Category Archives: Uncategorized

Much like the attack on Rank Choice Voting (RCV) in Maine, the The New York Times‘ Linda Greenhouse reports on a favored phrase of Republican-appointed judges and justices, and so I see memes are an important part of the Republican arsenal of weapons:

Why is this happening, and why now? To understand why the “second-class right” meme is suddenly penetrating the judicial conversation, we have to begin with Justice Clarence Thomas. He is not the first member of the current Supreme Court to use the phrase; Justice Samuel Alito Jr. used it in his 2010 opinion that extended the analysis of the Heller decision, which had applied only to Washington, D.C., as a federal enclave, to the states. The court was being asked, Justice Alito wrote in McDonald v. City of Chicago, “to treat the right recognized in Heller as a second-class right,” which he said the court would not do.

But it is Justice Thomas who has taken up the phrase as a weapon, using it in a series of opinions over the past four years to accuse his colleagues of failing in their duty to keep pushing back against limitations on gun ownership and use. The opinions were all dissents from the court’s decisions not to hear particular gun-rights appeals.

Followed by echoes in the inferior Federal courts by conservative judges. (For forgetful types, like myself, the 2nd Amendment to the American Constitution is “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.“)

This approach of corrupting honest debate by linking arguments temporally and geographically distributed arguments using emotional phrasing (which is something I deliberately do every time I suggest the GOP is a bunch of second-raters – and I do believe that) is the mark of a sophisticated social messaging campaign. It may not be targeted at the general public, but the community of lawyers is big enough to make it worthwhile. And what entity has made a name for itself in this area?

In light of this previous posting on the possibilities of malicious, anonymous Russian interference in American culture, which I still freely admit is brightly, even enjoyably paranoid, one is left to wonder if the far-right members of the judiciary are being manipulated, to their knowledge or not, by the Russians. After all, it makes little sense to arm teachers, to arm the mentally ill, to make high powered firearms available to those with undetected mental illness – or of a murderous temperament, if that does not fit into the category of mental illness. People are habitually careless and sometimes malicious. We need to understand this. These surprising statements about the 2nd Amendment from Justices Thomas and Alito, an Amendment over which appropriate readings remain highly controversial – and decidedly so, given its ambiguous form – is hardly an acceptable approach to the issue. It ignores the Amendment’s ambiguities and attempts to extend the possibly absurd interpretations as if they’re a settled societal matter – an assertion that is pointedly false.

And that extension of which I spoke leads to my last point. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, we are a country of limited rights, not unlimited rights. For example, yelling FIRE! in a crowded theater may be an example of speech, but if there’s no fire, then your free speech rights do not protect you from arrest, conviction, and punishment.

Therefore, there is nothing wrong with suggesting the right to arms is limited, for if we don’t, then every nitwit with a grudge and a few bucks could go out and buy a full-fledged machine gun. Every attempt to make it illegal would fall under the Alito / Thomas reasoning. And the toll in Las Vegas would have been far higher than the “mere” 50+ we so sadly suffered on that cursed night.

The second-rate meme is a feint, a magician’s trick to distract attention from the real issue of limited rights by slyly invoking emotional thinking in a context that cries out for rational analysis. I use that meme as a descriptive insult of the GOP, supported by the evidence of the last 8 years; these conservative judges are using it as a distraction from the real issues of mass killings of children and adults, a situation which sows chaos in our society – and division in our shared heart.

The long-range strategy to invalidate ranked choice voting (RCV), begun in Maine, continues:

I’ve signed off on the CD2 election result as it’s no longer in federal court. Ranked Choice Voting didn’t result in a true majority as promised-simply a plurality measured differently. It didn’t keep big money out of politics & didn’t result in a more civil election #mepolitics pic.twitter.com/0fEhD1dvAb

— Paul R. LePage (@Governor_LePage) December 28, 2018

Note Stolen Election is scrawled next to LePage’s initials. The goal is to spread the meme that RCV is not a valid voting system. How well this strategy will work is a little questionable in this case, as I doubt a sizable portion of the populace ever views such documents, and while Twitter is popular, I’m not sure this will attract a lot of attention, since soon-to-be-former Governor LePage (R-ME) has been considered a poor governor:

The two most unpopular governors in the country, Republican Mary Fallin in Oklahoma and Democrat Dan Malloy in Connecticut, are both leaving office in January with similarly anemic approval ratings — 17 percent for Fallin and 20 percent for Malloy. Opposing partisans in both states are hoping the sour taste left in voters’ mouths from their tenures will bring electoral dividends next month following two terms out of power.

It’s a similar story with Susana Martinez of New Mexico, Rick Snyder of Michigan and Paul LePage of Maine, three term-limited Republicans who will leave office in January. Fifty-four percent of New Mexicans, 54 percent of Mainers and 50 percent of Michiganders respectively disapproved of Martinez, LePage and Snyder during the third quarter. [Morning Consult]

But spreading the meme does remain part of their strategy.

In concert with this thread concerning the South Carolina GOP’s deepening allegiance to President Trump and Senator-elect Romney’s (R-UT) sharply critical op-ed in WaPo, now the Republican National Committee (RNC) itself is considering protecting President Trump from challengers, according to the Washington Examiner:

Mitt Romney’s scorching critique of President Trump in a New Year’s Day op-ed has sparked a call from within the Republican National Committee to change party rules to protect Trump from any long-shot primary challenge in 2020.

The RNC committeeman representing the Virgin Islands late Tuesday emailed fellow elected members of the national party urging them to change the rules when they convene in New Mexico for their annual winter meeting later this month. Republicans are confident that Trump would hold off any primary challenger, but worry the campaign would derail his re-election.

“Look, the political history is clear. No Republican president opposed for re-nomination has ever won re-election,” RNC committeeman Jevon O.A. Williams said in a email obtained by the Washington Examiner. “Unfortunately, loopholes in the rules governing the 2020 re-nomination campaign are enabling these so-called Republicans to flirt with the possibility of contested primaries and caucuses.”

Note the phrase so-called Republicans. Clearly, the RINO meme is still strong and active among the Republicans, compressing everyone into an automatic bow to President Trump – or a hip-check right out of the GOP.

And will the RNC bow to this inevitable logic and never consider the possibility – nay, certainty – that a weak President Trump running for re-election is inferior to a primary challenger who just might beat him? That’ll measure just how far this profound rot has set in to the Republicans. It’s implicit in Williams’ email, an almost holy belief that Trump is their leader who cannot be betrayed, dumped, or even questioned. He must be protected.

Probably because he’s just not tough enough.

Now perhaps Williams and those who end up agreeing with him view this as an investment on their part. They’ve pledged allegiance to Trump, which takes more than a little political coin, and if they lose him then their political careers are down the drain.

But I think there is an equal part a firm belief in Trump’s charisma and success, persistent despite the failures of the last two years. While willingness to put in one’s lot with a leader is not a measure of a person’s worth, moral or otherwise, the willingness to stick with a third-rater like Trump indicates an inability to evaluate the evidence, an intellectual laziness which does, in fact, signal a second-rate or third-rate intellect.

So will the RNC go along with the proposal? I suspect that as soon as Trump realizes how this proposal will safeguard him from a challenge, he’ll demand it be implemented, long-term consequences be damned.

And the nation will be poorer for it.

One of the salient Special Counsel Mueller mysteries is detailed in this Politico piece:

This month’s three-page summary D.C. Circuit decision revealed a fairly dry set of legal issues that just might conceal a juicy core. The dry issues involved matters of jurisdiction and statutory interpretation fathomed only by elite appellate lawyers, but the potentially juicier underlying issues hinted of fascination: Somewhere, a corporation (a bank? a communications firm? an energy company?) owned by a foreign state (Russia? Turkey? Ukraine? United Arab Emirates? Saudi Arabia?) had engaged in transactions that had an impact in the United States and on matters involved in the special counsel’s investigation. …

And then came Roberts’ surprise Sunday decision. He is the “circuit justice” for the D.C. Circuit, meaning he is the justice assigned to receive emergency and other petitions arising from that circuit. Under Supreme Court rules, the circuit justice may act without consulting his or her colleagues to dispose of routine rulings. So, we should not read too much into the fact that it is the chief justice in particular who acted here.

But we can read a good deal into his decision to intervene at all. Although every judge below agreed there was ultimately no merit to the Corporation’s legal claims, Roberts evidently harbors some doubt. Something in the Corporation’s papers caught his attention. So rather than consigning this appeal to the discard pile with thousands of others, he has blocked the lower courts’ decisions until he can receive the government’s briefs defending those decisions. Those papers must be filed no later than New Year’s Eve. Once he receives the full briefing, he can reject the Corporation’s appeal or he can advance the matter to the full court for consideration.

I have no idea what may be going on, but, on its face, it’s very interesting. Will the information go public if SCOTUS actually hears these arguments, or will this be a closed hearing? Probably the latter.

And, behind the scenes, this means that at least Chief Justice Roberts may have non-public information concerning the Mueller investigation. While I hope Roberts is capable of rulings on various matters without regards to secret information, it’s possible that this information may influence his behavior, both officially and unofficially. For example, he may give Trump only minimal respect, like much of the Federal judiciary has done so, because he doesn’t want to hitch his boat to a sinking ocean liner.

He’s already reprimanded President Trump once for behavior unbecoming a President, but I doubt Trump understood that. Roberts’ future behavior could become very interesting.

Postiche:

1. Something false; a sham.
2. A small hairpiece; a toupee. [The Free Dictionary]

Noted in Agatha Christie’s Partners In Crime.

I see Mitt Romney (R-UT), Senator-elect of Utah, former governor of Massachusetts, and failed Presidential contender, has decided to be the first to the mat to wrestle control of the Republican Party from President Trump, if his op-ed in WaPo is any clue. Here’s where he reached out to the disaffected:

It is not that all of the president’s policies have been misguided. He was right to align U.S. corporate taxes with those of global competitors, to strip out excessive regulations, to crack down on China’s unfair trade practices, to reform criminal justice and to appoint conservative judges. These are policies mainstream Republicans have promoted for years. But policies and appointments are only a part of a presidency.

These are mostly long-time tenets of the Republican Party, with the exception of reforming criminal justice. He also makes a probably debatable call for fiscal responsibility. Why is it misguided? For the Republicans, it’s a talking point, useful in debates, but nothing they’ve taken seriously.

So can Romney wrest control from Trump? I doubt it. Many of the disaffected have actually left the Party, and the rest have fallen into the unfortunate mode of supporting the President regardless of whether or not his positions make sense.

But it is possible Romney is looking to start a new political party, built from those disaffected conservatives as well as conservative-leaning independents. This is a carefully crafted call to rejecting Trump on the basis of how he’s fallen from conservative ideals as well as simple competency.

Will it work? I doubt it. He does not project any recognition of some of the core problems with the conservative movement of the last forty years, and without a good dig at those cancers with the appropriate scalpel, it’s hard to see how he’ll replace Trump with himself.

In case you’ve been hiding under a rock, New Horizons has reached and passed by the Kuiper Belt rock dubbed Ultima Thule sometime in the last 24 hours, and is now in the process of transmitting the data it’s collected. Here’s the latest pic from the latest story on the Johns Hopkins APL web site:

At left is a composite of two images taken by New Horizons’ high-resolution Long-Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI), which provides the best indication of Ultima Thule’s size and shape so far. Preliminary measurements of this Kuiper Belt object suggest it is approximately 20 miles long by 10 miles wide (32 kilometers by 16 kilometers). An artist’s impression at right illustrates one possible appearance of Ultima Thule, based on the actual image at left. The direction of Ultima’s spin axis is indicated by the arrows. Credits: NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI; sketch courtesy of James Tuttle Keane

An exciting time for us space exploration junkies. I’m mostly in it for the drama, of course.

Gary Sargent posts on The Plum Line about how Democrats should negotiate the shutdown with President Trump, and one of his points is inadequately developed:

[Customs and Border Protection commissioner Kevin] McAleenan also said something else on ABC that hints at how Democrats should proceed. He repeatedly stressed that increased economic development aid to the Northern Triangle countries, something the State Department is advocating, would help mitigate the migrant crisis, since many asylum seekers are motivated by desperate poverty at home.

This puts him at odds with Trump’s threats to cut off aid to those countries — and more deeply, is premised on a completely different narrative of the crisis than the falsehood-riddled cartoon version that Trump has adopted as part of his wall push. Getting officials on the record in more detail on these deeper differences would also be useful.

I’ve posted about the short-sightedness of putting up a wall vs investigating why people are abandoning their countries in droves^[1], and it’s good to see that some government agencies have looked into this angle, even if it’s only to send aid.

But it seems to me that Sargent misses a bet here, because he doesn’t suggest that Democrats should incorporate these findings directly into negotiations. That is, I think the next proposal from the Democrats should simply be this:

You get no money for your wall. However, we’ll add $10 billion in aid to the countries from which the immigrants are coming.

And their messaging should emphasize how this will theoretically slow the flow of emigrants.

This will put Trump in a bind, because it’s an eminently sensible, if possibly fruitless, idea that’ll appeal to the left and independents, but the lack of money for the wall will appall President Trump’s handlers at Fox News, as well as his base. If Trump has any ambition for the next two years, not to mention for re-election, he has to appeal to voters beyond his base.

But if he does, his base will hate him.

¹ I cannot think of how to search for those posts at the moment, unfortunately. Bad blogger! The primary point of those posts is that the economic / political activities of the United States, such as subsidizing the export of foodstuffs to those countries, may be ultimately responsible for the movement of these people towards our borders.

The concerns about deepfakes continue, as reported in WaPo:

Airbrushing and Photoshop long ago opened photos to easy manipulation. Now, videos are becoming just as vulnerable to fakes that look deceptively real. Supercharged by powerful and widely available artificial-intelligence software developed by Google, these lifelike “deepfake” videos have quickly multiplied across the Internet, blurring the line between truth and lie.

But the videos have also been weaponized disproportionately against women, representing a new and degrading means of humiliation, harassment and abuse. The fakes are explicitly detailed, posted on popular porn sites and increasingly challenging to detect. And although their legality hasn’t been tested in court, experts say they may be protected by the First Amendment — even though they might also qualify as defamation, identity theft or fraud.

Being a movie star just makes you a bigger target, as one of the biggest stars, Scarlett Johansson, reports:

“Nothing can stop someone from cutting and pasting my image or anyone else’s onto a different body and making it look as eerily realistic as desired,” she said. “The fact is that trying to protect yourself from the Internet and its depravity is basically a lost cause. . . . The Internet is a vast wormhole of darkness that eats itself.”

And, so far, there doesn’t seem to be any plausible approaches to this problem. I’m not saying that there won’t be any, but that, so far, none have come forward to thrust away the encroaching darkness.

So I’ve been musing on a contrarian approach, based on the old parents’ approach to the kid smoking cigarettes:

Here, kid, have thirty more, and finish them in an hour.

And then watch the kid puke all over the place and never smoke again.

That is, I’ve been considering the idea that our country’s elites should commission deepfakes using their own visages. Consider, perhaps, the head of Senator Mitch McConnell doing it with the head of Senator Harris, or perhaps (better yet) with soon-to-be-ex-Speaker Paul Ryan, said heads mounted on suitably young and lascivious bodies. Multiply that by thousands. Involve movie stars, sports stars, broadcasters, governors, zookeepers, your neighbors.

And then flood 8chan and all the other sites currently used by the creators of deepfakes with these videos. Absolutely bomb them. An overwhelming torrent of fake porn involving people who are being abused, or potentially could be abused, but now under their own control. Set up a site named MyDeepFakes.org just to display them.

One of the salient factors motivating the outrage and mortification caused by deepfakes is the old, and now out of date assumption, that video doesn’t lie. People can lie, forget, misremember, and confabulate, but the film, the cold and objective eye of technology, does not lie. That is one of the underlying bulwarks of humanity’s romance with technology.

And now that bulwark is being corrupted. It’s becoming a myth.

So, if we can’t stop the corruption, let’s wipe out that myth. If deepfakes of an obviously ludicrous nature become easily available to everyone, we can begin the process of removing concerns that someone may actually believe a fallacious deepfake. This could be a game changer. Consider this remark by media critic and deepfake victim Anita Sarkeesian, from the same WaPo article:

Sarkeesian said the deepfakes were more proof of “how terrible and awful it is to be a woman on the Internet, where there are all these men who feel entitled to women’s bodies.”

“For folks who don’t have a high profile, or don’t have any profile at all, this can hurt your job prospects, your interpersonal relationships, your reputation, your mental health,” Sarkeesian said. “It’s used as a weapon to silence women, degrade women, show power over women, reducing us to sex objects. This isn’t just a fun-and-games thing. This can destroy lives.”

But she is right for only so long as videos are taken as serious evidence of reality. Destroy that myth, and most of the damage can no longer be inflicted by these despicable moral children, because that damage depends on the credibility of the medium, and this proposal tries to destroy that medium.

I actually do hesitate to put this thought forth. After all, objectivity is an important facet of the scientific method, and invalidating technology that has provided objectivity is somewhat dismaying. But if no other solution can be found, this counter-attack may be the only way to keep our society sane. I can see block clubs where everyone agrees to contribute photographs of their heads, from a number of angles, and a fee, and a few weeks later there are a thousand videos of everyone on the block having sex with everyone else on the block.

Or, gratifyingly, imagine receiving a blackmail email from some dud threatening to send a video of you having sex with someone other than your spouse, to your spouse, and your reply is “Hey, see this link where I’m doing it with President Trump, it’s up on FB where my spouse has already seen it, isn’t it cool you dud?”

It’s enough to make a Bishop’s head spin.

The Wheel of Fortune, Hortus Deliciarum, copy of miniature from Manuscript by Herrad of Landsburg (1130-1195), Hohenburg Abbey, Alsace.

This semi-academic book, published by Peter Turchin and Sergey A. Nefedov in 2009, is on the topic of how societal structures and population interact. The title SECULAR CYCLES refers to demographic cycles lasting a minimum of a century.

CHAPTER 1, the introduction and most interesting chapter, briefly fills in the background of the subject, covering earlier theories ranging from the simple Malthusian conjecture concerning population and resources, through Monetarist theories, to Marxist thought on the matter; each receives criticism, mostly in the realm of their failures to explain the data as it is understood. It establishes some of the key concepts and terminology used by academics, problems with data collection and the importance of distinguishing raw data from trends. Careful consideration of this area will prove key to novice readers such as myself.

Structural-demographic theory is then defined:

In this book we examine the hypothesis that secular cycles – demographic-social-political oscillations of very long period (centuries long) – are the rule rather than the exception in large agrarian states and empires.

The demographic portion of the theory draws heavily on Malthusian theory, introducing important concepts such as carrying capacity, resources, etc. The social portion defines elites (the owner of rents) vs commoners (payers of rents), and how the former extract resources from the latter. The political portion of the theory concerns the actions of the State, which appears to be the important contribution of the authors. The State provides, or fails to provide depending on its health, law & order as well as other services, such as public health and (unmentioned, I think) currency support, an important part of a healthy economy.

From here we progress to the two phases of the cycles.

In the integrative phase, particularly the first segment or subphase, the commoner (peasants, serfs, or whatever the local term might be) population is growing, the elite population is relatively small and unified, and the State is more in less in agreement with the elites, strong, and effective in its putative tasks of maintaining order. External, successful wars are not inconsistent with this phase, especially if they add territory into which the expanding population may move, thus relieving pressures which will lead to the second phase, below. The economy is perking along, often resulting in a period characterized as a Golden Age in retrospect. But as the integrative phase grows long in the tooth, overpopulation, defined in the context of carrying capacity of the land, forces the per capita (or per household) income of the commoners downward, while prices increase. During this stagflation subphase, the elites enjoy their Golden Age and, crucially, their numbers increase beyond reason.

The disintegrative phase’s beginning is marked by one or more crises of either exogenous or endogenous source. Commoner populations decline precipitously from either migration or mortality, and the elites enter crisis as their true basis of wealth, the commoners, suddenly decrease in number. The elite crisis results in the depression subphase, marked by often extended, vicious civil wars. The violence discourages the commoners from basic economic activity, thus depressing replacement rates of commoners, while elites are busy exterminating themselves. The State is often broke and unstable, and sometimes in danger of being captured by the elites. The depression subphase often lasts several generations, until the elites become tired of the warring and dying, and have been reduced to a more reasonable number. The peace permits the commoners to venture forth from their sanctuaries, grow food, and raise their replacement rate, marking the beginning of the integrative phase of the next secular cycle.

To say Chapter 1 is the most interesting is not to denigrate the following chapters. I had envisioned these sections, which are case studies of how well structural-demographic theory fits the data available, to be dry and boring. To the extent possible, however, Turchin and Nefedov’s presentation is interesting, using proxies where raw data is not available, such as the temporal distribution of coin hoards or indictments for infanticide, and referring to lurid episodes (assassinations, massacres) from time to time. Both spark the imagination!

King Edward II of England, hapless victim of demographics?

The case studies are of the Plantagenet and Tudor-Stuart periods of England, the Capetian and Valois periods of France, the Republican and Principate periods of Rome, and the Muscovy and Romanov periods of Russian history. Since I’m neither a historian nor an avid reader of any of these particular historical subjects, these were relatively new to me, and thus interesting.

My Takeaways

As a reminder, this book’s conclusions are confined to agrarian societies, defined as societies where at least 50% of the population is working the land, and often it’s a far higher percentage. Attempting to apply their conclusions to today’s societies is undoubtedly an error, but quite tempting.

Perhaps most salient for me is that the three population groups, commoners, elites, and State, have the same motivations – namely, to survive and prosper – but define survival in starkly different terms.

The commoner faces the existential problem, as they work the land, pay the taxes, face stark death if the crop fails, and a brooding future as their numbers increase.

The elite’s definition of survival is to continue within their social stratum, not just as individuals but as families or clans. To sink back to the commoner level is to fail, and many or even most were willing to risk their lives in military service or civil wars to retain their positions.

Those of the State, usually of a monarchical position, look to maintain their positions at the center of power. While certain of these are willing to accept a degradation of status in exchange for continued life, most persist until they are ended violently in the disintegrative phase.

This polymorphic definition but constant framework suggests the basic psychology, perhaps evolutionary psychology, which drives the secular demographic cycle in concert with the implacable realities of limited food sources, land arability, and organisms dependent on ingesting the former for continued existence while reproducing without concern for the future – for most organisms, a simple, untranscendable reality – has to do with the relative definition of survival. It would be interesting to examine how and if a nominally celibate religious option, such as joining the Catholic orders or certain Protestant religious groups, acts as a safety valve for population pressure.

Another thought that occurred to me has to do with proxies. While I enjoyed how they used proxy metrics to at least measure the dynamics of the important metrics, if not the raw values themselves, I was a little disappointed that they didn’t mention the potential logical fallacies involved. Perhaps they expect that the trained reader is well aware of them, but for my own edification I had to realize that a proxy may suffer from the logical fallacy of affirming the consequent. That is, a proxy is implicitly a statement that

if dv changes then pv changes in some predictable manner

where dv is the desired value of the target metric, pv is the proxy value in a related metric, and predictable manner means some function f can be applied to dv such that

f(dv) = pv

and f is a reversible function. That is, it’s not a trapdoor function in the sense that it’s not easily calculated in reverse – a simple example is the exponential function, f(x) = a^x, where calculating the xth root of some value is not nearly as simple as calculating the exponential value. The usefulness of a proxy value correlates directly to how easily the transformation function f(dv) can be reversed into a function g such that

g(pv) = dv

I’m a little off point here, so the fallacy which worries me is that it’s difficult to prove that the relation between a desired value and/or its dynamics and a proxy value and/or its dynamics for a desired measurement is an if and only if statement, and if it’s not, then it’s possible some independent, and uninteresting value, may be moving that proxy value. For example, at one point Turchin and Nefedov use the recorded heights of military recruits as a proxy for measurement of the available food rations. But what if a new religious cult has come into vogue that forbids consumption of certain foodstuffs containing the nutrients which boost people’s heights? Using this simple proxy may seem to show oncoming famine, when in reality it was simply a cult becoming popular.

That’s just something to keep in mind, especially for the untrained reader, like myself.

Conclusions

I dove into this book in the belief that demographics are, as ever, humanity’s future, and I came out of it with that belief only bolstered. The details of how the demographics change, even if confined to agrarian societies, was fascinating and instructive in suggesting that the evolutionary survival strategy of boundless reproduction appears to lead inevitably to the human tragedies of war, famine, and disease.

War is the fierce battle over resources as they become scarce relative to the number of people demanding them, whether they be for survival or for maintenance of societal position.

Famine comes when that battle over resources actually blots out those very resources over which the battle began, or when exogenuous factors, such as climate change (think of a super-volcano explosion cooling the world’s atmosphere into a mini-Ice Age).

And disease often ravages us when our numbers grow to the point where we’re too crowded and our medical knowledge cannot compensate.

If this is a subject of interest to you, it’s worth a read.

Recommended.

During our recent trip to Traverse City, MI, to visit my Arts Editor Mom, she took us to see a locally famous Christmas display, and I thought it was nice enough to take pictures. Unfortunately, the smartphone is a sub-optimal choice when it comes to night-time pics, but here’s the best of what we did take.

These two illustrate the general effect, if not the size.

Here we have some lovely animals which we suspect are hand crafted.

And here’s a few more random decorations.

It was far more impressive than these poor pictures may indicate.

The essence of goodness is being short, the essence of evil is height and long noses. Every child should know this.

The silence and paucity of dialog cards in Cinderella (1914 – yes, a silent movie) forced me to pay more than normal attention to the gestural content of this movie, and the sometimes ambiguous content of these old scenes illustrating this old folk tale, whatever might be said about their competence at telling that familiar story, brought into a vivid relief the alternate view of this story.

Classically interpreted as a karma story, the problems for the tale begin with the observation that the Prince’s motivations in searching for a wife do not end with the normal urge to have a wife and a family, but with the additional and unusual duty to continue the royal line. This leads to the question of how Cinderella’s future will turn out, since she’s potentially reduced to the role of breeding stock for the royal family, and no matter how nice the royal family might be, a monarchy is difficult to justify, a priori, as a governmental system. History has indelibly taught us that no family has consistent access to the sort of wisdom required to run a country, even a small country. In fact, the most difficult task a country faces is discovering how to reliably find policy-makers who will wisely lead the country forward.

With this in mind, Cinderella then moves from her initial role as the oppressed daughter, barely a member of the family as her step-sisters have pride of place, into a role where she’ll enable a ruling family to continue their reign, which may end up wrecking the country.

And what of her qualifications? While it’s inarguable that the fairy-godmother selects her for, shall we say, promotion based on her kindness, this is accentuated through contrast with her wicked step-sisters, who mistreat her and others. Why is Cinderella the victim? Once again, the motivation is based on blood lines, as Cinderella is a virtual Outsider in her own family (in this version, where is dear old Dad anyways?), now headed by the equally wicked stepmother. This innate reliance on blood relations in both principal families of the story speaks to the evolutionary drive to propagate the genes which have so far resulted in successful progeny, with little regard for the more abstract concepts of justice which better society.

But back to her qualifications, and, at least in this portrayal of the story, it appears to consist of her beauty and her apparent financial endowment, which is the illusion provided by the fairy godmother. There’s no apparent appreciation of the intellect or wisdom she might bring to the problem of ruling a country.

In other words, taking this story to heart is to revert to an older, unenlightened time. Don’t do it.

It’s a fun production to watch, and I counted at least four nose prostheses during the movie; the still, above, suggests a fifth I missed during the performance. If it were only the wicked stepmother and her daughters bearing the devices, then we could take them to suggest how to identify the bad guys, but the King & Queen also have them, so either this hypothesis is falsified, or there’s a lot more going on behind this story than is present in most renditions of this story. Special effects are charmingly effective, and if I thought Prince Charming looked a bit like a doofus, no doubt he was quite the hot pistol when the movie is made, as the actor, Owen Moore, was married to lead Mary Pickford at the time.

But the real treat of the movie was the live musical accompaniment. We saw this at the Music House Museum in Traverse City, MI, in an informal cinema setting, and the music was provided by Dave Calendine, an accomplished organist who basically played what he felt was appropriate for each scene. He later explained to my Arts Editor that this was how the movie was originally presented 104 years ago (precisely!), and that he considers it an art form worthy of resurrection.

I wouldn’t quite recommend it, but we had a lot of fun. If you can see it at the Music House Museum, do so, and if they invite you upstairs to inspect how one of their music machines work, take it. We were fascinated at the elderly machines, still slogging along.

Paul Waldman in The Plum Line argues that there’s only one way to end the government shutdown, and that’s for the Democrats and the Republicans to do the impossible – ignore the Executive:

So the only answer may be for everyone, Democrats and Republicans alike, to ignore President Trump. Act as though he doesn’t exist and this has nothing to do with him.

By which I mean that members of Congress should shut their ears to Trump’s tweets and threats and fulminations, pass something that House Democrats and Senate Republicans can live with, and then dare Trump to veto it. Because I doubt he has the guts.

There’s two problems with Waldman’s proposal.

First, the Republicans already had that opportunity. The House and Senate had already substantially agreed on a bill to end the shutdown, but the Republicans in the House retreated when faced with an enraged Trump. The flip side of being a member of The Party of Trump is that you have to be his lap dog, or you won’t stand a chance of winning an election for dog-catcher, much less a substantive elective position, in any district controlled by the Trumpists – and, so far as the Republicans go, that’s most of them. The President is a vindictive, petty man, unleavened with wisdom or even cunning, and what that means for the hopefuls in the Republicans Party is that they can no longer exercise good judgment on certain topics popular with the Trump base, such as immigration reform. It is true they can defy him on more obscure topics, such as most areas of foreign relations – but most members lack relevant expertise.

Second, it doesn’t matter if Trump has the guts to veto the legislation, because he’s not the one making such decisions. It’s Fox News making those decisions. All they have to do is appeal to Trump’s inherent sense of victimization and remind him that he’s betraying his base, and he’ll veto the bill, and then he’ll storm and threaten and pound his fist.

And the Republicans will melt, because they don’t dare exercise good judgment.

When I heard Fox News was manipulating the President into rejecting the shutdown bill, I had some hopes the Republicans would show themselves to be mature adults, finally, now that many of them are leaving Congress, but this was a fool’s hope, thankyouverymuch. I don’t know if Trump is going to blink or if the Dems will cave, but the best Dem strategy may be to sit tight, investigate Trump when they come into control of the House, and let Trump stew and take responsibility for his shutdown.

And perhaps the Democrats can take advantage of the situation by labeling this adventure as the #TrumpShutdown. And the wall? Resurrecting an old but deadly Republican curse, label it the #TrumpBoondoggle.

Because that’s what it is.

Murder, My Sweet (1944) is a bit of a mixed bag. An adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, a noir crime novel by Raymond Chandler, which I’ve read in the last year, its fidelity to the novel is somewhat mixed, and of course that weighs on the audience familiar with the novel.

Taken on its own, it’s a fairly tight story of Phillip Marlowe, Private Investigator, who is hired to find a woman named Velma by a huge man, Moose Malloy.  In a bit of a jarring interjection, Marlowe is also hired by another man, Marriott, to assist in the ransoming of a woman’s jade jewels from some thieves. At the exchange point, however, Marriott is sapped to death, and Marlowe is attacked and loses consciousness. He awakens, finds his dead client, and ends up chatting with the police, who are a suspicious lot.

Back at his office, a woman reporter braces him for information, but he brushes her off until she reveals she knows more than she should. Soon enough, he discovers her last name is Grayle, which matches a name he already knows – Helen Grayle, owner of the stolen jewels.

Marlowe and the young Grayle repair to the Grayle estate, where Marlowe discovers Helen Grayle is young, shapely, and married to the elderly Mr. Grayle, himself the father of the faux-reporter. He’s soon hired to continue to hunt for the jade – and nearly seduced by Helen. She knows a name the police have mentioned, Anthor, a man working a blackmail con on troubled, rich women.

Marlowe plans on talking to Anthor, but Malloy shows up and drags him to Anthor. Malloy wants his woman, Anthor the jewels – and Marlowe a little relief from being pushed around. Not giving up information, he’s slugged and drugged, but escapes.

After a few more plot twists, we discover Helen at the Grayle beach house. She’s at work on manipulating Marlowe into doing some dirty work for her, and Marlowe gives her reason to believe he’s bought. But when he returns the next night to report on his progress, Malloy is with him. While Malloy waits outside for his woman, Marlowe finds himself in a double cross with Helen, and then things get tricky as Mr. Grayle and his daughter also show up. Eventually, Helen is revealed to be Malloy’s Velma, and both end up dead, along with Mr. Grayle, and Marlowe is blinded.

In a final scene, Marlowe gets the girl.

And, in a supposedly noir film, that’s right out.

While noir is often about just desserts, it’s rarely about happiness or rewards for the good guys. It’s a chronicle of people pursuing their base urges with abandon, and the unhappy results which attend not only them, but those around them.

And for a noir film, it’s hard to see those motivations. That there are attempts to convey such characterizations is definitely true, but they feel ineffective. Perhaps they ended up on the TV channel’s cutting room floor (TCM was the purveyor), but I doubt it. It just didn’t quite feel real.

Part of the problem might have been the coincidence of Malloy looking for his woman, and her being in another of Marlowe’s cases – assuming that was a coincidence. Perhaps Anthor had told Malloy, but Malloy, given how he’s depicted, would have simply charged into the Grayle estate; hiring Marlowe was far too subtle for Malloy. In the book, Malloy is in fact not connected with Anthor, as I recall.

And that connection to the book may be part of the problem. The book is more vivid, more clever, and more expansive than the movie, as well as being more racist. I cannot help but see the movie through the lens of the book. I appreciated how the movie managed to get at least a few of Chandler’s colorful similes into the movie through Marlowe’s inner narrative, but it’s not really enough.

And the happy ending really ruined it. For me, anyways.

But don’t let me discourage the interested audience member from seeing it. It’s not poorly acted, nor poorly constructed, although sometimes the audio is a bit muffled. There are worse ways to spend a snowy night.

Yesterday’s market jump was among the biggest ever, much less this year. But between yesterday’s absurd jump in market indice values (the Naz over 5%), and today’s drop in indice value, at least as of this typing, there’s been a lot of sophisticated hand-waving as to the reasons, but no one has mentioned the obvious.

Yesterday, the President was out of the country, finally visiting a war zone, and taking advantage of this opportunity to lie to them. Today, he’s back.

I think investors thought he might take advantage of being out of the country to not return. That is, given his unprecedented legal troubles (“No President has ever had legal troubles like I’ve had!”), I would be unsurprised if he sought a haven in a country lacking an extradition treaty with the United States, and tried to run the Executive from abroad.

And then, of course, today’s drop reflects the disappointment upon his return.

It makes the most sense, after all.

Over the 30-odd years of consciousness I’ve had (which is to say, once I made it past the age of 25), some aspects of the United States have been encouraging, and some have been quite bewildering. In the latter category I can thrust many organizations and beliefs that, honestly, have seemed anti-rational. Some of these are a-political, such as quack medicines (homeopathy, apitherapy, acupuncture, anti-vaxxers), which can be understood, if not excused, on the theory that medicine and healing are hard subjects.

But others have found political alignments. I can think of gun rights, creation science, religious sects, movements for special religious rights, the “stewardship” just means environmental rape movement, End of Days folks, and perhaps a few which escape me at the moment, all of which have a general conservative alignment. Hell, let’s throw in the Newt Gingrich-inspired politics of No Compromise With The Liberals, because, while I can see the impetuous embracing it, I do not expect to see an entire political party being so foolish as to follow it.

Being an independent, I should, of course, have a list for the liberals, but oddly enough I don’t. I daresay some of the more daring theorists on the left do get things wrong – which I don’t fault if they’re willing to admit to it. The Antifa movement probably belongs on the liberal list of the anti-rational, although I haven’t dug into that particular movement deeply. Andrew Sullivan’s remarks concerning their University, anti-liberal declarations and actions do suggest they are anti-rational.

To return to my point, as a young person, you ambitiously think you should be able to understand these sorts of things, even if you don’t agree, but as you grow older you come around to the perspective that perhaps you’re just not bright enough to comprehend their conclusions, and you just have to accept that.

This conclusion may turn out to be wrong, though.

(What follows is premised on one data point, about which much is merely guessed at, and a huge amount of speculation. Take it with an open mind and perhaps a bit of liquor.)

There’s an implicit assumption in that position that these fellow Americans, however much I might find their position(s) to be incomprehensible, have at least reached them using honest processes and facts. But as we’ve learned during the Trump Administration, at least one of the sources of this inexplicable behavior, the NRA, has come under investigation by the FBI for possibly improper financial ties to Russia.

That’s my data point. Merely an investigation.

So let’s expand on it a trifle. Let’s stipulate, not at all unreasonably, that the Russians used their financial ties to influence the top leadership of the NRA, a group long extremist and long entrenched in that position. For example, Wayne LaPierre has been part of the NRA leadership since 1991, damn near 30 years now. And their agenda of unrestricted gun rights, the rise and fall of Dr. Lott, the use of simplistic logic concerning the arming of everyone in America, the misreading of the Second Amendment to the Constitution, and the dangers of liberals to “authentic America” has been an undoubtedly divisive approach to communicating with American society.

And who would benefit most from a divided, at each other’s throats America? Why, its greatest adversary: Russia.

It is a daunting thought to wonder just how much your fellow Americans have been influenced by a subtle, malignant national adversary, but it’s not hard to imagine. America is often a provincial place that barely believes there’s anywhere outside of its national borders, and the very thought that the whispers in our fellow Americans’ ears might be of some entity inimical to all they hold dear would and will strike them as nothing more than paranoia.

My evidence is circumstantial, without a doubt. I plead guilty to that. But I have to note that if we add in the idea of a national adversary, such as Russia, working to damage us subtly through division, then that explains many of the otherwise incredible conclusions my fellow Americans reach. For example, we clutch the results of science and technology to our very breasts, in so very many fields, and yet a substantial portion of the American citizenry is mortally offended at the very idea of biological evolutionary theory – despite the fact that both biology and medicine are premised on its very existence, and that many examples of evolution may be found in the paleontological record. Is it so hard to visualize a malignant Russia supplying financial and ideological aid to the Discover Institute, the prime supplier of the utterly ludicrous creation science position of Intelligent Design? No, it’s not. I’m not suggesting that they needed to create it, since opposition to evolutionary theory has existed for just as long as evolutionary theory has existed – but simply boosting what would otherwise be an obscure position populated by loonies is an easy enough thing to do, if you have national resources with which to do it.

One more example: the obduracy of the Republicans over the last twenty years. It is an aphorism that elections have consequences, and a tradition that the parties will cooperate in governing the nation. Furthermore, it’s compromise is good policy, as it permits us to link arms and dip our toes into what may be quicksand, rather than abhor the “enemy” and tumble headfirst into treacherous currents. The Republicans have demonstrated the foolishness of obduracy time over time since the 90s, between farming legislation that left egg on their faces, the passing of the ACA without any Republican support in the face of soaring health insurance rates which left even software engineers financially gasping, and a Republican hypocrisy towards Federal financial matters of a magnitude which left the serious observer breathless at its brazen dishonesty; and, no doubt, other examples.

Many, many attempts were made to explain these frankly crass and dishonorable Republican behaviors, but one that was hardly ever mentioned was the possibility that their behaviors were neither the result of inborn character defects nor simple corporate corruption, but the subtle influence, financial and cultural, of a national adversary who found the Republicans a good subject for manipulation. Not that the left has not been the subject of manipulation during the Cold War, for this has been well-documented.

But now it may be the Republicans’ turn.

OK, enough with the wide-eyed speculation, because, beyond the nugget of investigation of the NRA, there’s nothing definite, nothing to wrap around our hands around. But, if you stipulate it, then you have ask:

How do we fix it? How do you overcome conservative denial that their culture has been controlled by an enemy? By what icons do you draw their eyes from the prisms through which they view anything and demonstrate that they’ve been misled?

In some fields, it’s a simple case of logic. In others … the present generation, and perhaps the next, will simply have to die out. Some problems cannot be fixed.

But it’s something worth contemplating.

With regard to the Maine contest for the seat of incumbent Rep. Bruce Pouliquin (R-ME), the game – for now – is over:

With two courts ruling against him, the Republican will no longer dispute Jared Golden’s election, but maintains that Maine’s voter-approved system is unconstitutional and illegal.

Rep. Bruce Poliquin on Monday dropped his legal challenge to the ranked-choice election in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in which he lost his seat in the U.S. House.

In a statement he released on Twitter on Christmas Eve, the two-term Republican said he continues to believe ranked-choice voting is unconstitutional, but “it’s in the best interests of my constituents and all Maine citizens to close this confusing and unfair chapter of voting history.”

Press-Herald

The real point, beyond the termination of Rep. Pouliquin’s attempt to retain his Congressional seat, is that this is not a final determination in the battle over ranked-choice voting (RCV). Indeed, Pouliquin continues to reiterate his claim that RCV is confusing, unfair, and illegal. To the first two points, he presents no evidence but his own personal and irrelevant testimony, and two federal courts have disagreed with his third point.

This may be just the first step in a long campaign by the GOP against RCV, since “first past the pole” voting is far more to their advantage, while RCV favors the more fragmented nature of liberal politics. I expect more court challenges to RCV in the future, at least at the Federal level, and I also continue to believe this may be one of the more important court campaigns of the future.

I’ve previously mentioned the lame-duck sessions in Wisconsin and other states, which are passing legislation to strip incoming Democratic office-holders of the powers traditionally associated with those offices. In a related development, it appears the Republicans don’t really take voter-approved initiatives seriously, as Steve Benen notes:

In Florida, for example, voters easily approved Amendment 4, which is set to restore the voting rights of an estimated 1.5 million former felons. Florida Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis (R), a former far-right congressman, is now “slow walking the implementation” of the voter-approved measure.

And in Utah, voters approved a measure legalizing medical marijuana, prompting the Republican-led legislature to intervene and pass a more restrictive measure – supplanting the policy approved by Utahans.

The question that may come to mind is whether or not voters of all stripes will be outraged at this usurpation of voter privilege. Regardless of whether or not you approve of any particular initiative, or the entire concept of voter-initiated legislation/constitutional amendments, decisions by State legislatures to ignore or attenuate this aspect of democracy must be unsettling.

With this in mind, I’m here to report that, in a recent visit with my Arts Editor’s family, outrage has already been expressed at these GOP power grabs, and this in a conservative part of the country. I’m beginning to suspect the Republican Party is in the process of handing a real big hammer to the Democrats for the 2020 election, if only the Democrats can recognize and use it effectively.

In a way, it’s not surprising that the second- and third-raters who make the leadership of the Republican state parties would commit an unforced error of this sort (repression of anti-gerrymandering measures, as may be happening in Michigan, is more of a forced error, I’ll grant). It’s ever the curse of third-raters that they can’t think beyond the end of their prejudices.

But that doesn’t mean the Democrats can effectively take advantage of this set of blunders.

The bitcoin phenomenon continues to fascinate. Somewhere on this thread back a few months, I commented on the energy costs incurred to calculate new bitcoins. This is becoming a bigger and bigger factor in its viability, as Douglas Heaven notes in NewScientist (15 December 2018, paywall):

The blockchain is kept going by miners, who run expensive, energy-hungry computers in exchange for the chance to be rewarded with bitcoins each time they update the ledger. In the boom times, mining operations sprang up in places with cheap sources of electricity, essentially as a licence to print money. But as bitcoin falls in value, miners are being paid less and less. Unable to cover electricity and hardware costs, many are packing up.

“You have to constantly explore to find cheap power,” says Idon Liu at Node Haven, a company that provides cloud computing services to miners. With bitcoin around the $4000 mark, you need to be buying electricity at no more than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour to break even, he says. But it is hard to find power that cheap. “Now we’re at $4000, people are getting nervous,” says Liu. “They are dumping hundreds of thousands of machines.” Last month, GigaWatt, a large mining operation near Seattle in Washington, went bankrupt. Pictures online show miners in China clearing out wheelbarrow-loads of servers.

The editors of NewScientist pile on in an editorial:

But here is the good news: we should be celebrating bitcoin’s downfall. What began as an interesting experiment has morphed into an environmental disaster. It is estimated that running the bitcoin network now consumes 45.5 terawatt-hours per year of electricity – enough to power more than 4 million homes in the US. As the world seeks to cut down on our energy use, shrinking bitcoin seems like an easy win.

It’s hard to argue. As I said previously, I don’t disagree that currencies controlled by governments are subject to abuses. Indeed, the recent controversy over President Trump’s alleged interest in removing Fed chair Jerome Powell has highlighted the acknowledged dangers of letting amateurs get their hands even near the levers of monetary policy, never mind the actual printing presses.

However, exposing currencies to open markets, inexperienced users, and speculators, and powering them using a technology which is, ultimately, endangering civilization, is beginning to appear to be a mistaken experiment. If most or all of our electrical grid were supplied from carbon-neutral sources, and there was plenty, it’d be worth leaving bitcoin in operation as a human experiment, and let the pieces fall where they may. But in the absence of an overwhelming advantage to bitcoin, its energy demands are making it a flawed approach to the problem of fiat currencies.

Ever have that uncomfortable feeling when you agree with someone you loathe? Andrew Sullivan may be having that in connection with Trump’s surprise announcement of withdrawal from Syria:

Or consider what a shocked Lieutenant General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. of the Marines, the incoming commander of Central Command opined after hearing the news of Trump’s withdrawal of 7,000 troops from Afghanistan yesterday: “If we left precipitously right now, I do not believe [the Afghan forces] would be able to successfully defend their country. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I think that one of the things that would actually provide the most damage to them would be if we put a timeline on it and we said we were going out at a certain point in time.”

Get that? After 17 years, we’ve gotten nowhere, like every single occupier before us. But for that reason, we have to stay. These commanders have been singing this tune year after year for 17 years of occupation, and secretaries of Defense have kept agreeing with them. Trump gave them one last surge of troops — violating his own campaign promise — and we got nowhere one more time. It is getting close to insane. Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them.

We could just conclude that Trump, like a broken clock, is at occasionally, if accidentally right. I have little opinion on what to do about Syria, which is just another example of the lethal politics the inhabitants of those parts seem to indulge in far too casually.

But, more importantly for the United States, is the lack of leadership that President Trump has once again demonstrated. At heart, he’s an autocrat, the last thing America needs. He should have initiated and led a national debate on just what sort of intervention, if any at all, we should be engaging in, using the debate to inform the electorate as to what costs we might expect to incur, both tangible and intangible, and how intervention, or lack thereof, fits in with our strategic goals and moral character.

Trump did none of this. Perhaps this is just a maneuver on his part to force Mattis out. Maybe he had heartburn. Maybe … pick your random reason of choice. The point is, Trump has lost the confidence of everyone outside of the Trump Echo Chamber in any wisdom he has in anything. Even real estate.

Andrew may be completely correct in condemning our troops presence in Afghanistan and Syria. Maybe Trump is doing the right thing. But he did it absolutely in the wrong way, and therefore does not deserve any real credit, no matter how much historians praise the move 50 years from now.

This is why the instrumentality of government must move in approved ways, for otherwise confidence is lost.

Spaceweather.com reminds me that deep space probe New Horizons is still functioning out there in the Kuiper Belt. If, like me, you were thrilled with its pictures of Pluto from three years ago, you should be ready to thrill again, because its current, and last, target, Ultima Thule, has mysteries of its own:

Last year, astronomers watched a distant star pass behind Ultima Thule. Starlight winked in and out in a pattern suggesting an elongated object with two bulbous lobes. Ultima Thule could be a binary system. You would expect the reflected brightness of such an object to vary as it rotates in the sunlight. Yet Ultima Thule does not behave that way. What’s going on? New Horizons science team members have different ideas. “It’s possible that Ultima’s rotation pole is aimed almost right at the spacecraft,” speculates Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute. Such an alignment, however, is unlikely.

“Another explanation,” says the SETI Institute’s Mark Showalter, “is that Ultima may be surrounded by a cloud of dust that obscures its light curve–much the same way that a comet’s coma often overwhelms the light reflected by its central nucleus.” 

“A more bizarre scenario is one in which Ultima is surrounded by many tiny tumbling moons,” suggests University of Virginia’s Anne Verbiscer, a New Horizons assistant project scientist. “If each moon has its own light curve, then together they could create a jumbled superposition of light curves that make it look to New Horizons like Ultima has a small light curve.” 

Data from the probe should reach us Jan 1 or 2. Can’t wait to see what it looks like!

My Arts Editor decreed the frogs must remain on their island.

I fear the Komodo dragons may find them a bit too tasty.

The Mainstream news is fake news meme that President Trump has exercised himself to spread does raise a question: how to effectively refute it?

Oddly enough, one approach is by energetically exposing fake news within the mainstream media. WaPo has published just such a report, concerning a now-former star reporter for the German weekly Der Spiegel:

When an out-of-town journalist showed up in Fergus Falls, Minn., in February 2017, Michele Anderson couldn’t help but feel skeptical. Claas Relotius had been telling residents that he was writing about the state of rural America under President Trump. Anderson, a community arts administrator with progressive political views, was uncomfortable with “the anthropological gaze” that had been cast on communities like her own after the 2016 election. Hopefully, she would later recall thinking, an award-winning international journalist would at least manage to capture more nuance than the pundits had in the months following the election.

As it turned out, the piece that appeared in the respected German weekly magazine Der Spiegel a month later was even worse than she could have imagined. Not only did it rely on stock stereotypes of provincial, gun-toting conservatives, but many of the details were blatantly false.

At one time any self-respecting media outlet would fact-check their reporters, so ya gotta wonder what went wrong at Der Spiegel. But it sounds like Relotius had some panache and charisma working for him:

On Wednesday, [the concerned Fergus Falls residents] were vindicated. Der Spiegel announced that Relotius had “falsified his articles on a grand scale” since at least 2016 and had resigned after admitting that he had fabricated quotes and invented fictional details in more than a dozen stories, including his dispatch from Fergus Falls. The magazine’s investigation found that the 33-year-old writer had faked interviews with the parents of Colin Kaepernick and falsified material that appeared in award-winning features about children kidnapped by the Islamic State and a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. Before it all came crashing down, he had also managed to convince editors that a co-worker who expressed suspicions was the real liar.

Sounds like a current President of our experience, doesn’t he?

The real message here, though, is that the mainstream media self-corrected. It demonstrated not an allegiance to a political ideology, but to a far more important ideology, that being truth matters.

It’s not dispositive on its own, of course, but for conservatives sucked into the fake news meme, this sort of article should give them reason to pause and think again.

If you’re wondering just how we ended up in a government shutdown, WaPo (among others) has a serviceable description which actually makes me laugh. At one point, Trump was ready to accept that he couldn’t have funding for the wall. Then this happened:

But on Fox News Channel and across conservative media, there was a brewing rebellion. Prominent voices urged Trump to hold firm on his wall money and warned that caving would jeopardize his reelection.

Rush Limbaugh dismissed the compromise bill on his radio program as “Trump gets nothing and the Democrats get everything.” Another firebrand, Ann Coulter, published a columntitled “Gutless President in Wall-less Country.” Trump even found resistance on the couch of his favorite show, “Fox & Friends,” where reliable Trump-boosting host Brian Kilmeade chided him on the air Thursday.

The president was paying attention. He promptly unfollowed Coulter on Twitter. And he pecked out a series of defensive tweets blaming congressional leaders for not funding the wall, while also assuming a defensive posture. He suggested that a massive wall may not be necessary in its entirety because the border already is “tight” thanks to the work of Border Patrol agents and troops.

Trump proclaims that he’s the branding master, which is all about image and messaging and television, and yet there he is, being brazenly manipulated by his masters at Fox and allied media outlets. At this juncture, we’re seeing policy being made by television personalities, people whose expertise is not in budgeting, immigration, or anything relevant – but how to look pretty and speak articulately on TV.

That’s it.

The Reality TV star that Trump used to be is caught in his own trap, and, worse yet, he doesn’t even realize it. For him, television is reality. For the rest of us on the ground, it’s not, and that’s going to be the worst for us.

There are so many adjectives applicable here: vacillating, manipulable, unfocused, and unintelligent simply arise from this one episode alone.

But added to what we’ve seen over the last three years, including the campaign, we can quite validly say that the best adjective is simply this:

He’s weak. The weakest President the United States has ever seen.