Category Archives: Uncategorized

Not all corporations come from the Big, Evil Corporation Factory:

On Wednesday, Axios published a list of the entities spending the most money on Facebook ads on both sides of the impeachment debate. …

“Folks, this is reporter Danforth Twiggler, and we’re here three months in the future, January 4th of 2020. As you all know, former President Trump was just convicted in his impeachment trial, and we’ve been fortunate to snag an interview with Republican Senator Clutching F. Power of >crackle-fade-out<!”

“Senator, thank you for speaking with us.  Senator Power, what factor, in the trial that ended yesterday in the conviction of President Trump, made you decide to vote against him?”

“Thank you for having me, Dan. Dan, for me, it began with the corruption evidenced in his ‘Ukraine call’, his crass use of the Oval Office to enrich himself, and ended with the evidence of his obeying the orders from the Russian state. He may have claimed that Russia was our friend, but we knew better!”

“So Representative Pelosi and her team were effective in their prosecutorial role?”

“>cough< I felt the evidence spoke for itself.”

“Thank you, sir. So the revelations of his payoffs to his paramours to keep them quiet during the campaign didn’t bother you?”

“Well, Dan, naturally, as a proud Evangelist, I was of course disgusted by his behavior, but he was doing God’s work with the judiciary -”

“You then agree with Pastor Jeffress, Ralph Reed, and others that Trump should have been given a free pass since he was touched by God?”

“Well, no, he was done with his work -”

“And God just throws away his tools when he’s done with him? Very interesting. I would not care to work for God. But going back to his attempts to buy the silence of his paramours, we knew about these virtually by the time he was taking office, and yet you didn’t comment on this criminal behavior -”

“I, I didn’t believe it was all that important -”

“Then there was the ten reports of obstruction in the Mueller Report -”

“What obstruction? I, I never read the damn, errrr, darn thing anyway!”

“And why not, Senator Power?”

“God would never permit his chosen tool to, to, and that report was therefore blasphemy!”

“And, yet, here we are. Senator, the President, excuse me, former President is widely seen as having displayed evidence of his miscreancy early in his tenure. I speak, of course, of such incidents as his unrecorded interviews with President Putin, his revelations of highly classified materials in public, and his infelicities in the selection of his Cabinet secretaries, and, oh, just his general incompetency. Given all this, if he had been impeached and convicted much earlier in his tenure, isn’t it true that the United States would have had a much more quiet and productive period?”

“Not at all, the judiciary -”

“Even with Vice President -”

“THE JUDGES! For they will wield the sword to redeem us -”

“So, Senator, you admit that you put your own self-interest ahead of the Nation’s -”

“They’re the same!”

“Thank you, Senator, for explaining your Party’s reluctance to to remove the worst President in modern memory. Tell me, sir, is it true that you were fired from your last three jobs for gross incompetency before you became a cleric and started a megachurch in – ah, he just stalked away, folks, I suppose discussing competency is just over the line. This is …”

With apologies to the late Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), and I suspect the reporter was from the Center for Inquiry, a freethinker organization that spends a lot of time safeguarding the secular nature of our government, when it can.

My point, of course, is that most of the Republicans in Congress have wedded themselves to Trump, and to vote for impeachment or conviction would, in effect, be a vote to do the same to themselves and their badly broken ideology or religious convictions.

So, despite the happy words of some pundits, I don’t see it happening.

Having watched just a little bit of the news coverage of the events surrounding the Trump campaign rally tonight in Minneapolis, MN, I was struck by how the need to express disagreement with Trump and his policies seems to be fulfilled by anger and violence.

It’s minor violence, it’s true, but it’s worth remembering that analysis of the typical Trump supporter has included conclusions that there’s a fear of societal change, and that the political opposition will indulge in violence. The first, of course, is true, as people try to change society to be more in tune with justice, but the second need not be necessary – and I feel those who threw objects at departing attendees and the police really played into the hands of the right-wing extremist leaders. In their missives to their followers, they emphasize the violent dangers of the left, fallacious as they are, and the left did nothing to falsify those charges.

Yet, I do sympathize with the protesters. Trump is glaringly obviously incompetent, an amateur who is doing tremendous damage to the reputation and tangible quality of the country. He has no concept of how ethics in government employees, such as himself, should work; he has, instead, imported his own bankrupt moral system in which he constantly seeks personal advancement into the Oval Office. He may even be a Russian asset. He’s become the emblem of how bad a President should not be. That our fellow Americans can embrace a liar, cheat, bungling fool, who is so bad that he doesn’t even recognize it, is infuriating.

But I fear tonight’s violence will only reinforce the Trumpist base’s decision to support the man.

Here’s what I would have savored seeing: a good-natured, old-fashioned shaming through laughter. When Trump came in, and when he left, all the protesters should have pointed a finger and laughed. When the attendees came out, seeking only to get in their vehicles and drive away, rather than yelling and screaming and throwing rocks at their cars, a good old-fashioned laughing might have been more effective. Perhaps call them suckers, just to get their attention, but nothing worse. Assail them with gales of laughter. Violence hardens attitudes, it persuades only the timid, and frightened, and that’s not a big piece of the Trumpist base.

A psychologist could address this more effectively, but the driving emotional need for Trump is respect, or admiration, for himself. As I understand it, he’s always yearned for it, and never quite gotten it from the creamy elite of New York City.

But if a bunch of Minnesota yahoos had just pointed and laughed at him and his followers, not only would his followers feel less physically threatened, while wondering what they’ve missed, but perhaps Trump himself would have taken a real hit.

They’re not yelling and screaming, they’re just laughing at me. Just laughing and pointing, practically crying they’re laughing so hard. They have no respect.

And would he continue to go on? Hard to say. But it would have been more respectful of our shared bond as Americans, legal or not, than this night of hatred and, well, stupidity.

A missed opportunity.

If you haven’t read about the shift in public sentiment concerning the Impeachment Inquiry into the conduct of President, this might brighten or darken your day:

I don’t read much Facebook, but even that little bit yields up the classic What About The Democrats! argument, and I’ve had it.

Look, whatabout-ism doesn’t work with me. We’re not measuring Trump against the lies of the Democrats, the Socialists, or for that matter the Nazis.

We’re measuring him against the Constitution.

That’s the only measuring stick that matters anymore^[1].

And he’s coming up short.

¹ Sure, we could talk about Obama and the Constitution, but, guess what? The Republicans had 6 years of dominance of Congress and never tried to impeach him. The actions of the Republicans tell us a lot more about Obama and, for that matter, H. “turns out she’s clean as a whistle, thanks to Rep Trey Gowdy, et al” Clinton, than does their rhetoric or their brazen apologists.

Steve Webb of Yates Webb Engineers is really pissed off, and vents in The RIBA Journal:

If I drive a Range Rover to the supermarket I produce about 400g of CO₂. Should we measure environmental morality in Range Rover Shopping Trips – RSTs? An RST is an ugly spectacle: me a paunchy middle aged guy, my wrap-around shades, in a ‘commanding’ driving position, nonchalantly palming my giant car between trolley-pushing pedestrians in the Sainsbury’s car park. Meanwhile in a studio nearby, a designer, loving the precision of razor sharp edges, draws a gorgeous slender bookshelf out of steel. It weighs 500kg, making about 1.5t of CO₂, so jot him down for 3,750 RSTs: a daily Range Rover drive to Sainsbury’s and back every day for 10 years – and that’s just a morning’s work for him. An engineer churns out the same old steel picture frame instead of a timber one – that’s 2t of steel and 6t of CO₂: she’s on 15,000 RSTs. A planner that insists on a brick facade produces 253t of CO₂ – 632,500 RSTs. Bricks are bad. They’re baked, doh! If a contractor, balking at the unknown, persuades a client to make a block of flats concrete instead of cross laminated timber that’s 2,300t of CO₂. Now we’re on 5.76 million RSTs. No matter that we’re peddling around on our Bromptons. We are actually all driving the Range Rover to Sainsbury’s… a lot.

It’s hard to swallow that we [the construction industry] are personally at fault. How can we rightminded modern people be perpetrating such a thing? Another architect told me recently that many buildings are not designed by architects, implying that these ‘other’ buildings are the problem. Barratt Homes’ houses are normally wood-framed! I’m sorry to say the ‘new London vernacular’ architect-designed end of the housing spectrum is the brick and concrete, carbon-heavy, one. Go Barratt!

As a practice transitions from morally acceptable to morally unacceptable due to increasing world-wide population densities and improving, but energy-demanding, quality of life in a world where morals are thought to be unchanging absolutes, but are not, it’s actually not surprising. Our perceptual systems are not built for it, our mindsets are against it. Good for Yates Webb to recognize the problem in their own backyard.

And what is Yates Webb doing? A statement:

Too bad they’re UK, not Minnesota, based.

The boar menaces the bore. Now if only this had taken place in a bore-hole, and it was all about a ice sample.

We recently viewed the silent film The Cat And The Canary (1927), and while we longed to like it, I think it’s cultural attitudes leave it too dated to appreciate. In this movie about the disposition of the estate of a man, mixed with an escaped convict, and a hint of insanity, it seemed the only woman with any hint of a backbone ultimately didn’t really figure in the climax of the movie; she merely stalks through the story with a broody look on her face. The element of farce was off-putting, while the heroine, who’s little more than a canvas for the projection of public attitudes of the day, left me cold, and I even considered cheering on the big clawed hand which hovered over her shoulder.

Characters were not differentiated, themes were not strongly developed, and two days later we were confusing it with elements of some other recently viewed movies.

In a word, forgettable.

Remember the three 2019 gubernatorial elections? Louisiana’s is a “jungle primary to a runoff,” where the runoff is skipped if anyone wins the jungle primary with more than 50% of the vote. Emerson College Polling is reporting Governor Edwards (D-LA) is not only easily ahead of the two Republicans who appear to be splitting the conservative vote, but doing well enough he might win outright in the primary:

A final Emerson College pre-election primary poll in the Louisiana Governor race finds Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards leading with 48% of the vote. Republican Businessman Eddie Rispone and Republican Congressman Ralph Abraham follow in a statistical tie, with 25% and 19% respectively. Independent Gary Landrieu is at 4%, Republican Patrick Landry is at 3% and Democrat Oscar Dantzler at 1%. (Oct 4-7, MM, n=467, +/-4.5%)

If this holds true in the actual primary, then it would indicate a substantial loss of support for Trump, who won the state by 20 points in 2016, and that his endorsement of the two top Republicans is either ineffective, or possibly a strategic error in that it didn’t give clear direction to Trump voters as to who he prefers.

Conclusions are always tentative when proxies are being evaluated, and one must remember Edwards is the incumbent, so none of this is final, but it’s certainly interesting in what it says about Trump support.

When it comes to the battle between Congress and President Trump, sometimes even the pundits become a little foreboding. Consider Steve Benen’s recent remarks concerning a recent report issued by the Senate Intel Committee:

The Senate Intelligence Committee issued a bipartisan report yesterday on how Russia used social media as part of the Kremlin-directed attack on the American elections. The document, released by Chairman Richard Burr (R-N.C.) and Vice Chairman Mark Warner (D-Va.), made a series of recommendations about new laws to foreign interference, but it also served as an effective indictment against the perpetrators

Steve then notes the White House appears to still be attempting to discredit the notion that Russia interfered in the 2016 Presidential election in Trump’s favor, and the State and Justice Department Secretaries are going out of their way to dispute and discredit these findings.

Which leads to this:

Maybe one of these guys can read the bipartisan findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee? Or does Team Trump assume senators are part of a nefarious scheme?

It’s a little chilling, having read sometime in the last few years of the slaughter of the Roman Senators as the Roman Empire entered a disintegrative phase. While Roman Senators were distinguished by the requirement that their families be part of the elite class, it’s still enough to send a shiver down my spine.

Chiasmus:

Chiasmus is a rhetorical device in which two or more clauses are balanced against each other by the reversal of their structures in order to produce an artistic effect.

Let us try to understand chiasmus with the help of an example:

“Never let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You.”

Notice that the second half of this sentence is an inverted form of the first half, both grammatically and logically. In the simplest sense, the term chiasmus applies to almost all “criss-cross” structures, and this is a concept that is common these days. In its strict classical sense, however, the function of chiasmus is to reverse grammatical structure or ideas of sentences, given that the same words and phrases are not repeated. [Literary Devices]

I’ll never remember this one. Noted in an emailed joke, courtesy my Arts Editor, which I will outtake:

Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

Reinforcing my speculation of yesterday on the spirit of those text messages, and the role Ambassador Sondland may have played in them, the Ambassador traveled back to the United States in response to a request from several House Committees wishing to interview him for the impeachment inquiry, and at the very last moment …

….to see. Importantly, Ambassador Sondland’s tweet, which few report, stated, “I believe you are incorrect about President Trump’s intentions. The President has been crystal clear: no quid pro quo’s of any kind.” That says it ALL!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2019

If you really believe the House is conducting rigged proceedings, then perhaps this makes sense, if you squint just right.

But if you’re wondering if Ambassador Sondland might have some evidence useful to Congressional oversight responsibilities, this reaction by a State Department, or at least Secretary thereof, known to be slavishly devoted to Trump, does little to dispute that inclination, and suggests circumstancially that Ambassador Sondland was, indeed, covering Trump’s High Crime in that final text, covered previously.

And how will Republicans try to cover for this? Appear in kangaroo suits?

President Trump made an amazing claim during an otherwise routine signing of a trade agreements with Japan:

You can’t impeach a President for doing a great job. You can’t impeach a President for having the lowest and best unemployment numbers that we’ve had in 51 years. You can’t impeach a President for tax cuts and regulation cuts and creating — and even the Ambassador would say — the strongest economy in the world. We have the strongest economy in the world.

This is a scam. And the people are wise to it. And that’s why my polls went up, I think they said, 17 points in the last two or three days. I’ve never had that one. I’ve never had that one.

We’ll skip who did what, the caveats, and how much a President is responsible for an economy in any case.

From FiveThirtyEight’s dynamic aggregate of polls.

But his (approval) polls are up 17 points? No. No jump at FiveThirtyEight.

So why does he say that? Why the big lie?

Maybe he’s trying to reassure himself.

More likely, he’s trying to keep his base together by lying about how many people disapprove of the Impeachment Inquiry. Fox News will pick this right up and broadcast it, although as Fox News seems to be somewhat disaffected with the President, this may be a bit of a risk.

And, least likely, but worth thinking about, this and the panoply of lies, exaggerations, and hyperbole President Trump has been employing may be a deliberate foundation for an insanity defense in the future. He is, after all, under investigation for many incidents, and perhaps he’s crazy like a fox, willing to put the nation’s security at risk just so he can avoid prison.

The sordid soap opera continues.

They’re quite restful.

Or, fun with optical physics:

In case you’ve not had the time to peruse the text messages between Administration members concerning the Zelensky phone call – that would be the one that is being investigated via Impeachment Inquiry – that was recently released by Congress, here’s the most interesting part:

[page 9]

A little context is helpful. Gordon Sondland is the United States Ambassador to the European Union. According to Wikipedia,

He was a major donor to Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

We may presume he is, like many Ambassadors over many Administrations, an appointee awarded an Ambassadorship as a reward for some service. This is not unusual, at least to those countries which are considered friendly.

William Taylor is currently the Charge d’Affaires at the U.S. Embassy in Ukraine. A Charge d’Affaires is a diplomat temporarily in charge of an embassy, presumably while the Ambassador is away or no Ambassador currently holds the appointment. My impression is that Foreign Service personnel are typically career professionals whose political preferences, if any, are not permitted to influence their conduct.

With that information, these messages become more interesting. A naive reading would simply suggest that Taylor was misreading the situation, and Sondland corrected him. However, a more careful reading, keeping the roles and origins of the correspondents in mind, suggests it’s not nearly out of the realm of possibility that Sondland, aware that President Trump might be committing an unethical act that could possibly rise to the level of a High crime or misdemeanor, is suggesting to Taylor that Trump is not thinking that at all, and then suggests the discussion be taken offline, i.e., where it is less likely to be recorded and revealed.

Neither reading is certain, but the fact that the latter is not only possible but probable, suggests the distance to which the rot has radiated.

When the dementia ward is asked to admit him, just submit this Tweet in support of the petition:

As I have stated strongly before, and just to reiterate, if Turkey does anything that I, in my great and unmatched wisdom, consider to be off limits, I will totally destroy and obliterate the Economy of Turkey (I’ve done before!). They must, with Europe and others, watch over…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 7, 2019

We used to just cart them off to the asylum with a card around their neck that said “Napoleon Complex.” Now it appears this is where the GOP is heading.

This caught my eye:

Dollars are the real polls right now.

We’re DOUBLE where President Obama was at this point in his re-election.

Americans are fired up for @realDonaldTrump, and they’re already putting their money behind him for 2020! pic.twitter.com/rNBA1ND750

— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) October 6, 2019

While it’s true that money makes winning elections easier, it’s not a deciding factor. A poor candidate, an outstanding message, a big scandal – these can all diminish the influence of money on an election.

Nor does it a reliable proxy for popularity. A few big donations can disguise the fact that the entity receiving them is actually not very popular.

But, y’see, money is the lazy man’s proxy. It doesn’t have to be persuaded and cozied up to, it doesn’t ask questions of your awful ideology or candidate, and it doesn’t suddenly defect to the other side. McDaniel can play it up all she wants, but all it really shows, for the discerning observer, is discomfiture with how only big donors are coming through.

And those are, sadly, often extremist zealots, ready to commit their all to a campaign, certain of their rectitude (or all in on their abandonment of principles).

In the wake of the shocking The New York Times report on the increase of reports of child pornography,

Pictures of child sexual abuse have long been produced and shared to satisfy twisted adult obsessions. But it has never been like this: Technology companies reported a record 45 million online photos and videos of the abuse last year.

More than a decade ago, when the reported number was less than a million, the proliferation of the explicit imagery had already reached a crisis point.

Skipping questions of the reliability of using these reports as a proxy for the actual size of the problem, let’s move on to where Ben Thompson of Stratecherry inches, if only implicitly, towards a less definite position on the question of the encryption of communications:

This report about child sexual abuse makes the point much more meaningful, and leads me to reframe the questions I originally raised in that piece: might it be the case that Facebook’s decision to encrypt conversations is not both good for consumers and good for itself, but rather good for itself and actively bad for society?

It’s worth taking this question apart in order to understand the clash taking place.

First, good is a relative word, and it can be defined for our purposes as the satisfaction of the immediate desire of the entity using it. If a person deems it good to catch a criminal, such as a viewer of pornography, then the act of catching and imprisoning them is good, and if insecure communications increases the probability of success, then that is good. The fact that there may be non-immediate reasons to not permit insecure communications isn’t relevant, since good is defined as satisfying the immediate desire.

Contrariwise, a viewer of child pornography will consider it good if they are not caught and imprisoned. If secure communications lessens the risk, then that facility is good.

When Thompson wonders “… not both good for consumers and good for itself, but rather good for itself and actively bad for society?” he is not inaccurate in his description: consumers, regardless of their goals, prefer private communications.

But immediate desires, I hear my reader mutter, are rarely a good way to run society, and, despite the blandishments of innumerable commercial entities, I agree. The momentary satisfaction of desires such as child pornography appears to lead to indisputable crimes, and thus Thompson’s last observation is also accurate: … actively bad for society. Yes, period. They are.

Despite the quasi-admissions of the secure communications advocates that secure communications can enable many bad actors, they don’t want to admit to being part of the problem, and that’s because they, themselves, really aren’t. They worry about governmental abuse, for the most part, with some concerns about private monitoring of their communications.

And they think they’ve found the perfect solution, a malady of us computer-folk^[1], in algorithms. Certainly computers have been used to improve – we think – many aspects of life, and here’s one more.

But I think, in a position that is almost certainly irrelevant given the nature of the maths involved, it’s a mistake to attempt to replace monitoring of human governance with algorithms. In an already demonstrated result, it will abolish the importance of human judgment by making the scenario itself less and less likely to happen.

Algorithms continue to be relatively inflexible, which means they don’t adjust to the situation very well. As we continue to move towards truly intelligent computer entities, this will change, but in the area of deciphering communications, the algorithms are more or less context free.

This means we’ve abandoned our responsibility to police ourselves, leaving it to computer systems little better than hammers to do that work for us. And, in the process, are losing the opportunity to learn wisdom and to grow beyond our petty little desires and live with each other again^[2].

I should also observe that the secure communications absolutists are also the extremists in this discussion. I’m well aware that the math is considered by many to be impenetrable, although a group of smart colleagues of mine actually think secure communications will become a dream in the world of quantum computers, but that’s a matter still in the future. But the other side, asking, technologically naively as it may be, for a backdoor in order to catch the bad guys, have not asked for abolishment. I don’t see them as non-compromising extremists; that would be the secure communications group.

The relative ignorance and out-right stupidity of many criminals is irrelevant to the discussion, as we’ve seen non-hackers use hacking packages to harass many entities on the Web for money. I have no idea what to suggest at this juncture, because there is a variable that almost no one is tracking:

Why does it matter more and more?

As resources become more and more precious, whether directly through their possession, or indirectly through having the financial resources to afford to obtain them, these communications become more and targets by the have-nots (or, at any rate, the have-not-enoughs, which may be an entirely different group). That last variable is the hardest to change, and the most controversial of all. But it may be the key to this mess.

¹ I’m starting to regard myself as a former computer geek. Although I never was much of one anyways.

² Cliff Stoll said it first, essentially. Maybe he’s right after all.

Watch out! There’s a ten ton statue sneaking up behind you!
Oh, ouch. That’ll teach you to be competent at your job.

If your cup of tea is watching cheap knock-offs of Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), then Ba’al: The Storm God (2008) might be right up your alley. We start off with a murderous robbery of an archaeology museum, which, despite being slightly clever, did make me laugh out loud. Why did that damn statue fall over and kill the security guard?

It seemed unjust after him being quite competent and all.

Anyways, a bunch of Dead Sea Scrolls are stolen – it’s not entirely clear why the digital versions available online couldn’t be used – and, the dead left behind to rot, the local cops are left to figure out who pulled the robbery.

Just about everyone here is a PhD, mostly of the archaeology variety, although we do get a meteorologist as well. Anyways, the oldest of the bunch, highly respected Stanford, has been frantically digging in Inuit territory (that would be the Arctic Circle), and in the midst of a requested visit by Helm, your generic and doctrinaire archaeologist and Brendan Frazier lookalike – except tubbier – and Carol (I can’t find her last name), a Sumerian cuneiform expert who, thank goodness, doesn’t get engaged in some horrific romantic subplot, and who’s mystified that she’s been requested to visit the Arctic when her specialty should take her to Iraq, virtually the antipodes of the Arctic Circle.

But even as they arrive and meet guards with rifles and bad tempers, an amulet covered in, insert your guess here, is discovered, comes to life, and zaps Stanford, who has an epileptic fit. But while he survives, a monstrous, and do I mean monstrous, storm roars in and wipes out the encampment. But, of course, the archaeologists escape.

Stanford is running things, and now they’re flying somewhere else. Why? Well, that damn amulet has some companion amulets, and, well, Stanford has cancer and thinks the amulets will cure it.

What?

Meanwhile, the American military has been watching as these absolutely monstrous storms pop up at each amulet site, even if they don’t know about supernatural storms. They bring in an independent meteorologist with expertise in upper atmosphere storms, and she thinks the storms are hooked into the Van Allen radiation belts (a real thing) and will draw infinite power (not a real thing) from them and soon we’ll be just like the Great Red Spot of Jupiter (a real thing, although shrinking recently), enveloped in one hellish storm.

She should have gone with a Venusian analogy, instead.

Anyways, deities appear, they have fights, a nuclear bomb plays a part, the cops get sucked into a vortex, and it’s all very silly.

The problems start with the story. It’s a fantasy, a genre which must explore the foibles of mankind, and necessarily their consequences. In Raiders, we see the Nazis in their arrogance, the mercenary French archaeologist Belloq who values his prizes and power over human life, Jones’ preoccupation with getting the treasure, and the general inclination for various assistants to go for the money.

Here? Stanford is weakly motivated, since there’s no obvious connection between Ba’al and curing Stanford’s cancer. Nor do Helm or Carol have much in the way of foibles. The meteorologist, Pena, has just a little bit of backstory, as she has been banned from the military base for misdeeds involving high tech, but it really goes nowhere.

And the actors are more or less sleep-walking through their roles, with the exception of the commanding officer, Kittrick, who properly projects military command presence throughout, even when admitting he ordered a plane into one of the storms, and lost it and the crew. But, honestly, these actors didn’t have much to work with.

Don’t waste your time on this one. It’s just good enough to tickle you along, but, in the end, it’s not in the least memorable, and you’ll want your time back.

Go see Raiders again, instead.

The ankle tag was annoying, but the camera to watch your smooch with your honey? Nuh-uh:

When you try to get some 'hidden camera' footage but your Burrowing Owls immediately find your camera… pic.twitter.com/ZnHmr0sNhD

— Hawk Conservancy (@HawkConservancy) August 2, 2019

You just have to love it: the screaming hairy armadillo.

It’s not as cute as I might hope, but that’s OK.

In case you were wondering if private militias are a thing, Professor Mary B. McCord of Georgetown will set you straight in Lawfare:

Although it is widely believed that the Second Amendment protects the right to form private militias, it does no such thing. The Supreme Court made this clear in its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, explicitly reaffirming its own 1886 holding that “the Second Amendment … does not prevent the prohibition of private paramilitary organizations.” Indeed, they are prohibited by state constitutional provisions or statutes in all 50 states.

The constitutions of 48 states include provisions that require the military to be at all times subordinate to the civil authority. That means that private, unregulated and unauthorized militias—operating wholly outside of the civilian governmental authority and public accountability—are prohibited by state law. There is good reason for this. As prominent historian and scholar A.E. Dick Howard wrote in 1974 in “Commentaries on the Constitution of Virginia,” the Virginia constitution’s ban on private militias “ensures the right of all citizens … to live free from the fear of an alien soldiery commanded by men who are not responsible to law and the political process.”

So if someone shows up at your door proclaiming some sort of authority as a private militia, tell them to get out of town and that they’re under surveillance at that very moment. Even if they’re not.

This is on Facebook, but the owls are adorable.

Part of an occasional series.

The promise: Candidate Trump promises the national debt will disappear rapidly under a President Trump’s leadership.

[Caption: Trump Tells O’Reilly Tackling $21T Nat’l Debt Will Be ‘Easy’]

An annual deficit (it can be monthly, or generally any time period) is simply outgo – incoming over the given time period.

The debt, on the other hand, is the cumulative deficits plus any interest incurred by financing (borrowing) against that debt. If the debt ever becomes negative (that is, a surplus) then one may also subtract any interest earned on that surplus.

Results So Far: This chart from the St. Louis Fed tells the story, with larger deficits towards the bottom of the graph:

I was unable to determine if these are raw dollars or are adjusted for inflation or any other relevant factor, which would explain why the numbers of the last thirty years are much greater in magnitude than previous years. But this caveat is immaterial for our purposes: the size of the annual deficits has been increasing dramatically under President Trump’s leadership, the direct opposite of his promise. For those who wish to point at Democratic President Obama’s first two years, when Congress was controlled by the Democrats, a second glance at the chart should remind them that this was the response to the Great Recession, initiated (through Quantitative Easing) by President Bush’s Administration; President Trump has had no such economic challenge against which to struggle. Indeed, our economy at the time of his election was chugging along nicely.

It must be remembered that President Trump is only, as of this writing, roughly 2.5 years into his four year term, and perhaps he’ll find a way to reduce the Federal Deficit before the end of this four year term, or a hypothetical second term.

The Bigger Picture: It cannot be emphasized enough: Congress has the power of the purse. That said, Republican President Trump had a Republican-controlled Congress for the first two years of his Administration, and during that time the much-ballyhooed Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 was introduced into and passed by Congress, and signed by President Trump.

President Trump, along with the Republican members of Congress, were enthusiastic supporters of the bill, proclaiming that the economy would expand at a greater rate than before, and that the Laffer Curve would help reduce deficits; critics, which included most Democrats, liberal pundits, and independent economists, rejected such claims.

The results? The chart above suggests the enacted tax cuts decreased government revenues substantially, as the critics suggested they would. Long-time readers and those who followed the Laffer Curve link, above, know that I do not believe the Laffer Curve has universal application, but instead only in very limited circumstances. The example of the failure of the Tax Cuts bill and, earlier, the smoking debacle of Kansas, where it was also confidently deployed under the leadership of former Governor Brownback (R-KA), confirms that conclusion.

Democratic control of the House, gained in 2019, may seem to be a good point to raise for conservative-minded readers who wish to suggest that an agreeable Congress would lead to smaller deficits, but I do not agree. First, general Republican economic policy has become deregulate, lower taxes, and all will be well. There is little empirical evidence in favor of this policy, and much against it (see Kansas, above). Second, President Trump, perhaps because of the Democratic control of the House, has concentrated on casting the blame for a potentially slowing economy on his own Fed Chair, Jerome Powell, for not lowering the prime rate as far as he wishes.

Finally, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my own observations on the Federal budget, and, consequently, deficits. While deficit hawks have often deployed the analogy of the family budget as an argument for balanced budgets, I do not find the argument convincing. A family has relatively few resources to meet its obligations, while governments may offer bonds and raise taxes, as well as provide services. The fact that the government has run deficits for years has not yet led to doom and disaster.

Economics is the dismal science, however. Would we be in a better place if our Federal Debt was smaller? Is the recent phenomenon of near-zero% prime rate a result of the huge deficits, as some have suggested? These are hard questions which do not yet have answers.

Updated 25 Oct 2019: WaPo is reporting on the 2019 Federal Deficit under President Trump’s leadership continues to grow:

The U.S. government’s budget deficit ballooned to nearly $1 trillion in 2019, the Treasury Department announced Friday, as the United States’ fiscal imbalance widened for a fourth consecutive year despite a sustained run of economic growth. The deficit grew $205 billion, or 26 percent, in the past year.

While President Trump did suggest he’d need all eight years to destroy the entire debt, this report does not give one hope that he’ll actually succeed in even reducing the Federal annual deficit, much less the Federal Debt, even if he wins reelection.