The Basic Dilemma

This is exactly the kind of dilemma Sun Tzu talked about.

It should be obvious that US politics is a sewer, better suited to the worst possible comments section on the worst possible website. It's fucking awful in way to many ways.

I don't think that's happened by accident, and I don't think the Dark Money Gang is even trying to hide their cards anymore.

We are being divided on purpose, and at the same time, we're being told that being divided is the real problem, and the solution is to go with a Third Party.

Bullshit. Standard Daddy State Divide-n-Conquer bullshit.

We can spend the time and effort it takes to sort through some of the shit and come to some basic conclusions about our approximate position on the old Left/Right spectrum, but an awful lot of people don't feel motivated for whatever reason, or they don't have the intellectual interest (or the mental horsepower) to do the work.

For my own bad self, I've been chided for being part of the problem - "our deeply divided nation" - because I try to pay some attention to what's going on, and I come down (mostly) on the progressive side of things. So plenty of people see me as way too partisan. And I'm betting that a majority of those people haven't stopped to think about the difference between ideology and partisanship, because then they'd have to make some kind of decision, which puts them right back into a position where they have to figure out what the issue is and where they stand on it, when what they really want is a sensible-sounding excuse not to engage at all.

So - dilemma.

• If you do the responsible citizen-of-a-democracy thing and take a side, you risk being wrong, voting for the wrong guy, and made to look a fool - possibly in public
• If you shun the process by hiding behind Both-Sides-ism, then you can self-congratulate because you're "too smart to fall for any of that politics stuff", but you've handed your right to self-determination to someone else

It may not feel right to be choosing the lesser of two evils, but why would you stand aside and let someone else choose the greater of those evils for you?

Keep choosing the lesser of the two evils, and over time, the "lesser of the two evils" starts to look more like what it is: The greater good.

Opinion

A No Labels candidate would likely throw the election to Trump

Al From, founder of the Democratic Leadership Council and author of “The New Democrats and the Return to Power,” is an adjunct professor of graduate studies in government at Johns Hopkins University.

 

Craig Fuller is a longtime Republican strategist and served as assistant to President Ronald Reagan for Cabinet affairs and chief of staff to Vice President George H.W. Bush.

For most of our careers, the two of us have been on opposite sides of the political aisle. We regularly express our disagreements in a weekly point-counterpoint commentary on a digital platform in Maryland.

But we love our country more than we love our parties, and as we look ahead to the 2024 presidential election, we are in complete agreement: To save the American republic, former president Donald Trump must be defeated. And that’s why the centrist political organization No Labels must cease and desist from its effort to nominate a third-party candidate.

We agree on three points: (1) In a head-to-head general-election contest, Trump faces the same challenges to winning the popular vote as he has in the past, perhaps worse; (2) a moderate independent third-party candidate on the ballot gives Trump the best possible chance of winning reelection; and (3) with Trump saying he will seek reelection even if he is convicted of crimes, we can’t just hope that this threat will go away.

The coup that Trump and his cronies attempted after he lost the 2020 election represented the greatest threat to our democracy since the Civil War. That threat is ongoing. Trump is the Republican front-runner, and, at least so far, his indictments appear to have only intensified his support.

That might change as his legal troubles mount, but if he wins the GOP nomination for president, all Americans who believe in democracy must unite behind a single candidate to assure that Trump, in the words of then-Rep. Liz Cheney, “never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.”

Even a wounded Trump will be formidable in 2024. Four out of 5 of his voters in 2020 told exit pollers they voted mostly “for [their] candidate” rather than “against his opponent.” Because he has so many hardcore loyalists, his vote is unlikely to fall significantly below its 2016 and 2020 level, about 46 percent.

Dedicated Trump loyalists don’t represent a majority of the electorate. That’s why he has lost the popular vote in both his presidential runs and did not top 47 percent in either. As long as the anti-Trump vote is unified behind a single candidate, Trump is very unlikely to win, as Joe Biden demonstrated in 2020. And this would most likely be the case in a Biden-Trump rematch in 2024.

But a third-party candidate dramatically changes the equation. If he or she takes even a small part of the anti-Trump vote away from Biden, Trump is likely to be returned to the White House. That’s why the No Labels effort poses such a danger to our democracy.

In the five states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — most likely to decide the 2024 election in the electoral college, the numbers tell the story. Together, they have 73 electoral votes. In 2016, Trump narrowly won all of them. In 2020, Biden did.

In all five of these swing states, Biden’s razor-thin margins came from a massive anti-Trump vote. In all of them, at least 1 in 3 Biden voters said they voted mainly against Trump; in Wisconsin, that number was 38 percent; in Arizona (where No Labels has already secured a spot on the 2024 ballot) a whopping 45 percent.

Even a small drop-off from his 2020 anti-Trump vote would put President Biden in a precarious position in 2024. He has no margin for error. Just 44,000 votes out of more than 10 million cast in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin — less than half of 1 percent — were the difference between the Biden presidency and a tie in the electoral college that would have thrown the election to the House of Representatives.

Our calculations show that if a No Labels candidate had won just 3 percent of the popular vote in 2020, Trump would probably be sitting in the White House.

Given Biden’s current low approval rating, it’s not unreasonable to assume a No Labels candidate in 2024 could peel off at least 15 percent of the anti-Trump vote from the president. If that happened, and Trump’s base stayed with him, Trump would win all five swing states comfortably and return to the Oval Office.

Early polling shows Biden and Trump running neck and neck, and every indication is that Biden will again need a big anti-Trump vote. In an April Wall Street Journal poll, 11.5 percent of voters said they disapproved of the way both Biden and Trump handled the presidency. Biden led among those voters by 54 percent to 15 percent. That advantage translates to about 4.5 percent of the total vote, giving Biden that much of a head start in the race. He’s likely to need every bit of that to overcome the intensity of the pro-Trump vote.

If the No Labels organization concludes it wants to put a third-party candidate in the race, that candidate would almost certainly throw the 2024 election to Trump. We need voices from all sides saying, “Not now, No Labels. For the good of the country, cease this third-party effort now.”

A Status Report

Dictionary

 

free·dom

noun
➡︎ the power or right to act, speak, or think as one wants without hindrance or restraint.

"we do have some freedom of choice"

➡︎ absence of subjection to foreign domination or despotic government.

"he was a champion of Irish freedom"

➡︎ the state of not being imprisoned or enslaved.

"the shark thrashed its way to freedom"

Opinion

Dictators’ dark secret: They’re learning from each other

In the spring of 2012, Vladimir Putin was feeling the pressure.

For months, anti-Putin protests had surged through the streets of Moscow and other cities following fraudulent parliamentary elections the previous December. Mr. Putin, who was about to be sworn in for a third term as president, harbored a fear of “color” revolutions — the 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the 2004-2005 Orange Revolution in Ukraine — as well as other popular revolts like the 2010-2012 Arab Spring, in which four dictators were overthrown. Until his inauguration in May, Russian authorities had tolerated the demonstrations. But when street protests broke out again, some marred by violence, the police moved in aggressively and hundreds were arrested.

On July 20, Mr. Putin signed legislation — rushed through parliament in just two weeks — to give the government a strong hand over nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), which he suspected were behind the protests. He had long been apprehensive about independent activism, especially by groups that were financed from abroad. Under the new law, any group that received money from overseas and engaged in “political activity” was required to register as a “foreign agent” with the Justice Ministry or face heavy fines.

The law crippled these groups, the backbone of a nascent civil society that had blossomed in the 1990s in Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Such organizations are the heartbeat of a healthy democracy, providing an independent and autonomous channel for people to voice their desires and aspirations. One of the first groups to be targeted was Memorial, founded during Mikhail Gorbachev’s years of reform to protect the historical record of Soviet repressions and to defend human rights in the current day. Mr. Putin was determined to squelch it and others like it.

Soon, similar laws began to crop up around the world. In the following years, at least 60 nations passed or drafted laws designed to restrict NGOs, and 96 carried out other policies curtailing them, imposing cumbersome registration requirements, intrusive monitoring, harassment and shutdowns. The wave of repressive measures offers a revealing look at the titanic struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. In the past decade, dictators have forged transnational bonds, sharing methods, copying tactics and learning from one another. They are finding new ways to quash free speech and independent journalism, eradicate NGOs, silence dissent and suffocate criticism.

In previous editorials in this series, we examined how young people who posted freely on social media were wrongly imprisoned by authoritarian regimes. We also described how Russia created and exploited disinformation about biological weapons. This editorial looks at how autocracies are reinforcing themselves by swapping methods and tactics.

The dictators want most of all to survive. They are succeeding.

A cascade of restrictions

The Russian “foreign agent” law hung an albatross around the neck of NGOs and, later, independent journalists and bloggers — anyone who received any money from abroad, even payment for a single freelance article. All were required to post a label on their published material identifying it as the work of a “foreign agent,” which in Russia has traditionally been associated with spying. When many organizations refused to oblige, the law was amended so the Justice Ministry could put them in the registry without their consent. Then in 2015, Russia added a new law designating any organization “undesirable” if the government deemed it a threat to national security — effectively a ban. One of the organizations so labeled was the Open Society Foundations established by financier George Soros, which had been, among other things, a lifeline of personal subsidies for Russian scientists in the lean years after the Soviet collapse.

Azerbaijan was the first among former Soviet republics to copy Russia’s 2012 law in 2013 and 2014. Then came Tajikistan in 2014 and Kazakhstan in 2015 with legislation directly limiting foreign funding to NGOs or sharply increasing bureaucratic burdens on them. The laws were largely borrowed from Russia. The cascade of laws has been documented in the Civic Freedom Monitor of the International Center for Not-for-profit Law.

Egypt also put NGOs in the crosshairs. In 2013, the courts convicted 43 NGO workers, including Americans, Egyptians and Europeans, many in absentia, on charges of operating without required government approval. The notorious criminal prosecution, Case 173, dragged on for years. Although the 43 were later acquitted in a retrial, the harassment continues. Under President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi, Egyptian authorities have frozen the assets of human rights activists, banned them from traveling abroad and regularly called them in for questioning on suspicions of “foreign funding.” This included Hossam Bahgat, founder and director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, one of Egypt’s most well-known rights organizations. Egypt replaced a draconian 2017 law on NGOs with a new one in 2019 but retained many harsh restrictions. The new law banned activities under vaguely worded terms such as any “political” work or any activity that undermines “national security.”

Cambodia, ruled by strongman Hun Sen for decades, in 2015 imposed a law under which NGOs can be disbanded if their activities “jeopardize peace, stability, and public order or harm the national security, culture and traditions of Cambodian society.” Uganda, which has an active community of NGOs, imposed a restrictive law in 2016; the groups have faced suspensions, freezing of accounts, denial of funding and restrictions on freedom of expression, association and assembly. In Nicaragua, the dictatorship led by former Sandinista guerrilla Daniel Ortega adopted a “foreign agent” law in 2020 and a law restricting NGOs in 2022. It has canceled the legal registration of more than 950 civil society organizations since 2018.

China, which originally permitted NGOs to exist in a legal gray zone, took a harder line after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012. A new NGO law went into effect in 2017, increasing state control over foreign and domestic funding to civil society groups. While Russia operated with blacklists, China created a whitelist, rewarding some NGOs whose interests it approved, as it sought to punish those in sensitive areas such as media, human rights and religion. Lu Jun, co-founder of one of the early successful NGOs, the Beijing Yirenping Center, which fought discrimination, recalled the ways in which the state turned against his group. For seven years, it was allowed to grow. But then, he recalled, “Between 2014 and 2019, in four separate crackdowns, nine of my colleagues were jailed and five of our offices were repeatedly searched until they were shut down.”

A secret school — or ‘mad scientists’?

How did so many countries come to do the same thing in the same decade? The answers are difficult to find — dictatorships are shrouded in secrecy. But Stephen G.F. Hall, a professor at the University of Bath, in Britain, uncovered evidence that the dictators copy, share and learn from one another. His new book, “The Authoritarian International,” looks at how this works.

According to Mr. Hall, authoritarian regimes must constantly maintain the illusion of steadfast control. Relax for a minute, and the illusion could vanish. “Protest is like a run on the bank,” Mr. Hall told us. “The protesters only have to get it right once.” For autocracies, protest and dissent are an existential threat.

“They’ve all seen what happens to autocrats generally — the Gaddafi moment, being dragged through the streets and beaten to death with a lead pipe. … They seem to know that if one country becomes democratic in a region, the rest will almost certainly follow. … And the best way to ensure that survival is to learn, to cooperate and to share best practices because you constantly have to stay one step ahead.”

Mr. Hall says much “authoritarian learning” is indirect, diffused through like-minded networks and emulation. When he began his research, he thought he might find an actual school of dictatorship, with Mr. Putin or other despots as “either star pupils or teachers telling other autocrats how to establish best survival practices.” But Mr. Hall did not find contemporary evidence of such a school. “I think it is primarily a case of trial and error,” he said, with the dictators more like “mad scientists” who run experiments and then share the results. which are passed around in the shadows, through security services and old-boy networks.

And there are traces of collaboration. According to Mr. Hall, Russia has frequently looked to Belarus as a proving ground and source of authoritarian methods. In 2002, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko created the Belarusian Republican Youth Union, a pro-regime, patriotic organization that could take control of the streets in Minsk in the event of an attempted color revolution. After the Orange Revolution in Ukraine, the Kremlin quickly created its own groups of “patriotic youths.” Years later, when Mr. Lukashenko was facing massive protests after stealing the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Putin came to his rescue. For instance, when Belarusian television workers quit their jobs in protest of the election fraud, Mr. Putin sent in Russians to keep the broadcasts going. (For Russia, the help is also driven by security concerns, given Belarus’s proximity to NATO.) Belarus also cooperates with China, which has long provided it with facial recognition technology. China’s telecommunications giant Huawei set up research centers in Belarus and brought Belarusian students to China for training.

Some authoritarian learning has its origin in history books. Magnus Fiskesjö, a professor at Cornell University, has shown how China in the past decade or so has brought back show trials, with staged, coerced confessions, borrowing both from the Mao era and reaching back to Joseph Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s. The extrajudicial show trials have been used against journalists, bloggers, academics, lawyers and entertainers, among others. The forced confessions go a step further than just silencing dissent; they are used to “shape reality” and create a more “predictably obedient society.”

The digital censors

In the world of authoritarian tactics, Russia and China are the center of gravity. They share know-how for policing the internet and generate sheaves of propaganda and disinformation, sometimes broadcasting identical sets of lies at the same time. Mr. Putin and Mr. Xi declared a “no limits” partnership in February 2022, but closer cooperation to squelch free speech on the internet was already well underway.

A glimpse of how it works was provided recently in a trove of internal documents, emails and audio recordings disclosed by Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty in an April 5 report by Daniil Belovodyev, Andrei Soshnikov and Reid Standish. The materials depict Russia and China working closely to help each other more tightly control the internet in two high-level meetings in 2017 and 2019.

The first meeting, on July 4, 2017, was a two-hour session in Moscow between Ren Xianling, who was then-deputy minister of the Cyberspace Administration of China, and Aleksandr Zharov, then-head of Roskomnadzor, the Russian government agency that censors the internet. According to the documents and other materials, the Russians wanted expertise from China about “mechanisms for permitting and controlling” mass media, online media and “individual bloggers,” as well as China’s experience regulating messenger apps, encryption services and virtual private networks. The Russians asked to send a delegation to China to study its vast domestic surveillance system and the “Great Firewall” that blocks unwanted overseas information. The Chinese visitors were particularly interested in methods used by the Russian agency to control the media coverage of public protest. The Chinese visitors’ questions were prompted by public demonstrations just a few months before, organized by opposition leader Alexei Navalny in March 2017. Mr. Zharov reportedly responded that the Kremlin wasn’t worried because the protests were small-scale and Mr. Putin’s public support was at a “very high level.”

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin in March. (Washington Post illustration; Alexey Maishev/Sputnik/AFP/Getty Images)
The discussion came just as Russia was looking at how to install more sophisticated controls over the internet. The government attempted in 2018 to block the popular messaging platform Telegram but failed to do so. In May 2019, Mr. Putin signed new legislation requiring that Russian companies install more intrusive controls, and also envisioning the creation of an entirely isolated Russian internet. Outside researchers have found that the new controls gave the Kremlin “fine-grained information control” over internet traffic.

In July 2019, the Russian and Chinese teams met again in Moscow, according to the RFE/RL report. Mr. Zharov asked the Chinese for advice about how to deal with platforms that successfully evade Russia’s blocking. The failure with Telegram was brought up as an example. The Russians also asked the Chinese how they used artificial intelligence to identify and block “prohibited content.” RFE/RL disclosed this year that Roskomnadzor has been using sophisticated techniques to track Russians online, searching for posts that insult Mr. Putin or call for protests.

Then in October 2019, on the sidelines of the World Internet Conference in China, Russia and China signed a cooperation agreement on counteracting the spread of “forbidden information.” In December 2019, China sent requests to Russia, in three separate letters, with censorship requests to block articles and sites, such as the Epoch Times, a newspaper with ties to the Falun Gong movement that is persecuted in China, and links on GitHub, the software development website, that describe ways to bypass China’s firewall inside the country.

The dictators have clung to power

Of course, the United States and other democracies also cooperate and spend billions of dollars annually promoting the values of open societies and rule of law around the world. Like the dictators, the democracies share tactics and methods with one another. But there is one important difference: Diffusion of democracy appeals to — and relies upon — individuals and free thinking, while autocrats pursue their own survival by suffocating individual voices.

The latest Freedom in the World report shows a decline in freedom for the 17th year in a row. Many autocrats are proving resilient. In the nearly 11 years since Mr. Putin signed the “foreign agent” law, most of the world’s leading dictators have held on. Rarely have they been toppled by popular protests. They are building new means of repression along with the old. In China, tech companies have invented an electronic surveillance system that can automatically recognize a protest banner and demonstrators’ faces — and alert the police.

In Russia, Mr. Putin is unrestrained. The “foreign agent” and “undesirable” laws were revised again in 2022, making them significantly more draconian. While the earlier version singled out those who received money from abroad, now a “foreign agent” can be anyone who receives any kind of support from overseas or comes “under foreign influence in other forms.” New names are added every Friday to the registry compiled by the Justice Ministry.

As of June 16, the registry listed 621 groups and people.

“Authoritarian regimes are much more brazen than before,” said William J. Dobson, co-editor of the Journal of Democracy and author of “The Dictator’s Learning Curve,” published in 2012. “They are not sitting still.”

At the same time, autocracies are racked with challenges and setbacks. Mr. Putin’s invasion of Ukraine might yet doom his rule. In China, Mr. Xi demands obedience, but protesters defy him, as they did last winter over “zero covid” restrictions. And one example of successful protest came recently in Georgia. The ruling Georgian Dream party advanced yet another “foreign agent” bill to require any organization receiving more than 20 percent of its funds from foreign sources to register as “agents of foreign influence.” But the bill was widely criticized, and after mass protests around the Parliament building in March, it was dropped.

All who believe in democracy must find new ways to advance it. This is especially important now, when democracy has lost luster around the globe.

Democracy’s greatest strength is openness. It should be harnessed to tell the truth loudly and widely.

When It Goes Bad

... it just goes bad.

John Eastman’s expert witness in disbarment hearing is barred for not being an expert

Attorney at the heart of Donald Trump’s efforts to subvert results of 2020 election faces potential disbarment

A judge in California barred an expert witness from testifying in the disbarment trial of John Eastman, the former attorney for former president Donald Trump, since the witness was not an expert, The Daily Beastreported.

Mr Eastman is facing a potential disbarment for his involvement in a plot to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. He attempted to call a man named Joseph Fried, an accountant who wrote an eBook that questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election results, as a witness.

But California State Bar Court Judge Yvette Roland vetoed the attempt.

“I don’t see how Mr Fried is qualified to be an expert,” NPR reporter Tom Dreisbach reported her saying. “He has no experience in voting or election matters.”

In addition, California bar attorney Duncan Carling said “We don’t believe the opinion of a CPA ... is relevant” and that Mr Fried “never identified any instances of fraud.”

Mr Eastman is facing 11 disciplinary charges related to his efforts to concoct a plan that would have allowed then-vice president Mike Pence to certify Mr Trump as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. If found culpable, he could lose his law license or have it suspended. The California Supreme Court will ultimately give the final ruling.

Mr Carling called Mr Eastman’s actions a “last-ditch effort” in a series “of increasingly desperate attempts to overturn the election.”

He was fully aware in real time that his plan was damaging the nation,” Mr Carling said, adding that “Dr Eastman sought at every turn to avoid every public test of his theory, and he privately confessed … that his theory had no chance of persuading the court.”

Mr Carling pointed to an email exchange between Mr Eastman and Mr Pence’s attorney Greg Jacob, wherein Mr Jacob said Mr Eastman was being “gravely irresponsible.”

Mr Eastman’s attorney Randal Miller defended his client’s actions, saying “Lawyers get to argue debatable issues, which is what Dr Eastman did,” according to The Washington Post.

You Little Bitch

Marj and Bobo got after it pretty good on the House floor. No ripped pantyhose or hair-pulling or busted glasses though.

It doesn't look like much, but people within earshot have said it was pretty nasty.

It remains to be seen, of course, if the followers of either one will attack the other - rhetorically or bodily or whatever.

We might also look forward to a time when the "grownups" in GOP Leadership step up and try to tell these idiots they're doing harm to their own ambitions, and they ... nah, never mind.

But wait - what's this? Kevin McCarthy speaks.

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy is urging House Republicans to vote against a proposal from Representative Lauren Boebert this week.

Republicans have long made their dissatisfaction with President Joe Biden known, with some advocating for impeachment. Earlier this year, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene introduced articles of impeachment, but Boebert took the threat a step further and introduced the articles of impeachment against Biden in a strategic way that would force a floor vote.

Some Republican officials expect the motion to worsen relationships in the Republican Party, and McCarthy is asking the legislators to vote down the proposal when it reaches the House floor.

Boebert announced the motion on Twitter on Tuesday, citing Biden's handling of the U.S.-Mexico border as the reason behind the articles of impeachment.

"The American people can no longer be subjected to a President who refuses to secure our borders. His open border agenda has put every American at greater risk, allowed human traffickers to thrive and given the cartel a free pass. He is not fit to remain as Commander in Chief," she tweeted.

But McCartney advised his party to vote against Boebert's proposal, urging them to bide their time and wait for the right moment before impeaching Biden.

According to a tweet from Punch Bowl News founder Jake Sherman, McCarthy suggested that by voting in favor of Boebert's proposal, House Republicans could lose the majority they just fought so hard to win. He reminded his colleagues that Republicans have taken back the House only five times in the past century: 1946, 1952, 1994, 2010 and 2022.
"But the first 2 times, we lost it right away the next cycle. The second two times we held it for 12 and 8 years," he said, according to the tweet. "What majority do we want to be? Give it right back in 2 years or hold it for a decade and make real change. How are we going to censure [Representative] Adam Schiff for abusing his position to lie and force an impeachment and then turn around and do it ourselves the next day?"

Uh - 'scuse me, Kev - when did you start getting all ookie about Republicans looking like a buncha fuckin' hypocrites?

McCarthy reminded House Republicans that House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer is already investigating Biden, and if the investigation leads to articles of impeachment, then the House should vote to impeach.

Boebert's proposal also annoyed Greene, who allegedly called Boebert a "copycat" for offering a Biden impeachment resolution similar to the one she proposed, according to a tweet by CNN reporter Annie Grayer.

Boebert and Greene have disagreed in the past, such as when House Republicans finally voted in favor of McCarthy for speaker. McCarthy secured the position after 15 rounds of voting, with Greene voting in favor of McCarthy and Boebert voting against him.

Newsweek reported on Tuesday that one political science expert called Boebert's act a "political stunt, pure and simple."

"No one wants to be seen as sticking up for the White House or failing to go after the president. At the same time, they know that an impeachment vote is both substantively baseless and would backfire politically."

What does and doesn't amaze me is that people like Boebert and Greene seem to have no fucking clue how badly they're being manipulated by handlers and staffers who are puppeteering the fuck out of them - it's like they think they're actually smart enough and skilled enough to do this shit on their own.

High on their own supply.

Shitty Is As Shitty Does

Republicans always seem to be competing with each other, trying to see who can be the shittiest shit-heel in that whole shitty gang of shit-eatin' shit-flingers.

And I don't think it's only about pandering to "the base".

It's like the Dark Money Leaders Of The Yacht Buyers Club demand this shitty behavior, so Republicans are running around looking for opportunities to demonstrate just how shitty they can be.

The more you can use government to shit on average people, the better your chances are for collecting nice fat "donations", which will give you more opportunities to impress the bosses by proposing even shittier policies, which will get you nicer and fatter "donations".

And make no mistake - while sometimes they're being shitty just for the sake of being shitty, usually (like in this case) it's aimed at privatization, the pathway to which (again, in this case) runs through "religious" companies.

(I say 'companies' because that's what a church is - it's a fucking company)

Anyway, they get to fuck over poor people, and fuck over everybody who knows church and state have to be kept separate, and they hand "the libs" a dilemma.

• "How can you be against helping churches help homeless people?"
• "If the program is working, why wouldn't you want the private sector to help out and make it even better?"
• "Would you like to take responsibility for cutting the funding altogether? We can do that, y'know - and we'll spend whatever it takes to run a campaign that gets people to blame you guys for it."

And it all fits neatly into everybody's favorite GOP game

1. Fuck something up
2. Wait a while
3. Point at it and say, "Oh look - it's fucked up - better put us in charge so we can fix it."

Tell me I'm wrong.

Federal Policy on Homelessness Becomes New Target of the Right

The approach known as Housing First has long enjoyed bipartisan support. But conservatives are pushing efforts to replace it with programs that put more emphasis on sobriety and employment.

The bipartisan approach that has dominated federal homelessness policy for more than two decades is under growing conservative attack.

The policy directs billions of dollars to programs that provide homeless people with permanent housing and offer — but do not require them to accept — services like treatment for mental illness or drug abuse. The approach, called Housing First, has been the subject of extensive study and expanded under presidents as different as George W. Bush and Barack Obama. President Biden’s homelessness plan makes Housing First its cornerstone and cites it a dozen times.

But Housing First has become a conservative epithet.

Republican lawmakers, backed by conservative think tanks and programs denied funding by Housing First rules, want to loosen the policy’s grip on federal dollars. While supporters say that housing people without preconditions saves lives by getting them off the streets, critics say it ignores clients’ underlying problems and want to shift funding to groups like rescue missions that demand sobriety or employment. Some even blame Housing First for the growth in homelessness.

“No more Housing First!” said Representative Andy Barr, Republican of Kentucky, after introducing a bill last month that would offer more money for programs with treatment mandates.

Senator J.D. Vance, Republican of Ohio, used two recent hearings to argue that Housing First ignores the root causes of homelessness. The Cicero Institute, a Texas policy group, is promoting model state legislation that bars Housing First programs from receiving state funds. A documentary it produced with PragerU, a conservative advocacy group, cuts between critiques of Housing First and footage of people living in tents on the street and shots of drug use.

The escalating war over an obscure social service doctrine is partly an earnest policy dispute and partly an old-fashioned rivalry between groups seeking federal funds. But it is also a new ideological and political flashpoint, with former President Donald J. Trump and others on the right using it to to promote their argument that homelessness in liberal cities is an indictment of Democratic governance more broadly.

Joe Lonsdale, the tech mogul behind the Cicero Institute, has called Housing First part of a “Marxist” attempt to blame homelessness on capitalism, and Mr. Trump, in seeking a return to office, has pledged to place homeless people in “tent cities.”

“The attack on Housing First is the most worrisome thing I’ve seen in my 30 years in this field,” said Ann Oliva, chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness, an advocacy group with bipartisan roots. “When people have a safe and stable place to live, they can address other things in their lives. If critics succeed in defunding these successful programs, we’re going to see a lot more deaths on the street.”

Until Housing First emerged a generation ago, services for homeless people were built on a staircase model: Clients were meant to progress from shelters to transitional programs, where training or treatment would ready them for permanent apartments. In practice, services were weak and failure rates high, with large numbers of noncompliant people returning to the streets.

Though skeptics feared that troubled people would leave or get evicted, early results were impressive.

After five years, 88 percent of the clients in a New York City program called Pathways to Housing remained housed, compared to 47 percent in the usual system of care. Despite the lack of treatment mandates, Pathways clients were no more likely than those in the regular system to report mental illness or substance abuse. A large experiment covering five Canadian cities achieved similar results.

Citing such studies, supporters praise Housing First as unusually “evidence based.”

Contemporaneous research also offered hopes of cost savings. While most people entering shelters were quickly rehoused, work by Dennis Culhane of the University of Pennsylvania showed that a small minority became chronically homeless and consumed tens of thousands of dollars of services in jails and emergency rooms — roughly what it cost to house them. Supporters hoped Housing First would prove “not only more humane but for some people potentially cheaper,” Mr. Culhane said.

Housing First exploded from a model to a movement under a Republican administration. Philip F. Mangano, the Bush administration’s top homelessness official, proved relentless in promoting Housing First programs, and the approach, which initially targeted the chronically homeless, broadened to a wider range of people experiencing homelessness.

The Obama administration placed a preference for Housing First into the main federal grant programs, which now provide about $3 billion a year to local groups. From 2007 to 2016, chronic homelessness fell by more than a third.

For social workers used to seeing people languish on the streets, a breakthrough seemed at hand.

“I can still feel the emotion — ‘Wow, we can house everyone!’” said Adam Rocap, deputy director of Miriam’s Kitchen, a social services agency in Washington. Optimism about ending homelessness ran so high, he said, some of the agency’s staff members asked if they should seek other jobs.

Since 2007, the stock of permanent supportive housing has more than doubled to 387,000 beds, while the Department of Housing and Urban Development found 582,000 people were homeless on a single night last year, and researchers estimate the number experiencing homelessness in a year could be three times as high.

Some recent studies have noted limits on what the programs achieve. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine in 2018 found “no substantial evidence” that supportive housing improved clients’ health. Likewise, the medical journal The Lancet found “no measurable effect” on the severity of psychiatric problems, addiction, or employment.

And despite hopes, the programs did not save money. Supportive housing is expensive to build (average costs in high-priced Los Angeles, which has an ambitious Housing First initiative, are nearly $600,000 per unit), and the share of unhoused people who consume costly services is low.

Still, proponents say Housing First has succeeded where it matters most — getting people off the streets.

“Getting people out of homelessness quickly is more important than anything, because life on the streets is so dangerous,” said Professor Culhane, of the University of Pennsylvania. “The evidence shows that Housing First is a very successful policy. Undoing it would be a disaster.”

The growth in homelessness and the visibility of encampments in some locations have intensified debate. Since 2015, the unsheltered population has grown by about 35 percent, with California the center of the crisis. Most analysts say soaring rents play a major role. But critics fault Housing First for financing costly permanent housing instead of shelters that could serve more people, and for preventing treatment mandates they say would promote recovery and employment.

“I thought it would help the few and leave thousands out on the streets, and my fears have been solidified,” said the Reverend Andy Bales, chief executive of the Union Rescue Mission in Los Angeles, which enforces sobriety rules and does not get federal funds.

Housing First defenders scoff at the charge that it promotes homelessness.

“Blaming Housing First for the rise in homelessness is like blaming aspirin for headaches,” said Jeff Olivet, head of the Biden administration’s Interagency Council on Homelessness.

Mr. Olivet noted that the Department of Veterans Affairs has used Housing First policies — with more generous funding — and cut veterans’ homelessness since 2010 by more than half.

“That’s a proof point for showing we can end homelessness and end it with a Housing First approach,” he said. “What we need to do is scale it up.”

Like its predecessors, the Trump administration initially embraced Housing First, with the housing secretary, Ben Carson, praising a “mountain of data showing that a Housing First approach works.”

That changed in 2019 as California’s homelessness crisis worsened and Mr. Trump began highlighting the issue to criticize the state’s “liberal establishment.”

The Council of Economic Advisers issued a report skeptical of Housing First, and the Trump administration fired its homelessness coordinator, a holdover from the Obama years. His replacement, Robert Marbut, backed strict work and sobriety rules and said he favored “Housing Fourth.”

In a recent interview, Mr. Marbut said he was brought in to “do everything we could to reverse Housing First.”

But when the Trump administration tried to delete the Housing First preference in federal grants, congressional Democrats blocked the effort. With the coronavirus pandemic consuming the rest of Mr. Trump’s term, policy remained unchanged.

Still a revolt had been seeded. Conservative literature on the topic emerged, with critiques from the Manhattan Institute, the Cicero Institute, and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, and a Heritage Foundation paper by Christopher F. Rufo, the activist who turned “critical race theory” into a war cry on the right.

Tonally, the criticisms occupy two registers. Mr. Trump has described people experiencing homelessness as “violent and dangerously deranged,” and a Cicero Institute podcast asked whether phrases like “vagrants, bums, tramps” are preferable to “homeless.” But Cicero’s film offers sympathetic portraits of recovering addicts, and a former shelter director cries onscreen as she calls Housing First “one of the most oppressive things we’ve done” to the needy.

Cicero’s work has drawn particular attention, given Mr. Lonsdale’s wealth as a co-founder of Palantir, the data-mining firm, and his support of conservative causes. The group’s model legislation restricts encampments to designated sites and blocks Housing First programs from state funds.

“As an all-encompassing model for addressing homelessness, Housing First has failed,” said Judge Glock, who until recently led the group’s work.

Texas and Georgia have adopted measures that enforce camping bans, and Missouri passed a broader Cicero-inspired bill last year, blocking Housing First programs from state funds. Its State Senate sponsor, Holly Thompson Rehder, a Republican, said concerns about the status quo had grown after an encampment fire under a Kansas City bridge killed one person and closed Interstate 70. Even in her rural district, campgrounds complained of losing business because customers feared encampments nearby.

Ms. Rehder, who experienced homelessness as a child, said Cicero recruited her in part because of that history. Having watched relatives struggle with mental illness and addiction, she considered treatment mandates “a no-brainer.” The institute organized a study tour in Texas for her, and Mr. Glock testified for the bill.

“They were incredibly helpful,” she said.

In Congress, Mr. Barr, the Kentucky Republican, got involved after shelters in his Lexington-area district complained they could not get federal funding because of sobriety rules. He said residents told him they would have relapsed in less strict environments.

But Mr. Olivet, the Biden administration official, said critics have forgotten how often services failed the homeless before Housing First came along.

“Housing First saves lives every day,” he said. “It’s a proven intervention. We need more of it.”

The Week's GOP

All hail Trump The Glorious

Oh My Achin' Head

A high school buddy I played ball with died of dementia a few years ago. He was our quarterback, and we looked after him pretty good, so he didn't take a lot of punishment on offense. But he played safety too, and while I don't remember him getting slammed all that much, there's always that shitty little voice in the back of my mind telling me, "You're next, Mr Headbutt."

In case you didn't notice -

at a certain point, there's no escape

Collective Force of Head Hits, Not Just the Number of Them, Increases Odds of C.T.E.

The largest study of chronic traumatic encephalopathy to date found that the cumulative force of head hits absorbed by players in their careers is the best predictor of future brain disease.

When Jeffrey Vlk played running back in high school in the 1990s and then safety in college, he took and delivered countless tackles during full-contact football practices. Hitting was a mainstay, as were injuries, including concussions.

When he became a coach at Buffalo Grove High School outside Chicago in 2005, Vlk did what he had been taught: He had his players hit and tackle in practices to “toughen them up.”

By the time he became head coach in 2016, though, he saw that many of his players were so banged up from a week of hitting in practice that they missed games or were more susceptible to being injured in those games.

So, starting in 2019, Vlk eliminated full-contact practices. Players wore shoulder pads once a week, on Wednesday, which he called contact day. That’s when they hit tackle bags and crash pads, and wrapped up teammates but did not throw them to the ground. Vlk said no starting player had been injured at his practices in four years.

“Those types of injuries can stay with you for a long time,” he said, “and knowing that I’m keeping the kids safe, not just in our program, but beyond the program, is reason enough to go this route.”

Vlk’s approach to limiting the number of hits players take has been spreading slowly in the football world, where much of the effort has focused on avoiding and treating concussions, which often have observable symptoms and are tracked by sports leagues.

But researchers have for years posited that the more hits to the head a player receives — even subconcussive ones, which are usually not tracked — the more likely he is to develop cognitive and neurological problems later in life.

A new study published on Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature Communications added a critical wrinkle: A football player’s chances of developing chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., are related to the number of head impacts absorbed, but also to the cumulative impact of all those hits.

Collective Force of Head Hits Increases Odds of CTE, Study Says - The New York Times
The study, the largest to look at the causes of C.T.E. to date, used data published in 34 studies that tracked the number and magnitude of head hits measured by football helmet sensors. Using the data, which went back 20 years, the scientists estimated the number and force of head hits absorbed by 631 former football players who donated their brains to studies overseen by researchers at Boston University.

The paper tried to address one of the most persistent challenges for brain trauma researchers: identifying what aspects of head hits contribute most to C.T.E. They looked at the number of hits to the head, the number of years playing football, the force of those hits and other factors.

The best predictor of brain disease later in life, the study found, was the cumulative force of the head hits absorbed by the players over the course of their careers, not the number of diagnosed concussions.

“We’re now getting a better understanding of what causes C.T.E. pathology, but we’re also getting a better understanding of what’s not causing C.T.E. pathology,” said Dr. Daniel Daneshvar, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School and the lead author of the study. “And in this case, it’s the largest study of C.T.E. pathology ever, and concussions were basically noise.”

Of the 631 brains examined, 451 players, or 71 percent, were found to have C.T.E., while 180 did not. The players who were estimated to have absorbed the greatest cumulative force had the worst forms of C.T.E., which has been associated with symptoms including memory loss, impulsive behavior, depression and suicidal thoughts.

Eric Nauman, a biomedical engineering professor at the University of Cincinnati who was not involved in the study, said the results strengthened the idea that an accumulation of subconcussive hits, rather than concussions, was the driving force behind long-term cognitive decline.

The latest data “seems to support the idea that, yes, all these hits matter, they all add up,” Dr. Nauman said. “If you accumulate damage faster than the body can repair it, now you’ve got a problem.”

He said the analysis pointed the way toward obvious changes that could make football safer, like the elimination of hitting in practices and the development of helmets that absorb more impact, especially to the back of the head.

Dr. Nauman noted that the new study included brains of players with and without the disease, sparing it from the common concern that the researchers looked only at the most damaged brains.

It also found links between the estimated number and types of hits players sustained during their careers and their health many years later, a factor Dr. Nauman said would make it more difficult for detractors to argue that players had possibly suffered unknown injuries in the decades after they stopped playing football that caused later cognitive problems.

Dr. Nauman said the new research was still bound by limitations. The study counted all of the head impacts detected by helmet sensors, except for those caused by jostling or incidental motion. But previous research has suggested that the most important hits appeared to be those above a certain threshold, a distinction the study was not able to make.

Because the N.F.L. has not published its helmet sensor data, the study used college sensor data as a proxy for professional players.

Helmets have improved in recent years, and it is likely that players whose careers predate the improvements absorbed more of the impact from any given hit. But football players in decades past were on average smaller and slower than those playing today, making any given hit less forceful, Dr. Nauman said.

“That certainly is a caveat, but it’s not something that would make me think the basic conclusions are wrong,” he said.

Joseph J. Crisco, a professor at Brown University who helped devise a sensor used in Riddell helmets, said the study tried to overcome a basic challenge — that researchers had not tracked how many hits the brain donors had accumulated during their careers.

Rather, the study used helmet sensor data from a more recent set of players to estimate the number and force of head impacts for the older players, based on what positions they played, at what levels of the sport and for how long.

While studies using players’ actual lifetime head impacts were needed, he said, the findings suggest that “the players that are getting hit the hardest and most often are more likely to have C.T.E. down the road.”

Steve Rowson, who studies helmet impacts and concussion risk at Virginia Tech, said the study’s emphasis on the force and number of hits that players sustain fits with how scientists understand brain injuries.

The odds of developing C.T.E. increase exponentially with more force to the head
This table shows the increased risk of developing C.T.E. for each additional year played compared with someone who played only two years of youth football. Players who absorb more head hits, like linemen who play for many years, are at higher risk for the disease.

Researchers have managed to pinpoint some factors that explain different players’ exposure to head impacts, he said. For example, he said, linemen are most often hit on the fronts of their helmets, while quarterbacks are more likely to suffer severe impacts to the backs of theirs.

But, Dr. Rowson said, it would be a mistake for people to think that they could now use the findings to predict anyone’s chances of long-term cognitive problems.

“What I don’t think we can do right now is look at an individual and really get a good idea of their head impact exposure relative to another,” he said, “because there’s this huge difference person to person that we can’t quite account for.”

The study notes that future research should examine different thresholds for counting hits, an advancement that Dr. Rowson said was important. Some head impacts, he said, are mild enough that the brain can probably tolerate them. But at exactly what point the impacts become damaging is not clear, he said.

“Not all impacts are created equal,” he said. “Trying to figure out which impacts are the most important, I think, could really help this kind of analysis.”

My Stupid Brain

Respondents of all sorts —

young and old,

liberal and conservative,

white and black —

consistently agreed:

The golden age of human kindness

is long gone.

Your Brain Has Tricked You Into Thinking Everything Is Worse

Perhaps no political promise is more potent or universal than the vow to restore a golden age. From Caesar Augustus to the Medicis and Adolf Hitler, from President Xi Jinping of China and President “Bongbong” Marcos of the Philippines to Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” and Joe Biden’s “America Is Back,” leaders have gained power by vowing a return to the good old days.

What these political myths have in common is an understanding that the golden age is definitely not right now. Maybe we’ve been changing from angels into demons for centuries, and people have only now noticed the horns sprouting on their neighbors’ foreheads.

But I believe there’s a bug — a set of cognitive biases — in people’s brains that causes them to perceive a fall from grace even when it hasn’t happened. I and my colleague Daniel Gilbert at Harvard have found evidence for that bug, which we recently published in the journal Nature. While previous researchers have theorized about why people might believe things have gotten worse, we are the first to investigate this belief all over the world, to test its veracity and to explain where it comes from.

We first collected 235 surveys with over 574,000 responses total and found that, overwhelmingly, people believe that humans are less kind, honest, ethical and moral today than they were in the past. People have believed in this moral decline at least since pollsters started asking about it in 1949, they believe it in every single country that has ever been surveyed (59 and counting), they believe that it’s been happening their whole lives and they believe it’s still happening today. Respondents of all sorts — young and old, liberal and conservative, white and Black — consistently agreed: The golden age of human kindness is long gone.

We also found strong evidence that people are wrong about this decline. We assembled every survey that asked people about the current state of morality: “Were you treated with respect all day yesterday?” “Within the past 12 months, have you volunteered your time to a charitable cause?”,“How often do you encounter incivility at work?” Across 140 surveys and nearly 12 million responses, participants’ answers did not change meaningfully over time. When asked to rate the current state of morality in the United States, for example, people gave almost identical answers between 2002 and 2020, but they also reported a decline in morality every year.

Other researchers’ data have even shown moral improvement. Social scientists have been measuring cooperation rates between strangers in lab-based economic games for decades, and a recent meta-analysis found — contrary to the authors’ expectations — that cooperation has increased 8 percentage points over the last 61 years. When we asked participants to estimate that change, they mistakenly thought cooperation rates had decreased by 9 percentage points. Others have documented the increasing rarity of the most heinous forms of human immorality, like genocide and child abuse.

Two well-established psychological phenomena could combine to produce this illusion of moral decline. First, there’s biased exposure: People predominantly encounter and pay attention to negative information about others — mischief and misdeeds make the news and dominate our conversations.

Second, there’s biased memory: The negativity of negative information fades faster than the positivity of positive information. Getting dumped, for instance, hurts in the moment, but as you rationalize, reframe and distance yourself from the memory, the sting fades. The memory of meeting your current spouse, on the other hand, probably still makes you smile.

When you put these two cognitive mechanisms together, you can create an illusion of decline. Thanks to biased exposure, things look bad every day. But thanks to biased memory, when you think back to yesterday, you don’t remember things being so bad. When you’re standing in a wasteland but remember a wonderland, the only reasonable conclusion is that things have gotten worse.

That explanation fits well with two more of our surprising findings. First, people exempt their own social circles from decline; in fact, they think the people they know are nicer than ever. This might be because people primarily encounter positive information about people they know, which our model predicts can create an illusion of improvement.

Second, people believe that moral decline began only after they arrived on Earth; they see humanity as stably virtuous in the decades before their birth. This especially suggests that biased memory plays a role in producing the illusion.

If these cognitive biases are working in tandem, our susceptibility to golden age myths makes a lot more sense. Our biased attention means we’ll always feel we’re living in dark times, and our biased memory means we’ll always think the past was brighter.

Seventy-six percent of Americans believe, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center poll, that “addressing the moral breakdown of the country” should be one of the government’s priorities. The good news is that the breakdown hasn’t happened. The bad news is that people believe it has.

As long as we believe in this illusion, we are susceptible to the promises of aspiring autocrats who claim they can return us to a golden age that exists in the only place a golden age has ever existed: our imaginations.

The Antropocene Epoch

The gain is always tempered by the cost.

God love the nerds

HIDDEN BENEATH THE SURFACE

Digging deep into a humble lake in Canada, scientists found a spot on Earth like no other — and a record that could redefine our history of the planet

This summer, researchers will determine whether Crawford Lake should be named the official starting point for this geologic chapter, with pollution-laden sediments from the 1950s marking the transition from the dependable environment of the past to the uncertain new reality humans have created.

In just seven decades, the scientists say, humans have brought about greater changes than they did in more than seven millennia. Never in Earth’s history has the world changed this much, this fast. Never has a single species had the capacity to wreak so much damage — or the chance to prevent so much harm.

“It’s a line in the sand,” said Francine McCarthy, a professor of Earth sciences at Brock University in Ontario, who has led research on Crawford Lake. “The Earth itself is playing by a different rule book. And it’s because of us.”

Seeking the golden spike

Every new phase of Earth’s history begins with a “golden spike” — a spot in the geologic record where proof of a global transformation is perfectly preserved.

These spikes are like exclamation points in the story of the planet, punctuating a tale of shifting continents, evolving species and temperatures that rose and fell as carbon levels fluctuated in the atmosphere. They mark the starts of epochs — small segments of geologic time. And they have helped scientists interpret the forces that shaped Earth’s past climates, which in turn allows them to forecast the effects of modern warming.

In 2009, the International Commission on Stratigraphy — an obscure scientific body responsible for defining the phases of Earth’s past — created a new working group to investigate the evidence for the Anthropocene. The group’s mission: to identify a potential “golden spike” site that might convince fellow scientists of the new epoch’s validity.

Their search spanned from mountain summits to the depths of the ocean, from the Antarctic ice sheet to tropical coral reefs. And, in 2018, it led them to McCarthy’s office door.

Before that moment, few beyond her field knew of McCarthy’s research studying lake sediments for signs of past climate change. Her outreach work was meaningful, but largely local: advocating for conservation of the Great Lakes, teaching geology to students at her midsize public university.

Crawford Lake was similarly modest — just a pretty little pool at a park in the Toronto suburbs. Schoolchildren liked to visit its reconstructed Indigenous longhouses. Locals treasured it as a quaint spot to have a picnic and watch for birds.

Yet McCarthy’s colleague Martin Head, a geologist at Brock who had been involved with the Anthropocene Working Group, was intrigued by the rare chemistry uncovered at Crawford.

No other water body is known to possess this particular combination of attributes, making Crawford Lake a unique bellwether of global change.

“It’s a freak of nature, but it’s my little freak of nature,” McCarthy said. “And it’s perfect for what we need.”

As she considered her colleague’s proposal, McCarthy thought about the decades she’d spent studying prior planetary upheavals. Her work on lake sediments from the past several million years had shown her how dramatic swings in temperature destabilized ecosystems and drove species to extinction.

Without drastic action to stave off modern climate change, she said, that history could repeat.

The diary of the Earth

McCarthy stood on the shore of Crawford Lake, watching the April breeze ruffle the water surface, waiting for work to begin.

First, researchers had to tether a wooden raft in the deepest part of the lake, right over the spot they wanted to sample.

To extract the lake’s layered sediments, the team used a tool called a “freeze corer,” but more affectionately known as “the frozen finger.” The long aluminum wedge was filled with a mixture of alcohol and dry ice, making it much colder than the surrounding water, soil and air.

They suspended the freeze corer from a tripod and lowered it through a hole in the raft. Down, down it went, through 75 feet of water, until finally it sank into the squishy mud on the lake bottom.

Then they waited. It would take about 40 minutes for the lake sediments to freeze onto the corer’s chilly surface.

Finally, it was time to pull the corer back up. Clinging to its face was a five-foot slice of mud, cut from the lake bottom like a piece from the center of a cake.

Back on shore, McCarthy traced a gloved finger over the core’s delicate brown and white stripes — sharper than any other sample she’d seen.

She had uncovered dozens of Crawford Lake cores by that point — but every extraction felt special, and strangely intimate. Each sample, she knew, would give her a glimpse into a thousand years of the lake’s history, revealing its deepest responses to the changing world above. Each was like a new page from the diary of the Earth.

What secrets would she find inside?

The archive inside Crawford Lake’s cores shows how human pressures on the lake built up over the centuries like steam inside a kettle, until finally the kettle boiled over.

But humanity’s influence hasn’t always been so destructive. The first people to make their mark on the lake were Native villagers who built longhouses near the lakeshore. Researchers have counted more than two centuries’ worth of sediments from the lake’s “Indigenous period” containing crop pollen and other evidence of human habitation alongside ancient goose droppings and traces of trees.

Around the start of the 16th century, all signs of the settlement vanished for reasons still unknown. Yet the seasonal process that built the lake’s layers remained.

Sediments from subsequent eras showed Europeans’ growing influence on the landscape. White pine pollen counts dwindled as people cut down trees. Traces of ragweed marked how different species flourished in the cleared land.

The impacts piled up throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Tiny black bits of fly ash — a byproduct of burning coal and oil — drifted into the lake from rapidly industrializing cities. Heavy metals like copper and lead increased in the mud.

And then, around 1950, the world reached a tipping point.

“This is when humans essentially overwhelmed the Earth as a functioning system,” said Head, McCarthy’s collaborator. Crawford Lake — and the rest of the planet — were fundamentally, irrevocably transformed.

The sharpest sign of change was a surge in radioactive plutonium that started in Crawford Lake’s mud around 1950. The element rarely occurs naturally on this planet; it could only have come from nuclear weapon tests happening thousands of miles away.

Other shifts weren’t necessarily new, but they appeared at scales ten or a hundred times greater than anything the lake had seen before. A lighter form of nitrogen — a molecular signature of burning fossil fuels — proliferated. The amount of fly ash increased eightfold in less than five years. Acid rain, caused by pollution reacting with water in the atmosphere, diminished the calcite layers.

Still more sediments recorded irreversible losses. Certain microbe species were eliminated locally. The amount of elm pollen plummeted — a consequence of the invasive fungus that was decimating North America’s tree populations at the time.

All the while, greenhouse gas pollution made the planet inexorably hotter. The lake’s calcite layers became thicker during warm years; pollen grains show how the forest composition shifted to include more heat-loving tree species.

Average temperatures in southern Canada have increased about 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) in this time. The globe as a whole is now warmer than it’s been at almost any point since the end of the last ice age.

Researchers were able to calculate summer temperatures from the pollen detected in the core sediments

These changes all are the result of what scientists call “the Great Acceleration” — the dramatic, simultaneous surge in almost every measure of human activity that started in the mid-20th century and continues through today.

The same evidence appears all over the planet, in every potential golden spike site the Anthropocene Working Group has examined. Peat bogs, ocean basins, the skeletons of coral reefs — even the ice of Antarctica has been permanently tainted by human pollution.

“What we have measured, in a very objective and quantitative way, is we are living in a world with conditions that are no longer within the last 11,000 years of natural variability,” McCarthy said. “The Earth is, in fact, fundamentally different.”

‘Where we have a story to tell’

When the last core samples were taken from Crawford Lake this spring, Catherine Tammaro couldn’t bring herself to watch.

To the Wyandot artist and faithkeeper, who is descended from the people who likely once lived here, the lake is a living being. She calls this space “Kionywarihwaen” — a Wyandot name meaning “where we have a story to tell.”

And Crawford Lake had already endured so much painful history. Dredging up its sediments — even for science — felt like another invasion.

But after hours of reflection alongside representatives from other First Nations, Tammaro had come to agree that the coring should go forward.

“It’s like a surgical operation,” she said. “It’s painful, but we recognize that it should be done … because it may help prevent further climate disaster by adding to our understanding of how humans have had an impact on the Earth.”

The extraction of this core was one of the last steps before the Anthropocene Working Group selects its preferred “Golden Spike” site, a decision that is expected this summer. Crawford Lake is considered a top candidate for the recognition.

Before the Anthropocene — and the lake — can claim a place in geologic history, the proposal must undergo several more rounds of voting. And not all geologists are convinced the Anthropocene belongs on Earth’s 4.6-billion-year timeline. Some say this period of overwhelming human influence has been too brief to know whether it is truly an epoch, a span that typically lasts millions of years. Others have pointed out that — unlike the asteroid impact that killed the dinosaurs and other epoch-defining events — human-caused changes didn’t happen simultaneously all around the world.

“Formalizing the Anthropocene creates a hard and bright line, and you either exist on one side or the other,” said Jacquelyn Gill, a paleoecologist at the University of Maine. “But really, it’s been a long gradient, a long process of changing how we live.”

Yet advocates for naming the new epoch say Crawford Lake’s sediments make clear the stark contrast between human impacts before 1950 — which were mostly local and often reversible — and the rapid transformation wrought by modernity.

Unless the world takes drastic steps to curb global warming, pollution and declines in biodiversity, the situation will become worse, said geologist Colin Waters, chair of the Anthropocene Working Group. Scientists warn that the planet is getting dangerously close to climate “tipping points,” where ice melt will accelerate and major weather systems could collapse.

“It is a permanent legacy of human impacts on the planet, written in the rock record,” Waters said.

Yet as much as the Anthropocene is a recognition of humanity’s culpability, it is also a declaration of human agency, McCarthy believes. Alongside geologic evidence of environmental destruction, Crawford Lake holds proof of people’s capacity for repair.

In 1963, when nations agreed to ban nuclear weapons testing that could contaminate the water and atmosphere, plutonium concentrations in Crawford Lake started to diminish. Fly ash counts fell after the United States and Canada required new pollution controls at power plants and other industrial facilities. The revitalization of the lake’s distinctive calcite bands during the 1980s is a sign of successful efforts to combat acid rain.

But not all changes captured in the Crawford cores can be so quickly undone. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations will remain elevated for tens of thousands of years. It will take at least as long, and a dramatic drop in temperature, for the polar ice sheets to return to their preindustrial majesty.

But “it’s not just a doomsday story,” McCarthy said. “It is a ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ story. It shows we can make meaningful change.”

She estimates that Crawford Lake will continue to accumulate new sediments for at least 10,000 years. That means a geologist in the distant future will be able to dig into those layers just as McCarthy has.

They will see whether the world managed to zero out carbon emissions and stabilize global warming.

They will learn whether people preserved threatened species and set aside nuclear weapons.

And they will discover what lessons humanity drew from this record of the Earth.