Unsightly Mental Blemishes

For readers who like national monuments, Trump’s desire to erase Obama’s legacy has resulted in a reduction of two of monuments from Obama’s era. From The Salt Lake Tribune:

To the cheers of Utah politicians and dismay of environmental and tribal groups, President Donald Trump swept into Utah on Monday and erased most of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National monuments — shaving 2 million acres from their boundaries and replacing them with five smaller monuments.

The historic move was swiftly met with a lawsuit filed by a coalition of conservation organizations and threats of another from American Indian groups, as opponents claimed the reductions are illegal and denounced them as potentially opening pristine lands to development. Protesters along Trump’s route and in downtown Salt Lake City shouted and waved signs opposing his changes, and for a time halted traffic.

But, as Steve Benen points out, Interior Secretary Zinke is playing the “say the opposite of reality” game:

Wait, what’s the hundredth prime number again?

If only the premise of Escape From New York (1981) were palatable. From my science fiction days, I remember “they” would say you got one unbelievable assumption in a story. But it just doesn’t work here. The sacrifice of Manhattan, with all its valuable buildings, to be a high-security prison for all the criminals of the United States simply rings completely false.

Add to that the lack of interesting thematic material, and Escape From New York becomes merely another mindless action flick, as Air Force One goes down in Manhattan, and the President must be found and extracted by one “Snake” Plisken, former Special Forces, later arrested and convicted on charges of attempting to rob the Federal Reserve.

What’s turned him from military to armed robber? For that matter, what’s caused the 400% increase in crime? We don’t know. Not a hint. It makes the movie much less interesting. It seems like everyone in Manhattan has heard of Snake. Some have even heard he’s dead. Where do those two bits of info lead?

Oh, nowhere.

If you want mindless action, this isn’t too awful. Good sequences. But it’s not gripping, it’s boring.

I’ve been laughing all day at this silly-ass assertion that the President cannot be obstructing justice:

John Dowd, President Trump’s outside lawyer, outlined to me [Mike Allen]] a new and highly controversial defense/theory in the Russia probe: A president cannot be guilty of obstruction of justice.

The “President cannot obstruct justice because he is the chief law enforcement officer under [the Constitution’s Article II] and has every right to express his view of any case,” Dowd claims. [Axios]

Dowd is suggesting the President has no standards to live up to as chief law enforcement officer.

BUT THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF THE FACT OF THE MATTER.

Law enforcement is ideally always held to a higher standard than the general citizenry. Because they’ve been permitted special powers as law enforcement personnel, they are also expected to adhere to standards that the rest of us need not.

In essence, no, Dowd, the President is not permitted to attempt to influence possible future cases. Not of Hillary Clinton. Not of himself.

And he most certainly may not use those powers to stop investigations into this own behaviors. That is inherent in being a law enforcement officer.

And it’s all in your own words, Dowd. If only you had given this matter deeper thought.

Sort of like your client.

Benjamin Wittes of Lawfare is having some trouble digesting Alan Dershowitz’s arguments against Trump indulging in obstruction of justice. He has four questions for Dershowitz, the first being this:

James Comey has testified that the FBI first opened an investigation of Russian interference in our election in July of 2016. This was presumably a counterintelligence investigation, in the first instance. To comply with Justice Department guidelines, it could only have arisen because some information came in—probably as a result of ongoing monitoring of foreign intelligence targets—indicating a degree of interaction between the Russians and Trump campaign officials or figures. That is, the FBI would have had to make a judgment, at a minimum, that a counterintelligence investigation touching the Trump campaign or someone within it “may obtain foreign intelligence that is responsive to a foreign intelligence requirement.” If there was a criminal component to that investigation, it would also have had to have information suggesting that “An activity constituting a federal crime or a threat to the national security has or may have occurred, is or may be occurring, or will or may occur.”

So here’s my first question to Dershowitz: Assuming that the information that came to the FBI in July 2016 properly met the standards for predication of either a national security investigation or a criminal investigation, should the FBI have declined to investigate it? That is, should the FBI have shrugged at the possibility of Russian recruitment of Trump campaign officials because Dershowitz concludes without the benefit of that investigation that “Even if it were to turn out that the Trump campaign collaborated, colluded or cooperated with Russian agents, that alone would not be a crime”? Note that Trump was not president at the time and that, therefore, no question arises at this stage as to whether a president can obstruct justice by exercising his constitutional authority to supervise the executive branch.

The story does not end there. Because when the FBI began investigating this matter, evidence arose of potential crimes among senior members of the Trump campaign. For example, in the course of investigating L’Affaire Russe, the FBI—and later the special counsel’s investigation—developed information suggesting that Paul Manafort and Rick Gates had engaged in a giant money-laundering scheme. Acting Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s appointment letter for Mueller specifically gave him jurisdiction over “any matters that arose or may arise directly from the investigation.”

The rest are interesting questions, as I think Benjamin more or less ridicules Dershowitzs’s arguments.

Andrew Sullivan on President Trump:

In his speech last Wednesday night in Missouri, for example, he claimed that his tax proposal was the biggest tax cut in history (not even close); that it was “going to cost me a fortune, this thing, believe me … I have some very wealthy friends. Not so happy with me, but that’s okay” (an absolute inversion of reality); and that the stock market had been flat before his presidency (the Dow was at 7,000 when Obama came to office and 20,000 when he left).

Or cast your eyes back a few days and consider his condemnation of various sexual abusers and harassers (such as Al Franken and Matt Lauer). Why on earth would someone who has been personally accused by a dozen women of sexual assault get on his high horse with respect to others? Because in his own mind, he never committed assault. Every single woman who accused him really is a liar and the tape that recorded his bragging of assault was in fact as faked as Obama’s birth certificate. And this is not the only indelible delusion we discover he still clings to. He believes — alone among the leaders of every single other country — that climate change is a Chinese hoax, even as the Chinese, for some unfathomable reason, invest heavily in renewable energy; he is adamant that Russia did not meddle in the U.S. elections last year and that the U.S. intelligence community is lying about it or full of “hacks.” He believes that every poll that shows him as unpopular is fake; and that virtually everything the mainstream media reports about his administration is fabricated.

And this is the result of building your entire identity on your success, to the n^th degree. For Trump, reality is a tertiary concern, to be repressed when it interferes with his perception of success.

To me, one’s first allegiance should be to reality, the truth. Which is why I find myself so much alienated from the GOP than the Democrats these days.

The Magnificent Seven (1960) is not your average Western film. The story of seven gunslingers hired to guard a Mexican village against a group of bandits, it pulls back the romantic reputation of the gunslinger to reveal its hollow, desolate core. Each of the Seven has a story to tell, from the young wannabe, searching for a reputation and the prestige to go with it in order to rise out of his humble beginnings, to the has-been, tormented by nightmares of not being good enough, to the leader and his number 2, both sadly aware that no place has a hold on them, no woman waits for them, there are no children to care for.

It’s this awareness of a hollow at core of their existence, perhaps, that permits this movie to open with a funeral scene – or, more properly, the trip to the burial site. A man has died of a heart attack, his funeral expenses have been kindly paid for by a stranger, and the undertaker reports all is ready on Boot Hill.

Except for the small group of men who object to an Indian being buried on Boot Hill.

Chris and Vin volunteer to take the body in, showing off their pinpoint shooting skills by shooting one man’s gun out of his hand, and another in the arm, and successfully taking the body to his final resting place. But why? Why not, perhaps? Or perhaps they’ve discarded that prejudice that so many early settlers had against the Indian, discarded it because of their own bleak future.

So when three villagers show up, looking for help against the 40 or so bandits who demand tribute from their village, Chris takes on the job, recruiting Vin and the others, each coming for their own reason, from the wannabe to the man still looking for the big score, which he’s convinced is somewhere in the mountains of the village, to the has-been, a quiet cipher who may be looking for redemption – or the final way out.

Once at the village, they direct the villagers in building defenses. Each step is careful to show the inner lives of the men, such as when they realize the villagers are giving them the best food and subsisting on a few beans a day – the Seven then turn around and host a feast using the food, making sure everyone is well-fed, if only for that night.

When the bandits show up, all hell breaks loose – but now we’re invested in these Seven, along with the villagers. They win the first battle, but when the second ends in their disadvantage, some would say they were lucky to walk away with their lives. Why do they return to the third and final battle? To rescue the villagers? To salve their wounded pride?

To do right? To fill, for a moment, that hollow core?

Strongly Recommended.

Andrew Sullivan celebrates the British royals’ influence on society:

One note in favor of the monarchy. I’m an unabashedly Tory royalist. This is not because I have anti-democratic impulses (if I’d stayed in Britain and at some point been offered some kind of aristocratic title, like many of my friends in the elite, I would refuse it on principle). And it’s not even because I love royal news and gossip. It bores me to tears. It’s because I see the enormous value, especially in these tribal times, of institutions that can unite people with each other and with the past. The British monarchy brilliantly performs both functions. The country is currently bent on an act of economic suicide in its pathetic attempt to leave the E.U.; it is riven by the same tribal divides as America; it has an identity crisis around race, religion, and even the boundaries of its own territory. But everyone loves the Queen. When she dies, the nation will fall silent. She is the living embodiment of that Burkean idea of a national compact between the generations, past, present and future. She gives an apolitical meaning to being British. I remember vividly watching Netflix’s The Crown in the wake of Trump’s victory. Queen Elizabeth II represented the polar opposite of President-elect Trump. Utterly self-effacing for decades, stable, rational, devoted to protocol, insistent on political neutrality, devoting her entire life to constant service, she is, in some ways, a living rebuke to the polarizing, showboating American presidency we now have to endure.

The contrast of Queen Elizabeth II and President Trump neglects one important challenge: when the Queen dies, how do you know her replacement, whether it’s son or grandson, will have her virtues? History is full of monstrous Kings and Queens, and in fact that’s some of the motivation for the American form of government.

I want to say the antidote is composite institutions, such as Congress, but recent experience has cast doubt on that assertion. Perhaps the most that you can say is that even if a majority of the institution has been perverted, they do remain individuals capable of random, even honorable acts. As each has individual ambition, they may occasionally neglect their sad, un-American allegiance to Party and whoever controls that Party.

Occasionally.

So long as we have institutions of power, we may suffer through periods like this.

Perfervid:

adjective
extremely fervid; ardent [Collins English Dictionary]

Noted in “America Is Trapped in Trump’s Delusional World,” Andrew Sullivan, New York:

At its center is mental illness. It radiates out of the center like a toxin in the blood. And this, again, is nothing new. On Trump’s first day in office, with respect to the size of his inauguration crowd, he insisted that what was demonstrably, visibly, incontrovertibly false was actually true. At that moment, we learned that all the lies and exaggerations and provocations of the previous year were not just campaign tools, designed to con and distract, but actually constitutive of his core mental health. He was not lying, as lying is usually understood. He was expressing what he believed to be true, because his ego demanded it be true. And for Trump, as we now know, there is no reality outside his own perfervidly narcissistic consciousness.

A lovely word. The context of the United States electing this chump, however, makes me ill at my heart.

They say I look good as a porcupine.

The best way to describe the genre of Kung Fu Hustle (2004) is as a cartoon come to life. For the movie’s director, Stephen Chow, the laws of physics are mere play things for characters whose actions and natures are amplified by Chow’s special effects team, frequently using ideas borrowed from cartoons. Running involves the classic spinning legs of the Coyote from the Roadrunner cartoons; fights can move at ludicrous speeds; and when the fat lady sings, look out.

But these are not merely affectations to mark the movie as novel, but also serve to notify the audience of the moral dimensions of this movie, because this is a movie that disputes the notion that there is little connection between the behaviors, or morals, of a person, and his capabilities as a fighter. For example, every time the hero of the story attempts an evil act, he fails spectacularly. No, catastrophically. His own weapons wound him, he is detected and pursued, escaping only through happy happenstance. He’s never committed arson, murder, rape, or anything else – despite a stated intent to do so. Rebuffed at every turn, his most evil attainment may be his pick-lock skills, which save his and his partner’s life when he’s about to be executed by the very gang in which he covets membership.

These tricks highlight a plot of some intricacy and anticipation that has playful references to other movies, some of which I’m sure I missed. But the running theme is how there is always a sufficiently skilled fighter for good to defeat the almost magical powers of the kung fu master for evil. And if some magical Chinese thinking is necessary to bring forth the final fighter for good, so be it, for he’s been with us all along, and simply needed to be released from the chrysalis that had constrained him.

My Arts Editor may not care for this movie, but if you don’t mind some bright whimsy – no, a lot of whimsy – and a hidden smile behind almost every scene, then this movie is Recommended.

It appears that anytime the ‘I’ word comes out, the American public perks up, shakes its head sadly, and discounts the Trump Administration, as we can see in the Gallup Presidential Approval poll. With a 33% approval rating, President Trump has achieved a new low, while the 62% disapproval rating ties a high.

If we just look at these numbers, it appears Trump is in trouble – but how long will these numbers persist or even worsen? The Manafort indictment resulted in a similar reaction, only to recover shortly thereafter.

So I’m hesitant to actually read much into these numbers. Now, if Trump’s approval rating were to reach 30%, then I’d grant a permanent effect, but at the moment, it’s more like a shock to the system, causing one’s hair to stand on end before the cardiac arrest returns.

And in the end, how much does this affect Speaker Ryan? In his hands are the ability to start the impeachment process, and so far he hasn’t shown any willingness to use it. Honestly, it’s hard to say if his loyalty to the Party leader is greater than his loyalty to the country, or if in his opinion there’s not enough evidence to justify impeachment – despite Trump’s increasingly dangerous and incomprehensible ways.

Stay tuned, I’ll be interested in tomorrow’s numbers – although I expect a recovery for President Trump.

Benjamin Wittes and a small team of his colleagues present a first cut at interpreting the implications of the Flynn indictment on Lawfare. Among the many takeaways:

The most important revelation here is that contrary to [Trump’s attorny, Ty] Cobb’s statement Friday morning, Flynn is saying clearly that he was not a rogue actor but was operating at the behest of the presidential transition team. He states that a “very senior member of the Presidential Transition Team,” a “senior official of the Presidential Transition Team” and “senior members of the Presidential Transition Team” were involved in directing his actions. The stipulated facts also make clear that Flynn reported back to the transition on his conversations with Kislyak.

Second, take a moment to remember the context in which Flynn’s underlying conduct took place: He and apparently the Trump transition team were working to undermine U.S. foreign policy goals endorsed by both parties. In December 2016, President Obama authorized sanctions against Russia in response to cyber-enabled election interference. He did so with broad bipartisan support to deter such activity in the future against the U.S. and its allies. The shared bipartisan—even nonpartisan—goal was to protect foundational elements of democracy and legitimacy. To the extent that there was mainstream criticism of the action, it was for being too weak, not for being too aggressive with respect to Russia.

And so Flynn is just part of the team, which means there will be more indictments. Will this Greek tragedy come to an end, or is Trump going to try to ride this right into the side of a mountain? I’m guessing his ego won’t let him resign and let the nation get on to the task of healing – we’ll have to endure some sort of impeachment, even possibly a criminal trial.

It’s an interesting article, seeing how experienced lawyers interpret a plea agreement in one of the most unusual contexts in American history – the investigation of a Presidential campaign and even Administration.

Andrew McCarthy on National Review prefers to see corruption in the Obama Administration:

Obviously, it was wrong of Flynn to give the FBI false information; he could, after all, have simply refused to speak with the agents in the first place. That said, as I argued early this year, it remains unclear why the Obama Justice Department chose to investigate Flynn. There was nothing wrong with the incoming national-security adviser’s having meetings with foreign counterparts or discussing such matters as the sanctions in those meetings. Plus, if the FBI had FISA recordings of Flynn’s conversations with Kislyak, there was no need to ask Flynn what the conversations entailed.

Flynn, an early backer of Donald Trump and a fierce critic of Obama’s national-security policies, was generally despised by Obama administration officials. Hence, there has always been cynical suspicion that the decision to interview him was driven by the expectation that he would provide the FBI with an account inconsistent with the recorded conversation — i.e., that Flynn was being set up for prosecution on a process crime.

While initial reporting is portraying Flynn’s guilty plea as a major breakthrough in Mueller’s investigation of potential Trump-campaign collusion with the Russian regime, I suspect the opposite is true.

Speculation that Flynn is now cooperating in Mueller’s investigation stirred in recent days due to reports that Flynn had pulled out of a joint defense agreement (or “common interest” arrangement) to share information with other subjects of the investigation. As an ethical matter, it is inappropriate for an attorney whose client is cooperating with the government (or having negotiations toward that end) to continue strategizing with, and having quasi-privileged communications with, other subjects of the investigation and their counsel.

Nevertheless, as I explained in connection with George Papadopoulos (who also pled guilty in Mueller’s investigation for lying to the FBI), when a prosecutor has a cooperator who was an accomplice in a major criminal scheme, the cooperator is made to plead guilty to the scheme. This is critical because it proves the existence of the scheme. In his guilty-plea allocution (the part of a plea proceeding in which the defendant admits what he did that makes him guilty), the accomplice explains the scheme and the actions taken by himself and his co-conspirators to carry it out. This goes a long way toward proving the case against all of the subjects of the investigation.

McCarthy seems to ignore the possibility that Mueller may select a different strategy than McCarthy sees and interprets. He also forgets that Flynn may be protecting his own son, Mike, Jr., who is thought to also have been a part of this scandal – although he’s not charged. He may function as extra leverage for Mueller.

Here’s the choices given to the survivors of the spaceship Shenandoah, located on the Saturnian moon Titan:

1. Try to salvage stuff from some unnamed alien ship, which just happens to be a charnel ship.
2. Try to fix the Shenandoah, which is unfixable, and is about to become a charnel ship.
3. Try to take an unnamed German ship off the surface and return home. BTW, this is a charnel ship.

And they thought it was part of a butterfly collection!

An unhappy choice for the survivors, a shrinking number, in the movie Creature (1985). The remains of a ship – I think – are found on Titan by the crew of a ship owned by the corporation NTI, and as the researchers / archaeologists / crew (again not sure) are in the midst of trying to document it, something comes popping out of one of the containers they’re puzzling over.

A few hours / days / months later, an unknown ship apparently piloted by one of the crew crashes into a manned satellite in orbit around Earth. Why? Uh, I’m not sure.

So now, of course, another ship, the Shenandoah, is sent by NTI to see what might be there. On getting there, they find a ship owned by their chief competitors, Richter Dynamics, or RD for short, is there. The commander of the mission, a corporate flack, orders an immediate landing over the objections of the Captain, with no research as to the best place to land, and moments after landing, Shenandoah bursts through the crust and the ship is effectively disabled.

Well, after this it gets messy, what with bodies hidden in cupboards (the monster is apparently related to squirrels), dead bodies springing to life, a German survivor who has a thing for the tall, silent security officer who hasn’t an effective weapon, and, well, a lot of screaming.

It was fairly awful.

If it sounds a little like the classic Alien (1979), I assure you this felt like a thin ripoff, from the plot to the persistent fog on the surface of the moon, even the landing reminded me of the Nostromo landing sequence.

But not nearly as good. Just like the rest of this movie. Don’t waste your time.

When they build them (or specify them, since private industry builds them), NASA builds them to last:

This artist’s concept shows NASA’s Voyager spacecraft against a backdrop of stars.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA scientists needed to reorient the 40-year-old Voyager 1 — the space agency’s farthest spacecraft — so its antenna would point toward Earth, 13 billion miles away. But the “attitude control thrusters,” the first option to make the spacecraft turn in space, have been wearing out.

So NASA searched for a Plan B, eventually deciding to try using four “trajectory correction maneuver” (TCM) thrusters, located on the back side of Voyager 1. But those thrusters had not been used in 37 years. NASA wasn’t sure they’d work.

Tuesday, engineers fired up the thrusters and waited eagerly to find out whether the plan was successful. They got their answer 19 hours and 35 minutes later, the time it took for the results to reach Earth: The set of four thrusters worked perfectly. The spacecraft turned and the mood at NASA shifted to jubilation.

“The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all,” said Todd Barber, a propulsion engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. [CNN]

Wow!

An old friend has sent me an article by Brent Bozell concerning the sexual harassment problems at the long-time American institutions NPR and PBS:

The swift revolution against sexual harassment is ending the careers of a series of media “icons,” left and right. But perhaps nowhere is this hypocrisy more notable (and deeper) than at PBS and NPR. These were the entities that made sexual harassment the boiling feminist issue when Anita Hill testified during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing in 1991.

Here’s an easy question: Why didn’t this sudden spirit of self-discovery and investigation happen back then? Or in any year since? It could have happened when then-President Bill Clinton settled with Paula Jones in 1998, or even last year as these networks enjoyed reporting on sexual harassment scandals inside Fox News. All along the way, it appears that very same sexual harassment was alive at both PBS and NPR.

I’ll just interrupt the tirade to note that this is a very typical rant. PBS and NPR have been long time targets of the right-wing due to both content and the fact that they’re funded through taxes, one of the evils of government. More importantly, though, is that leadoff statement:  “These were the entities that made sexual harassment the boiling feminist issue when Anita Hill testified during Clarence Thomas’ confirmation hearing in 1991.” This assertion is provided without proof, and, in actual fact, this would be exceptionally difficult to prove or disprove. Brent slips it in as a way to ratchet up the emotional content of the article, and he wants that for a very specific reason.

After a series of shots at the current shooting gallery members, Brent finishes:

In what way, then, is “public” broadcasting morally superior to corporate broadcasting? And how deep is the hypocrisy on the left considering it waited decades to hold sexual harassers in its own taxpayer-funded ideological sandboxes accountable? They don’t deserve one more red cent from taxpaying Americans.

And did you catch the sleight of hand? He’s tried to suggest that public funding is all about paying the salaries of sexual harassers.

Well, no. We all know that’s false, we just need to be reminded that PBS and NPR missions have nothing to do with hypocrisy, they have to do with public service. The fact that powerful men and women^[1] may use their positions for morally dubious purposes is not confined to any one ideology, although some do not condemn it or may even celebrate it (not common in the American milieu, though). We see it at Fox News, NBC, and it seems positively rife in religious settings – although I’m sure an intellectually honest measurement would show it to be sparse.

But the proper response is to correct the situation, not to indulge in an impulsive termination of the entire enterprise, and that’s what we’re seeing – powerful people being fired. The enterprise should be judged on how well it fulfills its mission, and how important that mission is to the nation. Note that the question of sexual harassment does have an impact on the performance of the mission, because sexual harassment has a negative impact on the productivity of those who are victimized. An organization demoralized by a boss whose proclivities are not properly restrained will not be a successful organization.

Also, note Brent’s intellectual dishonesty of implying “the left” even knew about these offenders in their midst. It would be equally dishonest for me to suggest that the fans (or former fans) of Bill O’Reilly, ex-employee of Fox News and host of their “O’Reilly Factor,” the most popular cable show for 16 years, were aware that he was a serial sexual harasser, and Fox News had actually made substantial payoffs to settle lawsuits resulting from his behavior, and they continued to watch regardless because they all approved. No, of course they didn’t know, because the entire sexual harassment phenomenon embarrasses the victims, and then if they do lodge complaints, they’re going up against people in powerful positions who can make their lives quite difficult. By the same token, “the left” has no general knowledge that some leader X is actually a sexual harasser.

Bozell should be ashamed that he wrote that sentence.

I’ll also note in passing his mistaken conflation of “the left” with PBS and NPR. The fact of the matter is that all of us pay, or have paid, taxes, and that gives all of us a stake in these enterprises. If they appear “liberal” to viewers of a conservative bent, this may be more indicative of the state of the world than the ideological mindset within these institutions.

Up to here, this is just a simple close reading of Bozell’s prose and being sensitive to the use of emotional currents to cover up intellectual weakness. But now I want to address one more point, using one of my hobby horses that’s been out to pasture for a while. Long time readers are aware of my analysis of the sectors of society, which boils down to realizing that categorizing our various sectors also reveals their differing goals, and how those goals necessarily affect the selection and optimization of processes for achieving those goals – and explains why attempting to import one sector’s processes into another sector is an intellectually suspect project, also known as “elected business leader Y because he has leadership experience.” And then he flops (with some exceptions). Interested readers should click here.

Brent asks,

In what way, then, is “public” broadcasting morally superior to corporate broadcasting?

Of course, firmly fixed in the pliant reader’s mind is the entire sexual harassment episodes, linked to hypocrisy, and how surely this compromises the entire “left” – a position I think is quite weak. But implied in that is a right-wing frustration that the private-sector model of news reporting is always considered a little suspect when compared with public broadcasting.

First, we need to understand the importance of accurate news and information dissemination in our society. We function and do well on good information; we misfire, we make poor decisions, we elect bad leaders, when we have poor quality information.

The processes and goals of our news sector should be bringing the best quality news and information to its viewers, uncontaminated by political and commercial concerns. That is the ideal. The roles of competition, innovation, delivery modes, gathering modes are interesting but irrelevant here. A key problem is that the viewing audience should reward those who do this task best, but that requires rationality from a species that is only capable of rationality, but is not rational itself.

So? Corporations have financial, political and commercial interests that can, and sometimes do, contaminate the information that reaches the audience. I’ve commented before on the ongoing disaster which is Fox News, and Bruce Bartlett’s analysis of same. Another example, which may become worse if the government neglects its role in preventing and dismantling monopolies, is the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which is trying to buy Tribune Media and thereby gain a dominant position in the market – and stifle competition. How are they contaminating information? From The New York Times (which might be considered a competitor, but has a long and honorable history in the news sector):

They are called “must-runs,” and they arrive every day at television stations owned by the Sinclair Broadcast Group — short video segments that are centrally produced by the company. Station managers around the country are directed to work them into the broadcast over a period of 24 or 48 hours.

Since November 2015, Sinclair has ordered its stations to run a daily segment from a “Terrorism Alert Desk” with updates on terrorism-related news around the world. During the election campaign last year, it sent out a package that suggested in part that voters should not support Hillary Clinton because the Democratic Party was historically pro-slavery. More recently, Sinclair asked stations to run a short segment in which Scott Livingston, the company’s vice president for news, accused the national news media of publishing “fake news stories.”

Yes, because a news company is qualified to issue “terror alerts”. Nothing like amplifying the bad news and minimizing the good news in order to keep your audience cowed and compliant, eh? Compliant for what? Voting the way SBG wants.

So how does this connect to Brent’s plaint? Funding sources. Corporate broadcasting is necessarily tied to a company, which, to reiterate, will have commercial, financial, political, even religious desires – because corporations are motivated to deliver good news, but to make money, whether it be directly, or by manipulating the audience into doing what’s desired.

But public broadcasting? Readers who believe the funding is direct might complain that it, too, is susceptible to political influence – which is why the funding goes through a separate entity, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, thus insulating them from the strong political taint that might otherwise apply. Not that this will stop the determined leader at NPR or PBS from possibly tainting their productions – but that is not the mission, and employees will let that be known, as they appear to be a dedicated bunch.

And corporate broadcasters know the importance of appearing to be bringing you the best news. Consider Fox News‘ recently retired “Fair and Balanced” motto – anything but, but bought into by an audience eager to hear what it desired to hear, rather than what might be true but unpleasant. NBC, ABC, and CBS all have put together strong news rooms throughout the years, and exhibit journalism prizes and awards with pride and joy, for both journalistic and corporate reasons. A corporation is not staffed only with corporatists, but by specialists such as journalists.

Ditto the newspapers to varying degrees.

In a perfect world, the news sector would not have to intermingle with the private sector, and would produce news and information without contamination from those corporate interests, but that’s not the world we live in. The public funding of NPR and PBS is an attempt to inject some independence into a sector otherwise flooded with corporate intrusions and potential contaminations. By their very existence they are a reproach to the corporate broadcasters and publications who have failed the test of the ideal news sector, sometimes purposely. And, thus, the right’s anger – the reproach stings when one believes the private sector can do no wrong.

But the private sector is not the cure for all ills.

[h/t Greg Edmonds]

¹While no women have yet been caught up in this nation-wide scandal, Disclosure (1994) is a graphic reminder that women may abuse their positions, too.

Back in the old days, when “personal computers” were just starting to come out, the epithet hackers had positive connotations, and I suppose I was one of them, although I never sought the label, or much of any label. Since then it evolved to more negative connotations, although those who think of themselves as hackers will often disagree.

But now it may be returning to its roots in the guise of bio-hacking, where the skilled try to modify genomes for their individual purposes. It started out with the genomes of simple creatures, but with the development and availability of CRISPR technology, which permits editing genomes with few errors and fairly cheaply, bigger game can be tackled with confidence.

Such as ourselves.

NewScientist (18 November 2017, paywall) notes the growing controversy over the ethics of, well, self-editing a genome – that is, modifying your own gene-set. It’s unsettling a lot of people:

These biohackers believe it is a basic human right to access and edit one’s own genome. “I am of the opinion that your genome is your own,” says [bio-hacker David] Ishee. “I think that it is important that people have the ability to choose what kind of gene expression they want for themselves.”

This ethos of “my body, my choice” is used to underpin arguments for health, reproductive and disability rights, but should it extend to the right to edit our own genes? What about the potential unintended effects of using untested technology? And will allowing broad access to CRISPR risk creating a group of “superhumans” with enhanced senses and abilities? …

These are some of the many issues that have plagued scientists and ethicists for years. Recent papers from the US National Academies and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics in the UK have attempted to grapple with these questions, including whether there is a moral difference between gene editing for medical therapy versus enhancing ordinary abilities.

John Harris, a bioethicist at the University of Manchester, UK, who has written about human enhancement since the 1980s, does not believe there is a significant difference. He thinks the biohackers could help move the arguments along and hasten the safe use of CRISPR in humans.

“There is a long and noble history of both doctors and scientists experimenting on themselves,” says Harris. “It has proven tremendously valuable in the public interest.” …

And what if “the next guy” is a future Olympic medallist? The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) announced last month that it would ban all forms of gene therapy or gene doping from international competitive sports from 2018. However, it’s unlikely that international testers will be able to detect most forms of gene editing, and with all the free-flowing information about various experimental enhancements, it seems even less likely that WADA will be able to enforce this ban. “WADA is a joke,” says Ishee.

Günes Taylor, who also works with CRISPR at the Francis Crick Institute in London, says she is conflicted by these home-brew experiments.

“Part of me is, like, ‘that is so awesome’… but it won’t work,” she says, insisting it will be more difficult than the biohackers think. “CRISPR has been sold as a cure-all… but actually getting it to do the thing that you want it to do successfully is more complicated.”

The article is somewhat more muddled than need be, dancing around the ethics controversy without ever getting a good balance of dueling views. Still, the muddling itself suggests that the ideology of individual autonomy – for which I have a lot of sympathy – is the rock over which a lot of folks are stumbling.

I don’t have an answer, since I’m not a specialist in this technology, but I think a re-think of ethics might be helpful, along with some questions that might illuminate the way.

So, not one to let my lack of training stand in the way of opening my mouth, ethics. Ethics discusses, at its core, how people ought to conduct themselves, which can be mostly seen as how we interface with each other – honestly, dishonestly, with flowers or with knives in our hands. There is, implicitly, a goal of having a peaceful society.

But why a peaceful society? Briefly, it’s about survival. Think of society as an engine; a society with ethics that lead to harmonious relations between its members can be thought of as a well-oiled machine quietly humming along; a society in which relations are acrimonious is the machine which is starved of oil and off-balance. In the latter case, as time passes the machine’s performance degrades, until pieces are flying through the air and its hostile neighbors dismember it.

So when we’re talking about individual conduct that does not directly interface with other individuals – which is a good representation of this situation – it becomes valid to ask whether the behavior of the bio-hackers might harm society as a whole. Here are some questions which might guide the answers.

1. Is it possible for a bio-hacker to change oneself, without regard to intent, such that one is an implicit, physical danger to others? Not being a biologist, I can only wonder, as a single example, as to whether the virus DNA found in the human genome could be accidentally set to, say, manufacturing some deadly illness that can be easily spread. Sound dumb? Sure. But reassure me. I’m just a dumb hacker.
2. I can easily accept bio-hacking when attempting to repair a deficiency in oneself, by which I mean some capability of survival value which most members of the species has. Here is one example. But what is the likelihood that substantive improvements can be attained beyond the above-average member of human society? Can we really expect to double the strength of our strongest current members without substantial damage to other physical faculties? Improve our IQs beyond 300, if that even means anything? If vast improvements seem unlikely, then perhaps the question is moot, and autonomy may be left undisturbed.
3. But if the answer to (2) is yes, then we must ask, can society survive with the capabilities of certain of its members so far beyond the capabilities of others that it might as well be two different species? Or will that rip the society apart into hostile constituents? While the bio-hacker may argue that individual autonomy trumps such concerns as the latter seem trivial, I’d suggest that our profound interdependence, which we so often ignore, puts everyone at great risk if society starts ripping itself apart – a torn, broken society will soon drown in its own wastes, if it doesn’t die of starvation itself.
4. All that said, what if some competing society – say, Russia – made bio-hacking the national past time? What sort of risks do we then face?

Got others? Let me know.

If you’ve been depressed by these appointments to the Federal bench, remember these come with the caveat – no misbehavior. WaPo has a report on a State judge – yeah, it’s different, but the same principle applies – who fouled up:

A juvenile and domestic relations judge in southwest Virginia was removed from the bench Monday by the Virginia Supreme Court, effective immediately, after he admitted contacting two key witnesses in a pending federal corruption case against his wife.

Kurt J. Pomrenke, 64, was elected to the bench in 2013 to oversee juvenile and domestic court cases in Washington and Smyth counties and Bristol City along the Virginia-Tennessee border. He is only the second Virginia judge in the past 23 years to be removed by the state Supreme Court, court records show, with the other being a juvenile and domestic judge who resolved some visitation issues with a coin flip.

Pomrenke also has been found guilty of contempt of court by a federal judge in Bristol in connection with his wife’s case and on Thursday was sentenced to two months in prison and ordered to pay the maximum allowable fine of $1,000. His wife, Stacey Pomrenke, a former chief financial officer of Bristol Virginia Utilities, is serving a 34-month prison sentence on multiple charges of conspiracy, extortion and wire fraud, as well as contempt of court, in part for her husband’s contact with potential witnesses in the case.

The point being, fouling up like this will get you lifted right off any bench – and you can just bet some of these brand new judges are going to let their worst urges get the best of them, because that’s what often happens with the GOP.

Not that it’ll be enough to save the nation, but it’ll provide some nice schadenfreude.

Trammel:

1. (trammels) literary Restrictions or impediments to freedom of action. ‘we will forge our own future, free from the trammels of materialism’
2. A three-layered dragnet, designed so that a fish entering through one of the large-meshed outer sections will push part of the finer-meshed central section through the large meshes on the further side, forming a pocket in which the fish is trapped.
3. An instrument consisting of a board with two grooves intersecting at right angles, in which the two ends of a beam compass can slide to draw an ellipse.
4. US A hook in a fireplace for a kettle.

[Oxford Dictionaries]

Noted in “On Waiving the Jerusalem Embassy Act (or Not),” Scott R. Anderson and Yishai Schwartz, Lawfare:

The Clinton administration, however, raised strong objections while this legislation was  debated. From a policy perspective, this debate was happening shortly after the celebrated Taba Agreement wherein Israel and the Palestinians had just agreed on interim governance arrangements for the West Bank and Gaza. Hope was high that this momentum would lead to a lasting peace, and the Clinton administration arguedthat a “premature focus on Jerusalem” could “undermine negotiations and complicate the chances for peace[.]” The Clinton administration also maintained that section 3(b) of the act was unconstitutional, asserting in a memorandum by the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that “the Constitution vests the President with the exclusive authority to conduct the Nation’s diplomatic relations with other States[,]” including recognition matters, and that “Congress cannot trammel the President’s constitutional authority to conduct the Nation’s foreign affairs and to recognize foreign governments by directing the relocation of an embassy” through limitations on funds. On both grounds, the Clinton administration threatened to veto.

Tetrachromacy:

Rich Lee, a biohacker in Utah who is colour-blind, says he wants to use Zayner’s kit to not only cure his colour blindness, but take his eyesight to the next level. He wants to see into the ultraviolet spectrum, a rare genetic mutation called tetrachromacy that is sometimes found in women. [“Biohackers are using CRISPR on their DNA and we can’t stop it,” Alex Pearlman, NewScientist (18 November 2017, paywall)]

The 18 November 2017 leader in NewScientist was interesting more for what it didn’t say than what it did. But that first, of course:

THE plot of P.D.James’s dystopian novel The Children Of Men revolves around a provocative thought experiment: what would happen if humans stopped being able to reproduce? In the story, set in 2021, no child has been born in the past 25 years and Homo sapiens is heading for extinction. With no future to plan for, society is spiralling into the ultimate fin-de-siècle decadence.

By the time 2021 comes around for real, life may be starting to imitate art. In July, Israeli scientists reported that sperm counts in developed countries have declined by more than half in the past 40 years and continue to fall by about 1.6 per cent a year. “Shocking” and “a wake-up call” were two of the responses from other scientists.

The cause of the fertility crisis in The Children Of Men was a global disease. The cause of ours is not known (see “We’re heading for a male fertility crisis and we’re not prepared“). To say that we urgently need some research into it is not an exaggeration. We are almost certainly not heading for a total collapse of male fertility, but sperm counts are approaching dangerously low levels. Around one in 10 couples already experience fertility problems. And yet our scientific understanding of male infertility remains rudimentary, with some researchers complaining that they struggle to get funding to do the long-term, large-scale studies needed to get to the bottom of the problem.

For many women, the news that men are suddenly in the spotlight will feel like a welcome role reversal.

And so on and so forth. But what came immediately to my mind was to wonder whether this could be classified as a natural response to human overpopulation. From nature studies, we know that overpopulation by a species doesn’t end well – if they’re lucky, the predators rebound and the species returns to some sort of rhythmic stasis by having the old and infirm eaten; if they’re not lucky, famine, plague, ecological ruin are all cards in the deck awaiting overpopulated species. Even cannibalism has been observed, although that study was of imprisoned rats.

I believe those are very real possibilities in the next hundred years. But what if Nature has gentler ways? What if most of the men of the next few generations die off childless? To some small extent, polygamous men might make up for it. But we might see a sizable decline in total human population, which would relax both political and natural tensions.

It’s quite possible that systemic pollution is affecting men’s gonads. Or it might be the increasing CO₂ in the air – remember the studies indicating our food is becoming less nutritious, in correlation with CO₂ concentrations? Just as our food evolved in an environment with lower CO₂ concentrations, so did we – it’s not hard seeing how that might make our current performance sub-optimal. Now, we may argue that this is man poisoning himself, but in reality, given the common definition of Nature, man is just another critter running around, and if his own waste acts as a natural brake on his reproduction, I’m cool with calling it natural.

But I think NewScientist really missed an interesting bet by not pursuing this question, but rather pointing out that women are not on the spot for once. It, too, is an interesting subject – but when we’re talking about mass deaths through war or famine, it seems quite secondary to me.

I see there’s also a major article, which I’m partway through. The claim of male fertility dropping is apparently limited to the developed world; the developing countries do not exhibit it. Maybe this is just the result of sedentarianism.

In WaPo Gary Sargent muses on the Trump behavior pattern:

To date, Trump has made over 1,600 false or misleading claims as president. Routinely, the lies are demonstrably false, often laughably so. But this actually serves his ends. It is impossible to disentangle this from his constant effort to undermine the news media, seen again in today’s NBC tweet. In many cases the attacks on the media are outlandishly ridiculous, dating back to the tone-setting assertion that the media deliberately diminished his inaugural crowd sizes, even though the evidence was decisive to the contrary. Here again, the absurdity is the whole point: In both the volume and outsize defiance of his lies, Trump is asserting the power to declare the irrelevance of verifiable, contradictory facts, and with them, the legitimate institutional role of the free press, which at its best brings us within striking distance of the truth.

Press critic Jay Rosen has surmised that Trump represents something broader, “an organized campaign to discredit the mainstream press in this country,” which “takes many forms.” To wit: When conservative activist James O’Keefe got busted trying to bait The Post with a false accuser of Moore, to discredit the believable charges against him, O’Keefe skipped over questions about whether he had employed the woman, instead citing laughably meaningless video “evidence” to cast further doubt on The Post’s commitment to reporting the truth. Those who claim O’Keefe is now “on the defensive” miss the point. He isn’t trying to win an argument. The goal is to render fact- and evidence-based inquiry itself a cause for suspicion.

But it’s important to remember this behavior was not born with Trump. The right-wing has been disregarding the great importance of truth, if the steady stream of falsehoods and truth-shading and misleading claims I find in every single piece of conservative email I receive is any indicator – and I believe it is – for years. Trump is simply the leading proponent.

But I’ve now run across an old term in today’s reading twice now, and that’s agitprop. Short for agitational propaganda, it’s a form of propaganda credited to the old Soviet Union, although I suspect it’s much older than that. Its purpose is not to inform the public of important facts so that decisions can be made and etc. The content of agitprop, as determined by those who control its distribution, has little connection to truth, to reality on the ground. Instead, the content is that determined as best for manipulating the consumers of agitprop into doing what those who control the agitprop want them to do.

Source: Wikipedia

It’s basically an intellectual wrist lock that the victim doesn’t notice, even as he’s escorted into the required position; meanwhile, the astute reader can sometimes hardly believe their eyes.

At this point, the unknowing victim of agitprop, on reading this post, will no doubt assert that the “mainstream liberal media” also engages in agitprop, and will cite the occasional inaccurate article as evidence. But there’s a problem with this objection.

The mainstream media knows their audience wants truth, not lies, and so they fact-check and fact-check. When they fall off the wagon, they jump back on. Even in today’s world of reduced revenues, the best ones soldier on, because journalism is an honorable profession with expectations of its practicioners; if they become known as liars, they’ll lose their readership and become another has-been.

But let’s consider the producers of content labeled agitprop today, which would be Trump and O’Keefe, from the article above. Trump, in less than a year of his Administration, has more than 1,600 documented lies. These are not claims and assertions, but documented in the finest sense of the word – his words on tape, in legal documents, uttered at rallies, at press conferences. It’s in black and white, as our grandparents would have said.

And consider his little re-tweet of today. In the finest tradition of agitprop, as noted by The New York Times:

President Trump touched off another racially charged furor on Wednesday by sharing videos from a fringe British ultranationalist group purportedly showing Muslims committing acts of violence, a move that was swiftly condemned by Britain’s prime minister as well as politicians across the spectrum.

The videos Mr. Trump retweeted were titled: “Muslim migrant beats up Dutch boy on crutches!” “Muslim Destroys a Statue of Virgin Mary!” and “Islamist mob pushes teenage boy off roof and beats him to death!” But the assailant in one of them was not a “Muslim migrant” and the other two showed four-year-old events with no explanation.

If you’re a Trump supporter, did you watch those videos? How did they make you feel? All steamed up? Congratulations, you’re a victim of agitprop. Didn’t feel the wrist lock, did you? But you’re not feeling any too friendly towards Muslims right now, I’m guessing.

And now you may be mad at me, because, well, I’ve just insulted your ability to make your own judgments. But before you flip me off, read just a little bit further.

This Thanksgiving I shared with my wife’s family in Michigan, and we know a couple of the family voted for Trump – I can only guess that they are still Trump supporters, as my mother-in-law absolutely forbade political talk during the get-together. But I’ll tell you what, they are really nice people. They have grown up kids that work hard, they go to church, help out at various things, while holding down their own jobs. Probably give their shirts off their back if need be.

And this is no surprise. I like them. They’re good, honest folks.

And that’s their downfall.

See, many people – most people – walk around with a hidden assumption in their brains. It’s a really good one, too. That assumption is that other people are about as honest as I am. And it’s a good assumption to have within our community, because it helps set expectations, predict the behavior of others, and when someone violates that assumption, you can label them as untrustworthy and to be avoided (if they went off the low end), or worthy of leadership positions (if they exceed expectations).

The problem is that Trump is so fucking aberrant (my friends know I rarely swear, so you can take that adjective as a serious word selection) in the honesty department that folks who rely on intuition and how what he says makes them feel are completely mislead. He is totally off their radar screens. Think about it.

From the objective evidence, he has no allegiance to truth.

We’re not talking “liberal opponents,” or “fake news”, or any other convenient misleading statement that makes my conservative reader feel good. We’re talking truth, facts on the ground, invincible documentation. The things that our parents and grandparents would have held in deep respect. Remember that? Remember when you were paddled for lying when you were a kid?

Evidently, Trump never got that paddling. When he told us that we were suffering through a terrible crime wave during the Presidential campaign, someone should have swatted him so hard one of his buttocks would have fallen off and rolled away, because the FBI statistics – the best in the world – show us near a historical low.

But that’s agitprop for you.

And in case you’re the odd person who thinks the “truth” doesn’t matter, let me address that. I could give you a hypothetical situation about how awful it’d be to just shout lies at each other until the Nation collapses, and the importance of recognizing the truth as politically neutral, and how it’s our best tool for determining our way forward, and how we should virtually worship at the alter of truth. And I completely believe that.

But this’ll catch your attention. Imagine you’re following Trump through a jungle. There’s the great leader, hacking his way through the path, machete in hand just to show how macho he is. Whack Whack!

And then he comes to a sign. It’s new & clean, and it says

WARNING: MINEFIELD

You’re going to skirt that field, aren’t you? But wait – Trump has grabbed the sign, he’s tugging away at it, oh it’s out of the ground and tossed aside! And then he snorts and proclaims, “That’s where we’re going. There are no mines here.”

And then he gestures at you to lead the way.

This is why truth is important in life. Lying may seem like a useful shortcut to get what you want, but in the end it just dooms you to disappointment, being shunned, imprisoned. That’s why Trump’s Administration, despite his frantic self-congratulations, has been such a disappointment to both sides of the political spectrum.

In case your head was turned by Professor Calabresi’s arguments about not having enough Republican judges and the Democrats have too much influence on the judiciary, you should take a look at Asher Steinberg’s analysis on The Narrowest Grounds:

I don’t know if Calabresi seriously believes that we should expect 60% of active judges on every circuit to have been appointed by Republican presidents because Republican Presidents will have held the White House for 60% of the time between 1969 and 2021, or actually thinks that there’s any Carter “court-packing” left to unpack.  Probably the more charitable assumption is that Calabresi understands the current composition of the courts isn’t a function of Carter and Schumer/Reid’s “court packing,” and that he is merely attempting to provide a thin veil of spin to politicians who might support his plan.

However, supposing that Calabresi means what he says seriously, the reason Democratic appointees control the circuit courts in spite of Republican control of the White House for three-fifths of the 1969–2021 period is not anything that Carter or even Schumer and Reid did, but death and senior status.  The lifespan of the average circuit-court judge is simply too short, the temptation of senior status too great, and the age at which circuit-court judges are appointed too high, for Republican control of the White House through much of the ’70s, or even Republican control of the White House through all of the ’80s, to have much effect on the composition of the circuit courts in 2017.

To begin with, it is nonsense to say that we should expect anything about the composition of the courts because of Republican control of the White House in 2018, 2019, and 2020, which, it should hardly need saying, haven’t happened yet.  When those years do pass, we should expect the courts to become somewhat more Republican, but they have to pass first.  So the relevant years, taking Calabresi’s start date of 1969 as a given for a moment, are 1969 through 2017, and Republicans have controlled the White House for twenty-nine of those forty-nine years.  To be sure, that’s still 59%.  But then we come to the matter of Calabresi’s start date.

Well, I shan’t grab anything more from Asher. Either the professor is dissembling mightily, or he doesn’t understand that as time passes, the influence of each President will fade due to simple biology – as Asher basically says. For example, Asher has done the footwork to ascertain that all of Nixon’s appointees – and there was a lot of them – are dead or in retirement (or senior status, which I take to be much like retirement).

Basically, Asher puts cleats on and stomps Calabresi into the ground.

There’s only a few holes in me, I’ll be fine!

The bodies begin piling up early and fast in The Naked Face (1984), a story about a Chicago psychoanalyst, Dr. Stevens, who suddenly loses a patient, a secretary, and then nearly his own life to a mystery killer. Another pair show up in a nearby (?) building. In response, the cops send a detective with a grudge against Stevens, along with his assistant, but there are plots within plots here, as the grudge-carrier discusses the potentiality of a fake resignation with his boss – but the assistant is merely informed that the resignation letter has been delivered.

Meanwhile, Steven ducks his way through more attempts on his life, loses a private detective, and eventually delays his own death just long enough to be rescued.

It’s not a particularly great movie, although information is withheld quite nicely. What struck me the most was the clashing moralities of the killer and society at large. This has been explored in other movies as well, but it’s always worth being reminded that not everyone shares the basic morality that encloses most of American society – and it’s worth considering how to make the case that such should be binding on everyone in such a way as to be persuasive. The attempt to make that argument can often be revealing about one’s own biases – and gaps in knowledge.

But otherwise, this is a fairly forgettable story.

While working and reading today, the insanity of the Trump Administration just became another part of the pattern that my head is trying to match. DeVos wrecking Education, Pruitt at the EPA. Long time readers, and readers with some curiosity about political life, know the drill. Then came yesterday, when Steve Benen took note of Tillerson’s gutting of the State Department:

The picture painted by the Times is alarmingly bleak. Senior Foreign Service officers are leaving in droves; career diplomats and civil servants are being bought out; and Tillerson and his team have forced many to resign “by refusing them the assignments they wanted or taking away their duties altogether.”

In some cases, some diplomats returning from high-level assignments, have been ordered to “spend months performing mind-numbing clerical functions beside unpaid interns.”

For most observers, all of this is simply baffling. The secretary of state’s principal responsibility is to oversee the nation’s diplomatic efforts, and yet, Donald Trump’s chief diplomat appears determined to undermine his own department’s capacity. In a rather literal sense, it defies explanation.

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, recently wrote, “The purposeful gutting of American power abroad is mystifying. If you didn’t know better, you’d think some rival government was running our foreign policy.”

Senator Murphy’s remark set things off for me. The moves we’re seeing are the sort calculated to push the United States – and the greater ideology that it pushes – into the second rank of nations. Our universities may be first-rate for a long time to come, but we need everyone to be pushing their educational boundaries, not struggling with the silliness of for-profit schooling. Pruitt doing terrible things to the environment. And the Tillerson behaviors at State are mystifying only so long as we try to attribute those behaviors to personal avarice or idiosyncratic beliefs – hard to really see in isolation.

But Benen reminded me in some earlier post that Tillerson has long been an ally of Russia. The same Russia that is now considered to have interfered in our 2016 elections.

I’m entertaining some thoughts here. The Mercers, the Kochs, Adelson, maybe even Murdoch and the Sacklers. These are all known bogey-men of the liberals. What if they’re not free agents? What if each of these groups, known for their conservative positions and donations to extremist causes, have been bought or are being blackmailed?

What if the big bad Koch brothers are just puppets? What if someone has something on Tillerson, and he’s just bouncing along to their string-jerks?

And what if the puppeteer turns out to be Russian?

Yeah, it sounds like something a conspiracy theory nutcase would say, and I think generally I don’t fit into that box. But try as I might, I find most of the explanations for the patterns we’re all seeing to actually be of low probability, a low enough probability that I’m left thinking there must be a better explanation for this incredible cock-up of an Administration than simply he’s a fucking egotistical incompetent who can only hire people who are worse than he is at his job.

I hope someone can come up with a less fantastical explanation for this that fits the pattern better, because it all really makes me sick.

Matthew Kahn on Lawfare notes that a number of “acting officers” in government are approaching the limits of their authority under the law. What happens next?

So where does that leave the acting officers who as of Nov. 18 (the 300th day of the Trump administration) have begun to fall out of compliance with the [Federal Vacancies Reform Act]?

The FVRA does not provide a mechanism for removing officers who continue to act beyond their statutorily authorized period. Though the statute requires the comptroller general to report such cases to Congress, which may employ oversight tools to bring the executive branch into compliance, there is no guarantee of efficiency or effectiveness.

If the president does not nominate officers to those positions, then any actions taken after the 300 days of vacancy have no force or effect. The Supreme Court intonated in National Labor Relations Board v. SW General that such actions are “void ab initio,” or “null from the beginning.” (Courts cannot allow void acts to proceed under harmless error doctrine, as they can with “voidable” acts.) A party who has standing to challenge an action taken by a non-compliant officer might argue that the action was void. But in the absence of clearer enforcement language, it may take further litigation to understand how the FVRA applies to the uncharted territory we’ve entered.

Sounds like chaos to me. Or, as they say in the tennis world, a whole mess of unforced errors by the Administration.

Again.