Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Treehugger’s Lloyd Alter comments on Uber’s latest venture – shredding e-bikes:

One of my co-workers asked for some advice on buying an e-bike; I suggested a few brands and she checked them out, only to find that it would take months to get delivery. Finally, she found one that she could get in six weeks. Everywhere in North America, there is a shortage of bikes and e-bikes because of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, as you can see in this Twitter video, Uber is shredding about 20,000 Jump e-bikes. This is after Uber gave up on Jump and sold it to Lime, the scooter company. …

Uber says they only kept the old models and had no choice but to scrap them.

We explored donating the remaining, older-model bikes, but given many significant issues—including maintenance, liability, safety concerns, and a lack of consumer-grade charging equipment—we decided the best approach was to responsibly recycle them.

After exploring and disputing the question of whether those older models were truly a burden, Alter goes for the sordid truth:

Apparently, it is all about killing Jump, “destroying every bike they can, and slowly taking Lime down in the process.” Kurt of Bikeshare Museum describes what we have been saying about Uber forever:

We also can’t emphasize enough how disgusting it is for UBER to scrap 20,000 bicycles in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic where bicycles have literally become an object of survival. Heavy as they are, these could be transportation for the many who have been brought to financial ruin during COVID-19.

… But Uber has become so adept at screwing people and burning through billions of their investor’s money that they probably didn’t give a moment’s thought to doing the right, sustainable or even possibly profitable thing by selling or donating the bikes.

I’ve never used Uber, and I’ve been dismayed by stories of personal danger for both passengers and drivers in the Uber service. While it started out to better utilize vehicle transportation while keeping prices low, it appears to have morphed into a corporation which believes it can create markets by destroying environmentally better modes of transportation.

I’m unlikely to ever use Uber.

Add more -es if it makes you happy in these stressful times.

A couple of drops of water on the petals would have been nice.

Gypsy cop:

Roberta X reports on the combined behavior of protesters and law enforcement:

     The Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Force mobilized.  They showed up in full battle-rattle, helmets with face shields, armor, gloves, and armed with every modern crowd-control tool, from batons to tear gas along with their normal sidearms.  They formed a deep line across Meridian and when the marchers neared the Governor’s residence at 8:30, the police stopped the marchers cold.

IMPD ordered them to disperse within the next ten minutes.  The marchers stood fast and chanted slogans.  There was some yelling back and forth.  The police were much better armed — and enormously outnumbered.

It looked bad.  Someone — a lot of someones — was going to get hurt.

Deputy Mayor Dr. David Hampton, a man I had never heard of before today, stepped in as a negotiator.  What did the marchers actually want?  There was a brief huddle between the Deputy Mayor, high-ranking police officers, and the people at the forefront of the marchers.

And then something happened.  I’m not sure who started it, but the chanting changed, coalescing on on slogan, over and over, spreading through the crowd:

“Walk with us!  Walk with us!”

The huddle of police and marchers dissolved into fist-bumps and shoulder slaps; the line of contact between police and marchers broke out in handshakes and even hugs, social distancing notwithstanding.*  You could see the strain easing in expressions and postures.  The police were still wary and the marchers were still upset, but they appeared to be seeing one another as people instead of symbols or threats.

White supremacists or antifa, this must be disappointing for those entities hoping for more fighting and alienation between law enforcement and protesters. This is, in fact, how adults resolve matters – negotiation, good will, acknowledgement of each others’ requirements and working towards a mutually acceptable solution.

Not absolutist, I get it all – you get nothing negotiating tactics.

Like Flint, Michigan, Indianapolis is leading the way out of this morass. Sober, inclusive leadership will be far better for us than the hysterics we’re seeing on the right. Enough of fear, enough of faux-outrage. Similarly, if Congress refuses to help lead the way out of our economic and health mess, it’ll be more than time to replace McConnell and his supporters in the House and Senate in November – replaced with non-ideological problem-solvers.

Relax, for a moment in these troubled times, with an orange azalea that’s not quite … orange:

Governor Charlie Baker (R-MA):

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker on Monday excoriated President Donald Trump’s “bitterness, combativeness and self-interest” as nationwide protests have intensified over the death of George Floyd.

The Republican governor made the comments at a press conference when asked about Trump’s video teleconference call, in which the President urged state leaders to aggressively target violent protesters. The call came after nearly a week of protests across the country that at times have turned violent over the death of Floyd, a 46-year-old African American man who died at the hands of a police officer in Minneapolis.

I heard what the President said today about dominating and fighting. I know I should be surprised when I hear incendiary words like this from him, but I’m not,” Baker told reporters. “At so many times during these past several weeks when the country needed compassion and leadership the most, it was simply nowhere to be found.”

Instead, he continued, “we got bitterness, combativeness and self-interest. That’s not what we need in Boston, it’s not what we need right now in Massachusetts and it’s definitely not what we need across this great country of ours either.” [CNN]

Not that Baker is a lickspittle Trump cultist, but he is a Republican occupying an elective seat. Add in earlier criticisms from Romney, Walsh, Hogan, and Weld, and it is significant that Republicans are willing to criticize their Leader.

What will Trump do when calls for his resignation start coming from Republicans?

Daniel Byman comments on Lawfare about Accelerationism, the strategy behind at least some of the violence we’ve seen over the last week:

Accelerationism is the idea that white supremacists should try to increase civil disorder—accelerate it—in order to foster polarization that will tear apart the current political order. The System (usually capitalized), they believe, has only a finite number of collaborators and lackeys to prop it up. Accelerationists hope to set off a series of chain reactions, with violence fomenting violence, and in the ensuing cycle more and more people join the fray. When confronted with extremes, so the theory goes, those in the middle will be forced off the fence and go to the side of the white supremacists. If violence can be increased sufficiently, the System will run out of lackeys and collapse, and the race war will commence.

Although the white supremacist embrace of acceleration is relatively recent, capitalizing on, or even creating, polarization is not a new strategy. Those who call for violence to create political change, regardless of ideology, are more likely to thrive when the traditional political system is not working, and such people often try to use bloodshed to further the perception that the system is broken. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, for example, right-wing (but not white supremacist) terrorists conducted dozens of attacks in Italy, several quite bloody, to sow fear and panic. In December 1969, a series of bombings shook Italy, including one on the Banca Nazionale dell’Agricoltura (National Agricultural Bank) that killed 17 people. Neo-fascists sought to discredit their rival left-wingers with “false flag” attacks and make the government seem powerless. Their hope was that as order collapsed, the people would demand an end to the chaos and thus support an authoritarian regime. This backfired. It soon became clear that the right had orchestrated many of the bombings and that some authorities were complicit. Public order indeed suffered, and Italians became even more skeptical of traditional political parties. Communist and socialist parties stepped into the void far more effectively than did authoritarian groups. Today’s white supremacists may find that the unrest helps their enemies on the far-left or African American organizations rather than leads to a broader public embrace of their cause.

In addition to the possibility that the “wrong” side might win from acceleration, it’s also important to note that accelerationism is an admission of weakness, no matter how frightening the concept. Its proponents are recognizing that, on their own, they cannot foment the revolution they seek or use the system to achieve their ends. Nor are they able to use the political system to achieve their ends, as leaders of the alt-right would endorse. Instead, they must latch on to existing societal problems and try to shape and exploit them.

For me, it’s a graphic lesson in the methods of the racists, should they grab control: violence for all those they dislike, starting with those who are much unlike them – at least physically – and then, as time passes and so literally illustrated by the intra-GOP warfare tactic of RINOing^[1], the steady reduction in the size of the group that is considered protected by the strength of the party as more and more members are found to be impure. At some point, it’s either kiss the ass of the leader in a daily exotic public ceremony, or out you go. Possibly in a body bag.

For the person who is undecided or, worse, is cheering the supremacists on, this is the argument I’d hand them. Let them chew on that. Ask them just how much ass-kissing they’d do – with a gun to their, for those full of bravado.

But also of interest is that Byman, writing on what I generally take to be a non-partisan platform, although the occasional anti-Trump article is not unknown, is assuming – perhaps on good authority – that white supremacist groups are behind these atrocities. This is not true on the right. Erick Erickson, far-right pundit and former editor of the now-dead RedState, has seen fit to send another missive to people on his mail list who aren’t paying for his thoughts:

It was overwhelmingly progressive white twenty-somethings doing the damage across America these past few days. They hijacked the peaceful protests of black America seeking justice and led marauding gangs out to vandalize, pillage, and destroy.

That should tell us all something about race and justice in America. There were certainly black Americans engaged in the destruction, but in city after city it was mostly young white men picking up the first bricks and lighting the first fires.

Ponder that for just a minute with me. Let’s ignore, for a minute, the false claims that these are white supremacist Trump supporters. They weren’t. They were mostly the black clad thugs of Antifa and a bunch of teen and twenty-somethings who’ve been cooped up and unemployed for a few months. But just ponder this with me. [mass emailing]

And his evidence that this is mainly driven by the Antifa – they’re wearing black! OMG! Well, that’s all he has.

I’ve been telling my Arts Editor over the last few days that virtually all the information we’re getting must be considered tentative until confirmed at a later date, when malicious rumors as well as innocent misunderstandings can be shown to be false. History has conclusively shown that a huge percentage of information gained in the midst of a conflict is either false or critically incomplete. I do not wish to alienate people I or my Arts Editor know who’ve actually seen what appeared to be white supremacists setting fires, or were attacked by white men with crowbars, but until these individuals are positively identified, apprehended, and investigated for their links to radical groups, there will be a voice in the back of my head saying, But how can we be sure? And acting on inaccurate information is more likely to

So Erickson is committing an error in pursuit of pushing his agenda, which happens to be bringing everyone to Jesus. He appears to have conveniently forgotten that Jesus was a radical reformer himself, who inflicted violence on the money changers, and frightened the Romans enough that they crucified him.

If, indeed, he ever existed.

And, for what little it’s worth, noises about Antifa involvement have only made their way into my awareness from the right. There’s no mention on the local news, among any of my contacts, indeed anything at all beyond Trump and his ineffective apologist, Erickson. Anarchists have had a little mention, but not much: Antifa is sometimes considered to be allied with the anarchists, and so I mention it.

Again, maybe the trustworthy investigative authorities will find Antifa involvement, and then we’ll have to deal with it. But right now we only know things like this:

The U.S. Attorney’s office has charged Galesburg, Illinois resident Matthew Lee Rupert, 28, with causing civil disorder, a riot and possessing unregistered explosive devices in an effort to stoke chaos Friday night during protests for George Floyd in Minneapolis.

The criminal complaint says Rupert posted to Facebook Friday, saying, “I’m going to Minneapolis tomorrow who coming only goons I’m renting hotel rooms.” Then Saturday, he posted a cellphone video of himself in Minneapolis, giving out explosive devices to people and pushing for others to throw the explosives at law enforcement. He is also shown in the video damaging property, and engaging in arson and looting businesses.

“They’ve got SWAT trucks up there … I’ve got some bombs if you all want to throw them back,” Rupert said in the video. “Bomb them back … here I got some more … light it up and throw it.”

He is also seen in the video asking people for lighter fluid before he enters a Sprint store.

“I lit it on fire,” Rupert says in the video, before going into an Office Depot and looting merchandise. [WCCO]

Hopefully, information on his background and connections will be discovered, verified, and made public quickly. Right now, all we know is he’s from Chicago, and … probably isn’t too bright.

¹ In case you’re not up on Republican warfare acronyms, it stands for Republican In Name Only, and is used to mark those who, in the user’s opinion, should be ejected from the Republican Party for not being conservative enough.

I’ve opined on an occasion or three that, eventually, the Republican Party will consist of three members, two on probation, due to the unrestrained RINO rampaging through their ranks.

In Kansas, one of the two candidates that the Kansas GOP had been urging to drop out in order to more effectively coalesce opposition to former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach (R-KS) around Rep Roger Marshall (R-KS) has, in fact, dropped out:

Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle said Thursday that she will not run for the U.S. Senate, citing “personal and political trials” in the last year for her decision.

Wagle announcement also indicated that she would not seek reelection to the Kansas Senate. The filing deadline is Monday.

The decision leaves U.S. Rep. Roger Marshall and former Secretary of State Kris Kobach as the primary candidates for the GOP nomination for the seat. [Kansas City Star]

Overland Park Republican Dave Lindstrom is still vying in the Republican primary. However, I think Rep. Marshall (R-KS) must be considered the favorite for the nomination, unless Kobach moderates some of his positions.

And I say that as a former young-stupid-man myself. Oh, you want to know who I’m answering?

Former President Barack Obama in an important FB posting sharing his knowledge of how governmental mechanisms work, which, the younger you are, the more important it is to your future to read. But here’s where I wonder if he’s forgotten his own youth:

It’s mayors and county executives that appoint most police chiefs and negotiate collective bargaining agreements with police unions. It’s district attorneys and state’s attorneys that decide whether or not to investigate and ultimately charge those involved in police misconduct. Those are all elected positions. In some places, police review boards with the power to monitor police conduct are elected as well. Unfortunately, voter turnout in these local races is usually pitifully low, especially among young people – which makes no sense given the direct impact these offices have on social justice issues, not to mention the fact that who wins and who loses those seats is often determined by just a few thousand, or even a few hundred, votes.

Young people – let’s say up their late twenties – haven’t got their brains fully wired, yet. Simple neurological fact. So expecting them to think about the obscure nuances of governmental mechanism, irrespective of race or class, is in many cases foolish.

This is not to say that the case is lost for young folks. There are several common approaches to rectifying the problem of the youth being non-voters, all leaning on utilizing groups the young should be respecting – parental organizations, church organizations, heritage organizations. I do not believe they should instruct how to vote, i.e., give a name, but rather they should emphasize how the governmental mechanisms work for the locality. For example, if there is a Police Review Board with some actual authority, this should be emphasized as to how the Board can, over time, ferret out the bad cops, and therefore those who the youth vote for should be chosen for their anti-racism views, although of course competency, anti-corruption, and other elements come into play.

But – having been a young, stupid person once myself – I think education and social pressure is a necessary part of reforming law enforcement. If this is a voting matter, grab the young by the ears, tell them how it works, instill that sense of shared responsibility and reasonable expectations – and yell at them if they say they’ve got better things to do.

Anyone remember the old movie Dave (1993)? It’s about a guy who runs a temporary employment agency, and does official impersonations of the US President on the side. One of the characters is Duane Stevenson, a Secret Service agent assigned to the President, who, as it happens, is a philandering, power-mad fool. Stevenson, although discrete, makes it clear that he has no respect for this President; when the President suffers a stroke and Dave takes over temporarily, and far more honorably, Stevenson’s change from contempt for Dave, who initially goes along with the loathesome scheming of an associate of the President, to respect as Dave diverges from the script is a guide for the audience.

I couldn’t help but think that we’re direly unlucky in that, in real life, we’ll not be making that transition from contempt to respect with our current President, as I read Steve Benen’s remarks about the typically absolutely silent Secret Service actually having to issue multiple statements to refute the communications of their client, the President:

But as part of the same Saturday morning Twitter thread, Trump kept going, claiming that “many” Secret Service agent were “just waiting for action.” Quoting an unnamed person, who may or may not exist, the president added, “We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and good practice.”

Trump went on to say that Muriel Bowser, the mayor of the District of Columbia, “wouldn’t let” local police respond to the unrest near the White House.

It was about four hours later when the Secret Service issued a press release saying largely the opposite.

“The Metropolitan Police Department and the U.S. Park Police were on the scene.”

As for assertions that agents were eager for a violent confrontation with protestors, the Secret Service’s official statement seemed to dismiss this, too.

“Some of the demonstrators were violent, assaulting Secret Service Officers and Special Agents with bricks, rocks, bottles, fireworks, and other items. Multiple Secret Service Uniformed Division Officers and Special Agents sustained injuries from this violence. The Secret Service respects the right to assemble, and we ask that individuals do so peacefully for the safety of all.”

I don’t know, but I suspect such remarks are unprecedented, and whether they truly reflect the Secret Service’s opinion of the President or not, I read their very existence as an attempt to disassociate themselves from the communications of a profoundly dishonorable man.

And it’s quite striking. While I don’t expect to hear much more from the Secret Service, much less some anti-Trump statement, it’s worth keeping this in mind: The Secret Service is certainly going to have eyes on some of the worst behaviors of the President. How this plays out could be quite interesting.

I don’t know if this is irrelevant or a great lesson in policing, but I thought it was beautiful:

A Michigan sheriff joined protesters in Flint Township on Saturday, putting down his weapon and saying, “I want to make this a parade, not a protest.”

Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson spoke with demonstrators who were met by police officers in riot gear, local affiliate WEYI reported.

“The only reason we’re here is to make sure that you got a voice — that’s it,” Swanson said in video clips shown on Twitter.

“These cops love you — that cop over there hugs people,” he said, pointing to an officer.

He was speaking to the crowd protesting police brutality and the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

He smiled and high-fived people in the crowd, who responded by chanting, “walk with us!”

So, he did.

“Let’s go, let’s go,” Swanson said as he and the cheering crowd proceeded. “Where do you want to walk? We’ll walk all night.” [CNN]

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times in northwest Iowa, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2017 for editorial writing. It’s about 80 miles east of Sioux City, which I’ve visited often, last in 2016. For WaPo he sums up the situation in his home town, where a JBS meat-packing plant ran for weeks without protective gear or Covid-19 testing, and – my focus – as well as the multistate region:

Vasculotropic:

1. That is attracted to blood vessels [Wiktionary]

Noted in “Coronavirus May Be a Blood Vessel Disease, Which Explains Everything,” Dana G Smith, Medium:

“All these Covid-associated complications were a mystery. We see blood clotting, we see kidney damage, we see inflammation of the heart, we see stroke, we see encephalitis [swelling of the brain],” says William Li, MD, president of the Angiogenesis Foundation. “A whole myriad of seemingly unconnected phenomena that you do not normally see with SARS or H1N1 or, frankly, most infectious diseases.”

“If you start to put all of the data together that’s emerging, it turns out that this virus is probably a vasculotropic virus, meaning that it affects the [blood vessels],” says Mandeep Mehra, MD, medical director of the Brigham and Women’s Hospital Heart and Vascular Center.

I’d forgotten about this little incident of an appalling nature:

So President Trump has accused the WHO of being slow to respond to the coronavirus, and dominated by the Chinese. The first is debatable and is quite possibly yet another Trumpian projection of his own failings, while the second is silly. But let’s stipulate that the WHO didn’t perform up to standard.

Does walking away from the WHO make sense?

Is this what a supposedly competent businessman would do? Throw away the tool because it didn’t quite work as well as intended, and replace it with nothing? Especially when faced with health threats that do not respect international borders?

No. Enhancement and reformation is far more sensible, especially for an organization which, until now, has not seen any criticism worth noting; in fact, given President Trump’s consistent strategy of distracting public attention from his own failings, the independent observer must wonder if Trump is merely selling a fantasy – keeping in mind that’s what he did in his hit TV show The Apprentice – in order to keep his base stirred up emotionally.

My conservative friends, if you voted for the “successful businessman” to shake up Washington, well, he’s turning out to be vastly incompetent at running government. There is no doubt about that. From failing to pass effective legislation when Congress was held by his Republican allies^[1], to the utter lack of leadership that is arguably contributing to the tragic rioting across the nation today, President Trump is working hard at being the worst Chief Executive this nation has seen.

You still think we should leave the WHO? Well, we’ve seen what the amateur President has managed to do to this nation; it’s time to ask experts. Public health researcher and surgeon Atul Gawande and former UN Ambassador and National Security Advisor Susan Rice:

Unspeakably stupid and self-defeating https://t.co/R3Fbiq5GeL

— Susan Rice (@AmbassadorRice) May 29, 2020

Indeed, I suspect anyone in the public health and epidemiology sectors are aghast. Public health researcher Howard Koh, M.D., of Yale and former Assistant Secretary for Health:

This decision is really so short-sighted and ill-advised, and all it does is put American lives at risk. [NPR]

Defense technology journalist Kelsey D. Atherton:

“[M]aybe the weirdest thing about the right’s strategy of quitting international institutions is they were built, expressly, to give the United States an outsized role in shaping and directing the post-1945 international order, but they can only do that so long as the US stays in.”

It’s a polite way of saying that America is in the process of an immense neutering.

In fact, I’d like journalists at the next press conference ask President Trump why he’s neutering the nation.

Senator Lamar Alexander (R-TN):

I disagree with the president’s decision. Withdrawing U.S. membership could, among other things, interfere with clinical trials that are essential to the development of vaccines, which citizens of the United States as well as others in the world need. And withdrawing could make it harder to work with other countries to stop viruses before they get to the United States.

At the same link I used for the Senator are a number of other such opinions from experts and political leaders, condemning this decision.

I’ll not burden my reader by quoting them, though, but, frankly, given the weight of opinion, it’s becoming more and more clear that, whoever President Trump was, he is now incompetent. To my conservative friends, do you really want to blot your honor by voting for such a man? Whether he’s mentally ill, malicious, or merely poorly advised, does it make sense to politically ally yourself with such plain and obviously flawed judgment?

¹ No, the tax reformation act of 2017 was not effective, as it never came close to equaling the benefits touted by then-Speaker Ryan (R-WI), et al, and in fact had no long-term benefit to the economy at all. If you disagree, go do the research and find a third party assessment that shows the economy boosted. And, while you’re at it, explain why the monstrous annual deficits caused by that legislation are good for the nation.

A Target Corporation news release:

We are a community in pain. That pain is not unique to the Twin Cities—it extends across America. The murder of George Floyd has unleashed the pent-up pain of years, as have the killings of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor. We say their names and hold a too-long list of others in our hearts. As a Target team, we’ve huddled, we’ve consoled, we’ve witnessed horrific scenes similar to what’s playing out now and wept that not enough is changing. And as a team we’ve vowed to face pain with purpose.

Every day, our team wakes up ready to help all families—and on the hardest days we cling even more dearly to that purpose. As I write this, our merchant and distribution teams are preparing truckloads of first aid equipment and medicine, bottled water, baby formula, diapers and other essentials, to help ensure that no one within the areas of heaviest damage and demonstration is cut off from needed supplies.

[My bold.]

I’ve noticed over the years that the news reports from time to time how Target dedicates some X% (I forget just what – 10%?) of their profits to local charities, and at least portions of the company founder Dayton family have been very socially active (and others not so much, of course). Between having the supply chain to pull this off and some sort of social conscience (I am always a bit suspicious of corporate social conscious/conscienceness, but let’s go with it here), they may come out of this an even more solid corporate citizen than before.

I wonder if Wal-Mart is doing anything similar.

Former Congressman, co-host of Morning Joe, and former Republican Joe Scarborough, currently the target of President Trump’s personal rumor mill in the form of a baseless murder accusation, claims to have no clue for the big circle on his back in this editorial defending himself and shaming President Trump:

It can be confusing talking to experts and specialists, because they have developed and employ a specialist vocabulary in order to be able to communicate with each other in a precise and compact manner. Unfortunately, amateurs and bad ‘experts’ – people of low quality, basically, who nevertheless have attained some position of respect in their field – can also employ jargon, and while experts in that domain of expertise will come to understand that these people are fakers fairly quickly, those of us who are not experts can often find the jargon impenetrable enough that we can’t assess the particular people using the jargon with any confidence.

But jargon must be precise and accurate, and I think we can designate Kevin Hassett as an amateur based on this recent pronouncement of his:

Senior White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett said on Sunday that America’s “human capital stock” is ready to get back work as the country takes steps toward reopening.

On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, Hassett discussed future unemployment and America’s readiness to lift measures put in place to tackle the coronavirus spread.

“Our capital stock hasn’t been destroyed. Our human capital stock is ready to get back to work, and so there are lots of reasons to believe that we can get going way faster than we have in previous crises,” Hassett said. [BusinessInsider]

This rhetorical blunder has caused consternation and outrage for its callousness from many people (see my initial source on The Daily Kos if you need a ration of mostly liberal, highly justified outrage), but I’d like to draw attention to the scholarly academic implications of Human capital stock.

Human, in this context, is a modifier indicating the domain to which this description applies.

Capital refers to a resource.

Stock? A fungible (i.e., no individual identities) collection of units.

Getting by the dehumanization of the work force that is so implied (another step beyond Human Resources, for those few of us who still remember that Human Resources used to be Personnel), this abstraction of the work force is inaccurate. Why?

Resources are passive in the usual sense, such as mineral resources.

And human stock is not, like cattle, best characterized by a single, dominant attribute (“nutritious”). It is not, in a word, fungible. Humans have a diverse set of talents, skills, willingness to work, need to work, intelligence, motivations, and many other attributes which render them – ME! – a creature which must be regarded not with care, not with a measuring stick, but with … RESPECT.

But Human capital stock has a real expert ring to it, now doesn’t it? The psychology behind its use centers on the user. Because it’s an unusual phrase, it marks the user as an expert, as someone Who Has Studied the Subject. Or so they’d like you to think. Respect the dude, eh?

But, as we’ve seen, it’s a profoundly inaccurate bit of jargon to use. If it’s rampant in economic circles, it should be expunged after various and horrible rituals. I mean, as an engineer, I can go to enormous lengths to be accurate, even in something as trivial as a variable name.

And, I’ll tell you, Mr. Hassett’s phrase really caught my attention as a big ol’ red flag that this guy shouldn’t be trusted in matters economic. It’s horrendously inaccurate description of the work force is gob-smacking. And he’s exhibiting the behavioral characteristics that are congruent with just about all Trump advisors and appointees – second- and third- raters who long for respect that they never seem to get.

Much like their boss.

So, when you see Mr. Hassett pounding the lectern and trying to be profound, listen with a lot of skepticism.

I see President Trump is trying to keep the bonds of truth off his arms:

President Donald Trump signed an executive order targeting social media companies on Thursday, days after Twitter called two of his tweets “potentially misleading.”

Speaking from the Oval Office ahead of signing the order, Trump said the move was to “defend free speech from one of the gravest dangers it has faced in American history.”

“A small handful of social media monopolies controls a vast portion of all public and private communications in the United States,” he claimed. “They’ve had unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter, virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences.” [CNN]

Because, heavens to betsy, the Republic might fall if he is forced to tell the truth.

So what sort of authority might he have?

The executive order tests the boundaries of the White House’s authority. In a long-shot legal bid, it seeks to curtail the power of large social media platforms by reinterpreting a critical 1996 law that shields websites and tech companies from lawsuits. But legal experts on both the right and the left have raised serious concerns about the proposal. They say it may be unconstitutional because it risks infringing on the First Amendment rights of private companies and because it attempts to circumvent the two other branches of government.

Is Twitter a conveyance of free speech, or the originator?

That’s the superfluous legal issue. The more important societal issue is how to deal with a congenital liar and cheat, who happens to hold arguably the most important elected government post, and has discovered, in Twitter, a fire hose for communicating with the public, compared to the old style pea-shooters, aka newspapers and televisions, that were in use before.

Not that they guaranteed truth, either, but their relatively limited reach and the presence of their gatekeepers (editors) made them more or less dependable; indeed, that “more or less” made for hours of vigorous debate for a couple of hundred years in those parts of the country affluent enough to support competing outlets.

In the Internet era, the fading of the importance of geography has erased questions of affluence; the old outlets have been fading, with a few newspaper exceptions such as The New York Times and WaPo, and the television outlets have seen some renaissance of late as well. But the social media platforms remain dominant, because they effectively have no gatekeepers; their feeble efforts are often mis-aimed (my Facebook account was recently disabled for no given reason, and then re-enabled) and appear to be entirely reactive. An editor at a newspaper gets to read contributions before they’re published; critically untrue at social media platforms.

Because there are no natural boundaries to the gaming field, it becomes the entire world, and it’s zero-sum because it’s not just a publishing platform, but also a communications platform – for nearly anyone. Judging a platform on its truthfulness is nearly useless, as it’s unable to control what is said – but because it’s the carrier and barrier of last resort, it becomes responsible.

So I suppose that’s a lot of blather just to get to my favorite quote coming out of this dustup, from a CNN article yesterday:

David Vladeck, a Georgetown University law professor and former top FTC consumer protection official, said any government push to restrict how private platforms moderate their websites could raise First Amendment questions.

“This is just another example of Trump thinking that the Constitution makes him a king, but it doesn’t,” he said.

What are these pictures of?

Maybe Mars from 100 million years ago?

I’ve only scuba-dived a little, but I know enough to know that stirred up silt can really make the experience frustrating. Similarly, business leaders prefer a clear vision of future conditions when trying to make plans for their firms. So this report caught my attention:

These make for a nice contrast.

Oooops! A cheeky stripenkatzen.

When I am debugging a program, especially when it’s someone else’s work and its substantial, I put a fair amount of time and effort into constructing a mental model of how the program works. It’s not exact, and quite often I’m looking for congruencies with models of how such tasks are accomplished in my experience.

Since this has met with a fair amount of success, I’ve tried to transfer the same approach to other situations, such as understanding how certain people’s brains work. In these situations, I’ve found it often helps to understand how each real person differs from a collection of iconic persons, to whom I’ve assigned certain attributes & values: an average value for truthfulness, a morality system that incorporates both traditional morality and a liking for prestige and prosperity, although for religious officials prosperity becomes less important, etc. All of this is idiosyncratic on my part; I have no idea how other people do these sorts of things.

The interesting part for me, though, came yesterday while reading Steve Benen’s latest conniption fit over President Trump:

Usually, when two politicians feud, at least one has the facts on their side. What’s amazing about the Trump-Sessions dispute is that they’re both wrong.

The president, for example, has repeatedly made it clear that he expected Sessions to be a partisan loyalist in the attorney general’s office, making Trump’s legal troubles go away whenever the president snapped his fingers. Indeed, he’s left little doubt that he believed it was Sessions’ job to interfere with the justice system on the president’s behalf.

In effect, Trump has spent years whining that Sessions wasn’t corrupt enough for his liking.

As Benen reminded me once again of the corruptive influences of President Trump, it finally became clear to me who President Trump most greatly resembles, if only in ambition:

The robber barons of the American 19th century.

Their overwhelming concerns were for personal prestige and wealth; they dedicated their lives to accumulating and building business empires. Conventional mores were for fools; laws were not boundaries for behavior, but obstacles to be neutralized in the pursuit of the envisioned empire. Such was Vanderbilt, JJ Hill, and those others.

This is a description of Trump right to the T.

And the robber barons didn’t come out of their era smelling of roses. Despite attempts to salvage reputations by descendants (think: Vanderbilt University), the robber barons are considered to have harmed society, even as they built and built. Carnegie may have built libraries, but coal miners died in his mines and in protests of his practices; the libraries were a late gesture of redemptive character. Other robber barons may not have done as much. They were cold, brutal men who cared for, at most, their own families. Perhaps this is overly generic; but it helps to keep in mind the general reputation of the robber barons.

And whether one such has any qualification for running a nation.

A conservative friend sent me an email with a link to a Forbes article from a few days back:

Another thing no one hears about.

Hi,

I thought you’d like this:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/gracemarieturner/2020/05/22/600-physicians-say-lockdowns-are-a-mass-casualty-incident/

600 Physicians Say Lockdowns Are A ‘Mass Casualty Incident’ – Forbes

From the article:

More than 600 of the nation’s physicians sent a letter to President Trump this week calling the coronavirus shutdowns a “mass casualty incident” with “exponentially growing negative health consequences” to millions of non COVID patients.

“The downstream health effects…are being massively under-estimated and under-reported. This is an order of magnitude error,” according to the letter initiated by Simone Gold, M.D., an emergency medicine specialist in Los Angeles.

“Suicide hotline phone calls have increased 600%,” the letter said. Other silent casualties: “150,000 Americans per month who would have had new cancer detected through routine screening.”

The response I began to write but decided to blog is this –

Oh, I’ve heard several variations on these arguments, actually.

But none of them are made by epidemiologists, but instead by just everyday doctors who don’t have relevant training or research experience.

So why pay attention to them?

Actually, there’s a very good reason: because they, by implication, condemn President Trump. He should be leading, which means communicating to us how to handle all these things. To tell people that when they are worried about a different health problem, go in and see your doctor. Just take precautions.

But has he?

Instead, we get these poor victims, and then we get all the idiots who decided Memorial Day weekend was for partying down, endangering themselves, their families, their colleagues and co-workers, and their friends. We get wicked lies about Trump’s rival, Joe Biden; ridiculous accusations that Morning Joe co-host Joe Scarborough, former Republican, former Republic member of Congress, murdered a junior aide; recommendations to take medications based on nothing more than a badly done study; musings on ingesting bleach; and threats against Michigan, Nevada, and North Carolina.

These are the actions of a President?

I think just about everyone, those who voted for him, those who voted against him, those who abstained from voting because of outrage at the candidates, even those who didn’t vote from simple political apathy, knew that it was going to be Amateur Hour at the White House when his Electoral College victory was confirmed, against the will of the popular vote. Those who voted against him feared what this could mean; those who voted for him hoped and even expected Trump and his people to grow into their jobs, learning day in and day out.

But now we know, don’t we? Now we know that it’s still Amateur Hour, that Trump never improved, that he was incapable of learning, of leading, of inspiration. And that it’s cost us lives, our morale, and our cohesion.

The Forbes columnist, Grace-Marie Turner, probably thought she had found a devastating critique of the approach we’re taking to a pandemic. She was wrong. Those 600 physicians, as much as they may believe they’re condemning a plan to slow the spread of the coronavirus, are actually silent accusers. By their actions, they accuse Trump of being a failure in an hour of great American – and world-wide – need. He should have been a partner to the epidemiologists, a guide translating their recommendations, a leader.

Instead, all he could do was think about reelection, and in the least effective, coarsest terms.

That group of physicians, whether they realize it or not, has condemned Trumpian leadership for the sheer fakery that is – or should be obvious – to all.