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I missed this gem from old-line conservative and Never-Trumper Jennifer Rubin in WaPo concerning the Mueller testimony:

I worry that we — the media, voters, Congress — are dangerously unserious when it comes to preservation of our democracy. To spend hours of airtime and write hundreds of print and online reports pontificating about the “optics” of Mueller’s performance — when he confirmed that President Trump accepted help from a hostile foreign power and lied about it, that he lied when he claimed exoneration, that he was not completely truthful in written answers, that he could be prosecuted after leaving office and that he misled Americans by calling the investigation a hoax — tells me that we have become untrustworthy guardians of democracy. …

Trump reads from the same hymnal of disinformation and recites the same slander of democratic institutions that 20th-century totalitarians deployed, yet too many in the media call him the “winner” because Mueller did not pass their ridiculous tests (e.g. add new information, persuade Republicans).

It’s a beautiful opinion that cuts right through the fluff and gets to the heart of the matter.

Unfortunately, for all that I admire her pithy, stop-the-nonsense piece, I fear too many people have given up on rational thinking, and instead look to presentation to tell them what to think – and Mueller’s presentation was not as compelling as it might have been. Whether he was being lawyerly, overwhelmed with information, or even ill, as he struck me, he didn’t give a compelling story about the morally depraved man whose desperate pursuit of money endangers this country. Perhaps he didn’t have that story to give, perhaps the Republican interlocutors were too good at breaking up the story, or maybe he’s not up to a performance like that.

But a lot of people are going to read the performance, not the facts, and proceed from there.

Not as much detail as I might have liked.

Being a working dude, I didn’t have the time to sit and watch Mueller testify; however, I have been working my way through the transcript. But just is interesting is how partisan pundits are reading the testimony. Liberal Steve Benen of Maddowblog has not, insofar as I can tell, remarked upon some of the lapses present in the testimony, concentrating on what he considers the remarkable testimony, and Trump’s reactions to it. See here and here and here for some examples. The impression I gain from reading Benen’s material is that Trump’s becoming increasingly desperate. The material present in the testimony suggests he can be criminally tried if he loses his re-election, and, meanwhile, he continues to lose on multiple fronts unrelated to the testimony, such as building the wall (not an inch constructed), and not revealing his tax returns.

National Review conservative contributor Kevin Williamson sees the testimony as evidence that impeachment is impossible:

The Mueller circus offers us one lesson and one lesson only: The Democrats still believe they can defeat the star of The Apprentice in a reality-show election.

Ain’t nobody gonna beat Donald J. Trump in a goat rodeo.

The Democrats are running a scorched-earth, high-drama spectacle campaign against President Trump, who specializes in scorched-earth, high-drama spectacles and who today has the power of the presidential bully pulpit to amplify the drama and magnify the spectacle. Put another way, the Democrats apparently are intent on fighting Trump on his own ground, challenging him to a duel in the one thing he’s actually pretty good at: putting on a show.

David Thornton on the theo-conservative The Resurgent has an interesting observation:

For those of us who were unable to watch the hearings but were able to hear parts of it on the radio, Mueller sound calm, collected and careful. However, those who watched the hearings on television thought that Mueller underperformed. Much of the difference seems to be a question of style versus substance.

In the hours that followed, Republicans attacked Mueller’s style as well as his refusal to answer questions about the Steele dossier, even though his opening statement made clear that he would not comment on ongoing matters or privileged information from within the Justice Department. This is consistent with Mueller’s public statement in May in which he said that any testimony would not go beyond his office’s written report.

Mueller’s grueling testimony before two committees seemed to largely consist of Democrats baiting him to attack President Trumpand Republicans attacking the Russia investigation vicariously through him and chortling when he failed to show that he had every passage of his two-volume report memorized. Mr. Mueller didn’t give either side what it wanted, parsing his words carefully as lawyers tend to do.

As a software engineer, I sympathize with the need to parse statements carefully. I fall into the third group Thornton doesn’t mention: a reader. I’m only part way into the morning testimony, and so far Mueller seems a little under-prepared. This, too, is theo-conservative Erick Erickson’s observation:

Bob Mueller may be credible by reputation, but not by delivery. Trading messages yesterday with senior Democrat campaign operatives, even they agreed that Mueller did the Democrats more harm than good. They were hoping for some very clear statements and, while they got them, they were overshadowed by Mueller’s performance and his deflection of questions. Put bluntly — Bob Mueller seemed old and tired and ill prepared for the congressional hearing. It left people wondering if Mueller had even read his report.

Major Garret, CBS News Chief White House Correspondent, stated on the 24 July 2019 CBS Evening Newscast that he felt the testimony, summarizing now, was a disaster. However, I noted in his work history a preponderance of conservative news organizations present, such as Fox News, so I have to take that into account. Without, at the time, having begun reading the testimony, his language struck me as the sort of someone stating a desired conclusion, rather than an observed fact.

Back on National Review, apparent cheerleader Michael Brendan Dougherty believes the Democrats have stepped in a hole:

All along, Democrats were hoping the special counsel would do their dirty work. It’s the same mistake all of Trump’s opponents have made.

Toward the end of today’s long hearings, special counsel Robert Mueller struggled to find even the word “conspiracy” on his lips. Instead of drama, the hearings amounted to a recitation and endless reiteration of the stock phrases: no collusion, no exoneration. No interference from the Justice Department, and no charge of obstruction. That’s just the policy. “The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed,” Mueller said.

It’s really a ridiculous remark to make. Trump has been caught in lies by judges, who then have punished him for it. He lost the popular vote, his legislative agenda is in ruins, as are most of his promises, judiciary nomination exception duly noted. I find Dougherty so hard to believe I didn’t bother to finish the article.

Of course, the problem is reading partisan pundits can be misleading. Thornton seemed ambivalent, but didn’t say a whole lot. So where does a reader who’s more interested in analysis than cultish mumbo-jumbo go for an evaluation? In this case, it’s hard to think of any truly third-party, disinterested observers.

But I think the Lawfare analysis is interesting, as their angle is both scholarly and concerned with national security. Here’s the crew opining on the important factors of the testimony. After some performance-related disappointments, they get onto the meat of the exercise:

Yet Mueller’s testimony, notwithstanding the atmospherics, was a productive exercise. Over the course of the day, he seemed to gain confidence and by the end managed to have some genuinely moving exchanges with key members on important issues. He proved sharper, and more forthcoming, about matters directly related to President Trump in the afternoon Intelligence Committee hearing than he did in the morning before the Judiciary Committee. Perhaps he had better command over the subject matter of Russian electoral interference, which dominated the second half of the day, than he did over the discussion of obstruction that dominated the first half. Perhaps it was just his getting used to the high-pressure setting of public testimony after years out of the spotlight. But by the end of the Intelligence Committee hearing, he was offering thoughts and views that went ever-so-slightly beyond the four corners of the report itself. And they are thoughts and views every American should pause over.

An important note about what is being established in the legislative record:

One notable feature of the day was that the Republicans essentially accepted the assertions of the Mueller report as factual. By and large, they did not seek to contest the facts Mueller reported, but rather attacked alleged bias and the legal significance of the facts in the document. One of the functions of the report was to establish a common set of facts, and today’s hearing—in its own peculiar way—suggests that it has done that, at least to a point. The Republican members’ questions did not seem to doubt that McGahn was telling the truth and that Trump was lying. They accepted that Trump had asked Corey Lewandowski to get Sessions to unrecuse. While they fought on other matters, they didn’t contest the factual ground that Mueller has staked out.

A possible future tactic is to accuse the Republicans of supporting a liar, and that they have acknowledged exactly that.

My own reading has been limited, but one thing I’ve noticed is that the Republicans seemed to be tuned in to using a tactic in which they’d spend most of their 5 minute slots to raise irrelevant issues, and then with time running out, they’d make some accusation – often outlandish, as Committee chair Rep Nadler called them on time, thus leaving Mueller with no time to reply. Combined with his reluctance to speak, it left some interesting remarks unanswered, and I think that was unfortunate.

I haven’t made it to the Intel committee as of yet.

We’re putting one over on this audience!

Travelers on a trans-Pacific flight have an unfortunate crash that kills all but one member of the flight crew, but leaves the passengers unharmed, if a bit flustered. Washing up on a beach, they soon happen on the inhabitants – an American, Jim Taylor, and a Chinese, Ping, living quietly together. It’s a veritable Sinners in Paradise (1938), because everyone has a secret, it seems – or at least a sin.

Soon enough, the passengers discover there’s a boat available, and lean on Taylor to use it to rescue them. Taylor caves to the pressure and, because of the limitations of the boat, constructs a plan for conveying the passengers some thousand miles to inhabited land. Before he can implement his plan, though, two of the passengers, competing salesmen for ammunition suppliers intent on getting to China in order to supply either of the two sides with ammo, hijack the ship and fire on the other survivors, killing the one innocent in the group, an old lady who was going to China to visit her son.

There’s more to it than that, and it zips right along, but because no time is spent letting us bond with any character in particular, it’s all fairly pain-free and dull. Unless you’re a completist for one of these actors, I wouldn’t bother with this one.

Nasturtium.

I’m not sure.

And someone else’s lovely tiger lilies.

As a homeowner who hesitates to spend the dollars to add on to my home, I must say I find this tidbit in AL Monitor’s weekly email concerning Washington lobbying intimidating:

Saudi Arabia began building the planned $500 billion city from scratch earlier this year, but its future remains in doubt. Several members of Neom’s board withdrew after Khashoggi’s murder in October, and the crown prince himself reportedly admitted to a business delegation that he expected “no one” to invest in the project “for years.” Teneo is notably tasked with helping to “rebuild and recalibrate Neom’s advisory board over time to ensure the organization has the right advisers and advocates.” (The advisory board includes Andrew Liveris, the former chairman and CEO of Dow Chemical, who is a senior adviser at Teneo).

The “crown prince” refers, of course, to Mohammad bin Salman, first in line for the throne of Saudi Arabia, better known as MBS, and associated with the murder of WaPo columnist Jamal Khashoggi.

Whether or not this new city is needed or not, this sure looks like the 33 year old MBS is trying to salt away an heritage on the same order as Pharaoh Akhenaten, who notably built the city of Akhetaten as part of his effort to discard the old religion of Egypt and replace it with a worship of the Sun. While I think the analogy is a little stretched even at this point, it’s worth noting that Akhenaten was, post-reign, erased from Egyptian history by new dynasties; MBS’ ambition may be his undoing, as it doesn’t appear his association with the murder of Khashoggi has placed his eventual succession to the throne in any danger.

And that sure is a lot of money.

An example of a challenge to the cultists (and the rest of us) pops up in the pages of WaPo:

A network of out-of-state political consultants, secret donors and activists with close ties to President Trump is behind an effort to change the Florida constitution to explicitly state that only citizens may vote in elections, a measure that would amplify the issue of immigration in the 2020 battleground state. …

The exact legal effect the amendment would have remains unclear. While federal law explicitly bars noncitizen voting, the language in the Florida constitution — like that of many states — says that “every” citizen who is 18 may vote. The proposed amendment would change the language to say “only” a citizen may vote.

To which I mumbled, Sounds silly enough. Some political maneuvering, no doubt. But wait, there’s more:

Updating the constitutional language is necessary to challenge any future local laws that allow noncitizens to cast ballots, he said. “It needs to be in the constitution,” [John Loudon, chairman of Florida Citizen Voters,] said. “You have to be a citizen to vote.”

Noncitizens can cast ballots in local elections in about 10 Maryland towns or cities, such as College Park, and in local school elections in San Francisco and Chicago. Some Massachusetts towns also have passed resolutions supporting such laws. Supporters say immigrant voting, which was permitted in much of the United States through the 19th century, helps promote civic participation among all residents.

And then there’s GOP political strategist Tim Mooney:

Mooney cited the number of local jurisdictions that are considering expanding voting rights to noncitizens, such as Portland, Maine.

“Leftist activists have termed noncitizen voting ‘the newest civil right,’ ” he said, adding, “How is this possible? Citizen Voters wants every state to pass the Citizen Voters Amendment.”^[1]

Clearly, this is an attempt to use nationalism to stir up the Republican base, and that’s very unfortunate because this sounds like an issue that could use a good discussion. After all, what is the point of citizenship?

It varies from location to location, doesn’t it? In some places, it just means you live here and owe taxes, and maybe we’ll defend you next time the insurgents come. Other places, like the United States, it can mean much more: the right to representation in local, state, and national governments, the right to Social Security, the right to sign up with the military services, even the right to become an elected member of government.

And the right to vote?

It may be worth enumerating all the problems that might pop up if the citizenship requirement is removed. Let me be paranoid, way out on the extreme, just to start, and then we’ll move towards more likely problems:

1. The possibility of the flooding of localities with non-citizens who have a substantially different agenda than might be desirable for those localities. That is, an invasion of hostiles whose weapon is the vote. Sure, that’s paranoid. Really paranoid. But it’s not impossible.
2. It devalues the entire notion of being a member of the nation. Millions of immigrants over a couple of centuries – much to the dismay of the American Indians – have gone through varying amounts of work and stress to earn their citizenship, and part of that citizenship is the right to vote. The vote is the passport to participation in American society, and to make it worth so little – near nothing – is dispiriting.
3. This may have strategic consequences for the Democrats. The Democrats would like to think they have  a coalition of many groups and ethnicities, but one of the largest, the Hispanics, have shown signs of leaning towards stronger enforcement of immigration laws. I suspect this is a case of “we did the work to earn citizenship, why shouldn’t they?” It’s a valid and strong question.

Now, I’m not here to come to a final conclusion on the question. I’m here to suggest that if the Democrats react to this Florida Constitutional Amendment by suggesting, in blind counter-reaction, that citizenship should be passed out like peanuts, we’ll be missing out on a valuable debate. The Democrats should not permit themselves the lazy luxury of simply opposing everything the Republicans want. They must give it a good debate – and, occasionally, rise above petty jealousies and agree with the Republicans.

Even if the Republicans are blindly unable to do that themselves.

The strategic realities of not doing so may cripple them.

¹ This is known as strategic incredulity, and is a signal, often fake, that the position being criticized is so out in left field that it’s over the wall and shouldn’t even need discussion. Such a critical approach is often a signal that the critiquers are trying to hide something, and often persuade me to look deeper than I might otherwise look.

Ya gotta love the little hats. I’m sure it marks them as Generals, but to Western eyes…

In some ways, The 14 Amazons (1972) is a quintessential war movie, driven by collective character rather than the requirements of war. The Yang family, the embodiment of a war-like clan in service to the Emperor, is finally defeated on the field of battle, and 14 of the leaders killed. Back home, when the wives are informed of their deaths at the hands of the barbaric and dishonorable invaders from West Hsia, they resolve to bring their own not inconsiderable battle skills to bear on the killers of their husbands, but find they must recruit their own army as the Minister of War refuses to back them.

They set out to wage war, and find the tides of war wash thick with blood of both enemy and friend. This story does not shy away from disposing of many of the fourteen widowed wives, but few go down without earning their payment for the trip to the afterlife. Without going into too much detail, the story didn’t hesitate to have plans go awry, as they must in wartime, and depend on the improvisational skills of the leaders when faced with setbacks. Eventually, the king and his sons are cornered and killed, but not at no cost.

The battle scenes are, I think, standard for this sort of movie, which is to say that sometimes they go on for far too long, and appreciating the finer points of the tactical moves that both sides employ is often, but not always, a lost cause. But I enjoyed the innovative approach to bridging a chasm, and the use of a river is, I suppose, classic but effective.

But there are too many characters to become attached to any particular one, while the bad guys are really rather awful. I also noticed the bad guys are, per usual for Chinese war movies (or wuxia, as I see Wikipedia calls it, or “martial heroes”) and kung fu movies, very difficult to kill. Are they endowed with super powers, while the good guys snuff it on a simple spear thrust? Of course, sometimes we see the same thing in Hollywood films, I suppose, but it almost seems to be a requirement of wuxia.

If this sort of thing is to your taste, you’ve probably already seen it, but see it if you haven’t. It’s fairly epic, and the theme of Never give up! is greatly appreciated. But if you’re not into semi-mystical battle scenes, you may want to give this one a skip.

From Andrew Sullivan:

The way to fight [Trump’s use of white panic] is to highlight his extremism, to show America that mass immigration can be controlled humanely, and aim for the center. But Trump’s rhetoric makes this emotionally impossible for many Democrats who are triggered and appalled by this man’s depravity. This polarizing dynamic all but guarantees a Democratic nominee further to the left on cultural and racial issues than any in recent times, if only to balance the emotional intensity of the Trump base. Our politics has thereby become a kind of tribal Twitter war, a non-discourse in which arguments almost instantly reduce themselves to bigotry, insults, ad hominem attacks, slurs, and deepening intransigence. It is becoming a crude racial battle for power, each side doubling down further and further, rallying their bases with racial rhetoric, reaching a climax in base mobilization in 2020. Democrats may be right that in the long run, in a fast-diversifying America, this kind of white nationalism has an expiration date. And given Trump’s anemic ratings, maybe a landslide in 2020 against him with the right candidate is still possible.

One of the most difficult challenges facing any Trump opponent is to separate the man from his proposals, even those that are throwaways. Why? Because, ideally, proposals exist on their own terms, and should be evaluated as such. When two groups become vociferously opposed to each other, otherwise notable proposals become little more than targets of opportunity. An example, perhaps the only such, of a possibly fine proposal from President Trump was his suggestion, in his United Nations speech that evoked so much laughter, that investigating and helping those nations from which immigration to the United States is originating might be an effective approach to drastically lessening that immigration, and not, by implication, this “the fox is in the henhouse” tactics of walls and mass deportations. As long-time readers of this blog know, I have little use for Trump or the GOP that elected him, but on the issue of immigration, I agree with him on this strategy: what is going on in Honduras and Guatemala and other origin countries is of critical importance to resolving the problem^[1].

More generally, this entire pro-Trump cult vs anti-Trump cult has a negative impact on our entire political culture in the sense that proposals are no longer receiving evaluation without their political context stripped; that is, the first thing the cultists are doing is asking, Who proposed this?, and then reacting accordingly.

It’s dumb. The GOP has been doing it since at least the beginning of the Obama Administration, in the person of the incompetent Senator Mitch “Obama will be a one-term President!” McConnell (R-KY); I suspect political historians will point at Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA) as the true originator of blind political cultism. Now I worry, especially when reading The Daily Kos, that this canker sore has spread to the Democrats.

But the real problem is the “us vs. them” attitude engendered by Trump, his base, and the GOP. Fighting against it is a difficult requirement of being a political adult, especially given the lack of respect Trump has for the critical political procedures, institutions, and traditions of this country.

¹ Not that I took Trump to be serious since, and I have heard nothing more from the conservatives since that speech.

At least when it comes to information and open-mindedness. Here’s David Epstein in WaPo:

This should not be entirely surprising. University of Pennsylvania psychologist Philip Tetlock made a similar finding in a 20-year study that tested the ability of experts to make accurate predictions about geopolitical events. The results, in short, showed that the average expert in a given subject was also, on average, a horrific forecaster. Their areas of specialty, academic degrees and (for some) access to classified information made no difference. Some of the most narrowly specialized experts actually performed worse as they accumulated credentials. It seemed that the more vested they were in a worldview, the more easily they could always find information to fit it.

There was, however, one subgroup of scholars that did markedly better: those who were not intellectually anchored to a narrow area of expertise. They did not hide from contrary and apparently contradictory views, but rather crossed disciplines and political boundaries to seek them out.

Tetlock gave the forecasters nicknames, borrowed from a well-known philosophy essay: the narrow-view hedgehogs, who “know one big thing” (and are terrible forecasters), and the broad-minded foxes, who “know many little things” (and make better predictions). The latter group’s hunt for information was a bit like a real fox’s hunt for prey: They roam freely, listen carefully and consume omnivorously.

And the foxes are much better at forecasting than the hedgehogs, even within the hedgehogs’ discipline. We’ve seen a report like this before here, and it does remain a fascinating subject, doesn’t it? I have to wonder if part of the problem is an emotional attachment by the experts to their particular area of expertise, such that, even unconsciously, they incline their forecasts such that their area of expertise remains important and foremost, when perhaps it diminishes.

A reader remarks on my thoughts concerning American rationality:

Only in a rational world will this mean squat to the election.

Both sides have to play to the independents in order to win, and the independents are the most likely to not be affected by the bonds of cult membership. The absence of those bonds mean the independents have to use something to make their decisions, and a commercial such as the one I proposed, emphasizing the prioritization of commercial profits over the health of small children by the Trump Administration, does lean on rational thought patterns rather than emotion-plucking lies.

Hey, maybe I’m delusional, but I can at least hope.

When all three ex-wives are yelling at you.

The latest installment in the Godzilla series, Godzilla: King Of The Monsters (2019), suffers from an American malady: it tries to explain far too much.

As I thought about this movie, it occurred to me that, in many previous installments, Godzilla has represented the Divine. Recall the Greek gods, the Roman gods, the Scandinavian gods, the Judeo-Christian gods, and that they often behaved in ways that might be described as immoral, erratic, even capricious. If we admit that humans are limited to human thought-patterns and ways, it remains true that we can label the gods, the members of the Divine, as obeying their own, incomprehensible, morality systems. It’s not that they have no impulse control, but that they have their own constraints and requirements, unique to their Divine situation, and attempting to interpret them in a human context is, at best, problematic, and most certainly futile.

And Godzilla? Ignoring the reality that there have been many writers and directors who have used the characters in this saga to their own purposes, we’ve seen him, or her, at a malevolent worst that results in the apparently reasonless destruction of Tokyo (Gojira (1956)), as both a savior and arsonistic destroyer (Godzilla 2000 (1999)), Godzilla as a reckless Earthly guardian (Godzilla (2014) and Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965)), a rather ridiculous parental figure, and a number of Godzilla vs everyone else stories. If we dare to believe Godzilla to be the same essential character in all these stories, and commit the signal crime of ignoring the multiple sources and capabilities of those involved in this story-telling, then perhaps the only conclusion to draw is that Godzilla is some representative of the Divine: occult, violent, and little caring for mankind’s fate.

And, as such, an embodiment of the inexplicable. Attempting to bring Godzilla and the balance of the Divine into the context of mankind is an intellectual error which, quite honestly, destroys the aesthetic of a good Godzilla story. Gojira, for all of its crude production values, portrays a Godzilla that stomps the landscape, going from city destruction to its own apparent termination, at the hand of a suicidal scientist, all for reasons on which we may speculate, yet can never know for certain. It has a certain impressive and horrid beauty to it, a glimpse into the madness of another societal matrix, rudimentary as it may be, that reminds us of the fragility of our own societies, that our concerns about our own speculative Divinities may be for naught when faced with a Godzilla that steps forth with his own agenda in clawed hand.

When Godzilla: King Of The Monsters tries to force a human framework on Godzilla, as well-meaning as it is, it diminishes the central wonder of Godzilla and his mysterious actions. We may think we understand why Godzilla does what he does, and why King Ghidorah must be vanquished, but the legend of Godzilla is diminished.

Along with the rather dismal and predictable human element of the plot, the entire movie is something of a disappointment. There are kaiju movies which are about humanity, such as Pacific Rim (2013), and then there are kaiju movies about the importance of acknowledging that there is the unknown, perhaps even the eternally unknowable – and these kaiju are the embodiment of same.

Godzilla: King of the Monsters makes the mistake of trying to shift from the latter to the former, and fails. If you admire kaiju battle scenes, you may want to watch this, but otherwise I think this is a failure.

I found Matt Ford’s article in The New Republic on the Mississippi electoral system for statewide office rather repellantly fascinating:

Virtually every state in the Union elects its governor and other statewide offices by popular vote. Mississippi does something different. First, a candidate must win a majority of the statewide popular vote. Second, they must also win a plurality of the vote in a majority of Mississippi House of Representatives districts. If a candidate does both, they win. If they don’t, the Mississippi House chooses the winner. As with the Electoral College, the popular vote in Mississippi only matters until it doesn’t.

And why?

Though black voters outnumbered white voters in the state at the time, the 1890 constitution apportioned the state legislature to guarantee a majority of seats would be held by white lawmakers. That apportionment also affected the statewide election plan: Even if a black-supported candidate received a majority of votes, it would be almost impossible for him to clinch victory by also capturing a majority of the state House of Representatives districts. Lawmakers in those districts would then be able to elevate the second-place candidate to the governor’s mansion.

Mississippi’s white leaders did not disguise their intentions. “There is no use to equivocate or lie about the matter,” James K. Vardaman, one of the constitution’s framers as well as a future governor and senator, once boasted. “Mississippi’s constitutional convention of 1890 was held for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics.”

The article continues to discuss the chances of a Federal lawsuit calling for the law to be stricken from the laws of Mississippi, where Mississippi is using as a defense a justification by Chief Justice Roberts himself for not interfering in the recent gerrymandering case of Wisconsin.

But this all seems a bit complex for my tastes. We already know that gerrymandering on a racial basis is not permitted (Miller v Johnson, I believe), and, if the Federal courts are willing to admit that gerrymandering is an instance of the larger category of manipulation of the electoral system for political gain at the expense of the electorate, then it’s not hard to see that this particular case is specifically concerning the manipulation of the electoral system on a racial basis. The Federal judiciary should find for the plaintiffs, in my opinion, simply based on the plain statements of Vardaman, above, back in 1890.

But there’s a deeper sociological, if not legal, issue involved here, an issue of damage. The invocation of a racial basis for selecting leaders tends to forcibly group people by race, and not by more natural interests. I wonder that Mississippi has this, to be frank, hatred-based electoral system, and also happens to be generally acknowledged as one of the unhealthiest^[1] and most backwards^[2] States in the Union.

Coincidental? Causative? Beats the hell out of me. But that the law continues is deeply troubling, given its avowedly racist origins, and it should be expunged, now that the Federal judiciary has the opportunity, because it seems unlikely that the citizens of the State will be able to do so on their own.

And then perhaps Mississippi can work on getting beyond race, as the racists will have one less tool to their hand for perpetuating their hatreds.

¹ According to USA Today, Mississippi is #50 in life expectancy.

² According to this Forbes story, the Mississippi public education system ranks 45th.

Concerning my post on the uptick in abortions in Africa that correlates with a drop in United States funding to those clinics, a reader writes:

Another classic case of politicians imagining themselves to be geniuses, when even the actual geniuses are incapable of predicting the unintended consequences of making a policy change in a complex system of complex systems.

Indeed. I found the subtitle on this NYT article equally fascinating:

If Roe v. Wade were overturned, the number of abortions would fall in these places.

Would it? Or would the women being forced to make that decision because of the closing of Planned Parenthood offices, which provide contraceptive services, as well as the general shadow cast on the entire idea of controlling one’s reproductive behavior, result in higher rates of abortion, child poverty, and childbirth deaths?

My curiosity is merely morbid and need not be satisfied.

Certainly, the chant Send her back!, heard at a recent Trump campaign rally, and presumably directed at Rep Ilhan Omar (D-MN), has its racist salience that makes it worth wondering for how much longer the Trump adherents will turn off their brains and dishonor themselves. But something I’ve not seen in my quick reading of the reactions is something which can undo Trump’s own remarks. First, here’s WaPo‘s report on Trump’s reaction to the controversy:

President Trump broadly declared Friday that no one should criticize the United States while he is president, part of a renewed attack on four minority congresswomen whom he has targeted as un-American.

Trump also praised his supporters who chanted at a rally, “Send her back!,” a refrain directed at one of the lawmakers, ­Somali-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.). The president called the campaign crowd “incredible patriots” — a day after saying he disagreed with the chant.

It’s rare that improvement occurs without prior criticism, whether from within or without. The logical extension of Trump declaring that there should be no criticism of the United States, then, is that he doesn’t want to improve the United States. It’s almost as if President Trump is preaching … treason.

As if the Republicans never criticized President Obama. As if any political leader anywhere has never been critiqued.

It’s the recognition of shortcomings and the elucidation thereof that leads to improvement, not slavish supplies of praise to a narcissistic leader. So if Trump cannot stand a critique of himself or America, well, then we know how much better he’s going to become.

He’s not.

And that hurts the country a lot.

The Minnesota State Fairgrounds is hosting a Street Rod convention this weekend. Here’s pics of a couple of cars we stumbled across.

Which reminds me of my oldest friend’s old Impala.

It’s not particularly surprising to see Republican reactions to Democratic – or former President Obama’s – initiatives going awry when they’re not built on authentic concerns, but rather, it appears, because they suffer from the ol’ Not Invented Here (NIH) syndrome. Why? Republicans let their emotional urges (Democrats / Obama bad!), or worse yet their intellectual failings, drive their reactions, rather than thinking things through. We’ve seen this just recently in this report.

The mark of third-raters.

But here’s another, and potentially more severe, example, from AL Monitor:

The moderate [Iranian President] Rouhani, who came to power with the promise of restoring ties with the West and resolving the nuclear issue, is now at war on two fronts. Outside Iran, he is struggling with Trump, who not only withdrew from the JCPOA but is also preventing European and Eastern countries from trading with Tehran. Domestically, Rouhani is losing a six-year battle to hard-liners and has been seriously weakened by the dire economic situation, which is rooted in the US undermining of the JCPOA. According to some reports, Rouhani’s popularity has fallen below 10%, which is unprecedented.

The recent US sanctions directly against Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei haven’t hurt him, but have put a huge obstacle in the way of any negotiations, giving the hard-liners significant grounds for action while tying Rouhani’s hands tighter.

In reality, the US sanctions and, partly, Europe’s inability to save the JCPOA are gradually radicalizing Iran and its society. Moderates in Tehran risk being accused of betraying their country. They are being undermined and isolated, and their positions are being taken away one by one. For instance, Heshmatollah Falhatpishe, a prominent moderate and pragmatist parliament member, recently tweeted that Iran should give Instex more time. But he’s no longer taken seriously, having just last month lost his position as chairman of parliament’s foreign policy commission to a staunch JCPOA enemy.

I’ve mentioned in a number of posts that the JCPOA, aka the Iran Nuclear Deal, yes, that deal that Trump tore up for reasons he hasn’t truly explained, immensely frustrated both sets of hard-liners, those in the East and the West. I think that anything that makes the Iranian hard-liners shriek with frustrated fury and accuse the moderates of betrayal and such hyperbolic crap indicates something good is happening. Of course, this is predicated on the rational basis that moderates in power in Iran can set a positive example for the Iranian citizens, thus discrediting the hard liners who are least likely to cooperate with us; they want their nuclear weapon ice cream, and they want it Now!

Of course, it is the Islamic Republic of Iran, and it may be foolhardy of me to expect rationality from even their moderate leaders; as a mere interested spectator, it’s difficult to tell if moderate Rouhani would have continued to move Iran further and further away from an extremist position. What seems extremist to us, after all, may seem like the commonest of sense to the Iranian leaders.

This, of course, applies equally well to the Christianist leaders here in the United States. I’m an equal-opportunity suspicious nut-case, folks.

But it remains clear that when the Iranian hardliners cheer, and the Iranian citizen in the street becomes alienated against their Moderate leaders, something has gone seriously wrong with the American policy to isolate Iran, alienate the citizenry against the hard liners, stop engendering terror in the region, and make them drop their nuclear weapon plans. Instead, they have, or soon will, exceed the JCPOA limitations, the citizens scoff at the Moderates, the hardliners, who hate America the most, are poised to take control at the next elections, and at least reportedly the terror incidents continue …

Trump looks like an idiot. Again.

And while the hawks in the Trump Administration may believe an all out assault on Iran will crumble them like cheese, I don’t even need this report to suspect that it’ll turn into yet another decades-long war which further stains the reputations of both America and democracy, stains we can ill-afford in the face of the Republican incompetency since the start of the War in Afghanistan.

Once again, unintended consequences.

The New York Times reports on a major campaign blunder by the Trump Administration:

The Trump administration took a major step to weaken the regulation of toxic chemicals on Thursday when the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it would not ban a widely used pesticide that its own experts have linked to serious health problems in children.

The decision by Andrew R. Wheeler, the E.P.A. administrator, represents a victory for the chemical industry and for farmers who have lobbied to continue using the substance, chlorpyrifos, arguing it is necessary to protect crops. …

I found this article in NewScientist by Claire Wilson interesting:

When US foreign aid for abortion providers stopped in 2001 for eight years, the number of pregnancy terminations in parts of sub-Saharan Africa went up, new figures show.

The rise may have happened because many health clinics that offer abortions also provide contraception services, so more women got pregnant without meaning to, says Eran Bendavid of Stanford University in California. …

Bendavid’s team analysed the provision of contraception and abortion services in 26 African countries between 1995 and 2014, spanning periods when funding was on, then off, then on again. Half the countries were highly affected by the funding changes, but the rest were less dependent on US aid in this area.

Compared with the less dependent countries, the highly affected nations had a 40 per cent rise in abortions when funding for clinics was withdrawn. Contraception use was also lower during this period. “I imagine that many people who support the policy would have a preference for a world with fewer abortions,” says Bendavid. “I would say the policy is counterproductive.”

Suggesting that the demand for control of birth rates is not an elastic, but inelastic quantity. If a family that desires to limit its size at a given point in time cannot obtain proper contraceptives, then it’ll use abortion. Certain religious sects prohibit the use of contraception, thus making the disobedient even more dependent on abortion when they can’t get contraceptive education or supplies because funding has been cut off.

Abortion is the great carrot and cudgel of the conservative side of the spectrum, but the persistence of human need vs fallacious human myth, or reality vs delusion, continues to end in reality’s favor.

President Trump has been selling himself as the military’s best friend. For example, from APnews:

“You also got very nice pay raises for the last couple of years. Congratulations. Oh, you care about that. They care about that. I didn’t think you noticed. Yeah, you were entitled. You know, it was close to 10 years before you had an increase. Ten years. And we said, ‘It’s time.’ And you got a couple of good ones, big ones, nice ones.” — remarks Sunday to service members at Osan Air Base, South Korea.

Which, according to APnews, is false. Or the defense budget:

The White House unveiled its proposed budget for Fiscal Year 2020 and, to the apparent surprise of some military planners, the White House is calling for a top line national defense budget of $750 billion. Pentagon officials had reportedly anticipated a budget of $733 billion, which would have been a 2.4 percent increase over last year’s. They got a 4.7 percent increase instead. According to the supporting documentation, the request is intended to provide the Department of Defense with the resources to “remain the preeminent military power in the world, ensure balances of power in key regions remain in America’s favor, and advance an international order that is the most conducive to U.S. security and prosperity.” [Christopher Preble, Cato At Liberty]

But notice how this is all about the money. Money, money, money. That, reportedly, is what makes Trump tick. But is that appropriate in a government position? And is that metric really appropriate?

In this vein, I found this WaPo opinion piece by Guy Snodgrass, US Navy (ret.), and chief speechwriter for former Trump Administration Defense Secretary Mattis, quite dismaying:

The Pentagon is in far greater trouble because of one simple reason: a lack of leadership.

The Pentagon recently surpassed a previously-unthought-of milestone — 6 ¹ / ₂ months without a Senate-confirmed secretary at the helm. Mark Esper, the president’s new nominee for the position, was the second person to serve as acting defense secretary. The Federal Vacancies Reform Act of 1998 ensured that a third acting secretary — Richard V. Spencer, the secretary of the Navy — temporarily took the helm Monday, as Esper cannot serve as acting secretary while under consideration for the permanent appointment. …

… this long-standing leadership vacuum is compounded by a Pentagon with an acting deputy defense secretary, acting secretary of the Army, acting secretary of the Air Force, acting inspector general, acting assistant defense secretary for international security affairs . . . the list goes on. CNN revealed earlier this month that 19 of the most senior Pentagon positions are either vacant or filled by a temporary acting official. Lower-tier leadership posts are similarly gapped. Friends serving in the Pentagon describe a disordered situation, where no one can speak with confidence regarding the military’s long-term priorities. …

Under any normal circumstances, even a week without a defense secretary could present a dangerous leadership vacuum in the Pentagon. That the position was vacant for more than six months — and that this lack of leadership has become systemic — is shocking. This chaotic security situation emboldens U.S. adversaries, alarms allies and erodes the Defense Department’s ability to retain the talented careerists needed for the military’s long-term health.

It’s a fascinating article which should be read by everyone who has any interest in the politics, and it should not require the reader to be opposed to Trump to be profoundly troubled by the failure of leadership by Trump in this regard.

It’s also important to state the obvious: Money doesn’t solve all problems! That Trump has advocated for a higher budget, and brags about increases in military pay that are actually quite mundane, turns out to be quite irrelevant. This ties directly into the question of identifying the proper metric when measuring his performance. His bringing more money to the military doesn’t necessary mean he’s successful, or even its greatest friends.

He must bring a high level of management skill to the job in order to be rated as competent, and that he has not done.

And the saddest part of this? If the United States should suffer a disaster that is at least partially due to Trump’s leadership vacuum at Defense, it won’t get hung around his neck. Trump is a professional when it comes to avoiding responsibility. So it’s necessary to bring this issue into focus, as has Snodgrass, and to advocate for properly selecting a metric to measure Trump’s performance.

Trump’s obsession with money may be his undoing, and possibly that of the United States as well.

Eleemosynary:

1. Relating to charity, alms, or almsgiving.
2. Given in charity or alms; having the nature of alms
3. Supported by charity [Wiktionary]

Noted in “The Middle Aged Invulnerables (with poll!),” The Geogre, The Daily Kos:

Health care is no eleemosynary transaction (my Henry Fielding word), where prices are listed on a menu board. If you have severe pain above your right hip, in a few inches, warm to the touch, then you will have an appendectomy, and you will discover afterward that the anesthesiologist billed you, and the hospital billed you, and the surgeon billed you, and the internist billed you, and neither you nor they will have any knowledge of whether it is appropriate. After all, you could not have said no, retroactively.

I’m not certain how charity ties in with prices on a menu board, but the balance of the paragraph is a common criticism of market-based medical care – markets demand publicly known prices, among many other things.

Axios reports on a future possible firing by the Trump Administration:

President Trump has told confidants he’s eager to remove Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, according to five sources who have discussed the matter directly with the president.

The state of play: Trump hasn’t told our sources when he plans to make a move, but they say his discussions on the topic have been occurring for months — often unprompted — and the president has mentioned potential replacements since at least February. A source who spoke to Trump about Coats a week ago said the president gave them the impression that the move would happen “sooner rather than later.”

Axios goes on to mention a possible successor, but Kerry Eleveld’s vivid post on The Daily Kos triggered thoughts on the internal culture of the Administration:

Trump has been floating the name of Fred Fleitz as a replacement for Coats, saying he’s heard “great things.” Fleitz was John Bolton’s chief of staff on the National Security Counsel, so that might be one source of Fleitz’s “great” reviews.

But more importantly for Trump, Fleitz went on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business show to criticize Coats’ congressional testimony on North Korea and call for his ouster over his “second-guessing” of Trump. Oh, and in 2017, Fleitz also called the intelligence assessment about Russian interference “rigged.”

“I don’t use this word lightly, I think this assessment was rigged,” Fleitz said. “I think it was rigged to come up with the most negative conclusion possible to hurt Mr. Trump. … I think it was fabricated.”

In an op-ed on FoxNews.com in January 2017, Fleitz similarly wrote, “I also suspect the entire purpose of this report and its timing was to provide President Obama with a supposedly objective intelligence report on Russian interference in the 2016 election that the president could release before he left office to undermine the legitimacy of Trump’s election.”

It’s outrageous, when you think about it. A potential successor attempting to sabotage a high level official in the Administration in hopes of gaining the same position for himself is, I suppose, not unheard of, but for me it’s a signal of the culture of, well, unrestrained ambition that pervades the Administration. DNI Coats, former Senator for Indiana, appears to be an old-line Republican, which means he’s honorable, much like Special Counsel Mueller, and not a member of the greed-greed group within – or perhaps making up – the Republican Party these days.

But there’s no reason to believe that tomorrow’s target won’t be a full-fledged member of the Trump Party. See, we’re talking here about the difference between the good guys and the bad guys. The good guys work together to achieve their goals, and the subsumption of personal ambition to a great degree is the enabling factor behind the success of such groups.

The bad guys? Continual infighting. If you’ve watched The Man In The High Castle (or, to a lesser degree, read the book), it illustrates how the power struggles, the free rein given to ambition and the resultant tolerance for the playing out of that ambition, i.e., the violence and death and abrogation of the law in pursuit of that ambition, is what tears apart such organizations, in particular disillusioning the mass of people who provide the backbone of such movements.

Francisco Franco.

This is not always true, of course: the dictatorship of Francisco Franco lasted decades. although I see Wikipedia states:

… scholars consider Franco as conservative and authoritarian, rather than truly fascist. Historian Stanley G. Payne states, “scarcely any of the serious historians and analysts of Franco consider the Generalissimo to have been a core fascist.”

I am not enough of a student of the ways of fascism and authoritarianism to understand their differences, much less analyze how culture, outside threats, mass psychology, and the mythologies of the culture can play together to hold a leader in his place, but I am aware of those currents. Or we can point to the Soviet Union, a politically repressive and savage nation, hiding behind a collection of prima facie progressive political slogans and whatnot, and most importantly springing from political cultures which were equally if not even more repressive than the Soviets, that survived for seventy years. Context is darn near everything, a facet we ignore every time we go “nation-building”, it seems.

But to return to American soil, I’ve been puzzling over the behavior of AG William Barr. This morning it occurred to me that he may have ambitions beyond the Department of Justice. After all, he’s been approved by the Senate, which means he could move to the leadership of another department with relative ease. I’m not even sure he’d require confirmation by the Senate for such a move.

Or could he be angling towards replacing Pence on the upcoming election ticket? It’s not impossible, as Pence is more or less a zero on the campaign trail – Trump’s the big attraction, and wouldn’t tolerate another big attraction on the ticket with him, so we know Pence is a placeholder. Barr certainly lacks the charisma that supposedly surrounds Trump, so Trump would tolerate him. And after that, he’d be the incumbent VP, ready to assume the mantle of the nomination with Trump’s blessing, assuming a Trump victory in the 2024 campaign. All based on him not displaying competence, but simply pleasing Trump.

The question is whether or not Barr can dine al fresco on the entrails of his competitors without ripping apart the entire movement by exposing naked and ugly ambition. I see Barr as the dark horse in 2020. Let’s see if he makes it onto the ticket.

A few pictures I took when I should have been rescuing tomato plants after the big storm on Monday.

My Arts Editor took offense at all the power and telephone lines and blotted them out, so to an extent these are somewhat artificial.

Solecism:

A solecism is a phrase that transgresses the rules of grammar. The term is often used in the context of linguistic prescription; it also occurs descriptively in the context of a lack of idiomaticness. [Wikipedia]

Noted in this 9 Chickweed Lane comic.