Sunrise — 7:22.

"After spending the summer pounding Republican opponent Lee Zeldin as an anti-abortion, Donald Trump acolyte, Hochul is finding out..."

"... what other Democrats across the nation are also learning: Crime and the economy are crowding out abortion rights and the former president’s troubles as top of mind issues for voters. The New York governor is responding with a last-minute shift in approach just weeks ahead of the election by promoting her efforts to create jobs and fight crime. 'You deserve to feel safe,' Hochul says in a new TV ad released Saturday as part of a $1 million-plus buy in New York City. 'And as your governor, I won’t stop working until you do.'"

From "Hochul pivots in New York as GOP challenger rises on crime, economic message/New polls this week showed the race tightening — maybe to low single digits, uncomfortably close for Democrats after two decades of statewide dominance in New York" (Politico).

"You deserve to feel safe... I won’t stop working until you do" — Shouldn't it be "You deserve to be safe... I won’t stop working until you are"? I know politics is just about how we feel, but if you want people to feel safe, you've got to convince them that they are safe, and giving it away that you are just going after their feelings gives the brain a bit of a chance to notice that this is nothing but an effort at emotional manipulation.

Here's that last-minute-desperate shift ad:

 

I made a new tag for Lee Zeldin. I will disclose that that represents a bet that he will win. I don't like tag proliferation, but I also don't like needing to go back and add tags to old posts.

"The Black women detailed fierce competition on cryobank websites for vials from Black donors, which, they say, typically sell out within minutes."

From "America has a Black sperm donor shortage. Black women are paying the price. Black men account for fewer than 2 percent of sperm donors at cryobanks. Their vials are gone in minutes" (WaPo).

The sperm banks say they have tried to recruit Black donors and want to meet their customers’ needs. “Over the years, we have spoken to African American fraternities and student organizations to try to increase our number of applicants. This has not been very successful,” California Cryobank’s Shamonki said. She added that “it’s proven to be challenging to hit the right tone and appeal to these donors rather than further alienate them.”

The Sperm Bank of California has had similar challenges. “Folks felt our ads were a little too urban. And so we really work very hard to come up with images that we feel resonated with the donors,” Campbell said.

I think they're trying to say that the black men they tried to recruit found the appeal racist. I wish there was more detail to the content of the appeal and more clarity about why it was offensive.

Cat-napping — taking advantage of the little spaces — is a super-power, not a weakness.

But you said nothing when Trump did similar. https://t.co/Ggv2IZH0w3

— V Daniels (@funkapunk) October 22, 2022

Here's a 2021 column in The Guardian: "From Aristotle to Einstein: a brief history of power nappers/Churchill took naps for at least an hour, Da Vinci for 20 minutes and Dalí for just a second" by Caroline Davies."

Salvador Dalí, in his 50 Secrets of Magic Craftsmanship for aspiring painters, outlined tips for the one-second micro-nap, including sitting upright, key in hand and upturned plate beneath. Once asleep, the key will drop and the ensuing clang ensures instant revival. Albert Einstein deployed a similar technique, using a spoon or pencil instead of a key.

David Brooks says, "The Trumpified G.O.P. deserves to be a marginalized and disgraced force in American life. But I’ve been watching..."

"... the campaign speeches by people like Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor in Arizona. G.O.P. candidates are telling a very clear class/culture/status war narrative in which common-sense Americans are being assaulted by elite progressives who let the homeless take over the streets, teach sex ed to 5-year-olds, manufacture fake news, run woke corporations, open the border and refuse to do anything about fentanyl deaths and the sorts of things that affect regular people. In other words, candidates like Lake wrap a dozen different issues into one coherent class war story. And it seems to be working. In late July she was trailing her opponent by seven points. Now she’s up by about half a point. 

From "Why Republicans Are Surging" (NYT).

"Students... performed abysmally on exams that would have seemed too easy only a few years ago...."

"Exams that should have yielded a B average dropped to C- or worse. Single digit scores became common and we even had zeros on exams, something that had never happened before. Despite those declining scores, about 60 percent of my students still got As and Bs this past semester. At the same time the bottom was dropping out under the poorly performing members of the class; the top students, while still deserving their excellent grades, were no longer being stretched. Previously, they would be getting 90s, now they were routinely getting 100. Their A grades would not change of course, but they were not being challenged and thus not learning as much as they should."

From "I was fired from NYU after students complained that the class was too hard. Who’s next?/In these times when critical thinking skills are desperately needed, it is more important than ever to dedicate ourselves to the high standards of education" by Maitland Jones Jr.

"In the most basic sense, any legal arguments seeking to get Mr. Trump off the hook would merely need to be weighty enough to produce two and a half months of litigation."

"If Republicans pick up enough seats in the midterm elections to take over the House in January, as polls suggest is likely, they are virtually certain to shut down the Jan. 6 committee, a move that would invalidate the subpoena."

From "Trump Could Harness Unresolved Legal Issues to Resist Jan. 6 Panel’s Subpoena/If the ex-president turns down the drama of testifying, his legal team could mount several constitutional and procedural arguments in court" (NYT).

The most relevant instance in history occurred in 1953, then the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed Truman. Though he "voluntarily testified before Congress on other topics, Truman refused to honor the committee’s subpoena, claiming that as a former chief executive he was immune from compelled testimony by the legislative branch." But that was that. The Committee did not litigate.

But what will Trump do? 

Aides to Mr. Trump have said that he has weighed whether to testify, but only under the condition that it be live and on television. That would deprive the committee of controlling what gets seen or from releasing only selected excerpts.

The article quotes lawprof Mark J. Rozell, author of “Executive Privilege: Presidential Power, Secrecy and Accountability”: “If Trump is going to go out there and make himself vulnerable, he’s going to do it in a public way.... It’s going to be a Trump show, and he’ll be playing to his own crowd. At that point, legal argument and nuances would be out the window.”

What would you like to see Trump do?

Testify — but only if it's live and unedited, on TV.

Testify subject to the Committee editing and presentation.

Litigate — to nail down the law or to stall until the GOP takes over the House.

Wait to see if they charge him with contempt and prosecute him, and only then raise his defenses.

 

pollcode.com free polls

Sunrise — 7:11, 7:19, 7:22, 7:24.

"'Others must be deterred from committing similar crimes,' said Judge Nichols, a Trump appointee...."

From "Bannon Sentenced to 4 Months in Prison for Contempt of Congress/Stephen Bannon was found guilty of two counts of contempt of Congress this summer for defying a subpoena from the House Jan. 6 committee" (NYT).

Mr. Bannon, a rapid-talking provocateur who has used his daily internet radio show to skewer the government for prosecuting him, approached his sentencing with the same defiance that has characterized his attitude toward the congressional summons that prompted the case. He told reporters that he viewed President Biden as “illegitimate” as he entered Federal District Court in Washington, flanked by his lawyers. After thanking reporters for showing up, he went on to claim that Democrats would face their “judgment day” in the coming midterm elections and urged all within earshot to oppose the Chinese Communist Party.

He sat impassively in a dark military-style jacket and an untucked blue shirt as the sentence was issued.

Boldface added.

Nate Silver: "Why I'm Telling My Friends That The Senate Is A Toss-Up."

And we're all his friends at FiveThirtyEight, here.

The FiveThirtyEight Senate forecast gives Democrats a 58 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate, down from a peak of 71 percent last month.... If a friend asked me to characterize the Senate race, I’d say “it’s pretty fucking close”...

"Buckminster Fuller... was an American type—self-invented, overflowing with ideas and theories, eager to see the universe whole, and born to evangelize...."

"On his lecture tours he could speak for hours without stopping, and he mesmerized his audiences even as he baffled them. 'Students find themselves tuned in to the unique Fuller wave length, with its oddly necessary word coinings and its synergetic constructions,' Calvin Tomkins wrote in an adulatory 1966 profile in The New Yorker. In print—and Fuller’s books are mainly edited versions of his lectures—his prose is a word salad, the same phrases and catchwords combined and recombined until the mind reels. 'Physical points are energy-event aggregations,' he would say. 'When they converge beyond the critical fall-in proximity threshold, they orbit coordinatedly, as a Universe-precessed aggregate, as loose pebbles on our Earth orbit the Sun in unison, and as chips ride around on men’s shoulders.'..."

From "Space-Age Magus/From beginning to end, experts saw through Buckminster Fuller’s ideas and theories. Why did so many people come under his spell?" by James Gleick (NYRB).

"He believed in a coming utopia. He thought no one should have to work merely to earn a living. He had a gift for slogans: 'God is a verb.' 'Nature never fails.' 'Either war is obsolete, or men are.' 'Universe is eternally regenerative.' One young listener said, 'When I listen to Bucky talk, I feel I’ve got to go out and save the world. Then when I go outside, I realize I don’t know how.'...  Even Stewart Brand has come to regret touting Fuller in the Whole Earth Catalog. 'Domes couldn’t grow or adapt,' he says. 'When my generation outgrew the domes, we simply left them empty, like hatchlings leaving their eggshells.'”

Pro se.

Witness has seen enough antics from Waukesha killer pic.twitter.com/RJA3XIOA3E

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) October 21, 2022

"Her brief tenure should be remembered as the hyphenate premiership: all-in on supply-side, laissez-faire, trickle-down economics."

Writes Eugene Robinson, in "Liz Truss’s fall is a warning to populists everywhere" (WaPo).

Is supply-side, laissez-faire, trickle-down economics populist?

Robinson ends with this warning:

When you hear Republicans in this country say “secure the border” or “crack down on crime” or “America first,” keep in mind how easy it is to write a bumper sticker and how hard it is to actually govern in a complex, interconnected world. GOP leaders, pay attention: Britain’s Conservatives have pandered their way into ruin.

Well, “secure the border” or “crack down on crime” and “America first” sound populist, but every single one of those things is not supply-side, laissez-faire, trickle-down economics.

Seems like Robinson is mixing up the categories of right-wingers. You could easily blend left-wing economics with securing the border, cracking down on crime, and putting America first.

"TikTok has made it very clear they want their platform to be this joyous, silly, content app, but they outgrew that so long ago."

"There’s a lot of reporting on TikTok: newsworthy content, activists speaking up about movements. And yet they’re worried they can’t even use the correct language … or they’ll get taken down."

Said When Belle Ives, "a freelance photographer in Los Angeles who uses they and them pronouns," quoted in "Sorry you went viral TikTok’s explosive stardom has created a new kind of celebrity. But nothing goes viral like rage" (WaPo). 

Ives had videos taken down by TikTok. One showed 2 women kissing, which supposedly broke a rule against "predatory or grooming behavior." Another called a Pride Month cake "gayke," which TikTok deemed "hate speech." 

Look here, Elon, wouldn't this nucleus of survivors be so grief stricken and anguished that they'd... well, envy the fired and not want to go on working?

I've got to ask, reading "Documents detail plans to gut Twitter’s workforce" in The Washington Post.

Elon Musk told prospective investors in his deal to buy the company that he planned to get rid of nearly 75 percent of Twitter’s 7,500 workers, whittling the company down to a skeleton staff of just over 2,000....

Edwin Chen, a data scientist formerly in charge of Twitter’s spam and health metrics and now CEO of the content-moderation start-up Surge AI... said.... "It would be a cascading effect... where you’d have services going down and the people remaining not having the institutional knowledge to get them back up, and being completely demoralized and wanting to leave themselves.”...

"Anthony sitting here looking like he's dressed up as Anthony for Halloween."

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