Monthly Archives: July 2019

A reader remarks on my thoughts concerning American rationality:

Only in a rational world will this mean squat to the election.

Both sides have to play to the independents in order to win, and the independents are the most likely to not be affected by the bonds of cult membership. The absence of those bonds mean the independents have to use something to make their decisions, and a commercial such as the one I proposed, emphasizing the prioritization of commercial profits over the health of small children by the Trump Administration, does lean on rational thought patterns rather than emotion-plucking lies.

Hey, maybe I’m delusional, but I can at least hope.

When all three ex-wives are yelling at you.

The latest installment in the Godzilla series, Godzilla: King Of The Monsters (2019), suffers from an American malady: it tries to explain far too much.

As I thought about this movie, it occurred to me that, in many previous installments, Godzilla has represented the Divine. Recall the Greek gods, the Roman gods, the Scandinavian gods, the Judeo-Christian gods, and that they often behaved in ways that might be described as immoral, erratic, even capricious. If we admit that humans are limited to human thought-patterns and ways, it remains true that we can label the gods, the members of the Divine, as obeying their own, incomprehensible, morality systems. It’s not that they have no impulse control, but that they have their own constraints and requirements, unique to their Divine situation, and attempting to interpret them in a human context is, at best, problematic, and most certainly futile.

And Godzilla? Ignoring the reality that there have been many writers and directors who have used the characters in this saga to their own purposes, we’ve seen him, or her, at a malevolent worst that results in the apparently reasonless destruction of Tokyo (Gojira (1956)), as both a savior and arsonistic destroyer (Godzilla 2000 (1999)), Godzilla as a reckless Earthly guardian (Godzilla (2014) and Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)), a rather ridiculous parental figure, and a number of Godzilla vs everyone else stories. If we dare to believe Godzilla to be the same essential character in all these stories, and commit the signal crime of ignoring the multiple sources and capabilities of those involved in this story-telling, then perhaps the only conclusion to draw is that Godzilla is some representative of the Divine: occult, violent, and little caring for mankind’s fate.

And, as such, an embodiment of the inexplicable. Attempting to bring Godzilla and the balance of the Divine into the context of mankind is an intellectual error which, quite honestly, destroys the aesthetic of a good Godzilla story. Gojira, for all of its crude production values, portrays a Godzilla that stomps the landscape, going from city destruction to its own apparent termination, at the hand of a suicidal scientist, all for reasons on which we may speculate, yet can never know for certain. It has a certain impressive and horrid beauty to it, a glimpse into the madness of another societal matrix, rudimentary as it may be, that reminds us of the fragility of our own societies, that our concerns about our own speculative Divinities may be for naught when faced with a Godzilla that steps forth with his own agenda in clawed hand.

When Godzilla: King Of The Monsters tries to force a human framework on Godzilla, as well-meaning as it is, it diminishes the central wonder of Godzilla and his mysterious actions. We may think we understand why Godzilla does what he does, and why King Ghidorah must be vanquished, but the legend of Godzilla is diminished.

Along with the rather dismal and predictable human element of the plot, the entire movie is something of a disappointment. There are kaiju movies which are about humanity, such as Pacific Rim (2013), and then there are kaiju movies about the importance of acknowledging that there is the unknown, perhaps even the eternally unknowable – and these kaiju are the embodiment of same.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters makes the mistake of trying to shift from the latter to the former, and fails. If you admire kaiju battle scenes, you may want to watch this, but otherwise I think this is a failure.

I found Matt Ford’s article in The New Republic on the Mississippi electoral system for statewide office rather repellantly fascinating:

Virtually every state in the Union elects its governor and other statewide offices by popular vote. Mississippi does something different. First, a candidate must win a majority of the statewide popular vote. Second, they must also win a plurality of the vote in a majority of Mississippi House of Representatives districts. If a candidate does both, they win. If they don’t, the Mississippi House chooses the winner. As with the Electoral College, the popular vote in Mississippi only matters until it doesn’t.

And why?

Though black voters outnumbered white voters in the state at the time, the 1890 constitution apportioned the state legislature to guarantee a majority of seats would be held by white lawmakers. That apportionment also affected the statewide election plan: Even if a black-supported candidate received a majority of votes, it would be almost impossible for him to clinch victory by also capturing a majority of the state House of Representatives districts. Lawmakers in those districts would then be able to elevate the second-place candidate to the governor’s mansion.

Mississippi’s white leaders did not disguise their intentions. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” James K. Vardaman, one of the constitution’s framers as well as a future governor and senator, once boasted. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics.”

The article continues to discuss the chances of a Federal lawsuit calling for the law to be stricken from the laws of Mississippi, where Mississippi is using as a defense a justification by Chief Justice Roberts himself for not interfering in the recent gerrymandering case of Wisconsin.

But this all seems a bit complex for my tastes. We already know that gerrymandering on a racial basis is not permitted (Miller v Johnson, I believe), and, if the Federal courts are willing to admit that gerrymandering is an instance of the larger category of manipulation of the electoral system for political gain at the expense of the electorate, then it’s not hard to see that this particular case is specifically concerning the manipulation of the electoral system on a racial basis. The Federal judiciary should find for the plaintiffs, in my opinion, simply based on the plain statements of Vardaman, above, back in 1890.

But there’s a deeper sociological, if not legal, issue involved here, an issue of damage. The invocation of a racial basis for selecting leaders tends to forcibly group people by race, and not by more natural interests. I wonder that Mississippi has this, to be frank, hatred-based electoral system, and also happens to be generally acknowledged as one of the unhealthiest^[1] and most backwards^[2] States in the Union.

Coincidental? Causative? Beats the hell out of me. But that the law continues is deeply troubling, given its avowedly racist origins, and it should be expunged, now that the Federal judiciary has the opportunity, because it seems unlikely that the citizens of the State will be able to do so on their own.

And then perhaps Mississippi can work on getting beyond race, as the racists will have one less tool to their hand for perpetuating their hatreds.

¹ According to USA Today, Mississippi is #50 in life expectancy.

² According to this Forbes story, the Mississippi public education system ranks 45th.

Concerning my post on the uptick in abortions in Africa that correlates with a drop in United States funding to those clinics, a reader writes:

Another classic case of politicians imagining themselves to be geniuses, when even the actual geniuses are incapable of predicting the unintended consequences of making a policy change in a complex system of complex systems.

Indeed. I found the subtitle on this NYT article equally fascinating:

If Roe v. Wade were overturned, the number of abortions would fall in these places.

Would it? Or would the women being forced to make that decision because of the closing of Planned Parenthood offices, which provide contraceptive services, as well as the general shadow cast on the entire idea of controlling one’s reproductive behavior, result in higher rates of abortion, child poverty, and childbirth deaths?

My curiosity is merely morbid and need not be satisfied.

Certainly, the chant Send her back!, heard at a recent Trump campaign rally, and presumably directed at Rep Ilhan Omar (D-MN), has its racist salience that makes it worth wondering for how much longer the Trump adherents will turn off their brains and dishonor themselves. But something I’ve not seen in my quick reading of the reactions is something which can undo Trump’s own remarks. First, here’s WaPo‘s report on Trump’s reaction to the controversy:

President Trump broadly declared Friday that no one should criticize the United States while he is president, part of a renewed attack on four minority congresswomen whom he has targeted as un-American.

Trump also praised his supporters who chanted at a rally, “Send her back!,” a refrain directed at one of the lawmakers, ­Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The president called the campaign crowd “incredible patriots” — a day after saying he disagreed with the chant.

It’s rare that improvement occurs without prior criticism, whether from within or without. The logical extension of Trump declaring that there should be no criticism of the United States, then, is that he doesn’t want to improve the United States. It’s almost as if President Trump is preaching … treason.

As if the Republicans never criticized President Obama. As if any political leader anywhere has never been critiqued.

It’s the recognition of shortcomings and the elucidation thereof that leads to improvement, not slavish supplies of praise to a narcissistic leader. So if Trump cannot stand a critique of himself or America, well, then we know how much better he’s going to become.

He’s not.

And that hurts the country a lot.

The Minnesota State Fairgrounds is hosting a Street Rod convention this weekend. Here’s pics of a couple of cars we stumbled across.

Which reminds me of my oldest friend’s old Impala.

It’s not particularly surprising to see Republican reactions to Democratic – or former President Obama’s – initiatives going awry when they’re not built on authentic concerns, but rather, it appears, because they suffer from the ol’ Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome. Why? Republicans let their emotional urges (Democrats / Obama bad!), or worse yet their intellectual failings, drive their reactions, rather than thinking things through. We’ve seen this just recently in this report.

The mark of third-raters.

But here’s another, and potentially more severe, example, from AL Monitor:

The moderate [Iranian President] Rouhani, who came to power with the promise of restoring ties with the West and resolving the nuclear issue, is now at war on two fronts. Outside Iran, he is struggling with Trump, who not only withdrew from the JCPOA but is also preventing European and Eastern countries from trading with Tehran. Domestically, Rouhani is losing a six-year battle to hard-liners and has been seriously weakened by the dire economic situation, which is rooted in the US undermining of the JCPOA. According to some reports, Rouhani’s popularity has fallen below 10%, which is unprecedented.

The recent US sanctions directly against Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei haven’t hurt him, but have put a huge obstacle in the way of any negotiations, giving the hard-liners significant grounds for action while tying Rouhani’s hands tighter.

In reality, the US sanctions and, partly, Europe’s inability to save the JCPOA are gradually radicalizing Iran and its society. Moderates in Tehran risk being accused of betraying their country. They are being undermined and isolated, and their positions are being taken away one by one. For instance, Heshmatollah Falhatpishe, a prominent moderate and pragmatist parliament member, recently tweeted that Iran should give Instex more time. But he’s no longer taken seriously, having just last month lost his position as chairman of parliament’s foreign policy commission to a staunch JCPOA enemy.

I’ve mentioned in a number of posts that the JCPOA, aka the Iran Nuclear Deal, yes, that deal that Trump tore up for reasons he hasn’t truly explained, immensely frustrated both sets of hard-liners, those in the East and the West. I think that anything that makes the Iranian hard-liners shriek with frustrated fury and accuse the moderates of betrayal and such hyperbolic crap indicates something good is happening. Of course, this is predicated on the rational basis that moderates in power in Iran can set a positive example for the Iranian citizens, thus discrediting the hard liners who are least likely to cooperate with us; they want their nuclear weapon ice cream, and they want it Now!

Of course, it is the Islamic Republic of Iran, and it may be foolhardy of me to expect rationality from even their moderate leaders; as a mere interested spectator, it’s difficult to tell if moderate Rouhani would have continued to move Iran further and further away from an extremist position. What seems extremist to us, after all, may seem like the commonest of sense to the Iranian leaders.

This, of course, applies equally well to the Christianist leaders here in the United States. I’m an equal-opportunity suspicious nut-case, folks.

But it remains clear that when the Iranian hardliners cheer, and the Iranian citizen in the street becomes alienated against their Moderate leaders, something has gone seriously wrong with the American policy to isolate Iran, alienate the citizenry against the hard liners, stop engendering terror in the region, and make them drop their nuclear weapon plans. Instead, they have, or soon will, exceed the JCPOA limitations, the citizens scoff at the Moderates, the hardliners, who hate America the most, are poised to take control at the next elections, and at least reportedly the terror incidents continue …

Trump looks like an idiot. Again.

And while the hawks in the Trump Administration may believe an all out assault on Iran will crumble them like cheese, I don’t even need this report to suspect that it’ll turn into yet another decades-long war which further stains the reputations of both America and democracy, stains we can ill-afford in the face of the Republican incompetency since the start of the War in Afghanistan.

Once again, unintended consequences.

The New York Times reports on a major campaign blunder by the Trump Administration:

The Trump administration took a major step to weaken the regulation of toxic chemicals on Thursday when the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would not ban a widely used pesticide that its own experts have linked to serious health problems in children.

The decision by Andrew R. Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator, represents a victory for the chemical industry and for farmers who have lobbied to continue using the substance, chlorpyrifos, arguing it is necessary to protect crops. …

I found this article in NewScientist by Claire Wilson interesting:

When US foreign aid for abortion providers stopped in 2001 for eight years, the number of pregnancy terminations in parts of sub-Saharan Africa went up, new figures show.

The rise may have happened because many health clinics that offer abortions also provide contraception services, so more women got pregnant without meaning to, says Eran Bendavid of Stanford University in California. …

Bendavid’s team analysed the provision of contraception and abortion services in 26 African countries between 1995 and 2014, spanning periods when funding was on, then off, then on again. Half the countries were highly affected by the funding changes, but the rest were less dependent on US aid in this area.

Compared with the less dependent countries, the highly affected nations had a 40 per cent rise in abortions when funding for clinics was withdrawn. Contraception use was also lower during this period. “I imagine that many people who support the policy would have a preference for a world with fewer abortions,” says Bendavid. “I would say the policy is counterproductive.”

Suggesting that the demand for control of birth rates is not an elastic, but inelastic quantity. If a family that desires to limit its size at a given point in time cannot obtain proper contraceptives, then it’ll use abortion. Certain religious sects prohibit the use of contraception, thus making the disobedient even more dependent on abortion when they can’t get contraceptive education or supplies because funding has been cut off.

Abortion is the great carrot and cudgel of the conservative side of the spectrum, but the persistence of human need vs fallacious human myth, or reality vs delusion, continues to end in reality’s favor.

President Trump has been selling himself as the military’s best friend. For example, from APnews:

“You also got very nice pay raises for the last couple of years. Congratulations. Oh, you care about that. They care about that. I didn’t think you noticed. Yeah, you were entitled. You know, it was close to 10 years before you had an increase. Ten years. And we said, ‘It’s time.’ And you got a couple of good ones, big ones, nice ones.” — remarks Sunday to service members at Osan Air Base, South Korea.

Which, according to APnews, is false. Or the defense budget:

The White House unveiled its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2020 and, to the apparent surprise of some military planners, the White House is calling for a top line national defense budget of $750 billion. Pentagon officials had reportedly anticipated a budget of $733 billion, which would have been a 2.4 percent increase over last year’s. They got a 4.7 percent increase instead. According to the supporting documentation, the request is intended to provide the Department of Defense with the resources to “remain the preeminent military power in the world, ensure balances of power in key regions remain in America’s favor, and advance an international order that is the most conducive to U.S. security and prosperity.” [Christopher Preble, Cato At Liberty]

But notice how this is all about the money. Money, money, money. That, reportedly, is what makes Trump tick. But is that appropriate in a government position? And is that metric really appropriate?

In this vein, I found this WaPo opinion piece by Guy Snodgrass, US Navy (ret.), and chief speechwriter for former Trump Administration Defense Secretary Mattis, quite dismaying:

The Pentagon is in far greater trouble because of one simple reason: a lack of leadership.

The Pentagon recently surpassed a previously-unthought-of milestone — 6 ¹ / ₂ months without a Senate-confirmed secretary at the helm. Mark Esper, the president’s new nominee for the position, was the second person to serve as acting defense secretary. The Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 ensured that a third acting secretary — Richard V. Spencer, the secretary of the Navy — temporarily took the helm Monday, as Esper cannot serve as acting secretary while under consideration for the permanent appointment. …

… this long-standing leadership vacuum is compounded by a Pentagon with an acting deputy defense secretary, acting secretary of the Army, acting secretary of the Air Force, acting inspector general, acting assistant defense secretary for international security affairs . . . the list goes on. CNN revealed earlier this month that 19 of the most senior Pentagon positions are either vacant or filled by a temporary acting official. Lower-tier leadership posts are similarly gapped. Friends serving in the Pentagon describe a disordered situation, where no one can speak with confidence regarding the military’s long-term priorities. …

Under any normal circumstances, even a week without a defense secretary could present a dangerous leadership vacuum in the Pentagon. That the position was vacant for more than six months — and that this lack of leadership has become systemic — is shocking. This chaotic security situation emboldens U.S. adversaries, alarms allies and erodes the Defense Department’s ability to retain the talented careerists needed for the military’s long-term health.

It’s a fascinating article which should be read by everyone who has any interest in the politics, and it should not require the reader to be opposed to Trump to be profoundly troubled by the failure of leadership by Trump in this regard.

It’s also important to state the obvious: Money doesn’t solve all problems! That Trump has advocated for a higher budget, and brags about increases in military pay that are actually quite mundane, turns out to be quite irrelevant. This ties directly into the question of identifying the proper metric when measuring his performance. His bringing more money to the military doesn’t necessary mean he’s successful, or even its greatest friends.

He must bring a high level of management skill to the job in order to be rated as competent, and that he has not done.

And the saddest part of this? If the United States should suffer a disaster that is at least partially due to Trump’s leadership vacuum at Defense, it won’t get hung around his neck. Trump is a professional when it comes to avoiding responsibility. So it’s necessary to bring this issue into focus, as has Snodgrass, and to advocate for properly selecting a metric to measure Trump’s performance.

Trump’s obsession with money may be his undoing, and possibly that of the United States as well.

Eleemosynary:

1. Relating to charity, alms, or almsgiving.
2. Given in charity or alms; having the nature of alms
3. Supported by charity [Wiktionary]

Noted in “The Middle Aged Invulnerables (with poll!),” The Geogre, The Daily Kos:

Health care is no eleemosynary transaction (my Henry Fielding word), where prices are listed on a menu board. If you have severe pain above your right hip, in a few inches, warm to the touch, then you will have an appendectomy, and you will discover afterward that the anesthesiologist billed you, and the hospital billed you, and the surgeon billed you, and the internist billed you, and neither you nor they will have any knowledge of whether it is appropriate. After all, you could not have said no, retroactively.

I’m not certain how charity ties in with prices on a menu board, but the balance of the paragraph is a common criticism of market-based medical care – markets demand publicly known prices, among many other things.

Axios reports on a future possible firing by the Trump Administration:

President Trump has told confidants he’s eager to remove Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, according to five sources who have discussed the matter directly with the president.

The state of play: Trump hasn’t told our sources when he plans to make a move, but they say his discussions on the topic have been occurring for months — often unprompted — and the president has mentioned potential replacements since at least February. A source who spoke to Trump about Coats a week ago said the president gave them the impression that the move would happen “sooner rather than later.”

Axios goes on to mention a possible successor, but Kerry Eleveld’s vivid post on The Daily Kos triggered thoughts on the internal culture of the Administration:

Trump has been floating the name of Fred Fleitz as a replacement for Coats, saying he’s heard “great things.” Fleitz was John Bolton’s chief of staff on the National Security Counsel, so that might be one source of Fleitz’s “great” reviews.

But more importantly for Trump, Fleitz went on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business show to criticize Coats’ congressional testimony on North Korea and call for his ouster over his “second-guessing” of Trump. Oh, and in 2017, Fleitz also called the intelligence assessment about Russian interference “rigged.”

“I don’t use this word lightly, I think this assessment was rigged,” Fleitz said. “I think it was rigged to come up with the most negative conclusion possible to hurt Mr. Trump. … I think it was fabricated.”

In an op-ed on FoxNews.com in January 2017, Fleitz similarly wrote, “I also suspect the entire purpose of this report and its timing was to provide President Obama with a supposedly objective intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that the president could release before he left office to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election.”

It’s outrageous, when you think about it. A potential successor attempting to sabotage a high level official in the Administration in hopes of gaining the same position for himself is, I suppose, not unheard of, but for me it’s a signal of the culture of, well, unrestrained ambition that pervades the Administration. DNI Coats, former Senator for Indiana, appears to be an old-line Republican, which means he’s honorable, much like Special Counsel Mueller, and not a member of the greed-greed group within – or perhaps making up – the Republican Party these days.

But there’s no reason to believe that tomorrow’s target won’t be a full-fledged member of the Trump Party. See, we’re talking here about the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys work together to achieve their goals, and the subsumption of personal ambition to a great degree is the enabling factor behind the success of such groups.

The bad guys? Continual infighting. If you’ve watched The Man In The High Castle (or, to a lesser degree, read the book), it illustrates how the power struggles, the free rein given to ambition and the resultant tolerance for the playing out of that ambition, i.e., the violence and death and abrogation of the law in pursuit of that ambition, is what tears apart such organizations, in particular disillusioning the mass of people who provide the backbone of such movements.

Francisco Franco.

This is not always true, of course: the dictatorship of Francisco Franco lasted decades. although I see Wikipedia states:

… scholars consider Franco as conservative and authoritarian, rather than truly fascist. Historian Stanley G. Payne states, “scarcely any of the serious historians and analysts of Franco consider the Generalissimo to have been a core fascist.”

I am not enough of a student of the ways of fascism and authoritarianism to understand their differences, much less analyze how culture, outside threats, mass psychology, and the mythologies of the culture can play together to hold a leader in his place, but I am aware of those currents. Or we can point to the Soviet Union, a politically repressive and savage nation, hiding behind a collection of prima facie progressive political slogans and whatnot, and most importantly springing from political cultures which were equally if not even more repressive than the Soviets, that survived for seventy years. Context is darn near everything, a facet we ignore every time we go “nation-building”, it seems.

But to return to American soil, I’ve been puzzling over the behavior of AG William Barr. This morning it occurred to me that he may have ambitions beyond the Department of Justice. After all, he’s been approved by the Senate, which means he could move to the leadership of another department with relative ease. I’m not even sure he’d require confirmation by the Senate for such a move.

Or could he be angling towards replacing Pence on the upcoming election ticket? It’s not impossible, as Pence is more or less a zero on the campaign trail – Trump’s the big attraction, and wouldn’t tolerate another big attraction on the ticket with him, so we know Pence is a placeholder. Barr certainly lacks the charisma that supposedly surrounds Trump, so Trump would tolerate him. And after that, he’d be the incumbent VP, ready to assume the mantle of the nomination with Trump’s blessing, assuming a Trump victory in the 2024 campaign. All based on him not displaying competence, but simply pleasing Trump.

The question is whether or not Barr can dine al fresco on the entrails of his competitors without ripping apart the entire movement by exposing naked and ugly ambition. I see Barr as the dark horse in 2020. Let’s see if he makes it onto the ticket.

A few pictures I took when I should have been rescuing tomato plants after the big storm on Monday.

My Arts Editor took offense at all the power and telephone lines and blotted them out, so to an extent these are somewhat artificial.

Solecism:

A solecism is a phrase that transgresses the rules of grammar. The term is often used in the context of linguistic prescription; it also occurs descriptively in the context of a lack of idiomaticness. [Wikipedia]

Noted in this 9 Chickweed Lane comic.

And finishing up the photos labeled ‘best’ by my Arts Editor, here are miscellaneous.

This first probably should have made it into the ‘framed sunset’ shots, but I missed it.

A lovely field of greens.

Perhaps this is a sand trap on a real scuzzy golf course. Got a better idea?

And, finally, an interesting piece of dead bark.

Bonus! Two black cats at my brother-in-law’s house!

If I see any interesting pics in the second-class collection, I’ll post them.

A reader remarks on my latest flaying of an anonymous email masquerading as patriotism:

You have a lot of patience and time on your hands. They lost me at the grammatical error in the first sentence: “This came from a friend of ours’ who was a veteran.”

I have an abiding interest in the psychological nudges that an essay can apply to vulnerable readers, and it’s not a friendly interest – I’ve always reacted negatively when I perceive someone is trying to manipulate me. I have no idea whether I’m better or worse than average at actually noticing them, of course, but when I do I like to investigate and understand the how and what of the nudge.

And then share my findings, intuitive as they may be, with the victims of that nudging.

The latest post in this series dealt with unframed photos of the sunset; here are a few framed shots.

I hadn’t realized until now that last one was an impalement shot.

I’ve been meditating on the differences of the murder mystery parody films Murder By Death (1976), a classic of the genre and an old favorite of mine, and Clue (1985), a parody also referential to, but not really based on, the eponymous classic board game (which is known in some geographical areas as Cluedo). A collection of people, using for the evening the nom de plumes of various suspects from the classic game, are invited to a dinner party at an appropriately stately mansion in the Virginia countryside. Colorful, resentful, jaded, it soon comes out that they all seem to have something to hide; even the butler, Wadsworth, appears to be secretive when it comes to the motivations of this dinner.

But when the host, Mr. Boddy, arrives, we discover that all of the guests have one thing in common: they’re being blackmailed by Mr. Boddy. Soon enough, Mr. Boddy ends up dead in a dark room, and the guests find themselves in a heated chase after who among themselves might have offed their heartily disliked host.

References to the board game include the various weapons available to commit the murder, certain information presented in envelopes, and perhaps the secret passageways, but wherein Clue, as I recall, functioned as a lesson in deductive logic, the movie is more about the colorful personalities, the tropes of the era when the movie was made, and the energetic performance of Tim Curry as Wadsworth, the butler. It doesn’t really offer an ending, but rather three, from which I suppose you may pick whatever suits your emotional self.

The failure to offer a definitive, although I do not mean unambiguous, ending may be one of the contributors to my ambivalent feelings about this story. After all, an ending offers an underline to the theme of the story, and when there are three endings, even if one is marked “But this is the real ending,” it makes it a bit difficult to draw any sort of lesson.

Which isn’t to say I disliked the movie. It’s well acted, has some clever patter, and the crime is not completely unbelievable in motivation or execution. Like its aforementioned predecessor, Clue abounds in absurdities, but they are less tightly bound to the murder mystery genre, and perhaps it’s that failure to implicitly critique its subject that makes it less fun; indeed, some of it is merely sexist humor (such as when Colonel Mustard begins to pat down Ms Scarlett in response to her exclamation of “Search me!”), or references to the unacceptability of homosexuality, which marks the movie as dated.

But an integral part of the success of Murder by Death was its parody of the guests, who are analogs to famous fictional detectives and their side-kicks. They are legends of the genre, and to discover, for instance, that the Charlie Chan analog,  the Chinese Sidney Wang, dislikes his adopted Japanese son, is a play on Chan’s affectionate use of his son, whatever the number, during his fictional investigations – it brings a certain dark humanity to a character which otherwise seemed incapable of negativity. This is where Clue cannot compete, because Colonel Mustard, Mr. Green, et al, do not have histories to target to any effect. They are simply names on pasteboard.

So, despite the restrained and entertaining frenzy of Tim Curry’s Wadsworth, Clue’s attempt at an affectionate and memorable slap of the murder mystery genre isn’t as effective as that of its predecessor.

If you’re a Trump supporter who thinks the recent contretemps of the leaked diplomatic cables indicating one diplomat’s opinion that Trump is a poltroon, fool, and simpleton were simply the aberrational opinions of one diplomatic hack, think again. Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare has news for you:

And don’t kid yourself: There are cables like this from the Washington embassies of all of America’s allies. Whatever they may say in public, this is what our allies are saying in private. They are saying these things because these things are true and because they owe their home governments honest evaluations of the governance reality with which the U.S. daily confronts those allies. They are saying these things because the thought bubbles and the subtitles when they speak to us are precisely the candor they owe their own government. And in the subtitles and the thought bubbles, they are ridiculing us; and they are ridiculing us because we are, in fact, ridiculous.

I’m just a software engineer who has mildly uninformed opinions that may be way off-base. But Wittes? He’s a national security professional who interacts with these people quite often, who has decades of experience with professionals of just about all stripes.

And if you’re scoffing at my words, let me ask you: would you allot the repair of your SUV to some amateur who has no training and has the attitude of a ten year old?

Yeah, you wouldn’t. So why entrust the control of the Executive to a guy who spends his time lying and indulging in vindictive acts against anyone who dares whisper a critical word about him?

With regards to SCOTUS‘ refusal to rebuff gerrymandering, Professor Rebecca Spang of Indiana University suggests that they are putting society and democracy at significant risk:

A revolution is not a single event but a process, one driven in 1790s France as much by opposition to needed reform as it was by demands for a particular ideological system. The French Revolutionaries were not Russian Bolsheviks: They did not dream of revolution in advance and many came to regret their involvement. Nonetheless, in 1789, many comfortable men and women concluded that the society they had always known needed to be overturned and completely transformed. Reactionaries, who would never agree to more incremental changes, played a major part in radicalizing them.

On this Bastille Day, Americans should take note of this history. The Supreme Court’s recent decision that the federal courts cannot adjudicate or limit partisan gerrymandering should give us all pause; wielded with modern technical precision is massively anti-democratic, and apt to leave Americans feeling powerless to change things by working through routine political channels. The entire system is at risk of being discredited. People across the country today have urgent and competing grievances and concerns, but the institutions that are meant to adjudicate those differences are every day losing more and more of their legitimacy. If a way cannot be found to restore trust in our shared institutions, the 18th-century case suggests change will come through other means.

This has certainly been a decision that has given rise to a number of opinions, although I have to wonder if Spang’s suggestion that revolution may come of it, rather than a more effective time of participation in democracy, might be a little bit of hyperbole.

Still – and the real reason I’m writing this post – if the Democrats want to reprimand SCOTUS for not ruling to support anti-gerrymandering efforts, I have a suggestion. It’s nearly redistricting time, and the State of California, currently home to 53 Representatives to Congress, of which seven are Republican and the remaining 46 are Democrats, might be the best place for the Democrats take action^[1].

It’s simple enough. Gerrymander the state such that all areas which have Republican majorities are lumped into one or, if necessary due to rules about the population-size of each district, two districts. The key here is to make this district geographically discontinuous.

Sounds weird, doesn’t it? Little blobs of, say, District 1 scattered across the State. But it might be worth trying just to be rid of one of the two least respected members of Congress, Duncan Hunter and Devin Nunes. Run against each other, boys.

Of course, that’s not really my point. My point is to wave a big red flag in front of SCOTUS. Gerrymandering on the basis of race is already out of bounds, but they don’t wish to get involved in politics. If the Democrats want to give them a reason to get involved, commit the foul themselves and dare them to do something about it. When defending themselves in hearings, California’s lawyers should cite the recent decision as giving them cover, and explicitly state that ruling against them would also invalidate the other ruling; a reversal, if you will.

Sometimes, the crime of the absurd must be committed in order to shine a light on the absurd.

¹ For those interested in the question of whether or not California is already gerrymandered, the information offered by Public Policy Institute of California may be of interest:

California’s 19 million registered voters constitute 75.7% of eligible adults, a slight increase from the registration rate in 2014 (73.3%), the year of the last gubernatorial election. The share of registered voters who are Democrats (44.4%) is up slightly from 2014 (43.4%), while the share of Republicans (25.1%) has declined since 2014 (28.4%). At the same time, the share of voters who say they are independent (also known as “decline to state” or “no party preference”) has been increasing and is now 25.5%, up from 21.2% in 2014. Our surveys indicate that 47% of those we consider most likely to vote are Democrats, 28% are Republicans, and 21% are independents.

Assuming independents break in similar numbers, this suggests Democrats outnumber Republicans at something like two-to-one odds, very roughly speaking, or 66% to 33%. The delegation is 86% to 13%, rounded off. I failed to find numbers reflecting aggregate voting for House members.

Ouroboros:

The Ouroboros is a Greek word meaning “tail devourer,” and is one of the oldest mystical symbols in the world. It can be perceived as enveloping itself, where the past (the tail) appears to disappear but really moves into an inner domain or reality, vanishing from view but still existing.

The ouroboros has several meanings interwoven into it. Foremost is the symbolism of the serpent biting, devouring, or eating its own tail. This symbolizes the cyclic Nature of the Universe: creation out of destruction, Life out of Death. The ouroboros eats its own tail to sustain its life, in an eternal cycle of renewal. It is sometimes depicted in a lemniscate shape (figure eight) as well. [Token Rock]

Noted in “Jar Jar Binks takes over the Internet,” Molly Roberts, WaPo:

Here’s where it gets the most Binksian and also the most stereotypically “online.” This meme wasn’t enough to gain the Gungan any real attention, even when Twitter-happy Star Wars star Mark Hamill gave it a push. It was enough, however, to get “Jar Jar Binks” on the trending topics list for a number of users, prompting those people to ask why everyone was talking about Jar Jar Binks. This, in turn, caused Jar Jar Binks to trend more prominently. Which caused everyone to continue talking about how everyone was talking about Jar Jar Binks. Which … you get the point.

And so the ouroboros of the Internet chowed down on its own tail.

And here’s some red lilies that popped a couple of days ago.

Not quite the detail of the yellow lilies, but still attractive.

I’ve been trying to restrain myself in the wake of a tiff between President Trump and retired Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, but I just can’t.

Paul Ryan, the failed V.P. candidate & former Speaker of the House, whose record of achievement was atrocious (except during my first two years as President), ultimately became a long running lame duck failure, leaving his Party in the lurch both as a fundraiser & leader……

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 12, 2019

Yep, Ryan’s record of achievement was quite atrocious. It’ll be interesting to see how historians rate him in, say, thirty years. I’m guessing near the bottom of the heap. He was pushed around by the Freedom Caucus, passed throw-away legislation just so the Senate could rewrite it, and was generally just a thumb-puppet who couldn’t stick up for the nation in the face of Trump’s bluster.

So, yes, Trump was right.

Our yellow lilies bloomed, and I thought they were charming.