Last Call For The Vax Of Life, Con't

When Missouri GOP GOv. Mike Parson's office commissioned a state health department study on the effectiveness of masks in stopping COVID-19 last month, the goal was to show that masks did nothing to stop the spread, and then use that finding to politically pressure city governments in KCMO and STL to drop mask mandates.

 

The study of course found that masks were wildly effective in reducing the spread of COVID Delta, so Parson's office spiked the study and almost got away with it.

Mask mandates saved lives and prevented COVID-19 infections in Missouri’s biggest cities during the worst part of the delta variant wave, an analysis by the state Department of Health and Senior Services shows.

But the analysis, conducted at the request of Gov. Mike Parson’s office in early November, was never made public and was only obtained by The Missouri Independent and the Documenting COVID-19 project after a Sunshine Law request to the department.

The study compared infection and death rates in St. Louis, St. Louis County, Kansas City and Jackson County with the rest of the state. New state health Director Donald Kauerauf wrote in an email that the study’s findings showed the effectiveness of mask mandates and forwarded it to Parson’s office.

The analysis wasn’t included in material the department prepared for cabinet meetings, the emails show. Neither the health department nor Parson’s office responded to requests for comment asking why the data has not been shared publicly.

The comparison showed infection rates in “masked” jurisdictions were higher than the rest of the state in the six weeks prior to the emergence of the delta variant. Case rates then fell below other regions as the surge gathered force in late May and have remained lower since that time.

The statewide data shows that, from the end of April to the end of October, jurisdictions with mask mandates experienced an average of 15.8 cases per day for every 100,000 residents compared to 21.7 cases per day for every 100,000 residents in unmasked communities.

The four jurisdictions imposed their mask mandates in late July and early August, as the delta variant wave was peaking.

Mask requirements remain in place in St. Louis and St. Louis County. The Jackson County Legislature voted to end its requirement in early November, and the mandate in Kansas City ended Nov. 5 except for schools and school buses.

There are a number of variables that impact infection and death rates, the health director wrote in a Nov. 3 email. But the effectiveness of masks is clear, he wrote.

"I think we can say with great confidence reviewing the public health literature and then looking at the results in your study that communities where masks were required had a lower positivity rate per 100,000 and experienced lower death rates,” Kauerauf wrote.

 

Mask mandates saved lives in Missouri's biggest metro areas, but the Republican governor dumped the evidence in the trash. It all goes to show you, Republicans scream about "the science" being true until the science proves their political idiocy wrong.

The Department Of Power (Mongering)

Last year, Florida's state Senate elections were rocked by allegations that dark money interests funded candidates with the sole purpose of splitting the Democratic vote to keep Republicans in power, "ghost" candidates and it worked. Now the Orlando Sentinel has unearthed one of the major players in the scandal in Florida's biggest utility company, Florida Power & Light.

 

Top executives at utility giant Florida Power & Light worked closely with the political consultants who orchestrated a scheme to promote spoiler candidates in three key state Senate elections last year, according to documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel.

The records show that the consultants who controlled Grow United Inc., the dark-money nonprofit at the center of the “ghost” candidate scandal, billed FPL for more than $3 million days before they began moving money through the entity.

The records also show FPL has donated more than $10 million in recent years to other dark-money nonprofits controlled by some of the same consultants — and FPL CEO and President Eric Silagy has personally coordinated with those consultants on campaign contributions made through their nonprofits.

In a statement, FPL spokesperson David P. Reuter denied the company had any role in the ghost candidate scheme.

“Neither FPL nor our employees provided funding, or asked any third party to provide funding on its behalf, to Grow United in support of Florida state-level political campaigns during the 2020 election cycle,” he said. “Any report or suggestion that we had involvement in, financially supported or directed others to support any ‘ghost’ candidates during the 2020 election cycle is patently false, and we have found absolutely no evidence of any legal wrongdoing by FPL or its employees.”

Money from Grow United was used to promote independent candidates in three Senate races — District 9 in Central Florida and South Florida’s districts 37 and 39 — in an apparent effort to siphon votes from the Democratic candidates and help Republicans retain control of the 40-member Florida Senate.

The controversy has set off a wide-ranging criminal investigation by prosecutors in Miami, who have already secured a guilty plea from the independent candidate in District 37 and filed felony charges against Frank Artiles, a former Republican lawmaker accused of bribing the candidate to run.

That investigation and the Sentinel’s reporting have revealed extensive ties between the consultants behind the scheme and powerful business interests in Florida — but the new records show how closely those consultants were working with FPL specifically.

The cache of new documents was anonymously delivered to the Sentinel last week, including checks, bank statements, emails, text messages, invoices, internal ledgers and more covering a roughly four-year period between 2016 and 2020, all of which were apparently unearthed during an internal investigation by a former FPL contractor.

That contractor, Alabama-based political and communications consulting firm Matrix, LLC, has since sued its former CEO and several ex-employees, accusing them of conspiring with a Florida-based client to work on secret projects and cheat Matrix out of fees. The company’s former CEO has countersued, accusing Matrix’s owner of extortion.

The records — along with a summary of the internal Matrix investigation, which said it had identified “potential unlawful conduct” — were sent in early November to James “Jim” Robo, the chairman of Florida Power & Light’s parent company, NextEra Energy Inc. The Sentinel was also sent a partially redacted copy of the investigative summary.

The Sentinel independently corroborated dozens of details in the records — matching things such as bank routing numbers, employer identification numbers, campaign contributions, transfers between nonprofits, names and job titles, cell phone numbers, email addresses and transaction dates. Many of the details are available in public records, though some are not and were confirmed by Sentinel reporting.

 

So yeah, greedy power company wanted the GOP to stay in power so they'd have less regulation and make millions more off of Florida's people, and in 2021 that almost seems quaint compared to what Republicans are doing nationwide.

Shutdown Countdown, Vaccine Mandate Edition

It wouldn't be December in Washington without Republicans threatening to shut down the government again, this time GOP Sen. Ted Cruz and his merry band of knuckle-draggers say they have the votes to shut the government down on Friday unless the Biden Administration kills the vaccine mandate rules.

 

Leading Democrats and Republicans in the U.S. Senate scrambled on Wednesday to head off the threat of a partial federal government shutdown posed by Republicans opposed to President Joe Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandates.

Congress has until midnight on Friday to pass a measure that would continue funding federal government operations during the pandemic, amid concerns about a new rise in COVID-19 cases and the arrival of the Omicron variant in the United States.

A partial government shutdown would create a political embarrassment for both parties, but especially for Biden's Democrats who narrowly control both chambers of Congress.

Top lawmakers in the Senate and House of Representatives have yet to agree on a resolution that Congress could vote on.

Once a measure is set and passed by the House, all 100 senators would need to agree to circumvent Senate rules and pass such a measure before the Friday deadline.

That effort ran into opposition on Wednesday from a group of hardline conservative Senate Republicans, including Mike Lee, Roger Marshall, Ron Johnson and Ted Cruz, who demanded a vote on a measure to block federal money for Biden's vaccine mandates for federal and private sector employees, which they say put U.S. jobs at risk.

"The federal government needs to feel the pressure of what a vaccine mandate really does," Marshall told reporters.

Marshall said the group wants to see language barring vaccine mandate funding in the resolution to keep the government open but would also accept a vote on a separate amendment.

"We should use the leverage we have to fight against what are illegal, unconstitutional and abusive mandates," Cruz said.

Schumer told reporters that talks with McConnell to iron out an agreement were making "good progress" but acknowledged the possibility of a shutdown if the Senate was forced to observe procedural rules that would require a series of votes.

"We'll have total chaos. It's up to the leaders on both sides to make sure that doesn’t happen," Schumer told reporters.

McConnell did not seem overly concerned. "We're going to be okay," he told reporters.

Senator Kevin Cramer said the vast majority of his fellow Republicans are not in favor of forcing a shutdown.

"What's the outcome that you achieve? The government shuts down and you still don't have a vaccination mandate lifted,” Cramer said.

 

Now, it sounds like McConnell has figured out that shutting the government down as Christmas approaches might actually be bad for the country and for the GOP. Kevin Cramer has figured it out at least.

 

Somehow I think there will be enough Republicans to vote with the Dems over Cruz and his stupidity.

StupidiNews!

• Georgia Democratic voting activist Stacey Abrams says she will run against Georgia GOP Gov. Brian Kemp in a rematch of 2018, but Kemp may not be her opponent if Donald Trump has his way.
• A WW II bomb unearthed at a Munich construction site exploded and injured several people, authorities are investigating why the 250-pound bomb remained undiscovered until work began.
• The teen arrested for Tuesday's school shooting in Michigan has been charged with four counts of first-degree murder along with multiple other counts and will be tried as an adult.
• Massachusetts GOP Gov. Charlie Baker says he will not run for a third term in 2022, citing a campaign being a distraction from ongoing efforts to fight COVID-19 in the state.
• US CDC officials say the COVID-19 Omicron variant has been confirmed in California as the Biden Administration considers far stricter international travel and testing restrictions.
  

Last Call For The Road To Gilead: Endgame, Con't

Wednesday's Supreme Court oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization makes it very clear that there are five votes to overturn Roe v. Wade and end access to safe abortion for half of American women.

 

Midway through arguments in a case that could end with the Supreme Court abolishing the constitutional right to an abortion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked a pointed question about the Court’s future: “Will this institution survive the stench that this creates in the public perception, that the Constitution and its reading are just political acts?

There are early signs Sotomayor is correct that the public is turning against the Court as the Court turns against Roe v. Wade. But during Wednesday’s oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, all six of the Court’s Republican appointees appeared eager to push ahead anyway and overrule at least some key parts of the Court’s prior decisions protecting abortion.

The justices were asked to consider a Mississippi law that prohibits nearly all abortions after 15 weeks of pregnancy, a law that violates the Court’s decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) that pregnant people have a right to terminate their pregnancy up until the point when the fetus is “viable,” meaning it can live outside the womb. A majority of the Court appeared very likely to overrule this part of Casey.

At least four justices seemed inclined to go even further, eliminating the right to an abortion altogether. And though Justice Amy Coney Barrett played her cards a little closer to her chest than her colleagues, it seems more likely than not that she will join them. In other words, there could be a majority for overturning Roe.

And even if the Court does not explicitly overrule Roe, it could easily announce a new legal standard that renders Roe an empty husk. A decision like that might leave Roe nominally alive, but that would also leave states free to restrict access to abortions to the point they’re nonexistent in the state, or come up with other creative ways to effectively ban them.

It is still possible the Court will surprise the myriad of legal analysts predicting the end of a constitutional right to an abortion. In 1992, when the Court heard Casey, even Justice Harry Blackmun, the author of Roe, expected his landmark opinion to be overruled. Instead, Casey weakened, but didn’t overrule, Roe.

But after Wednesday’s oral arguments, no one should bet Roe will receive another stay of execution. The two political parties are too well-sorted on questions of abortion rights, the Republican Party has grown too sophisticated in picking judges who will hew to the GOP’s policy preferences, and a majority of the sitting justices were exceedingly skeptical of Roe at Wednesday’s argument.

 

There is now an almost certain chance that by this time next year, the right to an abortion will depend entirely on the state you live in, and for the majority of women outside of New England and the West Coast, it will not only be illegal to get an abortion in those states, but to cross state lines to get an abortion. If that's not made explicit, the next GOP-controlled Congress and President will outlaw it nationally. 

Depending on the reasoning behind the death of Roe, a lot of other rights now hang in the balance, not to mention the looming Damoclean blade of the end of most federal regulatory agencies. It would be a fundamental change in America.

 

In the past, Kavanaugh has sometimes pushed for more incremental attacks on Roe. In June Medical Services v. Gee (2019), for example, he argued in favor of placing complicated procedural barriers in the way of abortion plaintiffs that would make it difficult for them to bring their cases to federal court or to receive a meaningful remedy.

But on Wednesday, Kavanaugh seemed no less eager to overrule Roe than Thomas, Alito, or Gorsuch. At one point, Kavanaugh rattled off a long list of landmark — and largely celebrated — Supreme Court decisions, including its school integration decision in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), its first one person/one vote decision in Baker v. Carr (1962), and its marriage equality decision in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), which all overruled previous decisions.

The clear implication was that if the Court could overrule precedent in those cases, why can’t it overrule Roe?

That leaves Barrett, who often implies at oral argument that she might take a more centrist approach than her most conservative colleagues, but who also votes with the Court’s right flank much more often than not. Though Barrett’s questions were less revealing than Kavanaugh’s, they left little doubt that she disagrees with essential parts of Roe and Casey.

Among other things, Barrett repeatedly brought up so-called “safe haven” laws, which allow someone who recently gave birth to immediately give up their child for adoption (Barrett herself is the adoptive mother of two children). “Both Roe and Casey emphasized the burdens of parenting,” she noted, before asking why safe haven laws don’t “take care of that problem?”

In one particularly remarkable moment, Barrett appeared to argue that being forced to carry and birth a child is no big deal. “It doesn’t seem to me to follow that pregnancy and parenthood are all part of the same burden,” she said. “It seems to me that the choice, more focused, would be between, say, the ability to get an abortion at 23 weeks or the state requiring the woman to go 15, 16 weeks more” before terminating their parental rights after giving birth.

Barrett, in other words, appeared quite determined to erase Casey’s viability rule. And, while she was less explicit about whether she would eliminate Casey’s undue burden standard, the tone of her questioning was extremely dismissive of both Roe and Casey.

So the right to an abortion is in deep trouble. At the least, the Court appears very likely to overrule Casey’s viability standard — and there’s a good chance it will go all the way to overruling Roe entirely.

 

After that, well, here there be dragons. We're not about to turn back the clock, we're about to outlaw the last 70 years of modernity.

The Kids Are Alright (But They're Worried)

The latest Harvard youth poll of 18-29 year-olds finds that many Zoomers and young Millennials are not in a real great headspace in 2021.

 

A majority (52%) of young Americans believe that our democracy is either “in trouble,” or “failing.”

Only 7% of young Americans view the United States as a “healthy democracy”; 27% described the nation as a “somewhat functioning democracy,” 39% a “democracy in trouble,” and 13% went so far as to declare the nation a “failed democracy.”  

While Democrats are divided (44% healthy/somewhat functioning and 45% in trouble/failed) about the health of our democracy, 70% of Republicans believe that we are either a democracy in trouble (47%) or failed (23%). A majority (51%) of independent and unaffiliated young Americans also say we are in trouble or failed.  

Overall, 57% of all 18- to 29- year-olds say that it is “very important” that America is a democracy while another 21% say it’s “somewhat important.” Seven percent (7%) say either “not very” or “not at all important,” while 13% don’t know. Seventy-one percent (71%) of college graduates agree that it is “very important” that America is a democracy, but only 51% of those not currently in college, or without a college degree say the same. 

 

It's young Republicans, fed the nonsense of a stolen election, who overwhelmingly believe democracy is either broken or dead in America. 

It gets worse.

Young Americans place the chances that they will see a second civil war in their lifetime at 35%; chances that at least one state secedes at 25%.  

Nearly half (46%) of young Republicans place the chances of a second civil war at 50% or higher, compared to 32% of Democrats, and 38% of independent and unaffiliated voters. Level of education (27% among college students and those with degrees compared to 47% for others) and whether young people live in urban (33%), suburban (33%), rural (48%) or small town (51%) environments are all significant predictors.  

Similar patterns hold for those who think secession is likely. Overall, 25% rate the chances at 50% or greater.

 

Again, it's young Republicans driving this, nearly half of whom expect a civil war.  

Some 60% Women 18-29 say COVID has made them a different or very different person from what they were in 2019, it's 40% for men, and Joe Biden's approval rating among this age group is 46% (still above any point in Trump's reign).

Here's the killer though. These kids are a mess mentally, and I don't blame them one bit.

More than half (51%) of young Americans report having felt down, depressed, and hopeless -- and 25% have had thoughts of self-harm -- at least several times in the last two weeks. 

In addition to the majority of youth who express depressive symptoms, and the 25% who express thoughts of self-harm, we also found that a significant number of young Americans are bothered by traits associated with generalized anxiety disorder.

• 38% of young Americans report feeling nervous, anxious, or on edge in the last two weeks
• 36% have been worrying too much about different things
• 32% have been easily annoyed or irritable
• 30% have had trouble relaxing
• 22% report feeling afraid as if something awful might happen
• 20% have not been able to stop or control worrying
• 16% have been so restless that it is hard to sit still

School or work (34%), personal relationships (29%), self-image (27%), economic concerns (25%), and the coronavirus (24%) are the five most popular responses given when asked about the impact on mental health. Politics and social media each were cited by 17% of survey respondents. Young females (22% compared to 13% for males) were significantly more likely to cite social media as a problem; young people living in the suburbs (22%) were more likely than others to say the same.  

Additionally, young Americans believe that they are more worried about the country’s future than their parents. We found that 34% believe that they are more concerned than their parents, and only 19% note they feel less concerned. Slightly more than a third (35%) indicate they think about the country in the same way, while 11% don’t know.

 

And I thought my generation were a bunch of cynics.

I've said all along that the young folk must really hate what's been done to them, and what the Boomers and greedsters have taken from them with climate change and austerity. We see here that's spot on, to the point where they expect a fighting war with their own generation of Americans.

The Mask Slips Once Again...

...And House Republicans are gladly saying up front that they can't wait to impeach Joe Biden multiple times for wholly manufactured offenses should they take back the House in 2023, all but promising years of torment and endless hearings for Biden administration officials and Biden's son, Hunter.

 

Republicans can't wait to make Joe Biden's life miserable if they take back control of the US House in the upcoming midterm elections.

Odds are high that the GOP will wrest control of the House from Democrats in 2022. They've got a decent shot of winning back the Senate, too. And House Republicans are feeling so confident that they're already drafting their playbook for taking on the Biden administration once they've got more power on Capitol Hill.

Insider asked some of the very Republicans poised to take charge what they'd do if American voters decide to put them back in the majority in Congress. Their plans: theatrical oversight hearings, investigations into Hunter Biden's art sales, and maybe even one or more Biden impeachments.

"No government agency will want to receive a letter from us," said Rep. James Comer, a Kentucky Republican who is now the top Republican on the House Oversight and Reform Committee and is in position to become its next chairman if the GOP takes the majority.

Republicans are making the case that handing them majorities in the House and Senate would allow them to provide a check against the Biden administration. They argue that Democratic leadership in both chambers of Congress has failed to hold the administration accountable so far.

Democrats made the same pitch in the midterm elections during President Donald Trump's administration, and their House takeover in 2019 dramatically shifted the power dynamic in Washington and paved the way for Trump's two impeachments.

"Everyone's frustrated with the Biden administration," Comer told Insider in a recent interview on Capitol Hill. "What they see in Congress now is absolutely no oversight to the Biden administration. Like who was held accountable for Afghanistan? Who's held accountable for the lack of border security? No one," he added. "Someone needs to hold them accountable and provide oversight, and we're going to do that."

 

Oversight Chair James Comer, Judiciary Chair Gym Jordan, Armed Services Chair Mike Rogers, and the one-two NC GOP punch of Virginia Foxx chairing Labor and Education and Patrick McHenry in Financial Services will almost certainly be the biggest clown show in town, and they'll juggle their burning chainsaws and take the country down while they're at it.

With extreme gerrymandering alone more than giving the GOP the expected margin they'll need for the House, unless Democrats turn out in record fashion, it's all going to burn down with these idiots in charge.

The time to get serious about Democratic primaries and House races was three months ago.

StupidiNews!

• At least three are dead and eight more injured in a high school shooting in suburban Detroit on Tuesday, police have taken the 15-year-old suspect into custody.
• The Ninth Circuit has upheld California's ban on high capacity magazines, reinstating the ban on a 7-4 vote after a Trump-appointed federal judge ruled the ban unconstitutional.
• Two federal judges, one in Louisiana and one in Kentucky, have blocked the Biden administration from enforcing COVID vaccines for health care workers and for government contractors.
• China says the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics will continue "on schedule" in February despite the COVID-19 Omicron variant spreading globally.
• Union organizers in Alabama will get a second unionization vote for Amazon warehouse workers after the company was found to have violated several NLRB union election regulations.
  

Last Call For Preschool Of Hard Right Knocks

Even if Biden's Build Back Better plan passes President Manchin's desk, there's zero reason to believe any Red states will implement any social policy in the legislation, including universal preschool.

The White House’s proposal to create universal prekindergarten would face enormous implementation challenges, as GOP lawmakers in at least a half-dozen states are already balking and others are likely to follow.

The plan, which is included in the social spending package that recently passed the House and is now before the Senate, would provide $110 billion in federal funding for states to offer free prekindergarten for millions of 3- and 4-year-olds across the United States.

Universal prekindergarten has the potential to become one of the most transformative education programs in the country and is considered a legacy goal for the White House. The initiative comes at a time when an unusually large number of women have dropped out of the labor force and have yet to return, in part because of pandemic forces that temporarily closed or in some cases shut down prekindergartens and day cares nationwide. Meanwhile, worker shortages have hamstrung similar programs across the country.

Yet the success of universal prekindergarten would heavily depend on whether states participated and picked up billions of dollars in additional costs. States have had a very uneven approach to implementing federal programs meant to assist Americans in the past year. Emergency housing aid was hardly disbursed in some states, for example, and in states largely led by GOP governors, enhanced federal unemployment assistance was cut off months before it would have expired.

The universal pre-K program would prove another key test of this design.

White House officials have repeatedly said their proposal would mean that all American parents could enroll their children in free pre-K. But these promises depend on state governments kicking in substantial sums on top of the new federal funds in the legislation to create or expand state programs. Partially as a result of these requirements, GOP officials have expressed deep reservations about participating in the new federal system, according to interviews with state lawmakers, conservative policy activists and other early-education experts interviewed by The Washington Post.

“Legislators in Republican-run states are expected to voice opposition to what they see as a highly flawed pre-K plan and take action to stop it,” said Patrick Gleason, vice president of state affairs for Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group working with conservative state lawmakers.

Republican lawmakers in Missouri, New Hampshire, North Carolina, South Carolina and Minnesota told The Post that they will reject or are troubled by aspects of Biden’s proposed pre-K expansion. GOP state lawmakers in Texas and Arizona have also strongly criticized the plan, according to conservative advocacy groups working closely with officials in those states.

In interviews, Republican lawmakers expressed concern about the new prekindergarten education standards that would be required for participating states, as well as the risk that funding would evaporate, leaving states scrambling to cover expensive programs.

There “absolutely is going to be opposition from Republican state lawmakers,” said Jonathan Bydlak, director of the governance program at the R Street Institute, a conservative group that advocates for free markets. “There’s a philosophical disagreement that this is not the proper role of the federal government and that this is federal meddling, similar to opposition to other education standards in the past.”

Biden’s proposal would come close to fully funding the expansion of prekindergarten programs with federal dollars only in its fourth year, counting on state governments to make up the difference in every other year. Estimates vary, but the federal government’s plan may pay less than half the costs of providing free pre-K to all children ages 3 and 4, which could make it easier for lawmakers in GOP-run states to opt out. The funding is set to expire altogether in the program’s seventh year, because Democrats have sought to reduce the overall cost of Biden’s spending plan to meet the demands of centrist lawmakers. 

Of course, centrist idiocy aside, if the GOP gets into power in 2025, we won't have a Department of Education to begin with.

Remember however that Republicans don't want an educated populace, they want a stupid, easily manipulated one. They've been winning this game for 25 years now and it shows. Don't expect Red states to touch it.

The Vax Of Life, Con't

As America braces for Omicron Winter, WaPo's Philip Bump points out that MAGA country has suffered the most from COVID and the refusal of vaccines approaching more than 50% of the population in some areas. The death gap in Trump counties versus Biden counties has only gotten worse, and this winter it will only become more pronounced, as well, more are pronounced dead from the virus.

 

It’s worth putting a fine point on a subject I raised earlier Monday: It is red America, Donald Trump-voting America, that has seen the worst effects of the pandemic. With divergent vaccination rates, with the unvaccinated population that’s most at risk being made up of Republicans at three times the rate of Democrats, that gap is poised to grow.

If we break down monthly case and death figures by county vote in 2020, we see that Trump counties have been hardest hit by the pandemic on a per capita basis since last year. If we throw in vaccination rates, we see that it is those same counties that have been the slowest to get vaccinated. As of April of this year, the most red and most blue counties in the country began to diverge on vaccination rates. As of writing, data compiled by The Washington Post suggests that the counties that voted most strongly for President Biden are fully vaccinated at a rate 40 percent higher than the rate in the counties that voted most strongly for Trump.

Those are cumulative. If we look at how the monthly total of cases and deaths has compared to vaccination rates over time, the picture is different. Since June, the number of cases in the most-blue counties has grown more slowly than the number of cases in the most-red ones. The gap on deaths is even wider — even as the vaccination rates have moved in the inverse relationship.

 

It's possible things won't be as bad as last winter as we have more tools now. But the main tool remains the vaccine.

There is no guarantee that this pattern will hold. Winter is almost upon us and, last year, the Northeast got hammered. The Sun Belt was hit hard during this summer’s fourth wave, spurred by the delta variant, and may be less likely to see a surge this winter. It’s also possible that the omicron variant spurs a fifth surge of the virus that slams more-blue counties pushed indoors for the winter months.

All of the data, though, suggest that vaccination plays an important role in preventing infection, illness and death. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the unvaccinated are at far more risk of those worst-case outcomes — which might help explain why more-vaccinated blue counties saw slower growth in deaths during the fourth wave than cases. Hence Biden’s call Monday to get vaccinated with the new variant looming.

But the problem, as always, is that the people who disproportionately need to be convinced to get vaccinated are also those least likely to follow Biden’s lead.

 

And they will die. They will blame Biden for not stopping the virus, as I predicted months ago.

 

It's hard to defeat people willing to die to stop you. 

But it's not impossible.

Gov. Charlie Baker expects a state-sanctioned COVID-19 vaccination passport program to be implemented in Massachusetts and several other states soon.

During an appearance on GBH News' Boston Public Radio, Baker said a scannable quick response code, commonly known as a QR code, would show a person's vaccination status and be made available for others to scan and verify.

"It's a universal standard and we've been working with a bunch of other states, there's probably 15 or 20 of them, to try to create a single QR code that can be used for all sorts of things where people may choose to require a vaccine," Baker said of the passport program.

Baker showed hosts Margery Eagan and Jim Braude his code while in the GBH’s studios in Brighton.

"It's my proof that I've been vaccinated," he said.

 

The problem is where this will be needed the most is where it where never be allowed to be implemented.

Insurrection Investigation, Con't

The big story today on Trump's January 6th insurrection conspiracy from The Guardian's Hugo Lowell is different: it directly implicates Donald Trump himself as the ringleader of the tragic events of that day.

Hours before the deadly attack on the US Capitol this year, Donald Trump made several calls from the White House to top lieutenants at the Willard hotel in Washington and talked about ways to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election win from taking place on 6 January.

The former president first told the lieutenants his vice-president, Mike Pence, was reluctant to go along with the plan to commandeer his largely ceremonial role at the joint session of Congress in a way that would allow Trump to retain the presidency for a second term.

But as Trump relayed to them the situation with Pence, he pressed his lieutenants about how to stop Biden’s certification from taking place on 6 January, and delay the certification process to get alternate slates of electors for Trump sent to Congress.

The former president’s remarks came as part of strategy discussions he had from the White House with the lieutenants at the Willard – a team led by Trump lawyers Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn and Trump strategist Steve Bannon – about delaying the certification.

Multiple sources, speaking to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, described Trump’s involvement in the effort to subvert the results of the 2020 election.

Trump’s remarks reveal a direct line from the White House and the command center at the Willard. The conversations also show Trump’s thoughts appear to be in line with the motivations of the pro-Trump mob that carried out the Capitol attack and halted Biden’s certification, until it was later ratified by Congress.

The former president’s call to the Willard hotel about stopping Biden’s certification is increasingly a central focus of the House select committee’s investigation into the Capitol attack, as it raises the specter of a possible connection between Trump and the insurrection.

Several Trump lawyers at the Willard that night deny Trump sought to stop the certification of Biden’s election win. They say they only considered delaying Biden’s certification at the request of state legislators because of voter fraud.

The former president made several calls to the lieutenants at the Willard the night before 6 January. He phoned the lawyers and the non-lawyers separately, as Giuliani did not want non-lawyers to participate on legal calls and jeopardise attorney-client privilege.

Trump’s call to the lieutenants came a day after Eastman, a late addition to the Trump legal team, outlined at a 4 January meeting at the White House how he thought Pence could usurp his role in order to stop Biden’s certification from happening at the joint session. 

 

This was an open conspiracy to overturn a duly elected President in Joe Biden in order to execute a  violent, insurrectionist coup that would allow Trump to remain in the Oval Office. It was the worst-kept secret in Washington DC. It was an attempt to end American democracy and to halt the peaceful transfer of power.

Trump was calling the shots from the top, giving orders, and wanting options in case Pence got cold feet. The goal was to keep power despite Biden's clear victory.

It almost worked. He had a cadre of followers working on the plan. It fell through because Pence chickened out.

And we're all acting like Trump should get another shot at the apple.

StupidiNews!

• CNN says it will conduct a "thorough review" of documents pertaining to host Chris Cuomo's advisor relationship with his brother, disgraced former NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
• The sex trafficking trial of former Jeffrey Epstein confidante Ghislaine Maxwell begins this week in New York City, Maxwell faces decades in prison if convicted on all charges.
• Democrats in the House and Senate could vote as early as Wednesday on a continuing resolution that will fund the federal government into early 2022 as a shutdown looms on Friday.
• President Biden urged "caution but not panic" over the COVID-19 Omicron variant expected on US shores soon, urging all American adults to get booster shots as soon as possible.
• Harvard researchers are looking at 3D printer ink made from E.Coli that could have self-assembling and even renewable properties when it comes to forming carbon nanofibers.
  

Last Call For Coleman Has To Go

We started November with Kansas state Democratic Rep. Aaron Coleman's arrest on domestic battery charges for allegedly going after his girlfriend, and we end the month with Coleman now getting a DUI over the weekend.

Kansas Democratic House Representative Aaron Coleman was arrested on Saturday, Nov. 27 for driving under the influence.

Douglas County jail records show that he was arrested on I-70 heading westbound by Kansas State Highway Patrol.

He was released on a $250 bond.

“I want to reiterate what I have said in the past: It is clear Representative Coleman is in dire need of help,” House Democratic Leader Tom Sawyer said. “For the sake of the state of Kansas, his constituents, and himself, he should resign and concentrate on getting the help he badly needs. The stress of the legislature is not a healthy environment for someone in this mental state.”

Coleman has represented Kansas’ 37th District in the state House of Representatives for a year.

“Mr. Coleman’s most recent arrest is further evidence that he is not fit to serve in the Kansas House of Representatives and that his continued presence in the Legislature is a disservice to his constituents,” Gov. Laura Kelly said. “He should resign immediately and seek the treatment that he needs. If he does not resign, the Legislature should use its process to remove him from office.”

 

Kansas Dems keep refusing to expel Coleman from the state legislature as Coleman has repeatedly refused to resign, saying that the people elected him and that he will serve no matter what, accusing his fellow Democrats of hypocrisy for refusing to oust Democratic Rep. Vic Miller over his DUI earlier this year.

It's a mess, and Kansas Dems need to clean house in the House.

Of course, where do I get off saying anything? Kentucky Dems are moribund at best...

Oh well.

If At First You Don't Secede, Con't

Over at the Never Trump clubhouse that is The Bulwark, Kristofer Harrison notes that Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz is cozying up to the Texas Secessionist Movement, and the TSM is definitely getting help from Putin's merry band of white supremacist wackos.

A couple weeks ago Senator Ted Cruz was speaking at Texas A&M University when someone asked him his thoughts on the Texas secessionist movement. He replied that he wasn’t “there, yet.” It is important to understand that the modern secession movement is not a product of Lone Star pride. It’s an idea that has been force fed into the American conservative movement by Russia.

Secession is one of the Kremlin’s “active measures” campaigns: Promote fringe wackos abroad and hope that, eventually, they break something. This may not sound like much of a plan, but it sometimes works. Putin has been openly building his portfolio of wackos for a while. And the wackos have begun breaking things.

The shiny ball that caught Cruz’s attention was The Texas Nationalist Movement (TNM). TNM is Texas’s most prominent secessionist organization. In 2015, TNM attended a St. Petersburg gathering of worldwide extremists organized by Rodina—that’s “Motherland” in Russian—the fascist-adjacent offshoot of Putin’s United Russia party.

That gathering was a safe space where the likes of German Neo-Nazis, the KKK, Greece’s Golden Dawn, and Roberto Fiore (the Italian terrorist responsible for a 1980 bombing in Bologna that killed 85), could gather and praise Putin’s defense of Western (read: “white”) culture. Here, featured on Rodina’s website, is Nate Smith, TNM’s executive director, in attendance. Howdy! Russia’s info warriors were very pleased with his comments at the event. This skulduggery got so bad and Robert Mueller indicted 13 Russians who were working with the Texas secessionist movement in 2016 to—please put down your coffee—spread misinformation about Ted Cruz during the presidential primary in order to help Donald Trump.

There’s a nice symmetry there. Some day when when Hollywood comes calling the film can be titled, “From Victim to Dupe: The Ted Cruz Story.”

One of the nastier conferees at Putin’s 2015 conclave was the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group who was credited by Charleston shooter Dylann Roof in his manifesto for inspiring him to “take it to the real world.”

There’s a white nationalist group called Atomwaffen which venerates Roof as a hero. Atomwaffen was founded by a teenager in Florida using a messaging platform created by a Russian. You can find Roof’s manifesto—along with manifestos from other white nationalist killers—on 8chan, which has been relaunched as 8kun, by two Russians.

Fortunately for us, secessionists aren’t killing people—they’re not “there, yet”—but Putin’s propaganda can be convincing. Casey Michel notes that the fake Russian secessionist “Heart of Texas” Facebook page, which had more likes than the GOP and Democrat Facebook pages combined, organized a rally of white nationalists and AR-15 enthusiasts in downtown Houston in 2017.

Putin invests broadly in his pet extremist wackos. Richard Spencer used to appear regularly on RT where he commented as an expert on everything from Syria to U.S. cultural affairs. David Duke lived in Russia. The circular nature of this web can border on parody: Bringing it full circle to Texas A&M, Duke once rented his Moscow apartment to another American neo-Nazi named Preston Wiginton. Wiginton—a proud Aggie—organized presentations on the Texas A&M campus—the same place where Cruz was asked about secession!—for both Richard Spencer and Russian ultra-nationalist Alexander Dugin, a man who befriended Duke in Russia.

The only way to understand the neo-Nazi mob and the secessionist movement is as Vladimir Putin’s weapons. And Ted Cruz—despite having been on the receiving end of this in 2016—has no problem cozying up to them today.

 

Cruz may be the kind of dork to pick a Twitter fight with Big Bird and lose it publicly, but he's still a GOP US senator in Texas, and that automatically makes him dangerous by default.  Getting chummy with secessionist white supremacist terrorists is a major problem.

Or should be. At this point, nobody seems to care.

The Supreme Sinister Six

As Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus explains in a powerful essay, the next eight months of Supreme Court rulings will almost certainly result in a fundamental change in American rights, rights that will not be coming back in our lifetimes.

 

Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan Jr., the Eisenhower appointee who became the liberal lion of the Warren Court, had a tradition for introducing every new batch of law clerks to the realities of the institution.

“Brennan liked to greet his new clerks each fall by asking them what they thought was the most important thing they needed to know as they began their work in his chambers,” Seth Stern and Stephen Wermiel write in “Liberal Champion,” their Brennan biography. “The … stumped novices would watch quizzically as Brennan held up five fingers. Brennan then explained that with five votes, you could accomplish anything.”

Brennan, master vote-counter and vote-cajoler, was right — but there is an important corollary to his famous Rule of Five, one powerfully at work in the current Supreme Court. That is the Rule of Six. A five-justice majority is inherently fragile. It necessitates compromise and discourages overreach. Five justices tend to proceed with baby steps.

A six-justice majority is a different animal. A six-justice majority, such as the one now firmly in control, is the judicial equivalent of the monarchy’s “heir and a spare.” The pathways to victory are enlarged. The overall impact is far greater than the single-digit difference suggests.

On the current court, each conservative justice enjoys the prospect of being able to corral four colleagues, if not all five, in support of his or her beliefs, point of view or pet projects, whether that is outlawing affirmative action, ending constitutional protection for abortion, exalting religious liberty over all other rights or restraining the power of government agencies.

A six-justice majority is emboldened rather than hesitant; so, too, are the conservative advocates who appear before it. Such a court doesn’t need to trim its sails, hedge its language, or abide by legal niceties if it seems more convenient to dispense with them.

A conservative justice wary of providing a fifth vote for a controversial position can take comfort in the thought that now there are six; there is strength in that number. Meantime, a court with a six-justice majority is one in which the justices on the other side of the ideological spectrum are effectively consigned to a perpetual minority. They craft dissents that may serve as rebukes for the ages but do little to achieve change in the present. The most they can manage is damage control, and that only rarely.
Follow Ruth Marcus‘s opinions

That is the reality — exhilarating for conservatives, chilling for liberals — as the court, with a membership that has not been this conservative since the 1930s, embarks on what could be its most consequential term in decades. The October 2021 term is the first with six conservatives in place from Day One; the newest, Amy Coney Barrett, was not confirmed until several weeks into the court’s previous term, and the first year for any new justice tends to be a time of settling in.

Now, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who occupies what passes for this court’s center, holds the reins but is no longer firmly in control of his horses. Some of his most conservative justices are champing at the bit. Sometimes he can curb them, but not always; sometimes he is delighted to head in the same direction. And if any five agree, they can go galloping off anywhere they choose. If Roberts isn’t with them, the court’s most conservative member, Justice Clarence Thomas, has the power to assign the majority opinion or write it himself.

“The difference between six and five is exponential,” said Mike Davis, president of the Article III Project, which worked to confirm conservative judges during the Trump years. “With five justices to the chief’s right, they no longer need to compromise with the chief to win. And this means it is much more likely that the court is going to get to the conservative result most of the time."

The justices have defied some earlier liberal predictions of catastrophe, but there’s reason to believe this term may be different — and if not this term, then one not far off.

 

We're looking at a generational shift on civil, voting, and religious rights, where the country is permanently shifted towards a Christian Dominionist theocracy, where states become fiefdoms without a strong federal government tying them together, where a hopelessly deadlocked Congress, jammed by the GOP is unable to do anything to restore rights, and where people of color and women are afforded scraps of second-class citizenship, rights granted if and only if those rights do not impinge on the desires of white Christian men.

 

It will be a dark return to Jim Crow, segregation, and misery, where the status quo is enforced by any White man who chooses to take up arms to do so. This court has already destroyed enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. It's about to end Roe and affirmative action. It may end civil rights altogether, and eliminate 95% of federal agencies.

 

This decade is going to be one of abject enslavement.

StupidiNews!

• European, Asian, and North American travel restrictions from southern Africa over the COVID-19 Omicron variant has stranded thousands of passengers worldwide as bans went into effect.
• Washington State dairy farmers continue to reel from record flooding earlier this month as the Biden Administration has promised assistance.
• In Honduras, both the ruling National Party presidential candidate Nasry Asfura and opposition leader Xiomara Castro are claiming victory as delays in Sunday's voting tallies may take weeks.
• Russia is expelling more than 50 US diplomats and their families starting in January as "unresolved differences" remain between the US State Department and Moscow.
• Dictionary maker Collins has chosen "NFT" as its 2021 Word of the Year, as "non-fungible tokens" have taken the tech world by storm in the last several months.
  

Last Call For The Manchin On The Hill, Con't

Like the reality or not, I'm far from the only person who has adopted the President Manchin label at this point.

Democrats across the party are raising alarms about sinking support among some of their most loyal voters, warning the White House and congressional leadership that they are falling short on campaign promises and leaving their base unsatisfied and unmotivated ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

President Biden has achieved some major victories, signing a bipartisan $1 trillion infrastructure bill and moving a nearly $2 trillion social policy and climate change bill through the House. But some Democrats are warning that many of the voters who put them in control of the federal government last year may see little incentive to return to the polls in the midterms — reigniting a debate over electoral strategy that has been raging within the party since 2016.

As the administration focuses on those two bills, a long list of other party priorities — expanding voting rights, enacting criminal justice reform, enshrining abortion rights, raising the federal minimum wage to $15, fixing a broken immigration system — have languished or died in Congress. Negotiations in the Senate are likely to further dilute the economic and climate proposals that animated Mr. Biden’s campaign — if the bill passes at all. And the president’s central promise of healing divisions and lowering the political temperature has failed to be fruitful, as violent language flourishes and threats to lawmakers flood into Congress.

Interviews with Democratic lawmakers, activists and officials in Washington and in key battleground states show a party deeply concerned about retaining its own supporters. Even as strategists and vulnerable incumbents from battleground districts worry about swing voters, others argue that the erosion of crucial segments of the party’s coalition could pose more of a threat in midterm elections that are widely believed to be stacked against it.

Already, Mr. Biden’s approval ratings have taken a sharp fall among some of his core constituencies, showing double-digit declines among Black, Latino, female and young voters. Those drops have led to increased tension between the White House and progressives at a time of heightened political anxiety, after Democrats were caught off-guard by the intensity of the backlash against them in elections earlier this month. Mr. Biden’s plummeting national approval ratings have also raised concerns about whether he would — or should — run for re-election in 2024.

Not all of the blame is being placed squarely on the shoulders of Mr. Biden; a large percentage of frustration is with the Democratic Party itself.

“It’s frustrating to see the Democrats spend all of this time fighting against themselves and to give a perception to the country, which the Republicans are seizing on, that the Democrats can’t govern,” said Bishop Reginald T. Jackson, who leads the A.M.E. churches across Georgia. “And some of us are tired of them getting pushed around, because when they get pushed around, African Americans get shoved.”

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a leading House progressive, warned that the party is at risk of “breaking trust” with vital constituencies, including young people and people of color.

“There’s all this focus on ‘Democrats deliver, Democrats deliver,’ but are they delivering on the things that people are asking for the most right now?” she said in an interview. “In communities like mine, the issues that people are loudest and feel most passionately about are the ones that the party is speaking to the least.”

Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and other Democrats acknowledge that a significant part of the challenge facing their party is structural: With slim congressional majorities, the party cannot pass anything unless the entire caucus agrees. That empowers moderate Democrats like Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia to block some of the biggest promises to their supporters, including a broad voting rights bill.

A more aggressive approach may not lead to eventual passage of an immigration or voting rights law, but it would signal to Democrats that Mr. Biden is fighting for them, said Faiz Shakir, a close adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Mr. Shakir and others worry that the focus on the two significant pieces of legislation — infrastructure and the spending bill — won’t be enough to energize supporters skeptical of the federal government’s ability to improve their lives.

“I’m a supporter of Biden, a supporter of the agenda, and I’m frustrated and upset with him to allow this to go in the direction it has,” said Mr. Shakir, who managed Mr. Sanders’s presidential run in 2020. “It looks like we have President Manchin instead of President Biden in this debate.”

He added: “It’s made the president look weak.”

 

At the very least, without voting rights, there will be no free and fair elections in the future. Republican state legislatures will simply overturn Democratic candidate wins as fraud.  And it's Black folk who are, as always, suffering the most from Manchin's bullshit.

The problem is, there's not a lot we can do. Push Manchin hard enough and he jumps ship, and we get nothing instead of a slim chance. It's hard, but Manchin continues to go on the Sunday shows week after week and proclaim him agenda while Biden just twiddles his thumbs.

At this point, there's no reason to believe the Build Back Better plan will get a Senate vote at all, and it's Manchin's doing, not Biden's.

I hate this "Dems in Disarray" crap as much as you all do, but that still means Manchin is calling the shots, and that remains a terrible reality.

Israeli A Problem Here, Con't

Why yes, as I said six months ago, Israel deliberately targeted a Gaza City high-rise that they knew housed Associated Press and Al Jazeera journalists in order to take out Hamas agents they suspected were in the building. Six months and a pack of lies later, including the ouster of Benjamin Netanyahu, we finally learn the truth.

The intelligence file Israel gave the United States concerning the airstrike on a Gaza high-rise building that housed foreign news agencies was retroactively edited, according to Israeli sources.

This was done in order to justify Israel’s claim that the bombing of the Al-Jalaa tower during the last Gaza conflict was necessary, after it became clear that the intelligence in the hands of the Israel Defense Forces was less than solid, say the sources.

The report was given to senior U.S. officials after President Joe Biden demanded an explanation for the May 15 attack from then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Israeli officials expressed concern that submitting the altered report could adversely affect the trust between the two countries, especially on defense issues of strategic importance to Israel.

The Al-Jalaa tower in Gaza City housed the offices of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera news agencies. During Operation Guardian of the Walls Israel destroyed the tower, claiming that Hamas had been operating from the building in a way that justified the strike. Immediately after the attack, the United States demanded to see evidence supporting that claim. The IDF submitted intelligence on the tower to the U.S. the following day, but Secretary of State Antony Blinken said afterward that the information he was given did not prove that the attack was necessary. That same day, Biden conducted an uncomfortable phone conversation with Netanyahu in which the president demanded additional information explaining what led to the order to bomb the tower. Blinken has confirmed that additional information was delivered, but said that he could not discuss it.

As reported recently in Haaretz, IDF investigations found that Military Intelligence only discovered that The Associated Press and Al Jazeera had offices in Al-Jalaa during the “knock on the roof” protocol, a small missile strike meant to warn occupants to evacuate before an imminent airstrike. The military said previously, however, that it learned of the media organizations’ presence a few days before the attack. Since the beginning of the war with Hamas in May, international news organizations had given the IDF information about the location of their offices in the Gaza Strip, yet these offices were not designated as sensitive targets. Due to poor coordination, the information was not delivered to Military Intelligence or the Israel Air Force, and it was not in the building’s target file when the decision to destroy it was made.

When it became clear that foreign media organizations were housed in the tower, IDF Chief-of-Staff Aviv Kochavi convened an urgent meeting with several high-ranking officers. Sources with detailed knowledge of the discussion say Kochavi was determined to carry out the strike anyway, and the decision became final when Maj. Gen. Sharon Afek, the military advocate general at the time, ruled that it did not violate international law. A few senior defense officials warned, however, of the PR damage the strike would cause.

Military officials, as well as Hidai Zilberman, who was the IDF spokesperson at the time of Operation Guardian of the Walls, claim that the defense establishment failed to comprehend the consequences of the attack, even after it was completed. “They posted videos of the strike, before-and-after pictures,” says one knowledgeable source. “For an hour the whole world watched the building crumble in live coverage, and even that didn’t get the most senior figures to understand what Israel had got itself into.” The source said the attack had undermined the legitimacy of Israel in the operation. “Until it knocked down that tower the IDF enjoyed broad legitimacy to operate against Hamas, even from the Arab world. The collapse of the building ended that, and even if the establishment won’t admit it publicly, that was the moment that Israel understood the fighting would have to end soon," the source said.

 

They knew.

 

They bombed the building anyway.

 

That's fascism.

Sunday Long Read: In A Maze, Mint

Our Sunday Long Read this week comes to us from Nicola Twilley at the New Yorker, with the story of one of the premier designers of our age: Adrian Fisher, a man who makes...mazes.

Yes, those mazes. 

Dude's famous.

 

On the afternoon of March 25, 1980, Robert Runcie was enthroned as the hundred-and-second Archbishop of Canterbury, senior prelate of the Anglican Communion. For his first sermon following his ascension to the Chair of St. Augustine, Runcie told the assembled ranks of bishops, bewigged members of the judiciary, and assorted royalty about a recent dream. “You know how sometimes in an English garden you find a maze,” Runcie said. “The trouble is to get to the center of all those hedges. It is easy to get lost.” The Christian church, in Runcie’s slightly strained analogy, was in such a maze, and could progress toward its goal only by turning back, toward the periphery, in order to engage with those still outside the church’s embrace.

“He said, ‘I had a dream of a maze, and in this maze blah, blah, blah,’ ” the maze designer Adrian Fisher recalled, when I visited him late this summer, at his home in Dorset, in southwest England. In 1980, Fisher was twenty-eight years old and working for I.T.T., a multinational manufacturing company, where he was responsible for productivity enhancement. He was increasingly drawn to the idea of designing mazes; he’d even formed a company, Minotaur Designs, with a wealthy labyrinthologist and former diplomat, Randoll Coate. But public commissions proved elusive. “At first, I thought it was impossible,” Fisher said. “How do you start? How do you do it?”

Runcie’s dream gave him an idea: Fisher wrote to the letters page of the London Times, briefly outlining the maze’s long history as a Christian symbol and noting that, as in the Archbishop’s dream, a maze’s goal is typically reached not by “pressing toward the center” but, rather, by “returning almost to the edge,” in order to find the proper path. In his signature, Fisher styled himself a “Maze Consultant,” and, before long, this stealth marketing had reeled in a customer, and Minotaur’s first public commission. Lady Elizabeth Brunner, a former actress who was married to a chemical magnate, invited Fisher to tea. Over scones and jam, she wondered aloud whether he might create an Archbishop’s Maze, inspired by Runcie’s words, in her garden at Greys Court, a Tudor manor house in Oxfordshire.

Fisher didn’t yet have official stationery, or even a typewriter, so he submitted his proposal as a handwritten letter. His design was circular: a brick path, set in a lawn, that formed seven concentric rings winding toward a sundial in the center. At first glance, it seemed to replicate the traditional Christian pavement labyrinth, the most famous example of which is found in the nave of Chartres Cathedral. Medieval labyrinths of this kind aren’t puzzles; there is only a single path, arranged in a snaking pattern of concentric folds, and to process along it to the center is to participate in a physical allegory of the soul’s progress through life and toward salvation. But at Greys Court a maze walker—or aspirant, to use the technical term—encounters a junction within seconds and has to make a choice. Fisher cunningly combined the appearance of the old Christian labyrinth with the function of the puzzle maze, whose solution, taking its cue from Runcie’s metaphor, involves turning away from the center initially, to journey around the entire periphery.

The new Archbishop dedicated the Greys Court maze in October, 1981, and the resulting publicity generated more maze commissions. With new customers lining up, Fisher took out a business loan, bought a computer, a printer, and a secondhand car, and reinvented himself as a full-time maze designer. The course of his career, built on equal parts passion and self-promotion, was set. “See, you create events out of nothing,” he told me. Fisher realized that if he wanted to make mazes he first had to make people want mazes. From his Runcie letter to his (successful) campaign to have Britain declare 1991 the Year of the Maze, he has devoted the past four decades to creating both the market and the product. Today, at the age of seventy, he seems to have no intention of retiring. By his own count, he has created more than seven hundred mazes, in forty-two countries. He is the world’s leading maze-maker by a margin so large that he has no real competition.

“He’s the only one who’s managed to make mazes a business rather than a hobby,” Jeff Saward, a historian of mazes and labyrinths, told me. Saward, who edits the research journal Caerdroia—the Welsh name for a turf labyrinth—estimates that, when Fisher started out, there were no more than fifty public mazes and labyrinths in the U.K. There was just one text on the subject: “Mazes and Labyrinths: A General Account of Their History and Development,” by W. H. Matthews, from 1922. Matthews, a civil servant who had fought in the First World War, wrote the book in the Reading Room of the British Museum on his return from the trenches. Despite his fondness for mazes, Matthews was convinced that they were no more than a historical curiosity. “Let us admit at once that, as a favorite of fashion, the maze has long since had its day,” he wrote. The book, proving his point, sank almost without trace, and its poor sales became a family joke.

Yet today maze observers agree that there are more mazes than ever before, and more being built each year. Mazes, under Fisher’s watch, have become part of the British heritage business, de rigueur at stately homes, where, along with tearooms and gift shops, they can raise money to pay for otherwise crippling repair and tax bills. They have also diversified: Fisher helped invent the corn mazes that pop up alongside pumpkin patches on farms across America each fall, and reintroduced mirror mazes to piers, theme parks, and malls worldwide. He will happily design a labyrinth inscribed with religious quotations for a megachurch in North Carolina; a maze adventure with an artificial volcano, lake, and safe room for a Middle Eastern princess; a thumb-size maze tattoo for an anonymous female client; and a vertical maze for a fifty-five-story skyscraper in Dubai, with meanders that double as balconies. He does eighty per cent of his business overseas, and he told me that he has won nine Guinness World Records for superlative mazes of various sorts. “Of course, I wrote the rules about how a maze qualifies for the Guinness Book of Records,” he added.

 

You know what they say, it's the journey, not the destination.

Turkey Week: Ukraine In The Membrane

Ukraine and President Volodymyr Zelensky are back in the news this week with Russian troops and materiel building up on the border, and tensions have gotten high enough that Zelensky is now outright accusing provocateurs including one of Ukraine's wealthiest tycoon of an imminent coup plot.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Friday that a group of Russian and Ukrainians is planning to stage a coup d’etat in Ukraine next month and that the plotters are trying to enlist the help of the country’s richest man, Rinat Akhmetov.

Zelensky, speaking at a “press marathon” for local and international media, said that audio recordings, obtained by Ukraine’s security services, caught plotters discussing their plans and mentioning Akhmetov’s name. Akhmetov was not involved in the actual coup plot, however, Zelensky said.

“I believe [Akhmetov] is being dragged into the war against Ukraine,” Zelensky said. “This will be a big mistake, because it is impossible to fight against the people, against the president elected by the people of Ukraine.”

Zelensky said the alleged coup was being planned for Dec. 1 or 2. He did not provide further details, however.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied any Russian role in the alleged plot.

“Russia never engages in such things. There have never been such plans,” he said.

Ukrainian media in recent weeks have commented on the growing tensions between Zelensky and Akhmetov. Zelensky has launched a “de-oligarchization”campaign to reduce the political influence of Ukraine’s richest people, who control key sections of the economy.

Akhmetov, a mining and steel tycoon, also owns media holdings, which in recent weeks have increased their criticism of Zelensky and his administration.

Zelensky’s comments also come against a backdrop of rising tensions between Kyiv and Moscow.

Western and Ukrainian officials say that they have observed a buildup of Russian forces on the country’s border with Ukraine.

 

Very few of the possible scenarios that could unfold after this are going to exactly contribute to Eastern European stability, folks. I hate to say this, but it really depends on what Putin does from here now that Zelensky has called his hand. He may do nothing, he may already have a backup plan, or he may decide that the Crimea needs defending.

Let's remember how Zelensky got into power in the first place in April 2019.

With nearly all ballots counted in the run-off vote, Mr Zelensky had taken more than 73% with incumbent Petro Poroshenko trailing far behind on 24%.

"I will never let you down," Mr Zelensky told celebrating supporters.

Russia says it wants him to show "sound judgement", "honesty" and "pragmatism" so that relations can improve. Russia backs separatists in eastern Ukraine.

The comments came from Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, in a Facebook post on Monday (in Russian).

He said he expected Mr Zelensky to "repeat familiar ideological formulas" that he used in the election campaign, adding: "I have no illusions on that score.

 

A comedian who played the Ukrainian president on TV became the actual president.  We've seen worse, but the point is, he's in charge, not Putin.