Category Archives: Uncategorized

Observed on our recent visit to Michigan were these reminders of the classic Satnrday Night Live continuing series of skits…

In the third part of his tri-partite weekly column, Andrew Sullivan broods in New York on the fracturing of his favorite spot of the outer Cape Cod, the disappearance of the dunes he thought eternal:

Sometimes I wonder when we look back on this age, and its awful politics, and disgusting discourse, if we are actually missing the real story. The vandalism we are doing to our political way of life may at some point be repairable. Perhaps a future president will be able to reconstruct the discourse, or bind some of the wounds, or abate the tribalism. Perhaps the American people will rediscover resources of empathy and civility and reason that seem to have abandoned us for the moment.

But the dunes? They tell me that nature can, at some point, bring them back, that breaches this great can eventually be healed by time and new currents and tides. But the reemergence of a landscape inevitably takes far longer than its destruction. And the grief is as real as the wait is long.

Andrew, it’s called climate change, and many of us worry more about that than we do about our politics, as horrifying as some of our brethren have become in their pursuit of stasis.

Clare Garvie of Georgetown Law’s Center on Privacy & Technology remarks on the employment of facial recognition software in the pages of WaPo:

Imagine attending a public gathering — a political rally, an immigration-policy protest or a pro-life march — and police officers walk through the crowds demanding each attendee show identification. You would be justified both in your outrage at this intrusion and in refusing to comply. In this country, a police officer needs to suspect you of committing a crime before stopping you on the street and requiring an answer to the question: “Who are you?”

Face-scanning surveillance does away with this. The technology enables a world where every man, woman and child passing by a camera is scanned, despite no prior suspicion of wrongdoing. But their faces are nonetheless compared against the profiles of criminals and other people wanted by the police. It enables a world where people can be identified and tracked from camera to camera throughout a city — simply because they chose to get a driver’s license.

But, speaking as a software engineer, there’s an implicit assumption that each face in the crowd is being recognized. This is not necessarily how the system must work. Imagine – and this is easy for me to imagine – a system which has been programmed with the faces of those wanted for their alleged association with criminal activities, and flagging those who match those parameters set for the scan, while those who do not match are simply ignored.

It’s very easy to imagine a court hearing testimony from a forensic software engineer, testifying that a system is, or is not, designed in the above manner, and permiting or not, respectively, testimony deriving the facial recognition system. Why?

Because that’s how “it” works today, where “it” consists of police officers searching for suspects on foot. Those they don’t recognize as being the suspects or witnesses of interest are ignored and probably not recognized at all, unless they are acquainted with the officer. If we’re going to be very technical about this, the software is somewhat better than the police officer, although since the officer is unlikely to use this incidental information to track the movements of honest citizens, the point is exceedingly fine and can be ignored.

But, as she mentions, and as my long-time readers know, China is using this sort of software to track their entire population, and for advocates of freedom, it’s a nightmare situation. One wonders how the Chinese feel about it.

Garvie then indulges in an incomplete observation:

And what happens if a system like this gets it wrong? A mistake by a video-based surveillance system may mean an innocent person is followed, investigated, and maybe even arrested and charged for a crime he or she didn’t commit. A mistake by a face-scanning surveillance system on a body camera could be lethal. An officer, alerted to a potential threat to public safety or to himself, must, in an instant, decide whether to draw his weapon. A false alert places an innocent person in those crosshairs.

Facial-recognition technology advances by the day, but problems with accuracy and misidentifications persist, especially when the systems must contend with poor-quality images — such as from surveillance cameras.

Sure. And how does this differ from a human eye-witness? It doesn’t. Garvie should admit to the point and submit an analysis which compares the endpoints of mistakes by human and software, along with rates of false identification.

As facial recognition systems come closer and closer to being autonomous artificial intelligence system, there will be some important questions raised about the transition from being a hammer to an intelligent agent. But I think the points made here are tangential to those important questions, which are not fully developed in my mind.

Noticed during the recent vacation trip, and I suspect I’ve photographed it before. All I can think is root ball…

And then onwards. “That’s a nice boulder.”

Concerning President Trump and his missteps, a reader writes:

Just under half of all Americans, including one out of five who vote Republican, now describe Trump’s behavior as “treasonous.” I’m not sure he can distract, doubletalk, or accuse his way out of this one.

And isn’t that an amazing fact? An American President so untrusted, whose behavior is so awful, and yet he doesn’t resign, and his party, despite the dismay of many members, refuses to do much more than mutter among themselves. Now, it’s true other Presidents have suffered such poor reputations, but some – such as Lincoln – have rebounded in their reputations, while others had the grace to resign (Nixon), die, or be ignominiously trashed by history.

Of course, it’s possible Trump will manage that rebound. Perhaps he’ll take Putin prisoner when Putin visits the White House in the fall, put him on trial, and then onwards to jail.

But it seems unlikely. Trump’s affinity for autocrats, an inclination which should horrify every American, will forbid him from doing so.

His followers may believe he’ll do that, though, or may even believe that it’s OK for Russia to interfere in our election because “their” side won, not realizing how much this embitters and energizes their perceived opponents – and forgetting the critical point that we’re all Americans, and therefore we’ve agreed that we will play by the rules. Egged on by conservative media, we continue explore a series of ever-more horrifying abysses.

It’s becoming a measure of the failure of the moral systems in America. Perhaps we fail to take morality seriously any longer, with the evangelist movement leading the way.

A reader writes concerning my critique of Michael Anton’s opinion column on birthright citizenship:

I think your argument about “jurisdiction” may be incorrect. The “plain meanings” of words change over decades, for one. But it appears from what you’ve written, that the author of those words contemporaneously clarified exactly what he meant, even though it slightly differs with a current legal definition. And it’s logical: at the time, it would have been easy to consider someone who claimed allegiance too and citizenship in another country to NOT be subject to U.S. jurisdiction. That idea continues somewhat today, in the mechanism of extradition.

I absolutely shiver at the thought of the meanings of legal words, the underpinnings of our entire legal system, actually drifting. It’d be rather like gluon and meson trading definitions, which doesn’t matter until someone tried to do a physics experiment using the old words and the new meanings.

Ka-boom!

The reader is right that, in Anton’s piece, that Senator Turnbull had apparently defined the meaning, as I noted in my initial post. But today, also in WaPo, Elizabeth Wydra, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center^[1], rebuts Anton’s article. To the particular point of my reader:

Those who attack birthright citizenship, as did former Trump official Michael Anton in a recent Post op-ed, often go out of their way not only to misrepresent the plain meaning of the words of the 14th Amendment and those who drafted and ratified it, but also to ignore the racist and bloody history that required it in the first place. Sen. Lyman Trumbull, for example, a leading advocate in Congress for the citizenship clause, was quoted by Anton as somehow supporting his twisted reading of the clause.

Except it was Trumbull who answered the racists of his own time who worried about “naturalizing the children of the Chinese and Gypsies born in this country.” Trumbull said the citizenship clause “undoubtedly” would do that, and that a child of such immigrants “is just as much a citizen as the child of a European.” In other remarks, Trumbull made it even clearer, saying, “Birth entitles a person to citizenship, that every freeborn person in this land, is, by virtue of being born here, a citizen of the United States.”

Those who, like Anton, deny the plain meaning of the citizenship clause and its powerful history love to focus on the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction,” as if somehow they can make the clause say the opposite of what it actually says. They have even added to Trumbull’s statements — it’s amazing what slipping in an extra “[or]” will do — in ham-handed attempts to distort their meaning (which have been criticized across the ideological spectrum).

Either Anton, like myself, is ignorant of parts of the 14th Amendment debate, or deliberately conceals the full information (much like Fox News), or Wydra is engaged in similar deceit. In the absence of the time to research the subject more fully, I must reluctantly turn to circumstancial evidence. In this case, Wydra’s defense leaves the meaning of jurisdiction untouched, which I find more reasonable and preferable than the implications of Anton’s position. Without more first-hand evidence and analysis, I am inclined to stand by my analysis.

Any historians in the crowd?

¹I give her position simply as a courtesy, not to suggest she has dispositive authority. I am not familiar with her institution, it could be the equivalent of a mail-order church for all I know.

The orange lilies from a week or so ago continues, and I find it so charming I just have to publish a few more pics.

In this case, spiders ready to strike from above. Way, way above.

When one thinks of airborne organisms, spiders do not usually come to mind. However, these wingless arthropods have been found 4 km up in the sky [1], dispersing hundreds of kilometers [2]. To disperse, spiders “balloon,” whereby they climb to the top of a prominence, let out silk, and float away. The prevailing view is that drag forces from light wind allow spiders to become airborne [3], yet ballooning mechanisms are not fully explained by current aerodynamic models [4, 5]. The global atmospheric electric circuit and the resulting atmospheric potential gradient (APG) [6] provide an additional force that has been proposed to explain ballooning [7]. Here, we test the hypothesis that electric fields (e-fields) commensurate with the APG can be detected by spiders and are sufficient to stimulate ballooning. We find that the presence of a vertical e-field elicits ballooning behavior and takeoff in spiders. We also investigate the mechanical response of putative sensory receivers in response to both e-field and air-flow stimuli, showing that spider mechanosensory hairs are mechanically activated by weak e-fields. Altogether, the evidence gathered reveals an electric driving force that is sufficient for ballooning. These results also suggest that the APG, as additional meteorological information, can reveal the auspicious time to engage in ballooning. We propose that atmospheric electricity adds key information to our understanding and predictive capability of the ecologically important mass migration patterns of arthropod fauna.[8] [“Electric Fields Elicit Ballooning in Spiders,” Erica L. Morley and Daniel Robert, Current Biology]

Yep, spiders use the Earth’s natural electric fields to attain altitudes of up to 4 km (2.5 miles). Nature can be so damn cool.

Brachiation:

Brachiation (from “brachium”, Latin for “arm”), or arm swinging, is a form of arboreal locomotion in which primates swing from tree limb to tree limb using only their arms. During brachiation, the body is alternately supported under each forelimb. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “The brain’s secret powerhouse that makes us who we are,” Caroline Williams, NewScientist (7 July 2018, paywall):

[Neuroscientist Robert] Barton suspects that what started this unlikely growth spurt was the challenge of moving a much larger body through the trees. While small primates can run along the branches, even gibbon-sized apes are too heavy to do the same, at least without holding on to branches above. This led apes to make a switch to swinging through the branches, known as brachiation, which in turn made the ability to plan ahead a distinct advantage. “Brachiation is a relatively complex locomotor strategy,” says Barton. “It involves fine sensory motor control, but it also involves a need to plan your route so that you can avoid accidents.”

I’ve taken pictures of this dead tree in Michigan before, but this time I managed to get some camera artifacts to go with it! From bottom to top, here we go…

Ever wonder how Californians feel about the size of their state? Slate, in covering a story about the State Supreme Court removing an initiative statute to break the State of California into 3, happens to have an answer to that:

Proposition 9 was unpopular with California residents, too. According to a statewide April poll, 17 percent of respondents said they supported the measure to split California into three states, while an overwhelming 72 percent of respondents opposed the initiative.

While for some folks, states feel a bit obsolete, for others they remain an important part of the collective consciousness. And what brought on the proposal? A dissatisfied billionaire, of course:

Draper, who has sunk more than $1.2 million into passing Proposition 9, criticized the Supreme Court’s ruling. “Apparently, the insiders are in cahoots and the establishment doesn’t want to find out how many people don’t like the way California is being governed,” Draper said in a statement. He also noted that the six justices “probably would have lost their jobs” under his proposed three-state plan. …

Draper wants to dismantle the state because he believes California is too large to run effectively, citing the state’s high taxes and cost of living compared with its poor public services. While Draper’s professed goal of improving California’s governance and standard of living is admirable, it is unclear whether breaking up California would serve as an effective remedy to any of the issues currently facing the state.

How is California doing? Turns out, depends on your metric. US New & World Report rank them #9, noting their median household income of $67,739 (from May of this year). Back in 2016, L.A. Weekly declared California as “America’s Poverty State,” saying:

The nickname is the Golden State. And, true to form, we have more billionaires than any other country besides China and the United States itself. But we’re also the nation’s poorest state. Again.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s latest “Supplemental Poverty Measure” concluded that about one in five Golden State residents — 20.6 percent — lives in poverty. But the news isn’t all bad. It comes as the bureau also reported that, nationwide, “Real median household income increased by 5.2 percent between 2014 and 2015, while the official poverty rate decreased 1.2 percentage points.”

And Rich States, Poor States ranked California as #47 earlier this year. The trick here? They’re ideologically fixed on taxes and similar issues, listing hot topics such as estate taxes (Californian has none, so they get a rating of #1 in that category) and “right-to-work” laws (California has none, and so they get a rating of #50 – but how does this have an impact on ratings?).

It’s all about that prism you have in front of your eyeballs, isn’t it?

Back to Mr. Draper, it might be interesting to know which prism is glued to his face, but honestly, I’m not all that interested. He may think the State Supremes would lose their jobs, but perhaps he should think of it this way – if the State were to split into three, now there’d be Supreme Courts for three States to populate – and experienced personnel with a good record are always at a premium.

I’m one of those oddballs who loved science fiction growing up, but didn’t get into Doctor Who when I was young. Now, my Arts Editor is repairing this omission, and I’ve just been introduced to Sylvester McCoy as Dr. Who.

And, all I can say is that his eyes make me think Bill Murray should get the Dr. Who gig sometime soon. If he needs a job, of course.

In the WaPo Opinion pages Michael Anton tries to split an exceedingly fine hair when it comes to birthright citizenship:

Constitutional scholar Edward Erler has shown that the entire case for birthright citizenship is based on a deliberate misreading of the 14th Amendment. The purpose of that amendment was to resolve the question of citizenship for newly freed slaves. Following the Civil War, some in the South insisted that states had the right to deny citizenship to freedmen. In support, they cited 1857’s disgraceful Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, which held that no black American could ever be a citizen of the United States.

A constitutional amendment was thus necessary to overturn Dred Scott and to define the precise meaning of American citizenship.

That definition is the amendment’s very first sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside.”

The amendment clarified for the first time that federal citizenship precedes and supersedes its state-level counterpart. No state has the power to deny citizenship, hence none may dispossess freed slaves.

Second, the amendment specifies two criteria for American citizenship: birth or naturalization (i.e., lawful immigration), and being subject to U.S. jurisdiction. We know what the framers of the amendment meant by the latter because they told us. Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, a principal figure in drafting the amendment, defined “subject to the jurisdiction” as “not owing allegiance to anybody else” — that is, to no other country or tribe. Sen. Jacob Howard of Michigan, a sponsor of the clause, further clarified that the amendment explicitly excludes from citizenship “persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, [or] who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

Several problems immediately present themselves.

First, the citation concerning the debate over the Amendment is suspect on its face. Our first line of communication are our words, so what does jurisdiction mean?

n. the authority given by law to a court to try cases and rule on legal matters within a particular geographic area and/or over certain types of legal cases. [Law.com]

The power and authority constitutionally conferred upon (or constitutionally recognized as existing in) a court or judge to pronounce the sentence of the law, or to award the remedies provided by law, upon a state of facts, proved or ad- mitted, referred to the tribunal for decision, and authorized by law to be the subject of investigation or action by that tribunal, and in favor of or against persons (or a res) who present themselves, or who are brought, before the court in some manner sanctioned by law as proper and sufficient. [Black’s Law Dictionary]

Whether or not Senator Trumbull used that definition for the phrase, the simple fact of the matter is that jurisdiction does not mean Does this person have allegiance to the nation claiming the particular acre of land currently hosting our abstract person, it means, according to a couple of law dictionaries which I will freely interpret, which court or legal entity has the authority to enforce law in said acre of land. We need to be mindful of the words themselves, not the supposed artificial meaning given to them at the time. If the authors of the Amendment had wanted it to say what Anton claims they meant, they should have written it clearly.

Second, even if we’re willing to accept the strained argument concerning jurisdiction, then if someone is born on U.S. soil, they are, at that time, an infant. Infants don’t have allegiances. We can hide behind legal guardians and that sort of thing, but in the end, it’s better to have a law that doesn’t depend on a proxy for the person in question, since that proxy may not reflect the endpoint desires of that infant – that is, what that infant wants when they grow up.

Third, if the State doesn’t have jurisdiction, who does? Who imposes order when imperfect humans demand their self-interested objects and begin banging heads? Obviously, I find it hard to accept the first argument, so perhaps this one is a trifle dubious, but it still strikes me as important to understand this Amendment from its plain language.

And this is all very unfortunate, because there’s a real debate to be had here. Who, and how, should someone qualify for citizenship? The assignment of citizenship to those born on American soil may be too broad might be a very worthy side to argue in a debate. A similar debate is implicitly set forth, appropriately enough, in a science fiction novel of many decades ago. Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, while sounding like an action novel, and presenting itself as such, has as one of its indispensable facets a debate over just who deserves citizenship (or, more accurately, first-class citizenship, which brings with it the right to vote). For a man who many revere for his libertarianism as well as for his writing skills, the central lesson he drives home is unexpected. He comes across with the observation that citizenship should only be granted those who’ve learned to put the group before themselves – a communal observation if ever there was one.

On our recent trip to visit Deb’s Mom, I took some tranquil pictures of the countryside. Here’s some nice clouds on the horizon.

And a couple of tiger lilies.

Earlier today CNN was reporting that President Trump was seriously considering an offer by President Putin of Russia to permit interviews with the Russian military offers indicted by Special Counsel Mueller for interference in the 2016 Presidential Election IF the Russians could interview a set of Americans they purport have been up to shenanigans – including the former American Ambassador to Russia.

This caused quite the uproar among the diplomatic crowd; according to the Daily Beast, the general reaction was negative.

Current and former American diplomats are expressing disgust and horror over the White House’s willingness to entertain permitting Russian officials to question a prominent former U.S. ambassador.

One serving diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he was “at a fucking loss” over comments that can be expected to chill American diplomacy in hostile or authoritarian countries – a comment echoed by former State Department officials as well.

“It’s beyond disgraceful. It’s fundamentally ignorant with regard to how we conduct diplomacy or what that means. It really puts in jeopardy the professional independence of diplomats anywhere in the world, if the consequence of their actions is going to be potentially being turned over to a foreign government,” the U.S. diplomat told The Daily Beast.

Now CNN is reporting an abrupt about-face:

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders just issued a statement that says President Trump disagrees with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s proposal to question Americans, including the former US ambassador to Russia.

“It is a proposal that was made in sincerity by President Putin, but President Trump disagrees with it,” she said. “Hopefully President Putin will have the 12 identified Russians come to the United States to prove their innocence or guilt.”

This is the sort of flailing you get from incompetent amateurs. If we were serious about our leaders, Trump would not be one after the last couple of weeks. Trump, and the United States, has so much egg on our face you might as well call us the Frittata States of America.

And the eggs have gone bad.

We’ve seen how the new Republicans have been loudly proclaiming their allegiance to President Trump as they advance their candidacies for various elected positions, and thereby proudly brandishing a populist conservative / right wing extremist position new to the Republican Party. But how about in … Iran? Rohollah Faghihi reports in AL Monitor on the new generation of Iranian hard-liners:

Hard-liners in Iran face the key challenge of a new generation questioning the approach being taken by the old guard. Members of the younger generation, unlike their older peers, are challenging anyone who acts against their expectations, even including when that person happens to be Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, the most popular figure in the conservative camp.

Traditional Iranian hard-liners are broadly characterized by their anti-Americanism and opposition to engagement with the West, desire for “revolutionary” foreign relations and opposition to any form of liberalism promoted by Reformists. In short, they have a general intolerance toward cultural and political change.

The new generation, however, espouses the hard-line discourse, yet do not adhere to the Principlist camp of conservatives. They call themselves “innovative revolutionaries,” on a mission to lead a renaissance in their camp. They accuse the old guard of being overly cautious and of betraying the spirit of Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic. This generation tends to be more uncompromising than their predecessors, viewing their rivals as sworn enemies with whom forming alliances is unthinkable. …

The innovative revolutionaries vehemently oppose any cooperation with the Reformists, whom they consider promoters of liberalism and secularism, considered anathemas to the Islamic Revolution’s principles. In this regard, during Rouhani’s tenure, the new generation has criticized him for various reasons. They loathe older, pragmatic conservatives, including former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati and parliament Speaker Ali Larijani, for backing Rouhani in the past two presidential elections. When it comes to the Reformists and Rouhani, the new generation accepts no compromise and has no qualms about challenging those moving closer to their declared enemies.

Their movement is failing to win elections and the affections of the people, it must be a lack of purity, so let’s kick out the old perverts. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? A good old RINO expungement in action. The GOP didn’t control every single elected seat nationally or in the states, so let’s kick out some of our more moderate members for being impure, and bring in those who more explicitly embrace the Holy Writ ideology, and that’ll bring us to victory. That’s been the activity since at least the time of Reagan, although I see Newt Gingrich as a big signpost on that Trail to Oblivion. (As I’ve noted before, though, Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) saw this coming, and with a sense of foreboding, no less.)

Iran is best described as a managed democracy, meaning that there are those holding unelected seats of high power who control the list of who may vie for elective seats of power, and then, via the Supreme Leader, controls those who’ve won the elections. This new generation of hardliners will need to find ways to capture those unelected seats before they can have realistic hopes of capturing those elective seats, and the power that goes with them.

I think they realize that. It’s certainly suggested in the following:

In a May interview, Payam Fazlinejad, a young hard-line analyst, said of the new generation, “We are faced with ‘innovative revolutionaries’ who have distinctly critical thoughts, which are based on the originalist remarks of the Imam [Khomeini] and the [supreme] leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei]. [They] think about reforms and renaissance to help the [Islamic] Revolution overcome challenges.”

Returning to the words of the founders, as if they are without flaw and will always apply. Thus do fanatics avoid the need for intelligent thought. We’re starting to see that in the American candidates who embrace Trumpism. However, we may be more fortunate than the Iranians, as the analogy is imperfect and Trump continues to commit error after error, alienating more and more of the moderate Republicans. If their team politics discipline can be broken for the terrible curse that it truly has become, we still have a chance of avoiding the apparently inevitable fate of the Iranians – controlled by those who dare not think, dare not learn, dare not adapt.

Because adaptation is compromise, and compromise is unthinkable.

I generally avoid intellectual theft, but the material of this post simply aches for the title, which I have stolen from Chuck Shepherd of the venerable, and no longer active, newspaper column News Of The Weird. Onward!

Retraction Watch pointed me at the following sequence involving a research paper. First, the abstract, of which I’ll bold the gob-smacking part.

Controlling the release kinetics from a drug carrier is crucial to maintain a drug’s therapeutic window. We report the use of biodegradable porous silicon microparticles (pSi MPs) loaded with the anticancer drug camphothecin, followed by a plasma polymer overcoating using a loudspeaker plasma reactor. Homogenous “Teflon-like” coatings were achieved by tumbling the particles by playing AC/DC’s song “Thunderstruck”. The overcoating resulted in a markedly slower release of the cytotoxic drug, and this effect correlated positively with the plasma polymer coating times, ranging from 2-fold up to more than 100-fold. Ultimately, upon characterizing and verifying pSi MP production, loading, and coating with analytical methods such as time-of-flight secondary ion mass spectrometry, scanning electron microscopy, thermal gravimetry, water contact angle measurements, and fluorescence microscopy, human neuroblastoma cells were challenged with pSi MPs in an in vitro assay, revealing a significant time delay in cell death onset.

Say what? Is this some sort of karma thing involving head-banging rock? And then this question and response came along:

Does this only work with with the one song from AC/DC or can other music be substituted?

Maybe Fleetwood Mac? Or the folks who did Afternoon Delight, whoever they were?

In this publication we also investigated a range of monotonous frequencies. Each of these frequencies alone did not not produce as good a coating on the particles as the song. We suspect that the changing frequencies of songs provide chaotic mixing of the particles. We did not investigate other songs besides “Thunderstruck” but it might be possible to optimise the particle tumbling with other songs or frequencies. However, it is difficult to imagine having a song that rocks as much as “Thunderstruck”. Dr Thomas Michl conducted this work and would be happy to answer further questions.

Thanks for your question.

Augh!

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-WI) has, for all intents and purposes, appeared to have already checked out of his job as Representative to Congress from Wisconsin, as well as the Speaker of the House. He refuses to try to restrain President Trump in any legal & possible way with regards to the trade wars tariffs because he thinks it’ll be futile; his approach to writing and passing major legislation is the most rank amateurism we’ve seen in decades (see the Tax Change bill and the bill to revoke the ACA, each written with the express intent that the Senate would completely rewrite them and then the House would pass them through reconciliation); and even his reputation as a policy wonk hangs in tatters after the debacle with insurance.

The man has proven himself a total incompetent at the tough job of governance, and, since he’s stated he’s retiring from the job at the end of this term, he’s basically checked out.

Just a few moments ago I thought of a way to light a fire under this abjectly failed politico. Let’s postulate a series of events.

1. The Democrats, in a shocking mid-term wave election, bury the Republicans in the mid-terms. It’s so bad that the Democrats hold a super-majority in the House, and take the Senate as well.
2. In a critical move for the purposes of this post, Representative Nancy Pelosi is once again elected as Speaker of the House.
3. The next day, impeachment proceedings are begun against President Trump on charges of mismanagement and betrayal of state secrets, for which there exists abundant evidence in President Trump’s failure to nominate candidates for many critical positions in the government, in the former case, and his refusal to accept the judgments of his intelligence agencies in the latter. As an aperitif to the latter, his invitation that top Russians join him for a celebratory meeting in the Oval Office becomes a lovely dessert for a House full of enraged Democrats.
4. By the end of the day, the House has passed the impeachment resolution through acclamation, as most of Republican Representatives have come to realize the depth of President Trump’s incompetence, if not his perfidy. Those few who are still loyal to their leader whine incredulously.
5. The next day, the Senate votes to accept the presentation of the House, and before President Trump can do more than proclaim about it all being fake news, and in perhaps the most shocking and unlikely part of this hypothetical, enough Republican Senators, shamed by the Lion of the Senate, the terribly ill Senator McCain, as well former Senators Corker and Flake, join the Democrats and vote for conviction. Former President Trump is relieved of his duties, his perks, and possibly his freedom.
6. But even as suddenly President Pence is sworn in, the House has been busy. Pence, after all, is not a cheery faced innocence innocent. As many pundits have pointed out, he’s lied to the public numerous times. And, as part of the Trump Administration, there is a certain amount of guilt by association, just or not. Possibly unbeknownst to the rather busy Pence, the House has already brought and approved impeachment proceedings against President Pence during his swearing-in and inaugural celebrations.
7. The next day, in a terrifying shocker, enough Senate Republicans, frantically fighting for their political lives by avoiding the taints of corruption and treason associated with the Trump Administration, convict Pence and bounce him out on his ear.

Shocking? Sure. Unlikely? Oh, yes. Impossible?

Fuck, no. This. Could. Happen.

Have you been paying attention? Did you notice the critical omission?

President Pence, having been in office for only a few precious hours, hours filled with security briefings and all the minutiae his predecessor fluffed, DIDN’T GET AROUND TO APPOINTING A VICE-PRESIDENT. In fact, the 25th Amendment to the US Constitution requires that a nomination to the Vice-President’s office, made due to a sudden vacancy, be confirmed by a simple majority of both the Senate and the House.

In this scenario, both the Senate and the House are controlled by Democrats.

So, who remembers the succession order? The VP is gone, so who’s next?

The Speaker of the House.

Can you say President Pelosi?

If I were to be totally honest, I’d ask myself if Speaker Ryan has an hidden agenda. Perhaps he’s looking to blow up the Republican Party through his comically awful efforts at being a legislator and Speaker – a camouflaged Democrat, or a conservative who hates the GOP.

But I doubt it. Speaker Ryan currently has a TrumpScore of 95%; furthermore, FiveThirtyEight’s analyses of Ryan has shown that his policy positions are far-right extremist, consonant with the current members of the Republican Party. It’s a far stretch to label him a NeverTrumper or, heaven forbid, a Commie.

If I had Speaker Ryan in my office, and I was inclined to be honest with the man, despite my knowledge of his lack of a grasp on reality and my dislike of raw incompetence, I’d tell him this:

Impeach Trump right now. This moment. Because Trump’s most recent behavior is intolerable in an American President, and if you can’t do it, then the Republicans are doomed to the destruction of their party, the destruction of their hold on Congress, and the destruction of their hold on the Executive Branch. Even the Judicial Branch will not be invulnerable, as Judges can be impeached. Your views will be considered tainted and suspect because you, by default, supported a President who was impeached and convicted.

You must act decisively, for country and then for party.

The next few weeks will certainly form the basis of history’s judgment of Ryan and his party. I honestly strongly doubt we’ll be seeing a President Pelosi in February of next year.

But it’s not impossible.

Harry Enten, formerly with poll maven site FiveThirtyEight and now with CNN, talks not about polls – but about the behavior of pollsters and what that may augur:

Polls of the week: Four internal House polls released this week by groups aligned with Democratic or liberal causes. Conservative and Republican groups released no internal House polls this week. This is part of a pattern seen this year with left-wing groups putting out 93% of the partisan polls collected by FiveThirtyEight compared to only 7% by right-wing groups.

What’s the big idea: The House of Representatives is difficult to predict because non-partisan polling for individual districts is limited and often not that accurate. Much of the polling released is done by partisan groups.

The obvious problem with partisan-sponsored polls is that it tends to only see the light of day when it looks good for the side who is conducting the poll.

But, of course, a group first needs to get a poll with good results for their side to actually release it. This got me thinking that if one side fields a lot of polls that end up favorable to their side, then maybe they’re more likely to release more internal polls than other side.

It turns out that this has been true in past years.

Ah, so we have what may be a “tell,” to use poker-gab. You only talk when the news is good.

In every year but one, left-wing groups have put out more internal polls relative to right-wing groups. Still, there is a clear relationship between how many internal polls each side is releasing and the election results. The more internal polls put out by left-wing groups relative to right-wing groups, the better Democrats tend to do in House elections. …

But count the share of internal polls left-wing groups have put out relative to Republicans as another good sign for Democrats in 2018. Democrats have done very well in special elections,continue to lead on the generic congressional ballot and Republicans have a lot more seats at risk, according to ratings from CNN and others. All of these factors, at this juncture, point to Democrats doing very well in November’s House elections.

This is the sort of observation which can be invaluable, and it’s one of those details that comes from experts, not us dumb clods in the streets. It’ll be interesting to see if Harry’s observation turns out to be right.

During our recent vacation trip to Michigan, my scant watching of TV did yield two commercials of a political nature.

The first talked about “The Calley Plan,” a plan from candidate-for-governor and current Lt. Governor Brian Calley to fix the roads and otherwise improve the State, all without raising taxes. It sounded a bit like a fantasy, but perhaps he has an unstated funding source: raising corporate taxes, perhaps? Or cutting expenditures of some other sort.

The second commercial featured an attack on Calley’s behalf on Bill Schuette, current Michigan AG, one of his primary rivals. It boiled down to “He doesn’t love Trump enough.”

A depressing showing on Calley’s part. It lacked imagination, leadership, and showed a lack of confidence that he can win the nomination, much less the general election, on his own merits; instead, he implicitly swears fealty to a President who has been credibly accused of treason.

I wonder if an entire generation of Republican leaders will be lost to the Trump black hole of incompetence.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation beats back an assault on a bastion of freedom… knowledge of the law:

A federal appeals court today ruled that industry groups cannot control publication of binding laws and standards. This decision protects the work of Public.Resource.org (PRO), a nonprofit organization that works to improve access to government documents. …

Six large industry groups that work on building and product safety, energy efficiency, and educational testing filed suit against PRO in 2013. These groups publish thousands of standards that are developed by industry and government employees. Some of those standards are incorporated into federal and state regulations, becoming binding law. As part of helping the public access the law, PRO posts those binding standards on its website. The industry groups, known as standards development organizations, accused PRO of copyright and trademark infringement for posting those standards online. In effect, they claimed the right to decide who can copy, share, and speak the law. The federal district court for the District of Columbia ruled in favor of the standards organizations in 2017, and ordered PRO not to post the standards.

EFF notes this rejection of a lower court decision came under the fair use doctrine, and is not final because the lower court was instructed to reconsider keeping fair use in mind.

So far as I’m concerned, since the law cannot be obeyed if it’s not known, it is automatically in the public domain. It’s silly madness to suggest that any organization cannot publish a faithful reproduction of current law for the use of the public, just because of substantial contributions from an organization.

Ideally, laws are made to benefit the public, individually and as a whole. If the industry in question is developing these standards, which subsequently become law, they are benefiting from these standards through the age-old mechanisms of developing public trust in their products, reassuring the public that minimum standards of safety and efficacy have been met. Trying to control the publishing rights is little more than bare-teeth greed.

The tariffs are having immediate impacts on projects both north and south of the American / Canadian border. Lloyd Alter on Treehugger discusses the cancellation of the Framework Tower in Portland:

There are lots of crazy changing market conditions happening right now; lumber has spiked from US$315 at the start of 2017 to US$540 earlier this year, thanks to increased demand because of the hot American economy and big tariffs imposed by the Trump government on Canadian lumber. Cross-laminated timber (CLT) uses a lot of wood, so a big increase like that is going to make a difference. The alternatives, steel and concrete, have also spiked because of tariffs, generally making all kinds of housing less affordable.

CLT is still new and expensive, and between tax cuts that lit a fire under the economy and tariffs that lit a fire under material prices, it is a tough time to try and build non-profit housing for a fixed price. The Developer tries to put a brave face on it, saying, “Although beset with market challenges beyond our control, we are very proud of Framework’s achievements and the new standards we’ve established for the use of CLT in the U.S.”

And so some economic activity – and jobs – are extinguished by President Trump’s foolhardiness.

A reader reacts to my post concerning the motivations of President Trump:

Trump didn’t have a five star meeting or press conference after meeting with Putin. I don’t think it is alright to put all the blame of president Trump. I give some of the problem to Putin, the thug, who I think came to town to humiliate the President. Second, the President was maybe being to Polite, maybe he should have Chris Wallace do the press conference for him.

Another reader reacts to the first:

 “Polite” isn’t in 45’s vocabulary or standard behavior patterns.

If he can’t hold his own against Putin, then he is not qualified to be Commander in Chief.

He is 1) compromised or 2)in way over his head and destroying our democracy.

And the first replies:

 So the guy had a bad day, and that makes him a bad President. It’s time for the liberals to lighten up. There constant badgering is giving them less credibility if possible. I understand constructive criticism, but this non stop nonsense over a few remarks made in a press conference is taking it over the top. Putin has one thing in mind agreeing to meet with President Trump and he thinks he succeeded. Next week all this will be water over the damn, I hope.

My problem is that it’s hard to find President Trump having good days, and the fact of the matter is that engaging in a summit, whether it be with Putin or Kim, requires you to be having one of your best days, backed with exhaustive preparation – because we all know that respectable world leaders will be prepared. But it’s been well-reported that Trump doesn’t engage in preparation, he thinks he’s good enough to do things off the cuff, a reflection of what appears to be how he does everything. Thus, he continually fails.

Additionally, as the most powerful country in the world, we shouldn’t look like we’re engaging in “abasement” in front of another country’s leader, not even China – and most certainly not Russia.

But, as an independent, I will ask myself whether this is just a problem of the liberals being too partisan, as the first reader implies. The answer, to my mind, comes ironically from the conservatives.

I remain a proud conservative and Republican, but I resigned today as Belmont Co Ohio GOP Chairman. I did so as a matter of conscience, and my sense of duty.

— Chris Gagin (@cgagin)

The President is entitled to GOP party leaders, at all levels, fully committed to his views and agenda. Following today’s press conference with Pres. Putin, as well as certain policy differences, most especially on trade, I could no longer fulfill that duty. Thus, I resigned.

— Chris Gagin (@cgagin) July 16, 2018
[Twitter / WaPo / The Daily 202 ]

Another:

Former congressman Joe Walsh, a Republican from Illinois who has previously supported the president, called the surreal 46-minute news conference in Helsinki “the final straw for me.”

Look, I’m no big deal, but today is the final straw for me. I will never support Trump again. If that makes me a NeverTrumper, so be it.

I am a tea party conservative, that will never change. But Trump was a traitor to this country today. That must not be accepted.

Speak out.

— Joe Walsh (@WalshFreedom) July 16, 2018

[Twitter / WaPo / The Daily 202 ]

More conservatives jumping ship, recognizing a truth and – far longer after they should have – exiting the sinking intellectual vessel. How many just exited without the publicity?

James Hohmann, author of The Daily 202 post from which I extracted the above quotes, expresses a belief that the President’s actions, easily interpreted by dispassionate observers as treasonous and self-serving, will have no effect on the Trump supporters, but I think we’re going to continue to see a steady bleeding from the body of supporters as many factors come together to illustrate the fruits of incompetency. His “easily won” trade war, if he doesn’t avert it himself in the face of overwhelming retaliation from China and other countries, will bring economic distress to rural Trumpists; the tax change bill, despite the claims of conservative that it serves the middle class, does not and everyone knows how to read a paycheck; fiscal hawks, whether or not you approve of them, will see the deficit sky-rocket (already has begun) despite the claims of Laffer Curve true believers who fail to trouble themselves with the details of how taxation interacts with the economy, as we’ve already seen in Kansas; and those Trumpists dependent on the ACA for affordable health care premiums are beginning to realize that TrumpCare, which is the ACA minus some important mechanisms, is not affordable unless, to use a memorable phrase from a colleague in my first couple of years of employment, you buy the “shavetail” insurance plan.

Here’s the unfortunate part of the ugly and ongoing debacle: No doubt President Trump has tapped into some legitimate concerns. But his dubious relation with the truth, his thirst to win at any cost, his apparent racism, his abuse of the Office, all of these traits are obscuring these important points. Are illegal immigrants really a problem? Maybe so, but his absurd claims about rapists and gangs and his decision – HIS DECISION – to kidnap children from their illegal immigrant parents (to quote a member of my extended family) will bury the entire issue when he’s out of office. Should we reform legal immigration to use a meritocratic approach rather than the current approach, as he advocates? That issue will be tainted with Trump’s name in the future, and it will take a tremendous amount of work by honest advocates of the meritocratic approach to remove that taint before they can even hope to wage a successful campaign to change it.

Pick your favorite topic that Trump has addressed with his lies, boasts, and braggodocio, and realize that if he, accidentally, advocated a good position that happened to please his supporters, now that position is tainted with his bad name.

Think about it.

This is part of our future. Even as a past President, he’ll affect our lives in ways we’ll regret, even if we immediately reverse every single one of his decisions.

The organization Americans United for Separation of Church and State does not like the nomination of Judge Kavanaugh to SCOTUS. Among their points:

Third, in friend-of-the-court briefs in both Santa Fe and Good News Club v. Milford Central School, as well as in a 2017 speech, Kavanaugh argued against long-standing precedent prohibiting the use of public funds for religious activities. If the Supreme Court were to adopt Kavanaugh’s views on public funding of religion, that would upend the bedrock constitutional principle that we each get to decide for ourselves whether and how our money goes to support religion.

Which is more than a little disturbing, if true. Naturally, a summary like this elides nuance. I don’t have time to read the speech at the link, so I can only say I find it disturbing information, since it would lead not only to lawsuits, but eventually to violence (lynchings and the like, for those who like their descriptions vivid) and, if held to in an extreme way, civil war.