Monthly Archives: July 2020

Restful on the eyes, it is.

I think it’s already gone.

While discussing dinner plans with my Arts Editor:

ME: We could go to Mac’s [a local fish ‘n chips joint].

ARTS EDITOR: Yeah.

ME: We’d be eating outside in this 20 MPH wind.

ARTS EDITOR: Yeah.

ME: “Oh, noooooo! My fish is flying away! I ordered the cod!”

ARTS EDITOR: …!

SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts once again brings bewilderment upon the right-wing fringe movement that believes religion trumps all in the case of Calvary Chapel Dayton Valley v. Steve Sisolak, Governor of Nevada, et al:

Conservative lawmakers blasted Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts after he sided with the court’s liberal wing in a 5-4 decision Friday that rejected a Nevada church’s request to block the state government from enforcing a cap on attendance at religious services.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) tweeted early Saturday morning that Roberts had “abandoned his oath.”

“What happened to that judge?” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.).

“Freedom of religion is our first freedom. Yet SCOTUS has ruled that casinos can host hundreds of gamblers, while churches cannot welcome their full congregations. Justice Roberts once again got it wrong, shamefully closing church doors to their flocks,” Cotton added in a statement. [The Hill]

It’s starting to border on amazing that conservative lawmakers react with shock whenever a conservative justice refuses to adhere to their ideology. In this particular case, it’s not even a decision against the heart of the Nevada church’s case – it’s a decision to deny emergency injunctive relief, which basically means giving the church permission to conduct business as usual while its case proceeds in a lower Court.

That’s all.

No reasoning was presented for the majority opinion, so I can only guess that the majority has noted that churches have been a major vector for the spread of Covid-19, while movie complexes and casinos have not yet proven to be. I expect the latter may change, but at the moment why allow a church to possibly menace society while its case works its way through the court system?

Churches services are not essential services, no matter how red-faced priests, pastors, and faithful get about it. There are other options. Don’t confuse a potentially dangerous religious service configuration with a freedom of religion issue, like Justice Kavanaugh manages to do in his dissent:

For example, courts should be extremely deferential to the States when considering a substantive due process claim by a secular business that it is being treated worse than another business. … Under the Constitution, state and local governments, not the federal courts, have the primary responsibility for addressing COVID–19 matters such as quarantine requirements, testing plans, mask mandates, phased reopenings, school closures, sports rules, adjustment of voting and election procedures, state court and correctional institution practices, and the like.

But COVID–19 is not a blank check for a State to discriminate against religious people, religious organizations, and religious services. There are certain constitutional red lines that a State may not cross even in a crisis. Those red lines include racial discrimination, religious discrimination, and content-based suppression of speech.

I’m sorry, but if your religious service objectively endangers my health and life, you bet it better be suppressed. Kavanaugh tries to draw a red line, but I’m afraid the scuffing feet of Covid-19 has erased it – dispositively.

I see this as simply a ginned up issue to keep the base in line, rather than, once again, sober governance. Hysteria tends to be the Republicans’ stock in trade these days, and I’m getting tired of it. Cotton especially. He seems to be a ninny and a dick.

Good for Chief Justice Roberts.

The things you stumble across in RetractionWatch. Remember this cool bit of amber with something avian in it? The paper has been retracted by Nature, but not due to fraud:

We, the authors, are retracting this Article to prevent inaccurate information from remaining in the literature. Although the description of Oculudentavis khaungraae remains accurate, a new unpublished specimen casts doubts upon our hypothesis regarding the phylogenetic position of HPG-15-3.

When your epistemic bubble keeps telling you the government is evil and the private sector can do no wrong, you get shit like this:

[Serena Bumpus, regional director of nursing for the Austin Round Rock Region of Baylor Scott and White Health in Texas,] has fielded calls from nurses all over the country — some as far afield as the United Kingdom — wanting to know how they can help. But Bumpus says she does not have an easy answer.

“I’ve had to kind of just do my own digging and use my connections,” she said. At first, she said, interested nurses were asked to register through the Texas Disaster Volunteer Registry; but then the system never seemed to be put to use.

Later she learned — “by happenstance … literally by social media” — that the state had contracted with private agencies to find nurses. So now she directs callers to those agencies. [WaPo]

This was a prime role for the government to fill, and it appears to have been completely abdicated in Texas by the dollar-worshipping leaders of government. Think about it: she learned about it by accident.

That is unacceptable. But you can guess there’s more than one instance of that out there. The private sector has no experience and no motivation – but profit – with this situation.

This is the result of decades of preaching about the evils of government by the right, and the assertions, some very, very silly – I know, I read them when they were initially published – that the private sector can do darn near anything the government can do, ten times better and without corruption.

All of these are turning out to be lies. If my dear reader has bought into these assertions, this is the time to sit back in your chair and contemplate how they went wrong. Or go here (one of my personal prisms). Methods optimized for one sector of society rarely transfer to another. We’re seeing that in practice right now – especially the Southern states run by Republicans.

In the same paper referenced here on 5G technology inducing coronavirus, James Heathers (via RetractionWatch) notices a wee slip by the paper’s authors:

Remember, 5G causes 720 FACTORIAL different diseases.

I think there are about 13,000 diseases in the ICD-10.

That is a lot less that 720! which is – and you'll like this…

2.6e1746

As there are 10^82 atoms in the universe, this just might be shite. https://t.co/m0XcFbL2HC

— 🏴James Heathers 🏴 (@jamesheathers) July 23, 2020

Which makes me wonder, A) who are these jokers who wrote this paper, and B) who are the clowns who accepted it and published it?

At least it’s been retracted, eh?

Venereology:

Venereology is a branch of medicine that is concerned with the study and treatment of sexually transmitted diseases. The name derives from Roman goddess Venus, associated with love, beauty and fertility. A physician specializing in venereology is called a venereologist.^[1] In many areas of the world, the specialty is usually combined with dermatology. [Wikipedia]

Noted in the credentials of the authors of a withdrawn paper, “5G Technology and induction of coronavirus in skin cells.”

Readers respond to my post-analysis of the Trump-Clinton contest:

Worth pointing out: While poll-bashing in the wake of the Trump “victory” is a popular sport, the actual vote on Clinton v Trump was within a point of the consensus of the published legitimate polls. As predicted, Trump lost the vote. The distortions introduced by the electoral college put this beast in power, not the American people.

And thus Trump’s almost frantic cries of voter fraud. But his own hand-picked commission couldn’t find any evidence of massive fraud. Another reader responds to the first:

not even that. I believe there were 2 individuals (faithless electors they called them) whose states voted for Clinton but decided to cast their electoral vote for a third party. So, she really won the electoral college vote. If I had been her that would have been my lawsuit to win. Way better than hanging chads

Unfortunately, not true. From Taegan Goddard’s Electoral Vote Map:

Trump received 304 electoral votes to Clinton’s 227 electoral votes. Clinton won the national popular vote with 48.2% of the vote, while Trump received 46.1% of the vote. Clinton and Trump criticized each other over character issues and shared divergent views on America’s role in the world.

The map above shows Trump winning 306 electoral votes because that’s what would have happened if two Texas electors hadn’t voted against him.

Wikipedia notes there were ten faithless electors initially:

As a result of the seven successfully cast faithless votes, the Democratic Party nominee, Hillary Clinton, lost five of her pledged electors while the Republican Party nominee and then president-elect, Donald Trump, lost two. Three of the faithless electors voted for Colin Powell while John Kasich, Ron Paul, Bernie Sanders, and Faith Spotted Eagle each received one vote.^[8] The defections fell well short of the number needed to change the result of the election; only 2 of the 7 defected from the winner, whereas 35 were needed to defect in order to force a contingent election in Congress (a tally of less than 270).

The gap of almost 80 electoral votes was far too large to be affected by the two who defected from Clinton. The reader continues (the link at the end may be associated with the above, not the below):

… and the Supreme Court recently ruled that electors must vote the way their states voted. https://www.google.com/…/mobi…/article/amp/idUSKBN1480FQ

I believe the decision made clear that if there’s a state law requiring electors be faithful, it is not unconstitutional. However, in the absence of such a law, an elector cannot be legally compelled to vote for the candidate chosen by the state’s voters.

The Heisenberg Effect is also known as the Observer Effect. Nick Brown notices that, in academic circles, an Expression of Concern (EoC) doesn’t seem to mean what it used to mean:

When I first came across the concept, I was told that an EoC was a sort of preliminary step on the way to retraction. The journal acknowledges that it has received information that suggests that an article may not be reliable. This information seems, on the face of it, to be quite convincing. The journal is still investigating exactly what happened, but in the meantime, here is an early warning that people who are thinking of citing this article might want to think twice. We could see it as the equivalent of locking up someone who is accused of a serious crime: They have not yet been found guilty, their detention is only preventive (and often under better conditions than those who have been convicted), but the prima facie case is such that on balance, we probably don’t want to have that person walking around unchecked. …

However, it appears that many journals or editors are using the term “Expression of Concern” to mean something else. This article has had an EoC on it for six years now. The editors of Psychology of Music just issued this EoC, but according to Samuel Mehr they have no plans to escalate to a retraction. The author of that last paper has also had five EoCs in place at another journal for over a year.

This type of EoC basically comes down to the following statement from the editors: “We have good reason to believe that this article is garbage, and you should not trust it. But we’re not going to do anything about it that might hurt our impact factor, or embarrass us by getting us into Retraction Watch.” It’s like a restaurant menu with a small sticker saying “Pssst: The fish is terrible, please don’t order it”. (Plus, the sticker is permanent. It’s inside the laminated cover of the menu.)

[Bold mine.]

And where did I find this? In Retraction Watch, of course, in their weekly roundup.

Who watches the watchers? The answer would seem to be The Watched.

Deb’s begonia is coming along nicely.

Over the last few weeks there’s been a few articles concerning overpopulation out on the Web, a matter of some concern in today’s world. First up is an article in WaPo which discusses the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on birth rates in the United States:

In a new report, economists writing for the Brookings Institution estimate that the United States could see “on the order of 300,000 to 500,000 fewer births next year” as a result of the economic recession triggered by the novel coronavirus.

The economists, Melissa S. Kearney and Phillip Levine, derive their estimates from data on birthrates during the Great Recession and the 1918 flu pandemic. Both of those upheavals had a considerable negative impact on fertility. …

The reason? Children are expensive, and having a child is in many ways a financial decision. The loss of a job or otherwise uncertain prospects for a steady income lead many would-be parents to postpone having kids until things are more settled. In economic jargon, birthrates are “procyclical” — they tend to rise during times of economic growth and fall during recessions.

But I’m disturbed by this:

Economists use a tool called the value of a statistical life, or VSL, to help put losses of life on a level playing field with other policy considerations. Using a standard VSL of roughly $10 million, the permanent loss of half a million births works out to an economic loss of about $5 trillion over the coming decades.

Where VSL is:

The value of a statistical life (VSL) is the marginal rate of substitution between income (or wealth) and mortality risk. The VSL indicates how much individuals are willing to pay (WTP) to reduce the risk of death. Applied properly, the VSL can be used in benefit-cost analysis to evaluate the efficiency of government policies designed to reduce risk.

There is no mention of the benefit to society of not having those births occur due to the reduction in stress on the environment. One missed birth is meaningless, but in aggregate there will be some positive effect.

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger seeks to soothe my concerns:

… a new study published in The Lancet with a paragraph-long title, Fertility, mortality, migration, and population scenarios for 195 countries and territories from 2017 to 2100: a forecasting analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study makes the point again:

Our findings suggest that continued trends in female educational attainment and access to contraception will hasten declines in fertility and slow population growth. A sustained TFR [total fertility rate] lower than the replacement level in many countries, including China and India, would have economic, social, environmental, and geopolitical consequences. Policy options to adapt to continued low fertility, while sustaining and enhancing female reproductive health, will be crucial in the years to come.

…

It’s happening almost everywhere; the working adult population is already dropping in China, it’s coming in India, and only sub-Saharan Africa continues to increase to the end of the century. The world population will peak after mid-century and decline significantly by 2100. This is good news, and bad news:

 Our findings show that some countries with fertility lower than replacement level, such as the USA, Australia, and Canada, will probably maintain their working-age populations through net immigration. Our forecasts for a shrinking global population have positive implications for the environment, climate change, and food production, but possible negative implications for labour forces, economic growth, and social support systems in parts of the world with the greatest fertility declines.

Concerns about labor forces can be alleviated through medical advances and voluntary reductions in consumption, preferably through price increases required by increasing wages to workers. I wish I was an expert in demographic forecasting, since it would be interesting to see how increasing prices would restrain population growth, as noted in the WaPo article, as well as Secular Cycles (Turchin & Nefedov).

Finally, Andrew Sullivan in New York Magazine highlights the impact of plague on population, society, and, as a survivor of the AIDS epidemic himself, on individuals in this longish article:

It’s strange that we now see America threatened by a plague. Because without plague, America, as we know it, wouldn’t exist.

It may have been the most devastating epidemic in the history of humankind — surpassing in its mortality rates any before or since, including the Black Death in the Europe of the mid-14th century. Smallpox arrived in America with the first Europeans and went on, with several other imported diseases, to wipe out up to 90 percent of the Native population in a relatively short amount of time — millions and maybe tens of millions died. …

We are wrong, therefore, to think of plague entirely as a threat to civilization. Plague is an effect of civilization. The waves of sickness through human history in the past 5,000 years (and not before) attest to this, and the outbreaks often became more devastating the bigger the settlements and the greater the agriculture and the more evolved the trade and travel. What made the American plague of the 16th century so brutal was that it met a virgin population with no immunity whatever. The nightmare that humans had been dealing with and adapting to in Europe and Asia for millennia came suddenly to this continent all at once, and the population had no defense at all. The New World became a stage on which all the accumulated viral horrors of the Old World converged.

[My bold.]

And overpopulation appears to be the mechanism, which is why I’m unsurprised at the Covid-19 pandemic, and will expect another one soon enough – as does Sullivan. One problem is unsafe practices in crowded conditions, but defining and banning all unsafe practices is not a simple thing to do in, ah, practice.

Plagues have often been catalyzing events, entering human history like asteroids hitting a planet. They kill shocking numbers of people and leave many more rudderless, coping with massive loss, incalculable grief, and, often, social collapse. They reorder the natural world, at least for a time, as human cities and towns recede and animal life reemerges and microbes evolve and regroup. They suspend a society in midair and traumatize it, taking it out of its regular patterns and intimating new possible futures. In some cases, a society redefines itself. In others, trauma seems the only consequence.

Investments, emotional and intellectual, are made void, freeing the survivors to rethink their roles and goals in society, as the roiling of society shows its fault lines. I have to wonder if Covid-19 was a necessary requirement for the George Floyd murder to bring our racial injustice problem to light, as well as the toppling of statues honoring people who had done nothing worthy of such memorialization. Or was Covid-19 too mild of an epidemic? We’re not exactly dropping in the streets, are we?

And, like most traumatic incidents, individual changes can be dramatic. I shan’t steal Sullivan’s prose any longer – go read it for yourself. His description of the consequences of surviving the Spanish Flu by Katherine Anne Porter is a little horrifying.

All of which leads me to an endpoint of thinking about E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops (1909), a story of how most of humanity now lives in a vast underground honeycomb of apartments, served by machines, hardly ever seeing another person face to face, communicating via telecommunications, and their shared helplessness when things go awry. I read into it a meditation on how one approach to overpopulation, strict regimentation and dictation of the habits of the madding crowd, as it were, will have unintended and deadly consequences. There’s not really a great connection between this story and the articles I’ve discussed in this post, but The Machine Stops has stuck with me for more than forty years, and if it came to mind now, there’s a connection, if analogical in nature, that’s worth considering.

In case you were wondering why $600 was the weekly stipend, or “bridge payment,” to the unemployed from the Federal Government, Murfster35 on The Daily Kos thinks they know:

… there has always been something that bothered me about that $600 a week payment. As explained, it was meant to help families and workers cover the shortfall between what they would receive from unemployment, and what their full paycheck was before being laid off. And if that was the purpose, then the program was far oversubscribed for what it set out to do. Now my wife works in retail, so she’s not making Brad Pitt wages, and still, that $600 a week was multiples above what was needed to make her whole. I know that the whole object was to render as much aid to as many people as possible, but I would guess that in a majority of cases, people were actually profiting from the program.

The question that has bothered me every time I see that $600 in Teri’s account is Why $600 a week? The number can’t possibly be arbitrary, there has to be some kind of sensible reason behind it. It seems almost like the Democrats jammed it to the GOP because they had them over a barrel, which is fine by me, but that still doesn’t make sense. There has to be a reason why they settled specifically on $600 a week.

And last night, while just idly discussing the topic with Teri, it whupped me upside the head. Let’s start with a little simple math. It has to be simple if I’m going to do it. Start with $600 a week. Now, divide that $600 by a 40 hour work week. What do you end up with? $15.00 an hour!

Now that makes perfect, crystal clear sense. The Democrats have been pushing for a national $15 an hour minimum wage for at least the last three years. But there’s a problem with that, it’s purely conceptual. The Democrats talk about how great it would be, and everybody agrees that it would be great, but talk is cheap, and nobody had any way to know what it would feel like to make $15 an hour.

So the Democrats took the bull by the horns and showed them what it feels like to make $15 an hour. Without saying a word to tip their mitts, the Democrats used the terrible unemployment shortfalls to show every American making less than $15 an hour what it feels like to make $15 an hour. For 16 weeks they have handed the neediest Americans a weekly $15 an hour paycheck. And now the GOP wants to take it away.

Spreading discontent with Republican governance at every opportunity.

A friend sent me this missive concerning the Second Amendment by John M. DeMaggio (USN-retired):

The argument over the Second Amendment routinely centers on guns. But our Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” has just as much to do with casting off the stratification of the social class system and buttressing religious freedom. …

One cannot discuss the Bill of Rights independently but must consider it within a broader discussion encompassing two other pillars of our system of government: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.

Today people immediately consider “arms” to be guns. But in the long run-up to American independence — in medieval, pre-colonial and colonial times — arms for “bearing” were usually edged weapons, especially swords.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art tells us that in medieval times “generally speaking only noblemen were allowed to carry a sword in public.”

Plinio Correa de Oliveira writes in “What is the Symbol of Nobility and Power? And Why?” that “The people of the Middle Ages regarded the sword with a certain profundity, esteeming it as a symbol of man’s God-given nobility.”

French nobility prerogatives after 1440 included the right to “wear a sword.” The sword was used during the noble “dubbing ceremony,” still practiced by today’s British Crown. [The Hill]

Here’s the problem with his discussion – he insists on contextualizing the Bill of Rights, which is great, but then he proceeds to ignore an important part of the Second Amendment itself – the entirety of the text, which is

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

DeMaggio makes no mention of a well regulated militia, which makes his entire argument difficult to take seriously. If context matters, the entire Amendment, especially one so terse, should be addressed. Surely the clause considering a well-regulated militia needs a mention.

Worse yet, he engages in a bit of Fight-or-flight sleight of hand with his concluding paragraph:

I wonder if opposition to the Second Amendment’s right of people to “bear arms” might also be — at some level — a rejection of the “equal station” of all people, a reaffirmation of a sort of “Nobility,” a sense of privilege by an established “professional political class?”

This is a big red flag that this is not a serious essay, at least for me. The historical aspect has some mild interest to it, but as a serious defense of an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment, the contextual omission, the superfluous bit of rhetoric, and, additionally, the omission of any treatment of the differences between the weapons of today and the weapons of two, three, or four hundred years ago, really renders this piece as little more than a curiosity.

A reader reminds me of the events of four years ago when it comes to confidence:

The former Secretary of State leads Trump by 51% to 39% among registered voters nationwide, a new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows. (Time, July 2016 polls)

Yes, indeed, and he never really caught up. Here’s a time series of poll results from Real Clear Politics:

If only this had major events shown as well, such as the day Clinton sniffled and the right-wing media threw a tizz-fit over her poor health.

And, at the end, due to Electoral College oddities and a collection of independents and Democrats who didn’t trust Secretary Clinton, Clinton won the popular vote and Trump won the Presidency.

But history needn’t repeat itself. Among a positively huge host of differences, the most important might be Trump himself. Before the 2016 election, those who were paying attention knew Trump was untrustworthy.

Today’s FiveThirtyEight Trump Approval Results

But four years later, the gross incompetence facet of his personality has really, really come out. In fact, it’s so flamboyantly obvious that I’m actually discouraged that some 40% of the American public still approves of him. I suspect some 30% will stick with him even if he’s caught committing a crime, just because of his promises to bring back their version of the good times.

And Clinton had carried quite a load of mud from years of Republican Party assault on a person who was actually competent in her job, as both sides of the aisle acknowledged. Republican Party tenets couldn’t accept an expert, as we’ve come to see, and they still seethed from losing to Bill Clinton – twice.

But Biden, former Senator and Vice President, has never been under sustained attack, and is generally likable. His occasional lapses into stuttering, long-term union supporter, history of family tragedy, and other elements render him far more likable than Clinton, as at least I can see myself stuttering when making speeches on the topics he often addresses.

So, sure, there’s an element of “here we go again,” and that’s good – it’ll keep the partisans working and persuade the progressives to get out and VOTE. But it’s not a worrisome element for me. Each election is unique.

I’ve been meditating on the editorial by Portland, OR NAACP President E.D. Mondainé in WaPo entitled “Portland’s protests were supposed to be about black lives. Now, they’re white spectacle.” There’s a lot that I perceive to be true in the piece, and yet there’s something I believe Mondainé is missing.

Images of “Naked Athena,” as the protester has been labeled, have gone viral, her unclothed confrontation with police earning her accolades as a brave ally of the cause. But I see something else: a beneficiary of white privilege dancing vainly on a stage that was originally created to raise up the voices of my oppressed brothers and sisters. In this, she is not alone. As the demonstrations continue every night in Portland, many people with their own agendas are co-opting, and distracting attention from, what should be our central concern: the Black Lives Matter movement.

From Feminist News.

It’s my perception that the original struggle of the BLM movement has, as Mondainé suggests, recently been co-opted, but not by Mondainé’s white allies, but by President Trump through the dispatch of anonymized federal officers.

The character of the response is the key feature that changes the situation out of Mondainé’s reckoning, I think. If the officers were wearing normal uniforms and ID and acting as normal law enforcement, I’d agree with Mondainé.

But they’re not. They’re acting, to put it in a simple phrase, as terror troops.

President Trump has proclaimed this a law and order matter, yet the mayor of Portland as well as the governor of Oregon have rejected the troops. These two factors, taken together, has transformed the struggle in Portland from a black civil rights matter into a Trump campaign maneuver, meant to influence the American public against the BLM movement as well as liberals in general.

Every move an adversary makes is potentially an opportunity, and I’m not sure Mondainé understands this.

If we engage them now, we do so on their terms, where they have created the conditions for a war without rules, without accountability and without the protection of our Constitution. This makes me fearful for the safety of everyone demonstrating in Portland. That’s why we need to remember: What is happening in Portland is the fuse of a great, racist backlash that the Trump administration is baiting us to light.

By engaging in what is essentially an immoral act, Trump has left himself vulnerable to a charge of corrupt morals. But, in order to communicate this to Americans from coast to coast, it must be emphasized. In previous struggles, the black community used non-violent confrontations, in which they sacrificed their bodies and, sometimes, their lives, to make the point that the morals to which they adhered were superior to those who beat them – and thereby shamed them.

If Trump’s barbaric attempt to boost his popularity as the elections near is to be rebutted, Americans of all colors who stand against him must rebut his charge vividly. Protests are communications, and communications benefits from contrast.

Terror troops?

Meet the Wall of Moms.

The latter function as a moral authority in a struggle that Trump transformed, but, because the latter occupy the moral high ground, Trump is engaged on the terms chosen by his opposition. The Wall of Moms shame his troops, through their peaceful protest and their position in society, which exists regardless of community.

Mothers are the sacrosanct source of peace.

Mondainé may wish to withdraw from the streets:

We cannot fall for their deception. We cannot settle for spectacles that endanger us all. This is a moment for serious action — to once again take up the mantle of the civil rights era by summoning the same conviction and determination our forebears did. We welcome our white brothers and sisters in this struggle. In fact, we need them. But I must ask them to remain humbly attuned to the opportunity of this moment — and to reflect on whether any actions they take will truly help establish justice, or whether they are simply for show.

Thursday night, I will lead a rally in downtown Portland to refocus public attention where it belongs: on redeeming a guilty nation. But recent events might be a sign that our work in the streets should be coming to an end.

But how will an American independent perceive that action? As the opposition being run off by the Federal troops, unwilling to put up or shut up? The independents hold political power in their collective hands. It seems to me that communicating that the protesters are willing to peacefully protest even in the teeth of barbarity will be more convincing than evacuating the streets.

Letting Trump’s terror troops prove their own depravity in a nation where votes will decide the future of this country only benefit BLM.

I think.

These state GOP officials who think the election’s in the bag are looking worse and worse, at least according to Fox News:

The other states Fox News polled are equally discouraging for Trump and his supporters. In the previous post I suggested a 10 point victory for Biden (and Senator Smith, up for reelection after winning the 2018 special election by 10+ points against a credible opponent with a famous hockey name known state-wide) was not an unreasonable expectation this November.

I may have been a trifle conservative.

There’s still a lot of time for Biden to step in a hole, or for Trump to suddenly start doing his job. But given his propensity of hiring sycophants who are not qualified for their jobs – and that’s a large part of any President’s job description – I don’t expect President Trump to turn it around through sudden competency.

Instead, he’ll try to stir the pot, and I hope that America continues to be a place of smarter and smarter citizens. I hope and believe they’ve learned not to take President Trump at face value, but instead investigate, not to take right-wing media “facts” on faith without checks, and not to jump and run on command.

And keep holding our breath that Trump doesn’t do much more damage than he’s already accomplished.

Pharrell William’s Freedom:

After a day of attending to personal matters, with the background worries about the pandemic, the racial justice vs President Trump tragedy, and wondering how to rescue those who, despite all the evidence of his vast incompetence, are still Trump supporters from their terrible misjudgment – yes, I know, that’s terribly arrogant – I found myself remembering this video. Yes, it’s years old, maybe everyone’s seen it, but it has a life and vividness and even droll humor that reminds me that hope can still be right around the corner.

Sure, his Happy video is fun as well, but I think the overt seriousness of Freedom makes it more memorable, and more apropos of the times.

Prelapsarian:

characteristic of or belonging to the time or state before the fall of humankind [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “The Curious Case of the Electrified Épée,” Michael Farber, SI.com:

Sandy Kerekes is 95. Over a Wiener schnitzel lunch at Foyer Hongrois in early March, a Hungarian seniors residence on the edge of downtown Montreal, he says he sometimes still dreams about [Boris] Onischenko. Kerekes was nurtured in a prelapsarian sporting world and believes athletic competition—especially his sport—is meaningless if devoid of honor. Once Onischenko made the conscious decision to cheat, Kerekes says, “There were two ways for this to end. He could get caught. Or if he didn’t get caught and won, he would’ve been a total goddamn heel in his own head. This would have represented a downfall of a human mind. He would have lost his honor even if he would’ve been a hero for society and history.”

There’s an inherent difference in being the best and being a champion. The latter is just a guy with a trophy. Being the best, well, unless it’s best at cheating, it means something.

Getting back to the situation of having only a few massive slaughterhouses, with work forces vulnerable to Covid-19, and the problems of centralizing capacity in a few huge companies (starts here, last here), I see that the venerable Bruce Schneier is of the same mind, albeit coming at it from his famous perch as a computer security expert:

First, we need to enforce antitrust laws. Our meat supply chain is brittle because there are limited numbers of massive meatpacking plants — now disease factories — rather than lots of smaller slaughterhouses. Our retail supply chain is brittle because a few national companies and websites dominate. We need multiple companies offering alternatives to a single product or service. We need more competition, more niche players. We need more local companies, more domestic corporate players, and diversity in our international suppliers. Competition provides all of that, while monopolies suck that out of the system.

I cannot agree more. It’s not hard to draw an analogy between a market with many small and competing suppliers and the Internet itself, which is itself composed of interlinking subnets, potentially of different types of networks. This flexibility was designed into the Internet by the original designers, and there’s something to be learned there. Contrariwise, a network confined to a single platform type is a monoculture, which is a huge security risk, since a platform with a security hole means all of the instances of that platform has the hole, until it’s patched.

And patching’s usually a ragged, even irresponsibly managed, process.

It’s important to realize that the libertarians will tell you that our current situation of a few big companies is self-correcting. As the big boys become fat and sloppy, new competitors armed with new technology, processes, and business models will come in and knock over the current kings. They’ll have examples to show that it happens.

And sometimes it does.

But, as tempting as that model is for the government hater and, incidentally, the computer programmer who sees human interference in their programs and systems as loathesome^[1], a few examples do not prove the case for the whole. Indeed, some potential examples, such as Amazon knocking over Barnes & Noble (increasingly irrelevant) and Borders (bankrupt), has resulted in exactly the opposite: concentration of the market in the hands of the few. Or one. To bring in some thoughts from the investing community, part of the calculation of a new competitor making good, and thus being a good investment, depends on the size of the moat, which is the amount of investment needed to compete, plus the critical intellectual properties owned by the current winners. A big moat has an inverse correlation with changes of success for the new competitor – and moats are often big, and manipulable into becoming artificially bigger.

I look forward to learning if Schneier will be, or has already, critiqued free trade in general.

(h/t CT)

¹ Interference, as in adjustments, restarts, corrections of corrupt data. These all hint at imperfections in the program for the naive software engineer who is prone to an almost-religious devotion to their craft – I’ve known a few. Then they look at the economy and capitalism and see government regulation as an opportunity for corruption, and seek to prove it’s unneeded. Someone should write a book, Government Regulation For The Software Engineer: Why It’s Needed.

All those paths in gardens you see in shows, so well kept and peaceful.

Bullshit.

Which reminds me I should go weeding right now. Tomorrow and the weekend are supposed to be fairly miserable around here.

An impressive résumé and introduction, even if you don’t live in Louisiana.

I’m running for United States Senate because Louisiana and our country are at a crossroads, and Washington’s political games are only making us sick. It’s time to take a new road, and I hope you’ll join me: https://t.co/lI336iVf9K #lasen #lagov pic.twitter.com/G4sxAWS7J4

— Adrian Perkins (@PerkinsforLA) July 22, 2020

I think this is effective. It doesn’t attack any of his opponents, it presents himself as a highly competent and effective person who has experience as the public service bug. That’s the first step to getting elected. The Republican incumbent, Bill Cassidy, is running for reelection, and it’s worth remembering this:

Cassidy was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2014, defeating incumbent Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and becoming the first Republican to hold the seat since 1883. [Ballotpedia]

If Perkins makes it out of the primary – and it appears to be a jungle primary – he may be a more formidable opponent than Cassidy is expecting in the current political climate.

Meet Trump lawyer Jenna Ellis:

No Democrat should EVER AGAIN be elected in the United States in any capacity. The government’s constitutional obligation is to preserve and protect OUR rights, not to preserve and protect their own power. They are willing to sacrifice America and our freedom and liberty. NO!!!

— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) July 23, 2020

Not a bad effort.

Even a relatively sane Republican such as Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT) is puzzled concerning the flaming crash his political party is committing, as he explains in an interview with the Deseret News:

Sen. Mitt Romney says he doesn’t know where the Republican Party is headed as the president cozies up to dictators, and character doesn’t seem to matter in leaders anymore. …

Romney said Republicans were once insistent on reducing the national debt, but that doesn’t seem to be a priority anymore. Character, he said, used to be a critical element in selecting leaders but isn’t talked about in clear ways these days.

“I don’t know where my party goes,” Romney said. “I have to be honest with you in that regard.”

Even Romney suffers from the philosophical ills of living in the epistemic bubble. I’m not going to go into the structural troubles of the Republican Party, as I’m sure my regular readers’ eyes are starting to burn from the repetition. But I’ll say this to the puzzled Senator:

1. Examine the philosophy of how the party is run, every tenet, every guideline. Nothing is holy.
2. Quit believing the opposition is the enemy, they’re just friends with different views.
3. Acquire some political friends from outside the bubble and have sober, serious discussions with them. They will see things not apparent from within the bubble.
4. Talk to apostates! Maybe the most important thing Romney can do.
5. Put facts and truth first, not the comfort – emotional or religious – of the base. If they all want to head south, but the best direction is north, tell them so and start marching! And teach them that facts come first. Religious fervor has turned out to be one of the rocks of doom, so get rid of it.
6. Be uncertain. That’s the basis of true governance.

These are just some of the things that Romney and like-minded colleagues must do if they’re not going to rebuild a clone with the same destiny after the current Republican Party self-destructs.

Will they? I’m sure there will be a lot of screaming over all of the above and more. For example, the tenet of Winning at all costs seems like a great tenet, but it’s led to self-destructive primaries and campaign mendacity of staggering proportions. Or Ideology above all, another one that seems like a good idea, has led to a host of third and fourth raters occupying important positions – such as host of governor’s seats.

OK, I promised not to delve into old topics, and so I apologize. But Romney, et al, have to get this right. Not for the sake of their party, but for the sake of the nation.

And now President Trump joins his faithful band of minions in yelling at Rep Cheney (R-WY):

Liz Cheney is only upset because I have been actively getting our great and beautiful Country out of the ridiculous and costly Endless Wars. I am also making our so-called allies pay tens of billions of dollars in delinquent military costs. They must, at least, treat us fairly!!!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 23, 2020

Rep Cheney has notably hawkish views, not unlike her father, former VP Dick Cheney (R-WY), while President Trump is fairly allergic to foreign military adventures.

That is a subject for another time: some such ventures are foolish, and some are important and beneficial. I am not an Isolationist. I will only note that President Trump sees these ventures in monetary terms, and appears incapable of strategic thinking, as do many of those in his Administration.

My real point is that the Amateur-in-Chief, recognizing a philosophical threat to what has become a primary Republican Party religious tenet, amateurism, has now joined in chasing out the rascal. If Rep Cheney apologizes or changes her tune, she may be allowed to remain in the Party.

Otherwise, she’ll become, at best, a ragtag relation. Maybe an independent. And, right now, she’s #3 in the GOP House hierarchy. No one but the President is immune to this grim treatment.

Meanwhile, one of the RINOers will get her post, or at least move up onto the leadership ladder, if she’s thrust out into the cold. Probably Gaetz, given his high profile roles in past debacles, who’ll be showered with praise by Trump.

And this is what happens when religious parties encounter deviancy from the core teachings.