BURN AFTER READING - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2101.27
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Joe Biden’s American Fairy Tale
The ambivalent essence of “the soul of the nation.”
“I sought this to restore the soul of America,” Joe Biden said on November 7, the day he declared victory. Biden had repeated that phrase, “soul of America,” time and again on the campaign trail, but he never elaborated much on it. He alluded to it again in Wednesday’s inaugural address, speaking of the imperative “to restore the soul and to secure the future of America.” What did it mean?
Like most matters of the spirit, America’s soul is a question of faith rather than evidence. But a TV spot from his campaign, titled “Soul of America,” offers some detail. “American history is not a fairy tale,” Biden begins in a campaign ad that manages, by its end, to treat American history as a fable. He reminds us that Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, was a slaveholder. “We’ve never lived up to our American ideals,” Biden says. Yet as a montage of civil rights triumphs flickers across the screen—Jesse Owens crossing a finish line, Rosa Parks addressing a crowd—Biden insists that Jefferson’s words have “pulled us towards justice” ever since. Trump’s reelection, though, would “fundamentally alter the character of this nation.”
The spot’s unusual bluntness about US history almost hid its basic incoherence: If “the character of this nation” is so enduring, how could it survive Stonewall Jackson, George Wallace, and, yes, Thomas Jefferson but perish at the hands of a huckster like Donald Trump? And if the threat is so acute, why should we trust the most moderate candidate in the race to rescue it? Doesn’t salvation require something more? The author and Biden speechwriter Jon Meacham, author of a 2018 book entitled The Soul of America, told the New York Times that the fight for the country’s soul is ultimately about providing a sense of stability. Voters “just want somebody to run the damn thing with a modicum of efficiency and sanity.” We are not exactly in Sermon on the Mount territory here.
The ambivalent invocation of the American soul is nothing new. In 1932, a University of Pennsylvania English professor named Arthur Hobson Quinn wrote a paean to the national character, titled The Soul of America. Quinn’s was an uplifting book, written to counter the pessimism taking hold in the Great Depression. A reviewer in the New York Times praised Quinn’s “calm, serene-eyed surety…a very pleasant quality after the gleeful hullaballoo some of the younger-generation writers have raised over what they are sure have been our failures and disgraces and general incompetence.” It’s hard not to think here of our own era’s “younger-generation” voters and their dissatisfaction with the calm-eyed surety of leading Democrats.
A more radical approach treats the Christian metaphor of the soul as something that must be redeemed from disgrace rather than restored to glory. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization, was chartered in 1957 under the slogan “redeeming the soul of America.” In 1971, an anti-war Episcopal bishop, Paul Moore, said the “soul of America” was corrupted by the “moral depravity” of Vietnam. This treatment of the American soul is less abstract, more searing. This soul rots from the outside in, and our sins—Jim Crow, a cruel foreign war, poverty—corrupt us.
To most politicians, though, the soul of America is good and enduring. Faith in it is righteous. Ronald Reagan spoke triumphantly of “a revolution of spirit that taps the soul of America” in a 1985 State of the Union address; Bill Clinton invoked it soberly after the 1999 Columbine shootings, which he said had “pierced the soul of America.” Like the Puritan settlers who invariably interpreted bountiful harvests as evidence of God’s favor and famines as one of His loving tests, American politicians tend to look into the soul of the country and find themselves affirmed by whatever they see.
Biden’s use of the phrase is unique in that it straddles the line ambiguously between restoration and redemption. But the problem with his presidential metaphysics is that it demands so little of us. To restore the soul of the nation, vote for the former vice president. North Carolina’s Reverend William J. Barber II, a leader of the Poor People’s Campaign, recently told Adam Harris in the Atlantic that a country’s “soul” cannot just remain a matter of spiritual malaise. “If it does not produce a quarrel with the world, then the claim to be spiritual is suspect,” he said.
Throughout the campaign it was never clear what new quarrels Biden’s call for restoration was starting. His inaugural address, in which he used the word “soul” five times, offered the beginnings of an answer: “I ask every American to join me in this cause. Uniting to fight the common foes we face: anger, resentment, hatred. Extremism, lawlessness, violence. Disease, joblessness, hopelessness.” We have defeated these enemies before, in Biden’s telling. “Our better angels have always prevailed,” he said, drawing once again on our more virtuous past, on a heroic national character that can repair the disappointments of the present. Rather than the repudiation it seems to be, the call to restore the soul of America is more of a mirror image of another slogan from our recent history: Make America great again.
Donald Trump's dumb foray into half-hearted Culture Warring, the "1776 Commission," which was thrown together in September as one more sop to the Christian Right, took the occasion of Monday's Martin Luther King holiday to poop out a 45-page report reviewing some completely objective, "nonpartisan" facts about American history and how it should be taught. The goal, as usual with rightwing history distortion, is again to save the country from socialism, especially from the New York Times Magazine's 1619 Project.
How good is this commission on teaching American history? For one thing, its membership doesn't include any historians, guaranteeing it can't be biased. It also lacks a works cited page, or any hint of which commission members wrote it.
Historians have already had a field day calling the report garbage; the head of the American Historical Association, James Grossman, said it's a "hack job. It's not a work of history. [...] It's a work of contentious politics designed to stoke culture wars." On the whole, the report is just one more rightwing iteration of some very old panic about education, a call to fix America by teaching history as simplistic Founder worship.
Happily, the 1776 Commission Report is likely to have minimal influence. Because it's already been deleted. Thank goodness for the Wayback Machine!
Even though the 1776 Commission is about to vanish, its report really does reflect dangerous bullshit believed by a lot of people on the Right, so let's hop in and see what some of that nastiness is. Herewith, your Five Stupidest Bullshits from the '1776 Project' Report!
Look, Everybody Had Slaves and It's Over Anyway
The report is very big on the idea that the Declaration of Independence identifies fundamental truths about the universal, eternal, immutable rights of all people, which come from God. But what about slavery, and the fact that most of the Founders owned human beings as property? Not a problem, really, since the Declaration and the Constitution actually made the abolition of slavery inevitable, at least once we had a war over it almost a hundred years later.
Besides, everyone had slaves, so an institution that utterly denied the eternal truths in America's founding documents wasn't at all a "uniquely American evil." Instead, the report insists, "the unfortunate fact is that the institution of slavery has been more the rule than the exception throughout human history," so hooray for the Founders for recognizing that "all human beings have inviolable rights and inherent dignity." Just don't harp on the Founders' failure to actually treat enslaved people as fully human, because they really hated slavery, OK?
The report even pretends to make a virtue of the Constitution's euphemisms for slavery, because while the Founders weren't willing to end slavery, they at least didn't like talking about it too openly:
James Madison saw to it at the Constitutional Convention that, even when the Constitution compromised with slavery, it never used the word "slave" to do so. No mere semantics, he insisted that it was "wrong to admit in the Constitution the idea that there could be property in men."
So much nicer to just cover it up!
Hey, What About Native Americans?
You might think that a text that's so gung-ho on excusing America's original sin might also present some horrific justification for the genocide of Indigenous people, but the 1776 Report goes a step further and just plain never mentions them at all. Which is fine, because "identity politics" is bad.
Besides, Native Americans are sort of implied in the report's mention of Americans' shared "history of struggle and achievement," which includes "carving communities out of a vast, untamed wilderness." So they did their part, good for them.
Slavery, Progressivism, and Fascism: Pretty Much the Same
The report is dogmatically wedded to the notion that all rights are individual, and that any concept of "group rights" is blasphemy upon the Founders. The authors even pretend that "group rights" had nothing to do with the Founders, who literally classed enslaved people as three-fifths of a human. Rather, that heresy falls to slavery advocate Senator John C. Calhoun.
Calhoun stands in for pretty much everyone who ever considered African-Americans less than fully human, and he has to be an outlier, because in the Commission's imagination, the Founders were wholly committed to the "truth of the founding," that all people are equal. But Calhoun rejected that obvious truth, and
To this rejection, Calhoun added a new theory in which rights inhere not in every individual by "the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God" but in groups or races according to historical evolution.
That's probably the report's most outrageous fantasy: White supremacy was a "new theory" that was "developed to protect slavery," rather than the default assumption of the traffickers in human misery who wrote the Declaration. They can't be allowed to be hypocrites, because then you may as well just say the 1619 Project was right.
Those darn "group rights" are invoked again in the report's condemnation of the Progressive era. In keeping with the report's sloppy construction, there's barely a mention of the abandonment of Reconstruction, since there are other right-wing axes to grind.
The Progressives' sin was in rejecting the primacy of individual rights, and instead setting up an "administrative state" that made rules without even being elected, and even worse, advancing the notion of a "living" Constitution that might be interpreted differently as human conditions change. You can't do that, you see, since individual rights come from nature's God and are immutable!
Just in case anyone missed the point, the report goes on to remind us that both fascism and communism were united in their "utter disdain for natural rights and free peoples," and that "Like the Progressives, Mussolini sought to centralize power under the management of so-called experts."
Martin Luther King Jr: World's Bestest Capitalist!
Like any Republican after the 1990s, the 1776 Report doesn't call Martin Luther King Jr. a communist. Instead, it goes with the conservative fantasy that King spoke just one line at the 1963 March on Washington, then sat right down again and never said anything else. So the Trump administration marked the MLK holiday Monday by insisting King would never have supported "identity politics," because it
values people by characteristics like race, sex, and sexual orientation and holds that new times demand new rights to replace the old. This is the opposite of King's hope that his children would "live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," and denies that all are endowed with the unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Also please ignore King's critiques of such limited views of "equality," like his support for affirmative action, or his insistence that poor people had some kind of collective rights, summed up by the line, "What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?"
The 1776 Commission is happy to forget all of that, insisting the Civil Rights Movement went all wrong when it
was almost immediately turned to programs that ran counter to the lofty ideals of the founders. The ideas that drove this change had been growing in America for decades, and they distorted many areas of policy in the half century that followed. Among the distortions was the abandonment of nondiscrimination and equal opportunity in favor of "group rights" not unlike those advanced by Calhoun and his followers.
After all, Jim Crow was an assertion of group rights and white identity politics, so any other recognition that some groups have it better than others is just as bad and anti-American. Ergo, John C Calhoun and John Lewis were cut from the same cloth.
In an appendix, the document decries how Sixties Radicals ruined everything for King's supposed dream of colorblind "equality":
The Black Power and black nationalist movements reimagined America as a white supremacist regime. Meanwhile, other activists constructed artificial groupings to further divide Americans by race, creating new categories like "Asian American" and "Hispanic" to teach Americans to think of themselves in terms of group identities and to rouse various groups into politically cohesive bodies
Natural-born Asian Americans were never considered unpeople, and natural-born Latino Americans were never thrown out of the country en masse. Instead, the Black Panthers lied them into thinking they had group identities, which is just so like them.
In conclusion, we have now written entirely too much about a very bad take on history and we're glad it won't serve much purpose other than to excite the same people on the Right who buy Christian textbooks, the end.
[1776 Commission Report / CNN / NYT / WaPo / Philadelphia Partisan]
https://www.wonkette.com/amanda-gorman-inauguration-poem
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https://news.slashdot.org/story/21/01/17/1830244/7-of-americans-have-had-covid-19
7% of Americans Have Had Covid-19 (cnn.com)
On Friday, the CDC said new more contagious variants of the coronavirus will likely accelerate the spread of the virus and that means the US must double down on efforts to protect people.
The U.S. Census Bureau calculates the country's entire population is 330,827,996 people. These figures suggest 7.18% of the American population has now experienced the disease — more than 1 out of every 14 Americans.
Almost a Third of Recovered COVID-19 Patients Return To Hospital In Five Months, One In Eight Die (yahoo.com)
Study author Kamlesh Khunti, professor of primary care diabetes and vascular medicine at Leicester University, said: "This is the largest study of people discharged from hospital after being admitted with Covid. People seem to be going home, getting long-term effects, coming back in and dying. We see nearly 30 per cent have been readmitted, and that's a lot of people. The numbers are so large. The message here is we really need to prepare for long Covid. It's a mammoth task to follow up with these patients and the NHS is really pushed at the moment, but some sort of monitoring needs to be arranged."
The study found that Covid survivors were nearly three and a half times more likely to be readmitted to hospital, and die, in the 140 days timeframe than other hospital outpatients. Prof Khunti said the team had been surprised to find that many people were going back in with a new diagnosis, and many had developed heart, kidney and liver problems, as well as diabetes. "We don't know if it's because Covid destroyed the beta cells which make insulin and you get Type 1 diabetes, or whether it causes insulin resistance, and you develop Type 2, but we are seeing these surprising new diagnoses of diabetes,â he added. "We've seen studies where survivors have had MRS scans and they've cardiac problems and liver problems. These people urgently require follow up and the need to be on things like aspirin and statins."
Biden’s COVID Plan Is Simple. Trump Could Have Done It and Saved More Than 130,000 Lives.
The parallel universe where we actually had followed public health guidelines.
On Biden’s second day in office, he issued a slew of executive actions aimed at curbing the coronavirus pandemic, and they came at a particularly desperate moment. By most counts, more than 400,000 Americans have died of COVID-19. The vaccination rollout program has been plagued by logistical problems and poor messaging. Meanwhile, the country is bracing for the onslaught of more contagious new variants. The new president’s executive actions are wide ranging: Biden called for widespread mask mandates, and he intends to invoke the Defense Production Act to supercharge the manufacturing of lifesaving protective gear. He also aims to streamline vaccine distribution and prioritize those hardest hit by the virus, particularly Black and Latinx communities.
You might have heard yesterday or this morning that CNN had a hot scoop what said the Biden administration was having to start from square one on COVID vaccine distribution, because of how the Trump administration had left them "no coronavirus vaccine distribution plan to speak of." Which would be both amazingly bad and also par for the course for what we expect from the previous know-nothing fascist regime!
CNN's piece had anonymous quotes like this:
[I]n the immediate hours following Biden being sworn into office on Wednesday, sources with direct knowledge of the new administration's Covid-related work told CNN one of the biggest shocks that the Biden team had to digest during the transition period was what they saw as a complete lack of a vaccine distribution strategy under former President Donald Trump, even weeks after multiple vaccines were approved for use in the United States."
There is nothing for us to rework. We are going to have to build everything from scratch," one source said.
Another source described the moment that it became clear the Biden administration would have to essentially start from "square one" because there simply was no plan as: "Wow, just further affirmation of complete incompetence."
However you interpret those quotes, the Biden administration got them a nice shit sandwich tied up in a nice shitty bow, sounds like. That said, if you read the headline and the quotes themselves, you can see how there might be some gray area between LIT'RALLY no plan and something more akin to "this fuckin' shit is some fuckin' shit, we're gonna have to start all over." Either way, again, both amazingly bad and also par for the course from the Trump administration.
But quickly reporters started to push back, including the Washington Post's health reporter Dan Diamond, who said no, there was a plan. It might have been a total garbage plan, but it was technically a plan-shaped object. They even suggested maybe Biden people are saying this strategically to lower expectations:
And Fox News said AHA! Owned ya, libs! Trump didn't have NO PLAN, he just had a TOTALLY SHITTY PLAN, BET YOU FEEL DUMB RIGHT NOW, ARMPIT FART DOT GIF.
Thing is, we don't think either CNN or those reporters is necessarily getting it wrong. The story is still that the Trump administration left the Biden administration utter, stale garbage when it came to a plan for distributing the COVID vaccine.
But seriously, Fox News built an entire article around this.
It begins:
CNN is under fire for publishing an anonymously sourced "scoop" that the Biden administration will have to "build everything from scratch" because there was no Trump plan to distribute coronavirus vaccines, when reality tells a far different story.
Fox News used those tweets from Sam Stein and Dan Diamond, claiming all the mainstream reporters are calling CNN a big idiot right now. Trouble is, besides those tweets and a tweet from Josh Wingrove at Bloomberg saying actually, at this point, the rate of vaccine distribution isn't all that bad, the rest of Fox's "sources" are tweets from wingnuts like Ari Fleischer you can't trust as far as you can throw them, which isn't very far since their mouths are affixed so firmly to Donald Trump's now Florida-based b-hole.
What's the truth? Probably somewhere between CNN and the other mainstream reporters. As with everything in the Trump administration, we know it started out horrifically shitty. Both reporters' tweets up there seem to say there are a metric fuckton of problems the Biden administration is going to have to fix. But as Diamond notes above, the US has administered 912,497 doses per day for the past week, which is just under President Biden's goal of a million doses per day, to make 100 million in his first 100 days. The New York Times reports that Biden's stated goal of 100 million doses may actually be "aiming low" at this point. So maybe, despite the Trump administration's utter incompetence, shit was at last starting to fall into place.
And really, all these real reporters (not the Fox News people and not Ari Fleischer, fuck that guy) may be taking the same basic data and interpreting it a bit differently. The CNN article reads more like quotes from Biden people saying "The Trump plan? LOL." The tweets from Diamond and Stein seem more like HIGHLY LITERAL NERDS saying, "Um, OK, you guys, technically there was a plan, OK?" because they don't understand quotes like "The Trump plan? LOL."
The New York Times has a more full quote from Jeff Zients, the Biden administration's new COVID-19 chief:
"What we're inheriting is so much worse than we could have imagined," said Jeff Zients, the new White House Covid-19 response coordinator, adding, "The cooperation or lack of cooperation from the Trump administration has been an impediment. We don't have the visibility that we would hope to have into supply and allocations."
Like we said, shitshow.
That said, the Biden administration did indeed spend its first full day tackling the COVID crisis head on. Dr. Anthony Fauci appeared at the daily press briefing — which happens now again! and isn't full of lies! — and he seemed so genuinely happy to be there:
"One of the new things about this administration is that if you don't know the answer, don't guess. Just say you don't know the answer," Fauci said.
"It is somewhat of a liberating feeling," Fauci said ...
God bless that man. He added that just 15 minutes before the briefing, he talked to President Biden, and they agreed that science is good and science is their friend. That shouldn't be progress, but sadly 'tis.
Honest to Betsy, if you haven't seen it yet, and you have 20 minutes, watch Dr. Fauci give his first briefing of the Biden administration. The man is almost giddy, he is so relieved. And oh hell yes, he does throw shade at El Loser:
President Biden delivered his own remarks to the nation Thursday on the pandemic, signing a buttload of executive orders regarding mask requirements for mass travel and instituting quarantine periods for people traveling to the US from abroad, which is what other countries have been doing for eons. He also invoked the Defense Production Act to "direct all federal agencies and private industry to accelerate the making of everything that is needed to protect, test, vaccinate and take care of our people." He called it a "wartime undertaking." He said we're going to be hearing a lot more from that Fauci guy up there, too.
And regarding vaccines, Biden said, "The brutal truth is it's going to take months before we can get the majority of Americans vaccinated," even if they are more on top of the 100 million doses in 100 days strategy than expected. So there's that.
Oh yeah, and we finally have a president who's not afraid to tell people to WEAR A FUCKING MASK:
So that's where we are. The Biden administration inherited a shitshow, but they're committed to fixing it, and they're relying on science to do it. Godspeed.
But sure, Fox News, keep owning the libs with very cool own-goal headlines about how the Trump administration wasn't quite as much of a colossal fucking failure as mean old CNN says, just mostly that much of a colossal fucking failure. You betcha.
THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT
If you prefer your data in a visual format, here's the current map from COVID Exit Strategy, using data from the CDC and the COVID Tracking Project.
I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:
A Sense of Doubt blog post #1983 - Is Coronavirus more contagious and more deadly than the flu? YES.
ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.
United States
Coronavirus Cases:
Deaths:
Recovered:
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Amazon is beginning to remove QAnon products from its site, a process that could take a few days, spokeswoman Cecilia Fan said Monday afternoon following inquiries from The Washington Post and other media outlets. Third-party merchants that attempt to evade Amazon's systems to list QAnon goods may find their selling privileges revoked, Fan added.
Republicans had been preparing for this moment for years. Between gerrymandering and laws designed to reduce the influence of Democratic constituencies—by making it harder to vote, repealing limits on political giving, and stripping unions of collective bargaining rights—they had effectively made Wisconsin “a democracy-free zone,” says Ben Wikler, chair of the Wisconsin Democratic Party. Those efforts helped conservative candidates win a majority on the state Supreme Court, which has upheld nearly every move by the legislature to weaken Evers’ power, creating an almost-impenetrable anti-democracy feedback loop in a state that Joe Biden narrowly won.
“The way that Republican legislators have relentlessly sought to weaponize the courts and torpedo the governing power of Tony Evers is a preview of how Mitch McConnell and Republicans will treat Joe Biden,” says Wikler. “Democrats should prepare accordingly.”
The parallels between the only successful coup in the United States and the failed insurrection at the US Capitol on January 6 are uncanny.
On November 10, 1898 in Wilmington, North Carolina a mob inflamed by out-of-power white nationalists attacked a thriving majority Black coastal port. The insurrectionists embraced racist propaganda, and they doubted the legitimacy of Black political power. Led by former elected-official, Democratic Alfred Waddell, they marched to The Daily Record, a Black newspaper, demolished property, and lit the building ablaze. “Hell broke loose,” an observer wrote in a letter. In the historically Black neighborhood of Brooklyn, where workers from the waterfront yards confronted an armed white mob, cries and blood filled the streets.
Karl Rove: "The racism thing to me is -- I was offended"
— Lis Power (@LisPower1) January 21, 2021
If you are offended by someone saying we need to battle against racism, then perhaps you need to do some self reflection pic.twitter.com/uHg7OtXAu6
“And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat,” Biden said on the steps of the Capitol that had been stormed by a violent Donald Trump-supporting mob only two weeks before.
Guess which one conservatives decided was a personal attack? “Much of it is thinly veiled innuendo calling us white supremacists, calling us racists,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) whined on Fox News on Wednesday night. “[He’s] calling us every name in the book, calling us people who don’t tell the truth.” Let’s not begin to unpack the Trump election loss denier’s injured innocence about someone’s capacity to tell the truth. It’s his hurt feelings about the term “white supremacist” that’s my concern.
HHS Secretary Blasts Trump’s Role in Capitol Riots in Resignation Letter
“The actions and rhetoric following the election…threaten to tarnish” the administration’s legacy, he wrote.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/01/hhs-secretary-blasts-trumps-role-in-capitol-riots-in-resignation-letter/
Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar condemned President Trump’s “actions and rhetoric following the election” in a resignation letter obtained by CNN, telling Trump that these actions “threaten to tarnish” the administration’s legacy.
“The attacks on the Capitol were an assault on our democracy and on the tradition of peaceful transitions of power that the United States of America first brought to the world,” Azar wrote.
Since the riots at the Capitol, which Trump incited and only meekly condemned, several Cabinet members, including Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, have resigned early. Azar said he plans to stay on until Joe Biden is inaugurated and listed what he believed were HHS’s main accomplishments during his tenure, as is customary for end-of-term resignation letters. But he also singled out Trump’s mild reaction to the violence carried out in his name.
“Unfortunately, the actions and rhetoric following the election, especially during this past week, threaten to tarnish these and other historic legacies of this Administration,” he wrote. “I implore you to continue to condemn unequivocally any form of violence, to demand that no one attempt to disrupt the inaugural activities in Washington or elsewhere, and to continue to support unreservedly the peaceful and orderly transition of power on January 20, 2021.”
Azar, who as the president of a pharmaceutical company was known for price-gouging insulin, will be forever tied to the outbreak of the coronavirus last year and the haphazard government response that followed. Despite learning about the threat of the coronavirus in early January, Azar “struggled to get Trump’s attention to focus on the issue,” the Washington Post reported last year. Weeks after his administration had already convened a task force to address the virus, Trump was still falsely claiming that it would “go away.”
“While we mourn every lost life, our early, aggressive and comprehensive efforts saved hundreds of thousands or even millions of American lives,” Azar wrote in the letter.
More than 23.6 million people have been infected with the coronavirus in the United States, which now has the world’s worst outbreak. Nearly 400,000 Americans have died from it.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/01/a-list-of-the-lawmakers-who-joined-pro-trump-crowds-on-the-day-of-the-capitol-riot/
A List of the Lawmakers Who Joined Pro-Trump Crowds on the Day of the Capitol Riot
There are many calls for these elected officials to resign.
Among the pro-Trump crowd on January 6, when a mob stormed the Capitol and caused five deaths, were more than a dozen state lawmakers, many of whom now face calls to resign.
“Any Republican legislator who took part in yesterday’s insurrection, in Washington, DC or anywhere else in the country, should resign immediately,” Jessica Post, president of the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, said in a press release a day after the riots. “Yesterday was a stain on our country’s history and a dangerous affront to democracy—all those involved have no place making laws.”
The “Stop the Steal” protests were endorsed by Republican organizers across the country, and the fundraising arm of the Republican Attorneys General Association even sent out robocalls urging supporters to march to the Capitol and “call on Congress to stop the steal.” Trump himself endorsed the protests and was slow to condemn them even when protesters stormed into the Capitol.
Here is a list of current lawmakers who were spotted outside the Capitol or at Trump’s rally on the day of the riots. We’ll update it if any more names come to light.
Alaska state Rep. David Eastman attended Trump’s rally outside the White House and later shared several posts on social media suggesting that Antifa was behind the Capitol riots. “Those who planned and carried out today’s attacks should be speedily identified and put before a jury of their peers for public trial so that our nation never again has to experience an attack at their hands,” he said in a statement posted to his Facebook page. When reached for comment, Eastman told Mother Jones that he “traveled to DC to speak with members of Alaska’s Congressional Delegation and was glad for the opportunity to hear the president speak in person.”
Arizona state Rep. Mark Finchem was at Trump’s rally and made his way to the Capitol but later gave a shifting account of what he saw. Calling himself a “witness” to the events in his newsletter, Finchem falsely claimed that protesters did not attack the police and cited a baseless conspiracy theory that “a handful of individuals, who have been identified as ANTIFA infiltrators,” caused property damage. When the Phoenix New Times asked Finchem about the claims in his newsletter, he said that he was “a significant distance away” from the Capitol steps. “I did not say that there was not violence against police officers, I did not see any, but I did see people following police officers prompting to pass by the barricades,” he told the outlet. “Since I was a significant distance away from the steps I referenced in my statement, I did not have a vantage point to see what you describe.” Earlier this week, a Democratic state legislator filed an ethics complaint against Finchem, arguing that he is “not entitled to hold office because he supported the insurrection against the national government.” Finchem did not respond to a request for comment.
Colorado state Rep. Ron Hanks marched to the Capitol following Trump’s rally, according to an interview he gave a Colorado radio station. “I was a little surprised to see people already on the scaffolding, with the Trump flags, and so forth,” he said. Following the riots, Hanks was “absent for the majority” of the Colorado General Assembly’s legislative session that started on January 13, the Denver Post reported. His Facebook page has also been removed. He did not respond to a request for comment.
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/01/trump-administration-executes-federal-inmate-days-before-biden-takes-office/
Trump Administration Executes Federal Inmate Days Before Biden Takes Office
Until Trump restarted it, the federal death penalty hadn’t been used in nearly two decades.
Dustin Higgs, who was sentenced to death for his role in a triple murder, was executed Saturday morning, becoming the final person executed by the Trump administration, just four days before Joe Biden takes office.
Last month, Higgs appealed to President Trump for clemency, arguing that he should be spared because he did not actually pull the trigger in the murder of three women in 1996. The shooter “was tried separately and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of release,” Higgs’ lawyers argued. “It is arbitrary and inequitable to punish Mr. Higgs more severely than the actual killer.”
Since the Justice Department revived capital punishment at the federal level in 2019, 13 prisoners, including Higgs, have been executed. In the days preceding his death, two other federal death row prisoners, Corey Johnson and Lisa Montgomery, were also executed.
Before the Trump administration reinstituted the death penalty, it had not been used at the federal level for nearly two decades. As my colleague, Nathalie Baptiste, reported last month:
Trump has enacted the fewest pardons and commutations of any president in 100 years. But he’s carried out the most executions by resuming the federal death penalty and has become the first lame duck president to execute inmates in 130 years. For the first time ever, the federal government carried out more executions than all the states combined.
Biden, once a longtime supporter of the death penalty, now has as a plank of his criminal justice platform that he will eliminate the death penalty at the federal level and “incentivize states to follow the federal government’s example.” In a fall Gallup poll, only 55 percent of Americans said they support using the death penalty as punishment for murder, lower than at any point since the early 1970s.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/man-arrested-inauguration-credentials-loaded-gun.html
Man Arrested at Inauguration Checkpoint With Loaded Gun Says He Made “Honest Mistake”
Update on Jan. 17 at 8:30 a.m.: The man arrested at an inauguration checkpoint in Washington, D.C. says he forgot he had a weapon in his truck, characterizing it as an “honest mistake.” Wesley Allen Beeler, 31, of Front Royal, Virginia said he had been working as a security guard in Washington, D.C. when he got lost and asked for directions. “I pulled up to a checkpoint after getting lost in D.C. because I’m a country boy,” he told the Washington Post in what the paper describes a “tear-filled interview.” “I showed them the inauguration badge that was given to me.”
AdvertisementBeeler doesn’t have extremist ties and cooperated with law enforcement officials. He was cleared from further investigation except for the charge of violating Washington law by carrying a gun without a license. Prosecutors did not object to Beeler being released. “I forgot that I had my weapon in my vehicle. You know, I’m a Virginia resident who has licensing and training in the state of Virginia for this firearm,” Beeler said. Although police say they found 509 rounds of ammunition and 21 shotgun shells, Beeler denied those numbers were accurate. “I’m not a bad person. I’m not connected to any hate groups. I’m not there to harm anybody,” he said.
Trump Targeted the Mentally Ill With His Lame Duck Execution Spree
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/01/trump-mentally-ill-lame-duck-executions.html
The Trump Administration’s 2020-21 execution spree came to an end on Friday with the execution of the Dustin Higgs. Higgs was the 13th person put to death since federal executions resumed in July, 2020.
A close look at those executed over the last six months shows that the federal death penalty is not reserved for the “worst of the worst” as some of its proponents contend. Instead it targets the most disadvantaged and disabled of those charged with capital crimes.
AdvertisementHaving an intellectual disability, a mental illness, or a history of childhood abuse and trauma turns out to be a very important, though often unappreciated, factor in explaining both who ends up on death row and who gets executed.
That is just one of the reasons why President-Elect Joe Biden should take decisive steps to end the federal death penalty and lead a campaign for nationwide abolition of capital punishment.
“Sense of Entitlement”: Rioters Faced Few Consequences Invading State Capitols. No Wonder They Turned to the US Capitol Next.
Armed far-right mobs met little law enforcement resistance when they repeatedly attacked state capitols.
But it was Trump supporters who did the learning. That it was possible—even easy—to breach the seats of government to intimidate lawmakers. That police would not meet them with the same level of force they deployed against Black Lives Matter protesters. That they could find sympathizers on the inside who might help them.
And they learned that criminal charges, as well as efforts to make the buildings more secure, were unlikely to follow their incursions. In the three cases, police made only a handful of arrests.
The failure to stop state capitol invasions is especially chilling after the attack on the US Capitol, which left five dead, including a police officer, as lawmakers met to certify the election of President-elect Joe Biden.
Experts and elected officials said the lack of action by lawmakers and police created an environment that encouraged political violence. The FBI has warned of armed protests occurring in all 50 state capitols in the run-up to the inauguration on Wednesday. Authorities in both Washington and state capitols have dramatically strengthened security.
“Eventually, you get to the point of entitlement where you can get away with anything and there will never be any accountability,” the Idaho House minority leader, Ilana Rubel, a Democrat, said. “I don’t know that (Bedke) was wrong under the circumstances, but it adds up to creating a sense of entitlement.”
Tucker: Joe Biden Wants to Lock Us All Up
Out of Joe Biden’s entire inaugural speech, Tucker Carlson is dedicating tonight’s program to attacking this sentence:
And now, a rise in political extremism, white supremacy, domestic terrorism that we must confront and we will defeat.
Seriously, this is the part he objects to. Apparently Tucker took the mention of white supremacy personally, and even claimed to have no idea who the Proud Boys are. Eventually he moved on to Biden’s opposition to domestic terrorism, which he also takes offense at because . . . something something. As near as I could tell, Tucker’s message to his viewers was that Biden plans to use all this as a thin excuse to silence and lock up anyone who watches Fox News.
Four more years of this stuff, folks.
https://apnews.com/article/us-news-michigan-drawing-traverse-city-e3a8c5d6f3fb5e3c34a696a07c7c185a
Michigan official shows gun after public meeting criticism
TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — A county official in northern Michigan displayed a rifle during an online meeting in response to a citizen’s comments about a far-right extremist group, drawing outrage from some local residents.
Ron Clous, an elected member of the Grand Traverse County Board of Commissioners, was at home during the livestreamed meeting Wednesday, the Traverse City Record-Eagle reported
At that point, Clous stepped away from his webcam and returned with a rifle. MacIntosh told the Record-Eagle she felt threatened.
“This guy is in the middle of a government meeting brandishing a weapon,” MacIntosh said. “Why would I not think they were trying to harm me?”
MacIntosh, 74, told The Associated Press on Thursday that she planned to file a report with the Michigan State Police.
“I didn’t think he was going to shoot me, obviously, but I do think his whole point was to intimidate me and threaten me and anyone else who’s going to speak out ... and see if he can stir up masses of people who are just looking for things to fight about,” she said.
Clous told the newspaper he retrieved his rifle in response to MacIntosh’s request.
“I was going to chime in as well,” Clous said. “I was just going to show the rifle and show that I fully support the Second Amendment, but then I opted not to ... I was in my home.”
Two self-described members of the Proud Boys spoke to the county board last March in support of a pro-Second Amendment resolution the panel adopted.
Clous said he won’t denounce any group, including Black Lives Matter, the NFL, or LBGTQ organizations.
“The only thing I know about them (Proud Boys) is when they came and spoke to us,” Clous said. “They were probably the most respected folks that got up and talked. They were decent guys and they treated us with respect.”
Proud Boys has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center and an extremist group by the FBI.
Hentschel, the board chairman, laughed in response to Clous’ actions and said he had no problem with what Clous did.
“I saw it across his chest and I thought it was ironic of him to do that,” Hentschel said. “The person was talking about guns and he had one across his chest. I didn’t see him do anything illegal or dangerous with it. He wasn’t threatening or brandishing. He was just holding it.”
Holly T. Bird, a local attorney and activist, was appalled when she watched the recorded meeting.
“Everyone knows that if you’re walking down the street and someone flashes a gun at you, it’s a threat,” Bird said. “To have a public official do that during a public meeting is horrendous.”
Betsy Coffia, a fellow county commissioner, labeled Clous’ action “deeply disturbing.”
The largely symbolic resolution approved by the board in March 2020 says the county cannot use public funds to restrict Second Amendment rights or to enforce measures contradicting it.
“I am not a member of Proud Boys,” Hentschel said Wednesday. “But I do know a few Proud Boys. I’ve met Black Proud Boys, I’ve met multi-racial Puerto Rican Proud Boys and they inform me they also have gay Proud Boys. I don’t see how that’s a hate group.”
The Tea Party Morphed Into the Cult of Trump. What Will It Become Next?
Ten years ago I wrote a short essay for the magazine about the tea party phenomenon. The gist was that it was nothing new: every time Democrats come into power, some sort of conspiracy-minded right-wing movement blossoms. It happened with FDR, it happened with JFK, it happened with Bill Clinton, and at the time it was happening with Barack Obama. I happened to reread this piece a couple of days ago and I was startled at how relevant it still sounded. Here’s an excerpt, right after I noted that each movement was larger than its predecessor:
Beyond sheer numbers, though, right-wing extremist groups are also becoming more effective. The Liberty League withered after it failed to make even a dent in FDR’s 1936 reelection campaign. The Birchers improved on that record, winning lots of local campaigns and eventually helping Barry Goldwater win the Republican presidential nomination in 1964, before collapsing under the weight of Robert Welch’s increasingly bizarre rants. The ’90s activists were more successful yet, helping Gingrich take over Congress in 1994, impeaching a president in 1998, and eventually sending George W. Bush to the White House.
And the tea partiers? Their history hasn’t been written yet, but they have, for all practical purposes, already trumped every previous generation of activists by successfully taking over the Republican Party almost entirely. And this is, at last, something that really is new: The Liberty League was rejected by the GOP almost from the start, the Birchers were all but spent as a political force after the 1964 election debacle, and even during the ’90s there were still moderate factions in the GOP. But today, there’s virtually no one left in the party leadership who doesn’t at least claim to adhere to tea party principles. Recent polls by both Gallup and the Mellman Group (PDF) find that the views of self-identified tea party supporters are nearly identical to the views of self-identified Republicans across the board. Gallup’s analysis may go a little too far in saying that the tea party movement is “more a rebranding of core Republicanism than a new or distinct entity on the American political scene,” but not by much.
Reading this now, the cult of Donald Trump and his iron hold over the Republican Party seem almost inevitable. All he had to do was take over the machinery that had been steadily developing for more than half a century.
So what happens now? It was bad luck that this machinery happened to fall into the hands of a maniac like Trump, but it’s always going to fall into the hands of someone. Who will control it next? And by what new name will we hear about it?
Josh Hawley Is Lying About His Election Stunt
The Missouri senator claims he wasn’t trying to overturn the election results. Really?
Josh Hawley isn’t sorry about challenging the result of the 2020 election. In an interview with CNN’s Manu Raju on Friday, the Republican senator from Missouri attempted to defend his actions in the lead-up to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol, accusing his critics of distorting his words and unfairly villainizing him.
When he challenged the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s Electoral College win in the Senate and voted to reject the results of the election in Arizona and Pennsylvania, Hawley explained Friday, he merely “gave voice” to Missourians who were concerned about allegations of fraud. “I was very clear from the beginning that I was never attempting to overturn the election,” he said.
That is just false. Let’s roll the tape.
On November 6, Hawley appeared on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to call out “deeply disturbing” allegations of election malfeasance by Democrats. “We’ve seen reports in Detroit about ballots brought in there, new ballots in the middle of the night,” Hawley said. “We’ve seen it in Philadelphia.” (Hawley believed these rumors demanded serious investigation, though had he investigated them on Google he would have learned that what was being unloaded in the middle of the night in Detroit was camera equipment.)
By December 1, Hawley was objecting to fast-tracking the confirmation process on Joe Biden’s cabinet nominees on the grounds that no one could say for sure who the president would be. It would be rash, he told Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, to do so “before this election has been certified, before the Electoral College has even met, while there are important appeals and legal cases ongoing, including the one involving Pennsylvania that I hope the U.S. Supreme Court will hear.” At least four times in that interview he raised doubts that Biden would actually be sworn in—”if Joe Biden ends up being sworn in as president,” he said; “If Joe Biden ends up as president,” he said; “If Joe Biden—if he is president come January,” he said; “should he actually be sworn in as president,” he said.
That Pennsylvania lawsuit—which called for all ballots cast by mail in the state to be thrown out, in an attempt to overturn the election result in the state through mass disenfranchisement—was rejected by the Supreme Court. When Missouri’s attorney general filed an amicus brief in support of another effort to throw out Pennsylvania’s election results (along with the results of three other states), Hawley cheered that on too.
Four days after Texas’ Pennsylvania challenge was thrown out (by, among other people, Chief Justice John Roberts, whom Hawley once clerked for), and one day after the Electoral College itself met to formally make Biden president-elect, the result of the election, was still just a known unknown to Josh Hawley.
Trump Conspired to Fire Acting Attorney General and Force Georgia to Overturn Election Results
He ultimately backed off—only to incite the Capitol riot days later.
In the final days of his presidency, Donald Trump schemed with a little-known attorney at the Justice Department to fire then-Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to advance a harebrained effort designed to force Georgia to overturn the state’s election results. The New York Times reported late Friday that Trump nearly replaced Rosen with Jeffrey Clark—the newest character in Trump’s never-ending, baseless claims of election fraud—but ultimately backed off because a group of department officials caught word of the plot and threatened to resign in protest.
According to the Times, the effort was the culmination of a month-long campaign by Trump to persuade Rosen to use the powers of the Justice Department to interfere with Georgia’s election results. (Trump himself also interceded, being captured on audio threatening Georgia’s secretary of state if he didn’t fraudulently swing more votes to the then-president). At the same time, Clark was pushing Rosen to challenge the election, and when that failed, he went around the acting attorney general and offered his plan directly to Trump, who agreed that Rosen should be replaced so Clark could attempt to disrupt Congress’ counting of Electoral College votes. When Rosen and other top DoJ officials were informed of Clark’s shenanigans, they formed a plan to resign as a group if Trump followed through.
The alarming episode comes just as the Senate prepares for Trump’s second impeachment trial over his role in inciting the murderous, pro-Trump riot at the Capitol. During the trial, scheduled to start the week of February 8, Democrats are all but certain to point to this report, and you can expect them to specifically refer to an absurd, “Apprentice”-style meeting at the White House to make their case the Sunday before the election was set to be certified by Congress. From the Times:
Their informal pact ultimately helped persuade Mr. Trump to keep Mr. Rosen in place, calculating that a furor over mass resignations at the top of the Justice Department would eclipse any attention on his baseless accusations of voter fraud. Mr. Trump’s decision came only after Mr. Rosen and Mr. Clark made their competing cases to him in a bizarre White House meeting that two officials compared with an episode of Mr. Trump’s reality show “The Apprentice,” albeit one that could prompt a constitutional crisis.
After three excruciating hours, Trump ultimately declined to throw the Justice Department into yet another crisis. The following Wednesday, he appeared at his Stop the Steal rally and incited the murderous riot at the Capitol. Shortly after the Times’ report on Friday, E. Jean Carroll, the prominent writer who alleges that Trump raped her in the mid-1990s, tied Clark to the Justice Department’s unusual decision to take over Trump’s defense in Carroll’s defamation suit against him. It’s the latest reminder that it may take years before the full scope of the Trump administration’s corruption and abuse of power ever comes to light.
Why is Sean Hannity? "Sean Hannity Attacks President Biden for Not Having Coronavirus Under Control." — Media Matters
Qooks Sad. I would be sad for them, because of how I am MADE of mirror neurons, except for the part where they are sad because they didn't get their mass executions of media, Democrats, and noted communist Mike Pence. (NBC News)
Before we all get our memories erased, David Corn would like to lay out clearly for you what exactly the Russia "hoax" was (not a hoax). — Mother Jones
And Susan Glasser would like to remind you of all of it. (New Yorker)
I ... what, Washington Post?
From 2017 to 2019, government records show, Trump family members took more than 4,500 trips that required Secret Service to travel alongside them, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars.
A thousand trips a year? Three ... a day? I remember when they almost burned down the White House (HYPERBOLE) because President Barack Obama took his wife to dinner for Valentine's Day. (By the way that last link is FULL of RACISM, so trigger warning for MY GOD.)
Speaking of which! White women's role in white supremacy, Vox-splained.
Also speaking of which, learn a thing about the original "Patriots Party," which was white Appalachian allies of the Black Panthers! (LibCom.org)
Ex Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder, eight others charged for poisoning Flint. — PBS
Nooses Placed Outside Illinois School Over MLK Day Weekend Spur Police Investigation
A pair of nooses found outside an Illinois high school over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday has spurred a hate crime investigation by local authorities.
According to NBC News, the nooses were found hanging from the bleachers of a field at York Community High School by a group of adults playing a game of soccer over the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. “The adults removed the ropes themselves and took them away with the intent to give them to school administrators later,” the Elmhurst Police department said in a statement. “School Administrators were contacted on Monday and informed Elmhurst Police Investigators.”
There were two messages taped on the nooses, with one saying “Let them play!” and the other “Hear us now! Please!” Can’t even front, I’m going to be big mad if this is some racist-ass protest against distanced learning.
If that winds up being the case, why didn’t they tape the message to, I don’t know, a ball or something? Unless you’re asking for the kids to be allowed to play hangman, which I’m pretty sure no one is preventing them from doing. This whole thing is just weird, and I honestly hope they find who did it because I have several questions.
Also, why do folks always feel the need to show their racism around MLK Day? At this point, the routine is somehow both fucked up yet entirely predictable. Regardless of the note, hanging up nooses over the MLK Day weekend sends a very specific message.
Bleh. I’m just tired of stupid people, y’all.
Elmhurst police are currently investigating the matter as a hate crime and have said that they will increase patrols around the school and the community around it.
“The City of Elmhurst has no tolerance for symbols of hatred, oppression, and violence,” police said in their statement. “One of our City’s core services is to provide safety for the Elmhurst residents and the community.”
The school plans to install more security cameras and sent a letter out to parents after the nooses were found, according to Newsweek.
“Regardless of intent, this act decries the principles, values, and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whose holiday we paused to celebrate today,” the letter read. “We further pledge to be courageous leaders, who will ensure that symbols of hatred, oppression, and violence have no place in our school district and in the city of Elmhurst.”
STUFF, STUFF, AND MORE STUFF - SPACE, THE INTERNET, SCIENCE, SUNDRY
https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/01/16/2336244/how-tim-berners-lee-will-fix-the-internet
How Tim Berners-Lee Will Fix the Internet (reuters.com)
"People are fed up with the lack of controls, the silos," said Berners-Lee, co-founder and chief technology officer of Inrupt, in an interview at the Reuters Next conference... John Bruce, a veteran technology executive who is CEO of Inrupt, said the company had signed up Britain's National Health Service, the BBC and the government of Flanders in Belgium as pilot customers, and hoped to announce many more by April...
A key aim for Inrupt is to get software developers to write programs for the platform. Inrupt, like the original web, is at its core mostly a set of protocols for how machines talk to one another, meaning that specific applications bring it to life.
"The use cases are so broad, it's like a do-over for the web," Berners-Lee said.
In a video interview, Berners-Lee tells Reuters that what people are worried about isn't privacy per se but "the lack of empowerment" — for example, to collaborate with people. And then he acknowledges that the worldwide web does suffer from limited access control. "I wanted it to be a collaborative space, but in a way that was naive, because collaborative spaces you need to be private. You need to start off with just a limited sharing, and then you allow the sharing to increase."
Social networks provided some features like a unique login and identity. But unfortunately, then "The large social networks will tend to get larger" — and ultimately without a single global signon, users then become trapped in separate silos.
Tesla Is Hiring People To Handle Complaints People Tweet At Elon Musk (engadget.com)
https://science.slashdot.org/story/21/01/21/0017207/vertical-farms-grow-veggies-on-site-at-restaurants-and-grocery-stores
Vertical Farms Grow Veggies On Site At Restaurants and Grocery Stores (newatlas.com)
The recycled and repurposed 20- or 40-ft (6/12-ft) shipping containers used to host the farms can be installed within reach of consumers, such as in the parking lot of a restaurant or out back at the grocery store. Growers can also scale up operations to more than one pod per site if needed, and the external surfaces could be covered in a living wall of decorative plants to make them more appealing. The vertical urban farms are claimed capable of supporting the production of a wide range of fruits and veggies -- from leafy greens and herbs to strawberries and mushrooms, and more. And it's reported to use up to 90 percent less water than a traditional farming setup.
Unlike some high-tech farming solutions, staff won't need special training to work with the vertical farm as the automated growing process monitors, irrigates, and fertilizes the crops as they grow thanks to arrays of sensors that continually feed data on climate, soil condition, LED lighting and so on to management software. Each vertical farm unit has its own Wi-Fi comms technology installed to enable operators to tap into the system via a mobile app. The company told us that, by way of example, one container pilot farm offered a growing space of 400 sq ft (37 sq m) and yielded around 200 lb (90 kg) of produce per month, harvested daily. Lighting remained on for 16 hours per day. We assume that the pods are completely powered from the grid at their respective locations, though the company says that it is looking at ways to make use of solar panels as well as making more efficient use of water.
Twitter Bots Are a Major Source of Climate Disinformation (scientificamerican.com)
The new focus on automated accounts is driven partly by the way they can distort the climate conversation online. Marlow's team measured the influence of bots on Twitter's climate conversation by analyzing 6.8 million tweets sent by 1.6 million users between May and June 2017. Trump made his decision to ditch the climate accord on June 1 of that year. President Biden reversed the decision this week. From that dataset, the team ran a random sample of 184,767 users through the Botometer, a tool created by Indiana University's Observatory on Social Media, which analyzes accounts and determines the likelihood that they are run by machines.
Researchers also categorized the 885,164 tweets those users had sent about climate change during the two-month study period. The most popular categories were tweets about climate research and news. Marlow and the other researchers determined that nearly 9.5% of the users in their sample were likely bots. But those bots accounted for 25% of the total tweets about climate change on most days. [...] The researchers weren't able to determine who deployed the bots. But they suspect the seemingly fake accounts could have been created by "fossil-fuel companies, petro-states or their surrogates," all of which have a vested interest in preventing or delaying action on climate change.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2101.27 - 10:10
- Days ago = 2035 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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