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There are some of the elements of a good mystery story in The Thirteenth Guest (1932, aka Lady Beware [UK]), but it’s an incomplete set, and they are offset by two very poor elements.

Thirteen years earlier, a husband and father read his newly revised will to his family & friends, numbering twelve, and then he dropped dead. The twist? The will gives the bulk of the vast estate to the unnamed 13th guest.

Now the young daughter, just turned 21, has received instructions to return to the abandoned estate. While there, she’s electrocuted and dies; her taxi driver calls the police, who notify the family and begin investigating.

By the time she pops up again, alive and kicking, things are interesting. Add in another plot twist, a takedown of the entire family for being too hoity-toity for their own good, and a private eye with some attitude, and there’s some good elements.

However, the police are portrayed as buffoons, which grates on the nerves, even if it is a poke at nepotism. Worse yet, though, is that the person truly responsible for the murders, well, you would never have guessed. Not because of the portrayal of that character, but lack thereof. She is just another face in the family, and there is no big reveal of a grievance or psychosis or immorality which explains the mildly clever murders.

In the end, it was a pleasant way to spend an hour, especially following a medical procedure which required I rest, and if you’re a Ginger Rogers completist, this should be on your list of movies to see. She doesn’t distinguish herself, but she’s competent in the ensemble. And I liked the innovative manner in which the credits were handled.

Too bad about the bad guy.

Here’s the movie itself.

I expect the next week of blogging to be lighter than normal, or even non-existent, but if something catches my attention I’ll comment on it.

Happy Holidays and may you spend it with family.

I must admit I was fascinated when I read this report from a few months ago in D-brief on tropical cyclones, but then it fell through the cracks. I remain fascinated, though:

Recent research suggested tropical cyclones are moving toward the poles. But these analyses used data collected from instruments over a relatively short time period and the results sometimes disagreed with each other. [Forest dynamics expert Jan] Altman and the team of scientists wanted to find out how tropical cyclone activity changed over a long time and what ramifications the storms had.

Homes aren’t the only things impacted by cyclones, forests also get heavily damaged. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was estimated to have killed or seriously injured around 320 million trees. The team used that damage to determine the impact of changes in tropical cyclone activity. The researchers analyzed tree rings from six forests in northeastern Asia. The study areas traverse a latitudinal gradient from the southern tip of South Korea northward to costal Russia. The team examined tree rings from 54 species for tree growth and disturbance. Then they compared the data with a 40-year historical record of tropical cyclones in the region.

The farther north the researchers assessed, the more scientists realized cyclones were increasingly damaging trees over the past century, the team reports today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The findings provide evidence that northward tropical cyclone track migration caused more frequent forest disturbances during the last century in the western North Pacific,” Altman said.

Tthe changes in CO₂, leading to a warmer world, causing weather patterns to change, is of leading interest because this suggests landfall at locations not accustomed to such violent weather phenomena. Indeed, given that new storm tracks are inevitable over the ocean itself, will these new tracks cause other unforeseen consequences as areas that have not seen storm turbulence on this scale begin to experience it?

This should be an area of slow but unstoppable interest.

It has to be Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). I saw him on TV tonight, outraged at Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria. Remember, this is the guy who went from NeverTrump to being Trump’s sock puppet, playing golf and carrying water for him. Here’s one of his milder reactions; the one I saw on TV showed him spitting bullets.

You’re outraged, Graham? Really? Really? You’re up close and personal with this man-child of a President, and it didn’t occur to you that he has no concept of responsible governance?

Really, you must be fucking kidding because Trump’s incompetence has been highlighted over the last two years. In this regard, Graham, this is on your head. This is on the head of a GOP terrified to impeach and convict a President who has repeatedly demonstrated incompetence.

And, please, stop lying, you bloody fucking idiot. You said Obama was wrong to withdraw from Iraq? You bloody well know that he was legally constrained to leave Iraq due to a treaty signed by his predecessor, President Bush. Please stop saying Trump’s done so many good things. You’re just lying through your teeth and you know it. If you don’t, then your understanding of government is impaired and you should resign for the good of the Nation.

You want to fix this? Call for impeachment. Hell, I know Speaker Ryan collapsed, as usual, when Trump put the pressure on him regarding the Continuing Resolution, but maybe you can harass him into calling for a snap impeachment during this lame-duck session. Then it’ll be on you Senators to decide if your loyalty to a pathogen-laden Party leader who can’t find his ass with both hands is really more important than your loyalty to the President.

‘cuz I’m really fucking tired of your covering up the shit your dog keeps dumping on the carpet of what used to be a great Nation.

In some ways, the advent of Trumpism may be the smoke of the fire that will be the rebirth of American Democracy, the final, back-breaking error which will drive home to another three or four American generations the abject error of voting in someone like Trump.

With this in mind, I submit the South Carolina GOP is a ways behind virtually everyone else:

The South Carolina Republican Party could cancel its marquee presidential nominating contest in 2020 in a move to protect President Trump from any primary challengers.

Drew McKissick, chairman of the South Carolina GOP, said he doesn’t anticipate Trump would face a primary challenge and emphasized that the state party executive committee hasn’t held any formal discussions about the contest, dubbed “first in the South” and usually third on the presidential nominating calendar. But McKissick would pointedly not rule out canceling the primary, indicating that that would be his preference.

“We have complete autonomy and flexibility in either direction,” McKissick told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “Considering the fact that the entire party supports the president, we’ll end up doing what’s in the president’s best interest.”

Washington Examiner

Come on. There’s no way this ends well for McKissick.

1. He’s so personally in the tank for Trump that he might as well get plastic surgery so he looks like his omniscient Party Leader.
2. The primaries are meant to winnow out the poor candidates in order for the Party to present an excellent candidate. By eliminating the primary, McKissick perverts his responsibility.
3. Either he’s not paying attention to Trump’s terminal troubles, or he’s so bought into the ludicrous fake news meme that if his hypothetical divorce were mentioned in the local media, he’d declare it false and try to kiss his ex-spouse, sans permission.
4. If Trump is so fragile that he cannot withstand a primary challenge in South Carolina, then what of the declaration that “We are the party of President Donald J. Trump?” Is this just the South Carolina GOP elite trying to enforce an unwanted discipline on the base?
5. Speaking of that declaration, candidate Katie Arrington, its author, did not succeed in becoming Representative Arrington; her blind embrace of Trumpism, in particular its projected ruination of the sea coast of South Carolina, is one of the primary factors favored by analysts in her defeat by Democrat Joe Cunningham, the first Democrat to represent the district since at least 2000 (Ballotpedia’s data doesn’t go back further). Many of those contests even lacked a Democratic challenger. That a declaration of Trump-adoration resulted in the loss of what should have been a safe Republican seat should have McKissick seeking better alternatives – before he loses more seats in 2020.

Yeah, this report from the Examiner made me laugh and laugh, but then my understanding is that South Carolina politics of any brand can be best understood in the context of an insane asylum. Ah, here we go:

South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum. — James L. Petigru, 1860

It’ll be interesting to see how many other state Republican organizations will fail in their responsibilities in the same way, and how many of their respective members suddenly decide to leave the Party. The general situation is already not so good, as this latest Gallup poll on Party affiliation speaks volumes:

Democrats are picking up affiliations while the GOP appears to be static. In reality, I suspect right-wing extremists are moving into the GOP, forcing more moderate members out in disgust, who then join the Independents, while more Independents join the Democrats. But sometimes even elected GOP officials will jump parties, as four recently did in Kansas. This is noteworthy, even important, because that switch in allegiance is an implicit denial of a central GOP tenet: that the Democrats are somehow evil. While I’m sure the four defectors will cast as apostates to the remaining Kansas base, if they can communicate their reasons to the base, some parts of the base may follow suit, if not in formal allegiance, then in the voting booth.

So McKissick is roughly four steps behind the political times, I’d say, and he has a lot of scurrying to do if he doesn’t want South Carolina Republicans, not to mention himself, to become a historical curiosity gaped over by a citizenry who finds their activities incomprehensible in the greater context of a secular society bent on excellence in politics, which is something we certainly don’t have in the White House and the Senate. The House remains to be seen.

It’s a very traditional retelling of a rather amazing story: The Great Escape (1963) presents the tale of an attempted mass escape during World War II from Stalag Luft III, a German POW camp, by prisoners from the Allied forces. Led by Major Roger Bartlett (in reality, Bushell), they meticulously planned and executed a plan to drain the camp of 250 prisoners in one explosive night through the digging of long tunnels to a nearby forest, the latter of which were dug over the course of weeks.

The movie documents the methods, eccentricities, and, most importantly, the ambitions that men can conceive and execute on in contrary circumstances. In this regard, this movie falls into the category of inspirational stories that teach us to see opportunity where we may initially see only limitations. Another lesson is that of cooperation, realizing that while not everyone is gifted in the same way, sometimes those varied gifts together will help accomplish the seemingly impossible.

In the end, the prison break only results in 76 escaping before the operation is detected and shutdown. Of those 76, 50 were summarily executed (for movie purposes, as a group, but in reality in small groups), two more died during their escape attempt, three made it to the neutral countries of Sweden and Spain, and ten or so are returned to the camp.

But it’s a mistake to focus on the concrete results: it’s a metric-selection error. As Major Bartlett states at the beginning, he’s not trying to escape so much as open a new front in the war. At this point, Germany is desperate. Nearly all able-bodied men are at the front or dead, or they are members of the Cowards’ Brigade, as I call them, the Gestapo, the uniformed bullies who kept the civilians in line, and hunted down “traitors” to the Homeland. The escape diverts precious resources from the fronts where the Allies are hammering away, uses up precious fuel, even the bullets are becoming precious.

Did few escape? Sure. But the primary mission was, in reality, accomplished. And that’s what makes this story so interesting. It’s not the destination which is important, but the journey.

Very well made, and virtually overrun with stars, both matured and in the egg, this is an excellent story that can strain credulity – and yet it’s true.

Raymond Chandler’s The High Window has too many similes.

This is actually not a throw-off, but an attempt on my part to understand why The High Window is not as good Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (which I’ve not reviewed). I’m only partially through The High Window, but I think it’s not holding my interest as well as Farewell, My Lovely due to the abundance of similes, some of which seem far-fetched. It depends too much on the similes and not enough on vivid characters.

While I had noted that a Trump-appointed Federal judge had rejected a lawsuit from Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) that sought to invalidate an election result generated from ranked choice voting (RCV), the game isn’t over yet, as the Bangor Daily News reports:

Attorneys for U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin are asking the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to prevent the state of Maine from sending a certification to Congress that says Jared Golden won November election in the 2nd Congressional District. …

As with Poliquin’s original complaint, the latest motion claims that ranked-choice voting violates the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause because it prevents voters from knowing which candidates will be in the so-called instant run-off election if no candidate gets a majority of votes in the first round. It also argues that ranked-choice voting violates the Equal Protection clause by allowing “certain voters, but not others, the ability to shift their vote from candidate to candidate, thereby affording them a greater degree and different kind of electoral power.”

But I think there’s more going on here at a national level than many realize. RCV is an important change to the voting landscape because it obviates the advantage Republicans have over Democrats when it comes to voting discipline. As has become increasingly apparent over the last three decades, Republicans vote Republican, and rarely is there a second conservative in a general election^[1].

This is not as true of Democrats. A Democrat, miffed by a rejection in the primaries or at the caucuses, will be seen running as an independent, or as a Green Party member. More generally, there are more party options on the left side of the spectrum than the right, and that has the tendency to split the vote – and that’s disaster for the Democrat. Remember the candidacy of Ralph Nader in 2000? Without him splitting the liberal, it might have been President Gore^[2].

RCV has the potential to relieve that disaster. For the Republicans, anyone other than a Republican winning is unacceptable because there are no other real independent conservative parties, not since the Libertarians chose to join the Republicans.

But Democrats can easily work with other liberal parties if necessary. They already do that in the United States Senate, where Senators Sanders and King are not Democrats, but Independents – but both caucus and vote with the Democrats.

And since RCV will allow a liberal voter to list their personal favorite candidate first, and the Democrat second or even third, and get the same result as listing the Democrat first, all of a sudden the Republican disciplined voter advantage disappears.

Maine is the first State in the Union to use RCV, and that’s why this is the first time there’s been serious litigation over it. Because of the tactical consequences of the final ruling on the issue, it’s worth keeping an eye on it. If RCV is approved by SCOTUS itself, the Republicans will find one of their built-in advantages has disappeared.

And this will be a good thing. Not because more Democrats will potentially win, although I don’t have a problem with that, but because one of the key pillars of Republican validity will disappear, the one that says We hold power, therefore what we’re doing is right! There’s a lot of moral momentum behind electoral victories, because it seems to say that voters approve of what you’re doing. That is the naive viewpoint; sophisticates are aware that vote splitting by multiple candidates on the liberal side of the spectrum, voter suppression tactics, even foreign adversary interference, can swing an election, if it’s undertaken with suitable panache.

And, contrariwise, a string of losses should lead to introspection and modification. A single loss, no, but when you start stringing them together, there’s an indication that something is going wrong, and while it’s popular to blame marketing and messaging, there’s always the worry that a core ideological position has been judged to be inferior by the electorate.

And that’s how change for the better can occur.

Make no mistake, the more I think about this, the more convinced I become that the Pouliquin suit is one of the most important election law suits of the next 50 years.

¹ A notable exception is Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who, after rejection by the Alaska Republicans in the primaries, won her seat on the strength of a write-in campaign in 2010. This exception is more a commentary on the weakness of the Democratic and official Republican candidates.

² Mr. Nader, for the record, rejects this conclusion himself. However, there are many election watchers who do accept that conclusion.

Monopsony:

In economics, a monopsony (from Ancient Greek μόνος (mónos) “single” + ὀψωνία (opsōnía) “purchase”) is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. In the microeconomic theory of monopsony, a single entity is assumed to have market power over sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service, much in the same manner that a monopolist can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say,” Christopher Ingraham, WaPo:

As [Josh] Bivens and [Heidi] Shierholz [of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute] tell it, a relatively recent thread of economic research into monopsony power — which they define as “the leverage enjoyed by employers to set their workers’ pay” — has helped economists explain some of the wage stagnation observed in the United States over the past 40 years. You can think of monopsony power as the flip side of monopoly power: If monopoly power lets companies charge higher prices to consumers, monopsony power lets them pay lower wages to workers. Either way, it spells trouble for people who buy things and work for a living.

Research into monopsony power finds that many job markets are dominated by a relatively small number of employers. If you are, say, a coal miner, there may be just one or two coal mines within 100 miles of your home. If the mine you’re working at is treating you unfairly, you don’t have many options for finding a new job — particularly if you already left the other mine for similar reasons. In the absence of any serious competition for the most talented workers, employers have a huge amount of leeway in setting workers’ salaries, and they often set them at levels below what traditional economic theories would expect.

From the wider societal view, it sounds like cancer to me. The engine of the economy depends on workers earning a living and spending their earnings on both necessaries and optionals. The rapacity implicit in this article suggests that many workers in these situations are not able to contribute to the “thrash” of the market, as it were.

This is also ringing a bell in connection with Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles, which speaks to a stagflation phase occurring near the end of an economic-societal-political secular cycle. It’s important to note that Turchin and Nefedov’s work is on agrarian societies, so it may not be wholly applicable to today’s American urban society – but, being the undisciplined sort, I cannot help but note the interesting similarities. It suggests that we are, in fact, suffering from overpopulation, between an excess of skilled people, falling incomes, and rising rents.

I hope to put out a review of Secular Cycles in the near future, but, speaking as a complete newcomer to the subject, I will recommend its first Chapter for the serious reader who doesn’t mind slogging and thinking, or is familiar with the area. I think it’s fascinating. I’m in the midst of Chapter 2, but I suspect all of the Chapters following the first are case-studies studying the congruency of their theory with reality.

Tim Klein likes to meld two die-cut puzzles to produce his artwork.

More at Puzzle Montage.

It’s actually fascinating.

More here.

As WaPo and many others have noted, the Weekly Standard is shutting down, with one of its last news reports being a repudiation of Representative Steve King (R-IA) as being representative of conservatism:

Founded in 1995 by Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, and Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard became the de facto voice of the neoconservative movement under President George W. Bush as its writers lustily cheered on the Iraq War. But as Kristol emerged as one of the loudest conservative voices against Trump, the magazine he edited until 2016 likewise became a harsh critic of the populist president and his allies.

President Trump, per usual, thinks this is a victory for him:

But I was careful to note that the Weekly Standard was a home for neocons, short for the neo-conservative movement. What was their great accomplishment?

Two wars, the one in Afghanistan, justified as a war to stop al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, and the other in Iraq, which we began under the since-proven false pretenses that Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, were in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, despite agreements to be rid of them. Whatever you thought of the malignancy of Saddam Hussein, promulgating a war on false pretenses is inevitably a stain on our honor.

The President and his allies would like us to believe that Trump-ism has swept the Weekly Standard away in its victorious jetstream, but I have my doubts about that. I think the next few weeks will see those political observers with deeper sources than mine asking whether the neocon movement collapsed simply because of its duplicity and its inferior results. It’s certainly seen adherents, such as Max Boot, slip away recently. This may be the face-plant of an inferior philosophy, and not the victim of a party wallowing in its own amateurism.

WaPo notes a special report to the Senate on Russian disinformation efforts:

The report traces the origins of Russian online influence operations to Russian domestic politics in 2009 and says that ambitions shifted to include U.S. politics as early as 2013 on Twitter. Of the tweets the company provided to the Senate, 57 percent are in Russian, 36 percent in English and smaller amounts in other languages.

The efforts to manipulate Americans grew sharply in 2014 and every year after, as teams of operatives spread their work across more platforms and accounts to target larger swaths of U.S. voters by geography, political interests, race, religion and other factors. The Russians started with accounts on Twitter, then added YouTube and Instagram before bringing Facebook into the mix, the report said.

To my mind, the poor fit between national politics and an international communications tool is the highlight, at least from this article (the report, by Howard, Ganesh, and Liotsiou, all of Oxford University, and Killy and  François of Graphika is here). There’s no easy fix, as everyone knows, other than shutting the Internet down.

Kevin Drum’s a little puzzled:

I don’t really understand this. Why were the Russians trying to get Republicans elected back in 2013 and 2014? Was it an anti-Hillary thing even back then? Were they convinced that Republicans would be softer on them than Democrats? That doesn’t really make sense. And when, exactly, did the pro-Trump propaganda start? As soon as he announced he was running? Or was it later than that?

Drum’s not thinking well. We are the super-power, and that makes us the enemy for Russia. I suspect the two major political parties were evaluated by the Russians for vulnerability, and the Republicans won – easily. After all, they’re expected to vote the party line, which makes the investment to put a properly corrupted candidate in place of a lower risk than the more fractious Democrats. The Democrats also have stronger civil liberties instincts than do the Republicans, which are repugnant to Russians, who prefer an all-or-nothing approach to governance. Finally, the Republicans have been running further and further to the right since, well, really since the days when Goldwater warned about the changing nature of the Republican Party! But, more clearly, since Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House (1995-1999) and took the Republicans away from the idea of shared governance and towards dominance and isolation.

This is clearly a fascist mindset and is quite compatible with that of the current Russian government. In order to get their hooks into a Republican Party whose soul had been ripped away by Gingrich and his buddies, they started during the Obama days – or does Drum not remember the irrational refusal of the Republicans to share governance with President Obama and the Democrats? This report certainly serves to help solidify the case that the Republicans have been co-opted by the Russians through the insertion of certain ideological tenets and, even more importantly, the alienation of Republican culture from the greater American culture. By reinforcing the fear of change in the minds of the Republicans, they slowly are tearing the United States apart. Doubt it? Just consider recent Republican actions in end-of-term legislative actions in Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina meant to hobble incoming Democratic office-holders. These over-the-line tactics are classic examples of the all-or-nothing mindset that refuses to trust the opposition; in contrast, most Americans expect that trust to be present, as expressed by the current aphorism, elections have consequences.

Or, at least, that’s how I’d do it if I were a Russian.

Steve Benen may be a bit puzzled over last week’s elevation of former Representative, current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, and former acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) director Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) to the slot of acting Chief of Staff to President Trump:

… [Trump promoting] Mulvaney to lead OMB, where he peddled conspiracy theories, was at times disconnected from the president’s position on budget issues, and where he gave the banking industry some rather crude advice on how best to buy access to policymakers.

During Mulvaney’s tenure as budget director, the nation’s finances also took a turn toward the absurd: by some measures, the United States has never had a budget deficit this high during a period of strong economic growth.

He also unveiled a budget plan with a jaw-dropping $2-trillion mistake – and then insisted his colossal screw-up was intentional.

It’s against this backdrop that Trump decided to give Mulvaney additional responsibilities, so the president tapped him to lead the CFPB – despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that Mulvaney opposes the existence of the CFPB. Predictably, he proceeded to gut the agency’s enforcement efforts, aligning the bureau’s priorities with the goals of the payday-lending industry.

And yet, the more Mulvaney’s record took ridiculous turns, the more the president was impressed. Every failure has been followed by a promotion.

But it seems fairly obvious to me. The clue is, of course, President Trump. Obsessed with image and brand, we often interpret him as motivated by the optics of a situation. But there’s also the reputational aspect. Whether Trump is conscious of it or not, he’s an amateur and a screwup. There’s nothing graceful about his approach to life and success, as we can see in his many visits with the legal system over the years.

But few people enjoy actually being visibly incompetent. Trump cherishes his image of success Therefore, Mulvaney, a fringe character himself, can continually screw up and only earn the appreciation of a President eager to disguise his own large collection of failings.

Add in the dozens of investigations targeting Trump, of which he’s eager to distract attention from, and Mulvaney’s appointment remains, in Trump’s eyes, nearly perfect. At least for the next week, this appointment will attract attention that would otherwise be assigned to Trump’s many, many failings. Mulvaney’s ultimate competency in the position will, at some point, bring approbation down upon him, at least from Trump, and then Trump will blame him for all things rotten with his Administration.

But this appointment may be better for Trump’s ego than that of Nick Ayers, Pence’s current Chief of Staff, who doesn’t appear to be garnering controversy through incompetency. He refused Trump’s offer of the position. I suspect his current perch gave him a great view of the chaos such a position entails, and refused to bite on it. Smart guy.

So many ways to go on vacation.

More here.

I was a little bemused to read this article by Stephen Battersby in NewScientist (8 December 2018, paywall) on the latest refinement of the coordinate system used by astronomers and others based on black holes:

To chart our place in the universe, astronomers have looked billions of light years away, to some of the most extraordinary objects in the cosmos: quasars. These intense beacons of light surrounding black holes in distant galaxies are being used to fix physical positions back here in the solar system. And not only will they help guide our travels to distant worlds, they will also help us learn more about our own. …

… in the 1990s, astronomers took a giant leap. Rather than relying on stars mere hundreds of light years away, they decided to look billions of light years away instead. Objects that distant don’t shift their position in the sky we see very fast, which made them ideal candidates as reference points. But to be clearly visible from so far away, they have to be bright, and the brightest beacons we know are quasars: the sites where supermassive black holes suck matter in and fire radiation out. A side benefit of using such heavy markers is that they don’t get pushed around easily. Being billions of times the mass of the sun, supermassive black holes tend to stay put at the centre of their galaxies.

What’s my problem? The Universe is allegedly continually expanding. That really renders attempts to absolutely establish position a bit of an exercise in futility for those of us who refuse to operate with error bars. (An error bar refers to the uncertainty of some measurement, the plus/minus of a given measured value.)

And, I’m sure, this coordinate system is nifty enough that it doesn’t really matter. It just strikes my funny bone a little oddly….

If you’re a fan of the Grade-B horror and sci-fi films of the mid 20th century, Horrible Horror with Zacherle (1986) is an incredibly cheesy look at various scenes, trailers, and promos from movies across the genres. From The Giant Claw (1957) to Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), the latter including outtakes of scenes in which the actors couldn’t hold it together, it’s a quick overview of a passel of bad, and sometimes good, horror films, hosted by the late John Zacherle.

It’s also good if you’re in a post-surgical recovery haze and need something to occupy the time but not the brain.

Boondoggle:

A boondoggle is a project that is considered a waste of both time and money, yet is often continued due to extraneous policy or political motivations.

Wikipedia

As in President Trump’s proposed southern wall, destined to be known as the Trump Boondoggle if it is ever funded and built.

These are endlessly fascinating as I contemplate how much effort must go into making them.

I found Cold Turkey (1971) to be a bit of a puzzle. A consultant convinces a fictional tobacco industry of the 1960s and 1970s to follow in the footsteps of Alfred Nobel, who, for those readers not up on their history, used the profits from his invention of dynamite to fund the Nobel Peace Prize, promoting peace and not war. The gig? The industry offers a $25 million prize to the town in America that can stop smoking for a month. The idea is to endear the tobacco industry to the world.

It’s not entirely clear why they think this should work, but then there’s a lot of skimming over weak points in this film.

The focus then descends on the depressed town of Eagle Rock, Iowa, which has seen both industry and government exit the town, leaving it primarily with churches and the wearily desperate. When the announcement comes, Rev. Clayton Brooks grabs the reins and leads the effort to cleanse the town of the devil tobacco, his wife swirling helplessly behind him. We see the unmitigated use of social shaming to force townsfolk into signing onto the pledge, extending even to the town doc, Doctor Proctor, helpless in his addiction. Even a new hospital dangling in front of him cannot break the Satanic hold.

And then comes Day 1, Day 2, Day 3. A “massage parlor” opens up, much to the relief of some of the smokers. Rev. Brooks, himself a former smoker who took the habit back up so that he could join the smokers on their month long abstinence, discovers his wife’s charms will distract him from the urge to smoke. Again. And again. And again.

As the days pass, though, the tobacco industry is becoming more and more nervous, because they as strong as the addiction of tobacco might be, their addiction to money is stronger. They pressure the consultant to find a way to shoot down Eagle Rock’s dreams. As he and his hired guns descend on the town to find cheaters, they run into the town’s own proctors, a self-deluded bunch who spout anti-communist and anti-government slogans, even as a military man appears with offers of possible industry return to the heartland.

Amidst the frantic chasing after the material prize, led by the good Reverend, Mrs. Brooks finally reprimands her husband for being a monster, but to no effect, for to him the Good Book always has the answer that affirms his essential rightness in the world. There is no self-awareness here as the dash for the cash consumes them all.

In the climax, the abstaining smokers hungrily await the clanging of the town clock’s midnight hour, the industry’s fixer attempts to entice the smokers into indulging too soon, President Nixon shows up to announce Eagle Rock will become home to a missile manufacturing plant, the anti-communist old lady’s gun gets loose in the guise of a cigarette lighter and proceeds to shoot Doctor Proctor, Rev. Brooks, and one or two other people (with an admirable lack of blood and gore), and the town dog proceeds to pee all over the wounded Reverend.

Yeah, take a big breath.

The final scene? The new manufacturing plant, belching copious amounts of oily pollution into the clear blue sky from its four stacks, is negating the benefits of the recent campaign, as if Earth itself wants to poison itself in search of the tobacco buzz.

This sort of story is out of a tradition of satire with which I have a certain lack of sympathy. Characters are motivated, true, yet they’re more like wind-up toys than self-aware creatures. They’re set on their courses with little chance of correction coming from introspection. Does Rev Brooks ever wonder if the $25 million prize is more of this world than the next? No, not really. Desperation has set him off, a more prestigious posting is dangled in front of him if he succeeds, and he’s off and running.

And I shan’t deny there’s a certain social good in such satires. The ability to be introspective, to recognize and correct errors in one’s behavior, is an important part of being human. It may be the most important part. Demonstrating that its lack can lead to absurd consequences is important. But I don’t have a great deal of patience with it.

But if my reader has that taste, this is not a bad example of it. Or, if you like the cars of the 1950s and 60s, this is also not a bad film to watch, as there are a number of attractive examples.

I have little to remark upon specific to yesterday’s decision by a Texas Federal Court to dismember the ACA, because, after all, I’m not a lawyer and cannot follow the arguments. Non-severability? But according to conservative lawyer Ted Frank, this is a terrible ruling:

Not a fan of ACA or King v Burwell decision, and usually a fan of Texas, but this is an embarrassingly bad decision, and if a liberal judge had issued something like it goring a conservative ox, conservatives would be rightly up in arms. https://t.co/wv46QioLK2

— (((tedfrank))) (@tedfrank) December 15, 2018

But I think this will lead to some interesting fallout in two areas.

First, the inevitable appeals will give us common citizens a feel for how radical this Texas court judge, Judge O’Connor, may be. The general rumor is that he’s an extremist, and that’s why the plaintiffs in this suit filed in this court. As the appeals progress, it’ll illuminate whether or not this judge has a good understanding of the law, or not. This may even lead to scrutiny of this judge by relevant Congressional committees. A single decision is hardly a case upon which to build an impeachment, but a pattern of partisanship, i.e., abuse, may provide sufficient motivation. Such a proceeding needs great justification, however.

And, second, this potentially returns the pressure of a national health plan back onto the GOP. A large number of Americans will lose, or see diminished, their health care. These are folks who may have never had health care and took advantage of it when available, people living off of disability, all sorts of people who couldn’t afford it until the ACA was developed. And, concerning everyone outside the clan of the independently  wealthy, Steve Benen says the pre-existing condition clause, forbidding the refusal of health care coverage based on pre-existing conditions, will also go away.

Republicans filed the suit. Will the Democrats use this lawsuit’s results to hammer the Republicans in 2020? Eric Earling on conservative site The Resurgent thinks they will, and that the Republicans are not ready:

Health care is a top tier issue for both the public and private sector. Future health care agendas are essential for good governance moving forward.

So what’s the conservative solution?

You’re not going to dramatically reduce eligibility for Medicare or Medicaid. A Republican President, Senate, and House, couldn’t even make relatively incremental changes to an already comparatively incremental law in Obamacare without major political fallout. If you think simply cutting Medicare or Medicaid are political winners, I invite you to enjoy your extended time in the Congressional minority.

Yes, Medicare and Medicaid will definitely require reform, even as addressing the issue of Obamacare’s problematic impact on the affordability of individual market coverage for middle class consumers is still necessary as well. Yet, a clear lesson of recent electoral politics is Republicans don’t have the combination of a winning message and a winning policy solution for health care. Not even close.

The next two years see a split Congress, and it seems unlikely any major health care plans will be written that are acceptable to both bodies, much less President Desperate Trump in the White House. My vague understanding of the decision for the plaintiffs in yesterday’s result was the fact that the individual mandate penalty had been “zeroed” out during the passage of the 2017 Tax Change (it wasn’t a reform) bill. We may see the Democrats passing a bill in the House that reauthorizes the ACA by activating the individual mandate, thus invalidating the ruling, and then beating the GOP about the head and shoulders when the Senate refuses to pass the same bill. This will then be used for messaging purposes during the 2020 elections. The Republicans don’t believe in affordable health care. Why should you vote for them?

I suspect this lawsuit result for the Republicans is a fool’s Pyrrhic victory.

If you were a fan of the cable TV series Dead Like Me (2003-2004), you may have been disappointed that this whimsical series about the lives of a Grim Reaper squad, and the youngest member in particular, George, came to an end after only two fairly good seasons.

But you may not have heard that there was a movie sequel, Dead Like Me: Life After Death (2009). However, don’t let the fact that I’m mentioning it tempt you into running right to your TV and seeing it, because it’s inferior to the series.

First of all, Rube is gone, and the character who takes over as squad leader has the requisite accompanying mystery, but all the personal warmth of a squid wrapped around your face.

Second, the actress who played Daisy was replaced (due to other commitments), and her replacement simply didn’t have the same personal flair as did the original actress, Laura Harris, nor the chemistry that had been developed between Daisy and Mason. Most of the other supporting characters and their actors, including Reggie (but I’m not sure about Murray, who I always felt stole every scene in which he made an appearance), make return appearances.

But in the end, it came down to the story they were trying to tell. The charm of each episode of the series was the attempt to tackle a couple of problems in maturation, one applying to one or two of the squad of Grim Reapers, such as Daisy’s vanity, and one applying to a member of George’s now-grieving family. One can argue that the replacement of the squad leader, the primary problem in this movie, is another question of maturation, but it’s not handled in a manner that really inspires the proper reaction in the audience, and that’s because character logic broke down. Roxy, in her bring-in-living role as police officer, gets to meet and drink with the Police Commissioner, and when faced with her next reaping, saves the man instead. Why? Roxy was a strong by the rules character. No reason is given for her sudden change.

Delores and Mason really go nowhere, and Daisy has regressed. George cruises along, but reveals herself to her sister, Reggie, another big no-no.

But, worst of all, the directives from Upper Management, or whatever that entity might be called, are occasionally wrong. Is this deliberate miscommunication by the new squad leader? Something else? It’s never explained, not even hinted at, and while we could laugh at it as double-entendre deus ex machina, it’s deeply unsatisfying as a plot mechanism. The best plot mechanisms are organic to the characters and their situation, and this is like inserting a Predator into the movie and expecting it to make sense. Sure, there’d be a novelty element to a powerful creature discovering Reapers are unkillable, but so what?

Extremist apologist Hugh Hewitt thinks the pundit class is all wet when it comes to the threatened government shutdown and who will come out smelling like a rose – and perhaps he’s right.

A contrarian view is anchored by Gov. Doug Ducey’s (R-Ariz.) galloping victory in his reelection bid last month. Ducey talked about border security almost every day during his romp in “purple” Arizona. Not about illegal immigration, but always about border security and about keeping Americans safe from drugs, cartels and human trafficking.

Because more than 70,000 Americans died from overdoses in 2017, millions of people have at least brushed up against fentanyl or other opioids, and have often been terribly scarred by it. Some may know most of these killer drugs come via the mail, but they also know it flows like a vast river northward from the Mexican state of Sinaloa, and with it mayhem and death. Border security isn’t about the “dreamers” or hard-working undocumented people living for decades in the United States. It’s about security. And Trump has declared he is for this security, is willing to engage in budget brinkmanship to obtain it, and is staking the first confrontation in a two-year battle with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on it.

WaPo

Certainly, this is a key worry for American communities. Still, I have my doubts as to Hewitt’s wisdom in the matter.

• Apologist. I said apologist for a reason. Hewitt wants to push the acquisition of two red state Senate seats as a resounding victory, while the truth of the matter is that the Democrats had far more on the line than did the Republicans in the Senate. Nor is the flipping of 40 or more House seats to the Democratic side of the aisle any small matter. I delved into this acute intellectual error more here. Further, the denial of the border wall has not been a matter of the Democrats refusing to cooperate, but of the entire GOP-dominated Congress, meaning even Trump’s allies see through this campaign promise as useless – but Hewitt elides the point. Why does all this matter? Because it tells the careful reader that this is a head feint, and the balance of his reasoning needs careful assessment.
• Transport. From what little research I could do (kidney stones surgery yesterday, I’m a little shaky), it does appear that illegal fentanyl mostly comes in from abroad, although some is manufactured domestically. However, even if the entire supply is coming in over the southern border, which seems unlikely in view of the report that Canada is experiencing similar problems and believes the drugs are coming in through West Coast Asian crime syndicates, it’s important to understand that drugs are easy to transport, and we have so many ports of entry, not to mention lightly guarded coast lines, that building a border wall will have little effect on the supply. Remember the drug submarines used by the Mexican drug cartels? They’ll just build and use those. And if Russia or China were to choose the back the drug suppliers? That’s not unprecedented, see the Opium Wars of the 1800s.
• Supply. Hewitt’s argument is that the supply of illegal drugs is the problem. Few economists will find this a reasonable argument, because the true driver is the demand. Demand, demand, demand, repeat it over and over and you soon realize that fentanyl is not the problem, it’s a symptom of a deeper malaise in our society. Whether it’s the inevitable stress of a society transitioning from the arbitrary strictures of divinities to reasoned debate concerning ethics, morality, and law, or the stress caused by manufacturing moving overseas, or the stress of a populace that often does not push itself intellectually and now finds itself in an international competition where intellect is the key to success, it needs to be explored. It may not be a resolvable matter, as sad as that makes me, but it’s important to realize that cutting supply does not eliminate the problem. It’ll be like squeezing an unpoppable balloon, the symptom will just reappear in some other form. The core problem, singular or plural, needs to be identified and, if possible, addressed.
• Trump’s Reputation. Trump’s poll numbers have reflected the lack of respect that most Americans have for the President (latest Gallup has approval at 40%, disapproval at 56%, and I view Gallup as fairly conservative). The fact of the matter is that Trump spews lies, boasts, and misleading statements at a truly astounding rate, as documented by many fact-checkers. Certainly, some portion of that 40% is made up of the Trump cultists, and they will swallow anything Trump wishes to claim concerning a government shutdown. Trump is playing to his base with this gamesmanship, and they’ll be four-square behind him. But will anyone else? More and more, Americans have learned to distrust their President to provide anything resembling leadership. From the lack of substantial response to the Khashoggi outrage to tariff wars, they’re realizing that Trump is not driven by an urge to make the country better – but to enrich himself.

So how should Democrats play this? I think they could use the above as the kernel of a game plan. Emphasize the problem is not supply, but demand, and suggest that we need to explore why so many people are numbing themselves to their lives. Make this a mental health problem, not a drug problem.

And then use the phrase The Trump Boondoggle to fix in folks’ minds that this is a waste of taxpayer’s money.