Category Archives: Uncategorized

 

“Of course the wolf flies.” – Duane Johnson, Rampage ad

Paul Rosenzweig, a national security lawyer of long standing, finds he can’t finish a book he’s contracted to write. Why? Because he’s lost the faith. He writes about this on Lawfare:

The last straw for me was this week’s announcement by the Republicans in the House that they have found no evidence of collusion – directly contradicting what the Special Counsel has uncovered and revealing that the function of oversight is now dead in Congress.  Thus two thirds of my thesis (the premise of legality by the Executive and oversight by the Legislative) is now untenable.  And I have 90,000 words that are no longer ones I am willing to publish.

I can hear my liberal friends now, mocking this somewhat.  They have had this skepticism of government for a long time and will, I am sure, both welcome my “conversion” to their view and deride me for how late in my career it was.  I think however (and with respect) that this sort of response undervalues and mis-states the deviance of Trumpism.  The Trump approach has truly stolen the soul of conservatism.  It is different in kind and not degree from past administrations.

And so, for now, I put aside the book.  I hope I can return to it someday with a chapter on the “Trump Detour.”  At this point, however, we can no longer say that Executive and Legislative probity is a given.  The guardrails of American democracy (to paraphrase Jack Goldsmith in describing institutional restraints on authoritarianism) are buckling.  To which one can only respond: Trumpism Delenda Est.

It’s disturbing to me to hear a hardened lawyer looking at the future in such a dismal way. I’m not sure I’m as depressed as all that. The structure of any democracy cannot safeguard against dictators and incompetents if the people are unwilling to participate in that democracy. Trump was elected because a sufficient number of citizens either did not participate, or participated with little attention, in the election. They have since learned that elections have consequences. We’re seeing the reaction to that in the number of new candidates for seats that have become available through special elections, or will be available at the midterms.

I think that’s encouraging, and may portend a change at the midterms of a magnitude such that the Republicans may be forced to begin reforming themselves – finding ways to man the gates, removing certain rules of the Party, as I’ve discussed before, and otherwise guiding their Party away from extremist-right.

Or the Party may simply recede into history, as the old “moderate Republicans” form a new Party which can hopefully grow into a responsible governing entity.

The hidden trick will be for the Democrats not to follow the Republicans into their own form of extremism, or they may also fade into the own forms of depravity and obscurity. In a nation such as ours, we best function through compromise at the center, feeling our way towards correct positions by feel, rather than by ideology. Right now we’re off the rails, but continued pressure on the currently incompetent President and his supporters in Congress may force them from power as their own supporters begin to realize how badly their selections have performed.

The hair may say 70, but the face says 30.

The biographical drama Leadbelly (1976) chronicles the life of Huddie William Ledbetter from his late teenage years through his second prison term for murder. He was a blues musician who worked from 1903 until his death 45 years later. This is truly a chronicle, for there is little attempt to do more than connect his upbringing, the strictures of the American South in which he grew up, and his own lust for life with his prison terms and his music.

Indeed, in some ways this movie is all about the music he composed and performed, the subjects both well-worn, such as women and love, and more unusual, such as the song he sang hoping that the Governor of Texas might grant him a pardon. We’re given performances of his many songs as they fit the time and scene.

But as such, the movie comes off just a little flat. In some ways, I found it hard to connect with Ledbetter, and perhaps that’s just a societal difference of 100+ years and a completely different social circumstance. Some of it may have been questions in my head about whether Ledbetter ever really learned from his experiences, or if the pain he endured was more a function of the racist society in which he lived. Indeed, it has elements of film noir to it, although I wouldn’t classify it as such, as an epilogue suggests there was, in fact, a happy ending to his life, as it claims he later played Carnegie Hall.

It is an interesting movie, but not necessarily a movie you’ll remember a month from now.

Speaking of the original Bolo by Laumer, I just got around to seeing last night’s Colbert where he interviews Paul Giamatti – and gifts him with a copy of one of the classic collections of Bolo stories by Laumer. They didn’t really discuss it, but it was cool to see an obscure ex-diplomat get a call-out on Colbert. (Yes, it was also cool to see Kuttner and Moore mentioned.)

When you’re on God’s team, you don’t lose. Keeping this in mind, we can better understand how the GOP, the party of the Evangelicals, even if they’re led by a lying, boasting, adulterer, can embrace lies such as we’ve been hearing of late concerning the special election in PA-18. From the conservative Washington Times:

“The president’s engagement in the race turned what was a deficit for the Republican candidate to what is essentially a tie,” said White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah. “Also the Democrat in the race really embraced the president’s policies and his vision whereas he didn’t really embrace [House Minority Leader] Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader.”

But as Jon Favreau points out:

Conor Lamb campaigned:

1. For universal health car
2. Against Trump’s tax cut
3. For expanded background checks
4. For stronger unions
5. Against cuts to Social Security
6. For a woman’s right to choose
7. For medical marijuana

Why the ridiculous claim? A mature secular voter knows that this isn’t a horserace – that there’s no financial cost or gain depending on whom you vote for. But the GOP base isn’t made up of mature secular voters (no offense), but rather, to a substantial degree, they’re Evangelicals on God’s team.

Or at least this is where they’d like to see themselves.

But Trump went into PA-18 and campaigned in a district which went for him in 2016 by 20 points, and his most excellent candidate, who was going to win easily (or so Trump pronounced on the eve of the election), lost by a feather – less than 700 votes.

Left to consider it, an Evangelical voter should be appalled that God couldn’t push just a few more votes into the Republican column, let alone give losing candidate Saccone a twenty point victory. Since there must be a God, well, either Saccone (who called his opponent and those supporting him God-haters) isn’t favored by God, despite the blessings of Party leader (and thus favored by God) Trump.

Or God isn’t with the Republicans.

The Republican leaders, despite a lot of foolishness, know their base. What’s the most efficient way to convince their base that God is still with them? By co-opting the victorious Lamb (fortunate name for the Republicans, BTW). I suppose God recognized his innate Republican-ness, and helped him to a wonderful victory.

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays with the base, although it may be hard to discern. The next Presidential Approval poll might yield something, but then again it might not. Since there are so many other incidents that can affect that poll, it’s hard to know how to interpret it in this context.

But this loss may chip away a few more Evangelical voters from the Republicans. When you’re in a team sport and your team gets blasted, it has to make you wonder if you’re doing things the right way.

Ever wonder what Great Britain can really do when they suspect a foreign power of aggression on their own soil, such as the recent poisoning incident? Lawfare‘s Ashley Deeks gets the details:

The press has reported on (non-forcible) reactions that the U.K. may be considering. This reporting tends to focus on imposing economic sanctions; expelling Russian spies or diplomats from the U.K.; restricting visas to Russian businesspeople; or revoking the broadcast license for RT, Russia’s national media network. These measures would be “retorsions,” or unfriendly acts that do not violate international law.

The U.K. still has another category of options: countermeasures. The Draft Articles on State Responsibility, adopted by the International Law Commission and generally accepted as an accurate restatement of customary international law, define countermeasures as acts by the injured state that would otherwise be international law violations but that are not wrongful because they are responses to an initial violation of international law by the wrongdoing state. Countermeasures should be proportional to the original violation, and their goal must be to induce the wrongdoing state to comply with its international obligations and cease the violative behavior. The victim state must cease its countermeasures once the violation ceases. Only states that are injured may impose countermeasures: This means that a victim state’s allies may not impose “collective countermeasures” on the wrongdoing state if only the victim state was actually injured. And, according to the Draft Articles, before imposing countermeasures the injured state must call on the wrongdoing state to fulfill its obligations, notify the wrongdoing state that it intends to take countermeasures, and offer to negotiate with that state.

Not the sorts of things that’ll make Putin’s hair stand on end, but then he has little enough as it is.

I wonder if the fangs were of the glow in the dark variety I had as a kid.

High Anxiety (1977) is a comic farce and a parody of, among other things, Alfred Hitchcock movies. Unfortunately, it has not aged as well as the Hitchcock movies, despite a number of individually funny bits.

I think it has to do with the lack of a serious undertone to the movie. Subjects include psychotherapy (at “The Institute for the Very, Very Nervous”), Hitchcock’s The Birds, ineffectual personal servants, dominatrices and submissives, and others, but none are really subjects of vital interest. Charlie Chaplin also used comic farce, but his subjects included the submission of workers to their corporate masters, the blindness of love, etc., subjects that are either timeless, or seem nearly so.

All that said, there are parts which still made me laugh out loud. If you happen to stumble into this flick, you will find it entertaining. But I fear it doesn’t work as well as it used to.

The zero-risk society is a bit of an aphorism these days, emblematic of the fear of any risk for children – which has left many to wonder, how are they supposed to learn about dealing with risk?

Well, in Britain it looks like they’re starting to figure that out, as Lenore Skenazy at Let Grow reports. Her conclusion?

Something Steve Benen said reminded me that there may be a fix for the national conundrum – who to vote for in a winner-take-all contest. First, the conundrum:

… we’re occasionally reminded that while the Republican Party rejects everything the Green Party stands for, the GOP nevertheless sees the Green Party as incredibly useful in moving the country to the right. Indeed, we know just as a matter of arithmetic that if Green Party voters had backed the Democratic ticket in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin in 2016, Donald Trump would not be president today.

This is an oft-noted wail of voters – they would prefer a 3^rd party candidate, but aren’t they wasting their vote by voting for that candidate?

Minneapolis, just a few miles to my west, uses instant-runoff voting. In this method, voters may list their preferred candidates in preferred order. During counting, losing candidates have their votes redistributed to surviving candidates based on the order specified by the voters. In the end, these ballots may indicate the most accurate measurement of preferences for 3rd party candidates, while permitting such voters to also specify someone else who is “acceptable”. How about we implement this for the Presidency? Heck, we could probably do this on a state-by-state basis. (Maybe the only way, legally speaking.)

I’m sure this has been suggested many times before, but it’s worth reiterating.

Incidentally, Steve’s report is about someone on the GOP payroll in Montana who registered for the Green Party primary for the Senate seat that’s in contention, perhaps hoping to split the vote that would otherwise go to the Democratic candidate through hard line leftist appeals if he were to win the primary. It seems to me that electoral shenanigans such as this, legal or illegal, might be abandoned if we had instant-runoff, as they would become ineffective.

Akiva Eldar describes Netanyahu’s campaign tactics and their consequent fallout on AL Monitor:

In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s school of morality and politics, accepting a bribe is no reason to unseat an elected premier, nor is a hostile takeover of the country’s media. He insists that a prime minister should not be replaced because of criminal indictments or guilty verdicts. According to Netanyahu, a prime minister can only be “replaced at the ballot box,” although what he means is that a prime minister can only be “replaced by Jews at the ballot box.”

March 17 marks two years since his horrible election-day video warning — “Arab voters are coming out in droves to the polls” — and calling on Jews to turn out en masse. It’s hard to know how many votes he picked up for the Likud with this alarmist message, but the damage he caused to relations between Jews and Arabs is discernible.

The annual index compiled for more than 40 years by professor Sammy Smooha of Haifa University points to a decline in the Jewish majority’s perceived legitimacy of the country’s 20% Arab minority. The proportion of Jews accepting the Arabs’ status as a minority with full civil rights in a Jewish and democratic state fell from 75% to 68%. Three out of 10 Jews think the Arabs should leave the country and receive appropriate compensation. The percentage of Jews who refuse to have Arabs as neighbors grew from 41% to 48%.

At the same time, the Arabs’ perception of the state’s legitimacy has also changed. Whereas 66% of Arabs recognized Israel’s right to exist in the 2015 survey, the rate declined to 59% in the 2017 survey. Only a minority, 47%, of Israeli Arabs are reconciled to Israel as a state with a Jewish majority compared to a majority of 60% two years earlier. In addition, the study discerned a significant increase in the threat perception of Israeli Arabs, with 73% fearing a severe undermining of their basic rights compared with 68% in the previous poll.

There is a certain resemblance to GOP tactics for riling up their base, isn’t there? Get the emotions going, call the other side “God haters”, get the fight or flight mechanism firing – and then harvest the votes.

It’s really quite despicable, isn’t it? And it has consequences, as the cohesiveness of the Israeli state falls apart, which in turn exacerbates the tensions in the Middle East.

There’s been quite the hubbub since the House Intel Committee abruptly terminated its investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election and concluded there wasn’t any interference.

Excuse me, the GOP members of the House Intel Committee, being in the majority, did so “…over the fierce objection of Democrats.”

Wait, wait, I’ve still got it wrong. SOME of the GOP members of the House Intel Committee blah-blah-blah.

Who’s the goat here? Retiring, and that’s probably the key word here, Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC). From Politico:

Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina said that the evidence gathered by the committee clearly showed Russia’s disdain for Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, and was “motivated in whole or in part by a desire to harm her candidacy or undermine her Presidency had she prevailed.”

Rep. Gowdy is a member of the Tea Party, so we know he’s not a moderate. He led one of the fruitless investigations of the Benghazi tragedy.

But apparently he’s remembering some conservative positions, such as country comes before party.

I wonder how long it’ll take before someone tries to RINO him out of the party. Although, given that he’s retiring, it might not be worth the time, except as an object lesson.

Let the purification rituals begin. Someday, there’ll be three members of the GOP left – and two will be on probation.

After Saccone’s small-minded vitriol in the closing of the PA-18 special election, compare to his opponent, Conor Lamb (D), and his commentary the morning after the election:

“Look, I was at a lot of polling places yesterday with cars parked outside of them that had president Trump’s bumper sticker on them. So he’s a popular person here,” Lamb told CNN’s “New Day” on Wednesday. “But I think that what happens when you campaign in real life as much as possible is that those divisions go away. Everyone gave me a fair shake and I know that there are people that voted for the president who also voted for me. And, you know, I thank them for hearing me out.” [Politico]

I think Mr. Lamb has a bright political future ahead of him, if that’s what he wants. He speaks the language of inclusiveness, and, assuming he has follow-through, that will take him a ways.

Antediluvian:

Of or belonging to the time before the biblical Flood.
‘gigantic bones of antediluvian animals’

humorous Ridiculously old-fashioned.
‘they maintain antediluvian sex-role stereotypes’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]

Noted in this episode of 9 Chickweed Lane.

When clearing the gutters of ice, this is what you get …

That one piece sort of looks like amber with an embedded insect.

Nyah.

An inspiration as both a scientist and as a disabled man, he serves – present tense, yes – as a model of what you can do. Not everyone can have the support system he had, and he reportedly had his pecadilloes, but still a light in the firmament has gone out tonight.

The folks at the Center for Economic and Policy Research are searching for signs of the coming economic boom:

The National Federation of Independent Businesses released its February survey of its members this morning. The survey showed (page 29) that 29 percent of businesses expect to make a capital expenditure in the next 3 to 6 months, the same percentage as in January. This is somewhat higher than the 26 percent reported for February of 2017, but below the 32 percent reported for August of last year. It’s also the same as the 29 percent reading reported back in August of 2014 when a Kenyan socialist was in the White House.

In other words, there is no evidence here of any uptick in investment whatsoever and certainly not of the explosive increase promised by the Trump administration. Maybe if Trump did some more tweeting on the issue it would help.

To my totally untrained mind, it might be a trifle too soon for the great economic expansion to begin, but it might be time to start getting antsy about it, if you were in any way dependent on it. But keep an eye out for reports on the monthly balance of tax collection vs outlays at the Federal level, such as this one from Reuters:

The U.S. government had a $215 billion budget shortfall in February as revenues into the government’s coffers fell and outlays increased, the Treasury Department said on Monday.

That compared with a budget deficit of $192 billion in the same month last year, according to Treasury’s monthly budget statement.

Economists polled by Reuters had forecast the Treasury recording a $216 billion deficit last month.

If those continue to grow, then we’ll know that the Kansas “miracle” is now afflicting all of us. Only, the Federal government is allowed to run deficits, unlike the states, and the deficit hawks are muffled. Thus, we’ll need to keep watch ourselves.

With regard to the firing of Secretary Tillerson, Ezra Klein confirms on Vox the firing of the #4 person at State as well, and then lets his jaw go slack:

Let’s count the eye-opening things here:

1. Trump, whose television catchphrase was “You’re fired,” couldn’t bring himself to fire America’s top diplomat in person. This is similar to how he fired FBI Director James Comey, sending his former bodyguard Keith Schiller to deliver the news. The two incidents together confirm frequent press accounts that for all his bravado, Trump actually is loath to fire people himself.
2. Tillerson reportedly only found out about his firing when Trump tweeted about it on Tuesday morning. This statement likely represents shock on the State Department’s part as well.
3. The lead State Department spokesperson is openly insulting the president by leaking details about Tillerson’s dismissal that paint him in a negative light.
4. Tillerson, whose tenure in Foggy Bottom was widely seen among foreign policy experts as one of the worst (if not the worst) in modern history, still believed he was doing a good job at the time of his firing.
5. It’s still unclear why, exactly, the secretary of state was just fired at this particular moment in his spectacularly unimpressive tenure as America’s top diplomat.

In the Trump administration, chaos is something of a norm. But this is shocking even when grading on that curve.

With regard to Ezra’s #5, my previous offhand remark that this is cover for a possible disaster for the Republicans in the PA-18 special election has grown on me. Ezra’s making the classic error of trying to evaluate the event without thinking about the political context. Since Tillerson was out of favor with Trump, it was easy to sacrifice him.

And while Tillerson may have been one of the worst to occupy the post in recent memory, Pompeo may try to best him in that department. Assuming he’s confirmed in the post.

Readers remark on the dismissal of Secretary of State Tillerson:

Typical Trump. He likes to surround himself with a phalanx of Yes Men to advance his position as the “smartest man in the room.” Non-conformity must be avoided at all costs. Another sad day for America.

Trump’s nominee to replace Tillerson is Mike Pompeo, current CIA Director and a former far-right House member. He is considered to be a close ally of President Trump. I wonder if President Trump is feeling like he needs some support from his Cabinet.

Another:

Were basing this story on what we have been told. The relationship didn’t seem right from day one, and it’s not nice to call the boss names .We shall see if it was a good decision in short order. Plus in defense of Tillerson it would be hard for a guy who was big time in the private sector to follow somebody’s agenda. I really think he took the job because you’re not supposed to say no when the President ask’s you to serve.

The reader has a couple of good points. I think it all started with Trump’s preoccupation with appearance, because Rex Tillerson surely has the look of a distinguished diplomat – not my deduction, of course, as many other writers have noted about Trump.

But, as the reader points out, he didn’t have the experience to be Secretary of State, having been a private sector guy all his life.

This is probably illustrative of why Trump has been a failure so far – he doesn’t understand how to pick the people with whom he has to work.

BTW, Tillerson wasn’t the only State employee let go today. Conor Finnegan reports on Twitter:

Vaughn Hillyard relays some information about the PA-18 special election:

If accurate, it continues the narrative that the GOP has become the party of the Christian far-right, which is more than a little morally confusing, given the nature of the leader of the GOP – President Trump.

It does suggest, however, that Saccone may have hurt his chances of winning. This is the rhetoric you use to firm up your base when you are certain they are all of the Christian variety. However, on the flip side are the Independents, who generally remember that this is a secular nation, and may even take offense at the suggestion that those who are not voting Republican are doomed to the Nth circle of hell (I don’t recall just which circle was reserved for Americans who don’t vote Republican). He’s circumscribed his potential voters to those who buy into divisive, hateful rhetoric.

And that’s not a recipe for winning.

From 38 North‘s Adam Meyers is some commentary on North Korea during the run-up to the Trump-Kim meeting. He’s certain that North Korea’s Kim will continue to aggressively defend its interests:

In response to the most recent round of UN sanctions, a spokesman of the North Korean Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated: “We define this ‘sanctions resolution’ rigged by the U.S. and its followers as a grave infringement upon the sovereignty of our republic and as an act of war violating peace and stability in the Korean Peninsula and the region.“ This initial reaction, now that the ebullience of the PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics has passed, should put the world on notice that the Kim regime may see offensive cyber operations as a proportional response to the increasing chokehold of international sanctions. What might such an attack look like?

North Korean operators have been observed over the past several months targeting a variety of organizations that might be seen as viable targets for a retaliation, including financial organizations and defense contractors. North Korean operators would likely use an existing penetration as a jumping off point looking for a high-profile target to inflict damage upon as a show of force. Attacks that occurred during 2016 demonstrated DPRK actors had the capability to penetrate a financial institution and use their processes against them in a currency generation scheme that netted millions of dollars in currency. Based on several other high- profile attacks that followed this watershed event, it is possible that DPRK actors already possess access to organizations that may meet their needs. If a suitable penetration is not present, a new one would be targeted, likely using spear phishing emails or a “watering hole” attack (compromising a legitimate website likely to attract targets of interest who would then be infected with malware). Both techniques have been leveraged by DPRK cyber operators successfully in the past.

The North Koreans will not be angelic during this period prior to the big meeting. Embedded in his commentary is a description of a strategy new to me:

If a suitable penetration is not present, a new one would be targeted, likely using spear phishing emails or a “watering hole” attack (compromising a legitimate website likely to attract targets of interest who would then be infected with malware). Both techniques have been leveraged by DPRK cyber operators successfully in the past.

I’ve fallen way behind on the dark-side of programming, I fear.

I’ve been meditating of late on how human processes or customs don’t really seem to scale. First, I suppose I should define what I mean by scale. As a software engineer, a process is scalable if its functionality and performance is relatively insensitive to the amount of data it’s processing.

But this isn’t quite what I mean here. In today’s context, a human process or custom is scalable if it continues to display positive survival characteristics regardless of the context in which it is utilized. Now, there should be an equivalent to the word “relatively” in the first paragraph, but I’m not sure what that word might be. When one says insensitive to context, that means context can assume any value and the process continues to be valuable to humans as a survival mechanism, and I do understand that there are truly no behaviors which can be completely insensitive to context in the manner defined.

So let me clarify how I am considering context to change, and that is in terms of population density. Thus, in one fell statement, I’m trying to say that human customs that have good survival characteristics at low population densities begin to reverse that attribute at higher population densities.

One of the best examples of this lies in humanity’s custom of dividing into tribes for, paradoxically enough, survival reasons. At low population densities, when faced with competition from other tribes, whether these are based on geography (nationality) or religious reasons, it was a positive survival characteristic to reproduce quickly. Families of ten or more produced excess children which could work the fields, serve in the military, and secure other purposes critical to the group’s survival.

But this survival mechanism, pursued to the N^th degree, actually exacerbates the problem of scarce resources as population rises. Consider the problem known as the tragedy of the commons. Economists and libertarians will characterize the tragedy of the commons as a problem in which a resource does not, and most usually cannot, have a human owner that will manage it and, if possible, renew it, but as an unmanageable and important resource, all comers have a go at it without thought as to whether its harvesting will extend it beyond its capacity to renew. The most common example with which I’m familiar are fisheries.

But the pressure behind the tragedy of the commons is burgeoning population. Without a large and growing population, we would not be harvesting the fisheries with great abandon, or draining marshes for more living space, or opening mines in wilderness areas such as Minnesota’s own BWCA – or finding the existence of our civilization threatened by anthropogenic climate change.

And this is all pushed along by customs from bygone eras. Have children, keep the bloodline going, out-grow that other sect over there, grow grow grow! I don’t even need to give a name to the sect because it’s always true regardless of the sect; those that do not grow disappear. The Quakers tried not reproducing, as I recall, and disappeared in the dust of history.

Yet the logic of the low population era persists – how do you tell someone not to  have ten children? It’s the problem of They got here first and therefore they win, so you’d better not have more than one kid – there’s no justice in the justification. Their group is threatened by the growth of other, potentially savage, groups, and unless they can convert outsiders to their cause like the Quakers did, they have to reproduce. And, absent a reasonable ladder to the stars, we see pressure continuing to build on our resources, on our environment, and on ourselves.

The resolution? I suspect it’ll be just like deer and wolves, with dramatic drops and climbs as the two revolve around a dynamic balance, which is so bloodless in that abstract way of writing, but implies the bloody deaths of fawns and pups, mothers and fathers. The analogs in the human world will be bloodier because we have bigger weapons and behaviors not strictly motivated by simple survival.

In a way, this is yet another blow to the Creationist argument, because God, if it actually does have an existence, has sure given us an awful set of tools for continuing our existence. Their existence and behaviors are far more congruent when assuming we come from an animal evolutionary tree, than when we think we’ve come from some omniscient being who has plans for everyone.

And what are our chances for finding better survival tools? Beats me. Science provides us a way to recognize the problem, but I doubt any controlled & peaceful manner of population reduction will really work, unless the approach that appears to have evolved in Japan, which seems to be a distaste for sex, spreads across the globe.

Seems unlikely.

Your Dark view of the future for today.

The first in this series goes to Pennsylvania GOP chairman Val DiGiorgio for this statement:

“The other reason it’s so tight is, you have to remember, this is a Democrat district, notwithstanding the fact that the president won this by 20 points.” [Politico]

According to Ballotpedia, the last time this district was represented by a Democrat was 2000. In fact, redistricting happened in 2010, so one might argue that this district has never been represented by a Democrat – but I think the boundaries are similar prior and post, so it might be a specious assertion.

In any case, the Democrats didn’t even run a candidate 2014 and 2016, and defeated his last serious oppont 64% – 36%.

Someone’s in a panic. Is it him or his bosses?

My reaction to the news that Secretary of State Tillerson had been fired? A visceral feeling that another honorable man had been booted out of the Administration. Which is somewhat ridiculous, given how the State Department has reportedly been chronically understaffed by Tillerson, and become fairly irrelevant under his leadership.

And now I see this from NBC News:

Hours before being ousted as secretary of state, Rex Tillerson called the poisoning of an ex-Russian spy and his daughter with a military-grade nerve agent in the U.K. “a really egregious act” that appears to have “clearly” come from Russia.

On his way back from a trip to Africa, Tillerson said late Monday that it was not yet known whether the poisoning “came from Russia with the Russian government’s knowledge.”

But Press Secretary Sanders refused to confirm the Russian connection asserted by Prime Minister May of the UK. I get the feeling that Tillerson, another amateur, was at least doing the best he could do under the circumstances.

And it sort of brings a tear to my eye, even though he should never have been in that position.

Reportedly, CIA Director and former House Representative Mike Pompeo will be nominated to take over the Secretary of State position. Will he be a stolid guardian of President Trump?

Decedent:

Noted in “Odor Thought To Be Sewage Leads CA Prison Staff To Inmate’s Body,” Hoa Quách, San Diego Patch:

“Examination was limited by decomposition artifact,” the autopsy said. “The only demonstrable natural disease was his hepatitis cirrhosis due to chronic hepatitis C viral infection. Sudden death has been associated with hepatic cirrhosis; however, the decedent was not clinically in liver failure and was not known to be jaundiced. Although it is certainly possible that the decedent died of natural causes related to his liver disease, focal bronchitis, and/or (redacted) due to homicidal violence cannot be completely excluded.”