Author Archives: Hue White

In Wisconsin, Republican Speaker of the House in Madison Robin Vos has fired a former member of the Wisconsin Supreme Court who had been hired to investigate the 2020 Election – and made his task into a public display of utter incompetence:

“After having many members of our caucus reach out to me over the past several days, it is beyond clear to me that we only have one choice in this matter, and that’s to close the Office of Special Counsel,” Vos said in a written statement. [WaPo]

If it’s true that multiple members of the Republican caucus have indicated dismay at Gableman’s antics to Vos, this may show that the Wisconsin GOP has at least a few moderate members who understand that competency and fair play is far more important to the voters than pre-determined investigation results and general clowning around.

Gableman took months to set up his office and spent the early stage of his review performing online research from a public library in suburban Milwaukee. He toured the site of a frequently criticized GOP-led ballot review in Arizona and attended a seminar in South Dakota hosted by Mike Lindell, the MyPillow chief executive who has spouted false claims about the 2020 election.

So maybe the Wisconsin GOP still has some respectable members.

But it does leave open the question: How the hell did Gableman ever get himself elected to Wisconsin’s SCOTUS? I mean, really? Unless he’s into early-stage dementia, he should have never been allowed anywhere near a judge’s chamber, except as a defendant.

Such are the results of straight ticket voting.

Why, yes, Senator Scott (R-FL), this is 3rd World country stuff:

The @FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago is incredibly concerning, especially given the Biden admin’s history of going after parents & other political opponents. This is 3rd World country stuff.

We need answers NOW. The FBI must explain what they were doing today & why.

— Rick Scott (@SenRickScott) August 9, 2022

A former President taking various papers, with neither the right nor the permission, home with him after being kicked out of office, and perhaps selling them off to the highest bidder, does sound like something the corrupt leader of a Third World country would do.

Thanks for the reminder. I’m sure your colleagues will thank you as well.

A CME, or Coronal Mass Ejection, occurs when part of the Sun’s corona, a plasma atmosphere of a star that happens to be very, very hot, which is required for a plasma, is blown off and outwards, usually by the magnetic forces of the star.

So what’s a Surface Mass Ejection (SME)?

NASA astronomers believe that in 2019 a colossal piece of Betelgeuse’s surface blew off [the red supergiant Betelgeuse]. The mass of the SME was 400 billion times greater than a CME or several times the mass of Earth’s Moon. Data from multiple telescopes, especially Hubble, suggest that a convective plume more than a million miles across bubbled up from deep inside the star, producing shocks and pulsations that blasted a chunk off the surface.

“We’ve never before seen such a huge mass ejection from the surface of a star,” says Andrea Dupree of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who is leading the study. “Something is going on that we don’t completely understand.”

After it left the star, the SME cooled, forming a dark cloud that famously dimmed Betelgeuse in 2019 and 2020. Even casual sky watchers could look up and see the change. Some astronomers worried that the dimming foreshadowed a supernova explosion. The realization that an SME is responsible has at least temporarily calmed those fears. [Spaceweather.com]

Betelgeuse isn’t the biggest star around, but it might be in the top ten, with a diameter so huge that it’s literally greater than the diameter of a Jovian orbit.

Something that size blowing pieces off isn’t even terrifying. If our star did that, we’d probably never even know. We’d just be blotted out, as if the Divine had decided it’d made a mistake with us and was starting over.

It’s maybe 500 light years away, ± some odd numbers that appear to be in dispute, which, for my purposes, means we’re about 4 rows back in the audience if something serious happens to Betelgeuse.

Despite deepening doubts concerning cryptocurrency in the West, the Middle East is buying in:

The Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange FTX announced today that it has received regulatory approval to operate in Dubai [United Arab Emirates (UAE) capital]. FTX’s Middle East subsidiary FTX Exchange FZE, can now conduct virtual asset exchange services in Dubai’s program under the United Arab Emirates’ Virtual Asset Regulatory Authority, FTX said in a press release. [AL-Monitor]

While my wildest concerns with regard to cryptocurrency, that it’s a way to strip money from users who necessarily invest in it, seems to be unjustified paranoia, it’s hard not to read the above and nod. Why? These days it’s almost background noise, but the truth of the matter is that there’s a great deal of wealth in the Middle East, ranging from the fluid of wealth – no, not oil, but paper, gold, credit, and increasingly digital assets – to the engine of wealth – minerals and other tangible sources of wealth, such as, yes, oil.

And hyenas run to the source of sustenance.

So in UAE we see a country increasingly opening up to an unregulated currency that they also do not control. Maybe nothing will go wrong.

Or maybe the hyenas are circling and waiting for an opening. Hyenas are known to take down lions. And UAE is known to be a rich lion.

Sexagesimal:

Sexagesimal is a numbering system whose base is sixty. It originated in the ancient Sumerians in the 3rd millennium BC and was passed down to the ancient Babylonians and other nations. It is still partially used for measuring time and angles. The numeral system we now usually use is the decimal (10-base) system and the number 123 is equivalent to 1×102+2×101+3×100, while 1 hour, 2 minutes and 3 seconds is equivalent to 1×602+2×601+3×600=3723 (seconds). [NagaiToshiya.com]

Noted in “How the secrets of ancient cuneiform texts are being revealed by AI,” Alison George, NewScientist (6 August 2022, paywall):

It took a long time for cuneiform to shift from record-keeping to a tool for linguistic expression. The first royal inscriptions appeared around 2700 BC, and the earliest literary texts a hundred or so years later. One of the first known authors was Enheduanna, a princess, priestess and poet who lived around 4300 years ago. She wrote many hymns and the myth of Inanna and Ebih, which recounts a conflict between a goddess and a mountain. The most famous text of all is the Epic of Gilgamesh, about a king’s quest for eternal life, and includes a section that appears to be a precursor to the biblical story of the flood.

The impact of Sumerian culture still ripples through our lives today, not only through our biblical stories, but in our clocks. Their sexagesimal counting system, with a base of 60, is the reason why we have 60 seconds in a minute and 360 degrees in a circle.

I keep reading bits and pieces of the right, principally wannabe Limbaugh replacement Erick Erickson, and I stop as soon as I spot a mistake, a false assumption, that sort of thing.

And I don’t bother to write about it. No time.

But today I have off. So here’s what I found with Erickson’s analysis of the Mar-a-Lago raid, which borrows from National Review’s Andy McCarthy, and so I presume the entire right is consumed with this silly theory:

Look, the left is, at this point, epistemically convinced Donald Trump plotted, planned, and organized the riot on January 6th. They truly believe there was a master plan to overthrow the government. They truly believe Trump is a threat to democracy.

When you believe all these things, you’re going to try to find that one smoking gun to stop Trump from running for office again.

They tried. They seemingly did not find it. They’ve had to fall back on their excuse about classified documents knowing a very compliant press won’t ask too many questions.

Here’s the thing: former Judge and current US AG Merrick Garland isn’t “of the left,” as they say. When President Barack Obama received a recommendation that Garland replace the recently-deceased Scalia on SCOTUS, it was from both sides of the aisle. He’s considered a centrist, not someone out on the left.

And that’s why I don’t bother with the rest of Erickson’s post. Simple matters of false fact invalidate the thrust of his post. OK, so I read it, but very quickly, as it’s demonstrative of Erickson’s own position of peril, left trying to justify fourth-raters like Trump, Hawley, Cruz, Gaetz, Greene, Boebert, and many other “officials” who should never have been permitted the honor of holding such offices. Their embarrassing lusts, lack of ethics, and credulousness (you can include Erickson’s own religious beliefs under that heading, I shan’t object) have proven the point.

Erickson’s trying to build a story that’ll hold the conservatives’ Doubting Thomases together. Sadly, it seems that every day brings a fresh blow against the integrity of his story. Maybe he should give up?

Well, that would move him from direct opposition to the “baby killers.” Such are the wages of bad logic.

Senator Cruz (R-TX).

When it comes to the former President, Senator Cruz (R-TX) is soon to find himself in quite a quandary. For those who don’t recall, Cruz first despised Trump upon his entry into the GOP Presidential primary in 2016, calling him a coward and pathological liar. Trump, however, returned fire, and when it became apparent that Trump would win the GOP nomination, he changed his tune, despite Trump’s frenzied attacks on Cruz’s wife and father.

He was gentled by Trump.

Since then, if he’s criticized Trump, it’s not been to any great extent. Rather, he’s considered an ally, with a TrumpScore of 92%.

The weasel smile.

Leaping forward to, oh, today, Cruz finds himself allies with a man who is alleged to have broken the law, as well as the public’s trust, over the matter of nuclear weapons. If such documents were found, and we may find that out later today, Cruz may gain a reputation as having been gentled by a criminal. We may find out, at a later date, that Trump was trying to sell nuclear secrets, much like the Rosenbergs – who were executed for their crimes. Such is his known passion for wealth.

And Cruz has his own known passion for power. He’s reportedly despised, in some cases even hated, by a bipartisan majority of the Senate.

We may be in the middle of a morality play, in which the value of putative social norms, such as temperance in connection to the pursuit of wealth and power, and a conscious and sober regard for the well-being of society, will get a well-needed boost. Not that those who need to learn those lessons the most will pay it more than lip-service, if that, but there’s value in the vast bulk of the population getting a good, swift kick upside the head as more than one of the elite conservatives take the long, agonizing fall into ignominy and social loathing. It may turn into a question of how many comrades will accompany Cruz into Hell.

At least, that’s where this is going. Next time Cruz runs for anything, he’ll be facing deep and searching questions concerning his relationship with the former President.

As the fast moving events of the Mar-a-Lago FBI raid continue, for those who are a little fuzzy on the fine points of law enforcement – alleged criminal interactions, Lawfare has a slightly out of date tutorial available. I found this paragraph useful for clarifying my thoughts:

It is telling that the FBI sought a search warrant rather than relying on a grand jury subpoena for the documents in question. Subpoenas are typically used when the bureau has reason to trust that the recipient will hand over the information in question rather than obfuscating or destroying it. One possibility, raised by former Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, is that the bureau and the Justice Department “could not be confident that the former President of the United States would comply with a grand jury subpoena.” Another possibility, assuming this was an effort to recover classified material, is that the bureau proceeded by search warrant because that is standard practice when attempting to recover spilled classified material.

I’m speculating that these boxes of confidential information have a certain monetary value to the right persons, and Trump was hoping to monetize them.

Which makes me wonder what had already gone out the door, sad to say.

There’s been a lot of muttering behind Democratic and other doors concerning the speed at which AG Merrick Garland operates, but I think that Garland is beginning to demonstrate how being deliberate and thoughtful can be just as useful as blazing speed.

And remember my comment that the former President has to control the narrative? I hope he didn’t have too strong a grip on the narrative, because otherwise he might be losing his fingers.

Again, a Twitter source, but it’s worth a quote.

I fully expect the court to grant DOJ's motion to unseal the warrant and we will see it soon, maybe even later today. This will be a substantive blast against Trump after Garland's procedural one this afternoon.

— Barb McQuade (@BarbMcQuade) August 11, 2022

Unsealing the warrant as well as the records of what was found.

And, from what I’ve read elsewhere, Trump really can’t oppose this tactic. Oh he can, legally, but politically it’s a bad looking move.

So now the Republicans who’ve been yelling about the politicization of the Department of Justice are about to get a full look at the FBI’s suspicions, as confirmed by a judge, as well as what was found.

And I can’t imagine Garland would walk down this path without some real goodies to show off.

The MAGA base will get to see it as well, and, having read Republican hysteria, will now get to compare and contrast Cruz, Rubio, et al, with reality. That’ll do some damage.

But worst of all for Trump is the loss of control. Control is part of his psychological makeup, and while I’m sure he’s used to losing control of narratives before, he’ll still be in danger of losing personal control with Garland’s foot up his ass.

And I still wonder if Trump has self-exile plans setup in case everything goes South in a hurry for him.

This may be a pivotal moment in the Trump investigatory era.

You’d think they’d tire of the sausage-maker of news.

• Progressives would like to believe the Florida matchup between Senator Rubio (R) and Rep Demings (D) is now even, but both cited poll sources are strongly progressive, so the grain of salt is large.
• Attempts to weaponize the mysterious Republican urge to not cap insulin prices for privately insured individuals may be alluring, but a strong message shouldn’t try to communicate a complicated thought.
• In Connecticut, incumbent Senator Richard Blumenthal (D) now knows his Republican opponent. Leora Levy is a Trump endorsee and won yesterday’s primary by 10 points. However, her political experience is, as one might expect of a Trump-endorsee in a blue state, extremely limited. Will a far-right extremist appeal to Connecticut independent voters? Back in May, Emerson College Polling, rated A- by FiveThirtyEight, gave Blumenthal a 16 point lead over Levy – but that was months and months ago. Time for another poll to see if intervening events have had an effect on Connecticut voters.
• In Vermont, Democratic Rep. Peter Welch won the Democratic nod to replace retiring Senator Leahy (D), winning more votes in his primary run than all the Republicans running in the Republican primary put together. Welch’s Republican opponent will be the inexperienced Army veteran Gerald Malloy, who only won with a plurality. I want a poll, but I expect Welch to cruise to victory in this blue stronghold.
• In Wisconsin, Tuesday’s primary yielded the expected Senate result: incumbent Senator Ron Johnson (R) vs Lt. Governor Mandela Barnes (D).
• Arizona’s Senate race now has its first poll since its primary last week, and it shows incumbent Senator Kelly (D) with a shocking 14 point lead over Republican challenger Blake Masters. The pollster is Center Street PAC, a new pollster, so it’s hard to assess whether or not they are credible, even as I’ve run across them repeatedly for this year’s races. Arizona is known to be tracking more to the left, at least since the passing of Senator McCain (R) in 2018, but a jump like this on general principle is unlikely. I suspect that Masters and his backers, former President Trump and Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, all known extremists, are personally responsible for this poor polling result. I look forward to a poll from a known and A-rated quantity, such as Fox News or SurveyUSA, on this race, and for now cannot consign this race to be safe for either party. But it may turn out that Senator Kelly owes Masters’ two backers a Thank You! note or two.
• While the Republican hysteria over the Mar-a-Lago FBI raid has a number of factors, for Senate races there has to be some highly credible worries that the former President will act like a black hole in terms of potential damage to the empty shell of high morality Republicans like to project, as well as the very real and tangible damage that may occur for all Senatorial candidates who are perceived as tied, or allied to, the former President and his agenda, fragmentary as it is. Indeed, for one or two of them, this event may be the incident that pushes them into political oblivion; contrariwise, for any Democratic Senators up for reelection that were in trouble, few as they seem to be, this may be the lifeline that they climb to safety.
• The boomerang issue of the election season? Republicans love to portray themselves as law & order types, but, ya know, tax law is law, too. So why are the Republicans outraged at the idea of increasing funding for the Internal Revenue Service? This is the question that can bother quite a few voters, if it’s presented properly – and I’m sure the Democrats will so present it. Are Republicans trying to protect their patrons, as well as themselves, from tax investigations? They’re trying to stir up the ol’ fear thing, but the IRS has already stated that anyone making less than $400,000 will not have an increased chance of investigation.

The relentless flood’s predecessors are here. Your fellow audience members are below.

We’re starting to reach the goal of the tomato replacement project.

Sunflower seeds! For the bees!

Polychrome:

Polychrome is the “practice of decorating architectural elements, sculpture, etc., in a variety of colors.” The term is used to refer to certain styles of architecture, pottery or sculpture in multiple colors. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “What if the ancient Greeks and Romans actually had terrible taste?” Philip Kennicott, WaPo:

In its new exhibition, the Met is pushing back against the general resistance, using speculative reconstructions by Vinzenz Brinkmann and his wife, Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, scholars based in Frankfurt, Germany, who have specialized in the study of what is called polychromy. These include a painted reconstruction of the Met’s sixth-century B.C. marble sphinx finial, in which the wings are red and blue with gilded feathers, the tail dipped in blue and the neck ornamented with a red-and-gold choker.

Well. Far be it for an artistic heathen like me to say anything. Harrumph.

This thread hasn’t been awake for a couple of years, but the story this time isn’t surprising, only sordid.

The private judging industry needs stronger oversight, California’s chief justice said, following a Times report last week on the role for-hire judges played in Los Angeles attorney Tom Girardi’s suspected swindling of clients out of millions of dollars in settlement money.

Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye called revelations about the conduct of the retired judges, including a former state Supreme Court justice, “shocking” in a statement to The Times, acknowledging, “There are not adequate safeguards regarding the business of private judging.” [Los Angeles Times]

How bad is this collection of cases?

For decades, Girardi paid well-regarded private judges as much as $1,500 an hour to help him administer mass tort cases involving thousands of clients. The Times described how Girardi traded on the names of these former jurists to deflect questions about missing money and how, in some instances, they aided his misappropriation of client funds.

In one settlement in which a former appellate justice was paid $500,000 to oversee the distribution of funds, Girardi managed to divert millions of dollars from a settlement account for questionable purposes. A downtown jeweler received $750,000 for what court records show was the purchase of diamond earrings for Girardi’s wife, Erika, of “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” fame.

Classic pecuniary corruption, eh? But surely this can be corrected –

[The outgoing chair of the Assembly Judiciary Committee, Mark Stone (D-Scotts Valley)] said he was skeptical of a legislative fix to the problem, given opposition to prior proposed legislation to bring more transparency and public safeguards to the arbitration industry. Those measures, he said, were vigorously contested by corporations and business groups that favor the system that allows them to settle disputes out of public view, adding, “I’m not sure these ethical lapses bother them that much.”

“Those are very, very difficult bills to get through the Legislature, because those who stand to benefit from the way the arbitration system works oppose us at every turn, and that is to the detriment of consumers,” Stone said.

This isn’t to say that public justice is without corruption; the oversight of the judiciary by the Senate speaks to the negation of such a foolish assertion. And, of course, attorneys can also be corrupt.

Properly understood, this sort of article rebuts any claims that private justice is immune to corruption. Worse yet, the multiplication of avenues of corruption, as Assemblyman Stone narrates, further taints the idea of American justice; it suggests that private justice is worse than public justice when it comes to corruption.

Private justice isn’t about justice, but about minimizing the cost of wrong-doing by corporations.

Two days ago they flowered, today they’re gone. Here’s some pics from their better days.

While I’m a little dubious of citing Twitter sources, I think the importance of the story concerning the contents of the Mar-a-Lago warrant and the option of the Trump operation to release the contents of that warrant make it worth the risk.

“No, we’re not releasing a copy of the warrant.”

~A source close to Trump suggested last night to me that the burden of transparency rests with the DOJ to lay out its reasoning for the search warrant.

The source noted the “complete circling of the wagons” around Trump by GOP. https://t.co/wl7sb4WKTZ

— Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) August 10, 2022

As I wrote about yesterday, the answer is ‘No.’ In fact, though, I’m surprised it came out so quickly, as I expected some dancing to and fro as a delaying tactic. Perhaps the Trump operation is in disarray, which would not be surprising from a herd of fourth-raters like them.

I also appreciate the note that the question of confidential records at Mar-a-Lago had been under discussion, as Erick Erickson has been whining that the raid was unnecessary, all the FBI had to do was ask. Drat, now I can’t find his post.

Based on the above, maybe they did. Again, it’s a Twitter source, so take it with a lump of salt.

Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenburgh at cryptocurrency think tank Coin Center may think they’ve made an effective argument over Tornado Cash, which I’ll have WaPo explain first:

The service, Tornado Cash, is what is known as a mixer, and it pools digital assets to obscure their ownership. Since its launch in 2019, the program has laundered more than $7 billion in digital assets, according to the Treasury Department. By adding the service’s website and 45 associated crypto wallets to the sanctions list, the administration makes it illegal for any American to transact with them.

“Despite public assurances otherwise, Tornado Cash has repeatedly failed to impose effective controls designed to stop it from laundering funds for malicious cyber actors on a regular basis and without basic measures to address its risks,” Brian Nelson, Treasury’s undersecretary for terrorism and financial intelligence, said in a statement.

Here’s Brito and Van Valkenburgh:

Moreover, while limitations on speech are often constitutional when applied after the fact (e.g. defamatory speech can be penalized), prior restraints on speech are typically unconstitutional. OFAC sanctions, unlike a defamation claim, operate as a regime of strict liability, meaning that no prosecutor or judge needs to make any public showing of fact to add a name to the sanctioned persons list, and transactions with anyone on that list are banned–a prior restraint–irrespective of the specific details of any particular transaction or the motivations of the transacting person. The Constitutionality of that regime as it is typically applied has not, to our knowledge, been challenged on First Amendment or due process grounds. This particular usage of OFAC raises heightened constitutional concerns because it is, again, not a ban on one non-US person’s ability to use the financial system, it is instead a ban on effectively every American’s ability to use a particular open source software tool.

While I’m no lawyer, their arguments appear to be a mess:

1. Tornado Cash is a platform, not an open source software tool. The sanction appears to be against the platform. Whatever tool it’s built on, it’s not banned, at least that I can tell.
2. But tools, despite decades of “warranties” that warranty that software has no particular use, are built with particular uses in mind. I’m a software engineer, trust me on this. And, yes, like any tool, people unconnected with the development of a tool often find really cool things to do with it. But a tool that enables anti-social activities to an extent thought to be far greater than its hypothetical enablement of a social good may be a target for banning that I, and many others, would consider valid. Keep in mind one person’s social good may be someone else’s social evil, with thanks to Heinlein.
3. Same applies for a platform using said tool(s).
4. Especially when the platform’s history demonstrates that its most popular function happens to be illegal, cf. WaPo.

In the end, given the apparent bias of authors Brito and Van Valkenburgh, I’d be a little cautious about taking their arguments at face value. Like I said, I’m no lawyer, but a plain English reading suggests they either don’t understand the difference between a tool and a platform, or they’ve deliberately confused the two.

Dysgenic:

Dysgenics (also known as cacogenics) is the decrease in prevalence of traits deemed to be either socially desirable or well adapted to their environment due to selective pressure disfavoring the reproduction of those traits. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Slightly Against Underpopulation Worries,” Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten:

The claim isn’t that fewer people will have PhDs in the future: colleges will certainly solve that by increasing access to education and/or dumbing down requirements. It’s a dysgenic argument where we assume at any given time the people with higher degrees have on average higher genetic intelligence levels. If they’re reproducing less, the genetic intelligence level of the population will decrease.

Which is decidedly simplistic.

The big news concerning the FBI “raid” of Mar-a-Lago home of former President Trump has given rise to a political hubbub new to me: Trump is being badgered to release the warrant under which the FBI performed the search. Here’s Steve Benen’s lead-in on the story:

Neal Katyal, the former acting solicitor general in the Obama administration, is aware of the Republican pushback against the search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago. On MSNBC today, the Supreme Court lawyer responded with a challenge to the former president:

“Donald Trump, you have a copy of the warrant. It explains what they were looking for, what statutes they think were violated, and what judge signed off on that. Release the warrant. You called on [Barack] Obama to release the birth certificate and all sorts of nonsense. If you believe this is such an abuse, let us see the warrant and let us decide for ourselves.”

Trump certainly could. But will he?

My money says he’ll publicly play with the idea, but eventually reject it. Trump’s success is greatly dependent, like any conflict, on controlling the narrative. In war, they call it shaping the battlefield. In Trump’s case, as one of the world’s greatest con-men, he’s been successful by giving out, as facts, information that plays to his advantage. Crime is climbing. He’s a genius. Migrants are rapists. The people he’s screwed over deserved it. Etc.

Is the FBI somewhere in this picture?

The warrant will spell out the facts, the legal theory justifying this intrusion into Trump’s home and properties. Facts, once out in the open, are difficult to spin, and thus are not generally of advantage to Trump.

Of course, the details of the warrant may change my analysis.

But this is my expectation. The more incontrovertible details are out there, the less Trump looks like a genius, a victim, a saviour, whatever he needs to be, and more like a mere criminal, or, even worse, an incompetent. That spins the narrative out of his control.

He may tease about it, he may claim he has no such right, he may find other excuses. In the end, it’ll remain a bit of a mystery.

He can’t even follow paperwork rules!

Mark Elias has the insight on the raid of former President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort and home:

The media is missing the really, really big reason why the raid today is a potential blockbuster in American politics.👇 pic.twitter.com/3BdI9NA9Az

— Marc E. Elias (@marceelias) August 9, 2022

… shall forfeit his office and be disqualified from holding any office under the United States.

Well. That’d put an abrupt end to a 2024 Presidential run, now wouldn’t it? I wonder if DeSantis, et al, are madly cheering the FBI on?

And it’d relieve Trump of the burden of actually running. He can blame the Feds, call it all fake news, fund-raise some more, and not have to face the quite likely defeat in 2024. Indeed, if his replacement stumbles then he can point a finger at that and proclaim how it wouldn’t have happened to him.

I wonder how much more patience the MAGA base has left for these shenanigans?

“Gentlemen, ideas outlive men; ideas outlive all earthly things. You who fought in the war for the Union fought for immortal ideas, and by their might you crowned the war with victory. [Great applause.] But victory was worth nothing except for the truths that were under it, in it, and above it. We meet to-night as comrades to stand guard around the sacred truths for which we fought. [Loud and prolonged cheers.] And while we have life to meet and grasp the hand of a comrade, we will stand by the great truths of the war. [“Good,” “good,” and loud cheers.] Many convictions have sunk so deep into our hearts that we can never forget them. Think of the elevating spirit of the war itself. We gathered the boys from all our farms and shops and stores and schools and homes, from all over the Republic. They went forth unknown to fame, but returned enrolled on the roster of immortal heroes. [Great applause.] …”

General James A. Garfield
Campaign speech, New York, August 6, 1880
(Sharper Iron)

I think the point that impresses me the most is that such mundane things as loot are not mentioned. The war was fought on principles, on the Union side, of equality and cohesion, which, while seemingly abstract principles of justice, were, and remain in the end, the pillars upon which societal survival are mounted. The citizenry, by the very nature of these principles, are called upon to work together, to sacrifice for the greater good.

For those who would snort and point at the continued racism of both North and South, I must reply that, yes, progress is never instantaneous, and malevolent forces continued to work after the Civil War to thwart justice, originating in the South, as well as the traditional views of many of both Northern and Southern origin.

But, speaking of the South, they worked to defend, directly, the prosperity attained via the institution of slavery. It’s important to remember that such prosperity is not founded on a communal spirit, but on that of competition and violence. There is no valid appeal to principles that lift mankind from its animal origins, merely cries of fear that the prosperity will disappear.

And I think it’s this difference that elevates this speech.

The Minnesota Fringe Festival is on, and we saw three shows today.

The Shrieking Harpies Improv – based on audience contributions, these three singers and a keyboardist create a story. Fun!

Finger Lickin’ Good – perhaps a bit one note and more to the male taste, this production of the Colonel Harlan D. Sanders story should be admired for the bravery of its lead actor.

Swords & Sorcery: The Improvised Fantasy Campaign – for members of that community it seemed to be quite a hit. I am not a member, and thought it was fun but not memorable.

We hope to see two more shows, since we’ve already paid for them, but have not decided what. Warning: prices are up to $15/single show at the box office, $18/single show reserved ticket. If you can still buy a 10 show pass, there’s a discount, but that option may be gone by now.

And you have to buy a one-time button.

Yes, there’s a news stream. It’s behind the old Potter place. Why do you ask?

• In Connecticut, as they await the August 9th primary, a Republican-sponsored poll gave this result: McLaughlin’s poll for Jordan found [incumbent Democratic Senator] Blumenthal with an 11-point lead over his closest Republican challenger, Themis Klarides, similar to the results of an Emerson College poll conducted for WTNH in May. But respondents were unfavorable when asked if Blumenthal “deserves” to be reelected. [WSHU] Maybe not all politics is local, but a big chunk qualifies.
• 

  Senator Moran’s On The Issues summation.

  The Democratic nominee for the Kansas Senate seat currently occupied by Senator Moran (R) is minister and former mayor Mark Holland. He is thought to have little chance, but here’s an “among the voters” piece from KCUR. On The Issues rates Senator Moran as quite the extremist, which may enhance Holland’s chances. My latest on Kansas here.

• Bad news continues in Pennsylvania for Dr. and candidate Mehmet Oz (R), as his opponent for the open Senate seat, Lt. Gov. Fetterman (D), has won another poll. A Center Street PAC poll show Fetterman ahead 52% – 38%. A key observation that will apply to many Republican candidates: Almost all voters know Oz, but they don’t like him. Oz’s un-favorability levels are staggering among unaffiliated voters and Democrats, and his Favorability among Republicans is barely above neutral. This suggests a huge disconnect between PA GOP primary voters and the general electorate, but then voting for the inexperienced fool’s gold hawker Oz in the first place, apparently based on his endorsement by former President Trump, demonstrates the deeply fallen nature of the PA GOP.
• Center Street PAC remains a polling organization of unknown quality, but it’s worth noting that their latest Ohio Senate poll, a Republican seat in which the incumbent is retiring, has Rep Tim Ryan (D) leading lawyer and author J. D. Vance (R) 49% – 38% among likely voters. If SurveyUSA or another A-rated pollster released numbers like that for reddish Ohio, I’d be happy, as Vance is not really qualified for the seat. For the moment, it merits a contingency “if accurate”, but suggests Republican arrogance may be turning off Ohio voters. This would be another invalidation of the Republican wave thesis that has been such a favorite among the timid pundit set.
• A-rated SurveyUSA has a poll out showing that the Missouri Senate race between State AG Schmitt (R) and former nurse and heiress Valentine (D), taken in late July, prior to the primary that selected each, has Schmitt up by six. As noted before, a poll prior to that one showed Schmitt with a thirteen point lead. How about a poll since the primary? For reference, in 2018 Senator Hawley (R) won his general election by roughly six points.
• In North Carolina and the competition for an empty Senate seat, currently held by Republicans, Cheri Beasley (D) is finding the climb steep against Rep Ted Budd (R). She’s down by 5 points, according to a Civitas poll. FiveThirtyEight does not appear to rate Civitas, so it’s difficult to gauge this poll’s credibility.

Previous allegations, unsubstantiated as they are, are here.

This NewScientist article (16 July 2022, paywall) was, at first, bewildering, and then bemusing:

Artificial intelligence can use your brainwaves to see around corners. The technique, called “ghost imaging”, can reconstruct the basic details of objects hidden from view by analysing how the brain processes barely visible reflections on a wall.

Ghost imaging has been used before to reveal objects hidden around corners and normally relies on using video recordings of faint reflections cast by an object onto a nearby wall. Daniele Faccio and Gao Wang at the University of Glasgow, UK, have now replaced the video component with electroencephalography (EEG) brain scans.

In their experiment, a single person wearing an EEG headset connected to a computer stands in front a white wall and next to a wall painted grey, which obscures the view of an object and a projector. This projector is controlled by the computer and casts a series of special patterns onto the object.

Some of this patterned light reflects off the object and hits the white wall or diffuses through the room. The person can’t see the object in the reflections. However, a ghost-imaging machine-learning algorithm can build a basic 16-by-16 pixel image of the object using the EEG data. [“AI can use your brainwaves to see things that you can’t,” Karmela Padavic-Callaghan]

It’s a bit astounding, and then a bit mundane: as data processors, there are some data making it into our cerebral cortex that we either don’t or can’t use – and probably of which we have no awareness.

There’s something distinctly ghost-like, and, yet, so dull as to be a “so what?”, even though it’s being used to recognize a reality that our unaided senses couldn’t.

An odd melange of opposites.

It’s not in the least uncommon to hear political references to the State of Kansas being prefaced with the phrase ruby-red, meaning solidly Republican. This, despite the fact that it has a Democratic governor, a position that is up for reelection this fall, Governor Laura Kelly (D). She succeeded, in the elected sequence, former Senator, Governor, and Ambassador, in that order, Sam Brownback (R).

Remember him? Brownback, and his allies in the State Legislature – a pack of extremists – cut taxes while leaving spending in place, confident in the magic of the Laffer Curve, the idea that cutting taxes will lead to economic prosperity sufficient to cover the governmental budgetary hole left by cutting taxes. Five years later, with an unexpected, gaping, pus-filled hole in the State budget, and a Federal court hounding the State to properly fund education, most of Brownback’s allies went down to unexpected defeat, either in the primaries to moderate Republicans, or to Democrats in the general election. Once in power, the victors modified, mostly by rolling back, the tax policies to cover the gap, overriding Brownback’s veto in order to do so.

And Brownback? He resigned to accept the position of U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom. He went down screaming defiance (or “patience!” as he might have put it), but, truth be told, it was disgrace. That’s what we call it when a person’s policy fails so disastrously that the tenets upon which it rests burn down with it. His Lt. Gov., Jeff Colyer, took over – I didn’t mention him before as he came to this position through inheritance, not election – and when he ran for a full term, he lost in the primary to well-known extremist and former State AG Kris Kobach (R).

So. Back to Governor Laura Kelly. How did she win the seat? Remember Kobach? It’s widely accepted that Kobach, as an extremist, repelled so many independent and moderate Kansas Republicans that Kelly snatched victory from the Republicans. And it’s true, she won only with a plurality, even if by five points.

There’s a pattern here, and I think it’s this: Kansans dislike extremists. And who is currently running for power in Kansas? On the Republican side, from what I can gather from random reading, a bunch of anti-abortion extremists. For Kansas voters, my impression is this would be fine if Roe vs. Wade were still in force, but with the Dobbs decision overturning Roe, the power dynamic in Kansas, as it is already proving in certain other States, may be changing. There is already evidence of a power dynamic change in the rejection of the Kansas Constitutional Amendment that would have rejected abortion protections of just this week.

Could we see a Kansas legislature of a vastly different nature after this November’s election? I’ll skip analysis, as I know little to nothing about local Kansas politics, but as a general rule, extremists are kicked out by voters once they appear to be imminently dangerous.

Does this give Governor Kelly (D) a lift in her re-election run?

And what about Senator Moran (R), also up for re-election. Until now I had him marked as a safe seat, but now I wonder. His On The Issues summation is on the right. It’s clear that he’s no moderate, and the OTI page quotes him:

Life from conception is sacred and must be defended.

The last Senate election in Kansas, of Roger Marshall (R), found Democrats to be short of the 50% mark by 8+ points. Can they make that up against a sitting incumbent with the aforementioned added boost?

I have no more facts than that, no polls, just that and the knowledge that the same primary that yielded the rejection of the Constitutional Amendment also yielded Mark Holland as the Democratic nominee. He claims to be or have been a pastor and mayor, but little detail is present on the source Ballotpedia page.

That first poll will speak to whether the rejection of the Constitutional Amendment was a one-time event, or if the Kansas electorate will continue to safeguard their right to abortion by showing Moran the door and giving the seat to the inexperienced, but pro-choice, Holland. I do not envy them their choice.