Category Archives: Uncategorized

While reading Steve Benen’s commentary on Republicans use of the Watergate comparison, this rang a bell for me:

As regular readers know, for much of Barack Obama’s presidency, his detractors seemed annoyed by the lack of credible scandals surrounding his White House. The more the Democratic president stayed out of trouble, the more Obama’s critics searched for a new “Watergate.”

At one point, I counted at least 10 separate “controversies” that various observers labeled “Obama’s Watergate,” each of which turned out to be meaningless, further diluting an already over used cliche.

And I’ve noticed in my random readings in the conservative side of the line that this does continue, as Steve elsewhere notes^[1].  And I think it has to do with a GOP sense of inferiority. President Clinton had several scandals, and while most proved to be nothing, the Lewinsky affair, as silly and trivial as it started out being, morphed into a big old anchor around President Clinton’s neck.

But the disaster that was the Bush Presidency, between inciting at least one unnecessary war that resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties and pushed the Middle East towards instability, through a GOP-controlled Congress that was spending money like a drunken sailor, the Great Recession, and finally the horrendous blot on our honor of actually promoting torture as a legitimate interrogation technique, made Clinton look like his worst crime was wearing cheap makeup.

Then Obama came along and managed to run a scandal free Administration for 8 years, led the way out of the Great Recession, and, well, let’s just call it a successful two terms.

Now we have Trump, who seems to specialize in daily scandals, ranging from rank incompetence, through deliberate attempts to destroy important institutions of our democracy, to possible treacherous collusion with the Kremlin to contaminate the last Presidential election.

As the GOP appears to be swirling around the toxic shithole that comes from toadying up to President Trump, there must be a consciousness that they are not measuring up to the standard set by the last two Presidents hailing from the Democratic Party. Indeed, it’s gotten so bad that the last two Republican Presidents have effectively repudiated President Trump, and by extension the GOP itself.

Inferiority complex? All the makings are there, aren’t they? All the GOP has at this point is a superior marketing machine, consisting of their “talking points” psychological approach to manipulating voters, and the right-wing talk radio hosts who make it happen. Governance? Good policies? A fucking clue on how to conduct themselves? They’re hardly doing more than mumbling incoherently through their fingers when they’re not frantically retreating from one position to another. I’m looking at you, Senators Rubio and Graham.

The question is whether or not the wheels will fall off the Republican machine before the Republic is irretrievably broken by the pack of second- and third-raters currently packing the GOP side of the aisle.

¹For that matter, Andy McCarthy once called the JFK Administration “Caligula-like”, referencing a Roman emperor reputed to be insane and sadistic, but it was a passing remark on Andy’s part, presented with no evidence – which could be construed as another dishonest attempt to stain the left side of the political spectrum.

The latest scandal of the Trump Presidency is the announcement today that they won’t be implementing the sanctions mandated by Congress. The best single sentence response I’ve seen so far comes from Nicholas Burns, former US Ambassador to NATO for President G. W. Bush, and now at Harvard:

Trump’s weakness is appalling.

Perhaps more than anything else, weakness is the word that summarizes Trump as President. From his flip-flopping on China, his refusal to lead on climate change, his flip-flopping on TPP, his flip-flopping on immigration, his being led around by the nose by Fox News, and his consistent failure to recognize Russia as an ongoing threat, he has been a President of no great vision, no obduracy, no leadership.

A strong President would have no need to attack the national security agencies, the free press, and all of his other attacks on our institutions. Those, in fact, would be part of his strengths.

In fact, his only strong attribute is his mouth.

And now the GOP, which controls Congress, has a challenge in front of it. Both chambers voted overwhelmingly for these sanctions; if Trump had vetoed the legislation, an override would have not required negotiations. Will the GOP step up and tell him to do his job? Or are they still a bunch of wet-wipes for the President to use as needed?

If you’re a Trump supporter, you have some strong questions to ask yourself, starting with why you’re supporting the weakest, most vacillating President since, well, way before my lifetime. It’s time to disregard his penchant for speaking to your fears, and start evaluating his behavior.

And if you don’t think he’s weak, hey, tell me why. There’s a mail link up on the right side.

Egyptian news reader Shahira Amin shares in AL Monitor what the press looks like from the inside when it’s not free, from her experience in 2011 during the Arab Spring, the time of rioting and yearning for freedom from oppressive governments in many Arab countries:

As I got ready to go on air Feb. 2, the producers handed me the news bulletin. It made no mention of the “Battle of the Camels” that had just taken place. I learned that Abdel Latif al-Menawi, the man in charge of the news department for state television, had ordered them not to mention the incident. This was the first time in all my years working for Nile TV that I became aware of direct editorial interference by the station’s management. Because we broadcast in English and French for Egypt’s expatriate community, Nile TV had long enjoyed more editorial freedom than our Arabic-language sister channels. Not anymore. As it turns out, Menawi had called the producers several times that day, issuing new directives every couple of hours. The presenters were told to read Interior Ministry press releases that acknowledged that protesters had been killed while denying the security forces’ involvement. I refused.

For my live talk show that evening, I had planned to host an outspoken Mubarak regime critic. A couple of hours before the show, Menawi summoned me to his office to tell me there had been a “slight” change of plan. A member of the president’s National Democratic Party, Hussein Haridy, would be my guest instead. “You may discuss the uprising,” I remember Menawi telling me. “But you can only talk about attempts by Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah to destabilize Egypt and the need for a national reconciliation dialogue between different factions of society.”

For an hour, I sat aghast as the irrepressible regime apologist droned on about how the protesters were all “thugs” and “hired agents.” That night, overwhelmed by shame and guilt, I could not fall asleep. The next morning, I slipped on jeans and a T-shirt instead of a formal suit, having unconsciously decided to quit. Upon hearing the protesters clamoring for “Bread, Freedom and Social Justice” on my way to work, I parked my car and marched enthusiastically into Tahrir Square.

Thugs and hired agents … sounds sadly familiar, doesn’t it? At one point President Trump tried out that line.

I took out my cellphone and banged out a message to my boss. “Forgive me, I’m not coming back,” I wrote. “I’m on the side of the people, not the regime.” Moments later, I got a call from the head of security at state TV: “Miss Amin, what happened? Are you upset about something?” He sounded anxious. Before I had a chance to reply, the mobile network went down and my phone went dead. I was relieved that I did not have to explain myself. And for the first time in years, I felt free.

Readers persuaded the free press should be less free because it inhibits President Trump should consider what a less free press looks like, and how much less useful it would be for you – even if it isn’t controlled by your “political enemies.” Which, frankly, is a phrase to be discarded – we’re all Americans, and we’re all in this together. But a press without the current protections from libel, etc, would make me nervous, regardless of who was in power.

Noted while fixing a typo, wreckless vs reckless.

WaPo helpfully points out that perjury trap, a term thrown around by Trump advisors and lawyers in reaction to reports that Special Counsel Mueller is interested in interviewing President Trump concerning his campaign possibly colluding with Russia during the 2016 Presidential Campaign, is actually a term of art, and not applicable to the interview:

But “perjury trap” is a specific legal defense, related to entrapment. A claim of a perjury trap is really a claim of prosecutorial misconduct. It refers to an abuse of the legal process, whereby a prosecutor subpoenas a witness to testify not for a legitimate investigative purpose but to try to catch him in an inconsistency or falsehood — even a relatively minor one — that can then trigger a perjury charge.

Because there’s not a doubt in the world that Trump is a witness to any possible wrong-doing, the term doesn’t apply. WaPo believes this is the motivation:

Characterizing the president’s interview as a potential perjury trap is simply wrong. But it is of a piece with the broader effort by the president and his political allies to discredit Mueller’s investigation. It suggests — wrongly — that Mueller is treating the president unfairly. If the president commits perjury or false statements, it will be because he chose to lie — not because he was caught in a “trap.”

Or you can simply believe they’re all second-raters.

Which is to say, sometimes casting baseless aspersions are not enough. I see CNN is reporting that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe is “stepping down,” and there is a suggestion that it may not be his choice. McCabe has not been a favorite of Trump (and it’s terrible that I can write that line as more than just a turn of phrase, but instead mean it), mostly because he and his wife are Democrats – and his wife actually ran for a state-level office and gave money to the Clinton campaign.

Regardless of whether he chose to quit or was handed a termination notice, it’s important to note that McCabe has worked for the FBI since 1996 – he’s no political appointee who has received a sinecure for butt-licking, he’s a real working dude with real world experience in counter-terrorism and interrogation techniques. The FBI’s reputation, like most institutions, rests primarily on its personnel, so by removing high-ranking personnel, Trump is implicitly destroying the prestige of the institution.

It’s also worth thinking about how the efficiency of the FBI is compromised by McCabe’s exit. Undoubtedly, the FBI will do its best to compensate – and they have enough resources to reduce the impact to perhaps unmeasurability in the short term. But without a doubt, this will impact the morale of the FBI, as did the sacking of Comey after he quite properly refused to swear fealty to Trump. People who are not happy going into work rarely do their best work.

If McCabe has been forced out, someone should ask Trump why he’s endangering the citizens of the United States in order to pursue a personal vendetta.

And if he doesn’t answer, ask it again. And again. The regular folk endangered by reckless acts would really like to know.

Noted at Menards:

Urticaria:

Urticaria, known to many simply as hives, is a common reaction to a wide range of allergens and irritants. It’s caused by histamines, a compound our bodies produce to mobilize the immune system against threats. The reaction can take the form of itching, eye watering or sneezing, but the goal is the same — get the foreign substance out. [“It’s So Cold, You Might Be Allergic to It,” Leah Froats, D-brief]

Which is not true of extremists, who must continually keep up their street cred. National Review started out opposing Trump, but now that he’s President I’ve noticed sometimes they support his actions. But when it comes to institutions, Kevin Williamson has a lesson for the extremists:

One thing about which thoughtful progressives and conservatives generally agree is that institutions matter. It is important to have a First Amendment and other protections for a free press, but you also need the New York Times, National Review, Wired, CNN, and, the times being what they are, In Touch Weekly and its Stormy Daniels coverage — or else the First Amendment is only a hypothetical. The irreplaceable nature of functioning institutions is why we can’t just drop off copies of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence in Somalia and Afghanistan and expect to find thriving constitutional republics there a few years later. The right to a speedy trial doesn’t mean much if your courts are corrupt or inept. The right to petition the government for redress of grievances means nothing if the government is impotent or indifferent.

Like government agencies and political parties, the character and quality of the press matters enormously to the health of public discourse and, consequently, the health of democratic institutions. There are conservative media critics who have been cheering the prospect of the New York Times’ demise for many years, but the more intelligent ones want a better New York Times rather than a crippled one. It is more obvious if you live in New York City, but in spite of the Times’ ongoing bias problems and the partisan stupidity of its op-ed pages, the newspaper does irreplaceable work — work that RedStatePatriotAmericaFirstJesusGunsDerkaDerkaMAGA at Twitter dot com is not going to do in the absence of the New York Times.

Of course, he still believes in liberal media bias:

No one believes that the IRS or the FBI is above reproach. No one seriously believes that the editors of the New York Times would have treated a President Hillary Clinton and a President Donald Trump in the same way. (One likewise wonders what Fox News would have made of partially documented claims that President Bill Clinton had paid $130,000 in hush money to a porn star who says she had an affair with him.) President Obama’s so-called scandal-free administration was in fact rife with abuses of power, from the IRS to the ATF to the EPA to the NLRB. Trump may sometimes attack our institutions without good cause; the Obama administration gave critics good cause to attack our institutions.

Good news coverage brings subscribers, and subscribers brings survival. Or so the theory goes. If he wants to suggest that there wouldn’t have been the humiliating lie count currently applied to Trump, that would be because it would be unneeded. Behavior drives coverage.

But this remains a rebuke to Trump and his attacks on liberal democratic institutions, from government to the free press, and it’s good to see coming out of National Review. My occasional, random readings always leaves me shaking my head (or shrugging, if I’m not familiar with the subject); this has been the exception – only a half shake.

Even the monster used an assumed name for this flick.

Battle For The Lost Planet (1986, aka Galaxy) follows the life of Harry Dent, a thief. It begins with his theft of a computer tape, and, as he is pursued by company security forces, he steals a space shuttle.

Heckuva thief. Security, well, what to say?

As he takes off, on the ship’s radio he hears the beginnings of an invasion from space, and his ship is damaged. Does it crash back on Earth? Whoa, Nelly, it doesn’t! Instead, it breaks out of Earth orbit and enters a solar orbit, and for the next five years Harry is out of circulation.

Upon his return, he manages to land safely, but the world has changed. Voiceless people roam the land, but just as Harry is about to lose his life, a lady perhaps best described as a limp Amazon rescues him from a tight situation. Eventually, he learns from her and her companion (it’s not worth naming him, he dies soon enough) that Earth is now dominated by the invaders, who pass the time by torturing humans and snorting through their little piggy snouts. And there may be a super-weapon 40 miles away, but how to get there?

Oh, must I go on? There’s the warlord, who also knows about the super-weapon but thinks mankind should not have a weapon like that. There’s the bad bad BAD special-effects, especially the stop-action monster that interrupts the bad sex scene, the bad dialog, the BAD audio, the bad cinematography, the bad plot, bad costumes, bad stage combat …

Or, as my Arts Editor commented before she abandoned ship, it’s a junior high school film project gone wrong.

BAD BAD BAD

Bad Bad Bad

bad bad bad

bad bad bad

bad bad bad

If you’re forced to watch this one, file a complaint with the local Human Rights office. Listen for snorting.

Rubric:

noun

1. a title, heading, direction, or the like, in a manuscript, book, statute,
   etc., written or printed in red or otherwise distinguished from the rest of
   the text.
2. a direction for the conduct of divine service or the administration of the
   sacraments, inserted in liturgical books.
3. any established mode of conduct or procedure; protocol.
4. an explanatory comment; gloss.
5. a class or category.
6. Archaic. red ocher.

adjective

1. written, inscribed in, or marked with or as with red; rubrical.
2. Archaic. red; ruddy.

[Dictionary.com]

Noted in the poem “The Paper of My Enemy Has Been Retracted,” Andrew Gelman, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, from which I outtake the relevant partial stanza:

And (oh, this above all) his sensibility,
His sensibility and its hair-like filaments,
His delicate, quivering sensibility is now as one
With Edward Wegman’s Wikipedia cribs,
A volume graced by the descriptive rubric
‘The simplex method visits all 2d vertices.’

Yes, I referenced this yesterday. I hope it lights you with the glow of hope, too.

A reader asks the impossible question about those Americans who’ve forgotten what America is all about:

I totally agree with you. What’s wrong with people?

There’s a hard question, not least because there may be a multitude of answers.

But, sure, I’ll bite. Let’s start with this: Why do certain philosophies endure, while others fall by the wayside? Because they bring a measure of contentment to their adherents. Let’s be clear here – contentment is a variable in this equation, not a constant. My definition of contentment, which includes making a comfortable living that lets me pursue my interests with little interference from work, is a far different thing that Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, driven to dominate the consumer software market, and virtually creating the world we now inhabit. I mention this because the ideal Christian’s definition of contentment – helping the poor and desolate, doing God’s work – is far different from whatever is Trump’s contentment, which I suspect includes a bathtub full of $1000 bills.

But for the Republicans in question, I think they’ve lost the contentment they treasure. They’re not willing to consider themselves at fault – few people are willing to go there – so they search around for other problems. At this point, it’s not hard to point at the fear-mongers of the conservative base, those who shout about the lawless hordes of immigrants (actually, immigrants appear to be more law-abiding, on average, than us native-born types), the horrors of defying the Bible, their abhorrence of the gay community (until they discover their own kid is gay, then things change in a hurry), etc.

They feel their society is changing beyond their control. And it is. It’s no longer a static society.

For them, the past was much better than today. Think of Roy Moore’s proclamation that the United States was so much better off just prior to the Civil War. But in that statement lies the seeds damning their position, because that stability and prosperity they imagine existed back then were carried on the backs of those treated poorly by society: the minorities. The African-Americans, mostly, as the American Indians were mostly separate from white American society. But in successive ways, the Irish, the Polish, the Scandinavians, the Italians. Each wave was victimized.

Back to the thesis, a conservative who sees society spinning out of control, rather than moving towards justice (as I do), cannot blame his religion for those changes, nor herself for any failures of their personal fortunes. Ah, but government – after all, the liberals are taking it over. Ol’ Rush tells them that over and over. It makes them be nice to people of the wrong color or wrong sexual orientation.

There’s the failure. For them. Some folks can’t handle that change. And so the very principles of our governmental system come under attack, because those abstract principles are the easiest to dismiss.

Or not. That’s just my guess. Your mileage may vary.

The leader for the 20 January 2018 NewScientist discusses the possibility that the end of current civilization may be coming into view, and discusses research into that possibility in the context of climate change research, in particular focusing on, in their view, the premature politicization of the science – as if science was, as Lysenko believed, capable of being politicized.

But amidst the imminent doom & gloom, I had to chortle at their conclusion:

The risk is that this new and important science is turned into yet another culture war. Before proposing divisive solutions, scientific eschatologists need to concentrate on nailing the basic facts. Otherwise, historians of the future may judge us harshly for reading the danger signs but failing to act.

Boys, if this civilization falls apart, in all probability there will never again be a respectable profession of historian – or historians to populate it. It’ll be all unstable autocraticisms, or radioactive rubble.

Andrew Gelman has something to say about an unnamed enemy (perhaps merely nominal), and he’s chosen the medium of poetry to express it. The venue? Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science (no, I don’t read that site – I was directed to it by Retraction Watch!). Just to whet your whistle:

The paper of my enemy has been retracted
And I am pleased.
From every media outlet it has been retracted
Like a van-load of p-values that has been seized
And sits in star-laden tables in a replication archive,
My enemy’s much-prized effort sits in tables
In the kind of journal where retraction occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected articles and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all that thoughtful publicity
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s article—
For behold, here is that study
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.

There’s oh so much more to go.

Just minutes after publishing this piece, which includes some meditations on traditional media, I ran across this WaPo article on the state of the Los Angeles Times:

Under a new “pyramid” structure proposed [by management] this month, a network of nonstaff contributors would produce the bulk of the information the Times publishes online. Reporters say the paper has quietly begun hiring a cadre of editors to supervise the reorganization, which would effectively create a new company within the company.

The man who introduced the plan — blindsiding the newsroom when he presented it to an investor conference in New York — was publisher Ross Levinsohn, the fifth person to hold that title in the past five years. Last week, Levinsohn was suspended by the paper’s owner, Chicago-based Tronc, after NPR revealed a series of sexual harassment allegations against him in previous jobs. The company said it is investigating.

The state of play at the Times, as well as the existential dread swirling around it, was neatly summarized in a tweet this week by Matt Pearce, a Times national reporter and an organizer of the union effort: “Basically, anything could happen at this point at the L.A. Times and people in the newsroom could only be half surprised by it. We’re hiring [editors] that aren’t being announced to the newsroom, our publisher wants to turn us into a pyramid, and by the way, he’s under investigation.”

And their new top editor?

D’Vorkin, who took over as Times editor in November, is a controversial figure in media circles. At Forbes, he undertook some unorthodox steps to arrest the magazine’s declining fortunes — including setting up a network of outside contributors to write stories for Forbes.com, some unpaid and some compensated on the basis of how many readers their stories attracted. He also permitted ads that blurred the lines between promotional content and news stories.

Probably talks a great line without understanding the structure of things before him. Unpaid contributors to Forbes, of all places? That should be a big clue.

In case you’re not keeping up with the Steve Wynn story, here’s the next chapter, from CNN:

Andrew Sulllivan’s weekly tri-partite column (I will be responding to the second part) is out and it rings all sorts of nostalgia bells for me:

Is social media on the decline? Here’s hoping. A lovely piece in The New Yorker last week by Jia Tolentino lamented the loss of blogging, idiosyncrasy, quirkiness, and intelligence from the web. This set of reflections on the Awl compiled by Max Read in these pages also conveys the essence of the Internet That Nearly Was. Tom Scocca gets the essence of this old era: “What the Awl represented to me was the chance to write exactly what I meant to write, for an audience I trusted to read it.”

I feel entirely the same way about the blogging golden age. What was precious about it was its simple integrity: A writer gets to explore her craft and develop her own audience.

His Golden Age remarks are reminiscent of the BBSing era for myself and so many others. And it didn’t require that we be writers, but just people who wanted to express some thought or another, against the possibility that someone else might criticize it. No editors, just the backlash of those critiques.

Those were golden times for many of us, particularly those who were socially awkward. Imagine – the chance to actually (virtually) talk without being interrupted by someone with a louder voice or poorer upbringing! Of course, if you couldn’t take criticisms then it still wasn’t all that great – but the smart ones grew callouses, participated, matured (or not), and made lifelong friends. In fact, I just received a Holidays letter from a friend from those times, which includes her particular fetish – collecting quotes from friends for later regurgitation. Some are in her database, scraped from the BBSes, some are “still on napkins.” (And, yes, I had the honor of being part of the source of one of the quotes in the letters.)

Andrew then addresses social media:

The sewer of most of Twitter is now so rank that even addicts have begun to realize that they are sinking in oceans of shitholery. Facebook is long overdue for a collapse, and the old institutions are showing signs of developing more character and coherence. Nick Bilton at Vanity Fair cannot wait for FaceTwitterGramChat to peak:

A few years ago, for example, there wasn’t a single person I knew who didn’t have Facebook on their smartphone. These days, it’s the opposite. This is largely anecdotal, but almost everyone I know has deleted at least one social app from their devices. And Facebook is almost always the first to go. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and other sneaky privacy-piercing applications are being removed by people who simply feel icky about what these platforms are doing to them, and to society.

The evidence that social media has turned journalism into junk, has promoted addictive addlement in our brains, is wrecking our democracy, and slowly replacing life with pseudo-life is beginning to become unavoidable. And the possibility that the media may recover from its loss of nerve is real.

Readers will reward quality. The editors of our day, if we’re lucky, will begin to realize that this is the economic future of journalism, and bank on it again. This tide will turn. Drop your Twitter; abandon Facebook; and buy a subscription to a magazine that is trying to save its own soul.

I regard Facebook as fine marketing platform, a marginal keep in touch platform, a horrible publishing platform, and a wretched place to get news, and that’s because Facebook has many readers, and that’s all a marketing platform need do, if the cost per viewer is zero. I haven’t used Twitter as an author and have read precious few Tweets, but it strikes me, and always has, that a platform that can host automated accounts that cannot easily be detected is not a platform that has placed a high value on trustworthiness, and I think there must be a relatively high level of trust in order for any kind of communications platform to ultimately be successful and respectable – the National Enquirer may be successful, but only the credulous pay it any heed, even if it did break the Senator Edwards story, and the fact that it remains successful suggests there are many credulous people in this country. The many descriptions of Twitter overall suggests that this observation has borne out, and I suspect in it will not be a long-term player. The other platforms? No experience. Given that academic research, as well as anecdotal reports, suggest that social media is not a positive in our lives; for me, it’s suggestive of social evolution visiting a dead-end, and now slowly backing out.

From a larger perspective, I have to believe we’re seeing the results of the private sector intruding too deeply into the free press sector. Recalling my hobby horse concerning how the sectors of society – private, governmental, health, free press, educational – I believe we’re seeing, in the temporary shrinkage of blogging, the interference of the private sector with the free press. The exigencies of society – even excellence – requires the use of capitalism as part of the free press, but the intrusion of the processes of the private sector into the free press is palpably warping and destroying parts of the free press.

Consider the monetization of clicks, of views, and how this warps and, apparently, eventually destroys some of the publishing platforms on the webs. These metrics are at least partially motivated by those who seek to set ad rates, no? Advertisers will not buy ad space on a site without knowing the size and suitability of the audience. So now publishers and editors are motivated to publish content that will expand the audience – and this is not necessarily a process that leads to excellent writing. That is, the reward is not for better and better writing and the accompanying investigatory skills – which is not always easy to measure – but simply views of the given page. Easy to measure, but not a great motivation for improving one’s journalistic skills, or for that matter the output of a magazine.

But Andrew suggests buying subscriptions, and by paying ahead for the journalistic skills of the writers, there is a motivation to improve the free press output without the constant pressure of views or clicks. You put out the best you have, and if the subscriptions are renewed, then you know you’re doing well. If they’re not renewed, then you go under.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a far sight better than the path technology has taken us, I suspect. Have you considered opening a new subscription to a magazine or newspaper lately? Let me know.

I just love this story from Spaceweather.com about a guy hunting for live satellites using a radio. He’s looking for Zuma, a recently launched spy satellite, but then …

That is, until Scott Tilley started looking for Zuma. “When I saw the radio signature, I ran a program called STRF to identify it,” he says. Developed by Cees Bassa, a professional astronomer at the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, STRF treats Earth-orbiting satellites much like binary pulsars–deducing their orbital elements from the Doppler shifts of their radio signals. “The program immediately matched the orbit of the satellite I saw to IMAGE. It was that easy,” says Tilley.

Discovery plot above obtained of IMAGE and the first fit attempt that lead to revealing it’s identity.
From Riddles In The Sky

And IMAGE was considered to be a dead satellite, having died in 2006 for unknown reasons. However, being solar powered, it’s come back to life. Read the whole story on Spaceweather, or go to Riddles In The Sky for more information from Tilley himself – I think.

In WaPo’s DemocracyPost, Christian Caryl takes note of certain poll results:

Trump attacks the press? One poll this past July showed that 45 percent of Republicans approved of the government shutting down media deemed “biased or inaccurate.” Trump plays fast and loose with democratic norms? An August survey found that fully half of GOP voters would support postponing the next presidential election if Trump proposed it. Trump praises Russian President Vladimir Putin? A poll this past May found that 49 percent of Republican voters regard Russia as friendly or an ally. Trump expresses frustration with democratic constraints on his power? A Pew Research Center poll last year revealed that fully one-third of Republicans favor the idea of a strong leader who can govern without interference from Congress or the courts.

And to those Republicans who affirm these positions, I should like to say …

You may be Republicans, but you are not Americans any longer.

I’m not going to bother to say I’m ashamed of those Republicans, or appalled. Folks, if that’s how desperate you are to hold on to the privilege of governing, of being part of some imagined elite that depends on being in control of American government, then you’re no longer Americans.

You simply yearn to be a member of an autocratic country. And we don’t need you here.

Being American means believing we function best as a Republic, with elected representatives with specified powers, all corralled by checks and balances, and kept relatively honest by a free press. If any of that is not to your taste, hey, Russia’s always looking for new citizens.

Write and tell us how that works out for you.

There’s not much to The Pharaoh’s Curse (1957). The acting is professional, but the special effects range from mundane to just awful (I particularly liked how the real scorpion crawled past the plastic arm that was supposed to be real), the cinematography’s OK, and the sound might be a bit off.

But the real disaster is the story. Set during Britain’s colonial period, a small British patrol is sent out to retrieve some archaeologists digging for a pharaoh’s grave in Egypt, bringing with them the wife of one of the archaeologists, although we’re not sure why. The leader of the patrol, Captain Storm, is attracted to her. Whatever.

Also appearing, a mystery Egyptian lady named Sumera, who draws her strength from the desert.  And the pack asses don’t like her.  Really.  In fact, Mabel the donkey deserts the mission. We never hear if she makes it back to camp. I miss Mabel.

Meanwhile, the archaeologists have found a coffin and are in the midst of opening it when one of the native torch-bearers collapses, leaving the mummy to its own devices while they carry the guy back to the camp.

After some mishaps, including the aforementioned scorpion’s sting of the wife, the patrol arrives and tells the archaeologists it’s time to leave.  But before they can go, the torch-bearer turns into an old man and starts to attack people at random in the cave complex where the coffin is located. Various riches are found, which are inexplicably ignored by the archaeologists. Maybe it was the fact that people are starting to die, completely drained of blood.

At one point, the archaeologists do pull the arm off of their stealthy attacker, which made me laugh.

In any case, the expedition soon gives up and leaves. Sumera disappears as well.

And we don’t care. Horror movies thrive on you caring about those that meet a gruesome end, and no one here evokes sympathy, much less empathy.

Watch it for the risible special effects. And with shots of your favorite liquor available.

Or go do jumping jacks. They’ll be better for you than this waste of time.

On Slate Dahlia Lithwick and Steve Vladeck express their dismay at certain supporters of President Trump’s agenda:

For months, a vocal but small cohort of conservative and libertarian legal scholars have been trying to convince anyone who will listen that the federal courts have “joined the resistance”—that subversive lower-court judges have abandoned their oaths of integrity and impartiality to rule against President Trump on anything and everything. These commentators have used inflammatory and incautious language to tar entire federal circuits and besmirch virtually every judge who has sided against any Trump administration action. Over the weekend, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal joined that chorus. In a breathless and tendentious editorial, the Journal portrayed the Supreme Court’s decision last Friday to hear the latest challenge to the travel ban as reflecting a desire on the part of at least some justices to “rebuke the judiciary for stretching the law to join the political resistance to Mr. Trump.” As the Journal put it, “The Justices have a chance to rule on the legality of Mr. Trump’s ban but also whether judges can ignore the law merely because they loathe Mr. Trump and all his works.”

The claim that the high court took up the case not to settle a novel legal question on the merits but to spank the feckless judges of the resistance is fatuous and shallow. It’s also profoundly dangerous to the norms and values of judicial integrity and stability.

And these adversarial legal scholars don’t appear to be able to think ahead. If they succeed in the politicization of the courts – no doubt they’d argue that’s already occurred, but given the fact that judges appointed by Presidents from both parties have weighed in against President Trump, that argument hangs in shreds – then the future of the Republic would look far less stable than it would otherwise.

The judiciary is not a political battleground. The independence of the judiciary is such a necessary part of our governmental system that it is legendary. If we compromise it, either with great vaingloriousness such as these chappies, or more subtly through the subjection of judicial seats to the winds of the electoral system, then we risk the future stability of a Republic that prospers when the judiciary is stable & independent – and suffers greatly when the political winds blow through the judicial galleries. We still rue Dred Scott, do we not?

So SCOTUS is looking at Trump’s Travel Ban 3.0. Does the very future of this argument rest on it? Will this band of brave legal scholars triumph, or lie tattered in defeat, depending on how these elderly and, sometimes, wise jurists decide this one case? I personally doubt it. If the travel ban is permitted, it’s merely SCOTUS correcting the lower courts, which happens with some frequency, for the law is sometimes hard to understand, as it flows from our legislatures.

And if the travel ban is once again rejected, will these legal scholars throw over their crusade and return to more honorable pursuits? No, for those who affirm Trump despite all affronts seem to know no shame.

So don’t go looking for a climactic throw-down here. Regardless of the result, the legal railing against oft-settled law will just go on and on. Some run along on momentum, and others are not able to visualize themselves being in the wrong.

Steve Benen notes the allegations of sexual misconduct by Steve Wynn, business tycoon and Finance chair of the Republican National Committee, and asks, perhaps sardonically, whether Wynn will now be forced out, and his contributions to various campaigns and to the RNC itself rejected:

Just a few months ago, as the public was first learning about the Harvey Weinstein scandal, the RNC seemed eager to exploit the controversy for partisan gain. In fact, the RNC invested considerable energy, not only in trying to tie Weinstein to Democratic candidates he supported, but also in demanding that DNC return any contributions they received from the Hollywood producer.

When the DNC was slow to respond, the Republican National Committee intensified its focus. It didn’t matter that Weinstein had no formal connection to Democratic politics; he was a Democratic donor and for the RNC, that was enough. “If the DNC truly stands up for women like they say they do, then returning Weinstein’s dirty money should be a no-brainer,” Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel said in October.

In retrospect, this was a risky posture, not only because of the allegations of misconduct made against the president, but also because of the man the president asked to help lead the RNC’s fundraising efforts. As of today, Wynn is the RNC’s finance chair, a friend of Donald Trump, and a man accused of ”behavior that cumulatively would amount to a decades-long pattern of sexual misconduct.”

Hard to say. Senator McConnell’s deliberate hypocrisy with respect to the norms of the Senate only applying to Democrats suggests to me that the Republicans don’t see themselves as being subject to the same forces of ethics and morality as are the Democrats. They see themselves as somehow above those requirements, existing on a higher plane.

Tony Perkins’ willingness to give President Trump a “mulligan” on sexual indiscretions reinforces that perception.

On the other hand, several GOP elected officials have resigned in the last year over sexual misconduct charges of various sorts, or announced they’ll not be running for re-election.

Wynn is not an elected official. He’s a guy with a shitload of money and, I’m guessing, an iron grip on his business holdings. The shitload of money is probably the key phrase here, as money is now the God of the GOP. He may be forced out regardlessly, but only after a lot of anguished screaming by those sucking at his teat.

A reader remarks on Trump’s use of language:

It may be part of his appeal, but he’s an idiot. My son had a larger vocabulary at age 8 — no exaggeration.

Or in other words: if you as a citizen are equally limited in your vocabulary and thinking by choice, I don’t think you should have the right to vote.

I fear that down that street lies riot and ruin.

An allied approach – you must first prove you can put the good of the group ahead of your own profit before you can participate in the democracy – is the underlying philosophy of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. (Not the movie!)