A Modest Proposal for Biden, Victims of the Los Angeles Wildfires, & the Worst Team in Basketball
It's Free for All Friday!
Before we dive into Free for ALL Friday, here’s something I’ve meant to write. I’m curious what you think.
I've had an idea in the back of my head:
What would I do if I were advising Joe Biden with just a few days to go before President Trump takes over? Then, someone asked that question on Bluesky, and I ran with it.
In short, I'd advise Biden to use his pardon power in a far-reaching manner like only a few presidents have before, pardoning:
every first-time federal drug convicton in American history,
every first-time federal conspiracy conviction where the underlying crime was drug-related.
This would be an acknowledgment of the extreme collateral damage caused by our War on Drugs. It would be an imperfect solution; you'd wind up pardoning some people you don't want to, and you'd miss a lot of people you do want to help.
But, we only have a few days, and there would be some practical fixes.
Take the case of someone currently facing drug charges who is, to use the technical term, "a really bad dude."
Creative prosecutors could come up with other federal charges (wire fraud? everybody does that), or more likely just refer the case to state prosecutors, since a federal pardon doesn't affect state law.
Or, consider a true "victim of the drug war" who wound up with two federal drug charges.
She’d still have a felony record, but she could at least ask to be resentenced on her later charges, since the significant enhancement for not being a first-time offender would no longer apply. (If she’s already served her time, maybe there’s a fine that could be waived?)
I highly doubt this is going to happen, but I realized this is my last chance to make the argument to anyone besides my tiny little Bluesky following.
But let me use it as a jumping off point for this weekend's comments:
If you were advising Biden on how to make the most of his last few days in office, what would you suggest?
OK, with that, here's Free for ALL Friday!
Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
What We Know About the Victims Killed in the California Wildfires
At least 24 people have died across the Los Angeles area. Officials have said the true death toll isn't known as the fires continue to burn.
At least two of the people killed in the Southern California wildfires tried to protect the homes where they raised families and lived for decades, while another stayed behind with his son who had cerebral palsy and could not evacuate.
Twenty-four people are known to have died across the Los Angeles area after destructive wildfires fueled by dry conditions and powerful winds erupted Tuesday. Thousands of structures have been destroyed and roughly 180,000 people have been forced from their homes. Officials have said the true death toll is not known as the fires continue to destroy neighborhoods.
Here is what we know so far about the victims.
(NBC News)
What Happens When a Whole Generation Never Grows Up?
As American 30-somethings increasingly bypass the traditional milestones of adulthood, economists are warning that what seemed like a lag may in fact be a permanent state of arrested development.
Americans in their 30s have never looked less like grown-ups.
Amid steep declines in homeownership, marriage and birth rates, economists have long been warning that young people are struggling to meet the milestones of adulthood. Although some 30-somethings are consciously choosing a less traditional path, many say these goals are simply out of reach.
“It feels like the instructions for how to live a good life don’t apply anymore,” says 38-year-old Cody Harding, who is single and lives with three roommates in Brooklyn. “And nobody has updated them.”
Now, as a mix of social and economic factors holds back an entire generation, what researchers once called a lag is starting to look more like a permanent state of arrested development.
“We’re moving from later to never,” says Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. He notes that the longer people take to launch into a more conventional adulthood, the less likely they are to do it at all.
A third of today’s young adults will never marry, projects conservative think tank the Institute for Family Studies, compared to less than a fifth of those born in previous decades. The share of childless adults under 50 who say they are unlikely to ever have kids, meanwhile, rose 10 percentage points between 2018 and 2023, from 37% to 47%, according to Pew Research Center.
“You can kick the can down the road, but only so far,” says Reeves.
Inside Elon Musk’s Plan for 'DOGE' to Slash Government Costs
Mr. Musk has turned to Silicon Valley to help recruit executives who will take up unofficial positions across the federal government.
An unpaid group of billionaires, tech executives and some disciples of Peter Thiel, a powerful Republican donor, are preparing to take up unofficial positions in the U.S. government in the name of cost-cutting.
As President-elect Donald J. Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency girds for battle against “wasteful” spending, it is preparing to dispatch individuals with ties to its co-leaders, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, to agencies across the federal government.
After Inauguration Day, the group of Silicon Valley-inflected, wide-eyed recruits will be deployed to Washington’s alphabet soup of agencies. The goal is for most major agencies to eventually have two DOGE representatives as they seek to cut costs like Mr. Musk did at X, his social media platform.
On the eve of Mr. Trump’s presidency, the structure of DOGE is still amorphous and closely held. People involved in the operation say that secrecy and avoiding leaks is paramount, and much of its communication is conducted on Signal, the encrypted messaging app.
“The cynics among us will say, ‘Oh, it’s naïve billionaires stepping into the fray.’ But the other side will say this is a service to the nation that we saw more typically around the founding of the nation,” said Trevor Traina, an entrepreneur who worked in the first Trump administration with associates who have considered joining DOGE.
‘I Think Things Are Going to Be Bad, Really Bad’: The US Military Debates Possible Deployment on US Soil Under Trump
Trump has said he wants to use active duty U.S. troops to quell protests and round up immigrants. Will the military comply?
The last time an American president deployed the U.S. military domestically under the Insurrection Act — during the deadly Los Angeles riots in 1992 — Douglas Ollivant was there. Ollivant, then a young Army first lieutenant, says things went fairly smoothly because it was somebody else — the cops — doing the head-cracking to restore order, not his 7th Infantry Division. He and his troops didn’t have to detain or shoot at anyone.
“There was real sensitivity about keeping federal troops away from the front lines,” said Ollivant, who was ordered in by President George H.W. Bush as rioters in central-south LA set fire to buildings, assaulted police and bystanders, pelted cars with rocks and smashed store windows in the aftermath of the videotaped police beating of Rodney King, a Black motorist. “They tried to keep us in support roles, backing up the police.”
By the end of six days of rioting, 63 people were dead and 2,383 injured — though reportedly none at the hands of the military.
But some in the U.S. military fear next time could be different. According to nearly a dozen retired officers and current military lawyers, as well as scholars who teach at West Point and Annapolis, an intense if quiet debate is underway inside the U.S. military community about what orders it would be obliged to obey if President-elect Donald Trump decides to follow through on his previous warnings that he might deploy troops against what he deems domestic threats, including political enemies, dissenters and immigrants.
(Politico)
Why Do Some People Thrive on So Little Sleep?
Short sleepers cruise by on four to six hours a night and don’t seem to suffer ill effects.
Everyone has heard that it’s vital to get seven to nine hours of sleep a night, a recommendation repeated so often it has become gospel. Get anything less, and you are more likely to suffer from poor health in the short and long term—memory problems, metabolic issues, depression, dementia, heart disease, a weakened immune system.
But in recent years, scientists have discovered a rare breed who consistently get little shut-eye and are no worse for wear.
Natural short sleepers, as they are called, are genetically wired to need only four to six hours of sleep a night. These outliers suggest that quality, not quantity, is what matters. If scientists could figure out what these people do differently it might, they hope, provide insight into sleep’s very nature.
“The bottom line is, we don’t understand what sleep is, let alone what it’s for. That’s pretty incredible, given that the average person sleeps a third of their lives,” says Louis Ptáček, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco.
Less Traffic, Faster Buses: Congestion Pricing’s First Week
Early data from the Metropolitan Transportation Authority suggests that traffic has dropped around Manhattan’s core.
The first data for New York City’s new congestion pricing program shows that gridlock lessened in its initial week as fewer drivers traveled into the core of Manhattan, though traffic continued to be heavy in parts of the tolling zone.
In the first six days of the program, officials estimated, there were tens of thousands fewer vehicles entering the busiest parts of Manhattan below 60th Street, which includes some of the city’s most famous destinations like Times Square, the Empire State Building and the High Line.
Congestion pricing aims to lure people out of their cars and onto mass transit. Most passenger cars are now charged $9 a day to enter the tolling zone at peak hours, with additional fees for trucks and other vehicles as well as overnight discounts.
“There’s so much evidence that people are experiencing a much less traffic-congested environment,” said Janno Lieber, the chairman and chief executive of the M.T.A., which is overseeing the program. “They’re seeing streets that are moving more efficiently, and they’re hearing less noise, and they’re feeling a less tense environment around tunnels and bridges.”
Paid to Lose, College Basketball’s Worst Team Takes the L’s to Make Ends Meet
Angelo Massagli and Caitlin Hale bonded as classmates in the 2003 Jack Black film. They brought the cast back together for their wedding.
A sweat-drenched Donovan Sanders returned to the bench for a timeout late in the first half, looked up at the scoreboard, and saw his team in a familiar position: Down by 18 points against BYU, its hopes of victory already dashed.
“We just need an 8-0 run,” the Mississippi Valley State men’s basketball captain shouted, earnest in his belief that it could happen, not wanting to acknowledge the reality that it almost never does.
MVSU is the country’s worst college basketball team. It’s a poor program financially, and plays nearly its entire nonconference schedule on the road, where the Delta Devils haven’t won a nonconference game in more than 18 years. Why do they do it? Money. MVSU traverses the country for “buy games” against juggernaut programs who routinely win by 50 points or more, the suffering funding the school’s entire athletic department.
(The paywall should be down. But if it's not, the second link below is to a 14-year-old article about the exact same story! Some things never change.)
(The Athletic; Yahoo Sports from 2010)
She Who Stirs The Storm
In my mother's time, good girls wore
gloves to church & didn't ask questions
when men spoke. I learned early: some kinds
of survival meant playing dead.
Let me be clear: I was raised
on Wonder Bread & nuclear drills,
taught to trust the government
would save us. Now, at seventy-three,
I recognize the taste of ashes
in democracy's mouth. How history
folds like a flag, neat triangles
of forgetting. In the kitchen,
my wife reads headlines
like obituaries. We who fought
for marriage now watch them debate
if we deserve to keep it. Funny
how rights feel solid as marble
until they crack. Until you remember:
marble breaks too. Everything
America taught me about permanence
was a story about power. Even now,
they're rewriting the books, scrubbing
clean the chapters where we bled,
where we won, where we named
ourselves sacred. The young TikTok addicts
don't remember how we danced
in the streets when the Supreme Court
said our love was legal. How we wept,
mascara running like ink
down the pages of history.
Now we're back to watching
them deliberate our humanity
in marbled halls. Back to that old
familiar taste: fear mixed with fury,
bitter as my grandmother's
bone-deep certainty that silence
keeps you safe. But safety
was always a white woman's myth,
like believing progress
moves in one direction.
This morning, my neighbor
takes down her rainbow flag.
Says she's too old for fighting.
I understand: some bones
get tired of breaking
against the same walls.
Some hands forget
how to make fists.
But my body remembers
every march, every protest,
every friend lost to silence
& stigma. Remember: I was raised
to be a good girl, to speak
only when spoken to. Now
I'm speaking to no one,
watching it all burn
from my comfortable chair,
in my comfortable house,
my white skin still a passport
to certain kinds of safety.
Let them have what they chose:
this bonfire of democracy,
this funeral of facts.
I'm too old to save them
from themselves. Too tired
to explain why history
isn't linear, why progress
is more fragile than flesh.
In the garden, my freckled hands
shake as I deadhead flowers—
everything beautiful requires
constant tending. Everything earned
can be lost. This too
is an American story:
how quickly we forget
the cost of forgetting.
Tonight, I'll watch the news
go dark, screen by screen.
Let them choke on the ashes
of what they burned.
I've got front row seats
to this empire's ending—
another good girl gone quiet,
watching it all come undone.
— Gloria Horton-Young
Blanket pardon everyone involved (witnesses, prosecutors, lawyers, etc) in the January 6th investigation. It was a clear attack on our nation's capital to overturn a free and fair election. We all watched it happen live and listened to the hearings. Protect those brave Americans.