Category Archives: Uncategorized

Talking Points Memo has news about that State that prays for the fossil fuel industry. Now they want to tell you how to run your life while you’re heading for the toilette:

You often read that in the era prior to modern medical practice that soldiers were more likely to die of illness than from the fighting, but I rarely run across a salient example like this on the Body Horrors blog:

In 1779, over half of [General Washington’s] 10,000 strong Continental Army had contracted the debilitating [smallpox] virus during an epidemic, a grave tactical setback in the face of a largely immune British army.(5) “We should have more to dread from it, than from the Sword of the Enemy,” he wrote.(6) In February 1777, Washington would demand the use of an innovative technique, variola vaccination, to protect against smallpox and prevent the decimation of his troops in the face of the ensuing British onslaught.(7) He also instituted mandatory quarantine to prevent further spread of the infection among unvaccinated volunteers. By the end of the year, nearly 40,000 soldiers had undergone variolation and the rates of infection were dashed from 17% to 1%.(5) Washington’s oft-overlooked campaign against smallpox would be one of the most successful public health achievements of the era. The rest, as they say, is history.

The numbers are references within the original entry.

Hepatitis can be caused by overdoing energy drinks, as reported in Discover Magazine’s D-brief blog:

But take it easy on those Red Bulls, Monsters and 5-Hour Energy bottles — your liver will thank you. Case in point: Doctors at the University of Florida report what they believe to be the second documented case of acute hepatitis brought on by chugging too many energy drinks.

Those Aren’t Wings

The patient was a 50-year-old, otherwise healthy, man who had been nagged by abdominal pain, vomiting and drowsiness for a few weeks. He brushed it off as flu-like symptoms, but grew alarmed after he noticed darkened urine and signs of jaundice. After visiting with doctors, he was promptly diagnosed with severe acute hepatitis.

Doctors ruled out drugs, alcohol and sexual behavior as causes, and tests revealed this wasn’t a typical viral hepatitis infection. However, levels of B vitamins — used as “energy blends” in beverages — in his liver were literally off the charts. Sure enough, the patient told doctors he had been consuming four to five energy drinks daily, for three weeks straight, to get through his labor-intensive days as a construction worker.

I had a similar experience with Vitamin water and a kidney stone a few years back. The vitamin C, at ridiculously high levels in the nutrient-packed water, acted as an attractor for the material making up the stone (I forget which variant I had).

The lesson? Keep an eye on the constituents of what you’re drinking. A little enhancement is probably not going to hurt you, but when it says 1000% of the daily requirements and you’re chugging two or three a day, watch out.

And an example of the Standing Rock protesters‘ fear has come to pass. From The Earth Child:

A faulty pipeline has leaked 176,000 gallons of crude oil into a creek and the surrounding countryside 2.5 hours away from the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota.

The spill, which went undetected by the pipeline owners until a local stumbled on it, has spread almost 7 km (5.4 miles) from the site of the leak, and at this stage, it’s not clear what caused the pipe to rupture, or how long it’s been leaking.

According to CNN, an estimated 4,200 barrels of crude oil leaked from the Belle Fourche Pipeline in Billings County, 150 miles (241 km) from Cannon Ball in North Dakota, where protesters have been fighting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.

This article seems to be guilty of using inappropriate units, in this case measuring distance by time. Perhaps it was in the original CNN article. But even more interesting:

It’s also not clear how the pipeline ruptured in the first place, but Belle Fourche Pipeline spokesperson, Wendy Owen, told the Associated Press that it might have occurred when the hillside slumped due to increased snowfall.

“That is our number one theory, but nothing is definitive,” she said. “We have several working theories and the investigation is ongoing.”

Perhaps even more concerning than a freak accident splitting the pipe is the fact that electronic monitoring equipment failed to detect the leak – something that would have prevented the pipe from spilling so much oil out into the countryside.

Indicating the technology is not perfect. That is not something to panic about – it takes time to perfect technology in the face of reality – but the maturity of the technology must be a factor when judging projects such as these, just as the viability of continuing the massive use of fossil fuels should be a factor. As the demand for fossil fuels drops, projects like these have less and less justification.

And justifies the promotion of safe, carbon-neutral sources.

A friend sent me this article from the guardian concerning the abandonment of British Fencing by the UK Sport, the Olympic funding authority for Britain:

Last week  [British Fencing] was informed by UK Sport that its Olympic funding had been withdrawn. Over the next four-year cycle, leading up to the Tokyo Games, it will receive not a penny to match the £3.1m it received from the national lottery, via UK Sport, to prepare its campaign for Rio last summer.

Why?

Zero funding amounts to official confirmation that your sport has no chance of producing a medal from the 2020 Games, or even in 2024. UK Sport’s policy is to look at each discipline from an eight-year perspective, assessing the division of about half a billion pounds on the basis, as it put it, “of the medals won, the number of medallists developed, and the quality of the systems and processes in place to find and support the nation’s most promising future champions”. Its support generally equates to between £20,000 and £60,000 per athlete per annum. For this, results are not just expected but demanded.

I believe this is how the US Olympic Committee (USOC) also operates, funding winners while ignoring the losers. On its face, it’s a baffling approach to asking a sporting federation to improve its top-line athletes, by eliminating the very support which one might think it needs in order to produce what is requested. However, the article does go on to note:

But it should be remembered that British Cycling, currently riding a boom with 130,000 members, had barely 20,000 less than a decade ago. And whoever dreamed that British gymnasts would one day be winning Olympic medals? Our fencers, who thought they had parried the worst, must now launch a swift and decisive riposte.

That suggests two things: First, the funding is not utterly necessary to produce top of the line fencers. Second, and more subversively, it suggests the funding, and the strings that come with it, could be done without. I know US Fencing was in danger of being taken over by the USOC a few years back due to a lack of financial soundness (inefficiency, etc – not criminal), and I assume this was possible because they accepted USOC funding.

I wonder if US Fencing ever considers rejecting USOC funding.

Enjoy!

strophic:

Strophic form (also called “verse-repeating” or chorus form) is the term applied to songs in which all verses or stanzas of the text are sung to the same music.^[1] The opposite of strophic form, with new music written for every stanza, is called through-composed.

The term is derived from the Greek word στροφή, strophē, meaning “turn”. It is the simplest and most durable of musical forms, extending a piece of music by repetition of a single formal section. This may be analyzed as “A A A…”. This additive method is the musical analogue of repeated stanzas in poetry or lyrics and, in fact, where the text repeats the same rhyme scheme from one stanza to the next the song’s structure also often uses either the same or very similar material from one stanza to the next. [Wikipedia]

Encountered in a Rose Ensemble program last night.

The depths to which the North Carolina GOP is sinking raises serious questions about the shared sanity of that particular branch of the party. In case you hadn’t heard, the digested form is that they called a special session, supposedly to address some disaster recovery concerns, but now are apparently trying to pass legislation effectively stripping the Governor-elect, a Democrat, of the powers employed by the current governor, McCrory, who lost the election and is apparently a very sore loser. A North Carolina resident has sent me a link to the Facebook page of Jeff Jackson (D), a state Senator, where he’s written:

When we engage in blatant power grabs, there are consequences beyond merely writing bad laws and disrespecting the voters. We also broadcast to the rest of the country that we’re a state that isn’t committed to honest, decent government – and that brings a set of consequences all its own, as we’ve seen this year.

He then goes on to list links to stories in newspapers such as The New York Times and WaPo detailing these last-moment activities. And now I see this discouraging news, also from Senator Jackson:

In the end, it took Gov. McCrory less than one hour to sign the bill that will restrict the authority of incoming Gov. Cooper.

You deserve honest, decent leadership. Not this.

Well, it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. As Jackson implies, there’s a variety of angles: voter reactions, corporate reactions, even the reactions of recruits for the famed UNC basketball program.

And the evaluation of the GOP should be interesting as well. Generally, American governance’s ideal has been to assume that the opposition is quite loyal; it may differ on policies, but the well-being of the State or Union is uppermost in our minds. The current behavior suggests that the GOP in NC has no such opinion of the Democrats; indeed, they seem to think their they’re all devils. And that, in turn, tells me that the GOP is composed of second- and third-raters, people who listen to the worst, not the best, who have learned to be obdurate and closed, rather than open and willing to learn. Or so I speculate; it’s hard to find an alternative that sounds both reasonable and better.

But one thing’s for sure: North Carolina’s legislature is making a strong bid for the title of The Most Toxic State in the Union.

When I heard Colbert making jokes about the white supremacist movement boycotting the latest Star Wars movie, I thought he was kidding and forgot about it. But, no, it’s a real thing, as Emma Grey Ellis reports in Wired. She concludes:

The alt-right aren’t the first extremist group to use this strategy. “There are clear points of comparison with how the Klan protested against film in the 1920s,” says Tim Rice, a film studies lecturer at St. Andrews University and author of White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan. “These protests—then and now—seek to position the group as an underdog and the threatened minority.” And, just like the Klan, the alt-right holds up media as a symbol of the problem, so any criticism they receive can be dismissed, or used to reinforce their arguments.

But the KKK cracked up, and so will the alt-right. The group is already splintering into rival factions, and their ambition far outweighs their power. The group’s last big boycott called for people to #DumpKelloggs after the brand pulled its ads from Breitbart, and that call to action hasn’t halted Special K consumption. It’s doubtful that the fringe group will have any more impact on Star Wars—let alone Disney—than they did on the cereal giant.

I see this as a recognition by the supremacists of the power of storytelling – and their natural dread of it. They realize that the story will depict some awful fate that may await supremacists in any galaxy, and that the story will make an argument that such a fate is inevitable. Just as evil quite often breaks into self-defeating factions, as Ellis reports the supremacists are exhibiting at this early date, the story makes assertions that will discourage future potential recruits from joining the supremacists’ little hate groups. And if their little hate groups don’t grow, then the leaders are stuck with their little teacup of power, their influence will remain static and begin to wane, and … the country will end up laughing at them.

Rogue One may be the first strike in the war against the supremacists, but it’s a lot more civilized than the last time we had to deal with white supremacists.

That was called The American Civil War.

Serger:

An overlock is a kind of stitch that sews over the edge of one or two pieces of cloth for edging, hemming, or seaming. Usually an overlock sewing machine will cut the edges of the cloth as they are fed through (such machines being called “sergers” in North America), though some are made without cutters. [Wikipedia]

As my wife is a tailor, I’ve suddenly been introduced to this word several times in the last few years. Only recently did I learn the spelling, though.

Dipping into the email bag today, I see – perhaps to my surprise – that the war on both government and expertise appears to be continuing, although it’s possible this, like the bombs from World War II still found throughout Europe, is a leftover from the most recent metaphorical war.

Of course, it’s dressed up to deceive as a bit of down home humor; indeed, much like the use of children as suicide bombers (see, I can play dirty, too), its core appears to be a good piece, stolen for other purposes. Here it is.

Mensa Convention – Good One!

There was a Mensa convention in San Francisco. Mensa, as you probably know, is a national organization for people who have an IQ of 140 or higher. Several of the Mensa members went out for lunch at a local café.

When they sat down, one of them discovered that their salt shaker contained pepper, and their pepper shaker was full of salt. How could they swap the contents of the two bottles without spilling any, and using only the implements at hand? Clearly, this was a job for Mensa minds. The group debated the problem and presented ideas and finally, came up with a brilliant solution involving a napkin, a straw, and an empty saucer. They called the waitress over, ready to dazzle her with their solution.

“Ma’am,” they said, “we couldn’t help but notice that the pepper shaker contains salt and the salt shaker has pepper.” But before they could finish, the waitress interrupted: “Oh sorry about that.”

She leaned over the table, unscrewed the caps of both bottles and switched them.

There was dead silence at the Mensa table.

Kind of reminds you of Washington D.C., doesn’t it?

The emphasis is mine. What appears to be a light-hearted dig is actually a subtle manipulative maneuver, designed to convince those already suspicious of the Federal government that they’re right. It’s all in the bulk of the real humor, isn’t it? A conundrum, analyzed by the allegedly smart set, which is then solved by a waitress (who, by the implication that a waitress is also not particularly bright, is insulted into the bargain; a smart waitress would negate both the humor and the message of the missive). The problem is seen to be simple once viewed through the simple, down home wisdom of folks who lack the credentials other might have.

And, you know, credentials means expertise. Not only does the government take it in the teeth, the idea of experts is also dissed, a position sadly endorsed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Now, I could go on about nuclear weapons and justice and finding balance and North Korea, but I won’t, because someone else from another era said it so much better than I ever could, so I’ll defer to his facility with words. I quote, courtesy WikiQuote, H. L. Mencken:

… there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

Or, in other words, governing is harder than you may think.

With that in mind, shall we give the humor above the proper finish?

The Mensa folk, being far too trusting, then proceeded to use their condiments. The one who tried to use the pepper found the holes were too large, and quickly a little mound of pepper ruined his french fries. Meanwhile, the salt failed to pass through the too small holes of its fresh topper, thus inadvertently saving its would-be users from a hypertensive heart attack they were otherwise doomed to experience.

See? It’s still easy to make fun of Mensa, but now we have a more accurate insinuation concerning government. And, hey, still having doubts about that whole expertise thing? Here, let me help you out. Got a car? Would you let a 10 year old work on its engine?

Didn’t think so.

We’ve all heard of gravitational lensing. Somehow, I missed the opposite. The word may be a bit informal.

demagnification:

[Martin Sahlén of the University of Oxford] and his colleagues invoke a new field that is added to a cosmological constant to change dark energy’s density, depending on the local density of ordinary matter. That means dark energy would have behaved differently at different times. In the early universe, matter’s density was high, and dark energy would have had very little effect. But as the universe expanded and became less dense, dark energy’s effects became more prominent, causing the expansion to accelerate as observed.

Such dark energy has an observable consequence: it causes space-time in large, under-dense regions known as voids to behave differently than if dark energy were a cosmological constant alone. Where regions of high density, such as galaxy clusters, warp space-time to bend light towards us like a magnifying glass, voids bend light away like a concave lens. Measuring the amount of such “demagnification” could help test the team’s model. [“Huge cosmic voids could probe dark energy,” Anil Ananthaswamy, NewScientist (8 January 2014)]

Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute has published an article, taken from a talk he gave to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, on LinkedIn calling for a Reformation of the Internet:

There is a bug in [the Internet’s] original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet.

Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content.

All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously.

Certainly not an essay to everyone’s taste, but there is, as Walter points out, the possibility (and probably the only way to get there) for both classic Internet and new Internet to co-exist. Properly done, a web browser could probably work on both simultaneously. And I have to love his allusion to the ancient Greeks:

In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has proven him correct.

And while I added that for its smile factor, in a queer sort of way it does play into my thinking about the cancer of national and international corporations (and, yes, full disclosure: I work for one of the largest). The upper management are really the people with the rings of invisibility, because while they make decisions that affect remote communities, they aren’t there to experience the negative consequences – thus they’re invisible – and consequently they don’t care what happens to the environment at their manufacturing plants. The equivalent of the Internet trolls caused the Bhopal disaster.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaanywho. This sounds like an interesting proposal which should be pursued by those with the means to make it happen.

My reader is more interested in universal health care than UBI, for good reason:

UBI is an interesting idea, but I’d more interested in universal health care at reasonable rates.

For example, I currently pay more for private health care insurance than I would pay for Medicare parts A (hospital), B (out patients), and D (pharam) if could buy all of those. (And part D is higher priced than it would need to be except Congress explicitly forbade CMS from using its size to negotiate better drug prices.) And Medicare has far lower deductibles and copays than my current plan. (And I’m counting actually paying for part A here, which normally, if you’ve paid into Medicare via FICA deductions during your work life, is “free”, i.e. has no premium. The Medicare website is amazingly helpful on this point.)

If I recall the data correctly, a major cause of homelessness is bankruptcy. Medical calamity is the number cause of personal bankruptcies in this nation, and most of those medical bankruptcies are filed by people who had health insurance.

For most of the 99%, paying for health care is a critical component of staying solvent and hence, safe and healthy. That Medicare can do so much more with so much less money, despite various political hamstrings such as the drug pricing scam, than private industry insurers demonstrates just how greedy and detrimental to society they are. And that doesn’t even begin to address other things driving sky rocketing health care costs, such as immensely profitable hospitals, excessive end of life treatments, lack of continuity of care, etc.

Yes.

I’ve been reading a couple of interviews on Vox with Trump voters who happen to use the ACA, wherein the interviewers ask if they really believe the GOP would knock down the ACA and replace it with nothing (the replies have included “I didn’t realize they could change laws” and “I didn’t really believe them”). While a couple of interviews are indeed a slender reed to hang a conclusion from, it does occur to me that the GOP may have wedged itself into a crevice filled with blue ring octopuses (highly poisonous). How so? One of the their campaign promises was to shutter the “disastrous” (their terminology) ACA.

If they do so, they may screw over a part of their base, who’ll either die of embarrassment or scream bloody murder – right into the microphones of the waiting Democrats, who’ll happily broadcast the wails of agony.

If they don’t, the rest of the base will abuse and revile them, and probably indulge in the filthy epithet RINO, pushing the party yet further into the fever swamps. Or the health insurance industry may abandon ship on them, although heavens knows there’s nothing more than a life raft out there once they get off the capsizing GOP liner.

And, as Steve Benen notes, the attempt to sidle their way out of this has already begun:

The rhetorical shift on health care among congressional Republicans is also worth keeping an eye on. After years in which GOP lawmakers said the scope of “Obamacare” is a national scourge that’s tearing at the very fabric of American society, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) recently told reporters that repealing the reform law affects “a relatively small number of people.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) added, “We have an Obamacare emergency in a relatively small part of the insurance market.”

Continuing the fun, the man to lead the Department of Enery, former Governor Perry of TX, isn’t a nuclear physicist – and that’s the point of the DoE. Jeffrey Lewis on The Daily Beast put it quite nicely:

But in recent years, the trend has been to appoint a Secretary of Energy with real technical expertise. President Bush appointed Samuel Bodman, who had a distinguished career as an MIT-trained chemical engineer before making a fortune in the private sector. President Obama upped the ante, appointing Berkeley’s Steven Chu and MIT’s Ernest Moniz to the position. Both are physicists. Chu has a Nobel Prize. By contrast, Perry took four chemistry courses and got two Cs, a D and an F. He got a C in physics. And a D in something called “Meat.”

So did Perry apologize to Trump or not? After all, Perry did say:

“He is without substance when one scratches below the surface. He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: A toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued,” Perry said. “Let no one be mistaken — Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”

Bankruptcy looming? Was he just drinking that night and didn’t mean it?

Or no cojones?

If I must be, reluctantly, open-minded, then perhaps Perry hopes to offer mature guidance to Trump. Although it’s not clear that Trump has any interest in that sort of thing.

Continuing the theme, this would be an upcoming scandal, so really a little out of bounds: David Frum points out that one of the defining policies of the Trump campaign is unlikely to happen:

OK here’s the best part: the only thing in the 2013 bill that bothered Puzder was … more border security.

Andrew Puzder is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, and a strong advocate of immigrant labor … because it keeps the cost of running fast food restaurants down and his profits up, as he’s CEO of CKE, which runs Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

At best, there’ll a split right down the middle on this issue.

Rebecca Ingber on Lawfare discusses the long term consequences of a Trump Administration in which the bureaucracy may or may not work as an emergency brake on a President careless of safeguards. Noting that, at best, it will be an imperfect mechanism, she next addresses the problems facing the President following Trump in the arena of power accruing to the the Presidency:

… there is a catch-22 for presidents rising to power on promises to rein in the overreach of a predecessor on both process and substance. Remediating process fouls may make it more difficult to effect quick substantive change. Continuing to skirt the process norms of the executive branch in order to impose one’s substantive views entrenches the process errors. And yet a post-Trump president may well need to tackle both. For future presidential administrations, there are potential avenues for dialing back prior claims to power while still employing an inclusive decision-making process. Dialing back substantive claims to power of a predecessor are most effectively done immediately, upon taking office. For matters that require determining and implementing new legal positions or policies, decision-making should be channeled into processes that can examine problems ex ante and in a fashion removed from the pressures of addressing the facts on the ground inherited from the last administration, even if those pressures exist and are ongoing (i.e. forward-looking task forces to address best practices or legal positions, versus defensive litigation geared toward protecting power to defend actions already taken).

More urgently, for presidential administrations hoping to entrench internal constraints on future presidents: lay out your legal theories for action as clearly as you can; rest them on a specific theory and not in-the-alternative options; have the authors sign their legal positions to ensure accountability; publish them to ensure transparency; and include written redlines so there can be no confusion about the existence of outer legal limits on the president’s authority. The Obama Administration’s speeches, released legal memoranda, briefs, and the commendable recently released “Report on the Legal and Policy Frameworks Guiding the U.S. Use of Military Force” have over time checked several of these boxes on key national security issues.

I think it’ll be incumbent on the media and electorate that one of the discussion topics of the next campaign must be identification of power accrual and a discussion of whether this is detrimental to the Republic or not. Note this is different from the question of whether it’s good for the Presidency; the two are fundamentally different, as the Republic exists to promote the welfare of the citizenry, while the Presidency, though having a valid role in the Republic’s goal, is in itself an anti-democratic institution; only in relation to the limits set by the other two branches of government is it a tolerable institution, Therefore, arguing that limiting its power limits its efficacy is irrelevant; only in the context of the Republic as a whole can such arguments be properly judged as to their legitimacy, in terms of the dangers as well as the advantages that more power in the Presidency will cause.

I wonder if substantial portions of the electorate are up for such a discussion.

And no doubt more than one ship has been lost to these. LiveScience reports:

Source: FindLatitudeAndLongitude.com

A monstrous swell in the North Atlantic that rose up as high as a six-story building is now the world‘s tallest wave measured by a buoy, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The wave crashed down the morning of Feb. 4, 2013, in the watery expanse between Iceland and the United Kingdom, at approximately 59 degrees N, 11 degrees W. It occurred after a strong cold front passed through the area, producing winds of up to 50.4 mph (43.8 knots), the WMO reported. …

The WMO added that the new record isn’t from one wave, but rather an average of 10 to 15 wave heights, which “is a more reliable measure of wave height than that of a single wave,” said Randall Cerveny, a scientist at the WMO. “Of course, maximum waves have been recorded up to 29 meters [95.1 feet],” Cerveny told Live Science, but the WMO began using averages in 2007 so that their records would be more accurate, he said.

I suspect we don’t have enough data to see maximum wave sizes plotted against time and make any sensible conclusions in concert with climate change. But it’s an interesting thought.

A reader comments on automation in general:

Fascinating is not the word I’d have chosen. This is happening right now in America, and in other industrial OECD counties.

If “conservatives” believe we should reduce corporate income tax rates, but those same corporations replace 10,000 workers with 100 robots each (so to speak), and the 1,000 largest corporations avail themselves to this opportunity — then what? That’s conceivably 10 million fewer taxpayers at the same time those more profitable corporations are now paying less tax. Seems like federal government revenue will go down significantly over next decade, absent any changes from this effect. Reduce corporate income tax rates will likely reduce that revenue further.

Of course, this is just for the sake of argument and many of those 10 million now “out of work” people will find something else to do and have to pay taxes. We hope.

But does this maybe call from something like a VAT or a federal consumption tax?

Possibly. I remain interested in UBI, as that might reduce societal unrest as jobs disappear and retraining becomes necessary. Knowing that you aren’t going to starve while retraining might make the mind more receptive in many folks, although I grant there will be some who resent the entire situation. And I have little sympathy with whining about corporate taxes going up to cover UBI, as it’s a relatively small amount to pay to ensure the corporate HQ doesn’t get burned down in the middle of the night by those former employees.

And the drop in federal revenue could be covered by taxing the automation hardware, although I suspect the devil will be in the details on that legislation.

While reading Steve Benen’s commentary on the nominee for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, it occurred to me that his remarks about motivations, namely,

Note, Trump has chosen ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, a close Putin ally, as his Secretary of State nominee – and Tillerson has publicly criticized U.S. sanctions on Russia for years.

… may actually be more serious than Steve himself realizes.

What is citizenship? The common response is a passive “member of a country”, I suggest, and this is actually a poor response. Citizenship, among other things, presupposes a shared motivation when it comes to national survival; that is, we all value national survival in roughly equal amounts. How to attain it may be a matter of controversy, but it’s a valid and valuable controversy.

But now let’s ask this about Mr. Tillerson. He is the CEO, and reportedly lifelong employee of ExxonMobil, a true multinational corporation. Where does his interests lie?

Does he really have the same view of the national survival of the United States as do the majority of the citizens?

Or are his motivations so tied up in his corporation that they now diverge from the common citizen’s concerns about our traditional enemy? His experience of Russia may be more extensive, but that doesn’t make it better, because the lens in front of his eye is tainted, as it were, with ExxonMobil, a company that can always move away from the USA if necessary, perhaps even to Russia. Nothing really stops it – insofar as the US becomes unattractive to ExxonMobil. And that’s where his self-interest lies – in all the stock, all the money he has tied up in ExxonMobil.

Something to gnaw on going forward.

Quinta Jurecic on Lawfare surveys Trump as an actor in the Carl Schmitt drama. Herr Schmitt was a German legal theorist of the early 1900s who formulated the theory of exception, the idea that the sovereign can choose to act outside the law in exceptional circumstances. After discussing the concept and its problems, Quinta brings it around to our President-elect.

Trump has given us genuine reason for concern that he may actually represent the Schmittian nightmare feared by many on the left and in the civil libertarian community after 9/11. His offhand campaign promise to House Republicans to uphold the Constitution’s nonexistent Article XII raised concern at the time over his lack of textual knowledge of the document, but even this isn’t the important thing. Not every President has had detailed textual knowledge of the Constitution, though most have been better at glossing over that fact than has Trump. What’s key is Trump’s apparent lack of understanding of the document’s significance and power as the bedrock of democracy and the rule of law—an understanding that normally commits the President to behaving in a constitutional fashion by heeding the good-faith advice of legal counsel.

Trump, on the other hand, has displayed precious little respect for these underlying constitutional principles: recall his hedging on whether he would accept the results of the election, and his eventual declaration that he would do so “if I win.” And to paraphrase an astute acquaintance I spoke to in the days after the election, while Trump might want to be a good President for the American people, he has shown no sign of wanting to be a good participant in the American system of governance. Her comments were echoed recently by Representative Justin Amash (R-MI), who criticized Trump for his “extra-constitutional” view of the presidency: “I think he just views the job [of the presidency as] … outside the Constitution,” Amash said. “I don’t think our framework [of law] in this country really comes into play when he’s thinking about how the job should operate.”

Amash’s formulation is apt: think of Trump’s statement to the New York Times that “the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” and therefore can’t be in violation of the Emoluments Clause. As many have noted, it’s hard not to hear the echoes of Nixon’s infamous declaration, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”

“Extra-constitutional” is also a good way of describing Carl Schmitt’s sovereign power, which is not exactly above the law but, rather, outside it. The sovereign determines when law applies and to whom, and the sovereign’s decision is unreviewable by the courts or any other actor because it exists outside the structure of legal review entirely.

So let’s consider the case that Trump might be the real Schmittian. You can see hints of such an extra-constitutional self-understanding not only in Trump’s apparent lack of respect for the Emoluments Clause, but also in his contempt for the work of the courts.

She then goes on to examine the Judge Curiel and “lock up Clinton” controversies. There’s a lot of good stuff here, and it leads me to think the Trump Administration is going to be marked by a heckuva lot of litigation – and quite possibly some refusals to accept Presidential orders by the bureaucracy, and a subsequent figurative bloody nose for Trump.

Archaeology Magazine’s Samir Patel investigates the status of the wreck of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. I didn’t know this about its fuel tanks:

National Park Service/eTrac ROV via Archaeology.org

“What we learned is that, yes, Arizona is corroding. Yes, Arizona is rusting. And yes, Arizona is changing,” says Conlin, “but it’s changing very, very slowly, and the best science that we have tells us that Arizona will still have significant structural integrity for at least another 150 years.” The risk of a catastrophic spill is low, he adds. Battleships don’t hold oil in a single tank, but in hundreds of cells. A recent SRC study found that, of the several places where oil emerges from the wreck, only one appears to be closely connected to a fuel storage area. The rest of the leaking oil follows a circuitous path through interior spaces, which suggests that it is distributed around the ship. Furthermore, it is thought that the oil inside inhibits the degradation of the metal and provides a buoyant force for its structure. And there’s no way to remove the oil without deeply impacting or damaging a war grave. “We are getting smarter about how we can understand Arizona,” Conlin says, “and also how we can manage Arizona.”

USS Arizona Memorial. Source: National Park Service

I wonder if that applies to other types of ships sunk during World War II – and since then. However, wrecks may contain other potential disastrous materials, as noted here.

On this thread, the reader responds:

I’m not assuming a permanent political split, but I am assuming that in matters of POTUS, Roberts, Alito, Scalia are guaranteed for the GOP. Pretty risky to go after with an 8 member court.

I presume that the reader meant Thomas, not Scalia. The Court should be simply working on matters of law, and Lessig’s argument appears to depend on a proper appreciation of how the law has been interpreted in the past. Would the Court simply split along political lines? Are our Justices really that poor as a whole?

Also, I really think that if Lessig truly thinks this is a legit argument he should get ready to file it. Sooner rather than later.

I wonder if he would have standing. It’s not a subject I understand well.

A reader elucidates my point further regarding the Iraq War and the CIA:

I pointed this out elsewhere: the CIA was the least supportive of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/et al’s claim there were WMD. Most of the claims came from the aforementioned along with a few other direct reports. Moreover, the strongest Intelligence Community support came from the DIA, directly under Rumsfeld’s chain of command being part of the DoD. The CIA was highly reluctant to support the assertion.

Which makes his reluctance to trust the CIA – regarding a report roughly 15 years old, no less – just that much more disturbing. Keeping in mind Trump was for the war, this makes the CIA more accurate than some minor businessman in New York City – which is certainly what one would hope. Or we can ask Donald why, in 2000, he had spies operating in deep cover in Iraq, and see if he chokes on it.