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POSSIBLE TOPICS: ELECTION INFO; Commentary: Biden-Harris; CNN poll suggests Harris does better than Biden in a race against Trump; The Great Air-Conditioner Glow Up; Here’s how Texas students, families can access free meals this summer; In latest surprise move, Montrose and Acres Homes libraries now moving ahead; Anticipating a major bird flu crisis, the U.S. government just awarded $176 million for a vaccine; Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy; Critics Call It Theocratic and Authoritarian. Young Conservatives Call It an Exciting New Legal Theory.; Justice Amy Coney Barrett says presidential immunity doesn’t apply to Trump’s fake electors scheme; China ‘Blockade Simulation’ Exposes $5 Trillion Global Danger; In China’s Backyard, America Has Become a Humbler Superpower;

Welcome to Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig where we discuss local, state, national, and international stories. 

Thinkwing Radio with Mike Honig (@ThinkwingRadio) is now on Wednesdays at 11AM (CT) or Thursdays at 6PM on KPFT 90.1 FM-HD2, Houston’s Community Media. You can also hear the show:

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Except for timely election info, the extensive list of voting resources will now be at the end.

1. ELECTION INFO: Our next election is November General, so just make sure that you’re registered to vote, that your voting information is up-to-date, and that if you qualify for a mail-in ballot, you’ve mailed in your application.
2. MIKE — I have a commentary on calls for Biden to step down as the presumptive Democratic nominee:
   1. Continuing on the topic of 2024 election news … In my opinion, if the Democratic Party abandons Biden and chooses a different nominee for president, the resulting divisions, acrimony, and probable voter confusion and apathy, would likely mean a Republican victory that would conceivably also extend into the down ballot races for state and local offices, resulting in a Republican sweep.
   2. Does anyone else think that this is feeling a lot like 1968? The Democratic National Convention is taking place in Chicago and there are calls for the sitting US president — the current presumptive nominee of the party — to step aside and basically call for an open convention.
   3. And do we remember how that turned out in 1968? Hubert Humphrey, having run in no primaries or caucuses, was ultimately nominated on a first ballot to boos from many attending delegates. Humphrey then went on to lose to Richard Nixon in an apparent landslide of 301 electoral votes to Humphrey’s 191 electoral votes, but that apparent landslide was misleading, as Nixon beat Humphrey by only half-a-percentage point in the popular vote.
   4. However, 1968 was a peculiar year, as George Wallace ran a third-party campaign under the auspices of his American Independent Party and won 13.5% of the vote and 46 electoral votes. That’s an atypically successful third-party result, even though Wallace lost. It also implies that most of Wallace’s voters would likely have voted for Nixon rather than Humphrey, as Wallace made an unabashed appeal to far-right voters and racist voters.
   5. History may not repeat itself, but it rhymes.
   6. This brings us back to the 2024 election and, echoing 1968, there are calls from some Democratic Party activists and elected officials for Biden — an incumbent president — to step aside, and to allow the Convention to nominate someone else.
   7. Only Representative Dean Philips (D-MN) ran in the primaries against Joe Biden, and I don’t think anyone believes that he could successfully run for president as the Democratic nominee. That means that there is no one else who has gone before Democratic primary voters to test their viability as a presidential candidate, creating the potential for extensive party division among activists and potential apathy among many Democratic voters. These factors might assure a Trump victory, especially with the current imbalances in the Electoral College.
   8. As an alternative, I might suggest that the Biden team take a two-track approach to the campaign. The first track would be to run against Trump, the Supreme Court, and the Court’s catastrophic decisions on abortion, presidential immunity, and the likely replacement of Thomas and Alito over the next 4 years.
   9. The second track should emphasize that Biden and the Democrats have a deep bench of capable alternates if anything should befall Biden between now and 2028.
   10. Vice President Kamala Harris is a smart, young, capable politician and would absolutely make a strong, progressive, successful president if circumstances ever called for it. In those circumstances, Harris would then choose her own VP to replace her from a deep bench of strong prospects, thus elevating a rising star in her party.
   11. The alternative to this scenario is a divided, losing party in 2024 that would echo 1968, and the results of that would be catastrophic for the country and the world.
   12. REFERENCE: Who could replace Joe Biden? Here are six possibilities; With Biden not yet officially endorsed as Democratic presidential nominee, it is in theory open to the party to choose another candidate. By Martin Belam | THEGUARDIAN.COM | Fri 28 Jun 2024 05.54 EDT / Last modified on Fri 28 Jun 2024 21.30 EDT
   13. REFERENCE: 4 Contested Conventions in Presidential Election History — COM
   14. REFERENCE: 1968 United States presidential election — From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
3. Along the lines of the strategy I just suggested for the Democrats — CNN poll suggests Harris does better than Biden in a race against Trump; Vice President Kamala Harris would fare better than President Joe Biden in a theoretical race against Trump. By Marin Scotten | SALON.COM | Published July 2, 2024 @ 3:28PM (EDT). TAGS: Democratic Party, Vice President Kamala Harris, 2024 General Election,
   1. Three-quarters of U.S. voters say the Democratic Party will have a better chance of winning November’s election if President Joe Biden isn’t the nominee, a new CNN poll Even so, the head-to-head numbers have not budged since CNN’s last national poll in April, with Trump still beating Biden by 49% to 43%”
   2. Amid calls for Biden’s withdrawal following his weak debate performance on Thursday, the poll shows 56% of Democrats and Democratic-leaning voters said the party has a better chance of winning the election with a candidate other than Biden, a 3 point increase since January, CNN reported. …
   3. Vice President Kamala Harris, the most likely candidate to replace the president, fares better than Biden in a theoretical race against Trump, with 47% of voters favoring Trump and 45% favoring Harris, which is within the poll’s margin of [error].
   4. Despite this, Harris still scores just a 29% favorability rating among all U.S. voters, with 49% rating her unfavorably. By comparison, 58% … of voters viewed Biden unfavorably. 
   5. Some of the other candidates who have been suggested as replacements for Biden, such as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and California Gov. Gavin Newsom, are relatively unheard of, according to the survey, with 50% and 48% of respondents, respectively, saying they have no opinion on either candidate.
   6. Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating among Republican voters has increased by 11 points since April, with 83% saying the party has a shot to win the election with him as the Republican candidate, compared to just 72% in January.
   7. MIKE: The entire poll report runs 77 PDF pages, so too much for me to break down in detail. The surveys were obtained between June 28-30, 2024 with a representative sample of 1,274 respondents.
   8. MIKE: I’m not particularly skilled at parsing poll results, but a couple of things leapt out at me.
   9. MIKE: At the top of the poll document, which I’ve specifically linked to as a reference, the numbers are also broken down into whether voters are voting for a candidate, or are they voting against a candidate by voting for their opponent. That’s interesting.
   10. MIKE: In what might be considered a generic ballot, 45% said that they would vote for the The Democratic Party’s candidate while 47% say they’d vote for The Republican Party’s candidate. This might imply that the poll respondents are candidate-agnostic and are actually responding along part affiliation lines. This could reveal an unintended bias in the polling sample.
   11. MIKE: Looking at the overall results, my personal impression is that they generally lean Republican/Trump. While this is naturally concerning, I also have to wonder how they acquired this sample, and who would be most likely to respond depending on the sample they got.
   12. MIKE: I have a VOiP land line (Voice Over Internet Provider) that I almost never answer, especially when they don’t include a name on Caller ID. How many of those might have been pollsters? I have no idea. I will tell you that there was a phone number that called me 3 or 4 times over several hours, which made me curious. When I called that number, I got a voice message saying that they were a polling organization. If I had known, I might well have answered. So they missed me, and my responses to their poll.
   13. MIKE: So who did answer, and why? This could be the billion dollar campaign expense answer that everyone is wondering, and paying to figure out.
   14. MIKE: But to the extent that some voters might prefer the younger Kamala Harris to the older Joe Biden, that goes back to my suggestion that the Democrats sell both as a very solid package.
   15. REFERENCE: New CNN Poll —ORG
4. On a lighter note — The Great Air-Conditioner Glow Up; As climate change brings hotter summers, AC manufacturers are positioning sleek window units as lifestyle accessories. Some of them are less effective than they are stylish. By Callie Holtermann | NYTIMES.COM | June 30, 2024. TAGS: Global Warming, Air Conditioning, Style,
   1. Last year, during the hottest summer ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere, Dan Medley installed hundreds of new air-conditioners in apartments in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
   2. These were not the unglamorous window units familiar to Mr. Medley, 35, a handyman in Manhattan. His wealthier clients seemed to be upgrading to ACs that looked as if they had gotten plastic surgery: their harsh edges softened, their faces sculpted and smoothed.
   3. On Park Avenue, he installed an air-conditioner from July, a start-up that sells gracefully rounded window units with pastel covers. … Others went for [a brand] which bills its minimalist unit on Instagram as a “sleek and chic transformation moment.”
   4. Several companies are trying to capitalize on increasingly unbearable summers with a fleet of photogenic window ACs, targeted toward flush and fashionable customers in buildings without central air-conditioning. Their products are more expensive than the average window unit — ranging from $340 to nearly $600 — and their marketing sometimes elides the nitty-gritty, emphasizing svelte exteriors over B.T.U.s. …
   5. “We’re making home décor that just happens to be air appliances,” said Michael Mayer, a founder and the chief executive of Windmill.
   6. The recent class of sleek ACs vary widely in quality, according to Allen St. John, a senior product editor who works on Consumer Reports’ air-conditioner rankings. Mr. St. John praised Midea’s U-shaped unit, which he said was energy-efficient and effective in testing.
   7. But he was critical of the most affordable of Windmill’s premium WhisperTech units, which had struggled to cool a room down quickly. “This is the most important test that we do, and this performed about as badly as any air-conditioner we’d ever tested,” Mr. St. John said. …
   8. In 2020, an article in The Wall Street Journal described a group of design-forward air-conditioners, including one from July, as “Summer’s Unlikeliest Status Symbol” …
   9. “Ultimately people are going to have to buy air-conditioners, and they’re going to have to buy air-conditioners more, and they’re going to have to use them more” as temperatures rise, [said Michael] Mayer, the Windmill chief executive. …
   10. [I]n many cases, the most environmentally friendly air-conditioner is the one you already have, said Sandra Goldmark, a designer and a senior assistant dean at the Columbia Climate School. “Even if the new unit is more energy-efficient, it will take you a long time to essentially pay off the embedded carbon” that was used to create your new unit, she said.
   11. MIKE: There’s more if you care to go to the story that’s linked in this post.
   12. MIKE: The last comment by Ms. Goldmark is applicable to many products, from central A/C to cars to microwave ovens. In most cases, the best thing to do for the environment and your budget is to use a product until it no longer justifies its maintenance costs, or until it dies. A step-up in energy efficiency usually takes years to earn back.
   13. MIKE: Although I found this article interesting, I don’t consider it a story of great import, so I’ve cut it short, but I do consider it an interesting piece in the history of consumer goods development.
   14. MIKE: Consider that Henry Ford was able to sell his cars in any color you wanted as long as it was black, until about 1926 when General Motors introduced colors. This might be seen as a time when motor cars became less of a utilitarian commodity for the masses and more of a desirable fashion statement for those wanting it enough to afford the modest upgrade price. The idea of colors was originally targeted at women, who often signed off on the decision to buy.
   15. MIKE: A similar thing happened to computers. Early computers could be said to come in any color you wanted, as long as they were beige, a color commonly referred to at the time as “putty”. But when computers became common enough to be considered commodity items differentiated only by technical specs, some companies began to make them in colors, and to style them in ways that were less “boxy” and more like harmonious “décor” items.
   16. MIKE: This may now be what’s happening to window air conditioners as companies try harder to differentiate their products in an expanding market less by commodity features like BTUs and Seasonal Energy Efficiency Ratings (or “SEER”) and more by their potential to become décor-compatible items.
   17. MIKE: Like I said, this isn’t an earth-shaking story, but I think it represents an interesting turn in product design history.
   18. MIKE: Consider it the style-forward result of global warming.
5. Here’s how Texas students, families can access free meals this summer; By Hannah Norton | COMMUNITYIMPACT.COM | 2:50 PM Jul 3, 2024 CDT / Updated 2:50 PM Jul 3, 2024 CDT. TAGS:
   1. Around two-thirds of Texas children rely on free or reduced-price lunch during the school year, Feeding Texas CEO Celia Cole said.
   2. “When school shuts down, a lot of those kids lose access to the nutrition they need during the summer months,” Cole said. “And so typically, we see child hunger go up, and our food banks see that in their lines; they see an increase in families needing help feeding their kids—summer hunger is a real problem.”
   3. In response, local governments, school districts and nonprofits across the state have partnered with the Texas Department of Agriculture to offer free meals and snacks to children age 18 and younger and students with disabilities up to 21 years old.
   4. To find organizations participating in the Summer Meals Program, families can:
   5. Visit summerfood.org for an interactive site map
   6. Text “FOOD” or “COMIDA” to 304-304
   7. [OR] Call 211 to speak to an operator in English or Spanish
   8. Officials recommend calling sites in advance to confirm their operating hours and how meals will be served.
   9. Families do not have to apply, register or provide identification to receive food from the program. Meal sites are located in low-income areas, such as communities where over 50% of children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch, TDA officials said in a news release.
   10. Some sites in rural areas offer multi-day meal bundles for families who cannot go daily. …
   11. Just about 10% of students who receive free or reduced-price lunch also participate in the Summer Meals Program, Cole said. …
   12. Cole said she encourages families to visit their local food banks and, if eligible, apply for benefits through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Low-income adults may qualify for SNAP if they are working or looking for a job; are pregnant; have a disability; or are at least 60 years old.
   13. Texans can search for food banks by ZIP code here.
   14. This summer, the United States Department of Agriculture launched the Summer Electronic Benefit Transfer Program, or Summer EBT, which gives eligible families up to $120 per child to supplement the cost of food during summer break. Texas is one of 15 states that did not opt in to the program …
   15. Over 22% of Texas children experience food insecurity, meaning they do not have consistent access to food, Feeding America [can be found at this link].
   16. MIKE: This is a really important option for many families in the metro Houston area. If you and your family are not in need, do please let others know who might benefit from the program.
6. In latest surprise move, Montrose and Acres Homes libraries now moving ahead; By Maggie Gordon | HOUSTONLANDING.ORG | June 27, 2024 @ 4:25 pm. TAGS: Houston Public Library, Montrose Collective, North Regional Library, Beulah Shepard – Acres Homes Neighborhood Library,
   1. Two previously halted library projects will indeed begin moving forward after all, Houston Public Library Executive Director Cynthia Wilson said Thursday.
   2. The city’s plan to open a new library space inside the Montrose Collective on Westheimer Road, which was derailed by a surprise announcement by Mayor John Whitmire that he would not go through with the planned move, is in fact jumping back into full-speed motion, with plans to open this fall. 
   3. At the same time, Wilson said the recently announced “pause” on the new North Regional Library in Acres Homes has been reversed; now the library seeks to open the 20,000 square-foot space as soon as possible – likely a year behind its originally intended date due to delays. 
   4. Both the Montrose and Acres Homes locations have been swinging like pendulums for weeks as the city’s library system and the mayoral administration have changed course several times with little notice, surprising city council members, private developers, community leaders and residents at large. This recent bit of news is likely to create more ripples of shock among stakeholders. As of Thursday morning, Wilson noted, she had not yet had an opportunity to update city council members on the plans. 
   5. “The Montrose Collective is now back on the table. This just happened two days ago,” Wilson said Thursday morning during an interview with the Houston Landing. [and,] “The Houston Public Library is going to keep both” the historic Freed-Montrose library branch as well as the new space at the Montrose Collective, which had previously been slated as the new home for a modern, 12,000 square-foot library in the high-rent mixed-use Montrose Collective Development near the corner of Montrose Boulevard and Westheimer.
   6. This comes just six weeks after Whitmire announced during a news conference that he was concerned about plans to spend $11 million to move the Freed-Montrose library from its current location to a place that would position it “very close to adult entertainment, on the third story of a commercial building, behind the hamburger building. When [Whitmire] saw it, [he] said, ‘Not on my watch.’”
   7. While original plans called for the closure of the Freed branch, this new path forward will keep two operational libraries running in Montrose – a move that could save the city from losing the land where the current historic library sits. …
   8. The unexpected move to maintain two libraries in a community that already has one, during a tight budget year, has raised some questions about funding. But Wilson said both she and the mayor are confident they will be able to find money to build out the new library – which she said should open by this fall – and address the roughly $11.5 million to $14.5 million in capital improvement needs at the Freed Montrose branch without having to turn to taxpayers. 
   9. “We passed the bond for libraries several years ago, so we do have some funding in there and we just have to look at it very closely. And we have, quite honestly, the mayor did say one of the (Tax Reinvestment Increment Zones) came to him, and said they would be willing to help him with the cost, so we’re still looking at that.”
   10. The plan to have TIRZ 27, which operates in Montrose, pay for more than $10 million in rehabilitation to the current library building set off its own controversy earlier this month …
   11. … Wilson said, she plans to discuss possible funding not just with the Montrose TIRZ, which has yet to be fully reconstituted, but also with TIRZ 2 in neighboring Midtown – the zone in which the Freed Library actually sits. …
   12. One place Wilson said she will not seek funding is through a budgetary pause of the new North Regional Library in Acres Homes, which earlier this month, she had identified as a possible source of $10 million to help bridge the gap to rehabilitate the Freed branch …
   13. When Wilson told the Landing earlier this month that the Houston Public Library planned to “pause” the construction of the new North Regional Library in Acres Homes, community leaders expressed shock and outrage that the largely-Black community would once again be “overlooked and underserved.”
   14. “We did have the North Regional Library off the plans, but it’s back on,” Wilson said Thursday. “But its timeline is probably going to move maybe a year. They were going to start design in 2024, which we were not even close to.” … [The library’s] completion is more likely to happen in 2028 now, according to Wison. …
   15. MIKE: This is great news. What’s not so great is how the Whitmire administration seems to be developing a reputation for changing plans and minds back and forth in mid-stream. Is this a strategy to see which wheels squeak the loudest when potentially unpopular ideas are floated? To extend the metaphor, are the quietest wheels the most likely to actually see drastic cuts, or tax or fee increases?
   16. MIKE: If that is actually the strategy, I want to go on the record as not favoring this form of governance.
7.  Anticipating a major bird flu crisis, the U.S. government just awarded $176 million for a vaccine; As part of the Biden admin’s pandemic preparedness strategy, Moderna will develop an mRNA vaccine for H5N1. By Matthew Rozsa, Staff Writer | SALON.COM | Published July 3, 2024 @ 5:31AM (EDT). TAGS: H5N1 Bird Flu Virus, Moderna, mRNA Vaccine,
   1. In the ongoing waves of bird flu outbreaks, with the virus spreading to more than 141 herds in 12 states, the risk of another full-blown pandemic like COVID-19 is becoming a distinct possibility. In preparation for just such a disaster, the U.S. government will pay pharmaceutical company Moderna $176 million to develop a vaccine that protects against the H5N1 virus. Moderna will employ the same mRNA vaccine technology that was pioneered to develop COVID-19 vaccines in 2020, as well as the booster shots that have followed.
   2. Moderna is already in the early stages of testing its new mRNA vaccine, meaning that it will be receiving supplementary funds for that research from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The award was made through an agency organization called the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA.
   3. [HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement,] “We have successfully taken lessons learned during the COVID-19 pandemic and used them to better prepare for future public health crises. As part of that, we continue to develop new vaccines and other tools to help address influenza and bolster our pandemic response capabilities. … The Biden-Harris Administration won’t stop until we have everything we need to prepare for pandemics and other public health emergencies that impact the American public.”
   4. Because influenza strains are closely related to each other, the scientists can pivot from the avian flu to a different type of flu if a separate and more serious outbreak emerges. …
   5. MIKE: I thought that this story was reassuring. This administration is taking the possibility of a new pandemic seriously enough to be as prepared as possible to protect the health of Americans and the rest of the world. Isn’t that a nice change?
   6. REFERENCE: Scientists wary of bird flu pandemic ‘unfolding in slow motion’; By Julie Steenhuysen and Jennifer Rigby | REUTERS.COM | July 2, 2024 @ 4:30 AM CDT / Updated a day ago
8. Closing the Stanford Internet Observatory will edge the US towards the end of democracy; By John Naughton | THEGUARDIAN.COM | Sat 29 Jun 2024 @ 11.00 EDT / Last modified on Sat 29 Jun 2024 @ 16.43 EDT. The organisation responsible for monitoring digital falsehoods is reportedly being wound down after pressure from Republicans and conspiracy theorists. TAGS: Internet, Opinion, Artificial intelligence (AI),
   1. … All developed societies have a media ecosystem, the information environment in which they exist. Until comparatively recently that ecosystem was dominated by print technology. Then, in the mid-20th century, broadcast (few-to-many) technology arrived, … which, from the 1950s to the 1990s, was the dominant communication medium of the age. And then came the internet and the technologies it has spawned, of which the dominant one is the world wide web.
   2. Each of these pre-eminent technologies shaped the societies that they enveloped. Print shaped the world for four and a half centuries, followed by broadcast, which ruled for 50 years or so. …
   3. We’re now early into the period of internet dominance of our media ecosystem and have no real idea of how that will play out in the long term. But some clues are beginning to emerge. One relates to the idea of public opinion. Until Gallup invented the opinion poll in 1935, there was in effect no way of measuring what the public as a whole thought about anything. For the next 70 years, improved polling methods and the rise of broadcast television meant that it was possible to get a general idea of what public opinion might be on political or social issues.
   4. The arrival of the internet, and particularly the web in the 1990s, started the process of radical fragmentation that has brought us to where we are now: instead of public opinion in the Gallup sense, we have innumerable publics, each with different opinions and incompatible ideas of what’s true, false and undecidable.
   5. To make things worse, we also invented a technology that enables every Tom, Dick and mad Harry to publish whatever they like on opaque global platforms, which are incentivised to propagate the wildest nonsense. And to this we have now added powerful tools (called AI) that automate the manufacture of misinformation on an epic scale. If you were a malign superpower that wanted to screw up the democratic world, you’d be hard put to do better than this.
   6. Fortunately, scattered [throughout] the world (and mostly in academia) there have been organisations whose mission is to conduct informed analyses of the nature and implications of the misinformation that pollutes the online world. Until recently, the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) in California was one such outfit. Among other things (it was the first to out Russian support for Donald Trump online in 2016), it raised China spying concerns around the Clubhouse app in 2021, partnered with the Wall Street Journal in a 2023 report on Instagram and online child sexual abuse materials, and developed a curriculum for teaching college students how to handle trust and safety problems on social media platforms.
   7. But … After five years of pioneering research, it has been reported that the SIO is being wound down. Its founder and director, Alex Stamos, has departed and Renée DiResta, its research director, has not had her contract renewed, while other staff members have been told to look for jobs elsewhere. Stanford, the SIO’s institutional home, denies that it is dismantling the unit and loudly proclaims its commitment to independent research. On the other hand, according to DiResta, the university has run up “huge legal bills” defending SIO researchers from harassment by Republican politicians and conservative conspiracy theorists, and may have decided that enough is enough.
   8. At the root of all this are two neuroses. One is the Republicans’ obsessive conviction that academic studies, like those of DiResta and her colleagues, of how “bad actors – spammers, scammers, hostile foreign governments, networks of terrible people targeting children, and, yes hyper-partisans actively seeking to manipulate the public” use digital platforms to achieve their aims [—] is, somehow, anti-conservative.
   9. The other neurosis is, if anything, more worrying: it’s a crazily expansive idea of “censorship” that includes labelling social media posts as potentially misleading, factchecking, down-ranking false theories by reducing their distribution in people’s social media feeds while allowing them to remain on a site and even flagging content for platforms’ review.
   10. If you think such a list is nuts, then join the queue. As I read it, what came to mind was Kenneth Tynan’s memorable definition of a neurosis as “a secret you don’t know you’re keeping”. The secret in this case is simple: the great American experiment with democracy is ending.
   11. MIKE: This story tells us again what just one of the Conservative playbook tools is: If there is a resource that reveals their deliberate misinformation and disinformation, if they can’t be intimidated out of existence, then they must sue them out of existence. In lawsuits, the deepest pockets often win, and many Republican donors have very deep pockets indeed.
   12. MIKE: And yet, I think that this story is too generous in its intimation of the Rights’ motives, referring to “Republicans’ obsessive conviction [that] academic studies … of bad actors … is, somehow, anti-conservative …” and that, “The other neurosis is … a crazily expansive idea of ‘censorship’” applying “labelling social media posts as potentially misleading …”
   13. MIKE: I don’t believe that these are obsessive convictions or neurotic motives at all. I believe that at the Rightwing activist level, these protests and lawsuits are deliberate strategies to block the efforts of academics and progressives to call out deliberate lies, misinformation, and disinformation from the Right that are strategically voiced in mass media, written in mass media, and posted on social media in efforts to shape public opinion.
   14. MIKE: Truth and daylight are the enemies of this strategy. Believers in truth must persist in exposing lies, but those institutions and individuals who continue in this endeavor also need support and protection from the Rightwing bullies who seek to silence them. That will take money, organization, and perhaps creative legislation.
   15. MIKE: The Right has lots of money from Rightwing billionaires and multi-millionaires, making this a daunting endeavor, but American democracy desperately requires it.
   16. MIKE: One of this show’s mottos is that an educated electorate is a prerequisite for a democracy, but the exact reverse is also true: A deliberately misinformed electorate is a prerequisite for fascism and totalitarianism.
   17. MIKE: Charles Dickens struck a similar note in “A Christmas Carol” when he had the Ghost of Christmas Present describe the children under his robe: “This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware of them both, … but most of all beware this boy …”
   18. MIKE: This fight against a Rightwing strategy of disseminating and defending lies and disinformation is one that small-d democrats must consciously fight and win, and identifying this overarching Rightwing strategy for what it is is at least a first step.
9. Next is a long opinion piece from December 2022 that I think dovetails nicely with the previous story. I’ll be giving you only a relatively short excerpt — Critics Call It Theocratic and Authoritarian. Young Conservatives Call It an Exciting New Legal Theory.; ‘Common good constitutionalism’ has emerged as a leading contender to replace originalism as the dominant legal theory on the right. By Ian Ward | POLITICO.COM | 12/09/2022 @ 04:30 AM EST / Updated: 12/12/2022 @ 11:12 AM EST. TAGS: Theocratic, Authoritarian,
   1. It was half past two in the Revolution Room when Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett stepped up to the podium to introduce the final panel of the day. …
   2. “For those of you who are students, you might think that this is what all academic conferences are like,” Barnett said. “But let me just tell you: This is not what they’re like. You will tell your students or your progeny someday that you were at this conference, and that you got to see what was happening here.”
   3. Barnett was right that the gathering taking place at the Sheraton Commander Hotel on the Saturday before Halloween wasn’t your average law school symposium. The event was serving as a much-anticipated referendum on one of the most contentious ideas to emerge from the legal academy in recent years, and many of the biggest names in American constitutional law had come to Cambridge to join the debate.
   4. At the center of this debate was Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule [Pron.: “ver-MYOOL”], whose latest book served as the ostensible subject of the symposium. In conservative legal circles, Vermeule has become the most prominent proponent of “common good constitutionalism,” a controversial new theory that challenges many of the fundamental premises and principles of the conservative legal movement. The cornerstone of Vermeule’s theory is the claim that “the central aim of the constitutional order is to promote good rule, not to ‘protect liberty’ as an end in itself” — or, in layman’s terms, that the Constitution empowers the government to pursue conservative political ends, even when those ends conflict with individual rights as most Americans understand them. In practice, Vermeule’s theory lends support to an idiosyncratic but far-reaching set of far-right objectives: outright bans on abortion and same-sex marriage, sweeping limits on freedom of expression and expanded authorities for the government to do everything from protecting the natural environment to prohibiting the sale of porn.
   5. But if the symposium’s nominal subject was Vermeule’s new book, which shares the name of his theory, its real concerns were much broader. Since it was published in February of [2022], Common Good Constitutionalism has become a flash-point in a broader intra-conservative debate about the future of the conservative legal movement. This debate is unfolding in the shadow of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, but its scope extends far beyond constitutional debates over abortion. This conflict hinges on a more fundamental philosophical question: Does originalism — the theory of constitutional interpretation that conservatives have championed for the past 40 years — provide the conservative movement with the sort of intellectual ammunition that it needs to tear down half a century of liberal jurisprudence and rebuild American law on more conservative foundations? Or is it time, now that conservatives have secured a decisive majority on the Supreme Court, for the right to embrace a more aggressive and ideologically assertive legal theory?
   6. On the one side of this debate are defenders of the conservative legal status quo, who made up the majority of the speakers at the Cambridge symposium. By and large, these conservatives continue to champion the time-honored legal principles of the right: the sanctity of individual rights, the importance of judicial restraint and the wisdom of limited government. Practically all of them continue to identify as originalists.
   7. On the other side of the debate are those who, like Vermeule, want to push the conservative legal movement in a more radical direction. Partisans of this camp hail from different sectors of the American right, and they go by different names. (Some eschew the label of “conservative” for the edgier “postliberal” or “integralist,” two terms that are variously applied to Vermeule.) But they have cohered around a shared desire for a more muscular judiciary, one that sheds the guise of judicial neutrality in favor of a more assertive right-leaning posture. The members of this camp are almost uniformly critics of originalism — or at least of originalism as it’s practiced now — and many, though not all, are Catholic. They remain a distinct minority within the broader conservative ecosystem, but as the youthfulness of the audience in the Revolution Room suggested, their ideas have made particular inroads among young conservative lawyers and law students.
   8. “These are the things that people are talking about in FedSoc chapters all over the place,” said a clean-cut law student from Georgetown University … , referring to the conservative legal behemoth the Federalist Society. [He went on to say,] “I think our generation is a lot more open to it than the older generation.” (The student asked not to be identified by name, saying it can be “risky” to associate with Vermeule’s ideas.)
   9. [MIKE: I think that last bit about preserving anonymity is important. An unwillingness to be associated with the ideas one believes in and espouses can be the first sign that those ideas might be toxic to the public at large. Continuing …]
   10. For the most part, the debate between these two factions has been unfolding outside of the conservative mainstream. Instead, it’s being hashed out in the pages of academic law journals, in back-and-forths on obscure conservative blogs and in the nerdier corners of conservative legal Twitter, where Vermeule was until recently a prolific — and occasionally controversial — poster. In 2020, he was criticized for comparing attendees at a conservative legal conference to detainees in “camps,” which some interpreted as making light of the Holocaust. (Vermeule declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this article.) In the mainstream press, the fact that a heated debate is underway in the conservative legal movement has been largely obscured by the right’s triumphalist tone in the aftermath of the Court’s decision in
   11. But the gathering in the Revolution Room represented the clearest sign yet that the debate is seeping into the conservative mainstream. After all, the symposium’s hosts were two prominent organs of the conservative legal movement: the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy (JLPP), which pitches itself as “the nation’s leading forum for conservative and libertarian legal scholarship,” and the Harvard chapter of the Federalist Society, arguably the most influential student branch of the most powerful conservative legal organization in the country.
   12. “The debate between originalism and common good constitutionalism is the debate on the legal right, right now,” said Mario Fiandeiro, the editor-in-chief of JLPP and the lead organizer of the symposium, when [this author] called him a few months before the symposium.
   13. When [they] spoke, Fiandeiro made it clear that the event was not intended as an endorsement of Vermeule’s ideas. The purpose, he said, was simply to bring the discussions over “common good constitutionalism” out into the open, fostering free and robust debate about an important issue on the legal right. …
   14. Forty years ago, in the spring of 1982, a handful of conservative law students at Yale Law School convened a three-day-long event called “A Symposium on Federalism.” The purpose of that symposium was to chart a path forward for legal conservatives, who at that point constituted only a loosely connected network of like-minded lawyers and judges. The legal buzzword on the tip of everyone’s tongue back then was “originalism,” a new theory of constitutional interpretation that counseled judges to interpret the Constitution in light of the “original public meaning” that it had at the time of its ratification in the 1780s. Among the participants at the symposium was University of Chicago law professor Antonin Scalia, a leading proponent of the new theory, and former Yale scholar Robert Bork, who had recently left New Haven for a seat on the federal bench.
   15. Today, that symposium at Yale is remembered as the event that birthed the Federalist Society, which has since grown from a handful of disgruntled law students into the most powerful conservative legal organization in the country. Originalism, meanwhile, has been transformed from a marginal academic theory into the intellectual cornerstone of the conservative legal movement. …
   16. The origins of this potential insurgency are often traced to an essay that Vermeule published in The Atlantic in March 2020 under the headline “Beyond Originalism.” In that piece, Vermeule set the stage for his broader intellectual take-down of conservative legal orthodoxy. In the latter decades of the 20th century, Vermeule argued, originalism had been a useful political tool for conservatives, allowing them “to oppose constitutional innovations by the Warren and Burger Courts [by] appealing over the heads of the justices to the putative true meaning of the Constitution itself.” But following the rise of the conservative legal movement in the ’90s and 2000s, originalism had “outlived its utility,” becoming “an obstacle to the development of a robust, substantively conservative approach to constitutional law and interpretation.” …
   17. Vermeule coined the term “common good constitutionalism” to describe his alternative theory, and he was not coy about what it would entail. Unlike originalists and legal liberals, common good constitutionalists would not “suffer from a horror of political domination and hierarchy,” and they would display a “candid willingness to ‘legislate morality.’” In sharp contrast to libertarian conservatives, common good constitutionalists would favor “a powerful presidency ruling over a powerful bureaucracy.” On the Constitutional front, “The Court’s jurisprudence on free speech, abortion, sexual liberties, and related matters [would] prove vulnerable” to new challenges. …
   18. MIKE: The article goes on at considerable length and I recommend reading it, but I find it to have been highly predictive of the legal movements and decisions that are confronting us today.
   19. MIKE: We are experiencing the end-game of an integrated, long-term strategy to push a far-right Conservative legal agenda that is unlike anything that Progressives and Liberals have attempted on their side, to my knowledge.
   20. MIKE: Even the phrase “common good constitutionalism” is, in my opinion, intended to sound deceptively benign. Who can be against the common good? Until you realize that it’s designed to create the “common good” as decided by a moralistic, dictatorial class’s ideas of what constitutes the common good.
   21. MIKE: Conservatives are very good at perverting words and terminologies that used to be considered positives in our history. They toss around words like “freedom”, “liberty”, and “patriotism”, but use them in ways that mean exactly the opposite.
   22. MIKE: “Freedom of religion”, is now code for freedom of Christianity.
   23. MIKE: “Liberty” and “freedom” mean free to agree with the Right’s ideas of freedom and liberty, but maybe not your own.
   24. MIKE: “Patriotism” in the Conservative lexicon actually applies only to those who agree with the Right’s ideas of patriotism.
   25. MIKE: I now view those words as being equivalent to naming a country a “People’s Democratic Republic” when a country is actually none of those things.
   26. MIKE: At the 1964 Republican National Convention, presidential nominee Barry Goldwater said in his acceptance speech, “I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!”
   27. MIKE: Goldwater lost that election to Lyndon Johnson, receiving only 38.5% of the popular vote and winning only 52 electoral votes from 6 states, 5 of which were in the old Confederacy.
   28. MIKE: I think that Republicans learned something in 1964: Tossing around words like “extremism” as an ideology scared a lot of American voters. They got smarter, using words like patriotism, freedom, and liberty in ways that concealed their real intent, actually using those words to mean exactly the opposite of how they were popularly understood. That’s the strategy they use to this day with terms like “common good constitutionalism”.
   29. MIKE: This line of Conservative thought probably helped give rise to Project 2025, a plan to put vastly more power in the president and placing Republican loyalists throughout the ranks of the federal government, while also effectively destroying much of the career civil service.
   30. MIKE: This is a world that’s become a lot like 1984, where the Republican Party has become what amounts to a Ministry of Truth, which in the book had as its guiding principles that, “WAR IS PEACE”, “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY”, and “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”.
   31. MIKE: In that book, Orwell was describing a world where disinformation shapes the entire reality that people live in. Let’s hope that he wasn’t just 60 or 80 years to early in his dystopian predictions.
   32. REFERENCE: Project 2025 — PROJECT2025.ORG
   33. REFERENCE: 1964 United States presidential election — From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
   34. REFERENCE: Ministries in Nineteen Eighty-Four — From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
10. Justice Amy Coney Barrett says presidential immunity doesn’t apply to Trump’s fake electors scheme; Barrett, a Trump appointee, clarified her view that immunity does not extend to the fraudulent elector plot. By Nandika Chatterjee | SALON.COM | Published July 2, 2024 @ 2:57PM (EDT). TAGS: Fake-Electors Scheme, Trump Attorney Will Scharf, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett,
    1. One of Donald Trump’s attorneys is claiming that the “fake-electors” scheme qualifies as an “official act,” thus exempting him from being prosecuted after the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling on Monday, the Hill reported. Trump attorney Will Scharf told CNN Monday night that while some of the presumptive GOP nominee’s actions count as private conduct, meaning they can still be charged as crimes by special counsel Jack Smith, he should enjoy immunity for his failed attempt to put forward fake electors in key states following the 2020 election. “We believe the assembly of those alternate slates of electors was an official act of the presidency,” Scharf said, noting that the Supreme Court left that question for lower courts to decide.
    2. But Trump-appointed Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, while siding with the 6-3 conservative majority on immunity, wrote in her own opinion that the fake electors scheme should not in fact be construed as an “official act,” Mediaite reported.
    3. Specifically, Barrett agreed with liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent that acts which take place while a president is in office should be allowed to be introduced as evidence in a criminal trial. Barrett wrote that she disagrees with the belief “that the Constitution limits the introduction of protected conduct as evidence in a criminal prosecution of a President, beyond the limits afforded by executive privilege.”
    4. She added that the Constitution “does not require blinding juries to the circumstances surrounding conduct for which Presidents can be held liable.” Essentially, Barrett argues that a jury should be allowed to hear “both the quid and the quo,” even if the quo could not itself be the basis of a criminal charge.
    5. Writing specifically about Trump’s fake-elector scheme: “In my view, that conduct is private and therefore not entitled to protection. The Constitution vests power to appoint Presidential electors in the States. And while Congress has a limited role in that process, the President has none.”
    6. MIKE: This short article, which I read in its entirety, reminds me of a comment that MSNBC’s Chris Matthews made on the night that Trump was called the winner in the 2016 presidential election. Matthews, after a 2 minute analysis, said of Trump’s election, “There’s got to be a pony in this crap”
    7. MIKE: Is this article reaching for that metaphorical pony? And did the author find it? We’ll see.
    8. MIKE: As an aside, there is a paywalled article from the Wall Street JHournal Editorial Board entitled, “The Supreme Court Protects the Presidency in Trump v. U.S.”
    9. MIKE: I only mention it because it shows how completely biased and out of step Rupert Murdoch’s current Journal editorial board is.
    10. REFERENCE: “There’s got to be a pony in this crap” — Chris Matthews, MSNBC Commentator, November 9, 2016 (VIDEO: https://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/matthews-there-s-got-to-be-a-pony-in-this-crap-pile-804506691773)
    11. REFERENCE: [Paywalled] The Supreme Court Protects the Presidency in Trump v. U.S.; A 6-3 majority rules that Presidents have ‘presumptive immunity’ from criminal prosecution for their official acts. By The Editorial Board | WSJ.COM | July 1, 2024 5:47 pm ET
11. China ‘Blockade Simulation’ Exposes $5 Trillion Global Danger; By Chris Anstey | BLOOMBERG.COM | May 25, 2024 at 5:45 AM CDT. TAGS: Taiwan, President Lai Ching-te, Mainland China (PRC), Chinese Communist Party, People’s Liberation Army, Beijing,
    20. Taiwan inaugurated a new president on May 20. His name is Lai Ching-te, and he quickly got a taste of how challenging his next four years will be.
    21. While Lai, 64, who served as vice president in the previous administration, called on Beijing to drop its threat of war to force unification with mainland China, the Communist Party’s People’s Liberation Army on Thursday launched military drills that encircled the entire island. In the face of Lai’s statement that neither side of the strait was subordinate to the other, the PLA’s operations conveyed something quite different. …
    22. [A]ny view of China’s display of military aggression as business-as-usual carries grave peril. Instead, it may very well be a dress rehearsal.
    23. “This is almost certainly an intentional blockade simulation,” says Jennifer Welch, chief geoeconomics analyst at Bloomberg Economics. “A real blockade that cut Taiwan off from the world would choke off a significant portion of global semiconductor supplies—costing the world economy about $5 trillion,” she and her colleague Gerard DiPippo estimate.
    24. Bloomberg Economics calculates about a one-in-four chance of a “major crisis” in the Taiwan Strait over the next five years. The growing concern in Taipei is the idea of a blockade, which would be much less militarily hazardous to mainland forces than attempting a tricky amphibious invasion. And perhaps less likely to trigger war with America.
    25. It could take several forms, from a “customs-inspection regime” where Taiwan-bound shipping is selectively interdicted, to a quarantine that features more aggressive screening. “The most intense option is a traditional military blockade,” where China potentially cuts off all air and seaborne traffic, Welch and DiPippo write.
    26. While many foreign-affairs experts discount warnings by US military officials who see outright invasion as a danger in the near-term, scenario-modelling is still warranted, given the steady rhetoric from China’s President Xi Jinping and his lieutenants about the need to bring democratic Taiwan to heel. …
    27. Taiwan poses a direct threat to the Communist Party’s entire narrative that only it can secure prosperity and success for the mainland, something it hasn’t been doing so well of late. Little more than 100 miles (160 kilometers) off its coast is an ethnic Chinese population with high living standards and, in stark contrast with the mainland, a vibrant democracy. …
    28. If China did impose a blockade, a major part of the global economic impact would be the disruption of semiconductor supplies from TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker by market share and the go-to supplier for companies such as Apple Inc. and Nvidia Corp. When it comes to advanced chips, Taiwan’s world market share is some 46%.
    29. The world has already had several examples of the impact of supply-chain disruptions over the past decade and a half—most prominently with the Covid shutdowns of 2020 that both curtailed the array of things consumers could buy and sent prices for what was available soaring.
    30. Autos and home electronics would again be hugely disrupted by a Taiwan blockade. Economies and regions that have greater reliance on those sectors would suffer disproportionately. That includes South Korea, Mexico, Southeast Asia, Japan and the European Union, Bloomberg Economics says.
    31. A total Taiwan cutoff, along with the imposition of Western sanctions on China, would reduce global GDP by about $5 trillion, or 5%, in the first year, the team’s modelling shows. US GDP goes down 3.3% in the first year. China’s hit is 8.9%.
    32. And that assumes that Taiwan, the US and its other allies don’t raise the stakes militarily in retaliation to any such naval aggression.
    33. Even without a military response, it became clear this week that Beijing would see disruptions beyond just tariffs or trade bans. The world’s only maker of machines needed to produce the most advanced chips, Dutch firm ASML Holding NV, has ways to disable its sophisticated chipmaking machines remotely, Bloomberg reported.
    34. And Taiwan’s new technology minister, Wu Cheng-wen, confirmed Bloomberg’s reporting that TSMC also has that capacity. Smart machines connected to the internet, including chip tools, can be remotely shut off in the event of a conflict on the island, Wu said.
    35. That this is the news coming out of press conferences these days is a testament to how tense things have become. As Singapore Deputy Prime Minister Gan Kim Yong said on Friday, “Any clash in the Taiwan Strait will have dire consequences not just for the parties involved, but the entire world.” One other thing is sure—at least as far as Taiwan’s Lai is concerned: it’s going to be a bumpy four years.
    36. MIKE: We are living in tense times, and anyone who doesn’t take that seriously is kidding themselves.
    37. MIKE: I remember in February of 2022, right up until the day that Russia invaded Ukraine, how many people thought the Russians with their 200,000 troops surrounding the country might just be bluffing to extract concessions from Ukraine and NATO.
    38. MIKE: Just days before the invasion, my wife asked me, “Have you seen anything like this before?” And I said to her that I hadn’t seen anything like this since the Cuban Missile crisis, having been 11 at the time.
    39. MIKE: I fear that we are seeing the potential for this kind of long-term preparation by China for some kind of militant action against Taiwan. Maybe a blockade instead of a direct invasion. I don’t know, but we all need to be watchful and concerned.
12. Along those lines is this story — In China’s Backyard, America Has Become a Humbler Superpower; The United States no longer towers over the Asia-Pacific, dictating terms to its allies. Instead, it’s offering to be a teammate and share responsibilities. By Damien Cave | NYTIMES.COM | June 13, 2024. TAGS: Multipolar World, United States, China’s Rise, US Alliances, Indo-Pacific,
    1. Far from Ukraine and Gaza, as the Group of 7 wealthy democracies [gathered] in Italy to discuss a range of old, entrenched challenges, the nature of American power is being transformed across the region that Washington sees as crucial for the century to come: the Asia-Pacific.
    2. Here, America no longer presents itself as the confident guarantor of security, a trust-us-we’ve-got-this superpower. The terrain is too vast, China’s rise too great a threat. So the United States has been offering to be something else — an eager teammate for military modernization and tech development. …
    3. In this new era, many countries are doing more, on their own and with U.S. help. For the first time, the United States is building nuclear-propelled submarines with Australia; involving South Korea in nuclear weapons planning; producing fighter jet engines with India; sharing maritime surveillance duties with small Pacific islands; and working with Japan on adding an offensive strike capability.
    4. Behind the scenes, U.S. officials are also testing new secure communications systems with their partners. They’re signing deals to co-produce artillery with allies and to secure blood supplies from hospitals around the region in case of a conflict. They are also training with many more nations in more expansive ways.
    5. These collaborations highlight how the region sees China. Many countries fear Beijing’s growing military strength and belligerence — its threats against the democratic island of Taiwan, its claim to most of the South China Sea and its land grab at the border with India. They are also less sure about China as an economic partner, with the slowing pace of its post-Covid economy and tilt away from pro-growth, pro-entrepreneur policies under Xi Jinping.
    6. But are the countries linking arms with the United States making a long-term bet on America over China? Or are they recognizing their own rising strength and behaving like pragmatists, getting what they can from a fitful superpower where an increasing number of voters want the country to stay out of world affairs?
    7. In interviews with more than 100 current and former officials from the United States and countries across the Indo-Pacific over the past year, many said that the next century was likely to be less dominated by America than the last. No matter who wins the next election or the one after that, they said, the nation responsible for today’s world order has been weakened by the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the destabilizing effects of China’s rise on domestic manufacturing and America’s own internal divisions.
    8. The world is changing, too, with more nations strong enough to shape events. And as the United States shares sensitive technology and prioritizes teamwork, many believe they are witnessing both a global reshuffling and an evolution in American power.
    9. For now, they argue, the United States is adapting to a more multipolar world. It is learning to cooperate in ways that many Washington politicians, fixated on American supremacy, do not discuss — with an admission of greater need and more humility.
    10. The United States does not tower over the world like it used to.
    11. Since World War II, the U.S. share of the global economy has been cut in half. That is mostly because of Asia’s steady economic rise. China alone produces around 35 percent of the world’s manufactured goods, three times the share of the United States. Japan, India and South Korea have also joined the top seven in terms of output, giving Asia more industrial heft than any other part of the world.
    12. America’s military superiority has been better maintained, but China, with a smaller budget and sharper focus on the Indo-Pacific, now has a larger navy by number of ships, a likely lead in hypersonic weapons and many more factories to expand military production if needed.
    13. American democracy is also not what it once was, as measured merely by the declining number of bills that presidents have signed into law. The Republican Party has repeatedly held up budgets, drawing the president back from trips overseas, in addition to delaying aid for partners like Ukraine and Taiwan. Recent polls show that most Republicans want the United States to take a less active role in solving the world’s problems. …
    14. Both confidence and anxiety have emerged from these broader trends. Military budgets across Asia have soared in recent years, and the demand for American defense technology has never been higher.
    15. Yet many countries in the region now see themselves as players in an emerging multipolar order. “We are the main characters in our collective story,” President Ferdinand R. Marcos Jr. of the Philippines said during a keynote speech at the conference in Singapore. And as a result, they have turned to the United States less as a protector than a provider of goods (weapons), services (training) and investment (in new technology and equipment maintenance).
    16. Japan has made the sharpest turn. From easing tensions with South Korea to pulling back from decades of pacifism with plans to sharply increase its military budget, to signing troop movement agreements with Australia and other countries, Tokyo has made clear that it now seeks a leading role in protecting regional stability. But even as Washington welcomes the move, Tokyo’s actions grow in part from a critical assessment of the United States.
    17. During a joint exercise with the American Air Force in Guam last year, Japanese commanders said they were expecting to become more active because Japan’s neighbors wanted Japan to do more, implying broad recognition that America’s future role was uncertain.
    18. “The United States is no more what it used to be 20 years ago, 30 years ago,” said a senior Japanese intelligence official, who spoke on a condition of anonymity to avoid offending his American counterparts. … “No matter who the next president is,” he added, “the role of the United States will be relatively diminished.” …
    19. [S]ome Pentagon leaders have been open about seeking what analysts describe as “co-everything” with partners — co-development, co-production, co-sustainment. And while U.S. officials have talked for decades about alliances in Asia, their tone and actions over the past few years point to a subtle shift, toward a more decentralized approach to security and greater candor about their concerns.
    20. Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken delivered a speech in September that called for greater humility in foreign policy to face “challenges that no one country can address alone.” …
    21. Pushed by other countries, the United States may finally be learning that a humbler approach can yield powerful results, said Ryan Crocker, a retired diplomat who served as U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Kuwait and Lebanon.
    22. “A certain degree of humility does not mean weakness,” he said. “We can’t do it all, we shouldn’t do it all. We have these relations and alliances, let’s figure out who does what.”
    23. MIKE: The world has changed, and the United States must change with it. The United States is not weaker than it used to be, but it is relatively weaker in the world where the US wealth that generates its power is a smaller share of the world pie.
    24. MIKE: This article has a lot more detail and data, and I recommend reading it. Use the link in this show’s blog post.

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