Unsightly Mental Blemishes

With regard to the Maine contest for the seat of incumbent Rep. Bruce Pouliquin (R-ME), the game – for now – is over:

With two courts ruling against him, the Republican will no longer dispute Jared Golden’s election, but maintains that Maine’s voter-approved system is unconstitutional and illegal.

Rep. Bruce Poliquin on Monday dropped his legal challenge to the ranked-choice election in Maine’s 2nd Congressional District in which he lost his seat in the U.S. House.

In a statement he released on Twitter on Christmas Eve, the two-term Republican said he continues to believe ranked-choice voting is unconstitutional, but “it’s in the best interests of my constituents and all Maine citizens to close this confusing and unfair chapter of voting history.”

Press-Herald

The real point, beyond the termination of Rep. Pouliquin’s attempt to retain his Congressional seat, is that this is not a final determination in the battle over ranked-choice voting (RCV). Indeed, Pouliquin continues to reiterate his claim that RCV is confusing, unfair, and illegal. To the first two points, he presents no evidence but his own personal and irrelevant testimony, and two federal courts have disagreed with his third point.

This may be just the first step in a long campaign by the GOP against RCV, since “first past the pole” voting is far more to their advantage, while RCV favors the more fragmented nature of liberal politics. I expect more court challenges to RCV in the future, at least at the Federal level, and I also continue to believe this may be one of the more important court campaigns of the future.

I’ve previously mentioned the lame-duck sessions in Wisconsin and other states, which are passing legislation to strip incoming Democratic office-holders of the powers traditionally associated with those offices. In a related development, it appears the Republicans don’t really take voter-approved initiatives seriously, as Steve Benen notes:

In Florida, for example, voters easily approved Amendment 4, which is set to restore the voting rights of an estimated 1.5 million former felons. Florida Gov.-elect Ron DeSantis (R), a former far-right congressman, is now “slow walking the implementation” of the voter-approved measure.

And in Utah, voters approved a measure legalizing medical marijuana, prompting the Republican-led legislature to intervene and pass a more restrictive measure – supplanting the policy approved by Utahans.

The question that may come to mind is whether or not voters of all stripes will be outraged at this usurpation of voter privilege. Regardless of whether or not you approve of any particular initiative, or the entire concept of voter-initiated legislation/constitutional amendments, decisions by State legislatures to ignore or attenuate this aspect of democracy must be unsettling.

With this in mind, I’m here to report that, in a recent visit with my Arts Editor’s family, outrage has already been expressed at these GOP power grabs, and this in a conservative part of the country. I’m beginning to suspect the Republican Party is in the process of handing a real big hammer to the Democrats for the 2020 election, if only the Democrats can recognize and use it effectively.

In a way, it’s not surprising that the second- and third-raters who make the leadership of the Republican state parties would commit an unforced error of this sort (repression of anti-gerrymandering measures, as may be happening in Michigan, is more of a forced error, I’ll grant). It’s ever the curse of third-raters that they can’t think beyond the end of their prejudices.

But that doesn’t mean the Democrats can effectively take advantage of this set of blunders.

The bitcoin phenomenon continues to fascinate. Somewhere on this thread back a few months, I commented on the energy costs incurred to calculate new bitcoins. This is becoming a bigger and bigger factor in its viability, as Douglas Heaven notes in NewScientist (15 December 2018, paywall):

The blockchain is kept going by miners, who run expensive, energy-hungry computers in exchange for the chance to be rewarded with bitcoins each time they update the ledger. In the boom times, mining operations sprang up in places with cheap sources of electricity, essentially as a licence to print money. But as bitcoin falls in value, miners are being paid less and less. Unable to cover electricity and hardware costs, many are packing up.

“You have to constantly explore to find cheap power,” says Idon Liu at Node Haven, a company that provides cloud computing services to miners. With bitcoin around the $4000 mark, you need to be buying electricity at no more than 5 cents per kilowatt-hour to break even, he says. But it is hard to find power that cheap. “Now we’re at $4000, people are getting nervous,” says Liu. “They are dumping hundreds of thousands of machines.” Last month, GigaWatt, a large mining operation near Seattle in Washington, went bankrupt. Pictures online show miners in China clearing out wheelbarrow-loads of servers.

The editors of NewScientist pile on in an editorial:

But here is the good news: we should be celebrating bitcoin’s downfall. What began as an interesting experiment has morphed into an environmental disaster. It is estimated that running the bitcoin network now consumes 45.5 terawatt-hours per year of electricity – enough to power more than 4 million homes in the US. As the world seeks to cut down on our energy use, shrinking bitcoin seems like an easy win.

It’s hard to argue. As I said previously, I don’t disagree that currencies controlled by governments are subject to abuses. Indeed, the recent controversy over President Trump’s alleged interest in removing Fed chair Jerome Powell has highlighted the acknowledged dangers of letting amateurs get their hands even near the levers of monetary policy, never mind the actual printing presses.

However, exposing currencies to open markets, inexperienced users, and speculators, and powering them using a technology which is, ultimately, endangering civilization, is beginning to appear to be a mistaken experiment. If most or all of our electrical grid were supplied from carbon-neutral sources, and there was plenty, it’d be worth leaving bitcoin in operation as a human experiment, and let the pieces fall where they may. But in the absence of an overwhelming advantage to bitcoin, its energy demands are making it a flawed approach to the problem of fiat currencies.

Ever have that uncomfortable feeling when you agree with someone you loathe? Andrew Sullivan may be having that in connection with Trump’s surprise announcement of withdrawal from Syria:

Or consider what a shocked Lieutenant General Kenneth F. McKenzie Jr. of the Marines, the incoming commander of Central Command opined after hearing the news of Trump’s withdrawal of 7,000 troops from Afghanistan yesterday: “If we left precipitously right now, I do not believe [the Afghan forces] would be able to successfully defend their country. I don’t know how long it’s going to take. I think that one of the things that would actually provide the most damage to them would be if we put a timeline on it and we said we were going out at a certain point in time.”

Get that? After 17 years, we’ve gotten nowhere, like every single occupier before us. But for that reason, we have to stay. These commanders have been singing this tune year after year for 17 years of occupation, and secretaries of Defense have kept agreeing with them. Trump gave them one last surge of troops — violating his own campaign promise — and we got nowhere one more time. It is getting close to insane. Neoconservatism, it seems, never dies. It just mutates constantly to find new ways to intervene, to perpetuate forever wars, to send more young Americans to die in countries that don’t want them amid populations that try to kill them.

We could just conclude that Trump, like a broken clock, is at occasionally, if accidentally right. I have little opinion on what to do about Syria, which is just another example of the lethal politics the inhabitants of those parts seem to indulge in far too casually.

But, more importantly for the United States, is the lack of leadership that President Trump has once again demonstrated. At heart, he’s an autocrat, the last thing America needs. He should have initiated and led a national debate on just what sort of intervention, if any at all, we should be engaging in, using the debate to inform the electorate as to what costs we might expect to incur, both tangible and intangible, and how intervention, or lack thereof, fits in with our strategic goals and moral character.

Trump did none of this. Perhaps this is just a maneuver on his part to force Mattis out. Maybe he had heartburn. Maybe … pick your random reason of choice. The point is, Trump has lost the confidence of everyone outside of the Trump Echo Chamber in any wisdom he has in anything. Even real estate.

Andrew may be completely correct in condemning our troops presence in Afghanistan and Syria. Maybe Trump is doing the right thing. But he did it absolutely in the wrong way, and therefore does not deserve any real credit, no matter how much historians praise the move 50 years from now.

This is why the instrumentality of government must move in approved ways, for otherwise confidence is lost.

Spaceweather.com reminds me that deep space probe New Horizons is still functioning out there in the Kuiper Belt. If, like me, you were thrilled with its pictures of Pluto from three years ago, you should be ready to thrill again, because its current, and last, target, Ultima Thule, has mysteries of its own:

Last year, astronomers watched a distant star pass behind Ultima Thule. Starlight winked in and out in a pattern suggesting an elongated object with two bulbous lobes. Ultima Thule could be a binary system. You would expect the reflected brightness of such an object to vary as it rotates in the sunlight. Yet Ultima Thule does not behave that way. What’s going on? New Horizons science team members have different ideas. “It’s possible that Ultima’s rotation pole is aimed almost right at the spacecraft,” speculates Marc Buie of the Southwest Research Institute. Such an alignment, however, is unlikely.

“Another explanation,” says the SETI Institute’s Mark Showalter, “is that Ultima may be surrounded by a cloud of dust that obscures its light curve–much the same way that a comet’s coma often overwhelms the light reflected by its central nucleus.” 

“A more bizarre scenario is one in which Ultima is surrounded by many tiny tumbling moons,” suggests University of Virginia’s Anne Verbiscer, a New Horizons assistant project scientist. “If each moon has its own light curve, then together they could create a jumbled superposition of light curves that make it look to New Horizons like Ultima has a small light curve.” 

Data from the probe should reach us Jan 1 or 2. Can’t wait to see what it looks like!

My Arts Editor decreed the frogs must remain on their island.

I fear the Komodo dragons may find them a bit too tasty.

The Mainstream news is fake news meme that President Trump has exercised himself to spread does raise a question: how to effectively refute it?

Oddly enough, one approach is by energetically exposing fake news within the mainstream media. WaPo has published just such a report, concerning a now-former star reporter for the German weekly Der Spiegel:

When an out-of-town journalist showed up in Fergus Falls, Minn., in February 2017, Michele Anderson couldn’t help but feel skeptical. Claas Relotius had been telling residents that he was writing about the state of rural America under President Trump. Anderson, a community arts administrator with progressive political views, was uncomfortable with “the anthropological gaze” that had been cast on communities like her own after the 2016 election. Hopefully, she would later recall thinking, an award-winning international journalist would at least manage to capture more nuance than the pundits had in the months following the election.

As it turned out, the piece that appeared in the respected German weekly magazine Der Spiegel a month later was even worse than she could have imagined. Not only did it rely on stock stereotypes of provincial, gun-toting conservatives, but many of the details were blatantly false.

At one time any self-respecting media outlet would fact-check their reporters, so ya gotta wonder what went wrong at Der Spiegel. But it sounds like Relotius had some panache and charisma working for him:

On Wednesday, [the concerned Fergus Falls residents] were vindicated. Der Spiegel announced that Relotius had “falsified his articles on a grand scale” since at least 2016 and had resigned after admitting that he had fabricated quotes and invented fictional details in more than a dozen stories, including his dispatch from Fergus Falls. The magazine’s investigation found that the 33-year-old writer had faked interviews with the parents of Colin Kaepernick and falsified material that appeared in award-winning features about children kidnapped by the Islamic State and a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay. Before it all came crashing down, he had also managed to convince editors that a co-worker who expressed suspicions was the real liar.

Sounds like a current President of our experience, doesn’t he?

The real message here, though, is that the mainstream media self-corrected. It demonstrated not an allegiance to a political ideology, but to a far more important ideology, that being truth matters.

It’s not dispositive on its own, of course, but for conservatives sucked into the fake news meme, this sort of article should give them reason to pause and think again.

If you’re wondering just how we ended up in a government shutdown, WaPo (among others) has a serviceable description which actually makes me laugh. At one point, Trump was ready to accept that he couldn’t have funding for the wall. Then this happened:

But on Fox News Channel and across conservative media, there was a brewing rebellion. Prominent voices urged Trump to hold firm on his wall money and warned that caving would jeopardize his reelection.

Rush Limbaugh dismissed the compromise bill on his radio program as “Trump gets nothing and the Democrats get everything.” Another firebrand, Ann Coulter, published a columntitled “Gutless President in Wall-less Country.” Trump even found resistance on the couch of his favorite show, “Fox & Friends,” where reliable Trump-boosting host Brian Kilmeade chided him on the air Thursday.

The president was paying attention. He promptly unfollowed Coulter on Twitter. And he pecked out a series of defensive tweets blaming congressional leaders for not funding the wall, while also assuming a defensive posture. He suggested that a massive wall may not be necessary in its entirety because the border already is “tight” thanks to the work of Border Patrol agents and troops.

Trump proclaims that he’s the branding master, which is all about image and messaging and television, and yet there he is, being brazenly manipulated by his masters at Fox and allied media outlets. At this juncture, we’re seeing policy being made by television personalities, people whose expertise is not in budgeting, immigration, or anything relevant – but how to look pretty and speak articulately on TV.

That’s it.

The Reality TV star that Trump used to be is caught in his own trap, and, worse yet, he doesn’t even realize it. For him, television is reality. For the rest of us on the ground, it’s not, and that’s going to be the worst for us.

There are so many adjectives applicable here: vacillating, manipulable, unfocused, and unintelligent simply arise from this one episode alone.

But added to what we’ve seen over the last three years, including the campaign, we can quite validly say that the best adjective is simply this:

He’s weak. The weakest President the United States has ever seen.

There are some of the elements of a good mystery story in The Thirteenth Guest (1932, aka Lady Beware [UK]), but it’s an incomplete set, and they are offset by two very poor elements.

Thirteen years earlier, a husband and father read his newly revised will to his family & friends, numbering twelve, and then he dropped dead. The twist? The will gives the bulk of the vast estate to the unnamed 13th guest.

Now the young daughter, just turned 21, has received instructions to return to the abandoned estate. While there, she’s electrocuted and dies; her taxi driver calls the police, who notify the family and begin investigating.

By the time she pops up again, alive and kicking, things are interesting. Add in another plot twist, a takedown of the entire family for being too hoity-toity for their own good, and a private eye with some attitude, and there’s some good elements.

However, the police are portrayed as buffoons, which grates on the nerves, even if it is a poke at nepotism. Worse yet, though, is that the person truly responsible for the murders, well, you would never have guessed. Not because of the portrayal of that character, but lack thereof. She is just another face in the family, and there is no big reveal of a grievance or psychosis or immorality which explains the mildly clever murders.

In the end, it was a pleasant way to spend an hour, especially following a medical procedure which required I rest, and if you’re a Ginger Rogers completist, this should be on your list of movies to see. She doesn’t distinguish herself, but she’s competent in the ensemble. And I liked the innovative manner in which the credits were handled.

Too bad about the bad guy.

Here’s the movie itself.

I expect the next week of blogging to be lighter than normal, or even non-existent, but if something catches my attention I’ll comment on it.

Happy Holidays and may you spend it with family.

I must admit I was fascinated when I read this report from a few months ago in D-brief on tropical cyclones, but then it fell through the cracks. I remain fascinated, though:

Recent research suggested tropical cyclones are moving toward the poles. But these analyses used data collected from instruments over a relatively short time period and the results sometimes disagreed with each other. [Forest dynamics expert Jan] Altman and the team of scientists wanted to find out how tropical cyclone activity changed over a long time and what ramifications the storms had.

Homes aren’t the only things impacted by cyclones, forests also get heavily damaged. Hurricane Katrina, for example, was estimated to have killed or seriously injured around 320 million trees. The team used that damage to determine the impact of changes in tropical cyclone activity. The researchers analyzed tree rings from six forests in northeastern Asia. The study areas traverse a latitudinal gradient from the southern tip of South Korea northward to costal Russia. The team examined tree rings from 54 species for tree growth and disturbance. Then they compared the data with a 40-year historical record of tropical cyclones in the region.

The farther north the researchers assessed, the more scientists realized cyclones were increasingly damaging trees over the past century, the team reports today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The findings provide evidence that northward tropical cyclone track migration caused more frequent forest disturbances during the last century in the western North Pacific,” Altman said.

Tthe changes in CO₂, leading to a warmer world, causing weather patterns to change, is of leading interest because this suggests landfall at locations not accustomed to such violent weather phenomena. Indeed, given that new storm tracks are inevitable over the ocean itself, will these new tracks cause other unforeseen consequences as areas that have not seen storm turbulence on this scale begin to experience it?

This should be an area of slow but unstoppable interest.

It has to be Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). I saw him on TV tonight, outraged at Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria. Remember, this is the guy who went from NeverTrump to being Trump’s sock puppet, playing golf and carrying water for him. Here’s one of his milder reactions; the one I saw on TV showed him spitting bullets.

You’re outraged, Graham? Really? Really? You’re up close and personal with this man-child of a President, and it didn’t occur to you that he has no concept of responsible governance?

Really, you must be fucking kidding because Trump’s incompetence has been highlighted over the last two years. In this regard, Graham, this is on your head. This is on the head of a GOP terrified to impeach and convict a President who has repeatedly demonstrated incompetence.

And, please, stop lying, you bloody fucking idiot. You said Obama was wrong to withdraw from Iraq? You bloody well know that he was legally constrained to leave Iraq due to a treaty signed by his predecessor, President Bush. Please stop saying Trump’s done so many good things. You’re just lying through your teeth and you know it. If you don’t, then your understanding of government is impaired and you should resign for the good of the Nation.

You want to fix this? Call for impeachment. Hell, I know Speaker Ryan collapsed, as usual, when Trump put the pressure on him regarding the Continuing Resolution, but maybe you can harass him into calling for a snap impeachment during this lame-duck session. Then it’ll be on you Senators to decide if your loyalty to a pathogen-laden Party leader who can’t find his ass with both hands is really more important than your loyalty to the President.

‘cuz I’m really fucking tired of your covering up the shit your dog keeps dumping on the carpet of what used to be a great Nation.

In some ways, the advent of Trumpism may be the smoke of the fire that will be the rebirth of American Democracy, the final, back-breaking error which will drive home to another three or four American generations the abject error of voting in someone like Trump.

With this in mind, I submit the South Carolina GOP is a ways behind virtually everyone else:

The South Carolina Republican Party could cancel its marquee presidential nominating contest in 2020 in a move to protect President Trump from any primary challengers.

Drew McKissick, chairman of the South Carolina GOP, said he doesn’t anticipate Trump would face a primary challenge and emphasized that the state party executive committee hasn’t held any formal discussions about the contest, dubbed “first in the South” and usually third on the presidential nominating calendar. But McKissick would pointedly not rule out canceling the primary, indicating that that would be his preference.

“We have complete autonomy and flexibility in either direction,” McKissick told the Washington Examiner on Tuesday. “Considering the fact that the entire party supports the president, we’ll end up doing what’s in the president’s best interest.”

Washington Examiner

Come on. There’s no way this ends well for McKissick.

1. He’s so personally in the tank for Trump that he might as well get plastic surgery so he looks like his omniscient Party Leader.
2. The primaries are meant to winnow out the poor candidates in order for the Party to present an excellent candidate. By eliminating the primary, McKissick perverts his responsibility.
3. Either he’s not paying attention to Trump’s terminal troubles, or he’s so bought into the ludicrous fake news meme that if his hypothetical divorce were mentioned in the local media, he’d declare it false and try to kiss his ex-spouse, sans permission.
4. If Trump is so fragile that he cannot withstand a primary challenge in South Carolina, then what of the declaration that “We are the party of President Donald J. Trump?” Is this just the South Carolina GOP elite trying to enforce an unwanted discipline on the base?
5. Speaking of that declaration, candidate Katie Arrington, its author, did not succeed in becoming Representative Arrington; her blind embrace of Trumpism, in particular its projected ruination of the sea coast of South Carolina, is one of the primary factors favored by analysts in her defeat by Democrat Joe Cunningham, the first Democrat to represent the district since at least 2000 (Ballotpedia’s data doesn’t go back further). Many of those contests even lacked a Democratic challenger. That a declaration of Trump-adoration resulted in the loss of what should have been a safe Republican seat should have McKissick seeking better alternatives – before he loses more seats in 2020.

Yeah, this report from the Examiner made me laugh and laugh, but then my understanding is that South Carolina politics of any brand can be best understood in the context of an insane asylum. Ah, here we go:

South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum. — James L. Petigru, 1860

It’ll be interesting to see how many other state Republican organizations will fail in their responsibilities in the same way, and how many of their respective members suddenly decide to leave the Party. The general situation is already not so good, as this latest Gallup poll on Party affiliation speaks volumes:

Democrats are picking up affiliations while the GOP appears to be static. In reality, I suspect right-wing extremists are moving into the GOP, forcing more moderate members out in disgust, who then join the Independents, while more Independents join the Democrats. But sometimes even elected GOP officials will jump parties, as four recently did in Kansas. This is noteworthy, even important, because that switch in allegiance is an implicit denial of a central GOP tenet: that the Democrats are somehow evil. While I’m sure the four defectors will cast as apostates to the remaining Kansas base, if they can communicate their reasons to the base, some parts of the base may follow suit, if not in formal allegiance, then in the voting booth.

So McKissick is roughly four steps behind the political times, I’d say, and he has a lot of scurrying to do if he doesn’t want South Carolina Republicans, not to mention himself, to become a historical curiosity gaped over by a citizenry who finds their activities incomprehensible in the greater context of a secular society bent on excellence in politics, which is something we certainly don’t have in the White House and the Senate. The House remains to be seen.

It’s a very traditional retelling of a rather amazing story: The Great Escape (1963) presents the tale of an attempted mass escape during World War II from Stalag Luft III, a German POW camp, by prisoners from the Allied forces. Led by Major Roger Bartlett (in reality, Bushell), they meticulously planned and executed a plan to drain the camp of 250 prisoners in one explosive night through the digging of long tunnels to a nearby forest, the latter of which were dug over the course of weeks.

The movie documents the methods, eccentricities, and, most importantly, the ambitions that men can conceive and execute on in contrary circumstances. In this regard, this movie falls into the category of inspirational stories that teach us to see opportunity where we may initially see only limitations. Another lesson is that of cooperation, realizing that while not everyone is gifted in the same way, sometimes those varied gifts together will help accomplish the seemingly impossible.

In the end, the prison break only results in 76 escaping before the operation is detected and shutdown. Of those 76, 50 were summarily executed (for movie purposes, as a group, but in reality in small groups), two more died during their escape attempt, three made it to the neutral countries of Sweden and Spain, and ten or so are returned to the camp.

But it’s a mistake to focus on the concrete results: it’s a metric-selection error. As Major Bartlett states at the beginning, he’s not trying to escape so much as open a new front in the war. At this point, Germany is desperate. Nearly all able-bodied men are at the front or dead, or they are members of the Cowards’ Brigade, as I call them, the Gestapo, the uniformed bullies who kept the civilians in line, and hunted down “traitors” to the Homeland. The escape diverts precious resources from the fronts where the Allies are hammering away, uses up precious fuel, even the bullets are becoming precious.

Did few escape? Sure. But the primary mission was, in reality, accomplished. And that’s what makes this story so interesting. It’s not the destination which is important, but the journey.

Very well made, and virtually overrun with stars, both matured and in the egg, this is an excellent story that can strain credulity – and yet it’s true.

Raymond Chandler’s The High Window has too many similes.

This is actually not a throw-off, but an attempt on my part to understand why The High Window is not as good Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely (which I’ve not reviewed). I’m only partially through The High Window, but I think it’s not holding my interest as well as Farewell, My Lovely due to the abundance of similes, some of which seem far-fetched. It depends too much on the similes and not enough on vivid characters.

While I had noted that a Trump-appointed Federal judge had rejected a lawsuit from Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-ME) that sought to invalidate an election result generated from ranked choice voting (RCV), the game isn’t over yet, as the Bangor Daily News reports:

Attorneys for U.S. Rep. Bruce Poliquin are asking the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston to prevent the state of Maine from sending a certification to Congress that says Jared Golden won November election in the 2nd Congressional District. …

As with Poliquin’s original complaint, the latest motion claims that ranked-choice voting violates the U.S. Constitution’s due process clause because it prevents voters from knowing which candidates will be in the so-called instant run-off election if no candidate gets a majority of votes in the first round. It also argues that ranked-choice voting violates the Equal Protection clause by allowing “certain voters, but not others, the ability to shift their vote from candidate to candidate, thereby affording them a greater degree and different kind of electoral power.”

But I think there’s more going on here at a national level than many realize. RCV is an important change to the voting landscape because it obviates the advantage Republicans have over Democrats when it comes to voting discipline. As has become increasingly apparent over the last three decades, Republicans vote Republican, and rarely is there a second conservative in a general election^[1].

This is not as true of Democrats. A Democrat, miffed by a rejection in the primaries or at the caucuses, will be seen running as an independent, or as a Green Party member. More generally, there are more party options on the left side of the spectrum than the right, and that has the tendency to split the vote – and that’s disaster for the Democrat. Remember the candidacy of Ralph Nader in 2000? Without him splitting the liberal, it might have been President Gore^[2].

RCV has the potential to relieve that disaster. For the Republicans, anyone other than a Republican winning is unacceptable because there are no other real independent conservative parties, not since the Libertarians chose to join the Republicans.

But Democrats can easily work with other liberal parties if necessary. They already do that in the United States Senate, where Senators Sanders and King are not Democrats, but Independents – but both caucus and vote with the Democrats.

And since RCV will allow a liberal voter to list their personal favorite candidate first, and the Democrat second or even third, and get the same result as listing the Democrat first, all of a sudden the Republican disciplined voter advantage disappears.

Maine is the first State in the Union to use RCV, and that’s why this is the first time there’s been serious litigation over it. Because of the tactical consequences of the final ruling on the issue, it’s worth keeping an eye on it. If RCV is approved by SCOTUS itself, the Republicans will find one of their built-in advantages has disappeared.

And this will be a good thing. Not because more Democrats will potentially win, although I don’t have a problem with that, but because one of the key pillars of Republican validity will disappear, the one that says We hold power, therefore what we’re doing is right! There’s a lot of moral momentum behind electoral victories, because it seems to say that voters approve of what you’re doing. That is the naive viewpoint; sophisticates are aware that vote splitting by multiple candidates on the liberal side of the spectrum, voter suppression tactics, even foreign adversary interference, can swing an election, if it’s undertaken with suitable panache.

And, contrariwise, a string of losses should lead to introspection and modification. A single loss, no, but when you start stringing them together, there’s an indication that something is going wrong, and while it’s popular to blame marketing and messaging, there’s always the worry that a core ideological position has been judged to be inferior by the electorate.

And that’s how change for the better can occur.

Make no mistake, the more I think about this, the more convinced I become that the Pouliquin suit is one of the most important election law suits of the next 50 years.

¹ A notable exception is Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), who, after rejection by the Alaska Republicans in the primaries, won her seat on the strength of a write-in campaign in 2010. This exception is more a commentary on the weakness of the Democratic and official Republican candidates.

² Mr. Nader, for the record, rejects this conclusion himself. However, there are many election watchers who do accept that conclusion.

Monopsony:

In economics, a monopsony (from Ancient Greek μόνος (mónos) “single” + ὀψωνία (opsōnía) “purchase”) is a market structure in which a single buyer substantially controls the market as the major purchaser of goods and services offered by many would-be sellers. In the microeconomic theory of monopsony, a single entity is assumed to have market power over sellers as the only purchaser of a good or service, much in the same manner that a monopolist can influence the price for its buyers in a monopoly, in which only one seller faces many buyers. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Politicians have caused a pay ‘collapse’ for the bottom 90 percent of workers, researchers say,” Christopher Ingraham, WaPo:

As [Josh] Bivens and [Heidi] Shierholz [of the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute] tell it, a relatively recent thread of economic research into monopsony power — which they define as “the leverage enjoyed by employers to set their workers’ pay” — has helped economists explain some of the wage stagnation observed in the United States over the past 40 years. You can think of monopsony power as the flip side of monopoly power: If monopoly power lets companies charge higher prices to consumers, monopsony power lets them pay lower wages to workers. Either way, it spells trouble for people who buy things and work for a living.

Research into monopsony power finds that many job markets are dominated by a relatively small number of employers. If you are, say, a coal miner, there may be just one or two coal mines within 100 miles of your home. If the mine you’re working at is treating you unfairly, you don’t have many options for finding a new job — particularly if you already left the other mine for similar reasons. In the absence of any serious competition for the most talented workers, employers have a huge amount of leeway in setting workers’ salaries, and they often set them at levels below what traditional economic theories would expect.

From the wider societal view, it sounds like cancer to me. The engine of the economy depends on workers earning a living and spending their earnings on both necessaries and optionals. The rapacity implicit in this article suggests that many workers in these situations are not able to contribute to the “thrash” of the market, as it were.

This is also ringing a bell in connection with Turchin and Nefedov’s Secular Cycles, which speaks to a stagflation phase occurring near the end of an economic-societal-political secular cycle. It’s important to note that Turchin and Nefedov’s work is on agrarian societies, so it may not be wholly applicable to today’s American urban society – but, being the undisciplined sort, I cannot help but note the interesting similarities. It suggests that we are, in fact, suffering from overpopulation, between an excess of skilled people, falling incomes, and rising rents.

I hope to put out a review of Secular Cycles in the near future, but, speaking as a complete newcomer to the subject, I will recommend its first Chapter for the serious reader who doesn’t mind slogging and thinking, or is familiar with the area. I think it’s fascinating. I’m in the midst of Chapter 2, but I suspect all of the Chapters following the first are case-studies studying the congruency of their theory with reality.

Tim Klein likes to meld two die-cut puzzles to produce his artwork.

More at Puzzle Montage.

It’s actually fascinating.

More here.

As WaPo and many others have noted, the Weekly Standard is shutting down, with one of its last news reports being a repudiation of Representative Steve King (R-IA) as being representative of conservatism:

Founded in 1995 by Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, and Fred Barnes, the Weekly Standard became the de facto voice of the neoconservative movement under President George W. Bush as its writers lustily cheered on the Iraq War. But as Kristol emerged as one of the loudest conservative voices against Trump, the magazine he edited until 2016 likewise became a harsh critic of the populist president and his allies.

President Trump, per usual, thinks this is a victory for him:

But I was careful to note that the Weekly Standard was a home for neocons, short for the neo-conservative movement. What was their great accomplishment?

Two wars, the one in Afghanistan, justified as a war to stop al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies, and the other in Iraq, which we began under the since-proven false pretenses that Iraq and its leader, Saddam Hussein, were in possession of Weapons of Mass Destruction, despite agreements to be rid of them. Whatever you thought of the malignancy of Saddam Hussein, promulgating a war on false pretenses is inevitably a stain on our honor.

The President and his allies would like us to believe that Trump-ism has swept the Weekly Standard away in its victorious jetstream, but I have my doubts about that. I think the next few weeks will see those political observers with deeper sources than mine asking whether the neocon movement collapsed simply because of its duplicity and its inferior results. It’s certainly seen adherents, such as Max Boot, slip away recently. This may be the face-plant of an inferior philosophy, and not the victim of a party wallowing in its own amateurism.

WaPo notes a special report to the Senate on Russian disinformation efforts:

The report traces the origins of Russian online influence operations to Russian domestic politics in 2009 and says that ambitions shifted to include U.S. politics as early as 2013 on Twitter. Of the tweets the company provided to the Senate, 57 percent are in Russian, 36 percent in English and smaller amounts in other languages.

The efforts to manipulate Americans grew sharply in 2014 and every year after, as teams of operatives spread their work across more platforms and accounts to target larger swaths of U.S. voters by geography, political interests, race, religion and other factors. The Russians started with accounts on Twitter, then added YouTube and Instagram before bringing Facebook into the mix, the report said.

To my mind, the poor fit between national politics and an international communications tool is the highlight, at least from this article (the report, by Howard, Ganesh, and Liotsiou, all of Oxford University, and Killy and  François of Graphika is here). There’s no easy fix, as everyone knows, other than shutting the Internet down.

Kevin Drum’s a little puzzled:

I don’t really understand this. Why were the Russians trying to get Republicans elected back in 2013 and 2014? Was it an anti-Hillary thing even back then? Were they convinced that Republicans would be softer on them than Democrats? That doesn’t really make sense. And when, exactly, did the pro-Trump propaganda start? As soon as he announced he was running? Or was it later than that?

Drum’s not thinking well. We are the super-power, and that makes us the enemy for Russia. I suspect the two major political parties were evaluated by the Russians for vulnerability, and the Republicans won – easily. After all, they’re expected to vote the party line, which makes the investment to put a properly corrupted candidate in place of a lower risk than the more fractious Democrats. The Democrats also have stronger civil liberties instincts than do the Republicans, which are repugnant to Russians, who prefer an all-or-nothing approach to governance. Finally, the Republicans have been running further and further to the right since, well, really since the days when Goldwater warned about the changing nature of the Republican Party! But, more clearly, since Newt Gingrich became Speaker of the House (1995-1999) and took the Republicans away from the idea of shared governance and towards dominance and isolation.

This is clearly a fascist mindset and is quite compatible with that of the current Russian government. In order to get their hooks into a Republican Party whose soul had been ripped away by Gingrich and his buddies, they started during the Obama days – or does Drum not remember the irrational refusal of the Republicans to share governance with President Obama and the Democrats? This report certainly serves to help solidify the case that the Republicans have been co-opted by the Russians through the insertion of certain ideological tenets and, even more importantly, the alienation of Republican culture from the greater American culture. By reinforcing the fear of change in the minds of the Republicans, they slowly are tearing the United States apart. Doubt it? Just consider recent Republican actions in end-of-term legislative actions in Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Carolina meant to hobble incoming Democratic office-holders. These over-the-line tactics are classic examples of the all-or-nothing mindset that refuses to trust the opposition; in contrast, most Americans expect that trust to be present, as expressed by the current aphorism, elections have consequences.

Or, at least, that’s how I’d do it if I were a Russian.

Steve Benen may be a bit puzzled over last week’s elevation of former Representative, current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) director, and former acting Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFBP) director Mick Mulvaney (R-SC) to the slot of acting Chief of Staff to President Trump:

… [Trump promoting] Mulvaney to lead OMB, where he peddled conspiracy theories, was at times disconnected from the president’s position on budget issues, and where he gave the banking industry some rather crude advice on how best to buy access to policymakers.

During Mulvaney’s tenure as budget director, the nation’s finances also took a turn toward the absurd: by some measures, the United States has never had a budget deficit this high during a period of strong economic growth.

He also unveiled a budget plan with a jaw-dropping $2-trillion mistake – and then insisted his colossal screw-up was intentional.

It’s against this backdrop that Trump decided to give Mulvaney additional responsibilities, so the president tapped him to lead the CFPB – despite (or perhaps, because of) the fact that Mulvaney opposes the existence of the CFPB. Predictably, he proceeded to gut the agency’s enforcement efforts, aligning the bureau’s priorities with the goals of the payday-lending industry.

And yet, the more Mulvaney’s record took ridiculous turns, the more the president was impressed. Every failure has been followed by a promotion.

But it seems fairly obvious to me. The clue is, of course, President Trump. Obsessed with image and brand, we often interpret him as motivated by the optics of a situation. But there’s also the reputational aspect. Whether Trump is conscious of it or not, he’s an amateur and a screwup. There’s nothing graceful about his approach to life and success, as we can see in his many visits with the legal system over the years.

But few people enjoy actually being visibly incompetent. Trump cherishes his image of success Therefore, Mulvaney, a fringe character himself, can continually screw up and only earn the appreciation of a President eager to disguise his own large collection of failings.

Add in the dozens of investigations targeting Trump, of which he’s eager to distract attention from, and Mulvaney’s appointment remains, in Trump’s eyes, nearly perfect. At least for the next week, this appointment will attract attention that would otherwise be assigned to Trump’s many, many failings. Mulvaney’s ultimate competency in the position will, at some point, bring approbation down upon him, at least from Trump, and then Trump will blame him for all things rotten with his Administration.

But this appointment may be better for Trump’s ego than that of Nick Ayers, Pence’s current Chief of Staff, who doesn’t appear to be garnering controversy through incompetency. He refused Trump’s offer of the position. I suspect his current perch gave him a great view of the chaos such a position entails, and refused to bite on it. Smart guy.

So many ways to go on vacation.

More here.

I was a little bemused to read this article by Stephen Battersby in NewScientist (8 December 2018, paywall) on the latest refinement of the coordinate system used by astronomers and others based on black holes:

To chart our place in the universe, astronomers have looked billions of light years away, to some of the most extraordinary objects in the cosmos: quasars. These intense beacons of light surrounding black holes in distant galaxies are being used to fix physical positions back here in the solar system. And not only will they help guide our travels to distant worlds, they will also help us learn more about our own. …

… in the 1990s, astronomers took a giant leap. Rather than relying on stars mere hundreds of light years away, they decided to look billions of light years away instead. Objects that distant don’t shift their position in the sky we see very fast, which made them ideal candidates as reference points. But to be clearly visible from so far away, they have to be bright, and the brightest beacons we know are quasars: the sites where supermassive black holes suck matter in and fire radiation out. A side benefit of using such heavy markers is that they don’t get pushed around easily. Being billions of times the mass of the sun, supermassive black holes tend to stay put at the centre of their galaxies.

What’s my problem? The Universe is allegedly continually expanding. That really renders attempts to absolutely establish position a bit of an exercise in futility for those of us who refuse to operate with error bars. (An error bar refers to the uncertainty of some measurement, the plus/minus of a given measured value.)

And, I’m sure, this coordinate system is nifty enough that it doesn’t really matter. It just strikes my funny bone a little oddly….