How AWS and Other Cloud Providers Became the Internet’s Most Powerful Moderators

When Amazon Web Services decided to stop hosting the alt-right social network Parler last week following the insurrection at the Capitol, it looked like the site was doomed to go offline.

Migrating an app successfully between cloud providers, and ensuring it works on the other side as expected, is hard enough. But moving the vast amounts of data associated with a social network (likely hundreds of terabytes of information) would be agonizingly slow, taking far longer than the 24-hour warning Amazon gave Parler.

Unfortunately for Parler, virtually every other vendor was ditching them as well. With cloud providers rejecting them and no physical servers of its own, Parler has nowhere to go and now says it may never return.

The swift shutdown of Parler illustrates a wonder of the modern internet. It’s simple to get a website or service online without ever physically seeing or touching a server. Developers can choose from an array of hosts, from Amazon Web Services to Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, click a few buttons, and be online in a few minutes. These companies manage vast data centers full of servers, renting them out by the hour, so you don’t need to think about setting up your own gear. They have centralized much of the web, which gives them unprecedented power to police it.

This is a relatively new phenomenon. Until just over a decade ago, getting anything online at scale was a complicated, expensive process. It required procuring expensive physical servers from a company like Dell or HP, putting them in a data center somewhere, and configuring them yourself to get them up and running. Smaller companies might contract with a “colocation” provider like Rackspace to rent a spot for their servers in its data center, but the arrangement was expensive and slow, taking days or weeks to get the contracts signed, servers delivered, set up, and online.

Those enormous data centers are still there; they’re just operated by the largest companies at an enormous scale. Rather than renting an entire server sitting in a rack somewhere, virtualization technology allows companies like Amazon to rent out hundreds of tiny slices of a single server’s performance to lots of people, which is what makes it such a profitable business.

Because of the complexity and expertise involved, nobody wants to buy an actual server because then you’re stuck maintaining it, replacing it every few years, and making sure it’s in a safe place — doing so would be far too expensive for most services. (...)

Larger companies and governments do still operate their own data centers for various reasons, from data privacy to local laws that disallow using cloud services, but the vast majority of the world now rents servers from one or more cloud providers.

Most of the largest services, like Apple’s iCloud, use multiple cloud platforms to avoid putting their eggs in one basket in case of outages. The average company can’t afford this because it’s hilariously expensive to pay multiple cloud platforms—and it requires ensuring that your app is built to work correctly when spread across all of them.

Snap, for example, revealed in 2017 that it had a contract with Google Cloud for $2 billion over five years for its service, in addition to a contract with Amazon Web Services for $1 billion. It’s unlikely Parler has that kind of money, let alone custom contracts with any of these companies.

When Amazon booted Parler from its cloud platform, there was little the company could have done to stay online, which shows the power of deplatforming hate. A decade ago, when the norm would have been owning actual servers and space in a data center, the company likely could have stayed online in a similar fashion to how torrent website The Pirate Bay famously dodged almost every global takedown it’s faced over the last 20 years.

But, gone are the days when it was common for smaller companies to own servers. It’s simply not realistic anymore. Getting things online fast and cheap has been an incredible change to how the internet is cobbled together, but it has also centralized the majority of the web around giant platforms like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud — which means that the internet is at the mercy of their whims as well, for better or worse.

by Owen Williams, One Zero |  Read more:

Image: Thiago Prudêncio/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

[Ed. See also: Beyond Platforms: Private Censorship, Parler, and the Stack (EFF); How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler (Glenn Greenwald).]

Paywalls

[ed. Everybody hates paywalls (see here, here, here, here and here), and some are more impenetrable (and irritating) than others (like the Washington Post, thanks J. Bezos). There are some workarounds and it's probably worthwhile to revisit them from time to time. Here are a couple I've found on the Chrome extensions page:]

Cookie Remover: removes cookies (and paywall) from the current page.

Outline: Read and annotate without distractions (cut and paste url for a paywall/ad-free experience).

Also, just opening a link in incognito mode (Chrome users) can sometimes work

Orlando Agudelo-Botero, Democracia, 2017

via: Uncivil Liberty (Lapham's Quarterly)

Violence in the Capitol, Dangers in the Aftermath

In the days and weeks after the 9/11 attack, Americans were largely united in emotional horror at what had been done to their country as well as in their willingness to endorse repression and violence in response. As a result, there was little room to raise concerns about the possible excesses or dangers of the American reaction, let alone to dissent from what political leaders were proposing in the name of vengeance and security. The psychological trauma from the carnage and the wreckage at the country’s most cherished symbols swamped rational faculties and thus rendered futile any attempts to urge restraint or caution.

Nonetheless, a few tried. Scorn and sometimes worse were universally heaped upon them.

On September 14 — while bodies were still buried under burning rubble in downtown Manhattan — Congresswoman Barbara Lee cast a lone vote against the Authorization to Use Military Force (AUMF). “Some of us must urge the use of restraint,” she said seventy-two hours after the attack, adding: “our country is in a state of mourning” and thus “some of us must say: let’s step back for a moment, let’s pause just for a minute, and think through the implications of our actions today so that this does not spiral out of control.”

For simply urging caution and casting a single “no” vote against war, Lee’s Congressional office was deluged with threats of violence. Armed security was deployed to protect her, largely as a result of media attackssuggesting that she was anti-American and sympathetic to terrorists. Yet twenty years later — with U.S. troops still fighting in Afghanistan under that same AUMF, with Iraq destroyed, ISIS spawned, and U.S. civil liberties and privacy rights permanently crippled — her solitary admonitions look far more like courage, prescience and wisdom than sedition or a desire to downplay the threat of Al Qaeda.

Others also raised similar questions and issued similar warnings. On the left, people like Susan Sontag and Noam Chomsky, and on the right people such as Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan — in different ways and at different times — urged U.S. politicians and Americans generally to resist unleashing an orgy of domestic assaults on civil liberties, foreign invasions, and an endless war posture. They warned that such a cycle, once initiated, would be very difficult to control, even more difficult to reverse, and virtually guaranteed to provoke even greater violence. (...)

In retrospect, it is hard to deny that those who defied, or at least questioned, the potent 2001 emotional consensus by urging deliberation in lieu of reactionary rage were vindicated by subsequent events: the two-decade expansion of the war in Afghanistan to multiple countries, the enactment of the Patriot Act, the secret implementation of mass surveillance systems, the trillions of dollars of taxpayer wealth transferred to weapons manufacturers, and the paramilitarization of the domestic security state. At the very least, basic rationality requires an acknowledgement that when political passions and rage-driven emotions find their most intense expression, calls for reflection and caution can only be valuable even if ultimately rejected. (...)

There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses.

This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions. One can reject maximalist, inflammatory rhetoric about an attack (a War of Civilizations, an attempted coup, an insurrection, sedition) without being fairly accused of indifference toward or sympathy for the attackers.

Indeed, the primary focus of the first decade of my journalism was the U.S. War on Terror — in particular, the relentless erosions of civil liberties and the endless militarization of American society in the name of waging it. To make the case that those trends should be opposed, I frequently argued that the threat posed by Islamic radicalism to U.S. citizens was being deliberately exaggerated, inflated and melodramatized. (...)

It is stunning to watch now as every War on Terror rhetorical tactic to justify civil liberties erosions is now being invoked in the name of combatting Trumpism, including the aggressive exploitation of the emotions triggered by yesterday’s events at the Capitol to accelerate their implementation and demonize dissent over the quickly formed consensus. The same framework used to assault civil liberties in the name of foreign terrorism is now being seamlessly applied — often by those who spent the last two decades objecting to it — to the threat posed by “domestic white supremacist terrorists,” the term preferred by liberal elites, especially after yesterday, for Trump supporters generally. In so many ways, yesterday was the liberals’ 9/11, as even the most sensible commentators among them are resorting to the most unhinged rhetoric available.

by Glenn Greenwald, Substack |  Read more:

Image: Samuel Corum/Getty Images)

Edward Burtynsky, Three Gorges Dam Project, Yangtze River, China, 2005
via:

Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.

The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just a month ago, when it passed its previous all-time high of around $20,000.

The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever. He has since tried eight of his most commonly used password formulations — to no avail.

“I would just lay in bed and think about it,” Mr. Thomas said. “Then I would go to the computer with some new strategy, and it wouldn’t work, and I would be desperate again.”

Bitcoin, which has been on an extraordinary and volatile eight-month run, has made a lot of its holders very rich in a short time, even as the coronavirus pandemic has ravaged the world economy.

But the cryptocurrency’s unusual nature has also meant that many people are locked out of their Bitcoin fortunes as a result of lost or forgotten keys. They have been forced to watch, helpless, as the price has risen and fallen sharply, unable to cash in on their digital wealth.

Of the existing 18.5 million Bitcoin, around 20 percent — currently worth around $140 billion — appear to be in lost or otherwise stranded wallets, according to the cryptocurrency data firm Chainalysis. Wallet Recovery Services, a business that helps find lost digital keys, said it had gotten 70 requests a day from people who wanted help recovering their riches, three times the number of a month ago.

Bitcoin owners who are locked out of their wallets speak of endless days and nights of frustration as they have tried to get access to their fortunes. Many have owned the coins since Bitcoin’s early days a decade ago, when no one had confidence that the tokens would be worth anything.

“Through the years I would say I have spent hundreds of hours trying to get back into these wallets,” said Brad Yasar, an entrepreneur in Los Angeles who has a few desktop computers that contain thousands of Bitcoin he created, or mined, during the early days of the technology. While those Bitcoin are now worth hundreds of millions of dollars, he lost his passwords many years ago and has put the hard drives containing them in vacuum-sealed bags, out of sight.

“I don’t want to be reminded every day that what I have now is a fraction of what I could have that I lost,” he said.

The dilemma is a stark reminder of Bitcoin’s unusual technological underpinnings, which set it apart from normal money and give it some of its most vaunted — and riskiest — qualities. With traditional bank accounts and online wallets, banks like Wells Fargo and other financial companies like PayPal can provide people the passwords to their accounts or reset lost passwords.

But Bitcoin has no company to provide or store passwords. The virtual currency’s creator, a shadowy figure known as Satoshi Nakamoto, has said Bitcoin’s central idea was to allow anyone in the world to open a digital bank account and hold the money in a way that no government could prevent or regulate.

This is made possible by the structure of Bitcoin, which is governed by a network of computers that agreed to follow software containing all the rules for the cryptocurrency. The software includes a complex algorithm that makes it possible to create an address, and associated private key, which is known only by the person who created the wallet. (...)

But the structure of this system did not account for just how bad people can be at remembering and securing their passwords.

by Nathaniel Popper, NY Times | Read more:
Image: via

Geert Oliver
via:

Lucien Lorelle, “Les Baigneuses, collage Hommage à Picasso (Nus surréalistes)”, 1933.
via:

Bernie Sanders Wants to Go Big

Shortly before the 2016 election, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican nominee for vice president and the speaker of the House, told a group of college Republicans why he thought Democrats winning control of the Senate would be a policy nightmare.

“Do you know who becomes chair of the Senate Budget Committee?” Mr. Ryan asked. “A guy named Bernie Sanders. You ever heard of him?”

Republicans have long feared the prospect of Mr. Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont, taking the helm of the powerful committee given his embrace of bigger government and more federal spending with borrowed money. With Democrats reclaiming the Senate, that fear is about to become a reality. Mr. Sanders, the most progressive member of the chamber, will have a central role in shaping and steering the Democrats’ tax and spending plans through a Congress that they control with the slimmest of margins.

Mr. Sanders, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats and twice ran unsuccessfully for the party’s presidential nomination, said he would move quickly in his new role to push through a robust and deficit-financed economic stimulus package soon after President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. takes office.

“I believe that the crisis is of enormous severity and we’ve got to move as rapidly as we can,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview.

“Underline the word aggressive,” he said. “Start out there.”

Despite Democrats’ narrow control of the Senate, Mr. Sanders is expected to exert heavy influence over taxes, health care, climate change and several other domestic issues. That is because his role as budget chairman will give him control over a little-known but incredibly powerful congressional tool that allows certain types of legislation to win Senate approval with just a simple majority.

That tool — a budget mechanism called reconciliation — allows Congress to move some legislation without gaining 60 votes. It has become the vehicle for several major legislative efforts this century, including tax cuts under President Trump and President George W. Bush, and the final version of President Barack Obama’s signature health care bill.

The reconciliation process begins with lawmakers adopting a budget resolution, originating in the House and Senate Budget Committees, which can include directions to congressional committees on how much to increase federal spending or taxes.

The nature of the process effectively gives Mr. Sanders a leading role in deciding how expansive — and expensive — Mr. Biden’s ambitions for new taxes and spending will be.

Mr. Sanders said in the interview that he wanted an initial, emergency stimulus package to be “big.” He thinks it must include an additional $1,400 in direct payments for adults and children, on top of the $600 that Congress just passed, along with money for states and cities to fund coronavirus vaccine distribution, testing and contact tracing. He also wants to create an emergency universal health care program, so that anyone can get medical treatment during the pandemic, whether they currently have insurance or not.

Mr. Sanders said he had been speaking with Mr. Biden about the scale and timing of stimulus legislation. He said that he did not intend to try to force his long-held priorities, such as “Medicare for all,” into a relief bill. However, he does intend to test the legal bounds of how reconciliation can be used so that Democrats can pass policies that go beyond traditional budget items and address “structural problems in American society.”

by Alan Rappeport and Jim Tankersley, NY Times | Read more:
Image:Elizabeth Frantz for The New York Times
[ed. Go Bernie, go!]

You Can’t Have an Open-Carry Democracy

Last Wednesday evening, as soldiers went room to room clearing the United States Capitol of seditionists, I was on the phone with Michigan State Sen. Dayna Polehanki, who recalled the April 2020 day when men with long guns showed up at the statehouse in Lansing to pressure lawmakers to repeal a COVID-19 emergency law. Like last week’s siege, that incursion was egged on by Donald Trump, who tweeted in support, “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” Some observers even thought the president’s tweet constituted insurrection—the offense for which he is now being impeached.

The intimidation in Michigan worked: Lawmakers did repeal the law, and though Polehanki did not vote with the majority, she told me the threat was clear: “When I can’t speak freely and press my vote button because someone is standing over me with a rifle, you’re infringing on my First Amendment rights.” Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel agreed that the protesters had crossed the line from simply carrying weapons to brandishing them—making a threat. (Later, it turned out that several men present were plotting to kidnap the governor.)

On Monday, the Michigan State Capitol Commission decided to prohibit open carry inside the statehouse, citing the attack on Congress. It was an acknowledgment that—beneath the conspiracy theories, the presidential cult of personality, and the craven Republican Party—the big challenge to returning to any kind of political sense of “normal” is guns. (...)

For a decade, we’ve been slowly adjusting to the new role of guns in public life. We’ve redesigned schools, installed metal detectors at every theater and arena, and endured horrific massacres at events including a Brooklyn block party, a California garlic festival, an El Paso, Texas, Walmart, and a Dayton, Ohio, nightlife district. And that was just over eight days in 2019. While the pandemic has brought some respite from headline-grabbing massacres such as school shootings, the toll of gun violence in 2020 was even worse than the year before. Shootings almost doubled in New York City. Murders in both Chicago and New York rose by 50 percent. This trend was consistent across most U.S. cities.

And while America’s trigger-happy policing is not new, police departments justify the warrior-cop equipment on display at this summer’s protests by citing the heavily armed populace. Indeed, police are more likely to kill and to be killed in parts of America where more people own guns.

So in a way, confronting the role of guns in political life—from Washington to Lansing to beleaguered county commissions—is long overdue. After Michigan, the issue flared again this summer as militia groups confronted Black Lives Matter protesters in Portland, Oregon; Austin, Texas; and Kenosha, Wisconsin. Several people were killed.

When the rioters entered Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s suite in the Capitol last week, staffers hiding in her conference room had turned off the lights and barricaded the door—techniques, she told 60 Minutes, they learned from active shooter drills in high school. (...)

... sooner rather than later, we’re going to have to deal with the oxymoron of open-carry democracy. How do we permit a populace armed to the teeth to safely march, to rally, to watch its government in action, to confront and engage with politicians at will? When does the mere presence of a gun become a threat?

by Henry Grabar, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Seth Herald/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Chekhov's gun: 'If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off.']

Emergency Room Notebook, 1977

You never hear sirens in the emergency room — the drivers turn them off on Webster Street. I see the red backup lights of ACE or United Ambulance out of the corner of my eye. Usually we are expecting them, alerted by the MED NET radio, just like on TV. “City One: This is ACE, Code Two. Forty-two-year-old male, head injury, BP 190 over 110. Conscious. ETA three minutes.” “City One … 76542 Clear.”

If it is Code Three, where life is in critical danger, the doctor and nurses wait outside, chatting in anticipation. Inside, in room 6, the trauma room, is the Code Blue team. EKG, X-ray technicians, respiratory therapists, cardiac nurses. In most Code Blues, though, the EMT drivers or firemen are too busy to call in. Piedmont Fire Department never does, and they have the worst. Rich massive coronaries, matronly phenobarbital suicides, children in swimming pools.

All day long the heavy hearselike Cadillacs of Care Ambulance back up just to the left of emergency parking. All day long, just outside my window, their gurneys sail past to cobalt, radiation therapy. The ambulances are gray, the drivers wear gray, the blankets are gray, the patients are yellow-gray except where the doctors have marked their skulls or throats with a dazzling red Magic Marker X.

They asked me to work over there. No thanks. I hate lingering good-byes. Why do I still make tasteless jokes about death? I take it very seriously now. Study it. Not directly, just sniffing around. I see death as a person … sometimes many people, saying hello. Blind Mrs. Diane Adderly, Mr. Gionotti, Madame Y, my grandma.

Madame Y is the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She looks dead, actually, her skin translucent blue-white, her exquisitely boned Oriental face serene and ageless. She wears black slacks and boots, mandarin-collared jackets cut and trimmed in Asia? France? The Vatican, maybe — they have the weight of a bishop’s cassock — or an X-ray robe. The piping has been done by hand in rich fuchsias, magentas, oranges.

Her Bentley drives up at nine, driven by a flippant Filipino who chain-smokes Shermans in the parking lot. Her two sons, tall, in suits made in Hong Kong, escort her from the car to the entrance of radiation therapy. It is a long walk from there, down a corridor. She is the only person who walks it alone. At the entrance she turns to her sons, smiles, and bows. They bow back to her and watch until she has reached the end of the hall. When she disappears they go for coffee and talk on the telephone.

An hour and a half later everyone reappears at once. She, with two flushed spots of mauve on her cheekbones, her sons, the Bentley with the Filipino, and they all glide away. Glisten and sheen of the silver car, her black hair, her silk jacket. The entire ritual as silent and flowing as blood.

She is dead now. Not sure when it happened, on one of my days off. She always seemed dead anyway, but nicely so, like an illustration or advertisement.

I like my job in Emergency. Blood, bones, tendons seem like affirmations to me. I am awed by the human body, by its endurance. Thank God — because it’ll be hours before X-ray or Demerol. Maybe I’m morbid. I am fascinated by two fingers in a baggie, a glittering switchblade all the way out of a lean pimp’s back. I like the fact that, in Emergency, everything is reparable, or not.

Code Blues. Well, everybody loves Code Blues. That’s when somebody dies — their heart stops beating, they stop breathing — but the Emergency team can, and often does, bring them back to life. Even if the patient is a tired eighty-year-old you can’t help but get caught up in the drama of resuscitation, if only for a while. Many lives, young fruitful ones, are saved.

The pace and excitement of ten or fifteen people, performers … it’s like opening night at the theater. The patients, if they are conscious, take part too, if just by looking interested in all the goings-on. They never look afraid.

If the family is with the patient it is my job to get information from them, to keep them informed about what’s going on. Reassure them, mostly.

While the staff members think in terms of good or bad codes — how well everyone did what they were supposed to do, whether the patient responded or not — I think in terms of good or bad deaths.

Bad deaths are ones with the manager of a hotel as next of kin, or the cleaning woman who found the stroke victim two weeks later, dying of dehydration. Really bad deaths are when there are several children and in-laws I have called in from somewhere inconvenient and none of them seem to know each other or the dying parent at all. There is nothing to say. They keep talking about making arrangements, about having to make arrangements, about who will make arrangements.

Gypsies are good deaths. I think so … the nurses don’t and security guards don’t. There are always dozens of them, demanding to be with the dying person, to kiss them and hug them, unplugging and screwing up the TVs and monitors and assorted apparatus. The best thing about Gypsy deaths is they never make their kids keep quiet. The adults wail and cry and sob but all the children continue to run around, playing and laughing, without being told they should be sad or respectful.

Good deaths seem to be coincidentally good Codes — the patient responds miraculously to all this life-giving treatment and then just quietly passes away.

Mr. Gionotti’s death was good … The family respected the staff’s request that they stay outside, but one by many one they went in and made their presence known to Mr. Gionotti and came out to reassure the others that everything was being done. There were a lot of them, sitting, standing, touching, smoking, laughing sometimes. I felt I was present at a celebration, a family reunion.

One thing I do know about death. The “better” the person, the more loving and happy and caring, the less of a gap that person’s death makes.

When Mr. Gionotti died, well, he was dead, and Mrs. Gionotti wept, they all did, but they all went weeping off together, and with him, really.

I saw blind Mr. Adderly on the 51 bus the other night. His wife, Diane Adderly, came in DOA a few months ago. He had found her body at the foot of the stairs, with his cane. Ratshit Nurse McCoy kept telling him to stop crying.

“It simply won’t help the situation, Mr. Adderly.”

“Nothing will help. It’s all I can do. Let me alone.”

When he heard McCoy had left, to make arrangements, he told me that he had never cried before. It scared him, because of his eyes.

I put her wedding band on his little finger. Over a thousand dollars in grimy cash had been in her bra, and I put it in his wallet. I told him that the denominations were fifties, twenties, and hundreds and he would need to find somebody to sort it all out.

When I saw him later on a bus he must have remembered my walk or smell. I didn’t see him at all — just climbed on the bus and slumped into the nearest seat. He even got up from the front seat near the driver to sit by me.

“Hello, Lucia,” he said.

He was very funny, describing his new, messy roommate at the Hilltop House for the Blind. I couldn’t imagine how he could know his roommate was messy, but then I could and told him my Marx Brothers idea of two blind roommates — shaving cream on the spaghetti, slipping on spilled stuffaroni, etc. We laughed and were silent, holding hands … from Pleasant Valley to Alcatraz Avenue. He cried, softly. My tears were for my own loneliness, my own blindness.

The first night I worked in Emergency, an ACE ambulance brought in a Jane Doe. Staff was short that night so the ambulance drivers and I undressed her, pulled the shredded panty hose off of varicose veins, toenails curling like parrots’. We unstuck her papers, not from her gray flesh-colored bra but from her clammy breasts. A picture of a young man in a marine uniform: George 1944. Three wet coupons for Purina cat chow and a blurred red, white, and blue Medicare card. Her name was Jane. Jane Daugherty. We tried the phone book. No Jane, no George.

If their purses haven’t already been stolen old women never seem to have anything in them but bottom dentures, a 51 bus schedule, and an address book with no last names.

The drivers and I worked together with pieces of information, calling the California Hotel for Annie, underlined, the Five-Spot cleaners. Sometimes we just have to wait until a relative calls, looking for them. Emergency phones ring all day long. “Have you seen a — ?” Old people. I get mixed up about old people. It seems a shame to do a total hip replacement or a coronary bypass on some ninety-five-year-old who whispers, “Please let me go.”

It doesn’t seem old people should fall down so much, take so many baths. But maybe it’s important for them to walk alone, stand on their own two feet. Sometimes it seems they fall on purpose, like the woman who ate all those Ex-Lax — to get away from the nursing home.

There is a great deal of flirty banter among the nurses and the ambulance crews. “So long — seizure later.” It used to shock me, all the jokes while they’re in the middle of a tracheotomy or shaving a patient for monitors. An eighty-year-old woman, fractured pelvis, sobbing, “Hold my hand! Please hold my hand!” Ambulance drivers rattling on about the Oakland Stompers.

“Hold her bloody hand, man!” He looked at me like I was crazy. I don’t hold many hands anymore and I joke a lot, too, if not around patients. There is a great deal of tension and pressure. It’s draining — being involved in life-and-death situations all the time.

Even more draining, and the real cause of tension and cynicism, is that so many of the patients we get in Emergency are not only not emergencies, there is nothing the matter with them at all. It gets so you yearn for a good cut-and-dried stabbing or a gunshot wound. All day long, all night long, people come in because they don’t have much appetite, have irregular BMs, stiff necks, red or green urine (which invariably means they had beets or spinach for lunch).

Can you hear all those sirens in the background, in the middle of the night? More than one of them is going to pick up some old guy who ran out of Gallo port.

by Lucia Berlin, A Manual For Cleaning Women |

“Good news! He’ll be gone in a week!”

via: Paul Noth

Via Getty

People Thought This Rioter's Name Was "Via Getty" (Buzz Feed)
via: (not Getty)
[ed. Hilarious. The internet is on the case. See also: The Capitol rioters put themselves all over social media. Now they’re getting arrested (Vox/Recode).]

Mobile Homes As Chic Affordable Housing

The following is a lightly-edited extract from a podcast conversation I had with Andres Duany, a principal founder of the New Urbanist movement. In it, Duany proposes the mobile home as an intelligent response to the affordable housing crisis—bucking the dogma and the orthodoxies of our horrified New Urbanist colleagues. The full interview can be heard here (no paywall).

Kunstler: I know for a couple of years now you’ve been studying the mobile home industry, mainly as a way of figuring out how to deliver affordable dwellings to people. This has raised a lot of ire among our fellow New Urbanists, who can’t process the idea. What did you learn from all this?

Duany: It’s not ire. They think I’ve lost my mind. It’s like pity. Okay, first of all where does it come from? (And it took me a long time to arrive at this.) Most people don’t understand how much subsidized affordable housing Liz [Plater-Zyberk] and I have built, because we never show it. We’ve done so much affordable housing for agricultural laborers, for black communities. It’s nice-looking—actually we’ve gotten some prizes. Why don’t we show it? I never show it because you might ask me how much it costs. And it actually costs twice as much as regular market housing. With government subsidies everything blows up in expense. Now, I know very well that there will not be money for subsidies any longer, but there are ways to deliver housing that costs much less to build without a subsidy. (...)

So, I backed into the mobile home industry and I realized that they had solved the problem technically. They know how to build it. And, by the way, it’s not like the 1960s mobile homes, the ones that are collapsing. These are much, much better. The codes have improved tremendously. But they still look horrible.

So, what we have is a cultural problem, not a technical problem. Whenever you see new mobile homes, they’re not new parks, they’re old ones being refurbished, switching out the units. You can’t get new ones permitted. But what happens is nobody wants them [anywhere near them] because they’re so distinctly for “losers.” Now, parenthetically, they’re not “losers.” They’re actually people who don’t make enough money to get any other kind of house, and very often they have jobs and everything else. Many are down on their luck, but they’re not dysfunctional people on the whole. They’re paying every month for the charges and for the unit and maintaining them. Don’t think they’re “losers.” They’re just people on a low burn-rate.

But the mobile home industry has cultural problem. The reason is that the mobile home tries desperately to look like conventional housing, with the little pitched roofs, the clapboards, the little shutters. When you compare them to conventional houses, they’re always less good. If you compare them to the 1950s houses by Philip Johnson in Connecticut, the great houses by the chic architects of the ‘50s for the Houston oil people, which are flat-roofed boxes with sliding glass doors—they’re ultra-chic, particularly these days when everybody loves mid-century modern. So, instead of making my mobile homes look like “shotgun” houses, we redesign them to look like mid-century modern.

Suddenly they’re so much better! You know how the [shipping] container houses are so popular? Well, those are actually miserable inside. They’re only eight feet wide and so forth. So, you pick up the aesthetic of the container house in mid-century modern, and suddenly you have a winner—and it’s $90 a square foot! It’s not $50 anymore, but that’s still $100, $200, $300 less than stick-built housing. We’re hacking the industry’s technical abilities, and over-laying on it a very advanced aesthetic. It’s no longer the dwellings of losers but the dwellings of winners.

Kunstler: Part of your idea was a way to provide housing in the big corporate parking lots of companies like Google and Apple, that don’t pay their tech workers enough to live otherwise in these high-priced places, right?

Duany: The kids at Google are earning, minimum, 150,000, okay? God knows maybe more than that. And they’re still commuting an hour and sharing a ranch house somewhere. The traffic jams are unbelievable. So, we said, “why not use the parking lots?” The tiny houses that we design meet the standards of the Department of Motor Vehicles. We followed that code, so they’re legal to park in parking lots. You put them there instead of the car, and the kids don’t have to commute. And they’re very, very chic. They’ve got leather chairs, they’re finished with Japanese interiors, full baths, queen-sized beds. They’re definitely not for losers. They’re cool. They’re not…a ranch house somewhere! We tried so hard and spent a lot of extra money so that they would not be associated with losers. They’d be associated with people who have a choice. This housing is for people with master’s degrees, okay? I say that not to be cruel to everybody else but just to get the damn things permitted, approved by the neighborhood.

by James Howard Kunstler, The American Conservative | Read more:
Image via:
[ed. Imagine repurposing ghost malls with their miles of parking spaces (and infrastructure already in place) for affordable housing, or to help with homelessness. Makes too much sense. See also: Transforming trailers (CNU).] 

The FTC Should Do Its Job

A Simple Thing Biden Can Do to Reset America

“An Extremely Online Riot”

The riot inside Congress last week is going to be with us for a long time, in terms of reaction and policy response. While we can lay responsibility on Donald Trump’s doorstep for inciting the violent behavior, he himself did not participate in the riot itself, nor did he pay for people to come to D.C. to be a part of it. Trump can channel the anger of large numbers of alienated people, but the anger and paranoia exists independently of him, even though he uses this rage for his own purposes. And even when Trump is gone, these angry people will remain in our society.

So who are they? Some are opportunists who flew private jets to D.C. to break windows, others are far-right racists flying Confederate flags, and a few are just normal Republican activists and officeholders choosing to indulge an anti-democratic violent fantasy. But many in what CNN’s Brian Stelter called an Extremely Online riot are middle or lower middle class people who found their way to radicalism through social media. The one who has been profiled in depth is Ashli Babbitt, a woman who died from a gunshot wound as she tried to climb into the Speaker’s lobby. In tracing her life, I think there are some lessons about what we can do to stop the polarization and radicalization of our society. (...)

So here’s the profile of a rioter, a working class person who went overseas eight times in military service, including two combat zones, who then tried her hand at a small business where financial predators and monopolists lurked. She then fell in with conspiratorial social media, and turned into a violent rioter who, like most of the rioters, thought she was defending America by overturning an election.

It’s easy to mock this kind of thinking, to see rioters as losers or racists. And no doubt there’s a strain of deep-seated racial animus that is with us and always will be, but I think ascribing all of it to such an explanation is too simple. Racist or no, Babbitt really was at one point a patriotic American, serving in the military for over half her adult life. More broadly, she’s far from alone in expressing rage at the status quo. There have protests against the existing social order for almost a decade, starting with the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and then Black Lives Matter in 2014 and accelerating into protests and riots earlier this year. I’ve written about the relationship between unrest and corporate power in the context of those protests, a sense of alienation that normal political channels, that politics itself is not a realistic path for addressing social problems. (...)

There are two paths in a representative democracy if we have a large group who lives in a cult-like artificial world of misinformation, and many more who rightly or wrongly don’t trust any political institution. We can try to strip these people of representation and political power; that is the guiding idea behind removing Trump, as well as a whole host of conservatives, off of Silicon Valley platforms that have become essential to modern society. Removing these people is a choice to not have a society, to pretend that we can put these people into a closet somewhere and ignore them.

The alternative is less dramatic. We can take on the legal framework behind social media so these products aren’t addictive and radicalizing. As I’ve written, there are legal immunities and policy choices that allow Facebook to profit in especially toxic ways through compiling detailed user profiles and targeting them with ads. If we change how social media companies make money, we can change how these services operate to make them socially beneficial instead of engines of radicalization.

More broadly, we can try to rebuild our institutions so everyone has a stake in society again, and end the systemic cheating in our commerce that strips people of community. Just saying ‘trust our institutions’ won’t work, at least not until we make those institutions trustworthy. (...)

The Problem Lies in Policy

If we recognize that a major short-term cause in creating this paranoid cult is social media models based on addiction, monopolization and surveillance, and a long-term cause is systemic cheating in our economy and culture, we can break down our problems in manageable chunks. These problems originate from laws and regulations guiding commerce.

And that’s why I think the solution lies in part at the agency set up to regulate commerce - the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC is a potentially economy-reshaping institution. It has broad jurisdiction over privacy, consumer protection, and antitrust laws, meaning it can reorient how virtually every corporation in the country functions. It can write rules against ‘unfair methods of competition,’ which can include prohibiting anything from discriminatory pricing in industrial gas markets to addictive or deceptive user interfaces to certain kinds of targeted ads. As a small example, the commission took action earlier this year against corporations engaging in ‘merchant cash advances,’ precisely the predatory lending that trapped Babbitt.

by Matt Stoller, BIG |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

A Message to the Country

[ed. Very powerful. Thank you, Mr. Schwarzenegger.]

Upirngasaq (Arctic Spring)

It is now early June – the beginning of springtime in the Arctic, that brief period between winter and summer when life is miraculously renewed. The snow, apart from patches here and there, will soon vanish from the land. Our delicate plants, such as the purple saxifrage, fireweed and poppies, suddenly freed from their covering of snow, are quickly greening again. The snow buntings – qupannuaq – always the first to arrive, are being followed by flocks of other migratory birds, among them geese, ducks, loons and terns. The snow-white winter plumage of the ptarmigan – aqiggiit, our Arctic grouse – is taking on its summer camouflage. And our favourite fish, the Arctic char – iqalukpik – will soon begin their seaward migration from lakes connected to the upper reaches of the river, where they overwintered, to feed and replenish in the rich coastal waters of nearby Ungava Bay.

This is also a time when families look forward with intense joy to escaping community life for a while, heading to their traditional springtime camping spots near the mouth of the river or on the shores of Ungava Bay. Many of these sites have been occupied by the same Inuit families for generations, and being in any one of these places is to sense immediately the depth of history and connection they hold. In this way, year after year, families simultaneously renew their attachment to the land and to our ancestors. It is a time of storytelling, of remembering who we are. Here, our language, Inuktitut – ultimately a language of the land – reclaims its rightful place. And here our children, according to their age and gender, participate fully in traditional daily activities: learning and absorbing all the essential skills, aptitudes and attitudes required to survive and thrive on the land when their own time to be autonomous comes. In so many ways, the land never fails to invigorate and teach. Family and communal bonds are restored, and our spirits uplifted. We become healthier in mind and body, nourished by the ‘country food’ the land and sea provides. This includes a varied menu of goose and duck, fresh-run Arctic char and trout, and, of course, natsiq, the common seal, a staple food of Inuit coastal dwellers everywhere. This ample diet is inevitably supplemented by seagull, goose and eider duck eggs, gathered from islets just off the shore. At low tide we dig for shellfish, mostly mussels, or catch sculpins, a small, spiny fish we call kanajuq, stranded in rocky pools by the falling tide. Raw, crunchy seaweed, gathered from these same pools, occasionally complements the boiled kanajuq.

With the signs of spring all around me, and my dreams of soon being able to get out on the land again, in season to go berry picking with fellow Inuit women, it’s perhaps not surprising that my thoughts have turned to the place of nature in Inuit life. In our language we have no word for ‘nature’, despite our deep affinity with the land, which teaches us how to live in harmony with the natural world. The division the Western world likes to make between ‘man and nature’ is both foreign and dangerous in the traditional Inuit view. In Western thinking, humans are set apart from nature; nature is something to strive against, to conquer, to tame, to exploit or, more benignly, to use for ‘recreation’. By contrast, Inuit place themselves within, not apart from, nature. This ‘in-ness’ is perfectly symbolized in our traditional dwellings of the past: illuvigait (snow houses) in winter and tupiit (sealskin tents) in summer. What could be more within nature than living comfortably in dwellings made of snow and sealskin!

This is especially true of our relationships with the animals that sustain us: the puijiit – sea mammals – seals, whales and walruses; and the pisuktiit, the land animals, in particular caribou and polar bear. No other people have relied so exclusively on animals as my Inuit ancestors.

In one of the world’s harshest environments, these Arctic animals provided everything needed to sustain human life. Their flesh supplied all the nutrition required for a healthy diet. From their skins, cut and worked as needed, clothing and shelter were sewn. The blubber of marine mammals fuelled the qulliit – our soapstone lamps – providing light and a little warmth for the snow houses in the depths of winter. From bones, ivory and caribou antler, tools, utensils and hunting equipment were expertly fashioned. Thread, strong and waterproof, used with the seamstresses’ delicate bone and ivory needles, came from the sinews of caribou and beluga whales. The reliance on animals was total. Other than berries and roots, in some places available at the end of the Arctic’s brief summer, there was no plant life, no agriculture, to fall back on should the hunt fail.

Our ancient beliefs held that the animals we relied upon had souls, just like ours, which needed to be treated with respect and dignity. In the early 1920s, Avva, an Inuit shaman from Igloolik, whose descendants I know well from my residential schooldays, as well as from the time I lived in Iqaluit, Nunavut, for almost twenty years, famously summed up these beliefs at the very core of our pre-Christian identity:

All the creatures that we have to kill and eat, all those that we have to strike down and destroy to make clothes for ourselves, have souls, like we have, souls that do not perish with the body, which must therefore be propitiated lest they should revenge themselves on us for taking away their bodies.

Founded on respect, our appeasement of the animals we harvested took many forms: for instance, giving a newly killed seal or walrus a mouthful of water, a practice based on the knowledge from a deep understanding of and connection to the animals we hunt that these mammals, having spent all their lives in the sea, craved a drink of fresh water. Taboos associated with particular animals were strictly observed. In this way, care was taken to avoid mingling creatures of the sea with those of the land, and so there were prohibitions against sewing caribou-skin clothing on the sea ice. Nor could the flesh of seal and caribou be boiled in the same pot. I remember my mother reminding me of this even when I would eat both frozen fish and frozen caribou together. Above all, the absolute bond between my ancestors and the animals they hunted (and, by extension, the land, sea and air) was founded on respect. Hunters never boasted about their prowess. Abusing animals in any way, or mocking them, or using them for ‘sport’, resulted in serious consequences for society, as did disputes over sharing. In response to maltreatment or insults, animals would withdraw from hunting grounds. Hunters were obliged to kill only animals who ‘presented’ themselves for the taking. This is exactly why, when I lived in the south and made visits home to Kuujjuaq in the early spring, and we hunted aqiggiit, my mother would say to me: ‘Isn’t it wonderful that the aqiggiit brought themselves to you so that you could take them back with you to eat in Montreal!’ My mother always had that deep Inuit understanding of how life gives life. (...)

I have an early memory that brought all these strands together, underscoring our essential place within nature that I didn’t fully understand it at the time. Inuit have many categories of relationships and relationship terms without an exact equivalent in the Western world. Traditionally, personal names given at birth were said to carry souls and they immediately established a wide network of relationships, even mutual responsibilities, often extending beyond the immediate family. Nor were personal names ever gendered. For instance, a baby boy named after, say, his maternal grandmother would be addressed by his own mother as anaana – meaning mother – and, in some cases, at least until puberty, would be dressed and even socialized as a girl. Family members would notice with delight how he took on some of his grandmother’s personality traits and mannerisms. In this way, his grandmother continued to live through him.

A particularly significant relationship, in terms of linking community and nature, was initiated at birth with the person who cut the umbilical cord, usually a woman. If the baby was a girl, this woman would be known as her sanajik; if a boy, she would be his arnaqutik. The baby then became the arnaliak of her sanajik, or the angusiak of his arnaqutik.

Both my grandmother and mother were known for their midwifery skills, and so they had a good number of angusiaks and arnaliaks. One of the main obligations of their angusiaks was to present them with their first catch from the hunt – be it fish, seal, ptarmigan or caribou, a rite of passage, celebrating the very foundations of Inuit society: that is the sacred, interdependent relationship between the animals we hunt and our hunters. When I was a small girl, I saw this ritual played out many times as these budding hunters – my grandmother’s angusiaks – honoured their obligations to her. One at a time, every other month or so, young men would come by our house to present their catch. In response my grandmother put on an amazing performance. This normally quiet, dignified elderly woman would suddenly turn into an animal-like person, rolling around and making animal noises on the floor. Sometimes she would nibble the young hunter’s hand or wrist, acknowledging their power, encouraging him to become a great hunter. I watched this startling performance almost in embarrassment because then, as a child, I didn’t fully grasp its deep ceremonial significance, beyond sensing it was a necessary part of our hunting culture.

For their part, the girls and young women who were my grandmother’s and mother’s arnaliaks would be similarly honoured and encouraged when they brought gifts demonstrating their increasing ability in sewing. Proper, well-made skin clothing, warm and watertight as needed, was an absolute necessity for the successful provider. Inevitably my grandmother’s ritual would finish with the young men or women we had just celebrated leaving the house confident and reassured, knowing that their work or hunt had been well received, endorsed by the woman who had helped to bring them into this life.

Despite the extensive damage done to Inuit society and culture when we moved from the land into the villages, there is, in most of these settlements, an essential core of families instinctively committed to maintaining our traditions. Individual members of these families, even while living within the semi-urban settings, strive to relate to the land and its resources in the same respectful way that sustained us prior to the move. They acquire an intimate knowledge of their local area and the various animal species it supports. The men employ many of the same hunting skills used in former times while the women prepare and soften the skins of seals and caribou for the clothing they make for themselves and their hunters, using techniques, patterns and stitches handed down by an endless succession of mothers, aunts and grandmothers. Most importantly, members of these families embody the essential philosophies and understandings of the land and animals that enabled us to thrive over countless generations before we suffered the consequences of European contact. In a real and substantial sense such Inuit keep the vital flame of our culture alive. They are an irreplaceable resource, in both practical and intellectual ways, and they need and deserve every possible means of support.

But beyond the challenges this already vulnerable way of being endures, in the face of the Arctic’s rapidly increasing urbanization (and globalization), there is another imminent threat – no less insidious – that, unless checked, will end forever our unique attachment to the land and its life-giving resources: climate change.

by Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Granta | Read more:
Image: Sheila Watt-Cloutier

via:

[ed. See also: Rev. Robert Jones, Blues Guitar Lesson - Slide, Resonator, and Open Tunings]

Existential Crisis

Watching MAGA World Fracture in Real Time (The Atlantic)

Following the riot at the Capitol, Trump supporters are having an existential crisis on Twitter.

Bryson Gray, a 29-year-old rapper and Donald Trump superfan from North Carolina, wants to make one thing clear: It was a group of the president’s most loyal supporters that rioted in the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday, and nobody else. When I spoke with Gray yesterday, he said he had been “too late” to get inside the Capitol itself with the rest of the mob, which broke windows and chanted through the halls of Congress in an ultimately futile attempt to disrupt the confirmation of Joe Biden as president. So he stood outside the building with a crowd and sang the national anthem.

“When I left the Capitol, I actually thought I was going to get on Twitter and see a bunch of support, because it was actually a very beautiful thing,” Gray said. Instead, he was met with a strange message spreading across the site: Trump fans weren’t behind the riots. Instead, it was antifa, the decentralized left-wing group that has become a bogeyman for Republican commentators and politicians, and for President Trump in particular. Many of Gray’s former #StopTheSteal allies had disavowed the insurrection, and a good number of them were using leftist antagonists as their scapegoat. “The first tweet I saw was somebody saying ‘Patriots don’t storm buildings; there were no patriots in the Capitol,’” Gray told me. “I’m like, Uh, that literally makes no sense; what are you talking about?” (...)

There is no credible evidence of involvement by antifa, which is not an organized group and has been responsible for very little violence, while Gray and numerous other known MAGA figures actually were involved in the insurrection. But empirical reality notwithstanding, the antifa story has become a dividing line within the MAGA world this week—and a telling symbol of its internal upheaval.

Over the past two days, Trump loyalists have been bickering online over whether to take credit for and celebrate their most dramatic action yet, or distance themselves from the scene by calling up familiar conspiracy theories to explain it away. Some may genuinely believe, as they say, that paid “crisis actors” are responsible. Many don’t seem to know what they believe, or what is most savvy to present, and pivot from post to post. Still others, like Gray, are consistently frustrated and outraged that anybody on their side wouldn’t be proud of what happened Wednesday afternoon. “The blue-check conservatives, all the popular ones, put ‘1776’ in their bios and tweet about how it’s time for patriots to stand up and fight,” he told me. “Then they turn around and condemn patriots doing exactly that.” (...)

The antifa rumor is unsurprising and sort of stale—a knee-jerk response at this point to anything that certain right-wing commentators see in public and don’t like. “This is such a repetitive tactic that many in the [disinformation] field don’t even track it anymore, because it’s so glaringly obvious,” Donovan told me. Nevertheless, it caught on easily—just as it did last summer, when antifa was repeatedly blamed for stoking unrest during the Black Lives Matter protests, and the summer before, when Trump first tweeted that the “Radical Left Wack Jobs” were a “major Organization of Terror.”

by Kaitlyn Tiffany, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

Self-Pardon Fantasy Will Meet a Harsh Reality

I don’t believe a self-pardon’s gonna fly.

I don’t mean to say that President Donald Trump will not attempt it. He very well might.

I also don’t mean to say that it won’t be a big deal if and when he does attempt it. It will be a very big deal.

I mean, rather, that a self-pardon will not materially decrease the likelihood of his attempted prosecution by the Justice Department after he leaves office, and may even increase the chances of his indictment.

More important, it will probably not result in legal recognition that the pardon power extends to presidential self-forgiveness. To the contrary, if Trump does attempt a self-pardon in the face of a compelling federal criminal case against him, the result is likely to be Supreme Court rejection of the self-pardon’s legality.

The reason has little to do with doctrine. There is a very plausible textual case that the pardon power—which the Constitution extends to all “offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment”—includes, by dint of not excluding, the issuance of a pardon to oneself. The legal scholar Paul Larkin Jr. of the Heritage Foundation recently offered strong reasons not to read into text restrictions that aren’t there—reasons rooted in the absolute nature of the pardon power, which is historically a creature of royal prerogative. There are also compelling reasons to doubt the constitutionality of the self-pardon, including those spelled out in this thoughtful analysis from Frank Bowman III of the University of Missouri School of Law, which focuses on the word grant as understood in the founding era.

My argument, however, is not doctrinal, but premised on the judicial politics involved in how a self-pardon would make its way to the courts.

To understand why a self-pardon gambit is preponderantly likely to fail, imagine the awkward circumstances in which it would realistically play out. Back in 1974, a woman named Mary Lawton articulated what has been the executive branch’s position on presidential self-pardons ever since. Lawton was then the acting director of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is the guardian of presidential power, the office responsible for interpreting the law on behalf of the executive branch in a fashion that protects executive prerogatives. As such, the OLC tends to take expansive views of presidential authority within the confines of reasonable legal interpretation. Yet during the Watergate era, Lawton wrote that the pardon power does not permit a self-pardon: “Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, it would seem that the question should be answered in the negative,” she held for the department. [ed. emphasis added] To my knowledge, her opinion has not been withdrawn during the Trump administration, though it is certainly possible that the OLC has done subsequent work on the subject and kept it secret.

The president does have the authority to overrule the OLC, or to just ignore it, so the fact that the Justice Department has long held that he may not pardon himself isn’t a real impediment—except in one important optical sense: The courts, including the Supreme Court, would know that Trump was taking a position far more radical than the executive branch ever has on this matter. Indeed, they would know that he was taking it in contrast with a long-standing Justice Department position.

What’s more, the courts, and ultimately the justices, would know that the Justice Department had—within days of Trump’s self-pardon—reverted to its traditional view. President-elect Joe Biden takes office in only two weeks. He will surely adopt the view that the president may not pardon himself. So the Justice Department under him will undoubtedly argue, representing both the current president and the traditional position of the executive branch, against the self-pardon. Meanwhile, the former president will have taken a position that radically outflanks that of the traditional guardian of presidential power, in a self-serving view of the pardon power that held sway in the executive branch for all of two weeks.

That’s not a good look.

This brings me to a second awkwardness: the facts.

A self-pardon, after all, matters only if the Justice Department tries to investigate or prosecute Trump. Otherwise, it’s quite literally just a piece of paper. The department can contend that it is not a valid piece of paper. The new president can say so as well. And Trump can contend that it is valid. But without an attempted investigation or prosecution, Trump’s action will face no test. It will not set the precedent that the president can pardon himself, merely that he can try to do so—and we already know that. (...)

The first point here is that given the possibility of such a case, the self-pardon would function almost as a taunt to the Justice Department. A pardon given to anyone else would abort an incipient investigation immediately; all the investigative subject would have to do is plead the pardon if indicted, and a court would dismiss the matter. But a self-pardon is different. It presents one of the great open questions of constitutional law, and if the Justice Department backed down from investigating or indicting because a subject had pardoned himself, it would effectively be acknowledging the former president’s power to issue a pardon over the current president’s insistence on the traditional executive-branch position.

by Benjamin Wittes, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Getty/The Atlantic

[ed. Quite a crash course in constitutional law. By the end of the year we'll all be epidemiological and legal experts. See also: What is Sedition? (NYT)]