It’s interesting to see the likes of David Frum recognize the imbalance in the media after all these years. People who read this blog have seen this for about three decades now. A thread:

“Donald Trump tried to overthrow an election by violence.”

That’s old news, we already reported that.

“As president, Donald Trump directed tens of millions of tax dollars to his own pockets.”

Old news.

“Russian intelligence helped elect Trump by illegal means. Trump welcomed the help.”

Russia, Russia.

A reliable feature of our politics is that people from the center to the left, including the press, direct more fire at Democrats than at Republicans. It’s not that Democrats deserve more criticism. It’s that the aggrieved see more chance that their complaints will leave a mark on the left than on conservatives better armored against them. If shamelessness is conservatives’ superpower, giving a damn is the left’s kryptonite.

Protecting our freedoms matters. Improving other people’s lives matters. A more perfect union matters. Equal justice under law matters. Just not to our opponents, if ever it was.

Joe Biden’s terrible debate performance bleeds, so it leads. The media feeding frenzy is dispiriting in the extreme. Some Democrats tearing out their hair in panic and others circling the wagons around Biden makes quite a messy show. Pixels and ink, eyeballs and clicks.

And while the piranhas chomp away at the party that actually gives a damn about salvaging a country once aspirationally dedicated to the proposition that all men persons are created equal, supposed Real Americans™ who never accepted that proposition (except as a marketing slogan) march towards reformatting the United States as a monarchy similar to the one we declared ourselves free of on July 4, 1776.

Ian Milhiser’s write-up of Trump v US :

Trump v. United States is an astonishing opinion. It holds that presidents have broad immunity from criminal prosecution — essentially, a license to commit crimes — so long as they use the official powers of their office to do so.

Broadly speaking, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion reaches three conclusions. The first is that when the president takes any action under the authority given to him by the Constitution itself, his authority is “conclusive and preclusive” and thus he cannot be prosecuted. Thus, for example, a president could not be prosecuted for pardoning someone, because the Constitution explicitly gives the chief executive the “Power to Grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States.”

One question that has loomed over this case for months is whether presidential immunity is so broad that the president could order the military to assassinate a political rival. While this case was before a lower court, one judge asked if Trump could be prosecuted if he’d ordered “SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival” and Trump’s lawyer answered that he could not unless Trump had previously been successfully impeached and convicted for doing so.

Roberts’s opinion in Trump, however, seems to go even further than Trump’s lawyer did. The Constitution, after all, states that the president “shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” So, if presidential authority is “conclusive and preclusive” when presidents exercise their constitutionally granted powers, the Court appears to have ruled that yes, Trump could order the military to assassinate one of his political opponents. And nothing can be done to him for it.

That. Is. Terrifying.

We are on the verge of electing an already convicted criminal who has also been found liable for rape and defamation to this office. If there is a better argument for voting for Biden or anyone else I don’t know what it is. Trump is a corrupt criminal already. Now they’ve given him carte blanche to break any laws he wants.

Remember back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton’s emails were all The New York Times could write about? Flooding its front page instilled FUD – fear, uncertainty, and doubt, a well-known and frequently used tactic to undermine opposition.

(source: Vox, Study: Hillary Clinton’s emails got as much front-page coverage in 6 days as policy did in 69)

That. We’re watching a reprise of a FUD flood right now, this time with NYT’s uppermost management in on the effort.

In 2016 it was so bad it became a joke memorialized as a meme.

That was then, this is now. Welcome to NYT’s 2024 election FUD operation: “But His Debate.”

The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that district court judges are more qualified to decide complex matters of science and technology than government experts. Here’s the result:

Just think of all the health and safety rules we count on to keep us safe. Then think about all the unqualified MAGA weirdos Trump put on the courts and the bitter, angry Supreme Court majority that really seems to believe that it’s every man for himself.

... Trump’s focus on 32-year-old Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich, who was arrested by Russian officers in March 2023 and is currently on trial for the trumped-up charge of espionage. The State Department considers him “wrongfully detained,” a rare designation indicating that the person is being held by a hostile government as a bargaining chip. That designation means the U.S. government will do all it can to secure his release.

At least three times now, Trump has interfered with those negotiations by vowing that Russian president Vladimir Putin will release Gershkovich for him and him alone. He said it in last night’s CNN debacle, where he also made a big deal out of the idea that Putin will do it as a favor, without an exchange of money.

He said something else last night in his slurry of words that jumped out. Somewhere in his discussion of Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, Trump said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.”

In last night’s debate, Trump insisted that Putin never would have invaded Ukraine on his watch (although Putin in fact continued his 2014 assault during Trump’s term, and Trump tried to withhold support for Ukraine).

After Russia invaded Ukraine again in 2022, Jim Rutenberg published a terrific and thorough review of this history in the New York Times Magazine, pointing out that Putin’s attack on Ukraine looked different with this history behind it. Once Biden took office in 2021, the many efforts of the people around Trump, including most obviously Rudy Giuliani, to influence Ukrainian politics through their ties to the White House were over.

In 2017, Equifax suffered the worst data-breach in world history, leaking the deep, nonconsensual dossiers it had compiled on 148m Americans and 15m Britons, (and 19k Canadians) into the world, to form an immortal, undeletable reservoir of kompromat and premade identity-theft kits:

Equifax knew the breach was coming. It wasn't just that their top execs liquidated their stock in Equifax before the announcement of the breach – it was also that they ignored years of increasingly urgent warnings from IT staff about the problems with their server security.

Our whole economy is now composed of companies with sociopath-shaped holes at the tops of their org chart. The reason these companies can only be run by sociopaths is the same reason that they have become infrastructure that is crumbling due to sociopathic neglect. The reckless disregard for the risk of combining companies is the source of the market power these companies accumulated, and the market power let them neglect their systems to the point of collapse.

This is the system that Schumpeter, and Easterbrook, and Wood, and Scalia – and the entire Supreme Court of 2004 – set out to make. The fact that you can't buy a car is a feature, not a bug. The pig-butcherers, wallowing in an ocean of breach data, are a feature, not a bug. The point of the system was what it did: create unimaginable wealth for a tiny cohort of the worst people on Earth without regard to the collapse this would provoke, or the plight of those of us trapped and suffocating in the rubble.

Before I present this post I want to add a few disclaimers.

First, there are a lot of unique considerations for individuals, including which sleeping positions are uncomfortable, impair breathing, complicate sleep apnea treatment, etc. A good article I read while preparing this post states: “Sleep habits are highly personal, and the same goes for your ideal sleep position. A side sleeping position has many advantages and fewer drawbacks than a stomach or back position. Ultimately, the position that helps you fall asleep, stay asleep, and get quality rest is the best one for you.”

Second, the science of how our brains wash out the accumulated junk of a full day’s cognitive work while we are sleeping is still very much being studied. There is fascinating stuff to learn, including the magic of the brain’s glymphatic system and washing cycle mode. As a primary care doctor I am not contributing to this research by any means. But I do have a vested interest in helping to prevent or slow neurodegenerative diseases like the ones I see every day (dementia, Parkinson’s, general cognitive decline, etc.)

The typical articles we read about preferred sleep positions concentrate mostly on our physical comfort, breathing, and associated medical issues. So I’m going to quickly summarize that and let the interested reader click through to more information if desired. But then I’m going to spend the bulk of this post examining an overlooked consideration - which sleeping position best clears out the brain of leftover metabolites and junk that can accumulate and lead to long term problems?

In short, side sleeping is generally considered the most beneficial position, offering advantages for spine alignment, reducing snoring and sleep apnea symptoms, and aiding digestion for most people. Everyone is different, and so following your body signals here goes a long way. For example, side sleeping may cause shoulder and hip pain, especially in older people. Forcing it will result in bad sleep. But one of the best tricks I learned along the way in this regard is to put a pillow between my knees while side sleeping. For me, this keeps my spine, hips, and knees in alignment and therefore happier in the morning. Some nuances between side, back, and front sleeping are discussed further in this article from The National Council on Aging (NCOA) as promised. And a bonus article from Houston Methodist on sleep positions.

HELENA, Mont. — Sophia Ferst remembers her reaction to learning that the Supreme Court had overturned Roe v. Wade: She needed to get sterilized.

Within a week, she asked her provider about getting the procedure done.

Ferst, 28, said she has always known she doesn’t want kids. She also worries about getting pregnant as the result of a sexual assault then being unable to access abortion services. “That’s not a crazy concept anymore,” she said.

“I think kids are really fun. I even see kids in my therapy practice, but, however, I understand that children are a big commitment,” she said.

In Montana, where Ferst lives, lawmakers have passed several bills to restrict abortion access, which have been tied up in court. Forty-one states have bans or restrictions on abortion, according to the Guttmacher Institute, and anti-abortion groups have advocated for restricting contraception access in recent years.

University of Pittsburgh researcher Jackie Ellison and her co-authors used TriNetX, a national medical record database, to look at how many 18- to 30-year-olds were getting sterilized before and after the ruling. They found sharp increases in both male and female sterilization. Tubal ligations doubled from June 2022 to September 2023, and vasectomies increased over three times during that same time, Ellison said. Even with that increase, women are still getting sterilized much more often than men. Vasectomies have leveled off at the new higher rate, while tubal ligations still appear to be increasing.

Tubal ligations among young people had been slowly rising for years, but the ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization had a discernible impact. “We saw a pretty substantial increase in both tubal ligation and vasectomy procedures in response to Dobbs,” Ellison said.

Shareholders at three of the world’s largest oil companies recently turned down tax transparency proposals from an activist investor.

At Chevron, a proposal to publicly report the company’s earnings and tax bills in every country where it operates was defeated on May 29; 85% of votes were against the proposal. The shareholders followed recommendations from the board of directors, according to documents from the Securities and Exchange Commission obtained by Law360. Meanwhile, ExxonMobil and ConocoPhillips blocked similar votes, SEC letters obtained by Law360 show.

The proposals were initiated by nonprofit Oxfam America, which purchased shares in the companies to engage in shareholder activism to try to influence their behavior.

“Country-by-country reporting doesn’t only make sense because it is good for oil and gas companies to get involved in tax transparency as a best practice, but it is also better for business,” Aubrey Menard, Oxfam America’s senior policy advisor for extractive industries transparency, told ICIJ.