Ireland’s Lake District
The view from Aghadoe Heights over Killarney.
Quote of the Day
“Any fool can know. The point is to understand.”
- Albert Einstein.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
‘Fairytale of New York’ played at Shane MacGowan’s funeral
Shane McGowan’s funeral in Dublin was never going to be a staid affair, and so it proved.
Long Read of the Day
The American historian Heather Cox Richardson was one of the first big stars on Substack. Her Letter from an American remains a must-read for anyone interested in the madness going on over there, because she writes calmly and brings to bear her wide knowledge and historical perspective on every subject she touches. Tuesday’s edition of her blog was particularly gripping and revelatory. It starts with J.D. Vance’s persistent lying in the vice-presidential debate and then goes back to a gripping account of what went on in the run-up to the ‘insurrection’ on January 6, 2021.
Here’s an extended sample that gives a flavour of the essay.
By late November, neither the legal challenges nor the threats had worked. So in early December the conspirators decided to get the people who would have been the electors if Trump had won to sign certifications saying that they were the legitimate electors and were casting their electoral votes for Trump. The lawyer who came up with the plan, Ken Chesebro, admitted that “the votes aren’t legal” but thought Congress could use them to challenge the real votes.
Many of the electors were wary of the plan, but Trump and his conspirators managed to get the slates of fake electors on December 14, the appointed day for real electors to meet. The plan was for Vice President Mike Pence, who as president of the Senate would preside over the counting of the electoral votes, to use the fake electors to say there were competing slates of electors and thus to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” On December 19, Trump posted: “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6. Be there, will be wild!”
But the plan hit a snag. Pence maintained he did not have the power to do any such thing. The more Pence refused, the more insistent Trump became. After another argument on January 1, 2021, Trump told Pence that “hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts,” “people are gonna think you’re stupid,” and, finally, “You’re too honest.”
Trump, Bannon, and Trump’s lawyers all continued to pressure Pence, and Bannon normalized the plan on his podcast. Trump continued to talk publicly of fighting to make sure his opponents didn’t take the White House and continued to pressure Pence. On January 5—the day before the election certification proceeding—he talked to Bannon, and less than two hours later, on his podcast, Bannon told his listeners: “All Hell is going to break loose tomorrow” in Washington, D.C.
Concerned at Trump’s escalating fury at Pence, Pence’s chief of staff Mark Short alerted Pence’s secret service detail…
You get the point. Do read it.
Books, etc.
This arrived yesterday. I knew that Kissinger had been thinking about AI for a while, but not that he was working on a book with the former CEO of Google and a former senior Microsoft executive. It’s now on my list. Strange title, though.
My commonplace booklet
How Hurricane Helene became a monster storm.
Great report in The Verge. I particularly liked a quote from Karthik Balaguru, a climate scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, who “likens the effect of climate change to the world having a weakened immune system. ‘It doesn’t mean that you will become sick. It just increases your tendency to become sick’”.
In a British tabloid the headline would have been “A Perfect Storm”.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- London saw a surprising benefit to fining high-polluting cars: More active kids Link
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