as Mittens—might look cute. Her listed chess rating of a single point seems innocuous. But her play over the past few weeks, which has bedeviled regular pawn-pushers, grandmasters, and champions who could play for the world title, is downright terrifying. And as it turns out, people are gluttons for punishment.”

My Pocket account shared this great explainer by Tim McMillan about the Pentagon’s process for creating code words and secret project nicknames. 

Chicago magazine’s Elly Fishman profiles John Becker, who musicians like Joshua Bell trust to repair some of the world’s most expensive violins. “For Becker, the work is an act of historic and cultural preservation. He often points to something Fulton once told him: “We are caretakers of these instruments. We move on, but these instruments continue to the next generation.”

Science Alert’s Michelle Starr writes that the James Webb Space Telescope has found the elements of biochemistry in the coldest and darkest place yet. “In a molecular cloud called Chamaeleon I, located over 500 light-years from Earth, data from the telescope has revealed the presence of frozen carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and sulfur – elements vital to the formation of atmospheres and molecules such as amino acids, collectively known as CHONS.”

Political campaigns sent more than 15 billion texts in 2022 (and Republicans sent 12 billion of them). There were more political texts than calls made during last year’s elections. And, as NBC News’ Alex Ford explains, “Most voters don’t have to do anything to wind up on political text lists. Contact information for millions of voters has already been collected into vast databases known as data exchanges, which are managed by brokers that sell access to campaigns. The data itself, according to the brokers, is collected from public records and other sources.”

I hope the California Legislature makes this happen.

Proud to announce that @SenBlakespear and I are introducing new legislation, #SB8, that would require CA gun owners to obtain insurance for the negligent or accidental use of firearms. If enacted, the bill would make CA the first state to adopt such law.

— Nancy Skinner (@NancySkinnerCA) 5:42 PM ∙ Jan 26, 2023

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A Dedication

I’m dedicating the 23rd issue of this newsletter to my all-time favorite baseball player, Chicago Cubs Hall of Fame second baseman Ryne Sandberg. The Cubs retired his #23 uniform in 2005, and the team recently announced that he will become the fifth player to be honored with a statue outside Wrigley Field later this year.  

He became my favorite player in 1984 when he won the National League Most Valuable Player Award while leading the Cubs to their first postseason appearance since 1945. But what he did against the St. Louis Cardinals on June 23, 1984, cemented my adoration in what has become known as the Sandberg Game. 

On the NBC Game of the Week (when that institution mattered), Sandberg hit game-tying home runs in the 9th and 10th innings to help the Cubs come from behind to beat our most bitter rivals. The Cubs’ Marquee Network made an excellent documentary about this game a couple of years ago. 

But now, back to this newsletter’s more typical content—even though I am quite sure Ryno would disagree with my perspective on almost everything that follows. It happens. 

Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

Don’t Speak to the Police

New York Times columnist Farhad Manjoo explains how Alec Baldwin’s indictment for involuntary manslaughter demonstrates why people—even innocent people—should use their Fifth Amendment rights when interacting with police. 

New Mexico prosecutors filed the charges against Baldwin and the film’s armorer for the October 2021 fatal shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of the film Rust. Baldwin told the police in the aftermath of the shooting that he would do whatever he could to help. Baldwin spoke to the police about the incident after being told they were not charging him.

Manjoo notes that he is more interested in the general idea than in Baldwin’s specific case, explaining why he has become a “zealot” for the right to remain silent: “The Fifth Amendment of the Constitution allows Americans to refuse to answer questions from law enforcement. Yet despite the ritualistic incantation of the Miranda warning on every TV police procedural, silence is a right that people can find hard to accept. If you’re convinced of your innocence, aren’t you obligated to help the police solve the matter under investigation? Refusing to talk to the police seems like something people do only when they’ve got something to hide.

I have only a passing interest in Baldwin’s guilt or innocence. Several years ago, though, I came upon the work of James Duane, a professor at Regent Law School in Virginia who has become a Johnny Appleseed of Fifth Amendment advocacy. A video of a lecture Duane gave a decade ago on the importance of the Fifth Amendment, “Don’t Talk to the Police,” has been viewed millions of times on YouTube, and Duane has since given his talk dozens of times around the country. The title of his book “You Have the Right to Remain Innocent” sums up the case for silence, since the presumption of innocence and the burden prosecutors bear to prove guilt even when the accused remains silent are the bedrock of American criminal law.”

Duane’s 2012 lecture proved vital to me when I faced a situation where I had to decide whether to speak to the police voluntarily. I listened to my attorney after watching this lecture. You can watch Duane’s presentation on YouTube by clicking here. 

Manjoo explains that one of the most critical reasons Duane urges people to remain silent is because it is legal for the police to lie when they interrogate you. He writes, “Looking beyond the Baldwin case, Duane argues that a key danger is that in trying to defend yourself to the police, you may unwittingly admit some wrongdoing. Navigating around such dangers is made all the more difficult because courts have given the police wide leeway to lie to people being interrogated.

“They will lie to you about what crime they are actually investigating,” Duane writes in his book, “whether they regard you as a suspect, whether they plan to prosecute you, what evidence they have against you, whether your answers may help you, whether your statements are off the record, and whether the other witnesses have agreed to talk to them — even about what those witnesses have or have not said.”

Last September, California Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law Assembly Member Chris Holden’s AB 2644. The legislation prohibits law enforcement officers “from employing threats, physical harm, deception, or psychologically manipulative interrogation tactics, as specified, during a custodial interrogation of a person 17 years of age or younger.” The California Innocence Coalition supported the bill, and California is the fourth state (after Illinois, Utah, and Oregon) to ban the police from using these tactics with minors. 

I would go further. I don’t think the police should be able to lie in interrogations. And as long as they can do that, people should utilize their Fifth Amendment protections to defend themselves. 

Also, let’s stop tolerating how police routinely lie to the media. Reporters and editors do not need to be stenographers.

MN Police claimed George Floyd died of a “medical incident” & made 0 mention of kneeling on his neck for 9 min

Memphis Police claimed Tyre Nichols had “trouble breathing” & made 0 mention of beating him for 10 min

Media needs to hold police accountable—not parrot their claims.

— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) 4:52 AM ∙ Jan 28, 2023

Statistician Fights to Exonerate People

Science’s Cathleen O’Grady writes about how the Dutch statistician Richard Gill has become a leading expert on how the improper use of statistics can lead to the convictions of innocent people. 

O’Grady writes, “It wasn’t until late 2006, when Gill read two whistleblowers’ account of the trial, that he started to look into the case—and became incandescent. Tunnel vision, bad statistics, and poor human intuitions about coincidence had marred the investigation. When Gill ran the numbers himself, he found the string of deaths on De Berk’s watch might well be entirely due to coincidence. Along with fellow statisticians, whistleblowers, and others, Gill campaigned for a retrial that eventually led to De Berk’s exoneration in 2010. Her case is now considered one of the worst miscarriages of justice in the Netherlands.

It also opened a new chapter in Gill’s professional life: He became a leading expert on the statistics of medical murder cases similar to De Berk’s—and a loud, persistent voice warning of the shoddy statistics that are sometimes central to prosecutors’ arguments. “In a normal murder case, you actually have a body which has clearly been murdered,” he says. When there’s only a suspicious cluster of deaths, investigators may assume a murderer is at work and selectively focus on evidence that supports that assumption. People’s intuition of an “impossible coincidence” joins the dots in the evidence.”

Chris Fabricant, the author of the book Junk Science and the American Criminal Justice System, has been warning people about the work we need to do to protect innocent people from junk science in our courtrooms. Thanks to the C-SPAN archive, you can watch Fabricant talk about his book at the Printers Row Lit Fest. 

Thank you for reading Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Fast Food Worker Wages on the November 2024 Ballot

The California Secretary of State’s office announced that a coalition of fast food businesses and trade groups successfully collected enough signatures to force a voter referendum on a bill signed into law last year to improve the working conditions of fast food workers in the state. 

The Los Angeles Times’ Suhauna Hussain writes, “AB 257 sought to create a first-of-its-kind council of workers, corporations, franchisees and government representatives with a mandate to set wages and other workplace standards statewide.

Had the law gone into effect Jan. 1 as planned, the council would have had the authority to raise the minimum hourly wage for fast-food workers as high as $22 this year.

Labor advocates said the legislation could transform collective bargaining, creating a precedent in the U.S. for negotiating workplace standards. The coalition of businesses opposing the law, led by the International Franchise Assn. and the National Restaurant Assn., argued the law would saddle businesses with higher labor costs and increase food prices.

Fast-food corporations and business trade groups including In-N-Out, Chipotle, Chick-Fil-A, McDonald’s, Starbucks and the National Restaurant Assn. donated millions to support the referendum effort, according to the nonpartisan Fair Political Practices Commission.”

The referendum about whether to allow the bill to go into effect will appear on the November 2024 ballot. I suspect it will be an expensive campaign on both sides. 

The Power of Biden’s Corporate Competition Executive Order 

The American Prospect’s David Dayen argues that we should be taking more notice of an executive order President Joe Biden signed that has significantly impacted our economy. 

Dayen writes, “On July 9, 2021, President Joe Biden signed one of the most sweeping changes to domestic policy since FDR. It was not legislation: His signature climate and health law would take another year to gestate. This was a request that the government get into the business of fostering competition in the U.S. economy again.

Flanked by Cabinet officials and agency heads, Biden condemned Robert Bork’s pro-corporate legal revolution in the 1980s, which destroyed antitrust, leading to concentrated markets, raised prices, suppressed wages, stifled innovation, weakened growth, and robbing citizens of the liberty to pursue their talents. Competition policy, Biden said, “is how we ensure that our economy isn’t about people working for capitalism; it’s about capitalism working for people.”

The executive order outlines a whopping 72 different actions, but with a coherent objective. It seeks to revert government’s role back to that of the Progressive and New Deal eras. Breaking up monopolies was a priority then, complemented by numerous other initiatives—smarter military procurement, common-carrier requirements, banking regulations, public options—that centered competition as a counterweight to the industrial leviathan.”

Naturally, some of those initiatives have gone further than others. Still, the executive order, and key appointments made by Biden, have changed the dynamics around antitrust laws and have fostered increased competition in our economy. We need more of it. 

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Today she highlights a new bill seeking to create a federal government website to collect data on pregnant women.

Valenti explains, “Republicans want to create a federal anti-abortion website that not only seeks to deceive women about abortion and direct them to crisis pregnancy centers—but would collect their personal information to give to anti-abortion groups.

The ‘Standing with Moms Act’ was introduced this week in the House by South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, and in the Senate by Florida Sen Marco Rubio. The legislation would set up the website life.gov as a portal for pregnant women that would explain the “risks related to abortion at all stages of fetal development,” and direct users to local crisis pregnancy centers. But here’s where it gets interesting: The way that this government website would let users know about crisis pregnancy centers in their area is by taking women through a series of questions about their location and contact information.”

Can pundits please stop arguing that Mace and Rubio are moderates?

On a related note, The Nation’s Elie Mystal writes about how forced-birth advocates are forum shopping in our judiciary as they seek to ban abortion medication. 

Mystal writes, “Unfortunately, we have to treat this incoherent nonsense masquerading as a lawsuit as a serious threat to abortion drugs because of the judge who recently got hold of the case: Matthew Kacsmaryk. Kacsmaryk is a Trump-appointed district court judge in Texas who is basically the bad guy from a Nathaniel Hawthorne novel made flesh. He was an anti-gay crusader for a Christian right law firm before Trump raised him up to be a judge. He claims that homosexuality is a “disorder.” He’s attacked the right to contraception and denounced the “sexual revolution” of the 1960s and ’70s. Senator Chuck Schumer said Kacsmaryk “has demonstrated a hostility to the LGBTQ community bordering on paranoia.”

Since rising to the bench, Kacsmaryk has functioned as a wish-fulfillment machine for the most wackadoodle right-wing causes and legal theories. He once ordered the Biden administration to reinstate Trump’s “Remain in Mexico” immigration policy—and then tried to do it again, even after he was overruled by the Supreme Court.”

Mystal explains that Kacsmaryk getting this case is no accident but rather part of a coordinated strategy that has every chance of working.

Altercation Says Goodbye

One of my favorite columnists, Eric Alterman, is leaving The American Prospect because his columnist position’s grant funding has run out. I’m sure he will pop up somewhere else, but I wanted to share a couple of paragraphs from his last newsletter in which Alterman distills why these times seem so perilous. 

“The key question I want to leave people with is this: Given the lack of guardrails, how far are these people willing to go? Trump is as popular as he was before January 6th and has been invited back on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. His only credible alternative for the Republican nomination at this point, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is in many significant respects even worse than Trump. Kevin McCarthy is elevating lunatic insurrectionists who fear Jewish space lasers and children’s books about loving gay parents to positions with real power and rejecting people merely because they are competent and committed to the Constitution. Tucker Carlson, a paranoid, racist co-conspirator of the morally disgusting Alex Jones, has the highest ratings in cable news. Thanks in part to a great lineup at the New York Jewish Film Festival this month, I’ve just recently seen a whole bunch of films about the fate of fascism in Germany, Austria, France, Ukraine, and Poland—I’m considering Stalinism to be a form of fascism here—and another about Eichmann’s trial and death in Israel, and elsewhere in theaters about town, about fascism in Argentina, in Italy (which I wrote about here), and another one about Austria. They speak to this question, which has long been on my mind: How far are these people willing to go and what is to stop them?

My answer is that I really don’t know. I just know I never imagined, when I began writing about the overall awfulness of the American right and the wimpiness of its left, that my country would ever face a question like this one.”

Baseball Online Art Exhibition

The Society for American Baseball Research’s Lefty O’Doul (San Francisco Bay Chapter) shared that a new online exhibition from Krevsky Fine Art, Art of Baseball: Hot Stove League, launched on January 26 and will run through March 30. You can click here to view the exhibition.

“The Hot Stove League refers to the efforts by sportswriters who wrote about baseball during the dark winter season. Between the end of the World Series and the opening of Spring Training in mid February, in order to maintain interest in the truly folk tradition of America’s Pastime, stories were written about legends of the past and prospects for the future. It is still a flourishing institution in small towns across the country. In anticipation of the next season’s cry of “Play Ball,” pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training February 15th so get ready and enjoy the show.”

Quick Pitches

Netflix dominated the streaming charts in 2022, with 11 of the top 15 most-streamed programs, led by Stranger Things. 

The AP Stylebook deleted this tweet after the French Embassy U.S. successfully mocked it. 

That said, as long as the AP is reconsidering things, it’s time to adopt the Oxford comma. 

Of these, I’m a 6, but only because I don’t see a fountain pen option.

OK, you can only write with ONE type of pen for the rest of your life, which one are you picking? (ignoring the ink color)

— 𝘾𝙝𝙧𝙞𝙨 𝙂𝙧𝙤𝙨𝙨𝙚 (@Chris_Grosse) 11:06 PM ∙ Jan 25, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

It’s 90 Seconds to Midnight

Albert Einstein joined several University of Chicago scientists involved with the Manhattan Project to found The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945. As part of their publicity efforts, the organization created The Doomsday Clock two years later, using the imagery of the apocalypse (midnight) and the contemporary idiom of nuclear explosion (countdown to zero) to convey threats to humanity and the planet. 

The Bulletin updates the clock each January. This year’s update moves the clock’s hands forward to 90 seconds to midnight—the closest they have ever set it to midnight.

The Bulletin explains why its Science and Security Board made this change: “This year, the Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists moves the hands of the Doomsday Clock forward, largely (though not exclusively) because of the mounting dangers of the war in Ukraine. The Clock now stands at 90 seconds to midnight—the closest to global catastrophe it has ever been.

The war in Ukraine may enter a second horrifying year, with both sides convinced they can win. Ukraine’s sovereignty and broader European security arrangements that have largely held since the end of World War II are at stake. Also, Russia’s war on Ukraine has raised profound questions about how states interact, eroding norms of international conduct that underpin successful responses to a variety of global risks.

And worst of all, Russia’s thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons remind the world that escalation of the conflict—by accident, intention, or miscalculation—is a terrible risk. The possibility that the conflict could spin out of anyone’s control remains high.”

The Bulletin also cites the danger that the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the United States may expire in February 2026, the impact of the climate emergency, biological events, and the potential misuse of disruptive technologies as factors requiring them to move the clock forward. 

Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

MAGA’s Godfather Retires

Paleoconservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan announced his retirement from a 60-year writing career. He started as an op-ed writer with the St. Louis Globe-Democrat before moving into a speechwriting role with former President Richard Nixon. When not serving in the White House, Buchanan was a national columnist and television pundit. He also ran unsuccessfully for the presidency in 1992, 1996, and 2000. 

Why should we care? Because I agree with John Ganz’s assessment of Buchanan’s career: “I’ve long believed there’s a case to be made that Buchanan, not Buckley, not Goldwater, and not even Ronald Reagan, is the most consequential right-wing figure of the past century.”

Those runs for president may not have succeeded personally, but they set the stage for former President Donald Trump’s MAGA coalition. Intelligencer’s Ed Kilgore explains this dynamic: “To put it plainly, Pat Buchanan was the living link between the nativist, isolationist, and protectionist paleoconservative tradition in GOP politics — which most observers thought had died in the 1950s — and the MAGA conservatism associated with Donald Trump. Both these strains of right-wing thought substituted nativism and economic nationalism for the free-market ideology that prevailed in the last half of the twentieth century, combined with an aggressive traditionalism on cultural matters and heavy-handed appeals to white racist fears of a more diverse nation. This “blood and soil” politics provided an American version of the authoritarian movements that wreaked so much damage in Europe and beyond.”

Ganz goes into more detail about Buchanan’s career, including how he persuaded Nixon to veto legislation that would have created a national system of daycare and afterschool programs because Buchanan saw the idea as a threat to the family unit and Western Civilization. 

And I hope Kilgore isn’t prophetic as he sums up Buchanan’s career: “The Buchanan legacy is one of a deeply reactionary point of view that quite recently looked to be a thing of the past but now seems prophetic. He may have statues built to him if the right-wing authoritarians he admires gain power in America or elsewhere.”

Meta Brings Back Trump

In the January 17 edition of this newsletter, I made a prediction about what I feared Meta’s President for Global Affairs Nick Clegg would decide to do as he faced a deadline to announce if the company was going to allow former President Donald Trump to return to Facebook and Instagram. Meta banned Trump in the wake of the January 6, 2021, insurrection against the United States government. 

I wrote, “Given that Trump’s posts have gotten even more extreme on his Truth Social platform, I believe Meta should make Trump’s ban permanent. Facebook may not be as powerful as it was in 2020, but it was one of the social media platforms used to organize the failed coup attempt in Brazil earlier this month. The danger to our democracy remains. 

Given the damage done to the United Kingdom in the aftermath of Clegg’s decision to take his Liberal Democrats into a coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010, however, I fear this is another big call Clegg will get wrong.”

Clegg has a brand. Oh well. But I guess this was one way for Facebook actually to add a user in 2023. 

The Washington Post’s Will Oremus writes about how Clegg is justifying the decision to reinstate Trump: “He went on to lay out a somewhat convoluted, legalistic explanation for why reinstating Trump was the only logical move according to Meta’s protocols and community standards, maintaining the company’s tradition of valiantly resisting any notion that it’s simply making all this stuff up as it goes along.

The crux of the argument is that suspending Trump was a move made in a moment of crisis for the country, and that the crisis has since subsided, justifying his return. Though the Jan. 6 committee found evidence that Facebook and other social platforms helped to create the conditions for the U.S. Capitol attack, its final report buried those findings, and Clegg’s announcement made no mention of Facebook bearing any responsibility.”

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. 

Valenti writes about a horrific story from Texas: “Conservatives claim that women won’t be targeted as a result of abortion bans, but that lie has been falling apart at the seams. The latest example comes to us from Texas, where a young woman miscarried at a hospital and the fetal remains were released to her—legally. But when she had a small burial at a local park, someone called the police, who dug up the remains, sent them for an autopsy and issued a public alert looking for the woman and another person seen with her at the park. The woman went to police after seeing the media coverage; but even after explaining the situation it appears that the remains are still with the medical examiner and the District Attorney is reviewing the case. 

So this young woman who just lost her pregnancy is now dealing with the horrific trauma of being investigated—her fetus dug up against her will—and the added shame of having the media cover her loss as if it was some kind of crime. This is our post-Roe reality.”

This is vile.

Thank you for reading Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter. This post is public so feel free to share it.

California Sends Toxic Waste to Nearby States

This CalMatters investigative report finds that “environmentally stringent California sends nearly half its toxic waste across its borders, often to states with weaker rules.” Worse, the Department of Toxic Substances Control is one of the biggest out-of-state dumpers. 

U.S. Soccer Honors Grant Wahl

Journalist Grant Wahl passed away while covering the World Cup in Qatar. For a long time, he was the only mainstream journalist (starting at Sports Illustrated) to cover women’s and men’s soccer in this country. His death at the age of 49 devastated the U.S. soccer community. 

So I appreciate that his legacy will be appropriately honored over the next few years. The Associated Press explains: “The late Grant Wahl will be honored with this year’s Colin Jose Media Award — given to journalists who made long-term contributions to soccer in the United States — and a seat will be saved for him in the press box for every home U.S. men’s and women’s game between now and the 2026 World Cup.” 

Thank you, @ussoccer @ussoccer_comms @AmericanOutlaws @soccerhof. 🙏🏾🙏🏾🙏🏾

espn.com/soccer/united-…

— Céline Gounder, MD, ScM, FIDSA 🇺🇦 (@celinegounder) 3:43 AM ∙ Jan 26, 2023

I discussed Wahl’s legacy more in the January 9 edition of this newsletter, as I shared an op-ed written by his widow, Dr. Céline Gounder, the prominent infectious disease physician and epidemiologist. “Dr. Céline Gounder explains what she’s faced after the loss of her husband, the late soccer journalist Grant Wahl, to a ruptured aortic aneurysm while he was covering the recent Men’s World Cup in Qatar. (Wahl was one of my favorite writers and journalists, and his death deeply impacted many people.) Because Grounder is an infectious disease physician and epidemiologist who has been a prominent voice during this Covid pandemic, anti-vaxxers leaped to blame the vaccine—and Grounder—for Wahl’s death. The messages they sent to her were nothing short of evil.”

Quick Pitches

The best thing about this graphic is realizing that batters have a .378(!) on-base percentage (14/37) when they are the potential final out of a perfect game. The Los Angeles Dodgers were the best team in 2022 with a .333 OBP. 

Rarity of events in MLB games (individual, not team)

— Jay Cuda (@JayCuda) 1:07 AM ∙ Jan 26, 2023

Marc Maron will deal with some hard stuff in his new stand-up special coming out on HBO Max on February 11 (including the sudden passing in May 2020 of his partner Lynn Shelton). Maron said he felt good about the taping while discussing it on his podcast. So I have been looking forward to seeing how he puts it all together. 

His happy place is darker than most.

#MarcMaron: From Bleak to Dark premieres February 11 on @hbomax.

— HBO (@HBO) 6:00 PM ∙ Jan 25, 2023

There’s a bit of this going around. 

Word of the day is ‘bayard’ (16th century): one who shuts their eyes to reality and has all the confidence of ignorance.

— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) 8:47 AM ∙ Jan 26, 2023

And watching this is death by a thousand cuts. 

Here’s 52 seconds of senators making Taylor Swift references at the Ticketmaster hearing.

nbcnews.to/3kHsn9n

— NBC News (@NBCNews) 7:55 PM ∙ Jan 24, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

Red States Enjoying Green Money

The Wall Street Journal’s Phred Dvorak writes about a new infrastructure spending analysis from his newspaper: “Republican-leaning states are attracting most of the clean-energy investments spurred by the Biden administration’s signature Inflation Reduction Act, a bill that passed the U.S. Congress without any Republican votes.”

Of course, this makes sense. Many red states are in areas with plentiful sun and wind. Local officials are happy to have the projects and the jobs they create. Dvorak explains, “Wind and solar-power development has been strong in red-leaning Sun Belt states because many of them get larger amounts of sun and wind, and have more land available than more densely populated, blue-leaning areas such as the Northeast, industry experts say.”

This story brings to mind an article from The Atlantic’s Franklin Foer earlier this month. Foer argues that President Joe Biden plans to campaign heavily on the infrastructure projects made possible by the legislation passed in his first term. Foer spells out how Biden has grand ambitions for this work: 

“Overseeing these investments will allow Biden to fulfill the two grandest ambitions of his presidency. The first ambition is both lofty and self-interested. He has long argued that democracy will prevail in its struggle against authoritarianism only if it can demonstrate its competence to the world. That means passing legislation. But he believes that non-college-educated voters, the neglected constituents he wants to take back from the Republicans, hardly know about the big bills emanating from Washington with banal names. And they won’t believe in their efficacy in any case, unless they can see the fruits of the legislation with their own eyes.

Biden intends to deluge this group with relentless salesmanship—christening new airports and standing next to local officials as they break ground on new factories and tunnels. When he daydreams in the Oval Office, he imagines omnipresent road signs announcing new government projects in his name. In his mind, there will be Biden Rest Stops as far as the eye can see.

His second ambition is far trickier. He doesn’t just imagine scattered projects. He wants to comprehensively change the economy of entire regions of the country. By geographically concentrating investments—in broadband, airports, semiconductor plants, universities—he can transform depressed remnants of the Rust Belt into the next iteration of North Carolina’s Research Triangle. By seizing the commanding heights of the industries of the future, he can reindustrialize America.”

Given that the House Republican majority will make it nearly impossible to govern over the next two years, Biden going on the road to tout these investments makes sense—even if it is with someone like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY).

Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

San Francisco Police Use Marijuana to Harass Black People

The San Francisco Chronicle analyzed more than three years of data about police stops in the city and found that officers “regularly claim they suspect marijuana or smell a suspicious odor to justify needless searches of Black people in the city.”

The results are stark but not surprising, given recent coverage of how police officers target groups of people with pretextual stops. The Chronicle’s Susie Neilson and Justin Phillips lay out what the paper found:

“In San Francisco specifically, Black people were about six times as likely to be stopped by police as white people in 2020, and 10 times more likely to be searched as a result of a stop. And while white people were more likely to be in possession of illegal substances when searched, Black people are more likely to be subjected to physical force by police, according to a state-level advisory board tasked with reducing police bias.

San Francisco’s disproportionate stop-and-search rates make it an outlier even in California, where Black people are disproportionately stopped by every law enforcement agency reporting data to the state, as a previous Chronicle analysis found.”

In the January 18, 2023, edition of this newsletter, I mentioned that California State Senator Steven Bradford (D-Gardena) is trying again to pass legislation banning many kinds of pretextual stops. The Chronicle’s research provides another example of why that legislation is necessary. 

Debt Ceiling Fight Is an Attack on Democracy

New York’s Jonathan Chait says what needs to be said about the current national debt limit situation: the House Republicans’ position is dangerous to the world economy and an attack on democracy. 

“Republicans, on the other hand, lost ground in the Senate and have not won the presidency. They wish to use their narrow control of one chamber now to force the entire elected government to accede to sweeping domestic change that almost nobody campaigned on, or even mentioned, last fall.

The Republican Party is plotting a series of cuts — to programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security — without even going through the pretense of obtaining a mandate. Rather than campaign on a platform of shrinking social-insurance programs, they ignored this question almost entirely, failed to win either the presidency or the Senate, and have responded to this defeat by attempting to force through their radical program anyway by exploiting a quirk in federal law.

This is not just a threat to the global economic system or to the welfare state. It is a challenge to democracy itself, an attempted domestic-policy coup.”

Republicans could campaign to cut Medicare, Social Security, and other federal spending and see how it works for them. Instead, when a Democrat is the president, they create this crisis to try to get Democrats to take the blame for cutting popular programs. (I hope President Biden doesn’t fall for it.)

As I mentioned in the January 16, 2023, edition of this newsletter, my preference is for President Biden to declare that the national debt limit is unconstitutional under the taxing power of the 1787 Constitution (see Federalist 30, for example) or the 14th Amendment’s public debt clause in Section 4. 

But legal scholar Rohan Grey makes a convincing case in this piece by The Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey that minting the trillion dollar platinum coin may make the most sense—and actually is a less radical and disruptive idea than many of the extraordinary measures and accounting gimmicks the U.S. Treasury is using at this moment to keep the nation from defaulting on its debt. 

The Putin Power Myth

Puck’s Julie Ioffe explains how the oil price cap designed by the Biden Administration is (surprisingly) working to keep Russia pumping oil while limiting how much Vladimir Putin’s regime can profit from it. 

In the end, as Ioffe writes, Putin has destroyed an energy business it took three generations of Russian leaders to create. And now that Europe has been forced to find alternatives, that business isn’t likely to return even after the war Russia started in Ukraine ends.

“It was the Kremlin’s prophecy of what they were sure the winter of 2023 would bring to Europe: a brutal reckoning for their support of Ukraine and betrayal of their energy overlord, Russia.

It turned out, it was mostly hubris. A warm winter, low energy prices, and Europe’s rapid turn away from Russian energy have revealed that the balance of power wasn’t quite as durable as the Kremlin had predicted. Moreover, the now nearly two-month G7 and E.U. price cap on seaborne exports of Russian oil has produced surprising results, further cutting into the Kremlin’s energy dominance of the West. (To recap: It was a measure designed by the Biden administration to simultaneously incentivize Russia, one of the world’s largest oil producers, to both keep pumping oil so as to not create an energy crisis at a moment when the world was in an inflationary spiral all while preventing the Kremlin from manipulating prices to fund its ruthless invasion of Ukraine.)”

Thank you for reading Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. 

Today’s most important story is from an Indiana Senate candidate making the mistake of sharing the quiet part out loud. As Valenti explains, “An Indiana Republican running for U.S. Senate wants to institute a travel ban on women. In a radio interview last week, U.S. Rep. Jim Banks indicated that he would support legislation that stopped women from leaving the state for abortion.”

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard a Republican candidate or elected official say something like this. So let’s be clear: a significant part of our nation is heading down this road. It will start with laws punishing organizations and employers that provide funding for women to go to different states. Then we will see other laws to punish women. But piece by piece—starting with the states and moving to the federal government—this is part of their goal. 

University of California Admissions Rates for Every California Public High School

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Nami Sumida has created this database showing the admission rates for University of California schools for every public high school in the state. You can search by high school to see how students do at each of the UC system’s nine undergraduate campuses.

The Earth’s Core Is Not Following a Bad Movie Plot

Earth’s inner core’s rotation is slowing down and stopping. But don’t worry; it’s all part of a pattern. As Science Alert’s Clare Watson explains, “Before anybody panics and searches for a copy of a terrible 20-year-old science fiction movie predicting such an event in hopes of inspiring a solution, it’s not the first time record of such an event. It’s not even the first in recent history.

“We show surprising observations that indicate the inner core has nearly ceased its rotation in the recent decade and may be experiencing a turning-back in a multidecadal oscillation, with another turning point in the early 1970s,” geophysicists Yi Yang and Xiaodong Song of Peking University in Beijing write in their published paper.”

Scott Rolen Elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame

The Baseball Writers Association of America elected former third baseman Scott Rolen to the Hall of Fame. Rolen made history with his election, becoming the person with the lowest first-year ballot percentage (10.2 percent) to eventually get the 75 percent vote required. It was his sixth year on the ballot. 

While it pains me to write positively about a former St. Louis Cardinal, Rolen absolutely deserves this honor. (Here is his player biography from the Society for American Baseball Research.) His career WAR (wins above replacement) of 70.1 is the ninth-best among all third basemen in history. 

In case you don’t know about WAR in the baseball context, here’s the MLB website’s definition, “WAR measures a player’s value in all facets of the game by deciphering how many more wins he’s worth than a replacement-level player at his same position (e.g., a Minor League replacement or a readily available fill-in free agent).”

Only eight players with more than 70 WAR haven’t gotten into the Hall of Fame. Four have a connection to the performance-enhancing drug era in the 1990s and early 2000s. (I think three of those—Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez—should get in, perhaps a conversation for another day.) Two of the others are from the 19th Century. 

Rolen was a great player, and the Baseball Hall of Fame needs more representation from the third basemen who have played the game. 

It’s the White Card!

REF SHOWS WHITE CARD ⬜️🇵🇹 Referee issues white card to Benfica and Sporting medical staffs after both ran to aid of a fan who had fainted in the stands during a Portuguese Women’s Cup match. White cards are used in Portugal to praise acts of fair play.

— Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) 4:36 PM ∙ Jan 23, 2023

In soccer, referees use yellow and red cards to discipline players. Two yellow cards, or one red card, will lead to a player’s ejection from a match and a likely suspension for one or more future games. 

This video shows the first time a match official issued a new kind of card: a white card to commend an act of fair play. It is a new initiative of Portugal’s National Plan for Ethics in Sport to encourage fair play.

Per Sky News: “The card was shown during a women’s cup match between Sporting Lisbon and Benfica on Saturday after medical staff from both clubs rushed to help a fan who had fainted in the stands as Benfica led 3-0 during the first half.

Referee Catarina Campos then showed the card to both teams.”

I love this idea. But how is this not a green card? A traffic light inspired the creation of the existing yellow and red cards! The comparison is sitting right there!

Tom Holland’s Umbrella

Twitter has an “unofficial” Tom Holland Umbrella Law that requires people to retweet this joyous video of Tom Holland performing Rhianna’s Umbrella on Lip Sync Battle. 

I didn’t see it on Twitter, but I am taking the fact I heard this song in a coffee shop while writing this newsletter as coming close enough to the rule. Thank you, Tom Holland. And enjoy!

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

Florida Students Lose Access to Classroom Books

Popular Information’s Judd Legum reports on how Florida school districts and teachers are trying to implement some of Gov. Ron DeSantis’ (R) worst culture war legislation. School districts are now telling teachers—under threat of felony prosecution—to remove student access to books in their classrooms until a media specialist can vet the books. 

“Teachers in Manatee County, Florida, are being told to make their classroom libraries — and any other “unvetted” book — inaccessible to students, or risk felony prosecution. The new policy is part of an effort to comply with new laws and regulations championed by Governor Ron DeSantis (R). It is based on the premise, promoted by right-wing advocacy groups, that teachers and librarians are using books to “groom” students or indoctrinate them with leftist ideologies. 

Kevin Chapman, the Chief of Staff for the Manatee County School District, told Popular Information that the policy was communicated to principals in a meeting last Wednesday. Individual schools are now in the process of informing teachers and other staff.”

And, to be clear, this isn’t about just one Florida county. It is happening statewide. 

“Similar policies will be implemented in schools across Florida. Some Florida schools do not have a media specialist, making the process even more cumbersome. 

That review must also be consistent with a complex training, which was heavily influenced by right-wing groups like Moms For Liberty and approved by the Florida Department of Education just last week. Any mistake by a librarian or others could result in criminal prosecution. This process must be repeated for any book brought into the school on an ongoing basis. But librarians and teachers are not being provided with any additional compensation for the extra work.”

And just in time for Florida Literacy Week! The laws that red state politicians pass to own the libs don’t die at the end of the celebratory press conference. School teachers and districts must implement them, and students encounter a degraded learning environment. 

Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Why Ukraine Needs to Win

As NATO nations consider what additional arms to provide Ukraine, historian and authoritarian expert Timothy Snyder shares 15 reasons why the world needs Ukraine to win the war Russia started. 

Snyder starts his list with the need to halt Russian atrocities and its genocidal occupation. He writes: 

“I am a historian of political atrocity, and for me personally number 1 — defeating an ongoing genocidal project — would be more than enough reason to want Ukrainian victory. But every single one of the other fourteen is hugely significant. Each presents the kind of opportunity that generations of policy planners wish for, but almost never get. Much has been done, we have not yet seen and seized the moment.”

In yesterday’s Atlantic Daily newsletter, Tom Nichols made a similar point: “At this point, the fight in Ukraine is not about borders or flags but about what kind of world we’ve built over the past century, and whether that world can sustain itself in the face of limitless brutality. As the Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin said in Davos last week: “We don’t know when the war ends, but Ukraine has to win. I don’t see another choice.”

Neither do I. 

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Here are some stories that she highlights: 

• Why hasn’t there been more media coverage of the extreme Arkansas anti-abortion bill that would criminalize miscarriages?
• A Tampa-based doctor describes the suffering Florida’s 15-week ban caused a pregnant woman with twins when one of the fetuses began to deliver. The patient had to wait for treatment because the doctors feared violating the law. As OBGYN Rachel Rapkin explained, “Because of the 15-week ban, she was forced to come to the office every day, as she waited in agony for the cardiac activity to stop or for her to develop signs of infection before the hospital would agree to end her pregnancy. By the end of the week, neither fetus had a heartbeat and doctors were finally permitted to end her pregnancy and prevent her from going into deadly septic shock.”
• And Idaho patients face similar problems: “The Idaho woman whose story went viral after she documented being denied miscarriage treatment in a series of videos on TikTok describes her 19-day ordeal and what if felt like to have a doctor explain that there was “trepidation” to give her care because of state law…”
• Vox’s Ian Millhiser explains why whether or not mailing abortion medication remains legal likely depends on how activist Republican judges rule and whether a Democrat or Republican is in the White House because of the Comstock Act. So I’m not optimistic. 

The Best Place to Hide During a Nuclear Exchange

Here’s information I hope we never have to use: Gizmodo shares where physicists have determined is the best place to seek shelter during a nuclear attack. 

“A new study provides a reality check about your chances of surviving a nuclear explosion. It suggests that, even if you’re hiding indoors and far away enough to avoid immediate disintegration, the high-speed winds created from the blast could still be enough to kill or seriously injure you. But the findings also indicate the best locations within a building to take shelter, should the worst-case scenario ever occur.

…

The worst places to hide seem to be in the direct vicinity of the windows, door openings, and hallways, since this is where the air will be most funneled through in the shockwave. But airspeeds are likely to be lowest in the room corners away from these openings along the walls facing the blast, so these areas should be the best to take immediate shelter.”

Nukemaps can help you figure out whether you’ll be outside the incineration radius of a nuclear explosion. You can go to that site, select a location, and decide what kind of nuclear weapon should explode there. It looks like I’d have a shot of surviving the initial burst of a detonation at the nearest Air Force Base to where I live. Of course, there’s still the radiation and radical environmental damage with which to contend, but one problem at a time. 

Oh, and I should mention that Timothy Snyder has “preventing the spread of nuclear weapons” as number 10 and “to reduce the risk of nuclear war” as number 11 on his list of reasons Ukraine needs to win, which I mentioned above. I wish this weren’t so relevant. 

Thank you for reading Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Opposing Putin

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny flew back to Russia two years ago this month despite knowing he would likely be arrested upon his return. Navalny had been in Germany to recover from an attempt to assassinate him using a Novichok nerve agent. 

The Observer’s Carole Cadwalladr profiles Maria Pevchikh and the work she has continued to lead with Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation as the opposition leader continues to be jailed by Vladimir Putin’s regime. 

“One of the foundation’s main objectives at the moment is simply to keep Navalny in the news. Inside Russia, they’re doing so via a whole new slew of YouTube channels, bringing news of the war to the public via the one channel that’s still available to them. And in the west, they’re doing it via a documentary, Navalny, an independent feature released last year that’s been nominated for a Bafta and shortlisted for an Oscar. Awards season is in full swing and for months Pevchikh and Navalny’s wife, Yulia Navalnaya, have been flying back and forth to America to talk and appear on panels and meet the great and the good. “I honestly don’t know where we would be without the documentary,” Pevchikh says. “It’s mentioned in every meeting I have with ministers or their staff. Everybody knows who he is because of it. And who I am.”

Cadwalladr tells the story of the foundation and its efforts to oppose Putin. It is difficult—but essential—work. And Navalny just earned an Oscar nomination for best feature-length documentary. It is streaming on HBO Max, and I thought it was outstanding. 

420 Jokes are Serious

I think the ongoing security fraud trial about Elon Musk’s August 7, 2018, tweet claiming he had secured funding to take Tesla private for $420 a share merits more attention. 

As the Verge’s Andrew J. Hawkins reports from the trial: “In testimony during his ongoing securities fraud trial on Monday, Musk argued that the $420-a-share price he proposed back in his infamous “funding secured” tweet from 2018 wasn’t a weed joke but actually just a coincidence — with a dash of karma.

Musk was asked about the proposed share price by Nicholas Porritt, an attorney for a class of Tesla investors who are suing the billionaire CEO for the loss of millions of dollars that they say resulted from his bungled attempt to take Tesla private. And it prompted an eyebrow-raising response from Musk regarding what he considered a serious proposal despite nearly everyone else taking it as an obvious reference to cannabis.

“You rounded up to 420 because you thought that would be a joke that your girlfriend will enjoy, isn’t that correct?” Porritt asked. “No,” Musk said, adding, “there is some, I think, karma around 420. I should question whether that is good or bad karma at this point.”

Buying Twitter for $54.20 a share sure has worked out for Musk. And that 420 reference—I’m sure—is just a coincidence too. 

Musk has already paid a $40 million fine to the Securities and Exchange Commission about the tweet. Still, he could be on the hook for billions more in damages if the jury finds him guilty of knowingly tweeting false information. 

The California Senate Race

Rep. Barbara Lee‘s (D) supporters are making the case that she will run to serve one term as a transitional figure to counter arguments that the 76-year-old may be too old for the job. 

Art and A.I. 

The Guardian’s Sarah Shaffi writes about artists who are angry that companies used their work without permission to train generative A.I. programs. 

As Shaffi explains, “Beyond creativity, there are deeper issues. An online campaign – #NotoAIArt – has seen artists sharing concerns about the legality of AI image generators, and about how they have the potential to devalue the skill of illustration. To create images from prompts, AI generators rely on databases of already existing art and text. These comprise billions of images that have been scraped from the internet. Among the biggest is the open-source LAION-5B dataset, used by DDG’s Text 2 Dream. Kaloyan Chernev, founder of DDG, says that the dataset comprises “largely public domain images sourced from the internet”, but many artists and illustrators say that databases will often also include a lot of copyrighted images.”

I also mentioned this controversy in my previous newsletter. It’s a complicated issue, but I think companies should ask artists to opt into these programs and companies should pay them royalties. 

See The Comet!

Phil Plait explains how you can see the green comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) over the next few weeks. No, apparently, it doesn’t have a catchy name yet. 

“The good news is its location in the sky: Toward the end of January it will be far to the north, close to the Big and Little Dippers, which means it’s up pretty much all night and decently high off the ground for most northern hemisphere observers. In fact, you may know the old method of finding Polaris, the North Star, by using the “pointer stars” at the end of the Big Dipper’s bowl, which point very nearly toward it.”

The comet has not been here for 50,000 years and may never return. So don’t miss your chance! 

What Did the U.S. Women’s National Team Learn

Just Women’s Sports Claire Watkins examines what the United States Women’s National Team learned on its trip to New Zealand last week. 

She writes, “The U.S. wrapped up their January game schedule in New Zealand on Friday, kicking off 2023 with two big wins, nine goals scored and none conceded. The trip was as much about getting acclimated to long travel in the World Cup host country as it was about friendly competition, but now that we’re under six months away from the tournament, every game matters.”

This Is Fine

K.C. Green, the creator of the webcomic that became one of the internet’s most recognizable memes, talks to the Washington Post’s Kelsey Ables about the 10th anniversary of This is Fine. 

“Stressed college kids, irked congressmen, dispirited crypto bros and disillusioned Christian bloggers have all seen themselves or their situations in the dog. Wearing his tidy little hat and staring at his sad little coffee cup, he has become the internet’s patron saint of denial, a hero of helpless resignation.”

Final Thought

The institutionalization of election denial as GOP dogma and practice is another sign it is now an autocratic party. Election denial is not just propaganda but a form of corruption. Its ultimate purpose is to discredit the idea of choosing leaders through elections.

— Ruth Ben-Ghiat (@ruthbenghiat) 6:30 PM ∙ Jan 22, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

Dubious Leaks and Investigations

The Supreme Court Marshal’s report examining the May 2022 leak of the draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case that overturned Roe v. Wade leaves us with more questions than answers. 

At the time of the leak, there were two main theories about who could be behind it. The Fox News side of the world tried to pin the blame on clerks associated with the liberal justices. But it always seemed to me more likely that the leak came from someone who wanted to ensure that the Justices would not water down Justice Samuel Alito’s draft, as Chief Justice John Roberts was reportedly trying to do. 

So there was a bunch of interest in what this investigation would find. But the results are conveniently unclear, as the New York Times’ Jodi Kantor explains: “On Thursday, the court issued a 20-page report disclosing that the marshal’s months long search for the leaker had been fruitless, and detailing embarrassing gaps in internal policies and security. While noting that 97 workers had been formally interviewed, the report did not say whether the justices or their spouses had been.

Public reaction was scathing: “Not even a sentence explaining why they were or weren’t questioned,” tweeted Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, a conservative magazine.

A day later, the court was forced to issue a second statement saying that the marshal had in fact conferred with the justices, but on very different terms from others at the institution. Lower-level employees had been formally interrogated, recorded, pressed to sign affidavits denying any involvement and warned that they could lose their jobs if they failed to answer questions fully, according to interviews and the report.

In contrast, conversations with the justices had been a two-way “iterative process” in which they asked as well as answered questions, the marshal, Gail A. Curley, wrote. She had seen no need for them to sign affidavits, she said.”

Oh really? Even though an allegation came to light while this investigation was happening that claimed Justice Samuel Alito leaked the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby opinion giving private employers the right not to include contraception in their health care plans because of religious liberty reasons?

I agree with what Esquire’s Charlie Pierce thinks about all of this: “This result calls into question how serious the court’s investigation actually was. The justices have made loud and angry noises about the leak, and they have done precisely nothing as a consequence. There is a reason why the justices kept this in-house. An outside investigation might’ve actually found out who leaked the draft opinion, and then everybody would’ve been embarrassed and, perhaps, there would be some talk of resignation, which in turn might’ve endangered the carefully engineered six-vote conservative majority on the court. And we can’t have that, now can we?”

Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Correct the Internet

A new initiative to Correct the Internet aims to fight back against the bias in interest search results that erases the accomplishments of women athletes. 

A group of organizations, including New Zealand soccer’s governing body, launched the effort with this commercial during halftime of New Zealand’s women’s match against the United States women’s national team on Friday. New Zealand will be co-hosting the 2023 Women’s World Cup with Australia. 

MUST WATCH. “Correct the Internet” aims to highlight the inaccuracies of internet searches that disregard the achievements of sportswomen. The new initiative from @NZ_Football Et al. – launches at HT of tonight’s friendly between New Zealand & the USWNT.

— Men in Blazers (@MenInBlazers) 8:54 PM ∙ Jan 20, 2023

The Correct the Internet website provides the background about why the effort is necessary: 

“This project began with a little girl searching the internet for her own school project. She was looking for the greatest sportswomen in the world, the kind of inspiring women she could look up to. Her searches revealed many of the greatest male athletes in the world and all of their achievements, but very few women. She was then shocked to discover that when she did search for the achievements of the greatest sportswomen, many of them were superior to the men she was being served in her search results. It turns out, Christine Sinclair has scored more goals in international football than Cristiano Ronaldo. Steffi Graf spent more time ranked number 1 in tennis than Novak Djokovic. And the USA Women’s Basketball team has won more than double the world cup titles of any men’s team. This was just the beginning.

The deeper we looked, the more inaccuracies we discovered in our search results. The facts say that many of the world’s greatest athletes are women, but the internet keeps saying they are men. The reason for this is simple – the algorithms our search engines use are trained on our human behaviour. And now, the internet has learnt our human bias towards men. It’s a problem we created, but one we have the power to fix.

So we’ve made it our mission to Correct The Internet. We’re collecting the incorrect search results, and have built a simple tool so you can help us correct them.”

I know I’ll be spending some of my free time trying to correct the internet. I hope you will too. 

Texas Universities Block TikTok 

The University of Texas at Austin became the latest red state public university to block access to TikTok from its campus wi-fi system because of recent laws passed to limit the app from government-issued devices. 

The Texas Tribune’s Kate McGee reports: “More than half of states in the U.S. have banned the use of the social media app on government devices in some capacity in recent months, according to a CNN analysis. Across the country, a growing number of universities have banned the app on devices connected to campus networks, including Auburn University in Alabama, the University of Oklahoma and the schools within the University System of Georgia.

The ban could have broad impacts particularly at universities serving college-age students, a key demographic that uses the app. University admissions departments have used it to connect with prospective students, and many athletics departments have used TikTok to promote sporting events and teams. It’s also unclear how the ban will impact faculty who research the app or professors who teach in areas such as communications or public relations, in which TikTok is a heavily used medium.”

I’m surprised there is such confusion, given how Governor Greg Abbott (R) prioritizes nuanced policy analysis over culture war own-the-libs moments. </sarcasm>

There are legitimate concerns about TikTok and how the Chinese government could control the data it generates. But this kind of policy directive—including the ban on its use on federal devices to which President Biden agreed in the recent omnibus spending bill—isn’t getting us closer to a solution to this challenge. 

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. The most important story today comes from Arkansas, where Republican legislators are pushing a new bill to allow women to be prosecuted for the death of an unborn child. 

Valenti has been warning about this kind of move for some time now, and she explains the stakes: “This is important: They are not just trying to criminalize abortion, but any ‘death’ that is “caused by a wrongful act, neglect or default.”

That means that under this legislation, a woman who has a miscarriage could be arrested if the state determines she did something to cause her pregnancy to end.

There’s language in the bill that says it “does not authorize prosecution for an accidental miscarriage”—something I’m sure Republicans will point to as proof that they won’t target women for pregnancy loss. But specifying an “accidental miscarriage” means that Arkansas lawmakers are suggesting that there are miscarriages that aren’t accidental, and their legislation would enshrine the idea that it is murder to ‘cause’ a miscarriage or stillbirth. 

We already know that prosecutors across multiple states have used fetal personhood laws to arrest women for stillbirths and miscarriages—for reasons ranging from alleged drug use, refusing medical interventions like a c-section, even a suicide attempt. So this kind of criminalization is not without precedence.

And under this bill, almost anything a woman does while pregnant could be used against her. Having wine could be a ‘wrongful act’; not taking prenatal vitamins or lifting a heavy object could be ‘neglect’; ‘default’ could be failing to seek prenatal care. There is no limit to what a zealous prosecutor could arrest a woman for. This is always where these laws were leading, but it’s shocking to see it written out so explicitly.”

Thank you for reading Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Artists Sue Over A.I. Models Using their Work Without Permission

This week’s Hard Fork podcast gives co-host Kevin Roose an opportunity to do something I often wish I could: interview the author of a newly published long-read reported article. 

It also helps that the article’s author is his podcast co-host, Platformer’s Casey Newton. They discuss the New York cover story that he co-authored with his Platformer colleague Zoë Schiffer and the Verge’s Alex Heath about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. 

Then Roose and Newton talk to Sarah Andersen, a cartoonist and illustrator, about the class-action lawsuit she joined after finding her art in the databases of several text-to-image A.I. platforms. Should artists have the ability to opt in before A.I. companies use their work to train their algorithms? How should they be compensated for how A.I. uses their work?

I think Andersen raises excellent points about how personal art can be to its creators. I suspect this is going to be a significant issue from now on. 

Skyglow Means We See Less 

Popular Science’s Laura Baisas reports on how the rapid growth of light pollution over the past decade impacts our ability to see the stars. 

As Baisas explains, “Gazing up at the night sky in awe and wonder can be a calming and almost primal joy, but stargazers are seeing fewer and fewer stars. A study published January 19 in the journal Science finds that every year, the night sky is getting seven to 10 times brighter, a quicker pace than measurements of artificial light emissions from Earth first suggested.”

I was surprised to learn that it is horizontally emitted light accounting for most of this increased skyglow and not just light directed upward. We lose something when we can’t connect with the night sky. 

Luxury Tax Time

On Friday, six Major League Baseball teams had to pay the luxury tax penalty for their player payrolls in 2022. They included: 

• Dodgers: $32.4 million
• Mets: $30.8 million
• Yankees: $9.7 million
• Phillies: $2.9 million
• Padres: $1.5 million
• Red Sox: $1.2 million

Five of those teams made the postseason. No one is sure about what the Red Sox are doing, and they should also face a penalty for finishing in last place in the American League East.  

Also, all of these teams made money last year. More teams should be willing to pay the luxury tax and try to win. 

It was great to see them together again. 

April Ludgate and Leslie Knope from Pawnee, Indiana!

— Saturday Night Live – SNL (@nbcsnl) 6:04 AM ∙ Jan 22, 2023

Oh yeah, so true. 

I Shazammed this at a diner today, couldn’t believe they were playing it. Looked up streaming data. Superman is @taylorswift13’s 190th most streamed song. Imagine having a catalogue so deep that a diner proactively plays your song and you have 189 songs people like even *better*.

— Nathan Hubbard (@NathanCHubbard) 11:13 PM ∙ Jan 19, 2023

After a break, I do hope we get some more here in California. 

Remarkably clear view from space today of California.

The snowpack is DEEP, rivers are gushing and vegetation is amazingly green.

— Colin McCarthy (@US_Stormwatch) 9:35 PM ∙ Jan 20, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

Making Restaurant Workers Pay for Anti-Minimum Wage Lobbyists

What if I told you the mandatory food safety training that many cooks, servers, and bartenders are required to take before starting their jobs also provided some of the funding for the lobbyists that work to kill minimum wage increases?

I wish that were the script of a scary—but darkly humorous—cultural satire, but as the New York Times’ David A. Fahrenthold and Talmon Joseph Smith report, “…in taking the class, the workers — largely unbeknown to them — are also helping to fund a nationwide lobbying campaign to keep their own wages from increasing.

The company they are paying, ServSafe, doubles as a fund-raising arm of the National Restaurant Association — the largest lobbying group for the food-service industry, claiming to represent more than 500,000 restaurant businesses. The association has spent decades fighting increases to the minimum wage at the federal and state levels, as well as the subminimum wage paid to tipped workers like waiters.”

Given that California is by far the most populous state in the nation, I’m unsurprised to learn that California is among the states where workers take the “vast majority” of ServSafe classes. Perhaps California can take a look at how to stop this practice. And let’s add this to the long list of reasons we should be as generous as possible when we tip people in the service industry. 

Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A Major Victory for Maternity Pay

Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir is one of the world’s top women’s soccer players. She’s the captain of the Iceland Women’s National Team, and earlier this year, she joined Juventus, one of the significant Italian Serie A clubs. 

Earlier this week Gunnarsdóttir—and the football players union FIFPRO—won a victory against her previous club, France’s Olympique Lyonnais making it clear that teams need to pay their players in full while they are on maternity leave. 

The Guardian reports: “The Iceland captain Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir has won her maternity claim against Lyon after she was not paid her full salary during pregnancy and has hailed the ruling as a “wake-up call for clubs.”

The 32-year-old turned to players’ union Fifpro to lodge her complaint with Fifa and football’s global body ruled in August last year that the club must pay the full amount owed to Gunnarsdóttir – €82,094.82 (£72,139) – within 45 days of notification of the decision. Fifa said the French club would face a transfer ban if they failed to pay in full.

Fifpro posted on Twitter: “Sara Björk Gunnarsdóttir’s landmark ruling against former club Olympique Lyonnais sends a clear message to clubs and footballers worldwide. The strict application of maternity rights is enforceable.”

Lyon is an important club in women’s sports. It is the most-decorated club in women’s soccer, having won eight European Champions League titles and 15 of the last 16 championships in France’s top league, Division 1 Féminine. Gunnarsdóttir explains how this history was one of the reasons she chose to play there in The Players Tribune. 

It shouldn’t have taken a ruling from the world’s governing body—and Gunnarsdóttir should not have had to fight—for Lyon to provide what FIFA’s Maternity Regulations require. I hope this is clear to all teams now. 

Websites Selling Abortion Pills Sharing Customer Data

One would think that companies selling abortion pills would understand how extreme forced-birth politicians and prosecutors in this post-Dobbs world could weaponize the personal data of the people using their services. 

This ProPublica investigation, however, shows how much these companies are failing to protect the people who come to them for this essential service. Jennifer Gollan reports: “Online pharmacies that sell abortion pills are sharing sensitive data with Google and other third parties, which may allow law enforcement to prosecute those who use the medications to end their pregnancies, a ProPublica analysis has found.

Using a tool created by the Markup, a nonprofit tech-journalism newsroom, ProPublica ran checks on 11 online pharmacies that sell abortion medication to reveal the web tracking technology they use. Late last year and in early January, ProPublica found web trackers on the sites of at least nine online pharmacies that provide pills by mail: Abortion Ease, BestAbortionPill.com, PrivacyPillRX, PillsOnlineRX, Secure Abortion Pills, AbortionRx, Generic Abortion Pills, Abortion Privacy and Online Abortion Pill Rx.

These third-party trackers, including a Google Analytics tool and advertising technologies, collect a host of details about users and feed them to tech behemoth Google, its parent company, Alphabet, and other third parties, such as the online chat provider LiveChat. Those details include the web addresses the users visited, what they clicked on, the search terms they used to find a website, the previous site they visited, their general location and information about the devices they used, such as whether they were on a computer or phone. This information helps websites function and helps tech companies personalize ads.

But the nine sites are also sending data to Google that can potentially identify users, ProPublica’s analysis found, including a random number that is unique to a user’s browser, which can then be linked to other collected data.”

There are things more important than website analytics. These companies need to fix this immediately because a prosecutor in a forced-birth state is going to target a woman for seeking this public health service. 

When QAnon Isn’t Extreme Enough

Bellingcat’s Annique Mossou and Gabriel Geiger report on the new conspiracy theory that seems to be replacing QAnon in Europe, and may be headed our way. 

The conspiracy theory, GESARA/NESARA, is actually one that dates back to the 1990s but has been updated for the cryptocurrency era. 

Mossou and Geiger explain: “Imagine you’re a jaded stalwart of the QAnon conspiracy. The latest batch of ‘drops’ – the cryptic posts into which you’ve read so much – aren’t quite as enticing, and you’re not even sure that Donald Trump will return to the Oval Office.

But you’re not ready to reassess your belief system. Luckily for you, there are other doomsday prophecies to keep you engaged. That’s how you ended up with billions of Zimbabwean dollars. Or Iraqi Dinars.

Whatever the currency, this scenario doesn’t seem so rare in those corners of the internet that are populated by Europe’s conspiracy theorists. New data shows that QAnon’s hold on the continent’s conspiracy discourse has begun to loosen at the same time that some of its European followers flock to a decades-old financial conspiracy. 

That decades-old conspiracy is GESARA, which heralds a financial reset that will see billions of secret funds distributed to people across the globe and the erasure of all debts.”

Don’t threaten me with such a good time. 

Researchers have connected QAnon, and former President Donald Trump’s embrace of it, to political violence. Seriously, these conspiracy theories are dangerous. I wish our law enforcement agencies would take them more seriously. But I haven’t had much confidence in the Department of Homeland Security in these matters since conservative activists got the Obama Administration to retract a study on right-wing extremism in 2009. 

Thank you for reading Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Stop Treating Mass Layoffs as Normal

We see the numbers in the news. Ten thousand laid off here. Fifteen thousand tech workers getting pink slips there. Elon Musk culling the Twitter workforce ruthlessly because of his ongoing wealth-destroying midlife crisis. 

But as Labor Institute Executive Director Les Leopold reminds us in this Los Angeles Times oped, mass layoffs aren’t only about a company’s bottom line. They are devasting and traumatic for the workers involved. 

Leopold writes, “And the harm is always considerable, as described by a recent report in the Harvard Business Review.

Medical studies have shown that the trauma of unemployment causes disease. One study found that being laid off ranked seventh among the most stressful life experiences — more stressful than divorce, a sudden and serious impairment of hearing or vision, or the death of a close friend.

Experts say that it takes, on average, two years to recover from the psychological trauma of losing a job.

For healthy employees without preexisting health conditions, the odds of developing a new health condition rise by 83% in the first 15 to 18 months after a layoff, with the most common problems being cardiovascular conditions, including hypertension and heart disease, and arthritis. The psychological and financial pressure of being laid off can increase the risk of suicide by 1.3 to 3 times.”

Later in the op-ed, Leopold asks a vital question: “Do we really have to inflict such pain and suffering on millions of working people to build a prosperous society?”

988 Is Making the Suicide and Crisis Hotline Easier to Access

Early reports about the new 988 national number to access the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline indicate that more people are using the service and getting connected to the help they need. 

NPR’s Rhitu Chatterjee reports: “The 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline received over 1.7 million calls, texts and chats in its first five months. That’s nearly half a million more than the old 10-digit Suicide Prevention Lifeline fielded during the same period the year before.

…

Not only are more people reaching out, more are being connected to help.

Federal data shows that the Lifeline responded to 154,585 more contacts – including calls, text messages and chats – in November 2022 than the same month the year before. The number of abandoned calls fell from 18% in November 2021 to 12% last November.

The average wait time to speak to a counselor also fell – from close to 3 minutes in November 2021, to 36 seconds last November.”

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Here are some stories that she highlights: 

• A report from the Gender Equity Policy Institute found “that mothers who live in states with abortion bans were three times more likely to die during pregnancy, childbirth or soon after giving birth, and that babies in those states were 30% more likely to die within their first month of life.”
• YouTube influencers are spreading misinformation about hormonal birth control. 
• What authorities have learned about the recent arson at an Illinois Planned Parenthood.
• Utah Legislative Republicans advance legislation to bypass the state’s Supreme Court injunction blocking the state’s abortion ban.
• Montana Republicans are working to redefine the state constitution’s right of privacy so it doesn’t include abortion.

Art Experts and AI

AI-generated images have gone viral in recent months. Several image generators—including Dall-E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion—have enabled people to create images based on user-generated prompts. For example, I asked Dall-E to generate the image at the top of this newsletter by asking it to make an “impressionist oil painting of a restaurant worker.”

How good are these AI bots? The Guardian’s Jo Lawson-Tancred decided to see if AI could fool the experts, “To find out, we set a challenge for three art experts: Bendor Grosvenor, art historian and presenter of the BBC’s Britain’s Lost Masterpieces; JJ Charlesworth, art critic and editor of ArtReview; and Pilar Ordovas, founder of the Mayfair gallery Ordovas. Each was invited to look at pairs of artworks of a similar style and period over Zoom to see if they could tell which was generated by a machine. All three admitted to finding it tougher than expected.”

Monorail! Monorail! Monorail!

The Ringer’s Alan Siegel gets Conan O’Brien to reflect on one of the masterpieces of his comedy career: the Marge vs. the Monorail episode of  The Simpsons. This episode is one of my favorites of all time, and it first aired 30 years ago this month. 

O’Brien explains how he came up with combining one of his favorite musicals with the tension found in popular disaster films like The Towering Inferno. 

“Somehow, all those things are swimming around in my head,” O’Brien says. It just took a space-age train to bring them together. “It unfolds really naturally because once you have the idea of a Music Man selling you a monorail, you know Homer’s for it, the town’s for it. … Well, who’s going to be against it? It’s either Marge or Lisa, because they’re sensible. For me, it was Marge. She’ll be the voice of reason who senses this isn’t wise. The first part is Music Man. The second act is an Irwin Allen disaster movie.”

And this is the best song ever written about how to waste the proceeds from a nuclear waste dumping fine. 

This advice is the best. 

Hey, kids! It’s your old buddy Steve King telling you that if they ban a book in your school, haul your ass to the nearest bookstore or library ASAP and find out what they don’t want you to read.

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) 4:05 PM ∙ Jan 18, 2023

And a thing I learned yesterday.

The Northernmost part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the Southernmost part of Brazil

— Amazing Maps (@amazingmap) 1:41 PM ∙ Jan 17, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

A High Five for Obstruction

Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV) and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) demonstrated their deep commitment to working people by sharing a high five over their promise never to reform the Senate filibuster at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

Sinema also suggested that keeping the filibuster in place led to more productivity in the last Congress. As Bloomberg’s Steven T. Dennis reports:

“Joe and I were not interested in sacrificing that important guardrail,” she said. “That massive voting-rights bill was not passed through Congress, and then we had a free and fair election all across the country.”

Sinema also suggested the duo’s actions led to a series of accomplishments.

“That was the basis for the productivity, for some incredible achievements that made a difference for the American people in the last two years,” Sinema said.”

One of my rules of politics is that there is always an internal logic to the decisions an elected official makes. He or she may not explain to others what is actually driving them—whether it is ambition, something personal, or responding to kompromat—but there is a reason. 

As Robert Caro quotes former President Lyndon Johnson in Master of the Senate: 

“The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.”

So figuring out what is not being said is so important. But I have yet to figure out what Sinema is trying to accomplish. I don’t see how this helps her.

Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

What the January 6 Committee Didn’t Share About Social Media

I realize the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol had to prioritize what it included in its report given the need to finish before the new House Republican majority took over earlier this month. 

While we knew that former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) worked to keep the focus of the committee’s findings on former President Donald Trump, now we learn that Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) reportedly played a role in minimizing the critique of the Silicon Valley companies she represents. 

The Washington Post’s Cat Zakrzewski, Cristiano Lima, and Drew Harwell dug into what wasn’t in the final report, even though investigators had drafted a memo outlining their findings: 

“The Jan. 6 committee spent months gathering stunning new details on how social media companies failed to address the online extremism and calls for violence that preceded the Capitol riot.

The evidence they collected was written up in a 122-page memo that was circulated among the committee, according to a draft viewed by The Washington Post. But in the end, committee leaders declined to delve into those topics in detail in their final report, reluctant to dig into the roots of domestic extremism taking hold in the Republican Party beyond former president Donald Trump and concerned about the risks of a public battle with powerful tech companies, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the panel’s sensitive deliberations.

Congressional investigators found evidence that tech platforms — especially Twitter — failed to heed their own employees’ warnings about violent rhetoric on their platforms and bent their rules to avoid penalizing conservatives, particularly then-president Trump, out of fear of reprisals. The draft report details how most platforms did not take “dramatic” steps to rein in extremist content until after the attack on the Capitol, despite clear red flags across the internet.”

The memo mentioned in the above story details how social media companies failed to respond to warnings about what was happening on their platforms but failed to take action until after the insurrection. 

Given what has happened with Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover in October 2022, I have no confidence we will see better reactions in the future. 

Elon’s Hardcore Chaos

Speaking of Twitter, Zoë Schiffer, Casey Newton, and Alex Heath collaborate on a New York magazine cover story describing the chaos he has created since launching his bid to take over the company. 

The story Schiffer, Newton, and Heath tell highlights how toxic a combination of arrogance and nastiness can impact a company and the people trying to make it work. They write: 

“According to more than two dozen current and former Twitter staffers, since buying the company in October 2022, Musk has shown a remarkable lack of interest in the people and processes that make his new toy tick. He has purged thousands of employees, implemented ill-advised policies, and angered even some of his most loyal supporters. Those who remain at the company mostly fall into two camps: people trapped by the need for health care and visas or cold-eyed mercenaries hoping to ascend through a power vacuum.

Today, Musk has become notorious for the speech he suppresses, rather than the speech he allows, from suspending journalists for tweeting links to his jet tracker to briefly restricting users from linking to their accounts on Instagram and Mastodon.

In three months, Musk has also largely destroyed the equity value of Twitter and much of his personal wealth. He has indicated that the company could declare bankruptcy, and the distraction of running it has caused Tesla stock to crater, costing him $200 billion.

If “free speech” was his mandate for Twitter the platform, it has been the opposite for Twitter the workplace. Dissenting opinion or criticism has led to swift dismissals. Musk replaced Twitter’s old culture with one of his own, but it’s unclear, with so few workers and plummeting revenues, if this new version will survive. As one employee said in December, “Place is done for.”

Remarkably, given how closely I have followed the story of Elon and Twitter, the situation turned out to be worse than I thought.

The Atmospheric River Scorecard

The California Sun’s Mike McPhate compiled a set of statistics that tell the story of the series of atmospheric rivers California has experienced since New Year’s Eve. He writes: 

“The rain is finally relenting. While Northern California could face some light precipitation Wednesday, meteorologists predicted that the rest of January would be dry. Here are some of the stunning numbers from the great California drenching of 2022-2023:

• At least 19 people died, a toll higher than the last two wildfire seasons combined. L.A. Times
• More than 18 inches of rain fell on San Francisco in its wettest 22-day period since 1862. Other isolated places across the state got more than 50 inches. @NWSBayArea | CNN
• Some reservoirs filled up so much that they had to release water. Levels at the reservoirs of Oroville, Folsom, Sonoma, and Don Pedro, among others, are all now at least 100% of average for this date. Water.ca.gov
• The Sierra snowpack now stands at 247% of normal for this time of the year, or in the technical language of State Climatologist Michael Anderson: “epic levels.” KQED | Water.ca.gov
• More than 500 landslides were recorded since New Year’s Eve, a troublingly large number attributed to California’s young geology, prolonged drought, and widespread burn scars. @CAGeoSurvey | AGU.org

We need a few weeks to process the rain we’ve received. But even all this rain and snow isn’t enough to end the drought if the precipitation stops now as it did after a wet December 2021. 

Abortion, Every Day

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. Here are some stories that she highlights today: 

• Someone set an Illinois Planned Parenthood on fire; 
• Idaho State Senator Scott Herndon compared his bill to eliminate that state’s rape and incest exceptions to the work of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.;
• Wyoming Republicans are trying to ban abortion medication unless a woman’s health or life is at risk while going out of their way to omit psychological reasons from that definition; and 
• This informative conversation between legal analysts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern about the forced-birth movement’s lie that they are not trying to prosecute women under state abortion bans. 

Student Mental Health Crisis

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Elissa Miolene shares troubling findings about how our students are faring: “according to two recent national surveys, the ripple effects of pandemic isolation — along with a hostile political climate — are continuing to affect youth across the state, with LGBTQ+ young people paying the highest price.”

There are efforts in California to respond to this crisis, including programs included in last year’s state budget. Miolene writes: 

“Last year, Children Now, along with seven children’s hospitals and organizations, asked Newsom to declare a state of emergency for children’s mental health and fast-track new spending. In the months since, those requests were enveloped into the state’s master plan, with $50 million allocated to create a youth suicide reporting program, and $40 million to support organizations working to prevent youth suicide. While the larger master plan will be rolled out over the next three years, the first of these two programs has already been initiated, and the second will begin in early 2023.”

Elected officials and educators must continue taking this mental health emergency seriously. I hope to see more action on this as the State Legislature begins its work this year. 

More Calls to Ban Pretextual Police Stops

California State Senator Steven Bradford (D-Gardena) is trying again to pass legislation banning many kinds of pretextual police stops because of racial bias. New reports from two state commissions recommending this action may help Bradford’s latest effort.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Dustin Gardiner writes: “Justice reform advocates are hopeful, however, that the effort could succeed this year after two state boards that study racial profiling recommended lawmakers ban or limit such stops because the evidence is clear they exacerbate racial disparities and rarely lead to seizures of contraband.

Within the past month, the state’s Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board and the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code both made that recommendation for the first time.”

The GOP’s Fake War with Corporate Lobbyists

Popular Information’s Judd Legum and Rebecca Crosby debunk spin from media entities—including Fox News, Axios, and The New York Post—that the new GOP House leadership is refusing to work with corporate lobbyists. 

As Legum and Crosby report: “There will be little evidence of such a “war” between House Republicans and corporate lobbyists on February 7, when “Team McCarthy” hosts its first major political event of the year — a mega-fundraiser at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in Washington, DC. 

Attendees are required to donate or raise at least $50,000. You need to donate or raise even more cash to be a co-host ($100,000) or host ($250,000). All of the proceeds will benefit the McCarthy Victory Fund, a joint fundraising committee that benefits McCarthy’s reelection campaign, McCarthy’s leadership committee, and the National Republican Congressional Committee. The establishment of joint fundraising committees is a tactic used by both parties to circumvent campaign finance laws that cap the donations to any one committee.

All ten hosts and co-hosts listed on the invitation are corporate lobbyists.”

Supreme Dysfunction

The Atlantic’s Steven Mazie, who has covered Supreme Court arguments since 2013, shares that there appears to be a breakdown in relationships along the Justices since the Dobbs decision eliminating the federal Constitutional right to access abortion health care last summer. 

A New Kind of Support for Ukraine

The president of the Shakhtar Donetsk soccer club, which hasn’t been able to play in their home city since 2014 because of the Russian invasion of the Donbas region of Eastern Ukraine, has made a significant donation to the Ukrainian war effort with a portion of the proceeds from the transfer of Mykhaylo Mudryk to the English club Chelsea. 

The circumstances here are even more interesting, given that Chelsea’s previous owner was Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. The United Kingdom forced Abramovich to sell Chelsea after being sanctioned following last February’s invasion. 

International soccer sees players move from team to team from sales rather than trades as in U.S. professional sports. Despite all of the hardships since Russia’s initial invasion in 2014, Shakhtar Donetsk continues to perform at a high level, including in European competitions. I also look forward to Chelsea having the opportunity to play a friendly against Shakhtar after Ukraine wins the war. 

James Webb Finds its First Exoplanet

Popular Science’s Laura Baisas reports on a significant discovery from the new James Webb Space Telescope: “the multi-mirrored space observatory has identified its first new exoplanet named LHS 475 b. At only 41 light years away from Earth in the constellation Octans, the exoplanet is about 99 percent of our world’s diameter.”

U.S. Women Start Year with Victory

The United States Women’s National Team opened the calendar year with a 4-0 victory at New Zealand in front of a record crowd for the hosts. 

New Zealand will co-host the Women’s World Cup with Australia starting July 20. The U.S. and New Zealand will play again on Saturday.

They needed some time to get started, but in the end, they cruised to the win thanks to two goals from Mallory Swanson. And this Rose Lavelle backheel was sublime. 

Alex Morgan slots one home, but that backheel from Rose is the real stunner

— Meg Swanick (@Meg_Swanick) 4:30 AM ∙ Jan 18, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

1. Editing Martin Luther King Jr. 

The Present Age’s Parker Malloy catches my former local newspaper, the Bangor (Maine) Daily News, running a heavily-edited version of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech to remove the liberal politics that were at its core. 

As Malloy explains, “The BDN piece gives audiences the sanitized King, the mythologized man and beloved civil rights hero. What it omits is a messy, important reality.”

Malloy highlights the text the Bangor Daily News cuts from the speech transcript and how what the editors cut changes the meaning of the speech significantly:

“I understand why someone might cut the “Let freedom ring from…” refrain where King lists New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, Colorado, and so on.

Other changes are harder to reconcile. For instance, why omit King saying “…Alabama, with its vicious racists”? Why cut the paragraphs about “the fierce urgency of Now” and calls against “engag[ing] in the luxury of cooling off”? Why remove the paragraph about not being satisfied “as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality”?

Those are the core components of the speech! Those portions of the speech help us understand what King meant when he talked about dreaming of a future in which people are “judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” Many (especially on the right) cite that line as evidence that King thought the world would be just fine if suddenly people just started acting “colorblind” to race. It’s not true. That is not what he said, and omitting the list of things that still needed to happen in order to achieve the world he dreamed of, is how the world has been handed a sanitized version of a man who was extraordinarily controversial and despised by a significant portion of Americans during his life.”

This is not the first time the Bangor Daily News has run this edited version of King’s speech, and Professor Kevin Kruse highlighted what the paper had to say the day of the address. Surprise! The paper’s opinion doesn’t age well. 

If you want a good example of how sanitized and sterilized we’ve made MLK’s memory, here’s the editorial the @bangordailynews ran on the day of his “defining speech.”

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) 12:47 AM ∙ Jan 16, 2023

Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

2. Decision Time for Meta

Meta is approaching a self-imposed deadline this month to announce whether it will reinstate former President Donald Trump’s posting privileges on Facebook and Instagram. Meta suspended Trump because of his actions that led to the January 6, 2021, insurrection. 

Meta’s leadership tried to get its Oversight Board to decide whether to end Trump’s indefinite suspension, but it kicked the final determination back to Meta’s executives in May 2021. The decision is now former British Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s to make in his role as Meta’s president of global affairs. 

Given that Trump’s posts have gotten even more extreme on his Truth Social platform, I believe Meta should make Trump’s ban permanent. Facebook may not be as powerful as it was in 2020, but it was one of the social media platforms used to organize the failed coup attempt in Brazil earlier this month. The danger to our democracy remains. 

Given the damage done to the United Kingdom in the aftermath of Clegg’s decision to take his Liberal Democrats into a coalition government with David Cameron’s Conservatives in 2010, however, I fear this is another big call Clegg will get wrong. 

3. Junk Science Convicts Innocent People

The latest episode of the Legal Talk Network’s On the Road podcast features a great conversation with the Innocence Project’s Chris Fabricant. Fabricant is the author of Junk Science and the American Justice System, a book that analyzes discredited forensic sciences and their impact on our criminal justice system. Fabricant and host Laurence Colletti also discuss why we should do more to ensure people convicted based on junk science or police misconduct can easily access the courts to appeal the verdict against them. 

4. Apple’s False Alarms

The Daily Beast’s Dan Ladden-Hall writes about an unintended consequence of the Apple Watch’s fall detection feature: “An avalanche of unintentional 911 calls are being made by smart watches attached to skiers’ and snowboarders’ when they fall over, authorities in Idaho said. The Bonner County Sheriff’s Office said the devices’ “fall detection” feature has been repeatedly contacting law enforcement from the Schweitzer Mountain ski resort.” I didn’t realize this fall detection feature existed until I tripped while jogging this past weekend, and I had to tell my watch that there was no need to call 911. (How about that humblebrag? Well, the jogging was the dog’s idea, not mine, although he was right.) Anyway, you will want to be aware of this feature before going out.

5. China’s Population Decline

China reported its first population decline in 61 years, the start of what demographers expect will be a long period of decline. As the Wall Street Journal’s Liyan Qi writes, “The National Bureau of Statistics said Tuesday that China’s population dropped to 1.412 billion in 2022, from 1.413 billion in 2021. It was the first decline since the early 1960s, when the country was devastated by famine after Mao Zedong launched his “Great Leap Forward.” This decline reinforces the likelihood that India will surpass China this year as the world’s most populous nation (and will have twice as many people as China by the end of the century). These demographic changes will impact the world’s economy and China’s foreign policy. 

6. Artificial Intelligence Could Help Learning

The most recent episode of Hard Fork, the technology podcast cohosted by the New York Times’ Kevin Roose and Platformer’s Casey Newton, featured the first optimistic conversation with an educator I’ve heard about the potential impact of the new artificial intelligence tools on classroom learning. Their interview with Cherie Shields, a high school English teacher from Sandy, Oregon, went in a direction I didn’t expect, given all of the worries I’ve previously heard about how OpenAI’s chatbot will kill the high school and college essay. Shields explained how she uses OpenAI in her classroom to help her lesson plan and how we can teach students to use the tool as a supplemental personal tutor. I also always appreciate a proper mention of the paperclip maximizer artificial intelligence thought experiment. 

7. The Green Comet is Coming

A comet with a green hue is headed toward Earth this month for the first time in 50,000 years. The Planetary Society’s Kate Howells tells us more, “Comet 2022 E3 (ZTF) — still without a snappy nickname — is currently visible using a telescope, but as it approaches Earth it is expected to get brighter and easier to see. The comet has a long orbit that takes it from the outer reaches of the Solar System in toward the Sun over thousands of years. It will reach its closest point to the Sun on Jan. 12, 2023, after which it will continue on past Earth. The comet will be closest to us on Feb. 1, at a distance of about 42 million kilometers (26 million miles). In the weeks surrounding its closest approach it may be visible with the naked eye or with binoculars.”

8. The JFK Airport Runway Incursion

James Fallows examines what went right and wrong on Friday at John F. Kennedy International Airport when an American Airlines plane took a wrong turn and almost led to a catastrophic situation. Fallows examines the transcripts and the information we currently know. But as he explains, “There is still a large amount we don’t know. About what was happening in that American cockpit, and how a two-pilot team missed the taxi instructions and mixed up which runway was which. About what was happening among the Kennedy control team, and when exactly they realized where the errant plane was heading. About what practices and safeguards will be revised, to reduce the chance of this ever happening again. Because we know that the aviation world is ruthless about learning from its mistakes. And the stakes are high: the highest-fatality airplane disaster in history involved a similar confusion about runway clearances.”

9. Another Warning About a National Debt Default 

Kurt Eichenwald explains why the GOP’s decision to play chicken with the world economy by using the national debt increase to extract concessions is so dangerous in The Greatest Disaster in American History. Eichenwald writes, “I hope we don’t have to get there. We must stop this perennial economic terrorism. If Congress wants to cut the debt, stop doling out tax cuts and spending increases. But that requires hard choices, and Washington doesn’t seem prepared to make them. So, we turn to this performative gimmick every few years, and one of these times, we will pay the price.“ I also wrote about the national debt crisis yesterday and will continue highlighting this perilous situation. 

10. A Statue for My Favorite Player

The first Cubs Convention in three years concluded over the weekend, and I watched the events about my favorite team from my Bay Area location. I was particularly pleased to see Bleed Cubbie Blue’s Sara Sanchez share that my all-time favorite player, Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg, will become the fifth player honored with a statue outside Wrigley Field. I haven’t had many opportunities to write that I was pleased with the Cubs’ ownership in recent years, so this Cubs Con was a nice change of pace. Son Ranto’s Danny Rockett also shared this fun overview of the weekend on Bleed Cubbie Blue. 

Thank you for reading my newsletter. Let me know what you think about what you’ve read. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. 

Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please consider signing up for a free or paid subscription. 

Here are some of the topics that have caught my attention as I’ve been browsing the internet: 

1. I listen to Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech from the August 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom on this holiday celebrating his birthday and legacy. Click here for National Public Radio’s website, which has the entire audio and a transcript. The Majority Report also has its annual compilation of King’s speeches, including a previously unheard address about reparations, white economic anxiety, and guaranteed income.

Craig Cheslog’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

2. We need to talk about the national debt limit. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen notified Congress that the U.S. would reach the limit on Thursday, January 19, requiring extraordinary measures to avoid a debt default. But at some point early this summer, even those will not be enough. 

The national debt limit represents the cap on the amount of money the federal government can borrow. Raising the national debt limit only authorizes the Treasury to issue the debt needed to fund the spending and revenues on which Congress and the President previously agreed. It’s about paying the bills already due, not about future spending. 

The House Republican majority has declared that it plans to use the need to increase the national debt ceiling to extract concessions from President Biden and the Democratic majority in the Senate. The Washington Post reported that the House GOP has a plan to direct the Treasury to prioritize certain payments once the U.S. reaches the national debt ceiling. “The plan, which was previously unreported, was part of the private deal reached this month to resolve the standoff between House conservatives and Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) over the election of a House speaker. Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), a leading conservative who helped broker the deal, told The Washington Post that McCarthy agreed to pass a payment prioritization plan by the end of the first quarter of the year.”

Oh great. 

The U.S. defaulting on the national debt would have terrible consequences for the national and world economies. In 2011, as this New York Times story explains, we learned that just approaching a national debt limit breach negatively impacts the economy and individual finances. 

So avoiding a breach of the debt limit is vital. 

Do President Biden and Congressional Democrats have any choice but to agree to significant budget cuts—including to programs like Social Security and Medicare—to prevent that outcome?

I hope the Democratic leadership is examining several alternatives outlined by economists and Constitutional experts. Here are some, in the order of my preference: 

a. Declare that the national debt limit is unconstitutional. Many people point to Section 4 of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, “The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned.” This point is important, but I agree with Thomas Geoghegan’s argument that this language in the 14th Amendment confirms the 1787 Constitution’s prohibition on Congress from using its powers to default on the national debt. Geoghegan explains, ”Were Congress to use its power to willfully trigger a debt ceiling default, it would be no ordinary constitutional violation. It would be a repudiation of the Constitution in a much more fundamental way, a betrayal of the very purpose of leaving the Articles of Confederation—which did not grant borrowing powers to Congress—behind; that is to say, it rebukes the very thing that gives our Constitution its legitimacy. From the perspective of Hamilton in Federalist 30, it would be tantamount to terminating the Constitution itself.”

b. Biden declaring ignoring the debt ceiling to be the ”least unconstitutional” option as he works to meet his Constitutional requirement to faithfully execute the laws Congress passes. Vox’s Dylan Matthews explains the argument made by University of Florida law professor Neil Buchanan and Cornell law professor Michael Dorf: “Buchanan and Dorf note that Congress, by setting spending and tax policy as well as a debt limit, has given the president three mandates: to spend the amount Congress authorizes, to tax the amount Congress authorizes, and to issue as much debt as Congress authorizes. When the debt ceiling is breached, it becomes impossible for the president to obey all three of these legal requirements.”

c. Mint the trillion dollar coin. A 1997 law gives the U.S. Mint the power to mint platinum coins of any denomination. Congress created the law so the Mint could make money from coin collectors, but there are no upper limits in the law for how much any coin can be worth. In a different Vox article from the one I mentioned above, Dylan Matthews explains the idea and discusses it with attorney Carlos Mucha, who first proposed it on an internet discussion board in 2010 as one of the first debt ceiling battles was coming into focus. As Matthews writes, “Instead of issuing new debt and running afoul of the debt ceiling, the Treasury secretary could simply fund the government by minting platinum coins. In 2013, even former US Mint Director Philip Diehl agreed it would work, and over the years, influential voices like financial journalist Joe Weisenthal and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman have also promoted the idea.

But all these people did not simply stumble upon this law. It was brought to their attention by Beowulf, a blog commenter and “reply guy” better known as Atlanta-area attorney Carlos Mucha.”

There should be a robust debate about how much the federal government taxes and spends. But that’s why we have a budget and appropriations process. Minting the coin would be better than seeing the U.S. default on its debt. But I’d rather see the debt limit—and its potentially horrible impact on the national and world economy—eliminated from the conversation. 

3. The American Prospect’s David Dayen argues that regulators, led by the Security and Exchange Commission’s Larry Gensler, prevented a broader economic calamity from the recent cryptocurrency meltdowns by shielding the primary financial system from crypto. 

4. Beautiful Public Data’s Jon Keegan writes about how the Federal Highway Administration’s (FHWA) Manual on Uniform Traffic Control works to help to make our roads safer. He writes, “Driving across America today, you will encounter a dizzying variety of cultures, landscapes, people and animals. But the one consistent thing that will stay the same from Maine to California are the signs you pass on the highway. And that is because America’s roads and highways have a big, fat style guide.”

Government entities do a great deal of work behind the scenes. It is vital that we properly acknowledge how much these regulations make our lives safer and better. 

5. The Daily Beast’s Marcel Plichta reviews all of the high-tech Western military weapons that Ukraine is about to receive to help with its defense against Russia’s invasion. 

6. I remember when the media ran many, many stories about the price of gasoline before the election. Esquire’s Jack Holmes has noticed how gasoline isn’t a story now that prices have dropped after the midterm elections

7. Pepsi is replacing Sierra Mist with a new lemon-lime soda called Starry. It’ll be another attempt to take some market share away from Coca-Cola’s Sprite. According to Insider’s Bethany Biron, “In 2021, Sprite raked in $6 billion in sales and carried 8.3% of the overall market, according to Statista data. By comparison, Sierra Mist comprised less than a tenth of 1% of market share, according to Beverage Digest data provided to CNN, which first reported on the launch of Starry.”

8. I.News soccer writer Daniel Storey profiles the community behind the Wrexham soccer team that actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney purchased a couple of years ago. (The purchase and their first year of ownership is also the focus of the outstanding FX documentary Welcome to Wrexham.) Storey goes into the history of the city, the team, and how Reynolds and McElhenney’s efforts have brought a sense of hope to a group of people who haven’t had much to cheer the past decade or two. 

9. One can’t emphasize enough that Robert E. Lee was a traitor to the United States. 

There were 8 full bird Colonels from Virginia in the United States Army in 1860.

6 did not commit treason.

1 resigned, took a commission in the Virginia Militia, then resigned that when Virginia provided the militia to the Confederate Army.

The other was Robert E. Lee.

— Dagger John 🇺🇸🇺🇦 (@theSloopJohnM) 5:31 PM ∙ Jan 14, 2023

Thank you for reading my newsletter. You can email me at craigcheslog@substack.com. Please help me spread the word about this newsletter by sharing this post via email or on the social media network of your choice. And if you haven’t already, please subscribe.