Lead Paragraph:
While meeting with Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week, President Trump suggested that China, the U.S., and Russia work together to fight the International Criminal Court.
World in motion.
Excerpts:
One proposal would constitute the current Supreme Court justices as just nine of the 179 federal appellate court judges, who would rotate on and off the high court for fixed terms (perhaps two or four years) and staggered appointments, so that its membership would be a continuing body, not unlike the U.S. Senate. This arrangement would avoid the current stasis that allows wealthy interests to game the outcome of legal cases, since those interests could never be sure of the judicial body’s composition from one term to the next. These are far-reaching reforms that will cause the pretended deep thinkers to swoon, but as one observer has stated: “You can have democratic self-government or the corrupt Court — not both.”
But even thoroughly revamped federal courts might not be enough to deal with the Trump regime’s unprecedented level of lawlessness, constitutional violations and criminal corruption. (For instance, its deliberate dismantling of the nation’s infectious disease early warning system, with increased deaths a clearly foreseeable consequence, should be understood as criminal malfeasance.) Virtually every senior official has been involved in serious wrongdoing, and bringing them all to book within a legacy legal system replete with frivolous delays and endless appeals could take well over a decade, by which time many statutes of limitations will have expired.
Given that Congress has already created special courts by legislation, such as the Military Commissions Acts of 2006 and 2009, it could also establish a special domestic tribunal capable of doing what the regular courts are unlikely to accomplish: bringing the principal actors in a regime of unprecedented criminal racketeering to timely public accountability and appropriate punishment.
The reconstruction of democracy will require creative thinking in other areas. The presidential pardon power may be absolute, but should only be used for honorable purposes. A new, reformed Supreme Court could properly decide that, yes, a pardon is absolute and irrevocable, but of course the framers never intended that George Washington or his successors could ever conceivably grant a pardon for corrupt purposes. Accordingly, pardons issued to insurrectionists, fraudsters and those who could have otherwise incriminated Trump would receive expedited review by a special panel, and barring extenuating circumstances would be revoked, with all criminal records reinstated and remaining sentences carried out.
Abstract
Social media platforms have significantly expanded the reach of social movements, allowing individuals to more easily publicly advocate for politically and socially salient causes. In this research, we examine whether the moral rhetoric used to promote a cause shapes people's willingness to publicly share it. Across five behavioral experiments (N = 3549), we find that liberals are less willing to share messages supporting causes they personally endorse when those messages employ moral rhetoric they perceive as aligned with conservative values (i.e., binding foundations), relative to rhetoric aligned with liberal values (i.e., individualizing foundations). In contrast, conservatives' willingness to share cause-related messages remains relatively stable regardless of rhetorical framing (Studies 1b and 2b). We also identify mechanisms underlying this asymmetry, including evidence of ideological signaling: liberals appear less willing to amplify rhetoric they associate with political opposition (Study 3). Supplementary observational analyses of aggregate sharing patterns on Twitter/X are directionally consistent with these experimental findings. Together, these findings show that moral language associated with an opposing political group can suppress liberals' public support for aligned causes, revealing how the dynamics of online visibility may hinder collective advocacy even when substantive agreement exists.
Excerpt:
…imagine an alternative world—perhaps our future—in which Kentucky is just one six-member district. Everybody votes in the same election as you do for Senate, and parties put forward lists of candidates. So Republicans put forward a list of candidates, Democrats put forward a list of candidates. Democrats get 33 percent of the seats—the two most popular Democratic candidates on that list go to Congress. Republicans put forward a list of candidates—the four most popular Republicans go to Congress.
So that’s proportional. That’s what we think of as fairness. You don’t have to draw any district lines, and candidates run on party lists, and parties get representation in Congress in proportion to the share of votes that they get—which is a very intuitive sense of fairness.
Excerpts:
Head of the Iranian parliament’s national security committee Ebrahim Azizi announced the mechanism to regulate traffic through the vital shipping lane on Saturday.
Under proposed plans, vessels would be charged “fees for specialized services” provided under the new system.
Azizi said: “In this process, only commercial vessels and parties cooperating with Iran will benefit from it.”
For those concerned with immigration: if we aren't educating Americans to handle our future where do you think we'll get people to replace them?
Excerpts:
The famous lines from Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey in 1816 here very much apply:
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was and never will be. The functionaries of every government have propensities to command at will the liberty and property of their constituents. There is no safe deposit for these but with the people themselves; nor can they be safe with them without information. Where the press is free, and every man able to read, all is safe.”
American education has been in a phase of systemic decay for decades, and the consequences are piling up. Right now, as the global economy is yet again being reinvented by artificial intelligence and quantum computing, America’s schools are cranking out year after year of failure. Since 2015, 83 percent of districts have lost ground on reading and 70 percent have lost ground on math.
There are lots of individual success stories to tell from districts and states that have beaten the trend, but the unmistakable truth is that the mechanism on which America has relied since 1965 to produce capable adults — universal K-12 education supported by federal tax dollars and accountable to federal standards — has failed. It won’t matter whether the United States or China wins the current struggle over which AI models run the world if Americans can’t run AI models.
“It’s a deliberately constructed fog of lies and grievance, and it has one purpose: to keep us screaming at each other about bathrooms and brown-skinned invaders while the people writing the checks rob us blind.”
“The environmental movement needs to find nature again—to fight for the planet’s ecosystems, plants, and wildlife….”
Summary
Top diplomats agreed in April that no country should charge tolls in international waterways, State Dept says
China and US may be seeking common ground to pressure Iran on Strait
Excerpt:
“…it is worth thinking through the legal and constitutional implications of annexing Venezuela, Greenland, or even Canada—especially since they are not favorable to the Trump administration’s other political, social, and cultural priorities.”