Monthly Archives: June 2020

From AL-Monitor:

There’s a little unrest concerning the ascendance of QAnon conspiracy theorists within the Republican Party, especially as one of them in Georgia is close to securing the nomination to a House seat in a safe Republican district. I thought this paragraph is certainly true, although QAnon theorists might be unhappy with the true reasons:

QAnon believers tend to support other conspiracy theories about government, experts said. And Trump has tacitly breathed life into these ideas. The central theme around QAnon fits his argument that he’s an outsider being dragged down by (mostly Democratic) lawmakers who feel threatened by him and the change he brings to governing. [WaPo]

And here’s the top two reasons Democrats are uncomfortable with Trump and his changes to governance:

1. He pushes the idea that lies are truth.
2. He pushes the idea that truths are lies.

Heavens, I just can’t bloody imagine why that would make Democrats nervous.

For the QAnon-inclined reader:

Bring out this QAnon leader and let’s see if he’s a Federal government employee, or if he speaks with an honest Russian accent.

You can’t produce the guy, but you want to prattle on about Deep Throat? This is a familiar ploy from the science field. For a good thirty five years I’ve heard the remark of people pushing silly theories of supposedly a scientific background that are not accepted is that, well, Hey, Einstein wasn’t accepted at first, either!

Thing is, for every Einstein there are one hundred THOUSAND kooks, at an easy estimate, people who are clueless but still think they’ve discovered perpetual motion machines. Einstein did hard work and won Nobels for it, and his theoretical work eventually translated into technology, from atom bombs to transistors. Just as much of medicine and biology is dependent on theories of biological evolution being true, so does most of technology – or maybe all of it.

If there was any consilience for QAnon – corroborating, independent, objective lines of evidence – I’d be interested. There isn’t. It’s all nonsense. And so that’s what the prattling wannabe politicians are consuming and, no doubt, will be soon peddling.

Sorry, QAnon kids. It’s just another scam, and you’re the scammed. Fortunately, for most of you it’s just your self-respect you’ve lost. And the security of your country. Yeah, that’s what electing Trump got you.

NASCAR’S decision to ban the Confederate flag and other such symbols from its events on the part of fans brings to mind this question:

If you won’t venerate the memory of the traitor General Benedict Arnold, why the hell would you venerate the memory of General Robert E. Lee?

I ran across this suggestion on FB and simply shared it as something to think about, and, well, it’s made me think.

Presently, the ultimate responsibility, and the entity on which punishment falls when a cop engages in bad behavior, is the employing institution: City, County, or State. They will attempt to pass on some of the responsibility to the perpetrating cop, of course, but that is weak tea, especially when a police union is involved. Locally, the Minneapolis Police Dept (MPD) has blamed a lot of its problems on the local police union and its President, Officer Kroll.

This proposal shifts responsibility from the police department to the insurance companies, and while city management is made up of people who have many responsibilities, including the requirement that they provide policing, insurance companies labor under the requirement that they make money – and not necessarily from providing insurance to police.

That means that if they choose to dip their toes into this pool, they can do what insurance companies do best – price risk. They can do the research and develop the tools and strategies necessary to find officers who will fulfill their duties properly, and detect those who shouldn’t be officers. For those that slip past initial screenings, the increasing price for their required insurance will force out those who cannot be a good officer.

Of course, the devil will be in the details, especially legislative. Unions will push for laws shielding their officers from pretextual lawsuits, which inevitably will result in shielding some bad actors from justified lawsuits; they’ll demand control over the rates charged by the insurance companies, which cannot be permitted; and they’ll scream about the pension provision, which I happen to think is sheer genius. But there will be objections raised in the administrative realm as well, and then the problem of cops covering for cops comes up; such behavior is in itself worthy of punishment in the form of steep insurance rate rises – or refusal to coverage.

And the insurance companies, as part of risk minimization strategy, will develop a database for tracking officers, thus reducing the problem of ‘gypsy cops‘; reduction correlates with the number of employing entities.

The libertarian in me, which I’ve learned to regard with some suspicion, rejoices in using the machinery of the free markets to resolve a problem. I await the necessary and helpful critiques of Miller’s idea, and I wonder if an entire State could be persuaded to pass laws requiring all entities under their jurisdiction to use this model for employing officers.

Incumbent Senator Inhofe (R-OK).

I finally checked up on Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), and the 85-year old has filed papers for the Republican primary in order to be eligible for reelection to his current Senatorial seat; in the post that kicked off this thread covering the various Senate seats this cycle, Inhofe had not yet filed papers or stated intentions.

Inhofe has several primary challengers, but there’s little reason to think there’s a serious alternative. However, Dr. John Tompkins, a retired surgeon, is noteworthy:

“I became increasingly concerned about what’s going on in this country. … I’m extremely disappointed with our politicians,” he said.

His particular beef with Inhofe, Tompkins said, began about a year ago when he began reading the senator’s book, “The Greatest Hoax,” which claims to debunk climate change.

“I got through about 75% of it and said, ‘This is garbage.’ It’s just nonsense. … It’s poorly written and is only loosely related to any science whatsoever.”

Which is curiously polite and even passive-aggressive. It has to do with the government’s attempt to abandon the prosecution of former National Security Advisor Flynn now that he’s plead guilty twice to lying to the FBI, as retired Judge Gleeson, asked to investigate whether the government should be permitted to drop those charges, doesn’t agree they should:

First, “the requirement of judicial approval entitles the judge to obtain and evaluate the prosecutor’s reasons.” United States v. Ammidown, 497 F.2d 615, 620 (D.C. Cir. 1973). Here, the Government’s statement of reasons for seeking dismissal is pretextual. The Government claims there is insufficient evidence to prove materiality and falsity, but even giving it the benefit of every doubt—and recognizing its prerogative to assess the strength of its own case—this contention “taxes the credulity of the credulous.” Maryland v. King, 569 U.S. 435, 466 (2013) (Scalia, J., dissenting). The Government’s ostensible grounds for seeking dismissal are conclusively disproven by its own briefs filed earlier in this very proceeding. They contradict and ignore this Court’s prior orders, which constitute law of the case. They are riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact. And they depart from positions that the Government has taken in other cases. While Rule 48(a) does not require the Government to bare its innermost secrets, it does require a statement of its reasons for dismissal. See Ammidown, 497 F.2d at 620 (explaining that this requirement “prevent[s] abuse of the uncontrolled power of dismissal previously enjoyed by prosecutors”). Leave of court should not be granted when the explanations the Government puts forth are not credible as the real reasons for its dismissal of a criminal charge.

Second, the Court should deny leave because there is clear evidence of a gross abuse of prosecutorial power. Rule 48(a) was designed to “guard against dubious dismissals of criminal cases that would benefit powerful and well-connected defendants.” In other words, the rule empowers courts to protect the integrity of their own proceedings from prosecutors who undertake corrupt, politically motivated dismissals. See id.; see also Ammidown, 497 F.2d at 620-622. That is what has happened here. The Government has engaged in highly irregular conduct to benefit a political ally of the President. The facts of this case overcome the presumption of regularity. The Court should therefore deny the Government’s motion to dismiss, adjudicate any remaining motions, and then sentence the Defendant.

It’s full of politely intellectual slaps of the face. I wonder if AG Barr even realizes how much he’s been insulted by Gleeson’s evaluation of Barr’s order to drop the prosecution of a man that Judge Sullivan claimed was close to treason.

He basically called Barr a criminal to his face.

Some people seem to think they’re immune to change – and some of them live in the Tennessee State Legislature:

Never rains but it pours.

Oh, sorry in advance.

Wired has a report on the next problem originating from our excess:

Writing today in the journal Science, researchers report a startling discovery: After collecting rainwater and air samples for 14 months, they calculated that over 1,000 metric tons of microplastic particles fall into 11 protected areas in the western US each year. That’s the equivalent of over 120 million plastic water bottles. “We just did that for the area of protected areas in the West, which is only 6 percent of the total US area,” says lead author Janice Brahney, an environmental scientist at Utah State University. “The number was just so large, it’s shocking.”

It further confirms an increasingly hellish scenario: Microplastics are blowing all over the world, landing in supposedly pure habitats, like the Arctic and the remote French Pyrenees. They’re flowing into the oceans via wastewater and tainting deep-sea ecosystems, and they’re even ejecting out of the water and blowing onto land in sea breezes. And now in the American West, and presumably across the rest of the world given that these are fundamental atmospheric processes, they are falling in the form of plastic rain—the new acid rain.

I wonder how this will be dismissed by the anti-regulatory right?

Skipping over questions that I can’t answer regarding collection, disposal, and prevention, it seems to me that only one thing will get the right on board with taking steps to stop and roll it back – if, in fact, there is a viable strategy for same – and that’s if something they value is hurt by it. Consider Ducks Unlimited, dedicated to the conservation and increase of waterfowl. Seeing as

The majority of DU’s financial contributors and 90 percent of members are hunters.  [Wikipedia]

J. P. Morgan

and the founders included robber baron J. P. Morgan, it seems reasonable to assume that if these plastic micro-debris begins hurting, say, their favorite prey animal, or begins ruining scenic overlooks, we might start seeing some activity on the right side of the political spectrum.

Why should anyone be surprised by this development? Unless you think President Trump is a principled man, in which case you haven’t been paying attention, or you really need some help:

A vote by the Republican National Committee to leave the party’s 2016 party platform unchanged ahead of the November election has infuriated grassroots activists — including moderates who wanted to streamline its message and social conservatives who sought added language on emerging hot-button topics.

The decision by the party’s executive panel Wednesday means the GOP will maintain positions in the 4-year-old policy blueprint — including opposition to same-sex marriage and a nod to gay conversion therapy — and decline to stake out new positions on topics such as police reform, gender identity and third-trimester abortions. Party officials and senior Trump campaign aides had previously discussed ways to pare down the 58-page document to a single note card or abbreviated list of principles, but the effort broke down after several conservative groups registered complaints with the White House. [Politico]

A party platform is helpful for appealing to voters, but at the same time it serves to place restraints, loose though they may be, on the candidates and elected officers, and for an arbitrary, unprincipled man whose exercise of power has more to do with self-aggrandizement than advancing the principles of his Party, they are absolutely something to be avoided. Sure, President Trump blames this entire mess on Governor Cooper (D-NC), as the Governor’s cautious and honorable approach to the pandemic supposedly forced the President to move the Republican National Convention somewhere else and make the important work of the committee impossible.

Yeah, that’s where all the red flags start waving. Hey, guys, ever think of using Zoom or something similar? Work in subcommittees? It might be more efficient than getting everyone in a conference room or two!

The old principles in the platform of yesterday and tomorrow have been successfully ignored for the last four years, pushed out of sight by sheer outrage, but if brought to the fore again and modified, made even more aggressive on certain social policies, Trump may fear that he cannot operate as freely as he wishes – or he might not even be reelected because of the far-right radicalism inherent in some of those positions. Thus, the old platform is quietly trotted out, paraded briefly, and then sent back to its kennel. If there are embarrassments that come out of that, let the critics have their laugh at the poop on the display floor. It serves to distract them from many other issues that are weighing Trump down.

And distraction is what Trump does best.

NBC News reports on an interesting little addition to the Trump campaign rallies that are due to resume Juneteenth, 2020 in Tulsa, OK:

“By clicking register below, you are acknowledging that an inherent risk of exposure to COVID-19 exists in any public place where people are present. By attending the Rally, you and any guests voluntarily assume all risks related to exposure to COVID-19 and agree not to hold Donald J. Trump for President, Inc.,” the rally site or organizers “liable for any illness or injury,” the form says.

I’m surprised there’s not another addition:

If you become ill with Covid-19, you will keep this a private matter and not broadcast, or cause to broadcast, or release to the news media, such information indicating you have Covid-19 or that you may have contracted it at the Trump Campaign rally in Tulsa, OK.

Because, of course, it’s impossible to have that happen at an event blessed by the God that has blessed Father of Lies Donald J. Trump.

But this will turn into a test of the cultists’ faith, won’t it? We went to see the leader in spite of all the warnings of the Godless liberals, proving we are worthy! Cult members often compete to show their loyalty, so, no kidding. That’s what’ll happen.

I hope for their sakes that nothing does happen, Covid-19 related. But I’m not laying money on it.

Margaret Sullivan sets out a critique of One America News Network (OANN), which, given she’s at a major competitor, I would have taken as biased, except I’ve seen the OANN correspondents at press conferences with President Trump and must agree, they show neither professionalism nor professional skills at all – they’ve completely given in to the idea that the media must be biased, or, as Sullivan notes, [OANN] even unapologetically described itself last year as “one of his greatest supporters.”

But, in the context of Fox News sometimes criticizing the President’s actions of late, this is what struck me:

When you live by the water …

Here’s the Gizmodo story.

Source: American Civil War Story

It turns out the memorials to the second American Confederacy are being cleaned out like pus from an oozing wound, and President Trump is digging in his heels when it comes to renaming Army bases such as Ft. Hood in Texas. I’m not sure which reason applies – perhaps some of his key allies still live in the Confederate dream, or Trump refuses to be seen giving into the sponsors of this legislation, which include his feuding partner Senator Warren (D-MA) – but the one given out by Press Secretary McEnany seems particularly disingenuous:

“He does, as I noted at the top of this briefing, fervently stand against the renaming of our forts, these great American fortresses where literally some of these men and women who lost their lives as they went out to Europe, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and all across this world to win world wars on behalf of freedom,” McEnany said. “A lot of times, the very last place they saw was one of these forts and to suggest these forts were somehow inherently racist and their names need to be changed is a complete disrespect to the men and women.” [NBC News]

And … she doesn’t address why the forts were named as they were. She doesn’t address why we name forts.

Names are given to such things to honor the people who bore those names. We accord such honors to men who went above and beyond the call of duty in serving the needs of society, and that should be all of society.

Fort Hood was named after Confederate General John Bell Hood, and while he suffered some horrific injuries during the war, the fact remains that, as a graduate of the United States Military Academy, he wasn’t just a treasonous man, a man bent on dividing American society, but a treasonous US Army officer. The most you can say is that at least he didn’t engage in subterfuge by remaining in the US Army when the Civil War began and engaging in sabotage, but immediately joined the Confederate side openly.

Why honor a treasonous man? The blanket pardon issued by President Johnson certainly didn’t remove the stain of treason, merely the punishment.

McEnany does not address this entire argument, because she and Trump have no effective rebuttal. Thus, the squirrel argument: don’t trample on the honor of the fallen who happened to have trained or been based there!

Well, by honoring treasonous officers, you already have trampled the the honor of the fallen, the Union soldiers who lay dead in the fields, and while Trump and McEnany are not responsible for the names given, they have the opportunity to erase that stain.

And they won’t.

Over the last eight months, give or take, President Trump has had three ongoing opportunities to fulfill his primary responsibility as President: Be a leader. These opportunities, for those of us asleep at the proverbial switch, are the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic collapse that was a consequence of the quarantine that the States were forced enforce, mostly, on the advice of epidemiologists, and, finally, the unrest caused by the murder of George Floyd by Officer Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department (just a few miles from here). If he’d fulfilled his role, his approval numbers would be sky-high, just President Bush’s after the Towers fell.

I like the Gallup polls because they have decades of experience, they’re fairly conservative, meaning I’m not likely to be led astray as I might by polling services that might have a more liberal tilt, much like Rasmussen is known for its conservative tilt, and for consistency – I’ve cited many Gallup polls over the years. I am aware that FiveThirtyEight rates them a B, while the ABC News/The Washington Post service is rated an A+. With that in mind, this may be quite a shock to the conservative reader: the latest Gallup Presidential Approval  Poll:

It’s hard to spin a drop of 10 points to 39% approval over two weeks as anything but a disaster, and I’m not in that business anyways. While the public appeared to have been somewhat willing to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt when it came to Covid-19 and the consequent economic collapse, since we haven’t seen a pandemic of this virulence in a very long time, we have short memories, and not many Americans pay close enough attention to his official actions vs his overactive mouth and fingers, his reactions to the protests over the George Floyd killing have been a catastrophe for public perception of his competency.

FiveThirtyEight’s Poll of Polls. Not quite the same as Gallup’s poll, as approval and popularity are not synonyms.

This, of course, should come as no surprise. Business people are not trained for, and are not expected to deal with, problems of this magnitude. These are problems primarily of a political, communal nature, and while his incompetence in reference to the first two appear to have hardly touched him in the Gallup poll, the glaring, in your face divisive and authoritarian reaction to the protests, and the hollow attempts to blame Antifa in the face of a lack of evidence of their involvement (reported on here and here) once again reveals him as the manipulative & dishonest person that he is as well as his lack of aptitude and training for the job. While his business bona fides, questionable as they are, were acceptable to many voters in 2016, the raw truth should be coming quite clear:

There’s more to being a politician than making promises hearkening back to some Golden Age and saying outrageous things about opponents. Amateurs may be appealing, but they are fool’s gold.

The latest monthly CNN Poll by SSRS, showing Trump approval numbers dropping from from 45% to 38%. Reportedly, the Trump Campaign sent CNN a cease and desist letter, demanding a retraction and apology, which CNN refused. They really should have just posted an article consisting of laughter.

Yep, that campaign rhetoric of 2016 might have been delightful to the hard-right conservative voter, but in the end it, along with his lack of track record in the public sphere, were a big red flag that he was the wrong choice. The Republican primary voter in 2016 had a plethora of choices, and yet enough of those voters chose Trump to push him over the top; in retrospect, I wonder if fewer choices might have left Trump out of the winner’s circle. On the other hand, the base desperately wanted red meat, and while the Republican Party boasted many ambitious candidates, none were particularly impressive individuals. Perhaps Governor Kasich (R-OH) would qualify, but he didn’t appeal to the base. In a Party that was constantly fed the misinformation that Democratic President Obama was wrecking the economy domestically, and internationally endangering the country through the Iran Deal (JCPOA) and losing national prestige, the base was, purposefully or not, being trained to believe the unbelievable was true. Trump told them we were in the middle of a crime wave, the economy was a wreck, Clinton was a Russian puppet even as he publicly begged the Russians for help, that any governmentally-supplied number that didn’t help him was a lie, and the base, trained to believe, did as told: it believed, it stepped forward, and it voted for him, and categorically labeled those sources as fake news.

And now, here we are with someone who’s so incompetent and clueless that I, quite frankly, have begun ignoring. He’s being outrageous again? Good, more fodder for Colbert on The Late Show. It’s not late night at the moment? Then please don’t bother me with President Irrelevancy, because the United States has a lot of shit to clean up and the more we listen to him, the higher that shit pile gets.

From The Blob trailer.

Shameful, maybe. He wields a lot of power and has quite a few levers he can pull in order to wreck the United States even more, but whether he’s a Russian thumb-puppet following orders, or the iconic barroom blowhard given a chance to implement his ill-informed opinions, I’m no longer fascinated with him, and I certainly don’t respect him; I never really did, once it became clear he was a congenital liar. I try to pay attention because I should, but it’s like salt in the wound, sandpaper on the nerves. He’s The Blob ingesting the guy under the car.

But what does this crash potentially mean? Depends on the topic. Former VP Biden has begun modeling what he will do as President, showing compassion to the Floyd family by recording a video but not disturbing his memorial in Houston. He speaks from the heart, as someone who has lost his first wife, baby daughter, and an adult son, and speaks directly to Floyd’s daughter, offering adult sympathy and guidance on the road ahead. Contrast that to Trump’s offerings. If Biden can keep this up, we may see a landslide of near Nixon-McGovern-esqe magnitude.

The Republican Party may now reap what it’s sown, which were lies, in a disaster. We may see Senate seats that were considered safe before this began suddenly become seriously contested. All that money Trump and the RNC have received from rich donors may suddenly not be enough to cover all the advertising they’ll feel is necessary.

And advertising may not do the job this time around.

I personally hope that some quasi-religious tenets will come up for public discussion and review: Are taxes always evil? Is Regulation always bad? Is profit all that’s important?

How do we truly begin to erase racism? That’s the most important problem, of course. But concomitant with that is the recognition that a roaring economy doesn’t solve the question; it’s quite the other way around, only once racism is at least in the process of being erased can an economy be truly classified as roaring. If only investors, who are overwhelming white, are doing well, then the economy is not really doing well because the economy is about the citizenry, and if not all of the communities are benefiting, then it’s not roaring as much as we’d like to believe. And, as an investor, I do not consider investors to be deserving to be the primary recipient of corporate profits.

There are so many other implications to this slide. If the next few polls show Trump heading for the low 30s or even the upper 20s, then Trump is finished. He simply hasn’t the intellectual capacity to turn it around. His ideology is flawed, his bigotry becoming well known, and his refusal to lead painfully obvious. Another politician … wouldn’t have let it get this bad.

I’ve noticed CNN has been running headlines about the competition to be Trump’s political heir.

In the face of his dreadful incompetence, I have to ask: Which idiot could possibly want that mantle? Continuous mendacity is not a political ideology, it’s a mental disorder. Every chaser after this mantle should simply be ejected from office at the next opportunity.

This is a fascinating example of crossover techniques in technology:

At over 600°C, a jet engine’s exhaust stands out like a beacon when seen in infrared, making it an obvious target for heat-seeking missiles – but a US Navy device might be able to thwart such missiles with ghost images projected in mid-air.

The traditional method of defence has been to eject hot flares to draw missiles away from the aircraft. This new approach would use lasers rather than pyrotechnics.

When focused to a point, a laser can produce a spot or filament of ionised gas in the air, known as a laser-induced plasma (LIP). The US military has long shown interest in LIP to create artificial lightning to defuse bombs or produce “non-lethal” effects.

Now, Alexandru Hening at the Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in California is using lasers to create an array of plasma columns in the air. These are rastered like the beam in an old cathode-ray screen to create two or three-dimensional images in mid-air of ghost aircraft that can distract incoming missiles. [NewScientist]

It’s a fascinating idea for confusing thermal detectors, and transfers an old, obsolete technique for display technology using a phosphorescent material with … air. And, for those wondering about my forklift remark, the old cathode ray TVs seemed to get exponentially heavier as the screen size increased; the big ones, I should imagine, could require several husky men to deliver them to their customers.

A reader catches me depending too much on the Axios summary concerning a CDC survey:

Um, it was 200 people who responded to the survey. Who knows how many people have actually done those stupid things. It could be 201 or it be 20,000+.

Oh, crap. Here’s the relevant section from the actual CDC report:

A recent report described a sharp increase in calls to poison centers related to exposures to cleaners and disinfectants since the onset of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic (1). However, data describing cleaning and disinfection practices within household settings in the United States are limited, particularly concerning those practices intended to prevent transmission of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. To provide contextual and behavioral insight into the reported increase in poison center calls and to inform timely and relevant prevention strategies, an opt-in Internet panel survey of 502 U.S. adults was conducted in May 2020 to characterize knowledge and practices regarding household cleaning and disinfection during the COVID-19 pandemic. Knowledge gaps were identified in several areas, including safe preparation of cleaning and disinfectant solutions, use of recommended personal protective equipment when using cleaners and disinfectants, and safe storage of hand sanitizers, cleaners, and disinfectants. Thirty-nine percent of respondents reported engaging in nonrecommended high-risk practices with the intent of preventing SARS-CoV-2 transmission, such as washing food products with bleach, applying household cleaning or disinfectant products to bare skin, and intentionally inhaling or ingesting these products. Respondents who engaged in high-risk practices more frequently reported an adverse health effect that they believed was a result of using cleaners or disinfectants than did those who did not report engaging in these practices.

[Bold mine.] The Axios report was poorly written, and I didn’t double-check it. If I’d realized it was an opt-in Internet survey, I wouldn’t have paid any attention, because these depend too much on special interest from the survey taker. 39% sounds high because many of those who had not taken up a dangerous practice would also not have taken the survey, thus skewing the results.

My humble apologies.

A new word. Yep.

From Axios:

The CDC released data on Friday from a survey commissioned to understand why more people have been calling poison control centers during the coronavirus pandemic.

What they found: Roughly 200 adults who responded to the survey in May said they intentionally inhaled disinfectants, washed food with bleach, or applied household cleaning products to bare skin to combat the virus — all of which are dangerous.

• Fewer respondents reported drinking or gargling household cleaners and soapy water to fight COVID-19, or inhaling bleach and other cleaners.

No matter how you slice it, 200 is a very small number against the citizenry or the electorate sliced up by political leaning or not. While it’s certainly a tragedy that the President managed to influence anyone with his absurd and dangerous suggestion, statistically speaking, for a population of roughly 280 million adults, this is unsurprising only in that it wasn’t higher.

This speaks to the diminishing influence of this President. Even those who are still inclined to vote for him are applying critical analysis to what comes out of his mouth and not doing what he’s doing when it’s obvious. This is suggestive, but of course not dispositive, that the President will be less able to entice voters down his rabbit hole come November.

It appears Republican hopes in the Michigan Senate race are fading:

Biden, the presumed Democratic nominee, leads Republican Trump in Michigan 53-41, according to a poll conducted by EPIC-MRA of Lansing between May 30 and last Wednesday. …

U.S. Sen. Gary Peters, a Democrat from Bloomfield Township, leads Republican challenger John James of Farmington Hills, 51-36, with 13% undecided or refusing to say. [Detroit Free Press]

This is roughly twice the gap from the previous poll that had come to my attention with regards to Senator Peters (D-MI) reelection chances.

And, of course, Biden appears to enjoy a tremendous lead in Michigan. It’s still a long ways to November, and there are many possible potholes facing Biden, so he has to continue projecting bold leadership – from his basement – and concentrate on talking about the current incompetency in the White House, and detail how he’ll reintroduce competency and integrity to the White House. He almost must keep his constituencies confident that their concerns will be addressed, if he does win. Chief among these are the black community, who essentially forced the Democrats to choose him, and he must retain their confidence.

Keep an eye on the polls.

They should have been on Survivor.

Lost In Space (1998) can never make it past its original pained premise. Earth is doomed to environmental disaster, but the Robinsons, with their trusty, if lascivious, pilot Major Don West, are blazing a path to the only other known livable planet in the Galaxy to, you know, maybe ruin it, too.

Yeah.

And two young Robinson kids will be occupying important posts. They happen to be prodigies with all the usual irritating stereotypical kid things.

Robot and Mr. Smith are there as well, and I will happily admit the robot is fairly cool.

It was sort of vaguely entertaining when I saw it in the theater back in ’98 – not to mention excellent CGI for the time. The action is non-stop, but then we get into time travel, with all of its conundrums. The audience applauded in ’98 at the end, but I did not when I saw it recently. The show is essentially themeless.

Not worth your time unless you’re a completist for any of the actors.

One of the problems of data analysis is being able to trust the results in the face of questionable data collection and coverage practices. For example, WaPo has a longish article on the problems of understanding the range and character of deaths of people by police force:

Amid the turmoil, nobody could answer a simple question: How often do police shoot and kill someone? No one knew for sure, because no government agency kept a comprehensive count.

The Post’s database relies significantly on reporting from local media outlets on shootings in their own communities. The amount of reporting done on individual shootings has declined, probably a victim of the continued cuts by local media outlets.

But fatal shootings by police have not slowed — even though the pandemic closed businesses, shuttered schools and effectively shut down much of American life for weeks on end. In May 2019, police shot and killed 74 people. In May of this year, police shot and killed 109 people.

WaPo maintains its own database because no one seems to have a reliable and official database available.

And:

Fatal shootings by police are a limited metric for answering larger questions about how police use their powers, experts said. Whether a shooting is fatal may depend entirely on a few centimeters in the trajectory of a bullet.

No nationwide data exists on how often police shoot and wound someone, or how often they fire and miss. And no comprehensive national data exists on how other kinds of force — such as chokeholds or the use of batons or stun guns — are used.

“The fatalities is a very good measure of some things, but doesn’t include the kinds of events and activities that we’re seeing all over the country that normally don’t lead to death,” said Alpert, the criminology professor. “Unless there’s an injury or unless there’s a complaint that gets traction, either we don’t know, or it doesn’t matter.”

So when we want to analyze the situation, it almost seems hopeless – the data is not trustable, not granular enough, and how do we measure the racism inherent in redlining and profiling and, say, the casual racism of this woman:

The staff at progressive web site The Daily Kos sees a Trump ad buy in Ohio, won by Trump in 2016 by 8 points, as a signal that Trump has already lost:

So they’re spending money to shore up Ohio, which is for presidential election purposes an irrelevant state! It’s as if Democrats spent money playing defense in Nevada, which Hillary Clinton won by 2.4% in 2016. Because if we lose Nevada (or Minnesota, another close 2016 state), we’ve already lost enough other states to call it a day.

Or to put it another way, Trump’s problem isn’t Ohio. His problem is that his national numbers have tanked, and because of that it’s potentially putting reach-states like Iowa, Ohio, and Texas in play. But Ohio isn’t going to cost him the election. It’ll be the seven battlegrounds that will fall to Biden long before—and by a bigger margin than—Ohio ever will.

So why spend money on such ads in Ohio?

So there are two options: The first is that Trump is dictating where money should be spent. It would be just like him to assume he knows more than the experts and usurp their judgment. It’s easy to imagine Trump seeing a poll showing him narrowly losing Ohio and panicking, then ordering his campaign to go on the air in a state that won’t be deciding who wins or loses.

That theory fits in with the kind of campaign Trump is running: one based on his own prejudices, score-settling, and whatever else his lizard brain demands. It’s the kind of campaign that thinks mocking Biden for wearing a mask is effective when 72% of Americans agree on the importance of wearing a mask. It’s a campaign build on getting cheers from the QAnon deplorables, not on winning the actual votes he needs to win an actual election.

The other option is that his campaign manager, Brad Parscale, is actually bad at his job. It’s not as if Trump has ever surrounded himself with the best and the brightest. So it’s not a stretch to think that Parscale is just another in a long list of failures inside Trump’s orbit.

Personally, I think they have to dig a little deeper in the swamp. The Trump Campaign has an amazing amount of money for a campaign that appears to be going down to defeat. By buying ads in Ohio, they’re transferring some of that money, sent by loyal donors, from their coffers to someone in Ohio. The Daily Kos staff might want to consider following the money.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if it turned out to involve firms under the influence of the Trump family?

Odder things have happened in politics. I’m not even sure it’d be illegal. But I’m guessing the fees would be steeper than usual.

In Texas, Reeves County GOP chairperson LaDonna Olivier manages to put her foot in her mouth and just about get it down to her gullet.

LaDonna Olivier, GOP chairperson from Reeves County, shared a post on Monday saying “people are trying to turn George [Floyd] into a saint” but he was a “brutal criminal.” [Texas Tribune]

How many ways can this be wrong?

1. The police are the police. They are not judges, jury, or executioner.
2. The police almost certain were not aware of George Floyd’s criminal record, if any. Suggesting that it was OK to commit homicide extra-judicially in this context is utter nonsense. Given their likely lack of knowledge, even this exceptionally weak justification breaks down.
3. The entire weakness of Olivier’s argument suggests a bigoted position. This isn’t a thoughtful argument; instead, it uses some emotional trigger words, namely “saint” and “brutal criminal” in close juxtaposition. For those readers who don’t understand, or take seriously, such arguments, please purchase and read The Persuaders.
4. And, finally, this isn’t a serious assessment of a situation in which protests are taking place in cities and towns large and small. In a WaPo article on the same subject, they quote her, although I don’t know the source of the interview:
   

   “I said he was no angel,” Olivier said in an interview. “My concern is all the rioting and people not knowing what’s going on, making something so huge out of it. There are more important issues of people dying or being killed. Nobody cries about the abortions. The police were wrong, but from what I’ve seen on his medical records he was high on drugs.”

   The reference to abortion is another use of an emotional keyword, a reminder that, Hey, the Democrats are evil baby-killers! if I may paraphrase the lost soul Erick Erickson. Olivier is speaking as GOP attack dog first, not as an American citizen faced with one of the most important and chronic issues which threaten the prosperity of the United States. Abortion is nothing more than a squirrel, an attempt to avoid having to address an issue at all. And, while there have indeed been reports of Floyd being high on something – fentanyl was one mentioned, although I’m a little surprised toxin screens came back so fast – all the videos I’ve seen of the arrest have shown a cooperative Floyd, not a combative man.

Only four. I’m a little disappointed in myself. Other thoughts?

The visual is damning, but also a lovely way to illustrate how the black community is mistreated by police:

From here.