Jul 25, 2023
Jul 24, 2023
Today's Tweet
When your declaration of "virtue" sounds a whole lot like it came directly from the movie "Good Fellas", it's time for you to fade away.
Huckabee: "I think there are two virtues. Loyalty and confidentiality. Be loyal to the people who helped you and learn how to keep your mouth shut. If you have information that could be hurtful to someone, be confidential."@Acynpic.twitter.com/BVHRRLEPCf
— The Intellectualist (@highbrow_nobrow) July 22, 2023
Today's Brian
Brian Tyler Cohen
The traditional approach to politics and faith is often seen as a competition between two sides: left vs. right, woke vs. unwoke, Red State Jesus vs. Blue State Jesus. However, the Rev. William J. Barber II, a MacArthur “genius grant” recipient and contemporary leader who has been compared to Martin Luther King Jr., has developed a different approach: "fusion politics."
This approach brings together coalitions that often transcend the traditional conservative vs. progressive divide. Barber believes that by uniting marginalized groups such as the poor, immigrants, working-class whites, religious minorities, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ community, a powerful force for change can be created. (Hebrews 10:24-25)
Barber argues that these groups share a common enemy, citing how the same forces that demonize immigrants also attack low-wage workers, the same politicians that deny living wages also suppress the vote, and the same people who deny the climate crisis and refuse to act are also willing to deny access to healthcare to millions of Americans.
By leading one of the nation’s most sustained and visible anti-poverty efforts as co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival, Barber has become one of the country's most prominent activists and speakers, known for his fusion politics approach.
Who is Rev. William J Barber II?
Rev. William J. Barber II has made a name for himself as a powerful speaker and organizer, known for his "fusion politics" approach. He delivered an electrifying speech at the 2016 Democratic National Convention that was called a "drop the mic" moment by one commentator. Barber also regularly organizes and marches with groups such as fast-food workers and union members, at a time when both political parties have been accused of ignoring the working class.
Barber has also been outspoken about the importance of voter turnout among marginalized communities, saying, "there is a sleeping giant in America." He believes that poor and low-wealth folks now make up 30% of the electorate in every state and over 40% of the electorate in every state where the margin of victory for the presidency was less than 3%. He argues that if these marginalized communities vote, they could fundamentally shift every election in the country.
Starting this month, Barber will take his fusion politics approach to the Ivy League as the founding director of Yale Divinity School's new Center for Public Theology and Public Policy. In this role, he hopes to train a new generation of leaders who will be comfortable "creating a just society both in the academy and in the streets."
Rev. William J. Barber II has announced that he will step down as pastor of the North Carolina church where he has served for 30 years, but he has made it clear that he is not retiring from activism. He remains the president of Repairers of the Breach, a nonprofit organization that promotes moral fusion politics.
Against Christian Nationalism
Barber has recently spoken out against White Christian nationalism, a movement that insists that the US was founded as a Christian nation and seeks to erase the separation of church and state.
When asked why poverty is so urgent to face now, Barber responded: "Doctor King used to say America has a high blood pressure of creeds, but an anemia of deeds. In every generation we’ve had to have a moment to focus on the urgency of the right now. We will never be able to fix our democracy until we fully face these issues. We will constantly ebb and flow out of recessions because inequality hurts us all." Barber also cites Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz's book "The Price of Inequality," which argues that it costs more as a nation for these inequalities to exist than it would for us to fix them. Barber also argues that paying a living wage would not hurt business, but rather it is the lack of it that does.
Rev. William J. Barber II, an advocate of "fusion politics" has spoken out against the concept of White Christian nationalism, arguing that it is flawed because it goes against the core values of Christianity.
He explains that the scriptures say that God loves all people and that if a nation is going to embrace Christian values, then one must know what those values are, and they certainly aren't discriminatory or exclusive. He also explains his view of the word “evangel” which means good news and that when Jesus used that phrase it was in his first sermon, which was a public policy sermon. He said it in the face of Caesar, where Caesar had hurt and exploited the poor. He also explains that he embraces the kind of evangelicalism that Jesus embraces and that is to start where Jesus started, preaching good news to the poor.
He also speaks about his health challenges and how he keeps going year after year and keeps himself from being burned out. He finds inspiration in reading the Bible and seeing that all the people that God used in a major way had some physical challenge, it helped him overcome any pity party and made him see that Moses couldn't talk, Ezekiel had strange post-traumatic syndrome types of emotional issues, Jeremiah was crying all the time from his struggles with depression, Paul had a physical thorn in the flesh, Jesus was acquainted with sorrow.
Today's Beau
Republicans are trying to turn themselves back to the appearance of a more "friendly" monster - the smiling hyena.
They won't stop being anti-choice, anti-democracy, and anti-people - they'll continue tearing away at all of the institutions of democratic self-government - it's just that they know they have to ease back on the overt expressions of hatred.
"Plutocracy is definitely what we still want - we've just had the wrong plutocrats leading the party."
I think we can expect to see a lot more smiling hyenas like Rick Scott and Glenn Youngkin and John Kasich.
Beau Of The Fifth Column
Jul 23, 2023
Waiting For That Shoe To Drop
We hope.
Rumors have been flying thick and heavy about how the grand jury has recommended racketeering charges for a whole boatload of co-conspirators, with the big fish to include Mark Meadows, Rudy Patootie, Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, et al.
We haven't heard much of anything from Meadows or Stone, only a little from Rudy, and just the usual daily bullshit from Bannon.
The guy who stands out a bit is Lindsey Graham, and he's particularly interesting to me.
He's been up and down, and flipping and flopping for 5 years, trying to play that shitty Trump game that not even Lindsey Graham likes to play. Nobody's licked more shit off Trump's boots than Lindsey, and nobody's called it quits with Trump more than Lindsey, only for him to go simpering back again. And again. And a-fucking-gain.
But. I think ol' Lindsey has been waiting in the bushes looking for his chance to butt-fuck Trump with a prickly pear.
This is the guy who read, "Donald Trump is a fuckin' idiot", into the official record of official business being officially conducted by the official US Senate. And the context doesn't matter. Yes, he was quoting, and yes, it was part of a statement during which he was voicing anger at Trump's opponents - or was he?
Graham has been badly damaged with this back & forth, on-again-off-again schtick, so I think he went shopping for an immunity deal. I think he figures it'll let him off the hook, get some ice cold badass vengeance against Trump, which will make Lindsey feel like a brass band hero who rode to the rescue and saved mom and home and apple dumplings - or some shit like that.
I dunno, but it sure sounds like a Lindsey Graham kinda thing to do.
Exclusive: racketeering charges based on influencing witnesses and computer trespass, sources say
The Fulton county district attorney investigating Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in the state of Georgia has developed evidence to charge a sprawling racketeering indictment next month, according to two people briefed on the matter.
The racketeering statute in Georgia requires prosecutors to show the existence of an “enterprise” – and a pattern of racketeering activity that is predicated on at least two “qualifying” crimes.
In the Trump investigation, the Fulton county district attorney, Fani Willis, has evidence to pursue a racketeering indictment predicated on statutes related to influencing witnesses and computer trespass, the people said.
Willis had previously said she was weighing racketeering charges in her criminal investigation, but the new details about the direction and scope of the case come as prosecutors are expected to seek indictments starting in the first two weeks of August.
The racketeering statute in Georgia is more expansive than its federal counterpart, notably because any attempts to solicit or coerce the qualifying crimes can be included as predicate acts of racketeering activity, even when those crimes cannot be indicted separately.
The specific evidence was not clear, though the charge regarding influencing witnesses could include Trump’s conversations with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which he asked Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes, the people said – and thereby implicate Trump.
For the computer trespass charge, where prosecutors would have to show that defendants used a computer or network without authority to interfere with a program or data, that would include the breach of voting machines in Coffee county, the two people said.
The breach of voting machines involved a group of Trump operatives – paid by the then Trump lawyer Sidney Powell – accessing the voting machines at the county’s election office and copying sensitive voting system data.
The copied data from the Dominion Voting Systems machines, which are used statewide in Georgia, was then uploaded to a password-protected site from where election deniers could download the materials as part of a misguided effort to prove the 2020 election had been rigged.
Though Coffee county is outside the usual jurisdiction of the Fulton county district attorney’s office, the racketeering statute would allow prosecutors to also charge what the Trump operatives did there by showing it was all aimed towards the goal of corruptly keeping Trump in office.
A spokesperson for Willis did not respond to requests for comment.
The district attorney’s office has spent more than two years investigating whether Trump and his allies interfered in the 2020 election in Georgia, while prosecutors at the federal level are scrutinizing Trump’s efforts to reverse his defeat that culminated in the January 6 Capitol attack.
A special grand jury in Atlanta that heard evidence for roughly seven months recommended charges for more than a dozen people, including the former president himself, its forewoman strongly suggested in interviews, though Willis will have to seek indictments from a regular grand jury.
The grand jury that could decide whether to return an indictment against Trump was seated on 11 July. The selection process was attended by Willis and two prosecutors known to be on the Trump investigation: her deputy district attorney, Will Wooten, and special prosecutor Nathan Wade.
Charges stemming from the Trump investigation are expected to come between the final week of July and the first two weeks of August, the Guardian has previously reported, after Willis told her team to shift to remote work during that period because of security concerns.
The district attorney originally suggested charging decisions were “imminent” in January, but the timetable has been repeatedly delayed after a number of Republicans who acted as fake electors accepted immunity deals as the investigation neared its end.
Today's Bluff-N-Bluster
First, Jordan can't quite come through with the fulfillment on the assumed promise to get all this weaponization stuff cleared away by impeaching Joe Biden, and the AG, and the White House gardener, and then digging up the dead rotting corpse of Joe's 3rd grade teacher and impeaching her too, dammit.
And then, Jordan takes Merrick Garland's visit to the Hill (every AG does this every year), and he tries to spin it like, "The great and powerful Gym has summoned the evil Garland to appear before us and atone for his many dastardly sins."
The GOP is 9 gallons of shit in a 3 gallon bucket.
Fox’s Maria Bartiromo pressed Jim Jordan on impeaching Biden, and Jordan’s answer was a dodge that made it clear that House Republicans aren’t going to pursue impeachment.
Bartiromo asked Jordan about impeachment and then what Republicans would do about Biden.
Jordan answered, “Well, we may — that may be the question too. It may not be about the attorney general so much, although I think there’s important things there, it could be more about the president himself. Again, that’s why Chairman Comer’s going to continue to pursue his investigation. He’s looking to get Hunter Biden’s business partner, Devon Archer, in for a deposition, get that all on the record. He’s been trying to get that done. There’s been a number of times it’s been rescheduled. Hopefully, that happens soon and then we’ll see where we go from there.”
Bartiromo specifically asked Jordan about impeachment, and he answered, talking about Merrick Garland’s upcoming testimony. “Well, he’s scheduled, he is scheduled to come in front of the Judiciary Committee for the annual, every year the attorney general comes in front of the Judiciary Committee in September. That is scheduled already. As we get closer, there’s going to be lots of questions about this particular subject for the attorney general when he’s in front of us in two months.”
Less than a month ago on the very same program, Jim Jordan claimed that impeachment was on the table for Biden. Now, he won’t even say the word in his answers.
The reality is that Jordan’s investigations into Biden have bombed. The House Judiciary Chair doesn’t have the evidence or the votes to impeach President Biden or Attorney General Garland.
Jordan can pay lip service to impeachment to keep the base happy, but his non-answer to Bartiromo confirms that House Republicans may try to impeach Biden, but even they know that it is going nowhere.
To Sum It Up
- Putin sucks
- Ukrainians are awesome
- NATO is getting off cheap
Money quote:
(paraphrasing Yitzhak Rabin) "Ukrainians are going about their everyday lives as if there is no war, while waging war as if there is no everyday life."
WARSAW — Last week, a friend asked me what I could learn from a four-day trip to Ukraine I was planning that I couldn’t glean just by reading the news. It was a fair question. With the trip now behind me, I can answer.
I learned how strange it is to visit a country to which no plane flies and, as of last Monday, no ship sails — thanks to Vladimir Putin’s cruel and cynical withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative through which Ukrainian farm products reached hungry countries like Kenya, Lebanon and Somalia. The only feasible way for a visitor to get from the Polish border to Kyiv is a nine-hour train ride, where the sign inside the carriage door urges, “Be Brave Like Ukraine.”
I learned that you need to download the Air Alert! app to your smartphone as soon as you enter the country. It sounds an alarm every time the system detects drones, missiles or other incoming aerial threats in your vicinity, something that happened time and again during my short stay. Following the alarm, a recording — in English by the “Star Wars” actor Mark Hamill — intones: “Proceed to the nearest shelter. Don’t be careless. Your overconfidence is your weakness.”
I learned that Kyiv is hopping. Despite what the U.S. Embassy says have been 1,620 missile and drone attacks on the city — and despite an economy that contracted 29 percent in the first year of the war — cars jam the roads, people dine in outdoor cafes on well-swept sidewalks and activists, civil servants and elected officials freely share divergent views with visiting columnists. To adapt a phrase attributed to Yitzhak Rabin, Ukrainians are going about their everyday lives as if there is no war, while waging war as if there is no everyday life.
I learned that every member of the American Embassy staff in Kyiv, led by our courageous and cleareyed ambassador, Bridget Brink, volunteered for the duty. They have been separated from their families and living for months on end in hotel rooms. They have the job of overseeing one of the largest U.S. assistance efforts since the Marshall Plan, ensuring that tens of thousands of individual pieces of American military hardware in Ukrainian hands are properly accounted for, reconstituting an embassy that was gutted on the eve of Russia’s invasion and keeping tabs on Russian war crimes — some 95,000 of which have been documented so far by the Ukrainian prosecutor general’s office.
I learned what it was like to sit in conference rooms and walk along corridors that would soon be shattered by Russian ordnance. On Tuesday, I joined a diplomatic group led by Administrator Samantha Power of the United States Agency for International Development on a visit to the port of Odesa. Power met first with Ukrainian officials to discuss logistical options for their exports after Putin’s withdrawal from the grain agreement, then with farmers to discuss issues like de-mining their fields and de-risking their finances. The stately Port Authority building in which the meetings took place, a purely civilian target, was struck barely a day after our departure.
I learned that Ukrainians have no interest in turning their victimization into an identity. Years ago, in Belgrade, I saw how the Serbian government had preserved the wreck of its old defense ministry, hit by NATO bombs in the 1999 Kosovo war, in keeping with its self-pitying perceptions of that war. By contrast, in Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that suffered some of the worst atrocities during Russia’s brief occupation in the early days of the war, I witnessed the transformation of apartment buildings dotted with patched-up bullet holes into trendy co-working spaces. As Anatoliy Fedoruk, the mayor of Bucha, told Power, “Memory will stay in memoirs but residents want to rebuild without reminders.”
I learned that Ukrainians aren’t likely to trade sovereign territory for Western security assurances, much less for some kind of armistice deal with Moscow. They tried the former in the 1990s with the Budapest Memorandum, in which they surrendered the nuclear arsenal on their soil to Russia for the sake of toothless guarantees of territorial integrity. They tried the latter with the equally toothless Minsk agreements after Russia’s first invasion in 2014. The goal of Western policy should be to provide Ukraine with the military means they need to win, rather than to pressure Ukraine into again bargaining away its rights to sovereignty and security for the sake of assuaging our anxieties about Russian escalation.
I learned that, for all the aid we’ve given Ukraine, we are the true beneficiaries in the relationship, and they the true benefactors. Ben Wallace, Britain’s usually thoughtful defense minister, suggested after this month’s NATO summit that Ukrainians should show more gratitude to their arms suppliers. That gets the relationship backward. NATO countries are paying for their long-term security in money, which is cheap, and munitions, which are replaceable. Ukrainians are counting their costs in lives and limbs lost.
I am writing this column from Warsaw Chopin Airport. Parked outside the terminal are jetliners destined for Doha, Istanbul, Rome, Toronto, New York. The sight of them here could scarcely have been imagined 40 years ago. It came true because the Polish people remained, in Ronald Reagan’s apt words, “magnificently unreconciled to oppression.”
Today, it is Poland’s neighbors in Ukraine who are magnificently unreconciled to invasion. What I learned from four days under closed skies is never to take a bustling airport scene like this for granted.
Putting Things Together
I'm not sure any single idea can flourish all by its little ol' lonesome - at least it's extremely rare that anything stands alone. I can't think of anything anyway, and of course, if I can't think of it, then it must not exist, right?
Hops for beer flourish under solar panels. They’re not the only crop thriving in the shade.
He grows hops, used to make beer, and in recent years has also been generating electricity, with solar panels sprawled across 1.3 hectares (32 acres) of his land in the small hop-making town of Au in der Hallertau, an hour north of Munich in southern Germany.
The pilot project — a collaboration between Wimmer and local solar technology company Hallertauer Handelshaus — was set up in the fall of last year. The electricity made at this farm can power around 250 households, and the hops get shade they’ll need more often as climate change turbocharges summer heat.
Solar panels atop crops has been gaining traction in recent years as incentives and demand for clean energy skyrocket. Researchers look into making the best use of agricultural land, and farmers seek ways to shield their crops from blistering heat, keep in moisture and potentially increase yields. The team in Germany says its effort is the first agrivoltaic project that’s solely focused on hops, but projects have sprouted around the world in several countries for a variety of grains, fruits and vegetables.
Beer-making hops can suffer if exposed to too much sun, said Bernhard Gruber, who’s managing the project’s solar component — and since there were already solar installations on the farm, it made sense to give them a second purpose by mounting them on poles above the crops.
In addition to shielding plants from solar stress, the shade could mean “water from precipitation lasts longer, leaving more in the soil” and that “the hops stay healthier and are less susceptible to diseases,” Gruber said. A scientific analysis of the benefits for the plants will be concluded in October.
The farm is working with researchers to understand how to get the balance right, so the hops get enough shade and sunlight for the best harvests each year.
In the U.K., where weather is also getting hotter and more variable, a team of researchers is looking at how to retrofit solar panels onto greenhouses or polytunnels — frames covered in plastic where crops grow underneath — with semi-transparent or transparent installations.
“You can get your renewables from the land that you do have covered and you don’t need to do these massive solar arrays on good agricultural land, which is what you’ve tended to see around to date,” said Elinor Thompson, a reader at Greenwich University who’s leading the research.
Thompson, a plant biologist, and her team are working with a fruit farm in Kent in southern England to make sure the plants also get the best out of solar structures.
“Nobody can afford to lose crop, especially in current conditions,” she said. “We are assuming that British summers are going to get hotter, we have a problem with water shortages, we need to be efficient in all parts of agriculture.”
Having shade where it’s useful and monitoring the effects of different arrangements of solar panels on a variety of crops will help the world prepare for a more climate-variable future, Thompson said.
In East Africa, which has suffered from a long and punishing drought that scientists said was worsened by human-caused climate change, solar panels can also help keep moisture in plants and soil and reduce the amount of water needed, said Richard Randle-Boggis, a research associate at the University of Sheffield who’s developing two agrivoltaic systems in Kenya and Tanzania.
Randle-Boggis said the systems can be used for “climate change resilience and a way of improving the growing environment for crops, while also providing low carbon electricity.” He said that some of the crops under the partial shade of solar panels are using around 16% less irrigation.
The solar-covered farms saw increased yields for maize, Swiss chard and beans, and while growers experienced lower yields for onions and sweet peppers, they still had the added benefit of clean electricity generation.
But crop yields can also “vary depending on the weather conditions because we’re seeing the climate changing,” said Randle-Boggis, although he added he was “really surprised and impressed with some of the results that we’re seeing” for solar-covered crops.
“Maize is grown by about 50% of farmers in Tanzania. Maize is also a sun loving plant. So the fact that we had an 11% yield increase in maize ... is a phenomenal result,” he said.
And Randle-Boggis said these projects can continue to be replicated around the world for many different crops, as long as systems are “designed with the local context in mind.”
A future with more crops under solar is Gruber’s hope for beer-making hops, too.
“At the end of the year we will set up another solar park over hops,” which will have about 10 times the electricity-generating potential as the current project, Gruber said.
But that’s still just the beginning.
“We’re getting lots of inquires from hop farmers,” he said, “even from abroad.”
So there's probably something, but my default position is that nothing in nature exists exclusive of everything else in nature. It's all evolutionary. Everything comes from (and so is part of) everything else.
Ooh. See what I did there? I got all zen and shit.
Anyway, same goes for anything people come up with. Everything goes with everything else.
So I get a little freaky when somebody takes one thing and marries it up with something else, either to create a new thing, or to prove that a technology thingie and a nature thingie can be put together in a way that benefits everything.
He grows hops, used to make beer, and in recent years has also been generating electricity, with solar panels sprawled across 1.3 hectares (32 acres) of his land in the small hop-making town of Au in der Hallertau, an hour north of Munich in southern Germany.
The pilot project — a collaboration between Wimmer and local solar technology company Hallertauer Handelshaus — was set up in the fall of last year. The electricity made at this farm can power around 250 households, and the hops get shade they’ll need more often as climate change turbocharges summer heat.
Solar panels atop crops has been gaining traction in recent years as incentives and demand for clean energy skyrocket. Researchers look into making the best use of agricultural land, and farmers seek ways to shield their crops from blistering heat, keep in moisture and potentially increase yields. The team in Germany says its effort is the first agrivoltaic project that’s solely focused on hops, but projects have sprouted around the world in several countries for a variety of grains, fruits and vegetables.
Beer-making hops can suffer if exposed to too much sun, said Bernhard Gruber, who’s managing the project’s solar component — and since there were already solar installations on the farm, it made sense to give them a second purpose by mounting them on poles above the crops.
In addition to shielding plants from solar stress, the shade could mean “water from precipitation lasts longer, leaving more in the soil” and that “the hops stay healthier and are less susceptible to diseases,” Gruber said. A scientific analysis of the benefits for the plants will be concluded in October.
The farm is working with researchers to understand how to get the balance right, so the hops get enough shade and sunlight for the best harvests each year.
In the U.K., where weather is also getting hotter and more variable, a team of researchers is looking at how to retrofit solar panels onto greenhouses or polytunnels — frames covered in plastic where crops grow underneath — with semi-transparent or transparent installations.
“You can get your renewables from the land that you do have covered and you don’t need to do these massive solar arrays on good agricultural land, which is what you’ve tended to see around to date,” said Elinor Thompson, a reader at Greenwich University who’s leading the research.
Thompson, a plant biologist, and her team are working with a fruit farm in Kent in southern England to make sure the plants also get the best out of solar structures.
“Nobody can afford to lose crop, especially in current conditions,” she said. “We are assuming that British summers are going to get hotter, we have a problem with water shortages, we need to be efficient in all parts of agriculture.”
Having shade where it’s useful and monitoring the effects of different arrangements of solar panels on a variety of crops will help the world prepare for a more climate-variable future, Thompson said.
In East Africa, which has suffered from a long and punishing drought that scientists said was worsened by human-caused climate change, solar panels can also help keep moisture in plants and soil and reduce the amount of water needed, said Richard Randle-Boggis, a research associate at the University of Sheffield who’s developing two agrivoltaic systems in Kenya and Tanzania.
Randle-Boggis said the systems can be used for “climate change resilience and a way of improving the growing environment for crops, while also providing low carbon electricity.” He said that some of the crops under the partial shade of solar panels are using around 16% less irrigation.
The solar-covered farms saw increased yields for maize, Swiss chard and beans, and while growers experienced lower yields for onions and sweet peppers, they still had the added benefit of clean electricity generation.
But crop yields can also “vary depending on the weather conditions because we’re seeing the climate changing,” said Randle-Boggis, although he added he was “really surprised and impressed with some of the results that we’re seeing” for solar-covered crops.
“Maize is grown by about 50% of farmers in Tanzania. Maize is also a sun loving plant. So the fact that we had an 11% yield increase in maize ... is a phenomenal result,” he said.
And Randle-Boggis said these projects can continue to be replicated around the world for many different crops, as long as systems are “designed with the local context in mind.”
A future with more crops under solar is Gruber’s hope for beer-making hops, too.
“At the end of the year we will set up another solar park over hops,” which will have about 10 times the electricity-generating potential as the current project, Gruber said.
But that’s still just the beginning.
“We’re getting lots of inquires from hop farmers,” he said, “even from abroad.”
Congratulations to all the
beer-drinkers
and Greenies -
we got us a big fat 'W'
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)