As discussed previously, this is my weekly Twitter roundup. Note that tweets of articles generally include header images from the articles, which I don’t include here unless their creators happen to have released them for use under a free license. Most have not. But I now add most of my commentary here, where I don’t feel restricted by the message length.

diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week

I also don’t generally attach pictures to posts with quotations.

9:01 – Mon 15 August 2022

Five songs to celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day from Global Voices

Guatemalan Mayan singer Sara Curruchich continuously updates a playlist on Spotify with Indigenous women singers from around the world.

I initially subscribed to Global Voices to broaden my news sources. I’ve ended up dropping most of the sites from that cohort, for various reasons that have little to do with quality—for example, I stopped reading The Root, because a lot of their business involved “entertainment news,” and they didn’t mark it to help people who don’t care—but I especially enjoy these articles highlighting artists who I wouldn’t otherwise hear about.

12:01 – Mon 15 August 2022

The more thou stir it, the worse it will be.

Miguel De Cervantes

9:04 – Tue 16 August 2022

Survey: COVID caution is plummeting from Futurity

Over half of Americans (54%) personally know at least one person who has died of COVID-19.

This has frustrated me since the beginning. We’ve spent almost a full three years standing two weeks from ending the pandemic. With a bit of planning and money to help them weather the damage, we could have shut down all public spaces for fourteen days—or severely restricted them to essential personnel obliged to wear high-quality masks—we could treat the remaining ill and either wipe the virus out or at least reset the clock by restricting the virus to small populations.

Instead, every time we’ve seen fewer people die, we’ve relaxed restrictions. And now, despite cases rising, the CDC has surrendered, as they’ve consistently relaxed guidelines as businesses have complained about labor shortages or Republicans have whined about needing to care about people.

12:04 – Tue 16 August 2022

Confession of our faults is the next thing to innocence.

Publius Syrus

9:03 – Wed 17 August 2022

This Is the Data Facebook Gave Police to Prosecute a Teenager for Abortion from VICE

Facebook and other tech platforms have previously declined to say whether they would give law enforcement data that relates to abortion cases.

You might notice that we never get a story about how Facebook helped stop a mass shooter or provides advertising help to politicians who want to make life better…

12:05 – Wed 17 August 2022

Great and unexpected successes are often the cause of foolish rushing into acts of extravagance.

Demosthenes

9:05 – Thu 18 August 2022

Politicians seek to control classroom discussions about slavery in the US from The Conversation

Most enslaved people in the United States, then, entered slavery not through importation or “involuntary relocation,” but by birth.

These Republican moves make it clear why they want to literally whitewash history: They don’t want people to feel guilty, not for slavery, which we can’t change, but for the continued effects of slavery, which we can change, but they benefit from.

Oh, and I quoted that one sentence, because it gets to the heart of a common argument in the United States, how we can call slavery an American institution, when other societies have taken slaves. We took the idea of forced labor and turned it into ownership, allowing a family to pass down the rights of ownership of the descendants of slaves to their own descendants. No prior system of slavery treated the slaves as livestock.

12:02 – Thu 18 August 2022

The manner of giving shows the character of the giver more than the gift itself.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

9:02 – Fri 19 August 2022

A dark money group is lying about Medicare cuts from Pluralistic

It’s like the Dems have pledged to halt $300b in fraud and the American Prosperity Alliance went to the country’s elderly and sick and screamed: “They’re cutting your benefits!”

I’ve seen a few of these ads floating around. In providing no context and moving fast, they definitely have an effect.

12:03 – Fri 19 August 2022

But when by slow degrees I somewhat learnt

By aid of wise preceptors, my conceit,

Like some disease, passed off; and now I live

In the plain sense of what a fool I am.

Bhartṛhari

Bonus

Because it accidentally became a tradition early on in the life of the blog, I drop any additional articles that didn’t fit into the one-article-per-day week, but too weird or important to not mention, here.

Three Ways Merrick Garland and DOJ Spoke of Trump as if He Might Be Indicted from Empty Wheel

Applying the law evenly means that if someone steals classified documents and stores it in their basement, they get charged for it. And the invocation of “fear and favor” even as an attack against the Cincinnati FBI office was still being resolved suggests that the actuality of violence will not deter charges, if they are warranted.

Indictment seems especially relevant to this story, because I strongly suspect that Trump had those boxes as his bribe, if he needed to leave the country to dodge a trial, knowing full well that his overseas allies wouldn’t accept him otherwise. If he could make it somewhere comfortable, I guarantee that he would claim to “represent the government in exile.”

The actual contents of the files, if we learn more about them, might tell us more about his plan.

Unsealed court documents show the FBI was looking for evidence Trump violated the Espionage Act and other laws — here’s how the documents seized show possible wrongdoing from The Conversation

Because this kind of sensitive information can reveal both methods and procedures for collecting intelligence — including the identity of undercover agents in hostile countries — the presence of such materials at Mar-a-Lago may be a violation of the Espionage Act, if Trump was willfully retaining this information after the government demanded its return.

This article goes into satisfying depth on the various issues in this investigation. I highly recommend it, if you want an overview.

Credits: Header image is Circular diagrams showing the division of the day and of the week from a manuscript drafted during the Carolingian Dynasty.