Tag: #Import 2025-04-02 22:28

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

The Flowers of Manchester

On February 6, 1958, Manchester United was returning home after eliminating Red Star Belgrade in the quarterfinals of the European Cup. This was the third year of that European competition, today known as the UEFA Champions League. 

Their plane had stopped in Munich, West Germany, to refuel because the flight distance from Belgrade to Manchester was beyond the range of the aircraft.

On that flight were team members, coaches, support staff, and journalists who had covered the match. The players included the famous Busby Babes, a group of young players who had progressed through the team’s youth academy. They won the English First Division Championship under manager Matt Busby in 1956 and 1957 at an average age of 21 (1956) and 22 (1957). The future seemed bright. 

The weather in Munich was awful. Snow had been falling, and the runway was slushy. The pilots aborted two takeoff attempts because of a boost surge in the left engine. Rather than stay overnight, however, the pilots wanted to try a third takeoff attempt. 

On that third attempt, the plane could not make the speed required to get into the air. It crashed through a fence at the end of the runway. 

Of the 44 people on board the plane, 20 died at the scene. Three more would die at the hospital. 

Manchester United’s memorial to the Munich Air Disaster names all of the people who died as a result of the crash:

“The eight players who perished were Geoff Bent (aged 25), Roger Byrne (28), Eddie Colman (21), Duncan Edwards (21), Mark Jones (24), David Pegg (22), Tommy Taylor(26) and Liam Whelan (22). Edwards, considered by many to be the finest player of his generation, died 15 days after the accident.

The three club officials who were killed were secretary Walter Crickmer, trainer Tom Curry and coach Bert Whalley.

Eight journalists died – Alf Clarke, Donny Davies, George Follows, Tom Jackson, Archie Ledbrooke, Henry Rose, Eric Thompson and former Manchester City goalkeeper Frank Swift.

Aircraft captain Ken Rayment, fellow crew member Tom Cable, travel agent Bela Miklos and supporter Willie Satinoff, a friend of United manager Sir Matt Busby, were also victims of the terrible tragedy.”

Busby had been seriously injured and was given his last rites twice at the hospital before a long recovery. There were serious questions about whether Manchester United could continue as a team after the death of so many of its players. 

But Manchester United did survive. Busby’s assistant, Jimmy Murphy, put together a team to finish that season. Busby returned to manage the following year. 

Busby and Murphy rebuilt the team, starting with a core of the surviving Busby Babes. Manchester United would win the FA Cup in 1963, the league championship in 1965 and 1967, and the European Cup in 1968—ten years after that darkest day in Munich. 

We will never forget The Flowers of Manchester. 

Honouring the heroes we lost ❤️

#FlowersOfManchester 🌹

— Manchester United (@ManUtd) 3:03 PM ∙ Feb 6, 2023

The Journey of a Chinese Spy Balloon

The U.S. military shot down a Chinese spy balloon off the coast of South Carolina. The balloon had been drifting over the United States for a few days. 

The right-wing outrage machine is trying hard to make the delay in shooting down the balloon into a scandal, supposedly demonstrating President Biden’s weakness in the face of Chinese aggression. 

But, as The Atlantic’s Juliette Kayyem explained, the delay was because the president understands how gravity works. 

“I’m no military expert, but I understand gravity. A surveillance balloon isn’t really a balloon; it likely has metal frames and carries electronic gear, and contains gases and other chemicals. These potentially dangerous materials will not reliably burn up when entering the Earth’s atmosphere, because they are already in the Earth’s atmosphere. Although the balloon lingers somewhere above where passenger jets normally fly, it is in American airspace—which is to say, the American homeland.

Homeland-security threats demand different responses than national-security threats. Blowing up an adversary’s airborne surveillance equipment over Montana, or even scrambling to capture it, involves different logistical and legal calculations than doing so in an active theater of war. Montana residents probably wouldn’t appreciate stuff spilling from the sky. Falling debris could maim or even kill Americans on the ground. Personal and property damage would occur. Kinetic action in a situation like this has a cost borne not by another country or its citizens, but by ours.”

So our military waited until it could shoot it down in relatively shallow water. It should be easy to recover and allow us to learn a bunch about what the balloon did, how it works, and what the Chinese were hoping to learn. And they had a bit of history fun with it, as the Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima, Alex Horton, Dan Lamothe, and Rosalind S. Helderman write: 

“The balloon was struck by an air-to-air Sidewinder missile at an altitude of 60,000 to 65,000 feet by a jet that had flown from Joint Base Langley-Eustis in southeastern Virginia, top Defense Department officials told reporters in a conference call. The Raptor pilot’s call sign, Frank 01, was a nod to World War I ace Frank Luke Jr., known as “the Arizona Balloon Buster” for destroying German observation balloons and enemy planes. The historical connection was reported by the War Zone.”

So what was this all about? As James Fallows explains, it was a mistake by the Chinese, but we don’t know if the Chinese leadership was aware of this operation. But it isn’t likely that the Chinese were trying to learn about the location of U.S. nuclear weapons sites because that’s already public information. 

“What the Chinese (or anyone else) would not learn much about is the placement of U.S. nuclear-deterrent forces. That information has been on the public record for decades.

I, personally, have flown a little single-engine plane at 3,500 feet above U.S. nuclear-submarine bases—not 60,000 feet up, like this balloon. I have done this many times, above bases both on the East Coast and on the West. 

What I did is perfectly legal. It would have been equally legal for any Chinese citizen who was a passenger or pilot on a helicopter or small plane. The listings are publicly available on any aviation chart.”

Now we will see how the Biden Administration handles the opportunity to use what happened to adjust our relationship with China. 

A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Domestic Abusers Can Legally Own Guns in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that the federal law prohibiting people from possessing weapons while under a domestic violence restraining order is unconstitutional. 

Vox’s Ian Millhiser explores the immediate ramifications of the decision: “The immediate impact of this decision is that Zackey Rahimi, who “was subject to an agreed civil protective order entered February 5, 2020, by a Texas state court after Rahimi’s alleged assault of his ex-girlfriend,” may not be convicted of violating the federal ban on gun possession by domestic abusers. 

More broadly, because the decision was handed down by the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which presides over federal lawsuits in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, this federal law can no longer be enforced in those three states.

One of the most alarming things about Rahimi, moreover, is that it is far from clear that this decision is wrong — at least under a new precedent the Supreme Court handed down last year drastically expanding the Second Amendment.

I fear that’s correct. 

Millheiser explains the implications of the new standard requiring gun regulations to be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” He also notes that since it was legal in all 50 states for married partners to beat their spouses until 1871, domestic violence restraining orders likely cannot be consistent with what the Roberts Court has ruled. 

This decision will lead to more deaths. Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern lays out the grim statistics: “An abuser’s access to guns makes it five times more likely that a woman will be killed. More than half of intimate partner homicides are committed with guns. An American woman is shot and killed by an intimate partner every 14 hours. Domestic abusers are also disproportionately likely to commit mass shootings: Nearly a third of mass shooters have a history of domestic violence, while more than half of mass shootings with four or more victims are committed by domestic abusers. “

The Delusions of Chief Justice John Roberts

I agree with The Nation’s Elie Mystal’s efforts to debunk Chief Justice Roberts’ attempt to compare his court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade as heroic in the tradition of the Warren Court’s decision to end school desegregation with Brown v. Board of Education. 

Mystal writes, “More important, it would be foolish to think that Roberts brought up the history of desegregation by coincidence. Conservatives have long made the argument that overruling Roe v. Wade is the kind of bold revocation of precedent that aligns with the court’s decision to overturn the segregationist ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. No matter that Brown restored constitutional rights secured for Black people under the 14th Amendment, while Dobbs revoked a constitutional protection given to women and pregnant people. In the conservative mind, Brown and Dobbs are linked, and in both cases, unelected, unaccountable judges are the heroes for standing tall against the popular will.”

Roberts makes these arguments because he understands the stakes if the people see the Supreme Court as the political actor it has become rather than as the metaphorical umpire calling judicial balls and strikes he described in his nomination statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee. 

Mystal explores the potential consequences of what the Roberts Court has done: “The great irony of Roberts’s parable about the heroic dedication of federal judges, then, is that it offers precisely the opposite lesson: It shows how powerless judges are when they are not perceived as legitimate by the other branches of government or by the people themselves. And it’s that very legitimacy that Roberts and his conservative friends have traded away in their extremist rush to unmake the progress of the 20th century. The Roberts court is one that ignores precedent and makes up facts to suit its agenda, and regularly grants special access to lobbyists and religious fundamentalists looking to push their agendas through the court. The Roberts-led judicial system does not live in fear. It lives in the muck.”

California Trying Again to Cap the Price of Insulin

California State Senator Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) has introduced legislation, SB 90, to limit patients’ monthly copay for insulin to $35. 

As CalMatters Ana B. Ibarra explains, previous efforts along these lines have failed because of strong insurance industry opposition. 

“California legislators have tried passing cost-sharing caps in the past without success. Last session’s bill, carried by former Republican Sen. Patricia Bates of Laguna Niguel, died in an Assembly committee. Despite bipartisan support, the insurance industry pushed back, arguing that capping costs only on the consumer’s end does little to tackle the underlying issue: the list price of insulin. 

“I would never suggest that the only problem is copays; overall cost is also a problem,” Wiener said. “We absolutely need to limit what consumers are paying out of pocket at the same time that we do this other structural work around the cost of insulin.”

Twenty-two states and the District of Columbia have enacted caps on copays, ranging from $25 to $100 a month, said Dr. Francisco Prieto, a family physician and advocacy chair for the American Diabetes Association, which is sponsoring Wiener’s bill.”

Congress last year passed legislation putting a $35 copay cap, but it only applies to people covered by Medicare. 

Ibarra also provides an update on the status of California’s effort to begin manufacturing insulin. The 2022-23 state budget allocated $100 million for this effort, and the state needs to identify a pharmaceutical manufacturing partner to move forward. 

People with diabetes should not have to pay so much for a drug that keeps them alive, especially since insulin’s creators did not profit from a patent for their work and wanted it to be affordable.

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Media’s Anti-Trans Bias

Public Notice’s Noah Berlatsky talks to The Present Age’s Parker Malloy about the mainstream media’s anti-trans bias. It is a bias that editors and publishers appear determined to make worse. 

Berlatsky introduces their conversation: “As journalist and media critic Parker Molloy pointed out recently on her Substack The Present Age, the New York Times started out the new year by hiring conservative columnist David French, who has called trans people a “tiny, disturbed population” and who has stated that he plans to willfully misgender trans people whenever he writes about them. French, as Molloy notes, joins an opinion staff “absolutely loaded with anti-trans voices” —from Pamela Paul on the right to Michelle Goldberg on the left. In contrast, there are no regular trans columnists writing for the Times.

Molloy has been writing about the mainstream media’s anti-trans bias for years, not because she wants to, but because she feels someone has to.

“I don’t like writing about trans issues,” she told me. “I’m not an activist. I don’t like writing about this topic. If I had the choice, I wouldn’t write about it ever again in my life. But I have to because these things are happening and the mainstream media just isn’t paying attention or covering it in a fair way.”

Malloy highlights many of the arguments she has been making in her writing. Our media outlets are not just reporting on anti-trans efforts by radical conservatives—they are facilitating them. 

This Week in Abortion

Jessica Valenti at Abortion, Every Day recaps the news from across the country regarding reproductive freedom and sexual and reproductive health care. She is now trying something new: a weekly recap about abortion news. 

Valenti writes, “The other reason for the new feature is that I know there may be times when you’re overwhelmed by the onslaught of daily abortion news. The weekly roundup can be a tool to ensure you’re caught up with the most vital stories, even if you decide to skip a few days of the newsletter.”

And a lot happened last week. 

Quick Pitches

Former Georgia President Mikheil Saakashvili’s health continues to worsen while in prison. As an opponent of Putin, he seems to be suffering from an all-too-familiar Soviet-era punishment. “Georgia is a former Soviet republic, and to those who live in the former Soviet empire—the same empire that Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, now seeks to re-create—Saakashvili’s accumulated prison illnesses form a familiar pattern. The slow prison death was a Soviet speciality: not a murder, not an assassination, just a well-monitored, carefully controlled, long, drawn-out decline. Most of the people who died in Soviet prison camps were not executed; they were merely starved until their heart stopped beating. In Putin’s Russia, torture and the deprivation of medical aid famously killed Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer who uncovered an infamous corruption scandal at the highest levels of the Russian regime. Isolation, withholding of food, and other punishments are right now being inflicted on Alexei Navalny and other political prisoners too.” (Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic)

The Los Angeles Dodgers are finally retiring Fernando Valenzuela’s number. Molly Knight explains the importance of this long overdue honor. (Molly Knight, The Long Game)

Major League Baseball this season will feature the most radical scheduling change of its history, as each team will play all of the other 29 teams at least once. And yes, because of the changes, the Cardinals will play the Cubs in London before they host them in St. Louis this year. Totally normal! I suspect a significant realignment is coming soon, and the current leagues will become history as part of the next labor agreement. Yay for MLB East and West, everyone? (Jayson Stark, The Athletic)

ChatGPT reached 100 million monthly active users in January, setting a new record for the fastest-growing user base of any consumer application in history. (Krystal Hu, Reuters)

The stupid. It burns. 

@SpeakerMcCarthy To everyone responding “we’re not a democracy, we’re a constitutional republic” — that’s like saying “it’s not a car, it’s a Honda Civic.”

You’re repeating a slogan cooked up by the John Birch Society on the assumption it would sound smart to idiots. And only idiots.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) 7:59 PM ∙ Feb 4, 2023

Whew. We needed some good news. 

War has been averted. For now. https://t.co/xzaRXd3dh1

— John Moe (@johnmoe) 4:49 AM ∙ Feb 6, 2023

I wish leap years didn’t mess this up. 

Important note:

February has 28 days (7 x 4). Each day has 24 hours (8 x 3). Each hour has 60 minutes (6 x 5 x 2).

So February has 8! minutes. 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1.

— Tim Urban (@waitbutwhy) 9:50 PM ∙ Feb 1, 2023

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Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

Belated Holiday Greetings

I hope you had a fantastic Groundhog Day. Yesterday I went down a bit of an internet spiral learning about the day’s origins. Here’s where I started with a post from the History Channel: 

“Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal—the hedgehog—as a means of predicting weather. Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition, although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State.”

I found that more interesting than speculating about an animal’s possible meteorological accuracy. 

Exposing Junk Science in the Courts

ProPublica’s Sophia Kovatch, Pamela Colloff, and Brett Murphy write a great summary of the media outlet’s work exposing the use of junk science in our nation’s courtrooms. 

The rise of the forensic science-focused television show over the past few decades has left far too many people with the impression that some scientifically debunked techniques are as accurate as a screenwriter or prosecutor may claim. 

ProPublica has found several common traits that help define whether a technique is actually junk science: 

• It has limited or no scientific evidence or research supporting it.
• It is presented as absolutely certain or conclusive, with no mention of error rates.
• It relies on subjective criteria or interpretation.
• It oversimplifies a complex science.
• It takes just a few days to become an “expert.”

Kovatch, Colloff, and Murphy write about what we’ve learned about 911 call analysis and bloodstain-pattern analysis as examples of the spread of junk science leading to the wrongful convictions of innocent people. They also note how our courts have had a junk science problem for decades. 

“Forensic science has had a junk science problem for decades. In the 1980s and ’90s, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies used faulty microscopic hair comparison in hundreds of cases, only formally acknowledging the problematic science in 2015. Since at least the 1990s, law enforcement has used a written content analysis tool with no scientific backing to interpret witness and suspect statements.

The 2009 report from the National Academy of Sciences, which reviewed the state of forensic science in the United States, found that a lot of forensic evidence “was admitted into criminal trials without any meaningful scientific validation, determination of error rates, or reliability testing to explain the limits of the discipline.” A 2016 report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology found that despite efforts to fund forensic science research, there was still a major gap in understanding the scientific validity of many forensic methods.

In 2017, the Trump administration allowed the charter for the National Commission on Forensic Science to expire, further limiting the progress on validating forensic science methods.”

We need to do more to validate these scientific claims. We also should make it easier for convicted persons to access the courts when we learn that scientific testimony used in their case has been found to be unreliable. 

A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Fixing the Recall

One of my annoyances with our government is the continuing failure to deal with critical problems after events have exposed a vulnerability. 

For example, the September 11, 2001, attacks revealed a significant continuity of government problem because our Constitution requires elections for the House of Representatives. The likely target for Flight 93 before the passengers intervened was the United States Capitol Building, where Congress was in session. If more than half of the members of the House were killed in an incident, it would be impossible for that chamber to convene for months while states held special elections to fill the seats. Here’s a great report from the Continuity of Government Commission that explains this vulnerability in more detail. 

Congress hasn’t fixed this problem. I’m frustrated. It is also dangerous. 

Anyway, that’s why I am glad when I see efforts to fix this kind of policy problem after they are exposed. The September 2021 effort to recall California Governor Gavin Newsom highlighted several issues with how those elections are conducted. California State Senator Josh Newman (D-Fullerton) has introduced SCA 1 to improve the rules in the state’s laws about recalling statewide officials (like the Governor) and legislators. 

As Newman’s office explained in a press release: “With the support of the California Secretary of State, California Common Cause, and the League of Women Voters of California, State Senator Josh Newman introduced a constitutional amendment today that, when approved by California voters, will ensure that future statewide and legislative recalls in California are democratic, objective and less susceptible to hyper-partisan gamesmanship. 

Under the provisions of SCA 1, in the event that the recall of a state or legislative official qualifies for the ballot, voters would be asked simply to make a judgement on the fitness of the elected official in question. The second question, in which voters choose from among replacement candidates in the event that a majority support a recall, would be eliminated, and the process for replacement would follow the same steps as currently provided in other scenarios in which a state or legislative office is vacated.”

Let’s quickly get this through the legislature and on the November 2024 ballot while we all remember why the current system doesn’t work. I don’t want to see us have these conversations again the next time a recall effort qualifies for the ballot. 

How Police Use Digital Data to Prosecute Abortions

Police are using the digital tracks of texts, messenger conversations, and geolocation data to charge women and the people who help them with offenses under the forced-birth laws active after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade last year.

TechCrunch’s Runa Sandvik reports: “In late April, police in Nebraska received a tip saying 17-year-old Celeste Burgess had given birth to a stillborn baby and buried the body. Officers soon learned that her mother, Jessica Burgess, and a friend had helped her with transportation and burial. The police issued citations for concealing the death of another person and false reporting. But in June, they also charged Jessica with providing an abortion for her teenage daughter. Police had made the discovery after obtaining a warrant that required Meta to hand over their conversations on Facebook Messenger. The messages, which were not encrypted, showed the two had discussed obtaining and using abortion pills.

Warrants for digital data are routine in police investigations, which makes sense, given how much time we spend online. Technology giants have for years responded to valid court orders for specific information sought by law enforcement, though some companies have done more to fight for our privacy than others.”

While companies have to comply with subpoenas, they can do much more not to keep this sensitive data and ensure users are aware of all the risks. Sandvick summarizes many recent examples of tech companies’ failures. 

“Last year, reporters found that Facebook and anti-abortion clinics collect sensitive information on would-be patients. The Markup also reported that Hey Jane, an online abortion pill provider, employed a series of online trackers that follow users across the internet — until the journalists reached out about the practice. More recently, ProPublica found nine pharmacies selling abortion pills also sharing sensitive data with Google and other third-parties. All nine were recommended by Plan C, which provides information about how to get abortion pills by mail. None responded to ProPublica’s request for comment.”

Aggressive prosecutors are going to come after this data. Technology companies have a responsibility not to put these women and people who can become pregnant at additional risk. 

Putin’s Plot Against America

Puck’s Julia Ioffe explains why Western governments believe Russian President Vladimir Putin is preparing to escalate the use of hybrid forms of warfare against the United States and other allies of Ukraine. 

She writes, “People in the Biden administration are worried that this leaves Putin with one remaining option: unleashing a wave of asymmetric chaos across the West. Think political interference, cyberattacks, assassinations. “The Russians wrote the book on this but they haven’t turned it on,” said Marc Polymeropoulos, who once ran the C.I.A.’s operations in Europe, countering the Russian threat. “Why is that?”

As Ioffe notes, there are reasons to believe some of those efforts have begun. She describes an incident last month in Sweden where a far-right activist set a Quran on fire in front of the Turkish embassy. This complicated ongoing diplomatic negotiations to get Turkey to drop its objections to Sweden joining NATO. What a coincidence. 

“Turkey, a majority Muslim country and NATO member which had already been on the fence about voting to accept Sweden into the alliance, was outraged. This triggered protests in Ankara, with Turkish protesters setting a Swedish flag on fire outside the Turkish embassy. The Turkish foreign minister said that the Swedish government was complicit in the Quran burning—Paludan had gotten a government permit for his demonstration, after all—and Turkey canceled a visit by the Swedish defense minister, who was on his way to Ankara to plead his country’s case for NATO accession. Within days, anti-Swedish protests broke out around the Muslim world. By week’s end Turkish President Reçep Tayyip Erdogan, who had already extracted significant concessions from the Swedes for his NATO vote, said, “Those who allow such blasphemy in front of our embassy can no longer expect our support for their NATO membership.”

But then an interesting bit of information emerged. Paludan, it turned out, hadn’t paid for his own protest permit. It had been paid for by a journalist, Chang Frick, who had once been a contributor to Russia Today and once bragged, while pulling out a wad of rubles, “Here is my real boss! It’s Putin!” The foreign minister of Finland also publicly hinted that the Quran-burning incident had ties to Russian intelligence.”

Ioffe explores several other recent incidents in the rest of her article. 

Russia has excellent resources to fight—and demonstrated considerable success in fighting—an asymmetric war against the United States and other western countries. Ioffe’s Puck column was originally titled Tomorrow Will Be Worse for a good reason. 

United States Claims Russia Violating Nuclear Arms Treaty

The Wall Street Journal’s Michael R. Gordon reports that the United States believes Russia is violating the last nuclear arms treaty that remains in place between the two countries. 

“Russia has violated the New START treaty cutting long-range nuclear arms by refusing to allow on-site inspections and rebuffing Washington’s requests to meet to discuss its compliance concerns, the U.S. State Department said in a report sent to Congress on Tuesday.

The State Department’s finding that Moscow is in “noncompliance” with the accord marks the first time that the U.S. has accused Russia of violating the treaty, which entered into force in 2011.”

Our planet does not need a renewed race of nuclear arms escalation. As Gordon explains, the Russian invasion of Ukraine had already created concerns about the possibility of negotiating a new treaty to be in place when New START expires in 2026. These tensions are one of the reasons The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January reset its Doomsday Clock to the closest-ever 90 seconds to midnight. I discussed that more in the January 26, 2023, edition of this newsletter. 

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

Florida’s Descent Into Fascism

While I subscribed to Craig Calcaterra’s Cup Of Coffee newsletter for the baseball news, I often nod my head at his political analysis. Since it was his Free Thursday, I hope you’ll read what he writes about how Ron DeSantis is turning Florida into a fascist state. 

“I absolutely love the fact that the governor of the third largest state in the country is threatening teachers with felonies if they don’t empty classroom bookshelves, has essentially banned the teaching of Black history, seeks to terrorize and stigmatize students in furtherance of a hateful campaign against trans people, and is destroying an entire college for ideological reasons and The New York Fucking Times thinks that the key takeaway here is what it means for the 2024 horse race. Apparently, if it doesn’t happen in Manhattan it’s just theater. 

My angst at the media aside, what is going on in Florida right now is profoundly reprehensible and downright dangerous.”

It is, indeed. We should pay attention now because we can see the signs of this descent into fascism right now. We won’t be able to claim to be surprised as DeSantis continues down this path and seeks national power. 

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 efforts by Republican state legislators to ignore voters who want to keep reproductive rights on the books. 

Valenti writes: “I told you this week about the bill that Wyoming Republicans are trying to pass which would ban abortion without exceptions for rape and incest—essentially, they’re supporting this new legislation because their trigger ban is currently blocked. The hope is that by passing HB152, they’ll have a ban that isn’t so easy for the courts to find unconstitutional. But some Republicans are concerned that in pushing for the new legislation—which would make the old ban moot—they’ll end up with no abortion ban at all. 

But here’s the other super important thing to know about this bill: It’s the legislation that Republicans are using to declare that lawmakers have the same standing as the Courts to interpret the state constitution—which is a way for them to pass their abortion bans whether the courts agree or not. As you know, this has become a broad Republican strategy: Utah Republicans want to change the standards by which an injunction can be ordered as a way to remove the current block on the state’s abortion ban; and in Montana, Republicans have introduced legislation that gives them the power to declare that the state’s constitutional right to privacy doesn’t include abortion, no matter what the state Supreme Court says. And then there are the states like Missouri and Ohio who are trying to make it harder for voters to pass pro-choice ballot measures. They are going to do everything they can to bypass voters and the courts—because they know their bans are unpopular and unconstitutional.”

I also draw your attention to the story about a whistleblower who has exposed how a Kentucky crisis pregnancy center is “using expired disinfectant on trans-vaginal ultrasound probes” and how “lubricant gel staff used for trans-vaginal ultrasounds was actually only meant to be used externally on someone’s abdomen.” Crisis pregnancy centers are basically unregulated in red states that would regulate abortion clinics to the point that they would have to close because their hallways were not wide enough. 

Women’s World Cup Hosts Protest Saudi Sponsorship

The co-hosts of the 2023 Women’s World Cup—Australia and New Zealand—are protesting the decision made by the international soccer governing body, FIFA, to sign a sponsorship deal with Saudi Arabia’s tourism authority given that country’s notorious record subjugating women.  

“Such a confrontation between a World Cup host and FIFA is unprecedented in recent history, and is likely to shine more attention on so-called “sportswashing” investments by Saudi Arabia.

“We write to express our serious disappointment and concern at the news of the apparent appointment of Visit Saudi as a sponsor,” Chris Nikou of Australia and New Zealand’s Joanna Wood wrote Wednesday in the letter to FIFA seen by The Associated Press.”

This awful decision again demonstrates the ability of FIFA’s leadership to make the wrong decision because money is involved. 

The Last Professional Player Drafted by the Montreal Expos Retires

Yeah, Tom Brady was also a pretty good baseball player. The Montreal Expos drafted Brady in the 18th round of the 1995 Major League Baseball Draft. As we know, Brady decided to go to Michigan after getting a football scholarship. 

CBS Sports’ Mike Axisa features a quote in the Hartford Courant from Expos scout John Hughes describing the team’s evaluation of Brady, the baseball prospect: 

“I never had as much fun scouting a player that we eventually didn’t sign,” chuckled Hughes, now an area scout with the Marlins. “We knew we didn’t have a good chance to sign him, because he had the scholarship (to play football for the University of) Michigan.

…

“He was drafted in the 18th round because everyone knew how difficult it would be to sign him,” Hughes said. “He was very talented. I mean on talent alone he would have been projected a late second-round pick.

“And I believe he would have made it, as a catcher, he would have gotten there.”

In his scouting reports, Hughes recalls Brady as already being around 6-3, “good athletic body” and “obviously” he could throw, Hughes said with a laugh. He had power to the pull-side and a good instinct for the game.”

Quick Pitches

People playing the online post-nuclear apocalyptic video game Fallout 76 can come across the Wasteland Theatre Company and its productions of Shakespeare’s plays. “Fallout 76 is an online open world; players travel wherever they wish and can bump into real-life strangers. With “area chat” enabled they can even talk to each other through microphones, calling out to a passer-by on the dusty road. This opens up endless opportunities for user-generated serendipity, and the Wasteland Theatre Company is one such experience: a delightfully unexpected thing for players to stumble upon in the devastation.” And yes: there is a reference to the traveling theater company from Emily St. John Mandel’s wonderful novel Station 11. Because, as St. John Mandel writes, “Survival is insufficient.” (Alysia Judge, The Guardian)

Tax experts who have examined Former President Donald Trump’s tax returns think they show how his finances are worse than many of us imagined. (Roger Sollenberger, The Daily Beast)

Figuring out what time it is on the moon is not easy because of the relativistic effects of gravity on time, but it is increasingly important to have a standard as countries plan more missions there over the coming decade. (Elizabeth Gibney, Nature)

Science explains why chocolate tastes so good, thanks partly to a 3-D printed tongue. (María Luisa Paúl, Washington Post)

Scientists have found more evidence supporting the theory behind one of the planet’s six mass extinctions. “The link between ancient volcanic eruptions and the most severe extinction event the world has ever seen just got even stronger. A new analysis of mercuryisotopes has provided evidence that a quarter of a billion years ago, far-flung places in Earth’s Southern Hemisphere were blanketed with debris from volcanic eruptions in Siberia. The so-called Great Dying, also called the Permian-Triassic mass extinction event, ensued, where most of life was wiped out under ash-filled skies.” (Clare Watson, Science Alert)

Let’s have more like this in Major League Baseball, please. 

You ever seen a walk-off this electric?

Venezuela does it differently.

🎥 @ElExtrabase

— The Athletic MLB (@TheAthleticMLB) 5:08 AM ∙ Jan 31, 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: 

GOP Wants to Wish Trump Away

The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins writes about an epidemic of wishful thinking among Republican leaders.

“Press them hard enough, and most Republican officials—even the ones with MAGA hats in their closets and Mar-a-Lago selfies in their Twitter avatar—will privately admit that Donald Trump has become a problem. He’s presided over three abysmal election cycles since he took office, he is more unstable than ever, and yet he returned to the campaign trail this past weekend, declaring that he is “angry” and determined to win the GOP presidential nomination again in 2024. Aside from his most blinkered loyalists, virtually everyone in the party agrees: It’s time to move on from Trump.

But ask them how they plan to do that, and the discussion quickly veers into the realm of hopeful hypotheticals. Maybe he’ll get indicted and his legal problems will overwhelm him. Maybe he’ll flame out early in the primaries, or just get bored with politics and wander away. Maybe the situation will resolve itself naturally: He’s old, after all—how many years can he have left?

This magical thinking pervaded my recent conversations with more than a dozen current and former elected GOP officials and party strategists. Faced with the prospect of another election cycle dominated by Trump and uncertain that he can actually be beaten in the primaries, many Republicans are quietly rooting for something to happen that will make him go away. And they would strongly prefer not to make it happen themselves.”

I guess we won’t need another volume of Profiles in Courage any time soon. 

Republicans have had repeated opportunities to leave Trump behind. I believe they would be in a better electoral position had they taken any one of the possible offramps, especially the one available to them with the impeachment that followed the January 6 Insurrection. 

Instead, they hope for his death to free them. I hope our democracy can survive their cowardice. 

A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Time for Real Reforms

The police murder of Tyre Nichols is the latest atrocity to spark a conversation about reforming the police to prevent these killings. 

We ask the police to take on activities beyond their training and expertise. Armed people focused on the “warrior mentality” shouldn’t be handling mental health crises or routine traffic stops. 

I dont think Americans realize how dystopian it is to get pulled over and effectively detained by a gov’t agent with a gun who runs through your entire criminal history before issuing you a ticket (or worse) for a traffic violation versus just getting a ticket in the mail.

— Darrell Owens (@IDoTheThinking) 4:19 PM ∙ Jan 30, 2023

Thom Hartmann argues that it is time for the federal government to regulate local and state police departments, end policing for profit, and roll back the militarization of the police. 

He writes: “You and I are 30 times more likely to be killed by police than are citizens of Germany or Great Britain. In 2018, for example, police killed over 1000 people in America. In Germany cops killed 11; in Australia 8; in Sweden 6; in the UK it was 3 people; and cops killed only 1 person in New Zealand.

The reasons for this disparity are deeply systemic.

At the top of the list is the fact that the United States is the only developed country in the world lacking national standards for hiring, training, supervising, and disciplining police across the 18,000 departments in the country.

While it takes years to become an officer on the street in most developed countries, the average cop in America spends about as much time training as does a barber. Many small police agencies require little to no training.”

I would love to find an alternative to the current policing model because of its history of racism and control over local governments. Enacting that kind of change isn’t likely in the short term. Hartmann’s proposals are the minimum response we should accept now. 

Students Ask for Mental Health Services; 
To Receive Guns on Campus Instead

West Virginia University students last May talked to members of the state’s legislature about the need for increased mental health services on campus. 

But, as the Mountain State Spotlight’s Ian Karbal reports, there has yet to be any follow-up about those needs. Several student mental health care bills stalled in the legislature despite bipartisan sponsors. But a bill concerning the campus appears likely to pass despite opposition from students and university leaders.

“Yet the campus carry bill is moving. It would allow students to carry concealed weapons on most areas of campus, and require schools to provide secure storage of those weapons in dorms and residential facilities. It passed the Senate last week, but still has to pass the House.

Sen. Rupie Phillips, R-Logan, the bill’s lead sponsor, said in an interview that he does not see the issue as connected to concerns about mental health, and has been trying to get a similar law passed since well before the calls for campus mental health funding increased during the pandemic.”

Phillips has his agenda, and he isn’t interested in any facts. 

“Notably, research has repeatedly shown that access to firearms is one of the leading predictors of suicide, and in West Virginia suicides account for a majority of firearms deaths.

Phillips said that he doesn’t believe data linking gun access to suicide.

“I can write anything down and call it data,” Phillips said.”

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 another example of why exceptions to abortion bans may provide a public relations boost but won’t meaningfully help people who can become pregnant. 

“I’ve been writing a lot about how Republican lawmakers across the country are suddenly very interested in adding exceptions to their abortion bans as a way to pretend like they give a shit about women: It’s a win-win for conservatives, who know that abortion exceptions aren’t real but that voters overwhelmingly support rape and incest victims having access to care. This kind of strategic PR play is especially important in places like Tennessee, where the abortion ban is so strict that it doesn’t have an exception for women’s lives. That’s why Republican Sen. Ferrell Haile has introduced legislation that he says would create an exception for rape and incest victims. But if voters catch on to what Haile’s bill actually does, the legislation may blow up in his face.”

Proposition 28 Protects Arts Education

This year’s California budget debate provided an immediate example of why passing Proposition 28 last November to guarantee funding for the arts in our schools was so important. 

Governor Newsom’s initial budget includes a $1 billion cut to a block grant that included arts funding in its title. The funding provided by Proposition 28 should offset that cut should it comes to fruition in the final state budget bill in June. 

EdSource’s Karen D’Souza explains why ongoing funding for arts and music education needs to be a priority: “Once considered a cornerstone of any comprehensive education, the arts have long been scrubbed in California classrooms in favor of math and science. But the pandemic exposed the urgent need to help children cope with trauma and find ways to heal, experts say, amid what many see an escalating youth mental health crisis. 

“The pandemic has taught us a lot about all the things the arts offer in terms of social-emotional well-being and student mental health,” said DeCaigny. “If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that there needs to be some joy in our lives, and we’ve always known that the arts provide that.”

Arts advocates also point to the power of the arts to boost student achievement. Despite the fact that students with access to the arts are five times less likely to drop out of school and four times more likely to receive a bachelor’s degree, nine out of 10 California schools, research shows, fail to meet the state mandate to provide arts education in schools. This is an equity issue, experts say, because it’s generally only affluent students who receive ongoing exposure to the arts. 

Building student engagement may also be crucial to combating learning loss, many suggest, as students struggle to rebound from the academic setbacks triggered by the pandemic.”

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

An Early Preview of the 2024 California Ballot

CalMatters’ Dan Walters takes a peek at the high-impact propositions that already seem likely to make the November 2024 ballot in California. 

I discussed the referendum coming about the law seeking to improve working conditions for fast food workers in the January 28, 2023, edition of this newsletter.

Walters provides updates on five other measures that already seem likely to make that ballot: including a referendum against a law creating a buffer zone for oil and gas drilling, a business-backed effort to overturn the Private Attorney Generals Act, a tax on upper incomes to fund pandemic preparation, an attempt to overturn a state Supreme Court decision lowering the voter-approval threshold required to pass local special purpose taxes, and an increase in the minimum wage. 

Quick Pitches

After three years of implementing a strict zero-COVID policy, the Chinese government made a snap decision to drop the restrictions after protests in November. But local officials were not prepared, partly because “[a]ny preparations for ending zero-Covid would be seen as a vote of no confidence in both the policy and Xi – an act of political suicide.” Now many Chinese are wondering if all of the sacrifices were worth it and how all this will impact Chinese President Xi Jinping. (Helen Davidson and Chi Hui Lin, The Guardian)

Efforts to ban TikTok in the United States have to overcome a 1988 United States law known as the Berman Amendments, which “took away the president’s authority to regulate or ban imports of “informational materials” from adversarial nations such as Cuba, and shielded those who produced such works—and their U.S. distributors—from penalties for violating economic sanctions.” (John D. McKinnon, Wall Street Journal)

Representative Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) became the first Member of Congress to deliver a speech partially written by artificial intelligence on the floor of the House. “The speech was written using ChatGPT, and is as dull and anodyne as you might expect for a political speech filtered through an AI system based on probabilistic averages. That’s not to say AI text tools can’t generate unusual and creative outputs, but that usually requires a little bit more imagination in both the prompting and the subject matter.” (James Vincent, The Verge)

Margaret Sullivan is one of my favorite media critics, and she is not happy with how the media has covered the revelations that President Biden’s offices improperly possessed classified documents. “Finally, all this coverage seems to say, a chance to get back to the false equivalence that makes us what we truly are! And make no mistake, any effort to equate Biden’s sloppy mishandling with former president Trump’s removal of hundreds of classified documents to his Florida hangout at Mar-a-Lago is simply wrong.” (Margaret Sullivan, The Guardian)

I’m a couple of weeks late to this, but the On with Kara Swisher podcast featured a great conversation about Prince Harry’s recent book release. Swisher interviewed journalist and King Charles III biographer Catherine Mayer and PR executive Patrick Harverson, who served as a communications advisor to the then Prince of Wales and Dutchess of Cornwall. 

John Adams, who was famous in baseball circles as the fan who played the drum at Cleveland baseball games for nearly 50 years, has passed away. (Paul Hoynes, Cleveland.com)

Some people were skeptical when, in 2020, Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenny purchased Wrexham, a Welsh team playing in the fifth division of England’s soccer pyramid. It’s a captivating story and the subject of a wonderful FX documentary. Here’s a story about all of the improvements in Wrexham as Reynolds and McElhenny seek to keep their promises and get the world’s third-oldest professional club back in the Football League. (Stuart James, The Athletic)

Jonah Furman recaps the week in U.S. unions at Who Gets the Bird?

The European men’s soccer winter transfer window SLAMMED SHUT yesterday. Men in Blazers recaps all of the transfers, including some intriguing moves for U.S. Men’s National Team players. 

This report is good news. 

🏔️ The Sierra snowpack is still showing impressive numbers due to the storms we have observed so far this winter. Here is a look at the snow water equivalent percent of normal for today’s date, January 31.

Snowpack data courtesy of CDEC/DWR: cdec.water.ca.gov/snowapp/sweq.a…

#CAwx

— NWS Sacramento (@NWSSacramento) 1:00 AM ∙ Feb 1, 2023

We sadly have many reasons to start using this word.

Word of the day is ‘malverse’ (17th century): to act corruptly in a position of trust.

— Susie Dent (@susie_dent) 9:03 AM ∙ Jan 30, 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. 

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

Homeschooling Nazis

I wish that title were a droll euphemism for some awful policy, but I mean it literally. HuffPo’s Christopher Mathias reports: “The Saxons said they launched the “Dissident Homeschool” channel on Telegram after years of searching for and developing “Nazi-approved material” for their own home-schooled children — material they were eager to share.

The Dissident Homeschool channel — which now has nearly 2,500 subscribers — is replete with this material, including ready-made lesson plans authored by the Saxons on various subjects, like Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee (a “grand role model for young, white men”) and Martin Luther King Jr. (“the antithesis of our civilization and our people”). 

There are copywork assignments available for parents to print out, so that their children can learn cursive by writing out quotes from Adolf Hitler. There are recommended reading lists with bits of advice like “do not give them Jewish media content,” and there are tips for ensuring that home-schooling parents are in “full compliance with the law” so that “the state” doesn’t interfere.”

Mathias puts this movement into the larger context of radicalized right-wing politics. We should consider how conservative politicians’ efforts to take over school boards, ban books, create voucher programs, and help to foster these homeschoolers. 

“Meanwhile major right-wing figures are increasingly promoting home schooling as a way to save children from alleged “wokeness” — or liberal ideas about race and gender — in public and private schools. As extreme as the Dissident Homeschool channel is, the propaganda it shares targeting the American education system is just a more explicit and crass articulation of talking points made by Fox News hosts or by major figures in the Republican Party.”

And before I move on from this subject, I want to reiterate that Robert E. Lee was a traitor to our nation. 

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

A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Erasing LGBTQ People from Michigan Schools

Popular Information’s Judd Legum exposes radical conservatives’ efforts to erase LGBTQ people from Michigan schools by overloading districts with misleading requests to opt their children out of sex education requirements. 

“A newly-formed conservative group is launching a brazen plan to remake Michigan public schools — using aggressive legal action to effectively mandate the erasure of LGBTQ people. 

The effort, organized by the Great Schools Initiative (GSI), seeks to exploit a Michigan statute that allows parents to opt their children out of sex education. Michigan law allows schools to offer courses in sex education. The nature of this instruction is quite traditional, and by law must “stress that abstinence from sex is a responsible and effective method of preventing unplanned or out-of-wedlock pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease and is a positive lifestyle for unmarried young people.”

Legum explains that the people behind this effort are not hiding their motivations here. The question is whether the school districts and Michigan officials can effectively counter this horrible effort, given how previous conservative legislators wrote the state’s permissive laws in this area.  

Far-Right Group Connected to Evangelicals Grows

The Guardian’s Peter Stone reports: “A far-right project that has helped spread Donald Trump’s false claims about voting fraud in 2020, and misinformation about Covid vaccines, is trying to expand its mission, while facing new criticism from scholars and religious leaders about its incendiary political and Christian nationalist messages.

ReAwaken America, a project of the Oklahoma-based entrepreneur Clay Clark, has hosted numerous revival-style political events across the US after receiving tens of thousands of dollars in initial funds in 2021 from millionaire Patrick Byrne, and become a key vehicle for pushing election denialism and falsehoods about Covid vaccines.

ReAwaken America also boasts close ties to retired Lt Gen Michael Flynn, who in December 2020 met with Trump, Byrne and others at the White House to plot ways to reverse Trump’s election loss. The meeting happened shortly after Trump pardoned Flynn, who was convicted for lying to the FBI about his contacts with the Russian ambassador before serving briefly as Trump’s national security adviser.”

The key element of this group is its ties to the Christian evangelical movement. 

“Christian nationalism has deep roots in American history and has gained traction at different points,” said Amanda Tyler, the executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. “The ReAwaken America Tour taps into the unholy well of Christian nationalism to sow doubt about the US election system and the safety of Covid vaccines while equating allegiance to Trumpism with allegiance to God.”

She added: “Clay Clark and others who run this tour are using the name of Jesus, holy scripture and worship music to promote a partisan political agenda and personal business interests.”

I once again ask how religious organizations can participate in these activities while keeping their tax-exempt status. The article explains that there has been a backlash within the Christian community, but I fear it isn’t large enough to make a difference as we start the 2024 presidential election cycle. 

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 story that most caught my attention involves a 29-year-old Georgia woman who gave birth two months ago and wanted to get an IUD. 

But, as Valenti writes: “Conservatives keep telling us they’re not coming for birth control, yet they don’t do much to hide what a total and complete lie that is. Last week, I spoke to a Georgia woman whose health insurance denied her coverage for an IUD because of the “sanctity of life.”

DeSantis and Destroy Florida Schools Until Voters Stop Him

The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols argues that Florida voters are responsible for stopping Governor Ron DeSantis’ efforts to destroy the state’s schools and universities. 

Elections have consequences. DeSantis has every right to appoint radical conservatives to boards. He has every right to work with the legislature to restrict the school curriculum to own the libs. 

Nichols writes: “Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has set out to ruin one of Florida’s public colleges. He’s appointed several board members to the ideologically progressive New College of Florida with, apparently, a mandate to somehow rebuild it and thus save it from its dreaded wokeification. Helpfully for the cause of screwing up a college, most of the new overseers aren’t from Florida and don’t live there; one of them, in fact, is Christopher Rufo, a young man from the Manhattan Institute who has no actual experience in higher education but does have a genuine talent for rhetoric that he seems to have gained at the Soviet Higher Institute of Pedagogy somewhere in Moscow or Leningrad circa 1970.

Bristling at criticism from the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, Rufo fired back on social media. “We’re in charge now,” he tweeted, adding that his goal was “constitutionally-mandated democratic governance, to correct the ideological corruption of *public universities.*”

As they would have said during those old Party meetings: The comrade’s remarks about implementing the just and constitutional demands of the People to improve ideological work in our educational collectives and remove corruption from the ranks of our teaching cadres were met with prolonged, stormy applause.

Rufo is part of a new generation of young right-wing activists who have managed to turn trolling into a career. Good for him, I guess, but these self-imagined champions of a new freedom are every bit as dogmatic as the supposed leftist authoritarians they think they’re opposing. Their demands for ideological purity are part of an ongoing hustle meant to convince ordinary Americans that the many institutions of the United States, from the FBI in Washington down to a college in Sarasota, are somehow all scheming against them.

But Rufo is absolutely right about one thing: If Ron DeSantis wants to put him in charge of a “top-down restructuring” of a Florida college, the governor has every right to do it.”

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Cost of Fighting for Better Pay and Benefits

From November 14-December 23, 2022, 36,000 graduate student workers and 12,000 other academic employees at the University of California participated in the largest higher-education strike in history. 

As a result, graduate students earned increases in pay and benefits. That was a start, but much more is required to ensure these students can afford to live in California. The fact that the University of California treated these graduate students so poorly does not reflect well on generations of leaders and legislators who failed to force the issue before the strike. 

Now the other part of the cost comes due. The University of California is clawing back any wages paid during the strike. It is required to take back the money, but the union claims the University is handling it poorly. 

EdSource’s Mikhail Zinshteyn provides the details: “But unions representing the striking workers allege that how the UC is going about this is all wrong. Rafael Jaime, president of the UAW 2865, the union of 19,000 teaching assistants, tutors and instructors, said the UC is violating state labor law by unilaterally docking pay without first allowing workers to review how much the university plans to claw back.

The UC is “well within their right to recover any money that was incorrectly paid out to workers who are on strike,” Jaime said in an interview Friday. “But there needs to be a fair process to make sure that workers aren’t left with additional hardships.”

Lawyers representing the three unions that struck last year filed an unfair labor practice charge against the UC on Thursday with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board. Core to the complaint is that the UC will deduct pay “without getting employee consent or first notifying employees of the actual deduction amounts before money was withheld from their paychecks,” the complaint read. “No other options were given to employees to ‘correct’ the payroll or otherwise review the University’s calculations before amounts would be withheld.”

State and federal law seem to require the university to take back money paid out to the graduate students and other faculty who participated in the strike. But they need to be fair about it. And administrators should be held accountable for the fact a strike was necessary for the graduate students to get these modest improvements. 

Restoring Workers’ Freedoms

The American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson explains why the Federal Trade Commission’s decision to start a process to ban companies from using noncompete agreements is so crucial to efforts to protect workers. 

Meyerson writes, “The other freedom workers have lost is even more elemental, and fundamental: the right to leave one job to take another. A large number of American workers are compelled to sign noncompete agreements, with which their employers forbid them from taking a job at a rival firm or leaving their job to start a business of their own in the same field. In recent decades, emboldened by the courts’ attitude—ranging from indifference to hostility to worker rights—employers have expanded this practice from the relatively small number of professional workers privy to proprietary trade secrets to any workers who may at some point want to move from the burger joint they’re working at to the burger joint across the street.

Which is one reason why the Biden-appointed majority on the Federal Trade Commission announced in January that it was beginning a process to abolish noncompete agreements. “Economic liberty, not just political liberty, is at the heart of the American experiment,” FTC Chair Lina Khan wrote in a New York Times op-ed, explaining the proposal. “You’re not really free if you don’t have the right to switch jobs or choose what to do with your labor. But millions of American workers can’t fully exercise that choice because of a provision that bosses put into their contracts: a noncompete clause.”

With the House of Representatives in Republican control, more Congressional action is unlikely in the next two years. So it falls to President Biden and his executive branch agencies appointees to address these power imbalances. 

Welcoming the NWSL to the Bay Area

The Wall Street Journal’s Jessica Toonkel and Rachel Bachman shared that the National Women’s Soccer League plans to expand to the Bay Area, Boston, and Utah. 

The price of the Bay Area and Boston franchises is reportedly $50 million—a considerable increase reacting to the growth experienced by the NWSL in recent years. 

Toonkel and Bachman write, “The addition of three teams—more than what NWSL commissioner Jessica Berman had previously signaled she expected in the near-term—will bring the league to 15 teams. The franchise fees reflect growing interest in the decade-old league despite its recent off-field turmoil involving abuse allegations that an investigation found had been ignored for years by league executives.

As recently as 2020, when Los Angeles and San Diego groups made deals to join the league, franchise fees were $2 million-$5 million. The strength of those teams’ launches in 2022 helped propel interest in expansion, and spurred initial interest from dozens of interested parties, according to the league.”

I am quite excited by this news and look forward to rooting for the Bay Area team as the NWSL announces the details. 

Quick Pitches

Gizmodo’s George Dvorsky reports about how we narrowly avoided a calamity in Earth’s orbit: “An old rocket body and military satellite—large pieces of space junk dating back to the Soviet Union—nearly smashed into each other on Friday morning, in an uncomfortable near-miss that would’ve resulted in thousands of pieces of debris had they collided.”

NPR’s Ayana Archie reports: “Consumers are suing Sazerac Company, Inc., the makers of Fireball whiskey, for fraud and misrepresentation, as the mini bottles of the alcoholic beverage don’t actually contain whiskey.” Yeah, I’m not looking to consume a mixture of malt beverage and wine. 

I’ve become such a weather wimp and traitor to my Yooper heritage that I now wear gloves when the temperature is above freezing. 

I do not want to say it is freezing cold outside, but my fingers are blue.

— Grover (@Grover) 2:03 PM ∙ Jan 31, 2022

The simulation is glitching again.

Y’all, we’ve discovered a new kind of number!

— Phil (I have a SubStack link in bio) Plait (@BadAstronomer) 5:09 AM ∙ Jan 31, 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: 

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.  

A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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.”

Thank you for reading A Long Drive to Left by Craig Cheslog. This post is public so feel free to share it.

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. 

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