Yearly Archives: 2018

The 10,000 Year Clock.

If you despair over the Kavanaugh hearing and what it might mean for the country, remember that the ideologies of the combatants are all equally vulnerable to one force.

Time.

The current participants in this grand clusterfuck of American society are also acting, if inadvertently, as teachers for the younger generations. These actors in the drama, be their name Pelosi, Feinstein, Kavanaugh, or Grassley, have so much invested in their positions that they cannot abandon the redoubts they now man, for to do so would be to give a lie to their positions, to ruin their reputations, to even lay waste to their families.

But the generations that follow them, that follow me (augh!), they don’t have those monstrous investments. They can still evaluate, with grave honesty and reference to the ideals deduced throughout the centuries, the actions taken by both sides. The current conservative movement members indulge in grand mendacity over the last decade? That’s a big black mark. The progressives are terribly intolerant, giving birth to the violent antifa movement, and otherwise alienating their fellow countrymen? That’s another big black mark.

Those teachers, and the rest of us, are not role models, but rather examples of the outcomes caused by our ideological choices, and those results are on NEON FUCKING DISPLAY in Washington for some of us.

All the youthful generations need to do is pay sober, long attention, and to remember that box of choices from which they draw is not a blind draw, only somewhat occluded, and contains far more choices than the two dominant ideological positions of today. They need to remember that, if you want it to be an effective choice, it means you’ll have to join up with others, either formally or informally, and that those you work with won’t be perfect, just as you aren’t. The trick is not to demand perfection, nor is it to tolerate imperfections, but to determine which imperfections are deal-breakers, which can transformed into virtues, and which ones, like bad hairlines, must merely be tolerated. Those may be personal, singular choices, but in the aggregate they shape society; making these determinations are the essence of justice.

I encourage them to question every assumption that has applicability to these and future political debates, from being of conservative or liberal temperament to the wisdom of adhering to any religious sect, or to choose to be an atheist, and to be aware that the latter case leaves one with hard choices concerning morality and philosophy that are not always faced by religious adherents – but both religious adherents and atheists have brought fear and suffering upon the innocent, and, worse, not through any malicious intent.

One day they’ll be in charge, dealing with problems of ecological degradation, national aggression, and other issues endemic to the severely over-populated world in which we live. For those who believe we’re on the edge of societal polarization and ruin today, as the final Kavanaugh vote is unexpectedly delayed a week for an FBI investigation, remember that the sweeping hand of time will brush these fugitive issues from us, and leave to our successors the responsibility of wise and skillful governance. Just as any despair for the foolishness of today will be swept away, so will that foolishness.

May they do better than us.

For good reason, this paragraph in a WaPo report on the Trump Administration’s foggy position on climate change caught my attention:

Trump has vowed to exit the Paris accord and called climate change a hoax. In the past two months, the White House has pushed to dismantle nearly half a dozen major rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, deregulatory moves intended to save companies hundreds of millions of dollars.

What gets my attention is that the paragraph succinctly and vividly states both the putative reason / metric for removing regulations, namely Saving Business Millions!, and, through its second statement on climate change gases, the real metric by which this particular deregulation should be measured.

It reminds me that misdirection is one of the implements in the toolbox of humanity, and a prime example is in the current political scene in Washington. The Trump Administration announces the deep-sixing of a regulation, its pundits pronounce on how foolish it was of the Obama Administration to have promulgated such a regulation, the Trump base runs around celebrating the staking of another vampire regulation, and it’s left to the critics to discern the negative impacts of the striking of that regulation.

For those readers who think this is usual politics, no, it’s not, or at least it shouldn’t be. These transactions between our leadership and the citizens should be explained as to their goals, consequences, and side-effects, and while I wasn’t paying much attention during earlier Administrations, I do recall just such projections being made during the debate on the ACA.

The real arguments and critiques should be concerning the projections and unintended side-effects of the proposed changes to laws, rules, and regulations; we shouldn’t be critiquing the fact that these communications completely omit important details.

OK, enough nit-picking. Almost in passing I note this passage in the article:

“The amazing thing they’re saying is human activities are going to lead to this rise of carbon dioxide that is disastrous for the environment and society. And then they’re saying they’re not going to do anything about it,” said Michael MacCracken, who served as a senior scientist at the U.S. Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 2002.

The document projects that global temperature will rise by nearly 3.5 degrees Celsius above the average temperature between 1986 and 2005 regardless of whether Obama-era tailpipe standards take effect or are frozen for six years, as the Trump administration has proposed. The global average temperature rose more than 0.5 degrees Celsius between 1880, the start of industrialization, and 1986, so the analysis assumes a roughly four degree Celsius or seven degree Fahrenheit increase from preindustrial levels.

The world would have to make deep cuts in carbon emissions to avoid this drastic warming, the analysis states. And that “would require substantial increases in technology innovation and adoption compared to today’s levels and would require the economy and the vehicle fleet to move away from the use of fossil fuels, which is not currently technologically feasible or economically feasible.”

In other words, these guys aren’t the game fighters for our future that we’d like them to be, they’d rather do nothing but lay waste to the world, including their own nation, in order to preserve the profits of the fossil fuel industry.

Perhaps my interpretation is extreme, but this is certainly how it feels to me.

Kevin Drum draws a lesson or two from Kavanaugh hearings:

This sense of endless victimization by liberals didn’t start with Donald Trump, but it’s no surprise that it’s reached his peak during his presidency. He literally rode conservative victimization to the White House and taught Republicans that it was even more powerful than they thought. Now they’re using it as their best chance of persuading a few lone Republican holdouts to vote for Kavanaugh not on the merits, but so that Democrats don’t have the satisfaction of seeing their contemptible plot work.

The problem here is not that Republicans were grandstanding over imagined liberal schemes to destroy anyone and anything in pursuit of their poisonous schemes to crush everything good about America. The problem is that most of it wasn’t grandstanding. They believe this deeply and angrily. And it explains the lengths Republicans are willing to go to these days—even to the appalling extent of accepting a cretin like Donald Trump as a party leader. If you believe that your political opposites aren’t just opponents, but literally enemies of the country, then of course you’ll do almost anything to stop them. I would too if that’s what I thought.

There are some liberals who do think that—and more and more of them since Donald Trump was elected. But it’s still a relatively small part of the progressive movement. In the conservative movement it’s an animating principle. This is why it so desperately needs to be stopped—not by destroying Republicans, but by voting them out of office. We simply can’t afford to have a major party run for the benefit of fearful whites who are dedicated to a scorched-earth belief that liberals are betraying the nation. It has to end, and Republicans themselves are ultimately the only ones who can end it. We need a real conservative party again.

While we could talk about the merciless patronizing attitudes you find in the outer reaches of the progressive movement and other minor details, I’d like to note that Kevin didn’t delve into the psychodynamics behind all this.

As Barry Goldwater predicted so long ago, the conservative movement has become intractable due to the influence of religious personalities & dogma. Keeping in mind that conservative Christian sects teach that morality is immutable, then the signs of societal change becomes one of the signs of the pervasive evil of the liberal movement, from same-sex marriage to transgender bathrooms.

This belief in the timelessness of the current order of yesterday is not confined to the sexual arena, either. There is, of course, the close association between these Christian sects and American patriotism, often resulting in the mistaken claim that the United States is a Christian nation. Patriotism is a pillar of the religious-conservative movement. But it also resonates in the commercial world. Remember this Trump rally slogan, Trump Digs Coal? The persistence of coal mining families in their devotion to an occupation which is manifestly on its way out is embodies a belief in the rightness of an unchanging reality. The libertarian wing of the conservatives believe in the creative destruction of the free market, and so they must find the rigid stance of the conservatives to be an annoying character flaw, and it makes me wonder how much longer the libertarians will form any sort of substantial portion of the conservatives, confronted as they will be by quasi-conservative-mercantilism, seeing as the Republicans seem to be in the process of discarding their devotion to free markets (see: tariffs and, especially, tariff waivers).

President Trump has tried to ride this belief in his tirade against those companies which have made strategic moves to minimize the impact of his tariff wars on their financial results, perhaps most notably motorcycle manufacturer Harley-Davidson. The tariff wars are weapons against the forces of change in the world in the minds of those conservatives not married to free market principles, and it must strike those folks particularly hard that H-D, perhaps the motorcycle manufacturer most closely associated with American patriotism, chose to move certain operations to Europe. Perhaps Trump was unsurprised, but his supporters must have been shocked that H-D did not choose to tough it out in the belief that fighting for unchanging reality was the way to go. Their acquiescence to the need to change in order to survive marked them as traitors to the movement that marries the blasphemy of religious certitude to the commercial world.

But in this reality in which we all exist and operate, change is inevitable in virtually all domains, including religion, society, morality, mores, and commerce. H-D recognizes the easy truth of the last in that list; the others are a more difficult sell, but I think the mendacious nature of President Trump is proof of the essential truth of my assertion concerning the necessarily malleable nature of religions, morality, and mores. No, these are not unchanging institutions, nor are they unflawed.

The refusal to recognize these truths has already transformed the Evangelicals from a group that could at least make an argument to holding the moral high ground into a group that would be the laughingstock of American society due to its imbecilic hypocrisy in voting for a President at such odds to their alleged principles if it didn’t happen that they are one of the most important groups enabling President Trump to win high office – and have one of their own occupying the office of Vice-President.

And a number of pundits with more coverage than I have remarked upon the extraordinary transformations of various conservative movement conservatives from reasonable politicians into ideologues who espouse new ideals in opposition of old ideals. Some have asked outright what has happened; one of the most recent examples is Senator Graham (R-SC), who at one time was an affirmed NeverTrumper, but now golfs with President Trump and does his bidding in the Senate. The mendacity of the Republicans over the last decade has been quite astounding, and is again indicative of a spiritual illness at the heart of the movement, an inability to accept the basic nature of reality; notable as semi-exceptions are retiring Senators Flake (AZ) and Corker (TN). The fact that both men, neither particularly elderly members of the Senate, have chosen to retire rather than continue indicates their deep unease with a movement that is cancerous at its heart. Senator Flake, in particular,  has made speeches to this effect.

Oh, look, there’s Senator Graham! Or is that Senator McConnell? It’s so hard to tell.

Naturally, no one wants to taint themselves with evil, so compromise is impossible; in the desperate dance to avoid that liberal evil, though, other puddles of evil are splashed in, until the coating of evil that comes from irrationality religious certitude begins to resemble that of the La Brea Tar Pits. In the interests of bad analogies everywhere, the trumpeting of Senator Graham at the recent Kavanaugh nomination committee hearing in his attempt to shame the Democrats for the tactics originating with the Republicans (mention Merrick Garland within Graham’s hearing and he’ll turn into dust, I fear) may be that of those creatures caught in the gooey tar, calling for help, yet unable to comprehend their imminent irrelevance to the future survival of this country’s true core: secular justice and prosperity. The only thing that keeps them vaguely relevant is their superior marketing machine, and even that may not be able to overcome the monstrousness of their twisted former selves.

Senator Lugar (R-IN), where are you? I think you’re party needs you and  your spiritual descendants.

A reader wishes to make a point clear concerning the late appearance of sexual misconduct allegations in the Kavanaugh nomination for SCOTUS:

Why are these assault accusations showing up at the last minute? Because the people making them didn’t want to relive the trauma, because they didn’t want to become public and the target of so much hate, vitriol and actual death threats. They’d rather have had Kavanaugh’s nomination fail on its own accord, but couldn’t stand by when it looked like a serial criminal was about to get a life appointment to the Supreme Court. In the case of Ramirez, it turns out that a group of Yale grads who know her have been yakking about the Kavanaugh nomination since it was made in July in private email amongst themselves — they were appalled. What could they do? Did they want to go public? What facts did they have at their disposal after 35 years? So, no, it’s not the mid-terms.

Nor did I wish to insinuate anything against the women in question. Taken out of context, few people would contest that interpretation, but as a group, it’s easy for the conspiracy theorist to see a malicious pattern.

I read an essay over the weekend which claimed that the real point of the Kavanaugh nomination was not only to get someone who would kowtow to the Federalist Society’s warped right-wing view on politics, someone who would be corporate-personhood’s shill, but to simply ram someone down our throats who we all knew was a bad actor to simply show the GOP’s power and for them to bask in the “win” of making us all live with a serial sexual criminal as a justice. It’s about winning, the crushing of your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.*

Speaking of conspiracy theorists, this concerted attack does seem like something Russia might want to have happen to us, no? It might work if people keep sticking to their System 1 thinking, too, but I think we’ll soon figure it out and stop that.

Reading Jennifer Rubin’s article in WaPo sparked a thought about the future. Rubin’s sounds fairly confident about where the mid-terms are going:

However, given the numbers, the Republicans’ unwillingness to examine what is going so very wrong and make adjustments is rather remarkable. It might be possible to save some seats, yet they are doubling down on losing positions. They might be too nervous about raising the alarm given President Trump’s nonstop cheerleading and intolerance for negative facts, or they also might have lost touch with political reality, caught up in the Trump whirlwind of paranoia and tribalism. Weirdly, though, you still see a batch of right-leaning pundits declare that if they pull Kavanaugh, the Republicans are done for. The base will bolt!

They’ve already bolted. Maybe it is a grand coincidence, but the decline in GOP polling fortunes in House and Senate races coincides with a huge dropoff in support for Kavanaugh among GOP women. Trump falsely and repeatedly says he won 52 percent of women. He actually won 52 percent of white women (suggesting nonwhites are invisible to him), only 41 percent of women overall. Some of those certainly are stampeding away from the party in House and Senate races as they watch the GOP fight furiously to the death over Kavanaugh, a Beltway elite whose own calendar doesn’t support his self-image of a Boy Scout and teen feminist.

The focus is understandably on the immediate results of the midterms. But suppose the Democrats win – then what? Putting aside the problem of an incompetent President, the Democrats have been in eclipse for much of the last twenty years or more years, as the Republicans have been in control of the legislative wing for much of that time. Being in the minority makes it difficult to impress the voters, so they need to be thoughtful about how they conduct themselves.

I saw that carefully. The manner in which they conduct themselves will matter more, electorally speaking, than what is actually accomplished. As an object lesson, the Tax Reform of 2017 (or what I just call Tax Change) was passed by the Republicans in the expectation that it would be the horse on which they’d gallop to victory in 2018. The economy would be erupting with growth, money would flow like wine, and everyone would congratulate them by re-electing them.

That strategy has been abandoned as the effective messaging of the Democrats concerning the beneficiaries of that bill has had its effect on Independents and even possibly moderate Republicans. And that abandonment has left the Republicans floundering. Even their second appointment to SCOTUS, illegitimate as it is, has alienated parts of their base, as Rubin suggests.

If the Democrats win only one house of Congress, then there’s not a whole lot they can do. But if they win both, then they must do two things.

1. They must conduct the business of the House and the Senate using the procedures which have been developed over two centuries of serious work. That means committee meetings, public debates, consultation with experts, acceptance of amendments, and all that heavy lifting which the Republicans didn’t want to do. Remember the House basically abdicated its Constitutional responsibility during the healthcare and tax process to the Senate? That is completely unacceptable and speaks to the incompetence of Speaker Ryan and his committee chairs. The American people can’t and shouldn’t put up with it.
2. They should communicate their dedication to these processes to the American people. The technological tools are available. They need that dedication to realize that the American people will be a lot more approving of them if they’re seen as respecting the rules and procedures of Congress, and  use them to good effect, rather than piddling on them. I don’t want to use that worn out word transparency, but that’s the core of this advice: to be convincing, they cannot be opaque.

If the Democrats take this seriously, then the country will benefit doubly as the Republicans are forced to kick out the incompetents currently in charge in order to begin winning elections again, maybe refuse the money flowing from corporate and foreign interests, and rebuild their leadership processes to produce people who really do deserve to be elected and help govern this nation wisely.

Courtesy WaPo:

China now, put on $250 billion, and they’re paying 25 percent on that. They’re paying billions and billions — this has never happened to China, and I like China and I like President Xi a lot. I think he’s a friend of mine, he may not be a friend of mine anymore, but I think he probably respects — from what I hear, if you look at Mr. Pillsbury, the leading authority on China.

He was on a good show, I won’t mention the name of the show, recently, and he was saying that China has total respect for Donald Trump and for Donald Trump’s very, very large brain. He said Donald Trump, they don’t know what to do — never happened. [President Donald J. Trump]

I really do think he’s in early-stage dementia.

Over the last couple of days I’ve been goggling over this Fox News Poll result, which I’ll have Steve Benen describe for us:

But toward the very bottom on the survey, there was a question we don’t generally see in most national polls:

Which of the following best describes how you feel about Democrats?

“They love America and truly want what’s best for the country,” or “They simply want what’s best for their party, even if it hurts the country.”

Which of the following best describes how you feel about Republicans?

“They love America and truly want what’s best for the country,” or “They simply want what’s best for their party, even if it hurts the country.”

Among likely voters, Democrats didn’t fare all that well: 44% of the public believes Dems love the country and what what’s best for it, while 43% believe Democrats simply want what’s best for their party. Ideally, a popular party would see a much larger gap, with the former easily outnumbering the latter.

But public attitudes about the GOP were quite a bit worse. The Fox News poll found that 36% of likely voters believe Republicans sincerely want what’s best for the country, while a 52% majority sees Republicans putting their party’s interests above the nation’s interests.

If you want the raw data, it’s questions 46 & 47 at the poll link.

Here’s Steve’s graph, just to emphasize:

I’m amazed that Fox News, widely considered the propaganda arm of the White House and GOP^[1], permitted that result to go out, as it clearly depicts in general American opinion that Republicans as far worse in the grubby, self-centered politicians department than the Democrats.

But it’s certainly congruent with my observations on the matter, as that happens to be a major trait of second- and third- raters, too often willing to proclaim their patriotism as they enrich themselves in various ways, distracting the voters in various ways.

Having thought about it, I suppose Fox News is really doing the Republicans a service by letting them know the general opinion of them. Of course, such news can be self-reinforcing, but that’s a chance they have to take.

And, if they’re really a news organization, they’re honor-bound to release all the results of the poll. Maybe whoever is running things over there is getting an uneasy feeling about the guy they’ve been busy enabling.

¹ Although sometimes just who’s the horse and who’s the carriage is debatable.

Burgess:

1. American History. a representative in the popular branch of the colonial legislature of Virginia or Maryland.
2. (formerly) a representative of a borough in the British Parliament.
3. Rare. an inhabitant of an English borough. [Dictionary.com]

From “Jamestown Archaeologists Discover 400-Year-Old Burial,” Paula Neely, american archaeology (fall 2018, print-only):

The grave was in the choir section of a wooden church built in 1617, in the center aisle between benches where representatives from the burgesses would have sat, said David Givens, directory of archaeology for Jamestown Rediscovery. It was a special location just below the altar that would have been reserved for a prominent individual.

It’s low budget when you have to wear your badly painted motorcycle helmet on your head.

It’s the night of the unsightly fusion when Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (1966) crosses the screen. On the one hand, we have a fairly reasonable Jesse James, on the run after his gang has been slaughtered, with Hank Tracy (aka The Steriodal Monster, as my Arts Editor described him) tagging along as they meet up with another gang in order to ambush a Wells Fargo stagecoach. In a nice plot twist, the drunken, resentful brother of the head of the other gang betrays them to the marshal, so WATCH OUT, IT’S AN AMBUSH. As this was at a mountain pass, we had the ambushers of the ambushers hiding in the rocks, and the ambushers of the stage coach also hiding in the rocks. Soon, ambushers are falling like crazy.

Capiche?

On the other hand, we have a standard-fare mad scientist movie, as the daughter of Dr. Frankenstein, Frau Doctor Frankenstein, and her brother or uncle (I was unclear), Rudolph, have moved to the Old West to continue their quest to replace a human brain with an artificial brain. When James shows up with a wounded Tracy in tow, she cannot resist Tracy’s muscular build and dull speech patterns, but it fails to go well with him, as he eventually, after having a pie plate sewn into his skull, ends up killing Rudolph, then the Frau, before having a go at James and the sheriff; only the arrival of James’ girlfriend saves the latter from the clutches, literal, of James’ former friend.

Yeah, it’s not particularly good nor awful enough to be fun. At least Jesse James really did look like Jesse James might have looked like. A sad day when that’s the best to hope for.

With regards to the imminent government shutdown of which no one is really speaking, WaPo reports the supposed pledge of President Trump to sign the bipartisan stop-gap bill:

President Trump pledged Wednesday that he would not allow the government to partially shut down next week, backing down from his demand that Congress appropriate billions of dollars for new construction of a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico.

Keeping the government open after Sunday would require Trump to sign a bipartisan spending bill from Congress, something he had resisted committing to for weeks. But Wednesday, with anxiety building on Capitol Hill, he suggested that he planned to acquiesce.

I’ll believe it when I see it. Trump is addicted to high drama, and he may delay signing it until the very last moment.

Kevin Drum meditates on the relative prices of oil:

The two most widely traded grades of oil are Brent Crude and West Texas Intermediate. Most of the time their price in the global market is close to identical, but for the past year Brent has been selling at a significant premium. That premium has bounced up and down, but for most of September it’s hovered just under $10 per barrel. Why?

No one knows for sure. There are some fundamental differences between Brent and WTI, but they’re small and haven’t really changed much lately. The best guess seems to be that Brent commands a premium when traders are nervous about the Mideast oil supply—though I’ll confess that the explanations for this don’t make a lot of sense to me. Regardless, that seems to be the conventional wisdom: when things get worse in the Middle East, both the Brent premium and the price of oil in general get higher. And right now they’re both getting higher.

I would suspect the unsettled political situation in Saudi Arabia is causing a lot of edginess. This might indicate a jump in gas prices sometime soon.

I have to say I was a little disappointed in Stephen Colbert’s monologue on The Late Show last night when he made fun of what might have been the one reasonable part of President Trump’s speech at the United Nations yesterday, namely suggesting that countries from which immigration is originating should be given help to “make them great again” or some such phrase.

Look, I have no illusions that Trump actually believes this, or, if he were to discover that American actions were at fault, that he’d try to correct them. And I certainly wouldn’t wish to work with him on such a project.

But the sentiment is, I believe, appropriate.

Perfidy:

1. : the quality or state of being faithless or disloyal : TREACHERY
2. : an act or an instance of disloyalty [Merriam-Webster]

Used by my Arts Editor in conversation recently.

I find the uproar over the Kavanaugh nomination to SCOTUS to be emotionally tiring. Not because I’m a liberal or a conservative, but because, not being a member of either of the aforementioned tribes, I don’t have the luxury of chanting in unison with my fellow ideological travelers. I am stuck with the non-trivial task of trying to evaluate the situation with my brain, rather than shaking my goofy little spear at my enemies while gibbering wildly.

And notice I didn’t say ‘nomination,’ but ‘situation.’ By this I mean the many facets of this ridiculous clusterfuck:

1. The removal of the requirement of 60+ yea notes in the Senate to confirm, an idea advanced by former Senator Harry Reid (D-NV), and implemented and utilized by current Senate leader (a term to be used loosely, if not with derision) Mitch McConnell (R-KY – notice how both major American parties are complicit in this screw up).
2. The attempts by the GOP to ram this nomination through so quickly it’ll leave flaming wreckage in its wake.
3. The last-hour appearance of an accusation of sexual assault against Kavanaugh in the person of Professor Ford. Why didn’t this show up earlier in the process? See: Looming mid-terms.
4. The refusal to release relevant material by the Administration under the rubric of Executive privilege relating to Kavanaugh’s job duties in previous Administrations. This is apparently unprecedented, particularly since we’re not talking about release to the public, but only to the Senate. The job of the Senate is to evaluate a nominee, and that evaluation must range from job qualifications to possible vulnerabilities which would permit a national adversary to influence decisions he may make as a member of the highest Court in the land. The Trump Administration’s secrecy should automatically disqualify Kavanaugh. However, the cancer of team politics has forced his nomination forward.
5. The last half-hour appearance of an accusation of sexual impropriety against Kavanaugh in the person of Debra Ramirez. Again, etc. etc.
6. The kow-towing to an external partisan organization in selecting Kavanaugh as the nominee with little inspection by the Administration itself. That’s an embarrassment all in itself.
7. The aggressive assertions from the Democrats that the various claims of sexual improprieties are credible and should result in the immediate withdrawal of the nomination. Really? All I hear are various assertions, no one is under oath, yet, and, really, I’d rather see corroborating evidence, thanks.
8. Nominee Kavanaugh claims he has calendars proving he didn’t go to any such party as Professor Ford claims. Wait. Just who keeps such calendars and puts such faith in their veracity as to raise such a claim? Does he think we are all half-wits here?
9. Attorney Michael Avenatti, already involved through his representation of porn star Stormy Daniels in the matter of an attempt to buy her silence with regard to her tryst with the current President, now claims to represent an unnamed woman who also has accusations of a sexual nature against Kavanaugh.
10. The various hints that nominee Kavanaugh might, or might not, have lied to the Senate during other hearings. Are they fabrications by the tribe on the left, or is the tribe on the right so committed to this nominee that they’ll ignore evidence that he lies on official matters in order to get him seated?
11. The composition of “explanations” for the incident, involving “mistaken identity,” which damages someone else’s reputation. At least in this instance, the perpetrator, long time Republican strategist Ed Whelan, has apologized, withdrawn the statements, and claims he’ll be withdrawing from public discourse for a while. I do hope he was sincere in stating that he’ll be searching for reasons for his mistakes. I suggest mistaken zeal and being a team player as a substantial first step. Try imagining the opposite of what you keep saying about the opposition, hey?
12. And lots more.

Old football fans would describe this as “student body right”, wherein all the offensive players try to move the ball by forming one tight formation, daring the defense to find a way to stop them.

Notice the lack of reference to concepts like truth, reality, compromise, and civilized discourse. The Republicans have their prize bull to put in the corral, and the Democrats are massed to stop them, if they can, with neither side considering what this entire mess means for the future of the Country as a whole. Scream, scream, scream.

Andrew Sullivan addresses the tribal problem in his excellent latest column:

And it’s this reflexive, reptilian sorting of in-group and out-group that has now been supercharged by social media, by Trump’s hideous identity politics, and by campus and corporate culture. There seem to be just two inalterable categories: the oppressors or the oppressed; elite globalists or decent “normal” people. You are in one camp or the other, and, as time passes, those of us who don’t fit into this rubric will become irrelevant to the discourse, if we haven’t already got there.

After a while, the crudest trigger points of tribalism — your race, your religion (or lack of it), your gender, your sexual orientation — dominate the public space. As Claire Lehmann, the founding editor of the refreshingly heterodox new website Quillette has put it, “the Woke Left has a moral hierarchy with white men at the bottom. The Alt-Right has a moral hierarchy that puts white men at the top.” The looming midterms will not be about health care or executive power or constitutional norms (although all these things will be at stake). They will primarily be about which tribe you are in, and these tribes are increasingly sorted racially and by gender. The parties are currently doing all they can to maximize these tribal conflicts as a way to seek power. This isn’t liberal democracy.

And in this fevered, fetid atmosphere, where the stakes are always sky-high, there are no constraints. Dox, harass, troll, lie, smear, mock, distort, harangue, and preferably ruin: those are the tools of the alt-right just as much as they are the tools of the woke left. In such a civil war, the idea that the Supreme Court could ever perform the role it was designed to — interpret the law in a non-tribal way — is laughable. Indeed, the notion of a filibuster becomes moot, because it requires some sort of common ground between senators, and this is regarded by both sides as complicity in evil. Even a private, confidential hearing for accuser and accused is now, according to Senator Gillibrand, equivalent to silencing the accuser. I lean toward believing Christine Blasey Ford, as I believed Anita Hill and Juanita Broaddrick and Paula Jones, but I cannot know about something that happened 36 years ago. So I favor an FBI investigation and see no reason to rush a confirmation vote. But offering someone a chance to provide testimony in a private session wherever she chooses is not “silencing” her. Senator Hirono has gone further and told half the citizenry to “shut up” solely because they are male.

Andrew is fearful for the upcoming generations:

They have been told, in Haidt’s and Lukianoff’s view, that safety is far more important than exposure to the unknown, that they should always trust their feelings, and that life is a struggle between good people and evil people. This infantilizes them, emotionalizes them, and tribalizes them. These kids have been denied freedom, have little experience of confronting danger and overcoming it themselves, have been kept monitored to all times. They tend to have older parents and fewer siblings. There is a reason the safest generation in history is also the most anxious, the most depressed, and the most suicidal. It is not that it’s all in their heads — prejudice and discrimination exist — but that they do not have the skills to put any of this in perspective. And so rather than rebel against their authorities, as students used to do, they cling to them like safety blankets, begging them to protect them just as their parents did.

In other words, they’re being taught to stick with System 1 thinking, rather than System 2. In fact, this is discussed in Garvey’s The Persuaders, which I reviewed a while back. Here’s part of my review:

Garvey also introduces us to the idea that we have two thinking systems. The first is the fast one, and is the one that is employed when, on a camping trip, the bushes rustle and you take off running. There’s no active, rational thinking, but rather the instinctive consideration that a mountain lion is about to leap upon you. What should one do? Run for your life. The second is the much slower, rational system, where we try to apply logic and reasoning to a situation. The goal of the Persuaders? To activate and manipulate the first system, leaving the second quiescent, through the use of keywords.

Which is all very interesting in view of an opinion piece in NewScientist (15 September 2018, paywall) concerning populism by Simon Oxenham:

Many are now wondering if this [the right wing populism pervading Europe and the United States] is the new normal. In 2015, Manuel Funke, then at the Free University of Berlin, and his colleagues turned to data analysis for an answer. They found that over the past 140 years, every major financial crisis has been followed by a surge in support for far-right movements. The good news for liberalism is that this faded after 10 years. If this pattern holds once more, we should be on schedule to see the surge in populism petering out.

Funke and his colleagues wrote: “After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners… Votes for far-right parties increase strongly, government majorities shrink, fractionalization of parliaments rises and the overall number of parties represented in parliament jumps.” Although some political after-effects are measurable for a decade, the political upheaval is mostly temporary, they add.

Funke’s work is rooted in data analysis, finding evidence for the apparent link between political trends and financial crises, but not for deeper behavioural reasons behind that link.

However, other studies already suggest reasons why, in times of turmoil, support rises for protectionist policies favoured by far-right and populist movements, be they on immigration, “unfair” trade or security. The studies point to negativity bias, a common trait in which people subconsciously respond more and pay more attention to negative than to positive events.

After taking into account socio-economic factors, those who are more biologically responsive to and devote more attention to negative events tend to favour “protective” policies.

It reads as a classic “let’s try that path, oh that hurt, let’s not do that path after all” situation, doesn’t it? The task for the right-wing extremists, then, is to convince the voters that venture on that path that any other path – the liberals – are evil incarnate. We’ve seen this in the abortion debate, where Evangelicals have basically slept with the devil in order to get judges friendly to their one and only cause of abortion seated, and the recent immigration debate, where the extremists magnify whatever crimes immigrants, illegal or not, may be committing, removing the all-important context. Context-free may be great when parsing computer languages, but it’s the worst way to think when it comes to social issues and, generally, real-life.

Simon notes there are uncertainties and dissidents to this study:

Not all political scientists agree that these cycles will apply now. Justin Murphy at the University of Southampton, UK, expects the pendulum to continue to swing further in the opposite direction this time. To him, the root cause of the contemporary rise of the populist right may be linked to a backlash against social liberals overstating the extent to which freedom of thought or behaviour has been restricted – despite declines in racism and sexism in the US and UK in recent decades.

There is clearly a case to be made that at least some overzealous elements among the left are harming their own cause and may be sparking a backlash at the ballot box. This was demonstrated in an incident earlier this year when renowned liberal psychologist Steven Pinker outlined his thoughts on how to deconstruct and fight back against false and illogical racist and sexist claims made by alt-right activists.

A point Andrew has also made.

Sometimes it helps to take a step back and consider the larger situation, and if it wasn’t for the fact that this particularly sordid episode involves a life-long appointment of someone with a religious viewpoint at odds with most of the United States, and probably devilishly hard to remove, I’d just sit back and laugh at it.

But that’s not so easily done here. Best to hope more and more partisans become conscious of this ludicrous situation and come together to figure out what can be done about the current bands of resolute zealots in both camps.

Don’t confuse water-bears with teddy-bears.

Ant-Man And The Wasp (2018) is a light and fluffy movie in which just about all the primary actions take place because one physicist was way too arrogant for all the other physicists, resulting in the latter going it alone and having various things go wrong. Does the arrogant physicist get his come-uppance? Nope.

In other words, this movie is thematically inert.

Spiced with good-hearted humor and some lovely tardigrades, it certainly entertains, as it’s well-acted and the fight sequences are nicely thought out, but in the end it’s little more than a meringue which has not been properly tanned. Don’t spend a lot of money to see this one.

In fact, if you wait for it to hit broadcast television, you won’t miss much. Except maybe the Easter Egg at the end. But, really, the producers should have just dumpsterized this script.

From womb to plate…

From a Motley Fool analysis mailing:

The news is all around: The S&P 500 keeps hitting all-time highs and is closing in on 3,000 for the first time.

But in reality, the S&P 500 passed 3,000 a few years ago, by a measure that’s much more reflective of the stock market’s true performance. I’m talking about the S&P 500 total return index, which topped 3,000 in 2013 and now sits around 5,700.

The quote for the S&P 500 that you most often see on financial websites and hear about on the news is just the price return of the stocks in the index. It doesn’t factor in dividends — and so it ignores a crucial component of what you can earn by investing in stocks.

How important are dividends? Over the past decade, the S&P 500 returned 133% on a price-only basis. But looking at the index’s total return, its performance jumps to 189%. … [Robert Brokamp, Rule Your Retirement, The Motley Fool]

For an investment professional, this is a part of the financial landscape, something worth discovering as if it were a natural feature.

But how about the rest of us? We can consider it a signal concerning the behavior of the American economic system, although I’m somewhat hesitant to extend it to the international financial system. A dividend is primarily, but not exclusively, considered a proof of the profitability of a business, because it’s money sent by the business to its shareholders. In most cases, the money is derived from the profits generated by the revenue it receives for the services it provides to its customer base.

So, if they’re going up, that means higher profits. For any individual company, that’s probably good, especially if the customer is receiving an excellent value for its money and the profits derive from efficiencies ethically created.

But Brokamp is talking about the market as a whole, so the fact that this aggregate entity is setting new records doesn’t necessarily mean great things. Depending on who you are, it may mean the ratio of price to cost for the generic service/product has gotten too high, i.e., the companies are finding it too easy to raise prices without serious blowback from competitors.

In other words, this may indicate we’re entering a monopoly situation. I’ve talked a little bit about this before, but not much. And, unfortunately, monopoly breakup is not currently part of our political culture, partly due to the influence of the libertarians, who steadfastly believe in the apparent logic that prices that are too high will naturally attract competitors that can supply better products at similar prices or similar products at lower prices. They acknowledge the moat problem^[1], but sometimes I wonder if they recognize how important moats can be. I also find their model of humanity to be simplistic in view of our history of corporate collusion, aka price fixing. They presume that only competition will occur, which turns out to be highly unlikely, given the common businessman lust for easy profit.

Back to the topic, the increase in dividends may also continue due to the irresponsible tax reform of 2017, which appears to not be sparking any kind of business renaissance, but instead is resulting in share buybacks and increased dividends.

In the end, what is the ethical course for an investment advisor such as Brokamp in situations such as these? Are they responsible for looking at the big, big picture that says we may burn down the economy by not responsibly managing the behaviors of corporations, and call for taxes to be returned to a level in which we can hope, through prudent budgeting, to return the annual Federal deficit to manageable levels (it’s too much to hope to return to 2000, when a couple of years of no deficit incited the Republicans into a drunken orgy of spending), or should the financial advisor keep his eye close to the landscape and simply advise his readers to buy dividend stocks and ignore the bigger picture?

To me, the dangers of ignoring the bigger picture could be considered a violation of the ethical duties of a financial advisor, because the dangers to one’s investments due to poor management of government may grow larger, and warning of that is one of the responsibilities of a financial advisor.

So I have to wonder about the ethics behind that analysis.

¹ The moat of a business is the cost of standing up a competing business, including physical facilities, human resources, intellectual properties (either secret or protected by law), and other things that escape my attention at the moment.

When I read about proposed alternative energy systems, they often seem to neglect the fact that removing energy from a system is still a perturbation of an energy system, just as much as adding or, in the case of climate change gases, retaining energy in the same system. So I was pleased to read about these concerns being addressed in this NewScientist (15 September 2018, paywall) article on carpeting the Sahara desert in solar panels:

COVERING the Sahara desert in solar panels and wind farms wouldn’t only help power the world, it would also improve the local climate. Rainfall there would more than double and there would be a modest increase in vegetation cover.

“There would be a slight greening of the Sahara,” says Fred Kucharski of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in Italy. This wouldn’t be enough to return the Sahara to the much greener state it was in just 6000 years ago, but the overall impact would be beneficial. And the greening effect could be amplified by other measures, such as tree planting.

Its plentiful sun and wind, sparse population and closeness to Europe make the Sahara desert prime real estate for solar and wind farms. Morocco is already building large solar plants. But any changes made to land surfaces – from cutting down forests to covering deserts in solar panels – affect climate.

According to a climate model used by a team including Kucharski, covering the entire desert in either solar or wind farms would lead to more air rising up above the Sahara and thus to more rainfall there. Building both would have an even greater effect.

It sets my mind somewhat at ease that at least we’re trying to understand all the effects of proposed changes to our natural environments, not just the anticipated positive effects.

Naif:

noun

• a naive or inexperienced person

adjective

• naive. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “I helped write a speech defending a vote for Clarence Thomas. I regret it still,” Stephen Rodrick, WaPo:

I wasn’t a complete naif; I’d been farmed out to work on the promising congressional campaign of Mel Reynolds, a former Rhodes scholar, who lost a close race in Illinois’ 2nd District in 1990. I was briefly crushed. Then I watched Reynolds get elected two years later; not long afterward, he was convicted of multiple felonies including statutory rape and embezzlement.

Ilya Somin analyzes an unfortunate legal situation at great length on The Volokh Conspiracy:

In debates over issues such as undocumented immigration, the War on Drugs, and others, we often hear the claim that the government should “just enforce the law.” If anyone breaks the law, the state is obligated to enforce it against them if it finds out about the violation, and the perpetrators have no right to complain, because they deserve whatever punishment they get.

Perhaps so. But this story about a woman who may be subject to charges for sheltering pets during Hurricane Florence highlights the flaws in that way of thinking:

And Somin then finds a number of problems with the blind application of law – but none are my immediate reaction. Don’t doubt it, I agree with Somin that this lady, Tammie Hedges, who runs Crazy’s Claws n Paws, a non-profit group, should be excused for having broken the law, but Somin doesn’t touch on my reasoning.

Ideal legal systems are designed to enforce laws during periods of normalcy, and the laws they contain are promulgated in order to continue that normalcy. We adjust them to change what we see as normalcy to be more congruent with a system of justice, because we believe that a normalcy more congruent with justice is more conducive to a society that is peaceful, prosperous (due to a lack of internal tension / dissension; external pressures are a different matter, often unaddressable through a legal system concerned with internal matters).

But when that baseline of normalcy is shattered, whether through an act of Nature or the malice of humanity, the applicability of certain laws may become questionable. Let me offer a limited example: a confrontation between a two people, one an aggressor. He (statistically the most likely gender) aggressively offers violence against the other, who replies in kind and kills the first. We have laws against taking the life of another, but normalcy has been shattered in this case by the first man offering deadly violence against the second, and when the second kills the first, we excuse it, after a proper investigation and possible judicial hearing, as self-defense.

Hurricane Florence certainly qualifies as a natural disaster. Ms Hedges found herself in a situation where she, and she alone, could offer shelter to a collection of pets who would otherwise be forced to fend for themselves in a situation in which many of them would perish. If we accept that pets have become limited family members, and many Americans, such as myself, have done so, then her choice to offer her physical facility as a temporary shelter is not an abrogation of law, but a sacrifice on her part ethically acceptable and quite admirable, even if she views it as simply the right thing to do.

Certainly, my position, assumed without caution, could lead to abuses, and I am not a lawyer, but rather a software engineer (which may explain my abstract approach to the theoretical framework of the law), so beyond special hearings and recognition that legal systems have limited applicability in time of emergency, I’m not sure how to proceed in a manner that is just, safe, and respectable, but then that’s why we train lawyers in the first place.

Ms Hedges should be freed of all concerns in this matter.

Concerning the recent story in The New York Times that Deputy US Attorney General and supervisor to the special counsel investigation of President Trump Rod Rosenstein had verbally considered invoking the 25th Amendment in order to remove President Trump, on Lawfare Jack Goldsmith presents an analysis of the fallout of the article. These points particularly caught my eye:

This story gives President Trump plenty of legitimate reasons to fire Rosenstein, including: (1) Rosenstein’s suggestion of recording Trump; (2) Rosenstein’s floating of the idea to decapitate Trump under the 25th Amendment; (3) Rosenstein’s plan to consult Comey about who should be appointed special counsel just days after Trump fired Comey; and (4) Rosenstein’s related acts of insubordination and disrespect. Trump now has cover should he wish to fire Rosenstein for his appointment and supervision of Robert Mueller. It will be interesting to see how Trump reacts. He could fire Rosenstein immediately. Or he could not fire him and instead use the story to continue to attack Rosenstein’s supervision of Mueller. (The current fight over the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court might significantly affect the President’s calculus.) …

Regardless of the legal issue of Rosenstein’s conflict of interest, this story will lend enormous credibility to the president’s claim that the Mueller investigation is hopelessly compromised. The president can now tell a story about how Rosenstein acted with anger and resentment in appointing Mueller; that the Mueller appointment was part of Rosenstein’s larger plan to decapitate the president; and that Rosenstein’s 18-month supervision of the Mueller investigation, and the investigation itself, is therefore compromised. I don’t think these revelations affect the legality of the Mueller appointment and investigation. But they will surely affect the atmospheric lens through which it is judged.

Which leaves me to wonder if the reporters involved were taken in by a false story, deliberately planted by President Trump and/or his allies. While Trump is not politically adept, some of his allies have political skills and better judgment than he has, outside of pleasing his base of supporters.

It’ll be interesting to see if Rosenstein survives in his position much longer. It’s possible that if the Republicans suffer a devastating mid-term election result, he’ll be left in his position rather than going through the trouble of shepherding a new Deputy AG through a hostile Senate; if the Republican control of the Senate continues, on the other hand, he may be handed his walking papers quite quickly.

Euphonious:

1. pleasant in sound; agreeable to the ear; characterized by euphony:
   a sweet, euphonious voice. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Iran’s rich, influential religious singers eclipse clerics,” Rohollah Faghihi, AL Monitor:

Other singers have joined in, criticizing the eulogists’ new style. Abdul-Hossein Mokhtabad, an acclaimed folk singer, told IRNA news agency Sept. 18, “The eulogists aren’t euphonious anymore. Their voices are mostly harsh and angry.” He added, “The content of their songs is violent and even [full of] superstition and insult.”

Image Credit: Inhabitat

In case you’ve heard of the hydrogen-powered trains entering service in Germany and are wondering if we’ll be seeing them any time soon, Lloyd Alter on Treehugger has been busily collecting the cold water they presumably spew and is ready to dump it all over you:

All the blogs seem really excited about this, even though rail electrification with overhead wires has been going on in Europe for decades and, though expensive, is the tried and true method. But hey, hydrogen is clean and green, right? I must admit that I have always been a skeptic of the hydrogen economy, but is it time to admit I was wrong? Perhaps things have changed. After all, as Daniel Cooper writes in Engadget,

Hydrogen’s strong energy density and relative ease of generation and transportation makes it ideal for heavy loads. And while it’s currently not a clean material, the hope is that companies can push towards creating H2 with 100 percent renewables in the future.

I read that and thought, no, I am not wrong. This is classic hydrogen hype. Let’s deconstruct it.

Just one of his critiques:

Energy Density: It’s true, hydrogen has the highest energy density per mass of any fuel; the trouble is it is the lightest fuel and has a very low energy per unit volume; a gallon of diesel has many times more energy than a gallon of hydrogen. So, according to the Department of Energy, “its low ambient temperature density results in a low energy per unit volume, therefore requiring the development of advanced storage methods that have potential for higher energy density.”

So energy density is a head fake. And then there’s the creation of hydrogen, which apparently is mostly fossil-fuel based.

I remember reading, oh so many years ago, that Mazda engineers had modified rotary engines to burn hydrogen (rotary engines were used in Mazda RX-7s and RX-8s, of which I own an example of the former and a cousin in Georgia owns an example of the latter). It appears it still doesn’t mean much.

Here’s a promotional video:

Gotta admit a quieter rail engine has its attractions for both humans and other creatures.

My Arts Editor recently had some fun with some ginger.

A still-life sort of thing.