Linky Friday: Tangled Webs, Weaved and Otherwise Edition

The long running tradition of bringing you stories and viewpoints from across the web and around the world, it is once again time for Linky Friday. As always, all the pieces in Linky Friday are for discussion purposes only, and the opinions therein are solely those of the author’s alone, and should not be seen as endorsements by Ordinary Times.

[LF1] An indictment of Trump is anything but certain by Philip Allen Lacovara and John S. Martin in The Washington Post

Those who are hoping to see former president Donald Trump indicted may well be disappointed. Signs are piling up that the investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. has taken a serious turn, but there are reasons for caution about whether Trump himself will be indicted, much less convicted.

The Post reported Tuesday that Vance had convened a special grand jury relating to his investigation of matters involving Trump and the Trump Organization. The news prompted a frenzy of speculation that an indictment and possible conviction of Trump is on the horizon. The reaction may have reflected more wish-fulfillment than hardheaded analysis. This is, after all, the man who was twice acquitted in Senate impeachment trials and sidestepped trouble from the Russian-influence investigation conducted by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III.

Vance has been investigating the Trump Organization for more than two years. He and his team have invested enormous resources in going after masses of financial records that may be relevant to the question whether Trump, or others in the organization, engaged in tax fraud or bank-related fraud. The district attorney has used search warrants and subpoenas to collect records from a range of witness and potential targets.

He is leaning on Allen Weisselberg, the chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, to cooperate. Weisselberg is a longtime Trump family confidant. Last month, Vance reportedly received a trove of confidential records from Weisselberg’s former daughter-in-law. Most ominous for Trump personally, Vance in February secured eight years’ worth of Trump’s personal tax records. Trump had fought in court for 18 months to block disclosure of the records.

The signs are clear that Vance is moving toward indicting someone. The district attorney has hired a forensic-accounting firm to assist in analyzing masses of financial records. He also brought on board a high-profile defense lawyer and former federal prosecutor, Mark F. Pomerantz, whose expertise is in financial matters. The special grand jury that Vance convened will meet three days a week for six months, The Post reported, making it easier to “participate in long-term matters rather than to hear evidence of crimes charged routinely.”

Given that Vance’s term as the elected district attorney expires at the end of the year, he seems unlikely to leave the fruits of his investigation to be taken up by his successor.

But none of this means that Vance will charge Trump personally. There are many reasons to think that he will not.

[LF2] “Cancel Culture,” Hypocrisy, and Double Standards by Cathy Young for Arc Digital

This brings me back to the point I made last week about free speech and criticism of Israel, occasioned by the controversy at the University of Toronto about the withdrawal of a job offer to pro-Palestinian legal scholar Valentina Azarova.

When “cancellation” targeting journalists or academics comes from the right, it is almost invariably met with a strong pushback from within the profession. This is already the case with both Wilder and Hannah-Jones.

When “cancellation” targeting journalists or academics comes from the left, it almost invariably comes from within the profession. Who speaks for Donald McNeil or Mike Adams? Certainly not their colleagues.

That makes right-wing “cancel culture” more episodic and easily contained. Yes, it can still be damaging and should be resisted by any genuine advocate for freedom of speech. (So, of course, should state-level bills championed by conservatives that would restrict teaching of “divisive concepts” on race and sex—a different, but extremely bad, kettle of fish.) But to argue that the real “chilly climate” for speech in the mainstream media and the academy comes from occasional right-wing hits? That’s projection on a par with claims that it’s the Democrats who are really responsible for subverting democracy by delegitimizing election results.

[LF3] Rush Limbaugh’s Radio Show to Be Taken Over by Clay Travis and Buck Sexton by Anne Steele for The Wall Street Journal

Well…this should be interesting.

Since the 70-year-old conservative talk-radio icon and pioneer of right-wing media died from complications from lung cancer in February, the industry has been looking to fill his massive void. Mr. Limbaugh’s show, marked by his signature brash and acerbic conservatism, ran for more than three decades and was the most listened to in the U.S., according to Nielsen Audio, reaching more than 20 million monthly listeners on more than 650 affiliates as of the end of 2020.

Premiere Networks has continued to syndicate “The Rush Limbaugh Show” using archived segments on topics relevant to the day’s news, with guest hosts filling in between clips. The program was attracting about 75% to 80% of its regular audience, according to a person familiar with the matter.

“Rush’s connection with his audience is one of the primary legacies of his show,” Mr. Travis said. “I also think Buck and I have the unique ability to offer a perspective that many people in their 20s and 30s are desperate to hear.”

Mr. Travis, 42 years old, is a sports journalist, lawyer, TV analyst and founder of sports website Outkick.com. Since 2016 he’s hosted “Outkick the Coverage With Clay Travis” on Fox Sports Radio, syndicated to more than 350 affiliates nationwide on weekday mornings. (Mr. Travis has agreed to sell Outkick to Fox Corp.) He will continue to co-host FS1’s daily gambling TV show “Fox Bet Live,” in addition to his podcasts “Outkick The Show” and “Wins & Losses With Clay Travis.”

A self-proclaimed political moderate and independent, Mr. Travis last year announced he would be voting for former President Donald Trump, saying it would be the first time he would vote for a Republican for president. He has written several books, most recently 2018’s “Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too: How the Left Is Ruining Sports With Politics.”

Mr. Sexton, 39, is a radio host and political commentator who has served as an officer with the Central Intelligence Agency and a New York Police Department counterterrorism expert. His three-hour weekday evening talk show, “The Buck Sexton Show”—formerly “America Now”—is syndicated to over 180 stations by Premiere, and he has served as a guest host for Mr. Limbaugh’s show. Mr. Sexton is a regular on Fox News as a national security analyst, and was previously national security editor for The Blaze.

Mr. Sexton pointed to their different backgrounds and younger ages as a boon for the show.

“The most dominant talk radio hosts have been from one generation; Clay and I represent the next phase. We’re going to bring the perspective of two guys who see a country they’re deeply worried about, and a massive audience that needs people who will speak for them,” he said.

[LF4] The West Is Failing Belarus by Yasmeen Serhan for The Atlantic

When the Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko plucked a dissident journalist out of the sky, he proved two things: that his 27-year grip on power is unhindered by international isolation, and that, absent meaningful action by the United States and Europe—whose citizens were among the passengers on the hijacked flight—nothing is going to change.

That, at least, is how Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya sees it. “Since December, we haven’t had any sanctions; we haven’t had any high-profile meetings,” the Belarusian opposition leader and self-styled leader of democratic Belarus told me from her office in Lithuania’s capital, Vilnius, where the Ryanair flight carrying the Belarusian opposition journalist Roman Protasevich was headed. Protasevich never made it to Vilnius, though, and neither did his girlfriend—both were detained after the flight was diverted to Minsk under the ruse that the Palestinian militant group Hamas had made a bomb threat (it had not). Tsikhanouskaya took the same flight only a week ago, and she told me she would have never imagined that something like that could happen. “Maybe I could be in Roman’s place,” she said.

That place is a Minsk detention center, where Protasevich appears to have been beaten and forced to confess to “organizing mass riots.” Tsikhanouskaya, meanwhile, remains in Vilnius, fighting the Belarusian prodemocracy movement’s corner on the world stage. Although her meetings with leaders and international bodies have reaped key wins—including widespread international refusal to recognize Lukashenko as the rightful leader of Belarus following last summer’s fraudulent presidential election, as well as U.S. and European sanctions against top Belarusian officials—they appear to have had little effect on the staying power of Europe’s last dictator. “The threat of sanctions stops [Lukashenko] from escalating violence,” Tsikhanouskaya told me during our Zoom call, “and that’s why very strong steps should be taken right now.”

Some steps have been taken since Protasevich’s kidnapping, albeit ones narrowly tailored to the interception of the Ryanair flight and the detention of the journalist, who is perhaps best known for being one of the original editors behind a popular Telegram channel used to organize demonstrations at the height of the grassroots prodemocracy movement last summer. In addition to calling for further EU sanctions, European leaders have also advocated for the bloc to ban Belarusian airlines from accessing the bloc’s airspace and airports. Britain announced that it too would consider sanctions, and advised U.K. airlines against flying over Belarusian airspace. In the U.S., President Joe Biden welcomed the call for further sanctions, noting that the U.S. would work to develop its own retaliatory measures in cooperation with allies.

Tsikhanouskaya said that it would be a mistake for world leaders to see these recent events as separate from the overall situation in Belarus, where more than 400 political prisoners continue to languish in prison. But she admits that getting countries to continue caring about the fight for democracy in her home country—which this weekend marks the first anniversary of the beginning of the movement against Lukashenko’s rule—hasn’t always been easy. “Sometimes you see real support and a real wish to help,” she said of her meetings with politicians and diplomats, “and sometimes in meetings, you see empty eyes.” In the latter instances, she told me, she tries to steel herself and turn off her emotions, to “just tell them mechanically what is happening.”

[LF5] The Labor Market Needs the ‘Soft’ Skills Older Workers Have by Brent Orrell for The Bulwark

Old dogs, it seems, don’t need new tricks. New research from David J. Deming at Harvard’s Wiener Center for Social Policy examines lifetime earning patterns and shows how the peak earning years have shifted dramatically up the age continuum over the past five decades. This trend has been driven by changes in the mix of skills required in the workforce—away from routinized tasks and toward non-cognitive domains like critical reasoning and decision-making.

The breadth of this shift is difficult to overstate. Between 1960 and 2018, the portion of the nation’s “labor bill” going to management and management-related occupations rose from 15 percent to 32 percent, moving the peak career earnings years from the 30s into the 50s. Deming controls for top executive pay to show this is not a function of the eye-popping salaries of the nation’s elite business leadership but a pervasive workforce reality.

The increasing demand for decision-making skills has several causes, including especially technologically driven reductions in the number of occupations that involve routine tasks and a corresponding rise in the premium for those who can lead and manage workplaces with ever-higher levels of automation. One of the main qualifications for such jobs appears to be the ability to absorb, integrate, and learn from the massive troves of data the modern economy creates.

Between 1960 and 2018, the number of jobs with decision-making components has increased from 6 percent to 34 percent of the total workforce, Deming reports, with almost half that increase occurring since 2007. The price of advancement in the workforce seems to be the ability to use data to guide decision-making, adapt work processes to maximize performance, and incorporate learning from previous successes (and failures) over time.

Which is to say, it isn’t the bright, young things who keep our economy humming but the seasoned managers who know how to deploy and manage the skill sets of smart but less experienced workers.

[LF6] I’m afraid I can’t dunk about the lab leak by Freddie deBoer

I am not really in the habit of defending the media. And I acknowledge that many were far too quick to dismiss the possibility that the virus that causes Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese lab, especially considering that whistleblowers have been saying for years that a lab leak somewhere was inevitable. It’s true as well that the term “conspiracy theory” was (once again) weaponized for partisan purposes. I also concede that the smug superiority and obsession with mocking the rubes that permeate professional media led to incuriosity about the origins of the coronavirus. There’s lots of blame to go around and I endorse Matt Yglesias’s analysis.

But I also think that a lot of the gloating about this issue has been unjustified and untoward. This is particularly true because we still don’t have the slightest idea whether the virus was zoonotic or escaped from a lab. It’s essential to underline that last point because if you only paid attention to all of the dunking going on you would be under the impression that we know for a fact that the virus emerged from a lab. We don’t know that, at all. It’s a strong possibility, but that’s as much as we can say, and given the nature of what we’re talking about there’s every chance that we’ll never know more than that. Pretending we know what we don’t was the problem in the first place, right? Yes, the media has lessons to learn here. But they are lessons about epistemological humility, which those prosecuting the case against the media seem to be lacking as well. Don’t commit overreach in condemning that of others.

I do not have the slightest idea what the origins of SARS-CoV-2 might be. (I assume no one would be so foolish as to think I’m worth listening to on that question.) I hope we find out and that the media learns lessons from its rush to belittle those who asked legitimate questions. But now is not the time to gloat. We are all still in the dark.

[LF7] The White Men Who Wanted to Be Victims by Chris Lehmann for The New Republic

This curious work of cultural alchemy came about thanks to the convergence of several other post–civil rights reckonings in 1970s America. As white Vietnam vets struggled with the challenges of adapting to an American social order transformed by the politics of anti-discrimination and cultural representation, they were not simply echoing the well-worn refrains of white reaction. Rather, as Darda shows in this wide-ranging and provocative tour through the post-Vietnam cultural and political scene, they fashioned their own new brand of therapeutically inflected grievance politics, poised to capitalize in a host of ways on America’s emerging postliberal backlash.

Conditions were ripe for returning Vietnam vets to engineer this dramatic change in status. The so-called white ethnic revival announced a defection from the old model of WASP ascendancy, and the assertion of new cultural status on behalf of a cohort of twentieth-century immigrants—Polish, Italian, Greek, and Slovak Americans (or PIGS, in the provocative coinage of white ethnic theorist and eventual neoconservative theologian Michael Novak)—who bore limited culpability for the original sin of Black slavery. This reconfigured model of the white immigrant experience “turned white people into minorities, innocent and self-made,” Darda writes, while the culture-first logic of the white ethnic revival permitted these reborn white Americans “to attribute the material barriers that Black and brown Americans faced in education, health services, housing, law enforcement, and wealth accumulation to culture and choice.”

The emerging new politics of white blamelessness came to a head in the 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision Regents of University of California v. Bakke. The plaintiff in that case, a Marine vet in Vietnam named Alan Bakke, alleged that he was a victim of reverse racial discrimination after the University of California at Davis twice rejected his medical school application in favor of nonwhite candidates selected under a quota system. The court ruled in his favor, and in place of the putative discriminatory nature of admissions quotas, the Bakke majority endorsed the far more amorphous-to-subjective metric of “diversity” to justify minority outreach efforts in college admissions programs—thereby vastly complicating measurable progress in racial representation while helping to launch a top-down human resources land rush in diversity training and institutional image management.

Other returning Vietnam veterans, meanwhile, were coping with the challenges of reintegrating into an America society that seemed ashamed of the failed Southeast Asian war—and indifferent to hostile to the plight of veterans of the conflict. The mounting sense of anomie in the white veterans’ community became focused on the notion of post-traumatic stress disorder—a new psychological diagnosis that took root after a nurse in a Boston VA hospital treated a veteran who’d taken part in the infamous massacre of some 500 Vietnamese villagers in My Lai. By the time PTSD was formally adopted in the 1980 edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the notion of post-Vietnam trauma was already spreading beyond the corps of afflicted veterans and gaining traction as an all-purpose depiction of white male grievance in a contracting economy and a still-confrontational climate of post–civil rights and feminist protest. “The attribution of PTSD to vets and the white men who identified with them, most of whom did not serve and did not suffer from PTSD” worked “as a kind of entitlement,” Darda writes, “a belief that something they deserved had been taken from them, had been taken and must be returned. It encouraged a feeling of entitlement through a sense of discrimination.”

The Week That Was At Ordinary Times:

Thursday Throughput: The Economy of Lockdowns by Michael Siegel
After a year of evidence, the claim that you must choose between saving the economy and stopping the virus is simply not true.

The Secrets of Cybersecurity Consulting by John McCumber
In a way, cybersecurity consulting transfers a lot of risk from organizational leaders and places it on an outsourced expert.

Wednesday Writs: The Willy-nilly Invocation of The Nuremberg Codes Edition by Em Carpenter
No, promoting vaccinations are not in “violation of the Nuremberg codes”. And I thought the willy-nilly invocation of HIPAA was bad.

Tech Tuesday: Re-Thinking Recycling by Oscar Gordon
So aside from metals (and organic stuff that can be composted), it doesn’t appear that we have a lot of recycling we can actually do

Wuhan Lab-leak Theory Timeline
The Washington Post has a timeline on the Wuhan lab-leak theory that the Covid-19 pandemic originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Requiring a Bit Of An Adjustment: Explaining the Santo Daime Church by Steve Pittelli
Explaining Santo Daime as a very different type of religious practice, and perhaps expand the tent for what most would consider a religion

Things I Learned Teaching During a Global Pandemic by Eloise Hilton
The big takeaway for me teaching this year has been that even in isolation, human connection is our greatest weapon in any sort of crisis

Sunday Morning! The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright by Rufus Hickok
Richard Wright’s “lost” 1942 novel of guilt, exile, and spiritual initiation has been fortuitously pulled up from the memory hole. It’s no less urgent today.

Nadia G’s Bitchin Kitchen: A Requiem For Not Taking Food TV Too Seriously by Andrew Donaldson
Thank God for the internet, where old shows that never got their due like Nadia G’s Bitchin Kitchen live forever.

Saturday Morning Gaming: Yaga by Jaybird
The Baba Yaga stories were particularly striking because of how weird they were. Well, the video game Yaga takes place in the Yagaverse.

For All Mankind: A Peek Into What Could Have Been by Dennis Sanders
Why For All Mankind is so arresting: it shows an America that wasn’t stagnating culturally, one willing to take risks even at great cost