News Notes: Hope is Not a Strategy
Plus: Santa Claus is dead, and you cannot outrun a Mexican free-tailed bat
Not meddling in our elections is also meddling in our elections. Over the summer, President Biden went to Saudi Arabia to make amends. Previously, on the campaign trail, he had vowed to turn the desert kingdom into a “pariah,” mostly in retaliation for the 2018 murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the country’s embassy in Istanbul. Biden’s denunciation felt good and righteous. The flaw in that approach, however, was that he hadn’t also made sure to first take over Saudi Arabia and extract the kingdom’s vast energy resources for the private benefit of the US economy. Now it was August before a critical midterm election, gas prices were soaring, and it was starting to look like Biden and his party could use a little help from the pariahs. I imagine the conversation went something like this:
BIDEN: Hello pariahs. Man, I tell ya, the future of transportation is right here in Saudi Arabia. What do these camels eat, anyway? And please say it’s not oil. Heh heh. Look, let’s be serious. Within a few years, all cars in the US will be powered by those pressured-air canisters you use to clean the keyboard on your computer. But until then, we’re really gonna need you to further destroy the planet and steal the future of our children by ramping up production of greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. Will you have a look at it?
PARIAHS: You bet we will. While we do, do you also suggest we pretend it’s in our economic interest to drive down fuel costs world-wide?
BIDEN: You do you. Except, don’t do you.
The payoff for this diplomacy came in October, when the OPEC nations, led by Saudi Arabia, decided they would cut production by two million barrels a day — an unwelcome choice that has put even more upward pressure on fuel prices. The decision came as a big surprise to the administration. Or didn’t. After the fact, the Saudis claimed Biden administration officials, apparently expecting to be disappointed, pressured the Saudis to delay OPEC’s decision until later in November, conveniently after the polls had closed in the midterms, when the futility of administration energy policies would no longer be front and center. (The administration didn’t deny the pressure, but claimed it was aimed at hampering the Russian war effort by denying Putin’s government increased revenue from oil sales.) Democrats would just have to grit their teeth and hope voters would not blame them for high prices at the pump.
Some Democrats are not taking this outcome lying down, and are now lashing out at the Saudis. “Democrats and administration officials are furious at the Saudis’ move to cut oil production, seeing it as an attempt to meddle in a U.S. election,” reads the dek on a Times story from last week. (Some bits in the article are, well, intriguing. “National security officials insist they weren’t blindsided. But other officials, including John Podesta, the climate czar, were furious.”) And if the Saudis had bowed to administration pressure and delayed OPEC’s decision until after the midterms? Yes: not meddling in our elections.
Lindell, take the wheel. I don’t mind telling you that about half (maybe more) of the junk text and email I receive is from the Republican Party. I think. It purports to be from the Republicans and their candidates, but it reads like it has come from a moody teenager cycling between indignation and despair. “I don’t know what else to say. Don Jr. texted you. Jim Jordan texted you. Mike Pompeo texted you. This is the end of the road.” That’s the tame stuff. With a lot of the messages, you can just about imagine the words being shouted at cafeteria workers in a mental hospital. “Ethan, the media insists Pres.Trump’s supporters have abandoned him & you're proving them right! If we don't get 7 more people to sign his birthday card in the next hour. we won't reach our goal! Don't make us ask again.”
(“Now, I ask you once more, can I have a second baked potato?”)
Really, I have no idea why I started receiving this stuff. I’m liberal enough to be considered conservative these days, but I’ve been registered unaffiliated since college. I think my news subscriptions probably peg me as “muddled.” Maybe for the Republicans, if you bother to register to vote at all, but not as a Democrat, you can safely be labeled “GOP-curious.” And then, if that really is your kink, you can be persuaded by messages that portray Nancy Pelosi as a witch and suggest your eyes MUST BE HARD OF HEARING. Still, I’m guessing on the Venn diagram of soft independents like me, and people who believe there’s a witch hunt targeting MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, those circles don’t touch.
The lion’s share of these messages are auto-shunted to the junk folder. And that’s probably a good thing, because it’s hard to imagine a spam trap that’s useful and doesn’t also send them there. But this is evidently turning into a real problem for the GOP. The Republican National Committee filed suit against Google last week, charging that the tech company’s algorithm has “arbitrarily throttled” outreach to GOP donors and voters, costing the party millions of dollars in potential contributions and hampering get-out-the-vote efforts.
The accusation is based partly on an RNC analysis that showed “nearly 100%” of emails were being routed to spam during key fundraising and voter-mobilization periods. (The lawsuit I guess answers the question of whether the smarter choice would be to loudly disavow the messages, blame them on Democratic Party sabotage, and then act surprised when the money rolls in.) Google strongly denies the GOP’s allegations, and says “users’ actions” determine the types of messages that are sent to spam.
Fortunately, I have a solution for the RNC (or whichever GOP group is messaging me), and I’m happy to share it: stop sending spam. If I can’t tell the difference between your messages and junk email, how’s my computer supposed to do it?
Abortive exercise. A group of publishing industry not-censors who definitely believe very devoutly in the importance of free speech and the free exchange of ideas and how dare you suggest otherwise is demanding that Penguin Random House, and its Bertelsmann subsidiary, cancel plans to publish a forthcoming book by Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. “This is not just a book that we disagree with, and we are not calling for censorship,” reads the group’s petition, which currently has 639 signatories. I guess they have a point: Since the book hasn’t been written, it’s not like they’re refusing to allow its distribution or burning it in the town square. (Yet.) It’s a technical point, but it’s a point.
Rather, they say, “this is a case where a corporation has privately funded the destruction of human rights with obscene profits.” No doubt about it. With that $2 million book advance, PRH is financing Barrett’s extralegal drone program, perhaps international “black sites,” and maybe a gimp dungeon where abortion providers will be hogtied and whipped.
I kid. The destruction of human rights in this instance was finding (in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health) that abortion is a question that is supposed to be settled by citizen representatives in state legislatures and not by nine unelected lord-adjudicators. Another technical point, I suppose. But if you are going to argue that Barrett, and presumptively everyone else who joined the majority in Dobbs, has destroyed human rights, you should at least acknowledge she and they destroyed those rights by giving you a role in deciding the relevant question. What, Bryn Mawr no longer teaches civics?
Let’s leave aside for now the question of whether freedom of conscience — you know, what books represent — ought to be regarded as a human right alongside the right to abortion on demand. What would our not-censors like the standard to be? They might want to think carefully.
Santa Claus is real. He’s just been dead this whole time: “Real-life Santa Claus’ grave found: ‘An extremely important discovery’” — NY Post
News You Can Probably Use: “Some people really are mosquito magnets, and they’re stuck that way” — Scientific American
News They Could Have Probably Used: "Georgia men come to pick up their daughter from school, realize it's the same girl: report" — Fox News
News I Could Have Probably Done Without: “Mexican free-tailed bats can reach speeds of up to 100 mph, making them the fastest mammals on Earth.” — The Daily Atom (Science Facts)
Shakedown Street: The new collection of Grateful Dead cashmere is out.
Arguments to nowhere: Hey, let’s have an "amnesty" for everyone who was super-wrong about Covid. Hey, let’s not.
Quote of this or really any year. From Patrick Freyne of the Irish Times:
“Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”
Today’s Rule of Thumb: If it happened in Vegas, you still haven’t shut up about it.