Category Archives: Uncategorized

Donald J. Trump:

This memo totally vindicates “Trump” in probe. But the Russian Witch Hunt goes on and on. Their was no Collusion and there was no Obstruction (the word now used because, after one year of looking endlessly and finding NOTHING, collusion is dead). This is an American disgrace!

CNN:

The highly controversial memo alleges that then-Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe told the House Intelligence Committee that no surveillance warrant would have been sought for a Trump campaign aide without a disputed opposition research dossier on Trump and Russia. The memo is the most explicit Republican effort yet to discredit the FBI’s investigation into Trump and Russia, alleging that the investigation was infused with an anti-Trump bias under the Obama administration and supported with political opposition research.

The memo tries to connect what Republicans believe was a flawed application to monitor former Trump foreign policy adviser Carter Page to the overall counterintelligence investigation into potential collusion between Russians and the Republican campaign.

But the memo undermines its own argument about the application being overly reliant on the dossier. It notes that the application also included information regarding Trump campaign foreign policy adviser George Papadopoulos, suggesting there was intelligence beyond the dossier in the Page application.

National Review‘s Editors:

Finally, the FBI says that the memo has material omissions, and Democrats contest key allegations in it. Resolving this shouldn’t be difficult: The counter-memo produced by the Democrats should be released, as well as underlying material including the transcript of the interview with Andrew McCabe, which has become the subject of a he-said/he-said between committee Republicans and Democrats. Perhaps the surveillance of Page bore some fruit; if so, we should hear about it. The more information the public can get about all of this, the better.

There is speculation that President Trump might, in response to the memo, fire Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who oversaw one of the renewals of FISA warrants on Carter Page. Trump made one of his patented ambiguously threatening remarks about this possibility on Friday. If he were to move against Rosenstein, it might cause a semi-collapse of his Justice Department, give further fodder to Robert Mueller, and undo the political headway Republicans have made in recent weeks. Trump should sit tight and — if the investigation is as unfounded as he says — await his eventual vindication.

Former FBI Director James Comey, fired by President Trump:

That’s it? Dishonest and misleading memo wrecked the House intel committee, destroyed trust with Intelligence Community, damaged relationship with FISA court, and inexcusably exposed classified investigation of an American citizen. For what? DOJ & FBI must keep doing their jobs.

Representative Trey Gowdy (R-SC):

“I actually don’t think it has any impact on the Russia probe,” Gowdy, the House Oversight Committee chairman, said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“To the extent the memo deals with the dossier and the FISA process, the dossier has nothing to do with the meeting at Trump Tower,” Gowdy said. “The dossier has nothing to do with an email sent by Cambridge Analytica. The dossier really has nothing to do with George Papadopoulos’ meeting in Great Britain. It also doesn’t have anything to do with obstruction of justice.” [via RollCall]

It’s worth noting that Gowdy recently announced he will not seek re-election, a decision insulating him from pressure by donors.

Lawfare‘s Quinta Jurecic, Shannon Togawa Mercer, and Benjamin Wittes:

But you get the point. The bottom line is that there are multiple reasons to expect that Nunes has not given a full and fair account of the FBI’s FISA process and that his memo is as factually deficient as it accuses the Carter Page warrant application of being.

and …

At the end of the day, the most important aspect of the #memo is probably not its contents but the fact that it was written and released at all. Its preparation and public dissemination represent a profound betrayal of the central premise of the intelligence oversight system. That system subjects the intelligence community to detailed congressional oversight, in which the agencies turn over their most sensitive secrets to their overseers in exchange for both a secure environment in which oversight can take place and a promise that overseers will not abuse their access for partisan political purposes. In other words, they receive legitimation when they act in accordance with law and policy. Nunes, the Republican congressional leadership and Trump violated the core of that bargain over the course of the past few weeks. They revealed highly sensitive secrets by way of scoring partisan political points and delegitimizing what appears to have been lawful and appropriate intelligence community activity.

Steve Benen:

It’s genuinely difficult to find an angle to the House Republicans’ “Nunes memo” that helps its intended beneficiary: Donald Trump. Every key argument the president and his allies hoped to advance has fallen apart, and after weeks of over-the-top hype, Republicans are actually worse off than they were before the previously classified materials were released to the public.

In fact, over the weekend, the memo’s credibility actually managed to move backward. The New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal each reported independently that the FBI did, in fact, notify a FISA judge to the political motivations surrounding Christopher Steele’s dossier. (The underlying allegation from Trump’s allies is wrong — information from politically motivated sources can be used to obtain a warrant — but the underlying charge is now dubious.)

Even if you strip the Republican memo of its context and ridiculous motivations, and consider it solely as a document intended to highlight an alleged FISA court abuse, the document fails miserably.

I was not aware of FISA until I started reading Lawfare; it’s not an everyday subject around American dinner tables. Given this obscurity, this will result on partisans being led around by the noses yet again – or perhaps the weaponization of the respective bases. Beyond specialized experts, I doubt that anyone can have a truly intelligent discussion about it. Ideologues will spout off, of course, prompted by their favorite leader – but will it really lead to anything?

Only if this all goes to court or impeachment perhaps.

I am interested in the fact that some Republicans are rejecting the memo as significant, suggesting that Representative Nunes, who is responsible for the memo, may be out on a limb here. However, given his outrageous behavior as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee, and yet his continued position, I do not see Speaker Ryan removing him from that prestigious seat.

Even if the prestige-meter is rapidly sinking under his leadership.

But the best analysis is probably Lawfare’s, above, as it seems quite complete and written by specialized professionals – in near-English, at that.

I have no doubt that I inherited my interest – passive though it may be – in archaeology from my mother. Not that dad wasn’t interested, but I think mom had the passion for learning the stories behind all the old artifacts, digs, and everything that went with it, starting with the old National Geographics. So it’s too bad that neither one of them is around to see this report on the Maya civilization in WaPo:

Archaeologists have spent more than a century traipsing through the Guatemalan jungle, Indiana Jones-style, searching through dense vegetation to learn what they could about the Maya civilization that was one of the dominant societies in Mesoamerica for centuries.

But the latest discovery — one archaeologists are calling a “game changer” — didn’t even require a can of bug spray.

Scientists using high-tech, airplane-based lidar mapping tools have discovered tens of thousands of structures constructed by the Maya: defense works, houses, buildings, industrial-size agricultural fields, even new pyramids. The findings, announced Thursday, are already reshaping long-held views about the size and scope of the Maya civilization.

“This world, which was lost to this jungle, is all of a sudden revealed in the data,” said Albert Yu-Min Lin, an engineer and National Geographic explorer who worked on a television special about the new find. “And what you thought was this massively understood, studied civilization is all of a sudden brand new again,” he told the New York Times.

An early result?

“Most people had been comfortable with population estimates of around 5 million,” said Estrada-Belli, who directs a multidisciplinary archaeological project at Holmul, Guatemala. “With this new data, it’s no longer unreasonable to think that there were 10 to 15 million people there — including many living in low-lying, swampy areas that many of us had thought uninhabitable.”

Wow. And what happened to that civilization? It just makes the blood race!

Andrew Sullivan is full of depressing pessimism when it comes to Americans and politics:

The problem with tribalism is that it knows no real limiting principle.

It triggers a deep and visceral response: a defense of the tribe before all other considerations. That means, in its modern manifestation, that the tribe comes before the country as a whole, before any neutral institutions that get in its way, before reason and empiricism, and before the rule of law. It means loyalty to the tribe — and its current chief — is enforced relentlessly. And this, it seems to me, is the underlying reason why the investigation into Russian interference in the last election is now under such attack and in such trouble. In a tribalized society, there can be no legitimacy for an independent inquiry, indifferent to tribal politics. In this fray, no one is allowed to be above it.

On the face of it, of course, no one even faintly patriotic should object to investigating how a foreign power tried to manipulate American democracy, as our intelligence agencies have reported. And yet one party is quite obviously doing all it can to undermine such a project — even when it is led by a Republican of previously unimpeachable integrity, Robert Mueller. Tribalism does not spare the FBI; it cannot tolerate an independent Department of Justice; it sees even a Republican like Mueller as suspect; and it sees members of another tribe as incapable of performing their jobs without bias.

And then he gets worse. Go read it (it’s the first part of his weekly tri-partite column) if you want to be disheartened.

Implicitly it raises the question of how to persuade the members of both tribes – he suggests the Democrats are also moving towards tribalism – that tribalism is wrong.

I’m not suggesting we don’t have a long history of tribalism in this country. Dyed in the wool xyz voter is a familiar chestnut. I’ve always taken it to mean that that the voter had more important things to do than worry about the political scene, between raising children and working, and usually legitimately so. And then remember the mass religious revivals we occasionally indulge in, until the next, and almost inevitable, revelations of the true motivations of the leaders damages those revivals.

But now, as Andrew points out, we’re seeing the wholesale abandonment of the most honorable of vocations, truth-seeking and living by the truth, by the GOP. Let me spell it out.

Once upon a time, in situations such as these, our ancestors, not so far away in time, would, regardless of political inclination, examine the evidence presented, looking both at its trustworthiness and what it said, and if they found the evidence compelling, they’d come to a judgment that put the interests of the country first. It required judgment, fair-mindedness, and a independent frame of mind that disregarded emotional responses in favor of intellectual rigor.

But some of us have lost that common-sense approach. Today, a huge percentage of the GOP has decided, prior to looking at evidence, that their leader is sacrosanct, must be protected, and thus cannot be guilty of any major crime. From this unsupported assertion, they then apply logic and conclude that any news, any evidence, which suggests their leader may be guilty of any sort of crime, must be false evidence. Indeed, using a meme supplied by just that person to which the evidence will allegedly point, they call it fake news, they even take up a belief that numerous news organizations with more than a century of tradition of excellence are simply making up news stories. All in the face of evidence

And it’s all so ass-backwards. They have a conclusion, and for that conclusion to work, they invent wilder and wilder stories. All the news organizations are making up news. That tape of Trump talking about “grabbing pussies”? Fake. The Russians? Oh, they’re our friends, they couldn’t possibly attack us.

And all because they have an allegiance to a group that overrides the good of the country.

That’s why tribalism is wrong. That’s why, in my view, it’s un-American.

How do we answer Andrew’s implicit question, then, of how to remind our fellow Americans about how we used to evaluate evidence, about how we used to put the good of the country ahead of the good of the party, of how pre-determined conclusions are the wrong way to go about evaluating our government?

I don’t really know.

But what I’m going to do is send this off to my friends who seem to in one or the other tribe and ask them to read this, think about it, and then send it onwards to their network of friends, to inject it into the thought-stream. Maybe everyone will snort at it, their minds made up and immovable in what I consider to be error.

But I present these thoughts not as a partisan – long time readers know I’m an independent – but as a fellow American who has grown concerned at this decay in common-sense in the GOP, and worried about similar patterns in the Democrats.

And I invite my readers to take similar steps. There will be no single event which will resolve this problem, just a series of small steps, of tribe members finally sitting down, thinking, and saying, What have I been doing? Recommend this post to friends, share it on FB, or however you want to point out that tribalism is wrong and is hurting America.

On this subject, a conservative reader sends me an article concerning the revived Keystone XL pipeline. From MSN/Money:

Nebraska regulators last November approved Keystone XL, a 1,180-mile-long (1,900-kilometer) extension of the existing Keystone Pipeline operated by TransCanada Corp.

However, the 3-2 vote in favor of expanding the pipeline followed a leak of 210,000 gallons of oil just days prior. That oil gushed from a section of Keystone in South Dakota before TransCanada cut off the flow. …

Proponents of the pipeline say it will lessen dependence on foreign oil while creating jobs. But environmental groups and many Americans — especially American Indians — remain furious about the project. Beyond the risk of spills, the project’s steep environmental costs also include the potential industrialization of 54,000 square miles of Alberta wilderness.

“The scale and severity of what’s happening in Alberta will make your spine tingle,” Robert Johnson, a former Business Insider correspondent, wrote after flying over the Canadian oil sands in May 2012.

What I found interesting is that a conservative reader sent it. It suggests that the future damage attributable to the pipeline through construction, maintenance, leaks, and supply to it bothers conservatives as well as liberals.

[h/t Bill C]

In NewScientist (20 January 2018, paywall) Laura Spinney surveys recent research concerning a potential future collapse of civilization, and these are the kinds of research I like – something simple-minded, application of techniques from other disciplines. And the end of the world:

So is there any evidence that the West is reaching its end game? According to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, there are certainly some worrying signs. Turchin was a population biologist studying boom-and-bust cycles in predator and prey animals when he realised that the equations he was using could also describe the rise and fall of ancient civilisations.

In the late 1990s, he began to apply these equations to historical data, looking for patterns that link social factors such as wealth and health inequality to political instability. Sure enough, in past civilisations in Ancient Egypt, China and Russia, he spotted two recurring cycles that are linked to regular era-defining periods of unrest.

One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society, then, as the population grows, the supply of labour begins to outstrip demand and so becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while the living standards of the workers fall. As the society becomes more unequal, the cycle enters a more destructive phase, in which the misery of the lowest strata and infighting between elites contribute to social turbulence and, eventually, collapse. Then there is a second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and made up of two generations – one peaceful and one turbulent.

Looking at US history Turchin spotted peaks of unrest in 1870, 1920 and 1970. Worse, he predicts that the end of the next 50-year cycle, in around 2020, will coincide with the turbulent part of the longer cycle, causing a period of political unrest that is at least on a par with what happened around 1970, at the peak of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam war.

Which suggests we do a poor job of teaching our young the lessons of previous years. Hell, we could see that when the American Glass-Steagall legislation was repealed and our economy subsequently, and possibly consequentially, fell into the Great Recession.

Onwards:

This prediction echoes one made in 1997 by two amateur historians called William Strauss and Neil Howe, in their book The Fourth Turning: An American prophecy. They claimed that in about 2008 the US would enter a period of crisis that would peak in the 2020s – a claim said to have made a powerful impression on US president Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, Steve Bannon.

Turchin made his predictions in 2010, before the election of Donald Trump and the political infighting that surrounded his election, but he has since pointed out that current levels of inequality and political divisions in the US are clear signs that it is entering the downward phase of the cycle. Brexit and the Catalan crisis hint that the US is not the only part of the West to feel the strain.

When population grows, in the age before WMDs, it helped to perpetuate the society that it makes up, so there’s a social survival value to that population growth; but the cheapness of labor it causes, and the strains which appear to grow out of that cheapness over time, certainly tends to suggest that in the common economic models, the growth of population is not a salutary development to the members of the population outside of the elite. In the end, those religions which encourage^[1] unlimited procreation – which is not uncommon, although not universal – may carry quite a lot of the blame for the misery of their adherents. Another reason to doubt the assertion that life is sacred, no?

But since we’re talking about a social science rather than a hard science, I don’t accept that these need be inevitabilities, and instead I believe this suggests that there’s certainly a role for government in the management of the economy. The trick is to do so without picking specific winners and losers, but instead to shape it in such a way as to benefit those who are not benefiting as they should. It certainly justifies a progressive tax system, since without one the rich ignorantly run the risk of the collapse of society – and the disappearance of their wealth.

The applicability of this article to current circumstances appears to be beyond dispute, as the article notes:

How and why turbulence sometimes turns into collapse is something that concerns Safa Motesharrei, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. He noticed that while, in nature, some prey always survive to keep the cycle going, some societies that collapsed, such as the Maya, the Minoans and the Hittites, never recovered.

To find out why, he first modelled human populations as if they were predators and natural resources were prey. Then he split the “predators” into two unequal groups, wealthy elites and less well-off commoners.

This showed that either extreme inequality or resource depletion could push a society to collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when the two coincide. “They essentially fuel each other,” says Motesharrei.

Part of the reason is that the “haves” are buffered by their wealth from the effects of resource depletion for longer than the “have-nots” and so resist calls for a change of strategy until it is too late.

This doesn’t bode well for Western societies, which are dangerously unequal. According to a recent analysis, the world’s richest 1 per cent now owns half the wealth, and the gap between the super-rich and everyone else has been growing since the financial crisis of 2008.

One might say the elite’s allegiance to their family outranks their allegiance to the society which made their wealth possible in the first place.

This whole thing makes the pulse quicken, doesn’t it? After all, we’re talking about an existential crisis. I took a look for this Peter Turchin for any pubications which I might comprehend and discovered he has a number of books out on this sort of thing, well-reviewed, so I put a couple of them on my Amazon wish-list.

As if I have time to read them 🙂

¹And by encourage, I suppose I really mean divinely command.

CNN/Money‘s reasons for Friday’s plunge in the markets?

1. The Fed may raise its core interest rates, in order to fight inflation brought on by the new tax law.
2. This will also cut into corporate profits.
3. They claim worries about the bond market. I don’t do bonds, but it sounds like the price of bonds may drop soon due to a “glut” of them because of increased government borrowing.
4. UGLY POLITICS!
5. The markets have been on a bull run for far longer than normal, and some investors are getting jumpy, waiting for the inevitable 10% drop.

I’m not quite sure what to think of this. The swiftly deteriorating democratic institutions of the leading economic powerhouse should be of concern to every investor world-wide. Their wealth, real and potential, is at risk when the trust we have in those institutions is threatened. If they choose to be worried about the GOP’s attacks on some of the most fundamental institutions of the United States – not only the FBI, but the judiciary as well – then we may see a helluva pullout.

And, in a way, that may be a political stabilization mechanism. If the President takes actions which destabilize the markets and threaten our prosperity, the immediate market signal may be the trigger we need. It’ll be the modern-day equivalent of the villagers with the pitchforks and torches, as the political class ejects the person doingthe damage to the system.

So long as it’s all theoretical, the GOP will sit on its hands. Its members are simply not bright enough to take necessary actions as a group. Sure, some are planning to retire, but that’s because they can’t see themselves doing much beyond that. But once the edge of chaos suddenly appears to them and their donors, it may become an entirely new scenario – with one expendable actor available.

Maybe. All hand waving here, as always.

The GOP, in the persons of President Trump, Representative Nunes, Speaker Ryan, and a number of others, hold the top of a hill in their war with the FBI. Normally, you’d expect those in a commanding position to win such a war, even second-raters like this bunch. But Eugene Robinson makes an important point – this is the FBI:

Presidents don’t win fights with the FBI. Donald Trump apparently wants to learn this lesson the hard way.

Most presidents have had the sense not to bully the FBI by defaming its leaders and — ridiculously — painting its agents as leftist political hacks. Most members of Congress have also understood how unwise it would be to pull such stunts. But Trump and his hapless henchmen on Capitol Hill, led by Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), have chosen the wrong enemy. History strongly suggests they will be sorry.

The far-right echo chamber resounds with wailing and braying about something called the “deep state” — a purported fifth column of entrenched federal bureaucrats whose only goal in life, apparently, is to deny America the greatness that Dear Leader Trump has come to bestow. It is unclear who is supposed to be directing this vast conspiracy. Could it be Dr. Evil? Supreme Leader Snoke? Hillary Clinton? This whole paranoid fantasy, as any sane person realizes, is utter rubbish.*

The asterisk is for the FBI.

And it’s quite the valid point. Let’s leave aside my constant, and no doubt annoyingly predictable, assertion that the Republicans are a pack of second-raters. Neither the President, an incurious man who doesn’t appear to have learned the primary management lesson that a boss should always employ people smarter than himself, nor his toadies in Congress, have the sheer resources to do the sort of investigating, collating of information, and out and out snooping which is the day-to-day business of the FBI. Nor do they have the professionalism, the discipline, and what appears to be the devotion to truth which should be, ideally and perhaps in reality, the attributes of the FBI. Not that I am deluded into thinking the FBI is run by angels, but it appears the current leaders, past and presence, are strongly bound by honor, and they’re certainly backed by one of the strongest information gathering and analysis organizations on the planet.

I suspect if President Trump and his allies want to play power politics with the FBI, they may lose a few appendages in a long, drawn out war. And while they’re distracted by the maelstrom, former FBI Director and current Special Counsel Mueller will be coming in from another tangent.

We can only hope the institutions of the United States will not be severely damaged while this Faustian drama plays out. And perhaps the FBI can also pull in a few outside players of whom we may not be aware.

Or, to return to the metaphor, President Trump may be beating his chest on top of that hill, but he picked a hill without a water source …. and the FBI will surround it soon enough.

Trying to predict this … Image Credit: NASA

I happened to run across something relating to this long-dormant thread concerning approximate solution computing where the problems are so difficult that they consume significant amounts of energy (the latter attribute of which also applies to Bitcoin, as discussed here), and as it’s from my alma mater (not that I have any sentimental attachment to it, not being the tribal sort), the University of Minnesota‘s Institute of Technology College of Science & Engineering, I thought I’d mention it. It turns out that CS&E has a Ph.D. student who has a paper getting published on the subject. I think. They sure weren’t talking about these fascinating subjects back when I was in school – but then, I barely survived college anyways. From a newsletter from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering:

Hassan [Najafi] is a doctoral student working under the guidance of Prof. David Lilja and his research interests include stochastic and approximate computing, fault-tolerant system design, and computer architecture. He is also the recipient of the University’s Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship that recognizes outstanding research work, for the 2017-2018 academic year.

A brief description of the paper:

Recent work on stochastic computing (SC) has shown that computation using stochastic logic can be performed deterministically and accurately by properly structuring unary-style bit-streams. The hardware cost and the latency of operations are much lower than those of the conventional random SC when completely accurate results are expected. For applications where slight inaccuracy is acceptable, however, these unary stream-based deterministic approaches must run for a relatively long time to produce acceptable results. This long processing time makes the deterministic approach energy-inefficient. While randomness was a source of inaccuracy in the conventional random stream-based SC, the authors exploited pseudo-randomness in improving the progressive precision property of the deterministic approach to SC. Completely accurate results are still produced if running the operation for the required number of cycles. When slight inaccuracy is acceptable, however, significant improvement in the processing time and energy consumption is observed compared to the prior unary stream-based deterministic approach and also the conventional random-stream based approach.

It sounds fascinating, but I doubt I’d understand the paper. For example, I have no idea what might be a unary-style bit-stream.

Massif:

In geology, a massif ( /mæˈsiːf/ or /ˈmæsɪf/) is a section of a planet’s crust that is demarcated by faults or flexures. In the movement of the crust, a massif tends to retain its internal structure while being displaced as a whole. The term also refers to a group of mountains formed by such a structure. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Forgotten mountain shrine to a Soviet superstar of astrophysics,” Simon Ings, NewScientists‘s Aperture column (20 January 2018):

A FORGOTTEN jewel in the crown of Soviet astronomy, the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory is located on the picturesque southern slope of Mount Aragats, a four-peaked volcano massif in Armenia.

Much of the mountain (above) once lay in the permanent grip of ice. Glaciers inside its crater weren’t discovered until after the second world war. Since then, the snow line has risen and sheep herders have abandoned the mountain’s waterlogged environs. Photographer Toby Smith, on assignment for Project Pressure, a charity documenting the world’s vanishing glaciers, also recorded the lives of those who remain on the mountain.

Nice pics, too.

As of roughly 2 PM American Central, the big 3 stock market indices are down anywhere from 1.3% to 2%. Perhaps it’s a bit of buyers’ remorse after a long, long run.

Or maybe it’s this:

President Donald Trump — poised to approve the release of a classified memo about the Russia investigation — on Friday ripped the ongoing probe, accusing top law enforcement officials of favoring Democrats.

“The top Leadership and Investigators of the FBI and the Justice Department have politicized the sacred investigative process in favor of Democrats and against Republicans — something which would have been unthinkable just a short time ago,” Trump tweeted. “Rank & File are great people!” he added. [NBC News]

Openly accusing the very officials he selected^[1] to run the agencies of being in open and illegal revolt against him – with no evidence, to boot. It’s tempting to connect market behavior with this new low in intra-government relations.

But I don’t necessarily give investors that much credit. After all, the markets didn’t come crashing down when Trump won election, did they? They – the investors, collectively – chose to believe there’d be a steady hand at the helm. A fair enough position, too.

But with Trump continually failing to be President in a responsible and positive manner has been rattling the world, and this may be the next group to be rattled. The next week will tell us how investors are really feeling. Can’t come to conclusions on this single data point.

1These would be Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray. The former is definitely a Republican, and reportedly the latter voted in the latest GOP Presidential primary, while declining to vote in the election.

… that the trees have taken to using parkas.

On Treehugger Lloyd Alter suspects the oil industry won’t be disappearing just yet, despite the claims of some industry watchers on the green side of things:

Peak oil used to be about running out of supply; now some think that we will run out of demand. The oil companies will ensure that we never run out of demand.

Remember Peak Oil? It was all over TreeHugger, the idea that the easy oil was going to start running out and it would get more and more expensive and difficult to find.

We wrote post after post about Hubbert’s Peak and how we were all gonna die, that we are “in the confusion stage now, followed by chaos and collapse and basically the End of the world as we know it as we slide down the slope from the Peak.”

Then along came hydraulic fracturing (fracking), tight oil, deepwater drilling, Trump, Zinke and Pruitt, and the oil and gas are flowing freely and people are piling into pickups. Peak oilman King Hubbert became “a punchline rather than a visionary.” And now, over at the NRDC, Jeff Turrentine asks Could Peak Oil Demand Be Just a Dozen Years Away? But he isn’t talking about oil supply, he is talking demand, suggesting that electric cars are going to cause a different kind of peak.

In this very different type of forecast, oil production doesn’t necessarily begin to decline at a particular point. But our need for it does. And it’s not just a theory: Experts on all sides of the issue say that it’s really coming. At some point over the next 25 years, a number of cultural, political, and technological factors will combine to slake our global thirst for this once most essential of fossil fuels. After decades spent planning for scarcity, oil companies are now busily preparing for something that they never saw coming: their own marginalization.

To be fair, I thought the same thing two years ago, writing Sooner than you think? A prediction that electric cars will cause the next oil crisis. They don’t have to take over the market totally, just enough to tip supply of oil up over demand, like fracking did. But I suspect that the NRDC is being over-optimistic about oil company marginalization.

We wrote earlier about how the oil industry isn’t taking this lying down, and is seriously pivoting to plastic. They are investing US$180 billion to increase plastic production by 40 percent.

And, for Lloyd, this is a problem because we don’t recycle plastics in any substantial way. For the oil industry, that’s glorious news – new product going out the door. It seems to me that this may be a time for government to step in and say This material has to be recyclable and reusable or you can’t sell it. Of course, the screaming will be remarkable, both from industry and from the libertarians who think markets always automatically adjust, but it’s not going to happen without the managing entity – government – waving a hand.

People can be endlessly clever. It’s something worth remembering.

It seems like every time I turn around another Senator or Representative is not going to run for re-election. Most seem to be retiring, while a few are declaring for another seat. So I went looking and found that Ballotpedia has an excellent summary page of these announcements so far.

I don’t know how this compares to previous elections, and I didn’t find anything for previous years on Ballotpedia. Just to summarize, 3 Republican Senators are not running for re-election, and 15 Democratic and 34 Republican Representatives are not running for re-election.

Without the context of previous years, it’s hard to really speculate on what’s going on, but it sure feels like a lot of Republicans are realizing the next mid-terms are going to be very difficult, no matter what VP Pence might be thinking, and sometimes it’s easier to let the next generation carry the fight.

Then there’s the discouragement of realizing that the leadership is basically incompetent (I’ve seen sentiments roughly approximating that in print somewhere), realizing that power isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and that sort of thing.

Incumbents are hard to beat. The large number of Republicans heading out the door suggest a lot of opportunities for the Democrats.

On Treehugger Melissa Breyer discusses the Swedish craze of plogging:

If Christopher Guest and crew were to make a mockumentary, a la Spinal Tap, about the warm-and-fuzzy cultural traditions of Scandinavia, they might have very well come up with “plogging.” They would portray wholesome Swedes running like gazelles through pretty Swedish landscapes, bounding with Swedish altruism as they stop, stoop, and pick up a pieces of Swedish litter to carry along with them for proper disposal. And it would be hilarious. But what’s even better than this imagined satire is that it is real! And it is awesome.

Which happens to be how I put things away. See it, grab it. Don’t see it, too bad.

My Arts Editor is not entirely happy with this process, I think.

The current Missouri Attorney General and likely Republican challenger for the Senate seat currently held by Democrat Claire McCaskill is Josh Hawley. In keeping with the rightward lurch of the GOP comes this statement from him, via The Kansas City Star:

“We have a human trafficking crisis in our state and in this city and in our country because people are willing to purchase women, young women, and treat them like commodities. There is a market for it. Why is there? Because our culture has completely lost its way. The sexual revolution has led to exploitation of women on a scale that we would never have imagined, never have imagined,” Hawley told the crowd in audio obtained this week by The Star.

“We must … deliver a message to our culture that the false gospel of ‘anything goes’ ends in this road of slavery. It ends in the slavery and the exploitation of the most vulnerable among us. It ends in the slavery and exploitation of young women.”

Poor guy is getting a lot of press, and most of it bad. So let’s see if we can help him out here.

We know that the sex trade is the world’s oldest profession, if we may take chestnuts at their face value, no? So we can immediately eliminate the obvious contention of his statement. But consider this: for the vast majority of that time, the sex trade was merely considered part of the commercial activity of society.

So when the “sexual revolution” came around, freeing women from the compulsion of fidelity from which men had freed themselves long ago, it lent an exclamation point to the work of women over the last couple of centuries to secure their personhood, previously marked by the Suffragette movement.

Which is to say, what had been a simple part of the commercial activity of society suddenly became … repulsive. Enslaving women for sex prior to the sexual revolution had not been terribly abnormal, even when the bonds were matrimonial. Afterwards? Not in the least normal.

And, so, he’s right, if you can read the sentimental tea leaves properly. A fairly normal activity suddenly becomes repulsive – because of freedom. The freedom to indulge, or not to indulge. The freedom to use self-judgment.

Thanks for pointing that out, A.G. Hawley. I’m sure the pastors you were talking with will appreciate this point.

Ben Caspit of AL Monitor reports that it appears that Israel may be preparing for a war brought on by preparations in Lebanon of a manufacturing plant for precision missiles:

Any analysis of recent remarks and moves by Israeli decision-makers and the heads of the country’s security apparatus raises the reasonable possibility that they are preparing the Israeli public for a “war of choice” in Lebanon.

This concept of a “war of choice” is especially sensitive in Israel. Ever since the founding of the state, its leaders have always tried to fight just those wars that were forced on it by its enemies or by circumstances. In contrast, the first Lebanon war (1982) is the best example of a “war of choice,” which evolved into a lengthy catastrophe. The second Lebanon war broke out in 2006, after Hezbollah abducted two Israeli soldiers.

The question is when the third Lebanon war will break out and whether it will be started by Israel. What we do know is the third Lebanon war will encompass the entire northern front, meaning Lebanon, Hezbollah and Syria, along with their Iranian backers.

The impression that Israel is preparing public opinion for a “preventive strike” that it would initiate along the northern border has been getting stronger over the last year. On Jan. 29, President Benjamin Netanyahu set off on a quick visit to Moscow, where he had another meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. It was the seventh meeting between the two men in two and a half years, an unusual meeting frequency for heads of states. In fact, the two men meet more or less every quarter. Putin and Netanyahu have been “going steady” ever since the Russians first appeared in the Syrian sector. So far, this close relationship has succeeded in preventing friction between the Israeli and Russian air forces, which are operating in the same region, sometimes simultaneously.

The United States is also inevitably part of this equation, and given the erratic and weak Administration, it’s hard to say what will come of that effort. But it does appear Israel may be heading into war.

And I found it interesting that Ben, normally a critic of the Netanyahu leadership, did not suggest this might be a useful distraction for the besieged Israeli Prime Minister. I wonder if that is indicative of the seriousness of the Precision Project Missile work.

As speculation builds over the Nunes memo, on Lawfare Professor Orin Kerr of USC casts doubt on one of the central propositions thought to make up the memo – requesting an affidavit under false pretenses:

And some of that depends on identifying just what the narrative is for why the funding source was critical to establishing probable cause. I think that point is really important and too easily ignored.  In #ReleaseTheMemo circles, any possible link between the Steele dossier and the Clinton campaign is like an atomic bomb. It completely annihilates any possible credibility the Steele dossier may have, leaving the exposed words of the dossier behind like the haunting shadows of the Hiroshima blast.

But that’s not how actual law works. In the world of actual law, there needs to be a good reason for the judge to think, once informed of the claim of bias, that the informant was just totally making it up.  As United States v. Strifler shows, that isn’t necessarily the case even if the government paid the informant to talk and guaranteed that they would get out of jail if they did.  Nor is it necessarily the case just because the informant is in personal feud with the suspect. What matters is whether, based on the totality of the circumstances, the information came from a credible source.

That’s a problem for #ReleaseTheMemo, I think. To my knowledge, Steele was not some random person motivated by an ongoing personal feud against Trump or Carter Page. To my knowledge, he was not a drug dealer facing criminal charges who was promised freedom if he could come up with something for the government’s FISA application. Instead, Steele was a former MI6 intelligence officer and Russia expert. He was hired to do opposition research because of his professional reputation, expertise and contacts.  And his work was apparently taken pretty seriously by United States intelligence agencies. Of course, that doesn’t mean that what’s in the dossier is true. Maybe the key allegations are totally wrong. But if you’re trying to argue that Steele’s funding sources ruin the credibility of his research, his professional training and background make that an uphill battle.

That’s just the legal world, though. This is playing out in the court of public opinion, and it’ll be necessary to communicate the legal opinion to the public in order for the public to  understand that the memo is meaningless – if, in fact, the memo contains what it’s thought it contains.

Politico is reporting the Vice President Pence is taking a confident view of the upcoming mid-terms – he thinks the GOP can expand its majority in both chambers of Congress:

“Elections are about choices,” he said in the interview in which he discussed his midterm outlook in detail for the first time. “If we frame that choice, I think we’re going to re-elect majorities in the House and the Senate and I actually think we’re going to, when all the dust settles after 2018, I think we’re going to have more Republicans in Congress in Washington, D.C., than where we started.”

How so?

The vice president’s team has devised a unique ancillary strategy to support his cross-country campaigning: partnering with America First Policies — a Trump-backed public-policy non-profit group designed to boost the president’s agenda — to hold public events designed specifically to discuss legislative achievements like the tax bill.

The goal is to have the group set up events to help voters understand what the White House sees as the upside of the Republicans’ legislative agenda. A senior administration official said Pence’s message at the events will provide a “blueprint for how to be successful in midterms.”

Out in reality, the legislative record of the GOP is dismal. A tax reform package, hastily assembled, which in all probability will do nothing for the economy – and may break it. That’s the only major achievement, written in secret and hurried through by the terrified rats who feared their donors. The rest of it is trivia or just major failures.

BUT Voters are all about perception, no? So I suspect this will be another Big Lie campaign. Their won’t be any mention of the recent AND imminent contretemps regarding the budget ceiling. No mention of how the party is being ripped apart by the Tea Party’s Freedom Caucus. No mention of the mostly supine position of the Senate GOP regarding Trump’s poor choices for the Federal judiciary.

But they will be public events. Will the Democrats setup booths outside the venues and label them as Truth, or Here’s Their Record, or How They Do Things? They’ll need to counter-message, that’s for sure, because marketing is where the GOP really excels.

Synecdoche:

: a figure of speech by which a part is put for the whole (such as fifty sail for fifty ships), the whole for a part (such as society for high society), the species for the genus (such as cutthroat for assassin), the genus for the species (such as a creature for a man), or the name of the material for the thing made (such as boards for stage) [Merriam-Webster]

Noted, with some wonderment, in “Once and for all: Obama didn’t crush US coal, and Trump can’t save it,” David Roberts, Vox:

In his campaign, Trump seized on that resonance with an odd kind of fervor, using miners as props in political rallies and promising, again and again, to put them back to work. He has managed to make the fate of coal miners a synecdoche for the fate of the white working class writ large.

Credal:

1. any system, doctrine, or formula of religious belief, as of a denomination.
2. any system or codification of belief or of opinion.
3. an authoritative, formulated statement of the chief articles of Christian belief, as the Apostles’ Creed, the Nicene Creed, or the Athanasian Creed.
4. the creed, Apostles’ Creed.

Noted in “Kennedy’s speech — so how’d he do?” Jennifer Rubin, WaPo:

That is precisely how all politicians should talk and what is entirely missing — even scorned — in the Trump GOP. Are we going to be a credal nation (“We hold these truths … ”) or a nation that is defined as white and Christian? The GOP has adopted the latter, which contradicts the former and betrays decades of conservative rhetoric.

There’s a bit more to this controversy about the proposed release of the Nunes memo. To recap, the DoJ and the FBI have protested that releasing this memo “… about the FBI’s surveillance practices omits key information that could impact its veracity.” And more, from CNN:

“With regard to the House Intelligence Committee’s memorandum, the FBI was provided a limited opportunity to review this memo the day before the committee voted to release it,” the FBI said in a statement. “As expressed during our initial review, we have grave concerns about material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy.”

And who’s protesting? FBI Director Christopher Wray.

Trump appointee Christopher Wray.

So what we’re seeing here, besides another attempt to discredit and damage one of the very security agencies which are responsible for keeping us safe, is a case of Trump’s appointee not acting with complete loyalty to the President. This, of course, is how it should be – these agencies must be carefully independent from the President in case he’s not a trustworthy man.

Will we see Director Wray fired next? Who will the next director be, Trump’s favorite janitor? This would be in line with his tendency to appoint and promote the obviously unprepared and incompetent. In fact, his appointee to lead the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. Brenda Fitzgerald, just resigned under pressure after investing in companies over whose test results she has control, a conflict of interest – and monumentally stupid. Add in fringe medical ideas, and she qualifies as having all the qualities of a Trump appointee. It’s a badge of shame, in fact. Incompetent, holding unsupported fringe notions – qualities not desirable in government leaders.

But back to the major point, which is this: there are many men and women who understand the importance of honor, and the importance of properly helming the agencies in which they work and manage. Trump appears to be discovering that not all of his appointees are going to drop and give him 20 everytime he raises a finger. AG Jeff Sessions gave him a taste of that when he recused himself from the Russia investigation, opening the door for Deputy AG Rosenstein to appoint Mueller, another man to prove his loyalty to the country.

And now it appears FBI Director Wray also has some understanding of how this all should work. The question is whether he can save the FBI from irreversible damage just because Trump and the GOP feel threatened.

And what can we expect? I don’t think the GOP’s going to back down, so the memo will be released. Will the FBI issue a correction? There is also a Democratic memo, which criticizes the Nunes memo – it’s not authorized to be released, as the GOP refused to permit that. Are we going to see a leak of that memo? And how can that be done to soften up the GOP base, rather than have it portrayed as just Democratic meddling or, even, treachery? Properly speaking, the release of the Nunes memo should in itself constitute treachery if it has classified material in it that can be used by adversaries to hurt us more – say, by revealing how we collect information.

But this is Trump. If it benefits him, he’ll do it. There’s no self-sacrifice in this man, no understanding that his role is to benefit the American nation. He doesn’t have that big a soul. And so we’ll just have to watch and wait for Speaker Ryan to grow a pair.

A dip into the old email bag brings us another angry anti-government missive, this time also attacking electric cars. Shall we take a look? I’ll intersperse commentary:

 The following article deals with realities involved with electric cars.  Similarly, if we all go to solar electric panels, and are “selling” electricity back to the grid, at what point will the owners of the grid demand payment for us to be hooked up to their grid?!?

Well, as Gomer Pyle would have said, “SURPRISE, SURPRISE!!”  I guess some people’s idea of efficiency is a bit different than mine.

It seems unlikely, seeing as the grid is highly regulated by the federal government.

Canadian Comments On Electric Powered Vehicles For USA People – INTERESTING !!

IT WOULD SEEM THAT IF ELECTRIC CARS DO NOT USE GASOLINE, THEY WILL NOT PARTICIPATE IN PAYING GASOLINE TAX ON EVERY GALLON THAT IS SOLD FOR AUTOMOBILES, WHICH WAS ENACTED SOME YEARS AGO TO HELP TO MAINTAIN YOUR ROADS AND BRIDGES.  THEY WILL USE THE ROADS, BUT WILL NOT PAY FOR THEIR MAINTENANCE!  Keep in mind the California Legislature is considering placing a mileage tax on motor vehicles.

Interestingly enough, this is the most valid point in the email – and I’ve seen proposals like the cited California proposal before. But let’s take this a little further than this guy did: the gasoline tax functions as a proxy for road usage, now doesn’t it? But it’s a bad proxy in and of itself, because vehicles have a wide range of gasoline consumption rates, from the big rigs who have very poor ratings, to little ol’ SmartCars and, now, the hybrids.

My real point here is that we’re not talking about catastrophe for funding road maintenance because of electric cars, but instead we’re making the mistake, and have for a while, of using a dedicated tax to fund the construction and maintenance of roads.

Why is this a mistake?

Because there’s a hidden assumption. That assumption is that only people who have cars and use the roads benefit from those roads. That, in fact, is the entire idea behind dedicated taxes. But that’s a bad assumption. Think of the shut-in who gets groceries delivered from the store – they benefit from roads, too. The bicyclist benefits not only because they have a place to bike, but they, too, benefit from the groceries – or the furniture truck that delivers furniture to the stores, and from the stores to the home of the bicyclist. I trust my point is clear – having a car is not a prerequisite for benefiting from the roads. They provide a way to bring in all sorts of supplies that all of us benefit from.

Thus, the gas tax should be repealed and roads should be funded from general taxation.

Electric cars merely point up the problem in how we fund roads, they are not the problem itself.

Ever since the advent of electric cars, the REAL cost per mile has never been discussed.  All you ever hear is the mpg in terms of gasoline, with nary a mention of the cost of electricity.

Electricity has to be one of the least efficient ways to power cars, yet it is being shoved down your throats.  Glad somebody finally put engineering and math to paper.

A British Columbia Hydro executive supposedly said: If you really intend to adopt electric vehicles, you have to face certain realities.  For example, a home charging system for a Tesla requires 75 amp service.  The average house is equipped with 100 amp service.  On a small street (approximately 25 homes), the electrical infrastructure would be unable to carry more than three houses with a Tesla.  If even half the homes to have electric vehicles, the system would be wildly over-loaded.

This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles. Your residential infrastructure cannot bear the load.  So as your genius elected officials promote this nonsense, not only are you being urged to buy these things and replace your reliable, cheap generating systems with expensive, new windmills and solar cells, but you will also have to renovate your entire delivery system!  This latter “investment” will not be revealed until you’re so far down this dead end road that it will be presented with an ‘OOPS!’ and a shrug.

I’m not an electrical expert, but I thought someone else must have looked into this. And, indeed, here’s someone who gave it some thought and, ah, disagreed. Just one point he (I presume) makes:

My 145 year old house is 100 amps… but I just use less than 12 amps off of a regular 110 outlet to charge my car… the same outlet you use for a hair dryer or refrigerator etc.etc. 

This is the elephant in the room with electric vehicles … Our residential infrastructure cannot bear the load.

We all use that much with 110 outlets regularly (your refrig.. A hair dryer..etc) As such it would NOT overload your home or the neighborhood grid. And most people charge at night while sleeping when the car is not in use and the electrical grid is not being taxed as much (more on that below)

If you’re beginning to suspect our correspondent isn’t interested in actually analyzing the problem, you’re not alone. But now onwards …

A man named Eric test drove the Chevy Volt at the invitation of General Motors and he writes, “For four days in a row, the fully charged battery lasted only 25 miles before the Volt switched to the reserve gasoline engine.”  Eric calculated the car got 30 mpg including the 25 miles it ran on the battery.  So, the range including the 9-gallon gas tank and the 16 kwh battery is approximately 270 miles.

Yes, that sounds about correct for the Volt – it’s advertised to be a short range hybrid, good for in-town driving. As the technology ramps up, stories like these will become historical curiosities, not warnings. The Teslas have a 200+ mile range, as I understand it. The Volt should be used for in-town driving where your mileage is less than 25 miles and, in fact, you can charge it up overnight and end up not running the motor much at all.

It will take you 4.5 hours to drive 270 miles at 60 mph.  Then add 10 hours to charge the battery and you have a total trip time of 14.5 hours.  In a typical road trip your average speed (including charging time) would be 20 mph.

Unless, of course, you happen to use a Tesla charging station. While not yet common, such installations – and it doesn’t have to be Tesla – can become as common as gas stations. How do we know this? Because gas stations exist.

And electric charging stations don’t require expensive tanker visits.

But how long? According to the cited web site, it’ll take about 30 minutes. Go ahead, click on the link and scroll down a bit. There’s a helpful map showing current and planned stations. And some helpful pics of Tesla cars 🙂

According to General Motors, the Volt battery holds 16 kwh of electricity.  It takes a full 10 hours to charge a drained battery.  The cost for the electricity to charge the Volt is never mentioned.  If you pay approximately (it varies with amount used and the seasons) $1.16 per kwh. 16 kwh x $1.16 per kwh = $18.56 to charge the battery.  $18.56 per charge divided by 25 miles = $0.74 per mile to operate the Volt using the battery.  Compare this to a similar size car with a gasoline engine that gets only 32 mpg.  $3.19 per gallon divided by 32 mpg = $0.10 per mile.

This is misdirection, as well as misinformation (see above comment concerning time)! It entirely ignores the point, which is emissions. Say it with me, emissions are making the planet hotter. They’re ruining crops, driving up food costs and air-conditioning costs (but maybe lowering snow-plowing costs :).

Additionally, electricity costs are going down. You’ll notice the author conveniently ignores the possibility that you have a solar power harvesting strategy, from your house’s roof-top to a Tesla solar power panel dedicated to your car – you pop it on the roof of the garage, it goes into a battery, and you plug that into your Tesla car. In this case, you have one up-front cost and then … no cost.

The math is bad because the variables are far more extensive than this biased author wants you to think about, and the important variables – the cost of fossil fuels in both $$s and in cost to the health of you and your children, are rising, while the cost of electricity generated without fossil fuels is falling. Beware bad math.

The gasoline powered car costs about $20,000 while the Volt costs $46,000-plus.  It looks like the “Greenies” in the American Government want loyal Americans NOT to do the math, but simply pay three times as much for a car, that costs more than seven times as much to run, and takes three times longer to drive across the country.

Say What…….?

And you have to love how he prices a gasoline powered car at $20K. Most folks don’t buy cars priced at that – they’re getting SUVs at $50K, Porsches at $60K, BMWs at $80K. Even the famously inexpensive Mini-Cooper’s price is going up. I bought a basic one for more than $20K back in 2005. I’ll bet I can’t get one for that now.

For comparison, the new Tesla 3, base model with no frills, is about $35K – and, yes, I and my wife are on the list to get one. Although, given our condtions, we may get an add-on package so we can have heated seats.

But notice how the author is blaming “government greenies,” which is both funny, as I doubt there are any such efforts going on at the moment in the current Trump “Clean Coal” Administration, and wrong – it’s all about the markets, baby, and the markets are slowly moving towards electric cars. We know Trump’s Administration won’t push this particular initiative, so trying to stir up anti-government indignation is deeply, deeply intellectually fraudulent.

Unless this guy is trying to reference foreign governments that are pushing for electric vehicles. But why would he care?

So, in case you bought into this little slickster’s presentation, you should ask yourself – how credulous am I? If you could confront him, he might argue he was only yelling about hybrids, but that’s not in the least clear here. Of course, hybrids will be a niche market, as I see it, for those vehicles going where there are no electric stations – and those areas will always exist. They often don’t have gas stations, either, but given the greater energy density of gas compared to batteries, gas makes more sense for specific situations.

But that’s a tiny fraction compared to most of our driving. If we want to continue to drive (and reportedly Millenials just aren’t all that interested) without destroying the environment on which we all depend, we’ll be moving towards electric cars.

She’s a sneaky one, isn’t she?

I don’t think anyone can argue it was probably one of the most successful first years in office …

That’s White House spokeman Sarah Huckabee Sanders … and what does she mean by that statement? Out of context, it’s actually quite ambiguous. I’d go so far as to argue that she’s telling the truth – the Trump Administration had a perfectly awful first year, probably the worst in history, and she’s saying, Well, it wasn’t a great year….

Of course, the context does give the lie to my interpretation:

The President is extremely proud of the accomplishments we had during 2017.  I don’t think anyone can argue it was probably one of the most successful first years in office:  Passed major legislation, reworked the court system, and got a Supreme Court justice nominated and approved and on the bench in the first year; a booming economy; massive gains against the war on ISIS.  I think we’ve had an extremely successful 2017, and some of that is due to the relationship-building that he was able to do there.

Clearly, she thinks, or wants us to think, that it’s been an exemplary year.

And, yet, I remain fascinated with the ambiguity of the statement. It’s emblematic of an Administration desperately scrabbling to simply remain in office in the face of tremendous failures, tangible and intangible.

It’s as if she’s decided to become an actual symbol of cognitive dissonance through the use of one simple statement. I halfway expect her head to explode, leaving only the remnants of her Christian upbringing, a smoking ruin, for us to marvel at in horror.

I recorded the State of the Union address, but having seen bits and pieces of it on the news and Colbert, I think I’ll take a pass on analyzing it. I mean, how often can I write Wrong, That’s Obama’s Achievement, Those Jobs Were Announced Two Years Ago, Yep That’s A Problem So Why Haven’t You Done Anything About It, That’s A Lie, That’s A Lie, and By God I Hope You’re Right But I Think We’ll Be Staring A Recession In The Face Before Too Long?

I do blogging for my own enjoyment, not to hurt myself.