Category Archives: Uncategorized

A trifle bedraggled, but still proud.

David Haryani on National Review:

Mask wearing has become just another stupid front in our partisan war. The fact is that whenever Donald Trump fails to engage the federal government in ways that Democrats demand, they claim he is negligent; and whenever he uses the federal government in ways they oppose, they rediscover the Tenth Amendment and accuse him of being a dictator. Trump could no more declare a no-mask mandate than Biden could force the entire country to wear masks. It’s all just political theater.

Because it’s easier to yell at the liberals than the conservatives. Don’t bother to be right, just be on the right team.

For those readers who are former Dishheads and have not kept up with Andrew Sullivan, today’s weekly update from Andrew announces his resignation from New York Magazine and the imminent opening of The Weekly Dish.

Life gets a little brighter, although weekly isn’t really enough for raging addictions.

But such opportunities must be grasped with care. Turkey’s President Erdoğan is anticipating some good grasping:

Speaking at the opening ceremony of the Ministry of Treasury and Finance’s Ataşehir Service Building in Istanbul, President Erdoğan said: “Turkey has become a powerful regional actor at a scale never seen in its recent history. Our country’s position in global power index assessments is increasing with each passing year. We are now close than ever to our goal of great and strong Turkey. Once we safely carry our country to 2023, we will have made Turkey an unstoppable power.” [Office of the Turkish Presidency]

Given the source, the statement should be taken with the due grain of salt. It remains a reflection, though, of the ambitions of the Turkish President, a man whose legal qualifications for the office were, at one time and perhaps still are, in doubt, and has presided over the Islamic takeover of the formerly secular government.

It’s a sad situation for Turkey. They may experience some temporary sugar rushes, but in the end, the standard theological intolerance and incompetency will be quite a challenge.

When it comes to the long-term health and prosperity of the Republican Party, this signal from Gallup, who I regard as a slightly right of center, is about the last thing the Party faithful should want to see:

An eleven point gap between the Democrats and the Republicans is bad. An eight point drop over six months is close to catastrophe.

Remember when the Republicans abandoned Richard Nixon? Here’s his poll numbers on the right. While they’re a poor proxy for Party Affiliation, it’s worth a guess that Americans began to leave the Republican Party in droves, too.

When Trump brags about his intra-party approval numbers, it’s wise to remember those willing to even admit to pro-Republican sympathies are rapidly shrinking. As I’ve expected, the Republican Party is rapidly becoming the Party of extremists who don’t respect the idea of democracy and its ideals, and the entire idea of liberalism which has animated the American experiment for all these decades, flawed as it has been, and that’s close to all of the membership. That’s why former Republicans are running for elective seats as Democrats.

The question then becomes: will the Republican elected officials dare to openly repudiate Trump? Outside of Senators Romney (R-UT) and Murkowski (R-AL)? Many are facing imminent defeat, and yet if they abandon ship individually, they cannot hope to persuade the independents to back them in enough numbers to win anyways – and the base, even as it shrinks more and more, will not vote for a Trump-traitor.

And if they jump ship all together, repudiating Trump en masse? My goodness, it just occurred to me that they could ask Pelosi to order a second impeachment effort, get it done in a week, and convict him in a day. That’d be ballsy. Also very entertaining.

But many of them have made it a virtue to cling to Trump knees, doing God knows what to him, in order to get nominated and elected. Even an impeachment and conviction would be ineffective for most of them, because voters remember and Democrats have advertising dollars. It might destroy the party faster than the slow, well, mildly fast disintegration we’re seeing now.

And how’s the Presidential Popularity poll amalgamation going on FiveThirtyEight?

No better than last time, and, based on the Gallup poll, it’ll not be improving substantially any time soon.

The Republicans are using a dead-end ideology paired with pathological operational processes, such as team politics, which in combination with Trumpist campaign tactics and profound governing incompetence is going to sink them – perhaps even deeper than can be imagined.

Some wonderfully colored lilies – maybe star gazers, but I’m not sure.

This one was grumpy.

And an active curmudgeon.

Wow. It’s almost creepy. Offering pollen to children, isn’t it?

I’ve occasionally railed about people who can’t help but see the world through their prism – for instance, a person paranoid about the Deep State would try to see everything, including blood test results, as evidence of the Deep State and evidence that the Deep State is trying to get them. So now it only makes sense to ask if I’m doing the same thing when I read this Politico piece on the Trump loyalty test:

In the middle of a devastating pandemic and a searing economic crisis, the White House has an urgent question for its colleagues across the administration: Are you loyal enough to President Donald Trump?

The White House’s presidential personnel office is conducting one-on-one interviews with health officials and hundreds of other political appointees across federal agencies, an exercise some of the subjects have called “loyalty tests” to root out threats of leaks and other potentially subversive acts just months before the presidential election, according to interviews with 15 current and former senior administration officials.

The interviews are being arranged with officials across a wide range of departments including Health and Human Services, Defense, Treasury, Labor and Commerce and include the top tier of Trump aides: Senate-confirmed appointees. Officials are expected to detail their career goals and thoughts on current policies, said more than a dozen people across the administration with knowledge of the meetings.

White House officials have said the interviews are a necessary exercise to determine who would be willing to serve in a second term if President Donald Trump is reelected. But officials summoned for the interviews say the exercise is distracting from numerous policy priorities, like working to fight the pandemic, revitalizing the economy or overhauling regulation, and instead reflect the White House’s conviction that a “deep state” is working to undermine the president.

Having watched the babbling, nonsensical brook which is President Trump from the beginning, and having it reinforced by the Tuesday Rose Garden rant, it seems to me that anyone who is competent and opens their mouth is very likely to say something at variance with President Trump’s utterances – and since he can’t stand to be contradicted in public, it exacerbates Trump’s temper.

So, in essence, this is another way to make the government even more incompetent. The Administration may be sincere in their search for the disloyal, but increasing incompetency is the net effect.

And that’s rather become my prism, hasn’t it? Republican amateurism and the damage it’s doing to the formerly great United States, now the object of pity world-wide. I don’t really like it, but it’s how I read the situation, and what I’m forced to bark to the moon. Because that’s what I think the reality of the situation happens to be, and we can’t go on much longer.

So get out and vote, folks. Every vote for Biden and Democratic legislative candidates is, unlike most years, a message to the Republican Party that their second rate people and third rate methods and fourth rate ideology is no longer acceptable in a United States which wishes to become first rate again.

And we need both left and right clicking on all cylinders in order to be successful in the future.

Michael Abramowicz on The Volokh Conspiracy is concerned that constraints, social or otherwise, damages academic exchange and his ability to trust the work of other people:

[A tweet by Wil Wilkinson]: Let’s simplify everything by noting that basically everyone committed to liberal values agrees that some claims and topics fall outside the bounds of socially acceptable opinion and debate, but we disagree about what’s in and out of bounds and about appropriate social penalties.

Wilkinson insists that he favors free speech, in the sense that he believes that the government should not proscribe speech (outside of narrow categories, such as slander), but that all reasonable people exact social penalties for at least some speech. And indeed, while I consider myself as about as in favor of free speech as anyone, I can imagine some extreme statements that a dinner party guest might make (say, holocaust denialism or white supremacy) that would make me less likely to invite the guest to another party, in part because I am convinced that a person announcing such views is seeking to get a rise our of listeners, exhibits serious defects in reasoning ability, or has profound prejudices, or maybe all three.

The danger, though, is that once we accept that it is acceptable for there to be social penalties for making out-of-bounds claims, people who make claims that ought to be in bounds, maybe even claims that are correct, will be found to be out of bounds. Moreover, people will not make claims that they think plausibly might be out of bounds.

And the impact on the non-polymath?

The knowledge that thoughtful people are self-censoring troubles me, not so much because it will lead me to censor myself, but because it makes it much harder for me and others to generate justifiable beliefs. Most of what any of us believes isn’t based on careful reviews of the literature. I believe in anthropogenic climate change and have even written about possible remedies for climate change, but I have not personally reviewed the models that predict global warming. My opinion is based on the declared opinions of others, who themselves may not have reviewed all the relevant models but may well be friends or friends of friends of people who have. I am, in other words, engaging in an exercise in social epistemology, trying to determine what is a justified true belief based on the announced beliefs of others.

But this exercise is a lot more difficult when one suspects that certain opinions are self-censored. If hypothetical climate scientists who have a view that differs from the consensus feel that they are better off staying quiet, then it is hard for an outsider to know whether the absence of such statements is because the climate change evidence is so strong or because there has been an information cascade. (The concern can push in the opposite direction as well. Because government climate scientists worry about stating their honest views, I would not place much epistemic weight on a government report about the state of climate science.) I still feel that I know enough about the culture of academia to determine with high confidence that climate change skepticism is largely unjustified. But I don’t have a very good answer to someone who, engaging in his or her own exercise in social epistemology, concludes that climate change is a hoax. I could tell this person that 97% of published papers that express a position on anthropogenic global warming conclude that it is occurring, but I don’t have a good answer to the objection that papers that say the opposite won’t get published and that scientists who claim such unorthodox views will harm their careers.

And that’s certainly a problem when confronted by people who want full, complete, and static answers, isn’t it? That’s why scientists can be very detailed in their answers, and why people talking to scientists should always append, in their minds, Contingent on new data and new arguments.

In a contrary view to Abramowicz, I’d like to note that the human brain has limits to its processing speed and its bandwidth. Given the amount of scientific data being generated for sub-sub-specialties, it only makes sense that certain concepts are repressed at the source, and discarded without investigation at the recipients. In particular, this helps preserve bandwidth that would otherwise be eaten up by cranks with PhDs, who are typically operating outside of their expertise, such as Dr. Navarro of the Trump Administration, or have some sort of religious or ideological objection to a paradigm of their area of expertise. This has been seen in the area of evolutionary biology in which the devout of fundamentalist sects who object to evolution have obtained PhDs in relevant areas and then tried to produce scientific arguments against their target paradigm. I’m not aware of any success in the latter case, but their dubious methods and proposals surely waste the time of serious scientists.

But, at least within the realm of science, if not of academia^[1], the processes of science should mitigate the problem over which Abramowicz worries. Science is about resolving open questions concerning reality, particularly those concerning paradoxes implicit in currently accepted theories. This is how Einstein resolved the question about the speed of light, as the theory of instantaneous transmission of light predicted certain phenomena which had not been observed. When paradoxes and other unexplained phenomena occur, hypotheses are proposed, tested, and either discarded or tentatively accepted.

Or, as Wilkinson suggests, they are ignored.

This happens in science. Two examples with which I’m familiar are the modern theory of plate tectonics and the bacterial theory of peptic ulcers. Neither were accepted when proposed, and took years of dogged persistence by scientists before they were accepted by the community.

And it was that dogged persistence and lack of successful competing theories which led to their acceptance. Science may drag its heels when it comes to exotic theories that are nonetheless correct, but it will – eventually – get there.

¹ I have a vague memory of reading somewhere that science without numbers was just academics. Apropos of nothing.

Another reason we’re in trouble:

Public health officials in Houston are struggling to keep up with one of the nation’s largest coronavirus outbreaks. They are desperate to trace cases and quarantine patients before they spread the virus to others. But first, they must negotiate with the office fax machine.

The machine at the Harris County Public Health department in Houston recently became overwhelmed when one laboratory sent a large batch of test results, spraying hundreds of pages all over the floor.

“Picture the image of hundreds of faxes coming through, and the machine just shooting out paper,” said Dr. Umair Shah, executive director of the department. The county has so far recorded more than 40,000 coronavirus cases.

Some doctors fax coronavirus tests to Dr. Shah’s personal number, too. Those papers are put in an envelope marked “confidential” and walked to the epidemiology department. [The New York Times]

That’s appalling. So is this:

Health departments track the virus’s spread with a distinctly American patchwork: a reporting system in which some test results arrive via smooth data feeds but others come by phone, email, physical mail or fax, a technology retained because it complies with digital privacy standards for health information. These reports often come in duplicate, go to the wrong health department, or are missing crucial information such as a patient’s phone number or address.

The absence of a standard digital process is hampering case reporting and contact tracing, crucial to slowing the spread of the disease. Many labs joined the effort but had limited public health experience, increasing the confusion.

“From an operational standpoint, it makes things incredibly difficult,” Dr. Shah said. “The data is moving slower than the disease.”

It sounds like we’re drowning in our own crappy systems.

Rush Limbaugh on how he thinks we should deal with Covid-19:

It’s just what was. They didn’t complain about it, because there was nothing they could do. They had to adapt. This is what’s missing. There seems to be no concept of adaptation. There seems to be no understanding in the Millennial generation that we can adapt to this, and that we’re going to have to.

Because there’s nothing stopping it right now. We don’t have a vaccine, we don’t have therapeutics. We can’t shut down bars and restaurants every two months for a couple of weeks, for the next three years. We can’t do this cycle that we’re doing. This cycle that we’re doing’s not stopping anything, it’s not saving anybody, it’s not preventing the spread. It’s just a knee-jerk reaction to a bunch of shock, scary numbers in the media.

Life has to go on. Life is to be lived. It’s not meant to be spent cowering and curled up in the corner in fear. It’s not meant to be spent as a victim. Your life is worth more than simply saying, “There’s nothing I can do about it, I have an excuse for not even trying.” But this is exactly where we are — and it’s not who we are. [Media Matters]

Adapting. That’s just what we’re doing, Limbaugh. Sheesh. Are you not paying attention?

Of course, that’s not politically convenient for a President who was relying on a good economy, inherited from his predecessor, to carry him through to reelection. Trump has yet to figure out this is no longer a President about efficacy or incompetency – but morality.

And Limbaugh, in far-right tradition, is carrying the water for him, because, of course, the far-right is not about life – it’s about power.

Getting away from our ongoing catastrophes, a couple of weeks ago Ward Farnsworth, who has written a book on convincing writing, published a come-on, as it used to be called, on The Volokh Conspiracy:

In any event: advisers on English style have long said that it’s best to use Saxon words when you can, because those words are most clear and forceful. If you need a single rule, that’s as good as any. But Lincoln didn’t create his great effects by sticking to one kind of word or another. He created them by skillfully mixing the two kinds of words, and doing the same with other aspects of his language.

For example, [President Abraham] Lincoln especially liked to start a sentence with Latinate words and then end with a Saxon finish.  Look at this famous passage from his “House Divided” speech in 1858:

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new, North as well as South.

The first half of the sentence has lots of Latinate words: opponents, slavery, arrest, course, ultimate, extinction, advocates. Then it ends with 14 words of one syllable in a row, all of them Saxon except “States” (which might as well be). He expresses the hope in large, uplifting words, and the threat in words that are short and simple. The first round sets up the second.

So is Farnsworth suggesting that English is a more expressive language precisely because it’s a hybrid? I’m not sure I’d buy into that without a convincing underlying theory. Just guessing, but I suppose we could postulate that the longer words force the brain to work harder to absorb the point of the first half, while the shorter, sharper ending words accelerates and emphasizes the need for action by not distracting the brain with long words which take longer to process – especially if they’re unfamiliar.

Unfortunately for me, I think the communication context of Lincoln’s time is not much like our current context. I’ve always found reading the Gettysburg a bit baffling, although it’s really just a matter of taking it a bit slow and envisioning, where necessary, what he’s trying to say.

For my part, I prefer uncommon sentence construction and unfamiliar words in order to make the reader slow down and think, at least when I’m trying to write something that I think will require some thought. I’ll have to remember Farnsworth’s recommendations next time I write something.

I wasn’t aware of this observation when I wrote about the Alabama primary earlier today:

Turnout for the Alabama GOP Senate runoff  was abysmal, and one Republican strategist told the New York Times you can’t just blame it on the coronavirus.

Said Angi Stalnaker: “The story here is that Trump cannot turn out votes in the reddest state in the country. That should worry him.” [Taegan Goddard’s Political Wire]

This changes the predictive calculus slightly, making it more fuzzy because we don’t know why the Republican Party voters were unenthusiastic. Was it concerns about Covid-19 and polling locations? Are they already sick of Trump? Just not interested in a primary runoff?

Or were both victor Tuberville and loser Sessions simply that much of a turnoff?

In any case, I’ll upgrade incumbent Senator Jones’ (D-AL) chances slightly. He still has a hill to climb, but the Republicans, by failing to field a respectable candidate, may fumble away their easiest pickup opportunity this November.

This, to be honest, is not unexpected, at least in retrospect. As the more moderate, but more competent, people are chased out of the party by the shrieking RINOers, the median member’s characteristics moves farther and farther rightward, and ideology and competency does have a loose correlation. While there have certainly been highly competent ideologues on both sides of the spectrum, my observation is that the competent people also tend to look at the world with more encompassing vision, and realize that ideology is sometimes a block around the ankle rather than a balloon ride over the mountains.

And those who gained traction via the RINO tactic didn’t have much more to offer, to be honest. It’s not an intellectually impressive approach to moving up the political ladder; one can only say that it has worked, so far.

Yesterday’s rambling Rose Garden rant is here, and CNN’s fact check is here. Just in case you want to check out one of Trump’s speeches. It incorporates a lot of his favorites, such as “Pelosi dancing in Chinatown”. I gave up when it got to the Q&A.

It’s quite the drone-fest, isn’t it? It’s his signature style – if you say everything in the same pitch, then it becomes harder to recognize a lie just by the quaver in the voice or the body language. He’s built some fake reasoning to support some of his contentions, but others he just flings out there.

It’s not hard to see why some people get taken in by it. It’s sneaky, mixing patriotic language with lies, mischaracterizations, and a short-sighted focus on money (see his bit on the Paris Climate Accords).

If you haven’t done it, it’s an interesting experience.

They’re just not quitting this season, posing in the sun like a rebellious nudist.

Maybe those Asian beetles could be done away with, please?

One of the great slug-fests:

I’ve been wondering about how effective reparations might be structured, and it appears that a city in North Carolina has decided to charge ahead and do what it can:

In an extraordinary move, the Asheville City Council has apologized for the North Carolina city’s historic role in slavery, discrimination and denial of basic liberties to Black residents and voted to provide reparations to them and their descendants.

The 7-0 vote came the night of July 14. …

The unanimously passed resolution does not mandate direct payments. Instead it will make investments in areas where Black residents face disparities.

“The resulting budgetary and programmatic priorities may include but not be limited to increasing minority home ownership and access to other affordable housing, increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities, strategies to grow equity and generational wealth, closing the gaps in health care, education, employment and pay, neighborhood safety and fairness within criminal justice,” the resolution reads. [USA Today]

I think reparations will have to come from both the highest levels and the lowest levels, and Asheville is leading the way in the latter category. Why the lowest? Because some areas have ongoing dissimilar outcomes, racially speaking, that must addressed locally. For example, I hope the issue of property taxes reparations is assessed – but that can only be properly performed locally, because the corrections may have differing sources.

I’ll be fascinated to see how we continue to treat this most important of issues – and who sets up a mighty howl when they begin to realize that taxes must go up, not only to cover the costs of making it through the pandemic, but for these reparations for the very unjust way the black community has been treated in the United States.

I’ve lived in a safe Democratic district these days, and have only once seen a Republican challenger come through to chat. I’m hoping to see one this year, and when they say they’re for lower taxes, I’ll just say, “Why?”

It appears the former Senator and Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III (R-AL) is finished with politics, having lost his primary battle with former football coach Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) for the right to contest with the current Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) for his old Senate seat – decisively:

A 20+% point loss doesn’t bode well for any future for Sessions. He’s earned himself the reputation of a big failure along with that of being a lickspittle, but then he was running in a state which is still, reputedly, strongly pro-Trump.

And that will be the key for Tuberville. Between now and November will Alabama continue to be pro-Trump? That’s how this race will run, because Tuberville, beyond his frantic clutching of Trump, literally has nothing else in the tank. He’s a successful football coach, a failed hedge fund manager, and that’s it.

He’s the embodiment of the Trump / Ryan amateur-hour debacle to which we’ve been a witness: not only is he for what Trump is for, but he loves him, too. And he dares not criticize Trump, because, frankly, Tuberville has no relevant accomplishments that would soften Trump’s outrage at being criticized.

Can sitting Senator Jones (D-AL) beat that? Ask a few Alabamans. I’m still a little appalled, if unsurprised, that Tuberville won. Frankly, the Alabama GOP, by serving up a far-right denizen of the swamp and a football coach with no relevant qualifications as their primary candidates, for one of the most important elected positions in the nation, marks them as unserious and incompetent.

Here’s something that reminds me of Professor Turchin’s Secular Cycles, as Jennifer Rubin writes in WaPo:

Joe Biden’s campaign puts together a near-genius ad for Texas:

This is important for a couple of reasons:

1. Trump isn’t mentioned. By not doing so, straight-up politics is pushed out of the limelight. This is an appeal to the emotions that the campaign thinks many people are feeling as hospitals fill up and businesses close down, and it focuses people on the candidate who is offering leadership, and takes the focus off the candidate who’s just putzing around in the background and randomly thumping his chest. This is a video about compassion and competency.
2. By not focusing on Trump, it gives the viewers the opportunity to think about other Texas Republicans, such as their local representative, who is up for reelection in November, or Senator Cornyn (R), also up for reelection, who inserted his foot in his mouth yesterday concerning children catching Covid-19, or even their Governor Abbot and Lt. Governor Patrick, both Republicans, but they are not up for reelection until 2022. Once again, Biden offers compassion and competency; all the Republicans have urged a quick return to opening the economy, a course of action that has put a lot of people in the hospital, and Texas, a big state that should probably be broken up for Covid-19 measurement purposes, in the top ten for daily new cases of Covid-19 per capita.
3. Biden gets to use his trademark reputation for bringing people together. We all know that sometimes he’s worked with unsavory sorts, but his ability to work with any reasonable person is gaining appeal in a country that’s long been tearing apart along partisan lines.
4. Finally, he may have forty years in government service, and, sure, maybe the partisan trolls will try to make him out to be a denizen of the swamp – but forty years of service is forty years of experience, and the drooping polls for Republicans across the boards suggest Americans have decided to dump their long-time date with freaking amateurs and try out experience and professionalism for a chance. Former Speaker Ryan (R-WI) once expressed confidence that experts weren’t necessary to run a country, but I think independents and moderate conservatives have run out of patience with that bit of right-fringe nonsense. This ad reminds us of Biden’s length of service, and, without mentioning Trump once, offers that experience. He doesn’t engage in magical thinking, unlike Trump. He’s told us that things will be tough. But he’s a realist, and maybe Americans have had enough.
5. This will force the Republicans to defend a State they may have regarded as secure. From the Texas Tribune:
   

   There have been a series of polls in recent weeks finding a tight contest between Biden and President Donald Trump in historically red Texas.

   One poll released Sunday found Biden leading Trump by 5 percentage points among likely voters, while another survey that came out the same day gave Trump a 1-point lead among likely voters, well within the margin of error.

   That has to be shocking for Texas Republicans.

Look for more effective ads from Biden’s campaign. Someone sure did this one right.

Fuliginous:

Pertaining to or resembling soot in such features as colour, texture or taste; sooty, dusky. [from 16th c.] [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Tucker Carlson whitewashes the racism of his show and his former top writer,” Erik Wemple, WaPo:

In a network of ideologues, Carlson occupies a particularly fuliginous fringe. Even the network’s leaders in Saturday’s note to colleagues characterized Neff’s postings as “deeply offensive racist, sexist and homophobic.” On the other hand, Carlson apparently couldn’t even bring himself to echo those same denunciations. That’s because Carlson has spent his entire career as a Fox News prime-time host — nearly four years — skewering those who call out President Trump for being, well, racist, sexist and other offensive things. Those spotters of hatred are a prime target for Carlson, a lure for viewers. There was no way that he was going to use his own show to call out racism by its name.

From The Guardian:

It’s no secret that nature can be brutal and violent, but a new Queensland Museum report on the death of some snake eels reads more like the plot of a horror movie than a scientific paper.

Snake eels are a family of eel species that live most of their lives burrowed in the soft sand on the floor of the ocean.

When eaten alive by predators, they will use their hard pointed tail tip, which is for digging, to burst through the fish’s stomach in a bid to escape digestion.

But unfortunately, this isn’t enough to save them. Unable to burrow through a fish’s hard ribcage, they become trapped and die, their body slowly mummified in the gut cavity of their captor.

It’s said that the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, quit believing in God after observing some of Nature’s more cruel ploys. I have no idea if it’s true, but I hope fish and eels are just as unthinking and unfeeling as they appear to be, because, just like parasitic wasps and their prey tarantulas, this is horrific. If there’s a God, he’s a sadist.

Yesterday I wrote about the statistical artifacts of being a congenital liar, which led to observations concerning how a congenital liar must still have integrity, just not the sort of integrity most of us share.

Lying is a species of corruption. Most of the time it’s unimportant or self-corrects, but when it, along with the other behaviors of corruption, become a determined part, a tool, of someone’s existence, corruption can force that person, a victim of its cruel requirements, into bad decisions. Take, for instance, President Trump and the conservative reactions, prior to and after, the commutation of Roger Stone:

Among those opposed to Trump’s decision to spare his longtime adviser from having to report to prison next week was White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, according to a person familiar with the situation. Multiple White House officials even advised the president against the commutation, according to a second source. …

Attorney General William Barr discussed Stone’s sentence with Trump and recommended clemency not be offered, according to multiple sources, and other White House officials, including Meadows, also advised the president against the commutation.

Trump was warned of these vulnerabilities, according to one of the people familiar with the discussions, who said the president was told “it was a big mistake.” [NBC News]

The President didn’t get the reaction he wanted from the conservative media, according to WaPo. So why did President Trump charge ahead? Stone has admitted – I won’t even say All but admitted – that he has some very important information that Trump didn’t want released, so he held a sword over Trump’s head. Trump had good reason to issue the commutation.

But one must keep in mind that corruption is rarely isolated. There are other actors holding important information on Trump, and he knows they’re watching his treatment of Trump. Corruption is a team sport, after all, and those out on the front lines, facing a prison term, will need reassurance that they, too, can be rescued.

Or they’ll drop their load into the FBI’s lap.

That Trump commuted Stone’s sentence is no surprise.

But notice how this just makes Trump even more visibly corrupt. Trump knows this, and thus the ceaseless yammer about how the Mueller investigation was a witch hunt. What he doesn’t seem to realize is that his base wasn’t going to go away because of the commutation – but this is another reason, among literally hundreds, for the independents, who hold his political fate in their hands, to vote against him and his enablers in Congress.

My point, though, is that corruption may seem like a way to game the system to those who consider themselves clever – but Trump is becoming an object lesson in how corruption can force its users into actions they’d rather not take.

What I find horrifically funny was this, also from the same NBC News report:

When asked about why the president would flout the advice of top advisers, one of the sources said the president believed Stone was treated unfairly by prosecutors and that the Russia investigation was an illegitimate “witch hunt.”

Trump’s decision to ignore the advice of those arounds [sic] him was also rooted in the president’s belief that his base would not disapprove of his decision to commute Stone.

Which suggests he’s either lying to his own advisors, or he’s demented. He knows the Mueller investigation was not a witch hunt – or, at least, he should. If he really, truly believes that all of the indictments and observations of obstruction of justice and straight out lying, as documented by Mueller, was not corruption, then once again he’s demented.

It’s really that simple.

It’s well known that all “artificial intelligence” systems are sharply limited in their domain. IBM’s chess playing Deep Blue doesn’t drive a car. But what happens when the domain itself begins a tectonic shift?

I initially felt a little bad at the thought of quoting Erick Erickson, the conservative dude who keeps me on his non-subscriber list to whom he nevertheless sends mail, because it is a mass email, not something I can point at as documented.

But, hell, the guy who once accused all anti-Trumpers as having Trump Derangement Syndrome, which made me giggle madly at the thought of this allegedly devout guy defending an inveterate liar, sexual infidel, cager of children, etc, the guy who had asserted he trusted Governor Kemp (R-GA) in the matters of Covid-19 response, a state now in today’s Top Ten for Covid-19 infections per capita, and was able to somehow ignore this …

I had people show up at my house to threaten my family and witnessed an organized effort to have me kicked off the radio. In fact, some of the very people most outraged about cancel culture right now were trying to cancel me because they just hated I wouldn’t hump Donald Trump’s leg with them and still won’t.

And now, only now, has he figured out that maybe, just maybe, those Republicans, whose supporters tracked him down for purposes of intimidation, who he judged to be better qualified for election than the hated Democrats, really aren’t all that … admirable:

The President of the United States was just fine in good times and got a lot accomplished, in spite of himself, but a person’s character is revealed in crisis and we should not be surprised that the man is revealed in crisis to be unfit for leadership during a crisis. Lest you think otherwise, the rest of the world is starting to go back to normal and the virus is running rampant here.

The very people that told us not to wear masks in February and March and then ridiculed Joe Biden for wearing a mask now have an erection for a President wearing a mask as if his own Surgeon General and other leaders were not telling us otherwise and he himself was treating mask-wearing as a sign of weakness.

Yes please, let me repeat this — THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TOLD US NOT TO WEAR MASKS BECAUSE IT WOULD DO US NO GOOD.

But frankly, my issue is not really with the President. It is with his apologists who have shown themselves to be full of invective without much insight. The people who told us 2016 was a “Flight 93” election have crashed the plane and are now fighting over who to blame. Along the way, they showed themselves to lack the valor and integrity of those aboard the real Flight 93. Go down the rabbit hole of deep insight among that crew and you’ll realize many of these people are all bluster. Their ideas are as completely incompatible with the structure of our republic as the left’s ideas are. Their “nationalist-conservative” hybrid approach can’t work in a democracy when more than half the people hate their standard-bearer and they think they can somehow use the mechanisms of a national bureaucracy to steer a country to “national greatness” but can’t even fight a freaking microscopic virus with any credibility. Drag-queen storytime delenda est my left butt cheek. Good luck with that.

And he’s surprised that the man who was impeached for international blackmail and caught committing civil offenses prior to his election has attracted the worst? That who Trump endorses seems to be chronically, even terminally incompetent, capable of only … humping Trump’s leg?

I’ll be just a moment. I have to sit back and smile. Erickson himself is a victim of his ideological fixation and team politics.

But Erickson has limits. He can only vaguely see the damage being done by the Republicans, from whom he conveniently distances himself. Biden?

Do you know the difference between Joe Biden and a tomato? A tomato is actually a fruit, not a vegetable. The leading luminaries of Reliable Sources on CNN, the gabfests of MSNBC, etc. have spent an inordinate amount of time on the mental fitness of Donald Trump to be President and have totally ignored their preferred candidate is a cadaver with a pulled back face who will be controlled by far-left activists.

The Democrats are too scared to even speak up against the mob right now because they are afraid the mob will turn on them. The mob is absolutely going to turn on them because the Democrats’ entire governing coalition is about ending the Trump Administration. Once it ends, the mob turns on itself like the orcs of Mordor with no hobbits around.

And, yet, his preferred candidate has surrounded himself with incompetent ideologues who are incapable of thinking the world is different from their dreams, people who live in delusions. The test for Biden and his team lies not in being perfect, because they won’t be, but it will be in how they adjust their strategies as they encounter reality. Obama did quite well in that area, and I expect Biden to emulate his old boss.

Trump? He still thinks domestic politics are stuck in the 1950s.

So, that’s my schadenfreude for the next six months.