The result of Magical Thinking is when reality reaches up and slaps you, much to your surprise.

The result of Science is the same as Magical Thinking, without the surprise.

You may or may not have heard that SCOTUS ruled, 5-4 along ideological lines, that President Trump may fire the head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) at his discretion, contrary to the legislation that created it.

As may any future President as well, as former CFPB head Richard Corday points out. And, further, that by only addressing that issue, SCOTUS may have implicitly signaled that the CFPB is not a zombie agency, soon to be removed by the judicial eraser, but still alive and waiting for an activist leader to be appointed once again.

But behind this issue is the deeper issue of just who should have the right to watch over the shoulder of such leaders, and remove them when they don’t perform well. It’s an important but complex and subtle question, and on Lawfare law professor and historian Jed Handelsman Shugerman thinks the conservative justices, in their textualist, originalist glory, are fudging the record. It’s a long article, but if this is an issue that interests you …

These events reveal mostly the complexities of collective decision-making—an example of how Congress is often a contradictory “they,” not an “it.” Refocusing attention from a deliberately muddled legislative debate to the actual statutes that the first Congress passed, it becomes clearer that—if there was any decision of constitutional significance from these debates—it was that Congress had broad powers to regulate, delegate and distribute removal powers.

It’s also an important topic, because who fires these people is determined on the legal consensus behind the unitary executive theory. For those who are not intimate with this theory:

The unitary executive theory is a theory of US constitutional law holding that the US president possesses the power to control the entire executive branch. The doctrine is rooted in Article Two of the United States Constitution, which vests “the executive power” of the United States in the President. Although that general principle is widely accepted, there is disagreement about the strength and scope of the doctrine. It can be said that some favor a “strongly unitary” executive, while others favor a “weakly unitary” executive. The former group argue, for example, that Congress‘s power to interfere with intra-executive decision-making (such as firing executive branch officials) is limited, and that the President can control policy-making by all executive agencies within the limits set for those agencies by Congress. Still others agree that the Constitution requires a unitary executive, but believe this to be harmful, and propose its abolition by constitutional amendment. [Wikipedia]

And, as we’ve seen, a corrupt Executive can wreak real damage when the theory of a strong unitary executive holds sway. I tend to not give it much credence myself, although for reasons that are virtually irrelevant to governmental theory, but instead going back to the days when I helped run a number of BBSes and a network connecting them by deliberately devolving as much authority and responsibility to my co-hobbyists as I possibly could. That experience, seeing as it was partly of a governmental form, was instructive as to the strength and competence of many vs the strength of just one.

It may be helpful to consider why the strong unitary executive theory is conducive to corruption. First, we need to realize that it means that, as with the CFPB director, the leaders serve at the pleasure of the President, once they are confirmed; that is, they have to keep the President happy. Now, that’s fine if the President is a fine, upstanding politician, as many have been. But when the leaders are faced with a President that is motivated by personal, rather than State-interests, and the leaders in question quite naturally would prefer to stay in their positions, then their performance can be impaired and even corrupted.

I find I far prefer a model in which, as now, the President nominates candidates, and the Senate confirms or rejects. But, post-confirmation, these folks, from Cabinet level on down, may operate as they wish, so long as they are in conformance with their duties and those are performed to the best of their ability, and no corruption occurs, (which may be redundant with performing their duties).

If the President wishes to remove a confirmed candidate from their position, then they must submit a request to do so to the Senate. In an emergency, they can submit a request for an immediate trial and decision, but then the President must come to the trial and present the evidence. Whether a super-majority of the Senate is required is an important detail.

In either case, the person to be removed may present contrary evidence, as can the investigative arm of the Senate. There should be a process for Congress to remove a poorly performing or corrupt person as well.

It seems far more sensible than this flawed unitary executive theory. Oh, and for those who wonder about the Department of Defense, the President is explicitly named as the Commander-in-Chief of the military by the Constitution, so we shouldn’t need to worry about an out of control military.

One more little tidbit from Shugerman:

Here comes the incorrect part of this story. According to the unitary executive theorists, this last bloc prevailed in the House, with Madison crafting language designed to imply that the power originated from the Constitution. Then the Senate split 10-10 on the subject, and Vice President John Adams broke the tie in favor of presidential power. And thus the first Congress confirmed, fixed, constructed or “liquidated”—as various judges, scholars and officials have put it over the years—a unitary executive as a matter of constitutional law. Like Roberts, many lawyers and judges rely heavily on this story to explain why the Constitution shields presidents from congressional limitations on their power.

There’s just one little problem with this founding myth of the unitary executive: The story is wrong. In fact, this story never made sense. But the unitary interpretation really unravels with newly identified evidence from the Senate. The Senate was closed and did not officially record debates. But a senator’s diary recorded a far messier reality: The first Congress actually retreated from the argument that the Constitution vests sole removal power in the president, even for the Department of Foreign Affairs (the equivalent of today’s Department of State) and Department of War (the equivalent of the Department of Defense), which would have been the strongest domains for presidential power. It settled on deliberately vague language instead, because doing so was necessary to get sufficient votes to establish the first executive departments.

Which is fascinating. Sometimes obscure political machinations will echo down the centuries until they impact us, hard, right between the eyes.

Heather Cox Richardson’s overnight summary of the Trump Administration’s apparent management goal of Covid-19 has been stuck in my brain:

Looming over Trump’s portrayal of his version of America, though, was the coronavirus. While other advanced countries have gotten the virus under control and are cautiously beginning to reopen, we are moving the opposite direction. As of today, we have almost 3 million confirmed cases and more than 130,000 deaths. In a number of states, especially in the South, cases are hitting new highs. Europe has banned American visitors, and Mexico and Canada have both closed their border with the U.S. Rather than trying to stop the crisis, the White House is launching new messaging about the coronavirus: “Learn to live with it.”

Trump is doubling down on the idea that the United States must simply reopen, and take the resulting deaths as a cost of doing business. Three people who have been privy to administration thinking about the issue told reporters for the Washington Post that officials are hoping “Americans will go numb to the escalating death toll and learn to accept tens of thousands of new cases a day.” Advisors have urged Trump to try to avoid responsibility for the administration’s disastrous response to the pandemic by simply blaming China for it. Their goal is to try to repair the economy before the election, recognizing that economic recovery is the only way to make up the gap between Trump’s poll numbers and those of presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden.

I finally found a suitable analogy: a mechanic on a Formula 1 race car, upon discovering his car’s engine has a broken piston, insists he can carve a new one out of wood and it’ll be better than ever.

And if that doesn’t work, well, the remaining pistons will cover it fine and, ya know, last place isn’t that bad if we don’t acknowledge there was anyone else in the race and … add your favorite strident self-delusion here.

Look. All it takes is comparisons, honestly done, to show how poorly this Administration has performed. That’s it. We can always talk about how much we hate our grandparents, our friends with health conditions, and all the folks who have heart attacks and can’t be treated at the local ICU because the Covid-19 patients are using all the beds, all with great sarcasm.

But we may, tragically, end up having all this magical thinking terminated by the great head slap of reality. Hospitals overflowing with patients, friends and family dying when they could have been saved.

If the GOP falls in line behind this rationale, they will have truly become the Party of Death. Historians will point out that this never had to happen.

Kevin Drum ruminates:

As near as I can tell, the most common reaction from most high-profile, movement conservatives to the toppling of Confederate statues is . . . sarcasm. Hey, how about toppling statues of Margaret Sanger? Burn! Why aren’t we toppling statues of Marx and Engels? Burn! How about the Hollywood Walk of Fame? Burn! And your hero Lincoln was just a big ol’ racist too. Why aren’t we toppling statues of him? Burn!

Is there something in the water that prevents so many conservatives with big media platforms from taking this seriously? There is, obviously, a perfectly good case for tearing down Confederate statues but leaving nearly everything else alone. I should know, since it’s pretty much my position. After all, it’s one thing to have been racist in the past, when explicit racism was all but universal, and quite another to literally fight a war of secession in defense of Black slavery.

1. The current conservative movement tends to operate as a team.
2. Partially due to the movement’s religious element, they are arrogantly sure they are right.
3. They hate change, as it implies they were wrong about something, even that they’ve sinned.
4. Their leader, President Trump, is vociferously supporting that revulsion at change. His motivations may not be congruent with the movement’s general motivations – he may be, in fact, a racist and a neo-Confederate – but he’s not talkin’.
5. The “left” wants the statues down, and the right’s current operating mode is to oppose whatever they want, on no particularly noteworthy principle. It’s the same reason the ACA is continually under attack, even now when it’s been most useful.
6. Finally, the big media conservatives cannot be seen as breaking ranks – or they’ll lose their jobs. Remember, Rush Limbaugh has publicly stated he’ll say anything for money. No doubt, the rest feel the same. The smaller fry are not always in line – I’ve seen Erick Erickson rebuking some of the Covid-19 skepticism memes, for instance. But the big boys, oh, money is their God and they adore it, so they’ll say The Right Thing in order to keep their cred up with the “conservatives”.

I don’t know Drum, but I suspect he’s the sort who’s more interested in truth than kant, who’d rather find the proper solution than back the ideological solution. He claims to be center left, and I’d believe it.

In a sense, if you’re going to pay attention to pundits, stay away from those doing it for big bucks, because that’ll twist their “truths”. For example, the very few times I’ve had the stomach for Mark Thiessen or a couple of other pundits of his ilk, both at WaPo and National Review, it’s very hard to reconcile their facts and arguments with a search for truth. It’s just a defense of their ideology. Obviously, there’s a tension because it takes time to have valuable opinions and more time to write them up in a comprehensible manner, so a modicum of pay is both reasonable and necessary. But pleasing the audience’s preconceptions is a corruptive influence, and so is buying into the emotional belief that the opposition is the enemy.

This is appalling:

A brother and sister working at a different plant both got sick in early April. The brother wound up on a ventilator, spending six weeks in the hospital, nearly all of it unpaid, his sibling said. He was still in a medically induced coma when the chicken plant began urging her to come back.

Though he survived, they recently received documents from the hospital in English, which they don’t speak. The only thing they understood was the number at the bottom for the cost of his hospital stay: $61,000. [WaPo]

It seems to me that if you’re deemed essential to the well-being of the nation, and are asked to put your life on the line, your medical bills connected to the risk become the responsibility of the Federal Government. Just like military personnel.

The “party of morality,” aka the Republican Party, should know this, they shouldn’t have to be told it. Why isn’t Majority Leader Senator McConnell (R-KY) not up at a lectern, pounding on it while demanding the Democrats in the House deliver legislation to cover the costs of these workers?

Quite lovely, but perhaps a little common.

In Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Kende point at the next legal reformation that we should soon see popping up as a wart on America’s hide – it’s called Washington v. Davis:

In Washington v. Davis, decided in 1976, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that laws or government policies that disproportionately harm Black people do not violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. The case was brought by aspiring Black police officers challenging the statistical disparity in test scores between Black and white test takers as a reflection that the D.C. police department’s hiring policy was unconstitutional. The test, known as Test 21, was chock full of white cultural and idiomatic references that may well have contributed to the fact that from 1968 to 1971, 57 percent of Black applicants failed the test as compared with 13 percent of whites.

In a 7–2 decision penned by Justice Byron White, the Supreme Court decided that courts can only find that a law or governmental action violates the equal protection clause when a plaintiff can show that a state actor intended to discriminate, and that this intention, in turn, caused a discriminatory result. But discriminatory intent is virtually impossible to prove. Who openly admits they are racist? This nearly insurmountable bar means that laws that treat Black people worse than white people (for example, laws requiring exponentially harsher sentences for crack possession than for cocaine use) remain tolerated throughout society.

It’s not exactly mind-reading, since intent is often written down, but when it’s racism it’s often concealed, and paper trails are either never permitted to exist, or erased when possible, as Lithwick and Kende point out.

As Osagie K. Obasogie noted in the New York Times, the result of this decision was the perpetuation of systemic racial discrimination and the ascendance of “what is now known as the ‘intent doctrine,’ which emerged in later cases as a simplistic search for a smoking gun—individual bad actors intentionally doing bad things with nothing but racial animus on their minds.”

Which is little more than denial of a systemic problem. But as was shown, contingent on confirmation, in this study, systemic racism is not necessarily even a conscious act; it may be the result of something as innocent as incomplete knowledge of a chronic situation.

Statistical analysis is necessarily a fuzzy understanding of a situation, and thus it takes specialist skills to decide if situations such as that motivating Washington v. Davis are coincidental or, as the authors suggest, causative. I think Washington v. Davis needs to be replaced by some sort of law that says if a respectable statistical analysis suggests structural racism is occurring, then call in a specialist (I believe legal jargon calls them special masters) to examine the matter. Not to assign blame or punishment, but to point out the causes of the structural racism and to supervise their correction.

Two more NBA teams are now offering their arenas for voting use, as have the Atlanta Hawks:

The three teams that have so far offered their spaces — the Atlanta Hawks, the Detroit Pistons and the Milwaukee Bucks — are located in presidential battleground states. More than a third of the league’s teams are in states that could help determine the presidential contest this fall. [NPR]

And now we see the source of pressure under which the NBA may be laboring:

And the offers come as many of the NBA’s mostly African-American players have upped their involvement in social causes following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody. Last month, for instance, superstar LeBron James announced a new organization aimed at protecting Black citizens’ voting rights.

The group, More Than A Vote, has praised the NBA franchises volunteering their spaces, while also egging on others with a hoops-like challenge: “Who’s got next?”

There’s no doubt at all that the NBA exists on the backs of its superstars, From Mikan to Kareem to Jordan and James. Fans come to see them perform – and for the underdog roles of the lesser known players who play against them. It’s a fabulous story.

So the implicit threat in the More Than A Vote organization of the superstars choosing to sit out a season – or three – exerts a great deal of pressure on the money hungry NBA, which has to pay superstar salaries.

But I think the NBA teams are more likely very tired of the GOP, which is mostly responsible for the management, if not genesis, of the two events which are costing the NBA its business – the pandemic and the systemic racism-unrest.

So even if it’s not true that there have been deliberate efforts to suppress voting by communities thought to be inclined to vote Democratic, these offers, and those that follow, are symbolic of an industry that is entirely fed up with a Party that has become increasingly isolated from mainstream America, built an epistemic bubble in order to limit apostasy and keep the faithful, well, faithful, and continues to try to reassure itself that it represents normal America by labeling everyone else ‘Marxists’ and ‘terrorists.’

All the while, their ‘normal America’ was the one that repressed the black community and put absolute rights above public health and safety. So long as the Democrats continue to push this message, they should have a good chance of success in November.

From NewScientist (13 June 2020):

The oldest and largest known monument built by the Mayan civilisation has been found in Mexico. Called Aguada Fénix, it is a huge raised platform 1.4 kilometres long.

Aguada Fénix was built around 1000 BC, centuries before the Maya began constructing their famous stepped pyramids. Its design suggests that early Mayan societies were fairly egalitarian and didn’t have a powerful ruling class.

There’s a lovely accompanying remote sensing picture of the area, but I was curious what it looks like au naturel, so I dug a picture up:

Source: Pagina66

It makes me wonder what’s under my feet. I’ve found several toys from previous owners of this property, but somehow they don’t have the magic of a Mayan ruin. But this picture explains why we keep finding ancient civilization artifacts, even huge ones – they’re very well hidden.

The other day I happened to look at the running kitchen sink tap when sun was coming in the window, and I could see a fine mist that I decided to try to photograph. Did I get the spray?

Well, yes. But that didn’t turn out to be the star of the show:

They’re like bubbly icicles.

For World War II buffs, the D-Day invasion of Normandy, followed by the battle for Europe and the final suffocation of Nazi Germany is a signal and gallant part of the war. It’s depressing, therefore, to read this:

Bomb-cratered landscapes can also tell the heartrending tale of the civilian cost of Allied air operations over Normandy. In the daily operational records of air squadrons, it is rare to find any acknowledgment that attacks on targets in towns, villages, and the surrounding countryside may have incurred civilian casualties, Passmore says. But it is becoming clear as research continues that as many as 60,000 to 70,000 French civilians died as a result of air attacks in support of the Normandy campaign and later operations across France. “This narrative warrants more attention,” says Passmore, “and archaeology can make a significant contribution by carefully documenting the survival of landscapes that testify to the extent, range, and intensity of the attacks that brought civilians in harm’s way tens, or even hundreds, of miles behind the front.” [“Letter from Normandy,” Archaeology (July/August 2020), page 5]

70,000 civilians dead as two ideologies struggled for supremacy, or even three, if we count the Soviets – although they were busy recovering Soviet territory and, if I remember my history properly, retaking Poland.

I’ve remarked that the roots of the Nazi Party were nourished by the soil of the Treaty of Versailles, a punitive treaty the French employed to exact their end; it’s my belief that without that treaty, the Weimar Republic, which succeeded the discredited German monarchy would have had a far better chance of success, and Hitler would have been dismissed as an impotent goof.

But it did exist, it discredited democracy in Germany, along with conventional morality, and in the end the Allies had to fight their way through every hedge in order to extirpate the Nazi Party – and, even then, Nazi ideology is still employed by some dead-enders.

This is what happens when ideology is clung to beyond reason and sanity, and it discourages me now. All of this is known, but sometimes it’s worth reiterating such points when we’re observing such obstinacy as with the Republican Party.

… this is what it looks like:

“The Republican Party under Donald Trump has become a party wandering aimlessly in the street talking to itself and responding to itself, and all the rest of us have become the pedestrians trying to avoid that guy.” – Patrick Gaspard

In other words, the epistemic bubble that so many pundits identified and worried about so many years before I started writing a blog (but I’ve been reading blogs since 2000 or earlier, when the BBSes dried up) are now getting to see the endpoint of those worries – a sclerotic Party in which the members are terrified of grabbing the wheel and not grabbing the wheel. (For those with a historical bent, here’s a reference to concerns about epistemic closure, an equivalent term, from 2007.)

I am so glad I’m not a Republican, because the Party sounds like just another chamber in the insane asylum in Hell. A President who can only divide, not lead; he may be, medically speaking, demented; madcap messages and actions such as The Confederacy deserves to be honored! (oh, maybe that very first one back in the late 1700s), foolish religious tenets (the Laffer Curve); demands for 100% support of the leader; zombie elected officials who cannot envision being rid of their leader; & etc.

This is toxic team politics at its worst, folks. Study, distill, and put the results in a textbook about how not to run an American political party.

Shambolic:

confused and badly organized:

• Things are often a bit shambolic at the beginning of the school year.
• Anna is far too shambolic to be able to run a business. [Cambridge Dictionary]

Noted in “Obama at Biden fundraiser: ‘Whatever you’ve done so far is not enough’,” Tal Axelrod, The Hill:

“The good news, what makes me optimistic, is the fact that there is a great awakening going on around the country, particularly among younger people, who are saying not only are they fed up with the shambolic, disorganized, mean-spirited approach to governance that we’ve seen over the last couple of years but, more than that, are eager to take on some of the core challenges that have been facing this country for centuries,” he said.

I never knew what it meant.

In response to my latest update on climate change, a reader remarks:

I hate to be a downer, but civilization will be toast by the end of this century — and it’ll be an ugly trip to that destination.

Maybe. But humanity sometimes finds a way to wriggle its way out of dubious situations. I think the Covid-19 pandemic, along with the chronic incompetency of Trump, has slapped a whole lot of people in the face about the realities of wishful thinking.

In fact, yesterday I was wondering what I would do if I was confronted with a pack of MAGA-hat wearing oldsters, as we happen to have a retirement community just across the street, and another one a-building down the road. In my fevered imagination, it’d go something like this, keeping in mind my hair went prematurely white years ago:

ME: Hey, folks.

CRANKY OLD GUY (COG): Hey, are you with us? (Shakes his cane at ME.)

ME: What are you?

(All together): Trump supporters!

(COG): See our hats? (Waves hat, exposing a pale pate.)

ME: I certainly am not.

(Discontented yelling and muttering. More cane swinging.)

COG: Why not? Are you a fucking Democrat?

ME: (smile) I’m an independent!

COG: Yeah? Hit by cars going both ways, then – hah!

ME: Not in the least, I’m far too fast on my feet. No, friends, it just means I get to think for myself.

(More muttering)

ME: Look, everyone settle down and I’ll tell you a story.

COG: Why?

ME: Because … I feel like it. OK, everyone settled? (COG mumbles but shuts up.) Back in the 1930s – anyone here grow up then? No? – the United States was mostly isolationist. Folks believed getting involved in the events in Europe that were leading to World War II was wrong; they were not our affair. So we didn’t officially get involved in the Spanish Civil War, and when Hitler’s Germany became more and more menacing, again Americans didn’t wish to become involved.

COG: We did nothing?

ME: Not precisely. President Roosevelt was not an Isolationist, and in fact arranged the Lend-Lease Program, wherein we sent obsolete naval vessels to the British, virtually for free.

But the shared view of Americans definitely tied his hands and restrained him from preparing properly for the storm clouds on the horizon.

And then came December 7, 1941. The day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor – remember? The day before, we were a nation of determined isolationist sentiment. The day after, we were in shock. And the day after that, America had discarded its shared delusion and began preparing for war, whether it was joining the service, beginning rationing, or transitioning businesses to a war-time footing.

COG: So what?

ME: Friends, I see a definite similarity between December 7, 1941, when the Japanese attack was the great slap of reality to our face, and the two defining incidents of today.

COG: Yeah? I don’t think so.

ME: Sure. Here are the great face slaps that reality has administered to us recently. First, the Covid-19 pandemic, our vastly incompetent response, the lives we’ve lost – surely you all have lost friends to it – and how badly we compare to many other countries has, has exposed our leadership – President Trump – as a monumental fraud.

COG: (Enraged) Bah!

ME: You can scoff if you wish, but then there’s the second incident. President Trump has campaigned on promises of No Change, Everything Will Be OK and You’re Fine How You Are! Isn’t that what attracts you? He told coal miners that their jobs would return, factory workers that factories would reopen, investors that the economy would come roaring back, that he’d rebuild the military, and all would be just as fabulous as it was before?

COG: So?

ME: And then came the George Floyd incident, and the black community said, once again, It’s Never Been Great, It’s Never Been OK, It’s Not Even Tolerable. They reminded us of slavery, the Tulsa White Supremacy riot which killed so many, the Tuskegee Experiment, the Democratic Convention riots, sharecroppers, segregation, separate but equal, police harassment of the black community, lynchings, and systemic racism.

COG: S-s-so?

ME: And they forced it upon our attention: maybe it was great for you folks, but not for them. Floyd was, from all appearances, deliberately murdered by a policeman, as have been a number of other blacks over the years. That’s the other great slap of reality that should eliminate the magical thinking that has infected American thinking for the last thirty years.

COG: Fuck you! (Turns and wave his cane at the crowd.) Come on! Fuck you!

(The crowd is angry but uneasy)

ME: I don’t expect anyone here to change their minds. Not right now. All I want to think is that you’ll go home and think about your support of a man who continually claims that all we have to do is go back to how things were. When racists could lynch blacks, for example. And how you can approve that.

COG: Fuck you! (Turns to leave, beckoning the crowd!) Fucking liberal! Come on, folks.

(As the crowd leaves, several are holding their red hats in their hands, and as they file away, one sails through the air and lands in a garbage can.)

I do have lurid fantasies.

From NewScientist:

Image: Wikipedia

Welwitschia is one of the world’s strangest and most resilient plants, living in the exceptionally dry Namib desert, which stretches along the coasts of Angola, Namibia and South Africa. But climate change may push these hardy plants past their limits, suggesting that they should be placed on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Vaguely reminiscent of a pile of kelp nowhere near the ocean, welwitschia (Welwitschia mirabilis) is unlike anything else on Earth. The plant consists of just two ever-growing leaves. These can grow to more than 4 metres long erupting out of a subterranean stem. These tough leaves split and coil, turning into a dishevelled, sun-baked heap over the plant’s roughly 1000-year-long lifespan.

Although we’re not nearly that dry. How do they estimate a thousand year lifetime, I wonder…

On the anniversary (well, off by one day) of the first day of service of CAHOOTS, the Eugene, OR, emergency mental health service often invoked rather than police, CNN, rather tardily, publishes an article on them. Readers may recall that I lamented that I couldn’t find an assessment of CAHOOTS performance, and while there’s nothing like a formal assessment in this article, they do have a few numbers:

Per self-reported data, CAHOOTS workers responded to 24,000 calls in 2019 — about 20% of total dispatches. About 150 of those required police backup.

CAHOOTS says the program saves the city about $8.5 million in public safety costs every year, plus another $14 million in ambulance trips and ER costs.

Although Eugene may be somewhat atypical in the United States:

Lane County, which encompasses Eugene and neighbor city Springfield, has staggering rates of homelessness.

The county’s per-capita homeless rate is among the nation’s highest. Recent data from the county also suggests mental health crises are widespread, too — the suicide rate, at around 17 deaths per 100,000, is about 40% higher than the national average.

Police encounters with the homeless often end in citations or arrests. Of homeless people with mental health conditions, anywhere from 62.0% to 90% of them will be arrested, per one journal review of homelessness studies. They may end up in jail, not in treatment or housing, and thus begins the cycle of incarceration that doesn’t benefit either party.

CAHOOTS was created in part because of another disturbing statistic — around 25% of people killed by police show signs of mental illness, according to a journal review of the Washington Post’s extensive officer-involved shootings database.

It’s an interesting article. Retired CAHOOTS co-founder David Zeiss notes that every city is different, and every solution must be local and organic. As a member of the Instant Gratification Generation, I found this a little disheartening, to be honest:

[CAHOOTS is] not an immediate fix. Zeiss said it took a lot of “patient plotting” for CAHOOTS to really have an impact.

“At this point, we’ve patiently waited out an entire generation of police officers,” he said. “There’s nobody on the Eugene police force today who can remember being a Eugene police officer without CAHOOTS. It’s been that slow of a process.”

Which suggests distrust and even resentment, which I suppose should not be surprising. But it’s important to understand that Zeiss himself does not agree with the Get rid of the police! movement:

But a growing group of dissenters feel there’s little room for police in the movement to fundamentally change the American criminal justice system. Services like CAHOOTS, they say, may function better and more broadly without the assistance of police.

Zeiss isn’t sure he agrees.

“Partnership with police has always been essential to our model,” he said. “A CAHOOTS-like program without a close relationship with police would be very different from anything we’ve done. I don’t have a coherent vision of a society that has no police force.”

He said the current movement has seemingly pitted service providers like CAHOOTS against police, which may stoke suspicion among police over “whether we’re really their allies or their competitors,” he said.

“In some sense, that may be true. But I think we still need to focus on being part of a system, and a system that includes police for some functions,” Zeiss said.

I think I’m with Zeiss. I, personally, view the police, in some form, as essential. That form does not look a lot like today’s form, though. I think leaders must ask themselves why we need a heavily armed organization that sometimes seems to be on a hair-trigger, and, from the behavior and statements of the current Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) police union president, Bob Kruller, views its duties as inherently violent and right-wing. Other problems include an atmosphere of extreme mutual protection, even in the face of illegal behavior by members, and the use of a funding source, civil forfeiture, that is prone to corruption. The militarization of the police has been a national topic of debate, and I’d like to see most or all of the heavy weapons removed from police armories.

Leaders need to very carefully select metrics for measuring police performance. Those metrics must not measure quantities that do not advance community interests, or are easily inflated quantities. Funding sources must be completely outside of the control and influence of the police as well. The idea that taxation is always bad needs to be jettisoned as the community wrecker that it is. Improper funding of anything will lead to corruption, so we need to come to an agreement on proper funding levels, adjust as needed, and implement the funding through taxation. Enough with hiding behind dubious sources and proclaiming how you’ve kept taxes low.

And, since it’s a related topic, we should also ban private prisons, as they can lead to behaviors by the corporations providing the service that are deleterious to the community, while only benefiting the coffers of the company.

Off the soap box. I’m getting dizzy from the altitude.

Or, at least, so it feels. BuzzFeed requested a new version of the Mueller Report, now that Roger Stone’s trial has concluded, and the courts obliged. Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic has combed through the newly revealed information, which I won’t be doing, and came up with this:

But there are a few shreds of information that are really, genuinely new, and they’re damning of the president. Namely: Trump had direct knowledge of Roger Stone’s outreach to WikiLeaks, according to multiple witnesses interviewed by Mueller. He encouraged that outreach and asked his campaign chairman to pursue it further, those witnesses said. And Mueller’s office appears to have strongly suspected, without putting it in so many words, that Trump lied to the special counsel in his written answers to Mueller’s questions about the Stone affair.

The redacted report hinted at this. But it’s another thing to see it spelled out unmistakably by the special counsel.

I suspect that, at this juncture, Lawfare really isn’t a non-partisan third party in many observers minds, but partisan is a slippery term: it usually refers to adherents to one side or another for a cause for which neither side can be considered malicious.

This is no longer true for President Trump. His list of incompetencies and malevolencies are too long to bear repeating here; it’s safe to say, though, that most or even all of Lawfare’s contributors are more or less scornful of President Trump and his enablers.

So I can say that it’s unsurprising that Mueller’s report is more incriminating of Trump than the previously heavily redacted report. Trump’s performance in just the last year has been appalling, and I don’t intend to say that in the appallingly partisan, grating manner that I might have read of Obama’s performance on National Review back in the day; as an independent voter who desperately wishes there was a reasonable conservative party that could be considered competent to be a governing party, I have to report that, objectively speaking, Trump’s not worthy of anyone’s support.

Here’s just one example Jurecic provides of many:

“…beginning in June 2016 and continuing through October 2016, Stone spoke about WikiLeaks with senior Campaign officials, including candidate Trump.” (Vol. I, p. 51)

While the redacted report hints at involvement by Trump, the hidden material makes this frustratingly unclear. The unredacted copy directly states that Trump spoke multiple times with Stone about WikiLeaks’s release of material damaging to Clinton. Specifically, according to the report, Stone told the Trump campaign “as early as June 2016”—that is, at least a month before WikiLeaks began its releases on July 22—that Assange would release damaging documents.

It’s all old, unimportant news in one sense, yet it functions as a confirmation of many suspicions of Trump’s mendacity, as well as his enablers’, and should guide future judgments.

I seem to be afflicted with short lilies, I’m not sure if that’s just their genetics or their treatment.

Siberia continues to be that fabled canary:

Neither Dallas nor Houston has hit 100 degrees yet this year, but in one of the coldest regions of the world, Siberia’s “Pole of Cold,” the mercury climbed to 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit (38 Celsius) on June 20.

If confirmed, the record-breaker in the remote Siberian town of Verkhoyansk, about 3,000 miles east of Moscow, would stand as the highest temperature in the Arctic since record-keeping began in 1885.

The triple-digit record was not a freak event, either, but instead part of a searing heat wave. Verkhoyansk saw 11 straight days with a high temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) or above, according to Rick Thoman, a climate scientist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. The average June high at that location is just 68 degrees Fahrenheit (20 Celsius).

This week, Ust’-Olenek, Russia, about 450 miles north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 93.7 degrees (34.3 Celsius), about 40 degrees above average for the date. On May 22, the Siberian town of Khatanga, located well north of the Arctic Circle, recorded a temperature of 78 degrees Fahrenheit — about 46 degrees above normal. [WaPo]

Disquieting, to say the least. Any change on the CO₂ measurement front?

No improvement there. Oh, wait, maybe a graphic representation will calm my nerves:

Siberia doesn’t look too awful, but world-wide that’s an awful lot of red.

Maybe this will turn out to be good news:

What is the aim of this project?

The SUN-to-LIQUID project is developing a technology that produces aviation fuels from water, carbon dioxide (CO₂) and the power of the sun.

How could this technology be explained to a high school student?

Concentrated solar radiation is absorbed in a solar reactor that converts water and CO₂ into synthesis gas – a gas mixture comprising hydrogen and carbon monoxide. The synthesis gas is then delivered to a gas-to-liquid plant where it is converted into jet fuel. [International Energy Agency]

I wonder about its long term stability. My thought is, rather than deliver it to the airports to be burned, just store the stuff in caverns. I suppose it’s too slow to actually be effective, though.

Republican internal polling signals a Democratic rout

[CNN/Politics]

From the article:

Democratic and liberal aligned groups have put out 17 House polls taken in April or later. Republican aligned groups have put out 0. That’s a very bad ratio for Republicans.

Interestingly, Republicans were the ones dominating the polling landscape in the first quarter of the year. From January through March, Republican and conservative groups released 10 polls compared with the Democrats’ 2.

The April turning point lines up well with when the coronavirus pandemic became the headline story of the year. It’s when President Donald Trump’s approval rating started an almost continuous decline that remains unabated.

In other words, it makes a lot of sense that Democrats started to dominate the House polling landscape in the past few months. They had a lot of good news for their side that they wanted out in the public. Republicans, meanwhile, were likely seeing numbers that wouldn’t make them look good.

Under the hypothesis that parties only release good news for themselves, the avalanche of poll releases from the Democrats point towards a rout of Republican candidates in November.

I went into the article hoping for more Republicans expressing confidence about November; the cognitive dissonance behind such pronouncements can be quite entertaining. But that’s not the message of this article. They just screwed up their article title.

Ah well.

Watercourt:

About 700 years ago the Calusa people of Southern Florida created large watercourts for capturing and storing live fish, according to a new archaeological study published in March by the Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Sciences. Although researchers have thought for years that these watercourts existed, this is the first archaeological study that documents when and how they were constructed, said archaeologist Victor Thompson of the University of Georgia, the lead author of the study. [“Ancient People Built Pens To Store Live Fish,” Paul Neely, American Archaeology (summer • 2020, print only).]

I did not find a congruent definition online; watercourt leads to articles concerning legal courts with jurisdiction over water rights.

The NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, seeing the recent mess of Georgia primary elections, have a donation to make:

On July 20, voters will be able to follow Centers for Disease Control and Prevention social distancing guidelines as they cast early ballots for the Georgia general primary runoff election, which takes place on Aug. 11. Voters also will be able to access the 21-year-old venue in October for early voting in November’s general election.

Hundreds of Hawks employees and arena staff will be trained as election workers at the 700,000-square-foot venue, which hosts more than 16,000 spectators for basketball games and 21,000 for concerts. The team says parking will be free for voters and more than 1,500 spaces will be made available. The recently renovated arena has been home to the Hawks since 1999. [WaPo]

Given the dubious strategies employed by GOP state parties and GOP-controlled governments to discourage voting by groups considered anti-GOP, this may constitute one of the most substantial pushbacks available to this particular commercial entity.

March of 2015.

And this is another clue that corporate America has become dissatisfied with the Republican Party as their representation in local, state, and federal governments. This is not entirely new, of course; Indiana experienced a lot of pushback in 2015 after then-Governor Mike Pence (R-IN) signed the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, passed by the GOP-dominated Indiana legislature, widely recognized, especially by corporate America, as an authorization to discriminate against the LGBTQ community by hiding behind religious institutions. It was part of an effort to give birth to paranoia among conservative religious practicioners by suggesting that shameful social practices were justified by religious beliefs. Such are the methods of constructing epistemic bubbles.

There was also the abandonment of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), best described as the link between the GOP and businesses, by Google (now Alphabet) and several other businesses over claims that ALEC was issuing misleading information concerning climate change back in 2015. As I said at the time,

From a wider viewpoint, one must wonder if the last couple of years are starting to signal a rift between a GOP increasingly controlled by a deeply religious conservative faction, and businesses who find the assumptions of this new GOP are no longer compatible with good business practices.  We saw signs of a rift earlier this year when Indiana passed a law widely interpreted as giving small businesses the right to discriminate against virtually anyone they wished on religious grounds, resulting in various businesses and other organizations vowing to leave, or avoid, the state.  Indiana eventually replaced the law; other states with similar laws in the pipeline then did not pass their versions.

The Atlanta Hawks donation of the stadium would be the next step, as it’s plausible to suggest this would imperil GOP control of the Atlanta legislature, as well as GOP success in national-level elections, including not only the Oval Office, but both Senate seats (one is up for a special election after the retirement, due to ill health, by Senator Isakson  (R-GA)).

And the recent move of corporations, ever loving of a stable environment and happy consumers, to dictate to social media platforms to stop fucking around and fix the propaganda problem is another cobblestone on the path towards disjointing the GOP from the business world.

So when the Republicans have been reduced to the a group of morality-free power-lovers, the religious groups who are desperately against change of any kind, a band of uneasy libertarians, a gross of racists and liberal-haters, a few class-B Hollywood actors, and some rogue billionaires, will they still truly qualify as a political party?

Only the voters can decide that.

Recent research on the Chicxulub impact crater, generally considered the remains of the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs, yielded the following fascinating diagram of the impact:

New simulations have revealed the asteroid that doomed the dinosaurs struck Earth at the 'deadliest possible' angle. The simulations show that the asteroid hit Earth at an angle of about 60°, which maximised the amount of climate-changing gases https://t.co/xqv3AmE4oH pic.twitter.com/faKoIAR25E

— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) May 27, 2020

It’s fascinating to think of granite as acting like a very low-grade rubber, isn’t it? It clearly compresses and then decompresses, leaving a peak, as shown at the end of the simulation. Compare to the lunar crater Moretus:

Information courtesy of the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera concerning central peak formation in lunar impact craters is here.