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Saturday, June 11, 2022

11: Abortion, Jack Dorsey, Ukraine

Sex, Abortion and Feminism, as Seen From the Right The socially conservative legal scholar Erika Bachiochi argues that abortion rights have stalled women’s progress toward equality. ........ For years, social conservatives provided the G.O.P. its votes and its shock troops. But the economic conservatives got all the policy. Republicans would win by mobilizing evangelicals and then use that power to pass corporate tax cuts............ an inflection point. The multidecade effort to stack the Supreme Court with hardcore social conservatives is paying off. Roe looks like it’s going to be overturned. ......... that Republican politicians of recent years put markets first and families and churches and communities last. And the result has been social disintegration and cultural chaos. .......... If Roe is indeed overturned, the Republican Party in general and social conservatives in particular are going to be the dogs that caught the car. .......... Most Americans don’t want abortion banned. ......... Erika Bachiochi.......... in her 2021 book “The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision,” she tries to build a structure, a philosophical structure, going back to older thinkers, for a socially conservative feminism, one that embraces women’s gains in professional and civic life but holds that abortion and technological forms of contraception and the sexual revolution were devastating for women’s well-being and the cultivation of virtue and duty. ........... Her view is that abortion and contraception — and you’ll hear this — really serve the needs of capital at the expense of families. And with Roe gone, Bachiochi believes that a truly pro-family conservatism and even country can flourish. ......... I tell the story of the cause of women’s rights through the lens of sexual and reproductive asymmetry. I think for a long time in the 1980s — and then still you hear this in different circles, that the real question of feminism is, are women and men the same, or are women and men different? ......... the question of sexual and reproductive asymmetry, the fact that men and women engage in the same sexual act in heterosexual sex but that women can get pregnant and men cannot, is really the one that all feminists are responding to in their different kind of ways. ........ And so we tend to, I think, see the modern day women’s movement really capitulate to a market logic, where equality is seen in market terms, a market equality, where instead of this women as caregivers and men as breadwinners, both men and women are valued only as breadwinners. .......... work of care they do in the home, has not been valued in the market and by our public institutions. And that has been especially, I think, difficult for poor women. .........

a profound problem in our society is that we don’t value care work

......... you’re drawing a fairly deep connection between the rise of contraception, abortion rights, and Roe particularly, the change in our sexual culture, the rise of single parenthood to that devaluing or lack of valuing of care work. ......... contraception and abortion create this dominance of market logic, this devaluing of the family and — I think you’re making this claim — lead women to be worse off. ........... casual sex culture has become sort of the default. And I think that tends to be better for a male sexuality. .......... it’s not to say that there aren’t alpha women who like sex on the first date or the first meeting. But all sorts of data shows us that women tend to prefer sex and actually enjoy sex much more in commitment. ........... The abortion-backed contraceptive revolution has allowed men especially to basically — gives them more reason to walk away from unexpected pregnancy. ........... that’s led to a feminization of poverty. ........... sexual economics ............

single motherhood is the single greatest predictor of poverty in our country

.......... we can point to all sorts of ways in which our current economy and economic transitions have harmed men and made them incapable of being there ............ disconnecting and decoupling sex from marriage and marriage from childbearing is pretty devastating for the poor. ............. the way sex, as thought about today, is very much self-expression, is very much pleasure in mind. And I think, again, there are pretty dangerous asymmetries for women there. Because when you decouple sex from marriage and from childbearing and pleasure is left to be the only marker, that it tends to be far better for men. .......... as it turns out, for women, sex is far more pleasurable in commitment. And why in commitment? Because for sex to be pleasurable for women, there needs to be kind of a vulnerability, where a woman is relaxed enough to enjoy sex. ......... some data about the real orgasm gap that you see in the casual sex culture today ........ a real marker of the decline of good sex, both in the sense of pleasurable sex but also what she calls good or ethical sex, which I think that there’s more sex within marriage, and I think women enjoy sex better in marriage when they can be more vulnerable. .......... freeing women to have sex just like men, which is basically what the pill and abortion do, I think also hasn’t been good for women .......... men have blasts of testosterone beating through them in a way that’s different from — it’s distinguished from women. And that does tend to lend to greater sexual desire and sexual aggression, especially sex that is quicker and easier, quicker release. It’s a different kind of sex than women want. ........ you see in the sexual economic work — that the pill kind of inspires this change in sexual behavior so that there’s more sexual risk-taking both inside and outside of marriage. .......... how the early American women’s rights advocates thought about this, because I think many people now know that they were opposed to abortion. ...........

they really were worried about these threats of undisciplined male sexual desire.

.......... you can bring, I think, women down to men’s standards, which is freewheeling quick sex. Or you can bring men up to women’s standards, which is actually what these women were hoping for ........ it sounds a lot like our desire not to have forced motherhood, which is a real kind of pro-choice slogan. ......... there should be abstinence during the fertile period. ........ You see all sorts of young women, actually — I hear they’re on TikTok being angry about contraception and really being interested, more interested in natural fertility regulation. ........ We want organic food. We want to take care of our bodies in all sorts of ways. And yet here we are consuming vast quantities of hormones to regulate our cycles. ............ it demands abstinence of men during certain times, that it is getting them to be more aware in their bodies just as women are every month because of menses of really the connection between sex and potential parenthood. ......... there are all sorts of signs of fertility that a woman’s body, I guess you could say, emits, things like cervical fluid, rises and falls in temperature, that indicate to the woman how fertile she is and when she could get pregnant. .......... one version is we should have the sexual ideal that is more restrained, more disciplined, more held back than what we currently have. But law — and a lot of this book is about law, and a lot of your advocacy is about law. Law is very much about what happens when things go wrong, when you have sex and maybe you wish you hadn’t, or the form of contraception you were using fails. ......... my understanding of the data is that about a quarter of people who try natural contraception of the kind you’re describing will get pregnant in the first year. ........ the best methods rival the birth control pill, are 1 percent — I mean, the birth control pill also requires a certain discipline, that you take it every day. .......... generally easy access to abortion actually tends to disincentivize contraceptive use. ....... the typical abortion patient. And it found that they have children. They’re poor. They’re unmarried. They’re in their late 20s. They have some college education. And they’re very early in pregnancy. That’s the modal person who gets an abortion. ........... I don’t know that women today, with the state of how women think in terms of that they owe men sex at having a beer, a cup of coffee, or something — that the cost of sex is so low right now that I’m not sure that I can convince women that it would be so much better for them, for their relationships, for their enjoyment of sex to go out and learn natural fertility regulation. ..........

natural fertility regulation is better for women than contraception

.......... this has been bad for women, for their emotions, for all sorts of things. ........ it takes the attention off the real structural problems in the lives of the poor, whether it’s substandard health conditions, whether it’s poor housing, whether it’s neglectful or absent fathers or the fact that their fathers can’t get work and so can’t pay child support. .......... we’re putting poor women in a situation where the best we can get, the richest country in the history of the world, is to offer them the means to have abortions. .......... these choice-based arguments basically strengthen the kind of impulse of our very libertarian culture and politics to leave women with the consequences of the bargain, basically, the consequences of her having gotten pregnant. ........... the way in which we treat pregnant women in the workplace culture, massive pregnancy discrimination still, the kind of workplace conditions that especially poor women have, where they have to return to work. Many women have to return to work within like two weeks or less of giving birth. ......... you have employers, corporations, you have states talking about the corporate case for reproductive health — is that it’s a far cheaper option than accommodations for pregnancy, accommodations for caregiving. And so when they’re thinking about the bottom line, this is the way they’re going to go. ........... neither the red states or the blue states are doing a good job at this ........ because it’s much harder to have a child than walk into an abortion clinic, it becomes an easier choice for that person, one which potentially a woman then suffers regrets from. ........... have abortion restrictions and have these pro-family policies. ............ that’s the work of the pro-life movement going forward. ........ many people end up regretting abortion ....... five years on, 99% of women, 99% who had the abortion said it was the right decision for them. And they were better off on a range of other health and economic outcomes. ......... for those women who were actually denied an abortion, only one week after seeking an abortion but then being denied it, 35 percent of those women no longer wished they could have aborted. .......... the child — well, they don’t call the child — the fetus is like a trespasser on their property of their body, the self-ownership of their body, again, in a very Lockean way — and they then have this right to dispel anyone who comes through it in kind of an absolute property right ........... the child, who is a human being and is really utterly dependent on his or her mother at that time for those nine months, is the most vulnerable and the most dependent. ..........

I don’t understand why it is that we could not think that there are two human beings here.

.......... a fetus at 10 weeks is different than someone at 30 weeks and doesn’t think there’s any easy way to draw the line .......... the choices people actually have to make are agonizing, and they agonize over them. And we should trust often that they know better than we do. .......... there are many women who have difficult or dangerous pregnancies. Most don’t. Most pregnancies aren’t dangerous and are natural experiences of bringing human life into the world. ........ The child who is conceived in rape has the same equal dignity, and therefore, the same sort of duties of care are owed. ........ abortion is actually kind of a second violent act against the pregnant woman. ......... somewhat unresolvable moral and philosophical and religious intuitions. ............ abortion has led to a feminization of poverty .......... marriage and having children inside a marriage has become a very important and profound class marker .......... a child’s life is taken in an abortion and that we actually owe duties to that child, that it helps reset thinking about sex itself, that I think it ought to help us take sex more seriously. .......... And that itself may empower women — I hope it would empower women — to kind of take their place again as gatekeepers of sex. And that is to expect more from men when they engage in sex, to expect commitment. Because if they do wait, if they are able to put off men and to expect more from them, to expect a greater maturity, to expect them to hold down a job, to expect them to get off their computers and get off porn and all sorts of things, that I think there could be a real maturation of men that is required. ............... and then, as the economists say, raise the cost of sex. ....... How opioids have been treated versus how crack was treated is very, very, very telling. .......... European countries have lower marriage rates than we do. And there is a lot of evidence, I think, at this point that pretty unchecked capitalism and a lot of inequality is a real driver of family breakdown in poor communities. ........... massive incarceration is a massive problem because of the way in which it pulls fathers away from their children. To me, it seems like it’s not just the poor who need self-discipline. It’s all of us who need self-discipline. ........... our equal human capacity for moral development. .......... there’s this kind of new antinatalism, this new people deciding ex ante that they never want to become parents. .......... for eons and eons, what human beings have seen is that becoming a mother or father really develops the person, requires a great movement away from the focus on self toward another .......... the kind of quest for autonomy tends to leaves people really empty, tends to leave people literally alone.

We have a loneliness epidemic.

the family is not parasitic on the market. The market is parasitic on the family. .......... policies that prioritize what she said was the family claim over the social claim. .......... now that you mentioned I was a Bernie supporter. But I was studying sociology, women’s studies, and then moved toward political theory in college. ............ a responsive community must act to smooth the path for parents so that the joys of family life might be more easily felt and its burdens more fairly borne. ......... the caring for children and the work of the home is something that all of society benefits from. ............ the idea of spreading costs of child rearing more fully across societies is, I think, a just kind of thing. And so thinking of the market as something that serves families and not just that families serve the market I think is a good way to think about it. .......... workplace flexibility is a really, really important one and predictable scheduling. ........ upper echelons of workers have this knit into their work and that those who are low-wage workers really — it’s the just-in-time scheduling, where they’re given their schedules barely a week ahead of time and have all sorts of difficult childcare predicaments ............. there should really just be a lot more workplace flexibility just as a humane kind of standard. ......... parents really should not be economically disadvantaged by raising children. .......... a man on the moon with government priorities. Why aren’t we prioritizing the really important work that takes place in the home? And so those are some of the basic things that I would say. .......... my time as a women’s studies student at Middlebury College



Jack Dorsey announces ‘Web 5’, a new platform built on Bitcoin blockchain Web5 is developed by The Block Head (TBH), one of the Bitcoin business units at Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square). ....... Web5 is developed by The Block Head (TBH), one of the Bitcoin business units at Dorsey’s Block (formerly Square). The platform brings decentralized identity and data storage to applications. “It lets developers focus on creating delightful user experiences while returning ownership of data and identity to individuals,” according to the company. ........ To the Twitter co-founder, Web 3 isn’t truly “decentralized” or owned by its users, but instead by various venture capitalists and limited partners ........ this web platform is built to provide two core use cases: individuals will have the ability to “own their data”, and they will be able to “control their identity”. These use cases will be supported by wallets, decentralized web nodes (DWNS), and decentralized web apps (DWAS). .......... “there are no tokens to invest in with web5.”

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Friday, June 10, 2022

Liberty's Donbas Strategy

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Tuesday, June 07, 2022

Jaishankar: The Indian Zelensky

हम युक्रेन को पुर्ण समर्थन कर रहे हैं और हम विदेश मंत्री जयशंकर के बात से पुर्ण सहमत हैं। ये कोइ विरोधाभाष नहीं है। ज़ेलेन्स्की जिस चीज के लिए युक्रेन के भितर लड़ रहे हैं जयशंकर उसी चीज के लिए बिश्व मंच पर लड़ रहे दिखाइ देते हैं। 

रेसिस्म (Racism) हुवा फासिज्म (Fascism) ----- विश्व राजनीति में रेसिस्म हावी है। जयशंकर उसका विरोध कर रहे हैं। जयशंकर विश्व मंच पर लोकतंत्र के लिए लड़ रहे हैं। 

इस युद्ध के दो हीरो, ज़ेलेन्स्की और जयशंकर। फासिज्म (Fascism) वायरस का ही एक वैरिएंट है रेसिस्म (Racism) । 

































Jaishankar does it again: EAM’s masterclass exposing Western misperceptions on Indian diplomacy External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar’s language and logic during a talk at Globesec 2022 were polite yet assertive, simple but effective, and at the same time politically correct and intellectually sound ........ India’s mainstream media and social media are full of reports, commentaries and articles in praise of External Affairs Minister (EAM) S Jaishankar’s replies to critical questions on the country’s positions on the war in Ukraine and several other foreign policy issues during his participation at Globsec 2022 Bratislava Forum, Slovakia. ........ There is no dispute that Jaishankar’s responses to questions were masterly. Any Indian listener would feel proud about what he said and the manner in which he said it. His replies and retorts reflected India’s current position in the world as an influential actor, constructive leader of the Global South and an independent major power. .......... It is quite understandable that the United States and its European allies have been lobbying hard through bilateral dialogues and even in international forums to make Indian policies aligned with the Western approaches to the Russia-Ukraine war. India is a strategic partner of the United States and a trade and investment partner of the European Union and is also a democratic polity, plural society and a market economy. ........... the popular perceptions among certain sections of the attentive public in the United States and Europe appeared as if India is a country that is siding with Russia, ignoring the deaths and destruction in Ukraine, bypassing the Western sanctions and funding Russia’s war in Ukraine by buying oil and indirectly helping Russian war efforts by refusing export of wheat despite the food crisis generated by the war-making it difficult for Ukrainian wheat to be put in the international market. ............

His language and logic were polite yet assertive, simple but effective and at the same time politically correct and intellectually sound.

....... India has made efforts to convince Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Russian president Vladimir Putin to resolve differences through dialogue. ......... He also said that India, like the European countries, has bought Russian oil to address its energy requirements amidst shortages in the market, India has restricted wheat exports to keep the speculators at bay and that like the American and European people, common people in India have also been suffering because of the war in Europe. .......... While the focus of the interview was on the Russia-Ukraine war, there was an attempt to corner him to take a definite stand in a scenario where a bipolar global power structure would emerge and whether India would be in the camp led by the US and Europe or in a bloc led by China and Russia. Jaishankar refused to view the world power structure in that mode and asserted that India would have its own way. A country where one-fifth of mankind lives and a country that ranks fifth or sixth among the economies in the world will have its own options and stay away from a fixed bloc. ............ not many countries are in a position to take sides! A large number of American allies, including in Europe, look up to China for economic collaborations and up to the United States for security partnership! The world now and even in the future will be more complex and cannot be viewed in binary terms.

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Sunday, June 05, 2022

5: Haiti, China

Why China Threads the Needle on Ukraine Beijing is confident in the United States’ decline and unwilling to rock the boat.



Winning the Skies Without Losing Your Lunch: Filming ‘Top Gun: Maverick’ The makers of the “Top Gun” sequel discuss the challenges of filming practical aerial stunts. ....... Zipping at 6.5 G’s — more than twice the G-forces some astronauts endure during rocket launches — Cruise felt the blood drain from his head. He vomited in his fighter-pilot mask. ........ Cruise continued to fly so fast, and so frequently, that he learned to squeeze his thighs and abs to stay conscious. His stomach adjusted to the speed. .........

“Top Gun” made Cruise a superstar

.......... “He’s got every kind of pilot’s license that you could possibly imagine — helicopters, jets, whatever,” Bruckheimer said. ........ “Top Gun: Maverick” is a 450 mile-an-hour flying-heist caper. The mission leaders devise a difficult set of challenges for the pilots: zoom low and quick, vault a steep mountain, spin upside-down, plummet into a basin and survive a near-vertical climb at 9 G’s while dodging missiles. .......... Cruise, a contender for the most daredevil actor since Buster Keaton, was adamant that every stunt be accomplished with practical effects. Each jet had a U.S. Navy pilot at the controls, while its actor spun like a leaf in a windstorm. The deserts and snow-capped peaks in the background are real, and so are many of the performers’ grimaces, squints, gasps and moans. .......... “You can’t fake the forces that are put on your body during combat,” the director Joseph Kosinski said by phone. “You can’t do it on a sound stage, you can’t do it on a blue screen. You can’t do it with visual effects.” ............ The imagery of the sky and ground spiraling behind the actors’ heads in “Top Gun: Maverick” looks like it must be digital wizardry. It isn’t. ........ “All the admirals that are in charge right now were 21 in 1986, or around there when they signed up,” he said. “They supported us and let us do all this crazy stuff.” .......... Usually, the Navy forbids pilots from flying below 200 feet during training. One of the film’s most staggering images is of Cruise in an F-18 whooshing just 50 feet above the ground, a height roughly equal to its wingspan. The plane flew so close to the earth that it kicked up dust and made the ground cameras shake. The pilot landed, turned to Cruise, and told the superstar that he’d never do that again. ........... that sequence’s actors and pilots would rehearse the maneuvers in a wooden mock-up of the jet cockpit until the motions were ingrained. Then, they took to the sky to film as many takes as possible before the jet, or the performers, ran out of fuel. In the afternoon, they did it again. .............. Soaring above the crew, Barbaro and the rest of the cast took on a Swiss Army knife of skills.

‘Top Gun: Maverick’ Lands Triumphantly on Opening Weekend The film industry takes the estimated $151 million in North American ticket sales as a breakthrough after a long pandemic slump. ......... “Top Gun: Maverick” finds Tom Cruise called back into service by a rattled Navy. A new threat has emerged, one that a younger generation of pilots can’t crack on its own. .........

Cruise, perhaps the last old-fashioned movie star

............ older audiences, largely absent from theaters over the last two years because of coronavirus concerns, returned en masse over the weekend, “ending the debate about a full recovery.” ......... cost roughly $170 million to make. A megawatt global marketing campaign cost another $125 million or more. ......... 20 percent of ticket buyers were aged 18 to 24, a demographic that had been in question before release. ........ Adjusting for inflation, the original “Top Gun” cost about $40 million to make and collected $942 million at the global box office in summer 1986 ......... “Top Gun: Maverick,” directed by Joseph Kosinski, arrived on 4,735 screens in North America, setting a theatrical booking record ......... As ever, Cruise trotted the globe on a tightly controlled publicity tour. .......... a large percentage of “Top Gun: Maverick” ticket buyers opted for premium-priced screenings in large-format theaters such as IMAX. ........ “The end is inevitable, Maverick — your kind is headed for extinction,” the superior says. Maverick’s reply: “Maybe so, sir. But not today.”

The Good News in Georgia That’s Bad News for Trump the turnout rate for the Georgia primary, where early voting numbers were higher even than in 2020

The Hard Truth: Gun Safety Must Be Everything That Republicans Fear
David Ellison on ‘Top Gun: Maverick,’ Working With Tom Cruise and Hiring John Lasseter David Ellison, loves it so much that he pushed for a decade to get a sequel made. Unlike me, Ellison had the power to make that happen. He’s the founder and C.E.O. of Skydance Media, which is behind the new release. Ellison had a rocky start in Hollywood. He’s the son of tech mogul, Larry Ellison. .......... that was the film that really helped launch Tom into kind of singular movie star status that he currently sits atop of. .......... this isn’t a bullseye movie. This is hitting a bullet with a bullet. ........ It was an iconic movie........ this movie in particular is designed to be seen on the biggest screen possible and really is a love letter to aviation. It’s a love letter to fighter pilot culture. And it’s a celebration of the big screen, the big screen experience. ......... the other thing that we were just adamant about from day one was, we were going to shoot everything real. Tom was adamant that everybody go up in the F-18. .......... a training program where it was three months for the entire cast, where they graduated from flying Cessna 172s to Extra 300s, then flying L-39 with the Patriots Jet Team, and then ultimately being ready to step into the F-18. Because when you shoot that type of photography reel, it is an entirely different experience for the audience. .......... “Top Gun” is number six. The next two missions will be seven and eight with Tom. ........ one of the things that has always amazed me about Tom is the extraordinary lengths that he will go to, to entertain an audience. ...... They did that by aiming high and never stopping work on a movie until they thought it was ready to be released......... My dad is supportive, but we’ve thankfully built a multibillion dollar business. And I have to address him as you would any other shareholder when it comes to it. He gave me an incredible opportunity by believing in me in the beginning. I could not be more grateful for that. And we definitely talk about work constantly and work together constantly. But he’s been an incredible mentor and guide throughout all of this. ........ he said, oh, it’s because I didn’t raise them. Their mother did, which I thought it was unusual coming out of his mouth ...... God, I don’t have enough words to describe how influential my mom’s been in my life. But he’s correct. My mother did raise me. My parents got divorced when I was three. And I grew up predominantly with my mom. And you know, she did the incredibly impossible job of being a single parent to two kids and really set everything aside to raise me and my sister............. my mom had an incredible VHS collection that I actually still have. She had about 2,000 VHS tapes. ......... they think you’re the dumb rich kid, right, presumably. How did you deal with that? ............ Put my head down, did the work, personally. ........ avoided a lot of mistakes by being able to stand on their shoulders gratefully and really listen to the advice. But then also, I tried to partner and hire at Skydance the smartest people possible. And now, when you look around our senior leadership team, one of the things I am the most proud of is the incredible group of people I get to come to work with every day. ......... believing in a 50-50 culture and believing in supporting equal rights for all artists, that’s how we believed in and felt since day one. ........ “Skate to where the puck is going, not to where the puck has been.” .......... As people, I believe we enjoy social experiences. And I think people will continue to go to the movies. And I think people are going to continue to have a tremendous amount of choice. ......... I’ll never forget personally the reason why I was so excited to get into virtual reality is, when I put on the headset, it was one of the most transformative experiences I’ve ever had in my entire life. ......... So we are not for sale. Our heads are down, and we’re building the business. Last year, we had an incredibly good year. It was actually the strongest year in the history of the company. And this year is already scheduled to be significantly better. We feel very good about where we are. And we’re very much in building mode, is kind of how we’re thinking about it. ............

Just let me quote your father. Everything’s for sale.



‘The Elon That We’re Seeing Today Is Not the Same One We Saw a Couple Years Ago’ Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter has been a big case of hurry up and wait. ......... Elon kind of agreed to buy a house without an inspection ....... He got $13 billion of senior debt commitments. He then got a margin loan for another $12 or $13 billion or so, which has since disappeared. And then the rest, which initially was going to be about $20 billion of his own equity or equity that he could raise, has now been revised upward to $33 billion of equity, which has to be an absolute record for one individual to pledge to a single deal. ............ his outs are very few ........ So he used bots and fake accounts as the excuse for an escape hatch, essentially, or to get a discount. It’s not clear which one. .......... he does this all the time. He loses interest in things. ........ the bots thing is a total pretense. He knew there was a bot problem. ........

It used to be like 90 percent Tesla and rocket tweets and 10 percent everything else. And now it’s almost entirely the culture war.

.......... He’s like someone who stumbled on to a PragerU YouTube video and emerges six months later just totally bought into the culture war. It almost feels like now his account is like if Ben Shapiro had a passing interest in satellites. ......... I think he is genuinely annoyed by what he sees as the woke PC left. Do I think it’s strategic for him in some way? Possibly. ......... at the beginning of the pandemic, poor Elon was only worth about $25 to $30 billion. And during the pandemic, because maybe Tesla became a bit of a meme stock, and along with some other meme stocks, his net worth just exploded 10 times to up to $300 billion. ........... all of a sudden you think, if I may say this, your shit doesn’t stink and you actually begin to think that you’re much more important than everybody else. And your hubris level rises and you think that everybody wants to hear what you have to say. ............ But the way he communicates, he’s a troll. He’s now become a troll in a lot of ways. ........... he is extremely skilled at using Twitter to draw attention to himself, and his projects, and his pet causes. He reminds me of Trump in that respect. .......... he knows that if he does some boring tweet about some rocket, he’ll get X amount of engagement, but if he shares a meme from Reddit attacking the left, he will get 2X, 3X, 4X that engagement. So he’s a skilled user of Twitter. .......... I think it’s purely cathartic for him. I think it’s purely sort of psychological. ........ he clearly is addicted, spends way too much time on it. ........ what is his calendar? Is it just wake up, tweet for three hours, go to the rocket factory, tweak a couple of things on the design, and then go back to playing “Elden Ring“? .......... this is like a deal that’s got $30 billion of equity on a $44 billion deal. That’s not a leveraged buyout. ....... that loan somehow already existed and it was already tied to the Tesla stock, which was dropping like a stone. ........ Qatar is in there ........... the business plan that he’s proposing, the PowerPoint that’s out there circulating that has his projections is fantasyland .......... this is a company that has long struggled to make its financial impact commensurate with its cultural and social impact. .......... I don’t think this is a moneymaker for him. I think this is a passion project. And so he may not care about getting a huge return on it. He may consider this part of his political mission. ........ Twitter is not full of Elon Musk fan boys. It is a big, diverse, famously socially conscious — or at least says it’s socially conscious — tech company. A lot of the people who left Facebook, the integrity division, because they felt like that company was capitulating too much to the right, now work at Twitter. .......... Elon is going to come in and I expect that something like 30 percent to 40 percent of the workforce will just leave ......... he could have been very happy at 9.1 percent. He could have then had a nice return because the stock jumped up. He could have made money on that. And could have had huge influence owning 9.1 percent. .......... Like, if he goes to some potentate in the Philippines, like I’m the head of Twitter. It gives him power — political power. ........ have you ever looked at the comments under a Mark Zuckerberg Facebook post? ........ The number of people who are going to talk to Elon because their account got hacked — ......... why he would want this, I don’t understand. ........ I don’t even understand the power thing. So the sultan of whatever thinks he’s great because he owns Twitter. I think Elon’s great because he has SpaceX and he’s created these rockets that can land on a platform in the middle of the ocean.” ........... I think they want to get this thing off their plate and onto Elon’s as quickly as possible. .......... I would put it at 85 percent that the deal closes and maybe 10 percent to 15 percent chance that he finds a way out. ......... I think until April 25, Elon had the power. On April 25, the power switched to the Twitter board and to that merger agreement, that binding merger agreement. Since then, Elon has fumbled. He’s had his passes intercepted. He’s played this terribly. He’s obviously stopped listening to his advisors, in my opinion, who gave him good advice until April 25. ........ the board has suddenly become much more powerful in this dynamic. It’ll be the board that will let him recut this deal or not. ......... you have a signed merger agreement. Nobody put a gun to his head and made him sign that merger agreement at $54.20. And the outs are very few. .......... he came in, he had a lot of ideas ....... He talked a big talk about decentralization and blue sky. And he had a lot of buy-in at the company. And now my sense, from talking to folks there, is that they just think he’s trying to pass the hot potato, get his payout ........ we’ll be either at a lower price to consummate this deal or Elon will have abandoned it and will be instead spending all his time playing “Elden Ring” and yelling about woke liberals.

Russian Academics Aim to Punish Colleagues Who Backed Ukraine Invasion A campaign is circulating a list of dozens of researchers in the hopes they will be denied the prestige of election into the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Crude, Ugly and Pro-American? China Investigates Images in Math Textbooks. The discovery of what some viewed as disturbing illustrations in books for elementary school students set off a national furor. ....... Then, on Monday, as anger spread online, the ministry announced a sweeping, nationwide investigation of all primary, secondary and university textbooks. ......... Universities have been ordered to emphasize the study of Marxism and the writings of China’s top leader, Xi Jinping. In 2015, Yuan Guiren, China’s education minister, ordered a closer examination of foreign textbooks and said that those that promote Western values should be banned from classrooms.



6 Takeaways About Haiti’s Reparations to France How did the modern world’s most successful slave revolt give birth to a desperately poor nation? Here is a summary of what a team of New York Times correspondents found out......... A failed state. An aid trap. A land seemingly cursed by nature and human nature alike. When the world looks at Haiti, one of the poorest nations on the planet, sympathy for its endless suffering is often overshadowed by scolding and sermonizing about corruption and mismanagement. ......... Haitians overthrew their notoriously brutal French slave masters and declared independence in 1804 —

the modern world’s first nation born of a slave revolt

. ............ what happened two decades later, when French warships returned to a people who had paid for their freedom with blood, issuing an ultimatum: Pay again, in staggering amounts of cold hard cash, or prepare for war. ........ delivered an astonishing demand: France wanted reparations from the people it had enslaved. ......... Haiti was virtually alone in the world, with no powerful allies. It was fearful of being invaded and eager to establish trade with other nations, so it agreed to pay. .......... The demand was for 150 million French francs, to be turned over in five annual payments, far more than Haiti could pay. .......... So France pushed Haiti to take a loan from a group of French banks to start paying. That Sisyphean weight came to be known as

the double debt

. ......... $560 million in today’s dollars. ........ Every franc shipped across the Atlantic to an overseas bank vault was a franc not circulating among Haiti’s farmers, laborers and merchants, or not being invested in bridges, schools or factories — the sort of expenditures that help nations become nations, that enable them to prosper. ........... the payments to France cost Haiti from $21 billion to $115 billion in lost economic growth over time. ....... in later years the French approached Haiti with a different tactic: the outstretched hand of a business partner. .......... But the National Bank of Haiti was Haitian in name only. It was a creation of Crédit Industriel et Commercial, a Paris-based bank commonly known as C.I.C., and its investors. They controlled Haiti’s national bank from Paris and took a commission on nearly every transaction the Haitian government made. ........... When the American military invaded Haiti in the summer of 1915, the official explanation was that Haiti was too poor and too unstable to be left to its own devices. Secretary of State Robert Lansing made little effort to mask his contempt for the “African race,” casting the occupation as a civilizing mission intended to end “anarchy, savagery and oppression.” ............. a small team of Marines entered Haiti’s national bank and strolled out with $500,000 in gold. Within days, it was in the vault of a Wall Street bank. .......... “I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues,” the general who led the U.S. forces in Haiti, said years later, describing himself as a “racketeer for capitalism.” ............

National City Bank was the predecessor of Citigroup, and along with other powers on Wall Street, it pushed Washington to seize control of Haiti and its finances

............ For decades to come, the United States was the dominant power in Haiti, dissolving parliament at gunpoint, killing thousands and shipping a big portion of Haiti’s earnings to bankers in New York while the farmers who helped generate the profits often lived near starvation. ........... The 19th-century Haitian official who engineered a sweetheart deal for a bank in France — and then retired there? ......... “That’s not the first case of a Haitian official selling the interest of his country for personal gains,” Mr. Michel said. “I would say it’s almost a rule.” .......... Haiti’s leaders have historically ransacked the country for their own gain. Elected legislators have spoken openly on the radio about accepting bribes and oligarchs sit atop lucrative monopolies, paying few taxes. Transparency International ranks it among the most corrupt nations in the world. ......... In an 1875 loan, the French bankers took a 40 percent cut off the top. Most of the rest went to paying other debts, while the remainder lined the pockets of corrupt Haitian officials ........... The Times spoke to more than 30 descendants of families that received payments under Haiti’s double debt. Most said they had never heard of it. “This is part of my family history I never knew,” said one sixth-generation descendant of Napoleon’s first wife. ............ in 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide stunned Haitians by denouncing the debt imposed by France and demanding reparations. ............ France moved quickly to try to discredit him. Talk of reparations was alarming to a nation with other former colonies still suffering the legacy of exploitation. The French ambassador to Haiti at the time recalls the reparations demand as “explosive.” ........... Mr. Aristide even offered a precise figure for what France owed, eliciting mockery. But Haiti’s long-term losses, The Times found, turned out to be surprisingly close to his estimate. He may even have been too conservative. .............

In 2004, Mr. Aristide found himself being hustled onto a plane in an ouster arranged by the United States and France.





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