Yearly Archives: 2018

Political reporter Marcy Wheeler seems convinced that Manafort will provide the key for uncovering a putrid swamp of corruption in Washington. With regard to the many exhibits that accompanied his confession, she think Special Counsel Mueller has a hidden agenda:

They’re there to show what Paul Manafort does when he’s running a campaign.

Because they show that for the decade leading up to running Trump’s campaign, Manafort was using the very same sleazy strategy to support Viktor Yanukovych that he used to get Trump elected.

In other words, these exhibits are a preview of coming attractions.

TAKE OUT THE FEMALE OPPONENT BY PROSECUTING HER

It describes how Manafort used cut-outs to place stories claiming his client’s female opponent had murdered someone.

MANAFORT took other measures to keep the Ukraine lobbying as secret as possible. For example, MANAFORT, in written communications on or about May 16, 2013, directed his lobbyists (including Persons D1 and D2, who worked for Company D) to write and disseminate within the United States news stories that alleged that Tymoshenko had paid for the murder of a Ukrainian official. MANAFORT stated that it should be “push[ed]” “[w]ith no fingerprints.” “It is very important we have no connection.” MANAFORT stated that “[m]y goal is to plant some stink on Tymo.”

& etc. I’m not an expert on any of this, so I’ll just have to wait and see how this all turns out. What bothers me, though, is how effective this sort of thing will be in dismembering the Trumpist base. Trump, on his own, is fangless; it’s his supporters which make him dangerous, which convinces those who should be overseeing Trump’s Executive activities to turn a blind eye. The extent to which the Trumpist base exists and continues to support Trump is, in my opinion, the extent to which the American Republic has failed to properly educate its citizens.

I know the Trumpists would bristle and consider me to be preaching at them without authority, which is why I preface this with in my opinion. We all render judgments, and the extent to which Trumpists swallow the fake news and Deep State memes and do the Lock Her Up! dance is, in my judgment, the measure of Americans who are failing the test of responsibly using their votes.

Meanwhile, Benjamin Wittes, et al, on Lawfare come to the expected conclusion, regardless of the opinion of Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani:

Spotted this beauty loitering near a church.

Based on the seats, I don’t think it’s a reproduction.

Arturo Casadevall and Ferric C. Fang want to improve the quality of scientific literature, and along the way make this observation in JCI, a publication of Johns Hopkins’ School of Medicine:

vii. Fostering a culture of rigor. In recent decades, many life science researchers have learned to accept a culture of impact, which stresses publication in high-impact journals, flashy claims, and packaging of results into tidy stories. Today, a scientist who publishes incorrect articles in high-impact journals is more likely to enjoy a successful career than one who publishes careful and rigorous studies in lower-impact journals, provided that the publications of the former are not retracted. This misplaced value system creates perverse incentives for scientists to participate in a “tragedy of the commons” that is detrimental to science (17). The culture of impact must be replaced by a culture of rigor that emphasizes quality over quantity. A focus on experimental redundancy, error analysis, logic, appropriate use of statistics, and intellectual honesty can help make research more rigorous and likely to be true (18). The publication of confirmatory or contradictory findings must also be encouraged to allow the scientific literature to provide a more accurate and comprehensive reflection of the body of scientific evidence (19).

For the scientist who values fame and fortune over getting it right, this is a golden observation. However, we shouldn’t depend on the researcher to have irreproachable ethics, but rather to structure the system so they don’t have a choice but to get the research right in order to gain that fortune and fame.

And here’s the cast and director of the movie.

For a mostly pleasant, if slightly mindless, time, The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970) is hard to beat. An exploration into the more salacious side of the famed detective’s life, it has not aged well. In its time, the suggestion that the detective was homosexual might have seemed risque, and such an intimation for Dr. Watson might be an outrage (a term mentioned multiple times, in true Brit fashion) for him, but today they come across as quaint and nearly irrelevant – a resolution to the matter that might have surprised director Billy Wilder.

The story itself, which centers around the development of the first working submarine by the British navy for Queen Victoria, and its secret technology, and how this connects to the mysterious cessation of letters from one of the men working on it to his wife in Belgium, is mildly interesting, but not as compelling as the actual Arthur Conan Doyle stories. Part of the problem is that the story is telegraphed, and with little subtlety.

But it’s also neither offensive nor incompetent. Dr. Watson may be a bit frenetic, but he’s not a bumbling boob, as he’s sometimes portrayed, and Holmes remains cool under pressure, even graceful in the face of failure.

The closest it comes to a theme is that some men rise above their hormone-laden ways to fall in love with women for their minds, as Holmes does with the doomed German spy who masquerades as the woman desperate to find her husband. It’s not as compelling as one might hope, though. Not Wilder’s best work.

But pleasant.

I was just reading up on Paul Manafort’s various confessions:

Before he was Donald Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort embraced extreme tactics in his lobbying efforts: He schemed “to plant some stink” and spread stories that a jailed Ukrainian politician was a murderer.

He enlisted a foreign politician who was secretly on his payroll to deliver a message to President Barack Obama in the Oval Office.

And he gleefully fueled allegations that an Obama Cabinet member who had spoken out against his Ukrainian client was an anti-Semite, according to court papers.

With his guilty plea Friday, Manafort admitted the lengths to which he went to manipulate the American political system and the media for massive profit, exposing how he thrived in the Washington swamp that Trump railed against during his campaign. [WaPo]

And more. And more. And more.

This all in pursuit of massive pecuniary profits. It becomes quite clear that any moral system Manafort might have probably only extends to his own family – and even that might be an exaggeration. Clearly, treating people fairly was of inferior priority to gaining profits.

Which leads to the question of the moment, Why would President Trump expect Manafort to hold up under the pressure? I mean, I’m amazed Manafort didn’t fold his cards the day the trial started. He must have felt that he could win at trial. But now that it’s clear he cannot, and Trump doesn’t appear to be riding to his rescue, he’s simply following his age old pattern:

Do what you have to in order to advance your own cause.

Why would Trump think Manafort would do anything else? He’s as morality-free as the President himself. I suppose Trump thinks of himself as the master manipulator, the one who can put something over on anyone, but, given Manafort’s apparent mindset, that’s one vulnerability he doesn’t have. Once you discard a moral system which says you must treat others fairly, which can lead to self-deception when it clashes with self-interest opportunities, you aren’t quite so easily manipulated.

You may not understand why your tactics eventually lead you to the jail cell, but at least you can see clearly what’s happening in the short-term.

A dismayingly predictable finding appears to exist in this academic paper, if I understand the abstract properly. Although the abstract doesn’t label it as such, it’s about civil asset forfeiture, an old interest of mine. By Alex Tabarrok, Michael Makowsky, and Thomas Stratmann on SSRN:

We exploit local deficits and state-level differences in police revenue retention from civil asset forfeitures to estimate how incentives to raise revenue influence policing. In a national sample, we find that local fine and forfeiture revenue increases at a faster rate with drug arrests than arrests for violent crimes. Revenues also increase at a faster rate with black and Hispanic drug arrests than white drug arrests. Concomitant with higher rates of revenue generation, we find that black and Hispanic drug, DUI, and prostitution arrests, and associated property seizures, increase with local deficits when institutions allow officials to more easily retain revenues from forfeited property. White drug and DUI arrests are insensitive to these institutions. We do, however, observe comparable increases in white prostitution arrests. Our results show how revenue-driven law enforcement can distort police behavior.

That last sentence should be unsurprising to long-time readers, because revenue-driven law enforcement means there are now two goals of law enforcement, the first being justice^[1], but this new goal of collecting revenue for law enforcement is not constrained by the first goal. As independent goals, in the abstract they may affect each other, but in the real world, where law enforcement agents are compensated primarily with money, which just happens to also be the content of revenue, the distorter is the revenue, and the distorted is the authentic goal of law-enforcement, justice.

This is the wrong way to run a societal sector.

Kevin Drum interprets (no doubt from the paper, which I’ve chosen not to read):

The more black (and Hispanic) an area is, the more likely it is that strapped local governments will turn to civil asset forfeitures to raise revenue. But the more white an area is, the less likely they are to increase the use of civil asset forfeitures.

Just to make it a bit worse.

Ban civil asset forfeiture now!

¹ I know, I know, law enforcement is rarely or never concerned with justice, but all the same it should be, and hopefully we’ll continue to move that way as society continues to evolve towards justice and away from arbitrary laws.

And an impressive one, too.

He’s hanging out on the northern outside wall, behind the ferns.

A reader disagrees concerning the Paulsen attack ad:

I don’t think that ad is as tone-deaf as you think. It plays right to the base with dirty, scurrilous accusations. It’s pure attack ad, and it matters not who is in the White House or anything else. All it says is that Dean Phillips is a liar and implies he’s a tax evader.

And yet, the base and, more importantly, the independents that Paulsen has to win in order to gain re-election will be reminded of who Paulsen supports in the White House – a shady businessman of dubious bona fides, a character who talks big, yet whose biggest wins have been that he can pick judges that are mostly rubber-stamped by a GOP-controlled Senate, an absolutely chronic liar who should be sitting in an alley, drinking avidly from a whiskey bottle, rather than sitting in the Oval Office.

That’s the risk for Paulsen, that reminder that he supports Trump. And if his district has tired of Trump’s antics, that may hurt him.

But I have an awful record when it comes to political prediction, so never mind me.

And a disconnect of the worst sort, in my opinion. Catherine Rampell remarks on some of the expert conclusions concerning the Great Recession of a decade ago in WaPo:

Second, the financial system is complex and hard to understand. It was, in fact, at least partly the growing complexity of the system that got us into such a mess in the first place.

And third: No amount of oratorical flair, they say, would ever convince the public to support a policy that felt so offensive.

“The core of the political problem and the communication problem is the deep conflict, to any normal human, between what it takes to break a panic and protect from a Great Depression, and what people think is moral and just in the moment,” [former Treasury Secretary Timothy] Geithner says. “And that is not a reconcilable thing. It can’t be solved with eloquence.”

Davis argues: “We need to be very clear that winning public opinion should not be your measure of success, because you’re setting yourself up for failure.”

I disagree. The top priority in the short run is preventing Armageddon. But public opinion absolutely matters in the longer term, as voters act upon their fury. And if winning public opinion over any time horizon really is hopeless, what happens next time there is a crisis?

Look, one of the central tenets of the general citizen is that they be treated fairly in the context of a capitalistic liberal democracy. From this viewpoint, then, the economic system should embody that desire for justice. We have discovered that a rules-based system is far more likely to lead to just outcomes than, as they say, the Rule of Man, i.e., a monarchy, so long as the rules are of a just nature.

So the rules in the economic system should reflect that fact and be followed. Consider the predecessor to the quasi-meritocratic capitalist system we think we have, the mercantile system. In this system, the status quo is deeply entrenched, basically resulting in a system where winners and losers are selected based not on their performance, but on the whim of the elite currently in power – and those last three words sums up why status quo is such a popular phrase for mercantilists. This leaves the common citizen meager opportunity to improve one’s situation, and the entire situation becomes moribund at all levels of society, until some other nation-state that happens to have better technology moves in and wipes them out.

The bailouts are equivalent to picking winners, and, as Catherine points out, Lehman Bros didn’t get a bailout – they were a loser. But the entire economic system was perceived as being abused by the players who were too clever by half for their own good. By the precepts of justice, if they’re going to dance on the edge of the cliff and take a misstep, they should be permitted the pleasure of plunging to their deaths.

But, as numerous economists and a couple of Treasury Secretaries pointed out, this might have wrecked our economy.

This confluence of facts – the urge to fairness and justice, the dangers of a deeply interlocked economy – brings us to an easy and definite conclusion, that we need a regulatory regime where the sudden collapse of one or more foolishly managed companies (particularly banks) isn’t going to overly^[1] endanger the economy. If the common citizen perceives the economic system as a way to reap great rewards while avoiding the responsibilities that go with them, then why should they have any great use for it?

Sure, there are highly pragmatic reasons for regulating the banking system. But perhaps the most important reason is not immediately pragmatic, but actually begins as a moral reason which then transmutes into a pragmatic reason: if people do not see the economic system as a fair, then they’ll repudiate it.

And then where will we be?

¹ I say overly because there is a certain value to the economy being somewhat endangered from time to time, a reminder that the economy is not a self-regulating mechanism which requires little attention as to its internal structures, but instead a highly useful mechanism which can run out of control if not properly regulated.

Erik Paulsen (R-MN), a current Congressional Representative, has aired a completely tone-deaf ad attacking his opponent, Democrat Dean Phillips:

If you didn’t listen to the end, it says Congress doesn’t need another “shady businessman.”

In case you hadn’t noticed, Rep Paulsen, neither does the White House. Perhaps you could get rid of the one we have now?

But it is interesting that this ad, this blunder of an ad that’ll remind every listener who sees it and is paying attention that Paulsen’s own Party has a shady businessman in the White House, a shady businessman with poor polling numbers and a large number of scandals hanging over him, making bad decisions, well, how could this ad be made? Just who did Paulsen employ to make an ad that’s this tone-deaf?

Another bunch of amateurs? It is a theme for the GOP.

Or is Paulsen subtly bucking his Party leadership with this ad, telling them very quietly to fuck off and trying to tell his constituents that, no, he really doesn’t like his President at all, and this proves it?

I dunno. I’ve never paid much attention to Paulsen, so I can’t say if he’s really that subtle. But my money is on it being a mistake.

In connection with the sudden controversy over the number of deaths in Puerto Rico last year following the impact of Hurricane Maria, in which an academic, independent group raised the total number of deaths on Puerto Rico to 2,975, a number which President Trump has rejected, Steve Benen laments:

These defenses are as wrong as they bizarre. Nothing about the federal response in Puerto Rico was “well done,” and to believe George W. Bush “did the right thing” in the wake of Hurricane Katrina is to ignore the assessments of the Bush administration.

But the broader lesson here is that it’s well past time to give up on the idea that congressional Republicans, en masse, will ever give up on defending Trump. If they’ll defend the nonsense we saw yesterday, they’ll defend just about anything.

I don’t think Congressional Republicans are defending President Trump. I think they’re defending themselves. If they and their Party gain a reputation of being the Party of incompetency and amateurs, which in the latter case they’ve embraced, then they and their Party will go down to ruin as Americans discover the consequences of putting amateurs in important positions is death and destruction.

Unfortunately for them, the GOP has such sterling examples as famed “Mr. Snowball” climate denier Senator Inhofe (R-OK), plus an impending Federal Debt blowout which will expunge their reputation for fiscal responsibility – as if their behavior when they last controlled congress, 2001-2007, wasn’t enough.

As Speaker Ryan explained, they don’t need no steenkin’ experts to tell them how to do things. And now that their constituents, those folks who handed them the reins of power, are being served up the results of that action, the Republicans simply have to deny, deny, deny.

Because, when  you’re supremely ideologically and religiously driven, you can’t be wrong. You can’t. It’s just not permissible.

I took some pictures of my Arts Editor’s succulents dish:

   And then she decided the pics needed more than subtle enhancements.

I think the first of the black background pics might even be more interesting if only the top third, quarter, or even fifth was present.

The Arts Editor replies:

There’s been a lot of blather about the “category” of Hurricane Florence, currently inflicting itself on the Carolinas of the United States (South and North, about which many political jokes could be made, but out of respect for their travails of the day, I shall desist), but as someone at work pointed out, it may not be as useful for predicting the impact of a Hurricane as one might wish. For those with a taste for technical details, the Category of a hurricane is a measurement of the sustained wind speeds in the hurricane, and the metric is known as the Saffir–Simpson scale. See the link for more details.

Hurricane Harvey (Wikipedia)

Not that I’m dissing the dangers of the wind, of course, but remember Hurricane Harvey, which afflicted Houston, TX, in 2017? For all that the wind did damage, the major part of the damage was inflicted by the rainfall, as nearly 40 inches of rain fell in some areas around Houston.

Did we have a clue it was going to be that bad? No. Now, perhaps the NWS (National Weather Service) didn’t have a clue, either, but it seems to me that when they do, they should find a way to inform the public of the expected characteristics of the storm^[1]. But it’s not enough to claim that they’ve worked up forecasts and made them easily available to the public. This is especially true as it becomes apparent that the characteristics of hurricanes are changing such that the “Category” isn’t as important as its expected rainfall.

And, finally, given the relative success of the Category system of classifying hurricanes, it should not be thrown out – it should be extended.

I think it should be extended so that, iconically, it looks like this

Category<wind-speed ind>,<expected heaviest rainfall>,<area of substantial impact>

As suggested, we keep the wind-speed indicator, as most folks know what it means or how to look up the mappings from the symbolic 1-5 values to wind speeds.

The expected heaviest rainfall value, which I suggest be in inches only because I live here in the States^[2], should be obvious. However, I argue for the heaviest expected rainfall, not average, because the difference between average and heaviest may be so large as to be misleading, and the go-to statistical alternative to average, which is median, has no meaning in this context. Best to be prepared for the expected worst.

Finally, area of substantial impact, probably best measured in square miles^[3], would describe the expected coverage of the weather event over the geographical territory it is most likely to hit, as constrained by substantial impact. I would limit this to dry land, since land is typically far more densely populated by humanity than is the ocean.

One more refinement is that the latter two measurements, unlike the first, would be predicted values, not current values. That is, they are the expectations as of the moment the categorization is issued of the amount of rain still to fall, over the specified area. As a hurricane hits a land mass, dumps its rain, and loses energy, these latter two values would fall (as would the first, in most cases, as winds need energy to blow). So we might see Harvey, before making landfall, and assuming the meteorologists saw this coming, as a

Category 4,40,1660

40 inches was the worst rain rain Houston saw, and, while I don’t know how much of the Houston and non-Houston area Harvey impacted, I decided to substitute, for the purposes of this example, the metropolitan area of Houston, which is roughly 1660 miles².

This approach, I think, will encode this brief, predictive, and descriptive categorization of a Hurricane into the public consciousness, and will hopefully lead to more thought about the potentially disastrous effects of any given hurricane. It may even lead to more easily understood comparisons, and perhaps some intrepid data visualization people can use these for graphing purposes.

And now I look forward to some reader telling me that the NWS is already doing this. Still, I hope this pushes them forward on this useful pursuit.

¹New readers may not know that I live in Minnesota, which, in the United States, is just about as far as you can be from any hurricanes. That should explain any ignorance I’m displaying in this post.

²Call us barbarians if you must.

³See note 2.

A pensive monster, looking for a moment of introspection.

Much like the giant, possessed squid that’s shambling across this island, mysteriously upright on its tentacles, Space Amoeba (1970) is a shambling wreck of a movie. The general conceit of this mess is that space aliens, having hijacked our first ship to Jupiter, have returned it to Earth, ended up in the Pacific Ocean near a quaint little island full of quaint islanders, which is scheduled for commercial development. They then “possess” (think The Exorcist (1973)) some innocent squid. Well, the movie calls it an octopus, Anyways, it mysteriously grows to be maybe 80 feet tall, makes landfall, can walk on its tentacles, kills a few people, tosses the head priest of the islanders about, and then exits the island holding its head as bats pursue it.

My Arts Editor’s favorite bad special effects scene. That would be victim #1 on the right, and our octopus on the left, experiencing a growth spurt after eating Mr. Doan’s Liver Pills.

One of the foreigners, a smarmy corporate spy, is next on the hit parade, while a crab and a sea turtle joins him as other members of the possessed. The spy doesn’t grow like the octopus, but the turtle and crab do. The possessed spy is the mole in the human community. Meantime, somehow the doughty humans have figured out that the dominating space aliens have one weakness, and it’s not that fungal problem afflicting bats. I’ll leave it to be the movie’s little secret. The humans blow the crab into an outsized meal, while the octopus and the turtle, attacked with the human secret weapon, lose their minds, attack each other, and eventually fall into a conveniently suddenly active volcano. The corporate spy, still dressed like a fop, manages to save humanity by throwing himself into the volcano after them.

Wow. It’s just awful. The turtle really just looked like a guy in a rubber suit. And the rest of the special effects were wretched. So was the acting, story, and audio. Oddly enough, I liked the space trip, and while I’m sure the “wide angle” shot showing the ship heading for Jupiter consisted of a photo of Jupiter pasted to a black board speckled with sparkles, I really felt like that might be what  you said. Too bad I didn’t find a frame of that portion of the flick.

But not much else.

Avoid.

syllogistically:

A syllogism (Greek: συλλογισμός syllogismos, “conclusion, inference”) is a kind of logical argument that applies deductive reasoning to arrive at a conclusion based on two or more propositions that are asserted or assumed to be true. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “George W. Bush Raising Money to Maintain Trump Cover-up,” New York:

George W. Bush, who declined to endorse Donald Trump (or anybody) in 2016, and made muttered elliptical criticisms of the 45th president, has thrown himself into the task of covering up Trump’s many crimes. Bush, reports Politico, is raising money for candidates who are committed to maintaining the cover-ups.

To be sure, Bush doesn’t put it that way, and almost certainly doesn’t think of it that way. But it is syllogistically true. The Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress have followed a course of non-oversight, blocking disclosure of Trump’s tax returns, allowing him to to be paid by figures at home and abroad known only to him, and preventing investigations of multiple cases of misconduct. Working to maintain Republican control of Congress is ipso facto working to maintain the cover-ups.

A description of Hurricane Florence from meteorologist Eric Holthaus via WaPo:

Since modern tracking began, no hurricane with its origins in the hundreds-of-miles-wide patch of the central Atlantic where Florence traveled has ever made landfall on the East Coast, or even come close. Thanks to unusually warm ocean waters, Florence has intensified at one of the fastest rates in recorded history for a hurricane so far north. Thanks in part to unusually warm ocean waters between New England and Greenland, the atmosphere has formed a near-record-strength blocking pattern — not unlike the one that steered Hurricane Sandy into New York Harbor in 2012 — that is propelling Florence toward the Southeast coastline. Another blocking pattern, expected to emerge later this week over the Great Lakes, could lock Florence in place for days — which would result in an abject freshwater flood that could extend hundreds of miles inland.

Will it be enough to change some climate change deniers minds? Probably not. The problem is not the sort we’re equipped to even recognize, and some folks just can’t get over they’re preconceptions to understand that the world is changing all around them.

And, if this continues, their kids will have a lot worse set of conditions to contend with than current generations.

There’s recently been quite a hubbub over the pressure being applied to Senator Collins (R-Maine) concerning the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings. In essence, a group is collecting IOUs from donors that will be burned if Collins votes against the Kavanaugh nomination, and will be collected and donated to Collins’ next re-election opponent if the Senator votes for Kavanaugh.

Reports have the total IOUs worth more than $1 million [WaPo].

The surface storm concerns the appropriateness of this approach to campaign finance. Senator Collins calls it bribery, and while I think that’s nonsense, it’s apparently getting some serious attention from legal experts.

But I don’t think that’s the real problem for the GOP. I think there are two underlying ideas that upsets them, or at least should upset them.

First, there’s the fact that this can happen at all. The people, who they’d like to claim to represent, just rose up and took a stand in opposition to a GOP-anointed SCOTUS candidate. Remember way back when Speaker of the House Ryan (R-WI) endorsed amateurism, the collective wisdom of the unwashed masses?

Well, if this funding effort is really constituted of small donors, then this is the unwashed masses kicking Ryan in the nuts.

But there’s another dynamic playing out here that I only became aware of this morning as I thought about Senator Collins’ dilemma, and it’s this: the types of donors to the political parties. While it’s true that both have what are termed mega-donors, it sure seem as if the Republicans are far more heavily funded by the mega-donor class than the Democrats.

A quick look at the table of mega-donors OpenSecrets vitiates my point slightly, but I think I can rebolster my point by citing the experience of Rep. Collins (R-NY) (no relation to the Senator to my knowledge) (yes, the guy who was just indicted on insider trading charges) with his donors, as noted by The Hill last year:

A House Republican lawmaker acknowledged on Tuesday that he’s facing pressure from donors to ensure the GOP tax-reform proposal gets done.

Rep. Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) had been describing the flurry of lobbying from special interests seeking to protect favored tax provisions when a reporter asked if donors are happy with the tax-reform proposal.

“My donors are basically saying, ‘Get it done or don’t ever call me again,’ ” Collins replied.

So what, you say?

So this: these mega-donors are, virtually by definition, individuals or small family groupings. These aren’t the hoi-polloi of which Speaker Ryan spoke in such confident and glowing terms. These are people such as Adelson and the Koch brothers and, presumably not for this election but verifiably in others, Betsy DeVos.

In other words, people with specific agendas that are quite often well out of the mainstream. DeVos, for example, is an outspoken advocate for for-profit and religious schools.

And this means the GOP is swinging back and forth, quite like the Sword of Damocles, where the thread is made of the opinions of all these mega-donors.

This crowd-funded financial weapon being waved in Senator Collins’ general direction, on the other hand, represents the opinions of many people, all agreeing on at least one thing: that Judge Kavanaugh’s opinions on abortion are incompatible with the American mainstream. By implication, that crowd of donors are also backing the Democrats. And it’s the multiplicity which virtually guarantees mainstream support for the Democrats.

The rise of the mega-donors is a great strength for a party, left or right, but it’s also an Achilles’ heel for them, because the outsize influence on the party’s direction and operation must be right – or it can wreck the party.

Taken out in Traverse City.

As I sat here tiredly digging through the news like any good citizen, I realized I’m feeling a little burned out by the whole political scene. And then I wondered if that’s true of just those who believe Trump is completely unqualified to lead this nation (quick, who said “Trump’s a moron!” while he was working for him in government!), or if the Trump true-believers also tire of him.

And then I ran across this from WaPo’sFact Checker column today:

“We have 25,000 people showing up to speeches.”

False. None of Trump’s post-election rallies attracted 25,000 people; most have been under 10,000.

That’s so interesting, isn’t it? Sure, 10,000 people is a lot of people – but it’s not really a noteworthy number, now is it? After all, he’s the President, he’s going to make America great again, people go gaga over him and demand God bless him^[1]. Shouldn’t they be flocking to him in droves?

They don’t.

Maybe the Trump base tires of his childish prattle and grasping ways as much as we do. Polls show approval is heading back down. Judge Kavanaugh doesn’t have overwhelming support from the general populace, indicating more wariness of President Trump’s judgment.

Well, I’m still tired of him.

¹A phrase I view with great fear, for if I’m wrong and there is a god, someday he’s going to get tired of being ordered to bless people and ZOT something will happen to one of the pious few, and I can only hope I’m not nearby.

Yes, I’m being facetious about there being a God. The rest I really do believe – ordering God to bless someone must be the height of hubris. Or is God just our little slave boy?

There’s a few ways to spin this story from CNN/Health:

A pharmaceutical company executive defended his company’s recent 400% drug price increase, telling the Financial Times that his company had a “moral requirement to sell the product at the highest price.” The head of the US Food and Drug Administration blasted the executive in a response on Twitter.

Nirmal Mulye, founder and president of Nostrum Pharmaceuticals, commented in a story Tuesday about the decision to raise the price of an antibiotic mixture called nitrofurantoin from about $500 per bottle to more than $2,300. The drug is listed by the World Health Organization as an “essential” medicine for lower urinary tract infections.

“I think it is a moral requirement to make money when you can,” Mulye told the Financial Times, “to sell the product for the highest price.”

We could begin with the basic purpose of capitalism, which is not to make money, as Lehman Bros amply illustrated, but instead to participate in the activities of the private sector in order to supply useful products and services to consumers, both corporate and individual, and by doing so in an efficient manner earn some money. No mercantilism (the selection of winners and losers by an elite), just a form of meritocracy. Mr. Mulye clearly doesn’t understand these subtleties, but then many capitalists clearly do not, so he shouldn’t be particularly embarrassed. Generally, we hope that karma will kick in on people like him, and boot him in the head at some point have him discover, the hard way, that companies which take advantage of the vulnerable do not earn the love of the marketplace – and the marketplace is not the center of rationality that many like to think it is.

We could ask if pharma companies are really private sector companies, or if they’re medical sector entities operating with private sector optimizations to their operationality, which, as I’ve discussed over the years, are often less optimizations than distortions once they stray from their home sectors. This link may help the new reader. However, I think it’s important to realize that private sector health companies have provided many useful drugs, therapies, and devices over the years, and that the profit motive which I was just maligning does play a real role in pharma research, especially financing the expensive path from concept to final product.

Suggesting the banning of profit for pharma companies should be accompanied by suggestions for keeping these companies adequately financed and motivated. I suspect there’s a lot of academic research into just this problem, but I fear I have not the time to discover that research. A couple of problems immediately present themselves, one being the report motivating this post, another being the selection of problem to solve. Libertarians and others assume that demand will result in the proper problems being solved in the proper order, but my experience with the corporate world is that the cancerous idea that profit is all can result in corporate research strategies that are sub-optimal to the use of society. We’ve seen this in the abandonment of the production of anti-venom treatments because of the lack of profits in the area.

I’m not trying to suggest that everyone is motivated by the profit motive; there are many researchers who simply want to make a contribution to the overall health of the populace. But, taken as a conglomerate, it is how we operate, and we need to decide if that’s still how we should be doing things. Mr. Mulye is simply another step along the way to that debate.

Another spin would be to consider these opinions are symptoms of the ultimate sickness of capitalism. Again, mercantilism is an even worse system, infinitely more open to corruption and manipulation.

That’s enough for now.

Vainglory:

Excessive pride in oneself or one’s achievements; excessive vanity.
‘his vainglory put the Republic at risk’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in “Christians are suffering from complete spiritual blindness,” Michael Gerson, WaPo:

In case this wasn’t clear enough, the document goes on: “We reject any teaching that encourages racial groups to view themselves as privileged oppressors or entitled victims of oppression. . . . We deny that a person’s feelings of offense or oppression necessarily prove that someone else is guilty of sinful behaviors, oppression or prejudice.” Christians, in the view of MacArthur and his fellow signatories, must condemn both “racial animosity” and “racial vainglory.”

Roughage can be hard for a kaiju.

Feeling rather like a traditional British whodunit, I suppose Behemoth, The Sea Monster (1959, aka The Giant Behemoth aka The Behemoth) is best characterized as science-detective fiction grafted onto a kaiju movie. A man and his daughter, fresh in from fishing off the Cornish coast, pull into a cove, and she runs off to start dinner. He loiters a trifle too long after she leaves, and something … gets him. Hours later, his daughter and another fisherman find him as he expires, badly burned, muttering.

Before long a marine biologist and another scientist are investigating, pawing their way through various fishy specimens, and eventually discover there’s radiation involved. Soon they use radar (for an underwater object?) to track whatever it is, but that fails. A visual search comes to a grisly ending for those involved, which was a trifle unfortunate for the redshirts manning the helicopter sent out to look manually, as they get mysteriously fried, which is even more frustrating because we lose the best character of the lot, a slightly wacko paleontologist, in the incident. The military refuses to blockade the Thames, which for reasons unclear is where our agent of malfeasance is heading, and soon it knocks over a car ferry, terrifies the locals, and then submerges again.

Soon, we’re on a monster romp through London, but the scientists devise a torpedo with a radium tip, and, enticing the Behemoth back into the Thames, manage to shoot it into Mr. B’s head. The End.

Except … there’s reports of dead fish washing up on America’s East Coast.

Right up front, I’ll say that some of the science is screwy. Radar is not used underwater, that’s where sonar excels, for example. But the plot is very much an example of scientists gathering data, analyzing it, making educated guesses, and following through. There’s some cool stuff, even, for example when they discover an irradiated fish by placing it on a glass plate sensitive to radiation, and  it showing the fish’s skeleton.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to make scientific method exciting, and so the movie tends to be a bit of a plodder. When we finally do get a good look at Mr. B, it’s really a trifle disappointing, although I’ll admit the extreme closeups of his head did make me laugh. But the acting is OK, the story is good, and the monster is at least a bit temperamental about getting hit with electricity.

This doesn’t really qualify as horror, so don’t watch it expecting to curl your toes. In some ways, it’s a historical curiosity. I couldn’t possibly recommend it … but you might enjoy it if you’re of a certain turn of mind.

I happened to run across this article in WaPo by Michael Gerson, calling out a recent joint statement authored by, among others, the conservative (or so Gerson says) pastor John MacArthur for betraying the legacy of the Evangelical movement. Recognizing the necessary shallowness of a mere newspaper article, I still found this bit from Gerson to be interesting, if dismaying:

Second, there is a matter of history. Elsewhere, MacArthur complains that evangelicals have a “newfound obsession” with social justice. This could be claimed only by someone who knows nothing of the evangelical story. During the 19th century, Northern evangelicalism was generally viewed as inseparable from social activism. Evangelist Charles Finney insisted that “the loss of interest in benevolent enterprises” was usually evidence of a “backslidden heart.” Among these enterprises, Finney listed good government, temperance reform, the abolition of slavery and relief for the poor. “The Gospel,” preached abolitionist Gilbert Haven in 1863, “is not confined to a repentance and faith that have no connection with social or civil duties. The Evangel of Christ is an all-embracing theme.” …

The MacArthur statement is designed to support not a gospel truth but a social myth. The United States, the myth goes, used to have systematic discrimination, but that ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Racism is now purely an individual issue, for which the good people should not be blamed. This narrative has nothing to do with true religion. It has everything to do with ignorant self-satisfaction.

I know very little about the Evangelical movement prior to, say, when Jerry Falwell, Sr, became a prominent and self-righteous leader in the Southern Baptists, and even since then my knowledge is still fairly shallow. However, it’s not difficult to pinpoint the most important issue for the conservative elements of the Evangelicals as being abortion.

Speaking of which, on a recent visit to extended family I had the opportunity to overhear a conversation – no, a venting – of a member who is probably evangelical, but positively appalled at her fellow church-goers. The surface issue is their voting and support for Trump, but the deeper issue was the use of abortion as the single issue on which they judged candidates for office, and how. To their mind, it is a signal error on their part to cast their votes on that single issue, as if nothing else matters. I was not part of the conversation, but I do agree.

Source: Gallup

As anyone who pays attention national matters is aware, abortion is considered a considerable evil by a sizable minority of the American populace, and I’ve come around to the point of view that this obsession over one issue, an issue of debatable religious as well as secular (or utilitarian) result, is tormenting the Evangelical movement in its conservative pole into something unworthy of respect. Of course, this may be laid partially on the leaders of the movement, as the constituents of the movement certainly look to them for knowledge and leadership. However, people are not sheep, and should not act like such, because in so doing we are wasting our potential to be truly autonomous moral agents. Why is this awful? Think of all unjust wars of aggression, from the Nazis to the United States war on the American Indian, all of which require the actions of the followers to discard their moral systems, or fail to acquire them, and engage in slaughter and even genocide.

And thus the followers, as well as the Evangelical leaders, are responsible for the injustices they perpetrate in pursuit of their dubious goal.

How many are self-aware enough to realize how far they’ve strayed from the path laid down by their admirable predecessors, led by this devil’s issue? That’s the question that preys on my mind.

Having just seen Colbert’s interview of Bob Woodward a few minutes ago, I’ll know I’m in trouble if he shows up at my door. Goodness, sharp as a pin, he is, and devious in his interviewing strategies.

I hadn’t planned on reading FEAR, but now maybe I shall.