Ever think about just how much it costs to send visuals across the Internet? NewScientist (11 May 2019) has a report that startled me:

Huge amounts of energy are needed to power the servers and networks that let YouTube viewers watch more than one billion hours of video every day.

Based on estimates of the electric energy used to provide YouTube videos globally in 2016, a team at the University of Bristol calculated that the firm’s carbon footprint is around 10 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year, roughly the same as Luxembourg or Zimbabwe.

A single design change – letting users listen to audio on YouTube with an inactive screen – could reduce its carbon footprint by between 100 to 500 thousand tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year. This reduction is roughly equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of 30,000 UK homes.

I’m still surprised at the thought of measuring computer usage for its impact on climate change, but it’s certainly a valid consideration. Seeing that a lot of YouTube is is strictly for entertainment – and passive entertainment at that – it sort of speaks to how much local entertainment has been superseded by global entertainment.

Incidentally, I’ve been listening to Chic’s Good Times today in an attempt to chase Colbert’s theme song out of my head. I bought the LP back in the vinyl days, but never got the CD.

From NBC News comes surprising news:

Former national security adviser Michael Flynn told investigators that people linked to the Trump administration and Congress reached out to him in an effort to interfere in the Russia probe, according to newly unredacted court papers filed Thursday.

The court filing from special counsel Robert Mueller is believed to mark the first public acknowledgement that a person connected to Capitol Hill was suspected of engaging in an attempt to impede the investigation into Russian election interference.

“The defendant informed the government of multiple instances, both before and after his guilty plea, where either he or his attorneys received communications from persons connected to the Administration or Congress that could’ve affected both his willingness to cooperate and the completeness of that cooperation,” says the newly revealed section of a sentencing memo originally filed in December. …

Prosecutors did not identify any of the people who reached out to Flynn, but said the special counsel’s office was in some instances “unaware of the outreach until being alerted to it by the defendant.”

No other details were provided in the filing, but the Mueller report noted that President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer left a voicemail message for Flynn in late November 2017 that addressed the possibility of him cooperating with the government.

A fascinating development, as this would be interference.

But who, in Congress, is involved?

All the smart money will be on one or more GOP members, and an extremist; it would be extremely outré for the malefactor (for that’s the best descriptor of such a person) to be a Democrat, or linked to that side.

But the really interesting point is how this is engendering a feel of an evil spider in Washington, where the legs are made up of various elected officials, or at least their staff, while the body is in the White House, frantically holding off the enemies. It’s really beginning to paint the GOP as a corrupt, power hungry, unprincipled party, a collection point for second-raters and brittle ideological zealots.

Not that the Democrats don’t have a few of them as well.

But for precisely that reason, that unflattering picture of a party uninterested in the rules of a democratic society, we can expect this to be a long, drawn out process. Removing pus from a wound often will be. And the strategies of those who’ve created this organization of those who have a will-to-power have been organized, varied, and effective – as evidenced by the situation we find ourselves in. We may find some of them are beyond the reach of the law.

And the deciders, to borrow President Bush’s unfortunate choice of word, is not a single person, or even a small group. It’s the citizens of the United States, an overly busy mob of people who, too often, know very little about the activities in Washington, who get their information from news services who have their own agendas, left or right, and are afflicted with sophisticated persuaders, as it were, to ensure they view the world in a way salubrious to the persuaders’ interests.

True, the judiciary still exists as a final backstop. Under attack from within and without, overworked and under-respected (at least by the right), it lurches along, and so far has proven to be a thorn in the paw of the spider^[1] in our government.

And, for those of us who feel particularly desperate, there is the tendency of evil to rip itself to pieces as its constituents pursue their self-interested passions to the detriment of the goal of the leader. Will that be enough? I doubt it.

The people will need to put an end to this. They must continue to educate themselves.

¹ A mixed metaphor is something that often follows a mixed cocktail.

There’s a certain emotional dissonance in realizing that President Trump is actually the moderate in his administration when it comes to Iran, as WaPo is basically saying:

The Trump administration has been on high alert in response to what military and intelligence officials have deemed specific and credible threats from Iran against U.S. personnel in the Middle East.

But President Trump is frustrated with some of his top advisers, who he thinks could rush the United States into a military confrontation with Iran and shatter his long-standing pledge to withdraw from costly foreign wars, according to several U.S. officials. Trump prefers a diplomatic approach to resolving tensions and wants to speak directly with Iran’s leaders. …

rump grew angry last week and over the weekend about what he sees as warlike planning that is getting ahead of his own thinking, said a senior administration official with knowledge of conversations Trump had regarding national security adviser John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

“They are getting way out ahead of themselves, and Trump is annoyed,” the official said. “There was a scramble for Bolton and Pompeo and others to get on the same page.”

With Trump’s re-election chances desperately dependent on keeping his base together, the key to this is his promises to stay out of bloodily unnecessary wars, unlike his Republican predecessor President Bush, whose reputation since leaving office has been quite tarnished by the ongoing results of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In that, I can agree with Trump.

But in his recently hired National Security Advisor John Bolton, he has a guy who’s strongly interested in how well a full-out war with Iran would go. He’s condemned just about all diplomatic maneuvers attempted with Iran.

Nor is his lead diplomat, Secretary Mike Pompeo, a particularly well-qualified person to be in that position. A former Representative, he was a businessman in the heart of Kansas prior to his political career. I don’t think a hard driving businessman is a good fit for the position.

So President Trump discovers he has to stand in the stirrups and hold his hand-picked horses back from plunging him into the abyss of ugly, bloody war. He threw the JCPOA (Iran nuclear deal) foolishly into the trash, and now looks like a hapless would-be leader who’s been sidelined by the adults.

And now he’s operating under one more disadvantage: all of his adversaries know that, despite his selections of Bolton and Pompeo, Trump himself is reluctant to engage in any sort of actual war. It’s as if he’s playing the black pieces in chess, and has ceded his first move. Not only do his foreign adversaries, such as Iran, know this, but so do his advisors. Might we see some hyperbole from them in an effort to force a war they desire? They know that Trump also doesn’t pay attention to intelligence briefings. He’s vulnerable.

I sympathize with his inclinations, but, like any amateur who shouldn’t be in his position, he’s operating on gut instinct and, to be honest, is in danger of a major failure because of it. Even if he stays out of war, adversaries will take advantage of his incompetence and unwillingness to learn.

It will be a tough ride for the reputation of the United States until he’s replaced.

The ferns have suddenly jumped to attention:

I don’t think they were even out of the ground last week this time.

An oldie but a goodie, always applicable when the munitions providers and ideological zealots are beating the drums:

The Virginia Bluebells this morning:

Pedagogy:

1. the function or work of a teacher; teaching.
2. the art or science of teaching; education; instructional methods. [Dictionary.com]

Noted in “1913: The year Bemidji became ‘Normal’: State selects city for teacher training school over Cass Lake, Thief River Falls,” Sue Bruns, The Bemidji Pioneer:

Normal School refers to a two-year teacher training institution for high school graduates that focused on teaching norms of curriculum and pedagogy. In 1921, the normal schools became four-year State Teachers Colleges.

Scott Alexander of Slate Star Codex, a psychiatrist research blog, gets entertainingly agitated about research on a gene named 5-HTTLPR, which was originally pronounced to be the key part of the genetics behind depression:

In 1996, some researchers discovered that depressed people often had an unusual version of the serotonin transporter gene 5-HTTLPR. The study became a psychiatric sensation, getting thousands of citations and sparking dozens of replication attempts (page 3 here lists 46).

Since then, genetics has advanced a long ways, and now studies trying to replicate the 5-HTTLPR effect have been failing, due to a better understanding of how to apply statistics to genetics. This all leads up to this description of the research on 5-HTTLPR:

First, what bothers me isn’t just that people said 5-HTTLPR mattered and it didn’t. It’s that we built whole imaginary edifices, whole castles in the air on top of this idea of 5-HTTLPR mattering. We “figured out” how 5-HTTLPR exerted its effects, what parts of the brain it was active in, what sorts of things it interacted with, how its effects were enhanced or suppressed by the effects of other imaginary depression genes. This isn’t just an explorer coming back from the Orient and claiming there are unicorns there. It’s the explorer describing the life cycle of unicorns, what unicorns eat, all the different subspecies of unicorn, which cuts of unicorn meat are tastiest, and a blow-by-blow account of a wrestling match between unicorns and Bigfoot.

And the first thing that pops to mind? Research on the nature of God. So many conclusions about a creature for which there’s no evidence.

Ah, well, I’m just tired and feeling a bit snitty. My thanks to Mr. Alexander for his condemnation of hundreds of studies. I have no idea if he’s right, but he’s certainly fun.

Kevin Drum remarks on ‘excise taxes’ (aka tariffs), the hypocrisy of ‘no-new-taxes crusader’ Grover Norquist, and a new study:

… tariffs are just taxes, and nearly the entire burden of tariffs is paid by consumers in the form of higher prices. So why aren’t Republicans yelling about this? Why isn’t Grover Norquist threatening to primary anyone who supports higher tariffs? Why are Republicans so amenable to this particular tax increase?

Then I came home and was looking around at some related material and happened to come across this:

Of course! A tariff on yachts or private jets would be progressive, but Trump’s tariffs are on food, steel, aluminum, consumer electronics, and so forth. That means they’re regressive: they hurt the poor more than the rich.

It’s easy enough to say this is actually unsurprising, given the class behaviors outlined in Turchin’s Secular Cycles, particularly during the disintegrative phase. First, the upper classes enrich themselves at the expense of the lower classes. Then, as upper class (and wannabe) population continues to stretch resource availability, they fall to fighting amongst themselves. In fact, I wonder if we’re seeing a little bit of that in the conflict between Trump and the House of Representatives, because when I say “Trump,” I must include the elected Republicans in Congress, as they are, just about to a man/woman, supporting Trump as if his personal failures are of no danger to the nation.

But this does prompt reflection on human nature. What brings us to this place where the well-being of the lower classes is disdained, even loathed, by the very “cream” of society? After all, the Republicans in Congress have tried very hard to get rid of affordable healthcare, reduced taxes on the rich in ways that had little to no impact on the middle class on downwards. Are they seen as potential competitors that must be suppressed at every turn? Or is it more subtle than that?

It does suggest that humanity can fragment along lines other than ethnicity and religion. I suppose it comes as no great surprise, given the frequency with which we hear the old phrase class warfare. The thing about Secular Cycles is that it was mostly descriptive, with some causal material thrown in; Turchin’s War and Peace and War appears, from what little I’ve read of it, to have more explanatory material in terms of human psychology.

Prelate:

A bishop or other high ecclesiastical dignitary. [Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in “When the Vatican faces a major sex-abuse scandal, he’s the man the pope sends in“, Chico Harlan, WaPo:

He points to past papal quotes as guiding wisdom for handling the crisis. He chides the church gently, prescribing reforms for handling complaints, urging prelates to listen more openly to victims. He speaks about the importance of transparency and encourages church officials to cooperate with civil authorities, but his own investigations are fully in-house, and not even summaries of his findings are made public.

At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union grabbed some of the Kuril Islands from Japan, and neither the Soviets nor their heirs, the Russians, have returned them. Now, no doubt as part of the Russian offensive to regain influence in the world, they may be offering them up to Japan. However, as WaPo notes, this may lead to some problems:

Japan has long claimed that Russia illegally occupies Kunashir and a handful of other nearby islands on the southern end of the Kuril archipelago, which threads the sea between mainland Russia and northern Japan. Seen from Kunashir, the snow-sheathed mountains of northern Japan tower on the horizon, but there’s no regular passenger service to connect the two worlds.

A recent flurry of talks between Tokyo and Moscow has brought speculation that the Kremlin may be willing to hand some of the islands, seized by the Red Army in the closing days of World War II, back to Japan.

Such a move could help Putin win closer ties with one of the United States’ most important allies. Russian nationalists have staged demonstrations across the country insisting that Putin must not give up an inch of Russian land.

But in the Kurils themselves, the debate highlights more existential questions. What does it mean to live in Russia? What would happen if your home suddenly turned Japanese?

And is this really, as the plaque next to a tank by the beach insists, “primordial Russian soil”?

It’s not clear sailing for Russia, which think is a fascinating counterpoint to the far-right conservatives in our own neck of the world. That is, both are willing to ignore painful historical facts in order to pursue nationalist agendas. In some ways, it connects both countries, doesn’t it? We both have our loonies.

Remember Fox News‘ Andrew Napolitano and his unexpected bout of honest evaluation? A few days ago he let loose another blast, this time on Attorney General William Barr:

Fox analyst Judge Andrew Napolitano on Wednesday let loose on Attorney General Bill Barr and his handling of the Russia probe in a fiery Fox News op-ed.

“It is clear that Barr’s four-page letter, about which Mueller complained to Barr and some of Mueller’s team complained to the media, was a foolish attempt to sanitize the Mueller report,” Napolitano wrote. “It was misleading, disingenuous and deceptive.”

“Also, because Barr knew that all or nearly all of the Mueller report would soon enter the public domain, it was dumb and insulting,” he continued.

The judge also addressed the attorney general denying to the House Appropriations Committee that he knew of any criticisms from special counsel Robert Mueller’s team about his characterization of Mueller’s findings, which later turned out to be untrue.

“Was Barr’s testimony before Congress deceptive?” Napolitano asked. “In a word: Yes.” [TPM]

If you’re a Fox News viewer, this has to be a little confusing. After all, Mr. Napolitano plays for the conservative team, so this can’t make much sense in the era of the political cult.

I’ll be interested – fascinated – to see if the former Judge continues with his discordant tune.

Senolytics:

A lot of the smart money is on a class of drugs called senolytics, which seek out and destroy worn-out cells that build up as we age. These cells have suffered some sort of irreversible damage and entered a state called senescence where they hit the emergency stop, hunker down and await destruction.

This process probably evolved to stop cells from becoming cancerous. But it eventually backfires. “Senescent cells are normally cleared out, but that goes wrong during ageing and they accumulate and cause tissue damage,” says Partridge. The cells are like zombies: beyond repair, yet undead and causing havoc. They pump out a range of inflammatory proteins that are a major cause of inflammaging. “Senescent calls are very bad for you,” says Lynne Cox, a biochemist at the University of Oxford. “They destroy the tissues around them.”  [“Anti-ageing drugs are coming that could keep you healthier for longer,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (27 April 2019, paywall)]

A delightful romp through the Milky Way:

(h/t JN)

On 38 North, Aidan Foster-Carter ruminates on the strategic problems facing North and South Korean relations, with, I think, lessons for the United States:

A bad moment is a good time to return to first principles. [South Korean President] Moon’s administration, and all South Koreans, should indeed be thinking long-term. They also need to ponder what has gone wrong, and ask why, after almost half a century, North-South dialogue is still at first base. No Korean proverb has proved falser than Sijaki banida [“Starting is half the task”]. The first step is not half the journey—as shown by how many times Seoul and Pyongyang keep taking it and retaking it, over and over.

Thinking long-term is painful. It means jettisoning the collapsist illusions that used to seduce so many of us. At a robust age 71 or 75, depending on where you count from, the DPRK has not only outlived but outlasted its creator, the USSR. As much as one laments Korea’s division, this has become a fact of life. North Korea could be around for another 75 years—and Kim Jong Un may still be in charge half a century hence in 2069, that is, if he takes better care of his health.

Moon Jae-in, by contrast, is already a lame duck: one reason Kim has dumped him, though it only makes him more so. South Korea’s electoral calendar is remorseless. Moon still has three years left, and if Kim was strategic he would be nicer to the most simpatico ROK leader he is ever likely to face. But with grim economic figures (in part, due to perverse policies), and parliamentary elections due next year where the resurgent conservative opposition may well gain seats, Moon is no longer the commanding and popular figure he started out as.

Even if he were, and Kim were making nicer, three years hence his successor could well tear up Moon’s engagement approach. That’s what Lee Myung-bak did in 2008, simply ignoring the joint projects his predecessor Roh Moo-hyun (whom Moon served as chief of staff) had agreed with Kim Jong Il in Pyongyang months earlier. A lost decade followed, undoing the small start towards reconciliation made during the “Sunshine” era (1998-2007).

One of the problems afflicting the narcissist American President Trump is his desperate, even pathological desire, for fame and prestige, and the negation of North Korea, whether through conquest and persuasion, lures him into actions that may be designed to gain that for him, but instead fail because they are high-risk, and neither he nor most of his advisors understand the mind-set of a national leader who has no time limit on his powers.

But this is not a new situation for Americans. The Cold War, which was the sometimes violent conflict through proxies between the democracies of the West and the Soviet states of the East Bloc (which did not include China due to a rivalry between the two Communist states and a disputed border), began at the end of World War II, during the Truman Administration, and lasted to 1991, the Bush I Administration. If we decide that North Korea is unacceptable in its current form of bloody dictatorship, we need to come up with a strategy, probably of containment, which can be handed off to successive Administrations.

Sound familiar? We need to bring back the relay race which was used successfully before.

And we have to use Kim’s advantages against him. He brings continuity, which means moving away from barbaric practices will be very difficult for him. Exactly how to use that is not entirely clear, but then I’m not a specialist in bringing on the collapse of states. No doubt information projected into North Korea will be part of it.

But, as Aidan notes, thinking we’re going to destroy or convert North Korea at this juncture seems to be a fantasy.

And he’s Texas state Rep Jonathan Stickland. He’s attempting to bawl out epidemiologist Peter Hotez of Baylor, a developer of vaccines for neglected diseases, and looking like a guy who bought the “everything is private sector” bullshit from the libertarians, hook, line, and sinker:

Make the case for your sorcery to consumers on your own dime. Like every other business. Quit using the heavy hand of government to make your business profitable through mandates and immunity. It’s disgusting.

— Jonathan Stickland (@RepStickland) May 7, 2019

Not every man, woman, and child is an island; in fact, we’re closely interconnected via, of all things, our atmosphere, through which pathogens often travel, and that is not subject to the free market. If we desire public health, it’s not a matter of individual choice, with little or not impact on everyone else. It’s not like buying a hat. If you fail to buy this hat, then you may doom that new-born infant, or that neighbor who, for medical reasons, cannot take the vaccine, to an early and awful death.

As I noted earlier, this is symptomatic of a deeply flawed view of how societies should work. Not everything is subject to the whims of the free market, not if we’re to have a stable and prosperous society – and that’s the real point, isn’t it? The role of public health  – not just vaccines, but publicly available pathogen-free water, and other aspects of which I’m too sleepy to remember – in reaching the goal of a stable, happy, and prosperous society cannot be subject to the whims, paranoia, and flawed reasoning of the public, or it will fail in its role, and then we all pay for that failure, through death and misery. Or, if you really prefer financial measures, lower productivity.

I suspect that a truly effective return volley to Stickland’s view is contained in Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, or allied work. I must find the time to buy and read it someday.

But I do appreciate the use of the word sorcery. So rarely do you hear it in public discourse these days. Makes one long for the days of the Salem Witch Trials, doesn’t it?

Healthspan:

Yes, that’s right: longevity research is no longer about living longer. “The aim is to keep people healthier before they die,” says Linda Partridge, a director at the Max Planck Institute for Biology of Ageing in Germany. “It is sometimes called compressing morbidity.”

To put it another way, it is about extending “healthspan”, the number of disease-free years towards the end of life. That means keeping life expectancy the same, which for children born in 2019 in developed countries is 85, but being healthy for 84 years rather than decrepit for the final 10. [“Anti-ageing drugs are coming that could keep you healthier for longer,” Graham Lawton, NewScientist (27 April 2019, paywall)]

The article felt like a tease. However, the concept is extremely important for developed nations, as otherwise the demographics would become quite burdensome for the young.

Marco Rubio on Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder:

Great statement by Marco Rubio. pic.twitter.com/F9CYk6P2ul

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) May 8, 2019

On current AG William Barr’s citation of contempt? Not so much.

The fight with Barr is a political stunt.

Real oversight was when House sought documents about #FastandFurious an Eric Holder program that allowed guns to reach drug cartels in Mexico.

Holder & Obama refused to give Congress information about it. https://t.co/3a5triWw36

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 9, 2019

Contempt is contempt, Senator, and AG Barr’s refusal to be questioned by those the House Committee feels are best equipped to get to the truth regarding what is potentially the most damaging scandal in the history of the United States is certainly worthy of it. AG Barr’s conduct after just a couple of months of service is terrifyingly bad.

I realize that the Republican Party and its leading members, such as yourself, are terrified of the unmasking of President Trump, because it will condemn the very culture of the Republican Party, its methods and attitudes, and all that has brought you to your prominent position, and it hurts to think that such a petty little man is the face of your Party – the petty little man who beat you and a bunch of pretenders to the 2016 Republican nomination.

But that’s one of the responsibilities of a Party leader, rooting out the pus and pestilence that inevitably comes with any human endeavour. This is your opportunity to be a leader. Don’t blow it.

I’ve been somewhat foggy on why the whole self-driving cars notion has bothered me. I knew it was beyond the technical challenges inherent in the concept, but after that I wasn’t sure. Then I came across an interview NewScientist (20 April 2019) did with novelist Ian McEwan, and just one Q&A cleared up my thinking:

Do you think we’re in trouble because we have become so reliant on these technologies?

With AI, we’re going to have that in spades. Already we’re having to think ethically about autonomous vehicles, and what kind of choices they’re going to make. Do they run over the granny, the dog, the child, or allow the “driver” just to kill themselves in a head-on crash?

We’re suddenly having to devolve these choices to someone else, to something else. The extent to which we devolve moral decisions to machines is going to be a very awkward and interesting ride. I’m sorry to be 70 and not see more of the story. The area where our interaction with machines enters the moral domain is going to be a field day for novelists.

See, we’re moral agents. I’ve never had formal training in this area, but, per usual, I’ll make some stuff up. Moral agency is about the knowledge that there’s right and wrong, and because we’re capable of understanding the concept of moral right and wrong, we’re responsible for offenses against the moral code we live under. Drinking and driving is a rather ironic example, as penalties for moral offenses carried out while drunk are often less than the same offenses without the “mitigating” factor of public intoxication. Indeed, it’s that intoxication’s effect on our reasoning capabilities which has led society to mistakenly “lift” the responsibility for moral offenses, recognizing that our ability to recognize moral questions is impaired by the alcohol. On the other hand, simply being drunk while driving is itself an offense, a recognition that a danger to members of society occurs when that drunk gets behind the wheel, so in that law there’s at least an attempt at balancing out the first mistake.

So let’s apply this to driving. As with most or all things humans do, driving is an activity in which we face moral decisions every time we undertake the activity. If we hadn’t driven to the store, been distracted by our phone, and hit that little old lady in the crosswalk, then we wouldn’t be guilty of her homicide, and we wouldn’t be full of regret.

But how about that self-driving car? We hop into it, tell it to take us to the store, and while we’re mucking about on our phone, it hits the little old lady and kills her. Again.

Do we feel guilty?

Some might argue ‘no,’ because we weren’t in control of the vehicle. It was the task, even the responsibility, of the entity driving the car.

But does that entity recognize the concept of moral right and wrong? Moral agency? No! At least, not yet.

The key is that without a moral agent actually controlling the car, the responsible party must then be that which motivated the original activity. You decided to go to the store, you decided to take a car rather than ride a bike, and your car hit the little old lady. You weren’t controlling it, but without some other entity to blame, you, rightfully, get it pinned on you.

Incidentally, the lack of a moral agent in actual control of the car is the meaningful separator between this example and, say, assignation of responsibility for an accident caused by a bus, or a military officer obeying an unlawful order from a superior.

So, if I’m going to take the blame for these accidents, I want to be the one in control. I am a competent, if not outstanding, driver, and I’m self-aware enough to know that I can’t daydream or talk on the phone while driving. Even talking to my wife while driving is sometimes a chancy business. And because there is no other moral agent involved in this scenario, I have to be the one driving, because then I can avoid hitting that little old lady with the annoying Pekingese and thus not feel guilt for the rest of my life. I must be the active agent.

Society may differ with me on this issue. Perhaps someday the safety levels and efficiencies allegedly achievable with self-driving cars will permit legislatures to mandate that self-driving cars actually be required to utilize that capability. I can see that happening. The devolvement of a moral question into a technical question is an interesting development, which I hope will get a thorough-going debate in public.

But that’s why I doubt I’ll let a self-driving car put me in danger.

And, thanks, Mr. McEwan. I’ve never read your novels, but that was a fab answer to a good question.

It may come as no surprise that there are a lot of characteristics of Joe Biden, now running for the Democratic Presidential nomination, that I like, and that many of them fall into the category of experience. After all, the one characteristic of every other Democratic candidate is they’ve never worked at a high level in the White House. True, some of candidates have executive experience at the city and/or state levels. However, in my view, this is only a taste of what the White House requires, and a very slight one.

Biden brings 8 years of experience as Vice-President, and a very busy Vice-President at that, a VP who became close friends with President Obama, and an integral member of the team. In short, he knows how the this branch of government works, and to me, that’s a valuable asset for Biden. I’ve not noticed any intolerable policy positions, and if he’s made some mistakes over the years, he seems to own up to them and correct them when he can. He’s apparently been an inveterate union champion, which on balance is a good thing.

My main objection is his age. I have to wonder about a guy who wants to be President in his late 70s. Vitiating this objection would be the selection of a VP candidate, of course, and so I shan’t belabor the point.

But if you want to know how he’ll match up with Trump, see Andrew Sullivan’s diary entry for this week. Sullivan goes against the received wisdom of the left side punditry and believes Biden may be the antidote to flush Trump right out of our system. He has details, and I found it enlightening.

And his strength is drawn from two contrasting bases: older, moderate whites, and African-Americans. Although his share is in the 30s overall, he has a whopping 50 percent share among nonwhite Democrats, according to the latest CNN poll. A Morning Consult poll found him with 43 percent of the black vote, including 47 percent support among African-American women. Biden’s deep association with Obama gives him a lift in the black vote no other white candidate can achieve. And so it turns out that the base of the Democrats has not been swept into the identity cult of the elite, wealthy, white left. As a brand-new CBS poll finds, Democrats may prefer a hypothetical female nominee over a male (59–41 percent), a black nominee over a white one (60–40 percent), and someone in their 40s to someone in their 70s. But that’s in the abstract. In reality, Biden seems to scramble these preferences.

He’s also been able to reach non-college-educated white men in ways few other candidates could. That’s a big fucking deal in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin — and if Biden can carry those states, he’ll be the next president. He’s a union man, and always has been. In what was a brilliant ad-lib, Biden began a speech to the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers by making a joke about the excesses of #MeToo — “I had permission to hug Lonnie,” the union leader, he quipped. Later, as he brought some kids onstage, he joked again, as he put his hands on the shoulders of a boy: “He gave me permission to touch him.” The crowd’s reaction both times was bellows of laughter.

Which is to say, as much as progressives would like to convert the country to their views in an instance instant, the truth of the matter is that these things can take time, and it appears Joe may understand that. It’ll be interesting to see if Biden fades down the stretch, or becomes the monster of the midway.

Enjoy!

Steve Benen expresses some anxiety concerning the possibility that President Trump is serious about getting a “do-over” just because he was being investigated by Special Counsel Mueller:

But at the heart of Trump’s tweets is something darker than just routine lies.

The amateur president with authoritarian instincts obviously hopes voters reward him with four more years in the White House, but Trump’s occasional talk about extra time in office is altogether scarier.

Indeed, the weekend’s tweets weren’t entirely unique. In March 2018, Trump praised China’s President Xi Jinping for extending his hold on power. “He’s now president for life,” the Republican said. “President for life… I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”

White House officials have said comments like these are intended to be funny. Perhaps. But Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a New York University professor who studies authoritarian rulers, said something to the Washington Post that stood out for me: “Everything that he says is a trial balloon – even his, quote, jokes are trial balloons. But if you look at what he jokes about, it’s always things like this – it’s the extension of his rights, it’s the infringement of liberties. And authoritarians are continually testing the boundaries to see what they can get away with, and everything he does is a challenge to Democrats to mount some response against him.”

And if he tries to remain in the Oval Office? You take half a dozen Marines and tell them to clear the White House of Trump and his staff.

Sounds flippant? It isn’t, really. The Joint Chiefs of Staff – indeed, just about every serious military person – has expressed serious doubts concerning President Trump. If push comes to shove, I seriously doubt there’s more than a few loons in uniform who wouldn’t be just as happy upholding the loyalty oath they took to country and Constitution, and explicitly did NOT take to the President, and boot him out on his fanny.

Benen speculates that Trump would call for a march on Washington by his followers to preserve his position. The problem with this scenario is that such marches nearly always happen during times of economic desperation, and, according to both President Trump and independent evaluations, that just isn’t happening – we’re chugging along just fine, although of course that could change between now and the next election.

It would be a sudden and humiliating ending for a Trump Presidency marked by ineptitude, incompetence, and sheer bad behavior – as the latter is documented by the motivating force for this entire ridiculous suggestion, the Mueller Report. If you’ve heard Trump was “exonerated” by that Report, just remember your good sense: President Trump has been busy proclaiming same, would benefit if that were the same, and, hey, we all know better than to believe the party that would benefit if it were true. That’s why Andrew Napolitano’s evaluation of the Mueller Report is so important. as well as the former Federal prosecutors of various political stripes who believe the President is guilty of obstruction.

So if you do run across a hair-on-fire true Trump believer who wants to abrogate the Constitution because of the terrible, terrible imposition of the investigation, just suggest to him that you’ll consider it if, first, the Gorsuch seat on SCOTUS is returned to President Obama, who can make the selection, and have it honestly debated by the Senate.

Margaret Sullivan’s headline tells you the first half of what you need to know:

Mark Zuckerberg claims that, at Facebook, ‘the future is private.’ Don’t believe him.

She fills in the blank:

Last week, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used the company’s annual Silicon Valley confab to announce that “the future is private.”

In one of the most awkward moments I’ve ever seen captured on video, he smiled broadly as he tried to joke about the supposed change of direction.

“I know that we don’t exactly have the strongest reputation on privacy right now, to put it lightly,” he said.

No, Zuck, you don’t. Facebook is facing more than a dozen international investigations into its history of privacy violations, Wired magazine has reported — “from its years of willy-nilly data sharing to several recent data breaches.”

But she doesn’t complete the thought. She should have suggested that someone ask Zuckerberg this simple question:

Mark, how will you make money off ‘the future is private?’

Because that’s all Facebook is about.

They sent a representative to negotiate the yearly fee.

That’s him, trotting away with the fee.

Don’t be alarmed by the latest headline from CNN:

Trump warns presidency is being stolen amid Mueller angst

After all, President Trump’s first half-term featured a Congress controlled by the Republican Party. He’s nominated and confirmed two SCOTUS justices in those two years, not to mention a horde of Federal judiciary nominees, some of quite dubious pedigree. He had a chance to trash the ACA, which he fatally mishandled, and managed to push through a tax reform bill that enriches the top 1% of Americans – which, if we’re to believe his remarks about himself, includes himself – while saddling the nation with an amazingly accelerating bout of debt, brought on by a fatal belief in the fallacious Laffer Curve.

And while the Mueller Report, despite Trump’s frenzied Tweets claiming complete exoneration, suggests otherwise and brings dishonor and distrust down upon an Administration which has already proven to be unusually lacking in ethical behavior, it’s had little effect on the potential efficiency of an Administration that could have accomplished a lot. So let’s just all laugh off that charlatan Franklin Graham’s suggestion that Trump get two more years. Not even GOP members of Congress would dare to rupture the Constitution in such a manner.

So what’s going on?

President Trump knows his base very well. He’s studied them, ingratiated himself with them, and thinks he knows which buttons to push, which experiences to claim he shares with them, in order to guarantee their votes, even as he indulges in trade wars which only endanger the interests of those very voters who helped put him in power in the first place.

The key here is victimization. Fox News and allied organizations have spent enormous amounts of time teaching their audience that they are victims, victims of crime, immigrants, Big Government, what have you. It’s the shared mythos, the soup they all drink. Why are times tough? Because someone’s out to get them.

And so now President Trump joins his base in being a victim. Never mind that any objective view of his situation refutes it absolutely. If he lacks in accomplishments, he can only blame his own ineptitude. If things go wrong, he can only blame his flawed ideology. If he’s honest. Given the evaluation of third party fact-checkers, he’s not.

He’s a victim. Because, well, he says he is.

Perhaps the worst of this, the most galling part of this, the abyss he’s desperately skirting, is that President Obama, whose party also controlled Congress for his first two years in office, managed to pass the ACA; and after losing control of Congress, he admitted he had made mistakes in campaigning, and then spent six years trying to work with an intransigent GOP majority with little, if any, complaints about being victimized.

That’s not to say he didn’t push his agenda in other ways. According to Constitutional experts, his unilateral action to care for the children of illegal immigrants, the DREAMERS, may have been an overstep of his Constitutional powers. It’s also true that, under his leadership, illegal immigrant counts plunged, at least to the extent that they can be measured. But it’s important, and fair, to remember that President Obama pushed the envelope of power, just as his predecessors have been observed to do, to produce results on his agenda. And Trump, much to the consternation of pundits on the left and right, has continued to do the same, but at a more accelerated rate, as I’ve occasionally discussed.

The real question is whether the American voter will tolerate Trump’s blatant incompetence, lies, etc etc, or if the GOP primary voter will deny him the nomination, replacing him with someone of more, shall we say, gravitas?