House NDA Disclosed. Courtesy of WHYY:
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Also, since the House has exempted itself from any requirement to release e-mails, such release as well is forbidden.
A Ring, A Mercedes, And A Watch Collection. All used to belong to Rudy Giuiliani. No more:
Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two Georgia poll workers defamed by Rudolph W. Giuliani after the 2020 election, received his watch collection, a ring and his vintage Mercedes-Benz on Friday.
The deliveries, which Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Joseph Cammarata, reported to the court on Friday, were a long time coming for the women, who are mother and daughter. It was also a small down payment on what the former New York City mayor owes them.
Last month, Judge Lewis J. Liman of Federal District Court in Manhattan ordered Mr. Giuliani to hand over his car, his Madison Avenue apartment and his valuable collection of jewelry and sports memorabilia within seven days to a receivership controlled by Ms. Freeman and Ms. Moss. That would enable them to start selling those items, the proceeds of which would serve as partial payment of the $148 million judgment against Mr. Giuliani.
Mr. Giuliani missed that deadline and subsequent others.
I’m gonna enjoy the slow but steady dripdripdrip of what remains of Giuliani’s manhood being stripped away from him.
The Plan Behind Trump’s Picks. Yes, he has one. This is a must-read:
The newspapers address the surprise and the shock by investigating each proposed appointment individually. And we need this. With detail comes leverage and power. But clarity must also come, and quickly. Each appointment is part of a larger picture. Taken together, Trump’s candidates constitute an attempt to wreck the American government.
In historical context we can see this. There is a history of the modern democratic state. There is also a history of engineered regime change and deliberate state destruction. In both histories, five key zones are health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. These people, with power over these areas of life, can make America impossible to sustain.
Imagine that you are a foreign leader who wishes to destroy the United States. How could you do so? The easiest way would be to get Americans to do the work themselves, to somehow induce Americans to undo their own health, law, administration, defense, and intelligence. From this perspective, Trump’s proposed appointments — Kennedy, Jr.; Gaetz; Musk; Ramaswamy; Hegseth; Gabbard — are perfect instruments. They combine narcissism, incompetence, corruption, sexual incontinence, personal vulnerability, dangerous convictions, and foreign influence as no group before them has done. These proposed appointments look like a decapitation strike: destroying the American government from the top, leaving the body politic to rot, and the rest of us to suffer.
A decapitation strike. To kill democracy. I agree with Professor Snyder: This is what we face.
RIP: Joyce Keeler. I was saddened to read of her passing. She was a wonderful colleague in the House. Her irreverence almost certainly would have landed her in trouble with the humorless Petes and Vals of this world. It’s one reason I liked her so much.
‘Braiding Sweetgrass’: A gift on behalf of the ‘gifting economy’. My youngest daughter gifted me this book. I have become deeply impressed with the book’s author:
When the ecologist and writer Robin Wall Kimmerer is in a city for work and starts to feel disconnected from the natural world, she likes to do a breathing exercise. She inhales and thinks about how she is breathing in the breath of plants. And then she exhales, and she thinks about how her breath, in turn, gives plants life. “That is a super fundamental way to recognise our reciprocity in the living world; that we are not separate,” she tells me, speaking on a video call from her farm near Syracuse, in upstate New York.
Once you begin to recognise yourself as symbiotically connected to plants, it might shift your views on politics, too. One of the great “delusions” of market capitalism, Kimmerer continues, is its notion of self-interest. Because how should you define the self? “If my self is the economic me, supposed to maximise my return on investment, that’s a very different notion than if my self is permeable, if it includes the trees whose oxygen I am breathing, and those birds, and the soil,” she says.
Kimmerer’s second book, Braiding Sweetgrass, was published in 2013 by the small nonprofit publisher Milkweed Editions and became a word-of-mouth sensation, entering the bestseller lists in 2020 – where it remains – and selling more than 2m copies. It is beautiful and unusual, the rare book that might cause you to forever see the world a little differently. In lyrical essays that span science, memoir, Indigenous wisdom and storytelling, Kimmerer, who is Native American, invites people to reconsider their relationship with plants and animals. She tells me she wanted to “help people fall in love with the world again”.
Her new book, The Serviceberry, is a slim, elegant distillation of some of her political ideas. It uses the serviceberry – a wild, red-purple berry, also known as a juneberry or sugarplum – to explore the idea of the gift economy, one structured around interconnectedness and reciprocity, as an alternative to the market economy. The serviceberry shares its wealth, its berries, freely with the natural world, and these birds, insects and humans in turn ensure its survival. In this world, all flourishing is mutual.
The Gift Economy: All flourishing is mutual. Somehow, that soothes me. In these times, why not close on a soothing note?
What do you want to talk about?