After some much needed rest, recovery, and the celebration of a wedding anniversary, I’m back in your inbox like a virus that just won’t go away! Here’s a taste of what’s going on in the world today:
Several lawyers who have had cases before the supreme court, including one who successfully argued to end race-conscious admissions at colleges, paid money to a top aide of Justice Clarence Thomas, according to the aide’s Venmo transactions. That’s right dear reader, we’ve reached the state of imperial decline where the corruption of the judiciary is exposed by the Venmo transaction history of some unnamed underling.
The underling, Rajan Vasisht, served as Thomas’s aide from July 2019 to July 2021, the same Thomas who is currently embroiled in multiple ethics scandals following a series of revelations about his relationship with a wealthy billionaire donor. Vasisht’s Venmo account showed that he received seven payments in November and December 2019 from lawyers who previously served as Thomas legal clerks. The amount of the payments is not disclosed, but the purpose of each payment is listed as either “Christmas party”, “Thomas Christmas Party”, “CT Christmas Party” or “CT Xmas party”.
Perhaps eventually we’ll see consequences for the ethics violations of the justices of the highest court in the land, but with each passing day and each growing scandal, that possibility seems less and less likely.
Side Items
Heating Up: The 7 hottest days on Earth in the last 100,000+ years all happened in the last week. The average planetary temperature has hovered around 63° for the better part of July, and cities like Phoenix have had temperatures over 100°F for a week straight with no end in sight. Better get used to being perennially sweaty
Hollywood’s Writer’s Strike: It appears we’ve got a standoff on our hands folks. The Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP, aka the bad guys) are planning to dig in hard over the next few months without even entertaining the idea of more negotiations with the Writers Guild of America (WGA aka the underdogs). Making matters worse, the Screen Actors Guild (SAG, aka the people we see on screen) have failed to reach an agreement with studios and streaming executives, and they’ll vote on whether to join the strike later today. According to a studio executive, “The endgame is to allow things to drag on until union members start losing their apartments and losing their houses.” Jokes on them, all the people I know who work as writers are already broke and have spent their entire lives growing accustomed to being broke
Egyptian Hip Hop Rebellion: This article provides insight into the role music, specifically hip hop, has played in Egypt after the revolution over a decade ago