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Or so does the amaranth appear to have.

Being neither musical nor obsessed with the literature of the 19th century, I was unaware of this particular vacation trip, as described by Jonathan Gaisman in Standpoint:

The most notoriously unsuccessful holiday in the history of classical music was that taken by Chopin and his androgynous literary lover George Sand (and her family) in Majorca in 1838-1839. The trousered, cigar-smoking Sand was derided by Baudelaire as possessing the morals of a janitress; her future lover Alfred de Musset mordantly observed of the silver dagger which pinned her hair that “a woman of such slight virtue hardly required so immoderate a weapon”. Chopin’s characteristically acidulous comment on his first encounter was, “What an unattractive person la Sand is. Is she really a woman?” That was in 1836; by 1838 the two were lovers. They numbered Delacroix (who painted them both) and Heine among their Paris friends.

In Majorca, where they arrived in November 1838, they soon retreated to a former charterhouse in the valley of Moses or Valdemossa, high in the mountains outside Palma. Here they occupied cell 4. (In the late 20th century, the owner of this cell successfully sued the owner of cell 2, who was passing it off as the composer’s former residence.) Relations with the islanders did not prosper: in her 1841 memoir Un hiver à Majorque, Sand referred to them as “cowards, hypocrites, pickpockets, Indian monkeys, Polynesian savages”. The local newspaper retaliated, describing her as “the most immoral of writers . . . the most obscene of women”. Chopin’s fragile health deteriorated through the winter. A neighbour observed: “That consumptive will go to hell, first for being a consumptive, and next for not going to confession.” Sand claimed that her children were stoned in the streets. They abandoned Majorca in February 1839, leaving the Bauza behind them. As is the way with unsuccessful holidays, this one improved in recollection; Chopin later told Liszt that the short visit was one of the happiest times of his life: “It was as if, like Linnaeus’s clock, the time of day was told by the blossoming of flowers, each with a different perfume and each disclosing other beauties as they opened outwards.”

I cannot say I’ve had such an unsuccessful vacation myself.

Kevin Drum is riding his favorite hobby horse, but this time in the context of Mexico. It’s a fetching Iron Horse …

This little fellow was very patient with me.

Last time I talked about a Nazi in Illinois who had managed to win the GOP nomination for a seat in the House of Representatives, but he’s not the only example of the Republican run to the right. WaPo discusses the mass embarrassment felt by the Virginia GOP after a former Minnesotan by the name of Corey Stewart won the Republican nomination for the Senate seat currently held by former VP candidate Tim Kaine by embracing Southern statuary, attacking immigrants, and refusing to disavow white supremacists:

Stewart’s elevation has some lifelong Republicans questioning their political identity.

“I am extremely disappointed that a candidate like Corey Stewart could win the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate,” former Republican lieutenant governor Bill Bolling tweeted on the night of Stewart’s primary win. “This is clearly not the Republican Party I once knew, loved and proudly served. Every time I think things can’t get worse they do, and there is no end in sight.”

Rory Stolzenberg, who began identifying with the GOP as a fourth-grader and had a seat on the state party’s governing board in his early 20s, plans to vote for Kaine.

“When the debate is between bad policies and fundamentally un-American policies that betray the democratic ideals that this country was founded on, it’s not even a choice anymore,” said Stolzenberg, 26, a Charlottesville entrepreneur. “I question whether I’m still a Republican, but I think it’s important that we don’t surrender the party to people like that.”

It’s not trickery, it’s a matter of numbers and attitude of the base. Stewart claims he’s not a supremacist, but he appears to be repulsing traditional members of the Republican Party.

I think there’s a clue here, though:

Fissures opened anew the next year when Dave Brat, a little-known professor with a tea party following, toppled then-House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, with help from Breitbart News. Divides between Cantor and his supporters, and Brat and the tea partyers still resonate four years later.

And Brat then won the seat, despite being little-known. That’s the key, little-known, because it implies the Party’s levers of party have been usurped by the extremists.

That’s something to think about, for the moderate Republicans. How long will they stick around?

Courtesy my Arts Editor. This amuses me a lot, not least because the rider reminds me of a late cat of mine…

The Green Revolution, long lauded as averting mass famine, turns out to have an attributed dark side in India: farmer suicide. Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com  comments:

Amrita Bhoomi offers an alternative to this deadly cycle. The centre’s educational philosophy is based largely on the teachings of Shri Subhash Palekar, the charismatic guru of “zero budget natural farming“, who teaches that a farmer doesn’t need anything other than what s/he has available locally to maximize soil fertility. The method uses home-brewed concoctions made from fresh cow dung (it must be an indigenous cow), cow urine (the older the better), jaggery (coarse palm sugar), and lentil flour to promote microbacterial growth in the soil. In Gifford’s words:

“Zero budget natural farming is amazing because it’s not top down; it’s informal, decentralized; there’s no central organizer, no revenue or paid staff, no bank account, and there are already millions of people practicing it.”

The approach is not all that unusual. Amrita Bhoomi’s director Chukki Nanjundawsamy told FoodTank last year:

“Agroecology isn’t new to Indian agriculture. The Green Revolution technologies that wiped out agroecology happened only 50 years ago. Before that, agroecology was everywhere… I’m proud of how this movement has evolved. Young farmers are joining. They know what’s going on with the agrarian crisis and are choosing agroecology as a way forward.”

Amrita Bhoomi wants to reclaim crops that once were staples in the Indian diet, such as millet, or ragi. Ragi was displaced by white rice, a more chemically responsive crop, when the Green Revolution enabled farmers to practice water-intensive, paddy-style agriculture, but Indians’ health has suffered as a result; there are 50 million cases of type 2 diabetes, the highest rate in the world, that are largely attributed to refined white rice. The centre is pioneering millet production and hoping to get it added to the public distribution system.

I was not aware that rice was more carbohydrate-intensive than other crops. I’m always wary of the charismatic, since they motivate people to do irrational things, so I’d like to see this put under a dispassionate microscope.

There is an old, old theory called Mind-Body dualism, which basically suggests that the mind, in at least some respects, is separate from the body, which implies that events impacting the body do not, at least directly, impact the mind.

Yeah, I’m neither a philosopher (it started with Aristotle and Plato) nor a biologist, but when you stick a pick axe in someone’s brain and see a change, that tells me the theory is fairly damn silly.

I was reminded of this theory while reading the second part of Andrew Sullivan’s latest tri-partite weekly column in New York, this one on the latest gender theory remarks of Katrina Karkazis:

Which draws Karkazis to this concession: “I don’t mean that T is immaterial, imaginary, or ineffectual, or that our scientific or experiential knowledge of T is completely false.” Science and human testimony can’t be explained away entirely, you see. Just almost entirely: Listening to science or individual testimony runs the risk of “naturalizing the difference [between men and women] and obfuscates how our very experience is structured by social and historical forces and the interpretive frameworks we derive from them. There is no experience outside these constitutive conditions.”

And this is her core case. Humans have no experience outside the social constructions they live in. Nature, as an entity outside those constructions, doesn’t exist, and therefore cannot be a valid form of critique. This is a world in which humans are not animals, and have never experienced natural selection, or evolved a reproductive strategy around sex. But when we observe other animals on this planet, we see their sexes programmed by millions of years of evolution for different and complementary purposes. The male tends to protect the home, fend off dangers, forage for food, while the female is oriented toward the rearing of the young. And sure enough, the males in almost all of these species have much higher testosterone than the females. And the hormone is much stronger in predicting malelike behavior than chromosomes: “Species in which the female is typically more aggressive, like hyenas in female-run clans, show higher levels of testosterone among the females than among the males. Female sea snipes, which impregnate the males, and leave them to stay home and rear the young, have higher testosterone levels than their mates. Typical ‘male’ behavior, in other words, corresponds to testosterone levels, whether exhibited by chromosomal males or females.” Meerkats also have females with slightly higher testosterone than males — and guess what? — the female is more aggressive, sharing duties in foraging and hunting. I suppose you can live your life without ever fully confronting this wider natural reality, and believe that none of this has any relevance for humankind. But seriously. Open your eyes to more than your shopworn ideology.

Karkazis then argues from my exploration of testosterone that I am inferring that the hormone “provides the biological basis for male-female hierarchies.” But that’s not what I believe at all. I believe it provides the biological basis for male-female differences, not hierarchies, and hold no case for the “superiority” of one sex to another, which is to my mind, an absurd idea. I agree that social constructionism has a part to play in how we see men and women, across time and place, but I also think it’s obvious that nature also has a big say in it. That doesn’t mean restricting any opportunities for women; it means finding a way for everyone, male and female, to live the lives they want to lead. It simply means that at some point, you won’t be surprised to find differences in behavioral and social outcomes for the two sexes, and given more formal or structural political equality, as in Scandinavia, the differences in careers and lifestyles may well become starker, going forward.

I haven’t read Karkazis, so apologies if my understanding of her arguments from Sullivan’s rebuttal is wrong. But I’m mainly reacting to Sullivan’s statements, not Karkazis’.

There’s a fundamental implication of  “provides the biological basis for male-female hierarchies” which should be reconsidered, and it’s that a biological basis provides a platform for the should statement. That is, a lot of how we tend to reason is to look at Nature and draw lessons for how we should behave. It’s a form of natural morality which derives a certain validity from the fact that it is a product of evolution, and evolution might be described as a conglomeration of success. In this example, the suggestion that there’s a biological basis for the mind being affected by testosterone is extended to suggest that men should dominate women. Karkazis, whether conscious of this or not, has chosen to deny the impact of physical processes on the mind, thus indulging in a form of mind-body dualism theory, because it appears that it doesn’t produce a conclusion compatible with her thesis that .

Giving in only slightly to Nature.

But for all that I just stated that we often look to Nature for a guide to the shoulds, humanity’s history is positively littered with cases in which we’ve gone against the dictates we might deduce from Nature. Perhaps one of the strongest examples is the entirety of the medical profession, which has obviated, perhaps only temporarily, the bloody dictates of biological evolution for the human species, which has been replaced with a social evolutionary mechanism.

Karkazis may deny the biological influences on the brain, and Sullivan seems to call for living with it, which is far more reasonable. But my suspicion is that we’ll continue to struggle against it, at least so long as we adhere to a genderless notion of justice as part of the foundation for running societies, a notion to which I see little sensible alternative. Nature has little truck with our notions of fairness, and so depending on it for guidance, however, informal, to how to behave may be a fool’s errand. We may find someday that the only way to achieve the goal of Karkazis’ is when the majority of humanity has downloaded its brains into computers, thus eliminating the, until now, inevitable biological & chemical influences to which we’re currently heir.

And then will we really be human?

My Arts Editor directs my attention to this Politico article portraying Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) as reasonable:

Texas GOP Sen. Ted Cruz on Friday urged residents of a Chicago-area congressional district to vote for a Democrat if they must, to avoid giving even one vote to an avowed Nazi who won the GOP nomination.

Cruz’s comments, made on Twitter, came after a POLITICO story detailed the Illinois Republican Party’s failed efforts to oust Holocaust denier Arthur Jones from the ballot or offer up an alternative for Republican voters.

“This is horrific. An avowed Nazi running for Congress,” tweeted Cruz. “To the good people of Illinois, you have two reasonable choices: write in another candidate, or vote for the Democrat. This bigoted fool should receive ZERO votes.”

It’s easy enough to laugh at Senator Cruz, given his reputation as a flake, and his father’s as a theocrat. But he, and everyone else, should really consider just how extreme the Republicans have become when they cannot find a reasonable candidate in one of the more populous states of the Union, the State of Illinois.

But Senator Cruz is eliding an important implication of this nomination. The fact that Jones is running in a heavily Democratic district against a Democratic incumbent is irrelevant to a central fact of the Republican Party:

It couldn’t stop an “avowed Nazi” from winning an important nomination.

Stop and think about that for a second. Nazis are not “just another political party,” as I’ve discussed before, but a system of government dedicated to power aggrandizement, conquest, and brutality, with little or no protection for minorities, dissident points of view, or any of the other important, even critical hallmarks of the liberal democracy.

And the Republican party was unable to understand this fact, recognize Jones as having a fundamentally un-American allegiance, and not only deny him the nomination, but to kick this bum and his supporters out onto the street.

They were permitted to stay and attain an important nomination. They had the numbers to do it.

If you’re a Republican, why? Why are you still enabling this appalling development? It’s not just embarrassing – it’s a danger to the Republic (see previous link concerning Nazi government).

And, since Cruz has now spoken out against a fellow nominee for national office, I have to wonder if he’ll eventually soon go from “far-right extremist” to being run out of the Republican Party for being a … RINO.

After an absence of a few years, the hollyhocks have returned to the garden. Here’s a few pictures of the first foot soldier invasion.

While reading about one of the possible replacements for Associate Justice Kennedy, namely Judge Brett Kavanaugh, in an article in WaPo, it gives his defense of his view that the President should be permitted to defer prosecutions of himself:

U.S. Circuit Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, a former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy who is viewed as one of the leading contenders to replace him, has argued that presidents should not be distracted by civil lawsuits, criminal investigations or even questions from a prosecutor or defense attorney while in office. …

Having observed the weighty issues that can consume a president, Kavanaugh wrote, the nation’s chief executive should be exempt from “time-consuming and distracting” lawsuits and investigations, which “would ill serve the public interest, especially in times of financial or national security crisis.”

If a president were truly malevolent, Kavanaugh wrote, he could always be impeached.

I’ve gotta say this view is extremely ill-considered.

First, an impeachment is not an activity that takes place without information. An investigation, such as that under the leadership of Mr. Mueller, is a critical source of information for any member of Congress who must vote on the question of the impeachment and conviction of the President. To suggest that a truly malevolent President could simply be impeached is either naive or deceitful, because malevolence is not always an obvious attribute of a person.

Second, deferral of an investigation, lawsuit, or allied legal activity until the President is no longer President is to deny justice, and, yes, it’s as simple as that. For those who proclaim justice is done when someone is convicted of a murder that occurred forty years ago, I say that’s a dish of cold, rotting fish. For those forty years, the murderer escaped punishment, and may have committed more crimes. Similarly, a President uninvestigated is encouraged in his or her malevolent pursuits.

If, as Judge Kavanaugh suggests, the press of duties is such that the President dare not be distracted, there are procedures available to relieve him temporarily of those duties, now isn’t there? The 25 Amendment comes right to mind. After all, why do we select and elect a Vice President? So he or she can sit on her duff for four years?

Rancid nonsense, Judge Kavanaugh.

If Judge Kavanaugh has not retracted his ridiculous position on this matter, then I believe that he has effectively disqualified himself from a seat on SCOTUS. Not for ideological or partisan reasons, but simply because he does not appear to be able to think.

Copromancy:

Copromancy is the art of prognostication based on examining feces. Copromancy has a long history, and is part of traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurveda. [RationalWiki]

Noted in the Feedback column of NewScientist (23 June 2018, paywall):

Feedback hasn’t given much thought to copromancy since “Dr” Gillian McKeith, who pored over potties like horoscopes, was flushed from our screens. Yet the art of fortune-smelling endures.

During last week’s summit in Singapore, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was reported to have brought his own portable toilet, to prevent foreign agents from capitalising on his leaks. With good reason: during a visit to Moscow in 1949, Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s excreta were swiped by Soviet spies hoping to divine his personality traits. A rare occasion when staff can be congratulated for going through the motions.

And again, same column:

MORE mystery droppings: residents of the Canadian town of Kelowna are keeping one eye on the skies after sewage twice rained down, creating a sort of Rorschach blot test for jobbing copromancers. Suspicion has fallen on aircraft bound for a nearby airport. Whether the plane responsible was anxious or angry is still unknown.

Wow.

Seem quite happy in their pot.

From Deanna Paul, a former prosecutor, on WaPo’s Retropolis:

Since Kennedy was confirmed in 1988, he has adopted a relatively predictable approach: consistently voting in favor of individual rights (outside of criminal justice and capital punishment) but otherwise voting with the right. Kennedy, according to [George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan] Turley, bridged the bench, not because of his votes but his voice. “He had impeccable credentials as a jurist,” Turley said. “He showed that you could have a conservative philosophy and still protect individual rights.”

The right likes to jangle the keys of rights, and how the left wants to take them away, from gun rights to free speech. I wonder if this will get an outraged reaction.

Currency always has costs, but sometime they’re hidden.

Really hidden.

WaPo reports on the latest sources of computing power for crypto-currency miners:

As the popularity of virtual currencies has grown, hackers are focusing on a new type of heist: putting malicious software on peoples’ handsets, TVs and smart fridges that makes them mine for digital money.

So-called “crypto-jacking” attacks have become a growing problem in the cybersecurity industry, affecting both consumers and organizations. Depending on the severity of the attack, victims may notice only a slight drop in processing power, often not enough for them to think it’s a hacking attack. But that can add up to a lot of processing power over a period of months or if, say, a business’s entire network of computers is affected.

“We saw organizations whose monthly electricity bill was increased by hundreds of thousands of dollars,” said Maya Horowitz, Threat Intelligence Group Manager for Checkpoint, a cybersecurity company.

Which leads me to wonder just how much power, along with the concurrent wonder about amount of climate gases generated, is being used for cryptocurrency mining activities. Quartz had an article on this topic earlier this year:

A new study published in Joule—the first on the subject to undergo the rigors of peer review—argues that, globally, bitcoin mining consumes at least as much electricity in a year as all of Ireland (about 24 TWh). Worse still, it contends that the energy use is doubling every six months and could reach the annual consumption of the Czech Republic (about 67 TWh) before the end of 2018, which would be about 0.3% of the world’s electricity consumption. …

One of the early concerns over bitcoin’s electricity use was that almost all of it was sourced at polluting coal power plants in China. It’s likely true that a lot of it does still come from coal power plants, but in a bid to cut pollution the Chinese government has taken steps (paywall) in the past year, telling local utilities not to give crypto miners low-cost deals on electricity. The upshot is that many miners have since moved out of China.

In many of the places they’ve ended up, there is plenty of clean energy available. For example, the Canadian province of Quebec actively courted cryptocurrency companies to use the spare hydropower capacity it had built. The same is true of Iceland (with its spare geothermal) and Sweden (which, like Quebec, has plenty of hydropower).

That said, it’s not the fault of those mining for cryptocurrency that the world relies mostly on fossil fuels for its electricity. And just because there is a new and fast-growing source of electricity consumption is not enough reason for governments to regulate crypto companies.

No? I have to wonder about the necessity of cryptocurrencies – or lack thereof. I suppose a tradeoff comparing other sources of liquid wealth representation with cryptocurrencies would be necessary, but right on the face of it I do not agree with Rathi’s glib statement that regulation of cryptocurrency companies is unjustified on a power consumption basis. That may be true at the moment, but it’s a statement that does not scale. Today they may be consuming as much power as Ireland – but does the statement still apply when the amount of energy goes up two magnitudes?

Of course not. Not if there are more energy efficient alternatives available, such as old-fashioned cash.

But there is, even for this agnostic, a certain delicious irony in the thought that one of the drivers of our possible doom is our continued and outsized pursuit of, well, wealth. Because that’s what’s driving the miners. It’s true that they’re providing a valuable service, namely provision of new coins, but if we apply the lens of examining capitalist activity I wrote about concerning Lehman Brothers in this post, which I will save my reader the problem of digging out by quoting here:

I would contend, as did the author of that article, that it was a primary symptom of a foundational illness that ultimately doomed Lehman Brothers. Look, from a societal point of view, companies do not exist to make money. I know the general wisdom of the private sector would differ with me, but if you think it through, it becomes obviously right. The proper formulation is, Companies provide specific services thought to be useful to their consumers, and the best ones are profitable because they have the right combination of efficiency and service content.

Why is this important? It brings back into focus that a company is not an instrument for the implementation of greed, for the collection of more and more proxies of wealth, which can fluctuate in their value to a dismaying degree, by which I mean dollars (or whatever might be your local currency). The private sector wisdom leads to a corporate function which contributes nothing to the advancement of society.

… then there’s an uncomfortable link between the philosophically bankrupt institutions such as Lehman Brothers and these coin miners and the minimal goods they provide to society. Not that I deny that provision of new bitcoins is a necessity, but it appears, from the scale of energy use and the enthusiasm with which they’re pursued the generation of coins, that in the end the balance of social utility vs impact on morals as well as ultimate physical impact may lean towards the latter, suggesting cryptocurrencies may not be the great social leap forward – but an evolutionary dead-end.

Or worse.

Just for fun, there’s another site which appears to be tracking cryptocurrency energy consumption named Digiconomist. Here’s they’re their current chart:

A few weeks ago I reported on the first response to the mail I sent to my Senators and Representative concerning civil asset forfeiture. I haven’t heard from the other two, but since then I sent mail off to the three of them suggesting the separation of children from their illegal immigrant parents arrested at the southern border was an immoral practice which should be stopped immediately. Senator Tina Smith (D) is the first to respond to this concern, in which she basically said she agreed and then reprinted an Op-Ed piece on the subject she wrote for the StarTribune.

So there is feedback. It’s sometimes slow, though. Representative McCollum has yet to respond on either issue. Come to think of it, I don’t think she responded to an email from a couple of  years ago concerning the legalization of marijuana.

Amber Phillips of The Fix covers one side of the President Irrelevancy Trump / Harley-Davidson story, wherein the iconic motorcycle manufacturer has announced plans to move some manufacturing to Europe in response to the trade war begun by President Trump:

By now it’s pretty clear that President Trump feels personally slighted by what used to be one of his favorite companies, Harley-Davidson, shipping some of its production overseas.

Harley-Davidson announced its decision Monday, and nearly every day since, Trump has insulted them or threatened them. Most remarkable of all, on Thursday, he flat-out begged them to bring production back to the United States.

“Harley-Davidson, please build those beautiful motorcycles in the USA, please. Okay,” Trump said in a speech in Wisconsin designed to champion his economic policies. “Don’t get cute with us. Don’t get cute.”

Harley-Davidson is based in Milwaukee, and it’s a brand that is popular with people Trump views as his loyal base. …

He’s tried everything to get Harley-Davidson to change their minds. Over 36 hours or so, he has gone from threatening them — “The Aura will be gone and they will be taxed like never before!” he tweeted Wednesday — to trying to cajole them back: “Build them in the USA. Your customers won’t be happy if you don’t. I’ll tell you that.”

Begging, as Trump appeared to do on stage Thursday in a televised address, is highly unusual for Trump.

And, sure, maybe the other half of the story might not yet be available – but I’m hoping it will be someday. It’s my guess that the top executives of H-D, or even the board of directors, are caught up in a bit of a political quandary. After all, they’re being harassed by one of the least popular Presidents in the history of the United States, but one who has a fanatical base. Does their customer base support Trump, or are they against him? If they roll over for Trump, do their customers refuse to buy from them ever again because they went soft?

They could easily go bankrupt if they shatter their own reputation as provider of bikes to some of the roughest riders in the States.

I don’t ride, so I don’t have a worthwhile opinion. But I’d like to see them show some gumption, basically tell Trump that them moving manufacturing is how it’s going to be, it was caused by him and he’d better own it, and not to come visiting because they’ll kick his ass right out of corporate headquarters because they don’t like threats from an incompetent moron.

It’d probably impress their entire customer base if they were aggressive enough about it, regardless of their political inclinations.

Will it happen? I have no idea who runs Harley-Davidson. Is it the cold-blooded corporate types who are just there to make money? Or is it cycle-lovers who care passionately about their product – and their reputation?

Erick Erickson on The Resurgent is upset about all the games in Washington:

The GOP knows damn well if this were a Presidential year, McConnell would be rushing through a nominee before the election regardless of his prior statement. You know he would. Stop pretending the Garland obstruction was anything other than preventing Obama from getting an appointment.

Everybody is playing games over this. That is to be expected. But what is happening in the process of gamesmanship is no one is really being honest about it. This is all part of politics. There is no noble rule about appointments. There is no high mindedness in the process. It is all partisanship.

Starting off the day with some lilies while my Arts Editor preps some bacon and eggs…

A reader comments on the impending retirement of Justice Kennedy:

We are so screwed. Who threatened him, one has to wonder.

In the interests of fairness, we don’t know his situation. Perhaps like the recently deceased pundit Charles Krauthammer, he’s facing a terminal prognosis and is putting his affairs in order. Or, as a few bitter liberals have suggested, he has detected a degeneration in his cognitive processes and has decided it’s time to make his exit before he’s forcibly removed.

But the fact remains that this will be a real problem for the Democrats. If they find a way to block a confirmation on a Trump nominee of sufficient right-wing views, they run the risk of enraging the moderate elements and losing their votes.

Kevin Drum disagrees, if somewhat limply:

As you all know by now, Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy has announced his retirement. He will be replaced by a hard-right justice and there’s nothing Democrats can do about it. This means two things are true:

• There will soon be five votes on the court to repeal Roe v. Wade.
• This should be enough to motivate Democrats to turn out in a massive wave even for a midterm election.

If it’s not enough to produce a blue tidal wave, I suppose we lefties might as well give up. Between this and everything else going on, what more can the leadership of the party want in order to finally produce a big midterm turnout?

Steve Benen notes how American style politics impacts free choice in suitably brutal fashion:

Abortion-rights advocates who stayed home in 2016, or voted for a third-party candidate, took a dangerous gamble. It now appears they placed the wrong bet.

Which raises the implicit question, Did it matter that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee for President, or would any Democratic candidate been equally vulnerable to the tactics used by the GOP and allied groups?

David French on National Review agrees this will stir up the conservatives – at least those believe abortion is an evil:

And that brings us to politics. Heading into the midterms, Republicans were desperately worried about an “intensity gap.” Democratic voters seem prepared to turn out in huge numbers. Republicans — while holding firm in their support for President Trump — lacked the same excitement. Special elections were swinging strongly Democratic, and even though the generic preference numbers were trending closer, most observers thought Republicans would struggle to get their voters to the polls. I’d say those concerns are eased a bit today.

After all, for an immense number of base GOP voters, judges aren’t just an issue. They’re the issue that drives them to the polls. Republicans are all over the place on immigration policy, trade policy, and foreign policy. Divisions in the party are deep and real. Those divisions disappear when judges are on the line. We can debate all we want about Russian influence on the 2016 election (or about the effect of the Comey letter), but one thing is certain — if Evangelicals and other conservatives weren’t afraid of the impact of a progressive Supreme Court on their fundamental liberties, Donald Trump doesn’t win. A new Supreme Court pick will galvanize the entire base for months.

David wades into a complex morass. Sure, some liberties are limited by any Court composition, but then we’re not a nation of unlimited freedoms. The most important topic in the context of a new Justice, abortion rights, will undoubtedly be in danger of regressing if Trump lives up to his campaign promise to nominate a pro-life justice – rather than someone devoted to the law.

But David’s closing observation with respect to the history of justices may be inapplicable:

Finally, a word of caution to gleeful conservatives. We’ve been here before. We’ve had opportunities to remake the Court. President Reagan and the first President Bush together appointed a majority of the Supreme Court. Yet Roe endured, and the Court even moved left on key issues. Presidents don’t nominate robots. They nominate people who possess their own will. It will be imperative that conservatives closely evaluate Trump’s potential picks, but that person — no matter his or her record — will not only possess immense power, they’ll face immense pressure. May he or she possess not just the right philosophy, but also the necessary character to do all the job requires.

He assumes Trump will nominate an adult. I don’t make that assumption. Trump has a clear history of selecting unprepared, sycophantic personalities for important positions, with names like Tillerson (unprepared), Price, Priebus, Pruitt, Bannon, Miller, Spicer … all incompetent and most of them unprepared. I think Trump will be dearly tempted at the idea of nominating one of the current crop of power-chasers who’ve proclaimed themselves to be absolute Trump lovers. And will the GOP Senators dare to reject any Trump nomination? In a word, no.

Erick Erickson on The Resurgent doesn’t think this will be such a big deal:

This is why President Trump should play it safe. He should consider someone like Senator Mike Lee, who his colleagues would be glad to push off to another branch of government. Or he should consider someone like Amy Barrett who these and several Democrats have already supported in the past year.

It takes more than one voice shouting lies to create The Big Lie. WaPo’s Fact Checker service has decided to award “Four Pinocchios” to a recent statement by Brad Parscale accusing the Clinton Foundation of being a slush fund, while claiming the Trump Foundation is absolutely pristine:

The New York Post report claimed that the Clinton Foundation took $140 million in grants and pledges in 2013 but spent just $9 million on direct aid, based on 2013 tax filings. But as we explained, it is a public charity. The ratio of 6.4 percent toward charities and 93.6 percent toward expenses, suggested by the tax form and repeated in the chart, is based on a misreading of the tax documents filed by the foundation.

By contrast, the American Institute of Philanthropy’s CharityWatch gives the Clinton Foundation an “A” rating, its second-highest efficiency rating, which is based on the percent of total expenses a charity spent on its programs in the year analyzed and the cost to raise $100.

For 2016, according to tax documents and audited financial statements, the Clinton Foundation spent 88 percent of its cash budget on programs, compared to 12 percent on overhead, such as fundraising, management and expenses. The organization also calculated that it costs the Clinton Foundation only $2 for every $100 it raises.

In other words, the reality is almost the opposite of what Parscale portrays in his chart. Indeed, CharityWatch includes the Clinton Foundation on its list of top-rated charities.

Meanwhile, the Trump Foundation appears to be … a slush fund:

But Trump twice used the charity’s money to settle legal disputes that involved his for-profit businesses, the New York attorney general alleged. He also engaged in other instances of self-dealing, such as paying $10,000 to buy a portrait of Trump that was found hanging in one of his golf resorts. The foundation also donated $25,000 to a Florida political group aiding the reelection effort of state Attorney General Pam Bondi (R) — and was used to benefit his presidential campaign, the lawsuit said.

The problem, of course, is that these days, the frantic rush of life means that follow-ups and rebuttals are rarely read by those who get the first reports. No doubt there are many people who believe the Clinton Foundation is a slush fund, despite its high ratings by neutral observers.

The lack of allegiance to the truth, as evidenced by Parscale, is a sad commentary on the ideological warriors of either side. But if you were wondering about the Clinton or Trump Foundations, this report is a good place to go.

And a final miscellaneous entry.

And that’s it for this year!

A boy and his model boat.

There were some fine black & white cinematography shots in Gammera, The Invincible (1965; aka Giant Monster Gammera, but recut).

Yep, there sure were.

The retirement of Associate Justice Kennedy from SCOTUS will almost certainly bring into strong relief the political riptides currently besetting the GOP, particularly those of a moderate, i.e., responsible bent, as modulated by President Trump’s nomination.

Let’s assume Trump does his usual thing and finds some extremist conservative (a phrase I tire of typing) legal type and nominates him. Given the 51-49 nominal status of the Senate (50-49 if we discount Senator McCain, who is severely ill with brain cancer, but he may vote on a matter of a new Justice no matter how ill he may be), this places any Republican Senator who finds that nominee objectionable in a position of great power. A simple vote against the nominee puts the nominee on the precipice, and if a second GOP Senator refuses to vote for him – even through abstention – then President Trump is left with egg on his face, a condition which he’ll greatly resent. This presents an opportunity for great leverage for any Senator willing to grasp the lever and with a burning issue in hand.

But that lever comes with an electrical charge in the form of President Trump’s base. The pressure they can bring to bear on a Senator exercising due diligence (Trump would call it disloyalty or even treason) will be incredible. Senators Flake, Corker, and McCain, who will face re-elections runs due to retirement or illness, are somewhat less vulnerable, but their record with regard to due diligence with other Federal judiciary picks does not inspire confidence in this scenario.

But even if Trump comes up with a semi-reasonable pick, it’ll still have the potential to be a circus. The amount of power a single Senator will enjoy during that short period, foreshortened as it will be by the oncoming election, will be, they think, immense.

But Trump’s hole card will be his dishonesty, his inability to hold to a bargain. That’s the joker in the deck.

And, finally, Justice Kennedy has had a long career of holding great power by his willingness to straddle the line between the liberals and the conservatives. By this final act, during the midst of a mid-term election which had been considered a prime opportunity for the Democrats to take control of the House, he has provided the fire the GOP, and more importantly President Trump, has been trying to ignite under the feet of moderate Republicans to come out and vote for the candidates he favors, candidates who have clutched him most frantically and, for this Republic, unhealthily, to their bosoms. Trump might have depicted the Democrats as unpatriotic leftist extremists in any scenario, but now he has the carrot to dangle in front of those voters, as well as the stick: another SCOTUS Justice’s seat to win for the conservative side. Not only does this make it highly unlikely that the Senate will be won by the Democrats, but since the voters will be in those booths anyways, the GOP candidates will enjoy a boost that the Democrats will find hard to beat. And, no doubt, Trump will elide the fact that only the Senate has any approval power over the SCOTUS pick, thus beating the bushes for extra conservative voters for his House Favorites.

Minus any unforeseen events, I do not expect the Democrats to take the Senate, and the House will be a hard mountain to climb.

But this is the era of Trump, which means that there may be multiple unforeseen events that will topple the majorities. Indeed, Special Counsel Mueller may come forward with a pair of handcuffs for a Trump family member, and given the graceless way every single one of them carries themselves, including the First Lady, there will be scant public sympathy for that family member outside of the GOP base. Or possibly the Trump Recession will start, and disaffected moderate Republicans and Independents will flock to the Democrats.

But, without those factors, this appears to be the way to bet.