Unsightly Mental Blemishes

One of the reasons I value reading atypical writers such as Jennifer Rubin is paragraphs like this:

For the Republican primary in Minnesota’s District 7:

Ya gotta wonder if hugging President Trump was a good idea for Collis, but otherwise it’s a cute commercial.

And, no, I don’t know who won the right to challenge Colin Peterson (D-MN), one of the more conservative Democrats in Congress.

Part of an occasional series examining President Trump’s progress against Candidate Trump’s promises.

The promise: Candidate Trump will protect Social Security.

Results So Far: So far, Social Security has not been changed. However, it’s not hard to see a threat on the horizon, as I documented here. Here’s the pivotal Tweet from one of Trump’s lawyers:

This is actually the biggest news of the day:

President Trump said if he is re-elected, he will look into terminating the payroll tax permanently!

— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) August 9, 2020

The “payroll tax” is the only revenue stream funding Social Security. Kill it, and in the face of the incredible deficits being run by the Republicans as a result of the 2017 Tax Reform law and the Covid-19 pandemic, as poorly managed as that has been, and there’s little chance of Social Security gaining a different revenue source and therefore surviving.

The Bigger Picture: It doesn’t get much bigger than this. President Trump appears to be fixated on deferring the payroll tax as part of the Covid-19 management strategy, but most experts do not think it’ll be of any help to to the unemployed, since they aren’t paying those taxes presently; I don’t see how such a reduction will spur growth, either, which is the usual reason for deferring collection of these taxes over the year. It’s our personal behavior, and progress made on cures or vaccines for Covid-19, which will determine when jobs will begin to reappear.

Republicans are well-known for their repugnance in connection to Social Security. Is this fixation a quid pro quo to the Republicans for not convicting him on the articles of impeachment earlier this year? Without further evidence, No must be assumed – but it remains an open question.

Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) apparently has little use for the current generation of Wisconsinites and, indeed, Americans in general:

U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson would rather see no new coronavirus stimulus bill than one that includes new spending, the Oshkosh Republican said Friday.

Johnson said in a Friday interview with Breitbart News Tonight that he hopes negotiations stay broken down between the Trump administration and House Democratic leaders on a new pandemic relief package given the trillions Democratic leaders proposed in new spending.

“From my standpoint, the breakdown in the talks is very good news. It’s very good news for future generations,” Johnson said. “I hope the talks remain broken down.”

Johnson does not support any new spending that would add to the federal debt, which is at about $22.8 trillion, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. He instead wants any new proposals to spend money already authorized by a relief package passed earlier this year known as the CARES Act. [Milwaukee Journal Sentinel]

Seems a bit harsh of me? Well, he can’t hide behind the government debt excuse, because he voted for the 2017 tax reform bill.

So I have no sympathy for that excuse. He just hates Americans.

Michael Jackson in the wrong genre:

The Kodak Pharma story continues to deepen:

“Recent allegations of wrongdoing raise serious concerns. We will not proceed any further unless these allegations are cleared,” the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation said in a tweet Friday.

The review of funding comes as the Securities and Exchange Commission is reportedly investigating how the company disclosed the deal with the government, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The probe is also reportedly expected to review stock options that were granted to executive chairman James Continenza ahead of the announcement. [NBC News]

This is getting more and more interesting. Never mind that the stock price has plunged from its high after the announcement. There may be criminal charges waiting for someone at the end of this story. And, besides the company execs, who in government is going to be caught with their hands in the cookie jar?

This mention of the app Robinhood is also interesting:

As news of the deal broke Kodak, which had been trading under $2, skyrocketed. Within two days, the stock was trading at $60, with 284 million shares changing hands. In the span of just 24 hours, more than 100,000 investors added the stock to their account on Robinhood, an app popular with millennial investors, according to data from Robintrack. The stock was so volatile the day after the announcement — at one point it was up more than 600 percent — that it was halted 20 times during the session.

But the momentum didn’t hold and on Friday the stock closed at $14.88, or 75 percent below its recent high. However, the current price is still more than 400 percent above where the stock traded ahead of the loan announcement.

It sounds like impulsive behavior was encouraged in this incident. I wonder how many people lost how much money on this. And while such things are learning moments for investors, it feels more like sheep being sheared.

Some more of what you know and love:

I like that last one the best.

With all the shouting about adding an image of President Trump to Mount Rushmore, I must admit the wrong thing stood out for me in this paragraph:

After all, the president had told [Governor Noem of South Dakota] in the Oval Office that he aspired to have his image etched on the monument. And last year, a White House aide reached out to the governor’s office with a question, according to a Republican official familiar with the conversation: What’s the process to add additional presidents to Mount Rushmore? [The New York Times]

Forgive my lack of focus, but I’ve been out to Mount Rushmore – twice – and you do not etch into that big pile of rock. Etching is what you do to make microchips and decorate watches and rings. When you’re dealing with a mountaintop, your tools are more along the lines of dynamite, hammer and chisel, and Bobcats.

This is not etching.

So, it’s bad, bad word usage about adding a face in travesty to a national monument which in turn is a defacement of a holy American Indian mountain.

Gad. It’s like the nuclear cherry on top of the arsenic ice cream mound.

Derecho:

A derecho (pronounced similar to “deh-REY-cho”) is a widespread, long-lived wind storm that is associated with a band of rapidly moving showers or thunderstorms. Although a derecho can produce destruction similar to the strength of tornadoes, the damage typically is directed in one direction along a relatively straight swath. As a result, the term “straight-line wind damage” sometimes is used to describe derecho damage. By definition, if the wind damage swath extends more than 240 miles (about 400 kilometers) and includes wind gusts of at least 58 mph (93 km/h) or greater along most of its length, then the event may be classified as a derecho. [National Weather Service]

Noted in “Derecho with 100 mph winds moves across the Midwest, bringing down trees and power lines in Chicago,” Theresa Waldrop and Judson Jones, CNN/Weather:

The storms are part of a derecho that was moving out of Iowa into northern Illinois, toward Chicago, and that prompted the Storm Prediction Center to issue a PDS thunderstorm watch through 7 p.m. CT Monday.

“PDS severe thunderstorm watches are rare, and reserved for only the strongest thunderstorm events,” CNN meteorologist Brandon Miller said.

That’s a new one on me. I wonder if we’re going to be hearing more about derechoes because they’ll become more common with climate change.

Dan McLaughlin on National Review thinks he can justify the naked hypocrisy of Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) if he just throws enough words at it, but I don’t see it.

Literally.

First, his presentation is confusing, and it’s not at all clear to me that he’s found parallel situations in which a SCOTUS seat became open in a term-limited election year in which the President is of one party and the Senate is controlled by another party. He certainly enjoyed talking about all the other situations, of which the nominations of President Tyler seemed particularly interesting, and his remarks about some of the politics were a lot of fun – such as President Lincoln’s banishment of Salmon P. Chase to SCOTUS as a way to eliminate a rival. But I’m not looking for entertainment.

Second, there is the veiled use of the discredited whataboutism argument inherent in frantically parsing past behavior without regard to the intent of the Constitution. That is the bulk of his article, a confusing survey of how these things came about. I much preferred the Wikipedia version, which shows several such “No actions”, some of which were due to the lateness in the Presidency of the nomination, others for reasons I shan’t guess – and none of which have happened in the era of Presidential term limits, with the exception of Garland’s appointment. But my point is really this: reaching back to other misdeeds to justify current misdeeds is a misdeed in and of itself; the standard that may be ascertained from the Constitution itself is of more importance.

Third, McLaughlin hides in the avalanche of words and charts a few key mis-statements. I’ll cite the paragraph that stood out for me:

In 2016, Barack Obama used his raw power to nominate Merrick Garland to replace Antonin Scalia in March of the last year of Obama’s term, with the Trump–Clinton election underway. The Republican majority in the Senate used its raw power to refuse to seat that nominee. Having reached that decision, the Republican majority did not even hold a hearing for an outcome that was predetermined.

Using the phrase raw power is a mischaracterization of governance as a power game between opposing parties, and betrays McLaughlin’s inclinations when it comes to governance in the post-Cold War era. The fact of the matter is that

[The President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court …

is best understood as an obligation upon the President and the Senate, collectively, to keep the Supreme Court properly staffed. This is clear once one remembers that the President, and all others, are to take care to execute their duties. There is no mention of political maneuvering, of vacating duties in the interests of furthering political or societal goals, of election year skips, or the importance of having an elvish presence in your heritage when being nominated.

If I may bypass the formal politeness of the Founding Fathers, it comes down to Here are your fucking duties, now go fucking accomplishing them.

And, just because McLaughlin needs to cover the above misstatements, note his closure of the paragraph:

Having reached that decision, the Republican majority did not even hold a hearing for an outcome that was predetermined.

No, no, no. If McLaughlin really believes this, he should hand in his quill pen and retire. Senator McConnell, Majority Leader, chose to never even bring it up. One man. No other Senator had a chance to cast his ballot, now did they? Some Republican Senators may have told McConnell they agreed with him, but, quite honestly, McConnell had a real problem. Merrick Garland was not a far left ideologue. In fact, he’d been endorsed by some Republicans for earlier SCOTUS vacancies. If hearings had been opened, Garland might have charmed his way into enough Republican votes to be confirmed. After all, elections were close, and independents, not Party members, held the keys to power. And Garland’s mid-spectrum position would have become apparent to a public that might have learned to mistrust the Republicans earlier than they apparently have learned since the Trump electoral college victory.

This all would have made McConnell look weak, and it would have made him a target of the Trumpian base. I clearly remember that when the report came of Scalia’s passing, Trump jumped onto his hind feet and shouted during a primary debate, Delay, delay, delay!

Any Senate leader ignoring that advice, that directive, was taking their political life into their hands. McLaughlin is presupposing a conclusion of dubious worth in that one little sentence, attempting to gloss over what was basically a political decision imposed on a governance function over which the Senate has little influence, once confirmation occurs.

But, by McLaughlin’s reasoning, a precedent had been set, and that’s why McConnell is a hypocrite – he’s willing, if a seat opens up, to confirm a nominee, while in identical circumstances with Obama, he was not. And he’s said so.

Fog may obscure the forest, but it’s still there.

You’ve probably heard about this, but I’ll mention it anyways, from NewScientist:

The algorithms that ride-hailing companies, such as Uber and Lyft, use to determine fares appear to create a racial bias.

By analysing transport and census data in Chicago, Aylin Caliskan and Akshat Pandey at The George Washington University in Washington DC have found that ride-hailing companies charge a higher price per mile for a trip if the pick-up point or destination is a neighbourhood with a higher proportion of ethnic minority residents than for those with predominantly white residents.

“Basically, if you’re going to a neighbourhood where there’s a large African-American population, you’re going to pay a higher fare price for your ride,” says Caliskan.

Uber & Lyft are not happy:

“We recognise that systemic biases are deeply rooted in society, and appreciate studies like this that look to understand where technology can unintentionally discriminate,” said a Lyft spokesperson. “There are many factors that go into pricing – time of day, trip purposes, and more – and it doesn’t appear that this study takes these into account. We are eager to review the full results when they are published to help us continue to prioritise equity in our technology.”

“Uber does not condone discrimination on our platform in any form, whether through algorithms or decisions made by our users,” said an Uber spokesperson. “We commend studies that try to better understand the impact of dynamic pricing so as to better serve communities more equitably. It’s important not to equate correlation for causation and there may be a number of relevant factors that weren’t taken into account for this analysis, such as correlations with land-use/neighborhood patterns, trip purposes, time of day, and other effects.”

I wonder if we’ll be seeing their proprietary algorithms and databases, of which the latter may be more important than the algorithms, be stripped of their protected status. Or perhaps the courts will be appointing “special masters” to study the systems and determine why they’re discriminatory.

And then see the companies ordered to “make them right.”

And then the see the companies to cheat on the test, much like Volkswagen did a couple of years back on efficiency tests.

Or am I too cynical?

… for the University of Minnesota’s nickname, the Golden Gophers.

R. Bruce Horsfall

The Horned Gophers. I like it. My goodness, the things evolution tries out. They’re all extinct now.

Which is reminiscent of the University of Minnesota sports teams at the moment.

Here’s another nail in the coffin of Trump reelection hopes – if Democrats can educate the American public on the connection between payroll taxes and Social Security:

This is actually the biggest news of the day:

President Trump said if he is re-elected, he will look into terminating the payroll tax permanently!

— Jenna Ellis (@JennaEllisEsq) August 9, 2020

Ellis is a Trump lawyer, from what I read. Her announcement is basically the death-knell of Social Security, if Trump is reelected with a compliant Republican Congress. Counting the days to retirement, are you, like a few of my friends are doing?

Better have a damn big retirement account. My guess is that Trump and his complaisant Republicans would happily raid the Social Security accounts in a vain attempt to balance the Federal books, and leave seniors and the retired a good look at living on the streets.

Or committing suicide.

And this is not out of the blue. Trump has been holding up the latest effort at propping up the unemployed over his desire to temporarily reduce the payroll tax, which, in my view, is not likely to be of much help to anyone who’s unemployed. It appears that his bugaboo is more important than the citizens of the United States.

But if the Democrats can bring into focus the connection between payroll taxes and Social Security, Ellis’ announcement, as excited as it sounds, might be another rock around Trump’s neck and he splashes about in the pool.

Eric Segall provides an important defense of stare decisis, even in the face of “obviously wrong” decisions, at least in the opinion of Justice Thomas, on Dorf on Law:

Even if one were to agree in the first instance with Thomas on some or all of his unique views, a thoughtful person would then ask how much chaos and confusion would occur with the overruling of many of the Court’s most impactful cases. But not Justice Clarence Thomas. Chaos and confusion be damned; the only important question is whether the old cases were obviously incorrect based on the Constitution’s text. So far as I am aware, no other Justice in history holds such a view of stare decsis, and for good reason, The rule of law requires some degree of stability and predictability so that people can order their affairs with a reasonable reliance on judicial decisions, especially the most important ones. To suggest that the Justices should not take those factors into account when considering whether to overturn prior cases is the height of judicial arrogance.

And it’s a very good point. While someone like myself sees the justice system as the abstract framework of laws that bring order, peace, and prosperity to society, and thus decisions at variance with that framework should be reverted because of the perceived failure to contribute to that prosperity, the fact of the matter is that there are real world consequences to those reversions.

I hope – I don’t know – that a discussion of any particular reversion will include a comparison of the consequences of reverting a decision and the consequences of not reverting, although I have to wonder if the Justices have the resources to do so. I also wonder if such a procedure was followed in disastrously unjust verdicts such as Dred Scott v. Sandford.

But it seems Thomas has little regard for the practical consequences of his decisions.

Actually it is more than that, but you don’t have to take my word for it. When the late Antonin Scalia was once asked to compare himself to Justice Thomas when it came to fitting originalism into the Court’s non-originalist precedents, Scalia said, “look I’m an originalist and a textualist, not a nut.”

I was not aware that Thomas had such an intra-Court reputation, but it certainly explains his persistent presence in the minority in certain classes of decision, doesn’t it?

Tennessee’s primary day has come and gone, and here are the important results, as I see it, courtesy Ballotpedia:

Under total votes, there are well over twice as many Republican as Democratic voters. This can be read several ways, but they all lead to this: how will political newcomer (and surprise winner of the Democratic primary) Marquita Bradshaw rally enough votes to overwhelm the much larger GOP turnout?

Assuming Republican winner Hagerty doesn’t put his foot in a pothole, I would expect it to be Senator Hagerty come January 20th, 2021. But let the polls come first.

In case my dear reader read my Case For Regulation post and shrugged in disbelief, here’s the flip side:

Protesters in Beirut occupied government ministries, set fires and faced off against security forces Saturday in an outpouring of anger directed at Lebanon’s leaders following the huge blast that ripped through the city earlier this week.

As the battles raged, Lebanon’s Prime Minister Hassan Diab delivered an address to the nation that left little doubt the political establishment intends to dig in. He offered early elections and said he needed two more months to secure an agreement among the country’s political factions.

But the protesters said they don’t want their politicians to agree on early elections under a decades-old system they blame for the dysfunction that allowed a vast stockpile of explosive material to sit unattended at their port for more than six years, only to explode on Tuesday with such power that it was felt 120 miles away in Cyprus.

The cry from the streets is for the politicians to stand down, and open the way for a new order in Lebanon. [WaPo]

Government is responsible for public safety, and this is accomplished through regulation. When the government fails in this duty, it’s not acceptable to suggest it’s not really needed, it’s too expensive, it impacts corporate profits, and, well, what’s a little occasional death anyways?

These are the sorts of arguments the libertarian wing of the Republican Party likes, or at least liked when I was still reading their rags, to bring up when someone mentions regulations. Too damn expensive?

“Resign or Hang” said the banners advertising the demonstration, making it clear that the demand is for the politicians to go, not to agree.

Better rethink that position, boys, because pretending to be clever about that consarned government doesn’t get you Jacque Merde when the mob is running after you in the alley. And while an accidental fertilizer bomb is more eye-catching than, say, salmonella on the cabbage, each is needlessly dangerous if unregulated – and, no, business owners are not rational creatures. They can be – but more often they are not.

Dr. Kaeli Swift on Corvid Research notes a newly observed behavior in Corvids – aka, crows:

Corvus macrorhynchos, the large-billed crow. Just call him Jimmy Big Mouth.
Image source: Wikipedia

Ask any crow feeder about their ritual and there’s a good chance that it starts with more than just making themselves visible. To get “their” bird’s attention, about half of crow feeders start with some kind of auditory cue, like a whistle or gentle name calling. Given that American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) can be individually distinguished by their calls, and many corvids—including the large-billed crows (Corvus macrorhynchos)—can recognize familiar conspecific calls, this strategy seems far from superstitious. In fact, previous work has demonstrated that crows can discriminate human voices.

When presented with playback of their caretakers or unfamiliar speakers saying, “hey,” hand-reared carrions crows (Corvus corone) showed significantly more responsiveness towards unfamiliar speakers. That their response is different is what suggests that they can discriminate, but it’s hard to not do a double take at the fact that the thing they seem more interested in is the person they don’t know. Shouldn’t they be more interested in the folks that generally come bearing gifts? While we still don’t have a super satisfying answer to this question, it’s possible this comes from the fact that novel humans are less predictable, and therefore more threatening, than a familiar caretaker who can be safely ignored. Likewise, a new study out suggests that it’s not just individual people crows can hear the difference between, but entire languages.

Recognizing unfamiliar human languages – for intellectual amusement, or as a survival mechanism? Fascinating stuff. I’ll go for the latter, but I’ll only put $5 into the pot, because, frankly, Corvids are known to raid the pot when you turn your back..

Logorrhea:

In psychology, logorrhea or logorrhoea (from Ancient Greek λόγος logos “word” and ῥέω rheo “to flow”) is a communication disorder that causes excessive wordiness and repetitiveness, which can cause incoherency. This disorder is also known as press speech. Logorrhea is sometimes classified as a mental illness, though it is more commonly classified as a symptom of mental illness or brain injury. This ailment is often reported as a symptom of Wernicke’s aphasia, where damage to the language processing center of the brain creates difficulty in self-centered speech. [Wikipedia]

This one came from a reader:

Here’s a word of the day for you, Hue. A writer applied this to the crazed critics of Bill Gates who accused him of implanting microchips, etc.: logorrheic

“He also became a target of the plague of misinformation afoot in the land, as logorrheic critics accused him of planning to inject microchips in vaccine recipients.”

Funny. I was just reading a Scientific American article on the topic of science vs clashing world views:

In theory, resolving factual disputes should be relatively easy: Just present strong evidence, or evidence of a strong expert consensus. This approach succeeds most of the time, when the issue is, say, the atomic weight of hydrogen.

But things don’t work that way when scientific advice presents a picture that threatens someone’s perceived interests or ideological worldview. In practice, it turns out that one’s political, religious or ethnic identity quite effectively predicts one’s willingness to accept expertise on any given politicized issue.

“Motivated reasoning” is what social scientists call the process of deciding what evidence to accept based on the conclusion one prefers. As I explain in my book, “The Truth About Denial,” this very human tendency applies to all kinds of facts about the physical world, economic history and current events. – Adrian Bardon

Another piece of literature on people who bank on reality not having its vengeance on them. Personally, I try to avoid reality vengeance, as it tends to shorten lifetimes and makes me cranky,

(h/t CJ)

NGC 2027 – the Jewel Bug nebula:

Credit: NASA/ESA/J. Kastner (RIT)

The object had been slowly puffing away its mass in quiet, spherically symmetric or perhaps spiral patterns for centuries — until relatively recently when it produced a new cloverleaf pattern.

New observations of the object have found unprecedented levels of complexity and rapid changes in the jets and gas bubbles blasting off of the star at the centre of the nebula.

It looks like a cartoon!

Just a couple of apples on this off-year – but begonias!

I don’t think you’ll find that word in the Scrabble dictionary.

It’s been weeks since we watched Fast Color (2018), and I’m still not sure what to make of it, outside of the obvious fact that it’s marvelously well acted. Ruth is a young black woman, traveling through the American West in a world plagued with drought. She’s headed for her family’s ancestral home, where her mother, Bo, and daughter, Lila, live. But she has a problem she cannot control: seizures. When they happen, she ties herself down, and then the earth moves for her.

Literally.

The government is searching for her, because power worries the powerful, but Ruth is resourceful. We reach her family’s farm with her, and discover that Bo and Lila each have powers of their own, but they control their’s – Ruth cannot control her’s. Pressure builds on Ruth, aware that the government is moving in on her and her family from one side, and her own family is pushing her as well – and, all the while, the lack of water is yet another force in her life, a dearth that may motivate the violence which accompanies the existentially threatened, especially when some are different from others. What will these raw forces pull out of Ruth, whose own restless nature wishes to follow its own course?

While some might call this a superhero movie, it’s not. Such stories have good guys and bad guys, and it’s not clear there are any bad guys here. It’s more of a meditation on the clash between mature judgment and the urges concomitant with being outcasts and different. It takes its time to build characters and advance lines of thought, but organically within the plot and world it’s building.

And it’s good.

Recommended.

Heather Cox Richardson on the activities of new Postmaster General DeJoy:

The Friday night news dump was about the United States Postal Service. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a Trump loyalist, has recently created new rules for the agency that have dramatically slowed the delivery of mail just as mail-in voting for 2020 has begun. Today, DeJoy overhauled the USPS, releasing a new organizational chart that displaces postal executives with decades of experience and concentrates power in DeJoy himself. Twenty-three executives have been reassigned or fired; five have been moved in from other roles. The seven regions of the nation will become four, and the USPS will have a hiring freeze. DeJoy says the new organization will create “clear lines of authority and accountability.”

There is reason to be suspicious of DeJoy’s motives. Not only have his new regulations slowed mail delivery, but also under him the USPS has told states that ballots will have to carry first-class 55-cent postage rather than the normal 20-cent bulk rate, almost tripling the cost of mailing ballots. This seems to speak to Trump’s wish to make mail-in ballots problematic for states. And DeJoy and his wife, Aldona Wos, whom Trump has nominated to become ambassador to Canada, own between $30.1 million and $75.3 million of assets in competitors to the USPS. This seems to speak to the report issued by the Trump administration shortly after the president took office, calling for the privatization of the USPS.

Yesterday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called out the policies that slowed the delivery of essential mail, “including medicines for seniors, paychecks for workers, and absentee ballots for voters.” They called for DeJoy’s recent changes to be reversed.

How this isn’t a conflict of interest, I don’t know. There are some notable points.

• Popularity. The USPS is not an unpopular institution. In fact, according to Gallup, as of about a year ago, USPS was the most popular Federal agency.
• Anti-democratic. Given its popularity, this approach – underhanded, if you need an appropriate adjective – to getting rid of USPS by replacing optimized processes and experienced personnel with sub-optimal processes and using political hacks like DeJoy in place of people who know their business, subverts the popular will, as well as betraying the legacy of the first Postmaster-General, Benjamin Franklin, who saw USPS not so much as a service, but as a national binder, a tie that related all of us to each other. By destroying it, Trump and DeJoy destroy another tendon holding this nation together. This is no way to run a government.
• Prices will rise. We’ve already seen price inflation from USPS. If USPS is completely subverted and destroyed, UPS, FedEx, and their competitors will have even less competition. Basic economic theory teaches that prices rise and fall for a particular product or service in relation to the number and intensity of competition, mitigated by collusive activities. Prices will rise and profits become further engorged – much to the benefit of stock holders like DeJoy and his wife. See the links to UPS and FedEx for information on profit growth in recent years.
• Endangerment. Seeing as many medicines are now delivered via USPS, citizens who cannot leave their abodes and, for whatever reason, are isolated from pharmacies, such as in rural areas, will now have their life-saving medicines delayed, as has already been documented. DeJoy should be arrested and criminally charged with malicious endangerment by one of the states. (I wonder what would happen if a Change.org petition calling for that action were to appear.)

I have little doubt that a Biden Administration, should that come to pass, would make rebuilding USPS a priority. But it shouldn’t be necessary; Trump should know better. The fact that he doesn’t is a measure of his dysfunctionality.

I hope Pelosi and Schumer can do more to stop this oaf.

NewScientist (5 August 2020, paywall) interviews post-doc mathematician Lisa Piccirillo, who solved the Conway knot question concerning slicing in a week, concerning why she became a mathematician, and what it takes:

The decision to go to graduate school was a difficult one. I still had this idea that I think a lot of people have, which is that the only way to be a successful mathematician is to be a genius, and I’m certainly not anything like that. So I thought: “Why bother? I’m never going to be that good.”

There’s a strong stereotype of what people who do maths are like – introverted, nerdy, probably male, probably dead – and I was none of those things. I was very worried that I would have to give up other aspects of myself to be a maths robot and I didn’t want to do that. I felt that tension very acutely in my undergraduate programme, but in graduate school, I learned that this tension isn’t real. Mathematicians are interesting humans and none of them are geniuses.

Oh, ouch. I’ll bet there were some hurt feelings over that one. But Piccirillo has her revenge on me just for writing this post:

NewScientist: What will you be working on next?

I’m still very interested in 4-manifolds and in using sliceness to understand them better. It’s also true that this trick I used for the Conway knot doesn’t work on some other, more complicated knots. The reason is because it isn’t always possible to build a trace – sometimes it’s provably impossible or we just don’t know how to do it.

I’m trying to understand how to apply this type of argument more broadly to sliceness problems. More concretely, it turns out that sometimes, for some special knots, I can go home and build you another knot that shows a trace, but a computer can’t. Why not? It’s because we don’t know the rules of how we do it ourselves. If the maths gods hand me a knot and ask me to build a trace, I may get lucky, but I don’t know if I could tell you how I got there. And I’d like to understand why.

Concerning a trace: All knots have something called a trace, which is the manifold you can build from that knot. And a manifold?

In mathematics, a manifold is a topological space that locally resembles Euclidean space near each point. More precisely, an n-dimensional manifold, or n-manifold for short, is a topological space with the property that each point has a neighborhood that is homeomorphic to the Euclidean space of dimension n. [Wikipedia]

OK, that’s just a digression. My actual interest is in her statement … If the maths gods hand me a knot and ask me to build a trace, I may get lucky, but I don’t know if I could tell you how I got there. That just leaves me hanging, being a software engineer and all. She doesn’t know how? What? Then how does she know the trace properly derives from the knot? Given a trace, is there a trapdoor function that reveals the knot to which it corresponds?

Augh!

If I were Governor Ron DeSantis (R-FL), I wouldn’t be betting on being reelected:

As Gov. Ron DeSantis pushed this summer for schools to reopen, state leaders told school boards they would need Health Department approval if they wanted to keep classrooms closed.

Then they instructed health directors not to give it.

Following a directive from DeSantis’ administration, county health directors across Florida refused to give school boards advice about one of the most wrenching public health decisions in modern history: whether to reopen schools in a worsening pandemic, a Gannett USA TODAY NETWORK review found.

In county after county the health directors’ refrain to school leaders was the same: Their role was to provide information, not recommendations. [Palm Beach Post]

Yeah, you think voters whose kids are being put at risk, along with those same voters when those kids bring the virus home with them, will vote for DeSantis?

Yeah, me neither.

Look: as I noted just a little while ago, Governor DeSantis won his position by basically sewing himself to President Trump. When he entered the race in 2018, no one gave him a chance, but he got himself on Fox News repeatedly, and thus in front of avid Fox News viewer President Trump, and made happy noises about the President, enough that he received the Presidential endorsement – and the Florida voters, by a bare .4% points, made him Governor.

Now, for a politician, disasters are a curse and an opportunity. Display wise leadership, pick the right people to solve the problem, and you’re golden. Suddenly, people talk about your national prospects.

Drop the ball, and your political career comes to an end.

DeSantis, in his frantic attempts to remain a Trump favorite, followed orders from the White House and tried to reopen early. There are rumors that numbers have been suppressed and manipulated even beforehand, and Rebekah Jones, GIS Analyst manager for the State of Florida, was fired – she claims for refusing to participate in the manipulations. She has since set up her own coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak. Lauded early on for numbers that looked far too good, Florida has since ascended to the top of the list of states for infection rates, a sad achievement. Currently, according to Global Epidemics, it sits in the fourth place. If you trust their numbers.

Interestingly enough, DeSantis’ behavior may not only end his own political career – sycophants rarely make good leaders – but he may be helping end the career of President Trump, who, after all, despite his attempts to disclaim responsibility, carries the ultimate responsibility for the response to Covid-19. The Biden Campaign will use the disaster in Florida, including DeSantis’ dishonest and dangerous attempt to manipulate the schools into looking normal, as another charge of incompetency and even dementia against Trump.

And It Should Stick. Because it’s true. DeSantis’ ties to Trump are not a secret.

Trump’s base won’t care, they’ve had their victimhood thoroughly instilled, and Trump keeps playing to it. But independents will care, especially those with kids.

Especially suburban moms who are seeing their kids being forced to go into danger, and then coming home and exposing mom and dad.

DeSantis’ next election is 2022. He may not even run, if he’s smart. But he doesn’t appear to be smart.