Better late than never // What's Good: Jun. 23, 2023
Optimism, crime time, and a coup.
Hello, good morning, happy Saturday. Apologies for missing the usual cadence - I had a tremendously busy week at work, and then last night I got distracted by what appears to be an ongoing coup in Russia. Normal things.
The ongoing what now
Yes, you heard me right, the ongoing coup in Russia:
The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.
Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, Central Africa Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement on Friday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.
Here is a video of an address from Putin with English subtitles. Wagner was, well, undeterred by any of that.
More to come, I’m sure.
Whose rights are they anyway
This can’t possibly be good policy:
ON A WEDNESDAY morning in May, Hannah got a call from her lawyer—there was a warrant out for her husband’s arrest. Her thoughts went straight to her kids. They were going to come home from school and their father would be gone. “It burned me,” Hannah says, her voice breaking. “He hasn’t done anything to get his bond revoked, and they couldn’t prove he had.”
Hannah’s husband is now awaiting trial in jail, in part because of an anti-pornography app called Covenant Eyes. The company explicitly says the app is not meant for use in criminal proceedings, but the probation department in Indiana’s Monroe County has been using it for the past month to surveil not only Hannah’s husband but also the devices of everyone in their family. To protect their privacy, WIRED is not disclosing their surname or the names of individual family members. Hannah agreed to use her nickname.
Also it feels like it shouldn’t be constitutional either? But even on an outcome-based evaluation, come on, what are we doing here.
Conflict check
An important backstory to this one is that Alito himself published a WSJ op-ed a day prior, insisting that he had not done any financial crimes. With that in mind:
In early July 2008, Samuel Alito stood on a riverbank in a remote corner of Alaska. The Supreme Court justice was on vacation at a luxury fishing lodge that charged more than $1,000 a day, and after catching a king salmon nearly the size of his leg, Alito posed for a picture. To his left, a man stood beaming: Paul Singer, a hedge fund billionaire who has repeatedly asked the Supreme Court to rule in his favor in high-stakes business disputes.
Singer was more than a fellow angler. He flew Alito to Alaska on a private jet. If the justice chartered the plane himself, the cost could have exceeded $100,000 one way.
Not since 1974 when New Times magazine called Sen. William Scott (R-Va.) Congress’ dumbest member and he called a press conference in response to deny the charge and thereby prove mental deficiencies has a member of the Washington elite so mishandled a critical press salvo as Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. did this week.
Alito, who shares with Donald Trump a toddler’s lack of impulse control, once again demonstrated his inability to plan more than one move ahead at a time after the investigative news outfit ProPublica emailed a list of questions for its story pegged to his flight to a comped 2008 luxury fishing trip in Alaska on a hedge fund billionaire’s private jet.
We have to talk about the sub
At least briefly. I cannot believe anyone got inside that thing:
The tourist submersible that went missing while exploring the Titanic wreck was previously the target of safety complaints from an employee of OceanGate, the parent company that owns the sub and runs tourist expeditions of the wreck. That employee complained specifically that the sub was not capable of descending to such extreme depths before he was fired.
That’s according to legal documents obtained by The New Republic. According to the court documents, in a 2018 case, OceanGate employee David Lochridge, a submersible pilot, voiced concerns about the safety of the sub. According to a press release, Lochridge was director of marine operations at the time, “responsible for the safety of all crew and clients.”
Reporting also suggests that the 19 year-old boy who was on board didn’t actually want to go, but did so as a Father’s Day concession to his dad, who insisted. Absolutely fucking heartbreaking.
We do what we must
Personally, I think that maintaining optimism in the face of despair is sort of the fundamental human condition. Here’s some of that:
A year ago, the patients in the waiting area at the Alabama Women’s Center on Sparkman Drive in Huntsville were separated into two rooms. In one, the staff put people whose abortion procedures had already begun through taking a dose of misoprostol. In the other were the ten or 15 who had come for their mandatory counseling or to start their abortions. These patients were unlucky by hours, because the Supreme Court had just ruled they had to stay pregnant, at least if the state of Alabama had anything to do with it.
Dr. Yashica Robinson, 47, doesn’t really want to talk about that day. Was she emotional? “I probably cried like a baby for ten minutes and then I cleaned my tears up and we came up with a plan,” she finally answers. By the end, she had been providing the majority of abortion procedures in the state, and most of the second-trimester ones, and in those last months, the clinic had been seeing people who were driving 12 hours — from Texas, from Mississippi — for their abortions. Robinson could tell by how their bodies sank which patients weren’t going to be able to get in their cars and keep driving to the closest state where abortion was still available.
Saviors of the spice
This is extremely cool:
In 1999, Susan Lin, a bespectacled plant researcher at the World Vegetable Center, in Taiwan, pulled on a pair of latex gloves and got to work cross-pollinating some chili peppers. She collected tiny white flowers from a cayenne-pepper plant, shook their pollen into a tiny test tube, and walked over to an aji-chili plant. Using tweezers, she removed the petals and anthers from its flower buds, exposing the thread-like stigmas that serve as the plant’s female reproductive organs. Then she dipped the stigmas into the pollen, hoping that they would eventually form peppers.
You deserve some good animal content
https://twitter.com/GoldretrieverUS/status/1672558774320521217
https://twitter.com/quokkaeveryhour/status/1672557417123704833
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1672474397234298883
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1672442864364662785
https://twitter.com/CAPYBARA_MAN/status/1672378152142745600
https://twitter.com/weirdlilguys/status/1672350121810329601
https://twitter.com/twperritos/status/1672289445721112577
https://twitter.com/RedPandaEveryHr/status/1672283969004421124
https://twitter.com/OregonZoo/status/1672272683919372288
https://twitter.com/raccoonhourly/status/1672265776231841800
Have a good weekend.
Addendums
She's A Children's YouTube Star. Her Fans Say She 'Groomed' Them As Teens. Colleen Ballinger, Miranda Sings and the unraveling of an online fandom. This isn’t the first time Moms for Liberty has quoted Hitler. The Bear Gets Out of the Restaurant—and Becomes Even Better for It. Eugenics, Environmental Ruin, and Surveillance: The Story of Silicon Valley. Barbie, Her House and the American Dream.