Category Archives: Uncategorized

Acrostic:

1. A poem or series of lines in which certain letters, usually the first in each line, form a name, motto, or message when read in sequence.
2. See word square.
3. A word puzzle in which the answers to several different clues form an anagram of a quotation, phrase, or other text. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in “A GOP congressman hid a meme about Jeffrey Epstein’s death in his impeachment tweets,” Teo Armus, WaPo:

A friend sent me a link to Museum of Artifacts, a website that presents various artifacts of ancient civilizations for your viewing pleasure:

The amber bear amulet was found in 1887 in a peat bog near Slupsk, Poland. When the figure was examined it turned out to be the amulet of a bear hunter, originating from the Neolithic period. It was dated at between 1700 B.C. and 650 B.C.

More here. I can only hope it’s not gone dormant.

The Keebler-Elf-In-Chief in action!

Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III would appear to have no concerns that he might be perceived as a complete and total lickspittle, a word I use for the literal visuals it brings immediately to mind. Here’s his latest ad, reportedly airing tomorrow:

Out of the 100 United State Senators, I was the very first one to stand with @realDonaldTrump and I will keep fighting for him and his agenda. pic.twitter.com/Cf0tN8nzGl

— Jeff Sessions (@jeffsessions) November 14, 2019

The verbiage should be a source of shame, not pride, and the ad itself almost makes me hurt for the guy and his total lack of self-respect. Jeff-boy, you can still cancel the ad!

But then a reader provides this on the history of Mr. Sessions:

And he was a criminal while he was the AG of Alabama. He’d have been in prison, except that powerful friends kept him from being prosecuted. (I suspect the crimes may have been committed slightly before he became the AL AG, but am too lazy to go re-research that bit of history.)

In response to my query for more information:

Fairly well documented. Don’t know if I’ll be able to find them now, but during his confirmation hearings for USAG, a woman was arrested and charged for an expletive-like comment (i.e. the statement to which she reacted was of such blatant dishonesty and complete opposite to fact, she could hardly help herself from saying something like “bullshit” — I don’t remember what she actually said). In the reporting by a reputable paper (maybe the WaPo?) on that event, the writer explained that the women responded this way because she knew of Sessions time as AG in Alabama, where he was a whisker’s width from being charged with felonies and then miraculously the crimes were just forgotten about. I’ll see if I can find anything.

Here’s a pile of stuff to whet your appetite: https://slate.com/…/the-terrible-things-jeff-sessions…

While Slate qualifies as a news source that is on the liberal side of the spectrum, the information in the article, based on a official sources, does appear to paint a pattern of petty corruption on Sessions’ part.

In addition to his fervent loyalty to Trump during the campaign, there are several pieces of evidence from his time as Alabama attorney general that indicate Sessions would act as a rubber stamp for potential acts of executive corruption. As detailed in this new examination of archived news reports and original source documents, at least twice during his mere two years in office, Sessions produced legally flawed opinions that were favorable to Alabama Gov. Fob James that also, conveniently, aligned with the interests of one of Alabama’s most politically powerful and deep-pocketed organizations. That organization also happened to have spent substantial sums on, and taken credit for, electing James and Sessions to office.

Years later, Sessions’ legal reasoning in these opinions was overruled by broad majorities of the Alabama Supreme Court—including in one ruling written by a Republican justice.

Sessions’ brief, troubling record doesn’t end there. As a state attorney general, he also cleared the way for a politically connected insurance company’s planned no-bid coverage of state road work; urged the Alabama Ethics Commission to approve corporate-funded junkets for state employees; fought successfully against seating the first black intermediate appellate court judges in Alabama’s history; and, no joke, provided formal support for a local sheriff’s use of actual chain gangs.

While I’m aware that this could be a political hit job, his spineless whining to get his Senate seat back is certainly congruent with the implications of this Slate article.

I can’t wait to see more of his spineless ads.

Which is really a slippery question. Yesterday, the President experienced another defeat:

A federal appeals court on Wednesday let stand a ruling allowing lawmakers to subpoena President Donald Trump’s accountants for years of his financial records. A lawyer for the president promised to appeal to the Supreme Court.

On an 8-3 vote, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to grant a hearing before the full court, upholding a ruling last month by a three-judge panel of the court to allow the subpoena.

The decision means that unless Trump appeals to the Supreme Court and wins, the House Oversight and Reform Committee can enforce its subpoena ordering the accounting firm, Mazars USA LLP, to hand over any documents in its possession related to accounts of the Trump Organization dating to January 2009. [NBC News]

So onward to SCOTUS, which Steve Benen reminds his readers, as if we needed reminding, of former Speaker of the House Gingrich’s very cry of corruption:

During a live interview on Oct. 25 [2018] at The Washington Post, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said that if Democrats re-take control of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2018 midterm elections and subpoena the president’s tax returns, it would likely force a fight in the U.S. Supreme Court. “And,” Gingrich said,”we’ll see whether or not the Kavanaugh fight was worth it.” [WaPo]

And now the question for every single member of SCOTUS is whether ideological loyalty is more important than loyalty to the country and its laws, or whether they’re congruent, liberal and conservative alike. And for the non-lawyer, it’ll be hard to tell who answered which way; we’ll have to listen to the experts in the matter to see who appears to have let their loyalties rule their behavior to the detriment of their legacy.

Or not. There’s four outcomes possible here.

1. SCOTUS refuses to hear the appeal. Enough of them agree with the lower court decision that they get to not be part of this mess.
2. SCOTUS takes the case and decides for the President.
3. SCOTUS takes the case and decides against the President.
4. SCOTUS takes the case and sends it back to the lower courts for reconsideration on a technical point.

I think 2 & 4 are functionally equivalent for partisan purposes.

Image: TradeZero

Brexit continues to fascinate me as a marker for how a nation is struggling with the clash of nationalism, which is neither bad nor good but simply exists, vs economic factors. Andrew Sullivan continues to illuminate how the generic Brexiteer regards the situation in an epic take down of Nick Kristof in the second part of his weekly tri-partite diary for New York Mag’s Intelligencer:

It is instead baffling as a distant friend of Kristof’s to see that he has “gone nuts” over Brexit. He cites the various projections of lower economic growth, which are plausible. And yet, far worse scenarios of economic calamity were broadcast prior to the referendum by the Remain campaign — it was known as “Project Fear” — and they still lost. It is as if (and I hope Nick is sitting down) the British were prepared to sacrifice some wealth in order to ensure that the British Parliament will have the sole say in how Britain is governed. He cites the possibility of breakup, ridiculing the idea that the English, whose nationhood is just as deep as the Scots and the Welsh and Irish, might actually end up as a “little” nation of 53 million, as opposed to a “great” nation with almost 67 million people. (Here’s a map of the British Isles, according to population density.)

I was surprised at my own shocked reaction, to be honest – the idea that “… the British were prepared to sacrifice some wealth in order to ensure that the British Parliament will have the sole say in how Britain is governed.” And yet it’s an obvious trade-off, isn’t it? Why didn’t I see it?

But if the Brits see the decisions of the European Parliament and allied bureaucrats in Brussels as deleterious to the metaphorical fortunes of themselves, as opposed to their literal fortunes, it’s certainly their right to stand up and say, Yeah, wealth is not as important to us as having a say in how our lives are run!

Bloody obvious, really, once I sit and think about it. I’m almost embarrassed to have really missed that viewpoint. And I suspect ridicule by Kristof (“[Brexiteers have] gone nuts“) and other anti-Brexiteers will merely result in heels digging in; perhaps those who are incredulous at what’s happening all around them across the Pond should perhaps sit down and really listen to their opposition. And re-examine their own reasoning.

A story teaching us to be suspicious of the titles of organizations whose names are a trifle too true-blue:

An attack ad in the [Louisiana] governor’s race was pulled from airwaves Friday after claiming Edwards’ military buddy landed a contract worth up to $65 million, even though the contract was never awarded.

Truth in Politics, a 501(c)(4) co-founded by GOP donor Lane Grigsby, launched the attack ad, which claims that after Edwards was elected, “backroom deals begin” and that his roommate at West Point, Murray Starkel, “lands a state contract worth up to $65 million.”

But the contract in question, for coastal restoration work, was never awarded to any of the four bidders who were deemed qualified, including Starkel’s firm, Ecological Service Partners, LLC. [The Advocate]

Truth In Politics, eh? That’s a name that soothes the nerves and practically shouts Let’s drain the swamp, doesn’t it? But wait, it gets better!

Truth in Politics spokesman Jay Connaughton, in a lengthy statement, appeared to stand by the ad and said “just highlighting one project that didn’t move forward is misleading,” calling the deal “shady.” The ad only references the $65 million project, however, and the ad was replaced with a new version. The new spot changed the wording from Starkel landing a contract to his being “poised to cash in.”

To me, that says that in Truth In Politics’ frenzy to splash mud on Democratic Governor Edwards during his re-election bid, truth has been thrown under the bus; victory is all.

Now, perhaps my cynical reader will shrug and says this happens all the time. However, to my jaundiced eye, Truth In Politics has an implicit promise in its name. A message from the RNC (Republican National Committee) or the DNC (guess) can be expected to shade the truth a little bit, because they are obviously partisan organizations, and while I’d like to see them be truthful, human nature being what it is, blah blah blah.

But when someone says Truth In Politics, well, I expect them to step forward and be truthful. Not just make shit up, not be right on 80% of the facts and wrong on that one critical fact that makes the whole piece into a shameful pill of false blame.

I expect them to live up to their name to the best of their abilities, not frantically defend their piece when even those bastions of low standards, revenue hungry TV stations, won’t run the damn ad.

Spokesman Connaughton and whoever runs Truth In Politics (some dude named Grigsby, apparently) should be utterly embarrassed and ashamed at this behavior, but they won’t be. They’ve swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, the old lie that Victory is the only thing. I would hate to know them on a personal level because, based on this behavior, I would know that I couldn’t trust them. They’d use illegal foils on the piste, they’d move the chess pieces when you’re not looking, they’d rig every game they play, and they’d have that pathetic excuse.

And now I’ll know never to trust anything Truth In Politics puts out.

Michael Gerson comments in WaPo on the relevation from former U. N. Ambassador and GOP star Nikki Haley that senior White House officials Tillerson and Kelly came to her with the notion of joining them in restraining and subverting Trump’s worst impulses:

… Haley is confusing two categories. If a Cabinet member has a policy objection of sufficient seriousness, he or she should take that concern to the president. If the president then chooses against their position — and if implementing the decision would amount to a violation of conscience — an official should resign. Staying in office to undermine, say, a law or war you disapprove of would be a disturbing arrogation of presidential authority.

But there is an equally important moral priority to consider: If you are a national security official working for a malignant, infantile, impulsive, authoritarian wannabe, you need to stay in your job as long as you can to mitigate whatever damage you can — before the mad king tires of your sanity and fires you.

This paradox is one tragic outcome of Trumpism. It is generally a bad and dangerous idea for appointed officials to put their judgment above an elected official’s. And yet it would have been irresponsible for Mattis, Kelly, Tillerson and others not to follow their own judgments in cases where an incompetent, delusional or corrupt president was threatening the national interest.

But it’s not a paradox. All these people swear an oath to uphold and protect the Constitution. That is the paramount applicable behavioral standard. The fact that the President has been elected, via the Electoral College, by the people^[1], is of secondary importance.

The fact of the matter is that once it became clear that Trump is inadequate to the position of the Presidency, whether it be due to general incompetence, mental illness, or malicious intent, these appointed officials should have gone to the Cabinet and asked for a 25^th Amendment proceeding. Succeed or fail, that’s where they should have gone, and the obvious concern that the Cabinet members may have made the intellectual mistake of supposing their Party loyalty and gratitude supersedes their oaths to the Constitution is irrelevant; indeed, if news of the proceeding were to leak to the media, and the names of the nay-sayers with it, then at least we’d know who in the Cabinet was unworthy of the public, or even private trust. That would be a public service in and of itself.

But in the end, the perception that there’s a paradox is an illusion. If Haley truly believed Trump is doing a good job, then it’s acceptable that she turned down Kelly and Tillerson. If Kelly and Tillerson refused to pursue the 25^th Amendment option at her urging, then it’s a less palatable, but still acceptable reason not to join them in their efforts.

But if she, like Gerson, finds herself in uncomfortable awe of the President, then I must say that she misapprehends her position, her oath, and the position of the Presidency. The President is the Executive, an implementor of law, head of defense, and top diplomat, but the President doesn’t make law. That capability, supreme among powers, is Congress, and is only moderated by the President when Congress is sufficiently fractured that it cannot override a veto.

That doesn’t make the President an angel not to be dealt with, Stephen Miller’s quaint little diatribe notwithstanding.

And Haley becomes, if only in my eyes, another fatally flawed Republican. Where have all the good ones gone?^[2]

¹ Sort of.

² Yes, yes, that was purely rhetorical. Most of them quit the party when they realized it was in sepsis and unrecoverable.

If you consider Trump to be your guy, you may want to consider this post by Steve Benen, where he lists the four points Republicans are being instructed to use, and then analyzes them:

Sintering:

Sintering is a heat treatment process in which a large quantity of loose aggregate material is subjected to a sufficiently high temperature and pressure to cause the loose material to become a compact solid piece. The amount of heat and pressure administered during the sintering process is slightly less than the material’s melting point. [Corrosionpedia]

Noted in a press release I ran across, “Siemens expands additive manufacturing portfolio through acquisition of Atlas 3D“:

Siemens announced today that it has signed an agreement to acquire Atlas 3D, Inc., a Plymouth, Indiana-based developer of software that works with direct metal laser sintering (DMLS) printers to automatically provide design engineers with the optimal print orientation and requisite support structures for additive parts in near real-time. Atlas 3D will join Siemens Digital Industries Software, where its solutions will expand additive manufacturing capabilities in the Xcelerator portfolio of software.

Keeping mementoes of prior careers?

The awkwardly named The Beast With Five Fingers (1946) is a relatively sophisticated foray into damaged personalities and how they can lead to horror. Francis Ingram is a former concert pianist who has suffered an accident that has paralyzed one of his hands, and has retired to a small village in Italy to recover. With him are his secretary, Hilary, a composer/arranger, Bruce, along with a nurse to whom Francis has become attached, Julie. Hilary and Bruce’s relationship with Francis is a dependency, as neither are capable of making a living on their own, while Julie is tiring of Francis’ constant demands, and is considering leaving and returning to America.

And then, one night, Francis suffers some sort of visual problem and plunges down the stairs in his wheelchair.

The vultures appear immediately, in the form of a former brother-in-law and his son, Raymond and Donald, and soon enough, the latest will, signed just a few days before, is read: Julie, who is all set to leave, is the sole inheritor. When Raymond hectors her, she digs in her heels. The lawyer then secretly consults with the in-laws and suggests the will is illegitimate, which pleases them.

Until they find his dead body the next day.

Slowly but surely, the police and the survivors are lead to the conclusion that the late Francis’ single working hand, mobile and malignant, is responsible for the lawyer’s death, and other attacks, and the tension builds until a night or two later, when one of the survivors can hear and see the hand actually playing the grand piano.

Nicely plotted and acted, with minimalist but effective special effects, this is a comfortably competent member of the horror genre, with the exception of the last five minutes, which becomes an odd comedy piece that doesn’t fit the rest of the film. The greatest mystery may lay in that odd little vignette.

But otherwise, it’s not bad. A period piece, if you like.

I must admit I am looking forward to the results of this case:

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear the case of two people ordered to repay $26 million they bilked out of Chinese investors through a program that gives U.S. visas in exchange for foreign investment in the United States.

In 2016, the Securities and Exchange Commission accused Charles Liu and Xin Wang of pocketing millions of dollars paid by a group of Chinese investors who were seeking to take advantage of the EB-5 visa program, which offers U.S. visas and a chance at citizenship to people who invest a certain amount in qualifying U.S. business ventures. …

In 2017 a California federal judge found Liu and Wang had violated federal securities law through the scheme and ordered them to pay back the full $26.4 million they brought in through their operation, a remedy known as disgorgement.

Before the two could appeal the order, the Supreme Court ruled in the case Kokesh v. SEC that disgorgement qualifies as a penalty. Liu and Wang cited Kokesh on appeal to the Ninth Circuit, saying that disgorgement is not among the punishments SEC is authorized to seek under federal securities laws, and that the District Court had been wrong to order it.

With the federal appeals court relying on pre-Kokesh, however, it ruled against them, setting the stage for Liu and Wang’s petition for certiorari. [Courthouse News Service]

The key for me is the classification of disgorgement as a punishment, which in standard English doesn’t pass the smoke test – making a victim whole should not be considered a punishment for the malefactor, but an obligation, a step on the path to rejoining society.

However, too often standard English can’t be used when interpreting legalese, so I don’t put my above opinion forward with any great enthusiasm, even if the idea that those convicted in Liu v SEC may retain the money they apparently illegally scammed from the Chinese. I’ll just note that it looks like the Kokesh v SEC decision was a mistake.

A big mistake.

Made not by five or even six justices.

By all nine Justices.

I noted this morning that there are still folks who haven’t run into the OK Boomer meme, so I thought I’m ruminate on it a bit. I’m not a fan of the whole demographic ‘generations’ thing, but I do know Boomers are people who are roughly my age, say 55, on up – nominally, I’m on the tail-end of a generation for which I’ve never felt any kinship. The top end of the boomers are in their mid-70s.

If you look at the political and theological fields, the members of the leadership class are dominated by Boomers.

Since it came out of the niche in which it evolved, OK Boomer has been causing some screams of outrage, since the folks to which it is applied, or potentially applied, tend to be occupying positions of importance in the power hierarchy. I see one dude considers it to be the ‘n-word of ageism.’ So what’s going on?

Understanding the usage of OK Boomer requires understanding who is using it, and that usage is typified by the recent incident which brought it to the attention of everyone outside of the social media platform Tik-Tok and one other, which escapes my memory. This happened during a speech by a New Zealand MP on the topic of climate change, 25 year old Chloe Swarbrick, when an older MP interjected a remark, and she retorted “OK Boomer.” In essence, those folks who are in age range of Swarbrick, let’s say 30, and younger, are using it. Wikipedia tells me these are the Millenials and the GenZ folks. (whee-ha. Generation names. Nevermind.)

So what’s going on? Let’s first admit that the outraged boomers, when they make claims about experience trumping youth, have a surface point: yes, experience matters.

But when experience is overshadowed by irrationalism, it becomes immaterial. The Western Civ Millenials are growing up in a world of technology of unprecedented levels. It’s everywhere. And technology is the child of rationality, of the imperfect but generally improving study of reality.

What do the Millenials see? Climate change, pollution, rising costs, falling salaries, greed, greed, greed, coddling of elite classes (see France’s attempt to raise taxes which reportedly didn’t impact the elites and led to riots), and overpopulation, and while Western societies are seeing birthrates slowly falling, other countries are making up for those falling birthrates, with the end result being minor wars breaking out, such as the Syrian Civil War.

And what do the Millenials see in the political class these days? Not much engagement with reality, at least on the conservative side. Trump joins with fundamentalist religious leaders to call climate change a hoax. Some UK or Aussie Minister with a technology portfolio demanding that the government have access to encrypted private communications, and pouting when told that it’s not currently possible – we’ll be needing a mathematical miracle for that one, boomer. A battle royale over the funding of health care in the United States, when the rest of the Western world has more or less socialized it – successfully, in their eyes. Even calls for a higher birthrate by such figures as Rep Steve King (R-IA).

The political and religious class Boomer leaders did not grow up in a world of constrained resources and technology everywhere they looked. Sure, things were changing quickly, but nothing like today – and add in over-population, another quickly-denied reality by many of our Boomer leaders, and the situation is becoming critical.

The problem – an inevitable problem in societies in which individualism and greed are considered to be unalloyed goods (see libertarianism, a wing of the GOP, in the United States), and the practice and improvement of the communal good, the responsibility of government, atrophies – is the investment in rigid ideological & theological positions divergent from reality. I use the word investment almost literally, because for those who have bought into such philosophies, many, even most, have literally put time and wealth into those ideologies order to acquire & solidify wealth and prestige.

Tell them they’re wrong to have done so, and they’ll squall and scream and wiggle and cry out No! But I have respect and power!

OK, Boomer.

Because of these investments, the Boomers in question continually fight wars with their opponents that are slowly – or quickly – becoming quite surreal.

Here’s a snowball, the world is not getting warmer. Really? Why do all our measurements disagree with you?

Abortion is evil. In an over-populated world of scarce resources? Should I permit this fetus to mature into a child and then bring it up in poverty, or die in war?

God gave us stewardship of the world and therefore strip-mining, pollution, and other forms of ruining the environment is ok. Really? How will the Millenials live in such an irremediable world?

Guns in the hands of everyone makes the world better. Let’s ask those folks in Las Vegas who cowered and died from the shooting from on high.

Profits before humans. And how does that lead to a better world?

These are all statements I’ve run across from our purported leaders, and there are many more. The Millenials are quite right to dismiss those who’s propagate them as right with OK, Boomer.

OK, Boomer.

OK, Boomer.

It’s simply a polite way of saying FOAD, Boomer, from forty years ago. Fuck Off And Die Already, Boomer. The Millenials will have to clean up after the Boomers, after all. It’s time to start stripping power from them so the mess isn’t quite so large.

But not all of them. Not all Boomers are stuck in their ideological foxholes, shooting at those who’d tell them that they’re wrecking the world. In a sense, everyone invests in ideological positions, if only by default, and those investments grow stronger as they age; it’s a rare person who flits from ideology to ideology, although some will change the window dressing frequently. It’s just that some pick a scalable ideology, a phrase I just made up. They select ideologies that retain their validity as conditions change, as knowledge grows and changes and matures.

In the end, OK Boomer selects those political and religious leaders who haven’t kept up with realities on the ground, who pursue their outdated dreams and stick to their now-irrelevant ideological and theological positions, and thus are damaging the future for those who come after them.

It’ll be interesting to see how often it’s misused to label all Boomers as misguided and not worth listening to. Personally, I hope I have the wherewithal to return fire with OK, Boomer, and let them puzzle over it.

NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using Landsat data from the U.S. Geological Survey.

According to WaPo, 150 homes are destroyed, and 3 people dead. This is just the start of summer; I hope nothing more catastrophic occurs.

As readers may remember, two gubernatorial contests were held last week in Kentucky and Mississippi, and while the latter was won relatively easily by the Republican candidate, the Kentucky contest between incumbent Republican Bevin and challenging Democrat Beshears resulted in the narrow loss of the governorship by the Republicans. It’s close enough that the Board of Elections hasn’t yet certified the results, and Bevins, unless I missed an announcement, has yet to concede.

That left me wondering just how red the State of Kentucky might be considered to be, so I did a bit of research, enough to make me tired of my graphing tool, and convincing me that the old adage that all politics is local is probably quite true.

In the below, I chose to show number of votes, rather than percentages, in order to get a feel for how the magnitude of votes has changed over the years. The first chart is of Senatorial contests since 1996.

While there have been some competitive contests, clearly the Republican competitors have had more appeal than the Democrats.

The second chart is of Presidential contests since 1996.

Clinton barely beat the wooden Dole in 1996; Democrats Gore, Kerry, Obama, and Clinton clearly had relatively little appeal. But coal mining, a major Kentucky industry, has been waning for quite a while, and blame has often been cast at big government, since Democrats have had the temerity to point out the polluting aspects of the fossil fuel.

Finally, here’s the chart for the recent Kentucky gubernatorial contests.

While Republicans would like to say Kentucky is a red state, I have to think, given the variance in the charts, that the perception of the candidates appears to be an important factor in voters determining the victor in contests. Republicans like to claim Bevin was deeply unlikable, yet Bevin survived a contested primary before being defeated by Andy Beshear, the son of former Governor Steven Beshear – and that family connection may have been important as well.

The supremacy of the Republicans in Kentucky Senatorial contests will be on the line in 2020 when long-time Senator McConnell will be once again running for re-election, unless he decides to retire. Recent polls have shown that he has become deeply unpopular, but I don’t think that’ll be enough. The Democrats will need to find a Kentuckian to run who appeals to the state’s residents, while still being able to tell them some hard truths.

This may be more open than the Kentucky GOP wants to think.

The maps of the world as provided by WorldMapper.org are the sort of thing that can mesmerize me for hours. For example, how about this one?

Or this somewhat more whimsical example:

Cartogram showing number of times @RealDonaldTrump mentions specific countries (USA not included).

Go! Have some fun!

Getting back to this thread on pharma and its production overseas where environmental standards are laxer than here in the States, WaPo has a report on the valiant efforts of a tiny pharmacy named Valisure to ensure the drugs it dispenses to customers are actually what they’re ordering.

A reader writes concerning Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III kick-off TV ad for his campaign to regain his old Senate seat:

That’s the most blatant act of self-abasement since Zelenskyy’s pathetic brown-nosing on the Trump-Ukraine phone call.

I think it’s a hard call. However, Zelensky has an entire nation under siege by Russia, while Sessions, who should have gone into retirement following his resignation from the AG spot (he’s currently 72 and, based on his statements as AG, significantly out of touch with much of America), is merely attempting to extend his political life.

I think I must disagree with my reader: brown-nosing to help an entire nation survive is not as morally revolting as brown-nosing merely to restart a political career. Indeed, in the latter case, ‘brown-nosing’ doesn’t seem to adequately describe the pathetic sight of Sessions’ humbling himself before the Altar of Trump. He should be kicking the crumbling marble, spitting on it with sulfuric acid, and leading the general revolt against this blasphemy called Trump. Instead, he … he …

Perhaps I should suggest Sessions should visit a geriatrics doctor to see if he has dementia.

Another reader writes:

He was a bad senator before.

Well, he certainly didn’t seem to have done much in the Senate, at least that I can remember or find in Wikipedia; and Trump didn’t pick him to be AG for his outstanding skills or contributions:

WaPo notes a veteran Republican’s analysis of the problems the Republicans didn’t overcome in the recent 2019 election cycle in Virginia, where the state House and Senate were lost to the Republicans for the first time in a generation:

“We need candidates who can run strong campaigns with a conservative agenda that actually people are attracted to and not repelled by,” said Dick Wadhams, the former state party chair in Colorado who has also worked in Virginia. “That may sound trite, but I’d swear sometimes people act like they have never heard such a thing.”

Wadhams is a long-time Republican who evidently is a little slow in understanding how the Republicans have changed over the last few decades, because he appears not to understand how his own party has become the Party of Absolute Truth. In other words, his last phrase, but I’d swear sometimes people act like they have never heard such a thing, is not only mostly true, but also anathema. Change is not acceptable to the most holy, ya know.

As Goldwater forecast so long ago, the party has been taken over by those who believe they have the truth, the whole truth, and anyone who disagrees with them is evil. If my reader has doubts, they should consider the recent draconian abortion laws passed in Alabama and other red states, which are basically theology dressed up in camouflage; the frantic flaying of powers from the governorship by a lame duck meeting of the Wisconsin state legislature after the Scott Walker (R-WI) lost his re-election bid to Tony Ever (D-WI); the threat to ignore the will of voters in Kentucky in the recent gubernatorial contest lost by incumbent Matt Bevins (R-KY) to Andy Beshears (D-KY); and the proposal of AZ GOP chairman Dr. Kelli Ward, who suggests an electoral college system be implemented at the state level for gubernatorial elections, as such systems magnify the power of the rural population at the expense of the city populations.

It’ll be interesting to see how quickly the Republicans adjust to the reality that some of their political positions are simply not acceptable to most Americans. I suspect what we’ll see is a gradual change as the more theological Republicans die off from old age, and then as the party begins to change, the more rigid Republicans leave in protest. But how quickly will this happen? Hard to say.

For two days now, too. Perhaps I’m too literal or something, but on CNN’s front page, this article was headlined:

Original ‘Marlboro Man’ dead after a life spent not smoking

And, from the article:

The rancher and philanthropist best known for playing the original “Marlboro Man” has died after a life spent not smoking.

NO NO NO NO. You don’t spend time NOT doing things!

Now, look, I’m an inadvertent advocate of new ways to express, in writing, inner thoughts in order to convey them to your readers. Contending adjectives, verbing nouns, contradictory assertions, all that sort of thing.

But this doesn’t work. It evokes nothing but annoyance. Simply say he played a smoker, but wasn’t. He didn’t waste his time with it. Something like that.

Stop it, CNN.

I wonder why monsters never practice good hygiene. Is it just that hard for Godzilla to get an appropriately sized toothbrush? Or is it really that good to have gobbets of flesh stuck between your incisors?

A cursed heart from Africa – a bit of a conceptual pun in itself – is at the heart of another movie that, surprisingly, didn’t suck: Jack Brooks: Monster Slayer (2007). The story concerns the travails of plumber Jack Brooks, a man whose childhood loss of his parents and sister on a camping trip to forest monsters has left him with anger management issues. Now a young man, when the professor of his night course in chemistry asks him to check into a plumbing problem at his recently purchased house, Jack stumbles into a mess that his raging anger may actually play a positive part: the cursed heart, imported from Africa decades ago and messing with the house’s plumbing, breaks free and infects the professor.

And now it’s hungry.

Two classes later, the professor loses his fight to the heart and is transformed into a clown-like monster that begins to drain the life from the students in his course, a sensation no doubt familiar to many of my readers. There is much running about, screaming, and a few new monsters are birthed through transformation. Think how parasitic wasps use paralyzed spiders to implant their larvae, which then eat the still-live spider –

Yeah, maybe not. The analogy may be imperfect.

Yes, that would be a petard.

But Jack the Plumber strikes back, and in an epic battle extinguishes the monster, even hoisting it on its own petard, as Jack creates for himself a new career.

Monster Slayer.

This could have been awful, rotten, terrible. It’s not. Fifteen minutes in, I turned to my Arts Editor and exclaimed, “This doesn’t suck!” And then we stayed up ’til 2AM watching the whole silly thing, enjoying the humor, appreciating the professional acting (even the bloody dog did a fabulous job!), getting into the organic plot, and razzing the slightly cheesy monster costumes and special effects.

I’m not going to recommend it. This isn’t, say, Mad Max: Fury Road (2015). But it’s nicely put together, and if you like comedic horror, this little fragment of a gemstone might be right up your alley.

I wasn’t quite sure how Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III was planning to campaign to regain his old Senatorial seat, but outright groveling at the feet of the guy who busted his chops was certainly not on my radar:

Wow. So he’s not written a tell-all book, he hasn’t attacked Trump since Trump told him to get lost, he hasn’t stuck needles in the Trump voodoo doll, hell, he’s in full support of Trump’s agenda.

Shit. Doesn’t this guy have any self-respect?

But on further navel-gazing, this all makes sense. Trump is the top dog of the Trump cult, and if Sessions wants to be part of the game again, he has to ingratiate himself to the cult. Was he a good Senator prior to being the Attorney General? Does he have good ideas going forward? The cult, abandoning its responsibilities as Americans, doesn’t care.

And hell if I know. It’s 30 seconds of groveling. But this is a strategy which just might work for Sessions, because this is how the Trump cult works – you don’t have to analyze, you don’t have to judge what your leaders do, just be attentive and follow the clues Trump leaves. Maybe he’ll give Sessions a thumbs up. Maybe it’ll be a down.

But your accomplishments, your competency, everything that matters to a traditional voter, these things no longer matter if you’re a Trump cultist. Will Sessions adore Trump enough?

Time will tell.

The Our Children’s Trust lawsuit against the government concerning the continued use of subsidies to buttress the fossil fuels industry, known as Juliana v. United States, presented its arguments to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit back in June. The counter-arguments advanced by the government, both under Obama and now Trump, is as follows:

In briefs to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco wrote that “the assertion of sweeping new fundamental rights to certain climate conditions has no basis in the nation’s history and tradition — and no place in federal court.”

Even before Tuesday, lawyers in two administrations had made similar arguments in lower courts. But again and again, judges allowed the case to proceed. [WaPo]

While I certainly shouldn’t be commenting on the Francisco’s claim these are new rights – although I’ll note that this sounds more like a pollution case that perhaps the government should like – it seems to me there’s a rebuttal right there in the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, …

That the general Welfare is mentioned as a motivation for the Constitution makes it a responsibility of the government; that an action of the government, namely the subsidization of the fossil fuel industry, is having a deleterious and, if not yet, soon a substantial impact on the Welfare of the people, makes that action illegal.

By fighting this lawsuit, both Obama and Trump seem to be saying that they have a right to take actions which harm large parts of the nation. That’s not right. If they were fighting this on some sort of technical grounds, I might understand their point. After all, the power of the purse resides with the Legislature, so perhaps they’d have been a more natural target, but maybe they cannot be sued. In any case, in this the Executives (Obama and Trump) seem to be denying their very responsibility to keep the Nation safe not only from foreign powers, but from our own disastrous actions.

It’s disappointing. Stop the subsidies now.

Minatory:

having a menacing quality [Merriam-Webster]

Noted in “Moving to Mars – this show will help you become a real Martian,” Simon Ings (NewScientist, 26 October 2019):

STEP into Moving to Mars, an exhibition of Mars mission and colony design at London’s Design Museum, and you are confronted, immediately, with some very good reasons not to move there.

Minatory glowing wall-texts announce that Mars wasn’t made for you; that there is no life and precious little water; that, clad in a spacesuit, you will never touch, taste or smell the planet you now call “home”. As Lisa Grossman wrote for New Scientist a couple of years ago, “What’s different about Mars is that there is nothing to do there except try not to die”.

Recently an argument over Trump broke out on a friend’s FB account, and it strikes me that it presents several teachable moments. Without permission, but omitting names and FB’s fbclids from links, I’m going to use it that way. It begins with my friend presenting the recent court finding that President Trump must pay a $2 million fine for misuse of the Trump Foundation’s funds:

[Friend]: “Our petition detailed a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more,” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/judge-orders-trump-pay-2-million-misusing-his-foundation-n1078306

And the rejoinder from the Trump proponent:

[Pro-Trump]: sounds like a partisan hit job.. bet it was some SDNY judge… lol.. talk about conflicted interest and corrupted legal.. that judge should be challenged and unfrocked

[Friend]: Trump can ask for an appeal but facts are facts and they will still be guilty.

[Pro-Trump]: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/420865-judge-orders-stormy-daniels-to-pay-trump-293k-in-legal-fees [the link’s title is Judge order Stormy Daniels to pay Trump $293K in legal fees]

And we’ll pause here to note that the Pro-Trumper has provided a link of no apparent relevance. This is the beginning of a classic maneuver, which I’ll elucidate in a moment.

[Pro-Trump]: No facts are NOT facts. If they were then Trump would not be being attacked while the clintons who actually did violate foundation laws walk free

And there it is. This is the attempt to divert attention away from the topic at hand to another topic, namely the Clintons, a name which has become a trigger word for political conservatives. The Pro-Trumper continues to pound away at the maneuver:

[Pro-Trump]: And, indeed, the multitude of connections that slowly turned out became hard to dismiss as coincidental. There was the fact that 85 of the 154 private interests who’d met with Clinton during her tenure at state were Clinton Foundation donors.

Emails turned up showing how the foundation intervened to arrange a meeting between Clinton and the Crown Prince of Bahrain, a country that had been a major foundation donor. A Chicago commodities trader who donated $100,000 to the foundation got a top job on a State Department arms control panel, despite having no experience in the area. On and on it went.

[Pro-Trump]: First, the Clinton’s almost immediately shuttered the Clinton Global Initiative and laid off 22 employees.

Now, fresh financial documents show that contributions and grants to the Clinton Foundation plunged since Hillary lost her election bid. They dropped from $216 million in 2016 to just $26.5 million in 2017 — a stunning 88% fall. Throughout Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, the foundation pulled in an average of $254 million a year. (See the nearby chart below for a timeline.)

[Pro-Trump]: these are FACTS

[Pro-Trump]:

[Friend]: I see you are resorting to a straw man fallacy, rather than actually refuting the original argument that Trump is guilty.

The Pro-Trumper has rapidly deployed a number of facts and inferences in an attempt to turn attention away from the matter at hand. The Pro-Trumper makes one more statement, which betrays the maneuver for the careful reader:

[Pro-Trump]: I first refuted that argument… then I exposed you to facts and your strawman

Here are the points I’d like to make.

1. The Pro-Trumper never addressed the facts of the matter, namely Trump being found guilty of misusing Trump Foundation funds, despite claiming he had. That’s classic.
2. My friend recognizes the maneuver, and the agenda behind it, but I fear his riposte is weak because of the use of a semi-technical term, the strawman argument, which is too abstract. I prefer to use the term Buh-whataboutism! for this type of argument. As noted, the idea is to run quickly away from the topic on which one cannot win to another which, valid or not, one could possibly win, declare victory and go home.
3. I’d like to note that the heart of the Buh-whataboutism! argument is not without its merits. We often use comparisons to make decisions concerning behaviors, from comparing consumer products to heroism in battle. But Buh-whataboutism! is invalid in this instance because the standard against which Trump is being measured isn’t the purported illegal behaviors of the Clintons, but the law. That is the one and only applicable standard when we’re discussing court cases. That the Clintons are brought up without reference to the facts of the matter at hand demonstrates the weakness of the fundamental argument for Trump; an honest conclusion from this court case suggests that Trump is a dishonest businessman who used a charity for personal gain. Of course, working from a single court case to characterize a man is itself intellectually dishonest, and so I shan’t do so, but point at his many other cases of lack of adherence to typical standards of American societal discourse in order to reinforce the conclusion. Just say it with me: Thirteen thousand lies….

In light of the first three points, I ‘d like to emphasize there’s no need to deal with the Clinton topic at all. However, given the weak presentation per the Clintons, I would like to present an observation or two.

With regard to evidence, it’s generally wisest to present the most generous interpretation possible during an argument^[1], rather than, as the Pro-Trumper does here, come to the most harsh, yet unsupported, conclusion: impute criminal behavior. Why? It’s more believable when presenting the argument in front of an independent audience; the audience, presumably intelligent and not predisposed one way or the other, will recognize unlikely conclusions for what they are, and discount the proponent for not having facts of the proper character to rule out other interpretations.

So in the case of the Clintons, the presented facts are not incongruent with the conclusion of illegal behaviors, but they are not nearly dispositive, meaning that there are other possible and reasonable interpretations of the facts presented. Take, for example, the cited chart for the Clinton Foundation. I’ll stipulate to the numbers, as I researched a couple of them in Charity Navigator and they appear to match, but not to the conclusions the Pro-Trumper wants everyone to believe. In fact, there’s probably a couple of dozen alternate interpretations, but I shall only list a few to get the reader’s juices flowing:

1. Operational incompetency. I do not mean the Clintons were skimming money off the top, because Charity Navigator actually places the Clinton Foundation in the top category for efficiency. I mean that perhaps the donor class perceived the Clinton Foundation as not being effective at its work, and chose to direct funds elsewhere.
2. Disagreement with goals. Donors discovered that the Clinton Foundation’s goals were incompatible with their own goals as philanthropists.
3. Major donor priorities changed.
4. Major donor funds dried up.
5. The Clintons are geriatric. No doubt about it, the Clintons are celebrities, but their advancing age is almost certainly making them less effective as fund-raisers. The diminishment of old age can be quite surprising, as I’ve found out recently.
6. This is not a complete picture. The chart is for the Clinton Foundation and, by implication, covers all such charitable organizations linked to the Clintons. This is wrong. There appear to be quite the number of charitable foundations connected with the Clintons, most of them focused on precise problems or goals, and I don’t know, being a working dude with limited resources, if all of their numbers go up and down in concert – or if they don’t, meaning donors are shifting funds from one charity to another. The chart looks nice and authoritative, but having done a bit of research, I actually have my doubts.

I came up with the above on the spur of the moment; I’m sure a thoughtful reader would come up with even more interpretations. But a conservative who has already fore-doomed the Clintons is probably snorting in disbelief, because it’s hard to go against preconceptions, and in a sense, the above list is weak – because it doesn’t assert the Pro-Trumper is out and out wrong, it’s merely a presentation of alternative interpretations congruent with the presented facts.

So let’s move on to bigger hurdles.

First of all, let’s consider the behaviors of President Putin. If the Clintons were sleazeballs who could be bribed by donations to their foundation, then why did Putin end up taking the far more risky route of meddling in the 2016 Presidential election in order to ensure that Hillary Clinton, who as Secretary of State worked to roll back the illegal Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, was defeated by Trump? This was all documented by Republican Special Counsel Mueller, by the way, which gives it far more weight than a non-Republican Special Counsel.

It’d be far more efficient and certain to have simply dumped $50 million into the Foundation. If a President Clinton then tried to work against Putin’s European plans, he’d have that lovely bribe, to use the unvarnished word, to hold over her head. But he didn’t, and I don’t take Vladimir Putin to be anyone’s fool. It’d have been cheap and certain, so why didn’t he?

Second, Why aren’t the Clintons in jail? Because they’re so smart? Nyah, it’s a rare person who can engage in such public hijinks and get away with it, and with the enemies the Clintons have made, the possibility seems zero.

But a properly cynical conservative will proclaim it must be corruption, the judge and/or prosecutors are taking bribes. Our Pro-Trumper actually did that in the thread above. But does this really make sense?

Look, I’m no lawyer. Most of us aren’t. But we all have a grasp of human nature. Do any of us think that prosecutors, who are traditionally highly ambitious lawyers, looking for that next step up the ladder or the big article in the newspaper, are really motivated by mere money and could be bought off not to prosecute?

Ignoring the problem of obscuring the bribe, that’s not how a prosecutor secures advancement. Can you imagine the improvement in the reputation of a prosecutor who put the Clintons behind bars? Similar to my favorite Benghazi incident argument, where I prominently and very sincerely thank the Republicans for publicly clearing former Secretary of State Clinton of any wrong-doing in that tragic episode, not just once, but a half dozen times, I conclude from the lack of prosecution that either the Clintons are fantastically master criminals who will never be caught for their crimes, and in fact should be given the Presidency on a permanent basis because their immense smarts makes them the best politicians to run the country^[2], or … they’re not guilty of anything more than occasionally speeding.

The fact they’ve not even been indicted, despite the professional inducements for prosecutors, suggests that their criminality is either extremely well hidden, or non-existent. As an independent and a non-lawyer, I always hold the possibility out that they’ve committed horrendous crimes, just like maybe my next door neighbors could possibly do – but at the moment it doesn’t seem likely.

In the end, Trump was found guilty of misuse of funds. Indeed, he admits to it, as my Friend’s link emphasizes:

The settlement also included an admission from Trump that he personally misused foundation funds and called for mandatory training requirements for the now-defunct foundation’s directors — Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump.

It remains to be seen how often Trump’s supporters admit to this blotch on his reputation. For most other folks, I’d just shrug and say they were ignorant but then I might make the same mistake. But for the “… most stable genius in the world”?

¹ However, investigators should take the most cynical view of the facts at hand, and then seek more facts to either prove or disprove that family of hypotheses. Why bother with a charge of bank robbery when you can jail someone on a murder charge? But a dishonest investigator is a dangerous thing.

² This is an example of logical sarcasm, wherein what I just said actually makes a certain appalling sense, but I would never countenance the actual conclusion because it’s bad policy. Besides, Bill Clinton always makes my skin crawl.