Category Archives: Uncategorized

Madrigal:

A madrigal is a secular vocal music composition of the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. Traditionally, polyphonic madrigals are unaccompanied; the number of voices varies from two to eight, and most frequently from three to six. It is quite distinct from the Italian Trecento madrigal of the late 13th and 14th centuries, with which it shares only the name. [Wikipedia]

Noted in Slaughter-House Five, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.:

And now there was an acrimonious madrigal, with parts sung in all quarters of the [railroad] car. Nearly everyone, seemingly, had an atrocity story of something Billy Pilgrim had done to him in his sleep. Everybody told Billy Pilgrim to keep the hell away.

A reader writes about the size of the US DoD:

The Department of Defense is so immense, and its “budget” also so immense, the idea of auditing it to find all the Things is amusing in the least. Even with various smaller components trying hard to to be efficient and effective, there’s so much slop, it’s ridiculous. It employs over 2 million people, operates over half a million facilities at over 5000 locations. A billion here and billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

Perhaps. The proper metric is hard to select. For example, from the world of private enterprise, Walmart employs over 2.3 million people and has over 11,000 locations. On the other hand, the mission and operations of Walmart does not compare to that of the US DoD, the latter having far more complexity.

But, in principle, it should be possible to track the money in the US DoD almost as readily as I’m sure Walmart tracks its cash flow.

One of the salient problems of climate change agreements are cheaters. Here’s Nobel Winner Professor William Nordhaus, from a report in WaPo:

Nordhaus has blamed the lack of climate policy progress on the strong incentive for what economists call “free-riding.”

“People free-ride when they jump the turnstile on the subway,” he said. “Nations free-ride in military treaties such as NATO when they enjoy the benefits of the strong U.S. military to protect them while doing little to pay for the common defense.”

And when it comes to climate change, he said, free-riding is “particularly pernicious.”

Unfortunately, no solutions to this particular problem are presented in the article. Obviously, it’ll end up being a matter for international law, which may mean it’ll require attention from the sometimes impotent United Nations.

If the United States wasn’t substantially in a position of denial when it comes to this problem, I’d say that it might be a good idea for Congress to pass legislation that would target cheaters in the future. I would suggest that perhaps tariffs would be automatically applied for those nations found to be in violation of their international obligations, except that there’d be a certain dark irony to such a proposal, given the United States’ decision to pull out of just such agreements.

Corporate entities could also face reprisals, including those of an existential nature, for endangering the future of the human species.

I wonder what the climate change community has come up with in this area.

Just for complete reporting concerning The Revolution at Rosedale, my Arts Editor reports gift cards may be bought for cash.

I see WaPo caught Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), arguably the favorite of the progressives in Congress these days, in a blunder:

Ocasio-Cortez claimed on Twitter that $21 trillion in “Pentagon accounting errors” could have paid for 66 percent of the Medicare-for-all proposal. Her tweet references an article in the Nation, a left-leaning magazine. The specific line about the missing $21 trillion comes from research by Mark Skidmore, an economics professor at Michigan State University. …

Skidmore’s paper clearly talks about Pentagon “assets” and “liabilities.” This key distinction was duly noted in the Nation article that Ocasio-Cortez referenced on Twitter.

To be clear, Skidmore, in a report coauthored with Catherine Austin Fitts, a former assistant secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development who complained about similar plugs in HUD financial statements, does not contend that all of this $21 trillion was secret or misused funding. And indeed, the plugs are found on both the positive and the negative sides of the ledger, thus potentially netting each other out. But the Pentagon’s bookkeeping is so obtuse, Skidmore and Fitts added, that it is impossible to trace the actual sources and destinations of the $21 trillion.

But it did not appear in her tweet, which clearly implied that the $21 trillion could have been used to pay for 66 percent of the $32 trillion in estimated Medicare-for-All costs.

“To clarify, this is to say that we only demand fiscal details [with health and education], rarely elsewhere,” Ocasio-Cortez said in a follow-up tweet.

“The point, I think, was more about how we care so little about the ‘how do you pay for it’ when we are talking about war and military spending,” her spokesman wrote in an email. “It’s only when we are talking about investing in the physical and economic well-being of our citizenry that we become concerned with the price tags.”

Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that’ll dent her credibility, between getting things wrong, and then frantically backfilling. In fact, the Pentagon undergoing an audit indicates we’re also paying attention to the financial details, even though this is the first such audit, so I suspect the conservatives will just use the explanatory e-mail from her spokesman as another bit of ammunition to discredit the Representative-elect.

Representative-elect Ocasio-Cortez needs to get her ducks in a row before trying to comment on just about anything. Right now she’s a leading target, and she has to be flawless or risk becoming irrelevant.

Related to the GOP frantic clutching at waning power comes this editorial from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Wisconsin citizens elected a new governor and attorney general in November.

Now, leaders of the state Senate and Assembly intend to rush through bills that would reduce the authority of the incoming elected leaders while raising taxpayer costs. They want to pass them as soon as Tuesday, in an extraordinary session, so that Gov. Scott Walker can sign the new rules into law before leaving office in January.  Details just came out Friday, with the first public discussion in the Capitol on Monday and a potential vote by Tuesday. …

This is about keeping the citizens in charge of their government.

It doesn’t matter which party is coming in and going out of office — we would say the exact same thing. In fact, we would shout it — just as we are now.

Let them know who’s boss.

Tell them you are.

And this from what Steve Benen characterizes as a conservative paper.

The phrase litmus test has appeared in campaigns and debates over judge nominations over the last few decades to indicate what one side or the other side thinks is an illegitimate standard that the candidate to meet. For example, their stand on abortion is sometimes considered a litmus test in which the liberals are outraged that it’s used as a standard, while for the conservatives either you’re against abortion or you’re not worthy of the post for which you’re a nominee.

Well, I think a new litmus test is on the horizon, and I think the non-extremists will get to use this one:

Nominee, what are your views on the actions of the GOP-controlled legislatures’ lame duck sessions in Michigan and Wisconsin in 2018 with regard to their attempts to negate the power of the incoming Democratic seat-holders?

If they dissemble or endorse those activities, I’d say they failed the litmus test and should be rejected by the Independent voter as inimical to the health of the Republic.

She’s not happy with her fiancee, I think.

In Starship Troopers II: Hero of the Federation (2004), the series transforms from a bad knock-off of the original novel to a sci-fi / horror akin to the classic Alien series, with no philosophical connection to book from which it supposedly originated. While the plot is more or less serviceable, it’s not really believable. It’s somewhat messy in the details, fails to deliver up sympathetic characters, and when characters are revealed to be under Bug control, it just caused some laughter. And theme? Hard to see any theme here.

At the end, a clumsy and ineffective anti-militarism scene is tacked on, as if to make up for the rest of the schlock. And that’s just about all it is.

In light of the 2016 attempt by the North Carolina GOP-controlled legislature to strip the incoming Democratic governor of certain powers (now bogged down in the Courts), and recent similar activities in Wisconsin and Michigan, I wonder how long it’ll be before state Constitutional Amendments begin appearing forbidding lame-duck legislative sessions in which the duties and powers of the various branches of government are modified.

This sort of shit didn’t used to happen all the time.

Scientists and science geeks love nothing more than a good natural mystery, and it appears there’s one brewing off the coast of Africa, between the continent and the northern tip of the big island of Madagascar. National Geographic has a longish pop-sci report:

I’m beginning a new hobby, and naturally it’s going to be taking up a lot of my time. I’m not abandoning the blog, as it’s how I like to vent opinions, but I may not be as active as I have been.

If you’re not a computer security professional, you may not be aware of the magnitude of the attacks on the computer systems on which we rely. Andrew Burt and Dan Geer on Lawfare can give you a taste:

Attack surfaces have expanded beyond any organization’s ability to understand, much less defend against, potential adverse events. Common interdependencies, once assumed secure, are not, rendering entire protocols, infrastructures, and even hardware devices susceptible to exploitation.

So large is the deluge of potential security threats that a new phrase has entered the lexicon for information security professionals: “alert fatigue.” One 2015 study, focused on malware triaging efforts at over 600 US organizations, found an average of 17,000 alerts generated per week, with only 4 percent of such alerts ever investigated. And that’s just malware alerts. The information we have at our disposal about our vulnerabilities does little in the way of mitigating them.

This serves as an intro to a paper they’ve written for the Hoover Institute. I’ve not read it, lacking free time. But this alert fatigue is a warning that our systems are too vulnerable. Long ago, I briefly worked for Siemens Energy Automation Systems (long enough ago that I’m not sure I have the name right and I don’t even know if that entity is still around), a division of Siemens that supplied computer systems for controlling electrical grids, and I know that, at the time, many of those installations were available via the Internet. I know because I found myself debugging systems on the fly in other states and countries, without ever leaving Minnesota.

In retrospect, that’s an amazing lapse. It’s like putting a webcam in your bathroom so people can watch you do your thing. (Yeah, yeah, I’m sure some people do that, too, but I’m making a point here.) Now, I do recall some of my colleagues traveling to do the same sort of work, indicating that at least some of our customers had the proper level of paranoia, but I suspect that was a minority.

But I really do wonder how many systems that are on the web really shouldn’t be.

Out at Rosedale (Roseville, MN) they’ve opened the most upscale food court I’ve ever seen. It’s called The Revolution and looked, at least in spots, delicious. Too bad I won’t be partaking. Why?

Only credit, debit, or gift cards? Really? This pronouncement, once you think about it, is mostly just garbage. Let’s do a quick dissection:

1. Smoother service. Really, folks, we’ve all learned how to wait in line. Really. And, you know what? Your long, slow lines are going to be one hell of a lot longer and slower if you lose connections to the central credit servers. I’ve seen it happen and, if you’re lacking a cash option, your customers are not going to have a happy experience. They’ll have all those wonderful smells, cash in their pockets, and yet not be able to buy any of those products that smell so good. Ah, of course, you could equip your vendors with those big old credit card manual processors. Remember them? <klunk, klunk, scribble> They will be significantly slower than straight cash.
2. Cashless terminals. Sure, of course it’s logical that the presence of cashless terminals require your entire facility be cashless. Of course they do! (Why are you shouting?) Of course … Of … course. Oh, wait. Maybe not. Logic. So much for that point.
3. Cleaner. This might possibly be true. But, given the lack of cries of calamity, I doubt it’s a major problem. How about just issuing latex gloves to the cashiers?
4. Easier. No, just no. But I’ll defer this explanation.
5. Safer [for customers]. No, not really. A stolen credit card means a big drain on your account, and while the issuer will cover [most] of it, that just means higher interest rates for everyone using credit. Cash is not open-ended like a credit card, and, depending on how it’s carried, can be more difficult than a card to subtly steal. And not nearly as attractive to thieves who know how to use a stolen credit card.
6. Safer [for vendors]. Yes! You’re right! Cash must be moved physically, and many merchants prefer to take a discount on their profits to handling cash. It makes sense. BUT IT DOESN’T MATTER TO ME. Your problems are your problems. Don’t impose them on me.
7. No-Cash. This policy is legal [although the informal reasoning presented in the link provided eludes me] but unfriendly to those of us who don’t care for plastic, whether their reasons are monetary or ecological. A little confused on that last point? Plastic is, after all, plastic. Consider this: Best Buy has stopped issuing plastic gift cards, because they’re, well, plastic. They’ve gone with paper, which is presumably recyclable. So you’ve lost those folks who think it’s more ecological to go with cash than credit cards. (I don’t actually know if that’s true or not.)

Now, back to the Easier point. In the short-term, many customers find it easier to use credit cards. Some use it for acquiring more and more stuff, others for budgeting.

But I’m a software engineer, and I’ll tell you what – credit cards are now all about computers, and what we’re generating here is a data trail for consumption by the Big Data analysis centers. These are used for a variety of operational purposes, but functionally, they’re mostly the same – how to extract more money from your wallet. As a consumer, I might like that (no, I’m not kidding – think of how hard it is to find stuff you want if you have specialized needs), but then again I might not. Discipline can be a problem for some folks.

Other purposes are more sinister, and mostly center around acquiring other information about you, such as your habits, your acquisitions, your physical locations, all the sort of things that most people would prefer to be kept out of sight. Which is not to say that they aren’t anyways. We spray off data every time we go online, every time we cross the visual field of a surveillance camera, etc etc. But it takes a lot of effort to bring all those things together, because the databases are disparate.

Which is why I dislike this scheme. By forcing you to disgorge your data into their computers, they learn a whole lot about you in a way that doesn’t require cross-referencing schemes across multiple databases. This is basically a corporate grab of data that they can analyze and make more money off of.

Not to mention they’re forcing you OUT of the generally accepted monetary system of the United States, and into the corporate controlled monetary system of credit & debit.

So, call me a crank if you will, and I’ll regret not sampling the pizza, but “Revolution” this is not. This is all about corporate profit and how to maximize it at your expense. And shitty, fallacious signage.

Found in Rosedale, located in Roseville, MN, is this quite impressive moose.

If moose were to evolve to this standard, the wolves wouldn’t stand a chance. Time to contact some rogue genetic engineers….

Looking for a new residence, she’s just not sure this one’ll do for her thousands of offspring. Maybe something a little taller?

Falling into the same category as Terrordactyl (2016) is Big Ass Spider! (2013), which concerns the Army losing track of a corpse of someone killed by a mutant spider. When the corpse shows up in the morgue of a local hospital, and the spider escapes into the ventilation system, pest exterminator Alex offers to go after “it,” whatever it is, in exchange for voiding his hospital bill.

By the time he and his informal partner track it down to the physical plant of the hospital, the Army has arrived and boggles up his attempts to take down the spider, which is only a foot or two across.

Things go rapidly downhill after that, as the spider escapes the building and rapidly begins harvesting “food” (that would be humans) in preparation for reproducing (although it’s not clear with what it might have mated with in order to fertilize the eggs), with Alex in dogged pursuit, and one might say competition with the Army, in particular the second-in-command, a lovely Lieutenant Karly. Their firearms are useless against the carapace of the spider, and Alex is having problems applying poison to the spider. By the time the spider spawns, Karly is another item on the menu. And the spider?

Well, it’s big ass.

This is another entry in the evolution of the role of mythical monsters in the psyche of Western Civ. Representative of the divine in the early centuries, it exchanged those responsibilities for the role of being the devilish offspring of scientists, but now they’re becoming the creatures we must overcome to assert our dominance in the local neighborhood, even as they are a result of our own miscues. For all this may be played for horrific laughs, it can be seen as societal training for future treatment of monsters, extra-terrestrial or domestic, political or physical.

As a movie, it’s not bad, but not great. We had more fun with it than we expected, to be honest, and there are minor names in the cast as well, which may explain why it didn’t descend into that layer of movies known as cultishly bad. It was competently acted.

But, still, it was silly.

I wasn’t paying much attention when our late President, George H. W. Bush, served his one and only term as President. He ran the Gulf War, and I do remember friends in the Reserves going off to serve in the war. He served as a pilot in World War II, shot down and rescued after completing a dangerous mission; went on to a private career in the oil industry; his government service included a stint as a Representative, director of the CIA, and Vice President to Ronald Reagan, before his election to the Presidency. I suspect he was limited to a single term as President because the extremist wing of the party, which had gotten started in earnest under Reagan, couldn’t abide Bush’s vision of an honorable and sober approach to governance, and while he won the nomination, he lost the general election.

Rest in Peace, President Bush. Whatever the blemishes of which I’m not aware, I think they’re more than balanced by dedication to good.

With regard to rank-choice voting in Maine, a reader writes:

Preaching to the choir, of course, but his lawsuit is complete bullshit. RCS [RCV] is effectively like holding actual multiple rounds of voting until someone gets a majority, but does it all in one go, saving a ton of money and time.

But it’s true that most American elections are not majority victory, but simple plurality victory. Incidentally, Minneapolis is using RCV, with the most recent race resulting in the election of Jacob Frey after four rounds. I recall no complaints regarding the use of RCV.

Since the Maine electorate chose through referendum to change to RCV (twice!), I don’t think his lawsuit has a chance of succeeding, but we shall see.

The acting Attorney General, Matthew Whitaker, is attracting scandals like rotting meat attracts flies. Steve Benen provides a helpful summary:

The sheer volume of controversies surrounding acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker – who was only appointed to the job three weeks ago – is extraordinary. New reports, each of which are deeply embarrassing to the nation’s top law enforcement official, seem to pop up with alarming frequency.

Just over the last week or so, Whitaker has faced credible allegations of having violated the Hatch Act and having run a dubious child-care facility in Iowa. Today, the news went from bad to worse.

The Washington Post, pointing to Federal Trade Commission documents released in response to a public records request, reports that Whitaker not only helped lead a scam operation called World Patent Marketing, but he was well aware of complaints from defrauded customers.

Despite the complaints, Whitaker “remained an active champion of World Patent Marketing for three years – even expressing willingness to star in national television ads promoting the firm, the records show.”

A Bloomberg News report twisted the knife.

And I’ll just stop there. There’s so much more, but it makes me nauseous.

Matthew Whitaker, tough guy and wannabe AG.

So after I stopped laughing at this zero-peg on the morality scale, and the lying liar who keeps on stocking the swamp with the largest alligators ever seen in the Federal government – much bigger than Obama’s alligators, one might envision Trump saying – I’ve begun to wonder about misdirection.

Whitaker’s ludicrous. Whitaker’s a joke. I’m not a lawyer, and even I can tell he’s a joke. Even if I take into account Trump’s predilection for selecting candidates to fill roles based on physical appearance, and willingly grant that Whitaker looks like an AG, his record still makes him a joke.

So while the reporters and the pundits and the basset hounds those of us venting pressure run around penning pieces on this pathetic joke, I have to wonder what the hell Trump thinks he’s up to behind the smoke and mirrors. This entire AG thing makes so little sense that it’s as if Trump were suffering from dementia.

All I can think is maybe, just maybe, his preferred nominee is being kept in the wings until the new Senate convenes, where he’ll have a more substantial majority, and can nominate someone who won’t be blocked by any two GOP Senators by the name of Flake (retired), Corker (retired and utterly irrelevant even when he wasn’t), Murkowski (erratic), or Collins (easily fooled anyways). With a 53-47 majority, Trump can lose three Senators and still have his selection confirmed, since Vice President Pence will always do his bidding.

Will it be Whitaker? Or will he pick some other tough guy, like Clint Eastwood, instead?

Our new Attorney General Eastwood attends every hearing in Congress with a six-shooter on his hip, by command of President Trump. He’s also not permitted to wash his hair.

Or is there something deeper going on? Or is it just that he can’t unglue himself from the TV to pursue this very serious matter any further?

It may be time to compile a list of Senators who appear frantic to not have the President found guilty of various crimes. NBC News has a couple adding themselves to the list right here:

[Senator John] Thune [(R-SD)] added that the Mueller probe should be thorough and complete, but can’t go on forever. He said Trump has important work to do for the American people and it is time to “move on.”

“And the longer these things drag on, it just, it gets, I think, very wearing on the American people,” he said. “The report needs to come out. We need to know what happened, but I agree with my colleagues that the time I think has come to start drawing this to a conclusion.”

Senator, it may be wearing on the shrinking Trump base, and on a GOP membership that is slowly becoming more and more disillusioned with the GOP leadership. The rest of us, however, are settling in with some popcorn to see just how far into the swamp President Trump strayed while claiming he was going to drain it, even as he partook of its dark charms. Your continued support of him will look very poorly indeed on your next re-election effort, especially if he gets marched off in handcuffs.

[Senator Lindsey] Graham (R-SC), who has emerged as one of Trump’s fiercest defenders, said he had “no idea what that’s all about” when asked his reaction to Cohen’s guilty plea, adding that it “seems to be a process crime.”

“I’ve yet to see anybody indicated for actually colluding with the Russians,” Graham told reporters on Capitol Hill. “I don’t know where Mueller is going but it is up to him to get there sooner rather than later.”

No, no, no, Senator. It’s up to Mueller to get it right. If there’s nothing, then there’s nothing, and that’s fine, but all the guilty pleas and indictments would suggest to the logically minded that there’s already a something, and it may point to a huge something.

We already know you’re frantically defending an incompetent President. The question is if you’re trying to blight an investigation into a criminal President.

On to the list you go. I already know you can’t seem to follow simple reasoning. Vapid defenses are not a positive sign for you.

Regarding my bafflement at quantum radar a reader writes:

My understanding of quantum entanglement would seem to say that such a thing is theoretically possible — although I question just how much quantum-level information gets changed by bouncing photons off a target. I’d guess it was a more macroscopic level of information in a radar signal. But assume that much works. The real next problem is how does one generate a few billion entangled photons, and separate them into the 2 described streams? My understanding is that it’s difficult to create and isolate quantum entangled (maybe we should just start calling them QE particles?) particles.

It occurs to me that one of the strategies of stealth aircraft is to absorb and even transmit the absorbed EM radiation out the other side, much like the conceptual “invisibility cloak,” and I wonder if that action of absorption would actually disturb the entangled photons as to dissolve the entanglement. Identify those disentangled photons and you have a picture?

I dunno, just guessing here.

From UMNews:

Researchers have known for years that tumors have patterns that are like little “highways” that cancer cells use to move within the tumors and ultimately toward blood vessels and adjacent tissue to invade the body. Patients who have high numbers of these patterns in their tumors have a lower chance of surviving the cancer.

What the researchers haven’t been able to figure out until now is how the cells recognize these patterns and move along them.

In this study, the University of Minnesota team examined in the lab how breast cancer cells moved and used medicines to try to stop the cells. When they stopped the mechanisms that serve as the motor of the cells, the cells surprisingly changed the way they moved to an oozing-like motion, almost like a blob.

“Cancer cells are very sneaky,” said senior author Paolo Provenzano, a University of Minnesota biomedical engineering associate professor and a Masonic Cancer Center researcher. “We didn’t expect the cells to change their movement. This forced us to change our tactics to target both kinds of movements simultaneously. It’s almost like we destroyed their GPS so they couldn’t find the highways. This stopped the cells in their tracks. The cells just sat there and didn’t move.”

Fascinating. I assume they’re talking about metastasization. This bit gave me pause, though:

The researchers studied the cells in the lab in two-dimensional, engineered microenvironments, that are almost like a microchip with cells. These microenvironments mimicked how the cells behave as they do in a tumor and allowed researchers to speed up their research.

How good a mimicry might it be? Does the loss of a dimension change how the cells react, or even how the unnamed med works?

Restless impatience over here. Family history of cancer on my Dad’s side.

Karst got back to me concerning me being a curmudgeon about their site in quite a hurry:

Hi Hue!

Thanks for reaching out. We appreciate the feedback and rest assured, I’ll pass this along to our web development team.

We regret that you’ve had this experience and thank you for the chance of improving our services. Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Sincerely,

[Omitted]

Nice of them to do so. On the other hand, as my Arts Editor pointed out, this is not a web development issue. It’s a marketing issue.

Missiologist:

[Concerning John Chau]

Obviously, the long-term strategy did not work, and Chau will become not only a topic of debate but of study for missiologists, people who train missionaries. That’s my field. I have a PhD in the subject and have trained missionaries to go to many places, including India. I am also the dean of the mission school at Wheaton College, where we unapologetically and enthusiastically train missionaries to engage their own cultures, as well as cross-culturally, from their culture to another. [“Slain missionary John Chau prepared much more than we thought, but are missionaries still fools?“, Ed Stetzer, Dean of the School of Mission, Ministry and Leadership at Wheaton College, WaPo]

For those readers following the story of the late missionary John Chau and his attempt to bring Christianity to the isolated Andaman Islanders, this claim may also be of interest:

But new information released Wednesday paints a more complicated picture of Chau, including an interview with Christianity Today. In the interview, Mary Ho, who leads All Nations (the agency that sent Chau on missions), indicated that he was heavily vaccinated and even quarantined before going on the mission.

It sounds good, but I’d rather here hear from an infectious diseases doc and researcher who also knew which vaccinations were employed. I remain worried this was the work of amateurs who only think they know what they’re doing.

I had been planning to write a post about the troubles of discerning truth in an age of political polarization, with a concrete example of the nomination of Thomas Farr for a seat in a U.S. District Court. The Democrats have been four-square against him, both now and back in President Bush’s tenure, when he was also nominated. Their complaint was that he represented Jesse Helms back in the day, and was instrumental in the voter suppression efforts ever since, usually used against black communities.

This was denied by the Republicans, and in fact the lone black GOP Senator, Tim Scott of South Carolina, stated he had discussed the matter with Mr. Farr and had come to the conclusion that he could support him. This left only Senator Flake (R-AZ) as the only Republican Senator voting no, and in his case it’s a protest against the failure of Senator McConnell to bring the Special Counsel protective legislation up for a vote. From the News Observer:

Sen. Tim Scott, a South Carolina Republican and the only black Republican in the Senate, called Farr on Wednesday and spoke with the author of a Department of Justice memo obtained by The Washington Post this week before casting his vote to advance Farr on Wednesday. Scott also spoke with Obama appointees about Farr.

“If he was the architect of that nasty, racist campaign, I would have been a ‘no’ without question. What I found so far from appointees of the Obama administration to my conversations with the author of the memo is that he was in fact not the architect of the campaign and that the character witnesses from the Obama administration coming forward on behalf of Tom Farr have been pretty strong,” Scott told Fox News Channel’s “Fox News at Night” on Wednesday.

So how does a casual observer come to a conclusion on this particular incident? Are the Democrats becoming tribalists, which would be awful for the nation?

However, the story changed in just a couple of hours. From CNN:

Republican Sen. Tim Scott announced Thursday he would oppose President Donald Trump’s nominee to be a US district judge in North Carolina, effectively ending the nomination that had been plagued with accusations that Thomas Farr supported measures that disenfranchised African-American voters.

“This week, a Department of Justice memo written under President George H.W. Bush was released that shed new light on Mr. Farr’s activities. This, in turn, created more concerns. Weighing these important factors, this afternoon I concluded that I could not support Mr. Farr’s nomination,” Scott said in a statement.

Scott, who is the Senate’s sole black Republican, told reporters Wednesday that he wanted to speak to the author of a 1991 memo obtained by the Washington Post, which outlines a controversial postcard campaign distributed by the 1990 campaign of Sen. Jesse Helms that the Justice Department said were used to intimidate black voters from going to the polls.

Scott’s decision to oppose Farr prevented Farr from being confirmed by the Senate, where Republicans hold a 51-to-49 seat majority. Also opposing Farr was Republican Sen. Jeff Flake, who has sworn off advancing Trump judicial nominees until the chamber votes on a bill to protect special counsels such as Robert Mueller. All 49 Democrats opposed the nomination.

There’s not a lot of insight to be drawn from this. We know that Trump’s selections for judges is not guided by good judgment or some sort of process that rewards both competency and good character. We know that both sides are becoming more and more tribalistic, and I believe that this will lead to a breakdown in one of these parties in the not too distant future, and I think the GOP is the leading contender.

The Democrats have to find a way to stand strong while preserving their trademark penchant for disagreements and even, yes, squabbles. That’s the yeast that keeps them going. The lack of that will turn the GOP into a pillar of salt.

Reporter: President Trump, how much foreign money has entered the Treasury’s coffers due to your tariffs on China and other countries?

President Trump: Billions & billions, I tell you –

Reporter: No, sir. Those countries do not pay the United States anything –

Trump: Sure they do!

Reporter: No sir, as your own Administration knows, foreign governments don’t send money in response to tariffs –

Trump: Well, then, if you’re so smart, then who does, young woman?

Reporter: The customers do, sir. The American citizens who voted you into office. Those billions and billions of dollars come out of the pockets of the blue collar workers of America.

Trump: No, no, no –

Reporter: Which leads to a second question, sir: Are you lying to the American citizens about how tariffs work, or do you truly not understand how they work themselves?

Trump: <stomps off cursing>

Reporter: <barely audible> Dumbshit.

One must indulge one’s fantasies from time to time. Since the rest are X-rated fantasies involving Trump and our favorite Minnesota herbivore, the moose, I’ll stick with this one.