Unsightly Mental Blemishes

Views on the Arpaio pardon are popping up. Perry Bacon, Jr. on FiveThirtyEight:

The trio of major announcements made by President Trump’s administration on Friday night — the departure of national security aide Sebastian Gorka, the pardon of former Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, and the release of a formal memo from the president ordering the Pentagon not to accept transgender people as new recruits in the armed forces — illustrate two important things about the president’s governing style.

First, one of the defining features of the Trump administration is that he embraces a kind of conservative identity politics, in which he promotes policies supported by groups that he favors and that may have felt marginalized during Barack Obama’s presidency. The second is that Trump’s support for those policies is not contingent on the presence of ousted aides like Gorka and Steve Bannon, who agree with him on these positions.

Yep. Harry Enten, also on FiveThirtyEight:

Of course, Trump’s, or really any president’s, biggest fear is that voters will punish him for a pardon like voters did Gerald Ford for his pardon of ex-president Richard Nixon. Ford’s job approval rating plummeted overnightand never really recovered. Trump’s pardon of Arpaio is unlikely to be nearly so toxic, however, given that Ford took over for Nixon and Nixon was involved in a major coverup as president.

Still, the numbers show that a high-profile pardon such as Trump’s of Arpaio is rarely good for a president’s popularity, which may be why recent presidents have tended to grant more pardons as they approach the end of their second terms. And while the major hurricane wreaking havoc in Texas may distract voters from this move for the time being, in the longer term, an unpopular Trump making an unpopular pardon probably isn’t good politics.

And a pardon from a deeply unpopular and incompetent President may rebound on the recipient as well. However, Arpaio has always affected a disinterest to his own reputation, so this probably doesn’t bother him. Former White House Counsel Bob Bauer on Lawfare:

Trump went ahead with the pardon, and the reasons having nothing to do with injustice, or the public welfare, can explain it. He has political problems with his right flank—with the Steve Bannons and the Sebastian Gorkas who are loudly protesting the ascendancy in the White House of Republicans lacking their revolutionary vision. The President made clear in his theatrical preview of the pardon at the Phoenix rally that the Arpaio pardon works well as a gesture to this political constituency—a reaffirmation that he remains the candidate they voted for who will keep what Gorka, in his resignation letter Friday, called the “MAGA promise.” Trump asked the Phoenix crowd if they liked Sheriff Joe, and they roared back their approval. Now he has delivered.

It all seems to come down to that: Trump disrupted the operation of the criminal justice process to score a political point, and he believes that the “complete power to pardon” gives him all the space he needs for this maneuver and requires of him only the most pro forma, meaningless explanation of his action. He has managed, however, to make a very clear statement about the “rule of law” in his government, and he has miscalculated if he somewhat imagines that it will not come back to haunt him.

Short term gain at the expense of long term strategy. No comment on National Review, but it’s the weekend. Susan Wright on RedState is mixing Arpaio, Senator McCain, and McCain’t failed primary challenger, Kelli Ward, in a cocktail glass with a swizzle stick:

Then, of course, there are the Trump clingers, hoping that agreeing with everything Trump says and does will ingratiate them to Trump’s fans and they can be dragged along the tracks behind the Trump train.

Flake’s challenger for his seat, Dr. Kelli Ward, quickly chimed in:

“We applaud the president for exercising his pardon authority to counter the assault on Sheriff Arpaio’s heroic efforts to enforce the nation’s immigrant laws,” Ward said in a statement.

There’s enforcing laws, and there’s singling out brown people. It’s a fine line that Arpaio was found to have happily crossed.

Then again, Ward is the InfoWars hopping, chemtrail queen, who couldn’t even beat John McCain in 2016. She felt her time had come when Senator McCain’s brain cancer was announced, and she went on radio and tried to rush the man to an early grave, saying she hoped she could get his seat.

Classy.

She’s determined she’s going to get one of those U.S. Senate seats, one way or another.

And this protection of loyalists, while he demonizes the press, other Republicans, and even our nation’s intelligence community is how autocratic rule takes hold.

Trump may be a wannabe autocrat, but it takes a nation ready to be ruled by an autocrat, and the Charlottesville incident is the mark of a nation violently uninterested in a Comrade Trump, and the poll I cited earlier in this thread reinforces that assessment. Kevin Drum:

With this action, Trump is basically saying that courts have no authority to enforce the law on agents of the state. I wonder if it will be challenged in court? Everyone always says the pardon power is absolute, but I don’t think that’s ever been tested. After all, the language of the First Amendment is also absolute, but the Supreme Court has carved out all kinds of exceptions. (But who would have standing to sue?)

Here’s a novel thought: the judge who issued the order to Arpaio telling him to stop profiling. Or the jury who convicted Arpaio. Of course, SCOTUS wouldn’t agree to Kevin’s suggestion.

Today, amidst the light showers of the afternoon, we took the opportunity to watch Mixed Precipitation’s production of Philemon & Baucis, an operetta featuring music from Haydn (of course, as the author of P&B), Freddy Mercury, and other musicians, as produced in Summit Hill Community Garden. It tells the story of the Solar System, from Creation and its most beautiful child, the Earth, Earth’s subsequent endangerment by its own inhabitants, and its abandonment by the God Jupiter. Oh, how will it end?

Well, we lost one scene to the weather, which made for some incoherency, but the treats were not delayed in the least. My Arts Editor said the singing was quite good, given the circumstances, and I thought the staging was imaginative and took advantage of the extra depth afforded by the park.

If you enjoy whimsy, it’s worth a whirl.

Paul Rosenzweig, who I’ve quoted before, is pissed off at some of fellow spirits in the legal profession. Identifying himself as a conservative lawyer, he’s puzzled at their acceptance of Trump. It’s a substantial post, full of the criticism of fellow travelers which I always find more interesting than criticism from the opponents:

Just a random mushroom. Might be poisonous. Draw a parallel with this post at your own peril.

What I can’t understand today is how my fellow members of the conservative legal movement don’t change their minds, even as the evidence of their error mounts. The malignant deviancy that is the Trump presidency continues its steady erosion of core American principles. …

To take one aspect that is particularly striking, America First (itself a phrase with pro-Nazi resonance) is not American exceptionalism. Indeed, it is the opposite of our tradition of exceptionalism—a foundational set of ideals that has defined our country. America First rhetoric says that America is just like every other country in its selfishness and self-regard. This diminishes our nation and society in ways that are incalculable. In Trump’s eyes, we are no Reaganesque “shining city on a hill,” no Emersonian “poem in our eyes.” …

The argument, of course, is that a good Supreme Court justice is worth all of the policy pain and political embarrassment that come with it. Say what you will, but at least these conservative lawyers (unlike those seeking Obamacare’s repeal or a taxcut) have collected on their wager: Neil Gorsuch has demonstrated that he will be a formidable conservative jurist, of that I have no doubt (and I think the same would be equally true of the others President Trump has suggested he would nominate). In a narrowly focused way, this pleases me personally—as I believe in the efficacy of conservative jurisprudence.

But seeing victory in this narrow area of public policy requires conservative lawyers to disregard the broader context and to, in effect, sell their souls. The movement I joined more than 30 years ago stood for something real—a reality that Trump traduces every day of his presidency.

If you march shouting “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us,” you are an anti-Semite. If you threaten a Charlottesville synagogue, you are an anti-Semite. If you march with any of these Nazi racists, you are not a “very fine” person; you are an enabler of racism and anti-Semitism. If you excuse these acts by saying there is violence on both sides, as President Trump did, you are an enabler of racism and anti-Semitism and unfit to lead this great nation.

I do not see how any conservative lawyer can, in good conscience, stay the course with this president. If you continue on this course—if you voluntarily choose to support Trump or to join his administration—you too are enabling the destruction of American values. In many ways, you are worse than Trump. For while he is a petulant man-child without any sense of right or wrong, you know that this is wrong. You know that you have sold your soul.

The taint of Trump also taints Justice Gorsuch, who I will always think and write with the modifier IJ, Illegitimate Justice. But it’s more than a bit of rhetoric, to be honest, it’s an actual suspicion that Justice Gorsuch operates with the same lack of principle as does the President. This is really unjustified, since Gorsuch was not an obscure backwater judge before his elevation, nor did he lack a reputation. But his path to SCOTUS, smoothed by the unprincipled Senator McConnell, has left a majority of the citizenry dissatisfied with the performance of the Senate in that sad incident.

The damage that does to the organs of government should be of primary concern to the members of the conservative legal movement; without those organs, they’re just ditch diggers, watching over their shoulders.

You’ll have to read Paul’s post on Lawfare to understand the Wales reference.

Long time readers may recall I’ve referred to Fredrik deBoer, an English PhD, educator, and longtime blogger, a time or two. Later, his blog seemed to disappear, but it turns out he started a new blog called the Anova. This appears to be short-lived, as Andrew Sullivan points at this farewell post by Fredrik:

Shortly I will be headed to the Richmond University Medical Center to pursue intensive treatment for my mental illness. My day-to-day existence has become entirely unmanageable, and I fear for my health and safety. I do not have much of a plan at this point other than to get checked in. When I am back out I will try to decide if this project can continue. If not I will immediately suspend the Patreon, but feel free to stop your payments yourselves too. It is clear that I can never return to my old ways of engaging online, and I must leave semipublic life permanently, among many other changes. All I want is to build a quiet and simple existence where I can live and work privately without hurting myself or others. At present I have a hard time contemplating the future. I just know that my life is fundamentally broken and drastic measures are necessary to fix it.

This touched Andrew, who, for those not aware of The Dish, was a blogger who tried to blog the blogosphere – keeping an eye on many of the blogs, as well as other news sources, and react to, or at least relay, the interesting bits. Of which there was a lot. As a reader of his blog, and only his blog, it was addictive to the point where I’d be fascinated, then burned out, then fascinated; no doubt, a reflection of my own personality, my own tendency to have a lot of interests, all of them about a millimeter thick. Here’s Andrew:

Freddie is someone I barely know in physical space, but feel intensely close to. In the years of hourly blogging, he was one of a handful of people I always tried to read and who guest-blogged for me on my vacations. I happily gave space to someone whose views are very different than mine because they were so sincerely held, so clearly expressed, and he was capable of challenging his own side. There was something of Orwell in him. But I also discovered in those years what he found out: that living online is deeply dangerous to mental and physical health, that the pressures of the online crowd can overwhelm individual thought, and, in the end, thought itself. Twitter is not a place to air diverse viewpoints; it is a desiccating swarm of like-mindedness, moving as a single mutating mass, shimmering with every minuscule ripple in the news cycle, destroying all perspective, undermining learning, destroying the very process of reading, and deeply corrosive of a liberal society. If you are in the middle of the online stream, as I was for a decade and a half, and you are intelligent and attempt to be conscientious and honest, the emotional toll will be crushing. If, like Freddie, you are already bipolar, it is a deeply unsafe space.

Freddie saw this very clearly only a week ago, explaining why he had drastically culled his online content: “I wanted to look past what we once called ideology: I wanted to see the ways in which my internet-mediated intellectual life was dominated by assumptions that did not recognize themselves as assumptions, to understand how the perspective that did not understand itself to be a perspective had distorted my vision of the world. I wanted to better see the water in which my school of fish swims.” So he tried to find a new perspective, but still failed. He realized what I once saw. You cannot edit this stream. It edits you in the end. This is self-knowledge: “[T]he fact that so many people like me write the professional internet, the fact that the creators of the idioms and attitudes of our newsmedia and cultural industry almost universally come from a very thin slice of the American populace, is genuinely dangerous.”

The scale is well beyond anything I ever experienced, but the nut at the center of this fruit is rather the same as what I did for years back in the 80s and 90s in attempting to keep up with 20-30 BBSes, every single day.

I am uncertain as to how to disentangle the effects of the experience from my own personality, since one affects the other in an endless positive feedback loop. Does my utter and long fascination with the telecommunications hobby, ever so much more comfortable than actual face-to-face conversation and confrontation, account for my later-in-life marriage? Or was that an inevitable result of a highly introverted and shy personality?

In the end, though, I doubt I share a lot with Andrew and Fredrik, because scale does matter. As any experienced software engineer knows, scale is an amplifier, and at some point your algorithm, your processing equipment, begins to fail. Andrew experienced scale harder than just about anyone, and I suspect Fredrik’s root mental illness made up for any lack of pure volume.

And motivations matter as well. I cannot speak for Fredrik, but my impression of Andrew, who I believe I found shortly after he started up, was that he put together a goal (of covering the blogosphere & other news, honestly critiquing what he read) and then strove to reach it – as it kept running away as the Internet grew at a fantastic rate. At some point, the endless reading, analsys, and the instant reaction writing wrecked him.

During the BBS days, I was addicted to the idea that I had a function which many people found useful. The feedback of maintaining, implementing, and participating in the BBS experience was emotionally and intellectually satisfying on many levels. But with UMB, the primary goal is to blow off steam. Just prior to starting UMB, which was a couple of months after the termination of Sullivan’s The Dish, I found I was beginning to mutter to my wife about, well, whatever was annoying me out in the world. Politics, science, anything that caught my attention. (Muttering is different from discussion, which my wife and I also do with each other.) And I didn’t like that. I’d spent years explicating opinions in public, and when the BBS world went away as the Web spread, that stopped. The Dish took its place for me in terms of lapping up my addictive energy, but then The Dish went away, and when I came up with the name Unsightly Mental Blemishes and mentioned to a friend that it’d make a good blog name, he said, Well, start one then.

So I did. And now I don’t mutter to my wife anymore, except during movies. She occasionally says I spend too much time blogging, but I think, given my motivation this time around, it’s probably healthier for me to blog than not to blog.

My best wishes to Fredrik. If blogs are homo sapiens, then BBSes are, perhaps, the equivalent to Neanderthals, each a distinct landscape to be explored. Exploration comes with costs, and I’m sad to hear that some explorers find those costs to be dear. I hope he finds an undamaging mode to living which he can learn to love.

I’m too macho to request backup.

When a movie as apparently predictable as the sequel to Alien vs. Predator (2004)^[1], the mundanely named Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007), comes along, it requires some extra pizzazz, or it risks becoming … no, let me replace a couple of words there: it BECOMES a dreary movie in which the audience must invent its own methods for enlivening the proceedings.

This usually takes us down the path of drinking games, of counting up casualties, of laying bets on which characters won’t make it, and how they’ll meet their demise.

The pizzazz? It can be unexpected ripples in the plot, morbid humor, inventive dialog, even making the movie into a musical done to the tunes of The Pirates of Penzance (although that might be a trifle cliched in the wake of The Simpsons send up of the Broadway classic) – or brave writers would take it down a path no one expects. Such as finding a way to let the humans be players in the game, rather than simply bumpers in a big pinball game.

In this movie, they’re the bumpers.

This movie is tied tightly to the previous movie in this mashup franchise, which ended with the body of a Predator, killed by an Alien in Antarctica, being placed on a Predator spaceship, presumably for return to their home. As this movie breaks out, unknown to the crew, an Alien managed to lay eggs in the dead Predator. Why the Predator crew didn’t check on this, I don’t know. Anyways, the eggs hatch, the crew is heroically slaughtered, and the ship crashes back on Earth, where the surviving Aliens, all apparently mothers, hie off for the nearest Coloradan town. A Predator on another planet is alerted to the situation by the ship’s automated systems, and he decides to take care of the problem himself. Herself. Whatever.

Meanwhile, hapless human townpeople start disappearing, becoming home to eggs, and dying in incredibly short order. The aforementioned Predator arrives and starts to hunt, the police are fighting and dying in droves against anything in sight, then comes the National Guard, and then they start doing the drove thing, too. Eventually, while the characters we didn’t really bond with are fighting to get out or are waiting for evacuation, the American military nukes the joint.

There’s little to surprise the observant audience here, although the writers do cross a boundary by letting the Aliens gain access to a hospital, where the infants’ ward and the expectant mothers’ ward become the equivalent of Chicken McNuggets. That caught me by surprise, but it only made me ill – it didn’t arouse sympathy, horror, terror, ennui, or even vague sleepiness.

So, all this said, I will give it a prop. A very small prop. It’s better than the first movie in the franchise. Alien vs. Predator was incredibly superficial, involving some mysterious monstrous artifact buried in Antarctica. At least this time we’re in a town where we can see people reacting. And dying. The Monster invades a small American town trope has been overdone, and this version does little to set the bar higher.

If horror is your thing, maybe you’ll enjoy this. I enjoyed Alien (1979) and Predator (1987) quite a lot. But not this mashup. Indeed, we speculated partway through how a polar bear might have done against an Alien. I guess our minds were wandering.

¹For anyone unfamiliar with the classic SF horror movies Alien (and its sequel, Aliens) or Predator, their  eponymous namesakes are alien monsters that are super predators. The former have flailing limbs, acidic blood, and a predilection for laying eggs in living bodies, much like certain varieties of wasps lay eggs in paralyzed tarantulas so that when the little buggers hatch, living meat is available for their first meal. Ugh. The latter monsters have interstellar spaceflight, body armor with automated weapons, NRA memberships, and a liking for skinning most of their game. For both, the concept of inter-species relations consists mostly of mutual complete destruction.

Cria:

Seen at the Minnesota State Fair. BONUS picture!

Almost unbearably cute.

And, probably faster than anyone expected, maybe even Bob Bauer, former Sheriff Joe Arpaio has been pardoned by President Trump.

President Donald Trump has pardoned controversial former sheriff Joe Arpaio of his conviction for criminal contempt, the White House said Friday night.

Arpaio, who was a sheriff in Maricopa County, Arizona, was found guilty of criminal contempt last month for disregarding a court order in a racial profiling case. Arpaio’s sentencing had been scheduled for October 5.

“Not only did (Arpaio) abdicate responsibility, he announced to the world and to his subordinates that he was going to continue business as usual no matter who said otherwise,” wrote US District Judge Susan Bolton in the July 31 order. [CNN]

For those who consider these matters soberly, with attention to conflicts of interest, checks & balances, and the importance of the separating determination of law from enforcement of law, this is a disturbing step by President Trump.

Fortunately for him, none of those people make up his base. His base is more or less the same people who kept re-electing Arpaio to his post as Sheriff of Maricopa County, AZ, because he was rough, tough, had no sympathy for prisoners, and didn’t take nonsense from the judicial system – which matches up well with how the right wing news groups have been training the conservative voters of the United States. Only in the 2016 election did the 84 year old Arpaio finally lose (56% to 43%, for what it’s worth). I don’t know why. Maybe his age played a part. Perhaps there was evidence of corruption as well as news of his trial.

By pardoning Arpaio, Trump is borrowing Arpaio’s mantle as a law & order peace officer to claim that’s he’s a law & order President, which is mildly ironic, given that Arpaio was convicted not only of breaking the law, but of disregarding direct orders from those whose responsibility it is to interpret the law. Basically, Arpaio claimed that, because he was on the front lines, he could do what he felt was best, and the hell with the system. This fits in well with the psychology of the Trump base, who are often frustrated with how the system works, since it often approaches problems with care and subtlety, rather than a bazooka and a wad of chewing tobacco.

But this is really a political move by Trump. He can read the polls, and while he may publicly dismiss them as “fake news,” this event proves that he doesn’t believe his own rhetoric. On the left is the latest Gallup Daily Presidential Approval poll. His approval ratings have reached a new low for Gallup, 34%, while disapproval is at 60%, right near the high. Carefully eyeballing the general trend suggests Trump is gradually losing support as more and more people awaken to the fact that he spews lies daily and makes bad choices.

That said, will this decision shore him up or cause more beach to slide into the sea? I don’t know. There’s virtually no support for Trump from the liberals, so no liberal is really going to experience dismay for the first time when word of this comes out. His core base will be encouraged by it. And the general GOP voter? It depends on how strongly the GOP core reacts to all of these triggers. If this doesn’t make sense, I suggest reading this post, and then going out and buying The Persuaders. Author James Garvey discusses how public political debate is devolving into the recitation of certain ‘trigger’ words which are designed to elicit certain reactions from listeners – even if they don’t realize it. The reactions are designed to cause the voter to vote for a particular candidate, usually the one using the trigger words. The Republicans are far ahead in this area, principally from the work of Frank Luntz, but the Democrats are working on it. This is a trend I detest and decry as contrary to the ways of the Republic.

But I also wonder if those reactions can, well, wear out. Like my joints these days, which snap and crack, perhaps those reactions become less reactive as they are used more and more. I know of no research in this area, but I can hope that it’s true. Perhaps certain GOP voters may begin thinking about the actions of this irrational, childish President – and he will see his support further shrink.

I only took a few pictures. And, yes, these are some weird chickens.

Of course, the smartphone camera doesn’t deal so well with the fast chicken moves, but, yeah, those are chickens with what appears to be long haired cat fur.

Trophic egg:

A trophic egg, in most species that produce them, usually is an unfertilised egg because its function is not reproduction but nutrition; in essence it serves as food for offspring hatched from viable eggs. The production of trophic eggs has been observed in a highly diverse range of species, including fish, amphibians, spiders and insects. The function is not limited to any particular level of parental care, but occurs in sub-social species of insects as well as in Leptodactylus fallax, a species of frog known for its close parental care. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “Lazy ants actually lay eggs for their industrious sisters to eat,” NewScientist (12 August 2017):

What’s more, the eggs they carry might serve as food for other ants – particularly since other ant species are known to lay such unfertilised “trophic” eggs.

“Inactive workers may be storing food for the colony,” says Charbonneau (Integrative and Comparative Biology, doi.org/cbh4).

Steve Benen on Maddowblog is puzzled about Trump’s continued pushing of “clean coal” and doesn’t believe Trump understands his own position:

I have to wonder if Trump heard about “clean coal” at some point, and thought to himself, “Well, I like coal, and ‘clean’ sounds good, so I guess I’m for ‘clean coal.’” Spending a few minutes to get up to speed on the basics probably never occurred to him.

But Trump is not operating with constraints of the potential reality of the various positions he might take. Trump made promises to his base, and if he’s going to hold his base together, he has to at least look like he’s fighting to keep those promises. This is all about Trump’s political survival, because if his base falls apart, there’s literally nothing to keep him from falling into the abyss of failure.

And that is something Donald J. Trump cannot tolerate.

So Trump will continue to push clean coal, whatever that means to him, for as long as it takes to keep his base hooting with him, rather than at him, until he finds someway to shore up his political base in some other way, whether it’s find that magical position which will sway independents to his side, or opens up a new industry which will quickly employ all those former coal miners.

While the latter option seems unlikely, I don’t know if Trump can actually look to the future. His success so far has been through reminders and exhortations concerning the past, all the way back to the Civil War. But that doesn’t mean, if the opportunity arose, that he couldn’t pivot to a future industry.

Or perhaps he’s just hoping to get a primo dacha on the Black Sea.

The rumor that President Trump may pardon freshly convicted peace officer Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, AZ, has brought forth some political analysis from former White House Counsel Bob Bauer on Lawfare. I particularly like how this could leave the Department of Justice in knots, as it would prepare the papers and attempt a justification:

It is very difficult to imagine that Attorney General Sessions would recommend a pardon of a law enforcement officer convicted of willfully and openly flouting a federal court order. And Mr. Sessions’s disinclination to give his boss cover would be all the greater in a case involving racial profiling, defiance of constitutional limits on local law enforcement, unprofessional conduct over an extended period of years, and to this day, the prospective pardon recipient’s refusal to accept responsibility for his acts.

The White House Counsel preparing the pardon papers would also need to labor hard, and would inevitably fail, to to bring this potential grant within the accepted norms for the grant of pardons. Among the more conventional considerations: the case is fresh, and with Arpaio’s lawyers readying the appeal of a decision issued in July, the president would be intervening in the middle of a legal proceeding yet to run its course. If Trump just jumps in and by executive fiat ends the matter, a pardon will have every appearance of being direct interference in the administration of justice. In his capacity as the Chief Executive, the President has already had exceptional difficulty grasping and respecting the independent and impartial operation of federal law enforcement.  With this act, Mr. Trump dramatically escalates the assault on these limits.

Does Trump hate these limits, or is Trump totally ignorant? Well, neither, actually – he’s just playing to his base, his last defense against oblivion. Bauer continues with an eye to the future:

And while the president may well get away with the specific act of pardoning Arpaio, this action will not be without effect on future calls for impeachment. Unlike a pardon of himself, family members, or aides in the Russia matter,  pardoning Arpaio would probably not result in the immediate demand for an impeachment inquiry. If, however, impeachment pressure increases, or a formal impeachment inquiry is launched on the basis of Russian “collusion,” obstruction, or on other grounds, an Arpaio pardon in the background will be highly damaging to the President’s position. It will immeasurably strengthen the hand of those arguing that Donald Trump does not have the requisite respect for the rule of law, or an understanding of the meaning of his constitutional oath, to be entrusted with the presidency.

A good reminder that impeachment is not about normal crimes, but suitability for the Presidency.

National Review’s definitely not happy about statue removal following the Charlottesville incident, judging from their front page. My patience with their material is limited, so I selected at random the piece by Victor Davis Hanson, and found he apparently thinks citing inconsistencies across historical personages and waving a finger constitutes a sophisticated argument. An example paragraph:

President Woodrow Wilson ensured that the Armed Forces were not integrated. He also segregated civil-service agencies. Why, then, does Princeton University still cling to its Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs? To honor a progressive who did a great deal of harm to African-American causes?

It might be helpful to dig out the hidden assumption Hanson is using but won’t tell us about. It’s the primary artery of his post – that progressives & liberals only care about racism. Of course, this is not true, and so the fatal flaw in his argument is that he enumerates a number of famous people, sure, even icons, and then adjusts his lens to only focus on their attitudes towards race. In fact, his own example betrays him, because while Wilson may have been a retrograde old coot when it came to racial relations, he was a liberal leader when it came to international relations. Was it not Wilson who looked at the new horrors of the Great War battlefields, and championed the League of Nations as a new approach to resolving those matters which traditionally led to war? And what is the name of this Princeton institution which now bears his name? The Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

The point is that morality has numerous facets.

But the perception, or understanding, of proper moral behaviors – and make no mistake, we’re talking about the moral systems of conservatives vs liberals (I’ll just settle on that term for the balance of this post) – is not an unchanging quality. Without addressing the question of whether morality itself is immutable or not, I think it should go without question that our perception of proper morality, of how we should treat each other, has changed over time. It used to be a knife in the back of anyone not of our tribe, then stoning those thought to be witches, then violently enforced slavery for those perceived to be of an inferior civilization, and now today, when slavery is considered horrific.

The perception of moral behaviors is a shared, community project; that is, if we didn’t have a shared basis of moral behavior, we would have chaos and a shattered, non-functional society. That said, this project can change as the scholarship of moral behavior makes progress in understanding how our treatment of each other leads to general improvements in society. This latter statement may be redundant with the previous paragraph, but seems appropriate to reinforce.

Keeping this in mind, let’s talk about iconic people who disappoint the conservatives. Without a doubt, advancing oneself beyond the cultural matrix in which one is brought up is an extraordinary thing. If everyone else holds some local ethnicity in loathing, then there’s a strong social pressure that you, too, spit on them, and not to diverge from that social habit.

But certain extraordinary individuals do push themselves beyond those pressures to conform, changing or even improving our perception of moral behavior, an evolution which has been known under other names, of which the best known may be “enlightened thinking.” Often, they think beyond the habits of the day and ask themselves whether, in a truly just system, the behavior in question should be encouraged.

This leads to the second criticism of Hansen’s post. Those people he, or his allies, would criticize and even equate to the Confederates, such as Washington and Jefferson, were inevitably products of their time. When I say they are extraordinary, it is a relative measure, relative to their native cultural matrix. Yes, they’ve advanced; but how far can they be expected to drive themselves, especially in a moral landscape which is new and unexplored?

Comparing Wilson to today’s liberals ignores both the different measures and the differences in cultural matrices; it is enough to say that Wilson led the way in trying to find ways to avoid the bloody slaughter of the new weapons of war, and for that he is recognized.

But to better illustrate the point, and because the moral turpitude of the author of the screed equating the Confederates to Washington and Jefferson really annoyed me for flunking such an easy test, let’s apply these concepts to that very question: if both the Confederates and some of the most famous Founding Fathers had slaves, then shouldn’t the statues of the Founding Fathers be following those of the Confederates into the trash heap of history?

Well, let’s look at the facts. There’s a nearly century gap between the Founding Fathers and the Confederacy. During this time, the cultural matrix, both local and international, changed. During, or just prior to, this time period, many major countries outlawed slavery; moral perceptions changed in the United States until the nation was metaphorically divided by the Mason-Dixon line. But at the beginning of this period, at the Founding, the idea of slavery was ingrained, and changing the practice was a matter of some import, especially for Virginians such as Washington and Jefferson; that Jefferson arranged for the freedom of his slaves on his death is a matter of some controversy (was it progressive to do so, or selfish to wait to do so?), but represents at least his striving to leave his social matrix’s flaws behind.

For, after all, Washington, Jefferson, and the Founding Fathers were busy creating a new governmental structure, one not based on a God-selected monarchy, full of self-important men with inherited diseases and an arbitrary will. They helped construct a new approach to government which would bring prosperity and peace to its citizens. That’s why they are liberal icons. They had flaws, of course they did. But we recognize them for what they overthrew, not for those burdens forced upon them by society. We cannot expect everyone, or even anyone, to be Supermen. To see substantial moral improvement is the best we can hope for.

The Confederacy? The Confederacy, despite the efforts of revisionists, was part & parcel with slavery, and by the time the Civil War began, the shared social moral perceptions of slavery had changed, been put to the fire of intellectual criticism, and emerged as a relatively well accepted part of the moral basis of society: slavery was vile and evil, so that some men were willing to risk their lives to remove it from society, such as the abolitionist John Brown. The Civil War, fought over that moral perception as if the agony of a people is not as important as the culture of the South, represents the failure of the moral behaviors of the Confederates, a failure so total that they instigated the Civil War that nearly destroyed the nation, killing thousands of our best young men, and brought about great resentment for decades following.

The moral reasoning was no longer novel, but instead spoken from the pulpits. The Confederates chose to disdain it, to mock it, to denigrate the black man for the condition forced upon him by those same white men who would make up the Confederacy. It’s all there in the speeches of Confederate politicians.

So when we talk about the statues celebrating specific Confederate icons, these are celebrations of their moral failings. They believed in slavery. They fought for it. They died for it. And the statue therefore endorses slavery, because that’s why the war in which they fought, found martial glory, and died, came into existence. For that moral failing.

The Founding Fathers? They were moving forward, out of their morass, and working on liberal government. For all their failures, they were glorious successes in one great experiment.

The Confederates, on the other hand, should be in museums, where the horrid truths of their war, their poor moral choices, and all that goes with it can be soberly studied by future generations.

And not glorified by folks who’ve failed to understand basic morality.

If you’re in the mood for a whole lot of really bad lust for political power, check out this expose in The Nevada Independent of a frustrated Nevada GOP that doesn’t hold the state Senate in its paws. You’d expect honorable politicos to wait for the next election, wouldn’t you? Not these guys – they’re going to use recalls to get what they want:

[State Senator Michael] Roberson and his spokesman have been uncharacteristically silent on the Woodhouse recall, which appears to be part of a coordinated and unprecedented series of recalls of state Senate Democratic caucus members. Indeed, secrecy has enveloped this effort by The Craven Caucus, which includes a former assemblyman (Stephen Silberkraus) who lost last year but hung around Carson City this session anyhow, and a losing candidate against Woodhouse less than a year ago, a charter school principal (Carrie Buck) who must be instilling wonderful values in her students.

The Nevada Independent already has traced the recalls of Woodhouse and Patricia Farley (who is not even running next year) to close Roberson ally Mark Hutchison, the lieutenant governor whose law firm is handling the recalls and whose elected job Roberson covets; and to Roberson crony Robert Uithoven, a Las Vegas Sands lobbyist whose employee solicited at least one member of the Farley recall committee. (That Uithoven staffer offered this when confronted by The Indy’s Megan Messerly: “I have no comment. I have nothing to say about it. I’ve got to go.”) …

The real secret here, though, is not who is behind this. The dirty secret here is this is grounded not in political principles but in campaign panic because the Republicans essentially have no chance to take the state Senate at the ballot in ‘18.

Even if you succumb to that trifecta of temporary amnesia, ask yourself this question: If all of this is so righteous, if the grounds are really there, why is there this conspiracy of secrecy on what should be public information? Even if they are not required by a typically porous Nevada law to reveal their reasons until they submit the signatures, why won’t they talk about their putative reasons for trying to recall these senators?

I’ll tell you why: Because they are desperate, because they know they are unlikely to win back the Senate at the ballot next year and because….they can. That is the standard in the Era of Trump, a perversion of the Nike slogan applied to campaigns and politics: Just Do It.

And if we were to put these guys under the microscope, would we find a bunch of second-raters? Any Nevada readers out there who’d care to comment, just hit the mail link. But that’s how this smells – they’ve lost command of the legislature, and they will do anything to get it back. This is the attitude of the political juvenile, who thinks it’s all about being in control – not governing wisely in concert with members of the other party. It’s having a focus roughly half an inch in front of their noses, with no cares for the future. Do they think this imminent debacle will be forgotten, by either the citizens or the other party?

Of course, if they do have some sort of scandal on the Democrats, then a recall is appropriate. But this ridiculous secrecy is not indicative that they have anything more than just an itch that needs to be scratched. And that itch is all about power.

Sometimes I’m dismayed at the importance of Justice Kennedy as the swing vote of SCOTUS, although I suppose I’m rather naive for not appreciating the importance of the ideological underpinnings of certain SCOTUS decisions. Here Rick Hasen on Election Law Blog discusses the recent district court decision regarding the Texas Voter ID law:

For two reasons, it matters whether the courts find discriminatory purpose in addition to discriminatory effect. When there is just a discriminatory effect, the remedy is much narrower. In this case, the interim remedy was to tinker with the voter id law, such as allowing voters to file an affidavit explaining why they lack the necessary ID signed under penalty of perjury. With a finding of purpose, however, the entire law could (and today was) thrown out. Second, a finding of intentional discrimination can be the basis, under section 3c of the Voting Rights Act, to put Texas back under the preclearance provisions of the Voting Rights Act for up to 10 years, at the court’s discretion. The court has scheduled further briefing on the section 3c issue for the end of the month.

Today the court reaffirmed the discriminatory purpose finding, and held that the tweaks Texas made to its voter id law in a recent session did not solve the problem of discriminatory purpose. In some ways Texas made things worse. The affidavit requirement, for example, could intimidate voters given that many sections open up voters to prosecutions for felony perjury. The Court also noted that the new law did not include any money for voter education, which the court found crucial to a fairly applied voter id law.

What comes next? Texas will no doubt appeal this ruling to the Fifth Circuit, and the first question will be some kind of interim relief—Texas will ask to continue to enforce its voter id law as this case works its way through the 5th Circuit (and likely back to the entire 5th Circuit sitting en banc). What happens in the request for a stay of the district court’s order may give us some sense of what is likely to happen on the merits at the Fifth Circuit.

But ultimately this case is heading to the Supreme Court. What kind of reception it gets there will likely depend upon (1) whether Justice Kennedy is still on the Court and (2) how Justice Kennedy, if still on the Court, views the evidence of intentional discrimination in this case.

Is the evidence really so ambiguous? Granted, it’s hard to understand the motivations of the actors if they refuse to admit to real reasons to hidden recorders, and this is certainly one of the more contentious areas, since the GOP, the actors in this drama, do have a prima facie reasonableness for taking some sort of action. But the lack of any evidence of abuse in the recent past by illegal immigrants makes the Voter ID law’s stated motivations dubious.

A friend sent along this example of the proper use of Twitter (via MSN/Money), but it jolted me in a totally different manner (annoying Twitter formatting removed):

On Friday evening, Tesla customer Paul Franks tweeted the following:

@elonmusk can you guys program the car once in park to move back the seat and raise the steering wheel? Steering wheel is wearing.

Just 24 minutes later, the famous CEO replied with the following message:

Good point. We will add that to all cars in one of the upcoming software releases.

Reminds me of how I dealt with user suggestions when I worked in open source software. Suggestion comes in the morning, strive to have it implemented in the evening for user testing overnight. I like to think the fast turnaround contributed to the ambiance of the project.

It’s also nice to see Twitter has a redeeming characteristic. I don’t bother with it, myself.

Goiter:

Goiter is an enlargement of the thyroid gland. The resulting bulge on the neck may become extremely large, but most simple goiters are brought under control before this happens. Occasionally a simple goiter may cause some difficulty in breathing and swallowing. [PubMed]

Mentioned by my Arts Editor last night, and I realized I had no clear idea of the meaning of the term. It appears to be descriptive and does not address causes. Here’s a helpful image:

Source: National Institutes of Health

These ladies suffer from iodine deficiency.

Here come the black-eyed susans, in three modes. Light …

… and dark, consorting with the cleome …

… and skulking off into the night, no doubt to harass innocent pedestrians. A bit hulking, don’t you think?

Kevin Drum remarks upon the difficulties of uniting the Democratic Party, which I suppose I’m happy enough to take his word for, not being the sort to pay much attention to the technical difficulties of a “big tent” party. But I think he suffers a hiccup in his reasoning in the addendum:

There’s a good example of this in Warren’s speech, where she says this:

A few weeks ago, I saw an op-ed in the New York Times from a so-called Democratic strategist titled, “Back to the Center, Democrats.”…We’ve been warned off before. Give up, keep your heads down, be realistic, act like a grown-up, keep doing the same old same old.

But here’s what’s interesting: instead of lots of ferocious back-and- forth and piling on, this time, no one cared. Big yawn. Why? Because the Democratic Party isn’t going back to the days of welfare reform and the crime bill.¹ It is NOT going to happen.

Bill Clinton campaigned on both those things and he won the presidency. But when he actually followed through, a lot of lefty Democrats rebelled. Nevertheless, Clinton won reelection by a huge margin. Warren is correct that the Democratic Party has moved left on these issues since Clinton’s presidency, but she’s not correct that this means moderates no longer exist. They do, and Democrats still need them to win.

There’s one big omission in Kevin’s reasoning: President Clinton’s opposition. Bob Dole ran a poor campaign and didn’t have the personal charisma that I’m told President Clinton had (I never understood that myself, but I’ll stipulate it). Clinton beat Dole by nearly 9% points in the popular vote. Some of that might be attributable to welfare and crime, but I doubt much of it. I remember that campaign, and Dole really never had a chance, despite Clinton’s political failings.

Remember Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX)? I’ve written about him before. He’s the guy who had the nerve to write this:

“Better to get your news directly from the president,” Smith said. “In fact, it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth.” [Vox]

I couldn’t help thinking about him while reading Steve Benen’s discussion on Maddowblog of Trump’s ego-rally (my thanks to my friend Jim for supplying that descriptive label) in Phoenix. What caught my eye?

But there was one line that jumped out at me because it dovetails with a rhetorical line I’ve been keeping an eye on in recent months. Trump was eager to argue that he’s produced amazing economic gains – the president touted the million-job figure again, though I don’t think he appreciates why that tally is so underwhelming – which led him to this gem:

“[E]conomic growth has surged to 2.6 percent. Remember, everybody said, ‘You won’t bring it up to 1 percent. You won’t bring it up to 1.2 percent.’”

Everybody didn’t say that. In fact, literally no one said that because this rhetoric doesn’t make any sense. The president seemed lost trying to talk about this a month ago, and his economic illiteracy doesn’t seem to be getting any better. …

All of which leads to a straightforward dynamic: (1) maybe no one in the White House has explained GDP reports to our first amateur president; (2) maybe Trump’s aides have explained it, but he didn’t understand the lessons; or (3) perhaps White House staffers did explain it, Trump understood the lessons just fine, and the president is working from the assumption that the public is easily fooled.

And we know that many the Trump supporters get their news only from Trump and some of his allied media. So, for them, when Trump shouts that no one thought he could bring economic growth up to 2.6%, they believe it – because they don’t know better and they’ve been told that everyone else lies to them.

And this is so in line with the expected results of Rep. Smith’s idiotic advice. He may have given it as a way to retain the allegiance of voters, but he may find out someday that he’s not the one dispensing the truth – it’s all about Trump. And that locks him into a straitjacket of loyalty that may, someday, squeeze him out of his job.

Helicity:

Imagine the tiny tornado that forms in your tea as you stir it. The swirl can have three parts: a link, in which one loop passes through the centre of another, like chain links; a writhe, in which a loop gets a kink in it like an unruly garden hose; and a twist, when several streams of water flow around one another, like the strings in a twisted rope.

These three motions combine in a vortex to make up what’s called its helicity … [“Teacup tornadoes brew up a storm,” NewScientist (12 August 2017)]

And it ain’t us. Greg Fallis elaborates on the problem of Afghanistan:

Same shit, different invader. In almost every invasion, the Afghan tribes have been outgunned, out-technologied, out-resourced, and often out-fought. But they’ve never been out-waited. Never.

Why? Because they’re operating on a radically different understanding of time and place than the invaders. They live there. They know the invaders, regardless of who they are or where they’re from, will eventually want to leave. The simple fact is the Afghans don’t need to win; they only need to persist. If it takes a generation or two of low intensity guerrilla warfare until their enemies get fed up and find a reason to go home, they’re okay with that. They’ve done it before.

“Afghans will secure and build their own nation, and define their own future.”

That’s from Trump’s speech, and it’s a classic case of stupidity fed by willful blindness. The Afghans have been securing and building their own nation for a couple thousand years. They are defining their future. Right now that definition includes killing U.S. and NATO troops and booting us out of their country. There’s yet another reality we need to accept.

That’s the long view. But how does Greg tally up the Taliban? Were they purely an Afghan phenomenon? Or were they an incursion from Pakistan? I ask because, in my understanding, the Taliban more or less ran Afghanistan 1996-2001. And, yes, they no longer hold power – but only because of outside interference from the United States. And it fights on, hungering for power. Which is not to say the warlords who preceded them were any better.

NewScientist (12 August 2017) reports on an unexpected chemical reaction may revive hydrogen fueled cars:

Earlier this year, Scott Grendahl and his team at the US Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland made a surprising discovery. They were testing a high-strength aluminium alloy by pouring water on it, and it started to bubble, giving off hydrogen. That doesn’t normally happen to aluminium. It usually oxidises in water, forming a barrier that stops any reaction. But this alloy just kept reacting.

Hydrogen has long been touted as a clean, green fuel, but it is difficult to store and move around because of the low temperature and high pressure at which it must be kept. If aluminium could be made to effectively react with water, it would mean hydrogen on demand. Unlike hydrogen, aluminium and water are easy to carry, and both are stable. But previous attempts to get aluminium and water to react required high temperatures or catalysts, and were slow. Obtaining the hydrogen took hours and was around 50 per cent efficient.

“Ours does it in less than 3 minutes,” says Grendahl. Moreover, the new material offers at least an order of magnitude more energy than lithium batteries of the same weight. And unlike batteries, it can remain stable and ready for use indefinitely.

So is the aluminium alloy consumed by the reaction? Or is it a catalyst itself?

Maybe I should hang on to my Mazda RX7 – I recall reading quite a long time ago that Mazda engineers had adapted the car’s rotary engine to use hydrogen rather than gasoline. Just pour in the distilled water…

In case you were wondering about the hiring bonuses awarded to former SCOTUS law clerks, newly hired into private practice, here’s a report from National Law Journal:

The trial boutique Wilkinson Walsh + Eskovitz has hired two clerks from the most recent U.S. Supreme Court term, and in the process it appears to have set a new high for incoming associate bonuses.

The hires, Elizabeth “Betsy” Henthorne and John James “JJ” Snidow, join the firm’s Washington, D.C., office from the chambers of Justices Elena Kagan and Anthony Kennedy, respectively. Wilkinson Walsh will award them hiring bonuses of $350,000 each, name partner Sean Eskovitz said, compared with bonuses that have topped out at $300,000 and $330,000 for former high court clerks in recent years.

Which is deeply suggestive of the value of the prizes to be won in court.

I decided to try cleome snapping at night, as lightly edited by my Arts Editor.

This is my favorite.

My Arts Editor really likes this one.