Saturday: Hili dialogue

May 11, 2024 • 6:45 am

Well, I’m off this evening traveling on cat Sabbath to Amsterdam, as it’s Saturday, May 11, 2024, and Eat What You Want Day.  This video tells you what I want to eat today:

It’s also American Indian Day (should be “Native American Day”), Mother Ocean Day, International Migratory Bird Day, Sun Awareness Day, National Babysitter’s Day (when will they learn to put the apostrophe in the right place?), National Train Day, and Windmill Day.

Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the May 11 Wikipedia page.

Da Nooz:

*Hamas has been rewarded for attacking Isral by a UN vote (largely symbolic) granting Palestine a kind of quasi-statehood.

The United Nations General Assembly on Friday overwhelmingly adopted a resolution declaring that Palestinians qualify for full-member status at the United Nations, a highly symbolic move that reflects growing global solidarity with Palestinians and is a rebuke to Israel and the United States.

The resolution was approved by a vote of 143 to 9 with 25 nations abstaining. The Assembly broke into a big applause after the vote. The United States voted no.

The resolution was prepared by the United Arab Emirates, the current chair of the U.N. Arab Group. The 193-member General Assembly took on the issue of Palestinian membership after the United States in April vetoed a resolution before the Security Council to recognize full membership for a Palestinian state. The majority of Council members supported the move, but the United States said recognition of Palestinian statehood should be achieved through negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.

The U.S. is right. This is one of the stupidest moves the UN has made yet, and that’s saying a lot. But wait! There’s more!

“The U.S. is resigned to having another bad day at the U.N.,” said Richard Gowan, an expert on the United Nations for the International Crisis Group, a conflict prevention organization. But he added that the resolution “gives the Palestinians a boost without creating a breakdown over whether they are or are not now U.N. members.”

The U.N. charter stipulates that the General Assembly can only grant full membership to a nation-state after the approval of the Security Council. Examples of that include the creation of the states of Israel and South Sudan. The resolution adopted on Friday explicitly states that the Palestinian issue is an exception and will not set precedent, language that was added during negotiations on the text when some countries expressed concern that Taiwan and Kosovo might follow a similar path to pursue statehood, diplomats said.

Sorry, but why is Palestine an exception and Taiwan is not? At any rate, this is symbolic (though of course will incite more people against Israel) because the Security Council has to approve full statehood, and the U.S. won’t let that happen, despite Biden’s current waffling and weaseling.  Besides, neither Israel nor Palestine want a state. Try again in another 40 years or so.

*Glenn Loury has published an autobiography called Late Admissions, a tell-all book reviewed in today’s NYT by Pamela Paul. (It’s archived here.)  I didn’t know that Loury’s past was that checkered!  Note that now he says he’s a conservative:

This is far from the first reversal, political or personal, for Loury, 75, one of the most celebrated and reviled Black intellectuals of the past half-century. While public debate has too often devolved into lobbing grenades from entrenched positions, Loury’s tumultuous life, his swings from the right to the left and back again, his remarkable, barrier-busting successes and his considerable frailties and failures, have taught him to always recognize that he could be wrong and to keep an open mind, no matter how vehement his opinions. He outlines this ragged road to wisdom in his remarkably candid memoir, “Late Admissions: Confessions of a Black Conservative.”

He was a star Ph.D. graduate in economics from M.I.T. and the first Black tenured professor of economics at Harvard. He was a darling of the neoconservative movement and was tapped to be deputy secretary of education during the Reagan administration.

But that was before he was charged with assaulting his ex-mistress. Before he was arrested for drug possession. Before he was exposed as both a serial philanderer and a crack addict. He’d left two daughters from his first marriage back in Chicago; he barely acknowledged a son born to a former girlfriend, until the son was fully grown.

A 1995 New Yorker profile described Loury’s first public downfall thus: “Loury was emerging as exactly the kind of person he had warned Black America to avoid: a violent, irresponsible, drug-using womanizer who put his own pleasure above the demands of his career and the needs of his family.”

In recounting all that’s happened since, “Late Admissions” does something that is rare in fiction but almost unheard-of in memoir: It presents both an unlikable and an unreliable narrator.

In an unusual introduction, Loury explains that he hopes to build trust with the reader by exposing his obfuscations and prevarications, warding off anything terrible a reader might say about him by saying it all, himself, first. One title he considered for the book, he told me, was “The Enemy Within.”

He goes into the controversy that’s arisen about the Death of George Floyd, which I’ve written about and now watched the movie saying Floyd wasn’t murdered and read the counter-narrative arguing that Floyd was indeed murdered (see here).  I have to say that I’m coming down on the latter side, but haven’t had time to review the very long rebuttal and write something. This may be as far as I get.  You can find the book, which comes out on May 14, here.

*Like many of us, Andrew Sullivan is peeved that Trump keeps delaying his trials, forestalling whatever day of reckoning is to come. The title of his piece this week,”Getting away with it, yet again“, tells the tale.

I really don’t want to be a Debbie Downer yet again, but it seems pretty clear to me at this point that the legal resistance to Donald Trump’s deep corruption, pathological recklessness, managerial incompetence, and outrageous attempts to steal an election and then prevent a peaceful transfer of power … have, well, failed.

By “failed” I don’t mean, of course, that Trump will definitely not be convicted in his current trial, or that the other cases — from the January 6 insurrection to the classified documents to the Georgia pressure campaign — won’t proceed at some point. I mean something more salient: none of this is likely to happen or seriously dent Trump’s popularity before the looming election this November. His antagonists had four years to prosecute and delegitimize him, and it wasn’t enough time. (Bill Maher chiefly blames Merrick Garland for preternatural dithering — “Attorney General Barney Fife.”)

Judge Cannon has now indefinitely postponed the Florida trial for Trump’s grotesque and dumb mishandling of classified documents. It looks fishy to me, but her pre-trial shenanigans do not appear outside her judicial prerogatives. If the DOJ had wanted to prosecute Trump in this complicated case — involving national security, executive privilege, the limits of discovery with classified information — they might have begun a little sooner than last year.

The Georgia case just got upended by Fani Willis’ hubris, as her romantic relationship with one of her prosecutors gave Trump’s lawyers a chance to delay the trial by asking the Georgia Appeals Court to rule on whether Willis should be disqualified. The federal January 6 case is suspended mid-air as SCOTUS ruminates on the question of presidential immunity.

Which leaves us with one case likely to be decided before the November election: the current, patently political prosecution of Trump for alleged violations of federal campaign law in concealing hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Technically, it seems pretty clear to me that Trump is guilty as sin, and may even be convicted by a New York City jury. Michael Cohen, after all, went to jail for the same crime. But the case itself is a stretch by Alvin Bragg, straining to elevate state financial misdemeanors into multiple federal felonies. Worse, the coverage this week is likely, if it has any political impact, to help Trump in his framing of the prosecution as personal persecution.

. . . So did Trump wear a condom? Boxer shorts? Was the fucking fully consensual? Yes, some of this was necessary because Trump, absurdly, is still denying he ever met the broad alone. But icky is icky, and humiliating people with the details of sexual encounters, even if they are scummy people like Trump, tends to backfire. And it’s hard to see how he politically loses from this trial. If the jury hangs, Trump wins. If he is convicted, he has an obvious appeal option, especially given the racy irrelevance of some of the testimony allowed by the judge this week. If he’s acquitted, we’ll never hear the last of it.

. . . it seems unlikely to me that an electorate that breezed past “grab ‘em by the pussy” is going to stop short at a federal financial fiddle. A recent poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe that the Stormy case is irrelevant to Trump’s fitness for the presidency — up a bit from 39 percent last summer. The slippage seems to come mainly from one demo:

[A]mong independents who lean Republican, the share calling those charges not relevant to Trump’s fitness has climbed from 57 percent to 73 percent, and the share of true independents saying the same has risen from 29 percent to 45.

Oy, gewalt! Whether Trump is a philanderer is not the issue, but whether he was involved in covering up financial dealings, which speaks to his honesty. Granted, its not a capital crime, but it does seem to me “relevant to his fitness” as President.

*Instead of a TFIF today, Nellie Bowles’s (whose new book, Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches from the Wrong Side of History, got shellacked in the Washington Post) has published an excerpt from her new book in a column called, “The Day I Stopped Canceling People.” Nellie’s first cancellation was when she decided not to interview a white friend who had written a book in which a black woman was made to look bad in a quote.  Apparently the quote was accurate and kosher, but Nellie didn’t want bad optics.  Her words (article is also archived here):

To do a cancellation is a very warm, social thing. It has the energy of a potluck. Everyone brings what they can, and everyone is impressed by the creativity of their friends. It’s a positive thing, what you’re doing, and it doesn’t feel like battle, but like tending the warm fire of community. You have real power when you’re doing it, and with enough people, you can oust someone very powerful.

The easy criticism of a cancellation is: You went after someone who agrees with you on almost everything except some tiny differences? Some small infraction? It seems bizarre. But that’s the point. The bad among us are more dangerous to the group. Mormons don’t excommunicate a random drag performer. They excommunicate a bad Mormon.

I watched all the presidential debates in 2016 with some family members who are conservatives. After Hillary lost, I couldn’t stomach going over there for a few months. I was too upset, and I couldn’t handle seeing them happy. But that’s not a cancellation. I had no power over these family members, or sway in their community. I couldn’t make them apologize for being happy that Trump won.

A cancellation isn’t about finding a conservative and yelling at them. It’s about finding the betrayer in your midst. They look and talk like you. They blend in perfectly. But they’re not like you.

The author I canceled existed in my community. She went to the parties I went to and showed up at the same events as me. The goal was to slice her carefully out, and I was thrilled to do my part. By showing where I stood, I felt closer to my friends. But also, in some ways, doing what I did is the price of admission to the club. To ignore the drumbeat was to suggest that I didn’t care. I definitely did care.

I saw later that the event was canceled altogether after I withdrew. Her book tour didn’t work so well. The book didn’t sell so well. I never saw her at another party, and I never heard from her again—and I was fine with that.

Nellie’s gloating about cancellation disappeared when she fell in love with someone with whom she had political disagreements (Bari Weiss, whose hiring at the NYT Bowles had argued against), and she goes on to discuss the topic of cancellation in general.

*MIT and Penn, two schools involved in those disastrous Congressional hearings, with the President of Penn losing her job, have both had their encampments cleared.

Police on Friday cleared pro-Palestinian encampments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, the latest efforts by colleges across the country to rein in escalating protests.

. . .On MIT’s Cambridge, Mass., campus, police arrested 10 graduate and undergraduate students, the school said Friday. None resisted, and the students were taken off campus by MIT police officers to be booked, a spokeswoman said.

“The escalation of the last few days, involving outside threats from individuals and groups from both sides, has been a tipping point,” MIT President Sally Kornbluth said. “It was not heading in a direction anyone could call peaceful. And the cost and disruption for the community overall made the situation increasingly untenable.”

MIT said police also arrested several protesters on Thursday after they marched to a campus building and blocked a garage.

. . . In Philadelphia, Penn said police arrested about 33 protesters who were cited for “defiant trespass” after repeated warnings. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, said a day earlier that it was “past time” for the school to disband the encampment on Penn’s College Green, which had grown in recent days.

Videos posted to social media by news outlets showed helmeted officers, with riot shields and zip ties, detaining people after Penn’s public-safety department warned protesters to leave.

And Harvard’s in for trouble, too:

At Harvard, a spokesman Friday said administrative referrals to place encampment protesters on involuntary leave continue to move ahead.

“The encampment favors the voices of a few over the rights of many who have experienced disruption in how they learn and work at a critical time of the semester,” said Alan Garber, Harvard’s interim president.

Garber at a meeting late Wednesday offered protesters a chance to meet with university officials to address their questions about the university’s endowment, but only if they first voluntarily ended the encampment, the Harvard spokesman said. Garber also reiterated that Harvard wouldn’t use its endowment as a political tool.

The school said protesters declined by deciding to continue the encampment.

So far quite a few of these things have been taken down, including ours, and there have been, as far as I know, no injuries. Only two cowardly schools—Brown and Northwestern—have bargained with the encampers, and that’s to their shame. 2,000 protesters have been arrested. Harvard’s tactic of allowing a “questions meeting but only after disbanding the site seems reasonable, but even that won’t work. And so the Schmarvard protesters will go the way of the others.

Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has yet another reason to hate Kulka:

A: What are you looking for?
Hili: I left something there but Kulka probably ate it.
In Polish:
Ja: Czego tam szukasz?
Hili: Zostawiłam tu coś, ale chyba Kulka to zjadła.
And a picture of the affectionate Szaron:

*******************

From The Dodo Pet:

I can’t remember where I found this, but it was somewhere on Facebook:

From Jesus of the Day. I guess they take the money out of your estate:

From Cate: Stickers found on the north side of Chicago. The one on the left is particularly good:

From Masih; quotidian life in Iran. Note that there’s now a ten-year sentence for Iranians sending a video to Masih!

From Scott, who notes, “I’ve never cared in the slightest about the Eurovision contest. But I think I’ll tune in this time to support Eden Golan, the 20-year-old Israeli who’s now in notoriously antisemitic Malmö, Sweden to perform, surrounded by a convoy of a hundred police cars and helicopters trying to stop the crowds from pulling another 1972 Munich Olympics.”

Here’s Golan being booed at her dress rehearsal. It’s simply because she’s Israeli. Morons. But she stuck it out as she’s a stalwart Israeli:

The demonstration that keeps Golan in her hotel!

And a relevant tweet:

From Luana; look at this impeccable encampment!

From Malcolm; a demonstration of the “Mercator Effect“: the unrealistic size of land as it gets farther from the Equator:

From Simon; Larry the cat is being a bit ribald:

From the Auschwitz Memorial, a ten-year-old girl gassed upon arrival at the camp:

Two tweets from Professor Cobb; the first part of his findings when researching Crick’s life. Can you see why “80 CG” would have been better?

A great idea: a milk bottle for multiple kittens. And yes, look at their ears:

20 thoughts on “Saturday: Hili dialogue”

    1. Agreed.

      The fact that we had to wait for the vote to find out what the outcome would be tells me how unreliable the U.S. has become. Is Israel the country to which we extend our “ironclad” support, or is it “the Zionist entity?” The answer seems to depend on which Biden is President on any given day.

  2. I’ve now read the self-congratulatory notes from the presidents of UChicago and Northwestern. Here are a couple of better ideas IMHO:
    1. Do not “negotiate” with demonstrators. When the hell did running a university become a negotiation? Is this part of the coddling phenomenon?
    2. To avoid confrontation, have regular listening and discussion sessions with students – maybe quarterly where it is open mic for them to bring concerns and comments directly to senior leadership in a civil way. Should be run by the president with the provost and maybe a trustee or two sitting on the listening panel. Members of the panel can lightly engage, but larger issues should be assigned to staff for an offline meeting with students.
    3. University policies rigorously enforced. With the first tent stake, sidewalk obstruction, harassment or intimidation, violators must be arrested for trespass if not members of the university community or cited for violation of college policy if students, staff, or faculty. Concerns from university community can be voiced at the quarterly meetings with the president. Outsiders have no say other than writing a letter to the editor of the college paper or local media.
    4. Have policies that reflect Chicago Principles on institutional neutrality and free debate of ideas.

    1. AFK for a couple of hours for trail walk and erev mothers’ day lunch with family. But would add that, in addition to quarterly chats with the prez, for larger issues, such as the recent encampment subjects and even encampments themselves, university leadership can show some initiative by organizing Oxford Union style panel discussions with subject matter experts spanning the spectrum of positions.
      Also want to emphasize that these interactions really need to be limited to the university community and specific guests, particularly when we see the high per centage of outsiders arrested at on-campus demonstrations over the past few weeks.

  3. The Mercator projection wasn’t designed to be equal-area. It was designed to be useful to mariners sailing the open oceans at a time before accurate navigation methods had yet been invented. When Mercator devised his new map projection, John Harrison’s accurate marine chronometer was still two centuries in the future.

    Straight lines on a Mercator map correspond to steering a fixed compass bearing, a course known as a “rhumb line”. Draw a straight line on a Mercator map from where you are to where you want to be, measure the angle from true north on the map, and tell the helmsman to steer that compass bearing. It won’t be the shortest route to your destination, but at least it will get you there.

    Let’s quit dumping on Mercator. He was a map-making genius and his projection saved lives. If you doubt me, read Nicholas Crane’s superb biography “Mercator: the Man who Mapped the Planet”.

    1. Thank you, I spent a lot of time in cartography labs in the 70’s earning my Geography degree and learned to appreciate the skill and dedication of those early map makers

    2. to steering a fixed compass bearing

      That’s a fixed bearing to true-north ; not a fixed bearing to magnetic north. Not a few people have been killed by making the error of thinking that a compass needle points to true north.
      Then there are the people who forget if it’s the white end of the needle that points north, or the red end.

      1. In Mercator’s time, and for a couple of centuries after that, the difference between true north and magnetic north would have been too small to make a difference for navigation on the open ocean. It’s less than 20 degrees over most of the Atlantic Ocean, for example, and it’s unlikely that any helmsman in the 17th or 18th centuries would have been able to maintain a course to that accuracy. But it would have been good enough to get them home.

        1. Well, good enough to get them to coasts they recognise, after which their log book (or copies of other’s) and the Master’s memory should give them a working chance.

  4. Trump is not the one responsible for delaying his trials (other than for defending himself). It is the responsibility of the prosecutors that have assembled and pushed cases that are so flawed. In the argument over which came first, bad prosecutors or bad cases, I am going to say the former. To get someone to push a mess like the classified documents case, you’d have to find a bumbler who cares more about politics than the law. Fanny Willis is, similarly, the right tool for the job. “Any means necessary” includes bad ones.

  5. I’d like to really Bowles’ book. (Does anyone have a link to an archived copy of that WaPo review, though?) I hate the phrase the “right/wrong slide of History,” though, assuming there is a predictable History (thanks, Marx). Recently, I’ve seen an explosion of memes with the message that “students [who are protesting] are on the right side of History” and so should you be. Well, what about those students who aren’t protesting? Maybe they are on the right side of History? Or what about Jewish students? Maybe they are on the right side? In all revolutionary movements there is a revolutionary minority that thinks it speaks for the masses (if only the masses weren’t so stupid).

    1. I found the WAPO review by searching online for the title of Bowles’ book. It was do vituperative I had to wonder if there’s some kind of backstory between Bowles and the reviewer?

      1. I wonder if the reviewer is the author whom Ms. Bowles helped cancel so pridefully and underhandedly, now come for her revenge.

    2. There are I think two basic problems with invoking “the right side of history” as a justification. As you say, we don’t know what will happen in the future and — even more to the point — EVERYONE thinks they’re on The Right Side of History. It’s a useless persuasive technique: “come join us we’re on the RSoH.” Everyone is saying that.

      It’s also an immoral and therefore pointless assertion. If we were to discover that 20 years from now the world will undergo a thousand year reich of white supremicist fascist Christian dictatorship and genuine science will be a thing of the past, we’d hardly be encouraging each other to join the Aryan Brotherhood and promote Young Earth Creationism now so that we can claim the virtue of being, today, on the right side of history. Whoop de doo.

    3. I can’t archive from an iPhone but here’s most of it.

      “ Her new book, “Morning After the Revolution: Dispatches From the Wrong Side of History,” is a kind of ideological autobiography, tracking her development from bratty liberal to freethinking what-about-er. It begins with her origin story. Bowles was once “a successful young reporter at the New York Times, a New Progressive doing the only job she had ever wanted.” She gleefully toed the party line, canceling wrong-thinking colleagues and basking in her righteousness. “When Hillary Clinton was about to win,” she recalls, “I was drinking I’m With Her-icanes at a drag bar.” Then, she fell in love with former Times opinion editor and writer Bari Weiss, to whom she is now married. Bowles grandiosely characterizes Weiss as a “known liberal dissident,” as if she were a renegade in a Soviet prison — not a canny businesswoman who left the Times vocally but voluntarily in 2020 so as to earn a purported $800,000 from an aggrieved newsletter the following year.

      In the gulag that is life after the New York Times, the pair founded the Free Press, an outlet that designates itself as a stronghold of “fierce independence” and that specializes in sneering at the alleged excesses of progressivism. (“Camping Out at Columbia’s Communist Coachella,” reads a representative headline about a student protest that has since been disbanded by swarms of police in full riot gear — not the sort of characters usually in attendance at a music festival.) With Weiss’s help, Bowles suggests, she abandoned her youthful follies and entered true adulthood.

      Hers is a familiar narrative, and one for which there is an eager audience. Publications like the Free Press, which boasts 77,000 paid subscribers, often publish confessionals in which newly minted centrists detail their conversions. Books abound with such stories, too. In a recent screed about the pitfalls of the sexual revolution, self-proclaimed “reactionary feminist” Mary Harrington explains that she pivoted rightward after a bout of hedonistic philandering in her 20s; the conservative commentator Sohrab Ahmari, in a 2021 memoir, admits that he arrived at college convinced of the wisdom of liberalism, only to be disillusioned as he came of age.

      What is the function of this genre, the conservative memoir of political awakening? And can it vindicate the contention that progressivism is simply a rite of passage, rather than a seriously considered platform? For my part, I suspect that maturation is not always a boon. “Morning After the Revolution” demonstrates that, if leftism is a hazard of adolescence, conservatism is all too often an unfortunate symptom of aging, not unlike senility.

      Now that Bowles is employed by the Free Press, a bastion of free thought, what free thoughts is she thinking? Very few, as it turns out. In fact, it can be difficult to discern any at all in her book.

      Bowles’s scorn is unmistakable enough. Her dispatches from various protests and anti-Whiteness seminars are full of bloggy jibes, the sort of zingers that circulate widely on X (formerly Twitter). She never misses a chance to discredit protesters by commenting on the color of their hair. At an anti-police rally, there is a “petite white person with purple hair”; at a pro-trans demonstration, she spots a woman “in pink hair” and “a man in a purple wig.” Attempts at scene-setting — a feeble homage to Didion’s magnificently visceral vignettes — fall flat. “It was a warm sunny day, and it smelled like LA, a little acidic, a little like grilled meat,” Bowles writes of a protest in Los Angeles. I was underwhelmed by the insight that the city smells like itself and, I must confess, perplexed by the claim that it smells like grilled meat.

      The book’s ambient contempt for progressives is legible; its actual thesis much less so. Its chapters are short, flitting and digressive. In one of them, Bowles ventures into the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone, a short-lived and ultimately disastrous experiment in anarchist living in Seattle; in another, she sits in on a tense school board meeting in San Francisco. From her perch at the Times, she writes, she witnessed “the arc of the movement as it rose, remaking our institutions from the inside, transforming the country.” But it is unclear what “movement” she means, or if the many diverse phenomena she tackles in her book really belong together.

      Some of the anecdotes Bowles shares are indeed about movements, albeit distinct ones: In a chapter titled “Whose Tents? Our Tents!,” she scoffs at the anti-homelessness movement in Los Angeles, and Black Lives Matter is a recurrent fixation. But some of her reporting treats isolated incidents that are not plausibly cast as part of any broader campaign. Is an irritating podcast about asexuality with fewer than 300 ratings on the App Store “remaking our institutions from the inside”? Are the three professors who pretended to be people of color for academic clout really “transforming the country”? (Given that there are 1.5 million college faculty members in America, the tendency these outliers represent appears to be less common than the rarest forms of cancer.) And what, if anything, do diversity, equity and inclusion workshops have in common with doctors who treat trans children? “Morning After the Revolution” is, at best, a grab bag of Bowles’s pet peeves.”

      It goes on but this is the mood of the piece.

  6. The good boy relief reminds me of the FDR memorial in DC. Fala’s ears are shiny, and it looks like visitors do a lot of “pull my finger.” The index finger was gleaming in person. Or maybe it stood out to me as an experienced mom of boys.
    https://www.pbase.com/image/58112180

  7. For Trump to be found guilty in New York they need to prove he chose how to record those transactions in the ledger, and that he intended by doing it in 2017 to influence an election in 2016.

    Given his financial controller has already said that Trump did not instruct how to code the transactions, and that the transactions were coded to match the invoices being paid, and that there were no codings for ‘hush money’, what is it that Trump’s allegedly guilty of?

    Not that any of this will prevent a jury verdict against him, but it’s hard to expect the people of America to feel justice is being done.

    1. I haven’t followed the details of the trial that closely, so you may be right. But a couple of observations: you can commit a crime in 2016, then act to conceal evidence in 2017; if Trump had had the payments coded as “hush money”, he would not have been falsifying records,

  8. A plea from abroad for accuracy:
    The Jan 6 case is not about insurrection. No one, including the President-at-the-time, has been charged under the Insurrection Act.
    The Mar-a-Largo case is not about the classification authority. The indictment alleges unauthorized possession of documents produced by, and therefore the property of, a government agency. Whether they were appropriately declassified or not is not in the indictment. The indictment also alleges obstruction of justice, a big deal of course.

    Finally, as to whether Mr. Trump’s lying about hush money to a prostitute (or whatever she is), if he did, ought to make him unfit, that is for the voters to decide. It don’t seem to be hurting him none. I suspect the reason is the other side of a social bargain. A man’s political enemies are free to use seamy sexual peccadilloes to try to bring him down, yes. But the deal is, the target is entitled to lie like a rug to fend them off, in a way that he wouldn’t have licence to do were the accusations less pruriently interesting. Of course we would all hide hush money to a whore. Who in his right mind wouldn’t? (I’m glad I’ve never been in the situation but I know exactly what I’d do.)

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