Category Archives: Uncategorized

National Review’s definitely not happy about statue removal following the Charlottesville incident, judging from their front page. My patience with their material is limited, so I selected at random the piece by Victor Davis Hanson, and found he apparently thinks citing inconsistencies across historical personages and waving a finger constitutes a sophisticated argument. An example paragraph:

President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies. Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes?

It might be helpful to dig out the hidden assumption Hanson is using but won’t tell us about. It’s the primary artery of his post – that progressives & liberals only care about racism. Of course, this is not true, and so the fatal flaw in his argument is that he enumerates a number of famous people, sure, even icons, and then adjusts his lens to only focus on their attitudes towards race. In fact, his own example betrays him, because while Wilson may have been a retrograde old coot when it came to racial relations, he was a liberal leader when it came to international relations. Was it not Wilson who looked at the new horrors of the Great War battlefields, and championed the League of Nations as a new approach to resolving those matters which traditionally led to war? And what is the name of this Princeton institution which now bears his name? The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

The point is that morality has numerous facets.

But the perception, or understanding, of proper moral behaviors – and make no mistake, we’re talking about the moral systems of conservatives vs liberals (I’ll just settle on that term for the balance of this post) – is not an unchanging quality. Without addressing the question of whether morality itself is immutable or not, I think it should go without question that our perception of proper morality, of how we should treat each other, has changed over time. It used to be a knife in the back of anyone not of our tribe, then stoning those thought to be witches, then violently enforced slavery for those perceived to be of an inferior civilization, and now today, when slavery is considered horrific.

The perception of moral behaviors is a shared, community project; that is, if we didn’t have a shared basis of moral behavior, we would have chaos and a shattered, non-functional society. That said, this project can change as the scholarship of moral behavior makes progress in understanding how our treatment of each other leads to general improvements in society. This latter statement may be redundant with the previous paragraph, but seems appropriate to reinforce.

Keeping this in mind, let’s talk about iconic people who disappoint the conservatives. Without a doubt, advancing oneself beyond the cultural matrix in which one is brought up is an extraordinary thing. If everyone else holds some local ethnicity in loathing, then there’s a strong social pressure that you, too, spit on them, and not to diverge from that social habit.

But certain extraordinary individuals do push themselves beyond those pressures to conform, changing or even improving our perception of moral behavior, an evolution which has been known under other names, of which the best known may be “enlightened thinking.” Often, they think beyond the habits of the day and ask themselves whether, in a truly just system, the behavior in question should be encouraged.

This leads to the second criticism of Hansen’s post. Those people he, or his allies, would criticize and even equate to the Confederates, such as Washington and Jefferson, were inevitably products of their time. When I say they are extraordinary, it is a relative measure, relative to their native cultural matrix. Yes, they’ve advanced; but how far can they be expected to drive themselves, especially in a moral landscape which is new and unexplored?

Comparing Wilson to today’s liberals ignores both the different measures and the differences in cultural matrices; it is enough to say that Wilson led the way in trying to find ways to avoid the bloody slaughter of the new weapons of war, and for that he is recognized.

But to better illustrate the point, and because the moral turpitude of the author of the screed equating the Confederates to Washington and Jefferson really annoyed me for flunking such an easy test, let’s apply these concepts to that very question: if both the Confederates and some of the most famous Founding Fathers had slaves, then shouldn’t the statues of the Founding Fathers be following those of the Confederates into the trash heap of history?

Well, let’s look at the facts. There’s a nearly century gap between the Founding Fathers and the Confederacy. During this time, the cultural matrix, both local and international, changed. During, or just prior to, this time period, many major countries outlawed slavery; moral perceptions changed in the United States until the nation was metaphorically divided by the Mason-Dixon line. But at the beginning of this period, at the Founding, the idea of slavery was ingrained, and changing the practice was a matter of some import, especially for Virginians such as Washington and Jefferson; that Jefferson arranged for the freedom of his slaves on his death is a matter of some controversy (was it progressive to do so, or selfish to wait to do so?), but represents at least his striving to leave his social matrix’s flaws behind.

For, after all, Washington, Jefferson, and the Founding Fathers were busy creating a new governmental structure, one not based on a God-selected monarchy, full of self-important men with inherited diseases and an arbitrary will. They helped construct a new approach to government which would bring prosperity and peace to its citizens. That’s why they are liberal icons. They had flaws, of course they did. But we recognize them for what they overthrew, not for those burdens forced upon them by society. We cannot expect everyone, or even anyone, to be Supermen. To see substantial moral improvement is the best we can hope for.

The Confederacy? The Confederacy, despite the efforts of revisionists, was part & parcel with slavery, and by the time the Civil War began, the shared social moral perceptions of slavery had changed, been put to the fire of intellectual criticism, and emerged as a relatively well accepted part of the moral basis of society: slavery was vile and evil, so that some men were willing to risk their lives to remove it from society, such as the abolitionist John Brown. The Civil War, fought over that moral perception as if the agony of a people is not as important as the culture of the South, represents the failure of the moral behaviors of the Confederates, a failure so total that they instigated the Civil War that nearly destroyed the nation, killing thousands of our best young men, and brought about great resentment for decades following.

The moral reasoning was no longer novel, but instead spoken from the pulpits. The Confederates chose to disdain it, to mock it, to denigrate the black man for the condition forced upon him by those same white men who would make up the Confederacy. It’s all there in the speeches of Confederate politicians.

So when we talk about the statues celebrating specific Confederate icons, these are celebrations of their moral failings. They believed in slavery. They fought for it. They died for it. And the statue therefore endorses slavery, because that’s why the war in which they fought, found martial glory, and died, came into existence. For that moral failing.

The Founding Fathers? They were moving forward, out of their morass, and working on liberal government. For all their failures, they were glorious successes in one great experiment.

The Confederates, on the other hand, should be in museums, where the horrid truths of their war, their poor moral choices, and all that goes with it can be soberly studied by future generations.

And not glorified by folks who’ve failed to understand basic morality.

If you’re in the mood for a whole lot of really bad lust for political power, check out this expose in The Nevada Independent of a frustrated Nevada GOP that doesn’t hold the state Senate in its paws. You’d expect honorable politicos to wait for the next election, wouldn’t you? Not these guys – they’re going to use recalls to get what they want:

[State Senator Michael] Roberson and his spokesman have been uncharacteristically silent on the Woodhouse recall, which appears to be part of a coordinated and unprecedented series of recalls of state Senate Democratic caucus members. Indeed, secrecy has enveloped this effort by The Craven Caucus, which includes a former assemblyman (Stephen Silberkraus) who lost last year but hung around Carson City this session anyhow, and a losing candidate against Woodhouse less than a year ago, a charter school principal (Carrie Buck) who must be instilling wonderful values in her students.

The Nevada Independent already has traced the recalls of Woodhouse and Patricia Farley (who is not even running next year) to close Roberson ally Mark Hutchison, the lieutenant governor whose law firm is handling the recalls and whose elected job Roberson covets; and to Roberson crony Robert Uithoven, a Las Vegas Sands lobbyist whose employee solicited at least one member of the Farley recall committee. (That Uithoven staffer offered this when confronted by The Indy’s Megan Messerly: “I have no comment. I have nothing to say about it. I’ve got to go.”) …

The real secret here, though, is not who is behind this. The dirty secret here is this is grounded not in political principles but in campaign panic because the Republicans essentially have no chance to take the state Senate at the ballot in ‘18.

Even if you succumb to that trifecta of temporary amnesia, ask yourself this question: If all of this is so righteous, if the grounds are really there, why is there this conspiracy of secrecy on what should be public information? Even if they are not required by a typically porous Nevada law to reveal their reasons until they submit the signatures, why won’t they talk about their putative reasons for trying to recall these senators?

I’ll tell you why: Because they are desperate, because they know they are unlikely to win back the Senate at the ballot next year and because….they can. That is the standard in the Era of Trump, a perversion of the Nike slogan applied to campaigns and politics: Just Do It.

And if we were to put these guys under the microscope, would we find a bunch of second-raters? Any Nevada readers out there who’d care to comment, just hit the mail link. But that’s how this smells – they’ve lost command of the legislature, and they will do anything to get it back. This is the attitude of the political juvenile, who thinks it’s all about being in control – not governing wisely in concert with members of the other party. It’s having a focus roughly half an inch in front of their noses, with no cares for the future. Do they think this imminent debacle will be forgotten, by either the citizens or the other party?

Of course, if they do have some sort of scandal on the Democrats, then a recall is appropriate. But this ridiculous secrecy is not indicative that they have anything more than just an itch that needs to be scratched. And that itch is all about power.

Sometimes I’m dismayed at the importance of Justice Kennedy as the swing vote of SCOTUS, although I suppose I’m rather naive for not appreciating the importance of the ideological underpinnings of certain SCOTUS decisions. Here Rick Hasen on Election Law Blog discusses the recent district court decision regarding the Texas Voter ID law:

For two reasons, it matters whether the courts find discriminatory purpose in addition to discriminatory effect. When there is just a discriminatory effect, the remedy is much narrower. In this case, the interim remedy was to tinker with the voter id law, such as allowing voters to file an affidavit explaining why they lack the necessary ID signed under penalty of perjury. With a finding of purpose, however, the entire law could (and today was) thrown out. Second, a finding of intentional discrimination can be the basis, under section 3c of the Voting Rights Act, to put Texas back under the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act for up to 10 years, at the court’s discretion. The court has scheduled further briefing on the section 3c issue for the end of the month.

Today the court reaffirmed the discriminatory purpose finding, and held that the tweaks Texas made to its voter id law in a recent session did not solve the problem of discriminatory purpose. In some ways Texas made things worse. The affidavit requirement, for example, could intimidate voters given that many sections open up voters to prosecutions for felony perjury. The Court also noted that the new law did not include any money for voter education, which the court found crucial to a fairly applied voter id law.

What comes next? Texas will no doubt appeal this ruling to the Fifth Circuit, and the first question will be some kind of interim relief—Texas will ask to continue to enforce its voter id law as this case works its way through the 5th Circuit (and likely back to the entire 5th Circuit sitting en banc). What happens in the request for a stay of the district court’s order may give us some sense of what is likely to happen on the merits at the Fifth Circuit.

But ultimately this case is heading to the Supreme Court. What kind of reception it gets there will likely depend upon (1) whether Justice Kennedy is still on the Court and (2) how Justice Kennedy, if still on the Court, views the evidence of intentional discrimination in this case.

Is the evidence really so ambiguous? Granted, it’s hard to understand the motivations of the actors if they refuse to admit to real reasons to hidden recorders, and this is certainly one of the more contentious areas, since the GOP, the actors in this drama, do have a prima facie reasonableness for taking some sort of action. But the lack of any evidence of abuse in the recent past by illegal immigrants makes the Voter ID law’s stated motivations dubious.

A friend sent along this example of the proper use of Twitter (via MSN/Money), but it jolted me in a totally different manner (annoying Twitter formatting removed):

On Friday evening, Tesla customer Paul Franks tweeted the following:

@elonmusk can you guys program the car once in park to move back the seat and raise the steering wheel? Steering wheel is wearing.

Just 24 minutes later, the famous CEO replied with the following message:

Good point. We will add that to all cars in one of the upcoming software releases.

Reminds me of how I dealt with user suggestions when I worked in open source software. Suggestion comes in the morning, strive to have it implemented in the evening for user testing overnight. I like to think the fast turnaround contributed to the ambiance of the project.

It’s also nice to see Twitter has a redeeming characteristic. I don’t bother with it, myself.

Goiter:

Goiter is an enlargement of the thyroid gland. The resulting bulge on the neck may become extremely large, but most simple goiters are brought under control before this happens. Occasionally a simple goiter may cause some difficulty in breathing and swallowing. [PubMed]

Mentioned by my Arts Editor last night, and I realized I had no clear idea of the meaning of the term. It appears to be descriptive and does not address causes. Here’s a helpful image:

Source: National Institutes of Health

These ladies suffer from iodine deficiency.

Here come the black-eyed susans, in three modes. Light …

… and dark, consorting with the cleome …

… and skulking off into the night, no doubt to harass innocent pedestrians. A bit hulking, don’t you think?

Kevin Drum remarks upon the difficulties of uniting the Democratic Party, which I suppose I’m happy enough to take his word for, not being the sort to pay much attention to the technical difficulties of a “big tent” party. But I think he suffers a hiccup in his reasoning in the addendum:

There’s a good example of this in Warren’s speech, where she says this:

A few weeks ago, I saw an op-ed in the New York Times from a so-called Democratic strategist titled, “Back to the Center, Democrats.”…We’ve been warned off before. Give up, keep your heads down, be realistic, act like a grown-up, keep doing the same old same old.

But here’s what’s interesting: instead of lots of ferocious back-and- forth and piling on, this time, no one cared. Big yawn. Why? Because the Democratic Party isn’t going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill.¹ It is NOT going to happen.

Bill Clinton campaigned on both those things and he won the presidency. But when he actually followed through, a lot of lefty Democrats rebelled. Nevertheless, Clinton won reelection by a huge margin. Warren is correct that the Democratic Party has moved left on these issues since Clinton’s presidency, but she’s not correct that this means moderates no longer exist. They do, and Democrats still need them to win.

There’s one big omission in Kevin’s reasoning: President Clinton’s opposition. Bob Dole ran a poor campaign and didn’t have the personal charisma that I’m told President Clinton had (I never understood that myself, but I’ll stipulate it). Clinton beat Dole by nearly 9% points in the popular vote. Some of that might be attributable to welfare and crime, but I doubt much of it. I remember that campaign, and Dole really never had a chance, despite Clinton’s political failings.

Remember Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX)? I’ve written about him before. He’s the guy who had the nerve to write this:

“Better to get your news directly from the president,” Smith said. “In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.” [Vox]

I couldn’t help thinking about him while reading Steve Benen’s discussion on Maddowblog of Trump’s ego-rally (my thanks to my friend Jim for supplying that descriptive label) in Phoenix. What caught my eye?

But there was one line that jumped out at me because it dovetails with a rhetorical line I’ve been keeping an eye on in recent months. Trump was eager to argue that he’s produced amazing economic gains – the president touted the million-job figure again, though I don’t think he appreciates why that tally is so underwhelming – which led him to this gem:

“[E]conomic growth has surged to 2.6 percent. Remember, everybody said, ‘You won’t bring it up to 1 percent. You won’t bring it up to 1.2 percent.’”

Everybody didn’t say that. In fact, literally no one said that because this rhetoric doesn’t make any sense. The president seemed lost trying to talk about this a month ago, and his economic illiteracy doesn’t seem to be getting any better. …

All of which leads to a straightforward dynamic: (1) maybe no one in the White House has explained GDP reports to our first amateur president; (2) maybe Trump’s aides have explained it, but he didn’t understand the lessons; or (3) perhaps White House staffers did explain it, Trump understood the lessons just fine, and the president is working from the assumption that the public is easily fooled.

And we know that many the Trump supporters get their news only from Trump and some of his allied media. So, for them, when Trump shouts that no one thought he could bring economic growth up to 2.6%, they believe it – because they don’t know better and they’ve been told that everyone else lies to them.

And this is so in line with the expected results of Rep. Smith’s idiotic advice. He may have given it as a way to retain the allegiance of voters, but he may find out someday that he’s not the one dispensing the truth – it’s all about Trump. And that locks him into a straitjacket of loyalty that may, someday, squeeze him out of his job.

Helicity:

Imagine the tiny tornado that forms in your tea as you stir it. The swirl can have three parts: a link, in which one loop passes through the centre of another, like chain links; a writhe, in which a loop gets a kink in it like an unruly garden hose; and a twist, when several streams of water flow around one another, like the strings in a twisted rope.

These three motions combine in a vortex to make up what’s called its helicity … [“Teacup tornadoes brew up a storm,” NewScientist (12 August 2017)]

And it ain’t us. Greg Fallis elaborates on the problem of Afghanistan:

Same shit, different invader. In almost every invasion, the Afghan tribes have been outgunned, out-technologied, out-resourced, and often out-fought. But they’ve never been out-waited. Never.

Why? Because they’re operating on a radically different understanding of time and place than the invaders. They live there. They know the invaders, regardless of who they are or where they’re from, will eventually want to leave. The simple fact is the Afghans don’t need to win; they only need to persist. If it takes a generation or two of low intensity guerrilla warfare until their enemies get fed up and find a reason to go home, they’re okay with that. They’ve done it before.

“Afghans will secure and build their own nation, and define their own future.”

That’s from Trump’s speech, and it’s a classic case of stupidity fed by willful blindness. The Afghans have been securing and building their own nation for a couple thousand years. They are defining their future. Right now that definition includes killing U.S. and NATO troops and booting us out of their country. There’s yet another reality we need to accept.

That’s the long view. But how does Greg tally up the Taliban? Were they purely an Afghan phenomenon? Or were they an incursion from Pakistan? I ask because, in my understanding, the Taliban more or less ran Afghanistan 1996-2001. And, yes, they no longer hold power – but only because of outside interference from the United States. And it fights on, hungering for power. Which is not to say the warlords who preceded them were any better.

NewScientist (12 August 2017) reports on an unexpected chemical reaction may revive hydrogen fueled cars:

Earlier this year, Scott Grendahl and his team at the US Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland made a surprising discovery. They were testing a high-strength aluminium alloy by pouring water on it, and it started to bubble, giving off hydrogen. That doesn’t normally happen to aluminium. It usually oxidises in water, forming a barrier that stops any reaction. But this alloy just kept reacting.

Hydrogen has long been touted as a clean, green fuel, but it is difficult to store and move around because of the low temperature and high pressure at which it must be kept. If aluminium could be made to effectively react with water, it would mean hydrogen on demand. Unlike hydrogen, aluminium and water are easy to carry, and both are stable. But previous attempts to get aluminium and water to react required high temperatures or catalysts, and were slow. Obtaining the hydrogen took hours and was around 50 per cent efficient.

“Ours does it in less than 3 minutes,” says Grendahl. Moreover, the new material offers at least an order of magnitude more energy than lithium batteries of the same weight. And unlike batteries, it can remain stable and ready for use indefinitely.

So is the aluminium alloy consumed by the reaction? Or is it a catalyst itself?

Maybe I should hang on to my Mazda RX7 – I recall reading quite a long time ago that Mazda engineers had adapted the car’s rotary engine to use hydrogen rather than gasoline. Just pour in the distilled water…

In case you were wondering about the hiring bonuses awarded to former SCOTUS law clerks, newly hired into private practice, here’s a report from National Law Journal:

The trial boutique Wilkinson Walsh + Eskovitz has hired two clerks from the most recent U.S. Supreme Court term, and in the process it appears to have set a new high for incoming associate bonuses.

The hires, Elizabeth “Betsy” Henthorne and John James “JJ” Snidow, join the firm’s Washington, D.C., office from the chambers of Justices Elena Kagan and Anthony Kennedy, respectively. Wilkinson Walsh will award them hiring bonuses of $350,000 each, name partner Sean Eskovitz said, compared with bonuses that have topped out at $300,000 and $330,000 for former high court clerks in recent years.

Which is deeply suggestive of the value of the prizes to be won in court.

I decided to try cleome snapping at night, as lightly edited by my Arts Editor.

This is my favorite.

My Arts Editor really likes this one.

Sarah Grant and Jack Goldsmith on Lawfare survey the array of options available to the Department of Defense if Trump decides to order a disastrous military order. The upshot?

To say that the Secretary of Defense and his subordinates have a legal duty to comply with presidential orders is not to say that they should do so. It just means that the law of the chain of command requires them to, and they have to be prepared to accept the consequences of defiance. For the Secretary of Defense, that means—if he thinks appropriate—resigning in protest, resisting until fired, informing congressional leaders (in or out of public), or quietly coordinating with the Vice President and others for presidential removal under the 25th Amendment. And whatever the Secretary’s choice, it provides no legal protection to the combatant commanders should they also resist. This might seem like a frustratingly limited set of options. But having an elected President as Commander-in-Chief, and strict adherence to the chain of command, are core elements of civilian control of the military that serve other very important values in the normal course of events. The current conundrum highlights again how very deeply our system of government depends on the People electing a President who is generally reasonable, prudent, and responsible.

That last sentence puts a shiver down my spine. Trump supporters may argue that this is a completely uncalled for exercise in paranoia, but based on the general level of knowledge exhibited by those supporters, and their information sources, I would not expect them to understand the situation in context. Given the long experience of many contributors to Lawfare in the area of national security law, and their consensus dismay at the actions of President Trump, I think this is a prudent article by Grant and Goldsmith.

But, in truth, the ultimate responsibility does not devolve upon Secretary Mattis and his direct subordinates, even if they are the ones fired and dishonored if they take the proper action in the face of an insane order. It rests with those who have the responsibility of oversight over the President, and that is the Legislative branch. In that respect, the general GOP preference to vote with the President is not a good omen; this comment from Speaker Ryan with respect to a simple resolution of censure of President Trump over his comments in the Charlottesville tragedy are quite discouraging:

QUESTION: Hi, Speaker Ryan. Given our shared upbringing, I’m sure that you are as shocked as I am at the brazen expressions, public expressions of white supremacy and anti-Semitism that our country has seen since the November election.

And our synagogue in Kenosha has had to have extra security hired and we’ve asked the Kenosha Police Department to help us out so that people can feel comfortable coming to our synagogue to gather.

And so following up on what’s been asked already, Speaker Ryan, as the leader of the congressional Republicans, I’d like to ask you what concrete steps that you will take to hold the president accountable when his words and executive actions either implicitly or explicitly condone, if not champion, racism and xenophobia. For example, will you support the resolution for censure?

(APPLAUSE)

RYAN: First of all, Dena’s mom and dad, Sylvia and Leon, were close friends of my mom and dad’s. Our families have known each other for a long, long time. And we are family friends.

But I just disagree with you. I will not support that. I think that would be — that would be so counterproductive. If we descend this issue into some partisan hack-fest, into some bickering against each other, and demean it down to some political food fight, what good does that do to unify this country?

(APPLAUSE)

We want to unify this country against this kind of hatred and this kind of bigotry.

So I think that would be the absolutely worst thing we should do. You just heard me say what I thought about what he said on Tuesday and what I thought he said on Monday and just a half-hour ago. The point is, all of us have got to strive to do better, and more importantly, I mean, that right there was sort of conflict of one party against another party. I think what we need to do is each of us drop our guard, start listening to each other, and having a good civil dialogue with each other about how we can improve the dialogue in this country and make sure that we can unify against this kind of vile, repugnant bigotry. [CNN transcript]

Speaker Ryan is one of the leaders in not listening to the other side, a leader in doing Trump’s bidding, not to mention a leader in general incompetency. I fear that any action that might negatively impact the GOP leader is off the table for him.

Given that he may perceive the GOP base is fully behind President Trump, and he values his position more than the safety of the country, this is not particularly surprising. But there’s also the fact that Ryan himself is part of the fringe. He spends a lot of time, I think, trying to normalize his ideology (that is, make his ideology seem mainstream and harmless), so he can’t really afford to condemn another member of the fringe, even if they don’t occupy precisely the same swampy spot. He’s already under attack from both Democrats and even more extremist members of the GOP (and just how that latter can be happening is a matter of conjecture), so he’s walking a tightrope.

He won’t do a thing if he can find a way not to.

Continuing this thread concerning recent violence in places of education, Peter Reinart of The Atlantic captures the heart of the antifa movement on the far left – and how they fuel the grievances of the right. It’s a fascinating look into how the extremist elements of both ends of the political spectrum tend to look a great deal alike. I think Peter nails it here:

What’s eroding in Portland is the quality Max Weber considered essential to a functioning state: a monopoly on legitimate violence. As members of a largely anarchist movement, antifascists don’t want the government to stop white supremacists from gathering. They want to do so themselves, rendering the government impotent. With help from other left-wing activists, they’re already having some success at disrupting government. Demonstrators have interrupted so many city-council meetings that in February, the council met behind locked doors. In February and March, activists protesting police violence and the city’s investments in the Dakota Access Pipeline hounded Mayor Ted Wheeler so persistently at his home that he took refuge in a hotel. The fateful email to parade organizers warned, “The police cannot stop us from shutting down roads.”

The return email is “You can’t stop us from arresting your punk asses for harassment of government officials and dumping you in prison for a few years.” I’ve never had much patience for the anarchist movement, as it seems to be predicated on the philosophy that humans aren’t humans. They find themselves applying violence to gain their goal, and then applying more violence to retain their goal. Might as well just call it a gang war and be done with it. Peter continues:

Antifa believes it is pursuing the opposite of authoritarianism. Many of its activists oppose the very notion of a centralized state. But in the name of protecting the vulnerable, antifascists have granted themselves the authority to decide which Americans may publicly assemble and which may not. That authority rests on no democratic foundation. Unlike the politicians they revile, the men and women of antifa cannot be voted out of office. Generally, they don’t even disclose their names.Antifa’s perceived legitimacy is inversely correlated with the government’s. Which is why, in the Trump era, the movement is growing like never before. As the president derides and subverts liberal-democratic norms, progressives face a choice. They can recommit to the rules of fair play, and try to limit the president’s corrosive effect, though they will often fail. Or they can, in revulsion or fear or righteous rage, try to deny racists and Trump supporters their political rights. From Middlebury to Berkeley to Portland, the latter approach is on the rise, especially among young people.Revulsion, fear, and rage are understandable. But one thing is clear. The people preventing Republicans from safely assembling on the streets of Portland may consider themselves fierce opponents of the authoritarianism growing on the American right. In truth, however, they are its unlikeliest allies.

Right. Peter notes the standard liberal response to these sorts of things is “…  appeals to reason”. In today’s world, to ‘reason’ I’d add ‘shame.’ The shame of having voted for an incompetent man-child, the shame of having voted for someone who appears to have great sympathy for one of the most evil of groups – the racists, to keep it to a single word. Frankly, I’m surprised the evangelicals who voted for Trump, such as Falwell of Liberty University, haven’t died of shame. I do understand a few graduates of Liberty are preparing to mail their diplomas back to Liberty out of disgust.

But the antifa, which are, from my understanding, largely drawn from universities, should be equally ashamed, as they’re betraying the very institutions to which they are attending. Institutions of education are, by their very nature, non-violent places for the exchange of information and learning how to think; war is in honest debate, where losers acknowledge their losses and correct their thinking.

The antifa has little connection to such a philosophy. So I fear we may see the two sides joyfully engaging in combat until they’re worn out, their ranks thinned by casualties and – gasp! – members finally maturing and leaving those organizations in search of something better.

Which they may find in democratic institutions. In an imperfect world, for all the imperfections Democracy offers, at least it has resilience, checks and balances, and a slant against the private use of violence to settle disputes. I have seen nothing better.

Continuing my lamentations on this thread, the Motley Fool has composed and sent another promotional mail of dubious quality. First, some background. The Motley Fool originally began by advocating a deliberate, long term investing style, centering around the theses of the Gardner brothers. They claimed they weren’t pumpers, and didn’t appear to be from the evidence of the time. They disdained the so-called “technical” style of investing, a style in which the behavior of stocks are thought to be predictable independent, more or less, of the company they represent; nor did they have any use for “market timing.” There’s was the fundamental approach, in which the companies are appraised in many facets, from financials to products to leadership. It was all done in a very open manner. And communications were very … they had a style of communication that was very much on the level.

So on to the missive.

It starts with this:

In exactly 24 hours, CEO Tom Gardner is going to reveal an incredible discovery he and his team of researchers have made in recent months and how it led them to a small group of stocks he’s calling “the single greatest buying opportunity” he’s seen in more than a decade.

While I won’t object to the content, I will say that I find the style of communication dismaying. Full of high-magnitude exclamations, it lacks only a few dozen exclamation points to really jam their point home. In fact, it feels like the slickest of promotional mails, meant to suck the wealth right out of elderly retired couples who have lost their mental acuity. Rather than appeal to folks’ rationality, it’s really a poke at the fight or flight mechanism by implying that, absent instant action on your part, you’ll lose out on a marvelous opportunity.

Mercifully, this is not one of their missives that resembles an Atlas rocket, but is fairly short. But in the wrapup, I was surprised to see this:

IMPORTANT NOTE: After Tuesday night, a replay of the event will not be made available. You must attend on Tuesday if you want to hear from Tom and his team of investors.

We sincerely apologize if you are unable to fit this time into your schedule, but because the specific strategies and recommendations we’ll be discussing are extremely time- and market-sensitive, we are simply unable to offer access to this information beyond Tuesday night. No exceptions will be made. We hope you understand.

No, I don’t understand. Really? Tom Gardner has abandoned his long held belief that buying well run companies in growing markets is the best way to build wealth, and that this can be done without market timing? Unless they’ve picked out some ultra small stock to buy, which is always highly risky, I can’t really understand this.

And no replay? What, really? And you don’t think someone else will record it and make it available? This is rather like shooting oneself in the foot.

But let’s think about this some more, because reading this straight on seems incoherent.

A sizable number of investors WILL have something planned for Tuesday, because Americans (who I assume make up the bulk of the membership of The Motley Fool) are simply a busy bunch of people these days. So the way I see it, if you can entice them into breaking plans and commitments in order to see this “opportunity”, then they have already made an investment in this “opportunity”. For the Sales/Marketing team, this may seem like a winning strategy – the suckers are already on the hook. Add to this the obvious fact that those who are watching are investors interested in scoring BIG … well, get out the live fish well. And, of course, the mystery about something being so time and market sensitive – it’s all quite alluring, isn’t it?

But I’ll tell you what – I won’t be finding out. My Tuesday is already booked. And when some slick promotional material happens across my desk, I nearly always help it accelerate to the nearest waste bin. And then when it’s someone changing his spots, as Mr. Gardner sadly appears to be doing, well, only morbid curiosity would induce me to check this out. Of which I have a modicum, but not enough to break my own plans.

Frieze:

A broad horizontal band of sculpted or painted decoration, especially on a wall near the ceiling.
‘the horsemen of the Parthenon frieze’
‘the coastline is a frieze of cliffs’ [Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in “A Princely Update,” Jason Urbanus, Archaeology ( Sept/Oct 2017):

Radiography showed that the prince’s belt was embroidered with fine silver threads that formed a continuous frieze of Celtic motifs, the only one of its kind ever discovered.

These gladiolas were innocently mooching about the garden one bedewed morning, and I decided to see if I could get a pic of the dew drops. Seems to have worked out.

Missouri State Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal (D) wrote an entirely inappropriate post on Facebook, as reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Missouri state Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal apologized on Sunday for a Facebook post that hoped for the assassination of President Donald Trump, saying, “I made a mistake.”

But the Democrat, who has faced a deafening chorus of critics insisting she should resign, did not indicate any willingness to do so.

At a news conference at Wellspring Church in Ferguson on Sunday, she said she had made a mistake and let others down. She had said much the same last week, but on Sunday she went further, apologizing to the president.

“President Trump, I apologize to you and your family,” she said.

She cited frustration with the tragedy in Charlottesville.

So why the lemonade? The reaction of Democratic leaders:

Missouri’s highest-ranking elected officials, Republicans and Democrats alike, have demanded that Chappelle-Nadal step down from her position. State Senate leaders have given her an ultimatum: Resign, or be expelled.

I was initially dismayed when reading a summary of the incident, but to hear that the Democrats, her own party, demanded her instant resignation – whether she complies or not – indicates to me that at least one side of the political spectrum still remembers how to conduct itself as a political party.

And, as a reminder, this is more than can be said for the GOP. For example, Senator Richard Burr (R-NC) said this during the Presidential campaign:

“Nothing made me feel any better than [when] I walked into a gun shop, I think, yesterday … and there was a copy of Rifleman on the counter,” he said in audio posted by CNN of an event with Republican volunteers. “It’s got a picture of Hillary Clinton on the front of it. I was a little bit shocked at that ― it didn’t have a bullseye on it.” [HuffPo]

There are other examples as well, including this one from the current President, then candidate:

Repeating his contention that Mrs. Clinton wanted to abolish the right to bear arms, Mr. Trump warned at a rally here that it would be “a horrible day” if Mrs. Clinton were elected and got to appoint a tiebreaking Supreme Court justice.

“If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Mr. Trump said, as the crowd began to boo. He quickly added: “Although the Second Amendment people — maybe there is, I don’t know.” [The New York Times]

So the Republican leaders in Missouri were outraged at State Sen. Maria Chappelle-Nadal’s faux-pas, and rightly so. Were they similarly outraged at Senator Burr, or candidate Trump, when they advocated violence against another political personage? Because this isn’t about the impropriety of advocating the assassination of a President. This is about the disaster that would befall this nation if we fell to using violence to settle political differences, much like, say, Yemen.

I call on the good Republicans of Missouri to condemn Senator Burr and President Trump for their inappropriate remarks during the last Presidential campaign, or to repeat their condemnations if they issued them when those fell utterances occurred. It would demonstrate that they have the future of the nation in their hearts – not just the party.

Yes, we saw your ad for helpless victims, and we think we fit the bill.

I’ve always heard that The Amityville Horror (1979) was a classic of the genre, but really not much else, so going into this television cut of the movie, we were really free from preconception, excepting that it was going to be good.

And I suppose I must say, not being the superstitious sort, I found the elements of horror in this movie, as they were supernatural and religiously based, rather unimpressive on a personal level. I can see how someone with a religious frame of mind might be horrified at the thought of a house in which demons from Hell have some influence, but for my Arts Editor and I, we were unaffected.

Not that I’m immune to horror movies. Both Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) kept me on the edge of my seat, and I suppose another reviewer would scoff at the science-fiction substrate on which these films are based. But I think there’s a difference, in that for all the improbability of the aliens in those two movies of existing, the premise which they exemplify is not impossible. Yes, there could be aliens hungry for human flesh out there, just waiting for us to stumble on them.

In The Amityville Horror, we’re confronted with mere hints of creatures from myth, with all apologies to readers with religious convictions. Worse yet, the victims do not aggressively defend themselves – they are persistent in their residence, perhaps, but they are not clever enough to strike a blow in their defense. The idea of their existence is absurd.

And, yet, I can be intrigued by other movies with absurd elements, such as Greek gods. In those cases, the genre is not generally horror, but some other general thematic category in which the absurd elements play a metaphorical or allegorical role. Their is no profession of their existence; they are used to tell a story and give a lesson.

With this horror movie, though, the fright-inducing elements are used literally, and are purposed to raise the hackles on the back of your neck, to inflict the fight or flight reflex and drag you into fright. And there’s nothing implicitly wrong with that – unless these literal elements are absolutely rejected by the audience. And that’s what we did.

Add in plot holes, such as what happened to Father Delaney, perhaps introduced by the television cuts, and the movie becomes an also-ran, a disappointing heart to the mythic classic.

Robert Williams on Lawfare has a suggestion for the North Korean situation – the United States should conditionally accept the Chinese proposal of North Korea freezing all tests and exports of nuclear & ballistic missile technology in exchange for scaling back US and South Korea joint military exercises. The condition? Professor Williams thinks that China should bring something to the table as well, such as a more robust enforcement of U.N. sanctions. But something rang a little false to my completely inexperienced ear:

The point here is not to suggest that a three-part deal with China and North Korea will necessarily work. Nearly any proposal designed to produce constructive negotiations with Kim’s regime must be viewed with an abundance of caution given the historical record and the fact that Kim sees nukes as essential to his survival. On almost any conceivable scenario, deterrence and containment will be cornerstones of U.S. strategy going forward.

There’s a key assumption that I have not seen questioned and/or bolstered anywhere is that Kim sees nukes as a key to his survival. Does he? The recent contretemps between Trump and Kim actually suggest something different – that Kim sees his advanced weapons capability as a lever for making further gains in the International game. Yes, survival is part of it – but the primary objective may be advancing such things as the North Korean economy, Kim’s prestige, and no doubt other things that don’t come immediately to mind. These may not be integral to his political survival, but by advancing them, he may make his position more secure, he may make his people more comfortable, he may even advance some lost ideological cause, although exactly what cause would not be lost under the North Korean flag escapes me.

Why is this important? Motivations dictate actions, even veiled actions. If we assume Kim is running scared and is surrounding himself with weapons that up the stakes world-wide just as a matter of survival, we may predict from that position that he’ll take an action which, in reality, he doesn’t care to take. We need to be sure of just exactly is motivating his development of nuclear weapons.

Trump blows a lot of smoke and looks foolish, and Kim probably got exactly what he wanted. That’s how I read Robert Carlin’s post on 38 North concerning the dangers of a war breaking out a few weeks ago between North Korea and the United States:

The real question, the important question, the one that could be answered was: what were the North Koreans doing from August 9-14 while the US was huffing and puffing over Pyongyang’s threat about Guam?

The answer, it turns out, was easy: almost nothing. There were rallies in Pyongyang and the provinces. (The two laggards held their rallies yesterday.) There were reports of youths and students rushing to declare their willingness to enlist in the army. But for the rest of the country, the message was that the way to defeat the Americans was: Stay at work! Produce more!

In other words, there was no mobilization of the population in preparation for a military confrontation. Even more telling, although Western media were fixated on Guam during this period, North Korean media barely mentioned it after the initial statements appeared announcing the planning. None of the reports on the rallies mentioned Guam. The focus, instead, was on the August 7 DPRK Government statement issued in response to the new UN Security Council sanctions resolution passed just a few days before.

And does the mainstream media have access to that sort of data? I don’t know. But certainly actions say more than incoherent bluster. Trump might have done better if he’d just said, Oh, did Kim say that? Maybe he needs a little pat on the fanny. Although that might have given us all a lot more heartburn.

Apposite:

suitable; well-adapted; pertinent; relevant; apt:
an apposite answer. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in Andrew Sullivan’s latest column for NYMag, “Trump’s Charlottesville Response Should Change Everything — and Will Change Nothing“:

These broad, smug generalizations are not only on the left, of course. Here, for example, is an interview with a traditional Southern Baptist theologian, Andrew T. Walker, who has a new book providing moral guidance on the transgender issue. Walker cites Paul’s condemnation of swindlers, thieves, drunks, homosexuals, and adulterers as apposite to the transgender experience: “There are practices and lifestyles that, if left unrepented of, can prevent someone from inheriting — that is, having a place in — the kingdom of God. To live as a Christian is to accept God’s authority over our own. Transgender identities fall into that category — they are not compatible with following Christ.”

A few weeks ago Neuroskeptic reported on his recent “sting”, using text from Wikipedia concerning Star Wars, of suspected predatory science journals, and how one had fun with him:

Two journals requested me to revise and resubmit the manuscript. At JSM Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (JSciMedCentral) both of the two peer reviewers spotted and seemingly enjoyed the Star Wars spoof, with one commenting that “The authors have neglected to add the following references: Lucas et al., 1977, Palpatine et al., 1980, and Calrissian et al., 1983”. Despite this, the journal asked me to revise and resubmit.

At the Journal of Molecular Biology and Techniques (Elyns Group), the two peer reviewers didn’t seem to get the joke, but recommended some changes such as reverting “midichlorians” back to “mitochondria.”

There were several which requested publication fees, and then printed it anyways. Clumsy assholes, them. At least the above guys recognized the sting. Maybe they’re legit.