… silver linings. And of course there’s Macron’s victory over Le Pen.
[O]ne of the largest United States-based cryptocurrency exchanges [is closing] its San Francisco-based headquarters.
Kraken CEO Jesse Powell retweeted an announcement stating that the exchange will close its global headquarters at 548 Market Street, in the center of San Francisco.
Our cities’ current terrible lawlessness is destroying/driving out not only businesses (big and small), but the public realm itself, so crucial to democratic life.
… “Witness.” The vicious hysteria of one actor escalates, and draws the witness of all. Shamed, confronted, it escalates still more, terrifying the innocent.
Will Russia back down? Its neighbors are not waiting to find out. This is NATO’s moment.
Finland, a European Union member state, shares a 1,300-km (810-mile) border with Russia. [Its foreign minister] said Russia’s invasion had shown that Russia is willing to take increasing risks in its military operations, can quickly mobilise more than 100,000 soldiers against a neighbouring country, and has mooted more openly than before the possible use of its nuclear and biological weapons.
… up the legal system. A French lawyer who wants to wear a hijab in court keeps suing to do so – and losing – in one court after another. Having been refused by France’s highest court, she apparently plans to head over to the European Court of Human Rights, which okay I wish her luck. All she’s so far done is force the issue in France so that now there’s an explicit ban on hijabs in court.
Boucar Diouf explains why this matters.
In a string of tweets sent from his prison cell, [Alexei Navalny,] the Russian opposition leader, called Putin “our obviously insane czar” and sent out a call to action. “We cannot wait any longer,” Navalny wrote. “Wherever you are, in Russia, Belarus or on the other side of the planet, go to the main square of your city every weekday and at 2 pm on weekends and holidays. If you are abroad, come to the Russian embassy. If you can organise a demonstration, do so on the weekend.”
‘People logging on to Russian state-owned news agency Tass to get the Kremlin’s version of events in Ukraine got a shock early Monday. Instead of the latest lies from the Kremlin, the site showed an anti-war message that condemned President Vladimir Putin for forcing Russian journalists to lie. “Dear citizens. We urge you to stop this madness, do not send your sons and husbands to certain death. Putin makes us lie..”.‘
… the latest European confection, served very cold.
And I’m following the mess closely. I haven’t written about it yet because I need to know a lot more about the particular circumstances, regions, histories, politics, before I venture an opinion. I’m reading, reading, and reading.
Rama Yade rose to the position of a junior minister in a recent center-right French government; she even ran for president. But when she failed to win that election, she left France for good and got a think tank job here in DC.
In France, in other words, she had a high-level government position; in the States, she’s an administrator at one of dozens of research firms. Why did she leave France?
When Ms. Yade — born in Senegal in a Muslim family — was appointed a junior government minister in 2007, she believed it would be a “starting point.” But after an unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2017, she left for the United States.
“My glass ceiling was political,” said Ms. Yade, 45, who is now senior director of Africa at the Atlantic Council, a Washington-based think tank.
For a lot of people, a ministerial position wouldn’t be a bad ending point for a career, but let’s go with her reasoning. Because she couldn’t get past the barrier to being president of France, she left the country and took an administrative position here…
Sorry, I can’t go with her reasoning. The current French government has a respectable number of high-ranking people who were born into Muslim families, or who have some form of Muslim identity, including the Interior Minister. It looks as though Emmanuel Macron will be re-elected, so there would seem to be opportunities for Yade – and Macron is center-left.
So here’s the deal:
To [Rama Yade, a junior minister for human rights during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy], the [current French] presidential race’s focus on immigration was the “consecration of 20 years of deterioration” in a political culture obsessed with national identity. She had quit her political party — for which [Valerie] Pécresse is now the candidate — because, Ms. Yade said, it had become “very hostile to anything that did not represent a fantasy version of French identity.”
Yade is certainly right to notice a rightward tendency among some in the French public, and indeed growing hostility toward Muslims. Millions of ordinary French Muslims have taken the hit for terrorist bloodbaths in the center of Paris, and for the growing religious radicalization of cities and towns located in one of the most proudly secular countries on earth.
For many non-Muslim French, it’s an obsession with religious identity that has messed things up; and as for fantasy versions of French identity — all nations pump themselves up with glorious versions of themselves, and I’m not sure the French form of this syndrome is worse than anyone else’s.
This rally tells UD all she needs to know about the future of this country. If the youth of deepest darkest West Virginia have the clarity, have the balls, to defend our fundamental principles this fiercely, if they still believe, despite all, that their teachers and administrators and superintendents are educable, WE ARE GOING TO BE OKAY.
You want to see a true revival assembly? This is a true revival assembly. Someone send this to Timothy Snyder, so he can stop worrying.
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And a shout-out to the science faculty at Huntington: Your required preacher, Nik Walker, has a lot to teach your students about empirical method!
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UPDATE: The superintendent will investigate, yada yada. Keep in mind this is the second time this school has foisted a mentally challenged fanatic on its students, so it’s clear we have a … structural problem.
The principal attended the required revival, so if the reason this keeps happening is that the person calling the shots keeps making it happen, this person must I think be put out to pasture.
As the Supreme Court today rejects without comment ISIS propagandist Hoda Muthana’s appeal of the decision to declare her not an American citizen, we do well to recall Christian Barry and Luara Ferracioli’s comment about self-exclusion.
And listen. It’s just Muthana’s bad luck that the political and judicial establishment of this country has its hands full, at the moment, with January 6 domestic terrorists. We can’t get rid of those assholes. Apparently we can rid ourselves of Muthana.
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Here are my Muthana posts.
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It is time for Muthana to do what she should have done long ago: Look for alternative citizenship. She has claims on Yemen through her parents. And slavery is still quite popular in Yemen, so as an ISIS slaveholder, Muthana would feel right at home. Through her son, she has claims on Tunisia. Several countries offer citizenship for a price, and they may be willing to take a chance on her. Letting her innocent son grow up in the squalid prisoner camp they now inhabit is pretty vile behavior; even if she cannot accompany him to, say, Tunisia (his father was Tunisian), she should, for his sake, allow him to go.
Through her philosophically committed, extreme, and persistent violence against the US and other democracies, Hoda Muthana has certainly destroyed her own life. No one can be surprised if a person this depraved decides to go ahead and ruin her child’s life too. But it would be nice if she decided not to.