Liz Cheney

Dear Commons Community,

Republican Representative Liz Cheney said Saturday that she would be willing to campaign for Democrats as she criticized her party’s acceptance of candidates who deny the results of the 2020 election.

“Yes,” Cheney, of Wyoming, said simply when asked whether she’d be willing to stump for Democrats — the first time she has said so explicitly.  As reported by NBC News.

Cheney made the remark in a discussion at the Texas Tribune Festival in Austin while talking about Arizona gubernatorial candidate and election denier Kari Lake.

Cheney, who has been a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump, said “partisanship has to have a limit” and mentioned Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, who has said he will campaign for Lake.

“He’s demonstrated that he’s somebody who has not bought into the toxin of Donald Trump — but he campaigned recently for Kari Lake, who’s an election denier, who is dangerous,” Cheney said.

“That’s the kind of thing we cannot see in our party. We cannot see an accommodation like that, and I think it’s very important that we be clear about that,” Cheney said.

Asked specifically whether she would campaign for Katie Hobbs — Lake’s Democratic opponent — Cheney said, “I am going to do everything I can to make sure that Kari Lake is not elected.”

Cheney is on her way out of Congress after she lost the Republican primary to a Trump-backed challenger in August.

Youngkin defended campaigning for Lake at the Texas Tribune Festival on Friday. “I am comfortable supporting Republican candidates,” he said. “And we don’t agree on everything. I have said that I firmly believe that Joe Biden was elected president.”

Cheney declined Saturday to offer many details about her own plans, including whether she will run for president.

She also did not disclose much about plans of the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, of which she is one of two Republican members.

The House committee is set to return Wednesday for its latest hearing.

Cheney did say that she does not think the committee’s hearings will conclude this week.

Chairman Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., said last week that unless something else develops it will be the last, “but it’s not in stone, because things happen.”

“We don’t anticipate that it will be the last hearing,” Cheney said.

Cheney is putting principle above politics.  We need more like her in government!

Tony

After Hemingway’s death, his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway (left), went through the material he had left at Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, Fla., packed up what she wanted, and gave the rest to longtime friends, Betty and Toby Bruce.Credit…The Toby and Betty Bruce collection of Ernest Hemingway in the Penn State Special Collections Library

Dear Commons Community,

A trove of items left in a Key West bar by Ernest Hemingway, are now part of a new archive at Penn State.  It includes four unpublished short stories, drafts of manuscripts and boxes of personal effects.

Below is an article by Robert Elder describing some of the material found.

Tony

————————————————————————————-

The New York Times

What Hemingway Left in Sloppy Joe’s Bar 80 Years Ago!

By Robert K. Elder

(Robert K. Elder is the author or editor of four books about Hemingway including the forthcoming “Mythbusting Hemingway” with Thomas Bevilacqua).

Sept. 21, 2022

In an untitled, three-page short story, Ernest Hemingway casts F. Scott Fitzgerald as a scrappy boxer who leaves the ring battered and disfigured but ultimately victorious.

He sketches out a novel he’ll never write, “A New Slain Knight,” calling it a “picaresque novel for America” that will follow his protagonist through a prison escape, a bank robbery and noirish double-crosses.

Wearing his American Red Cross uniform and smiling at the camera, an 18-year-old Hemingway huddles in a trench with Italian soldiers during World War I, just days before he was wounded by a mortar shell and machine-gun fire, an experience that inspired him to write “A Farewell to Arms.”

And in a notebook entry from 1926, there is a three-page meditation on death and suicide — 35 years before he took his own life.

The items, part of the most significant cache of Hemingway materials uncovered in 60 years, are in a new archive recently opened to scholars and the public at Penn State University. Called the Toby and Betty Bruce Collection of Ernest Hemingway, the material includes four unpublished short stories, drafts of manuscripts, hundreds of photographs, bundles of correspondence and boxes of personal effects that experts say are bound to reshape public and scholarly perception of an artist whose life and work defined an era.

Carl Eby, the president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society, said he was “truly floored” by the bounty of material from an artist best known for the taut, understated writing of works like “The Sun Also Rises” and “The Old Man and the Sea,” dispatches from World War II and the Spanish Civil War and his larger-than-life persona as a hard-drinking, hard-working outdoorsman.

“Hemingway reinvented modern American prose and the short story. His best work is deeply moving and rich in meaning and psychological complexity,” Eby, who is a professor of English at Appalachian State University, said. “He seemed to live on an epic scale, in fascinating times, in fascinating places, and because he was mythologized during his own lifetime, his public image to this day — for better or worse — retains all the allure and power of the mythic. There’s enough new material here to generate new biographical and interpretive insights for years to come.”

For years, most Hemingway scholars could only salivate about the Bruce collection, uncertain of its exact contents or even location. What they did know was that in 1939, after his second marriage crumbled, Hemingway, a notorious pack rat, left his belongings in the storeroom of Sloppy Joe’s Bar, his favorite watering hole in Key West, Fla. He never returned to collect them.

After Hemingway’s death, his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway, went through the material, packed up what she wanted, and gave the rest to longtime friends, Betty and Telly Otto Bruce, known to his friends as Toby. Toby Bruce was part of Hemingway’s inner circle for years, not only as his right-hand man, but also as his contractor, mechanic and sometime chauffeur.

The trove of materials spent decades uncataloged in cardboard boxes and ammo storage containers, surviving hurricanes and floods. Years ago, Betty and Toby’s son, Benjamin Bruce (known as Dink) and a local historian, Brewster Chamberlin, began creating an inventory of the haul in consultation with the Hemingway scholar Sandra Spanier. It was here, amid bullfighting tickets, checks, newspaper clippings and letters from his lawyer, family members and friends like the writer John Dos Passos and artists Joan Miró and Waldo Peirce, that they discovered a stained brown notebook. Inside was Hemingway’s first known short story, about a fictional trip to Ireland, written when he was 10 years old.

After Hemingway’s death, his fourth wife, Mary Welsh Hemingway (left), went through the material he had left at Sloppy Joe’s Bar in Key West, Fla., packed up what she wanted, and gave the rest to longtime friends, Betty and Toby Bruce.Credit…The Toby and Betty Bruce collection of Ernest Hemingway in the Penn State Special Collections Library

When that find was revealed in 2017, Dink Bruce told The New York Times that he hoped his family’s collection would find a permanent archival home. Spanier, the general editor of the Hemingway Letters Project and an English professor at Penn State, thought so too. For the next five years, she worked to bring the archive to the university, which purchased it in October 2021 for an undisclosed sum.

“I did have a sense of responsibility to make this happen, both as someone who had incredible affection and respect for Dink and Brewster, but also as a scholar,” Spanier said. “This is a gold mine for a scholar.”

The archive spans Hemingway’s life and even stretches past his death. In one box, labeled “Ernest’s baby treasures” in his mother’s handwriting, is a lock of his hair, his leather baby bootees and the head of his favorite toy, “Doggie,” which he slept with until age 6 and a half. In another folder, a telegram asks Toby Bruce to be a pallbearer at the author’s funeral. There is also Hemingway’s American Red Cross uniform — the one he wasn’t wearing when wounded — which rests in a box meant for a wedding dress.

“In terms of just being a fan, it gives me chills to touch his WWI uniform or to page through his letters,” said Spanier. “Just to touch the paper, there’s an electric connection that you get there personally, as well as intellectually as a scholar.”

In one newly discovered letter from the summer of 1945, Hemingway writes to Bruce about his son Jack, nicknamed Bumby, who had recently been released from a German prisoner of war camp during World War II.

“He is in o.k. shape. The wounds were plenty bad. One in the shoulder you could put your fist into. Another through fore-arm and another through shoulder,” Hemingway wrote. “He had six months of nothing but soup and a hell of a time all around.”

The most haunting piece of the archive comes from a notebook dated March 6, 1926.

“When I feel low I like to think about death and the various ways of dying and I think probably the best way, unless you could arrange to die some way while asleep, would be to go off a liner at night,” wrote Hemingway, then 26 and just seven months away from publishing his blockbuster novel “The Sun Also Rises.” While the scholar Carlos Baker quoted this section in his 1969 biography, “Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story,” the notebook itself was hidden away for years. What Baker didn’t include in his book is just as revealing.

Hemingway, in his tight penmanship, explores various means of death for three pages, writing: “For so many years I was afraid of death and it is very comfortable to be without that fear. Of course it may return again at any time.”

All of it is tempered, perhaps, by a pencil notation that Hemingway wrote later: “This is [expletive].”

Hemingway wrote these passages two years before his father killed himself, suggesting that the author’s own suicidal ideation started earlier and was perhaps deeper than scholars previously knew. In 1961, the Pulitzer- and Nobel-Prize-winning writer killed himself with a shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho, just weeks before his 62nd birthday.

The collection isn’t all darkness.

In a series of photos from February 1936, Hemingway referees sweaty teenagers in a boxing match during a good will exhibition between Cubans and Americans for Key West’s “Week of Joy” commemorating Cuban independence. In another, he grins in a candid shot with fellow author Sinclair Lewis ( “Babbitt,” “Elmer Gantry”) during a chance meeting in 1940. He can be seen beaming in the negatives from his wedding to his first wife, Elizabeth Hadley Richardson, on Sept. 3, 1921, in Horton Bay, Mich.

The collection not only allows access to things Hemingway wrote and touched and wore — it also allows scholars to see through his eyes.

There are dozens of tiny, two-by-three-inch snapshots that Hemingway took on his 1933-34 safari in British East Africa (now Kenya) and Tanganyika (now Tanzania). With his Graflex camera, Hemingway captured giraffes on the African plains, a pair of wary-looking elephants in the brush and an unguarded shot of his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, surveying the landscape with their guides. Hemingway chronicled the trip in a series of articles for Esquire magazine, and it served as the basis for his 1935 nonfiction book “Green Hills of Africa.”

“It’s a little flash of time travel. History comes alive for a minute,” Spanier says. “You can see exactly what he was experiencing on a given day.”

One of the most amusing finds is the short story about Fitzgerald as a fictional pugilist. The upstart Kid Fitz wins his match and “appeared in good condition after his grueling battle,” Hemingway writes. “His only marks were a strangulated hernia, a missing nose and two black eyes.”

Famously, Hemingway and Fitzgerald had a relationship that could be euphemistically described as “complicated.” The pair met in Paris in 1925 just after Fitzgerald published his masterpiece, “The Great Gatsby.” A more experienced and connected writer, Fitzgerald championed Hemingway’s work while offering him career and editing advice. He introduced Hemingway to his editor, Maxwell Perkins at Charles Scribner’s Sons, which ended up publishing his most important works.

The friendship soured, however, as Fitzgerald’s star waned and Hemingway took potshots at him in print. Fitzgerald also suffered the indignity of dying first, and Hemingway wrote in his memoir, “A Moveable Feast,” that Fitzgerald’s wife, Zelda, criticized the size of his manhood. Hemingway, according to his telling, had to reassure Fitzgerald that he was perfectly normal.

But this boxing story is playful and affectionate, though still biting. Hemingway casts Fitzgerald as a young boxing star who “deserves to rank” with other “boxers” including Battling Milton (John Milton), K.O. Keats (John Keats), Spike Shelley (Percy Shelley) and Wild Cat Wordsworth (William Wordsworth), among others.

“It’s making fun of Fitzgerald’s ineptitude in physical matters,” said Kirk Curnutt, a professor and chair of English at Troy University in Alabama, who also serves as the executive director of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Society.

“Hemingway clearly felt he’d surpassed Fitzgerald both in literary and physical virility,” he added. “But in a way, it’s an odd admission of delusion. Later in life, Hemingway would claim he could take world-renowned writers in the ring with the same sort of obliviousness he’s attributing to Kid Fitz here as he gets his nose knocked off.”

Because the story is undated, it’s difficult to fix its place in their relationship, although Curnutt thinks it might be related to a famous bone of contention between the two.

In 1929, Fitzgerald was the timekeeper in a sparring match between Hemingway and the Canadian novelist Morley Callaghan, who years earlier served on the staff at The Toronto Star with Hemingway. The match turned bloody, however, and took on a more serious tone when Callaghan landed several punches. Hemingway, who considered himself something of a boxer, claimed that he was battered during an extra minute in the round because Fitzgerald lost track of time.

“Hemingway never quite got over that extra minute,” said Curnutt. “He later stretched it out to 13 minutes.”

Two other Hemingway story fragments are “Alice in Wonderland”-style tales — actually featuring Alice, Tweedledee and Tweedledum — that savagely lampoon President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. The 10 pages of disconnected tales make fun of F.D.R.’s economic policy as Alice tries to make sense of the “Oddity Dollar” based on a loan she never applied for. These pages are new segments of an existing Alice story already housed at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston, home of the largest collection of Hemingway materials.

“The ‘Alice’ portions remind us not only of how opposed Hemingway was to the New Deal but just how much fun he could have with wordplay,” Curnutt said.

The archive is opening during a moment when Hemingway is enjoying a bit of a cultural renaissance. Last year, he was the subject of a lavish, three-part documentary by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, and Simon & Schuster has been releasing expanded library editions of his work. Hemingway continues to inspire movies, comic books, podcasts and TV shows. His last unfilmed novel, “Across the River and into the Trees,” was shot in Venice during the height of the Covid pandemic and stars Liev Schreiber. And Robert Zemeckis, the director of films including “Forrest Gump” and “Cast Away,” has agreed to direct a limited television series based on Hemingway’s life that is being shopped to studios and streamers.

As more of Hemingway’s early work comes into the public domain and his exposure to new readers increases, these materials will undoubtedly add to Hemingway’s legacy. They could help flesh out a figure who fell victim to his own masculine mythmaking. Part of that myth points to a darker side of Hemingway — malignant competitiveness, callous anti-Semitism, and a volcanic temper — that often overshadows his work and makes him the poster boy for toxic masculinity. It can also obscure a fuller understanding of Hemingway’s life that includes a generational struggle with depression, brain trauma and the author’s own gender identity — all facets of Hemingway detailed in recent scholarship. (He explored gender reversals with all four of his wives and referred to himself as Mary’s “girl” during their marriage and periodically called himself “Catherine” or “Kathrine.”)

“The Hemingway that you know from high school is not the Hemingway we know today,” Eby, the president of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation and Society, said. “The hyper-machismo was real, but it was less than half the picture. Hemingway’s sexuality and gender identity were much more fluid and complex than the general public realizes. The man was a thousand times more interesting and nuanced than the myth would suggest.”

While future scholars will mine the archive to discover secrets and insights, even a cursory review of the materials is impressive. Spanier, the Hemingway scholar at Penn State, said the process of annotating and dating items “has been just like an Easter egg hunt.”

There’s a check for $10 to Arnold Gingrich, the co-founder of Esquire magazine, to settle a boxing bet. Hemingway’s entire fishing log from 1934-35 — which includes what he was doing, what he saw, and who he was with — is here, too. The archive includes two partial typescripts for his 1932 nonfiction work about bullfighting, “Death in the Afternoon.” In an excised passage, Hemingway imagines a reader who questions if it’s appropriate to write about an amusement like bullfighting with the threat of civil war in Spain, when other writers were turning their attention to politics.

It’s all enough to keep scholars and the Hemingway-fascinated busy for decades.

“It fleshes out his genius as an artist, but also his everyday life,” Spanier said. “Usually, he’s a one-dimensional character in pop culture, but this archive adds a depth and nuance and complexity to our knowledge of Hemingway, so he’s not such a cartoon character. The artifacts all illuminate each other. Every object tells a story.”

Hemingway in Key West in early 1931, several months after breaking his arm in a car accident in Montana. Credit…The Toby and Betty Bruce collection of Ernest Hemingway in the Penn State Special Collections Library

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd has a scathing column this morning in The New York Times that focuses on the maniacal personalities of Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. Here is an excerpt:

“Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, long entwined, continue on vile parallel paths: They would rather destroy their countries than admit they have lost.

They have each created a scrim of lies to justify lunatic personal ambition. And while it should be easy to see through these lies, both cult-of-personality leaders are able to con and bully enough people to remain puissant.

As our ancestors did, the Ukrainians are fighting an abusive overlord, against all odds, for democracy. It’s especially inspiring as a split screen with Trump and his MAGA forces trying to bulldoze democracy … The Ukrainians are battling for a luminous ideal — unlike Trump and Putin, who are smashing a luminous ideal for their own benefit, driven by their dread of being called losers.

Both thugs are getting boxed in, Trump by a bouquet of investigations into his chicanery and Putin by an angry public pushback against his bloody vanity war….

It would be poetic justice to think the walls were closing in on Putin and Trump at the same time, because at some point, all this will become unsustainable. Losers, refusing to admit defeat.”

Must reading!

The entire column is below.

Tony

——————————

The New York Times

Solo Soulless Saboteurs

Sept. 24, 2022

By Maureen Dowd

Opinion Columnist

WASHINGTON — In the internet age, it’s almost impossible to get away with anything. (See: Adam Levine.)

And yet, some people still manage to pull off solo flights of destruction worthy of a megalomaniacal supervillain.

Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump, long entwined, continue on vile parallel paths: They would rather destroy their countries than admit they have lost.

They have each created a scrim of lies to justify lunatic personal ambition. And while it should be easy to see through these lies, both cult-of-personality leaders are able to con and bully enough people to remain puissant.

As our ancestors did, the Ukrainians are fighting an abusive overlord, against all odds, for democracy. It’s especially inspiring as a split screen with Trump and his MAGA forces trying to bulldoze democracy and rip away women’s rights. The Ukrainians are battling for a luminous ideal — unlike Trump and Putin, who are smashing a luminous ideal for their own benefit, driven by their dread of being called losers.

Both thugs are getting boxed in, Trump by a bouquet of investigations into his chicanery and Putin by an angry public pushback against his bloody vanity war.

America has its own history of lying itself into wars, in Vietnam and Iraq, for example, and then prolonging the killing of young soldiers as a sop to male politicians’ egos. Now it’s Russia’s turn.

Putin has doubled down on his unprovoked invasion of a neighbor — red-washed as a “special military operation” by the Kremlin. Now he has conscripted 300,000 men to join the front lines, commandeering school buses to drag the men to training camps — a move that sent draft-age men fleeing across the border and flocking to airports, amid tears and howls from women and children.

As Ian Bremmer noted on Twitter, Google searches in Russia for “How to break your arm” have skyrocketed.

The Washington Post said that 1,300 people were arrested at protests across Russia on Wednesday and Thursday. The Times reported that anti-draft protesters blocked a highway during a protest in Dagestan in southern Russia.

“When we fought in 1941 to 1945, that was a war,” a man yelled in a video that went viral. “And now it’s not war, it’s politics.”

Pressured by allies and humiliated by his awful judgment in thinking that swallowing Ukraine would be a cakewalk, Putin seems ever more unhinged. The bodies of critics and oligarchs dying in “accidents” and “suicides” are piling up around him, like a scene in “Goodfellas.” He is ruining countless lives in concentric circles, from former friends, to Russian citizens yanked into a war they don’t believe in, to Ukrainians willing to die for freedom.

George W. Bush thought he could see into Pootie-Poot’s soul, and Hillary Clinton thought she could have a reset with him. But no one can deal with someone so inhumane.

On Friday, Russia began sham referendums in Russian-occupied territory in Ukraine to decide whether the territories want to be incorporated into the Russian state.

Ominous in balaclavas and hoisting guns, Russian soldiers forcing reluctant Ukrainians to vote stood next to election workers in Ukraine in what The Times called “a legally bogus pretext to gobble up their country,” recalling staged votes in 2014 in Crimea.

Of course, the United Nations, where world leaders gathered this past week for the General Assembly, has been toothless as Russia has pursued an illegal war reeking with criminal actions. But the United States has sent repeated warnings to Russia about severe consequences if it uses nuclear weapons.

“As we assemble here,” Secretary of State Tony Blinken told the U.N. Security Council on Thursday, “Ukrainian and international investigators continue to exhume bodies outside of Izyum, a city Russian forces controlled for six months before they were driven out by a Ukrainian counteroffensive. One site contains some 440 unmarked graves. A number of the bodies unearthed there so far reportedly show signs of torture, including one victim with broken arms and a rope around his neck.”

Both Putin and Trump are famous for accusing everyone else of their own sins.

Speaking at the U.N. on Thursday, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said, “We have no doubt that Ukraine has finally turned into a Nazi-style totalitarian state where standards of international humanitarian law are trampled underfoot with impunity.”

Trump also constantly projects. And now he’s using telepathy. He told Fox’s Sean Hannity that he did not stash any classified papers at Mar-a-Lago because he merely had to think about declassifying them and it would be done. The Wizard of Id.

Just when you thought he couldn’t go lower, Trump said “Hold my Diet Coke.” He shared an image of himself sporting a “Q” pin, for QAnon, and has been reposting more QAnon garbage on his store-brand social media site.

It would be poetic justice to think the walls were closing in on Putin and Trump at the same time, because at some point, all this will become unsustainable. Losers, refusing to admit defeat.

The Tesla Bot, also called Optimus, is expected to be deployed in factories and households. (Photo: Tesla)

Dear Commons Community,

Reuters is reporting that Tesla  is ramping up ambitious plans to develop the Tesla Bot, also known as Optimus, with internal meetings and hiring for about 20 positions including software and firmware engineers, deep learning scientists, actuator technicians, and internships.

“Tesla is on a path to build humanoid bi-pedal robots at scale to automate repetitive and boring tasks,” one job posting for a mechatronics technician stated. “Most importantly, you will see your work repeatedly shipped to and utilized by thousands of Humanoid Robots within our factories.”  (see video below)

Tesla posted most of the jobs under its Autopilot division, which is simultaneously working to deploy full self-driving capabilities for vehicles.

Elon Musk tweeted the Autopilot team has “end of month deadlines” for both the Tesla Bot and Autopark projects. Earlier in the summer, Musk teased that a prototype of the robot could be unveiled at Tesla’s AI Day on Sept. 30.

Musk’s vision for the five-foot-eight, 125-pound Optimus extends beyond the production lines of Tesla factories. He ultimately sees an army of robots tasked with household chores and care work in millions of households (see video below).

“This, I think, has the potential to be more significant than the vehicle business over time,” Musk said on an earnings call in January.

Some on Wall Street, however, are skeptical.

Investors and Tesla enthusiasts are still waiting on the Cybertruck, due out in 2023 after several delays, as well as the company’s promise of fully autonomous vehicles. The EV maker expanded its Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta pilot to 160,000 Tesla owners as it scales its autonomous software program, though some have said the current $15,000 price tag isn’t worth its current capabilities.

Musk has also touted an automated robotaxi concept, which is slated to be announced in 2023

And with deploying robots at scale, there are other challenges in the way of deployment.

A number of companies have sought to develop humanoid robots — Hyundai’s Boston Dynamics, Honda, GM and NASA, Ford, Softbank, and others — though few projects have gotten off the ground.

According to Reuters, the robots have had trouble overcoming unexpected situations and completing unscripted tasks, much like self-driving cars.

Musk has a history of success.  I don’t think it is a question of whether he will deliver Optimus but when?  Maybe we will see on September 30th!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Douglas Jensen was convicted yesterday of charges that he led a crowd of rioters in chasing a U.S. Capitol police officer up a staircase and accosting other officers guarding the Senate on January 6th, 2021.

A federal jury deliberated for roughly four hours before convicting Jensen of felony charges that he obstructed Congress from certifying the Electoral College vote on Jan. 6, 2021, and that he assaulted or interfered with police officers during the siege.

Jensen was convicted on all counts, including a charge that he engaged in disorderly conduct inside the Capitol while carrying a folding knife in his pocket.  As reported by the Associated Press.

During the trial’s closing arguments, a prosecutor accused Jensen of “weaponizing” rioters by taking the lead in chasing Capitol Police Officer Eugene Goodman up a staircase. A reporter’s video of the confrontation went viral (see above).

“The defendant wasn’t just leading the mob. He was weaponizing it,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Hava Mirell told jurors. “He knew he had the numbers, and he was willing to use them.”

Jensen, a construction worker from Des Moines, Iowa, was wearing a T-shirt with a large “Q” expressing his adherence to the QAnon conspiracy theory. One of the most memorable images from the Jan. 6 attack captured Jensen with his arms extended as he confronted a line of police officers near the Senate chambers.

“Go arrest the vice president,” Jensen told one of the officers, according to prosecutors.

QAnon has centered on the baseless belief that former President Donald Trump was secretly fighting a Satan-worshipping cabal of “deep state” enemies, prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites. Jensen believed the conspiracy theory’s apocalyptic prophesy that “The Storm” was coming and would usher in mass arrests and executions of Trump’s foes, including Vice President Mike Pence.

Pence was presiding over the Senate on Jan. 6 as a joint session of Congress was convened to certify President Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. Before the riot, Trump and his allies spread the falsehood that Pence somehow could have overturned the election results.

After scaling the outer walls of the Capitol, Jensen climbed through a broken window to enter the building. Prosecutors said Jensen learned from a friend’s text message that Pence was about to certify the election results.

“That’s all about to change,” Jensen replied.

Jensen didn’t testify at his trial, which started Tuesday. Goodman was a key witness for prosecutors.

Before running upstairs, Goodman approached Jensen and other rioters with his hand on his gun. Fearing for his life, Goodman retreated upstairs and found backup from other officers guarding an entrance to the Senate, where senators were being evacuated, according to prosecutors.

At least 880 people have been charged with Capitol riot-related federal crimes. About 400 of them have pleaded guilty. Juries have convicted eight Capitol riot defendants after trials. None of the defendants who had jury trials was acquitted of any charges.

Justice is being served with this conviction!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

China has announced a new neuroscience initiative that will complement major research projects that have already begun in the United States and the European Union.  As reported by Science (see article below),  after five years of planning, China has launched its China Brain Project (CBP) with an initial investment of $746 million.  The CBP will focus on three main areas:  the neural basis of cognitive functions, diagnosing and treating brain disorders, and brain-inspired computing.

Glad to see this type of investment on the part of China especially if researchers here in America see it as complementary.

Tony

Click on to enlarge

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump’s former Attorney General Bill Barr doesn’t think the former president’s kids should have been included in the fraud lawsuit filed Wednesday by New York Attorney General Letitia James.

But his crazy rationale, as he explained it to Fox News on Wednesday, was an oddly patronizing defense that was an insult to Donald Trump Jr., 44, Ivanka Trump, 40, and Eric Trump, 38.

James’ suit accuses Donald Trump and his family of engaging in real estate business practices that routinely undervalued and overvalued assets to avoid paying taxes.

But even though the Trumps’ business practices have been under investigation for years, Barr told Fox News that the charges were a “political hit job” that was without merit.

Barr said he wasn’t sure that James had a good case against Trump, but said the fact she tried to “drag the children into this” was a gross overreach on her part.

Although Barr was referring to three middle-aged executives in the Trump company, the former AG suggested none of them had the smarts to understand things like contracts or real estate documents.

“The children aren’t going to know the details of that, nor are they expected in the real world to do their own due diligence and have it reviewed independently,” Barr said.

Barr continued to insult Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump by likening their involvement in the former president’s business dealings to a billionaire’s version of buying your child a car.

The Trump children might not be Mensa material but they are not innocent babes either. To the contrary, they have been complicit with Donald Trump and his business shenanigans all their lives.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Phil Hill, a partner at MindWires, an educational-technology consulting company, reviews the current state of online-program management companies in this morning’s issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.   He comments that colleges are increasingly turning to for-profit companies to develop and manage their online programs and that the value of the online-program-management (OPM) market is now estimated to be more than $4 billion.

However, with growth has come increased scrutiny, not only from higher-education observers but also from the federal government. In January, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Sen. Sherrod Brown wrote an open letter, following up on one they sent in 2020, to several ed-tech companies. The letters sought more information about how the businesses operate, specifically highlighting accusations of overly aggressive student-recruitment practices and their role in the student-debt crisis. In May the Government Accountability Office released a report pointing out the lack of available information about the arrangements and recommending how the Education Department should better monitor them.  Here is an excerpt from Hills’s article.

“While the threat of new regulations is sure to affect the future of the OPM market, the current financial picture of the companies themselves might give us more insight into where the sector is heading. Consider what has happened to some of the biggest players since the beginning of the year:

• Grand Canyon Education said, in a recent quarterly earnings report, that while its services revenue increased year-over-year, enrollment at its partner colleges was down 4.5 percent.
• Pearson reported in a quarterly update that while its OPM business was growing, next year it will lose its largest customer, Arizona State University. (ASU, by many estimates, represents roughly one-third, or $110 million, of Pearson’s OPM revenue.)
• Wiley said in its annual report that its OPM business saw decreasing revenue year-over-year, based on an 8-percent drop in online enrollment.
• Coursera said in its second-quarter report that it had missed its estimates for revenue. It also dropped its estimates for revenue growth, with its OPM business losing 4 percent in year-over-year revenue.
• Zovio’s finances have declined to the point where it was better for the company to sell its OPM assets to the University of Arizona Global Campus for just $1, in a deal in which Zovio will also send UAGC more than $14 million in cash payments.
• 2U said in its second-quarter report that its OPM revenue had dropped 2 percent year-over-year, and it lowered full-year 2022 estimates for overall revenue by 10 percent. Total enrollments for degrees also dropped — both from fewer students and from fewer credit hours attempted per student. The company, which acquired edX last year, laid off roughly 20 percent of its staff this summer as part of its strategy to focus on profitability.
• FutureLearn — the company created by the Open University and acting as a Europe-centric MOOC and OPM — is in a dire financial position and might not survive the next year without a new source of a cash infusion.

It turns out that the OPM business is a difficult one. And colleges with online programs — whether or not they use OPMs — can take a handful of important lessons away from the recent developments.

Good review!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope shows off its capabilities closer to home with its first image of Neptune. Not only has Webb captured the clearest view of this distant planet’s rings in more than 30 years, but its cameras reveal the ice giant in a whole new light.

Most striking in Webb’s new image is the crisp view of the planet’s rings – some of which have not been detected since NASA’s Voyager 2 became the first spacecraft to observe Neptune during its flyby in 1989. In addition to several bright, narrow rings, the Webb image clearly shows Neptune’s fainter dust bands.  

“It has been three decades since we last saw these faint, dusty rings, and this is the first time we’ve seen them in the infrared,” notes Heidi Hammel, a Neptune system expert and interdisciplinary scientist for Webb. Webb’s extremely stable and precise image quality permits these very faint rings to be detected so close to Neptune.

Neptune has fascinated researchers since its discovery in 1846. Located 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth, Neptune orbits in the remote, dark region of the outer solar system. At that extreme distance, the Sun is so small and faint that high noon on Neptune is similar to a dim twilight on Earth.

This planet is characterized as an ice giant due to the chemical make-up of its interior. Compared to the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, Neptune is much richer in elements heavier than hydrogen and helium. This is readily apparent in Neptune’s signature blue appearance in Hubble Space Telescope images at visible wavelengths, caused by small amounts of gaseous methane.

Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) images objects in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns, so Neptune does not appear blue to Webb. In fact, the methane gas so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark at these near-infrared wavelengths, except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas. Images from other observatories, including the Hubble Space Telescope and the W.M. Keck Observatory, have recorded these rapidly evolving cloud features over the years.

More subtly, a thin line of brightness circling the planet’s equator could be a visual signature of global atmospheric circulation that powers Neptune’s winds and storms. The atmosphere descends and warms at the equator, and thus glows at infrared wavelengths more than the surrounding, cooler gases.

Neptune’s 164-year orbit means its northern pole, at the top of this image, is just out of view for astronomers, but the Webb images hint at an intriguing brightness in that area. A previously-known vortex at the southern pole is evident in Webb’s view, but for the first time Webb has revealed a continuous band of high-latitude clouds surrounding it.

Webb also captured seven of Neptune’s 14 known moons. Dominating this Webb portrait of Neptune is a very bright point of light sporting the signature diffraction spikes seen in many of Webb’s images, but this is not a star. Rather, this is Neptune’s large and unusual moon, Triton.

Covered in a frozen sheen of condensed nitrogen, Triton reflects an average of 70 percent of the sunlight that hits it. It far outshines Neptune in this image because the planet’s atmosphere is darkened by methane absorption at these near-infrared wavelengths. Triton orbits Neptune in an unusual backward (retrograde) orbit, leading astronomers to speculate that this moon was originally a Kuiper belt object that was gravitationally captured by Neptune. Additional Webb studies of both Triton and Neptune are planned in the coming year.

A beautiful image of Neptune!

Tony