A second woman has come forward to charge San Diego County Supervisor Nathan Fletcher with sexual harassment. (NBC 7 San Diego/Eric S. Page)
People now living could break previous longevity records, and keep on going and going. But not in America, where lifespans are declining. (Brandon Vigliarolo / The Register)
Interestingly, while average longevity has steadily increased for centuries, the maximum lifespan has been relatively unchanged since the 1700s. In other words, most people are living longer, but the longest-lived people today are about the same age as the longest-lived people 200+ years ago. That leads some scientists to believe there’s a hard, biological limit to human lifespan.
Not so, according to new research.
Related: The last living person who was born in the 19th Century in the US was Susannah Mushatt Jones. She was 116 years old when she died in 2016.
Ian Welsh predicts dire outcomes for the US as a result of the Trump indictment.
America and most nations let their elites slide on crimes that don’t harm other elites. This has allowed a whole lot of evil acts to occur unpunished and for elites to act knowing they will never be held responsible for their actions. This goes beyond political acts, notice how somehow almost none of the people who took advantage of Jeffrey Epstein’s smorgasboard of underaged teenaged girls has been charged with a crime.
…. almost every powerful politician and every CEO of an important company has done things which are criminal acts: violations of red-letter law.”
This change to political norms opens the hunting season on politicians and will lead to political instability. Politicians will be charged, based not on their guilt, but based on political experience.
This is a further step towards America becoming ungovernable, and potentially a step towards a break-up of the Union, since red-state elites will be persecuted by blue state elites and vice-versa. With no norm of what laws elites are immune to, no member of the elite will feel safe. Either one side or the other must win and set a new norm, or the country must divide.
Trump could instead have been charged for crimes he did before he was President, but the crimes he was doing then “were the acceptable sort of crimes that real-estate moguls commit and aren’t charged for and if they had gone after him then, they would have made many other important people vulnerable.”
This is the consequence of having a two-tier justice system where some crimes are only crimes when committed by little people and then weaponizing that.
What Trump should have been charged with, if elites were smart, was his actual crime against elites, where he broke a norm: trying to stage a coup. By charging him with something lesser, they have shattered a consensus norm and a great price will be paid for it.
A Google VP says Microsoft is abusing its dominance in on-premises software and Office 365 to give it an unfair advantage in the cloud (Foo Yun Chee / Reuters).
“Microsoft definitely has a very anti-competitive posture in cloud. They are leveraging a lot of their dominance in the on-premise business as well as Office 365 and Windows to tie Azure and the rest of cloud services and make it hard for customers to have a choice,” Vice President Amit Zavery told Reuters.
I covered the 2001 US v. Microsoft antitrust lawsuit closely, so this is very familiar to me. Then it was about Internet Explorer and Windows, and now it’s about different technologies, but the same strategy.
Zavery says Microsoft is cutting sweetheart deals with European cloud providers to make those cloud providers’ antitrust complaints disappear.
Microsoft, of course, denies all.
A Maryland court reinstated Adnan Syed’s conviction and ordered a new hearing. (NPR).
This seems deeply wrong to me. Syed’s conviction was vacated after the court essentially found both his defense and the prosecution were incompetent. Nothing in the appellate court’s ruling changes or disputes that.
Hae Min Lee’s family’s rights were violated—but how does reversing the vacation of Syed’s conviction fix that? It just adds another wrong to the previous litany of abuse.
I had been thinking the Stormy Daniels case was bullshit, but Judd Legum makes the case why it matters.
Elections are supposed to be about information and transparency. Daniels’ statements could have changed enough voters’ minds to swing the election the other way.
Trump schemed to conceal relevant information from the voting public in the days before the election, engaged in an elaborate coverup, and then lied about his involvement.
This deceit may have changed the course of history.
A writer signing their name as “Jenka” on Medium describes a Midjourney experiment to envision selfie photos throughout history, which gave the subjects big smiles, making them all look American.
Smiling is not a universal language; the big, confident grin is uniquely American, Jenka says. Eastern Europeans see someone who smiles all the time as foolish or dishonest.
Jenka quotes French-American journalist Camille Baker, who writes about a woman Baker calls “Sofiya:”
“The expectation was, you have to smile eight hours a day,” [Sofiya says]. A 41-year-old Russian émigré who had been living in the United States for the past decade, Sofiya “was a proficient English speaker,” Baker writes, but it was in her job as a bank teller that she “came face-to-face with her deficiency in speaking ‘American.’ This other English language, made up of not just words but also facial expressions and habits of conversation subtle enough to feel imagined. Smiling almost constantly was at the core of her duties as a teller. As she smiled at one customer after another, she would wince inwardly at how silly it felt. There was no reason to smile at her clients, she thought, since there was nothing particularly funny or heartwarming about their interactions. And her face hurt.”
This Disturbing Theory Explains Pixar’s Cars.
By Jason Torchinsky at Jalopnik.
Things I saw around the neighborhood
