Monthly Archives: December 2017

Not something you see every day.

https://youtu.be/6pBT8n-SNWk

Presented with little comment.

Too bad the last one’s out of focus.

Homiletics:

Homiletics is the study of the composition and delivery of a religious message such as a sermon, bible study or other type of message. The word comes from the Greek homiletikos (“cordial”), which is itself derived from the Greek word translated as homily (homilia, Strong’s Concordance #G3657) which means “discourse.” Homilia is translated “communications” in the KJV Bible translation of 1Corinthians 15:33, its only occurrence in the New Testament. [The Bible Study Site]

Noted in “After Trump and Moore, some evangelicals are finding their own label too toxic to use,” Julie Zauzmer and Sarah Pulliam Bailey, WaPo:

Johnson and the other students hanging out after homiletics class found themselves discussing the four-part definition of evangelical faith, articulated by historian David Bebbington: obedience to the Bible as the ultimate authority, belief in the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross as the source of salvation, the necessity of a personal “born-again” conversion experience, and work to spread the Gospel.

On 38 North Jeff Baron interviews Eri Hotta, author of Japan 1941: Countdown to Infamy, looking for parallels to the North Korean situation. I found this description of how Japan ended up in a war it could not win fascinating:

In questions of war and peace, the common view is, a country goes to war because they think they’ll win the war. For Japan, that wasn’t the case at all. The chance of success seemed terribly small, especially to the people making the calculations, and ultimately, the decisions. But they did it anyway.

Fear was a big factor. The leaders were fundamentally people who were afraid of losing credibility, of not appearing tough enough before others in the room who were themselves arguing for a tough approach. The fear was that if they moved to put the brakes on preparations for war, it would open the way for harder line usurpers to come in and take over. That fear of usurpers pushed the leaders to champion the most aggressive policies.

Some of the answer, too, can be found in the nature of bureaucracies. For the military leaders, for the Army and the Navy, taking the tough line was the way to argue for a larger share of the budget and to defend the legitimacy of their institutions against outcomes that would have weakened them, their influence, their leadership roles in society.

It’s always hard to put the greater good ahead of your own good – or your own little tribe’s good. While Baron is wondering if North Korea is going down the same icy slope as did Japan, I wonder if it occurred to anyone to ask the same about the American leadership. After all, Trump has a big mouth and has insulted Kim on multiple occasions. Given his recent political reversals, one might expect that he can’t really afford to look soft with regard to North Korea. Then add in a military establishment that expects to be well-fed, but must occasionally demonstrate its utility, and it’s a dangerous situation.

We may end up in a war brought on by someone mainly concerned about his own prestige.

I’ve been reading this article on the DailyMail.com with some startlement. It discusses how Facebook is hijacking our lives, quoting various former FB employees. This one, with Justin Rosenstein, the developer of the ‘Like’ feature, caught my eye:

Mr Rosenstein says he has banned all apps on his phone, including Facebook, because he doesn’t trust himself not to get addicted to them.

What started as a Silicon Valley success story could end in a future where people are permanently distracted by devices from the world around them, he argues. …

Mr Rosenstein believes that the lure of social media and other apps can be as addictive as heroin and that they are having a noticeably detrimental effect on people’s ability to focus. …

He argues that the solution to the problem may be state regulation of apps, which he views on a par with tobacco advertising, to minimise any harm they may be found to cause.

Speaking to The Guardian, he said: ‘It is very common for humans to develop things with the best of intentions and for them to have unintended, negative consequences.

‘Everyone is distracted, all of the time.

‘One reason I think it is particularly important for us to talk about this now is that we may be the last generation that can remember life before.

‘If we only care about profit maximisation, we will go rapidly into dystopia.’

My first reaction is that this isn’t a legal problem, it’s a maturity problem. If you find you can’t exercise good judgment while using something, then don’t use it. But should the government get involved just because something is affecting folks in a negative way that they should be able to handle themselves?

BUT. Remember Carrie Nation? Maybe not. She was an instrumental member of the movement that resulted in Prohibition, the era when the consumption of alcohol was banned in the United States. She was legendary for personally destroying the contents of bars and saloons with rocks and, later, a hatchet. But, in this context, it begs the question: why?

Because she saw drink as destructive to society, and men being unable to exercise good judgment in its consumption. (She was also a bit of a religious crazy, to be honest.)

I’m not interested in pushing an analogy here. What I’m getting at is that humanity has always had problems with self-control and discerning what is good for us – and what’s bad for us. I suppose if I were of the old-timey Christian tradition, I’d call them (or us) sinners, or maybe Epicureans in the false^[1] belief that the word means dedicated to satisfying their baser urges.

Whether or not the banning of apps^[2] – or Facebook – would work is probably something we’ll never find out, because I suspect it’ll be even more politically unpalatable than banning alcohol or tobacco. I  hope what happens is that a societal consensus will build that leans against those apps that manipulate our emotional systems for financial or political gain, and leans towards those that have positive social attributes. Such a consensus would require a governmental lead, I do suspect, but simple legislation would probably never make it through the process – and be ineffective or have unintended consequences.

And that suggests that morality isn’t a private or context-less endeavour, but one that is informed by the surrounding society, and evolves as society comes to conclusions about the issues of the day.

¹Wikipedia notes Epicurus believed “…  that what he called “pleasure” was the greatest good, but that the way to attain such pleasure was to live modestly, to gain knowledge of the workings of the world, and to limit one’s desires.”

²Really, folks, they’re just computer programs.

For those readers worried about – or hating on – the Johnson Amendment, here’s some news concerning its presence in the tax bill the GOP is currently trying to ram through Congress, via CNN:

A controversial provision that would have permitted nonprofit groups to enter politics and could have led so-called “dark money” contributions to become tax deductible has been dropped from the GOP tax bill, according to a leading Senate Democrat.

Sen. Ron Wyden gave credit to his fellow Democrats for striking the Republican proposal to roll back the Johnson Amendment — which prevents tax-exempt charities from directly participating in politics — saying in a statement that they had stopped the measure “from being jammed into any final Republican tax deal.”

“I will continue to fight all attempts to eliminate this critical provision that keeps the sanctity of our religious institutions intact, prevents the flow of dark money in politics, and keeps taxpayer dollars from advancing special interest biddings,” the Oregon Democrat said in a statement.

If this tax bill does go through, at least the Johnson Amendment will remain intact. The manufactured outrage among certain preachers that they can’t remain tax-free and open their yaps from the pulpits has always appalled me, so this is a small good thing in what appears to be a recession-inducing avalanche of bad things.

I lost track of international doings lately, but I guess I’m not surprised that Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem has aided Iran. AL Monitor’s Reza Marashi has the report:

After US President Donald Trump’s ill-advised decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, some headlines have noted that Iran’s hard-liners have been empowered as a result. While that may be true — and extremists in Tehran certainly claim as much — it also paints an incomplete picture. Trump’s Jerusalem fiasco has, in fact, also been a boon to President Hassan Rouhani and his administration. In other words, it has in several key ways empowered the Islamic Republic as a whole — and not any particular faction or group.

First, Iran’s political system will now have an easier time realigning its ideological and geopolitical proclivities. This will essentially solidify the executive branch as Iranian stakeholders unify against Trump’s extremist activities in the Middle East. Before the Jerusalem announcement, Tehran was more measured in playing the anti-Israel card relative to its bombast during the presidency of conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013). This was because Iran’s geopolitical goal of escaping American and Israeli-led efforts to render it a pariah required tempering its ideological inclination to spout off anti-Israel tirades, which score brownie points among Arab public opinion.

So President Trump has succeeded in healing a rift in Iran, and not to forget that he also decertified Iran for the JCPOA – despite the protests of our allies, who now will probably not abide by any attempts on our part to re-apply sanctions to Iran. But sanctions was just what Trump was demanding – back then. From The Atlantic:

After months of speculation, here’s the Trump administration’s policy toward the nuclear deal with Iran, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action: “We will stay in the JCPOA, but the president will decertify under INARA,” said Rex Tillerson, the U.S. secretary of state, referring to the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. What this essentially means is that the JCPOA is safe for now, but Congress could amend existing U.S. legislation to make it easier to impose sanctions on Iran. If that doesn’t happen, Trump said, “the agreement will be terminated.”

Who knows what he wants now. Reza’s conclusion?

It’ll take a generation to regain the “soft power” we used to have – and the influence that went with it. We really need to boost this kook out of office. Too bad his Vice-President isn’t showing signs of more mature political judgment. Don’t forget this blunder on his part.

Yeah. I needed the money, too.

 The Return Of The Seven (1966) is the sequel to The Magnificent Seven (1960), but it has little to offer in comparison to its illustrious predecessor. Another group of bandits are kidnapping the men of some villages, and in the most interesting part of the story, they are laboring to build a church to honor the two sons of the rancher and leader of the bandits, dead & gone, tall and sleek as stallions, as he says.

But we learn later they were not what the bandit leader wanted, for he wanted rough, tough men in his own mold, and they were gentle men, like their mother; the church may be in their name, but in some twisted way, it’s for the bandit leader.

Not much else of thematic interest here. Lots of shooting, people falling off horses (I was actually musing on how terrified a stunt man must be when a horse is falling and he’s still astride it), a few chucking dynamite at the bad guys. Gotta say, no one seems to be able to shoot a gun straight.

Even the actors didn’t really seem to be into it all that much. But then, it was fairly boring.

Well, my conservative readers, they went and did it. Might be time to shiver in your shoes.

Net neutrality, the set of rules requiring internet service providers to treat all traffic as equal, is dead.

The five members of the Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday 3-2 along party lines to scrap Obama-era net neutrality rules, returning to a “light touch” approach and ending what Chairman Ajit Pai has called the federal government’s “micromanaging” of the internet. …

“Prior to 2015, before these regulations were imposed, we had a free and open internet,” Pai told NBC News. “That is the future as well under a light touch, market-based approach. Consumers benefit, entrepreneurs benefit. Everybody in the internet economy is better off with a market based approach.” [NBC News]

The chairman appears to be quite naive. To my eye, this means every ISP is now a target of political activists, not only for influence, but for marching your favorite ideological nutcase – liberal and conservative – up the corporate ladder until they’re in a position to control their portion of the Internet.

Fortunately, I suspect this is easy enough to reverse if consumer-regressive consequences do, in fact, occur.

Steve Benen on Maddowblog has some impertinent questions in the wake of the news that Senator Grassley has decided not to move the Federal judiciary nominations of Mateer and Talley forward, despite the fact that Talley had already cleared his committee and both have President Trump’s support:

2. If Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley now realizes that Talley doesn’t belong on the federal bench, why did Grassley advance him through committee? Does this suggest Grassley failed to scrutinize the nominee thoroughly before sending him to the floor for confirmation?

3. On a related note, why exactly did every Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee vote in support of Talley’s nomination?

4. Would Talley have been confirmed anyway were it not for the related controversy surrounding his failures to disclose his ridiculous published works and his marriage to the White House Counsel Don McGahn’s chief of staff?

This started after the Alabama Senatorial race terminated in Democrat Doug Jones’ favor, defeating Roy Moore, who had President Trump’s full support. I’d suggest this is a sign that President Trump’s influence is diminishing within the GOP. Granted, it was clear from the earlier contests, such as those in Georgia, South Carolina, Kansas and Montana, that Trump did not have a magical wand that cleared the way for all of his favored candidates.

But losing in the most conservative state in the nation? That may have broken Trump within the GOP, whether he realizes it or not. It’s not really in Grassley’s favor that he waited until now to start applying judgment to the nominees, given the quality of those who’ve already been nominated and confirmed, but at least we may be seeing the beginning of the end now.

So now we see one of the most important committee chaircritters actually doing his job. That’s one.

I think it has a nice graphic quality to it.

Another month, another debacle at Wells Fargo. From CNN/Money:

The Navajo Nation has sued Wells Fargo, claiming the bank targeted tribal members with “predatory sales tactics.”

In a federal lawsuit filed Tuesday, the tribe alleged that Wells Fargo — the only national bank that services its territory — preyed on people by opening unauthorized bank accounts and debit cards, and by pressuring people, particularly the elderly, to enroll in services they did not need.

“Under intense pressure from superiors to grow sales figures, Wells Fargo employees lied to Navajo consumers, telling elderly Navajo citizens who did not speak English that in order to have their checks cashed, they needed to sign up for savings accounts they neither needed nor understood,” the Navajo Nation said in its complaint.

These are not honorable banking practices. If any of my readers use Wells Fargo, I think you should reconsider your choice.

A reader responds concerning the legal system’s complexity:

Ilya Somin makes damn good points. You do, too. I’d argue that we do NOT need, nor do we even want — and in fact, it may be wholly counter productive to have — complex laws for our complex society. I’m using the real (or Nassim Taleb, if you will) definition of complexity here: things which are too complicated to enumerate and predict in any finite way. Instead, it’s better to have simple laws which are stated with an eye towards the desired outcomes, the preferences of society. They can be nuanced, they can even be occasionally complicated — but not complex. There’s a nuanced difference in the meanings of complicated and complex. I refer the reader to this article for one place which elucidates this:https://sloanreview.mit.edu/…/the-critical-difference…/ The crux being: Complicated problems can be hard to solve, but they are addressable with rules and recipes. The solutions to complicated problems don’t work as well with complex problems, however. Complex problems involve too many unknowns and too many interrelated factors to reduce to rules and processes.

Sounds interesting. But wouldn’t this possibly lead to more litigation as lawyers argue over the proper way to extrapolate from a recipe? This, of course, is the complicated case. It’s alluring, but I have to wonder…. too sick to think about the complex case.

Benjamin Wittes, Mieke Eoyang, and Ben Freeman of Lawfare were curious about the efficacy of the recent attacks on the credibility of the FBI by the extremist Republicans, so they did a survey:

The other day, curious about the impact of such attacks on public opinion, we put a very simple poll in the field using Google Surveys. It asked one question, polled between December 5-7: “How Much Confidence Do You Have in the FBI?”

The answer was striking:

The average confidence rating for the FBI in this poll measured in at 3.34. That compares favorably to any other institution we poll on, save the military, which had an average confidence score of 3.78.

I have no idea if Google Surveys are trustworthy, but I still will heave a sigh of relief on this report. If these attacks on the non-partisan institutions of our government were to cause them to crumble, we’d be facing chaos that results in blood and possible dissolution.

So this appears to be good news.

Just to take our minds off the picayune events that plague our consciences:

“This image shows Jupiter’s south pole, as seen by NASA’s Juno spacecraft from an altitude of 32,000 miles (52,000 kilometers). The oval features are cyclones, up to 600 miles (1,000 kilometers) in diameter. Multiple images taken with the JunoCam instrument on three separate orbits were combined to show all areas in daylight, enhanced color, and stereographic projection. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS/Betsy Asher Hall/Gervasio Robles“

In case you thought every member of the Republican Party is batshit-insane, this guy seems reasonable – term-limited Nevada governor Brian Sandoval. From an interview in The Nevada Independent:

Sandoval, a Catholic, said he had not evolved on abortion – he has always been pro-choice. “At the end of the day, I believe that decision is up to a woman” he said. “It’s her body, it’s her decision.” And on gay marriage, where he said he has changed his mind, he said, “My best friends are gay. They deserve to be happy, they deserve to have the partner of their choice….That’s where I am now.”

When I asked him why he opposed pot legalization when an argument could be made that gambling is even more addictive, Sandoval said he had never smoked marijuana but believed it to be a gateway drug. “I have had the benefit of serving as a judge, and when I did my sentencings, marijuana was almost always involved as a gateway.”

Reminds me of the better Republicans of 30 years ago.

From NewScientist (2 December 2017):

Source: The Audubon Society

Evolution usually moves at a snail’s pace, but not always. North American birds called snail kites have evolved larger beaks in less than a decade, in order to eat invasive island apple snails that are much larger than the snails they used to eat (Nature Ecology & Evolution, doi.org/cgrv).

They may not be a distinct species, but it’s a graphic illustration of adaptation.

It’d be lovely to be a bug on the wall of the Republican post-mortem of the Moore loss in Alabama. No doubt they’ll identify the surface problem – an extremist candidate who appealed to the zealots who voted in the primary over his rivals. But will they understand that Moore, who defeated establishment candidate and appointee to the seat Luther Strange by more than 9 percentage points in the final GOP run-off, was nearly inevitable as the Republican candidate?

As long-time readers know, I put a lot of the blame on the team politics practiced by the Republicans, along with the RINO culture. These two recent additions to the Republican operating procedure has caused the character of the Republican party to run rapidly to the right, as demonstrated by FiveThirtyEight’s review from a few years ago – the trend has only gotten worse, as Moore disparaged various American Constitutional Amendments, as well claiming he’d never met any of his accusers, who promptly began displaying documentation disputing that claim. As moderate Republicans are run out of the Party or side-tracked via RINO-tactics, and team politics silences the critical voices within the Party that would function to deny extremists candidacies and, often, electoral victories, we see those who are most focused on power gaining access to Party support.

And – just as a personal observation – those with the most extreme ideologies seem to have the fewest restraints on their personal behavior. I’d speculate it has to do with the extraordinary self-confidence necessary to hold extremist positions in the face of widespread community disapproval. In turn, this leads to the belief that what they do is always right, and also, dismayingly, they come off as very confident, which can seem charismatic and even convincing to those whose positions are not well thought out. Intuitive folks can often be taken in by such people.

Anyways, I’m going to guess that it’ll be extraordinarily difficult to take a decision to dissipate the team politics pillar, because it has led to some amazing victories for the Republicans, including dominating government at the current time – and using electoral victories seems like an easy proxy for measuring success, doesn’t it? Yet, they have little to show for it – no signature, quality legislation, some leading members not just disagreeing with the President, but publicly denigrating him, and a clutch of young, conservative judges who are not impressing anyone with their quality.

Will the Republican leadership – which may be distinct from the donors who really may be running the show – have the insight to realize that things are just not going very well, and it’s a systemic problem, not a spot problem?

My money is against them.

Swidden:

a plot of land cleared for farming by burning away vegetation. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Reading Jefferson’s Landscape,” David Malakoff, American Archaeology (winter 2017-18, partially online):

That shift from tobacco to wheat had far-reaching effects on Monticello’s landscape and enslaved workers, archaeologists have found. One big change was increased deforestation and erosion: while tobacco could thrive in holes dug in small clearings in forests called swiddens, wheat required bigger expanses of flatter, cleared land that could be plowed.

The usage seems somewhat divergent from the definition.

In the category of “processes of one sector intruding on another” (unwieldy, yes) is this report from The Volokh Conspiracy on one Mark Z. Jacobson of Stanford, who is suing over a paper critical of his own work:

In late September, Jacobson filed a defamation suit in the District of Columbia against [Christopher] Clack and the NAS [National Academy of Sciences] for publishing a peer-reviewed critique of one of his co-authored papers in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Jacobson further claims that the NAS wronged him by failing to follow its own publication guidelines. (The complaint is here. An explanatory statement is here.) The underlying issue is the credibility of Jacobson’s claim that 100 percent of the United States’ electricity needs may be met by renewable energy sources.
According to Jacobson, the paper authored by Clack, and joined by another 20 co-authors, made false and misleading claims about Jacobson’s work in the process of dismissing his conclusions about the potential of renewable energy. Jacobson objects to Clack, et al., charging that some of Jacobson’s conclusions were based upon unfounded, undisclosed assumptions and “modeling error.” Jacobson further claims that both Clack and the NAS were aware of these alleged problems before the paper was published. Clack, et al., for their part, have responded in detail to Jacobson’s claims. Readers may judge for themselves who has the better of the argument.

Although NAS published Jacobson’s response in “PNAS” as well, Jacobson is not satisfied. He is demanding a retraction and is seeking compensatory damages of $10 million each from Clack and NAS.  Some of Clack’s co-authors, who include Ken Caldeira, David Victor and Jane Long, are identified in the complaint but were not named as defendants in the suit. (For what it’s worth, Jacobson’s co-authors do not appear to be parties to this suit either.)

Suing is what happens in the private sector. In science? Dude, you just return fire, and let the peers qualified to comment render a verdict in time-honored fashion. The damage you’re doing to the scientific sector by introducing potentially career-ruining forces that are not connected to the scientific merit of arguments is huge and idiotic, as it introduces foreign influences that do not have the sector’s goals at heart.

Just stop it. Now.

On The Volokh Conspiracy Ilya Somin remarks on the perhaps unintended consequence of SCOTUS Justice Sotomayor’s remark on the mass of laws we have today:

During last week’s Supreme Court oral argument in Christie v. NCAA, an important federalism case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted a dangerous feature of our legal system. We have far more laws than the state and federal governments can effectively enforce:

[I]f every governor enforced every law on the book, the state would be more than bankrupt. It would have no way of surviving…

There are countless laws, and even laws that are in force, that are not enforced totally….

States make choices [about which laws to enforce] all the time.

Justice Sotomayor is absolutely right. At both the state and federal levels, we have so many laws that law enforcement officials can only target a small fraction of offenders; so many that the vast majority of adult Americans have violated state or federal law at one time or another. The executive therefore exercises enormous discretion about which lawbreakers to go after and which ones to leave alone.

This, in turn, has dire consequences for the rule of law in our society: It makes it very difficult for ordinary citizens to determine what laws apply to them and how to avoid violations, and ensures that whether a given lawbreaker gets prosecuted depends far more on the exercise of police, prosecutorial, and executive discretion than on any objective application of legal rules. Thus, the rule of law is in large part supplanted by the rule of whatever men and women control the levers of power at any given time. As Sotomayor notes, those people have vast discretion in deciding which of the “countless laws” on the books they want to enforce, and when.

So what’s to be done about this? If citizens have to keep track of all the laws applicable to themselves then they’ll simply lose their minds. But the complexity of modern society more or less demands a complex legal system. Without it, we run a couple of unacceptable risks:

1. Exploitation by those we currently call criminals, particularly of the white collar sect, and

2. The problems that come from unforeseen consequences for the typical citizen. There are good reasons for most laws we pass, and many have to do with the long-term consequences if many of us took certain actions. This can be pollution problems, this can be taking advantage of banking systems in which a single case of a particular incident happening is not a big thing, but when everyone does it, then the banking system loses the confidence of the populace, and before you know it you have chaos.

The only palliative I can think of is unpalatable – implement a system where, at least for more obscure crimes, you get a warning not to do that, and on repeat then you get hit by punishment. The apparatus to monitor that is, I suspect, intolerable.

So at this late hour, the Alabama Senatorial race is close (as I write this, 49.9% to 48.4%), but the media, such as CNN, is reporting a victory for Democrat Doug Jones, although Moore is unwilling to concede. His privilege to wait for the last bitter votes.

So it’s a little disappointing it wasn’t a big victory for Jones, but it’s a big plus that he was in the race at all, nevermind actually winning the darn thing.

So what’s next, assuming Jones wins? He has to find a way to earn the respect of those Alabama independents who didn’t vote for him. Some of that will come from assessing the demographics of the vote. This is a chance for the Democrats to prove that they’re not the Devil incarnate, despite the ravings of the extremist GOP. So he’ll have to do what politicians always do – take care of their constituents without going overboard.

I wish him well.

And on to the Senate, which now moves to a 51 – 47 edge for the Republicans, with two Independents who caucus with the Democrats. This flip of a seat is important because this seat doesn’t come up for election again until 2020. That means the Democrats have picked up a seat that normally wouldn’t even be available, and in fact a seat that wasn’t even contested back in 2014.

That makes it a bit easier for the Democrats to hope to take control of the Senate at the mid-terms. If they manage that, it’ll be another slap in the face of a Republican party which is doing no good service to the United States in its present condition, which is to say it’s held by extremists who are willing to burn down the most important buttresses of our governmental system if that’s what it takes to retain power, as they seek to discredit every objective source of information that doesn’t happen to have information favorable to the Republican party. They’d rather be top dog in a banana republic rather than out of power in the leading nation of the world.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

And I can’t help but wonder if there are Republican Senators who have considered changing parties. Murkowski of Alaska was actually not nominated by the Alaskan Republicans for her own seat the last time re-election came up; she won on a write-in vote. She might be a little bitter about that. How about she changes parties and suddenly we’re 50-48-2?

That would also help disassemble a Republican party that has an increasingly bad reputation in national polling, while demonstrating gross incompetence in just about all aspects of governing. About the only bright spot came today when Republican Senator Grassley, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told President Trump he should retract two of his nominations for the Federal judiciary. It’s a little late to show some spirit, Senator, but at least you did a little.

So disassemble the Republicans, I said? What should be their first step? Remove the “team politics” pillar, whether it’s a formal part or an informal tradition. Oddly enough, giving your membership the right to withhold their vote for some party hack will actually make your Party stronger, while pushing out the extremists.

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger reports on a trend just starting to pop up:

An investor network managing $4 trillion in assets has warned investors that they should prepare for the inevitable — a climate-driven “sin” tax on meat.

Taxing items that are seen as unhealthy or damaging to the environment is a common way for governments to raise money. Over 180 jurisdictions tax tobacco, more than 60 tax carbon emissions, and 25 tax sugar. Now, it looks as though meat might be the next target for governments wanting to get serious about climate change.

A new policy White Paper from the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR) Initiative suggests that meat is following the same path as tobacco, carbon, and sugar, and that the industry should expect to see a behavioral tax levied by many governments by 2050. The paper, titled “The Livestock Levy,” is a warning to investors, and considering that FAIRR is an investor network that manages more than $4 trillion in assets, it will likely be taken seriously.

My goodness – I can imagine the bulging eyeballs and incoherent shouts of rage from here. I can almost share in them – I’m a meat-eater myself. Mostly chicken, but the occasional chunk of red meat is a lovely accent on life. Fish, not so much. Pork, once in a while.

But I don’t think it’s possible to institute this tax in the United States until more folks have accepted that climate change is occurring, is anthropomorphic, and is generally deleterious to our collective health. I suspect this’ll require an entire city to be taken down by a hurricane, and even then it’s just a guess. Rationality and scientific curiosity seems to be ebbing these days.

Katherine may be optimistic.

Fewmets:

Fewmets are the feces of a hunted animal, by which the hunter identifies it.

Fewmets is a medieval English hunting term derived from the Old English, with the intimation that these droppings are the only hint of the animal’s presence; that the creature itself has yet to be seen. [Wikipedia]

Heard in conversation with my Arts Editor this evening.