Americans are bracing for a rare presidential rematch between the two oldest candidates in US history: the 81-year-old president Joe Biden and the 77-year-old former president Donald Trump.

Concerns about their age, mental fitness and the possibility that Trump could be convicted of a felony and sentenced to jail time have raised questions about what would happen in the extraordinary event one of them dies, becomes incapacitated or abruptly withdraws.

If Biden, as the sitting president, were suddenly unable to serve, either through incapacity or death, the vice-president, Kamala Harris, would immediately assume the powers of the presidency under the 25th amendment. But replacing Biden or Trump as their party’s presumptive nominees for president – a prospect that is entirely hypothetical – is more complicated. In the event of an unforeseen vacancy, party rules, state and federal election laws and the US constitution would guide what would undoubtedly be a messy process.

Thank you for this review, Mr. Burr, and for the recommendation that "The Sixth" should be seen by all. The advice was taken (as a $19.99 streaming buy on Amazon) by this Post subscriber, and the documentary was one of my most searing, sobering experiences in seven decades as a moviegoer.

For a viewer, the wrenching emotions are relentless, and among the many inescapable conclusions was that the violently insurrectionist MAGAts who stormed our Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and inflicted not only major injuries, trauma and damage, but even several deaths, were (and are) nothing short of filth. Moreover, be it this year or any other year, we must not let such filth overthrow our democracy and install their fascist demagogue as a dictator.

"The Sixth"permanently reminds us of how they almost did only 3 years ago.

Boeing's 787 "Dreamliner" is manufactured far from the company's Seattle facility, in a non-union shop in Charleston, South Carolina. At that shop, there is a cage full of defective parts that have been pulled from production because they are not airworthy.

Hundreds of parts from that Material Review Segregation Area (MRSA) were secretly pulled from that cage and installed on aircraft that are currently plying the world's skies. Among them, sections 47/48 of a 787 – the last four rows of the plane, along with its galley and rear toilets. As Moe Tkacik writes in her excellent piece on Boeing's lethally corrupt culture of financialization and whistleblower intimidation, this is a big ass chunk of an airplane, and there's no way it could go missing from the MRSA cage without a lot of people knowing about it:

More: MRSA parts are prominently emblazoned with red marks denoting them as defective and unsafe. For a plane to escape Boeing's production line and find its way to a civilian airport near you with these defective parts installed, many people will have to see and ignore this literal red flag.

The MRSA cage was a special concern of John "Swampy" Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower who is alleged to have killed himself in March. Tkacik's earlier profile of Swampy paints a picture of a fearless, stubborn engineer who refused to go along to get along, refused to allow himself to become inured to Boeing's growing culture of profits over safety:

A price floor means ex-president gets bonus even though Trump Media & Technology Group’s stock value has plummeted

Former president Donald Trump qualified for a bonus worth $1.2bn after shares in his social media company remained above a certain value despite falling sharply.

Trump is poised to receive 36m additional shares in Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), owner of his Truth Social platform, under an “earn-out” windfall which boosts the paper value of his stake in the business to about $3.7bn.

He was able to receive the bonus if TMTG’s stock traded above $17.50 a share for 20 days out of any 30-day period within the first three years of the firm’s stock market debut – a milestone it reached after closing at $32.57 on Tuesday.

Trump’s shares in his social media company have offered him a financial lifeline as he faces about $500m in legal penalties after being found liable in civil fraud, defamation and sexual abuse cases. While he cannot sell his stock until September due to the terms of a lockup agreement, the shares’ fluctuating value have at times made him one of the world’s wealthiest people on paper.

For the first time since November, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).

Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer's software code—isn't working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide affected the code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

In my opinion, Donald Trump’s criminal trial, which starts in earnest today, is no more than the third most important thing happening to him this week. While I think charging Trump for alleged crimes for which his co-conspirators have already been punished and in which Bill Barr’s DOJ tampered has merit, and while I don’t think you can separate the allegations here from his other attempts to cheat to win elections, I believe the Trump Organization fraud case and the outcome of the January 6 case (and his claim to absolute immunity generally) have far more impact on Trump’s ability to continue to wreak havoc.

So I think Tish James’ bid to have Knight Specialty Insurance disqualified for providing Trump’s appeal bond and SCOTUS’ review of Trump’s absolutely immunity claims are far more important events this week than the Alvin Bragg trial.

The same is true of last week. Jury tampering — abetted by Jesse Watters and other Trump allies — will be an urgent, ongoing concern. But there are a slew of events — the UAW’s election win in a southern VW plant, the House’s passage of Ukraine funding (and follow-on repercussions we’re likely to see from it), continuing Israeli and Iranian tensions and attacks on Palestinians, the likelihood SCOTUS will narrow the application of the obstruction statute in the context of January 6, even the planned withdrawal of US troops from Niger — will be far more important to the fate of the US and the world than whether Trump glowered or slept or farted in the courtroom.

All of which is my way of saying: beware of letting this trial drown out more important events. Yes, it is unprecedented to see Trump subjected to discipline. But this trial is sucking up far, far too much attention that might better be directed elsewhere — and all that attention is one of the reasons why jury and witness tampering are such a risk.

Dreadlocks can’t smoke him pipe in peace
Too much informers and too much beast
Too much watchie watchie watchie, too much su-su su-su su
Too much watchie watchie watchie, too much su-su su-su su

-from “Tenement Yard”, by Jacob Miller

Happy Holiday! How about some good news for a change? Via the Associated Press:

Saturday marks marijuana culture’s high holiday, 4/20, when college students gather — at 4:20 p.m. — in clouds of smoke on campus quads and pot shops in legal-weed states thank their customers with discounts.

This year’s edition provides an occasion for activists to reflect on how far their movement has come, with recreational pot now allowed in nearly half the states and the nation’s capital. Many states have instituted “social equity” measures to help communities of color, harmed the most by the drug war, reap financial benefits from legalization. And the White House has shown an openness to marijuana reform.

The origins of the date, and the term “420” generally, were long murky. Some claimed it referred to a police code for marijuana possession or that it derived from Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women No. 12 & 35,” with its refrain of “Everybody must get stoned” — 420 being the product of 12 times 35.

But the prevailing explanation is that it started in the 1970s with a group of bell-bottomed buddies from San Rafael High School, in California’s Marin County north of San Francisco, who called themselves “the Waldos.” A friend’s brother was afraid of getting busted for a patch of cannabis he was growing in the woods at nearby Point Reyes, so he drew a map and gave the teens permission to harvest the crop, the story goes.

During fall 1971, at 4:20 p.m., just after classes and football practice, the group would meet up at the school’s statue of chemist Louis Pasteur, smoke a joint and head out to search for the weed patch. They never did find it, but their private lexicon — “420 Louie” and later just “420” — would take on a life of its own. […]

A few weeks ago, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Chris Quinn, became an instant hero to the legion of news consumers who are fed up with the media’s refusal to call Donald Trump what he is.

In his weekly “letter from the editor,” under the headline “Our Trump reporting upsets some readers, but there aren’t two sides to facts,” Quinn wrote:

The north star here is truth. We tell the truth, even when it offends some of the people who pay us for information.

The truth is that Donald Trump undermined faith in our elections in his false bid to retain the presidency. He sparked an insurrection intended to overthrow our government and keep himself in power. No president in our history has done worse.

He continued, bluntly:

As for those who equate Trump and Joe Biden, that’s false equivalency. Biden has done nothing remotely close to the egregious, anti-American acts of Trump.

On what upset some readers: “I have not minced words about Donald Trump”

We run a lot of op-eds. We run a collection of national columns. But we have a lot of different platforms, and one of our platforms is a weekday news discussion. I host it with three editors where we talk about the big stories of the day. We’ve been very openly critical of Donald Trump there. And so part of it’s that.

I also started four years ago sending out a daily text message — with a character limit, 640 characters — that talks about questions we’re asking, stories we’re working on, just general inside-the-newsroom kind of things.

You gotta come up with something every day, and in that I have not minced words about Donald Trump.

So some of this is direct to me. Some of it is about the opinion platform. Some of it is about the story choices. You know: “If you’re gonna run the story about Joe Biden, why aren’t you running the story about Hunter Biden’s laptop?” There’s always the false equivalence kind of thing going on. People try to equate kind of the monstrous stuff Donald Trump has done to the Afghanistan pullout, and there’s no comparison, but they want that comparison. And so there’s a lot of that kind of correspondence.