Monthly Archives: June 2018

While reading about one of the possible replacements for Associate Justice Kennedy, namely Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in an article in WaPo, it gives his defense of his view that the President should be permitted to defer prosecutions of himself:

U.S. Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy who is viewed as one of the leading contenders to replace him, has argued that presidents should not be distracted by civil lawsuits, criminal investigations or even questions from a prosecutor or defense attorney while in office. …

Having observed the weighty issues that can consume a president, Kavanaugh wrote, the nation’s chief executive should be exempt from “time-consuming and distracting” lawsuits and investigations, which “would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis.”

If a president were truly malevolent, Kavanaugh wrote, he could always be impeached.

I’ve gotta say this view is extremely ill-considered.

First, an impeachment is not an activity that takes place without information. An investigation, such as that under the leadership of Mr. Mueller, is a critical source of information for any member of Congress who must vote on the question of the impeachment and conviction of the President. To suggest that a truly malevolent President could simply be impeached is either naive or deceitful, because malevolence is not always an obvious attribute of a person.

Second, deferral of an investigation, lawsuit, or allied legal activity until the President is no longer President is to deny justice, and, yes, it’s as simple as that. For those who proclaim justice is done when someone is convicted of a murder that occurred forty years ago, I say that’s a dish of cold, rotting fish. For those forty years, the murderer escaped punishment, and may have committed more crimes. Similarly, a President uninvestigated is encouraged in his or her malevolent pursuits.

If, as Judge Kavanaugh suggests, the press of duties is such that the President dare not be distracted, there are procedures available to relieve him temporarily of those duties, now isn’t there? The 25 Amendment comes right to mind. After all, why do we select and elect a Vice President? So he or she can sit on her duff for four years?

Rancid nonsense, Judge Kavanaugh.

If Judge Kavanaugh has not retracted his ridiculous position on this matter, then I believe that he has effectively disqualified himself from a seat on SCOTUS. Not for ideological or partisan reasons, but simply because he does not appear to be able to think.

Copromancy:

Copromancy is the art of prognostication based on examining feces. Copromancy has a long history, and is part of traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. [RationalWiki]

Noted in the Feedback column of NewScientist (23 June 2018, paywall):

Feedback hasn’t given much thought to copromancy since “Dr” Gillian McKeith, who pored over potties like horoscopes, was flushed from our screens. Yet the art of fortune-smelling endures.

During last week’s summit in Singapore, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was reported to have brought his own portable toilet, to prevent foreign agents from capitalising on his leaks. With good reason: during a visit to Moscow in 1949, Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s excreta were swiped by Soviet spies hoping to divine his personality traits. A rare occasion when staff can be congratulated for going through the motions.

And again, same column:

MORE mystery droppings: residents of the Canadian town of Kelowna are keeping one eye on the skies after sewage twice rained down, creating a sort of Rorschach blot test for jobbing copromancers. Suspicion has fallen on aircraft bound for a nearby airport. Whether the plane responsible was anxious or angry is still unknown.

Wow.

Seem quite happy in their pot.

From Deanna Paul, a former prosecutor, on WaPo’s Retropolis:

Since Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, he has adopted a relatively predictable approach: consistently voting in favor of individual rights (outside of criminal justice and capital punishment) but otherwise voting with the right. Kennedy, according to [George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan] Turley, bridged the bench, not because of his votes but his voice. “He had impeccable credentials as a jurist,” Turley said. “He showed that you could have a conservative philosophy and still protect individual rights.”

The right likes to jangle the keys of rights, and how the left wants to take them away, from gun rights to free speech. I wonder if this will get an outraged reaction.

Currency always has costs, but sometime they’re hidden.

Really hidden.

WaPo reports on the latest sources of computing power for crypto-currency miners:

As the popularity of virtual currencies has grown, hackers are focusing on a new type of heist: putting malicious software on peoples’ handsets, TVs and smart fridges that makes them mine for digital money.

So-called “crypto-jacking” attacks have become a growing problem in the cybersecurity industry, affecting both consumers and organizations. Depending on the severity of the attack, victims may notice only a slight drop in processing power, often not enough for them to think it’s a hacking attack. But that can add up to a lot of processing power over a period of months or if, say, a business’s entire network of computers is affected.

“We saw organizations whose monthly electricity bill was increased by hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Maya Horowitz, Threat Intelligence Group Manager for Checkpoint, a cybersecurity company.

Which leads me to wonder just how much power, along with the concurrent wonder about amount of climate gases generated, is being used for cryptocurrency mining activities. Quartz had an article on this topic earlier this year:

A new study published in Joule—the first on the subject to undergo the rigors of peer review—argues that, globally, bitcoin mining consumes at least as much electricity in a year as all of Ireland (about 24 TWh). Worse still, it contends that the energy use is doubling every six months and could reach the annual consumption of the Czech Republic (about 67 TWh) before the end of 2018, which would be about 0.3% of the world’s electricity consumption. …

One of the early concerns over bitcoin’s electricity use was that almost all of it was sourced at polluting coal power plants in China. It’s likely true that a lot of it does still come from coal power plants, but in a bid to cut pollution the Chinese government has taken steps (paywall) in the past year, telling local utilities not to give crypto miners low-cost deals on electricity. The upshot is that many miners have since moved out of China.

In many of the places they’ve ended up, there is plenty of clean energy available. For example, the Canadian province of Quebec actively courted cryptocurrency companies to use the spare hydropower capacity it had built. The same is true of Iceland (with its spare geothermal) and Sweden (which, like Quebec, has plenty of hydropower).

That said, it’s not the fault of those mining for cryptocurrency that the world relies mostly on fossil fuels for its electricity. And just because there is a new and fast-growing source of electricity consumption is not enough reason for governments to regulate crypto companies.

No? I have to wonder about the necessity of cryptocurrencies – or lack thereof. I suppose a tradeoff comparing other sources of liquid wealth representation with cryptocurrencies would be necessary, but right on the face of it I do not agree with Rathi’s glib statement that regulation of cryptocurrency companies is unjustified on a power consumption basis. That may be true at the moment, but it’s a statement that does not scale. Today they may be consuming as much power as Ireland – but does the statement still apply when the amount of energy goes up two magnitudes?

Of course not. Not if there are more energy efficient alternatives available, such as old-fashioned cash.

But there is, even for this agnostic, a certain delicious irony in the thought that one of the drivers of our possible doom is our continued and outsized pursuit of, well, wealth. Because that’s what’s driving the miners. It’s true that they’re providing a valuable service, namely provision of new coins, but if we apply the lens of examining capitalist activity I wrote about concerning Lehman Brothers in this post, which I will save my reader the problem of digging out by quoting here:

I would contend, as did the author of that article, that it was a primary symptom of a foundational illness that ultimately doomed Lehman Brothers. Look, from a societal point of view, companies do not exist to make money. I know the general wisdom of the private sector would differ with me, but if you think it through, it becomes obviously right. The proper formulation is, Companies provide specific services thought to be useful to their consumers, and the best ones are profitable because they have the right combination of efficiency and service content.

Why is this important? It brings back into focus that a company is not an instrument for the implementation of greed, for the collection of more and more proxies of wealth, which can fluctuate in their value to a dismaying degree, by which I mean dollars (or whatever might be your local currency). The private sector wisdom leads to a corporate function which contributes nothing to the advancement of society.

… then there’s an uncomfortable link between the philosophically bankrupt institutions such as Lehman Brothers and these coin miners and the minimal goods they provide to society. Not that I deny that provision of new bitcoins is a necessity, but it appears, from the scale of energy use and the enthusiasm with which they’re pursued the generation of coins, that in the end the balance of social utility vs impact on morals as well as ultimate physical impact may lean towards the latter, suggesting cryptocurrencies may not be the great social leap forward – but an evolutionary dead-end.

Or worse.

Just for fun, there’s another site which appears to be tracking cryptocurrency energy consumption named Digiconomist. Here’s they’re their current chart:

A few weeks ago I reported on the first response to the mail I sent to my Senators and Representative concerning civil asset forfeiture. I haven’t heard from the other two, but since then I sent mail off to the three of them suggesting the separation of children from their illegal immigrant parents arrested at the southern border was an immoral practice which should be stopped immediately. Senator Tina Smith (D) is the first to respond to this concern, in which she basically said she agreed and then reprinted an Op-Ed piece on the subject she wrote for the StarTribune.

So there is feedback. It’s sometimes slow, though. Representative McCollum has yet to respond on either issue. Come to think of it, I don’t think she responded to an email from a couple of  years ago concerning the legalization of marijuana.

Amber Phillips of The Fix covers one side of the President Irrelevancy Trump / Harley-Davidson story, wherein the iconic motorcycle manufacturer has announced plans to move some manufacturing to Europe in response to the trade war begun by President Trump:

By now it’s pretty clear that President Trump feels personally slighted by what used to be one of his favorite companies, Harley-Davidson, shipping some of its production overseas.

Harley-Davidson announced its decision Monday, and nearly every day since, Trump has insulted them or threatened them. Most remarkable of all, on Thursday, he flat-out begged them to bring production back to the United States.

“Harley-Davidson, please build those beautiful motorcycles in the USA, please. Okay,” Trump said in a speech in Wisconsin designed to champion his economic policies. “Don’t get cute with us. Don’t get cute.”

Harley-Davidson is based in Milwaukee, and it’s a brand that is popular with people Trump views as his loyal base. …

He’s tried everything to get Harley-Davidson to change their minds. Over 36 hours or so, he has gone from threatening them — “The Aura will be gone and they will be taxed like never before!” he tweeted Wednesday — to trying to cajole them back: “Build them in the USA. Your customers won’t be happy if you don’t. I’ll tell you that.”

Begging, as Trump appeared to do on stage Thursday in a televised address, is highly unusual for Trump.

And, sure, maybe the other half of the story might not yet be available – but I’m hoping it will be someday. It’s my guess that the top executives of H-D, or even the board of directors, are caught up in a bit of a political quandary. After all, they’re being harassed by one of the least popular Presidents in the history of the United States, but one who has a fanatical base. Does their customer base support Trump, or are they against him? If they roll over for Trump, do their customers refuse to buy from them ever again because they went soft?

They could easily go bankrupt if they shatter their own reputation as provider of bikes to some of the roughest riders in the States.

I don’t ride, so I don’t have a worthwhile opinion. But I’d like to see them show some gumption, basically tell Trump that them moving manufacturing is how it’s going to be, it was caused by him and he’d better own it, and not to come visiting because they’ll kick his ass right out of corporate headquarters because they don’t like threats from an incompetent moron.

It’d probably impress their entire customer base if they were aggressive enough about it, regardless of their political inclinations.

Will it happen? I have no idea who runs Harley-Davidson. Is it the cold-blooded corporate types who are just there to make money? Or is it cycle-lovers who care passionately about their product – and their reputation?

Erick Erickson on The Resurgent is upset about all the games in Washington:

The GOP knows damn well if this were a Presidential year, McConnell would be rushing through a nominee before the election regardless of his prior statement. You know he would. Stop pretending the Garland obstruction was anything other than preventing Obama from getting an appointment.

Everybody is playing games over this. That is to be expected. But what is happening in the process of gamesmanship is no one is really being honest about it. This is all part of politics. There is no noble rule about appointments. There is no high mindedness in the process. It is all partisanship.

Starting off the day with some lilies while my Arts Editor preps some bacon and eggs…

A reader comments on the impending retirement of Justice Kennedy:

We are so screwed. Who threatened him, one has to wonder.

In the interests of fairness, we don’t know his situation. Perhaps like the recently deceased pundit Charles Krauthammer, he’s facing a terminal prognosis and is putting his affairs in order. Or, as a few bitter liberals have suggested, he has detected a degeneration in his cognitive processes and has decided it’s time to make his exit before he’s forcibly removed.

But the fact remains that this will be a real problem for the Democrats. If they find a way to block a confirmation on a Trump nominee of sufficient right-wing views, they run the risk of enraging the moderate elements and losing their votes.

Kevin Drum disagrees, if somewhat limply:

As you all know by now, Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement. He will be replaced by a hard-right justice and there’s nothing Democrats can do about it. This means two things are true:

• There will soon be five votes on the court to repeal Roe v. Wade.
• This should be enough to motivate Democrats to turn out in a massive wave even for a midterm election.

If it’s not enough to produce a blue tidal wave, I suppose we lefties might as well give up. Between this and everything else going on, what more can the leadership of the party want in order to finally produce a big midterm turnout?

Steve Benen notes how American style politics impacts free choice in suitably brutal fashion:

Abortion-rights advocates who stayed home in 2016, or voted for a third-party candidate, took a dangerous gamble. It now appears they placed the wrong bet.

Which raises the implicit question, Did it matter that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee for President, or would any Democratic candidate been equally vulnerable to the tactics used by the GOP and allied groups?

David French on National Review agrees this will stir up the conservatives – at least those believe abortion is an evil:

And that brings us to politics. Heading into the midterms, Republicans were desperately worried about an “intensity gap.” Democratic voters seem prepared to turn out in huge numbers. Republicans — while holding firm in their support for President Trump — lacked the same excitement. Special elections were swinging strongly Democratic, and even though the generic preference numbers were trending closer, most observers thought Republicans would struggle to get their voters to the polls. I’d say those concerns are eased a bit today.

After all, for an immense number of base GOP voters, judges aren’t just an issue. They’re the issue that drives them to the polls. Republicans are all over the place on immigration policy, trade policy, and foreign policy. Divisions in the party are deep and real. Those divisions disappear when judges are on the line. We can debate all we want about Russian influence on the 2016 election (or about the effect of the Comey letter), but one thing is certain — if Evangelicals and other conservatives weren’t afraid of the impact of a progressive Supreme Court on their fundamental liberties, Donald Trump doesn’t win. A new Supreme Court pick will galvanize the entire base for months.

David wades into a complex morass. Sure, some liberties are limited by any Court composition, but then we’re not a nation of unlimited freedoms. The most important topic in the context of a new Justice, abortion rights, will undoubtedly be in danger of regressing if Trump lives up to his campaign promise to nominate a pro-life justice – rather than someone devoted to the law.

But David’s closing observation with respect to the history of justices may be inapplicable:

Finally, a word of caution to gleeful conservatives. We’ve been here before. We’ve had opportunities to remake the Court. President Reagan and the first President Bush together appointed a majority of the Supreme Court. Yet Roe endured, and the Court even moved left on key issues. Presidents don’t nominate robots. They nominate people who possess their own will. It will be imperative that conservatives closely evaluate Trump’s potential picks, but that person — no matter his or her record — will not only possess immense power, they’ll face immense pressure. May he or she possess not just the right philosophy, but also the necessary character to do all the job requires.

He assumes Trump will nominate an adult. I don’t make that assumption. Trump has a clear history of selecting unprepared, sycophantic personalities for important positions, with names like Tillerson (unprepared), Price, Priebus, Pruitt, Bannon, Miller, Spicer … all incompetent and most of them unprepared. I think Trump will be dearly tempted at the idea of nominating one of the current crop of power-chasers who’ve proclaimed themselves to be absolute Trump lovers. And will the GOP Senators dare to reject any Trump nomination? In a word, no.

Erick Erickson on The Resurgent doesn’t think this will be such a big deal:

This is why President Trump should play it safe. He should consider someone like Senator Mike Lee, who his colleagues would be glad to push off to another branch of government. Or he should consider someone like Amy Barrett who these and several Democrats have already supported in the past year.

It takes more than one voice shouting lies to create The Big Lie. WaPo’s Fact Checker service has decided to award “Four Pinocchios” to a recent statement by Brad Parscale accusing the Clinton Foundation of being a slush fund, while claiming the Trump Foundation is absolutely pristine:

The New York Post report claimed that the Clinton Foundation took $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid, based on 2013 tax filings. But as we explained, it is a public charity. The ratio of 6.4 percent toward charities and 93.6 percent toward expenses, suggested by the tax form and repeated in the chart, is based on a misreading of the tax documents filed by the foundation.

By contrast, the American Institute of Philanthropy’s CharityWatch gives the Clinton Foundation an “A” rating, its second-highest efficiency rating, which is based on the percent of total expenses a charity spent on its programs in the year analyzed and the cost to raise $100.

For 2016, according to tax documents and audited financial statements, the Clinton Foundation spent 88 percent of its cash budget on programs, compared to 12 percent on overhead, such as fundraising, management and expenses. The organization also calculated that it costs the Clinton Foundation only $2 for every $100 it raises.

In other words, the reality is almost the opposite of what Parscale portrays in his chart. Indeed, CharityWatch includes the Clinton Foundation on its list of top-rated charities.

Meanwhile, the Trump Foundation appears to be … a slush fund:

But Trump twice used the charity’s money to settle legal disputes that involved his for-profit businesses, the New York attorney general alleged. He also engaged in other instances of self-dealing, such as paying $10,000 to buy a portrait of Trump that was found hanging in one of his golf resorts. The foundation also donated $25,000 to a Florida political group aiding the reelection effort of state Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) — and was used to benefit his presidential campaign, the lawsuit said.

The problem, of course, is that these days, the frantic rush of life means that follow-ups and rebuttals are rarely read by those who get the first reports. No doubt there are many people who believe the Clinton Foundation is a slush fund, despite its high ratings by neutral observers.

The lack of allegiance to the truth, as evidenced by Parscale, is a sad commentary on the ideological warriors of either side. But if you were wondering about the Clinton or Trump Foundations, this report is a good place to go.

And a final miscellaneous entry.

And that’s it for this year!

A boy and his model boat.

There were some fine black & white cinematography shots in Gammera, The Invincible (1965; aka Giant Monster Gammera, but recut).

Yep, there sure were.

The retirement of Associate Justice Kennedy from SCOTUS will almost certainly bring into strong relief the political riptides currently besetting the GOP, particularly those of a moderate, i.e., responsible bent, as modulated by President Trump’s nomination.

Let’s assume Trump does his usual thing and finds some extremist conservative (a phrase I tire of typing) legal type and nominates him. Given the 51-49 nominal status of the Senate (50-49 if we discount Senator McCain, who is severely ill with brain cancer, but he may vote on a matter of a new Justice no matter how ill he may be), this places any Republican Senator who finds that nominee objectionable in a position of great power. A simple vote against the nominee puts the nominee on the precipice, and if a second GOP Senator refuses to vote for him – even through abstention – then President Trump is left with egg on his face, a condition which he’ll greatly resent. This presents an opportunity for great leverage for any Senator willing to grasp the lever and with a burning issue in hand.

But that lever comes with an electrical charge in the form of President Trump’s base. The pressure they can bring to bear on a Senator exercising due diligence (Trump would call it disloyalty or even treason) will be incredible. Senators Flake, Corker, and McCain, who will face re-elections runs due to retirement or illness, are somewhat less vulnerable, but their record with regard to due diligence with other Federal judiciary picks does not inspire confidence in this scenario.

But even if Trump comes up with a semi-reasonable pick, it’ll still have the potential to be a circus. The amount of power a single Senator will enjoy during that short period, foreshortened as it will be by the oncoming election, will be, they think, immense.

But Trump’s hole card will be his dishonesty, his inability to hold to a bargain. That’s the joker in the deck.

And, finally, Justice Kennedy has had a long career of holding great power by his willingness to straddle the line between the liberals and the conservatives. By this final act, during the midst of a mid-term election which had been considered a prime opportunity for the Democrats to take control of the House, he has provided the fire the GOP, and more importantly President Trump, has been trying to ignite under the feet of moderate Republicans to come out and vote for the candidates he favors, candidates who have clutched him most frantically and, for this Republic, unhealthily, to their bosoms. Trump might have depicted the Democrats as unpatriotic leftist extremists in any scenario, but now he has the carrot to dangle in front of those voters, as well as the stick: another SCOTUS Justice’s seat to win for the conservative side. Not only does this make it highly unlikely that the Senate will be won by the Democrats, but since the voters will be in those booths anyways, the GOP candidates will enjoy a boost that the Democrats will find hard to beat. And, no doubt, Trump will elide the fact that only the Senate has any approval power over the SCOTUS pick, thus beating the bushes for extra conservative voters for his House Favorites.

Minus any unforeseen events, I do not expect the Democrats to take the Senate, and the House will be a hard mountain to climb.

But this is the era of Trump, which means that there may be multiple unforeseen events that will topple the majorities. Indeed, Special Counsel Mueller may come forward with a pair of handcuffs for a Trump family member, and given the graceless way every single one of them carries themselves, including the First Lady, there will be scant public sympathy for that family member outside of the GOP base. Or possibly the Trump Recession will start, and disaffected moderate Republicans and Independents will flock to the Democrats.

But, without those factors, this appears to be the way to bet.

The New York Times‘ Matt Phillips covers the latest Wall Street concern which may impact the rest of us:

The so-called yield curve is perilously close to predicting a recession — something it has done before with surprising accuracy — and it’s become a big topic on Wall Street.

Phillips explains that the yield curve is the difference between interest rates on short term and long term US government bonds, taken over time. Interest rates are set through the dance of bid-ask – that is, if there is insufficient demand for a bond offering at a given interest rate, then the rate has to be boosted by the seller in order to make it attractive to buyers.

Matt explains why long-term bonds have higher rates:

Typically, when an economy seems in good health, the rate on the longer-term bonds will be higher than short-term ones. The extra interest is to compensate, in part, for the risk that strong economic growth could set off a broad rise in prices, known as inflation.

If, on the other hand, a collapse in prices is suspected by the bond traders as a whole, then the higher interest rates are not necessary to entice their dollars^[1].

Which is a long-winded way of saying that the bond market is getting very nervous about the future. Since the GOP is currently running things, and is so completely incompetent at actual governance that they aren’t even capable of botching it, it’s a telegraphed signal of under-confidence in the current leadership.

In other words, we may indeed be seeing the Trump Recession in the future.

Take a look at the article, it’s interesting and has a number of caveats I’ve chosen to omit. And it makes sense that bond traders are getting nervous, given the ludicrous hijinks taking place in Washington.

¹All of this is predicated on the notion that the US Government always pays off its bonds. There have been enough sacred cows found shot behind the barn during this Administration to make this bit of traditional wisdom just a wee bit suspect, in my amateur opinion.

Another batch of people’s pride…

During the recently passed winter I was ill with some sort of combination of infection (which antibiotics merely lessened) and head cold and who knows what. During this period, I noticed my thinking, as reflected in my typing and sometimes my speech patterns, was on a definite cycle of maybe half a sentence, or a couple of seconds. Perhaps the working buffer with which I pretend to understand how our brain works had been foreshortened by my illness.

Therefore, this article D-brief on how nouns tend to interrupt our thinking and speaking patterns rang a bell for me:

The paper’s authors explain that it’s not just a study into verbal tics, but more of a window into how our brains process and create language. “When we speak, we unconsciously pronounce some words more slowly than others and sometimes pause. Such slowdown effects provide key evidence for human cognitive processes, reflecting increased planning load in speech production.” A gap between words, or having to result to filler words (such as uh or um), literally suggests certain words tax our mental faculties more than others.

And which words were those? Nouns (“a person place or thing,” as per Schoolhouse Rock), as opposed to verbs (which tell us “what’s happening”). Across languages and cultures, speakers universally slowed down before uttering nouns, and only one of the nine languages showed any slowdown before verbs, despite these often being more complex than nouns.

The authors went to great pains to make sure they studied speech from “linguistically and culturally diverse populations from around the world,” choosing languages from the Amazonian rainforest (Bora and Baure), Mexico (Texistepec), the North American Midwest (Hoocąk), Siberia (Even), the Himalayas (Chintang), and the Kalahari Desert (Nǁng)…  plus English and Dutch. They also wanted to make sure they studied examples of spontaneous, naturalistic speech — nothing read out loud or memorized.

Sure, it’s not the same thing – but it’s interesting how the individual contents of our thoughts can have greater or lesser impact on our language processing capability.

Here’s a lovely MG Midget.

And a lovely family sedan.

Andrew Sullivan in New York, second part of his weekly tri-partite column:

This is a difficult time for writers. We’re a strange breed that is particularly dependent on liberal democracy to survive. Why? Because, at our most fully realized in the nonfiction world, we’re about argument not propaganda, persuasion not coercion, and our ability to write things someone else doesn’t want printed — Orwell’s definition of journalism — is dependent on a free society to sustain it. It is a very rare event in human history that writers have the kind of freedom liberal democracy allows for — almost unheard of before the last couple of centuries, and still a fringe phenomenon in the wider world. Which is why it’s so dismaying that even an organization like the ACLU is beginning to wobble on free speech, that Twitter mobs are so insidious and pernicious, and that “social justice” now includes the hounding and ostracism of writers who will not tow the party line.

Yes, a difficult time, indeed. Idiots on Twitter and then you’re asked to be a towboat for the intangible. How much further into Hell will Andrew descend?

Obloquy:

1. censure, blame, or abusive language aimed at a person or thing, especially by numerous persons or by the general public.
2. discredit, disgrace, or bad repute resulting from public blame, abuse, or denunciation. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “Remembering Charles Krauthammer,” Andrew Sullivan, New York:

Being a dissident on the right as I became — particularly in the new century — was to invite ostracism and obloquy from the mainstream conservative media. But not from Charles. It wasn’t because we didn’t have disagreements.

Over the years the National Rifle Association (NRA) has delighted in grading our legislators in the context of 2nd Amendment absolutism, or, inversely, gun control, by assigning a letter grade as if the legislators were in a school and needed to be corrected in their thinking in the failing cases.

A subtle application of dominance theory.

But apparently something has gone amiss for the NRA, because they’ve taken down the grades. WaPo’s Philip Bump has the story:

Last week, though, the Washington Post reported a change in the NRA’s presentation of its letter grades. Although evaluations for current races are online, past grades — once available to members — no longer are. When a Post reporter called the NRA to find out where the past grades had gone, the person who answered the phone said, “I think our enemies were using that.”

Indeed? But how? Everytown for Gun Safety is a gun control organization, and thus an adversary for the currently radical version of the NRA. Here’s the hint:

Why did Everytown compile the data? In a statement, the organization explained that “the NRA wanted to hide this information from the public. Everytown thinks it is important that voters see it.”

Imagine watching the letter grades change for a Democratic legislator who is hungry for campaign contributions. Imagine seeing them trend from F to A. Wouldn’t that make you wonder if this legislator is unduly influenced by NRA contributions?

Looks like the NRA is trying to protect the legislators they’ve bought. After all, they’re expensive and you can’t just have them disappearing. Follow the link to the WaPo story if you want to play with the data, because WaPo’s run a brush through it for you already.

This sure reinforces my inclination. It’s all about the President’s slack judgment:

President Donald Trump tweeted Sunday morning that the U.S. “Cannot accept all of the people trying to break into our Country” and called for migrants to be “immediately” deported without a trial.

“When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came,” he said. His tweet did not mention people coming to the U.S. to seek asylum, which is legal to do.

“Our system is a mockery to good immigration policy and Law and Order,” he said, adding in another tweet that legal entry to the country should be based on “merit.” [NBC News]

Sigh. Mr. President, without the Due Process you frown upon, how do we know the facts of each case? Perhaps that person you want to deport without due process is an American citizen? This what due process is partially about.

Tell you what, how about we do the same thing to Melania and her son, eh? Obviously, the passport is a fake. We’ll just send her back.

This is why I’ve decided Trump gets a new name: President Irrelevancy. Rather than clasping themselves to his knees, all the legislators should just ignore his opinions, commentary, dull-minded wit, and even his signatures. They’re all based in ignorance.

I shan’t even bother with vulgarities. Trump has become such an irrelevancy, such a pit of abominant amateurism, that just noting his opinions and judgments are irrelevant is more than enough.

For readers local to Minnesota, the company name Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, better known as 3M, is a storied name and the local corporate research powerhouse. But it appears that it, too, has supped at the forbidden soup-bowl of profits-above-all in regards to the recent legal settlement regarding water pollution. Carrie Fellner reports in The Age:

As a leading international authority on toxic chemicals, Professor John P. Giesy is in the top percentile of active authors in the world.

His resume is littered with accolades, from being named in the Who’s Who of the World to receiving the Einstein Professor Award from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Professor Giesy was credited with being the first scientist to discover toxic per- and poly-fluoroalkyl [PFAS] chemicals in the environment, and with helping to persuade chemical giant 3M Company to abandon their manufacture.

But Fairfax Media can now reveal that Professor Giesy was accused of covertly doing 3M’s bidding in a widespread international campaign to suppress academic research on the dangers of PFAS.

A trove of internal company documents has been made public for the first time following a $US850 million ($1.15 billion) legal settlement between the company and Minnesota Attorney-General Lori Swanson. They suggest that Professor Giesy was one weapon in an arsenal of tactics used by the company to – in a phrase coined by 3M – “command the science” on the chemicals.

It’s a disappointment and a shame on 3M to engage in a form of doublespeak that obscures the company’s responsibility in the manner. And what of Professor Giesy?

To the outside world, Professor Giesy was a renowned and independent university academic.

“But privately, he characterised himself as part of the 3M team,” alleged the State of Minnesota.

“Despite spending most of his career as a professor at public universities, Professor Giesy has a net worth of approximately $20 million. This massive wealth results at least in part from his long-term involvement with 3M for the purpose of suppressing independent scientific research on PFAS.”

Professor Giesy’s consulting company appears to have received payments from 3M between at least 1998 and 2009. One document indicated his going rate was about $US275 an hour.

In an email to a 3M laboratory manager, Professor Giesy described his role as trying to keep “bad papers out of the literature”, because in “litigation situations they can be a large obstacle to refute”.

Professor Giesy was an editor of several academic journals and, in any given year, about half of the papers submitted on PFAS came to him for review.

“Some journals … for conflict-of-interest issues will not allow an industry to review a paper about one of their products. That is where I came in,” he wrote in another email.

“In time sheets, I always listed these reviews as literature searches so that there was no paper trail to 3M.”

If true, I would be very careful about trusting Professor Giesy.

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