Category Archives: Uncategorized

For a view from the conservative side of the confidential memo of Representative Nunes concerning the FBI, Jonah Goldberg presents one on National Review, and is clearly feeling sqeamish:

Again, there are some legitimately disturbing facts (and allegations of facts) swirling around the FBI, the Mueller investigation, etc. But there’s also an astonishing amount of manufactured outrage, absurd dot-connecting, and near-hysteria. It’s as if everyone who shouts about the other side being conspiracy theorists needs to have a conspiracy theory all their own as well.

Meanwhile, this #ReleaseTheMemo campaign is obviously a PR stunt. But that in itself is not damning. PR stunts are sometimes valid efforts to get a real story out. I’m actually impressed that congressional Republicans were effective at messaging for once. I wouldn’t have predicted that it would work this well. After all, Republicans insinuating that a memo written by a Republican committee chairman in a Republican-controlled Congress during a Republican presidency is being hidden from the public by some force or entity other than the Republicans strikes me as kind of hilarious. As is the idea that all of these Republicans saw it, but no one leaked it because leaking is just wrong. (It is wrong, but come on.) That said . . . hey, it was just crazy enough to work.

Of course, this stunt — and so much else — will look not just absurd but dishonorable if the memo doesn’t live up to the hype.

That’s why I’d caution Republican politicians from taking their cues from President Trump’s Twitter feed or the media platforms that unapologetically fuel his persecution complex. If professional opiners want to go the way of Alex Jones and Jim Hoft, fine. But the GOP itself should think twice. If Ron Johnson’s performance on Special Report last night is a preview of what is yet to come, I think some Republicans may be painting themselves into an ugly corner.

Ugly corner? Just think of it as campaign fodder. The neediness of the Party Leader is really leading the GOP right down into a toxic waste dump. I know a few conservatives I talk to are really tired of the entire politics thing, even if they still suck down the fallacious swill about the Democrats – as persistent readers of this blog know from my occasional vents on the matter.

Meanwhile, Senator Johnson (R-WI), who Tuesday claimed he had a real live informant that would provide proof positive of a secret organization within the “deep state” out to get rid of President Trump, is retreating:

Johnson backtracked somewhat on Wednesday, saying he had merely “heard” about the existence of a secret society and did not have direct evidence of such a rump organization within the FBI.

“All I said is when I read those in those texts, that’s Strozk and Page’s term,” Johnson said when pressed by reporters on Capitol Hill on whether he believed such a group existed. “I have heard there was a group of managers in the FBI that were holding meetings offsite. That’s all I know.” [NBC News]

Ho hum. I think he’s a fantasist. How Wisconsin voters could pick this deceitful twerp over Russ Feingold is beyond me.

I’m beginning to think the mid-terms will be more interesting in terms of advertising than usual, because it will be all about presentation during the campaigns. These mid-terms could mark inventive new ways to bring the missteps of both sides into sharp focus for voters.

The question will be whether or not the voters will be willing to go out and verify the claims, or not. I wonder if the advertising will be adjusted to make verification a little easier than starting cold – or if either side will simply lie its ass off.

Glancing at CNN/Money‘s report on Trump’s sudden desire to be part of the successor to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), I was struck, for the umpteenth time, by his use of language:

“I would do TPP if we were able to make a substantially better deal. The deal was terrible. The way it was structured was terrible,” he said during a visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

I’m reading that and thinking that this is not the way an expert, nor an expert politician, would put it. But it’s the way that much of his base might put it. He uses general-usage adjectives, rather than specific nouns and adjectives, in everything he does.

And that’s part of his appeal, I’m afraid. In all probability, he’s not familiar with either the original TPP deal nor the successor, but, because he emotionally needs to be seen as improving “the deal” for the United States, not only because it makes his base happy, but because that’s an emotional requirement for  his own existence, he blasts it – and he does so in the same way they think they would. Then he keeps painting himself as a successful businessman – the guy who couldn’t even make money off of a casino! – as a way to butter up the base. He talks their way, and he’s a success – thus they must be a success, too.

Now, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe he’s a fantastically quick study and knows TPP inside and out, and can out-think economists and foreign policy experts on the matter. (I don’t know what either batch of specialists think of the agreement.) But his language militates against such a conclusion. It’s not arrogance on my part, either. The use of specialized words makes for far more precise, and efficient, communications.

What’s better, “I WANT BOMB GOES BOOM” or “Use 2000 lb pound bombs on the bunker”? Yeah. General use words signal the amateur who doesn’t know what he’s doing.

Add in the fact that White House sources indicate he spends his time watching TV (the notorious “Executive Time” meme of last week) and can’t be troubled to do any sort of deep reading, and it’s really hard to take this latest zig as Trump realizing he’s about to look bad, and trying to backtrack by criticizing something and trying to “improve” it – probably by adding a comma to an introductory section.

One of President Trump’s earliest moves was to take the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which effectively collapsed the effort to construct a trade agreement between maybe ten countries. This is the sort of thing that I look at as background noise when it comes to politics on the ground, because while these sorts of things have tangible impacts, they’ll be subtle, and if they don’t go through, often the folks on the ground aren’t going to notice – who are different from, say, farmers who might be more strongly affected.

So I appreciated Steve Benen’s piece on Maddowblog on what’s happened since Trump pulled out:

… as Reuters reported this week, our former TPP partners have decided to simply go around us.

Eleven countries aiming to forge an Asia-Pacific trade pact after the United States pulled out of an earlier version will sign an agreement in Chile in March, Japan’s economy minister said on Tuesday, in a big win for Tokyo. […]

An agreement is a win for Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s government, which has been lobbying hard to save the pact, originally called the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Remember, that partnership was originally the United States’ idea. Now it’s “a big win” for Japan – which came on the heels of another big trade deal between Japan and the European Union, announced last year.

A Washington Post  report in the fall noted that when Trump withdrew, it “created a vacuum other nations are now moving to fill, with or without the president.”

A FiveThirtyEight piece, noting that the Republican’s plans “backfired,” explained, “Japan, the world’s third-biggest economy, has assumed the leadership role. Canada, initially a reluctant member of the club, volunteered to host one of the first post-Trump meetings of the remaining TPP countries to work on a way forward – perhaps because research shows that Canadians will do better if they have preferential access that their American cousins lack. Smaller, poorer countries such as Vietnam and Malaysia wanted freer trade with the U.S. but agreed to consider improved access to countries such as Australia, Canada and Japan as a consolation prize for years of hard bargaining.”

It was clearly a trade agreement of some importance, and I suspect a lot of people will benefit from it – none of them Americans. But without analysis of the sort supplied by Steve, FiveThirtyEight, and others, how would we realize the mistake we appear to have made?

Of course, Japan and Canada are close allies of ours, so it’s not as if China or Russia had assumed the leadership position – and reaped the benefits of being out in front. But it’s clear that we’re retreating rapidly. And what are those benefits? Technologically, being out front often means developing new technologies that have often unpredictable positive – and sometimes negative – attributes. Financially, there are often advantages to being out front.

And prestige, while intangible, is not something to value lightly. This is not simple vanity, but is part of the unstated but always present struggle between governmental systems. The failure of our liberal democracy, under the dubious leadership of President Trump, to bring TPP to fruition speaks to a weakness in our governmental system of serious concern. It speaks to the vulnerability to spiteful whim to which President Trump appears painfully prone.

I can only hope we don’t bleed too much while we figure out how to patch it up.

P.S. now Trump wants back in.

Reprobate:

verb transitive
1. to disapprove of strongly; condemn
2. to reject
3. Theology
to damn
adjective
4. a. unprincipled
b. totally bad; corrupt; depraved
5. Theology
damned
noun
6. an unprincipled or totally bad person
7. Theology
a person damned; lost soul

[Collins Dictionary]

My Arts Editor called me an old reprobate last night. Sheesh.

For all that the GOP wants to deny the existence of climate change, it appears SCOTUS doesn’t agree, as it refuses to hear a case from Alaska concerning the protection of animals thought to soon be imperiled by climate change. From Anchorage Daily News:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected requests to review protections for bearded seals that live in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas.

The nation’s highest court denied an appeal by the oil industry and other groups including the state of Alaska to review a 2016 Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decision that reinstated protections for the seals.

It appears SCOTUS is satisfied that climate change is real and needs to be taken into account when evaluating the danger in which a species lives of extinction.

Or they want a better case for deliberation.

I suppose this could be called inadequate camera equipment.

Before dismissing Chelsea Manning as an attention seeker, er, or maybe if you haven’t recognized her for being an attention seeker, consider this report of the reported Democratic candidate for the Senator from Maryland at a party for well-known right-wingers. From WaPo:

“A Night for Freedom” was billed as a “gathering of patriots and political dissidents who are bored with mainstream political events,” in the words of Mike Cernovich, the far-right activist and conspiracy theorist who organized the party. The $139 general admission fee got attendees hors d’oeuvres and tickets for three drinks. DJ duo Milk N Cooks handled the music. As the event shifted into high gear, it featured an all-star lineup of fringe Internet celebrities, Trump backers and media trolls, including, reportedly, Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, Project Veritas’s James O’Keefe and the Gateway Pundit’s Lucian Wintrich.

But an unexpected guest, neither a Trump die-hard nor Internet provocateur, ended up dominating the news coverage of the event. Chelsea Manning, a former Army intelligence analyst who spent seven years in prison for leaking classified documents to WikiLeaks, was spotted “smiling and socializing with attendees” early in the evening, BuzzFeed reported.

“I f‑‑‑ing crashed!” Manning, a current candidate for a Maryland U.S. Senate seat, told a New York Observer reporter at the coat check. Later in the night, Manning posted her own tweet acknowledging she had “crashed the fascist/white supremacist hate brigade party,” she wrote, adding: “learned in prison that the best way to confront your enemies is face-to-face in their space.”

“I think it’s clear that she does what she wants,” Cernovich told BuzzFeed. “And I think she knows that we’re the same way.” …

On Monday, Manning again addressed the Saturday night event, writing on Twitter that “fascists/alt-right deserve no platform” and that she “took up an opportunity to gather intel on them b/c the ideology they peddle threatens everyone.” According to the Guardian, Manning also reached out to Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour to apologize for her “very bad judgment.” Buzzfeed’s Joe Bernstein reported Manning “was on the verge of tears” when she expressed her regret to Sarsour.

The last sentences were a little puzzling. It appears Manning wants to make a splash, though.

Comity:

1. An association of nations for their mutual benefit.
   [mass noun] The mutual recognition by nations of the laws and customs of others.
2. [mass noun] Courtesy and considerate behaviour towards others.
   ‘a show of public comity in the White House’ [Oxford English Dictionaries]
   

Noted in “Chief Justice John Roberts Has Changed A Little Bit. And That Could Be A Big Deal,” Chris Geidner, BuzzFeed News:

With the unpredictability that Trump has brought to government and Washington — which followed the year of instability that the court itself faced following Scalia’s death — Roberts has sought out a path of compromise and comity that is in fitting with the institutionalist conservatism that has marked his approach to his role on the court.

In case you’re wondering how the FBI Director is supposed to handle political pressure, Jack Goldsmith and Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare talk about it in a larger article concerning how current FBI Director Wray is currently interfacing with Attorney General Sessions:

One of the underappreciated benefits of Senate confirmation and a 10-year term for the FBI director is that it gives him an outlook and perspective that favor the rule of law and the integrity of law enforcement over high-profile presidential pressure. An FBI director can afford to fight with the president. Louis Freeh had a famously bad relationship with Bill Clinton. Yes, the president can fire the FBI director. But he almost certainly won’t—unless he’s Trump—and the firing would martyr the FBI director, not disgrace him. Conversely, no FBI director can afford to be pushed around publicly by the president and attorney general at the expense of a popular FBI career official the president is bullying, especially when that bullying is related, at least in the president’s mind, to an FBI investigation that involves the president, his campaign advisers and others close to him. To maintain his internal credibility, Wray’s loyalties simply must be with the forces he is charged with leading for a decade, long after Trump has departed from the scene. That’s all before one considers the mainstream attitudes Wray almost certainly holds—and that he professed at his confirmation hearing—about the proper relationship between the political echelon and law enforcement professionals.

And another illustration of the GOP‘s un-American deference to their putative leader:

Finally, a word about Attorney General Sessions. It says a lot about the man that he was willing to pressure Wray to remove McCabe—and that he was willing to put sufficient pressure on him to provoke a conflict. Of course, in theory, the attorney general—who supervises the FBI director—should be able to discuss with the FBI director who the deputy director should be. But in context, when the president is attacking McCabe and explicitly tying the attacks to the Russia investigation, and when Sessions is recused from that investigation, the proper role for Sessions is actually the one that Wray played here. The job of the attorney general here was to try to uphold and defend the FBI’s independence. Not only did Sessions not do that, at least according to Axios, but Wray had to do it, to protect the FBI from the attorney general himself.

I hope that part of the conclusion of this dubious episode in American political history will include a strong discussion of the importance of the independence of the Justice Department from the President, even though he nominates and supervises the Attorney General. Most Presidents usually nominate strong candidates, but Trump nominated someone who supported him early on, expecting slavish loyalty, and was shocked when he didn’t get it.

And I’d never really thought about this complex balancing act. Most Americans are probably puzzled by this entire little dance, and it wouldn’t hurt if we were able to take the time to explain it in greater detail, after Trump is gone.

Thought I’d snap a picture or two last night. My Arts Editor tells me this is the best of the bunch.

All cleared off now. Or so my aching back tells me.

WaPo is reporting that Special Counsel Mueller wants to have a chat with President Trump:

Special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is seeking to question President Trump in the coming weeks about his decisions to oust national security adviser Michael Flynn and FBI Director James B. Comey, according to two people familiar with his plans.

Mueller’s interest in the events that led Trump to push out Flynn and Comey indicates that his investigation is intensifying its focus on possible efforts by the president or others to obstruct or blunt the special counsel’s probe.

Trump’s attorneys have crafted some negotiating terms for the president’s interview with Mueller’s team, one that could be presented to the special counsel as soon as next week, according to the two people.

Negotiating terms? I’m sorry, the President doesn’t get special treatment. We’re all equal before the law. Well, I suppose some sort of deal will be cut in order to get President under the bright lights.

I’m guessing that Mueller will be asking for Trump’s versions of certain events, such as the Comey firing, for comparison with the stories obtained from other witnesses, which includes Attorney General Sessions, who was interviewed very recently. Sessions was apparently the first Cabinet-level interviewee. Discrepancies might form the basis for subpoenas and even criminal proceedings, although whether that would be against President or the other witnesses will depend on the issue. And will honesty even figure into this interview?

Probably not.

The Trump advisors and lawyers are not happy about this, of course. But this remark made me laugh:

However, some of Trump’s close advisers and friends fear a face-to-face interview with Mueller could put the president in legal jeopardy. A central worry, they say, is Trump’s lack of precision in his speech and his penchant for hyperbole.

People close to Trump have tried to warn him for months that Mueller is a “killer,” in the words of one associate, noting that the special counsel has shown interest in the president’s actions.

Roger Stone, a longtime informal adviser to Trump, said he should try to avoid an interview at all costs, saying agreeing to such a session would be a “suicide mission.”

“I find it to be a death wish. Why would you walk into a perjury trap?” Stone said. “The president would be very poorly advised to give Mueller an interview.”

Wait, isn’t Trump a stable genius? Surely he can outwit a mere lawyer, GOP member, and former FBI director, no?

Sorry, I just couldn’t resist. I wonder if any reporters will be egging him on….

Chris Geidner notes in BuzzFeed News that Chief Justice Roberts may have a little Vaseline under his shoes:

Roberts joined the Supreme Court in 2005, seen as a staunch, across-the-board conservative. In recent years, though, he’s appeared to moderate some of his positions, in specific instances and sometimes in very nuanced ways. That kind of shift could have significant effects on how the current court decides major issues and — if it represents a permanent change — on how Roberts leads the court into the next decade.

In certain cases involving heavily ideological issues, such as whether some activity should be protected under religious freedom or considered a prohibited activity, the Court tends to have a split of 4-4, with Justice Kennedy acting as an unpredictable swing vote.

But if the Chief Justice is sliding to the left, that could herald some interesting changes in the rulings from the Court. Recall that the Chief Justice voted in favor of the ACA, which shocked the political world – what else could he have up his sleeve?

With that in mind, I’ll inaugurate this thread to track the Chief Justice with respect to unusual voting patterns. The first entry? From The Volokh Conspiracy‘s Jonathan Adler:

In Artis v. District of Columbia the Court split 5-4 over the question of what it means to “toll” state law claims under 28 U. S. C. §1367(d). Justice Ginsburg wrote the majority and Justice Gorsuch wrote the dissent. This was not the usual 5-4 opinion, however, as the role of swing justice was played not by Justice Anthony Kennedy but by the Chief Justice, who joined the more liberal justices.

In case you’re as puzzled as I, from the opinion itself:

Section 1367(d)’s instruction to “toll” a state limitations period means to hold it in abeyance, i.e., to stop the clock.

As to whether there are ideological shadows to this opinion, I cannot guess. It seems to have something to do with someone not filing in time in reaction to a lower court ruling, and claiming the time constraint was tolled in this case. I do notice that Adler connects this with Geidner’s piece as well. A lot of court-watchers are on the edge of their seats, I’d say.

Brian Beutler on Crooked summed up Senator Lindsey Graham’s (R-SC) fairly awful position a week or two ago:

Maybe Graham is telling the truth, and maybe he isn’t, but either way, the ongoing “shithole countries” fiasco underscores something that should have been clear to all thinking Republicans a long time ago: Debasing yourself for the opportunity to bend Trump’s ear is an extremely stupid idea that will leave you debased without the upside of lasting presidential attention or loyalty. By the same token, the Republican congressional leaders who have given Trump free rein to engage in unprecedented corruption, in tacit exchange for control over the policymaking process, have assumed all the downside of complicity in Trump’s crimes without securing the means of assuring Trump won’t foul up policy anyhow. They have all committed reputational suicide-by-Trump, in exchange for practically nothing. As a result, Graham stands to be outflanked by people who are willing to be more shameless than he is, and who will in turn trap their weak leaders into shutting down their own government by the end of the week.

Perhaps Senator Graham should try being a Senator and not a Party hack. You know, give the bills your mature attention, politic within the Senate, but ignore the President. You can’t predict what he’ll do next, so simply concentrate on being a good Senator.

Oh, wait. I see he was part of the Letter to Iran tomfoolery. I’m afraid we can’t expect much out of him.

Inured:

transitive verb
: to accustom to accept something undesirable • children inured to violence

intransitive verb
: to become of advantage • policies that inure to the benefit of employees [Merriam-Webster]

Ah, one of those words that can mean the opposite of itself. Noted in “Trump aims low, falsely claims Dems are ‘complicit’ in murders,” Steve Benen, Maddowblog:

I’m not aware of any previous instance in which a sitting president accused a major political party of being “complicit” in murders. Indeed, the fact that Trump World’s new, 30-second ad isn’t a massive national outrage is evidence that we’re all getting a little too inured to this president debasing the political discourse and destroying American norms.

Spaceweather.com continues its data collection concerning radiation levels at high altitudes. Check out how it varies, not with altitude, but with latitude:

Recently we encountered an interesting feature in data taken over the Pacific Ocean: a “radiation bowl.” On Nov. 30th, 2017, Hervey Allen, a computer scientist at the University of Oregon, carried our radiation sensors onboard a commercial flight from San Francisco, California, to Auckland, New Zealand: map. As his plane cruised at a nearly constant altitude (35,000 ft) across the equator, radiation levels gracefully dipped, then recovered, in a bowl-shaped pattern:

In one way, this beautiful curve is no surprise. We expect dose rates to reach a low point near the equator, because that is where Earth’s magnetic field provides the greatest shielding against cosmic rays. Interestingly, however, the low point is not directly above the equator. A parabolic curve fit to the data shows that the actual minimum occurred at 5.5 degrees N latitude.

Keep in mind that the magnetic north pole is not coincident with the north pole defined by the spin of the planet (nor that of the geomagnetic north pole, which is getting beyond my meager knowledge of physics). I wonder if there’s a correlation between this offset and the magnetic pole offset…

E. J. Dionne in WaPo quite properly bemoans the likely narrative the conservatives will draw from the recently resolved government shutdown:

Government shutdown follies feed an ideologically loaded narrative that government is hopelessly incompetent and can never be counted on to do much that is useful.

President Trump and Republicans should bear the burden for Washington’s disarray because it was Trump’s erratic and uninformed negotiating style (along with his repeated flip-flopping) that made a rational deal impossible.

But even if he and his party are held responsible, episodes of this sort have the long-run effect of bolstering the standard conservative view of government as a lumbering beast whose “meddling” only fouls things up. The private sector is cast as virtuously efficient and best left alone.

Dionne then goes on to cite the many successes of the government in dragging us back from the brink of catastrophe during the Great Recession. I think those are valid examples, but because they may somewhat controversial in the minds of folks who want strict capitalism – that is, no government bailouts – I’d like to cite different examples.

1. Have you recently had to deal with a Red Dawn scenario in your hometown? If not, thank the government-organized US military.
2. Have you lost half your relatives to salmonella poisoning from food you bought at the supermarket? If not, thank government food inspectors.
3. Did you lose two-thirds of your siblings to smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera? No? Thank the epidemiologists who spend their days tracking down public health menaces and mandating sanitary sewers.
4. Do you spend all your time on the highways dodging idiots going the wrong way and doing 120 MPH? No? Thank government, which mandates the rules of the road and enforces them, for our collective safety.

When I was reading libertarian rags, it was quite fashionable to try to make government appear as useless as possible, and this was done with virtually no balance, no acknowledgment of the importance of government. So it doesn’t hurt to do what Dionne did – remind folks that we don’t have the American government as a punishment for the sins of our ancestors, but because, when well-managed (and it sure isn’t right now), it makes us stronger.

Stronger.

So if you’re one of conservative readers, readying yourself to trumpet the failures of government, take a step back and think about all it does FOR you. Quietly, behind the scenes, hardly asking anything of you but some cooperation.

Fun with cameras: the grid of the screen changes these into pictures from long ago. Of today.

These are of our garden-covered backyard. My Arts Editor thinks the last one is the best. Opinions?

CNN ran a poll and found out that the lump of coal from yesteryear sure damn well looks good now:

George W. Bush has turned his unpopularity upside down.

Six in 10 Americans, 61%, say they now have a favorable view of the 43rd President of the United States in the latest CNN poll conducted by SSRS, nearly double the 33% who gave him a favorable mark when he left the White House in January 2009.

To be sure, comparing Bush to Trump will make Bush look good. While Trump has yet to preside over a recession – those typically take a couple of years to build up to – he’s had a number of scandals already, and worse yet, his general job performance can be easily labeled as completely incompetent.

But none of this excuses Bush’s performance in office, which included a failed war in Afghanistan that no one can salvage, an unnecessary war in Iraq initiated on faked evidence that, in fact, many people saw through, and a little dip into the torture pool which should never have happened.

And then there was the Great Recession, marked by the rescue effort of the banks which infuriated so many folks.

In a more sober nation, this result would never happen. Bush’s rating would remain deservedly and pointedly low. Anyone who’d care to look would see the disaster that was Bush, the rebuilding effort led by Barack “scandal-free” Obama, and then Trump’s purposeful dive into the toxic waste dump. They’d understand that the GOP has a real problem with wise governance.

But that won’t happen. Bush has put forth a few statements critical of Trump, he’s taken up painting, and he’s more or less stayed out of the daily fray. Add in the folks who weren’t old enough to pay attention 15 years ago, and, well, he almost looks reasonable. You have to actually, like, read a bit to realize the Bush Administration was really quite the disaster.

I chanced into the living room as my Arts Editor was watching some show, resting from her Influenza.

Says I, observing the positions of the two (fully-clothed) people on the screen: “Oh, it’s doggy-style now, eh?”

Says she, “And on top of the body of her dead mother, too!”

Oh my oh my.

In reaction to Democrats demands for immigration reform in the fight over the Continuing Resolution, a video was released by the Trump campaign (for 2020). NBC News describes it:

After the government shutdown went into full swing this weekend, Trump’s campaign operation released a brutal advertisement slamming Democrats as “complicit in every murder committed by illegal immigrants” if they stand in the way of the administration’s attempts at curbing illegal immigration. The president himself appears in the ad to approve its message.

This is the sort of political chat that’s really beyond the pale, and should be rejected by all politicos, left and right, who believe they have serious input for the national discussion. I realize that Trump-supporters may believe this is just the President “shaking things up,” but it really isn’t. It poisons the atmosphere for good governance and, really, betrays the amateur status of this President and his advisors.

(If my reader is wondering why I don’t address the putative issue, I refer you to this Vox article indicating first generation immigrant crime rates are lower than Nth generation immigrant crime rates.)

But I think it also is an indicator of the desperation in the White House in the face of the continuing failures of Trump, from his Cabinet failures to his legislative failures to the failures of Republican candidates in special elections, from the Alabama Senate seat that should have been a walk in the park and became a failure, to the numerous special elections the Democrats have won by flipping previously Republican-held seats. They can only claim success in the judicial appointment arena, and despite the joyfulness of some conservative pundits, those are tainted, from Gorsuch’s illicit acquisition of a seat to the incompetence that is so frequently appearing in candidates to the federal judiciary that even the GOP has begun rejecting them.

What to do when you’re a President that’s failing? Well, you could try to improve, but that would mean admitting incompetence in the first place. The alternative is to fight back! And so we’ll be seeing more of these wild swings, most of them involving immigration, as that is the key issue for the Trump base.

But how long will they continue chowing on their own meat? For, after all, most of us are immigrants or the children of immigrants – it’s a self-condemning attack, and I have to wonder if it’ll result in the mad-cow disease which is the logical end of this metaphor. If, indeed, Trump voters start looking at their immigrant colleagues and friends and asking “What criminals?“, what will Trump do then?

What, will he punch himself?

Demimonde:

1. (especially during the last half of the 19th century) a class of women who have lost their standing in respectable society because of indiscreet behavior or sexual promiscuity.
2. a demimondaine.
3. prostitutes or courtesans in general.
4. a group whose activities are ethically or legally questionable:
   a demimonde of investigative journalists writing for the sensationalist tabloids.
5. a group characterized by lack of success or status:
   the literary demimonde.

Noted in “To the People Who Want to Spend 36 Hours in Washington,” Kriston Capps, CityLab:

Maybe you read in The New York Times that Showtime is the best bar in Washington, D.C., for “nightcapping with the demimonde.” Sorry. That is not something we do here. That is not something anyone has done anywhere since the Civil War. Piqued and stimulated Times readers should try a different bar—I hear they have loads of demimondes in Brooklyn. For anyone else confused about when D.C. shed its longtime status as a “white male fiefdom,” or when we opened our first non–steak house restaurant, or when we started to matter as a place, consider our recent reporting.

I found this NewScientist (13 January 2018) article fascinating, both for the specifics and how it implies living creatures occupy many spots on the spectrum of intelligence:

Some birds of prey have learned to control fire, a skill previously thought to be unique to humans. The birds appear to deliberately spread wildfires in order to flush out prey. The finding suggests that birds may have beaten us to the use of fire.

There are many anecdotes about Australian birds of prey using fire, according to ornithologist Bob Gosford at the Central Land Council in Alice Springs, Northern Territory. Most come from Aboriginal rangers who manage natural fires in the north Australian tropical savannah, which straddles Queensland, the Northern Territory and Western Australia. The three species mentioned are black kites (Milvus migrans), whistling kites (Haliastur sphenurus) and brown falcons (Falco berigora).

The claim is that the birds pick up burning twigs from existing fires and drop them elsewhere to start new blazes. This would flush out prey hidden in the brush. In effect, the birds are using the burning twigs as tools. At least, that’s the idea.

It’s a bit jaw-dropping.

The most dramatic evidence comes from Dick Eussen, a photojournalist and former firefighter who is a co-author on the paper. He recounts fighting and controlling a blaze at the Ranger Uranium Mine near Kakadu, Northern Territory [Australia], in the 1980s, only to discover a new one on the other side of the road. As he tried to extinguish that fire, he noticed a whistling kite 20 metres away. The bird was carrying a smoking stick, which it dropped, creating another spot conflagration. In all, Eussen extinguished seven new blazes started by the kites.

What we find catastrophic is just another tool for a different species. Much like tool-using crows, these kites are manipulating the world around them in order to get what they need.

Just like we do.

In one of the more puzzling developments for the mid-terms, Red Maryland reports that Chelsea Manning, who as Bradley Manning leaked national defense secrets via Wikileaks, has taken a legal step in the process of entering the Democratic primary for the Maryland Senate seat currently held by Ben Cardin. There are more to complete. Red Maryland just shrugged her off as a convicted traitor, which I suppose is accurate enough for some folks. It’s worth noting, however, that he was found not guilty of the charge of “Aiding the enemy,” and I suppose an argument could be made that she leaked these documents as evidence of bad behavior by the US Army.

Greg Fallis is disturbed, but not at her history, but …:

… I have to say, Manning’s campaign announcement video makes me wonder what the hell her ideas are. Here, watch:

It’s not just that the video is awkward (though it is), or that her voice-over is wooden (and lawdy, it is). The thing about the video is that with a different candidate and a different voice-over, this could easily be a right-wing nutcase propaganda piece. This is what she actually says:

We live in trying times. Time of fear, of suppression, hate. We don’t need more…or better…leaders; we need someone willing to fight. We need to stop asking them to give us our rights. They won’t support, they won’t compromise. We need to stop expecting that our systems will somehow fix themselves. We need to actually take the reins of power from them. We need to challenge them at every level. We need to fix this. We don’t need them anymore. We can do better. You’re damned right we got this.

Substitute a short-haired Aryan face for the image of a trans woman, exchange the footage of the Nazi rally with a BLM rally, and replace the voice-over with a deeper, more menacing voice and that video would be appropriate a pro-Trump candidate. …

But that video? It’s grounded in fear, not in change. It’s not about politics, even; it’s about Chelsea Manning. It suggests that the world is in turmoil and in order to fix it we need a trans woman. And hey, that may be true. But being a trans woman isn’t, in itself, enough. Be a trans woman with ideas and tell us what those ideas are.

If you want to take the reins of power, first tell me what you want to do with them.

I’ve watched it, too, and it’s a puzzling video, evidently motivated by frustration and even fear of the right wing extremists. Without much in the way of specifics, at least that which I can recognize as democratic specifics, it’s hard to really evaluate a potential candidacy.

But if she were to claim that what she said constitutes specifics, then I’d reject her. Those were words, I think, of power, and while she may think that’s what necessary, to my mind we need to use the traditional weapons of a democracy – reason and truth. Those who mislead will simply lead the nation down paths to dry rivers and disaster, and that message must be conveyed to the citizenry – persuasion, not force unless force is deployed against those who speak the truth. Coercion is a tool without moral force, which means it can used for evil and well as good, and by the same person at different times.

Today your submissive is Loki, God of Mischief!

Thor: Ragnarok (2017) has glitz, explosions, colorful vistas, some clever dialog, enormous comedic sympathy for the travails of Gods, and … not much else. And, yet, there is one nice little bit of thematic material, for while Thor must find a way to defeat his elder sister, Hela, the Goddess of Death, lurking in the background is the threatened fulfillment of the dread prophecy that Ragnarök, the destruction of Asgard, home of the Gods, has begun.

It’s really a useful approach to think about using one evil to cancel another out. Sort of like math with units, ya know?

But other than that, it felt a bit limp. My Arts Editor pointed out that most or even all of the strong female characters have disappeared, and the addition of a Valkyrie doesn’t really work – they were, after all, cannon fodder in Norse mythology. Even one as snappy as this one. More importantly, no one really seems to grow and change, although I suppose that the Gods are supposed to be eternally unchanging, no?

And resorting to claims concerning the undermining of the divinity, as with Ghostbusters (1984), would be false, for while there are non-divine characters present, this is really about a war between the creatures of mythology. The cheating of a divine prophecy may be uplifting, a paean to the old chestnut about never giving up, but it doesn’t satisfy the concept of the upending of the reign of Gods.

But, perhaps worst of all, according to our Arts Editor, the role of Death in the times when such mythologies held sway was as a time of transition. Death has a role in life, providing sustenance in one phase, and providing release from the fading of one’s body in another.

It was not considered necessarily an evil.

But destruction and evil is the essence of Hela. Shut away for undisclosed reasons, perhaps the isolation did in her mind; more likely, it injured pride, and now free but finding her father, Odin, out of reach, she reaches out for that which she perceives as most valuable, with plans to conquer everything in sight.

I mean, if it wiggles, she’s coming at it with everything she has.

And just why? There’s no depth to Hela, she’s all hurt pride and domination of Thor. What could we have learned if the personification of Death could have been more interesting? But, as part of the Avengers series, this movie had to deliver eyes-bugging-out fights, and that’s what it did.

Much to its detriment.