Well, okay, your election team can be trusted

During my travels I finished the book A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers. It is a sequel to The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet that I discussed back in March. The first book is about a spaceship with a multispecies crew. This one is primarily about two characters. The first is Lovelace, the ship AI, who was illegally transferred to a body that looks human. The crew turned against her, so she fled with Pepper, the woman who did the transfer. Part of the story is about Lovelace, who has taken the name Sidra, and how she deals with being in a body. She no longer has full time linkage (equivalent to internet access) and can see only through the body’s eyes rather than through cameras throughout a ship. She tries to fit into society without others learning she is an AI, not an actual human. She eventually sees that people of many species treat her better when they can interact with an actual body. Chambers does a good job of portraying what Sidra goes through. The other part of the story is about Pepper, who is super good at fixing all sorts of mechanical stuff. Pepper tells Sidra she was raised by an AI, so we go back to when Pepper was known as Jane. At the age of ten Jane escapes a regimented society and is given shelter by Owl, the AI who runs a space shuttle that has been damaged and can’t take off. Over the next decade Owl teaches Jane how to restore the shuttle so that it can be flown. Again, Jane’s predicament is well portrayed. Spoiler alert: My minor complaint of the story is that Sidra is never in great peril for being an AI in an illegal body. The third book in the series has already been purchased and I see a fourth book is available. More good reading ahead. Laura Clawson of Daily Kos wrote after Jim Jordan’s first failed vote to be Speaker of the House that he had tried to portray his win as inevitable and that several prominent Republicans also pushed that idea. However, what interests me from this post is her last paragraph.

The Republican Party’s longtime goal has been to break government and use its brokenness as evidence that government is dispensable. Along the way, the party has broken itself.

I add they want to dispense with government so that there is no one able to stop their oppression of those lower in the social hierarchy. Clawson also reported (before Jordan lost a second vote, though his chances didn’t look good) that the inability to elect a Speaker has increased the effort to give the Speaker Pro Tem greater interim powers. But that has political problems – to pass it would require Democrat support. Democrats would make sure the plan would not allow the Speaker Pro Tem to have the job indefinitely, so would limit their approval to 15 days at a time. Displease them and the SPT would be back to limited powers. But Republicans complain such a deal, as Jordan describes it, would be a “coalition government, where Democrats are involved in selecting the speaker.” And that’s to be avoided. Clawson reported today that Jordan canceled a third vote. The number of Republicans planning to vote against him has grown and it seems Jordan doesn’t want to be humiliated (though that didn’t stop McCarthy last January, though the number objecting to him was much smaller). Instead, Jordan is supporting the plan to give the SPT more powers, though perhaps Republicans are expecting those powers to last until McHenry’s term ends in January. Joan McCarter of Kos described what some are calling a possible “soft coup.” There seems no viable candidate for Speaker right now. Republicans are mixed in the possibility of giving SPT McHenry more powers in the meantime. They certainly will refuse any kind of deal that gives any shred of power to Democrats. That brings us to the “soft coup” idea – McHenry declaring and acting as if he had the full power of a properly elected Speaker. I’ve heard some are saying that they don’t want to give McHenry more powers because they don’t want the House to be able pass any funding bills. Then on November 17th a government shutdown would happen – which is what many wanted to happen all along. An Associated Press article posted on Kos describes what some Republican county clerks in swing state Wisconsin are doing to combat election deniers. They are going into small towns and holding townhall meetings to explain how elections are run and how people can trust they are accurate. Yeah, there lots of people who won’t give up their beliefs that the 2020 election was stolen. These clerks deal with a lot of strange claims and with threats. Some citizens claim they witnessed cheating, such as eight women giving the same address, and no one will take their claims seriously. Even so, citizens are engaged in the presentations. And when they are done one response is, well, okay, your election team can be trusted, but I still can’t trust the system as a whole, especially the teams in the big cities (which are predominantly Democratic). Even so the clerks keep up the effort because there really isn’t another option. McCarter wonders if Justice Clarence Thomas is begging to be impeached. She worked from yet another report out from ProPublica describing more ethical problems in the Supreme Court. This story (as have many others) centers around Leonard Leo, the head of the Federalist Society that has done a lot of work tilting our judicial system more conservative and getting most of the current conservative Supremes into their seats. The latest ethical storm is from the report that Leo arranged for his billionaire pals to have a private audience with Thomas at the Supreme Court building. As McCarter summarized:

That’s Leo and [billionaire Paul] Singer using the actual U.S. Supreme Court building, not to mention access to one of the justices, to fundraise for Republicans and their causes. Those causes include legal challenges—to voting rights, to abortion rights, to marriage equality, to environmental and consumer protections—that will work their way through the courts to be decided by Thomas and the other justices Leo put there.

Some of those cases are before the court this term. Thomas has not recused himself from any of them. In a Ukraine update from two weeks ago Kos of Kos explained one reason why Ukraine’s advance on the southern front is so slow. As in many places with good agricultural land around the world there is frequently a line of trees between fields. Such tree lines protect the soil from wind erosion. The big Russian defenses show up in satellite images and have been carefully mapped.

But the big surprise of the counteroffensives is that Russia has dug-in defenses in all of those tree lines. As a result, Ukraine’s advances have literally been tree line to tree line. That has both slowed the advance and created exhausting conditions for Ukrainian forces.

Wearing down the enemy is the kind of fighting Russia wants. The good news is fall is here and many trees lose their leaves. And that exposes the Russians. I’ve written very little about the current Israeli – Hamas war (though I’ve posted a few good cartoons). This war was started when Hamas carried out a big attack on Israel, committing lots of atrocities. But the conditions that prompted the attack have been going on for 75 years, since the founding of the modern state of Israel. Israel’s oppression of Palestinians has been going on that entire time. I’m coupling that with a discussion of Ukraine (more accurately Russia) because eleven days ago Kos made the same connection. Kos summed it up this way (before getting into some of the gory details):

But I will say that whatever goals Hamas had for the future, it just pisses them away. By following Russia’s playbook of targeting civilians and children and engaging in sexual violence against women, Hamas lost any semblance of moral high ground, and rallied not just Israeli public opinion against it, but much of the world’s. The atrocities Hamas gleefully committed against Israeli civilians yesterday were perhaps the worst I’ve seen in the last two years, and that includes my daily diet of Russian atrocities in Ukraine. It might’ve been worse than what we saw in Bucha early in the war. ... But directly targeting civilians isn’t a military operation, it’s a terrorist one. And the joyful celebration around that death goes beyond even Russia’s savagery in Ukraine. Russia may murder civilians and feel justified in doing so, they may even celebrate those murders, but I haven’t seen them express joy over it. ... But murdering civilians, filming it, and releasing videos of them joyfully dancing around the corpses of civilians, or abusing women and children, is winning them nothing of value. And this is where Hamas learned the wrong lesson from Russia.

Why has Russia been bombing Ukrainian citizens rather than military targets that could cripple the Ukrainian army? Why did Hamas gleefully terrorize Israeli citizens? Kos identifies it as rage. Putin does it because he feels betrayed that Ukrainians have turned their backs on their Russian ethic cousins. Hamas does it because they have endured so many decades of oppression from Israel and they feel helpless. This rage will prevent Russia or Hamas getting closer to their goals, but it sure feels good. Along the way Hamas targeted a peace music festival and killed people working towards peace. Kos wrote:

Hamas did a great job of both murdering the very people who could’ve paved the way to a solution, while turning even more of Israel and the world against their people.

Since reading this article I’ve been reminded that the primary goal of Hamas is the elimination of Israel. They targeted a peace festival and those working for peace because they don’t want peace. But their actions in this attack could very well bring about an Israeli response that will eliminate Hamas along with a great number of residents of Gaza.