Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Erick Erickson tries for that profound observation, but I think it’s hollow:

But the larger issue is that we as a people have abdicated our responsibility of taking care of the poor to the federal government. Instead of sending kids on “mission trips” to picture-perfect beaches in third-world countries, perhaps we’d be better off if they took a shift at the local soup kitchen or volunteered at the local homeless shelter. When Jesus references the poor, he undeniably puts the burden of support on me and you, not the federal government.

The problem? He’s bought into a long-time propaganda point of those who’d prefer to have more influence over there community and will obscure important points to get there. What is that? Let me state it as a negation of the propaganda point.

The federal government is us.

That’s the delight and glory of the United States of America. In monarchies and autocracies, government is thrust upon the populace by force, whether that force be exogenous or endogenous. I’ll leave the question of theocracies to the reader.

But not only do we pick our leaders, we can be those leaders. If we’re a citizen, we can put ourselves forth as candidates for positions from little town council member to President. For those who bang away with hammers and wedges to alienate the people from the very government we select, I say Cease! To demand the government change its goals, despite your opinion being a minority, is to not understand how our way of life works.

Are we subject to limitations when it comes to that participation? Of course; logistics demands it. But that doesn’t mean we, individually, cannot be part of the government.

So when Mr Erickson says feeding the desperately hungry is not the federal government’s responsibility, he’s ignoring one of the most important and fundamental truths of our Constitution, as well as a practical matter of feeding folks so we don’t have food riots.

We, not them, but emphatically we are the federal government. If you win an election with the purpose of stopping food bank support, you’re against Jesus. Says the agnostic.

During my unexpected but restful sojourn away from the computer, I did some revelating, and it was all banal. Nevertheless,

Writing is the process of moving from the complete ambiguity of the unexamined void to the precision of the nanometer.

Just something to keep in mind during your next composition. Since I haven’t time to compose myself.

From a donation solicitation from the Democrats:

→ 1. Early polling shows Democrats have a THREE-POINT lead in the race to control Congress.

→ 2. We only need to flip THREE seats to flip the House blue.

→ 3. Now that extreme MAGA Republicans know how close we are to defeating them, they’re holding big-ticket fundraisers to salvage their razor-thin majority.

Against that pack of fourth-rate clowns put forth by the Republicans, and it’s this close?

Just when will the Democrats get a clue that they are less popular than snakes and need to correct something?

30 hour ago we were snow-free. Temperatures in the 70s F.

Then we received nearly 3 inches of rain.

And then a couple inches of snow.

My oh my.

I took my computer to the repair shop, expecting to be out of action for a day or two.

That was a week ago today.

Apparently, keeping an old computer as your primary means repairs, such as finding a replacement CPU fan, takes a while.

Apologies.

When your typos are homonym-istic.

Thousands of years ago, Jews were bringing law and order to civilization. They inhabited the land of Canaan and created the Kingdom of David. They were conquered, disbursed, returned home, conquered again, and then ultimately driven out by the Romans in AD 136 after a series of rebellions. The Romans changed Judea, derived from the Kingdom of Judah, into Palestine. Now, disparate Arab tribes and antisemites use “Palestine” to lay claim to an area where both Biblical and historical archeological claims show the Jewish people lived before the Romans forcibly dispersed them through the Roman Empire. — Erick Erickson

Please pay only in American currency. Legitimate currency. No DitzCoin, please.

When applying archaeology to the intangible there can be some amazing results that can strain credulity. Try this on for size:

Today, COBOL is no longer the language of choice for computer programmers. It does, however, retain a small but important role in some software. [COBOL Cowboys founder Bill] Hinshaw estimates there are 800 billion lines of COBOL running today. [“The critical computer systems still relying on decades-old code,” Matthew Sparkes, NewScientist (8 March 2025, paywall)]

Worse yet, billion’s not even well defined in this context; the Wikipedia page for billion left me feeling like I needed a secret decoder ring, or membership in the Masonic Temple. I particularly like the references to milion^[1] in that page, as the milion page didn’t seem relevant. Or is this a systematic misspelling?

But that’s all irrelevant; we can all agree that 800 billion is a big number when counting lines of code, and I have my doubts that so many lines of code, in all the computer languages of the world, have been written by the human hand.

For one thing, the hospitals would be overrun by emergency patients suffering from psychoses, neuroses, neck injuries, and carpal tunnel.

I checked the next issue of NS but saw neither corrections nor errata nor complaints in the letters column.

This reminds me of the Soviet programmer a recruiter tried to sell to my employer of the moment decades ago. He made a claim as to how much code he’d written, and I think, to satisfy the claim, we calculated he’d have to write 10,000 lines per day for … his entire life? No weekends off. It was crazy.

So I think I’ll just be boggled.

¹ Nor had I ever encountered the word before, but there is such a word, presumably Latin or of Latin origin:

The Milion (Ancient Greek: Μίλιον or Μίλλιον, Mílion; Turkish: Milyon taşı) was a marker from which all distances across the Roman Empire were measured. Erected by Septimius Severus in the 3rd century AD in the city of Byzantium, it became the zero-mile marker for the empire upon the re-founding of the city as Constantinople in 330 AD. …

Its relevance to billion, however, is obscure to me.

That’s what struck me while reading Steve Benen’s summation of our top diplomat, Secretary Rubio, and his role, or lack thereof, in this Administration:

The lack of message discipline is an obvious problem, but just as notable is the apparent fact that the secretary of state, roughly two months into his beleaguered tenure, is struggling to remain on the same page as Team Trump.

I’m reminded anew of a recent Vanity Fair report, which noted, “Rubio is privately frustrated that Trump has effectively sidelined him. According to four prominent Republicans close to the White House, Rubio … has told people he is upset by his lack of foreign policy influence despite being, on paper at least, the administration’s top diplomat.”

The article from Gabriel Sherman added that Rubio “is often the last to know when foreign policy decisions are made in the White House.” …

It dovetails with a recent Politico report that noted members of Congress who believe Rubio “does not have the president’s ear.”

If you cast your mind back to the 2015 campaign, the tension between Trump and then-Senator Rubio (R-FL) was quite palpable, and their verbal exchanges were more the sort of thing that belonged in a wrestling ring than political debates.

I would not be surprised if President Trump, well known for his lack of political skills when it comes to running an Administration, decided to remove from Rubio the honor of being a Senator by luring him into a position where Trump can fire him at any time, and then letting him twist in the wind.

I don’t know if Rubio recognizes this possibility. Whatever you thought of him as a Senator, and he had, or has, a lot of political flaws, he is still an old-fashioned politician. Trump is not.

If Rubio should be fired, or resigns, in the near future, don’t be surprised.

Well, I can see that AG Pam Bondi is one of those folks with an inferior morality system. Consider:

“Tonight, a DC trial judge supported Tren de Aragua terrorists over the safety of Americans. TdA is represented by the ACLU. This order disregards well-established authority regarding President Trump’s power, and it puts the public and law enforcement at risk. The Department of Justice is undeterred in its efforts to work with the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and all of our partners to stop this invasion and Make America Safe Again.” [Office of Public Affairs, DoJ]

And if the trial judge got it wrong, he’ll be reversed on appeal. But her protest, no doubt similar to protests utilized by Democrats as well, puts expediency above rule of law; the text following is a plodding attempt to justify ignoring the law. As just one of a series of action which attempt to reduce the importance of the law, this is quite concerning.

As AG, Bondi should know better. If only because when she becomes a problem, she’ll be expediently disposed of. Maybe she’ll end up on a plane.

Oddly enough, this has a correlation to the essence of what an election judge told me just a couple of years ago. The two major Parties send lawyers to ballot counting centers to monitor the count, catch any shenanigans or honest mistakes. In her opinion, and she was certainly a Democrat, if only in spirit, the quality of Republican lawyers sent on this task had been falling off dramatically.

Not reassuring. I suppose all the smart ones keep their distance.

Necrogamy:

Posthumous marriage (also known as necrogamy or ghost marriage) is a marriage in which at least one of the participating members is deceased. [Wikipedia]

Noted in this video.

President Trump may have his own preferences for the membership of this exclusive club, but in this case I’d say it’s all the surviving recipients of pardons by … President Trump.

The “Pardons” that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen. In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime. Therefore, those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to investigation at the highest level. The fact is, they were probably responsible for the Documents that were signed on their behalf without the knowledge or consent of the Worst President in the History of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden! [President Trump on Truth Social]

Caught in the Great Spider’s web, they are.

Why? President Trump asserts the right to void previous pardons on grounds considered specious by most everyone. But now President Trump has opened the season on persecuting anyone he feels like persecuting, and that means his successors, of any party, can also do so.

Including, say, the January 6th Insurrectionists pardoned by President Trump. Once again, they’re under the gun, but arguably it’s not their fault this time. Well, it is, but it isn’t.

The President and his supporters try to paint him as always punching back harder on his critics. In this case, the punch goes awry and hits his own supporters. The mark of the amateur.

Which I think is a fine headline for The New York Times or WaPo to use. The source?

Portugal is getting cold feet about replacing its U.S.-made F-16 fighter jets with more modern F-35s because of Donald Trump — in one of the first examples of the U.S. president undermining a potential lucrative arms deal.

The country’s air force has recommended buying Lockheed Martin F-35s, but when outgoing Defense Minister Nuno Melo was asked by Portugese media Público whether the government would follow that recommendation, he replied: “We cannot ignore the geopolitical environment in our choices. The recent position of the United States, in the context of NATO … must make us think about the best options, because the predictability of our allies is a greater asset to take into account.” [Politico]

Perhaps Pacifists For Trump will celebrate?

Puerile:

behaving in a silly way, not like an adult:
I find his sense of humour rather puerile. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “HOW SILICON VALLEY BOYS CAME TO RULE POLITICS,” Carolina A. Miranda, WaPo:

I knew that facing the end of constitutional checks and balances during Trump 2.0 would be bad; I didn’t realize it would be so relentlessly puerile. To some degree, we have Silicon Valley — and the broader tech business — to thank for this.

The problem with not making it important that the workers be actual grown-ups, adults who need to put their best judgment forward in order to safeguard the company, institution, or government, is that they then don’t make that transition; they often remain high school juniors, fixated on impressing their fellows in their class in their chosen field of being clever. It’s not computing, it’s being clever. There’s no associated learning curves, you just be clever and that’s how you achieve dominance over your fellows, because it’s a bother to learn to think outside of the box, unless it confirms your bias.

Compare to, say, an aerospace engineer, or a civil engineer. Lives are on the line; refusing to learn how to judge a problem along multiple axes, such as moral as well as technical, can cost lives, which in turn ruins your career.

In software, lives are rarely on the line, unless you work, again, in aerospace. When you lose a job, you just move on to the next of the Greedy and Needy, the group of companies who see riches in their future if they can just harness software to do something. Take their paychecks until they figure out you’re incompetent, lazy, immoral, or whatever. Rinse, lather…

Another consequence of worshiping wealth, a problem dating back to old Roman times, and I’m sure historians would point even further.

Sec. 4. Each day for the remainder of the first session of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for purposes of section 202 of the National Emergencies Act (50 U.S.C. 1622) with respect to a joint resolution terminating a national emergency declared by the President on February 1, 2025.

– H. Res. 211, 119th Congress, wherein those who vote ‘aye’ are violating common sense in their disgraceful rush to please the man-child President. The National Emergencies act gives the President the power to enact tariffs; this joke of a resolution protects the President from the disapproval of the House, or even filing such a resolution. The political point?

But this would force Republicans to go on record as either supporting or opposing the unpopular economic ideology Trump and Musk are imposing. So Republicans just passed a measure saying that for the rest of this congressional session, “each day…shall not constitute a calendar day” for the purposes of terminating Trump’s emergency declaration.

– Professor Richardson

Thus the Republicans match or exceed the Democrats in their frantic twistings of reality.

In the goat entrails department, those habitually out over their ski tips may over-interpret this result from earlier this week, but here it is anyways:

Iowa Republicans kept a seat in the state House in a special election today, preliminary results from the Iowa secretary of state indicate.

Republican Blaine Watkins, a legislative aide to a state House Republican, beat out Democrat Nannette Griffin. Watkins won 51% of the vote to Griffin’s 48%. [NBC News]

Republicans win by three points, Democrats lose, but Steve Benen notes:

Note, however, that Donald Trump won this district by 24 points in November, while Watkins won by three points.

But we need more context. The seat was vacated by an unexpected death, and the election before that death was last November. The late victor in that contest, Martin Graber (R-IA), won by a 2-to-1 margin and more, 67%-32%, so a drop from a 35 point margin to a 3 point margin sounds significant.

But.

14001 votes were cast in that contest. The special election? 5336 votes, or a bit more than a third. That’s the significance. Is that drop off in attendance a matter of disgust with the Republicans, or is that confirmation bias? The late Mr Graber had personal popularity? Bad weather? Simple disinterest?

Also, in a bit of non-news, a special election in my backyard was won by the Democrats. It was up for grabs in November, but the victor, Curtis Johnson (D-MN) was never seated due to not satisfying residency requirements. Dumb Democrats. The same Republican, Paul Wikstrom (R-MN), then ran again, this time against David Gottfried (D-MN), in this deep-blue district. Wikstrom lost the first contest by 30 points, so I figured he’d make up some ground in the second.

I was wrong. He lost the second contest by 40 points. Apparently his commercials accusing the Democrats of corruption didn’t go over well in the district. I know my Arts Editor hated them.

But, like I said, it’s a deep blue district. Going through Ballotpedia-provided history shows the Democratic candidates crushing the latest Republican candidates by something like 30 points.

For those forecasting electoral futures, it’s little more than a gnat.

Kevin Drum, a blogger who started early in this millenium and made it pay and so never stopped, has passed away from cancer, according to his wife. I always enjoyed reading his blog, because it was well-written and based on facts. Personal animus was not part of his game plan. In some ways, he was the ideal of a blogger.

Good travels, Kevin, if there are more travels. You left too soon.

So long as President Trump insists that tariffs are the way to mega-wealth, I think all the other countries should impose tariffs on the United States, using as an excuse, “But President Trump told us we’d get rich sucking the lifeblood out of America!”

American exporters would be doomed. All because of President Trump.

I previously mentioned that widely admired Iowa pollster Selzer & Co. was exiting the polling business. It turns out there’s more fallout from the last election.

First, this shocker:

Just because it made me laugh, if only in horror:

Lastly, I continue to be appalled by the people on the right embracing the Tate brothers. If you see someone on the right justifying, defending, or apologizing for the Tate brothers, you have found a moral cretin and you should be weary of that person.

Erick Erickson

The Tate brothers are reputed to be highly misogynistic.

So, so tired.

Travois:

Which is an old reference to my thoughts on Sectors of Society, which long-term readers might remember. Briefly, systems start in one state, with a different state being the goal. The crucial observation is that the processes used to transform the system into the goal state are aligned, or optimized for, the goal. I don’t recommend following the above link, as I was working out my thoughts online, rather than more properly organizing them in private.

And goals for other systems, for other sectors, are not the same. Using processes and, for that matter, sub-goals in a sector foreign to the origin sector of a process is a chancy business; the law of unintended consequences not only will apply, but be reinforced.

I see it as so chancy that asking What Should Government’s Profit Margin Be? should immediately instill doubt in the soul of anyone who’s running around yelling about privatizing this and privatizing that.

Apparently The New York Times got around to the first step recently, as Professor Richardson observes:

The New York Times editorial board today lamented the instability that Musk is creating, noting that the government is not a business, that “[t]here are already signs the chaos is hurting the economy,” and that “Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die.”

I hope the Times went further to observe the fundamentals of why trying to move business processes into the public sector is a bad idea. Not that the President and Mr Musk will pay attention; it’d go against their confirmation bias, I suspect.

But it sounds like the world is waking up to unpleasant realities. Maybe I should get a sub to the Times. No. I just don’t have time for it, although with WaPo turning turtle as journalists hurried away after Bezos showed himself craven, it may be worth the aggravation.

The gears grind slowly, but grind they do. First, Rep Moulton (D-MA), a relatively obscure Representative who announced doubts concerning trans-women competing, at least with his daughters, and the blowback he experienced.

But the next Democratic politician to explore these grounds isn’t obscure. Governor Newsom (D-CA) is considered a strong possibility for the next Presidential election, and now he’s jumped into the transgender sports controversy with both feet:

That history was top of mind for several Democrats last week, when the governor said in his new podcast that transgender girls and women participating in female sports leagues is “deeply unfair.” The comments made him the most prominent Democrat to buck the party and echo public opinion on an issue that helped shape the 2024 election and could be a political liability once more in 2028.

The episode quickly made good on the promise of the podcast, advertised as a place where the governor would “answer the hard questions.” Chief among those: Are there limits to the party’s support for transgender Americans?

“The issue of fairness is completely legit,” Newsom said on “This Is Gavin Newsom” last week. “And we’ve got to own that. We’ve got to acknowledge it.” [CNN/Politics]

There is nothing wrong with recognizing a legitimate issue and using it in the run-up to an election run. In fact, it’s part of the American way, these days, of running a campaign.

No matter how much alleged party activists run around screaming Nazis!, per Rep Moulton at the above link, and indulging in performative morality as if that qualified as perceptive intellectual discussion, this remains an issue that bothers large numbers of Americans:

A January New York Times/Ipsos poll found that 79% of Americans — including 67% of Democrats — said they believed female transgender athletes should not be allowed to play on women’s sports teams. A Pew Research poll released last month found that 66% of Americans favor laws that require transgender girls and women to play on the teams of the gender they were assigned at birth.

And, yet, according to Andrew Sullivan, decisions concerning trans-athletes are handed down as if on high, quoting science as it’s the final word, rather than the normal contingent knowledge and conclusions that any normal scientist would agree is the way of science.

I know both transmen and transwomen, and the only hidden agenda I own, when it comes to sports, is the importance of fairness for both cis and trans athletes. What does it mean?

That means we need to have a real, society-involving debate. We need to follow the rules of a liberal democracy, and transgender advocates need to stop being arrogant, abusive sods. It’s probably the only way to bring America back together on this issue – and an important step Democrats must take if they’re going to cease being highly unpopular, even in the presence of the deeply incompetent pack of autocratic 4th-raters that is the Republican Party.

… that’s hard to type fast five times.

Suzanne Spaulding on Lawfare discusses the necessity of judicial independence:

“Judicial independence is not conferred so judges can do as they please. Judicial independence is conferred so judges can do as they must.” This essential insight from Justice Anthony Kennedy is cited by Chief Justice John Roberts in his 2024 Year End Report on the Federal Judiciary. The report rightly expresses concern about declining trust in the independence of the courts.

On March 4, following an address to Congress, cameras caught President Trump patting Roberts’s shoulder, saying, “Thank you again. Thank you again. Won’t forget.” Earlier, Attorney General Pam Bondi—commenting on the freeze on federal funds instituted by the administration—asserted that “the Supreme Court is backing us up.” Yet, on Wednesday morning, the Supreme Court rejected a plea from the administration to overrule a lower court’s decision that funds must be released to pay foreign aid contractors for work they have completed.

That said, many more cases involving the current administration are making their way to the Supreme Court. When faced with even more fundamental constitutional claims, there is a risk that, in a sincere effort to preserve the institution and avoid a constitutional crisis, the Court may seek to sidestep a significant confrontation with the executive branch in the face of recent threats to ignore court orders. This would itself reflect a devastating lack of independence and de facto create the very constitutional crisis and damage to the public’s trust that the chief justice presumably seeks to avoid.

A theme I haven’t revisited of late is the importance of the process of nomination of judges by the Executive, be that Governor or President, and confirmation or rejection by a designated Legislative branch.

The idea is to bring into the equation the judgment, both as to qualifications and character, of both Executive and Legislative, knowing that they are discussing a potential member of a branch of government that is independent, to a high degree, from the other two branches. That independence contributes to a governance system’s efficacy and stability.

And the ideological allegiance currently promoted by both Parties works precisely against such independence. Anything that works against rulings against the one’s nominator or confirmers is an important matter.

Let’s summarize this. Yes, politics is a normal part of government. However, illicit politics includes such actions that subvert the design of government, from the promulgation of laws, their execution, the judgment upon those on whom the laws fall, and the law itself.

Thus, when excellent, independent judges, regardless of their political stripes, are bypassed in favor of candidates who are considered middling, such as Justice Thomas, the system is subverted. Yes, Thomas and others may be reliable conservative votes, but that does not excuse such nominations for the top Court of the judicial branch of government.

Precarity:

the state of being uncertain or likely to get worse:
The older brother raised the younger one, a responsibility that gave him a perpetual sense of life’s precarity.
Despite the looming precarity ahead, I’ve found my time at grad school to be quite rewarding.

etc… [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Gripping account of how plants and animals shaped each other,” Simon Ings, NewScientist (1 March 2025, paywall):

[Author Riley Black] excels at conveying life’s precarity. Life doesn’t recover after extinction events, nor does it regenerate. It reinvents itself. Early on – 425 million years ago, to be exact – we find life flourishing in strange lands, under skies so short of oxygen, fires can only smoulder and dead plants can’t decompose.