Monthly Archives: January 2019

Epigone:

A less distinguished follower or imitator of someone, especially an artist or philosopher.
‘the humdrum compositions of some of Beethoven’s epigones’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

From “Why do people such as Lindsey Graham come to Congress?” George F. Will, WaPo:

[Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)], who is just 1 percent of one-half of one of the three branches of one of the nation’s many governments, is, however, significant as a symptom. When the Trump presidency is just a fragrant memory, the political landscape will still be cluttered with some of this president’s simple and empty epigones, the make-believe legislators who did not loudly and articulately recoil from the mere suggestion of using a declared emergency to set aside the separation of powers.

Whatever you think of Will’s opinions, you gotta love his word choices.

CNN is reporting that Pelosi is victorious in the State of the Union tug of war:

In his latest skirmish with Pelosi, Trump effectively admitted defeat late Wednesday and conceded that he would not be able to give his State of the Union address until after the shutdown ends. Earlier in the day, he had publicly thrown down a gauntlet and tried to force the speaker to back down over her refusal to let next Tuesday’s showpiece speech take place in the House chamber.

Pelosi’s victory came ahead of a pair of Senate votes due to take place on Thursday on dueling Republican and Democratic plans designed to end the shutdown. Neither is likely to break the deadlock, and may simply underline that Trump’s hopes of a win remain slim.

The President is trying hard to reshape a political battlefield that is stacked against him, as sources suggest he is increasingly mystified that his tactics have not turned the tables on Democrats. Throughout his life, in business and in politics, Trump has leveraged his domineering personality, flair for showmanship and an unshakable self-belief that often defies the facts of a situation to get his way.

I’m wary of declaring quick victory in political spats like this one. Experienced politicians who are full of bitterness, rather than wisdom, sometimes lie in wait for another go at the victor, reducing the battleground to rubble.

But whoever wrote that Trump is “mystified” (the article has multiple authors) seems to be in line with my thinking on the matter. With no invidious comparison meant, Trump’s story arc, from entering the Republican Presidential nomination process to today, has a strong resemblance to Adolf Hitler’s. No, I’m not saying there is any moral correspondence between the two, but rather a tactical correspondence. Hitler recognized that the traditional military approach to invading France, which would be a costly long grind against the Maginot Line, or wall, would be costly; but using what we came to know as blitzkrieg tactics (fast moving air, tank, and infantry tactics), then only tested in a limited way during the Spanish Civil War., would be effective. His war tactical insights, in combination with a German population that was, to a substantial extent, deeply resentful of their diminished position in the world due to the foolishness of Kaiser Wilhelm II and, just as importantly, the punitive Versailles Treaty, and led by a man possessing a modicum of charisma and a willingness to feed their egos as well as alleviate their economic distress, led to his early successes.

Similarly, Trump’s daring tactical insights during the Republican nominating process, based on his recognition that the small towns and rural areas of America felt disrespected, neglected, and were in economic distress, distinguished him from the more conventional field. It didn’t hurt that, despite media reports that the Republicans had a “deep bench”, they were by and large a pack of power-grasping second- and third-raters, with the possible exception of Governor Kasich of Ohio. Their general anti-Obama-anything message and little differentiation in message, accomplishments, or personality made them relatively easy prey for Trump, because he was willing to say things that rode the line on xenophobia. He would tell any lie that would conform to the personal conceptions of his target voters, whether it be xenophobia, their perception of being patronized by the “bit big city folks” (the progressive wing of the liberals didn’t help matters), or a perception that crime was sky-high under Obama, rather than the FBI’s report that crime was reaching historic low points. On that latter point, as ever, local information is more important to most folks than comprehensive information, i.e., the senses out-vote the intellect.

We engage in analogies in order to draw conclusions, and the better the initial conditions of an analogy are in correspondence, the more believable the predicted conclusion. At this point, it’s worth meditating on a point of this analogy concerning norms. Aggressive war is a wholesale violation of those norms that recognize peace as a more probable path to prosperity and enrichment, while and aggressive war, with all of its moral violations, is repudiated by moral personalities, within established norms. But those established norms had failed the German people. They faced rampant inflation and a failing economy – obviously, something was wrong. And Hitler, who had witnessed and survived the horrors of World War I (the ‘Great War’), was willing to transgress those norms and lead them towards what he claimed would be a return to glory, paved as it was with the bodies of the Jews, the Allies, and, as it turned out, their own military.

The Trumpists display a similar hunger for breaking norms, although there are notable differences. In the governmental arena, Trump and his aides have long displayed a tendency to ignore and damage norms that has been delineated by anyone who values them, including myself, and my long time readers are aware of this, so I shall not belabor the point. For his supporters, the norms are not as strong as those for peace. Gay marriage, transgendering, and other social issues, which are notably recent breaks from traditional American morality, are used to gather up the Trump voter, not a hunger for war, and given their recent debuts as norms, they’ve not necessarily been accepted by the Trumpists. There are similar scenarios of economic distress, and in this the analogy’s correspondence is stronger. However, the corresponding true cause of the German economic depression, which was the past war and the Versailles Treaty, has as its corresponding motivation free (that is, governmentally unconstrained) trade, far better and economically (if not environmentally) cheaper transport mechanisms, and a better information mechanism; it’s significant that the Trumpists have not raised significant principled objections to the trade wars or modifications to NAFTA, and, if they do, they do not remain Trumpists.

I’d also argue that, like many people, the Trumpists have dug in their heels on economic as well as social change. They want to believe that change cannot happen to them, that change is bad. Just consider the coal workers who have continued along in the industry long after its glory days have been consigned to the dust-bin of history. They consider it a a deeply ‘honorable’ occupation, even though it’s terribly polluting and contributes heavily to climate change – which is then denied by those miners. ‘Clean coal’ is trotted out, but this is a myth, according to experts, and even Senator McConnell (R-KY), an industry ally, admits the industry is finished in a free market. Only government interference, anathema to Republicans, can save it, and indeed this has been attempted, but has not yet been emplaced as an actual government policy.

The Germans, on the other hand, wanted, even needed change, under the weight of the Versailles Treaty. The Trumpists violently reject change, and Trump is their standard bearer. So there are differences in the substance of the two subjects, but in the end they may not be terribly significant changes.

I’ll omit the comparisons of the reactions of world leaders, prior to Churchill’s ascension to leadership of Britain, to Hitler’s moves, to those of the Republican establishment and, to a lesser degree, the Democratic establishment. Suffice to say the shock at the abrogation of norms is similar.

But it’s worth noting when Hitler failed. After the successful implementation of the blitzkrieg against France and the Low Countries, isolating Great Britain from the rest of the world, and the partition of Poland, Hitler then attacked Russia, his ally of convenience and the rock upon which the ship of Nazi Germany would founder. He was a fool to do so; he might have forced a peace at this moment, instead, and avoided the imminent entry of America of war, not to mention the disastrous siege of Stalingrad which essentially broke Germany. He was a fool and demonstrated his amateurism, as his generals had long warned him not to go into Russia. He then descended into madness, believing that destroyed armies still existed, and sending them orders that could not be executed. Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt hemmed him in and he finally failed.

Trump has had his successes, but in Pelosi he has met an experienced political warrior, unencumbered by the demands of the Trumpists, and he may have met that defeat that heralds his eventual removal from power. He’s ‘mystified’, they claim in the above report, and this is consistent with the amateur who has tried to ride his initial tactical insight to continuing success and power. He lacks the wisdom to recognize how to maneuver in waters strange to him, and, assuming what works in his old world will work in the new, now looks like a weak old man in his mistake. It’ll be an interesting challenge for his propagandists and apologists to rationalize this failure.

Onwards to analogical conclusions, then. While there’s little enough to say about the general disaster that befell Germany, it’s worth noting that examination of the individuals involved in leading Germany down this path, whether or not the Versailles Treaty made it inevitable, reveals personalities driven by greed, hatred, and even insanity. Whether the name was Hitler, Goering, Hess, or a host of others, their belief that the old norms against theft, rape, and large-scale murder did not apply to them is notable. The Trumpists, while not matching the Nazis in sheer magnitude of norm abrogation, have committed some notable transgressions, such as those of separating families at the border. Will Trump and his movement end up on trial and be condemned, in some sense of the word? That remains to be seen.

For the moment, the drama will continue.

Sometimes Watson, on the left, could be so sweet with Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes And The Deadly Necklace (1962) is a sloppy, substandard entry into the Sherlock Holmes canon. It was made originally in English, and then dubbed in English with voices that don’t always match the faces. What were they thinking?

But, worse yet, while it’s derived from an authentic Holmes story, the derivation is distant, at best, and it is not clever. Instead, it’s about the ephemeral tension of a Holmes hunting Professor Moriarty hunting Holmes, and while that’s fun and all, it doesn’t match up well with the best the canon can offer.

Add in that Watson is once again a buffoon of little real interest, and this one’s a dud.

Readers react to my suggested counter-offer for the Democrats in the wake of President Trump’s feeble offer:

Agreed 100%. This, or something very similar, ought to be sent to (and read by) every Democrat in Congress.

I had not seriously considered sending that one off to my reps. Maybe I should. Aaaand done, McCollum, Klobuchar, Smith. Another:

The poor liberals under their lousy leadership can’t even come up with a responsible reason not to sit down and negotiate the situation. If they think their going to get the President to open the government before they settle the border situation they have some more bad news coming their way, The Trump hate train is slowly going off the tracks and just maybe things will get a little more positive as far as the press goes,

Let’s look at the situation objectively. What did President Trump do, or more properly what was he manipulated into doing? To borrow a phrase, he took the government hostage and demanded that he be given all $5.7 billion he had requested, or he wouldn’t sign any legislation. Not a reduced amount, not other offers, simply Gimme everything I want or I’ll pout and whine and whimper about it!

In his latest offer, he finally progressed a little beyond that, with a temporary 3 year extension of the right to stay in the United States for “Dreamers,” aka the DACA program . Unfortunately for him, SCOTUS did not choose to listen to his appeal of a lower court ruling that his remaindering of DACA was illegal, so that offer turns out to be nothing:

The Supreme Court is not likely to review during its current term the program that shields young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children, leaving in place the Obama-era initiative that the Trump administration has tried to end.

The justices on Tuesday took no action on the administration’s request that it review the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which has protected nearly 700,000 people brought to this country as children, commonly known as “dreamers.”

If the court sticks to its normal procedures, that would mean that even if it accepts the case as a later date, it would not be argued until the new term starting in October, with a decision likely in 2020. [WaPo]

It is quite plausible to state that the liberals, who have been the responsible financial guardians of the government for something like the last quarter century, have once again stepped up to the plate to safeguard government finances, which is to say, my readers’ tax-money. I have stated numerous times that it does not appear the wall would be effective in stopping illegal immigrants or drugs, while the $5B is really just the beginning, not the ending of such funding.

But on a more fundamental level, this use of government shutdowns really needs to stop. This one was brought on by a Republican President; the others by Republican Congress, all as demands for this, that, and the other thing. Rather than continuing to pursue irrational policies at the expense of the public, we need to step away from this nuclear weapon of an approach to policy making and return to sanity. This time the Democrats, the liberals, appear to be the sane ones, but I don’t put it past them to do the same thing in pursuit of a pet insanity of their own.

And I don’t like that idea.

So I think the Democrats, having pinned this rightfully on Trump, who helped them along by taking gleeful responsibility for a potential shutdown just prior to causing it, are going about it mostly right. Public polling, last I heard, agreed as more than half the electorate blames Trump and the Republicans, and does not want to fund any wall. I just ran across this from WaPo:

Recent polling indicates that the government shutdown has caused skittishness among parts of Trump’s base, which has been one of the most enduring strengths of his presidency. An NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, conducted Jan. 10 to Jan. 13, found that his net approval rating had dropped seven points since December.

One of the biggest declines came among suburban men, whose approval rating of Trump fell a net 18 percentage points, while support from evangelicals and Republicans dipped by smaller margins. Among men without a college degree, the downward change was seven points.

We may be seeing the inevitable pendulum that comes from The grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Now that the Trump voters are beginning to suspect it’s all crab grass and poison ivy, they’re slipping away – at least those who aren’t too heavily emotionally invested in him.

Sure, Pelosi and Schumer, or other Democrats, could screw this up, but right now they have their spurs in Trump’s flanks fairly securely, and Trump is showing himself to be poor at flinging off riders when he’s not the one in a commanding position. Time will tell, but right now the smart money is on the Democrats, just as I’ve said before. Pelosi’s forgotten more about politics than Trump has ever learned.

I recently began Professor Peter Turchin’s War and Peace and War: The Rise And Fall Of Empires (2006), and while I’m only a couple of chapters into it, one of his early themes is the importance of asabiya, which

… refers to the capacity of a social group for concerted collective action. [p. 6]

In other words, cooperation, generally in the face of an external threat. Contrariwise, hinted at in the introduction is that the Fall part of the title comes about as divisions appear and are nurtured within the empire. Whether they’re about power or some superfluous definition of Other or, more precisely, the degenerate, they churn the empire and end up breaking it – or so it appears in my early meeting.

Keeping this in mind and noting that the United States is certainly a variety of empire, the actions of President Trump with regard to transgendered military personnel and aspirants certainly falls into the category of division, wouldn’t you say? Defining some Americans as degenerate and denying them the opportunity to serve the country, along with the direct damage done to units dependent on their skills, also damages the country in that it sows dissension and emphasizes what makes us different and labels it as somehow wrong. It’s long been true that often our differences strengthen, rather than weaken us, because, despite the bald exceptions such as the racism displayed in the two World Wars, we’ve learned to ignore the differences that don’t matter, and embrace each other.

Trump’s embrace of the white nationalists, his failure to condemn Rep. King following the latter’s remarks in favor of white nationalism, and now his attacks on American transgendered military personnel and aspirants may just be the cloying maneuvers of a President trying to preserve the political allegiance of a bloc of Americans who’ve lost their moral path, i.e., the evangelical movement, but it’s also congruent with the theory that President Trump is an asset of a foreign power who understands that American ascendancy is dependent on Americans clearly seeing what matters and what doesn’t. By dividing Americans on such trivial grounds due to the demands of an increasingly irrelevant and repellent religious group, our ability to pursue our goals is decreased, and our reputation crumbles in the eyes of the world. Except, of course, Russia.

It’s important to understand that the SCOTUS ruling today is a technical ruling concerning whether or not the Trump Administration may pursue implementation of their anti-transgendered policy while the appeals courts continue to wend their way through the Trump Administration appeal of lower court ruling that the policy is illegal. They rejected some other Administration requests, and therefore we’ll still await the appeals courts ruling, and the inevitable SCOTUS appeal. Let’s hope SCOTUS doesn’t bow to the cries of the irrationally intolerant.

The idea of synchronized dancing came after these folks left Atlantis for a moon of Jupiter.

It’s so hard to know where to start with Fire Maidens from Outer Space (1956). Meaningless, lingering shots on a secretary going up and down a staircase. A trip to Jupiter’s system that takes only three weeks, implying fabulous technology, yet they’re surprised by a meteor shower during takeoff (and those are big honkin’ meteors!)? Five guys on this expedition who can apparently withstand liftoff and landing while seated in their office chairs?

A single switch that appears to control everything from the magnetic gyro to the engines? OK, we’ll allow that the radio seemed to use a different set of switches.

And then … the Fire Maidens! Who were immediately pronounced by our Arts Editor as “not that attractive, really,” and, yeah, she’s right. Later on she remarked they “walked funny.” Oh, and the dancing, oh the dancing. Yeccccch. As there were ten or more of them for the crew of five, it was a bit of a flock, yet, in retrospect, I’m now wondering if there’s a word for a group of, well, preying mantises. Not that they consumed any of the crew, it was just their attitude.

Answer: he’s an escapee from the next studio lot. He can’t be hurt by guns shooting blanks, and grenades merely startle him. But the shrieking of the Fire Maidens does hurt his feelings.

And how the hell did this group move from Earth to Jupiter when Atlantis sank into the sea? Why didn’t they just return by the same means? And what’s this awful creature that menaces them? He never is explained.

And there’s more. And more. I can’t imagine why my Arts Editor wanted to see this dud.

My commentary on the Shutdown Showdown attracted some reader comments:

Good points. Keep in mind Pelosi is second in line to the presidency. Could this be posturing to establish the legitimacy of her leadership qualifications and style?

I doubt it. I think Pelosi excels as Speaker of the House, and she knows it. Some politicians simply have blind ambition to reach the highest political office, but some are more interested in making substantial contributions, rather than sit in the big chair and discover you ain’t God after all. My reader continues:

My inclination is to give 45 his $5.7 billion for border security but attach so many codices that he would be hamstrung on using any of it to fund a wall. The mere logistics of wall along the entire southern border would involve years, perhaps decades, to complete. The design, engineering, land acquisition, bidding, material sourcing, contract letting, and other considerations will extend far beyond 2020 when, I hope to god, 45 will have faded to obscurity or find himself a resident of some federal gray-bar hotel.

Yeah, no snapping the fingers and having it done.

Another reader:

He never said he was going to build a solid wall the entire length of the border as I recall. There are facts to prove the wall where it is in place has reduced illegals from coming over the border.

I think, at least in his early days, he sort of implied a wall from ocean to ocean, but I also think it started out as a symbolic remark that was more meant to attract undecided voters than be an actual, tangible promise. Once it became clear that the wall was a touchstone for his supporters, I seem to remember him admitting that certain natural features would function just fine as obstacles on their own.

All that said, the totality of his remarks concerning the wall come out to be a big, fat zero. The midterm caravan that was just about to breach our borders and invade us, but ended up peacefully at a port of entry; the criminal gangs flooding in over the border; the flood of drugs coming over the border will be stopped by a wall; illegal immigrants have higher crime rates; illegal immigrants take jobs away from Americans; and that the wall will stop illegal immigrants in their tracks. The rest have proven lies; is the last as well?

There’s no denying that smugglers do smuggle people over the border. But most come through ports of entry in rigs; those who don’t come through those ports are running significant safety risks, ranging from rape by the smugglers, to death from human or environmental factors. But will a wall somehow stop them? Will the immense cost of a wall, which Trump initially estimated at $25B and those with actual expertise estimate at closer to $50B, really be worth it? Or should we continue to use border agents and invest in these nations to help them stabilize their economies and do whatever else is necessary to make those countries worth staying in? This graph is slightly out of date but I think helps aid thought on the matter, and is from Pew Research:

The illegal immigration rate for Mexicans has dropped quite a lot since 2000, if we’re willing to take arrests by the Border Patrol as a reasonable proxy for illegal immigration in general, without Trump’s wall, but due to Obama policies. Does this drop invalidate the need for a wall? I think it does. As I’ve stated elsewhere, I think the entire wall idea is short-sighted and a very bad investment.

I’ve occasionally discussed the social factors of higher college tuition, which, to summarize, conservatives and libertarians prefer as this moves the costs of education onto the student, who they see as directly benefiting from that education, and thus should be responsible for covering the cost. My view, which I may not have stated quite this succinctly before, is that the benefits to society of an educated populace, both in vocational training (targeted training) and in liberal arts (the ability to think effectively), are such that a good conservative or libertarian should, on principle, require that society subsidize the costs of such training. The rationale that the student’s immediate benefit is substantially more is only accepted because measuring the value to society of an educated citizen is far more difficult than conducting a statistical study of the earnings potential of a medical doctor or a plumber.

Just because you can’t measure the value of something, or even understand the proper metric to use, doesn’t mean value doesn’t exist. To my mind, living in a society in which only the wealthy can afford the education which can make them wealthier is completely unacceptable and un-American. By the evidence, many people agree with me: witness the educational grant and scholarship communities (but not the educational loan community, which exists purely for profit).

But another cost of our current style of requiring students to pay more than substantial amounts for their education, of which I’ve never considered before, is the emotional burden it places on the student. Consider the study, “Suicide among veterinarians in the United States from 1979 through 2015“, Suzanne Tomasi, DVM, MPH, et al, Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association. From the abstract:

398 deaths resulted from suicide; 326 (82%) decedents were male, 72 (18%) were female, and most (298 [75%]) were ≤ 65 years of age. The PMRs [proportionate mortality ratios] for suicide for all veterinarian decedents (2.1 and 3.5 for males and females, respectively), those in clinical positions (2.2 and 3.4 for males and females, respectively), and those in nonclinical positions (1.8 and 5.0 for males and females, respectively) were significantly higher than for the general US population. Among female veterinarians, the percentage of deaths by suicide was stable from 2000 until the end of the study, but the number of such deaths subjectively increased with each 5-year period. …

Male and female veterinarians who worked in clinical positions had higher than expected PMRs for suicide. One potential contributing factor associated with this finding is exposure to occupational stressors. Veterinarians working in clinical medicine, particularly companion animal medicine, are exposed to high levels of occupational stress related to long working hours, client expectations, unexpected outcomes, communicating bad news, poor work-life balance, high workloads, rising veterinary care costs, professional isolation, student debt, and lack of senior support.

These stressors, in turn, can negatively effect the work of the veterinarians, so it’s a self-reinforcing problem.

Of course, a cold-blooded statistical study can fail to impart the proper momentum to an issue on its way to a possible appropriate, if partial, resolution. WaPo provides an antidote:

On a brisk fall evening in Elizabeth City, N.C., Robin Stamey sat in her bed and prepared to take her own life. …

The path to rock bottom was an unexpected one for Stamey. A chipper animal lover who went back to school at age 36 to pursue her lifelong dream of becoming a veterinarian, she had previously worked in a few small clinics before eventually opening her own.

Pulling this off wasn’t easy; Stamey graduated from veterinary school with more than $180,000 in student debt. Her first vet jobs paid about $40,000 a year, forcing her to work long hours to scrape together enough money to get by.

These financial troubles were compounded by the strains of the job, which is known for taking immense emotional, physical and mental tolls on its professionals. But like many people who work in medicine, Stamey had always thought of herself as a caretaker and was afraid to ask for help. Instead, she swallowed her frustrations and soldiered on, ignoring the creeping depression that began to cast a shadow over her life and her work.

$180,000 in debt. That’s a lot, and yet for many of the top professionals, it’s not particularly high. I came out with no debt, and about $50 to my name – but that was 35 years ago, it was a Bachelor of Computer Science, not a DVM, and I had some help from my parents. I probably should have been more adventurous and run up some debt in the process.

But don’t let me get off-point here. When our professionals are so burdened with debt that they can’t hardly hope to live in the cheapest apartments available, does that presage positive or negative outcomes for society in connection with those professions? Are such educational debts really desirable?

And is society really benefiting in its frantic urge to reduce taxes by moving the costs for its own benefit on to the students, when society as a whole actually benefits from it? This is societal cheapskating, and while I understand that many consider the taxes onerous, it’s my contention that those individuals who benefit from higher education contribute far more to society than those taxes they consume.

If you’re in charge of soliciting donations for a charity, you may want to consider this:

The researchers sent letters to more than 12,000 alumni asking them to donate to [Harvard University].

The letters started with one of two sets of words to appeal for their support: “Sometimes, one person needs to come forward and take individual action” or “Sometimes, one community needs to come forward and support a common goal”.

Among the 4 per cent who donated, those who received the message that focused on individual action gave an average of $432. In contrast, those who got the more community-minded appeal contributed $270 on average (PLoS One, doi.org/cx4m).

Thus demonstrating the power of individual marketing. It’d be even more interesting to characterize a collection of schools based on the strength of the various academic departments, and then repeat the above study on each school. How the results vary across schools might be instructive.

When toads go for a ride on a python?

The Guardian reports:

A huge storm in Australia’s north on Sunday flushed out a sight which either fascinated or horrified those who saw it – 10 cane toads riding the back of a 3.5m python. …

“The lake was so full it had filled the cane toad burrows around the bank and they were all sitting on top of the grass – thousands of them,” he told Guardian Australia.

“He was in the middle of the lawn, making for higher ground.”

“He” was Monty, a 3.5m resident python also fleeing the rising water, only with a band of cheeky travellers on board.

“He was literally moving across the grass at full speed with the frogs hanging on,” said Mock.

“I thought it was fascinating that some of the local reptiles have gotten used to [the cane toads] and not eating them.”

All the rest of the world has seen it, but I’m so easily amused….

Concerning captioning atrocities, a reader reports:

Years ago we were watching a Godzilla movie, recorded in Japanese, that didn’t have English subtitles. Right in the middle a subtitle popped up. It read, “F…k you! (In Japanese)”. The only subtitle in the entire movie.

In a related development, my Arts Editor reports that, if you look closely at some Godzilla movies, you can actually see the running-for-their-lives Japanese laughing like mad. I may have seen that once, myself.

It seems oddly apropos.

I see the WaPo Editorial Board thinks the Democrats should consider accepting the President Trump deal concerning the government shutdown, which is …

President Trump on Saturday offered Democrats three years of deportation protections for some immigrants in exchange for $5.7 billion in border wall funding, a proposal immediately rejected by Democrats and derided by conservatives as amnesty.

Aiming to end the 29-day partial government shutdown, Trump outlined his plan in a White House address in which he sought to revive negotiations with Democrats, who responded that they would not engage in immigration talks until he reopened the government.

I’m not a member of a political party, I’m an independent, and as an independent and someone who longs for rationality^[1], I’d advise the Democrats in charge of negotiations to respond with a warm No.

They should welcome the fact that President Trump made a real counter-offer, which shows he’s making progress on learning how to make a political deal. It’s a start. They might cautiously consider acknowledging that he’s making this progress. In a way, it’s an insult to Trump, one which he acknowledges only at his own peril. It’s a way to make him stop thinking and start reacting, so it’s a tactic to be used with a great deal of care.

But the answer should be No, and not because it’s inadequate, but because it’s a denial of the logic of the Democrats in refusing to build the wall, namely because it will be ineffectual. By answering Yes, they would destroy their own position. Even a Yes accompanied with some statement suggesting the Wall will be ineffective is to show intellectual and moral weakness.

I think they should do the following:

1. Acknowledge the concerns about illegal immigration are real, even if the southern border crossings have been dropping for years. Andrew Sullivan has gone into this in great detail.
2. Reiterate the ineffectiveness of a wall.
3. Suggest that, instead of a wall, we investigate the causes of these illegal immigration, and that the funding request for a wall instead be dedicated to research of those causes.
4. Require this be a joint legislative / executive operation. I am concerned about ideological influences on conclusions, so either Congress gets oversight of the process, or it be delegated to a neutral and respected third party.
5. Suggest, ever so delicately, that in some way Trump’s name could be attached to this research project. Appealing to his vanity is a proven approach with President Trump.

This is not without risks. For example, some shallow “analysts” will conclude the other countries suffer from gang violence, and recommend we eradicate the gangs without having the wit to ask why the gangs exist. Accepting such a conclusion will result in a lot of wasted money, time, and effort.

But a deeper, more effective analysis will also have its own risks. After all, the causes of Central American immigration are not necessarily independent of the big kahuna to the north. Suppose one of the conclusions is that American farm exports have destroyed the local ag economy. Will we be willing to even publish such a conclusion, much less act on it by restricting our ag exports? Tell an Iowa farmer that the Central American market is now closed. Or a zealous free marketeer libertarian who has no experience with the real world. Think of their reactions.

Still, I think this is the direction a rational country should go. Pursuing permanent solutions to these problems is how a mature country should pursue its business. Keep out the barbarians immigrants! is the slick response of the grifter who understands the fears of his audience, and rather than lead them to a permanent solution, instead sells them the piece of shit solution that he can sell … and sell … and sell. And profit from.

Give Trump a chance to be a real leader, rather than this Fake Leader! we’ve been seeing so far. He actually suggested this idea once, himself. And, at the same time, give these immigrants a chance to see their home countries revived. If he accepts, wonderful. If not, it’s another hammer the Democrats can use when wooing independents.

¹ In both others and myself.

And drawing lessons from them is also nothing new. WaPo reviews not one, but two documentaries concerning the cleverness of two con-men, and the folly of those they conned, through the instrumentality of something called Fyre Festival:

The notorious Fyre Festival was promoted as an elite concert event in the Bahamas, promising its attendees beachside villas, top-notch cuisine and nonstop partying with celebrities and social-network influencers on sandy beaches over two weekends in the spring of 2017.

Instead, as most everyone knows, Fyre was a disaster, becoming Instagram infamous for serving up “a tsunami of Schadenfreude,” as one observer puts it. Most of Fyre’s selfie-obsessed attendees, who’d paid thousands of dollars to attend, were stranded on a gravel spit with little food, water or shelter, and worst of all, spotty Internet access. Their suffering was exquisite and, admittedly, a fine comeuppance. “White people love camping,” joked “Daily Show” host Trevor Noah when news broke of the festival’s utter failure. “Unless it’s a surprise.”

Now, for reasons that easily dovetail with the same anxieties and lessons of the Fyre debacle, there are two competing documentaries out this week on streaming TV. The first, released in a hurry Monday on Hulu, is co-directors Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst’s “Fyre Fraud”; the second, premiering Friday on Netflix, is director Chris Smith’s “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.”

Funny thing is, it’s just one of the oldest stories in the world, isn’t it? I’m reminded of the religious scammers who’ve operated from time immemorial, out of the most staid of orthodox churches to the Last Days folks to tent revivalists.

Image credit: FIBERSHED

While the shearers, the con-artists who operated at Fyre Festival and operate at tent revival meetings, have more or less the same goal in mind, collecting money and leaving the marks to their own devices, I think the sheep also share a connection: a desire to belong that has exceeded reasonable bounds. I’ve never had much interest in the celebrity culture which has been rampant for 50 or more years; I treat it as trivia, I might know a little bit and I might not. I don’t really understand that drive to be part of celebrity culture.

But the folks attending Fyre just had to have their celebrity fix, as if it means much. I have friends who treasure their chance encounters with celebrity, such as one who happened to encounter Cary Grant as Grant exited a limo; even I have a story which amuses me, which is hitting up the then-new Byerly’s, a sort of upper-end grocery store chain, in Chanhassen, MN, at some ungodly hour of the night, and walking past what appeared to be a startled Prince and lady friend. Or perhaps they weren’t. I just nodded and kept on going. Such is the life of the focused hacker.

Back to the point, though, those encounters were not pursued, and speak more to the power of chance than anything else, and ultimately to our shared humanity. I mean, a grocery store? Come on!

But the Fyre Festival attendees? Eager to attain their own trivial celebrity, they paid their shillings, looked forward to rubbing shoulders with actors or singers or podcasters or YouTubers, or, what’s popular today, maybe entrepreneurs? And were humiliated. They pursued the central motivating force of celebrity culture beyond all reasonable boundary and … clip-clip.

I think a parallel case can be made for those caught and sheared by the snips of religion. As an agnostic, I do not dispute that religion brings a number of positives to human life, mixed as they can be with the negatives which do accompany religion. But when folks are so obsessed with touching the divine, for that assurance that what they’re doing is, rather than right, but instead divinely blessed, even to the point where they share in the divine being, participate in miracles, etc.

And, given credulity, brain plasticity, and the cleverness of con-men, it’s not all that hard to do.

In the end, the two groups just aren’t that different – pursuing the central core of their cultures with such single-mindedness as to discard all common sense. All, perhaps, to escape the essential ennui they may fear to encounter in their lives.

Up here in Minnesota it’s been unseasonably warm until the last couple of days. But how’s the rest of the world doing? From ClimateReanalyzer.org this is the 2M Temperature Anomaly, which I believe measures substantial deviations from historical averages temperature:

Yeah, it looks like Australia’s experiencing brutal highs. From The Guardian:

It was 48.9C [120F] last Tuesday in Port Augusta, South Australia, an old harbour city that now harvests solar power. Michelle Coles, the owner of the local cinema, took off her shoes at night to test the concrete before letting the dogs out. “People tend to stay at home,” she said. “They don’t walk around when it’s like this.”

It’s easy to see why: in the middle of the day it takes seconds to blister a dog’s paw or child’s foot. In Mildura, in northern Victoria, last week gardeners burned their hands when they picked up their tools, which had been left in the sun at 46C. Fish were dying in the rivers.

Almost every day last week a new heat record was broken in Australia. They spread out, unrelenting, across the country, with records broken for all kinds of reasons – as if the statistics were finding an infinite series of ways to say that it was hot.

Unpleasant. More accurately, getting close to inimical to human life. Especially if you’re a climate change denier. The penguins have yet to register a complaint in Antarctica from that nasty spot I see, but perhaps they’re enjoying the respite, eh?

Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) is another Harry Potter universe prequel movie, but much like its predecessor, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016), it suffers from a dearth of sympathetic characters (contrast with the original Harry Potter stories, featuring Potter, a boy suffering from hatred brought on by ignorance, and his courageous climb from his under-the-stairs bedroom to a leading position as a student at a school for wizardlings), instead substituting wizards who are inscrutable, or are even indulging in acts of barbarity, such as the removal of the tongue of a prisoner.

And the one who essentially takes responsibility for the removal is allegedly on the side of the good guys.

And the sad part, in terms of story development, is not that such barbarity, even if it’s reversible, has taken place, but that the story-tellers didn’t realize that this was a pivotal moral moment for the story. Think about it: does any modern Western society condone glossectomy as a punishment? Even to stop a silver-tongued devil, as the victim, Grindelwald, of this procedure is supposed to be?

Thus an opportunity arises to argue an important moral point concerning whether & when exceptions can be made to strong moral precepts, and that could have opened up the story immensely. Or perhaps some karmic recoil could have been rained down explicitly on she who authorized the procedure. Such action – reactions are the meat of a good story, and this opportunity was discarded like a dirty diaper.

Another problem is that the magic is basically free of boundaries. A wave of a wand, a couple of words, and something happens. Cool stuff, no? No. It’s too easy to pull a lion out of a hat every time a character runs into a roadblock, and that de-emphasizes the cleverness, wisdom, or (better yet) the sad tradeoffs the characters could have displayed and paid for.

In the original series (at least the movies, I never read the books), they get away with not discussing the rules of wizarding much because the characters were so compelling. They, in fact, moved the plot along, not the magic. But in this movie, the magic is too instrumental, so it should have been structured so that the characters had to do clever things to achieve their goals – which they occasionally do.

But, returning to the characters, there was little sympathy for them. Even the lead, autistic-like Newt Scamander, struggled to hold my interest, despite the adorable Chinese water dragon he eventually captures. I enjoyed the young Albus Dumbledore, and Johnny Depp, playing the evil Grindelwald, I think did a fine job conveying an entity convinced of its own rightness, and that did add to the story, not subtract. But after that the pickings are slim. It’s not the acting, which is fine except for the accents, which I often found impenetrable, but the characters’ words. Or perhaps the actors did fail to convey the essential humanity of their characters – but I am inclined to blame the storytellers, for it didn’t seem as if the characters really cared. An entire crop of good guys get wiped out, and yet I saw nary a tear wiped from a cheek over them. Glossectomy without controversy.

In the end, there’s too much convenient magic, and not enough struggle against overwhelming odds.

Concerning my dismay with regard to the WaPo report of some Democratic organization trying to use underhanded social media tactics, and the possible repercussions, a reader remarks:

Of course, the GOP hardcore already believes all of this and worse about the Democrats, so just how much black goo staining is occurring is highly open to question.

But I don’t think there is any delusions that the GOP hardcore is open to any persuasion. The group of importance are the independents, who make up just about 40% of the electorate.

The independents are the one that are fueling Presidential approval / disapproval polls such as thins one, showing Trump approval at an abysmal 37%. If they become disillusioned with the Democrats, perhaps they sit the next one out, and the Republicans, in all their third-rater glory, have a much stronger chance at both the state and federal levels.

A reader reacted quite a while ago to my post on decarbonization of the energy sector and the part nuclear power might play, with regard to Environmental Progress:

Environmental Progress sounds like a highly suspect group. California “could have mostly or completely decarbonized their electricity sectors had their investments in renewables been diverted instead to new nuclear”? In what crazy world of imaginative finance do they live? As you pointed out, new nuclear is crazy expensive.

I refer you to the last 2 subsections of the History section in the Wikipedia entry for Nuclear Power (https://en.wikipedia.org/…/Nuclear_power_in_the_United…), titled “Competitiveness” and “Westinghouse Chapter 11”. Fossil fuels are way too cheap to make nuclear viable. The 4 nuclear reactions under construction have already lost billions of dollars, and they aren’t online yet.

So noted. Yet I’ve been unable to find dirt on Environmental Progress, although my time for such activities is extremely limited. The Founder / President of EP is Michael Shellenberger, who from his Wikipedia entry appears to be on the up & up – but, of course, Wikipedia is always a contingent, not definitive, source. Listed as an eco-pragmatist, nuclear power may, in Shellenberger’s evaluation as an environmentalist, make the grade.

Stipulating to the fixed and running costs of nuclear power tending to run over estimates, let me quickly present a contrarian argument to my reader’s comments. One of the facets of most, or even all, “green” energy sources is its effect on the energy environment. I use that term simply as a lowest common denominator, so here’s an easy example: a wind turbine. It converts the energy implicit in the wind into energy convenient to human beings. But if a wind turbine doesn’t exist, is that implicit wind energy wasted?

Only in the mind of the short-sighted human. The truth of the matter is that this wind is carrying moisture, it’s bending trees, its conveying that energy itself to somewhere else. Perhaps birds are riding on it – easy enough to imagine, yes? But so are spiders. And bacteria. In other words, all those creatures and substances, which all boil down to energy, that energy topology is being disturbed in an unnatural manner by that wind turbine. What are the long term implications? Similar remarks may be made with equal accuracy concerning hydroelectricity, tidal power, and solar power – each is removing energy from an active ecology.

Xcel’s Prairie Island Nuclear Generating Station.

Nuclear power is emissions free, once installed, for its operational lifetime. Its fuel, until removed from the ground, contributes little or nothing to the energy landscape, although the removal and processing does contribute quite a lot. That’s interesting, because that failure to disturb the energy landscape makes it close to unique. I can only think of direct human (or perhaps animal) exercise as also being relatively benign to the energy landscape, an idea explored at length in Norman Spinrad’s Songs from the Stars.

I don’t wish to deny that the costs of commissioning and decommissioning nuclear power plants are unimportant, as they present unpleasant and even disqualifying challenges. Perhaps the potential cost of a disastrous accident is even more disqualifying, compared to the traditional green technologies. But I think it’s important to note that those green technologies, while carbon neutral, do have their own side-effects, and some of those may turn out to disqualify them in turn.

In the area of fighting climate change, I must confess I hadn’t paid much attention to the idea of just a simple carbon tax. I assumed it was simply a tax on how much CO₂ each person or corporate entity generates. It turns out that the revenues generated can be used to reinforce the point of the tax, as some top economists explain in WaPo:

The tax would add to the price of any good or service that uses carbon, especially fossil fuels. It means energy bills, gas and flying would cost more, at least at first. But the economists call for the government to return all the revenue raised from the tax directly to U.S. citizens, with a goal of effectively paying people to help address climate change.

“There is a substantial rebate. It’s estimated that if we were to start with something like a $40 a ton carbon tax that would amount to $2,000 per family, so it is a very substantial rebate,” said Yellen.

By giving every American a “rebate,” it encourages people to cut back on their own carbon usage because someone can make money if, for example, they receive a $2,000 rebate check and only spend $1,800 on carbon-intensive activities.

“The majority of American families, including the most vulnerable, will benefit financially by receiving more in ‘carbon dividends’ than they pay in increased energy prices,” the letter states.

It’s classic social engineering, but when it comes to a menace that is generally difficult for the common citizen to detect, it may be necessary, even if it raises my hackles. And I do appreciate the circularity of the tax, using both stick and carrot to begin reducing the amount of CO₂ we generate.

If & when the Democrats take control of both Congress and the White House, it’ll be interesting to see if they adopt this idea as rapidly as possible. The implementation details appear to be quite daunting, so I hope that at least some work is taking place at the moment on how to deal with them.

One of the latest GIF movies from the New Horizons trip to Ultima Thule.

Credit: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

This animated sequence shows the rotation of Ultima Thule (corrected for the changing distance) so that Ultima Thule (officially named 2014 MU69) appears at constant size but becomes more detailed as the approach progresses.

Intellectually, I understand the blurring. Emotionally, it makes me wonder, then it gives me wonder – that we made it out that far, hit the mark, took the pictures, and sent them back. Great stuff.

More can be found here.

Remember quantum computing, about how computers built using memory using quantum effects, known as qubits, will be so much faster because a qubit can assume all possible values at the same time, thus making computations of various reality that much faster?

OK, that’s a weird lead-in to a political post, but who can resist?

I wish I could have simultaneous bugs on the walls of Speaker Pelosi’s office, and the Oval Office, aka President Trump’s office, in relation to this recent tit-for-tat imbroglio over the State of the Union address to Congress, or lack thereof, and Speaker Pelosi’s aborted trip to Afghanistan. What would we have heard, I wonder? I mean, besides a blizzard of misogynistic profanities from Trump, of course.

Chris Cillizza of CNN thinks this is a big counter-punch from Trump:

Pelosi’s decision, like Trump’s on the CODEL [congressional delegation traveling abroad], was within her powers to do. (The speaker of the House invites the President to address a bicameral session of Congress. The President’s only role is to accept or reject the ask.) But just because the two principals can do what they’ve done doesn’t mean they should do it.

As a reminder: 800,000 federal workers are either furloughed or working without pay today. And they have been doing so for the last (almost) month. Bills aren’t being paid. Sacrifices are being made. Real life is happening.

Amid that backdrop, the childish one-upmanship between Trump and Pelosi feels deeply out of touch. But, more than that, it’s actively detrimental to the re-opening of the government. No one can argue that the actions of Trump and Pelosi over the last 24 hours have brought us closer to compromise that would re-open the government. Hell, no one can even argue that what’s happened between two of the most powerful people in the country has had a neutral impact on the shutdown showdown. This is a bad thing for the country. Period.

Kevin Drum is paying it never no mind:

Hah! That’ll show her! I can see in my mind’s eye Trump spending a couple of hours writing this letter and then adding little fillips to it. “Hey how about excursion? That’ll piss her off. Hee hee. And can we put public relations event in there somewhere? Oh man, this is so great.”

Me? I very much doubt that Pelosi was surprised by the return volley of President Trump. There are key differences between the two politicians, and perhaps the largest is Pelosi’s capacity for political planning. Speaker Pelosi is a planner. She has a reputation for getting major legislation through the House in a legitimate manner, and you don’t do that off the cuff. She makes alliances, persuades waverers, makes deals.

And she became the Speaker because she wanted the post. Her campaign to regain that post after the midterms is well known, and while pundits speculated that she might not attain it, in the end the election wasn’t even close, as many initially negative Democratic Representatives ultimately cast votes for her. Contrast that with former Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI), who nearly had to be forced to take the prestigious post, and once in he utterly punted on some of the most important legislative opportunities, such as the Tax Bill of 2017, as well as the failed AHCA (replacement for ACA), passing straw-man bills and leaving it explicitly to the Senate to write them any way the GOP-controlled Senate pleased. Historians may disagree, but I think Ryan’s fumbling will leave him one of the most lowly-rated Speakers in American history.

And does Trump have the capacity for planning? By just about all reports, no, although one must remember the report that he’s deliberately attempted to discredit the mainstream media from the get-go, although it’s not difficult to link that stratagem to his hypothetical Russian handlers. It’s also worth noting that there’s a big difference between mass media planning and political planning.

Nor are most of his political advisors really up to the task. In my view, the Republicans, outside of their suddenly-suspect marketing machine, are a pack of third-raters, from the now-retired Ryan to the stripped-of-his-assignments Steve King (R-IA). There’s little reason to believe Secretaries Pompeo, Whittaker, Mnuchin, or any of the others in the Cabinet, along with the various political advisors, have much capacity for planning, for the game Pelosi is playing. Pelosi, on the other hand, is a shark who knows how to get what she wants. That her approval ratings nation-wide are considered abysmal is irrelevant, as that’s the result of the advanced social media attack she’s been under for nearly a decade, and perhaps more.

In a way, that’s been a compliment.

Pelosi’s played the game honestly. She’s supported legislation to reopen the government as specified by the then-GOP majority in the House, back before January. That legislation was passed by both the House and the Senate on voice votes, but was vetoed, whether officially or informally, by our weak President Trump^[1]. When she took the gavel, she repassed that same legislation, presumably still Republican approved, but now the Senate, still under McConnell’s (R-KY) leadership, won’t even consider it. Having established her legitimacy, she then undertook to take the Congressional stage away from President Trump for the traditional State of the Union speech.

But now I suspect that Pelosi was unsurprised by the cancellation of her flight to Afghanistan. She may have even ticked it off her list of expectations yesterday. Trump raged and spat and hit back bigly, Pelosi may have been smiling and planning not her next move – but the one five more steps ahead. She’s like Obama, a planner who knows what she wants and is confident that it’ll be good for the nation, no matter how the Republicans howl.

Meanwhile, Trump is being shown as an intemperate child.

I don’t know how this will play out. The shutdown will eventually be ended, of course, and either completely on her terms, or a good political compromise. But does Pelosi care if Trump leaves through resignation or if he leaves through impeachment? Or will she be satisfied with having an impotent, torpid nobody in the Oval Office for two more years? Personally, I find the latter a little hard to stomach, particularly given recent speculation that Trump may be a Russian asset. But if that’s the best we can hope for, well, that’s how it goes sometimes.

But I think Speaker Pelosi is playing the long game, much like President Obama often did. I don’t see Pelosi as being surprised by the cancellation of the CODEL. I see it as part of a chess game being played by Pelosi. It’ll be fascinating to see how this plays out, particularly since it doesn’t appear that the White House is up to the challenge.

¹ I wonder if Fox News, the entity responsible for manipulating him into vetoing the funding resolution that would have avoided this shutdown, if impermanently, actually intentionally put him into the box called The Shutdown in hopes that he’d resign!

One of the scandals du jour (it’s appalling that it’s not unusual to think this way these days) is the revelation that Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen paid a certain John Gauger to attempt to influence some online polls early in the primaries for the Republican Presidential nomination. Just to cover my bases, I’ll note that online polls are pathetic, Gauger’s efforts reportedly failed, and Gauger claims Cohen didn’t fully pay him for his efforts.

That’s two: Trump and Cohen.

But I’ve read three articles on this, in WaPo, Heavy, and Maddowblog, and listened to Colbert, and they all seem to be ignoring the implications of an interesting little bit, which Maddowblog provides but then ignores:

To execute the plan, Cohen reportedly hired John Gauger, the chief information officer at Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University, and the owner of a small tech company called RedFinch Solutions LLC.

Bold mine. Sure, it seems reasonable to write him off as a techie with questionable morals. But Heavy contributes a bit more:

An article on Liberty University’s website says that Gauger was hired by the school in August 2012. Gauger’s first role as the Director of Specialized Initiatives. That piece says that Gauger is a Liberty graduate, as part of the class of 2009. Gauger gained an M.B.A. and a B.S. in business from Liberty.

Aaaaaaand we’re through with putting him off as a bit-part techie. He’s got the Liberty University imprimatur, and now we have him, along with his boss Jerry Falwell, Jr., engaging in ethically or intellectually dubious enterprises.

Of course, we all know online polls aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on, if you’ll permit the bad joke. But does that excuse this sort of behavior? The point of any poll is to communicate to its sponsors, as well as anyone to whom the sponsors release it, an honest assessment of the opinions of the respondents, and use that information in an attempt to further characterize some part of the general populace. Attempting to game any such poll constitutes intellectual fraud and, therefore, moral depravity.

I shan’t belabor the point. I also have little patience for cries of sin, redemption, everyone makes mistakes, and the favorite of the age, But what about Hillary? An institution of such religious rectitude should instill in its graduates and employees an allergy to fraudulent behavior, and if the institute is going to press a claim to higher learning, it should also instill a yearning for intellectual honesty. In neither Falwell nor Gauger do we see these things.

Given the evangelicals’ Satanic love and devotion to Trump, is this another clue that the evangelical movement has really just been a fraud all along? Generally, I’m fairly happy that evangelicals don’t show up at my door trying to convert me, but these days I’d actually welcome a visit. It could be a lot of fun imperiously demanding that they improve their morals.

My condolences to the family and friends of Glen Will, an old, old friend of ours. He passed away a little earlier today after a short stay in hospice.

Glen was a retired artist and bon vivant who was an avid fan of the musicals of the forties and fifties. A Korean War vet, he was a good friend to many people, a casual critic of many entertainers in the more traditional modes of music, and a pithy curmudgeon when it came to the political scene: He had little use for Trump or most Republicans.

He will be sorely missed by us and all who knew him.

There’s been a lot of buzz over the inability of President Trump to even offer a true deal to the Congressional Democrats, as well as to the Congressional Republicans (which I cautiously differentiate from Trump’s Base, which has been called the Party of Trump, and who constitute yet another entity in this sordid little drama). By true deal I mean something where everyone gets a little bit of what they want, and no one is happy.

For those readers who’ve avoided learning much about this repulsive and damaging little dance, Trump has been offering a deal that consists of I get everything and you get nothing, or, more literally, I get $5.7 billion to start building my wall and then I agree to sign a bill that reopens government, but with nothing for Dreamers, etc.etc.. This unconditional surrender offer is only a deal in the broadest of senses.

While ruminating over whether this might be indicative of the deteriorating state of Trump’s mind, aka dementia, which I do think is quite possible, it suddenly occurred to me that I’m overlooking the obvious.

Long time readers are well aware of my hobby horse concerning the Sectors of Society, and how the importation of the processes of one sector into another can have sub-optimal, even deeply undesirable results due to optimization effects. See the link for more, especially if you’re completely lost, or better yet read this executive summary: each sector of society (private, public, education, medical, etc) has goals peculiar to itself, and the processes it uses in pursuit of those goals are also optimized to those goals. Importing a process from another sector is problematic if the goals of the originating sector are at odds, as they often are, with the receiving. Thus we see rampant profit-taking by Pharma companies at the expense of patients, because the private sector believes it’s all about the profits (in itself a critical misunderstanding of the function of the private sector in society, but that’s another rant), while medical exists to cure patients.

And deal-making is a sector process! When we talk about deal making in the public sector, we’re talking about give and take, each side giving a little to get a little. But Trump’s deal-making has rarely, if ever, consisted of this sort of deal making. I suspect it’s consisted of two categories:

1. Screw the little guy over. Trump contracts for and receives the goods, but refuses to pay the agreed on price. He pays partial price and dares the contractor to come after him in court, and if the contractor does, Trump spends him into bankruptcy. This behavior was well-documented during the campaign, and I suspect is the reason why Trump lost Manhattan, his hometown, so badly in the Presidential election: they’re very familiar with the bullying, edge of the line and often over it, tactics he employed, and they didn’t want to see that in the Oval Office.
2. Finding a way to build the next building. Think about this process a bit: figure out what will sell, get the financing, buy the land, get permission to build^[1]. Maybe I’m missing a couple of steps, but my real point here is that this has no resemblance to political deal-making. None.

We might even put this down to insufficient English vocabulary. We should have understood there is no connection between private sector deal-making and public sector deal-making. Different words would enforce this idea with a certain finality.

But in the final analysis, we’re simply seeing amateur-hour all over again. Trump doesn’t know how to broker a political deal, because his concept of a deal has nothing to do with political deal-making. He’s assuming he’s in the position of power, as he always is in point #1 above, and that everyone should collapse or possibly take him to court, although exactly how that would come about wasn’t clear at the time^[2]. He’s not winning this shutdown showdown, but, whether or not he has the ability to recognize he must engage in give and take, he cannot because that third entity in this scenario, the Party of Trump, won’t let him. He’s pumped himself up to be the winner, the winner all the time, without ever making a concession^[3], and if he makes a concession now, that base may crack.

And the funny thing is, he’s already made a concession. His previous estimates were in the $20 billion range. Why isn’t he emphasizing this to the press? My guess is that he’s just not that savvy in the political realm. But I think he’s lost the messaging window that he needed to pursue to make that point work. The electorate is solidly of the opinion that the Shutdown is Trump’s responsibility, and it’s damaging America.

How Trump is going to resolve this without burning off his hair is an open question.

¹ A friend remarked yesterday that the Trump situation had suddenly become crystal clear for him: Trump got into this in order to build a Trump Tower in Moscow, and since he needs permission from Russian President Putin to do so, he’s putting himself through all these contortions to win that approval. He observed that Trump is really a simple man, driven by money and building, with no regard for his obligations to American society. I’d just say Trump’s a broken man.

² Trump is now being sued by a group of Federal employees under the banner of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery.

³ Typical Trump boasting, of course. Soon after making that boast, he settled the Trump University class action lawsuit(s) for “… 80 percent to 90 percent of what they paid for Trump University programs.” I’d call that a tremendous loss of face for him.

CNN’s The Point notes that Speaker Pelosi is refusing to bring the necessary resolution to the floor of the House which would permit President Trump to deliver the traditional State of the Union speech to Congress (reportedly Majority Leader Senator McConnell has also failed to do so for the Senate), purportedly (according to other sources) because the shutdown has made security for the President a more difficult matter. Cillizza wonders if Pelosi’s taking a chance:

But the question is whether voters who may not like Trump but who just want the government to reopen and politicians to get back to working for the people who voted them into office will see Pelosi’s move to effectively cancel the State of the Union as an unnecessary provocation. And whether Trump, who is desperately in search of a life preserver in this whole mess, can seize on Pelosi’s decision as evidence that the left is trying to silence him.

My guess is he’s going to try like hell to make that case.

I really don’t see it. President Trump is in full possession of the “bully pulpit,” as President T. Roosevelt called it, and all he need do is announce that he’s going to give the State of the Union speech from the Oval Office, or in front of a campfire out in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, and the media will cover it. It’s not statutorily required that he deliver a speech to Congress, only that he deliver a description of the State of the Union to them. [Ten hours later, I see Pelosi actually said as much, if somewhat more temperately.]

Hell, I’ll just whisper it: He could deliver the whole damn thing via Twitter and it’d almost certainly be legal.

So I think Cillizza is worrying over something that’s irrelevant. He also quotes Presidential son Donald Trump, Jr.:

“Speaker Pelosi is clearly attempting to block my father from giving his State of the Union speech, not because 20% of the government is shut down, but because she is terrified of him having another opportunity to speak directly to the American people about her party’s obstruction, unfiltered and without her friends in the media running interference for her.”

Jr. is clearly off the rails. Anytime Trump wants to give a speech, it’ll get out on the media “unfiltered,” and there’s not a damn thing Speaker Pelosi can do but respond.

The real trouble for the President is that his ammunition is so wet, his position & character so weak, his failure to retain the House so obvious to everyone that gives a damn, that everyone outside of his completely committed base knows better than to take him in the least seriously. They’ll wait for their favorite fact-checking service to correct any fact or figure before evaluating, and their evaluations will, in the main, run against the President.

So I take Pelosi’s move as another quiet jab of disrespect from one co-equal branch of the government to another. Pelosi’s reportedly trying to reform the House, repairing the damage done to its processes and institutions by GOP leadership dating back to Gingrich’s days, and by implication she’s setting a very high bar.

And I think she’s telling Trump and McConnell that they’re expected to make it over that bar. They won’t. Trump won’t try, he’ll sit on the ground and cry about it, because that’s his style, and McConnell won’t bother, because he won’t do anything without Trump’s permission.

Pelosi’s brandishing a whip. Will Trump dance to her tune? Trump, Jr.’s first response suggests they know there’s a danger here, and they need to obviate it. The Trump problem? They have a history of fouling this sort of thing up.