... what are we going to do?
Fight, fight, fight!

One of the under-discussed, but most important functions of political parties, is keeping the kooks out. Kooks, in this case, are people who carry ideas concerning the acquisition of power, and/or the practice of governance, that are deleterious to society’s over all function.

I.e., they’d fuck society over for the advantage of the kooks, although this motivation is often hidden, consciously or not, behind any of a multitude of facades. Two that come right to mind are religion and the good of the people.

It’s become apparent that the Republican Party has failed in this primary function, and that’s why it’s sinking into the Sea of Disrepute with independents, the a-political, and the horde of former Republicans who’ve fled their sinking ship. Their total devotion to a President who appears to teeter on the edge of autocratic dementia marks them as being a collection of the power-hungry and the kooks.

Which leads to the obvious question: What about the Democrats? As they are now functioning as the de facto conservatives in the American political landscape, if they want to practice responsible governance, they must attract enough of the independent centrists and center-rights to win elections, and that means keeping their own kooks out of power. Consider this mail I recently received from a former “very conservative” friend of mine:

I have been “feeling” my way through politics most of my adult life. I listen to the debates, and I think “that side just makes sense to me”. I try to listen objectively, but I tend to agree with conservative thinking over liberal thinking. In fact, as open minded as I try to be, sometimes I want to throw my pen and say “does that liberal even HEAR what he is saying?”

And I’ve heard this refrain many times over the years from other folks. To my mind, there are two possible problems for the liberal:

1. The liberals are failing to communicate effectively, OR
2. They’re kooks (and not liberals).

And I do worry about the far-left wing, especially in light of a recent TV news report (WCCO) in which they interviewed a woman attending the brief visit of President Trump to Bemidji, Minnesota. Her statement, boiled down, was that she had voted Clinton in 2016, but, gee, the Republicans seemed to make so much more sense, so maybe she’d vote Trump this time.

Although she could have easily been a plant, and I shouted at the TV Are you fucking kidding me!, it does occur to me that if the far-left is viewed as the current or future state of the Democrats, this response, as ill-informed as it is, makes sense.

So what is it about the far-left that’s bothering me? Andrew Sullivan has been ranting about this since, oh, January I suppose. To me, since I live in the middle of the country, it’s seemed a bit obscure, as I’ve not run into any actual proponents of what’s called critical theory. For those who are interested, this incident may be an example of critical theory brought into our reality.

However, this tweet, touted by Sullivan, finally brought into focus the reason critical theory needs to be bounced around and then out of the realm of serious political discourse:

I get regular invites to debate on various platforms. I always say no.

Because debate is an imperialist capitalist white supremacist cis heteropatriarchal technique that transforms a potential exchange of knowledge into a tool of exclusion & oppression.

My standard reply: pic.twitter.com/pwuV5evBKP

— Sunny Singh (@ProfSunnySingh) September 24, 2020

Ignore the polysyllabic jibber-jabber, which I’m not dissing, as technical jargon has its place, but … here it’s just meant to distract the reader from the real intellectual abyss at the center of critical theory.

And that’s the refusal to debate.

Debate, the free exchange of ideas and critiques, is the most important part of improving one’s intellectual state, after the process of study. By the word debate, I don’t confine it to the formal, face-to-face debate, but all informal modes, all of which Professor Singh rejects with this important “standard reply”:

I would be delighted to accept an invitation in the future should there be an opportunity for a reparative and contemplative – rather than adversarial – exchange of ideas.

[Typos mine]

In essence, the use of the word reparative is an implicit insistence that her position is right and all others are wrong, and contemplative means beyond debate.

Or, to use Sullivan’s pithy summary: And also perhaps because debate is one of the most effective tools in rooting out ideological bullshit.

I think my formerly very conservative friend would be beating her head on the table if he were exposed to Singh’s patronizing statement.

But it may be worthwhile to talk about fascism at this point. I have little political science training, so sometimes I get a little confused why some labels are applied to one side of the political spectrum, but not the other. I’m aware that non-monarchical, non-theocratic autocrats on the right, who accept no limits on power or the processes of gaining power, are called fascists.

But what about the left? Often, behind the veil of Power to the people and Workers should own the means of production – slogans which have their own valid motivations – autocrats also operate, from V. Lenin to Gorbachev, Mao to Jinping, from one Kim to another Kim. Importantly, these far-left regimes gained political power through the unrestrained use of violence, both to gain it and retain it. Usually, power retention is achieved via purges, a common feature of far-left regimes.

And, swinging back to the right side of the political spectrum, autocrats also gained power through unrestrained power. Think of the Brownshirts, or the Spanish Civil War: fascists all. And purges are also a salient part of the fascist regimes, most spectacularly in Nazi Germany^[3]. Left & right, purges hide behind ideological (“capitalist!”) or religious (“blasphemer!”) curtains, but always leave their victims bereft of political power, or bereft of their lives, but the real point is that purges function as a tool of those looking to gain more and more power.

I appreciate there may be operational differences, such as left-fringe draping themselves in veils imprinted with people slogans, while fascists use faux-religious claims, but in the end they operate the same.

So let’s call them, left and right, fascists.

Each side claims to be so right that they need not debate any longer. They’re right because they say they are. And that claim is not only hubristic, but it functions as an operational bulkhead, because if you tell your followers that they need not debate with those who would critique them, but merely impose their mob politics on lesser, weaker groups – which applies both left and right – then you, the mob boss, have effectively closed off a weak chink in your ideological armor.

You’ve told your followers to be orthodox, as you define it.

Of course, it’s not a perfect bulkhead. Some people have the audacity to think for themselves. You’re better off without them.

But if the ideology of your mob is sufficiently divergent from reality, a corrective slap to the head will – eventually – occur. We saw this with the Soviet Union, as it discovered its ideological approach could not keep up with the Western approach. We’re seeing it in California now, as the climate change deniers are seeing all their specious claims going up in smoke.

It’s worth taking a moment to note the importance of debate. The point of debate is to persuade the audience, if not the adversary, of the correctness of your position: to change minds, and consequently actions. But it’s not physically violent. I chug into a debate on my own two legs, and I chug out, again on my own two legs – not on a stretcher. And that’s the most important point of agreeing to, and benefiting from, being part of a liberal political system^[1] – to accept the centrality of reason^[2], to understand that being wrong in the arena of reality and reason implies being open to changing one’s mind, and accept that engaging in political violence is utterly unacceptable and will be punished.

For my purposes, I think I finally understand what has Sullivan and other thinkers, such as Jonathan Chait, so upset for the last year or so. By discarding this key part of the liberal political system, those supporting critical theory become illiberal.

And, bowing to the power of words, I think illiberal is not strong enough. Let’s call them incipient fascists. Or just fascists.

If you think you’re beyond debate, if your goal is political power and the mob is good enough for you, you’re a fascist. Kiss your brothers on the right on the cheek before you plunge that knife into their backs. Because that’s the essence of mob politics. The knife, not the kissing, that is; I request the kissing merely as a sentimental indication that critical theorists were, once, civilized.

¹ Not be confused with “those damn liberals.” There’s a large difference between the two, and the liberal democracy properly encompasses what we today call socialists, to Democrats, to right-centrists – but not the critical theory supporters, nor the Party of Trump.

² And this is why the magical thinking rampant in many religions finds the liberal democracies in which they are embedded an uncomfortable fit. Indeed, as they stray further and further into this magical thinking, that tells them that their divinity has selected them to be important, the less and less well they fit into that democracy, until it becomes an evil that has been revealed to them, and must be replaced with a benevolent theocracy. Or escaped into insularity, where many turn out to conceal crimes by the leaders. Sometimes I wish I was a social scientist who was being paid to actually measure these tendencies, rather than just a software engineer, noticing them in passing.

³ I’ll bet you thought I’d forgotten about the Nazis.

Euchre:

… tr.v. eu·chred, eu·chring, eu·chres
1. To prevent (an opponent) from taking three tricks in euchre.
2. To deceive by sly or underhand means; cheat: euchred us out of our life savings. [The Free Dictionary]

The second meaning, above, noted in the old TV series Peter Gunn, episode Spell of Murder, in which a bartender is noting the price of a bottle of bourbon vs. how many servings he’s expected to extract from it, at what price, as he “euchres” his customers.

Which was apropos of nothing, a part of the charm of Peter Gunn.

From …

Every single hour in South Carolina, Lindsey Graham is being violently out-fundraised.

But you can help stop the suffering. pic.twitter.com/9rDS5naJ4V

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 25, 2020

The Official Elected Lickspittle of the United States.

A gullibility note from Paul Fidalgo at CFI:

The stereotype says that it’s older folks who fall for online scams, but when it comes to COVID-19 misinformation, it’s the dang kids: “People under the age of 25 had an 18% probability of believing a false claim, compared to only 9% of people over 65,” according to a big study from Harvard, Rutgers, Northeastern, and Northwestern (or, HRNN, pronounced “hrrrrrnnnnnnn” like when you have a stomach ache).

You’d think the natives would be better at tracking the scams than those damn chrono-interlopers.

Perhaps it’s not the medium, but the message, after all.

This made me laugh:

Image credit: A Pakistani in the Bundesrepublik

Perched on a steep hilltop in southern Germany, the striking turrets of Hohenzollern Castle rise in contrast to the rolling countryside that surrounds them. The fortress is the ancestral seat of Germany’s last imperial family. If the country still had a monarchy today, the castle’s owners would be its royal family, led by Georg Friedrich, whose ceremonial title is also his legal surname: Prince of Prussia.

Inside, the would-be Kaiser Prince Georg cranes his neck towards an ornate family tree painted on the wall behind him. He proudly describes his lineage, which traces back through centuries of kings and queens who ruled over Prussia (a once-vast area that included parts of modern-day Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Russia and Denmark) through German monarchs like his great-great-grandfather, the Kaiser who led the country into World War I.

But, along with the castle and the wealth, Prince Georg has also inherited a very public and, at times, ugly legal battle with authorities to reclaim a family fortune confiscated after the fall of the Nazis. According to Prince Georg, the vast collection of more than 10,000 items includes everything from priceless artworks to the opulent heirlooms of German history’s most powerful and important family. [CNN/Style]

But there is an interesting question coming out of this mess: how do property rights propagate from one political system to the next?

A property right, to my mind, is defined by the political system in which it exists. It defines the rights and responsibilities that go along with it. But what happens if the political system which is defining it is replaced by another political system?

Are property rights greater than political systems? I think the answer is no. Consider the change from monarchy to communism in Russia, where property rights almost disappeared – although under the monarchy, it wasn’t much different for the peasantry.

Therefore, the replacement political system gets to define how property transfers between political systems as suits its needs. That means finding rationales for its rules which fit the philosophy buttressing the political system.

In this particular case of this Prince Georg, I would tell him to go make his own way in the world. His family constituted a monarchy for centuries, and monarchies were not famed for their progressive property rights views – that is, much of what he claims is his was probably acquired through ethically dubious means. Ahem.

Then there’s the little matter of the last Kaiser, who led his nation into an utterly disastrous and unnecessary war. For this crime, if nothing else, the family fortune should be forfeit.

Sure sounds like there’s fraud out there on the East Coast … somewhere. Perhaps you’ve read about the case of 9 mail-in votes, some marked for Trump, found in a waste can in Pennsylvania? Perhaps that made you revisit the entire voter fraud issue, once again?

Relax. RawStory has a report:

Major news is coming in over the “case” of the nine “discarded” ballots from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania that President Donald Trump revealed to Fox News Radio on Thursday.

Here’s what appears to have happened, and we’re going to bullet point this so it’s easy to follow.

• The ballots were discarded by a temporary, or “contract” worker assigned to sort the mail who appears to have been following direction.
• They ballots were military ballots, not absentee or other by-mail ballots.
• The county immediately reported what happened to federal officials, who appear to have immediately politicized the issue.
• “Because these ballots were returned in envelopes similar to absentee ballot requests, elections officials opened them,” The Washington Post reports. “If the ballots weren’t then enclosed in another envelope which shielded the actual vote being cast, they may have been considered ‘naked ballots,’ a term used to describe mail ballots returned without the voter’s intent being protected.
• The Trump campaign and the Pennsylvania GOP in a lawsuit argued that “naked ballots” should not be counted. They won that lawsuit. These nine ballots appear to be “naked ballots,” and that appears to be the reason they were thrown out.

In other words, in the eyes of Pennsylvania law, they did not meet standard and were therefore discarded, per direction.

I hope this makes the mainstream media, as I’m not quite sure of RawStory’s leanings or trustworthiness. Assuming this is accurate, this appears to be a fraudulent political move by the Administration.

And so the fraud may be emanating from Trump himself, who I will now, in honor of his trying to follow in the footsteps of disgraced former President Richard “Tricky Dick” Nixon, nickname …

Little Dick

Yusuf Cat Stevens on Stephen Colbert:

https://youtu.be/JBoln1TKQ8U

Listening to early Cat Stevens today, I’d say he’s matured.

TPM notes a clash between an expert and a … barstool blowhard:

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows lashed out at FBI Director Christopher Wray’s testimony to Congress in which the FBI leader rejected President Donald Trump’s bogus conspiracy theory that mail-in voting can and will lead to election fraud that would rig the election against him.

“With all due respect to Director Wray, he has a hard time finding emails in his own FBI, let alone figuring out whether there’s any kind of voter fraud,” Meadows told CBS “This Morning” anchor Anthony Mason. “This is a very different case. The rules are being changed.”

Christopher Wray: lawyer (Yale Law School), extensive government experience as a prosecutor and in national security roles. Resources: The entire fucking FBI.

Mark Meadows: Current Trump Chief of Staff; former member of the House of Representatives, representing North Carolina (7 years), no relevant experience in national security; small business owner (he ran a small restaurant, real estate development company). Resources: His fellow barstool blowhard, President Trump.

Who are you gonna believe, the guy with no experience, but blown about by political imperatives and his own ego, or the reality-grounded lawyer with scads of resources?

It’d be funny, if it wasn’t so important to get this right.

I see that attempts are being made to justify the tainting – or simple scrubbing out – of the honor and trustworthiness of the Republicans by conservative Republicans, and is best summed up by Erick Erickson’s secondary header on his email (perhaps available publicly?) on his frantic attempt to rationalize the collapse of Republican ethics and morality:

Remember Robert Bork!

Yes, I agree! Here’s the primary, even pivotal, information:

On October 20, 1973, Solicitor General Bork was instrumental in the ‘Saturday Night Massacre‘ when President Richard Nixon ordered the firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox following Cox’s request for tapes of his Oval Office conversations. Nixon initially ordered U.S. Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned rather than carry out the order. Richardson’s top deputy, Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, also considered the order “fundamentally wrong” and resigned, making Bork acting attorney general. When Nixon reiterated his order, Bork complied and fired Cox. Bork claimed he carried out the order under pressure from Nixon’s attorneys and intended to resign immediately afterward, but was persuaded by Richardson and Ruckelshaus to stay on for the good of the Justice Department. Bork remained acting attorney general until the appointment of William B. Saxbe on January 4, 1974. In his posthumously published memoirs, Bork claimed that after he carried out the order, Nixon promised him the next seat on the Supreme Court, though Bork didn’t take the offer seriously as he believed that Watergate had left Nixon too politically compromised to appoint another justice. Nixon would never get the chance to carry out his promise to Bork, as the next Supreme Court vacancy came after Nixon resigned and Gerald Ford assumed the presidency, with Ford instead nominating John Paul Stevens following the 1975 retirement of William O. Douglas. [Wikipedia]

[Citations omitted.]

Yes, former Solicitor-General and Nixon Hatchet-Man Robert P. Bork. A man whose moral system and understanding of the moral responsibilities inherent in our system of government were undeniably compromised.

Yep, let’s remember that it was the Democrats, and not the Republicans, who objected to the nomination of a man who obviously was willing to do whatever it was he was told to do, with no thought as to whether that was the proper thing to do. That is not a good characteristic in a Justice of SCOTUS, who often confront ideologies in governmental form. Just think of Trump’s frequent attacks on the judiciary.

Throw in the promise of a seat on the Supreme Court, which cannot be interpreted as anything but a bribe, which – regardless of Bork’s claim in his book – should have functioned as a red flag for Bork, as it would have for any person with a keen moral sense, and it really closes the casebook on Bork. The Democrats did right in rejecting him.

Yes, let’s remember Robert P. Bork.

All that said, no doubt Erickson will win this fight, because the right has made Bork into a minor deity, the man denied a seat on SCOTUS. A choice denied, not proper advice and consent exercised because of the authoritarian streak of the nominee. But, in the Platonic world of ideals, his is the losing end of the contest, because Bork wasn’t worthy of the nomination.

Yes, let’s remember the quality of the deities of the conservative kingdom. And repudiate it.

I enjoy bits of history when they illuminate today’s events, illustrating how yesterday’s decisions, foolish or as well-meaning as they may be, force people today into odd contortions. Take, for example, the fact that there are 435 members of the House of Representatives, and has been since 1929.

Other than setting a minimum of at least 65 representatives and requiring that each state have at least one, the Constitution does not specify a size for the House. But the framers intended for the size to increase alongside the country’s population, which essentially happened until 1910.

In 1910, Congress approved a reapportionment of House seats and an increase in the size of the House to 433. The membership was further increased to 435 in 1912 to accommodate the entry of Arizona and New Mexico as states. However, Congress was unable to pass legislation reapportioning the House in 1920. Congress finally passed new legislation in 1929, but it froze the size of the House at 435. That number, however, was an arbitrary cap. In the interest of political expediency, those members who voted for the limit forced their successors to represent two to three times as many constituents as they themselves represented. The cap of 435 members still exists today, and it creates a host of problems for
our representative democracy. [“Why the House of Representatives Must Be Expanded and How Today’s Congress Can Make It Happen,” Caroline Kane, Gianni Mascioli, Michael McGarry, Meira Nagel, Fordham University School of Law]

The more constituents per Representative, the less service they can provide. And then scantily populated States get disproportionate power – also true of the Senate, but there’s not much to be done there.

Of course, if the number of Representatives was increased, they’d have to grow the physical size of the House.

In NewScientist (15 August 2020) statistician David Spiegelhalter gives some clues on evaluating statistics:

There are tricks, but it’s not a simple thing. A lot of it is feeling, what I call “sniffing the number”. My first question is always “why am I hearing this number?”: to be sceptical about the motivations of the people telling you the number. Are they trying to make it big or small? Are they trying to persuade me, rather than inform me? Almost always they’re trying to persuade.

That leads to subsidiary questions. What am I not being told about? Can I believe this number? Where does it come from? Does it actually represent what I think it represents? It’s a bit like judging fake news. You often can’t tell from the claim itself; you have to look outside and see what other people are saying about it, do what’s called horizontal searching. That’s a very basic skill that you can teach people. It’s being taught in US schools now to show people how not be taken in by fake websites.

Great hints, and I think of this as required reading for any user of the Web.

There have been several reports that Republican-controlled State legislatures are quietly considering how to overturn Presidential results that displease them. Here’s Max Boot:

[Barton] Gellman reports that the Trump campaign is already “discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority.”

What those traitorous legislators is a reminder of what happened in 2015: as Republican legislatures passed and signed so-called religious freedom bills, which were better known as freedom to be bigots legislation, corporate titans informed legislators that if those laws were not retracted nor modified, they were leaving.

Other entities, such as athletic conferences, withdrew tournaments and that sort of thing, costing States millions of dollars.

I believe that it would be much to the benefit of large corporations that have a substantial presence in States that are reported to be considering anti-democracy maneuvers in order to upend election results to quietly call up the legislative leaders and inform them that, if they engage in such activity, even if it fails, they will begin the process of leaving that State, and staying out until Republican control of the legislature is ended.

And if the leaders do not respond appropriately, then take an ad out in the biggest newspaper in the biggest city that repeats the message.

Some corporate CEOs may dispute that they have a duty to do this, but they belong to a generation of CEOs who are obsolete. Concentrating on profit for investors, without treating workers and customers as equally important, spells doom for such companies. An oppressive political climate engendered by traitorous State legislatures is not conducive to products; it is, in fact, to the advantage of corporations large and small to have a healthy political environment, by which I mean the country is dedicated to honest and humble political exchange.

So, any CEOs with influence reading this? Think about those legislatures that you can influence, pick up the phone, and give someone who thinks they’re important a polite call.

I agree with Boot:

Another story of the disaffected, from D. L. Mayfield on Religion News:

I can no longer call myself an evangelical, because what defines a white evangelical in the United States has become a longing for an authoritarian state where Christianity is prioritized and privileged.

This kind of Christian nationalism is entirely at odds with the gospel of Jesus, who told us right from the beginning that he was going to be good news to the poor, the imprisoned, the sick and the oppressed — and that he would be bad news for people who longed to clutch at power and safety and affluence at the expense of their neighbor.

I think the long-term consequences of white evangelicals longing to secure their own power and influence will ultimately backfire spectacularly — we already see people leaving the church in droves, and I expect that number to multiply.

If I am being honest with myself, I know I was kicked out of the evangelical world a while ago. I was told I could not write for Christianity Today anymore because of my stance on LGBTQIA issues. I left my church in Portland after a long and drawn-out period of trying to advocate for equality for women and the LGBTQIA community. And now I routinely have evangelicals, both in person and online, question the state of my salvation because I support the Black Lives Matter movement.

In this case, the assumptions should include what Jesus said, as Mayfield notes, but those are conveniently forgotten by those who’ve been convinced that they are poor victims – because the American way of life is changing, as always, and they’re being told it should be static.

The cult way of life leads one right into the morass of sin, the agnostic idly notes. Those who’ve privileged their need to belong and be special are those who abuse the most, I suspect.

And it remains fascinating.

That’s not a typo up there.

CME Group, the world’s leading and most diverse derivatives marketplace, and Nasdaq, a global technology company serving the capital markets and other industries, today announced plans for a new futures contract on the Nasdaq Veles California Water Index (NQH2O). CME Group will launch its new Nasdaq Veles California Water Index futures contract in late Q4, pending regulatory review.

Nasdaq Veles California Water Index futures will be an innovative, first-of-its-kind tool to provide agricultural, commercial, and municipal water users with greater transparency, price discovery, and risk transfer – all of which can help to more efficiently align supply and demand of this vital resource.

“With nearly two-thirds of the world’s population expected to face water shortages by 2025, water scarcity presents a growing risk for businesses and communities around the world, and particularly for the $1.1 billion California water market,” said Tim McCourt, CME Group Global Head of Equity Index and Alternative Investment Products. “Developing risk management tools that address growing environmental concerns is increasingly important to CME Group. This innovative, new water contract builds on our strong partnership with Nasdaq, as well as our proven 175-year track record of helping end users and other market participants manage risk in essential commodity markets including agriculture, energy, and metals.” [Traders Magazine]

An implicit acknowledgement that the price of water, reflective of both natural availability and possibly hostile control thereof, is becoming a highly important and pricey component of the functioning of many industries. Futures helps smooth out risk and price.

But it’s also a signpost of the increasing scarcity of one of the fundamental basics of life, on a per capita basis as calculated not only per a person’s personal needs, but on their needs for water as it percolates throughout the industries they utilize.

Here’s the announcement:

Introducing @Nasdaq Veles California Water Index futures, a first-of-its-kind tool to help market participants manage exposure to water supply and demand risk. Coming Q4 2020.

— CME Group (@CMEGroup) September 17, 2020

I wonder what impact this has on the cost of living. Probably quite small, which in some ways is unfortunate.

There’s a lot of factors that go into earning – or at least gaining – international respect, and The Daily Beast has an excellent article on how Russia is doing just that – by clawing their way up the backs of the Americans:

A bizarre and, frankly, deeply disturbing ad from the [Russian] state-controlled RT network shows a deep-faked President Donald Trump joining the channel as an anchor. Although the wig is dodgy, the video superimposes Trump’s face onto a chubby body and plays real clips of him denigrating CNN and lavishing praise on “amazing” Russia.

The advert starts with Trump rolling up outside RT HQ in a limo and waddling to a dressing room which has the sign “Donald Trump: RT Special Host” on the door. Proudly holding up a signed RT contract which has “$1,000,000,000” scrawled across it in marker pen, the deep-faked Trump says: “It was a very nice offer from President Putin.”

The message of the advert is to not-so-subtly suggest that Putin is Trump’s personal hero and that the U.S. president is in the pocket of the Kremlin. In one scene apparently meant to show a network executive pitching shows to the deep-faked Trump, he’s handed a poster for a series called “Putin’s Apprentice” showing him standing with the Russian president. He exclaims: “I love that idea! I think I can do that!”

And the heads of other states will see that Trump won’t react to that, and they’ll read American weakness. This isn’t just a piece of odd humor, it’s just another step in dismantling American dominance and replacing it with Russian hegemony.

I would love to see reporters ask Trump for his reaction to this humiliating piece – and if he’s considered reacting to it kinetically.

Yeah, that means putting a missile into a Russian target.

“Mr. Trump, are you just going to continue to project American weakness, or will you defend American interests by, say, downing a Russian fighter?”

He might have a heart attack.

The Things I Don’t Know About Our Government would fill volumes and volumes. This article by Jennifer Rubin I found fascinating – and brightened my mood:

Yeah, no humor in that post title. Politico reports on Senator Johnson’s (R-WI) latest fiasco:

But an interim report, issued by Sens. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) less than six weeks before the presidential election and released publicly on Wednesday, is largely a compilation of previously public information — some of it rehashed anew by witnesses who already testified during the House’s impeachment inquiry last year — as well as news articles and strongly worded insinuations with little evidence to back them up. [Politico]

It’s a little surprising that Senator Grassley also signed on to that mess – he at least used to have a good reputation. On the other hand, his hurried rubber-stamping of Trump’s judicial nominees in the first two years of Trump’s term were hardly a dignified, exacting approach to the matter.

But it’s the work primarily of Wisconsin’s Senator Johnson, who really seems to have put his foot into a pothole here. No new information? No investigators scoring authentic data from Ukraine?

Not even new fake information?

I don’t bring up that last point as a rhetorical flourish, but to make salient a common refrain concerning the GOP: they’re a bunch of third-raters. If Johnson was better, he’d have at least made up some fake information.

If he was a competent and honorable Senator, he would have simply said he didn’t find anything new. But, no, he has to paddle around the Swamp of Trump and skim off the skin that’s formed on it.

I cannot imagine what Wisconsin voters were thinking when they reelected him back in 2016.

Having grown up in a mildly secular household, I don’t have any really weird religious stories to tell, and – probably therefore – I have a morbid curiosity about those who did. Like this pseudonymous story on HuffPost:

Senator Graham (R-SC) has definitely lead one of the most potholed of tenures in the US Senate, transitioning from a respected voice on foreign affairs with a proven ability to work across the aisle, to, well, a Master of Hypocrisy. Let The New York Times sum it up:

When Senator Lindsey Graham joined a Republican blockade of President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court nominee in 2016, he went out of his way to frame his position that a confirmation to the court should never be allowed in an election year as principled, apolitical and utterly permanent.

“I want you to use my words against me,” Mr. Graham said then, swearing that he would hold the same stance even if it meant denying a future Republican president the chance to confirm his chosen nominee.

But less than 24 hours after that hypothetical became a reality with the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on Friday, Mr. Graham, now the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, made a complete and brazen reversal. He promised that he would push forward immediately to confirm President Trump’s pick — seemingly unbothered by the obvious conflict between his position four years ago and his stance now.

“I am certain if the shoe were on the other foot,” Mr. Graham wrote Monday to Democrats on the judiciary panel, “you would do the same.”

Here, barring an unknown existential threat to Graham or his family, we are seeing a fallacious moral equivalency being drawn: Graham would like to believe, and have all observers believe, that the Democrats are no better than himself; that they, too, would be unable to resist temptation.

However, without any evidence on offer, it’s a doubtful proposition. While a SCOTUS seat is no doubt tempting, too often it’s been a Siren, not a pot of gold, as seen in recent conservative disappointments in judgments by Roberts and Gorsuch. But the real duty of Senators is not to obtain, for their Party, possession of such a seat; it is to investigate and analyze the nominee, and either confirm or reject the nominated person, based on perceived neutrality, experience, temperament, and other factors that Senators perceive as important.

It’s a big old pothole in Graham’s public morality, especially when combined with his recent Earl Landgrebe nomination.

But wait, there’s another one! (So much for his suspension!)

Senator Graham is hoping, through this misdirection, that his audience will forget that this isn’t a contest to see how equal everyone’s morality might be.

It’s a measurement: Is Senator Graham’s morality, his ethics if you prefer, up to the gig, to the bar implicit in his distinguished position? Senator Graham said he wouldn’t vote for any nominee in the final year of a Presidential term, and now he’s reversed himself. His Justice Kavanaugh-related excuse for the about face has been found to be riddled with holes, as Steve Benen notes:

I went back and found the exact date of the senator’s “hold the tape” comments: it was at a forum held on Oct. 3, 2018. That wouldn’t be especially notable, except Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee was on Sept. 27, 2018. The Republican-led panel advanced Kavanaugh’s nomination a day later, on Sept. 28, 2018.

And so with that observation, Graham finds a third pothole in his ethics. It’s amazing he’s ever able to earn anyone’s respect.

In fact, that leads me on to suggest that perhaps Senator Graham needs a little social shaming. I suggest those Democratic Senators who received his letter form a little singing group, and come up with a memorable ditty that they can sing to him during the hearings. Maybe something along these lines:

Oh, there goes the ragged Senator Graham,
    And his ethics, flayed by power's Mayhem,
Drag behind him like fried Ramen.
    He spins and he poses,
And spits thornless roses,
    All while smiling like a caiman.

Or maybe they can come up with something of their own, because, frankly, that was awful.

And then everyone should point and laugh at Graham whenever he’s encountered. There should always be a cost when someone is caught playing the victim, when they are the abuser.

A mass nomination. First, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC):

“There is a clear choice on the future of the Supreme Court between the well-qualified and conservative jurist President Trump will nominate and I will support, and the liberal activist Joe Biden will nominate and Cal Cunningham will support, who will legislate radical, left-wing policies from the bench,” Tillis’s statement reads. [13 News]

Given the quality of some of the nominees, Senator Tillis is foolish in his haste to stand behind the President. But, then, that is the point of the Earl Landgrebe nominees, isn’t it?

And then there’s Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC), chairman of the Judiciary Committee:

“We’re going to have a process that you’ll be proud of,” Graham promised. “The nominee will be supported by every Republican in the Judiciary Committee and we have the votes to confirm the justice on the floor of the senate before the election. And that’s what’s coming.” [TPM]

Note how Graham has placed all but two of the Republican Senators into Earl Landgrebe contention, those exceptions being Murkowski and Collins, who’ve already declared opposition.

J.R.R. Tolkien’s vision of Sauron.

In their frantic rush to please their master, Sauron President Trump, the Republicans have ceded to the Democrats the title American Conservatives. A conservative is someone who places great value in preserving the institutions and traditions of the past. It is not the Democrats who have been running roughshod over the valued institutions of the past, the procedures which were in place to assure orderly and just governance. For those who wish to raise a finger in objection, it is the Republicans who forced the Democrats to use the nuclear option in order to pass Judiciary nominations, or be faced by the judicial chaos caused by empty seats.

Remember the Republicans disregard of procedures when formulating the failed replacement of the ACA, and the successfully passed (but unsuccessful) Tax Reform of 2017, as the House, under the incompetent leadership of Speaker Ryan (R-WI), could not even fulfill its duties in formulating competent bills; both were deliberately left to the Senate to rewrite. Failing to respect and honor the traditions of Congress is a key indicator of their moral collapse.

Since then, we’ve seen little but miserable obeisance from the Republican Party and GOP Senators. Their latest advance is proactive miserable obeisance, as they bizarrely permit the tail of the dog, President Trump, wag them with all the vigor of a Roman Emperor disposing of a useless pack of Senators. Their duty, now foresaken? To vet the nominee, make sure he or she is qualified, both in terms of experience and temperament, and not be a howling, temperamental scalawag.

This is simply another example of the failure of the GOP.

And, if you’re wondering, yes, I hate sounding like some sort of ideologue. I’m a goddamn independent, and I am furious that the GOP has become a hollowed out skeleton of what it once was. I want more than one viable choice, but as the Democrats have become the conservatives and the liberals at the same time, that’s no longer viable.

I was feeling fairly grumpy today until I saw this reelection ad from appointed incumbent Senator Kelly Loeffler (R-GA):

Someone in her campaign has a sense of humor. I can’t help but be saddened that proclaiming a 100% TrumpScore (and it’s true as of this writing) is considered a positive, but today the idea of principled Republican Senators actually existing is a bit of a mind-boggler.

The makeup dude had a hard time of it. Here, I think he used one of those house painter brushes with synthetic fibers, rather than an artist’s brush made from hairs pulled from her own head. Pity, that.

Aniara (2018) is a reminder that humanity is not a rational animal, but an animal capable of rationality when there’s reason for it. The Aniara is a Swedish interplanetary passenger liner of the future, shuttling between an environmentally degraded Earth and the arid, barely-ready-for-mankind Mars. Among the thousands of passengers and hundreds of crew, we follow Isagel, an entertainment officer, who is responsible for operating and caring for the Mimarobe, a telepathic entertainment system that rationalizes what it reads from its clients and relays it back to them, turning their dreams into something they can almost touch.

But those dreams start becoming nightmares when Aniara is struck by space debris early on her latest voyage from Earth to Mars. Her out of control propulsion system takes her off-course; her damaged fuel is lost; and her communications system is gone. Pressure begins to build on all aboard as Aniara drifts further and further away from the home of humanity. The crew can at least be busy, but the passengers, ah, they are a problem. In fact, they are too big a problem, and soon their nightmares give the Mimarobe, sentient or not, some real troubles.

And when Mimarobe burns out, not only are the passengers half way to panic, it leaves Isagel out of a job, as well as out of favor – she had warned the Captain of the problem, and he had not supplied her with help. Who gets the blame? Not the Captain, who appears to be entering his own cozy psychosis.

Aniara, the story, consequently becomes an exploration of the various ways people explore irrationality, from violence to religious manias, from empty careers to empty gestures, from the construction and deconstruction of power structures to the sad depressions that grip non-narcissists when they perceive their lives to have no future, no relevance, and no purpose. There are starts and stops, as momentary hopes erupt and then fade away, but they seem to be lessons that are not learned, but mere fragrances on the wind of life. Fragrances from the burned out corpses of hopes.

But, in this story, rationality isn’t a way of life, it’s a tool. And it’s seen as a tool that is no longer useful when there’s no chance of rejoining humanity. In a way, this story is the observation that it’s hard for the involuntarily separated to retain their rationality, which may be an echo of those criminals, semi-criminals, and merely criminally unfortunate who were shipped from England to Australia in the late 18th century, who reportedly indulged in days of mass irrationality – perhaps in mourning at their permanent loss, in almost all cases, of their homeland and families.

The people of the Aniara could have concentrated on turning their ship into a colony ship, but they do not: their intimate desire of stasis, for their old life, emblematic in the very popular Mimarobe, is their fatal flaw. Its eventual malfunction foreshadows their ultimate, dismal fate. Not as individuals, but as a society.

And perhaps that’s a story for today.

Trump must be setting records in providing campaign material to his rival.

I’m Joe Biden and I approve this message. pic.twitter.com/TuRZXPE5xK

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 20, 2020

But Trump does have a purpose in this message. He’s threatening his cultists that the Great Leader will disappear if they don’t get him back into office. This is part and parcel with his general messaging meant to bind sympathetic listeners to his cause, all the way back to his claim that his followers would keep following him even if Trump shot somebody in broad daylight. That little tidbit set the bar for entering the cult, requiring aspiring members to discard normal public morality in favor of thinking the Great Leader be permitted to do anything he likes.

It’s a despicable psychology that has worked, time and again, mostly in religious cults.

This is surprising:

Sudden deaths are often assumed to be caused by a failing heart. But about 17 per cent of deaths assumed to be caused by cardiac arrest may actually have resulted from drug overdose, according to a study in San Francisco. [NewScientist]

This despite there being no drug paraphernalia or other evidence of drug use to suggest that a post-mortem is in order. What to make of this?

The finding also questions the accuracy of other health statistics, says [Zian Tseng at the University of California, San Francisco, who headed the team that performed the autopsies]. “Without post-mortem confirmation, all causes of death on death certificates are just educated guesses,” he says. “Therefore, all aggregate mortality data reported by the CDC [and other health organisations] on cancer mortality, heart disease mortality, etc. should be taken with a grain of salt.”

Which puts health researchers in a harsh position. After all, autopsies are an expensive business, and unless robots can be trained to do them, they’ll remain expensive.

It suggests a lot of estimates may have to be redone, with big error bars.