We begin with Dylan Wells of The Washington Post writing about the first day of early voting in the Georgia runoff elections.
In more than two dozen counties across the state, thousands of voters from both parties came out to vote, some waiting for hours in lines stretching around the block for the chance to cast their ballot early for the Dec. 6 runoff.
The secretary of state’s office reported that at least 70,000 people voted Saturday. The first Saturday of early voting for the general election drew 79,682 people, more than double the 2018 number. Early voting will continue through Friday.
Those taking advantage of Saturday voting included college students visiting home for Thanksgiving, police officers and ambulance workers with busy work schedules, lifelong voters who make it a point to always cast their ballots on the first day they are allowed, and retirees just seeking an escape from holiday guests.[...]
A total of 27 counties conducted Saturday voting, giving greater opportunities to cast a ballot for voters who may be occupied during the week. The participating counties, which include most the state’s major metropolitan areas and several rural counties, ensured that just over half the state’s population had the opportunity to vote on Saturday.
In light of the debate regarding Twitter usage here at Daily Kos, Kyle Chayka’s article for The New Yorker is a somewhat informative guide about what you will and will not find on the most popular Twitter alternative, Mastodon.
Thus far, the most talked-about alternative is not a competing Silicon Valley startup but a lesser-known piece of open-source software called Mastodon. Mastodon is one of a fleet of new tools for so-called decentralized social networking, or what is sometimes dubbed the fediverse. This includes various open-source programs trying to position themselves as substitutes for the major platforms—Pixelfed for Instagram, PeerTube for YouTube—by letting individual users run a “federation” of autonomous mini social networks, all of them linked but each with its own set of ground rules and policies. Until now, these sites have been niche undertakings, attracting a small set of early adopters. But the tumult at Twitter has caused Mastodon to see a sudden surge of mainstream interest. Eugen Rochko, its twenty-nine-year-old creator, told me that in the past month Mastodon has grown from three hundred thousand monthly active users to nearly two million. On a recent video chat, he looked haggard and solemn, like a medical resident on overnight rotation. To keep up with Mastodon’s influx, he’s been working fourteen-hour days—hard-core by most standards.
Rochko was born in Russia in 1993, but moved to Germany when he was eleven years old and eventually studied computer science at the University of Jena. He was a fan of Twitter in its early years, when it had a thriving third-party-developer ecosystem, with outsiders able to build on the platform or offer alternative interfaces. But, as Twitter gradually limited developers’ access to its A.P.I. and other tools, beginning around 2012, Rochko saw an opportunity to create something better. He began work on Mastodon in 2016, while still in school, and launched it the same year, later receiving grants from Samsung and the European Commission. (It is named after an American heavy-metal band, which in turn is named after an extinct elephant-like creature.) Mastodon’s interface looks much like Twitter’s. The text-entry box is on the left rather than at the top of the screen, and the graphic design is less slick, but the template feels comfortingly familiar—a Twitter for people who want to get off Twitter.
Yet in other ways Mastodon is designed to cultivate an environment very unlike Twitter’s. Posts have a five-hundred-character limit rather than Twitter’s two hundred and eighty, so people often communicate in short paragraphs rather than in pithy one-liners. Stats such as “favorites” and “boosts,” as Mastodon calls likes and retweets, are largely hidden in users’ timelines, making it harder to tell what’s popular. There is no quote-tweet function, and little algorithmic sorting of content. Mastodon itself runs two of the largest servers, mastodon.social (two hundred and forty-six thousand active members) and mastodon.online (eighty-seven thousand active members), but there are thousands of others that vary in size from hundreds of members to tens of thousands. Iain Triffitt, a records officer at the University of Technology Sydney, who has been on Mastodon since 2017, spends most of his time on tabletop.social, a server for board-game players, and aus.social, for Australia-specific posts. Each server has “a shared language that doesn’t have to be explained or interpreted,” he said. Brian Lloyd, an editor at the Irish Web site entertainment.ie, belongs to mastodon.ie, a server focussed on Ireland with sixteen thousand active members. Its feed is something like a national digital billboard, offering appreciations of the regional landscape, TikTok videos praising a butter-and-crisps sandwich, and historical political cartoons. Compared with Twitter, “you don’t feel the same level of hostility there,” Lloyd told me, and there’s no “swathe of American bullshit to cut through.”
Myself, I am leaning toward migrating to alternative social media by the end of the year, possibly to Mastodon. I’m less disturbed by Musk’s outright endorsement of Republican candidates than I am about his embrace and troll posting of far-right conspiracy theories. Mastodon, to the extent that I have used it, seems to be not as user-friendly as Twitter.
Now that the Supreme Court has denied Number 45’s request to block congressional access to his tax returns, Edward J. McCaffrey of CNN wonders what can be done with the information given that the Democratic majority in the House only has a few weeks.
So now what? Congress should get the returns within days, if they do not already have them. But the Democratic majority in the House has just a few weeks to do anything on their own. They could, legally, publish Trump’s returns. But this would seem hasty and vindictive, at a time when Democrats are hoping against hope to avoid hasty and vindictive investigations from the incoming Republican House.
Plus, there’s the fact that we already know what’s in the tax returns, more or less, and “we” haven’t much cared – taking “we” as the people who have little appetite for stories about how the rich and well-advised escape taxes, not being rich or well-advised themselves. The New York Times has been relentless in tracking down Trump’s tax information through journalistic means and published a detailed analysis of 20 years’ worth of the former president’s returns, showing that he paid little or no taxes in most years.
The Manhattan DA’s case has argued that the Trump Organization engaged in clear and rather obvious tax fraud, as by paying executives like Allen Weisselberg in untaxed, unreported forms, such as through private school tuition payments for his grandchildren. All of this is consistent with decades of Trump family aggressive tax avoidance, stretching back to the 45th president’s father, Fred, in the 1940s. The Trump Organization has routinely dismissed these allegations saying they are all part of a “witch hunt” by the Democrats.
Part of me thinks: be petty and vindictive and publish those tax returns. It’s not like the incoming Republican House won’t hold petty and “vindictive’ investigations. They will, for any reason and/or none at all.
Yasmin Tayag of Vox writes about how public skepticism of current vaccines can and will doom the social effectiveness of future vaccines.
Vaccine hesitancy has existed for as long as vaccines have, but Covid-19 has magnified its impact and spread. Prior to the pandemic, up to a third of Americans were already opting out of some recommended vaccines while consenting to others and often designing vaccine schedules of their own for their children, Jennifer Reich, a University of Colorado, Denver sociologist who studies vaccine hesitancy, told me. That’s in part because Americans tend to view vaccines in the same way they do consumer products, like a dietary supplement or over-the-counter drug — meaning they believe it’s up to them to decide whether to use or not, based on their perception of its risks and benefits, rather than relying on expert or government recommendations. [...]
As Americans paid more attention to vaccines, many naturally had more questions, but finding the right answers was often difficult, while finding the wrong one was often all too easy. The timing of the vaccine rollout, eligibility requirements, and dosing schedule — mostly multiple shots spaced weeks apart, with boosters to follow — were fairly complex to begin with. Public disagreements between health officials on timing and eligibility only added to the confusion. Shortcomings in the public health messaging around the shots created unrealistic expectations about what vaccines are usually meant to do.
Covid-19 vaccine campaigns, for example, often didn’t emphasize that the main goal of vaccination is to prevent severe illness and death, not guarantee protection against infection. The breakthrough cases that followed eroded support for the shots, even as the lower hospitalization rates and avoided deaths that could be attributed to the vaccines were overlooked. Since it was never made clear that vaccine-generated immunity was always expected to fade, booster campaigns were set up to fail. These drawbacks, together with more pernicious misinformation and disinformation, led to confusion, frustration, mistrust, and, in a significant part of the population, rejection.
Chris Buckley and Muyi Xiao of The New York Times explain the COVID-19 lockdown protests in several Chinese cities.
The wider demonstrations followed an outpouring of online anger and a street protest that erupted Friday in Urumqi, the regional capital of Xinjiang in western China, where at least 10 people died and nine others were injured in an apartment fire on Thursday. Many Chinese people say they suspect Covid restrictions prevented those victims from escaping their homes, a claim the government has rejected.
The tragedy has fanned broader calls to ease China’s harsh regimen of Covid tests, urban lockdowns and limits on movement nearly three years into the pandemic. For much of that time, many accepted such controls as a price for avoiding the widespread illness and deaths that the United States, India and other countries endured. But public patience has eroded this year as other nations, bolstered by vaccines, moved back to something like normal, even as infections continued. And after years of enforcing the strict “zero Covid” rules, many local officials appear worn down.[...]
The biggest protest on Saturday appeared to be in Shanghai, where hundreds of people, mostly in their twenties, gathered at an intersection of Urumqi Road, named after the city in Xinjiang, to grieve the dead with candles and signs. Many there and elsewhere held sheets of blank white paper over their heads or faces in mournful defiance; white is a funeral color in China.
Aleksander Bresar of Euronews reports that in large part because of the war in Ukraine, Armaments are being made at the fastest pace since the Second World War.
It is not just the ongoing war in Ukraine: many countries have increased their military and defence spending, both to replace what was donated and beef up what was previously in stock.
"There is a real chance to enter new markets and increase export revenues in the coming years," said Sebastian Chwalek, CEO of Poland's PGZ, a state-owned weapons and ammo consortium.
PGZ controls more than 50 companies making everything from armoured transporters to unmanned air systems and holds stakes in dozens more.
It now plans to invest up to 8 billion zlotys (€1.75 billion) over the next decade — more than double its pre-war target, Chwalek told Reuters.
That includes new facilities located further from the border with Russia's ally Belarus for security reasons, he said.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett writes for The New York Times about his earnest (and failed) attempts to form a “good-will government” in Israel.
A year and a half ago, I made a difficult decision: to break from my political base and form a government with people I couldn’t have imagined working with in my wildest dreams.
Israel was at one of its lowest moments, polarized and paralyzed: four rounds of elections in two years, massive riots in Arab and mixed towns, and killings of Israeli Jews and Israeli Arabs, plus hundreds injured. The Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas had just shot rockets into Jerusalem after the annual Flag Parade in the Old City.
We had near-record unemployment and an unprecedented deficit. We hadn’t passed a budget for three years. Benjamin Netanyahu had failed to form a government, and we were just days away from another round of elections and full-blown chaos.
I vividly recall the moment, a Sabbath morning, when I made the decision. I asked my four children to join my wife, Gilat, and me in the kitchen. I told my family, “Your abba is about to attempt something, and I don’t even know if I’ll succeed. A lot of people — including friends — will say a lot of bad stuff about your abba. So I want you to know that I’m doing it for Israel’s sake.”
Finally today...The Game
Michigan trounced THEE Ohio State Buckeyes 45-23 yesterday in Columbus, Ohio! Michigan will play for their second consecutive Big Ten title this coming Saturday against the Purdue Boilermakers.
And … I suspect that we do have our Heisman Trophy winner playing in Los Angeles.
Um, Michigan’s Desmond Howard set the standard for THAT pose back in the day, Caleb. But congrats in advance for what I expect to be your Heisman Trophy.
Have a good day, everyone!