Was someone asking "what else can we do to encourage piracy?" Because seems tailor-made for it
Amazon Prime Video subscribers will see new types of advertisements this broadcast year. Amazon announced today that it's adding new ad formats to its video streaming service, hoping to encourage people to interact with the ads and shop on Amazon. From a report: In January, Prime Video streams included commercials unless subscribers paid $3 extra per month. That has meant that watching stuff on Prime Video ad-free costs $12 per month or, if you're also a Prime subscriber, $18 per month. Amazon has heightened focus on streaming ads this year. Those who opted for Prime Video with commercials will soon see shoppable carousel ads, interactive pause ads, and interactive brand trivia ads, as Amazon calls them.
Amazon said that advertisers could buy these new displays to be shown "across the vast majority of content on Prime Video, wherever it's streamed." All the new ad formats allow a viewer to place advertised products in their Amazon cart. With carousel ads, subscribers will be pushed to shop "a sliding lineup of" products during ad breaks during shows and movies, Amazon said, adding: "The ad automatically pauses so that customers can browse, and automatically resumes play when ad interaction has stopped."
Sure, Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene said she would not pursue her pointless attempt to oust House Speaker Mike Johnson this week. But that was Tuesday. On Wednesday, she decided to go for it after all.
According to Politico reporter Olivia Beavers—and every other congressional reporter furiously tweeting in disbelief that Greene is actually doing this thing—the congresswoman took to the floor shortly after 5 PM ET to announce that heck yeah, she wants a full-blown GOP civil war.
Her announcement was met with booing, though it’s unclear whether the boos were louder from the left or right side of the aisle because just about everyone else in the House is very much against the idea.
Democratic leaders already said last week that they would rescue the beleaguered speaker. And even the most bloodthirsty nihilists in the GOP caucus don’t really have the stomach for another round of “House GOP in disarray” after booting poor Kevin McCarthy from the job last fall.
“Most of the chamber is not taking her effort to oust [J]ohnson seriously,” tweeted Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman Wednesday evening.
But seriously or not, Greene decided to go for it. And almost immediately failed, as the House quickly moved to vote to table the motion.
“[The] resolution to depose Speaker Johnson is going down in flames,” NBC’s Sahil Kapur tweeted as members were still casting their votes.
And like that—poof!—it was over. With only 11 Republicans voting to let Greene’s attempt move forward, Johnson was saved. At least for now.
Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld held a mock interview Tuesday with fellow host Dana Perino playing the part of South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem after the governor canceled an appearance on his late-night show. Noem’s calamitous book launchmight have been at fault, though she reportedly told Gutfeld she canceled due to “weather.”
“I don’t believe it,” Gutfeld said of Noem’s weather excuse. He then made a series of dog puns, referencing Noem’s terrible tale of killing her 14-month-old puppy named Cricket because it was “untrainable” and “less than worthless” as a hunting dog.
“I just think it's a little late to keep her on a short leash,” he said. “I'd hope she'd reconsider, but I'm not going to sit up and beg.”
He proceeded to interview Perino as “Noem,” asking her whether or not she has even read her book.
“Thank you for reading my book,” said Perino as Noem.
Gutfeld is one of the people that passes for a comedian in the right-wing-o-sphere. While he isn’t funny, it is funny that Noem’s book is such an unmitigated disaster that even Fox News, Gutfeld, and Perino felt comfortable throwing her under the bus.
GREG GUTFELD: So this weekend I did something I rarely do. I read a guest book for a segment we had planned. It's called “No Going Back” by Kristi Noem. Who knew the title was referring to this show? Because today she canceled on us. Yeah. The one time I actually read the book. And the author—sorry, I mean, the person whose name is on the book—cancels. Blames the weather.
I don't believe it. I just think it's a little late to keep her on a short leash. I'd hope she'd reconsider, but I'm not going to sit up and beg. At any rate, every dog has its day. It's just not May 7th, 2024 and I'm not going to let them waste my time. So we're moving forward with the interview. Standing in for Kristi Noem is somebody she wishes she had listened to before she ever wrote this stupid book: Dana Perino.
So Dana, aka Governor Noem, did you write the book yourself?
DANA PERINO: You know, that's a great question for someone who wrote the book. And I don't think I will dignify your question with a response when there are so many other important issues in the world, like animal cruelty.
GUTFELD: You know, I noticed that you seem not to know what was in the book, yet you voiced the audio for the book. Did you ever read the book?
PERINO: Thank you for reading my book. I said some words that were written about me, and they were in a certain order—they call them sentences, and so I read those aloud. I don't know if that means I read the book.
GUTFELD: Okay. You know what, would you blame—you've had a lot of controversies here—the ghostwriter, the editor, the publisher. Was it their fault?
PERINO: Well, a little-known fact: Another one of my dogs, his name was “Ghostwriter.” And I killed him this morning.
GUTFELD: Does it bother you—does it bother you that these stories about the dog and North Korea overshadowed the rest of this book?
PERINO: You know, what really bothers me is that apparently, I'm being overshadowed by the governor of the lesser Dakota, Doug Burgum. And apparently I'm off the list for VP.
GUTFELD: Because he only kills rattlesnakes.
PERINO: Yes and I really think that the lamestream media should focus on that because the rattlesnake is not, you know, something that we should be killing because they actually kill the rats. And so I know a lot more about ecology than the governor of North Dakota.
GUTFELD: Do you regret including the dog story? Because it's been reported you were told not to include it.
PERINO: You know, what I regret is that, I regret that I was in Germany in the 80s doing movies. I regret that. I didn’t include that in the book, and now I regret not including that in the book. I also regret not canceling on you on Saturday, so I didn't waste your time reading a book that I was not going to come on and do the interview about.
GUTFELD: Amen! Nicely done. That's how you do it, Kristi.
Navigator collects, analyzes, and distributes real data on progressive messaging. The Hub Project's Bryan Bennett and Gabriela Parra talk with Kerry about what they are seeing in their research this election cycle, and which messaging can help progressive candidates win elections in 2024—and beyond.
How is this not the headline everywhere? I guarantee it would be if Biden lost 20% in an uncontested primary.
The results on Indiana’s Republican primary on Tuesday evening showed Donald Trump winning with 78% of the vote and taking all of the state’s 58 delegates. That result may sound good, but Trump is running essentially unopposed. The last serious candidate other than Trump, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, officially dropped out of the race over two months ago.
Despite dropping out well before early voting in Indiana began, Haley still managed to collect over 21% of the vote. That’s not a testimony to the stubbornness of Haley fans, it’s a signal that there are a significant number of Republicans who won’t vote for Trump even when the only alternative is a candidate who is already gone.
Despite recent national polls in which Trump appears to be performing well, results like those in Indiana this week indicate that there is a significant lack of support for Trump within the Republican Party. Though it’s easy and sometimes facile to make the comparison, if President Joe Biden was losing 20% of Democrats to a protest vote in state after state, it would be the leading story in the national news.
Why isn’t the media asking about the anti-Trump protest vote?
In the same primary, President Joe Biden took 100% of the Democratic vote. It’s easy to say that’s because Biden faced no competition, but neither did Trump.
Results in Indiana are similar to results in other recent primaries. Only this time Trump can’t blame the issue on either early voters or mail-in ballots.
He also can’t blame the results on the primary being in a liberal state. Indiana is also not Washington, D.C., where Haley notched a victory just two days before dropping out. This is a deep red state where Trump won by 16% in 2020.
But the protest vote persists.
National polls may look at a few hundred voters and run them through models in an effort to determine how that limited sample represents hundreds of millions of voters. But the state primaries are by far the largest polls being taken at the moment. About 590,000 Republicans voted in the primary on Tuesday, and 127,000 of them placed their vote for Not Donald Trump.
No one voting for Haley on Tuesday believes that she is still in the race, or is somehow going to make a comeback. These votes are pure protest votes, meant to demonstrate a lack of support for Trump.
How these votes will translate into a general election isn’t clear. Voters in both parties have sometimes flirted with protest votes or third parties in the primary season, only to come drifting home when it came down to pulling the final lever. Some of these anyone-but-Trump Republicans may continue their protest into the general election by casting a vote for Robert Kennedy Jr., who is drawing more votes from Trump than Biden in some polls and has added right-wing Republicans to his conspiracy-centric campaign.
Biden has targeted some of these anti-Trump voters with special messaging from the campaign. The ad created for this push features Trump attacking both Haley and Haley voters, telling them they are not welcome in his movement. The ad ends with the pitch “Save America. Join us.”
In recent news, Republicans like former Attorney General Bill Barr have maintained that Trump belongs nowhere near the Oval Office … and then said they would vote for him. But there have also been a steady stream of Republicans at all levels who say they will not vote for Trump under any circumstance. That includes some of those who know him best.
There are a significant number of those who are voting against Trump in the primary, who also say they will not vote for him in the general election. In AP VoteCast surveys of Republicans, one-fifth of Iowa voters, one-quarter of South Carolina voters, and one-third of New Hampshire voters said they would refuse to vote for Trump in the fall.
That’s not a minor issue. That’s a huge cavity right in the middle of what should be Trump’s base. With numbers like that, Trump isn’t going to win swing states.
Indicted ”fake elector” and Arizona state Sen. Anthony Kern has been barred from using the Senate video studio at the state Capitol after he used the government facility to appear on Nazi apologist Stew Peters’ internet talk show.
“The Senate president does not approve of how the senator chose to use legislative broadcast resources last week,” Kim Quintero, a spokesperson for Republican Senate President Warren Petersen, told 12News. Kern’s “privileges to use those resources for future interviews have been revoked,” she added.
The interview, which took place on May 1, featured the extremist Freedom Caucus member opining on Arizona Democratic House members' decision to host a Drag Story Hour in the basement of the state Capitol the day before. That event, which was attended by Democratic representatives, their staff, and supporters of Planned Parenthood, earned the homophobic scorn of the state’s Republican majority and a suspension of privileges by House Speaker Ben Toma.
In March, Peters used his show to praise Nazi book-burning as “justified,” describing the practice as “great” and “awesome.” He later argued that the “propaganda that surrounds” World War II made it impossible for him to judge whether or not Adolf Hitler was “evil,” but that in the case of book burnings, he thought the real question to ask is, "Wasn’t he a hero?”
During Kern’s interview with Peters, the latter falsely claimed that the Drag Story Hour featured children (it did not) and called the drag king who read at the event a “mentally ill satanic pedophile,” according to the Arizona Mirror. Kern evidently forgot to push back on these false claims.
“God is raising up Donald Trump and Anthony Kern and Stew Peters and people like us to shout,” he declared.
Kern is one of 18 people recently indicted for their part in a fake elector scheme that aimed to illegally install Donald Trump in office after he lost the 2020 election to President Joe Biden. Kern’s other claim to fame is being a gun fetishist asshole who believes anyone should be allowed to carry concealed weapons on college campuses.
The GOP senator seems to believe that being around people with guns is somehow safer than being around people who read books.
The order from U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon had been expected in light of still-unresolved issues in the case and because Trump is currently on trial in a separate case in Manhattan charging him in connection with hush money payments during the 2016 presidential election. The New York case involves several of the same lawyers representing him in the federal case in Florida.
Cannon said in a five-page order Tuesday that it would be “imprudent” to finalize a new trial date now, casting further doubt on federal prosecutors' ability to bring Trump to trial before the November presidential election.
Trump faces dozens of felony counts accusing him of illegally hoarding at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida classified documents that he took with him after he left the White House in 2021, and then obstructing the FBI's efforts to get them back. He has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.
Trump faces four criminal cases as he seeks to reclaim the White House, but outside of the New York prosecution, it's not clear that any of the other three will reach trial before the election.
The Supreme Court is weighing Trump’s arguments that he is immune from federal prosecution in a separate case from special counsel Jack Smith charging him with plotting to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Prosecutors in Fulton County, Georgia have also brought a separate case related to election subversion, though it's not clear when that might reach trial.
Well that's a horrifying headline. And the result is a metric ton of civilian casualties.
AI is supposed to help militaries make precise strikes. Is that the case in Gaza?
Israel’s war with Hamas, in response to the attacks of October 7, 2023, has led to more fatalities than in any previous Israeli war, with at least 34,000 Palestinians killed as of May 7, 2024. In Israel’s 2014 war in Gaza, just over 1,400 were killed. One factor in that difference is the use of artificial intelligence.
Israel’s incorporation of AI in warfare has been public for years through both defensive and offensive weapons. But in this war, AI is being deployed differently: It’s generating bombing targets. The promise of AI in a military context is to enhance strike precision and accuracy, but over the past few months Israeli outlets +972 magazine and Local Call have revealed that the multiple AI systems that help the IDF select targets in Gaza have contributed to the highest number of Palestinian civilian deaths and injuries ever.
In our video, we interview multiple experts to understand how two specific systems, Gospel and Lavender, operate, and we explore the broader implications of current and future AI use in warfare.
Enlarge / An American Airlines Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner preparing to take off at Barcelona-El Prat Airport in Spain on May 1, 2024. (credit: Getty Images | NurPhoto )
The Federal Aviation Administration is investigating whether Boeing failed to complete required inspections on 787 Dreamliner planes and whether Boeing employees falsified aircraft records, the agency said this week. The investigation was launched after an employee reported the problem to Boeing management, and Boeing informed the FAA.
"The FAA has opened an investigation into Boeing after the company voluntarily informed us in April that it may not have completed required inspections to confirm adequate bonding and grounding where the wings join the fuselage on certain 787 Dreamliner airplanes," the FAA said in a statement provided to Ars today.
The FAA said it "is investigating whether Boeing completed the inspections and whether company employees may have falsified aircraft records. At the same time, Boeing is reinspecting all 787 airplanes still within the production system and must also create a plan to address the in-service fleet." The agency added that it "will take any necessary action—as always—to ensure the safety of the flying public."
Enlarge / Cleveland doctor Sherri Tenpenny gives false testimony on June 8, 2021, saying COVID-19 vaccines magnetize people. (credit: The Ohio Channel)
An anti-vaccine doctor best known for losing her medical license after falsely claiming that COVID-19 vaccines cause people to become magnetic and "interface" with 5G towers, has had her medical license restored, according to local media reports.
Sherri Tenpenny, an osteopathic doctor in the Cleveland area, beamed into the national spotlight in June 2021 while giving repelling testimony before state lawmakers about COVID-19 vaccine recipients. "I'm sure you've seen the pictures all over the Internet of people who have had these shots and now they're magnetized," Tenpenny said in her viral testimony. "You can put a key on their forehead—it sticks. You can put spoons and forks all over and they can stick because now we think there is a metal piece to that."
Her testimony was in support of a bill that would largely ban vaccine mandates in Ohio. The bill never made it out of committee. But the state's medical board opened an investigation the next month. The board intended to ask Tenpenny a variety of questions, including about her statements "regarding COVID-19 vaccines causing people to become magnetized or creating an interface with 5G towers… and regarding some major metropolitan areas liquefying dead bodies and pouring them into the water supply," according to a board report.
Redfall can die in a fire, but hi-fi rush was fucking art
Enlarge / Artist's conception of Microsoft telling Hi-Fi Rush maker Tango Gameworks they no longer exist as a studio. (credit: Tango Gameworks)
Microsoft is shutting down four studios within its Bethesda Softworks subsidiary, according to a staff email obtained by IGN. The closures include Redfall developer Arkane Austin and Hi-Fi Rush studio Tango Gameworks. While some team members will be reassigned to other parts of the company, head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty said in a letter to staffers "that some of our colleagues will be leaving us."
Tango Gameworks confirmed in a short social media message that "Hi-Fi Rush, along with Tango's previous titles [like The Evil Within], will remain available and playable everywhere they are today." But the closure of Arkane Austin means that "development will not continue on Redfall," the company wrote in its own social media update. "Arkane Lyon will continue their focus on immersive experiences where they are hard at work on their upcoming project [Marvel's Blade]."
In his note to staff, Booty said that [Redfall] “will remain online for players to enjoy and we will provide make-good offers to players who purchased the Hero DLC.”
Apple says the M4 includes "up to" four high-performance CPU cores, six high-efficiency cores, and a 10-core GPU. Apple's high-level performance estimates say that the M4 has 50 percent faster CPU performance and four times as much graphics performance. Like the GPU in the M3, the M4 also supports hardware-accelerated ray-tracing to enable more advanced lighting effects in games and other apps. Due partly to its "second-generation" 3 nm manufacturing process, Apple says the M4 can match the performance of the M2 while using just half the power.
As with so much else in the tech industry right now, the M4 also has an AI focus; Apple says it's beefing up the 16-core Neural Engine (Apple’s equivalent of the Neural Processing Unit that companies like Qualcomm, Intel, AMD, and Microsoft have been pushing lately). Apple says the M4 runs up to 38 trillion operations per second (TOPS), considerably ahead of Intel's Meteor Lake platform, though a bit short of the 45 TOPS that Qualcomm is promising with the Snapdragon X Elite and Plus series. The M3's Neural Engine is only capable of 18 TOPS, so that's a major step up for Apple's hardware.
Amazing. GOP voters really are the stupidest fucking people on earth.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem’s new defense of her terrifying memoir—the one in which she shot her own puppy and threatened to killJoe Biden’s German shepherd—seems to be that it was the ghostwriter what did it.
It’s not just these stories of malevolence toward man’s best friend that have gotten Noem in trouble. It turns out she also claims to have made North Korea’s dictator come to heel like a trained dog. Needless to say, Noem never met Kim Jong Un—there’s a reason why they call it the hermit kingdom. So how did this passage make it into her biography?
“It was brought to our attention that the upcoming book ‘No Going Back’ has two small errors. This has been communicated to the ghostwriter and editor,” said a Noem spokesperson somehow named Ian Fury earlier this week.
Now, Noem’s book doesn’t credit a ghostwriter on the cover, which rates her even lower in the honesty department than … Donald Trump, who at least acknowledged his amanuensis on the front of the “Art of the Deal.”
Still, fine, we’ll take her at her word that she didn’t really write her own tome. But is she also claiming she didn’t read it either? How else could her tall tales—which also include an apparently made-up story about canceling a meeting with French President Emanuel Macron, tres désolée—have been “brought to our attention” only now, for the first time?
In fairness, it would be pretty easy to believe that she hadn’t actually read her book, wouldn’t you say? There’s just, as Daily Kos’ Markos Moulitsas pointed out, one teeny, eensy, very small, micro-problem:
You can even hear Noem say it herself, complete with a little twangy Western theme music, right at the very start:
Hachette Audio presents, “No Going Back: The Truth on What's Wrong with Politics and How We Move America Forward,” written and read by me, Kristi Noem.
So what do we think the excuse is here? It’s actually an AI-generated simulacrum of Noem? She was strung out on ayahuasca and wasn’t really “there” when she recorded her audiobook? She didn’t understand that memoirs are meant to be factual? Well, don’t try asking her publisher.
“At the request of Governor Noem, we are removing a passage regarding Kim Jong Un from her book No Going Back, upon reprint of the print edition and as soon as technically possible on the audio and ebook editions,” said Center Street in a statement. “Further questions about the passage should be referred to the author.”
Shell sold millions of carbon credits tied to CO2 removal that never took place [non-paywalled link] to Canada's largest oil sands companies, raising new doubts about a technology seen as crucial to mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. FT: As part of a subsidy scheme to boost the industry, the Alberta provincial government allowed Shell to register and sell carbon credits equivalent to twice the volume of emissions avoided by its Quest carbon capture facility between 2015 and 2021, the province's registry shows. The subsidy was reduced and then ended in 2022.
As a result of the scheme, Shell was able to register 5.7mn credits that had no equivalent CO2 reductions, selling these to top oil sands producers and some of its own subsidiaries. Credits are typically equivalent to one tonne of CO2. Some of the largest buyers of the credits were Chevron, Canadian Natural Resources, ConocoPhillips, Imperial Oil and Suncor Energy. Keith Stewart, a senior energy strategist with Greenpeace Canada, criticised these "phantom credits." Stewart added: "Selling emissions credits for reductions that never happened ... literally makes climate change worse."
Shell said carbon capture played "an important role in helping to decarbonise industry and sectors where emissions cannot be avoided" and that realising its potential "requires creating market incentives now." Alberta's environment ministry said the crediting support scheme had not resulted in "additional emissions" by industrial polluters.
Deck chairs on the titanic, all to line Elon's pockets. This shouldn't be a surprise
Enlarge (credit: Karol Serewis/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
On Sunday night, even more Tesla workers learned they were no longer employed by the company as it engaged in yet another round of layoffs. Multiple former employees posted on LinkedIn and other sites to relay the news that they were no longer with the company.
"Well, tonight I have learned that my nearly 8 year journey leading and designing Service products at Tesla has come to an end," wrote one former employee.
"For the past Month, most Tesla Employees have had the ritual of keeping a close eye on one's personal email on Sundays and to check it before heading into work on Monday, as layoffs have been increasing. I was spared last October when we had layoffs and also for the last 3 weeks of layoffs. However, I too received the dreaded 'Tesla Employment Update' email today," wrote another.
PlayStation has reversed course on the Helldivers 2 PSN account requirement, walking back the unpopular policy after a weekend long backlash that included tens of thousands of negative reviews, some of which spread to Sony's other Steam games. From a report: "Helldivers fans -- we've heard your feedback on the Helldivers 2 account linking update. The May 6 update, which would have required Steam and PlayStation Network account linking for new players and for current players beginning May 30, will not be moving forward," PlayStation wrote on its official account.
"We're still learning what is best for PC players and your feedback has been invaluable. Thanks again for your continued support of Helldivers 2 and we'll keep you updated on future plans." PlayStation's decision means that Helldivers 2 players on Steam won't have to link a PSN account in order to play. The unpopular policy, which would have seen new players confronted with a mandatory login beginning this week, resulted in Helldivers 2 being delisted in around 177 countries.
Enlarge / Kenneth Dintzer, litigator for the US Department of Justice, exits federal court in Washington, DC, on September 20, 2023, during the antitrust trial to determine if Alphabet Inc.'s Google maintains a monopoly in the online search business. (credit: Bloomberg / Contributor | Bloomberg)
Near the end of the second day of closing arguments in the Google monopoly trial, US district judge Amit Mehta weighed whether sanctions were warranted over what the US Department of Justice described as Google's "routine, regular, and normal destruction" of evidence.
Google was accused of enacting a policy instructing employees to turn chat history off by default when discussing sensitive topics, including Google's revenue-sharing and mobile application distribution agreements. These agreements, the DOJ and state attorneys general argued, work to maintain Google's monopoly over search.
According to the DOJ, Google destroyed potentially hundreds of thousands of chat sessions not just during their investigation but also during litigation. Google only stopped the practice after the DOJ discovered the policy. DOJ's attorney Kenneth Dintzer told Mehta Friday that the DOJ believed the court should "conclude that communicating with history off shows anti-competitive intent to hide information because they knew they were violating antitrust law."
Six Supreme Court justices attend President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address. | Shawn Thew/Pool/AFP via Getty Images
The justices are quietly quitting their day jobs as judges, even as they become more and more political.
Young John Roberts was a funny guy.
“The generally accepted notion that the court can only hear roughly 150 cases each term,” the future chief justice wrote while he was an early-career lawyer working in the Reagan White House, “gives the same sense of reassurance as the adjournment of the court in July, when we know that the Constitution is safe for the summer.”
Roberts, of course, wrote this at a time when Republicans could not rely on the federal judiciary to advance its policy goals — something that Roberts has done much to change in his current job. The justices are in the middle of an unusually political term, fraught with cases that tweak many of America’s most bitter divides on issues like guns or abortion, and that seek to fundamentally restructure who wields power in the United States.
Yet, while the justices seem eager to be the final word on America’s most intractable political divides, they’ve increasingly stopped doing the traditional work of judges — resolving often technical, boring legal disputes that arise between litigants whose names will never be mentioned on cable news.
The Supreme Court used to do this work. But it avoids it more and more now. Indeed, one striking thing about Roberts’s Reagan-era quip about the Court’s docket is that he describes a Court that “can only hear roughly 150 cases each term.” Now, the Court is hearing barely more than 60.
Consider this chart, which was produced by Adam Feldman, a lawyer and political scientist who publishes empirical work on the Supreme Court. Although slightly dated (it ends with the Court’s 2016–17 term), the chart shows the total number of cases that the Court handed down in each of its annual terms on its merits docket — the cases that typically receive full briefing and oral argument before the justices:
Adam Feldman/Empirical SCOTUS
Feldman’s data shows a steady decline in the Supreme Court’s workload since the 1960s. By the mid-2010s, the Court was deciding fewer cases than it had since the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Because the size of the Court’s docket has been in steady decline for many decades, there’s been a great deal of scholarship examining why this decline is happening. The striking thing, however, is that the size of the Court’s docket continues to shrink, even after many of the most likely explanations fade into the past.
Many scholars, for example, point to the Supreme Court Case Selections Act of 1988, a federal law that gave the justices more ability to turn away cases they don’t want to hear, as a significant driver of the Court’s reduced caseload. Yet, while a 1988 law can certainly explain why the Court is hearing fewer cases today than it did in the early 1980s, it does little to explain why the Court heard about 23 percent fewer cases in its 2023 term than it did in its 2013 term.
It is unlikely that there’s a single explanation for the Court’s shrinking docket. Scholars and other legal experts have all proposed numerous overlapping explanations for the reduced caseload.
One thing is clear, however. The overall decline in the Court’s docket does not appear to be matched by a decline in the number of political cases heard by the justices. That is, while the justices are hearing fewer total cases than they used to, they are avoiding the kind of technical legal disputes that rarely garner headlines — all while vacuuming up more power to decide the kind of political disputes that divide Democrats from Republicans.
The many explanations for the Court’s diminished docket
Until the late 19th century, the justices had very little control over their docket. Litigants who lost in a lower court typically could bring their case to the Supreme Court whether the justices wanted to hear that case or not. This changed in 1891, when Congress enacted legislation creating mid-level courts that would hear most federal appeals and gave the Court discretion to turn away at least some cases.
Two subsequent laws, enacted in 1925 and 1988, further reduced the Court’s mandatory jurisdiction. The justices now have the freedom to turn away nearly all of the cases that are brought to their attention. Today, in the overwhelming majority of cases, four justices must agree to hear the case or the lower court’s decision stands.
Beyond this 1988 law, an internal change in the Court’s process for deciding which cases to hear may contribute to its reduced caseload.
In a typical year, the Court receives thousands of petitions — known as petitions for a “writ of certiorari” — asking it to hear a particular case. Prior to the 1970s, at least one law clerk in each of the nine justices’ chambers would typically review each of these petitions and advise their justice on whether the petition should be granted. After Justice Lewis Powell joined the Court in 1972, he decided that this process was needlessly inefficient, and urged his colleagues to pool their chambers’ resources.
The result was the “cert pool.” Under this process, petitions asking the Court to hear a case would be randomly assigned to just one clerk among all the justices who participate in the pool. These justices would all rely on a memo drafted by that one law clerk to advise them on whether to hear the case. Initially, five justices joined the pool, though that number has fluctuated, and it now includes every member of the Court except for Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.
Several court-watchers have blamed this process for the Court’s reduced docket. As Ken Starr, the former federal judge and US solicitor general best known for investigating President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, wrote in a 2006 essay, “this efficiency-driven device has been inadequately studied, but what is commonly understood is that the prevailing culture within the pool is to ‘just say no.’”
That is, law clerks are reluctant to recommend that the Court hear a case because they don’t want to be embarrassed if the case turns out to be a dud. And with so many justices participating in the pool, many justices’ decisions will be influenced by a single timid clerk.
Yet, while policy changes like the 1988 law and the implementation of the cert pool might explain why the Court hears fewer cases now than it did in the 1970s, they cannot explain why the size of the Court’s merits docket continues to decline to this day. These are, by now, well-entrenched, decades-old reforms. Whatever impact they might have had in the past is now baked into the Court’s year-to-year work.
Other scholars point to changes in the Court’s personnel to explain the shrinking docket. In a 2010 essay, David Stras, a former law professor who Trump later put on the federal bench, argued that, in the early 1990s, three justices who voted to hear a relatively large volume of cases were replaced by justices who wanted the Court to hear fewer cases.
The most dramatic shift was the replacement of Justice Byron White, who believed that the Supreme Court had an obligation to resolve disagreements among lower courts very quickly, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. According to Stras, White voted to hear a case an average of 215.6 times per Term between 1986 and 1992. When Ginsburg joined the Court, by contrast, she voted to hear only 63 cases during the 1993–94 term, “or 29.2% as often as her predecessor.”
Yet, again, while these personnel changes might explain why the Court’s docket shrunk in the mid-to-late 1990s, they do not explain why the trend continues nearly four years after Ginsburg’s death.
In a 2012 essay, scholars Ryan Owens and David Simon offer another explanation for the diminished docket. For much of the post-1960s period when the Court’s docket steadily declined, the justices were ideologically divided. As a result, any individual justice would “be less sure of outcomes and will anticipate more dissents and internal strife” if they agree to hear many cases. Owens and Simon argued that “such a Court will decide fewer cases” because justices will be reluctant to hear a particular dispute if they cannot predict how their colleagues will view the case.
This thesis made a lot of sense in 2012, when the Court was divided 5-4 between conservatives and liberals, and when the balance of power had long been held by “swing” justices like Powell or Justices Sandra Day O’Connor or Anthony Kennedy, who were relatively moderate conservatives who frequently made common cause with the Court’s more liberal bloc.
But the Court in 2024 is vastly different from the one that existed a dozen years ago. Now, Republicans enjoy a 6-3 supermajority on the Court, and moderate Republicans like O’Connor and Kennedy are an increasingly distant memory. The Court is far more ideologically cohesive than it was in 2012, and yet its docket continues to shrink.
When I asked Owens and Simon if their views have evolved since they published their 2012 paper, Owens pointed to the Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), an LGBTQ rights victory authored by the Trump-appointed Gorsuch, as evidence that there are still “sufficient differences among the conservatives that nothing is guaranteed.”
But even though real divides do exist among the Court’s Republican appointees, the Court certainly has not become less ideologically coherent than it was a dozen years ago. And yet the size of the merits docket continues to shrink.
So a complete explanation for why Court’s caseload has almost relentlessly declined over the course of the last six decades remains elusive — although, as Owens said to me over email, there is probably a good explanation for why the Court is unlikely to reverse course. “A small docket has become the new norm.” he told me. “It’s been so small for so many years now that going back to > 100 would be really odd.”
Inertia is a powerful force, and increasing the size of the docket today would require a critical mass of new justices to break with a well-established status quo.
The increasingly partisan Supreme Court appointments process may explain the Court’s behavior
One area where Owens and I seem to agree is that, while the overall size of the Court’s docket is in decline, the Court continues to hear at least as many politically contentious cases as it did in previous decades. As Owens put it in his email to me, “the Court has decided to hear fewer cases—but a greater percent of cases with national importance.”
The Court’s current majority has flooded the zone with decisions remaking the law in areas that the Republican Party cares deeply about. Just one month after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave Republican appointees a supermajority on the Court, for example, the Court handed down one of its most significant religion cases in three decades — giving religious conservatives a broad new right to ignore state laws they object to on religious grounds.
And this decision was only the first in a wave of cases revolutionizing the Court’s approach to religion. As I wrote in a 2022 article, the Supreme Court heard only seven religious liberty cases during the Obama presidency. By contrast, it decided just as many religious liberty cases before Barrett celebrated the second anniversary of her confirmation to the Court.
One possible explanation for why political disputes dominate so much of the Court’s docket, even as the volume of ordinary legal cases diminish more and more with each passing year, is that the process for selecting justices has become far more political — and far more partisan — than it used to be.
Similarly, President Dwight Eisenhower complained in 1958 that appointing Justice William Brennan, a titan of American liberalism who was extraordinarily effective in moving the law to the left, was one of the two biggest mistakes he made as president (the other was appointing Chief Justice Earl Warren, another highly consequential liberal appointee). But the Eisenhower White House did very little to vet Brennan ideologically, and Eisenhower selected him in large part because Brennan was Catholic and Ike wanted to appeal to Catholic voters.
To this day, many Republican judicial operatives still use the battle cry “No More Souters” to describe their approach to Supreme Court nominees, a reference to Justice David Souter, a George H. W. Bush appointee who turned out to be a moderate liberal after he was appointed to the Court.
Since Souter’s appointment, both political parties have grown far more sophisticated at vetting potential nominees to ensure that they won’t stray from their party’s ideological views after their elevation to the bench. On the Republican side, organizations like the Federalist Society begin to vet potential nominees almost as soon as they enter law school. And it's notable that every Republican justice except for Barrett served as a political appointee in a GOP administration, where high-level Republicans could observe their work and probe their ideological views.
The Democratic vetting operation, meanwhile, is more informal but no less successful. None of President Clinton’s, Obama’s, or Biden’s Supreme Court appointments have broken with the Democratic Party’s general approach to judging in the same way that Souter broke with Republicans.
So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that justices chosen largely because of their political ideology, rather than because of their records as neutral and impartial jurists, appear to be more interested in deciding political questions than they are in resolving legal disputes.
Using nuclear fusion, the process that powers the stars, to produce electricity on Earth has famously been 30 years away for more than 70 years. But now, a breakthrough experiment done at the DIII-D National Fusion Facility in San Diego may finally push nuclear fusion power plants to be roughly 29 years away.
Nuclear fusion ceiling
The DIII-D facility is run by General Atomics for the Department of Energy. It includes an experimental tokamak, a donut-shaped nuclear fusion device that works by trapping astonishingly hot plasma in very strong, toroidal magnetic fields. Tokamaks, compared to other fusion reactor designs like stellarators, are the furthest along in their development; ITER, the world’s first power-plant-size fusion device now under construction in France, is scheduled to run its first tests with plasma in December 2025.
But tokamaks have always had some issues. Back in 1988, Martin Greenwald, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology expert on plasma physics, proposed an equation that described an apparent limit on how dense plasma could get in tokamaks. He argued that maximum attainable density is dictated by the minor radius of a tokamak and the current induced in the plasma to maintain magnetic stability. Going beyond that limit was supposed to make the magnets incapable of holding the plasma, heated up to north of 150 million degrees Celsius away from the walls of the machine.
samleecole writes: Utah set up an online form for people to accuse other citizens and public establishments of violating the state's recently-enacted transphobic "bathroom bill." The submission form is being flooded with memes and troll comments, and the auditor also left the submissions database open to the public -- without a password, authentication, or any other protections that would keep anyone from viewing other people's submissions.
After 404 Media contacted the auditor's office for comment, they changed the permissions to require authentication. The form link has been posted to Twitter, and people have repeatedly posted screenshots of themselves uploading memes. In the database, those included photos of Barry Wood, characters from Bee Movie, and Shutterstock images of bull testicles. Twitter users have also found a link to the database that the form is connected to, which is hosted on a public Google cloud console bucket that as of Thursday, required no authentication to view. I tested the form, and found that my submission -- a photo of the yelling table cat meme -- appeared instantly in the Google Console bucket. The submission form offers anonymity with the option for the state auditor to contact submitters for more details. I haven't seen names and contact information shared in the database, but comments and image attachments were easily viewable.
Enlarge / New gods, same old drama. (credit: Supergiant)
Here at Ars, we were obviously excited by the late 2022 announcement of Hades II as a follow-up to our favorite game of 2020. But when early coverage of that sequel suggested major changes to the game's core combat, we were a bit worried that the developers at Supergiant risked messing up the core gameplay loop that made the original game so satisfying.
So far, it seems like those worries were unfounded. After spending a few hours playing through the game's recent technical test—which covers content up through the game's first major "boss" character—we found a confident sequel that keeps the original games familiar flow while adding just enough changes to avoid feeling like a rehash. If anything, the new systems in Hades II make the original game's positional combat more satisfying than ever.
Spoiler warning: The rest of this piece offers minor spoilers for the early parts of Hades II.
Enlarge / A rendering of Silver City Energy Centre, a compressed air energy storage plant to be built by Hydrostor in Broken Hill, New South Wales, Australia. (credit: Hydrostor)
The need for long-duration energy storage, which helps to fill the longest gaps when wind and solar are not producing enough electricity to meet demand, is as clear as ever. Several technologies could help to meet this need.
But which approaches could be viable on a commercial scale?
Toronto-based Hydrostor Inc. is one of the businesses developing long-duration energy storage that has moved beyond lab scale and is now focusing on building big things. The company makes systems that store energy underground in the form of compressed air, which can be released to produce electricity for eight hours or longer.
Fucking ridiculous to require this antiquated mess still
Enlarge / Congress provides government support for other industries, so why not AM radio? (credit: Getty Images)
A controversial bill that would require all new cars to be fitted with AM radios looks set to become a law in the near future. Yesterday, Senator Edward Markey (D-Mass) revealed that the "AM Radio for Every Vehicle Act" now has the support of 60 US Senators, as well as 246 co-sponsors in the House of Representatives, making its passage an almost sure thing. Should that happen, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration would be required to ensure that all new cars sold in the US had AM radios at no extra cost.
"Democrats and Republicans are tuning in to the millions of listeners, thousands of broadcasters, and countless emergency management officials who depend on AM radio in their vehicles. AM radio is a lifeline for people in every corner of the United States to get news, sports, and local updates in times of emergencies. Our commonsense bill makes sure this fundamental, essential tool doesn’t get lost on the dial. With a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, Congress should quickly take it up and pass it," said Sen. Markey and his co-sponsor Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas).
About 82 million people still listen to AM radio, according to the National Association of Broadcasters, which as you can imagine was rather pleased with the congressional support for its industry.
Windows 11's market share dropped in April 2024, falling below 26% after reaching an all-time high of 28.16% in February. According to Statcounter, Windows 11 lost 0.97 points, while Windows 10 gained 0.96 points, crossing the 70% mark for the first time since September 2023. Neowin adds: Some argue that Windows 11 still offers little to no benefits for upgrading, especially in light of Microsoft killing some of the system's unique features, such as Windows Subsystem for Android. Add to that the ever-increasing number of ads, some of which are quite shameless, and you get an operating system that has a hard time winning hearts and minds, and retaining its customers.
As long as there's more protection for those externally-exposed IPs, sure
An anonymous reader shares that IPv6rs has debuted a new one-click self hosting system:
Everyone seemed like they were talking about self hosting, but we didn't understand why it wasn't more prolific. Thus, we conducted a survey to hear reasons. It turned out the two most common reasons were:
1. Lack of an external IP address
2. Too difficult to setup and maintain
Our service already solves the first issue. We set out with a self-hostathon to figure out what the blockers were in setting up and running a self-hosted server.
... writes IPv6rs on their blog.
We needed to make things easier, so we created Cloud Seeder, a one click installer that instantly launches a fully encapsulated server appliance that is externally reachable.
At the time of launching, the current version of Cloud Seeder supports 20+ different appliances - from Mastodon which federates with Meta's Threads to Nextcloud which provides an enterprise-level, self-hosted alternative to the big-name collaboration suites.
It also automatically handles updates/maintenance.
We hope this will bring a new era to self hosting and, in turn, will bring the decentralized internet forest back.
Is the self hosting era making its return?
The best way to interview Donald Trump is to … not interview him.
Unless you’re a particularly ardent supporter of vicious, kindergarten-level lies—such as “I won the election because I was ahead on election night” or “immigrants ate my health care plan”—there’s really no reason to listen to, much less solicit, any of his so-called opinions. But Time magazine did just that.
Since his latest fibs are just fragrant fish heads in a whopping seafood ‘n’ BS paella, it’s important to at least take a taste if we want a full picture of his depravity. Or a sniff. Or, if possible, a six-month-long nap until this is all over and Joe Biden is reelected.
Ah, but there’s no sleeping on Trump and his march to Putin-style autocracy, so we have to stay awake. And—hoo-boy—did he ever just give an eye-opening interview.
What Cortellessa describes are the “outlines of an imperial presidency that would reshape America and its role in the world.”
To carry out a deportation operation designed to remove more than 11 million people from the country, Trump told me, he would be willing to build migrant detention camps and deploy the U.S. military, both at the border and inland. He would let red states monitor women’s pregnancies and prosecute those who violate abortion bans. He would, at his personal discretion, withhold funds appropriated by Congress, according to top advisers. He would be willing to fire a U.S. Attorney who doesn’t carry out his order to prosecute someone, breaking with a tradition of independent law enforcement that dates from America’s founding. He is weighing pardons for every one of his supporters accused of attacking the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, more than 800 of whom have pleaded guilty or been convicted by a jury. He might not come to the aid of an attacked ally in Europe or Asia if he felt that country wasn’t paying enough for its own defense.
In addition, notes Cortellessa, Trump would “gut” the U.S. civil service, send the National Guard to U.S. cities “as he sees fit,” close the White House pandemic-preparedness office (because apparently we were more than adequately prepared last time), and “staff his administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”
In other words, he wants to be a dictator on Day One … and day two … and day 365 ... and every day after that until God decides to reincarnate him as a severely undernourished infant forcibly taken from his mother at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Ah, but reading is believing. With that in mind, here are nine of the most frightening excerpts from Trump’s Time interview. (And in case you’d prefer to skip ahead to the fact check, that’s here.)
1.
Asked whether he’d override the Posse Comitatus Act, which makes it illegal to use the U.S. military against civilians in order to deport immigrants, Trump said this:
Well, these aren’t civilians. These are people that aren't legally in our country. This is an invasion of our country. An invasion like probably no country has ever seen before. They're coming in by the millions. I believe we have 15 million now. And I think you'll have 20 million by the time this ends. And that's bigger than almost every state.
Of course, if anyone should know what a “civilian” is, it’s Bonnie Prince Bone Spurs. As Time noted in its fact check, “a civilian is commonly defined as anyone who is not an active member of the armed forces. Immigration status does not factor into whether someone is a civilian. Any person in the U.S., regardless of their immigration status, may be entitled to many of the same constitutional rights as U.S. citizens.”
Then again, Trump appears far more interested in empty xenophobic gestures than actually helping the economy grow.
2.
Trump wants more tariffs, and to this day no one’s been able to dislodge from his head the (extremely) false notion that the cost of tariffs falls on exporters rather than importers. That said, it’s clear he’s been told that tariffs represent an added cost to consumers, because in this interview he attempts to preemptively debunk that fact:
I also don't believe that the costs will go up that much. And a lot of people say, “Oh, that's gonna be a tax on us.” I don't believe that. I think it's a tax on the country that's doing it.
Well, Trump also believes windmills kill whales and exercise is bad for you. (Neither of those things is true, but if Trump is elected again you can expect the NIH to spend millions of taxpayer dollars studying those theories.)
Of course, listening to Trump is bad for the health of your economy. As Mary Amiti, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, wrote in 2020 for the New York Times, “U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers.”
So if you like the pandemic-related inflation we saw after Trump left a flaming bag of fiscal poo on Joe Biden’s doorstep in 2021, you may be in luck. Trump wants to bring it back—and make it permanent—by deporting millions of willing workers and adding unnecessary costs to thousands of consumer goods.
3.
Of course, if Americans decide to resist mass deportations and/or the White House’s unilateral decision to make everything more expensive, they can expect an emboldened police force to push back. Because Trump wants to give police a lot more leeway to take matters into their own hands:
Police have been—their authority has been taken away. If something happens with them, even if they're doing a very good job, they take away their house, they take away their pension, they take away their, I mean, essentially, they end up losing their families over it. They take away everything. They prosecute people. And we have to give the police back the power and respect that they deserve. Now, there will be some mistakes, and there are certain bad people and that's a terrible thing. But there are far more problems with what's happened now, where police are standing outside of a department store as it’s being robbed and 500 mostly young people are walking out carrying air conditioners and televisions and everything else. And the police would like to do something about it. But they're told to stand down. They said don't do it. And if you do anything about it, if you stop crime, we're going to go after your pension, your home, your family, your wife or your husband. And you know, police are being prosecuted all the time. And we want to give them immunity from prosecution if they're doing their job.
Yes, clearly the problem with police these days is they’re far too accountable. But you know what they say: You can’t run a police state without police. It’s right there in the name! What ever will we do if every police officer who murders a citizen is simply shipped off to jail? It would be anarchy!
By the way, if police are really standing around watching 500 people cart air conditioners and TVs out of department stores, they should probably be fired. And I’m as liberal as they get.
Violent crime is going down throughout the country. There was a 6% drop in—
Trump: I don't believe it.
You don’t believe that?
Trump: Yeah, they’re fake numbers.
You think so?
Trump: Well it came out last night. The FBI gave fake numbers.
I didn't see that, but the FBI said that there was a 13% drop in 2023. [Editor's note: This statistic refers specifically to homicides.]
Trump: I don’t believe it. No, it’s a lie. It’s fake news.
Sir, these numbers are collected by state and local police departments across the country. Most of them support you. Are they wrong?
Trump: Yeah. Last night. Well, maybe, maybe not. The FBI fudged the numbers and other people fudged numbers. There is no way that crime went down over the last year. There's no way because you have migrant crime. Are they adding migrant crime? Or do they consider that a different form of crime?
“Do they consider that a different form of crime?” You were president, dude. You don’t know?
Of course, since migrants commit crimes at significantly lower rates than native-born Americans, welcoming more immigrants into the country would only serve to lower crime rates. As it is, we don’t know exactly why crime rates went down under Biden. We just know they did. Maybe the improved economy has made it easier for people to maintain their $2,000-a-month horse paste habits, and so they no longer need to gather 499 of their friends together to steal shit from Big Lots. Or maybe people are just a lot calmer since that big orange head stopped screaming at them from the TV every day.
5.
Of course, just because violent crime is down doesn’t mean Trump can’t ratchet it up a notch or two. Assuming he loses the election … again.
Mr. President, in our last conversation you said you weren't worried about political violence in connection with the November election. You said, “I think we're going to win and there won't be violence.” What if you don't win, sir?
Trump: Well, I do think we're gonna win. We're way ahead. I don't think they'll be able to do the things that they did the last time, which were horrible. Absolutely horrible. So many, so many different things they did, which were in total violation of what was supposed to be happening. And you know that and everybody knows that. We can recite them, go down a list that would be an arm’s long. But I don't think we're going to have that. I think we're going to win. And if we don't win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.
Got that? There will only be violence if Trump loses. Because if he loses, the results will obviously be fake. Dictators always win, after all. Hasn’t America figured that out by now?
6.
Of course, Trump is such a diligent crime fighter, he’d be fine with states monitoring women’s pregnancies to make sure they don’t get abortions. And he still somehow thinks “everyone” wanted to see Roe v. Wade struck down.
Do you think states should monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion after the ban?
Sheesh. Every time this dingbat sings, a Democratic attack ad gets its wings.
7.
Meanwhile, Trump is promising another big announcement in just ... two weeks! And because he announced the arrival of his announcement during the first part of this two-part interview—and since the two interviews were conducted two weeks apart—for once we get a timely update!
Do you think women should be able to get the abortion pill mifepristone?
Trump: Well, I have an opinion on that, but I'm not going to explain. I'm not gonna say it yet. But I have pretty strong views on that. And I'll be releasing it probably over the next week.
Well, this is a big question, Mr. President, because your allies have called for enforcement of the Comstock Act, which prohibits the mailing of drugs used for abortions by mail. The Biden Department of Justice has not enforced it. Would your Department of Justice enforce it?
Trump: I will be making a statement on that over the next 14 days.
Two weeks later …
Last time we spoke, you said you had an announcement coming over the next two weeks regarding your policy on the abortion pill mifepristone. You haven't made an announcement yet. Would you like to do so now?
Trump: No, I haven’t. I’ll be doing it over the next week or two. But I don't think it will be shocking, frankly. But I'll be doing it over the next week or two. We’re for helping women, Eric. I am for helping women.
So his answer to “did you formulate the policy that you promised, two weeks ago, to tell us about in two weeks?” was … “I’ll let you know in two weeks.”
Something tells me his answer will arrive six weeks after the heat death of the universe.
8.
Of course, while President Biden has been careful not to interfere in DOJ decisions, Trump has no such qualms. In fact, he’s outright promised to go after Biden. In this interview, he kinda, sorta, but not really walked that back:
Okay, so sir, you said that you would appoint a real special prosecutor to go after Biden and his family—
In other words, if Toddler Trump doesn’t get immunity for trying to end America and refusing to return top secret government documents, Biden shouldn’t get immunity for all the crimes Trump wants to pretend he committed. And the charges Trump believes Biden will face over all that nothing will “probably” have nothing to do with him.
Very reassuring. It’s clear how much this guy loves liberal democracy and the rule of law—or would, anyway, if he knew what either of those things were.
9.
Meanwhile, Trump is certain that all the cases against him were orchestrated by a shrewd and calculating Joe Biden, the senile old man who doesn’t know he’s alive.
In case you’re wondering why nearly that entire excerpt is hyperlinked, well, it’s because it’s all bullshit. And it directs the reader to this fact check:
In November 2022, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as Special Counsel overseeing the federal investigations into Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, and Trump’s handling of classified documents after he left office. The announcement came shortly after Trump announced he was running for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Special Counsels are appointed to ensure the independence of prosecutors when there is the potential for a conflict between the attorney general, who is a political appointee, and the subject of the investigation.
AND A BONUS
Of course, no rundown of Trumpian madness would be complete without his threats to destroy the post-World War II order that’s preserved decades of peace in Western Europe. But in this excerpt, Trump unwittingly (does he ever do anything anything wittingly?) makes his opponents’ argument for him. Because not only would other NATO countries come to our help if we were invaded, the only time NATO did act to defend one of its member states was when America was attacked.
Do you want to maintain 80 years of American leadership in defending the West, especially Europe, or do you want to change the architecture of the post-war world that has kept us out of a World War for the last 80 years?
Trump: I want them to pay their bills. Very simple. NATO is fine. See, the problem I have with NATO is, I don't think that NATO would come to our defense if we had a problem.
Since its adoption in 1949, Article 5 has only been invoked once: immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. The other 18 member nations of NATO launched a number of operations in response, including the deployment of air forces to secure the skies over the U.S. and naval anti-terrorism efforts. NATO members also participated in the ensuing ground war in Afghanistan.
Gee, maybe we owe them money. Nah, because NATO dues aren’t a thing. You’d think someone who was president might know that, huh? You’d think.
One reason plastic waste persists in the environment is because there's not much that can eat it. The chemical structure of most polymers is stable and different enough from existing food sources that bacteria didn't have enzymes that could digest them. Evolution has started to change that situation, though, and a number of strains have been identified that can digest some common plastics.
An international team of researchers has decided to take advantage of those strains and bundle plastic-eating bacteria into the plastic. To keep them from eating it while it's in use, the bacteria is mixed in as inactive spores that should (mostly—more on this below) only start digesting the plastic once it's released into the environment. To get this to work, the researchers had to evolve a bacterial strain that could tolerate the manufacturing process. It turns out that the evolved bacteria made the plastic even stronger.
Bacteria meet plastics
Plastics are formed of polymers, long chains of identical molecules linked together by chemical bonds. While they can be broken down chemically, the process is often energy-intensive and doesn't leave useful chemicals behind. One alternative is to get bacteria to do it for us. If they've got an enzyme that breaks the chemical bonds of a polymer, they can often use the resulting small molecules as an energy source.
It would be hard to find an organization more corrupt and incompetent than the NRA, though a fewindividuals on a certain court sure come to mind. In January, chief executive Wayne LaPierre ended three decades of control when he resigned ahead of a trial over tapping organization funds to treat himself to yacht trips, African safaris, and regular use of a private jet. In February, that trial ended with LaPierre being ordered to pay back almost $4.4 million.
In the wake of LaPierre’s resignation, the organization has reportedly descended into infighting. Finding a new leader has proven so difficult that not even Donald Trump Jr., who spent years talking himself up as the NRA’s next leader, is willing to take the job. Or at least, he says he wouldn’t, though no one has actually asked him to step in.
Leadership aside, the NRA now has only a fraction of the funds they had to sling around in past election seasons. They’ve declined from the $50 million they put into races in 2016 to only $11 million in their PAC and SuperPAC combined as of the last filing. Membership is also down by over a million, to around five million, which is half the goal LaPierre set for 2023 a decade ago.
And that’s not all that’s declined. So have gun sales. So what does that mean for the gun lobby?
GOP candidates routinely place guns right next to God in their campaign material, and Republican Christmas cards feature every family member clutching a ridiculous weapon.
Rep. Thomas Massie’s 2023 Christmas card
But it appears that Republican members of Congress aren’t putting enough guns in the hands of their adolescent children. According to the FBI, gun sales in the United States have declined for three straight years. The Trace estimates that Americans bought 665,000 fewer guns in 2023 than in 2022. That trend is continuing. Comparing year-over-year data, sales in March of 2024 were down 5% from the same month in 2023.
There are reasons other than the declining influence of the NRA for that drop in sales. The truth is only about 6% of Americans hunt, and even for them an expensive assault weapon is rarely, if ever, the right tool. While an AR-15-style weapon may be the perfect tool for war, it’s a poor choice for personal defense.
Buying guns like the trendy AR-15 can be an expensive hobby, especially for those who don’t use them beyond a temporary enthusiasm for the local gun range. A $650 Yeti cooler may at least contribute to a tailgate party, but a $1,000 assault rifle is just an expensive—and dangerous—decoration for the vast number of those who own them.
In short, not every gun buyer goes on to be the industry's serial-killing dream customer. Many may not be inclined to buy another copy of a weapon they aren’t using, no matter how many guns Massie or Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert have on their Christmas cards.
With the NRA fading, there are other gun lobby groups working to gain more influence. However, none of them seem to have the level of influence, extensive finances, and highly effective lobbyists that the NRA had a few years ago. Those other organizations haven’t spent decades nurturing relationships with both politicians and deep-pocketed donors. The decline of the NRA seems like a genuine moment of weakness in the pro-gun lobby.
There is certainly no shortage of Republican-dominated state legislatures standing by to pass stupid laws. But hopefully, it doesn't matter how tightly Republicans dig in their cold, dead fingers. America may have passed Peak Gun.
But of course that doesn’t mean it’s time to relax about gun control legislation. It means that it’s time to push harder.
AZ GOP, proudly losing their minds in full public view
The Arizona GOP has tapped state Sen. Jake Hoffman, a prominent Freedom Caucus member of the legislature, for a position with the Republican National Committee. This comes less than a week after Hoffman’s indictment on multiple felony charges for his part in a “fake elector” scheme connected to the 2020 election.
An Arizona grand jury indicted Hoffman and 17 others for their part in the massive scheme that sent lists of “alternate electors” from seven states to the National Archives after the 2020 election, according to the Arizona Mirror. The plan was to use those fraudulent documents to shift the states’ Electoral College votes from Joe Biden to Donald Trump.
The Arizona GOP did not respond to a CNN inquiry about why they chose one of two state senators charged in this scheme to represent the party at the national level. Maybe it’s because of Hoffman’s important efforts on behalf of the Arizona Freedom Caucus, like trying to keep Satan off of public property.
Hoffman and his co conspirators have been under fire since the forged documents appeared. The grand jury indictment targeting Hoffman also included fellow Arizona Freedom Caucus member and state sen. Anthony Kern, as well as former Arizona Republican Party Executive Director Greg Safsten.
Here's one way to avoid dealing with election results you don't like: just wipe them from the record books. It's not Orwell—it's Arizona, and we're talking all about it on this week's episode of "The Downballot." This fall, voters have the chance to deny new terms to two conservative Supreme Court justices, but a Republican amendment would retroactively declare those elections null and void—and all but eliminate the system Arizona has used to evaluate judges for 50 years. We're going to guess voters won't like this one bit … if it even makes it to the ballot in the first place.
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Adam Feldman/Empirical SCOTUS
