Monthly Archives: September 2018

A conservative friend, no doubt a little upset about the pressure under which President Trump finds himself to which I made reference, asked me a question on Facebook today:

Have you looked at your 401k lately?

Well, no, not as such, although I keep an eye on the entire portfolio.

But this gives me an excuse to talk about choices of metrics. This is an important topic, I think, which is sometimes under-addressed by media and citizens alike, because using the wrong metric can and almost always will lead to bad conclusions.

My friend’s implication is that the economic system should be the metric by which we measure “how well we’re doing.” But I have my doubts that this is an appropriate measure.

First, it’s quite self-centered. If my self-worth inflates by a magnitude or two, but all those around me sink by 90%, is this a good thing or a bad thing? Frankly, I suspect there’s a problem. It may be one of those problems where the villagers show up at my door with pitchforks and torches.

In addition, this metric reminds me of something that has irritated me about some progressive arguments I’ve seen on The Daily Kos, where a few members were puzzling over the failure of conservative voters to vote their self-interest. I’m sure some conservatives make the same argument, only they see self-interest differently. And, for those of us who understand the concept of self-sacrifice and why it’s actually a selfish action, my observation may seem amiss. But taking the whole vote your self-interest thing face value, it turns elections into contests over which group is larger in terms of benefiting from lower taxes or higher taxes, stronger development or weaker development, etc. In particular, that first clause, concerning taxes, is deeply misleading given the Kansas debacle.

Disregarding a side road labeled Self-interest is not necessarily economic, my second point is to ask, what use is wealth when we risk inflation? The tax change bill passed by the Republicans and signed into law by a boastful President Trump has done little to boost the economy, but more importantly it’s pushed us toward the cliff of inflation and/or national bankruptcy, as noted by the folks at the Bipartisan Policy Center recently:

The federal deficit so far for Fiscal Year 2018 reached $532 billion in May, which is 23 percent higher than the same period last year, according to monthly data released today by the Treasury Department. The total deficit remains on track to reach roughly $800 billion for the year.

In the month of May alone, the federal government ran a monthly budget deficit of $147 billion, which was 67 percent higher than the deficit in May 2017, according to the Monthly Treasury Statement.

Key drivers of the year-over-year deficit increase through May included:

• Gross interest spending rose 12 percent to $318 billion, a $33 billion increase relative to 2017
• Corporate tax revenues fell 25 percent to $124 billion, a $42 billion decrease from 2017
• Federal spending, excluding interest payments, increased 5 percent to $2.4 trillion, a $122 billion increase relative to 2017, driven in large part by increased spending on health care and defense programs

“Nine years into our economic recovery from the Great Recession, it is indefensible that we allow the deficit to grow unabated,” Shai Akabas, BPC director of economic policy, said. “These growing deficits are not a surprise, we have been warning about them for years.”

The Laffer Curve, while it may function in certain circumstances, is not a universal phenomenon, and so we’re now facing enormous new debts incurred by those with faith, rather than belief, that lowering taxes will increase economic activity. Turns out it’s not that simple. And to finance the debt? You-know-who may turn to printing money.

Therefore, an increase in my 401K is not impressive if inflation is eating it alive, and, worse, for those of us on a fixed income, it’s fucking disaster. Now some people would just shrug and state that it’s their problem for being, say, elderly, but I remember the United States as a polity, a political entity the purpose of which was the common defense and the common welfare. Throwing people off the cliff for not being as business-savvy as the rest of us is not how we started out – but it may be how we end, as those who would be discarded instead storm the mansions of the wealth and rid us of them.

Relating to the previous point’s conclusion concerning the common welfare, a third point is that measuring my self-worth doesn’t tell me anything about the trend lines of those structures around me which I require. A hypothetical might be the terminal degradation of all the farming land in Minnesota. A less hypothetical, and just as concerning, is our health system’s own health. There are many press reports on President Trump’s assault on the ACA, to the extent that I no longer use the term ObamaCare, but TrumpCare, because he’s taken it over. I know that members of my extended family are now worried about having health care at all in the future due to the continued assaults by Trump and other conservatives on the ACA. If the health of my neighbors and family is at risk, what do I care for my 401K?

Fourth, liberty. Yeah, I just said liberty, and by that, I refer to the authoritarian tendencies of President Trump. Of what use is money if our political system is damaged beyond repair? We need to remember that our economic system is secondary to our political system, or, better yet, our economic system is contingent on our political system. Capitalism may work in non-liberal democracies, but honestly it doesn’t work very well and often degrades into mercantilism, or perhaps doesn’t ever climb out of the black hole of mercantilism.

This suggests that our first metric must be the health of our political system, as was foreseen by the Founding Fathers. Given its current distress as President Trump continues to display so much incompetency that I honestly believe he’s afflicted with dementia, it seems entirely foolish to look at a 401K as the measuring stick of the current Administration, as well as the GOP so incompetently in charge of Congress.

Or, the 401K metric simply sucks. It tells us nothing of importance.

In case you wonder who’s going to be quoted in the paper soon – many people suffer this malady, I’m sure – I suspect it’s going to be mental health professionals specializing in dementia and how such a person can appear to be perfectly normal in one aspect of his life, and completely bonkers in another.

Just sayin’ it seems quite probable. After all, a big chunk of the American people are going to need an excuse for their misjudgments fairly soon now.

On Lawfare Professor Keith Whittington ponders how conviction on impeachments charge should proceed in the Senate (and if this conversation doesn’t leave you gob-smacked, you’re not paying attention to the conduct of our Executive branch):

President Trump presents a different problem, and indeed a problem that would be unique in the history of federal impeachments. The concerns revolving around President Trump do not center on a single incident like President Johnson’s effort to remove Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, or even a closely related set of incidents like Judge Humphreys’ support of the secessionist cause. President Trump has found himself entangled in a myriad of legal, political and constitutional difficulties, and he seems to stumble into more with every news cycle. If the House were to pursue impeachment charges against the president—perhaps after the midterm election and the seating of a new Democratic majority – the biggest challenge might be how to edit the list of potential impeachment charges down to a manageable size. Members of the House Democratic caucus have already introduced possible articles of impeachment focused on the president’s rhetoric after the Charlottesville riot and his unerring ability to bring the presidency into “contempt, ridicule, disgrace and disrepute.” It is easy to imagine more, ranging from his actions during the 2016 election campaign to his obstruction of the Russia investigation to his ongoing financial conflicts of interest to his handling of national security secrets to his abuse of his discretionary constitutional and statutory authority. Rather than doing everything possible to walk back out of impeachment territory and demonstrate that impeachment is not a necessary remedy to what ails the White House, the president and his supporters have preferred to dig in and try to weather the storm.

Trump’s critics have an embarrassment of riches when it comes to presidential scandals. Their difficulty comes with establishing that any single scandal is sufficient to justify the president’s impeachment and removal. Of course the president’s most committed foes are already convinced that Trump should be removed from office. Indeed, many thought extraordinary steps should have been taken to prevent him from even being inaugurated. The president’s fellow partisans, however, have thus far been unimpressed. Although many Republicans might readily admit President Trump’s many missteps, relatively few are prepared to say that those missteps amount to impeachable offenses that would justify overturning the will of the voters. Like Bill Clinton before him, Donald Trump benefits from the fact that those who cast their ballots in his favor had already decided that his personal flaws did not override his political utility. Trump’s many foibles were priced in to his presidency.

And in conclusion?

If, however, offenses pile upon offenses and an officer cannot be adequately checked and trusted to conduct himself in a more responsible manner befitting his high office, then the constitutional calculus changes. Impeachable offenses cannot be adequately evaluated is isolation. Although senators might be called upon to vote on one charge at a time, they have a responsibility to consider the totality of circumstances when casting that vote.

If the history of the President is such to suggest that he’ll continue to engage in behavior that is not to the benefit of the United States, if it’s a pattern of bad behavior, I do not see how one can excuse it.

However, I suspect the extremist right wing that is now the GOP sees the President as a useful tool for implementing their agenda. They can tolerate his crass attacks on our liberal democracy, because, to their minds, a liberal democracy is not important. They may see a Dominionist future, a fascist future, or a corporatist future, but not one where a liberal democracy is critical – or even tolerated.

I fear the Trump supporters are being played, at least in part. I’d rather not see the conclusion of such a play, I suspect it’ll not be what anyone, except our adversaries, would like to see.

A reader remarks on our surprise garden occupants:

If you’re talking about the plant with the trumpet-like bloom, that is Datura. They open in the evening and are pollinated by the hummingbird moth. They will get a prickly seed pod that spits out seeds after it dries. You can probably thank a bird or the wind for bringing it to your yard.

Ah! Thank you! I see the folks at iNaturalist also identified it as Datura, aka Devil’s Trumpet.

Some poor fool uploaded a recording to YouTube of Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) upbraiding Democrats for actually trying to conduct a thorough hearing on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to SCOTUS:

A righteous scolding, no? Steve Benen points out some inconvenient facts:

But the GOP senator may not remember recent history as well as he should. “If you want to pick judges from your way of thinking, then you better win an election”? Well, Barack Obama won an election – in fact, he won two – and when he tried to fill a Supreme Court vacancy with a compromise nominee recommended by Republicans, Graham and his GOP colleagues refused to even give Merrick Garland a hearing, choosing instead to impose a months-long blockade with no precedent in the American tradition.

If “winning an election” is the prerequisite to picking judges, why did Graham participate in a partisan scheme to steal a Supreme Court seat from a democratically elected president?

What’s more, Graham is conveniently overlooking the fact that several Senate Republicans argued in 2016 that if Hillary Clinton won the presidential race, they’d block any Supreme Court nominee she chose, regardless of merit, for her entire term. There was, at the time, a pending vacancy on the high court, and at least three GOP senators said that they’d keep that vacancy open until 2021, at the earliest, if the Democratic won.

And there’s more.

But I’m not here to bury Senator Graham. I’m here to glorify his name.

In fact, I’d like to suggest that every time, in the future, that a politician, be they Republican, Democrat, or other, tries to ignore the facts of history while scolding his or her colleagues like children, that politician be known as “pulling a Graham.”

Thank you.

On Lawfare, while reading Professor Dakota S. Rudesill’s analysis of policy changes from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration with regard to cyber warfare, I couldn’t help but reflect on alternative explanations for this:

It is by now clear that the Trump administration is pursuing a broad project of driving responsibility for national security decisions down the chain of command, and reducing review by the White House’s National Security Council (NSC) interagency process. The result is to empower agency-level actors, particularly cabinet secretaries, the directors of the NSA and CIA, and military commanders.  But decision devolution also drives up risks of uncoordinated government activity. Ultimately, the president is coming to bear less practical responsibility, and potentially less political responsibility, even as he retains ultimate constitutional and moral responsibility for what happens on his watch.

My question: who made this decision? President Trump? Or someone who doesn’t really want Trump involved in decisions for which he’s clearly not prepared? Steve Benen had similar remarks as well:

I realize many of us have grown inured to the bizarre circumstances we find ourselves in, but I’m inclined to stick that excerpted paragraph in a time capsule. The amateur president of a global superpower just says things, and no one — including White House officials — has any idea what to make of his orders or whether anyone intends to act on them.

As we discussed a few weeks ago, this comes up with alarming regularity. For example, Trump announced in June that he had “instructed” U.S. officials “not to endorse” an official G-7 communique negotiated by diplomats from member nations. Officials didn’t much care about the tweet and they proceeded to ignore Trump’s online instructions.

& etc. I’ve remarked on the long-term consequences of this de facto policy of treating the President like a child to be ignored, and while long-term the consequences are negative, we must first survive the short-term, which may require this regrettable policy.

In The New Yorker, Susan Glasser describes meeting Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who is retiring at the end of this term, at Senator John McCain’s funeral:

A few minutes after the service, when the talking and singing was over and the bipartisan establishment flowed back into the humid swamp outside the cathedral, I ran into Jeff Flake, McCain’s fellow-senator from Arizona and, like McCain, one of Trump’s few remaining public critics among Republicans on Capitol Hill. “The fever will break eventually,” Flake said. “It has to.” It was an oddly optimistic thing to say at a funeral, and, when he said it, it hardly sounded convincing.

Senator Flake, your analogy should acknowledge the role the body’s immune system, in particular the antibodies that neutralize pathogens, plays in breaking that fever. You, sir, should have considered yourself one of those antibodies and helped lead the Republican resistance to President Trump.

Instead, you’ve chosen to retire just because you were facing a tough challenge in the primaries. Those primaries were your chance to stand on a stage in front of your fellow Arizonans and articulate why your vision of the Republican Party is superior to that of President Trump’s and his fellow extremists. Being a Senator may mean working with others, but it also carries the responsibility of being a leader when the requirement arises.

As it stands, you sound desperate more than confident, a bystander who doesn’t understand what is happening, or how to fix it. And that’s a sad thing to say about a politician and his political party.

A doomed romance. Spaceship radio operators are never good mates.

We discover that we’re going to the moon to rescue the Moon-people in Cat-Women of the Moon (1953), who have deviously influenced the lady navigator of the first ship to go to the moon. There’s some barriers, of course, such as the moon-spiders (I think my parents made one just like those in the movie to scare the kids on Halloween and called it Herbie), and the fact the ladies on the moon, having eliminated the men of their race, plan to do the same with Earth-men.

And it’ll be a takeover, not a rescue.

It’s all dull, corny stuff, and if there was a noteworthy theme, it escaped my attention. In fact, we both managed to fall asleep during it. Stay away from this dog.

Not unexpectedly, Nike’s signing of Colin Kaepernick to an endorsement deal has led to some backlash, as reported in WaPo, although its magnitude is not yet clear. But the report goes further on the history of Nike and social justice:

[Corporate reputation adviser Anthony Johndrow] said there is a perception that “you’ve got to keep your house in order first,” and that companies “can’t go proactive unless they’re pristine.” But Nike is charting another path, Johndrow said, not because the company lacks issues of its own, but because it has historically engaged with hot-button issues in its advertising.

In 1995, for example, Nike looked to its “Just Do It” slogan to raise awareness of women’s rights in sports. That same year, the company featured Los Angeles marathon runner Ric Munoz, who was HIV positive. …

Joe Holt, an expert on business ethics at the University of Notre Dame, said there is an important moral difference to companies promoting their views “because you have to” versus “because you want to.” He said one true test of a company’s values is if that company is willing to stick to them even at a financial cost. Nike’s use of Kaepernick in the “Just Do It” ad seems to affirm that dedication, Holt said, because it will inevitably alienate some customers.

I remain unpersuaded that this will result in Nike losing money. I believe they’ve analyzed the moral issue in detail and came to the conclusion that Kaepernick is in the right – and, secure in the knowledge that a system with a component of a belief in justice will reward those who behave in a just way most of the time, took their decision to be on what they consider to be the side of justice.

It’s also possible they simply analyzed the demographics leanings and made their decision on which will lead to more profit in the future. However, if that information ever got out, they’d be at hazard of being abandoned by the youth element they’re pursuing, as they are far more idealistic than the older generations and more likely to abandon Nike for a purely profit-driven decision with no moral reasoning going into it.

Nike may not be profitable in the near-future, but in the long-term I suspect they made the right decision.

Unfortunately, it’s not clear that the Trump team understand the basics of negotiations, as Leon Sigal implies on 38 North:

While the Trump administration demanded that the North move first, reportedly by providing a complete inventory of its nuclear material and production facilities, the North countered with the demand that Washington join South Korea in declaring an end to the Korean War. The declaration would commit to initiating a peace process that would include military confidence building measures to reduce the risk of deadly clashes in the contested waters of the West (Yellow) Sea and the Demilitarized Zone and culminate in a formal peace treaty.

The administration contends that the North wants the peace declaration before taking steps to denuclearize, but as North Korean Foreign Minister Ri Yong Ho told ASEAN foreign ministers in early August, “We believe that a method involving the balanced, simultaneous, step-by-step implementation of all terms in the Joint Statement, preceded by the establishment of trust, is the only realistic means of achieving success.” He emphasized the North’s “unswerving resolution and commitment to responsible, good-faith implementation of the Joint Statement,” and the “unacceptability of a situation in which we alone are the first to move unilaterally.”

His statement is just the latest indication that a deal is possible if the United States is prepared to accept a peace declaration. Seeking a nuclear inventory in return will only initiate a long period of uncertainty, however, with little benefit to the US and allied security while Washington tries to verify that inventory and while North Korean manufacture of fissile material and missiles runs free. A better starting point for Washington to seek is a suspension of the production of plutonium, highly enriched uranium, and intercontinental- and intermediate-range missiles, along with a declaration of the locations of related production sites.

Giving in to the demands of a dictator would make Trump look weak, and upset those in his base who see North Korea as a slave state, which is not necessarily wrong. It’s certainly an alien ideology to the West, and one I would consider unstable as it depends on the temperament of exactly one person.

And, yet, sometimes one must compromise in order to make progress towards an ultimate goal. Will agreeing to ending the Korean War constitute progress towards transforming North Korea from a war machine to a democracy?  Or would Kim continue to reign unimpeded? These are the hard questions facing every American President, and, in Trump’s case, it may be complicated by the expectations of his base. Common right-wing expressions that Obama was terribly weak, especially in the face of contradictory indicators, may make Trump’s goals that much more difficult to reach.

A number of pundits and legal professionals got bent out of shape over President Trump’s Tweet yesterday concerning the recent indictments of Republican Representatives Collins and Hunter:

[tweet https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1036681588573130752]

For example, Steven Benen:

After more than a year and a half in the White House, Donald Trump genuinely seems to believe that the federal justice system should shield the president’s political allies – not only because of their partisan allegiances, but also because, in Trump’s mind, the attorney general should weigh electoral considerations before allowing criminal suspects to be charged.

Sally Yates, who served as acting attorney general before Trump fired her last year for giving the White House good advice, described the president’s rhetoric as “nothing short of an all out assault on the rule of law,” and I’m hard pressed to imagine how any fair minded observer would disagree.

Of course, it’s also easy enough to interpret this as another attempt to stir up the Trump base. The idea is to keep the emotional subsystem swirling about, aka “System 1”, and not let System 2, or the intellectual system, kick in^[1].

And, in fact, I do not credit the President with enough self-awareness to realize how what he writes may be interpreted. He may realize it, but even then he may not follow the consequences that the maelstrom that follows the collapse of the system we’ve built to so painfully over the last 200+ years would destroy not only him, but his family. He’s in immediate survival mode at the moment, proceeding on a plan he may think is clever, but has little basis in the realities of the moment.

But I think this is a great moment to take the measure of those in control of Congress. It’s clear that he’s calling for his own supporters to receive a break from the Federal law enforcement system, and in the past he’s whined about his political opponents not being investigated.

This is inciting corruption.

Any competent Congressional leader of any party should be calling for, and if they have the power, convening impeachment proceedings right now. Any excuse given in the past has been shredded and disregarded by competent observers. The fact that neither Ryan nor McConnell are not moving to remove this President is a measure of how far removed they are from the proper and required exercise of the powers of their offices. Whether it’s from fear for the fate of their party, their personal electoral fates (but Ryan is retiring at the end of this term), or fear for their personal safety matters not a whit.

And, as a further measure, the failure of the common Republican member of Congress stands as a further condemnation of the Republican members of Congress and the GOP itself. To my mind, this is due to the team politics concept that I’ve mentioned before, but perhaps I’m staring through my prism too much.

So, until November, it’s up to the Republicans to decide if they’re going to be responsible in governance – or prove they’re completely unworthy of the position. Their fate as an American political party is extraordinarily dependent on their decisions in the next few weeks.

¹This is from the book The Persuaders, which describes our cognitive apparatus as coming in two systems, #1 being the quick, fight or flight response, which is not rational but often serves best in emergency situations, while #2 is the rational, but slower, response. It’s a good book.

We think this may be wild cucumber.

Your Corporate Executive on Drugs.

The Wasp Woman (1960) is the classic story of the corporate executive who goes a step too far in pursuit of profit, and is turned into a wasp as a result.

Clllllllllasic. Yes. Shakespeare reportedly did a version, but lost the script during a drunken bout of sex with Queen Elizabeth.

And here it is.

Colin Kaepernick, the Super Bowl calibre quarterback that couldn’t find a job in the NFLlast year, remains unemployed in his chosen field this year after the entire preseason has been played – but not in that of endorsements, as The Bleacher Report notes:

Nike selected former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick as the face of its “Just Do It” campaign, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

And I think that simple, single sentence is a signal of how Nike sees the future, which is, as always, youth-centered. I did a little digging but failed to find any polls on the issue which call out results on an age basis. I suspect they would show that young people are more concerned with the justice of the situation than their elders, especially those who belong to no particular racial minority, who tend to have a more concrete approach to such matters.

So Nike, along with GQ^[1], recognizing the demographics of the situation, has made Kaepernick into one of their spokesmen, and by so doing have aligned themselves with the youth movement. Perhaps corporate leadership in either or both cases has an actual rational reason that has nothing to do with future corporate profits in making these moves – but, absent any cogent press releases on the matter, I doubt it.

And the poor ol’ NFL is between a rock and a hard place. Their best fans are getting older and don’t necessarily understand Kaepernick’s actions, the younger set are more likely to sympathize but wonder why they’re watching a sport that has terrible consequences for its players, and the President is – exceptionally inappropriately – pressuring the NFL to, well, take a knee by implementing rules that require the anthem to be honored.

Which is absolutely no  honor at all.

¹GQ named Colin its 2017 Citizen of the Year, according to The Bleacher Report article. On further consideration, that sort of honor may indicate GQ really does think kneeling for the anthem is a valid action. Good for them.

Years old, I think, but inspirational.

And the ornamental grass really didn’t appreciate it a week or two ago.

We tied it up with some string and it seems happier now.

Yes, Mr. Hammer, could you find my viscera? Someone seems to have sucked it out of me.

Mickey Spillane was not always content to simply write his books concerning leading man Mike Hammer, but once to actually play Mike Hammer in a movie, and that was in The Girl Hunters (1963). Hammer’s assistant and love interest, Velda, disappeared 7 years ago, apparently dead, and Hammer has crawled into a bottle and pulled the stopper in afterwards. But when a dying man appears with information suggesting Velda may still be alive, Hammer discovers purpose for his life has been restored.

The bullet that killed the man leads to another man killed with the same gun, a US Senator, and leads Hammer into danger where trusting the wrong attractive woman could get him killed. But Velda, mysterious Velda, summons him onwards, even as he discovers her concealed previous career as an OSI operative during the War. Hammer’s attention to detail and a sort of provocative caution serves him well as he solves more than one crime at a time, leading to a satisfying crescendo of betrayal and revenge.

The music is irritatingly repetitive, the audio is somewhat defective, but the cinematography is satisfactory and the story is not as predictable as one might expect. It’s no award winner, but it’s a respectable effort. And Spillane is not awful.

A couple of months ago Astronomy.com reported that the interstellar object that zoomed through our solar system appears to have been a comet:

In the new study, published June 27 in the journal Nature, researchers determined that ‘Oumuamua is slowly and steadily accelerating away from the Sun, which means it’s currently traveling faster than is predicted by celestial mechanics — a very well-understood branch of astronomy that deals with the motions of cosmic objects.

“Our high-precision measurements of ‘Oumuamua’s position revealed that there was something affecting its motion other than the gravitational forces of the Sun and planets,” said team-lead Marco Micheli of the European Space Agency in a NASA news release.

The researchers explored a number of possible scenarios in an attempt to explain the faster-than-expected speed with which ‘Oumuamua is hurtling out of the solar system. But after considering all the possibilities (such as solar-radiation pressure, friction-like forces, and magnetic interactions with the solar wind), the team concluded the most likely explanation is that the Sun is causing ‘Oumuamua to vent gas and dust from its surface in a process called outgassing, which almost exclusively occurs in icy comets, not rocky asteroids.

The assumption being no intelligence deliberately altering course, of course. They do note the lack of coma & tail, which they attribute to the small particles causing same to having been exhausted. The comet may be dissolving into bigger fragments.

And, as a science geek, it’s nice to get back to charismatic science – it’s uplifting to the spirit. Unlike politics.

Nocebo:

A nocebo effect is said to occur when negative expectations of the patient regarding a treatment cause the treatment to have a more negative effect than it otherwise would have. For example, when a patient anticipates a side effect of a medication, they can suffer that effect even if the “medication” is actually an inert substance. Both placebo and nocebo effects are presumably psychogenic, but they can induce measurable changes in the body. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “How a positive mind really can create a healthier body,” David Robson, NewScientist (25 August 2018, paywall):

Placebos are inert pills used in most clinical drug trials. The participants are divided randomly into two groups: half take the drug being tested, the rest, for comparison, take an identical-looking sugar pill. With no active ingredient, the placebo shouldn’t have any effects. Yet it often brings about measurable changes, triggering the release of natural painkillers and lowering blood pressure, for example – all because of people’s expectations. Patients sometimes reap these benefits even when they know they are taking the placebo (see “Everyday placebos”). On the downside, our expectations of a pill can also produce side effects, including nausea and skin rashes. This is the placebo effect’s “evil” twin, the nocebo effect (see “The science of voodoo”).

One practical result is to not consider a “diet” to be abstemious, but instead learn to adore every bite.

The biographical documentary RBG (2018) tells of the times of current Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, her life from college until today, and of the actions which she took which have cemented for her a prominent place in history with regard to women’s rights, which she distills to a simple, strong quote of one of her predecessors, Sarah Grimké, who I will quote in full (rather than Ginsburg’s abbreviated version):

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks [, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.]

The sheer drive it took to move society from hardly admitting women to Harvard Law School to multiple women occupying seats on the SCOTUS is illustrated in devastating fashion in this documentary, and serves, in a way, to enlighten us to the extent that high-achievers must shut themselves off from the more common facets of today’s society in order to pursue their dreams, as her own children comment that they believe their mother actually does not know how to operate her own television.

By turns charming, horrifying, opaque, and delightful, I believe it’s important to see just what it takes to pursue the proper implementation of the greatest organizing principle of American society, that without justice, our society is unstable and even dangerous. This realization should upset the current movement towards replacing government functions with private sector functions, as the latter have no inherent attachment to notions of justice, but rather to self-advantage; and, more importantly, the notion that justice necessarily limits freedoms should once again be acknowledged and examined, as perfect freedoms can be shown to lead to disaster.

Thought-provoking and inspirational.

Recommended.

It’s noteworthy that neither Party is doing well.

On the right is one of the most important charts in the current American political landscape. From Gallup, it speaks to how Americans feel about adhering to specific party tenets.

In two words, they don’t. In case you’re wondering, this 2017 chart is roughly reflective of the latest Gallup polling of August 1 – Independents at 43%.

I was reflecting on the Republicans and Democrats post-midterms, and how both parties are dependent on wooing Independents in order to get themselves elected. If the Democrats do manage to take control of the House as expected, Megan McArdle sees the Democratic majority as coming under tremendous pressure to begin impeachment proceedings:

And if Democrats manage to eke out a majority in both houses of Congress, here is the poll’s really bad news for Trump: Half the country wants him impeached. …

Most worrying for Trump is that three-quarters of Democrats say they want Congress to impeach him. If Democrats gain control, they will be under immense pressure from their base to deliver.

That doesn’t mean they’ll do it. It takes a two-thirds supermajority in the Senate to actually remove a president from office. The best that Democrats can possibly manage in 2018 is a narrow majority; they would need more than a handful of Republican senators to support removal. The leaders of a Democrat-controlled House might well decide they’d rather not force their Senate brethren to take a hard and futile vote.

For long-term Republican strategists, a failure to impeach may actually be a fucking disaster, as Megan hints at elsewhere. In Trump you have a President who is fundamentally disconnected from reality, who lies and cheats and is, for the first time, under continual observation by observers who make their money by discovering mistakes – the free press. He knows this, and tries to defend himself through his Fake News meme, but when even Fox News is beginning to criticize Trump, it may slowly be dawning on everyone in the news business that an attack on one is an attack on all, when it comes from the Executive.

But he remains the face of the Republican Party. In fact, in these mid-terms many Republican candidates are embracing him like Superman, as I’ve noted a number of times, and have used a perceived lack of personal loyalty to him as a lever against Republican competitors.

And this must horrify our hypothetical Republican strategist. The Republican brand is being bloodied not just by the incompetent and lying Trump, but by all his little Trump-wannabes.

And for the discerning Independent who takes their role in politics seriously, the Trump phenomenon, antithetical to American principles and customs, must mark the Republican party as an anathema not to be condoned.

Sure, there’s a lot of Independents who don’t take their role seriously, or absolutely loathe Democrats for reasons legitimate or illegitimate, or are single-issue voters who have yet to understand there’s more to politics than a strong defense, or abortion, or transgender bathrooms. But they will learn.

And the lessons to be learned is that the guy holding the biggest office happens to be Republican and lies a lot. And so do a lot of his adherents.

So what happens if Trump is not impeached and convicted next year? He has two more years of wrecking the Republican brand. Sure, his supporters won’t see it that way – but their intensity of loyalty is vitiated by their small numbers, which are shrinking as more and more come to their senses, and the demographics inevitably eat away at them, they being mainly older voters.

In the short-term, there’s a lot of hand-wringing over the Senate and how the Democrats can, at best, only hope for a slim majority. But what happens in 2020? There will be a lot more Senate Republican seats up on the election block, and a President who, in all likelihood, will have become far more toxic than he is even now – and, yes, I find that a little hard to stomach, too. But that’s what will happen. And that amateur claptrap he spews will end up all over the Republican brand, and its consequences will become apparent.

The Republican strategist should be squirming big. Particularly if Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed as a SCOTUS and Roe v Wade is set aside. Independent women will remember that for a long, long time. And they won’t forgive.

No character, in fact a real whiner. Godzilla reportedly sought help from a support group later that year.

One of the weaker offerings in the kaiju Godzilla series is Son of Godzilla (1967). Sonny boy, as I’ll call him, first comes to light on Solgell Island (if I remember the name right), still in the egg. The egg is being dug out of a mound of boulders by three Gimantises, gigantic praying mantises who can fly. This is being observed by a journalist who is visiting an experimental station on the same island.

Better known for their roles in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

The Gimantises break the egg open and make some half-hearted attempts to dine on Sonny boy, but Godzilla, in a very minor, unmenacing aspect, arrives in time to kill two of the three Gimantises and chase the third away, and Godzilla now assumes the parenting role. Meanwhile, the journalist discovers a heretofore unknown inhabitant of the island, a daughter of a missing archaeologist, who helps the team out when they become sick, and later when Spiga, a giant spider, attacks.

Bad story short, the last Gimantis is pithed by Spiga, and Sonny-boy almost meets the same demise, but big ol’ Dad comes to the rescue, and Spiga finds himself (herself?) overmatched and eventually catches fire and capsizes. The science team finally performs its experiment, which causes a snowstorm to occur on the tropical island, and Godzilla and Sonny-boy go into hibernation.

Yech. This was a real time-waster.

Corsetry:

[British]

1. the making of or dealing in corsets
2. corsets considered collectively [Collins Dictionary]

Noted in “Preserved ocean creatures make landfall in London,” review of a science show, Sumit Paul-Choudhury NewScientist (25 August 2018):

The presentation of body parts works well. The material fact of the crucian carp’s pea-sized brain makes its ability to learn from experience all the more striking. Everyone knows what gills look like from the outside, but their corsetry, winnowed free from flesh, is a different matter. And a shark’s stomach turns out to be surprisingly small but densely corrugated, as it is surface area, not volume, that counts when it comes to digestion.

Hmmmmmmmmm. Can’t help but wonder about the usage.