Yearly Archives: 2018

A reader asks the impossible question about those Americans who’ve forgotten what America is all about:

I totally agree with you. What’s wrong with people?

There’s a hard question, not least because there may be a multitude of answers.

But, sure, I’ll bite. Let’s start with this: Why do certain philosophies endure, while others fall by the wayside? Because they bring a measure of contentment to their adherents. Let’s be clear here – contentment is a variable in this equation, not a constant. My definition of contentment, which includes making a comfortable living that lets me pursue my interests with little interference from work, is a far different thing that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, driven to dominate the consumer software market, and virtually creating the world we now inhabit. I mention this because the ideal Christian’s definition of contentment – helping the poor and desolate, doing God’s work – is far different from whatever is Trump’s contentment, which I suspect includes a bathtub full of $1000 bills.

But for the Republicans in question, I think they’ve lost the contentment they treasure. They’re not willing to consider themselves at fault – few people are willing to go there – so they search around for other problems. At this point, it’s not hard to point at the fear-mongers of the conservative base, those who shout about the lawless hordes of immigrants (actually, immigrants appear to be more law-abiding, on average, than us native-born types), the horrors of defying the Bible, their abhorrence of the gay community (until they discover their own kid is gay, then things change in a hurry), etc.

They feel their society is changing beyond their control. And it is. It’s no longer a static society.

For them, the past was much better than today. Think of Roy Moore’s proclamation that the United States was so much better off just prior to the Civil War. But in that statement lies the seeds damning their position, because that stability and prosperity they imagine existed back then were carried on the backs of those treated poorly by society: the minorities. The African-Americans, mostly, as the American Indians were mostly separate from white American society. But in successive ways, the Irish, the Polish, the Scandinavians, the Italians. Each wave was victimized.

Back to the thesis, a conservative who sees society spinning out of control, rather than moving towards justice (as I do), cannot blame his religion for those changes, nor herself for any failures of their personal fortunes. Ah, but government – after all, the liberals are taking it over. Ol’ Rush tells them that over and over. It makes them be nice to people of the wrong color or wrong sexual orientation.

There’s the failure. For them. Some folks can’t handle that change. And so the very principles of our governmental system come under attack, because those abstract principles are the easiest to dismiss.

Or not. That’s just my guess. Your mileage may vary.

The leader for the 20 January 2018 NewScientist discusses the possibility that the end of current civilization may be coming into view, and discusses research into that possibility in the context of climate change research, in particular focusing on, in their view, the premature politicization of the science – as if science was, as Lysenko believed, capable of being politicized.

But amidst the imminent doom & gloom, I had to chortle at their conclusion:

The risk is that this new and important science is turned into yet another culture war. Before proposing divisive solutions, scientific eschatologists need to concentrate on nailing the basic facts. Otherwise, historians of the future may judge us harshly for reading the danger signs but failing to act.

Boys, if this civilization falls apart, in all probability there will never again be a respectable profession of historian – or historians to populate it. It’ll be all unstable autocraticisms, or radioactive rubble.

Andrew Gelman has something to say about an unnamed enemy (perhaps merely nominal), and he’s chosen the medium of poetry to express it. The venue? Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science (no, I don’t read that site – I was directed to it by Retraction Watch!). Just to whet your whistle:

The paper of my enemy has been retracted
And I am pleased.
From every media outlet it has been retracted
Like a van-load of p-values that has been seized
And sits in star-laden tables in a replication archive,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in tables
In the kind of journal where retraction occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected articles and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all that thoughtful publicity
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s article—
For behold, here is that study
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

There’s oh so much more to go.

Just minutes after publishing this piece, which includes some meditations on traditional media, I ran across this WaPo article on the state of the Los Angeles Times:

Under a new “pyramid” structure proposed [by management] this month, a network of nonstaff contributors would produce the bulk of the information the Times publishes online. Reporters say the paper has quietly begun hiring a cadre of editors to supervise the reorganization, which would effectively create a new company within the company.

The man who introduced the plan — blindsiding the newsroom when he presented it to an investor conference in New York — was publisher Ross Levinsohn, the fifth person to hold that title in the past five years. Last week, Levinsohn was suspended by the paper’s owner, Chicago-based Tronc, after NPR revealed a series of sexual harassment allegations against him in previous jobs. The company said it is investigating.

The state of play at the Times, as well as the existential dread swirling around it, was neatly summarized in a tweet this week by Matt Pearce, a Times national reporter and an organizer of the union effort: “Basically, anything could happen at this point at the L.A. Times and people in the newsroom could only be half surprised by it. We’re hiring [editors] that aren’t being announced to the newsroom, our publisher wants to turn us into a pyramid, and by the way, he’s under investigation.”

And their new top editor?

D’Vorkin, who took over as Times editor in November, is a controversial figure in media circles. At Forbes, he undertook some unorthodox steps to arrest the magazine’s declining fortunes — including setting up a network of outside contributors to write stories for Forbes.com, some unpaid and some compensated on the basis of how many readers their stories attracted. He also permitted ads that blurred the lines between promotional content and news stories.

Probably talks a great line without understanding the structure of things before him. Unpaid contributors to Forbes, of all places? That should be a big clue.

In case you’re not keeping up with the Steve Wynn story, here’s the next chapter, from CNN:

Andrew Sulllivan’s weekly tri-partite column (I will be responding to the second part) is out and it rings all sorts of nostalgia bells for me:

Is social media on the decline? Here’s hoping. A lovely piece in The New Yorker last week by Jia Tolentino lamented the loss of blogging, idiosyncrasy, quirkiness, and intelligence from the web. This set of reflections on the Awl compiled by Max Read in these pages also conveys the essence of the Internet That Nearly Was. Tom Scocca gets the essence of this old era: “What the Awl represented to me was the chance to write exactly what I meant to write, for an audience I trusted to read it.”

I feel entirely the same way about the blogging golden age. What was precious about it was its simple integrity: A writer gets to explore her craft and develop her own audience.

His Golden Age remarks are reminiscent of the BBSing era for myself and so many others. And it didn’t require that we be writers, but just people who wanted to express some thought or another, against the possibility that someone else might criticize it. No editors, just the backlash of those critiques.

Those were golden times for many of us, particularly those who were socially awkward. Imagine – the chance to actually (virtually) talk without being interrupted by someone with a louder voice or poorer upbringing! Of course, if you couldn’t take criticisms then it still wasn’t all that great – but the smart ones grew callouses, participated, matured (or not), and made lifelong friends. In fact, I just received a Holidays letter from a friend from those times, which includes her particular fetish – collecting quotes from friends for later regurgitation. Some are in her database, scraped from the BBSes, some are “still on napkins.” (And, yes, I had the honor of being part of the source of one of the quotes in the letters.)

Andrew then addresses social media:

The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery. Facebook is long overdue for a collapse, and the old institutions are showing signs of developing more character and coherence. Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair cannot wait for FaceTwitterGramChat to peak:

A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

The evidence that social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life is beginning to become unavoidable. And the possibility that the media may recover from its loss of nerve is real.

Readers will reward quality. The editors of our day, if we’re lucky, will begin to realize that this is the economic future of journalism, and bank on it again. This tide will turn. Drop your Twitter; abandon Facebook; and buy a subscription to a magazine that is trying to save its own soul.

I regard Facebook as fine marketing platform, a marginal keep in touch platform, a horrible publishing platform, and a wretched place to get news, and that’s because Facebook has many readers, and that’s all a marketing platform need do, if the cost per viewer is zero. I haven’t used Twitter as an author and have read precious few Tweets, but it strikes me, and always has, that a platform that can host automated accounts that cannot easily be detected is not a platform that has placed a high value on trustworthiness, and I think there must be a relatively high level of trust in order for any kind of communications platform to ultimately be successful and respectable – the National Enquirer may be successful, but only the credulous pay it any heed, even if it did break the Senator Edwards story, and the fact that it remains successful suggests there are many credulous people in this country. The many descriptions of Twitter overall suggests that this observation has borne out, and I suspect in it will not be a long-term player. The other platforms? No experience. Given that academic research, as well as anecdotal reports, suggest that social media is not a positive in our lives; for me, it’s suggestive of social evolution visiting a dead-end, and now slowly backing out.

From a larger perspective, I have to believe we’re seeing the results of the private sector intruding too deeply into the free press sector. Recalling my hobby horse concerning how the sectors of society – private, governmental, health, free press, educational – I believe we’re seeing, in the temporary shrinkage of blogging, the interference of the private sector with the free press. The exigencies of society – even excellence – requires the use of capitalism as part of the free press, but the intrusion of the processes of the private sector into the free press is palpably warping and destroying parts of the free press.

Consider the monetization of clicks, of views, and how this warps and, apparently, eventually destroys some of the publishing platforms on the webs. These metrics are at least partially motivated by those who seek to set ad rates, no? Advertisers will not buy ad space on a site without knowing the size and suitability of the audience. So now publishers and editors are motivated to publish content that will expand the audience – and this is not necessarily a process that leads to excellent writing. That is, the reward is not for better and better writing and the accompanying investigatory skills – which is not always easy to measure – but simply views of the given page. Easy to measure, but not a great motivation for improving one’s journalistic skills, or for that matter the output of a magazine.

But Andrew suggests buying subscriptions, and by paying ahead for the journalistic skills of the writers, there is a motivation to improve the free press output without the constant pressure of views or clicks. You put out the best you have, and if the subscriptions are renewed, then you know you’re doing well. If they’re not renewed, then you go under.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a far sight better than the path technology has taken us, I suspect. Have you considered opening a new subscription to a magazine or newspaper lately? Let me know.

I just love this story from Spaceweather.com about a guy hunting for live satellites using a radio. He’s looking for Zuma, a recently launched spy satellite, but then …

That is, until Scott Tilley started looking for Zuma. “When I saw the radio signature, I ran a program called STRF to identify it,” he says. Developed by Cees Bassa, a professional astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, STRF treats Earth-orbiting satellites much like binary pulsars–deducing their orbital elements from the Doppler shifts of their radio signals. “The program immediately matched the orbit of the satellite I saw to IMAGE. It was that easy,” says Tilley.

Discovery plot above obtained of IMAGE and the first fit attempt that lead to revealing it’s identity.
From Riddles In The Sky

And IMAGE was considered to be a dead satellite, having died in 2006 for unknown reasons. However, being solar powered, it’s come back to life. Read the whole story on Spaceweather, or go to Riddles In The Sky for more information from Tilley himself – I think.

In WaPo’s DemocracyPost, Christian Caryl takes note of certain poll results:

Trump attacks the press? One poll this past July showed that 45 percent of Republicans approved of the government shutting down media deemed “biased or inaccurate.” Trump plays fast and loose with democratic norms? An August survey found that fully half of GOP voters would support postponing the next presidential election if Trump proposed it. Trump praises Russian President Vladimir Putin? A poll this past May found that 49 percent of Republican voters regard Russia as friendly or an ally. Trump expresses frustration with democratic constraints on his power? A Pew Research Center poll last year revealed that fully one-third of Republicans favor the idea of a strong leader who can govern without interference from Congress or the courts.

And to those Republicans who affirm these positions, I should like to say …

You may be Republicans, but you are not Americans any longer.

I’m not going to bother to say I’m ashamed of those Republicans, or appalled. Folks, if that’s how desperate you are to hold on to the privilege of governing, of being part of some imagined elite that depends on being in control of American government, then you’re no longer Americans.

You simply yearn to be a member of an autocratic country. And we don’t need you here.

Being American means believing we function best as a Republic, with elected representatives with specified powers, all corralled by checks and balances, and kept relatively honest by a free press. If any of that is not to your taste, hey, Russia’s always looking for new citizens.

Write and tell us how that works out for you.

There’s not much to The Pharaoh’s Curse (1957). The acting is professional, but the special effects range from mundane to just awful (I particularly liked how the real scorpion crawled past the plastic arm that was supposed to be real), the cinematography’s OK, and the sound might be a bit off.

But the real disaster is the story. Set during Britain’s colonial period, a small British patrol is sent out to retrieve some archaeologists digging for a pharaoh’s grave in Egypt, bringing with them the wife of one of the archaeologists, although we’re not sure why. The leader of the patrol, Captain Storm, is attracted to her. Whatever.

Also appearing, a mystery Egyptian lady named Sumera, who draws her strength from the desert.  And the pack asses don’t like her.  Really.  In fact, Mabel the donkey deserts the mission. We never hear if she makes it back to camp. I miss Mabel.

Meanwhile, the archaeologists have found a coffin and are in the midst of opening it when one of the native torch-bearers collapses, leaving the mummy to its own devices while they carry the guy back to the camp.

After some mishaps, including the aforementioned scorpion’s sting of the wife, the patrol arrives and tells the archaeologists it’s time to leave.  But before they can go, the torch-bearer turns into an old man and starts to attack people at random in the cave complex where the coffin is located. Various riches are found, which are inexplicably ignored by the archaeologists. Maybe it was the fact that people are starting to die, completely drained of blood.

At one point, the archaeologists do pull the arm off of their stealthy attacker, which made me laugh.

In any case, the expedition soon gives up and leaves. Sumera disappears as well.

And we don’t care. Horror movies thrive on you caring about those that meet a gruesome end, and no one here evokes sympathy, much less empathy.

Watch it for the risible special effects. And with shots of your favorite liquor available.

Or go do jumping jacks. They’ll be better for you than this waste of time.

On Slate Dahlia Lithwick and Steve Vladeck express their dismay at certain supporters of President Trump’s agenda:

For months, a vocal but small cohort of conservative and libertarian legal scholars have been trying to convince anyone who will listen that the federal courts have “joined the resistance”—that subversive lower-court judges have abandoned their oaths of integrity and impartiality to rule against President Trump on anything and everything. These commentators have used inflammatory and incautious language to tar entire federal circuits and besmirch virtually every judge who has sided against any Trump administration action. Over the weekend, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal joined that chorus. In a breathless and tendentious editorial, the Journal portrayed the Supreme Court’s decision last Friday to hear the latest challenge to the travel ban as reflecting a desire on the part of at least some justices to “rebuke the judiciary for stretching the law to join the political resistance to Mr. Trump.” As the Journal put it, “The Justices have a chance to rule on the legality of Mr. Trump’s ban but also whether judges can ignore the law merely because they loathe Mr. Trump and all his works.”

The claim that the high court took up the case not to settle a novel legal question on the merits but to spank the feckless judges of the resistance is fatuous and shallow. It’s also profoundly dangerous to the norms and values of judicial integrity and stability.

And these adversarial legal scholars don’t appear to be able to think ahead. If they succeed in the politicization of the courts – no doubt they’d argue that’s already occurred, but given the fact that judges appointed by Presidents from both parties have weighed in against President Trump, that argument hangs in shreds – then the future of the Republic would look far less stable than it would otherwise.

The judiciary is not a political battleground. The independence of the judiciary is such a necessary part of our governmental system that it is legendary. If we compromise it, either with great vaingloriousness such as these chappies, or more subtly through the subjection of judicial seats to the winds of the electoral system, then we risk the future stability of a Republic that prospers when the judiciary is stable & independent – and suffers greatly when the political winds blow through the judicial galleries. We still rue Dred Scott, do we not?

So SCOTUS is looking at Trump’s Travel Ban 3.0. Does the very future of this argument rest on it? Will this band of brave legal scholars triumph, or lie tattered in defeat, depending on how these elderly and, sometimes, wise jurists decide this one case? I personally doubt it. If the travel ban is permitted, it’s merely SCOTUS correcting the lower courts, which happens with some frequency, for the law is sometimes hard to understand, as it flows from our legislatures.

And if the travel ban is once again rejected, will these legal scholars throw over their crusade and return to more honorable pursuits? No, for those who affirm Trump despite all affronts seem to know no shame.

So don’t go looking for a climactic throw-down here. Regardless of the result, the legal railing against oft-settled law will just go on and on. Some run along on momentum, and others are not able to visualize themselves being in the wrong.

Steve Benen notes the allegations of sexual misconduct by Steve Wynn, business tycoon and Finance chair of the Republican National Committee, and asks, perhaps sardonically, whether Wynn will now be forced out, and his contributions to various campaigns and to the RNC itself rejected:

Just a few months ago, as the public was first learning about the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the RNC seemed eager to exploit the controversy for partisan gain. In fact, the RNC invested considerable energy, not only in trying to tie Weinstein to Democratic candidates he supported, but also in demanding that DNC return any contributions they received from the Hollywood producer.

When the DNC was slow to respond, the Republican National Committee intensified its focus. It didn’t matter that Weinstein had no formal connection to Democratic politics; he was a Democratic donor and for the RNC, that was enough. “If the DNC truly stands up for women like they say they do, then returning Weinstein’s dirty money should be a no-brainer,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said in October.

In retrospect, this was a risky posture, not only because of the allegations of misconduct made against the president, but also because of the man the president asked to help lead the RNC’s fundraising efforts. As of today, Wynn is the RNC’s finance chair, a friend of Donald Trump, and a man accused of ”behavior that cumulatively would amount to a decades-long pattern of sexual misconduct.”

Hard to say. Senator McConnell’s deliberate hypocrisy with respect to the norms of the Senate only applying to Democrats suggests to me that the Republicans don’t see themselves as being subject to the same forces of ethics and morality as are the Democrats. They see themselves as somehow above those requirements, existing on a higher plane.

Tony Perkins’ willingness to give President Trump a “mulligan” on sexual indiscretions reinforces that perception.

On the other hand, several GOP elected officials have resigned in the last year over sexual misconduct charges of various sorts, or announced they’ll not be running for re-election.

Wynn is not an elected official. He’s a guy with a shitload of money and, I’m guessing, an iron grip on his business holdings. The shitload of money is probably the key phrase here, as money is now the God of the GOP. He may be forced out regardlessly, but only after a lot of anguished screaming by those sucking at his teat.

A reader remarks on Trump’s use of language:

It may be part of his appeal, but he’s an idiot. My son had a larger vocabulary at age 8 — no exaggeration.

Or in other words: if you as a citizen are equally limited in your vocabulary and thinking by choice, I don’t think you should have the right to vote.

I fear that down that street lies riot and ruin.

An allied approach – you must first prove you can put the good of the group ahead of your own profit before you can participate in the democracy – is the underlying philosophy of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. (Not the movie!)

There may be a very poor substitute for a President sitting in the Oval Office, but it appears the professionals who run the joint have the survival of the United States firmly in mind, as former White House Counsel Bob Bauer explains on Lawfare with regard to current Counsel McGahn’s behavior when told to fire Special Counsel Mueller by President Trump:

Of course, McGahn would have had every reason to object to the peculiar, if not wholly specious, grounds that the president apparently asserted for a firing. What counsel would have wished to advise the Justice Department that Mueller’s fatal “conflict” arose out of his unwillingness to remain a member of a Trump golf facility that had raised its fees?

McGahn just as likely understood the high stakes for his office and for his credibility within the administration. The president was asking that McGahn carry out an order with which he strongly disagreed—an order perhaps designed in the first instance in consultation with Kasowitz, his personal lawyer. McGahn would then be acting as mere messenger for an action certain to plunge the White House into controversy and further legal difficulty. McGahn would have shared in the blame but not the actual responsibility. He would have obeyed Trump’s command in an institutionally weakened state, suffering more weakness as the predictable result.

It is interesting that McGahn may have made his intention to resign clear, but according to the Washington Post, he did not communicate it directly to the president. He seems to have been keeping his distance—or otherwise his relationship with the president may have become distant. It is striking that a Counsel to the President who considered resigning at any time, much less in these circumstances, would rely on others to send the message. That this may have happened certainly suggests that McGahn was at the time functioning, at least in relation to Russia matters, on the periphery of the president’s inner advisory circle.

It’s reassuring to read that most or all of the professionals in the White House have the survival of the White House as an institution (I don’t mean the Trump White House by that phrase) firmly in mind. It speaks to the wisdom of those many people who’ve had to deal with one of the more delicate situations in the American governmental system over the years, no doubt motivated by the many sights of rampaging dictatorships in other countries. Kudos to them, from then to now, and presumably to Counsel McGahn for following faithfully in their footsteps.

It’s turned into a full-fledged retreat when it comes to that secret society:

The chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee acknowledged Thursday that a reference made between two FBI employees of a “secret society” could have been said in jest as opposed to evidence of an anti-Donald Trump plot.

“It’s a real possibility,” Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisconsin, told CNN. [CNN]

Gallup Weekly Presidential Approval Poll, 1/21/2018. Approval currently 36%, disapproval 59%.

Out and out lying? I don’t think so. I think the prominent devout members of the GOP, such as our credulous Senator Johnson, continue to inhabit the conservatives’ echo chamber, and that chamber rings with endorsements of the President by the American people – no matter what the polls say. Using that as their fundamental assumption, they’re forced to assume that the Mueller investigation is hollow and their leader is merely the potential victim of a lynch mob.

Such is the logic of self-delusion.

But when the crash comes, the GOP will have an out, because President Trump has never been a true member of the GOP – heck, he may not even have the card. He is an outsider who swooped in and took over the Party, but if & when the time comes to bid him adieu, via impeachment or a dishonorable term in office from which he shambles away, the Republicans can discard him as not one of them. They’ll be able to point at his marital record as well as his political record and proclaim, without displaying the real shame that adults would feel at this debacle, that he was a sham Republican and not representative of the real Republicans.

In essence, he’ll be a President who’ll be used and tossed aside by the people who hide behind the curtain, avoiding responsibility for the fallout of their beliefs of how to manage the United States. I hope he enjoys that position.

Preternatural:

• • Beyond or not conforming to what is natural or according to the regular course of things; strange quotations ▼

    Synonyms: inexplicable, extraordinary, abnormal

  • (dated) Having an existence outside of the natural world.

In modern secular use, refers to extraordinary but still natural phenomena, as in “preternatural talent”. In religious and occult usage, used similarly to supernatural, meaning “outside of nature”, but usually to a lower level than supernatural – it can be used synonymously (identical to supernatural), as a hyponym (a kind of supernatural), or a coordinate term (similar to supernatural, but a distinct category). For example, in Catholic theology, preternatural refers to properties of creatures like angels, while supernatural refers to properties of God alone. [Wiktionary]

Noted in WaPo‘s PowerPost:

The president’s proclamation reflects his preternatural self-confidence that he can talk his way out of any pickle. He insists he’s done nothing wrong, and he recognizes the bad optics of refusing to cooperate. Perhaps he thinks he can publicly convey support for transparency, even as he privately drags his feet, puts up roadblocks and makes demands that Mueller won’t agree to.

A random email, this time interesting. You may have heard about the recent 7.9 earthquake off the coast of Alaska. But did you hear about this resultant?

Tuesday’s 7.9 magnitude earthquake in the Gulf of Alaska sent vibrations through the earth that caused water to rise and fall in wells in Florida, thousands of miles away.

Sensors near Fort Lauderdale and Madison, near the Georgia border, showed a minor change in water levels after the earthquake, according to the United States Geological Survey (USGS).

A water level rise from 41.59 feet to 41.77 feet was recorded at the well near Madison before it returned to normal. At the well near Fort Lauderdale, the water level fell from 1.42 feet to 1.31 feet.

Why did water levels in these wells some 3,800 miles away from the earthquake’s epicenter change?

A 7.9 earthquake is nothing to sneeze at, of course, but we were fortunate that it was off the coast and not on land, like the Alaska 9.2 earthquake of 1964.

The 1964 Alaska Earthquake.
Source: Wikipedia

From WaPo:

The emailed response from the Guggenheim’s chief curator to the White House was polite but firm: The museum could not accommodate a request to borrow a painting by Vincent van Gogh for President and Melania Trump’s private living quarters.

Instead, wrote the curator, Nancy Spector, another piece was available, one that was nothing like “Landscape With Snow,” the 1888 van Gogh rendering of a man in a black hat walking along a path in Arles, France, with his dog.

The curator’s alternative: an 18-karat, fully functioning, solid gold toilet — an interactive work titled “America” that critics have described as pointed satire aimed at the excess of wealth in this country.

For a view from the conservative side of the confidential memo of Representative Nunes concerning the FBI, Jonah Goldberg presents one on National Review, and is clearly feeling sqeamish:

Again, there are some legitimately disturbing facts (and allegations of facts) swirling around the FBI, the Mueller investigation, etc. But there’s also an astonishing amount of manufactured outrage, absurd dot-connecting, and near-hysteria. It’s as if everyone who shouts about the other side being conspiracy theorists needs to have a conspiracy theory all their own as well.

Meanwhile, this #ReleaseTheMemo campaign is obviously a PR stunt. But that in itself is not damning. PR stunts are sometimes valid efforts to get a real story out. I’m actually impressed that congressional Republicans were effective at messaging for once. I wouldn’t have predicted that it would work this well. After all, Republicans insinuating that a memo written by a Republican committee chairman in a Republican-controlled Congress during a Republican presidency is being hidden from the public by some force or entity other than the Republicans strikes me as kind of hilarious. As is the idea that all of these Republicans saw it, but no one leaked it because leaking is just wrong. (It is wrong, but come on.) That said . . . hey, it was just crazy enough to work.

Of course, this stunt — and so much else — will look not just absurd but dishonorable if the memo doesn’t live up to the hype.

That’s why I’d caution Republican politicians from taking their cues from President Trump’s Twitter feed or the media platforms that unapologetically fuel his persecution complex. If professional opiners want to go the way of Alex Jones and Jim Hoft, fine. But the GOP itself should think twice. If Ron Johnson’s performance on Special Report last night is a preview of what is yet to come, I think some Republicans may be painting themselves into an ugly corner.

Ugly corner? Just think of it as campaign fodder. The neediness of the Party Leader is really leading the GOP right down into a toxic waste dump. I know a few conservatives I talk to are really tired of the entire politics thing, even if they still suck down the fallacious swill about the Democrats – as persistent readers of this blog know from my occasional vents on the matter.

Meanwhile, Senator Johnson (R-WI), who Tuesday claimed he had a real live informant that would provide proof positive of a secret organization within the “deep state” out to get rid of President Trump, is retreating:

Johnson backtracked somewhat on Wednesday, saying he had merely “heard” about the existence of a secret society and did not have direct evidence of such a rump organization within the FBI.

“All I said is when I read those in those texts, that’s Strozk and Page’s term,” Johnson said when pressed by reporters on Capitol Hill on whether he believed such a group existed. “I have heard there was a group of managers in the FBI that were holding meetings offsite. That’s all I know.” [NBC News]

Ho hum. I think he’s a fantasist. How Wisconsin voters could pick this deceitful twerp over Russ Feingold is beyond me.

I’m beginning to think the mid-terms will be more interesting in terms of advertising than usual, because it will be all about presentation during the campaigns. These mid-terms could mark inventive new ways to bring the missteps of both sides into sharp focus for voters.

The question will be whether or not the voters will be willing to go out and verify the claims, or not. I wonder if the advertising will be adjusted to make verification a little easier than starting cold – or if either side will simply lie its ass off.

Glancing at CNN/Money‘s report on Trump’s sudden desire to be part of the successor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), I was struck, for the umpteenth time, by his use of language:

“I would do TPP if we were able to make a substantially better deal. The deal was terrible. The way it was structured was terrible,” he said during a visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

I’m reading that and thinking that this is not the way an expert, nor an expert politician, would put it. But it’s the way that much of his base might put it. He uses general-usage adjectives, rather than specific nouns and adjectives, in everything he does.

And that’s part of his appeal, I’m afraid. In all probability, he’s not familiar with either the original TPP deal nor the successor, but, because he emotionally needs to be seen as improving “the deal” for the United States, not only because it makes his base happy, but because that’s an emotional requirement for  his own existence, he blasts it – and he does so in the same way they think they would. Then he keeps painting himself as a successful businessman – the guy who couldn’t even make money off of a casino! – as a way to butter up the base. He talks their way, and he’s a success – thus they must be a success, too.

Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s a fantastically quick study and knows TPP inside and out, and can out-think economists and foreign policy experts on the matter. (I don’t know what either batch of specialists think of the agreement.) But his language militates against such a conclusion. It’s not arrogance on my part, either. The use of specialized words makes for far more precise, and efficient, communications.

What’s better, “I WANT BOMB GOES BOOM” or “Use 2000 lb pound bombs on the bunker”? Yeah. General use words signal the amateur who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Add in the fact that White House sources indicate he spends his time watching TV (the notorious “Executive Time” meme of last week) and can’t be troubled to do any sort of deep reading, and it’s really hard to take this latest zig as Trump realizing he’s about to look bad, and trying to backtrack by criticizing something and trying to “improve” it – probably by adding a comma to an introductory section.

One of President Trump’s earliest moves was to take the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which effectively collapsed the effort to construct a trade agreement between maybe ten countries. This is the sort of thing that I look at as background noise when it comes to politics on the ground, because while these sorts of things have tangible impacts, they’ll be subtle, and if they don’t go through, often the folks on the ground aren’t going to notice – who are different from, say, farmers who might be more strongly affected.

So I appreciated Steve Benen’s piece on Maddowblog on what’s happened since Trump pulled out:

… as Reuters reported this week, our former TPP partners have decided to simply go around us.

Eleven countries aiming to forge an Asia-Pacific trade pact after the United States pulled out of an earlier version will sign an agreement in Chile in March, Japan’s economy minister said on Tuesday, in a big win for Tokyo. […]

An agreement is a win for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government, which has been lobbying hard to save the pact, originally called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Remember, that partnership was originally the United States’ idea. Now it’s “a big win” for Japan – which came on the heels of another big trade deal between Japan and the European Union, announced last year.

A Washington Post  report in the fall noted that when Trump withdrew, it “created a vacuum other nations are now moving to fill, with or without the president.”

A FiveThirtyEight piece, noting that the Republican’s plans “backfired,” explained, “Japan, the world’s third-biggest economy, has assumed the leadership role. Canada, initially a reluctant member of the club, volunteered to host one of the first post-Trump meetings of the remaining TPP countries to work on a way forward – perhaps because research shows that Canadians will do better if they have preferential access that their American cousins lack. Smaller, poorer countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia wanted freer trade with the U.S. but agreed to consider improved access to countries such as Australia, Canada and Japan as a consolation prize for years of hard bargaining.”

It was clearly a trade agreement of some importance, and I suspect a lot of people will benefit from it – none of them Americans. But without analysis of the sort supplied by Steve, FiveThirtyEight, and others, how would we realize the mistake we appear to have made?

Of course, Japan and Canada are close allies of ours, so it’s not as if China or Russia had assumed the leadership position – and reaped the benefits of being out in front. But it’s clear that we’re retreating rapidly. And what are those benefits? Technologically, being out front often means developing new technologies that have often unpredictable positive – and sometimes negative – attributes. Financially, there are often advantages to being out front.

And prestige, while intangible, is not something to value lightly. This is not simple vanity, but is part of the unstated but always present struggle between governmental systems. The failure of our liberal democracy, under the dubious leadership of President Trump, to bring TPP to fruition speaks to a weakness in our governmental system of serious concern. It speaks to the vulnerability to spiteful whim to which President Trump appears painfully prone.

I can only hope we don’t bleed too much while we figure out how to patch it up.

P.S. now Trump wants back in.

Reprobate:

verb transitive
1. to disapprove of strongly; condemn
2. to reject
3. Theology
to damn
adjective
4. a. unprincipled
b. totally bad; corrupt; depraved
5. Theology
damned
noun
6. an unprincipled or totally bad person
7. Theology
a person damned; lost soul

[Collins Dictionary]

My Arts Editor called me an old reprobate last night. Sheesh.

For all that the GOP wants to deny the existence of climate change, it appears SCOTUS doesn’t agree, as it refuses to hear a case from Alaska concerning the protection of animals thought to soon be imperiled by climate change. From Anchorage Daily News:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected requests to review protections for bearded seals that live in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

The nation’s highest court denied an appeal by the oil industry and other groups including the state of Alaska to review a 2016 Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that reinstated protections for the seals.

It appears SCOTUS is satisfied that climate change is real and needs to be taken into account when evaluating the danger in which a species lives of extinction.

Or they want a better case for deliberation.

I suppose this could be called inadequate camera equipment.

Before dismissing Chelsea Manning as an attention seeker, er, or maybe if you haven’t recognized her for being an attention seeker, consider this report of the reported Democratic candidate for the Senator from Maryland at a party for well-known right-wingers. From WaPo:

“A Night for Freedom” was billed as a “gathering of patriots and political dissidents who are bored with mainstream political events,” in the words of Mike Cernovich, the far-right activist and conspiracy theorist who organized the party. The $139 general admission fee got attendees hors d’oeuvres and tickets for three drinks. DJ duo Milk N Cooks handled the music. As the event shifted into high gear, it featured an all-star lineup of fringe Internet celebrities, Trump backers and media trolls, including, reportedly, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe and the Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrich.

But an unexpected guest, neither a Trump die-hard nor Internet provocateur, ended up dominating the news coverage of the event. Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst who spent seven years in prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, was spotted “smiling and socializing with attendees” early in the evening, BuzzFeed reported.

“I f‑‑‑ing crashed!” Manning, a current candidate for a Maryland U.S. Senate seat, told a New York Observer reporter at the coat check. Later in the night, Manning posted her own tweet acknowledging she had “crashed the fascist/white supremacist hate brigade party,” she wrote, adding: “learned in prison that the best way to confront your enemies is face-to-face in their space.”

“I think it’s clear that she does what she wants,” Cernovich told BuzzFeed. “And I think she knows that we’re the same way.” …

On Monday, Manning again addressed the Saturday night event, writing on Twitter that “fascists/alt-right deserve no platform” and that she “took up an opportunity to gather intel on them b/c the ideology they peddle threatens everyone.” According to the Guardian, Manning also reached out to Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour to apologize for her “very bad judgment.” Buzzfeed’s Joe Bernstein reported Manning “was on the verge of tears” when she expressed her regret to Sarsour.

The last sentences were a little puzzling. It appears Manning wants to make a splash, though.