Monthly Archives: December 2018

Monopsony:

In economics, a monopsony (from Ancient Greek μόνος (mónos) “single” + ὀψωνία (opsōnía) “purchase”) is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. In the microeconomic theory of monopsony, a single entity is assumed to have market power over sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service, much in the same manner that a monopolist can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say,” Christopher Ingraham, WaPo:

As [Josh] Bivens and [Heidi] Shierholz [of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute] tell it, a relatively recent thread of economic research into monopsony power — which they define as “the leverage enjoyed by employers to set their workers’ pay” — has helped economists explain some of the wage stagnation observed in the United States over the past 40 years. You can think of monopsony power as the flip side of monopoly power: If monopoly power lets companies charge higher prices to consumers, monopsony power lets them pay lower wages to workers. Either way, it spells trouble for people who buy things and work for a living.

Research into monopsony power finds that many job markets are dominated by a relatively small number of employers. If you are, say, a coal miner, there may be just one or two coal mines within 100 miles of your home. If the mine you’re working at is treating you unfairly, you don’t have many options for finding a new job — particularly if you already left the other mine for similar reasons. In the absence of any serious competition for the most talented workers, employers have a huge amount of leeway in setting workers’ salaries, and they often set them at levels below what traditional economic theories would expect.

From the wider societal view, it sounds like cancer to me. The engine of the economy depends on workers earning a living and spending their earnings on both necessaries and optionals. The rapacity implicit in this article suggests that many workers in these situations are not able to contribute to the “thrash” of the market, as it were.

This is also ringing a bell in connection with Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles, which speaks to a stagflation phase occurring near the end of an economic-societal-political secular cycle. It’s important to note that Turchin and Nefedov’s work is on agrarian societies, so it may not be wholly applicable to today’s American urban society – but, being the undisciplined sort, I cannot help but note the interesting similarities. It suggests that we are, in fact, suffering from overpopulation, between an excess of skilled people, falling incomes, and rising rents.

I hope to put out a review of Secular Cycles in the near future, but, speaking as a complete newcomer to the subject, I will recommend its first Chapter for the serious reader who doesn’t mind slogging and thinking, or is familiar with the area. I think it’s fascinating. I’m in the midst of Chapter 2, but I suspect all of the Chapters following the first are case-studies studying the congruency of their theory with reality.

Tim Klein likes to meld two die-cut puzzles to produce his artwork.

More at Puzzle Montage.

It’s actually fascinating.

More here.

As WaPo and many others have noted, the Weekly Standard is shutting down, with one of its last news reports being a repudiation of Representative Steve King (R-IA) as being representative of conservatism:

Founded in 1995 by Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, and Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard became the de facto voice of the neoconservative movement under President George W. Bush as its writers lustily cheered on the Iraq War. But as Kristol emerged as one of the loudest conservative voices against Trump, the magazine he edited until 2016 likewise became a harsh critic of the populist president and his allies.

President Trump, per usual, thinks this is a victory for him:

But I was careful to note that the Weekly Standard was a home for neocons, short for the neo-conservative movement. What was their great accomplishment?

Two wars, the one in Afghanistan, justified as a war to stop al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, and the other in Iraq, which we began under the since-proven false pretenses that Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, were in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, despite agreements to be rid of them. Whatever you thought of the malignancy of Saddam Hussein, promulgating a war on false pretenses is inevitably a stain on our honor.

The President and his allies would like us to believe that Trump-ism has swept the Weekly Standard away in its victorious jetstream, but I have my doubts about that. I think the next few weeks will see those political observers with deeper sources than mine asking whether the neocon movement collapsed simply because of its duplicity and its inferior results. It’s certainly seen adherents, such as Max Boot, slip away recently. This may be the face-plant of an inferior philosophy, and not the victim of a party wallowing in its own amateurism.

WaPo notes a special report to the Senate on Russian disinformation efforts:

The report traces the origins of Russian online influence operations to Russian domestic politics in 2009 and says that ambitions shifted to include U.S. politics as early as 2013 on Twitter. Of the tweets the company provided to the Senate, 57 percent are in Russian, 36 percent in English and smaller amounts in other languages.

The efforts to manipulate Americans grew sharply in 2014 and every year after, as teams of operatives spread their work across more platforms and accounts to target larger swaths of U.S. voters by geography, political interests, race, religion and other factors. The Russians started with accounts on Twitter, then added YouTube and Instagram before bringing Facebook into the mix, the report said.

To my mind, the poor fit between national politics and an international communications tool is the highlight, at least from this article (the report, by Howard, Ganesh, and Liotsiou, all of Oxford University, and Killy and  François of Graphika is here). There’s no easy fix, as everyone knows, other than shutting the Internet down.

Kevin Drum’s a little puzzled:

I don’t really understand this. Why were the Russians trying to get Republicans elected back in 2013 and 2014? Was it an anti-Hillary thing even back then? Were they convinced that Republicans would be softer on them than Democrats? That doesn’t really make sense. And when, exactly, did the pro-Trump propaganda start? As soon as he announced he was running? Or was it later than that?

Drum’s not thinking well. We are the super-power, and that makes us the enemy for Russia. I suspect the two major political parties were evaluated by the Russians for vulnerability, and the Republicans won – easily. After all, they’re expected to vote the party line, which makes the investment to put a properly corrupted candidate in place of a lower risk than the more fractious Democrats. The Democrats also have stronger civil liberties instincts than do the Republicans, which are repugnant to Russians, who prefer an all-or-nothing approach to governance. Finally, the Republicans have been running further and further to the right since, well, really since the days when Goldwater warned about the changing nature of the Republican Party! But, more clearly, since Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House (1995-1999) and took the Republicans away from the idea of shared governance and towards dominance and isolation.

This is clearly a fascist mindset and is quite compatible with that of the current Russian government. In order to get their hooks into a Republican Party whose soul had been ripped away by Gingrich and his buddies, they started during the Obama days – or does Drum not remember the irrational refusal of the Republicans to share governance with President Obama and the Democrats? This report certainly serves to help solidify the case that the Republicans have been co-opted by the Russians through the insertion of certain ideological tenets and, even more importantly, the alienation of Republican culture from the greater American culture. By reinforcing the fear of change in the minds of the Republicans, they slowly are tearing the United States apart. Doubt it? Just consider recent Republican actions in end-of-term legislative actions in Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina meant to hobble incoming Democratic office-holders. These over-the-line tactics are classic examples of the all-or-nothing mindset that refuses to trust the opposition; in contrast, most Americans expect that trust to be present, as expressed by the current aphorism, elections have consequences.

Or, at least, that’s how I’d do it if I were a Russian.

Steve Benen may be a bit puzzled over last week’s elevation of former Representative, current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, and former acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) director Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) to the slot of acting Chief of Staff to President Trump:

… [Trump promoting] Mulvaney to lead OMB, where he peddled conspiracy theories, was at times disconnected from the president’s position on budget issues, and where he gave the banking industry some rather crude advice on how best to buy access to policymakers.

During Mulvaney’s tenure as budget director, the nation’s finances also took a turn toward the absurd: by some measures, the United States has never had a budget deficit this high during a period of strong economic growth.

He also unveiled a budget plan with a jaw-dropping $2-trillion mistake – and then insisted his colossal screw-up was intentional.

It’s against this backdrop that Trump decided to give Mulvaney additional responsibilities, so the president tapped him to lead the CFPB – despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that Mulvaney opposes the existence of the CFPB. Predictably, he proceeded to gut the agency’s enforcement efforts, aligning the bureau’s priorities with the goals of the payday-lending industry.

And yet, the more Mulvaney’s record took ridiculous turns, the more the president was impressed. Every failure has been followed by a promotion.

But it seems fairly obvious to me. The clue is, of course, President Trump. Obsessed with image and brand, we often interpret him as motivated by the optics of a situation. But there’s also the reputational aspect. Whether Trump is conscious of it or not, he’s an amateur and a screwup. There’s nothing graceful about his approach to life and success, as we can see in his many visits with the legal system over the years.

But few people enjoy actually being visibly incompetent. Trump cherishes his image of success Therefore, Mulvaney, a fringe character himself, can continually screw up and only earn the appreciation of a President eager to disguise his own large collection of failings.

Add in the dozens of investigations targeting Trump, of which he’s eager to distract attention from, and Mulvaney’s appointment remains, in Trump’s eyes, nearly perfect. At least for the next week, this appointment will attract attention that would otherwise be assigned to Trump’s many, many failings. Mulvaney’s ultimate competency in the position will, at some point, bring approbation down upon him, at least from Trump, and then Trump will blame him for all things rotten with his Administration.

But this appointment may be better for Trump’s ego than that of Nick Ayers, Pence’s current Chief of Staff, who doesn’t appear to be garnering controversy through incompetency. He refused Trump’s offer of the position. I suspect his current perch gave him a great view of the chaos such a position entails, and refused to bite on it. Smart guy.

So many ways to go on vacation.

More here.

I was a little bemused to read this article by Stephen Battersby in NewScientist (8 December 2018, paywall) on the latest refinement of the coordinate system used by astronomers and others based on black holes:

To chart our place in the universe, astronomers have looked billions of light years away, to some of the most extraordinary objects in the cosmos: quasars. These intense beacons of light surrounding black holes in distant galaxies are being used to fix physical positions back here in the solar system. And not only will they help guide our travels to distant worlds, they will also help us learn more about our own. …

… in the 1990s, astronomers took a giant leap. Rather than relying on stars mere hundreds of light years away, they decided to look billions of light years away instead. Objects that distant don’t shift their position in the sky we see very fast, which made them ideal candidates as reference points. But to be clearly visible from so far away, they have to be bright, and the brightest beacons we know are quasars: the sites where supermassive black holes suck matter in and fire radiation out. A side benefit of using such heavy markers is that they don’t get pushed around easily. Being billions of times the mass of the sun, supermassive black holes tend to stay put at the centre of their galaxies.

What’s my problem? The Universe is allegedly continually expanding. That really renders attempts to absolutely establish position a bit of an exercise in futility for those of us who refuse to operate with error bars. (An error bar refers to the uncertainty of some measurement, the plus/minus of a given measured value.)

And, I’m sure, this coordinate system is nifty enough that it doesn’t really matter. It just strikes my funny bone a little oddly….

If you’re a fan of the Grade-B horror and sci-fi films of the mid 20th century, Horrible Horror with Zacherle (1986) is an incredibly cheesy look at various scenes, trailers, and promos from movies across the genres. From The Giant Claw (1957) to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), the latter including outtakes of scenes in which the actors couldn’t hold it together, it’s a quick overview of a passel of bad, and sometimes good, horror films, hosted by the late John Zacherle.

It’s also good if you’re in a post-surgical recovery haze and need something to occupy the time but not the brain.

Boondoggle:

A boondoggle is a project that is considered a waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.

Wikipedia

As in President Trump’s proposed southern wall, destined to be known as the Trump Boondoggle if it is ever funded and built.

These are endlessly fascinating as I contemplate how much effort must go into making them.

I found Cold Turkey (1971) to be a bit of a puzzle. A consultant convinces a fictional tobacco industry of the 1960s and 1970s to follow in the footsteps of Alfred Nobel, who, for those readers not up on their history, used the profits from his invention of dynamite to fund the Nobel Peace Prize, promoting peace and not war. The gig? The industry offers a $25 million prize to the town in America that can stop smoking for a month. The idea is to endear the tobacco industry to the world.

It’s not entirely clear why they think this should work, but then there’s a lot of skimming over weak points in this film.

The focus then descends on the depressed town of Eagle Rock, Iowa, which has seen both industry and government exit the town, leaving it primarily with churches and the wearily desperate. When the announcement comes, Rev. Clayton Brooks grabs the reins and leads the effort to cleanse the town of the devil tobacco, his wife swirling helplessly behind him. We see the unmitigated use of social shaming to force townsfolk into signing onto the pledge, extending even to the town doc, Doctor Proctor, helpless in his addiction. Even a new hospital dangling in front of him cannot break the Satanic hold.

And then comes Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. A “massage parlor” opens up, much to the relief of some of the smokers. Rev. Brooks, himself a former smoker who took the habit back up so that he could join the smokers on their month long abstinence, discovers his wife’s charms will distract him from the urge to smoke. Again. And again. And again.

As the days pass, though, the tobacco industry is becoming more and more nervous, because they as strong as the addiction of tobacco might be, their addiction to money is stronger. They pressure the consultant to find a way to shoot down Eagle Rock’s dreams. As he and his hired guns descend on the town to find cheaters, they run into the town’s own proctors, a self-deluded bunch who spout anti-communist and anti-government slogans, even as a military man appears with offers of possible industry return to the heartland.

Amidst the frantic chasing after the material prize, led by the good Reverend, Mrs. Brooks finally reprimands her husband for being a monster, but to no effect, for to him the Good Book always has the answer that affirms his essential rightness in the world. There is no self-awareness here as the dash for the cash consumes them all.

In the climax, the abstaining smokers hungrily await the clanging of the town clock’s midnight hour, the industry’s fixer attempts to entice the smokers into indulging too soon, President Nixon shows up to announce Eagle Rock will become home to a missile manufacturing plant, the anti-communist old lady’s gun gets loose in the guise of a cigarette lighter and proceeds to shoot Doctor Proctor, Rev. Brooks, and one or two other people (with an admirable lack of blood and gore), and the town dog proceeds to pee all over the wounded Reverend.

Yeah, take a big breath.

The final scene? The new manufacturing plant, belching copious amounts of oily pollution into the clear blue sky from its four stacks, is negating the benefits of the recent campaign, as if Earth itself wants to poison itself in search of the tobacco buzz.

This sort of story is out of a tradition of satire with which I have a certain lack of sympathy. Characters are motivated, true, yet they’re more like wind-up toys than self-aware creatures. They’re set on their courses with little chance of correction coming from introspection. Does Rev Brooks ever wonder if the $25 million prize is more of this world than the next? No, not really. Desperation has set him off, a more prestigious posting is dangled in front of him if he succeeds, and he’s off and running.

And I shan’t deny there’s a certain social good in such satires. The ability to be introspective, to recognize and correct errors in one’s behavior, is an important part of being human. It may be the most important part. Demonstrating that its lack can lead to absurd consequences is important. But I don’t have a great deal of patience with it.

But if my reader has that taste, this is not a bad example of it. Or, if you like the cars of the 1950s and 60s, this is also not a bad film to watch, as there are a number of attractive examples.

I have little to remark upon specific to yesterday’s decision by a Texas Federal Court to dismember the ACA, because, after all, I’m not a lawyer and cannot follow the arguments. Non-severability? But according to conservative lawyer Ted Frank, this is a terrible ruling:

Not a fan of ACA or King v Burwell decision, and usually a fan of Texas, but this is an embarrassingly bad decision, and if a liberal judge had issued something like it goring a conservative ox, conservatives would be rightly up in arms. https://t.co/wv46QioLK2

— (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) December 15, 2018

But I think this will lead to some interesting fallout in two areas.

First, the inevitable appeals will give us common citizens a feel for how radical this Texas court judge, Judge O’Connor, may be. The general rumor is that he’s an extremist, and that’s why the plaintiffs in this suit filed in this court. As the appeals progress, it’ll illuminate whether or not this judge has a good understanding of the law, or not. This may even lead to scrutiny of this judge by relevant Congressional committees. A single decision is hardly a case upon which to build an impeachment, but a pattern of partisanship, i.e., abuse, may provide sufficient motivation. Such a proceeding needs great justification, however.

And, second, this potentially returns the pressure of a national health plan back onto the GOP. A large number of Americans will lose, or see diminished, their health care. These are folks who may have never had health care and took advantage of it when available, people living off of disability, all sorts of people who couldn’t afford it until the ACA was developed. And, concerning everyone outside the clan of the independently  wealthy, Steve Benen says the pre-existing condition clause, forbidding the refusal of health care coverage based on pre-existing conditions, will also go away.

Republicans filed the suit. Will the Democrats use this lawsuit’s results to hammer the Republicans in 2020? Eric Earling on conservative site The Resurgent thinks they will, and that the Republicans are not ready:

Health care is a top tier issue for both the public and private sector. Future health care agendas are essential for good governance moving forward.

So what’s the conservative solution?

You’re not going to dramatically reduce eligibility for Medicare or Medicaid. A Republican President, Senate, and House, couldn’t even make relatively incremental changes to an already comparatively incremental law in Obamacare without major political fallout. If you think simply cutting Medicare or Medicaid are political winners, I invite you to enjoy your extended time in the Congressional minority.

Yes, Medicare and Medicaid will definitely require reform, even as addressing the issue of Obamacare’s problematic impact on the affordability of individual market coverage for middle class consumers is still necessary as well. Yet, a clear lesson of recent electoral politics is Republicans don’t have the combination of a winning message and a winning policy solution for health care. Not even close.

The next two years see a split Congress, and it seems unlikely any major health care plans will be written that are acceptable to both bodies, much less President Desperate Trump in the White House. My vague understanding of the decision for the plaintiffs in yesterday’s result was the fact that the individual mandate penalty had been “zeroed” out during the passage of the 2017 Tax Change (it wasn’t a reform) bill. We may see the Democrats passing a bill in the House that reauthorizes the ACA by activating the individual mandate, thus invalidating the ruling, and then beating the GOP about the head and shoulders when the Senate refuses to pass the same bill. This will then be used for messaging purposes during the 2020 elections. The Republicans don’t believe in affordable health care. Why should you vote for them?

I suspect this lawsuit result for the Republicans is a fool’s Pyrrhic victory.

If you were a fan of the cable TV series Dead Like Me (2003-2004), you may have been disappointed that this whimsical series about the lives of a Grim Reaper squad, and the youngest member in particular, George, came to an end after only two fairly good seasons.

But you may not have heard that there was a movie sequel, Dead Like Me: Life After Death (2009). However, don’t let the fact that I’m mentioning it tempt you into running right to your TV and seeing it, because it’s inferior to the series.

First of all, Rube is gone, and the character who takes over as squad leader has the requisite accompanying mystery, but all the personal warmth of a squid wrapped around your face.

Second, the actress who played Daisy was replaced (due to other commitments), and her replacement simply didn’t have the same personal flair as did the original actress, Laura Harris, nor the chemistry that had been developed between Daisy and Mason. Most of the other supporting characters and their actors, including Reggie (but I’m not sure about Murray, who I always felt stole every scene in which he made an appearance), make return appearances.

But in the end, it came down to the story they were trying to tell. The charm of each episode of the series was the attempt to tackle a couple of problems in maturation, one applying to one or two of the squad of Grim Reapers, such as Daisy’s vanity, and one applying to a member of George’s now-grieving family. One can argue that the replacement of the squad leader, the primary problem in this movie, is another question of maturation, but it’s not handled in a manner that really inspires the proper reaction in the audience, and that’s because character logic broke down. Roxy, in her bring-in-living role as police officer, gets to meet and drink with the Police Commissioner, and when faced with her next reaping, saves the man instead. Why? Roxy was a strong by the rules character. No reason is given for her sudden change.

Delores and Mason really go nowhere, and Daisy has regressed. George cruises along, but reveals herself to her sister, Reggie, another big no-no.

But, worst of all, the directives from Upper Management, or whatever that entity might be called, are occasionally wrong. Is this deliberate miscommunication by the new squad leader? Something else? It’s never explained, not even hinted at, and while we could laugh at it as double-entendre deus ex machina, it’s deeply unsatisfying as a plot mechanism. The best plot mechanisms are organic to the characters and their situation, and this is like inserting a Predator into the movie and expecting it to make sense. Sure, there’d be a novelty element to a powerful creature discovering Reapers are unkillable, but so what?

Extremist apologist Hugh Hewitt thinks the pundit class is all wet when it comes to the threatened government shutdown and who will come out smelling like a rose – and perhaps he’s right.

A contrarian view is anchored by Gov. Doug Ducey’s (R-Ariz.) galloping victory in his reelection bid last month. Ducey talked about border security almost every day during his romp in “purple” Arizona. Not about illegal immigration, but always about border security and about keeping Americans safe from drugs, cartels and human trafficking.

Because more than 70,000 Americans died from overdoses in 2017, millions of people have at least brushed up against fentanyl or other opioids, and have often been terribly scarred by it. Some may know most of these killer drugs come via the mail, but they also know it flows like a vast river northward from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and with it mayhem and death. Border security isn’t about the “dreamers” or hard-working undocumented people living for decades in the United States. It’s about security. And Trump has declared he is for this security, is willing to engage in budget brinkmanship to obtain it, and is staking the first confrontation in a two-year battle with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on it.

WaPo

Certainly, this is a key worry for American communities. Still, I have my doubts as to Hewitt’s wisdom in the matter.

• Apologist. I said apologist for a reason. Hewitt wants to push the acquisition of two red state Senate seats as a resounding victory, while the truth of the matter is that the Democrats had far more on the line than did the Republicans in the Senate. Nor is the flipping of 40 or more House seats to the Democratic side of the aisle any small matter. I delved into this acute intellectual error more here. Further, the denial of the border wall has not been a matter of the Democrats refusing to cooperate, but of the entire GOP-dominated Congress, meaning even Trump’s allies see through this campaign promise as useless – but Hewitt elides the point. Why does all this matter? Because it tells the careful reader that this is a head feint, and the balance of his reasoning needs careful assessment.
• Transport. From what little research I could do (kidney stones surgery yesterday, I’m a little shaky), it does appear that illegal fentanyl mostly comes in from abroad, although some is manufactured domestically. However, even if the entire supply is coming in over the southern border, which seems unlikely in view of the report that Canada is experiencing similar problems and believes the drugs are coming in through West Coast Asian crime syndicates, it’s important to understand that drugs are easy to transport, and we have so many ports of entry, not to mention lightly guarded coast lines, that building a border wall will have little effect on the supply. Remember the drug submarines used by the Mexican drug cartels? They’ll just build and use those. And if Russia or China were to choose the back the drug suppliers? That’s not unprecedented, see the Opium Wars of the 1800s.
• Supply. Hewitt’s argument is that the supply of illegal drugs is the problem. Few economists will find this a reasonable argument, because the true driver is the demand. Demand, demand, demand, repeat it over and over and you soon realize that fentanyl is not the problem, it’s a symptom of a deeper malaise in our society. Whether it’s the inevitable stress of a society transitioning from the arbitrary strictures of divinities to reasoned debate concerning ethics, morality, and law, or the stress caused by manufacturing moving overseas, or the stress of a populace that often does not push itself intellectually and now finds itself in an international competition where intellect is the key to success, it needs to be explored. It may not be a resolvable matter, as sad as that makes me, but it’s important to realize that cutting supply does not eliminate the problem. It’ll be like squeezing an unpoppable balloon, the symptom will just reappear in some other form. The core problem, singular or plural, needs to be identified and, if possible, addressed.
• Trump’s Reputation. Trump’s poll numbers have reflected the lack of respect that most Americans have for the President (latest Gallup has approval at 40%, disapproval at 56%, and I view Gallup as fairly conservative). The fact of the matter is that Trump spews lies, boasts, and misleading statements at a truly astounding rate, as documented by many fact-checkers. Certainly, some portion of that 40% is made up of the Trump cultists, and they will swallow anything Trump wishes to claim concerning a government shutdown. Trump is playing to his base with this gamesmanship, and they’ll be four-square behind him. But will anyone else? More and more, Americans have learned to distrust their President to provide anything resembling leadership. From the lack of substantial response to the Khashoggi outrage to tariff wars, they’re realizing that Trump is not driven by an urge to make the country better – but to enrich himself.

So how should Democrats play this? I think they could use the above as the kernel of a game plan. Emphasize the problem is not supply, but demand, and suggest that we need to explore why so many people are numbing themselves to their lives. Make this a mental health problem, not a drug problem.

And then use the phrase The Trump Boondoggle to fix in folks’ minds that this is a waste of taxpayer’s money.

The drama in Maine has a fine punctuation mark in which U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker, a Trump appointee, has rebuffed the lawsuit brought by Representative Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) concerning his loss in the mid-terms and the use of ranked-choice voting in that election:

U.S. District Court Judge Lance Walker ruled that, contrary to the arguments of Poliquin’s legal team, the U.S. Constitution does not require that congressional elections be decided by “a plurality” of votes. Instead, Walker wrote that the Constitution grants states discretion to decide how to run elections, including whether to require the type of runoff elections triggered by Maine’s ranked-choice voting law.

“To the extent that the Plaintiffs call into question the wisdom of using RCV, they are free to do so but . . . such criticism falls short of constitutional impropriety,” Walker wrote. “A majority of Maine voters have rejected that criticism and Article I (of the U.S. Constitution) does not empower this Court to second guess the considered judgment of the polity on the basis of the tautological observation that RCV may suffer from problems, as all voting systems do.”

Press-Herald

The hand-recount continues, but it appears that challenger Jared Golden (D-ME) will emerge the victor.

While some may be amazed that a Trump-appointed judge ruled against a Republican, it’s worth noting that Judge Walker was recommended not only by Senator Collins (R-ME), but also Senator Angus King (I-ME, caucuses with the Democrats), and has prior judicial experience. Given the number of judicial seats the Republicans had recalcitrantly held open over the Obama years, and Trump’s lack of serious interest in such nominations, I think it’s inevitable that some good nominees will also leak through. Walker may be one of those.

Whether Poliquin will appeal is not known.

While I appreciate that this article must be brought into existence, I certainly wish the title CNN had assigned it had better reflected the substance of the article. The title CNN assigned it?

Senator purchased stock in defense contractor after pushing for more military spending

The content of the article?

Republican Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee, purchased thousands of dollars in defense stock after successfully pushing the Trump administration for more Defense Department spending.

Sounds terrible enough. But wait, there’s more!

Inhofe’s communications director Leacy Burke told CNN in a statement that “the senator was not aware of this stock purchase until it came through the system very early this morning.”

“All of Sen. Inhofe’s financial transactions are handled by a third-party adviser,” Burke said. “The senator has had no involvement in and has not been consulted about his stock transactions.”

Burke said that Inhofe told his financial adviser to reverse the transaction once he was aware.

To my sleep-sodden brain this is a reasonable scenario, a financial advisor not quite understanding how this all works. The Senator reversed the transaction immediately.

It’s important that these articles be published as a warning to ethically challenged members of Congress, but I have to deplore the title.

It is worth exploring why Inhofe is even aware of the stock purchase at all, since it’s within the realm of possibility that a committee chairman, given knowledge about the activities of his financial advisor, could manipulate government business to his own benefit.

Now, if there’d been a mention of the FBI investigating the Senator for corruption, the title’d make sense. But, so far as I can see, he’s just a Republican Senator who has a notorious connection to the climate denialists. I doubt he’ll be spoken well of in future history books because of that, and his membership in the current Congressional class.

But it’s no reason to use a misleading title on this article.

Paleontologists recently announced a new find, as Sci-News reports:

Named Lisowicia bojani, the ancient creature belongs to Dicynodontia (dicynodonts), a group of plant-eating, mammal-like reptiles.

“Dicynodonts were among the most abundant and diverse synapids — early four-legged land vertebrates that gave rise to modern-day mammals — from the middle Permian (around 299 to 251 million years ago) to the early Late Triassic (around 237 million years ago),” said Dr. Tomasz Sulej from Poland’s Institute of Paleobiology and Dr. Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki of Uppsala University.

“Fossils of Triassic dicynodonts are extremely abundant in African, Asian, and North and South Americans deposits but are comparatively poorly known from the other regions like Europe.”

Mammal-like reptiles, wish I knew a thing or three about cladistics. The remark might make more sense then.

At 9 tons mass, though, they would have been a bit of a bite for most predators.

This NWI.com article concerning a request by various civil society organizations to SCOTUS to continue constraining the implementation of an Indiana anti-abortion law brought something to mind.

Two Hoosier organizations committed to preserving the right of women to choose abortion are urging the U.S. Supreme Court to let stand two lower court rulings that invalidated portions of Indiana’s 2016 abortion law, enacted by then-Gov. Mike Pence.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana (ACLU) and Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky (PPINK) this week told the nation’s high court it should reject the state’s petition, filed in October by Republican Attorney General Curtis Hill Jr., that asks the Supreme Court to allow House Enrolled Act 1337 to take effect.

The law mandates that any pregnant woman who is motivated to obtain an abortion after learning her child will be born, or potentially born, with Down syndrome, another genetic disease or physical deformities that aren’t immediately lethal, to instead carry the pregnancy to term and give birth.

The statute also prohibits women from procuring an abortion due to the gender, race, color, national origin or ancestry of the fetus.

Let’s be honest: anti-abortion laws are, by and large, religiously motivated. Let’s even be more explicit – the primary religion are those sects that make up much of American Christianity these days.

When the United States, a secular nation, creates laws, they are not supposed to favor any particular religion, either by conferring power on a sect or group thereof, or by being sensible of their preferences. This is why we talk about Government interests, which is shorthand for If individuals are permitted to make decisions in this area unhindered, will this have a severely negative impact on society. Most current non-controversial laws can be seen as falling under this rubric. Consider laws against most homicides, which converts homicide to murder. Clearly, a society in which someone can kill you without official sanction leads to a society of paranoia, lacking that cohesion necessary to a vibrant and productive society.

Such societies are easy prey for other societies.

This is the bar over which anti-abortion advocates need to jump, and so far their hurdling capabilities have proven inadequate to the task. The facts of the matter is that many women, when pregnant, welcome their new family members happily, and when a miscarriage occurs, they are devastated. Second, we’re vastly overpopulated as it is. Third, a fetus is not a human, not yet. If a woman assesses her situation and believes a child, especially a disabled child, is not appropriate to her situation, aborting a fetus is a reasonable response. Raising a family in abject poverty benefits no one but the religious fanatic who won the argument to have a law against abortion.

But while I was reading the NWI.com article concerning the anti-abortion law, it occurred to me to wonder if there are even further arguments to be made against it. Consider: a number of societies around the world, some into the modern era, have practiced infanticide, the killing of infants, for a variety of reasons.

It’s not unreasonable to suggest infanticide is a cousin to abortion, so let me suggest that it’s also reasonable to conceive of a religion which made it not only acceptable, but even required to occasionally utilize abortion. It’s a religious precept.

So what would such a religious practicioner do in Indiana if that law was freed of the constraints imposed by the courts? Clearly, our hypothetical practicioner’s religious freedoms have been trampled by the American Christians who led the charge against abortion. How should SCOTUS respond to such a lawsuit, especially in the face of a finding that there is no overriding governmental interest?

Now, there may be interesting exceptions, such as not permitting abortions based on gender. If this is puzzling, see this New York Times article on the social unrest caused by Indian infanticide of female infants. But, in general, I see the anti-abortion laws as foolish.

My Arts Editor and I have been watching the old sci-fi series Babylon 5, and we’ve noted that some of its insights into the moral corruption of those seeking power on Earth have had chilling parallels to the activities we see in today’s American government and, particularly, the tactics of such organizations such as the Night Watch and its emphasis on loyalty to the government (vs Earth), compared to that of the GOP’s first loyalty to its President, rather than to the United States. Another facet has been the disregard for the truth, the willingness to say anything to get and keep power.

I agree with Steve Benen when he says,

Republicans who want to wait for additional information have taken a somewhat defensible posture. I’m not sure what more they want to know, but “we’ll just have to wait and see” isn’t crazy.

But willful apathy about allegations that the sitting president is a criminal is awfully difficult to defend.

But I think it’s explainable. Trump and his ilk are, almost by definition, emerging from the same social matrix as the GOP Senators and Representatives, and to a great extent he’s using the same tactics and intellectual practices that they have used, with the key difference that he’s never recognized limitations. Where they’ve stretched truths, he’s indulged in brazen lies; where they’ve dog-whistled very carefully, he stuck his entire hand in his mouth to summon the repugnant white supremacists and their various cousins.

If they choose to reject Trump, they also reject themselves. Instinctively, they won’t go there quietly. Some are asking for more information, which is a delaying tactic which may turn into a hand grenade for those using it, but it’s a reasonable response. Newsweek reports, however, that retiring Senator Hatch (R-UT) has decided to respond with the classic end justifies the means excuse:

CNN reporter Manu Raju revealed in a series of tweets on Monday that Hatch—a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee and retiring Utah Republican—said “President Trump before he became president is another world. Since he’s become president this economy has charged ahead… And I think we ought to judge him on that basis.”

It’s evident that Senator Hatch has entered his dotage and hit utterances shouldn’t be accorded any further respect. However, I don’t doubt that the morally downfallen GOP is all set to line up behind that excuse. What will happen, however, if we were to then enter a recession?

One of the repetitious lessons of history is that the “how” we get somewhere is at least as important as that “somewhere” is itself. The GOP seems to be desperately ignoring that dictum, but I suspect this is going to be seen by historians as simply throwing gasoline on the flames that eventually will burn the GOP to the ground.

Panopticon:

Jeremy Bentham‘s ideas on how the greatest happiness principle should be applied were not always well-conceived. Bentham spent much of his time and fortune on designs for the Panopticon. The Panopticon (“all-seeing”) was a prison. It was designed to allow round-the-clock surveillance of the inmates by their superintendent. Bentham’s intention was humanitarian; but penitentiaries are not the best advertisement for a utilitarian ethic.

The Panopticon, Utilitarianism.com

Noted in “Green Christmas: How to have an ethical and guilt-free festive season,” Alice Klein and Chelsea Whyte, NewScientist (1 December 2018, paywall):

An extension of the ever-watchful threat is the Elf on the Shelf, a figurine that some parents place in their house that is said to be reporting to the North Pole like some kind of festive CCTV – [ethicist H. Peter] Steeves likens it to a panopticon.

Here’s a new way to track visitors to your website, as noted in NewScientist (24 November 2018, paywall):

The tool works by measuring subtle but unique differences in the way the quartz crystal in a computer’s clock behaves compared with crystals in other computers. These differences affect how quickly websites are processed by a computer, so they act as a digital fingerprint for a device.

When 300 volunteers made a one-off visit to a website using the tool, it could uniquely fingerprint around half of them. When combined with other techniques that measure how a computer processes a web site’s graphics, 80 per cent of devices could be identified.

“Our technique is far more reliable and practical than any existing fingerprinting technique,” says Sanchez-Rola. His team presented the tool at the recent ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security in Toronto, Canada.

So now I suppose browsers are going to have to offer an option for varying how quickly they process websites.

This what I call goofy shit.

In the United States, citizens often have a less than favorable view of the local utilities, whether it be the phone system or the power grid. I think it has a  lot to do with impingements on private property for utility right-of-ways, less than punctual service, and sometimes a perception that – in a capitalist country! – they’re in it for the money. I try not to get all het up about the utilities, but I see it around me.

So it was a nice local change of pace to see Ilana Strauss’ article on Treehugger:

For the first time in American history, a major utility company declared to dive fully into clean energy. Xcel Energy, a major utility company based out of Minneapolis, just pledged to go completely carbon-free.

“Our biggest energy source in a few short years is going to be renewable energy. We’re going to absolutely integrate as much of that as we can into the grid,” said Ben Fowke, Xcel’s CEO. That means more solar, more wind and less coal, among other changes. …

The company says it’ll be 80 percent carbon-free in 2030 and 100 percent in 2050.

It’s good, if inadequate, news for those customers who understand the seriousness of climate change. I hope Xcel will lay out a plan for achieving this goal. From Xcel’s publicly available information on electricity generation:

I doubt they’ll construct any more nuclear power plants, as they are expensive and tend to overrun cost estimates, and the environmentalists tend to be against them – although there has been significant dissent on that point. I would prefer Xcel not follow Germany’s lead and shut down its nuclear power plants unless they have significant physical vulnerabilities, until sufficient clean energy resources are available to replace the nuclear sources of power. In the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011, Germany began shuttering its nuclear power plants, and I worry that this is adding to the CO₂ in the atmosphere. However, finding solid estimates from reputable sources isn’t working so well this morning. I do see Environmental Progress has a chart for 2016:

Another article on Environmental Progress (EP) suggests nuclear power may be the right choice:

California and Germany could have mostly or completely decarbonized their electricity sectors had their investments in renewables been diverted instead to new nuclear, a new Environmental Progress analysis finds.

I’ve been unable to find anything to suggest EP is a nuclear power plant front, at least so far. I’d not go so far as to suggest further investment in nuclear power is a proper choice, but it may be worth considering; certainly, retention of current Xcel nuclear sources until other, more immediate sources of climate change gasses have been eliminated from their sources makes far more sense than the German approach, again absent significant physical vulnerabilities in those nuclear sources.