The virus that causes Covid-19 can remain in some people’s bodies for a long time. A growing number of scientists think that lingering virus is a root cause of long Covid.
New research has found the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in the blood of long Covid patients up to a year after infectionbut not in people who have fully recovered from Covid. Virus has also been found in tissues including the brain, lungs, and lining of the gut, according to scientists and studies
The findings suggest that leftover reservoirs of virus could be provoking the immune system in some people, causing complications such as blood clots and inflammation, which may fuel certain long Covid symptoms, scientists say.
A group of scientists and doctors are joining forces to focus research on viral persistence and aim to raise $100 million to further the search for treatments. Called the Long Covid Research Initiative, the group is run by the PolyBio Research Foundation, a Mercer Island, Wash., based nonprofit focused on complex chronic inflammatory diseases.
Among the strongest evidence of viral persistence in long Covid patients is a new study by Harvard researchers published Friday in the journal of Clinical Infectious Diseases. Researchers detected the spike protein of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in a large majority of 37 long Covid patients in the study and found it in none of 26 patients in a control group.
Patients’ blood was analyzed up to a year after initial infection, says David R. Walt, a professor of pathology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard Medical School and lead researcher of the study. Dr. Walt isn’t currently involved with the long Covid initiative.
A year after infection, some patients had levels of viral spike protein that were as high as they did earlier in their illness, Dr. Walt says. Such levels long after initial infection suggest that a reservoir of active virus is continuing to produce the spike protein because the spike protein typically doesn’t have a long lifetime, he adds.
Dr. Walt plans to test antivirals such as Paxlovid or remdesivir to see if the drugs help clear the virus and eliminate spike protein from the blood. He says it’s possible that for some people, the normal course of medication isn’t enough to clear the virus. Such cases may require “a much longer exposure to these antivirals to fully clear,” says Dr. Walt.
One of the research group’s goals is to find a way for people to identify whether they continue to have the virus in their bodies. There is no easy way to determine this now.
Long Covid patients experience such a wide range of long-term symptoms that scientists think there is likely more than one cause, however. Some cases may be fueled by organ damage, for instance.
Yet consensus is growing around the idea that lingering virus plays a significant role in long Covid.Preliminary research from immunologist Akiko Iwasaki’s laboratory at Yale University documented T or B cell activity in long Covid patients’ blood, suggesting that patients’ immune systems are continuing to react to virus in their bodies. Dr. Iwasaki is a member of the new initiative.
In a 58-person study published in the Annals of Neurology in March, University of California, San Francisco researchers also found SARS-CoV-2 proteins circulating in particles in long Covid patients’ blood, especially in those with symptoms such as fatigue and trouble concentrating.
Now, the group is completing a study using imaging techniques and tissue biopsies to detect persistent virus or reactivation of other viruses in tissue. It also is looking at T-cell immune responses in tissues and whether they correlate with symptoms.
Some people may harbor the virus and don’t have long-term symptoms, says Timothy Henrich, an associate professor of medicine at UCSF involved with the study and a member of the long Covid initiative. For others, lingering virus may produce problems.
“I think there’s a real amount of mounting evidence that really suggests that there is persistent virus in some people,” says Dr. Henrich.
This illness is going to be plaguing society for a long time (pardon the pun.) I wish that people would ]take it more seriously. We know that the vaccines prevent hospitalization and death in most people and there’s a lot of evidence that they inhibit infection as well.They are widely available. If everyone got them and stayed up to date a lot fewer people would get this thing. If everyone followed some common sense mitigation efforts when the virus is surging, it would be even better. I’ll never understand the resistance to doing any of this. It’s the difference between life and disability and death for an awful lot of people.
Rather than look backwards 21 years on this September 11th, let’s look back even further.
Sarah Churchwell is a professor of American literature at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study. The author of “Behold America: The Entangled History of ‘America First’ and ‘the American Dream,'” Churchwell examines Trumpism after Trump and America’s recurring flirtation with keeping out the undesirables.
Great gosh a’mighty, a host of insurrectionist refugees from the Trump administration are setting up America First think tanks and foundations and (oh, my) organizations aimed at curtailing legal immigration — even an “America-first education” academy for parents who want their kids uncontaminated by foreign ideas like the theory of relativity and, one supposes, democracy.
Phrases like the “American Dream” and the “melting pot” are commonly used today to describe ideas about American identity and inclusivity, but it’s “America First” that has been more closely associated with debates about inclusivity generally and immigration specifically — and for much longer.
The “American Dream,” for example, first appeared in American political conversations at the turn of the 20th century, to argue against the divisiveness created by wealth inequality. Among the earliest uses of the phrase I’ve found was in a nationally syndicated article in 1900 called “Rich Men and Democracy,” arguing that every republic in history was endangered not by disgruntled ordinary citizens but by “discontented multi-millionaires,” because they are “very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality.” Submitting to wealthy elites’ divisive demands for special privileges would mark “the end of the American dream,” because that dream was one of democratic parity and equality of opportunity.
By contrast, “America First” emerged much earlier — aptly enough, during the original nativist movement of the 1850s, when the Native American or American Party (nicknamed the Know Nothings) formed to defend what its members considered the nation’s “real” Protestant culture from the threat of immigrant Catholicism.
America Firstism has a long history through which Churchwell walks readers, much of it a century ago influenced by “eugenicist ideas of racial purity and the ethnic superiority of White Europeans over everyone else.” Nazism managed to discredit those notions for a few decades as a desire among Americans grew for “doctrines of liberal democracy and inclusivity.” But, like Michael Myers, it’s hard to keep nativism in its grave for long.
With the yawning wealth inequality of Gilded Age 2.0, America Firstism and “discontented multi-[b]illionaires” are back.
I think a lot of people fail to appreciate how anti LEGAL immigrant the average Republican is now.
Among Republicans with a college degree, 60% want to cut LEGAL immigration in half. It's 70% of those w/a HS diploma only.
White nationalism, and the specifically white Christian nationalism the decidedly un-Christian Trump saw and exploited for his own aggrandizement, is resurgent once again, kick-started by the presence of a black man in the White House. And by brown migrants from south of the border, as Trump, Stephen Miller, and Fox News made sure to remind us at every opportunity.
Now the America First Policy Institute declares that its slogan is “America First, Always” and that its immigration policy will mean no longer putting “America last” — echoing the language of a March 1922 editorial from what was then the nation’s most popular weekly, the Saturday Evening Post,as it harangued its readers about the “immigration problem” caused by “our policy of putting the alien and his interests first, and America last.”
These “America First” initiatives go beyond attempts at excluding the “alien” that were already divisive, and futile, a century ago. One of the most prominent spokesmen for “America First” today is Nicholas Fuentes, a white Christian nationalist who organized the America First Political Action Conference earlier this year. Fuentes was also present at the storming of the Capitol, as were his “Groyper” followers, waving his “AF” flags. Fuentes declared: “It is the American people, and our leader, Donald Trump, against everybody else in this country and this world.” That is certainly what “America First” has meant in the past, as its leaders promise that only they can put America first, by inflaming divisions against nearly every other human being. But it is “America First” that endures, not its erstwhile leaders — and its history offers a pretty good indication of what to expect from Trumpism without Trump.
Better than Trumpism with Trump. But not by much.
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Regretters, the Post suggests, “include a healthy population of liberal arts majors, who may be responding to pervasive social cues.” Those cues are not just social but financial. They’ve matriculated into a dismal job market:
As a rule, those who studied STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — are much more likely to believe they made the right choice, while those in social sciences or vocational courses second-guess themselves.
There doesn’t seem to be much relationship between loans, gender, race or school selectivity and your regrets. Though, as you may have guessed, our analysis of Fed data shows that the higher your income is today, the less you regret the major you chose back in college.
Before I climb onto my soapbox, here’s Roy Edroso’s take on the survey (emphasis mine):
The general idea — again, you’ve heard it a million times — is that you’re supposed to be practical and treat college as a trade school; if you’re more inclined to study something that is not a cinch to pay off big, you must suppress that instinct because money’s the only reason to go to school or, really, to do anything.
Within the money-making margins there is some flexibility: If you can’t stand the sight of blood but love logic puzzles, for example, you can pursue the law instead of medicine, notwithstanding it’s marginally less well-paying. And if your parents don’t think they can bully or beat you into the hard work necessary for either, you can do something further down the money tree — the MBA track is a hot one; God knows talent and taste are no prerequisite for success there.
But if you really want to learn how to paint or act or write or dance or just contemplate the Verities, unless your family is large and rich enough to approve of a cultural addition to the clan, you are destined for violent headwinds.
Unless, for you, a child of God on whom no man has claim, this stuff is absurdly beside the point.
Edroso pursued acting and does not regret it, although he has no IMDB entry. There was a little rock and roll, and some writing as well. “I am content. In no alternative Life of Edroso was I ever going to study anything sensible, because Anything Sensible has always bored the piss out of me.”
The Post allows that “critical thinking taught in humanities courses allows students to adapt to jobs that may not have existed when they enrolled in college.” Fine. But their studies may also have made them more adaptable in general. But that’s not what The Market wants, is it? Or critical thinkers.
Still, being educated was once an end in itself, and the premise underlying the Framers’ vision of this democratic republic. “There shall be reserved the lot No. 16, of every township, for the maintenance of public schools,” they wrote in Land Ordinance of 1785. “Schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged,” reads the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. Both were passed before ratification of the U.S. Constitution. By education the Framers, men of letters, did not mean apprenticeship to a trade.
“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”— Letter from John Adams to John Jebb, September 10, 1785
Today universities are seen as glorified tech schools. It’s offensive — perverse — the notion that the purpose of education is to mold one to serve the economy rather than oneself and one’s community.
The idea that the value of a person is measured in wealth or income is also offensive. “Money answereth all things,” declared one of those prosperity gospel preachers who once ran on AM radio on Sunday, misrepresenting Ecclesiastes. The love of money is poisioning our society and debasing people’s souls, not that most notice or care.
A lot of Americans seem to think the only courses of study offered nowadays are “gender studies,” “CRT,” and “wokeness.”
Lot of responses on my timeline said any major other than “STEM” is worthless woke indoctrination.
Science, technology, engineering, and … math?
LOL
When science tells them they are wrong, suddenly they don’t believe in any of THAT anymore either and you don’t have to look beyond the most recent pandemic and a public cheering a president telling them to inject aquarium cleaner and shove lightbulbs up their asses.
Last year about 3 million undergraduate degrees were awarded in the US. Of those, less than 0.4% were in some variation of cultural and gender studies. Less than 0.4%. Hardly a tsunami of wokeness there.
And, hey, what do you even do with a Gender Studies major anyway? Well, funny thing, a lot of the people with those degrees also got LAW degrees and are now lawyers, judges, magistrates, and judicial workers. Seems understanding people makes them better at their job.
Many become managers, social workers, human resource specialists, doctors, nurses, teachers. Some even join the military. Professionals with an in-depth understanding of how people fit together in large groups? That’s important to making a lot of organizations work better.
That is, if your pea-brain is limber enough to stretch that far.
Back in 2015, the New York Times consulted Cheshire Calhoun, chairwoman of the American Philosophical Association and a philosophy professor at Arizona State University:
Ms. Calhoun notes that philosophy is not about toga-wearing thinkers who stroke big beards these days. Rather, she says, the degree denotes skills in critical thinking and writing that are valuable in a variety of fields that can pay extremely well.
And so what if they don’t? I posted this in November 2015:
At Salon, Avery Kolers, philosophy professor at the University of Louisville pushes back at the notion that market price is any measure of social worth:
… What kind of person would assume without justification or explanation that an endeavor (or a person’s) value, derives solely from the amount of money it can make?
A market economy is a tool for securing human welfare and promoting human freedom. It may or may not be effective at those things, but either way, that’s what it is: a tool. Sadly, the contemporary Republican Party has elevated that tool into a religion, bowing before it and disparaging those who don’t.
But here’s the thing: Rubio (or my recruiter, for that matter) could have made the exact same point using religious studies or theology as an example of a pointy-headed field of study we should not be subsidizing. Church gigs on average pay even more poorly than philosophy, I’m pretty sure, and why should taxpayers be encouraging private religious training?
I have a philosophy degree myself, as I’ve mentioned before:
I grew up thinking that education was its own reward. In college, I studied, philosophy, art, drama and science. Yeah, I waited tables and traveled for awhile. After college, I was appalled at the attitude of many customers. They’d ask if I was in college. No, I told them, I’d graduated. Next question: What was your major?
When I told them, their eyes went blank. “But what are you going to do with it,” they’d ask. You could see the gears going round in their heads. How did that (a philosophy degree) translate into *that* as they mentally rubbed their finger$$ together.
Then again, there were those two suited, young businessmen dining on their expense accounts one evening at Table 29.
“Tom, where have you been? Haven’t seen you here lately,” one asked as I approached their table.
I told them I had taken the summer off for a solo, cross-country trip. I’d driven out to Los Angeles, then up the coast and as far as Alaska. I had just come back to work.
They looked at each other and you could see it in their eyes: What the hell are we doing?
Life’s not always about size (of your paycheck).
At Netroots Nation-Pittsburgh last month a philosophy major who designed U.S. factories (me; second degree in engineering) and a communications major with a theater background who negotiates labor disputes were discussing a mutual friend with a Ph.D. in comparative literature who once consulted for the auto industry and is now perhaps the internet’s premier independent journalist in national security and civil liberties. It’s funny what those liberal arts types can manage.
We don’t get rich, but then rich was never the point. Of course, back in the day the costs of schooling were not what they are now.
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(I missed the Blu-ray release of this docuseries back in July. I don’t have a Blu-ray copy for appraisal, but JICYMI here’s my 2021 review based on the Disney+ premiere).
We went to see those movies with Elvis. They’d all scream when he came on screen. So we thought “That’s a good job!” – John Lennon, from a television interview.
By the time the Beatles “debuted” on The Ed Sullivan Show in early 1964, they already had a rich 7-year history. The four polished pros in slick suits didn’t simply pop out of Liverpool fully formed; they had paid their dues toiling in sweaty cellar clubs and seedy strip joints (including the pre-Ringo “Hamburg period” from 1960-1962). But for fans here in the colonies, they descended like gods from the heavens.
People of “a certain age” reflexively say they “remember” watching the Beatles perform on Sullivan nearly 57 years ago (whether they did or not). For me that “memory” is fuzzy, for a couple of reasons. On February 9, 1964, I was 7 years old; too young to grok the hormonal/cultural impact of this “screaming ‘yeah-yeah’ music” (as my dad labeled any rock ’n’ roll song he heard wafting from my room throughout my formative years).
Also, I was living in Fairbanks, Alaska. At the time, none of the local TV stations were equipped to carry live network feeds. We would get Walter Cronkite a day late (the tapes had to be shipped from Seattle via commercial jet). And weekly programs like Sullivan were broadcast anywhere from 1 to 3 weeks later than they aired in the Lower 48. So technically I “remember” watching the Beatles “live” on Sullivan…on a slight tape delay.
In the Summer of 1967, I discovered two things that changed my life. As much as I would like to be able to tell you that it was body painting and tripping on acid…I can’t. Mainly because I had only recently turned 11. The first thing I discovered was Mad magazine (which undoubtedly explains much to long-time readers).
The second thing was record collecting. I scored my first-ever haul of vinyl, blowing three months’ allowance at the JCPenney in Fairbanks, Alaska. I bought two LPs (at $3.98 a pop), and a 45. The LPs were Revolver and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and the 45 was “Penny Lane” / “Strawberry Fields Forever”. That was my gateway drug to all the music (from psychedelic and garage to metal and prog and punk and new wave and everything in between) that has become a crucial element of my life to this day.
Flash-forward 35 years. I was enjoying my first visit to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. At the Beatles exhibit, I happened upon a glass case that contained some weathered pieces of paper with hand-written lyrics. I lingered over one, which was initially tough to decipher, with all the scribbled-out words and such:
But you know I know when it’s a bean? Huh? It still wasn’t registering as to what I was looking at. However, when I got to: I think I know I mean-er-yes, but it’s all wrong. That is I think I disagree I realized that I was “this” close to John Lennon’s original handwritten draft of “Strawberry Fields Forever”. My mind was blown. Here I stand, head in hand, with my eyes but inches away from a tangible manifestation of genius.
Suddenly, I panicked. Was I worthy enough to look at it? Should I turn my face away, so it wouldn’t melt like the Nazis’ in Raiders of the Lost Ark when Belloq lifts the lid of the Sacred Object? “Don’t look at it, Marion!” I exclaimed to no one in particular. At any rate, I was overcome; there was something profoundly moving about the experience.
[Intermission]
By 1969, the Beatles had done enough “living” to suit several normal lifetimes, and did so with the whole world looking in. It’s almost unfathomable how they could have achieved as much as they did, and at the end of all, still be only in their twenties.
Are there any other recording artists who have ever matched the creative growth that transpired over the scant six years that it took to evolve from the simplicity of Meet the Beatles to the sophistication of Abbey Road?
Hindsight being 20/20, should we really be so shocked to see the four haggard and sullen “old guys” who mope through the 1970 documentary, Let it Be? Filmed in 1969 and directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the movie was originally intended to be a TV special but ended up documenting the “making of” the eponymous album (there were also snippets of the band working on several songs that ended up on Abbey Road).
Sadly, the film has since weathered a rep as hard evidence of the band’s disintegration. Granted, there is some on-camera bickering (most famously, in a scene where an uncharacteristically riled-up George reaches the end of his tether with Paul’s fussiness).
Still, signs of a deeply rooted musical camaraderie remain in that outdoor mini concert filmed on a London rooftop. If you look closely, the boys are exchanging glances that telegraph they’re having a grand time jamming out; an affirmation that this is what this band of brothers were put on this earth to do, and what the hell …it’s only rock ’n’ roll.
The Let it Be movie doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of how tumultuous 1969 was for the band. As Ian MacDonald notes in his excellent 1994 assessment of the Beatles’ catalog, Revolution in the Head:
The day after the rooftop concert, the band recorded three songs unsuited to recital in a moderate gale [“Two of Us”, “Let it Be”, and “The Long and Winding Road”] before winding the [recording sessions for the “Let it Be” album] up in some relief. An ignominious failure which shook their faith in their collective judgement, it had pushed them to the verge of collapse. […]
[soon after the “Let it Be” sessions wrapped] a fatal rift in the group’s relationships opened when Lennon, Harrison, and Starr asked the Rolling Stones’ American manager Allen Klein to take over the Beatles’ affairs. McCartney, who favoured Linda Eastman’s family firm of management consultants, immediately opened a court battle which long outlasted the remainder of the Beatles’ career.
The dream was over. Or so it seemed. The boys were not about to go out on a sour note (at least in a creative sense). As Bob Spitz writes in his exhaustive band bio, The Beatles:
The tapes from earlier in the year that would eventually become “Let it Be” languished in the can, abandoned, a victim of haste and sloppy execution. “[They] were so lousy and so bad,” according to John – “twenty-nine hours of tape …twenty takes of everything – that “none of us would go near them …None of us could face remixing them; it was [a] terrifying [prospect].” “It was laying [sic] dormant and so we decided ‘Let’s make a good album again,’” George recalled.
One drawback with the Let it Be film (aside from the fact it’s been out of circulation for decades and unavailable on home video outside of the odd bootleg) was its relatively short running time. Considering director Lindsay-Hogg had 60 hours of footage at his disposal, the original 81-minute theatrical cut feels stingy; leaving little room for nuance or providing context to the on-camera bickering the 1970 film is chiefly remembered for.
Perhaps predictably in this age of Tweet-length attention spans, there has been much lamentation and rending of garments regarding the decidedly less stingy running time of Peter Jackson’s nearly 8-hour long Get Back, his oft delayed and long-awaited re-edit, sifted from Lindsay-Hogg’s trove of footage (now streaming on Disney+ as a 3-part series). All I can say to those folks is I’ve got no time for you right now, don’t bother me.
The beauty of Jackson’s film is that his extended cut allows room for nuance and context around those storied studio spats, which in fact did not “cause” the break-up of the Beatles; rather they were symptoms of a longtime creative partnership that was literally “aging out”. Three-quarters of the band (John Paul, and George) had been collaborating since they were in their mid-teens; now they were all in their late 20s.
Like any other human being, as each member of the band matured, their individual priorities (as people and as creative artists) diverged. This was evidenced by the release of solo albums from all four members in 1970, the same year Let It Be saw its belated release: Ringo’s Beaucoups of Blues and Sentimental Journey, Paul’s McCartney, John’s John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, and George’s epic triple album All Things Must Pass.
In fact, one of the film’s greatest delights is catching snippets of songs (still in their infancy) that would end up on later solo albums. John sings “On the Road to Marakesh/Child of Nature” which would turn up in 1971’s Imagine (with different lyrics) as “Jealous Guy” and works on refining a few lines of verse for “Gimme Some Truth” (also destined for Imagine).
George runs a song by the lads that he’s “been working on” called “All Things Must Pass” (it’s already well-formed at that stage). Paul noodles out a recognizable bit of “Another Day” on the piano, which would be his first solo single hit in 1971, and the gorgeous intro to “Backseat of My Car” (a highlight of 1971’s Ram).
Get Back apes the basic structure of Lindsay-Hogg’s Let it Be; the shoot (initially intended to end up as a TV documentary) begins with fitful and half-hearted rehearsals on a sound stage in the drafty (and acoustically-challenged) Twickenham Film Studios. Paul tries to play cheerleader to his cranky band mates (leading to some of the on-camera “bickering”, although it mostly manifests as passive-aggressive asides).
Director Lindsay-Hogg comes off a bit fitful and half-hearted himself; obviously self-aware that precious shooting days are passing by with relatively no narrative to hang his hat on, he prattles on through most of the first third soliciting ideas to spruce up the planned live performance that the film will culminate with.
At one point, Lindsay-Hogg has a brainstorm to film the concert in an ancient amphitheater in Libya, with the audience shipped in from England on the QE2, but the lads won’t have it (I assume this vignette inspired the “Stonehenge” bit in This Is Spinal Tap). Interestingly, the 1972 Pink Floyd documentary Live at Pompeii included a live performance filmed at the ancient Roman amphitheater in Pompeii, Italy (interspersed with footage of the band working on Dark Side of the Moon in the studio, à la Let it Be).
Once the action moves to the basement of the Beatles’ Apple Corps offices, where a makeshift recording studio has been assembled, the band (and the film) begins to perk up considerably. With the deadline pressure of the now discarded TV special off the table, the band focuses on laying down some tracks, enlisting Glyn Johns as producer (George Martin is seen popping in and out of the sessions on occasion, but for the first time, he was not invited to be at the helm …which in hindsight was an unfortunate decision).
But it’s not until keyboard maestro Billy Preston joins the sessions that the band really begins to bring their “A” game. Ironically, Preston would have never been part of the equation had George not (temporarily) walked out of the project (“See you ‘round the clubs,” he deadpans to his stunned band mates before storming out of frame).
While on his hiatus, George hooked up with his pal Eric Clapton and attended a Ray Charles gig in London. Preston (who the Beatles had originally met on a 1962 tour with Little Richard) was playing organ in Charles’ band.
George invited Preston to hang out at the studio, and he ended up playing keys on several songs (most notably, “Get Back” and “Don’t Let Me Down”), as well as sitting in on the rooftop set. At one point in the film, Paul asks Preston “Has anyone asked you yet if you mind coming in every day?” Preston beams like a beatific Buddha (as if someone is going to say “Fuck you…pay me” to an invitation to sit in with the Beatles!).
I was fascinated by the presence of gentle giant Mal Evans. An enigmatic member of the Beatles’ inner circle, Evans was their Man Friday; bodyguard, road manager, roadie, P.A., and apparently (as evidenced in one scene) an occasional co-lyricist.
In another scene, Evans registers childlike delight as he “plays” the hammer and anvil on an early run-through of “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”. Evans was the person who “discovered” Badfinger and brought them to the Beatles’ attention-which got them signed to Apple. Sadly, in 1976 he was shot dead in his home by LAPD officers, who mistook his air rifle for a real weapon (Evans had been struggling with depression).
Spoiler alert: Jackson saves the iconic rooftop performance for the finale (as Lindsay-Hogg did in Let it Be…but how else could you end it?). Granted, it’s a long and winding road of “fly on the wall” observation to get there, but it makes the payoff of finally seeing the band perform several classic numbers in their entirety sound that much sweeter. For some, spending a day in the life with the Fabs may ultimately feel like it’s all too much …. but do you want to know a secret? I watched Get Back and thought:
You won’t hear about this if you’re watching cable news but it seems like it might be kind of a big deal:
Ukrainian forces pushed deep into Russian-controlled territory Saturday, handing Kyiv some of the most strategically important towns and cities in the northeast of the country and delivering retreating Russian forces one of their biggest setbacks since the start of the war.
In a matter of days, Ukraine retook swaths of its Kharkiv region, where Russians had fought ferociously for months, spending lives and ammunition to take over cities, sometimes a building at a time.
The growing success of Ukraine’s advance signals to Western backers the effectiveness of weapons the U.S. and Europe has given to Kyiv. It comes at a particularly critical time for Western powers, days after Moscow indefinitely suspended natural-gas flows to Europe, raising the prospect of energy rationing this winter.
Russia’s retreat from key cities is likely aimed at avoiding encirclement after Ukraine captured the town of Kupyansk, which sits on a rail and road hub, and severed the last artery that connected Russia with thousands of its front-line troops.
“It’s a complete collapse,” Phillips O’Brien, professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, said about the Russian pullout of forces between Kupyansk and Izyum. “In the battle of Donbas, they probably had more troops deployed there than anywhere and now they seem to be unable to hold anything.”
Just thought you might like to know.
Now back to more speculation about whether Harry and Will have made up.
By the way, here’s what the pro-Putin press has been telling Americans:
The “reasonable chance” was solely based on who the judge was, not the merits of the case. So the prediction of outcome was correct, but the rationale given was wrong. So both half right and half wrong.
Hoenig said that it was reasonable to allow Trump to have a special master review all the documents for both attorney client privilege as well as executive privilege — which was based upon incoherent reasoning and the daft proposition that Trump needed special dispensation because he’s well… Trump. It didn’t pass the laugh test.
Everyone knew it was possible that this hand-picked toadie would likely give him what he wanted but Hoenig was alone in his agreement with the merits of the case. He’s still alone in that. The fact that the DOJ wisely whittled down the case to the classified documents (and also plan to appeal the rest on the merits) in order to ensure that Trump wasn’t down there selling classified information to the highest bidder doesn’t change that.
THE HIVES OF bees that reside within the gardens of Buckingham Palace have been informed of Queen Elizabeth II’s death.
In keeping with one of the stranger traditions connected to the British royal family, the palace’s official beekeeper broke the news of Her Majesty’s death at the age of 96 to the roughly 30,000 bees currently on the grounds, with the royal beekeeper also tying black ribbons around the hives in memory of Queen Elizabeth II.
John Chapple, who has been the royal beekeeper for 15 years, told the Daily Mail Friday that he was also tasked with informing the bees that King Charles III is their “new master” and that they should “treat him well.”
“I’m at the hives now and it is traditional when someone dies that you go to the hives and say a little prayer and put a black ribbon on the hive,” Chapple added of the ritual.
“The person who has died is the master or mistress of the hives, someone important in the family who dies and you don’t get any more important than the Queen, do you? You knock on each hive and say, ‘The mistress is dead, but don’t you go. Your master will be a good master to you.’ I’ve done the hives at Clarence House and I’m now in Buckingham Palace doing their hives.”
Chief Justice John Roberts on Friday defended the authority of the Supreme Court to interpret the Constitution, saying its role should not be called into question just because people disagree with its decisions.
When asked to reflect on the last year at the court in his first public appearance since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Roberts said he was concerned that lately some critics of the court’s controversial decisions have questioned the legitimacy of the court, which he said was a mistake. He did not mention any specific cases or critics by name.
“If the court doesn’t retain its legitimate function of interpreting the constitution, I’m not sure who would take up that mantle. You don’t want the political branches telling you what the law is, and you don’t want public opinion to be the guide about what the appropriate decision is,” Roberts said while being interviewed by two judges from the Denver-based 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals at its conference in Colorado Springs.
That wouldn’t sound like fatuous nonsense if Alito’s Roe decision wasn’t such a hack job and the Republicans hadn’t packed the court with right wing Catholic wingnuts by skirting all normal procedure. Other than that, though, he’s got a point.
GOP chucks that “liberty and justice for all” stuff
Turtles All the Way Down by Sam Hollingsworth
Election integrity is like that old saying about teen boys who brag about their sexual “conquests”: Those who talk about it the most do it the least.
And, brother, do Republicans talk a lot. Like patriotism and freedom that way.
We’ve written plenty here over the years about the GOP’s obsession with election integrity and alleged rampant voter fraud believers can never seem to document. Trump’s Big Lie is just the most successful. Nurturing the impression that there are “so many problems” in elections is the point: to create public demand for solutions to an all-but-nonexistent problem. Barriers to voting operate like a one-way ratchet. Each new restriction passed means to shrink small-D democratic participation incrementally.
Greg Sargent summarizes the lie powering the Republican fervor for election integrity:
Here’s what’s really ugly about this saga: These Republicans aren’t just urging rule-breaking at the polls. They’re also justifying it by claiming in advance that Democrats are the real cheaters, per CNN, thus prefabricating a phony rationale for their own chicanery.
This self-justifying ruse — Democrats will inevitably cheat, so pretty much anything goes to set things right — is absolutely foundational to right-wing efforts to corrupt democracy across the board, including laying the groundwork to steal future elections.
After decades of Republicans promoting the narrative, “Democrats cheat” has become one of those “everyone knows” bits of mental flotsam conservatives take as given. No proof needed. Like “the Earth is flat.”
Sargent recounts efforts by the GOP in Michgan to undermine election rules, all justified by the “reverse-justification” that Democrats cheat, so their cheating is just tit-for-tat:
The 2020 results were confirmed by dozens of court cases and numerous audits. But no matter: The myth of a fraud-riddled 2020 will forever continue justifying whatever means Republicans decide are necessary at any given point.
Republicans are just trying to restore the integrity of our elections, you see.
[…]
For instance, Politico reported that the Republican National Committee recruited prominent Trumpist election deniers— including lawyer Cleta Mitchell — to train poll workers battleground states. This, too, is being done in the name of “election integrity.”
Multiple GOP state-level candidates promise in the name of election integrity to overturn 2022 election results that do not fall Republicans’ way. The very opposite of integrity. Then again, those who talk about it the most….
There is a corollary in right-wing media and in education policy, Sargent notes:
As Nick Catoggio writes at the Dispatch, the presumption of corrupt mainstream media bias runs so deep that it has morphed into an automatic justifier of deceit by right-wing media, no matter how debased. Writer Jennifer Berkshire has located a similar dynamic in right-wing assaults on public education.
Conservatives are forever victims in a diverse world hostile to recognizing their God-given right to minority rule. If they lose, someone must have cheated. Must have. No proof needed. (See post below.)
When that happens, Sargent writes, “anything goes, and it’s all just a power struggle all the way down.”
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Lauren Windsor of The Undercurrent for years has visited public events to question Republicans about controversial stances they and/or their party have taken. Since the MAGA movement emerged, she’s turned “a hidden camera, a Tennessee drawl and a knack for disarming her targets with words of sympathetic conservatism into a loaded political weapon,” the New York Times reported last October:
Posing as a true believer — in Mr. Trump or a stolen 2020 election — Ms. Windsor approaches Republican leaders at party gatherings and tries to coax them into revealing things that they might wish to keep in the G.O.P. family.
Responding to her “sweet, young thing” persona, Republicans “mansplain” public policy positions and their beliefs. Often, with embarrassing frankness. The clips end up on the internet.
Someone was bound to catch on. Last night in Wisconsin, a Republican staffer “made” her:
LIVE THREAD: I’ve been caught in the act at an election denier dinner in Appleton, Wisconsin! 1/
One of the staffers here recognized me and I could see them huddling. They didn’t approach- so I tried not to be paranoid. 2/
But they just had the emcee — Regular Joe — name check me during his opening speech 🫠 3/
I’m still here recording their speeches— they invited me up on stage! I’m minding my p’s and q’s listening to Michael Gableman— the guy who got fired by Robin Vos for spending over $1 million in Wisconsin’s bs election audit — and Gableman addressed me too 4/
He’s saying that Mark Zuckerberg stole the election for Biden and railing against ballot drop boxes. Crying fraud, says that no one has challenged his report 5/
I just raised my hand to ask Gableman a question and they invited me on stage… why he didn’t produce documents from his investigation to the WI judge who held him in contempt… 6/
Gableman wanted me to leave stage, but I insisted on taking a seat since they invited me… 7/
Hands shaking, trying to suppress his rage, Gableman mocked me and evaded the question. He cut our convo short dismissing my inquiries bc I didn’t read his George Soros-Zuckerberg election denying conspiracy report. 8/
WI Assembly Elections Chair Janel Brandtjen was just on calling on all the election deniers in the room to get involved to protect “election integrity”… you should be terrified 9/
Election denier gubernatorial candidate Tim Michels decries “banana republics” and promises WI will lead on “election integrity.” He also promises to transform education in the state through universal school choice. 10/
I left after Michels, but they blocked me from talking to him. I went outside, a couple of attendees yelled at me asking why I came to stir up shit. I replied that did not- that they had in fact called me out and invited me onstage and I merely accepted the invite to engage. 11/
The fellow yelling at me calmed down then and we had a lovely debate, where we actually found common ground about Big Corporate $$ govt corruption. I invited Rocky to drinks if he’s ever in DC. And now I’m driving home.
While Windsor’s work may bear a superficial resemblance to the that of James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas, she reaches targets at public events without costumes or phony resumes.
“In some ways, Ms. Windsor’s stings echo those of perhaps the leading practitioner of stunts meant to deceive Republicans, the comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, who targeted figures including Mr. Pence and Rudolph W. Giuliani for his 2020 movie “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm,” the Times suggests.
The Undercurrent is sponsored by American Family Voices, a small nonprofit founded in 2000 by my friend Mike Lux “to take on projects that needed doing, but that more traditional DC groups weren’t able or willing to take on.” Inside the Beltway, pretty much anything edgy fits into that category.
Windsor is nothing if not edgy.
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