Unsightly Mental Blemishes

When I heard Colbert making jokes about the white supremacist movement boycotting the latest Star Wars movie, I thought he was kidding and forgot about it. But, no, it’s a real thing, as Emma Grey Ellis reports in Wired. She concludes:

The alt-right aren’t the first extremist group to use this strategy. “There are clear points of comparison with how the Klan protested against film in the 1920s,” says Tim Rice, a film studies lecturer at St. Andrews University and author of White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan. “These protests—then and now—seek to position the group as an underdog and the threatened minority.” And, just like the Klan, the alt-right holds up media as a symbol of the problem, so any criticism they receive can be dismissed, or used to reinforce their arguments.

But the KKK cracked up, and so will the alt-right. The group is already splintering into rival factions, and their ambition far outweighs their power. The group’s last big boycott called for people to #DumpKelloggs after the brand pulled its ads from Breitbart, and that call to action hasn’t halted Special K consumption. It’s doubtful that the fringe group will have any more impact on Star Wars—let alone Disney—than they did on the cereal giant.

I see this as a recognition by the supremacists of the power of storytelling – and their natural dread of it. They realize that the story will depict some awful fate that may await supremacists in any galaxy, and that the story will make an argument that such a fate is inevitable. Just as evil quite often breaks into self-defeating factions, as Ellis reports the supremacists are exhibiting at this early date, the story makes assertions that will discourage future potential recruits from joining the supremacists’ little hate groups. And if their little hate groups don’t grow, then the leaders are stuck with their little teacup of power, their influence will remain static and begin to wane, and … the country will end up laughing at them.

Rogue One may be the first strike in the war against the supremacists, but it’s a lot more civilized than the last time we had to deal with white supremacists.

That was called The American Civil War.

Serger:

An overlock is a kind of stitch that sews over the edge of one or two pieces of cloth for edging, hemming, or seaming. Usually an overlock sewing machine will cut the edges of the cloth as they are fed through (such machines being called “sergers” in North America), though some are made without cutters. [Wikipedia]

As my wife is a tailor, I’ve suddenly been introduced to this word several times in the last few years. Only recently did I learn the spelling, though.

Dipping into the email bag today, I see – perhaps to my surprise – that the war on both government and expertise appears to be continuing, although it’s possible this, like the bombs from World War II still found throughout Europe, is a leftover from the most recent metaphorical war.

Of course, it’s dressed up to deceive as a bit of down home humor; indeed, much like the use of children as suicide bombers (see, I can play dirty, too), its core appears to be a good piece, stolen for other purposes. Here it is.

Mensa Convention – Good One!

There was a Mensa convention in San Francisco. Mensa, as you probably know, is a national organization for people who have an IQ of 140 or higher. Several of the Mensa members went out for lunch at a local café.

When they sat down, one of them discovered that their salt shaker contained pepper, and their pepper shaker was full of salt. How could they swap the contents of the two bottles without spilling any, and using only the implements at hand? Clearly, this was a job for Mensa minds. The group debated the problem and presented ideas and finally, came up with a brilliant solution involving a napkin, a straw, and an empty saucer. They called the waitress over, ready to dazzle her with their solution.

“Ma’am,” they said, “we couldn’t help but notice that the pepper shaker contains salt and the salt shaker has pepper.” But before they could finish, the waitress interrupted: “Oh sorry about that.”

She leaned over the table, unscrewed the caps of both bottles and switched them.

There was dead silence at the Mensa table.

Kind of reminds you of Washington D.C., doesn’t it?

The emphasis is mine. What appears to be a light-hearted dig is actually a subtle manipulative maneuver, designed to convince those already suspicious of the Federal government that they’re right. It’s all in the bulk of the real humor, isn’t it? A conundrum, analyzed by the allegedly smart set, which is then solved by a waitress (who, by the implication that a waitress is also not particularly bright, is insulted into the bargain; a smart waitress would negate both the humor and the message of the missive). The problem is seen to be simple once viewed through the simple, down home wisdom of folks who lack the credentials other might have.

And, you know, credentials means expertise. Not only does the government take it in the teeth, the idea of experts is also dissed, a position sadly endorsed by Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Now, I could go on about nuclear weapons and justice and finding balance and North Korea, but I won’t, because someone else from another era said it so much better than I ever could, so I’ll defer to his facility with words. I quote, courtesy WikiQuote, H. L. Mencken:

… there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.

Or, in other words, governing is harder than you may think.

With that in mind, shall we give the humor above the proper finish?

The Mensa folk, being far too trusting, then proceeded to use their condiments. The one who tried to use the pepper found the holes were too large, and quickly a little mound of pepper ruined his french fries. Meanwhile, the salt failed to pass through the too small holes of its fresh topper, thus inadvertently saving its would-be users from a hypertensive heart attack they were otherwise doomed to experience.

See? It’s still easy to make fun of Mensa, but now we have a more accurate insinuation concerning government. And, hey, still having doubts about that whole expertise thing? Here, let me help you out. Got a car? Would you let a 10 year old work on its engine?

Didn’t think so.

We’ve all heard of gravitational lensing. Somehow, I missed the opposite. The word may be a bit informal.

demagnification:

[Martin Sahlén of the University of Oxford] and his colleagues invoke a new field that is added to a cosmological constant to change dark energy’s density, depending on the local density of ordinary matter. That means dark energy would have behaved differently at different times. In the early universe, matter’s density was high, and dark energy would have had very little effect. But as the universe expanded and became less dense, dark energy’s effects became more prominent, causing the expansion to accelerate as observed.

Such dark energy has an observable consequence: it causes space-time in large, under-dense regions known as voids to behave differently than if dark energy were a cosmological constant alone. Where regions of high density, such as galaxy clusters, warp space-time to bend light towards us like a magnifying glass, voids bend light away like a concave lens. Measuring the amount of such “demagnification” could help test the team’s model. [“Huge cosmic voids could probe dark energy,” Anil Ananthaswamy, NewScientist (8 January 2014)]

Walter Isaacson of the Aspen Institute has published an article, taken from a talk he gave to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, on LinkedIn calling for a Reformation of the Internet:

There is a bug in [the Internet’s] original design that at first seemed like a feature but has gradually, and now rapidly, been exploited by hackers and trolls and malevolent actors: its packets are encoded with the address of their destination but not of their authentic origin. With a circuit-switched network, you can track or trace back the origins of the information, but that’s not true with the packet-switched design of the internet.

Compounding this was the architecture that Tim Berners-Lee and the inventors of the early browsers created for the World Wide Web. It brilliantly allowed the whole of the earth’s computers to be webbed together and navigated through hyperlinks. But the links were one-way. You knew where the links took you. But if you had a webpage or piece of content, you didn’t exactly know who was linking to you or coming to use your content.

All of that enshrined the potential for anonymity. You could make comments anonymously. Go to a webpage anonymously. Consume content anonymously. With a little effort, send email anonymously. And if you figured out a way to get into someone’s servers or databases, you could do it anonymously.

Certainly not an essay to everyone’s taste, but there is, as Walter points out, the possibility (and probably the only way to get there) for both classic Internet and new Internet to co-exist. Properly done, a web browser could probably work on both simultaneously. And I have to love his allusion to the ancient Greeks:

In Plato’s Republic, we learn the tale of the Ring of Gyges. Put it on, and you’re invisible and anonymous. The question that Plato asks is whether those who put on the ring will be civil and moral. He thinks not. The Internet has proven him correct.

And while I added that for its smile factor, in a queer sort of way it does play into my thinking about the cancer of national and international corporations (and, yes, full disclosure: I work for one of the largest). The upper management are really the people with the rings of invisibility, because while they make decisions that affect remote communities, they aren’t there to experience the negative consequences – thus they’re invisible – and consequently they don’t care what happens to the environment at their manufacturing plants. The equivalent of the Internet trolls caused the Bhopal disaster.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaanywho. This sounds like an interesting proposal which should be pursued by those with the means to make it happen.

My reader is more interested in universal health care than UBI, for good reason:

UBI is an interesting idea, but I’d more interested in universal health care at reasonable rates.

For example, I currently pay more for private health care insurance than I would pay for Medicare parts A (hospital), B (out patients), and D (pharam) if could buy all of those. (And part D is higher priced than it would need to be except Congress explicitly forbade CMS from using its size to negotiate better drug prices.) And Medicare has far lower deductibles and copays than my current plan. (And I’m counting actually paying for part A here, which normally, if you’ve paid into Medicare via FICA deductions during your work life, is “free”, i.e. has no premium. The Medicare website is amazingly helpful on this point.)

If I recall the data correctly, a major cause of homelessness is bankruptcy. Medical calamity is the number cause of personal bankruptcies in this nation, and most of those medical bankruptcies are filed by people who had health insurance.

For most of the 99%, paying for health care is a critical component of staying solvent and hence, safe and healthy. That Medicare can do so much more with so much less money, despite various political hamstrings such as the drug pricing scam, than private industry insurers demonstrates just how greedy and detrimental to society they are. And that doesn’t even begin to address other things driving sky rocketing health care costs, such as immensely profitable hospitals, excessive end of life treatments, lack of continuity of care, etc.

Yes.

I’ve been reading a couple of interviews on Vox with Trump voters who happen to use the ACA, wherein the interviewers ask if they really believe the GOP would knock down the ACA and replace it with nothing (the replies have included “I didn’t realize they could change laws” and “I didn’t really believe them”). While a couple of interviews are indeed a slender reed to hang a conclusion from, it does occur to me that the GOP may have wedged itself into a crevice filled with blue ring octopuses (highly poisonous). How so? One of the their campaign promises was to shutter the “disastrous” (their terminology) ACA.

If they do so, they may screw over a part of their base, who’ll either die of embarrassment or scream bloody murder – right into the microphones of the waiting Democrats, who’ll happily broadcast the wails of agony.

If they don’t, the rest of the base will abuse and revile them, and probably indulge in the filthy epithet RINO, pushing the party yet further into the fever swamps. Or the health insurance industry may abandon ship on them, although heavens knows there’s nothing more than a life raft out there once they get off the capsizing GOP liner.

And, as Steve Benen notes, the attempt to sidle their way out of this has already begun:

The rhetorical shift on health care among congressional Republicans is also worth keeping an eye on. After years in which GOP lawmakers said the scope of “Obamacare” is a national scourge that’s tearing at the very fabric of American society, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) recently told reporters that repealing the reform law affects “a relatively small number of people.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) added, “We have an Obamacare emergency in a relatively small part of the insurance market.”

Continuing the fun, the man to lead the Department of Enery, former Governor Perry of TX, isn’t a nuclear physicist – and that’s the point of the DoE. Jeffrey Lewis on The Daily Beast put it quite nicely:

But in recent years, the trend has been to appoint a Secretary of Energy with real technical expertise. President Bush appointed Samuel Bodman, who had a distinguished career as an MIT-trained chemical engineer before making a fortune in the private sector. President Obama upped the ante, appointing Berkeley’s Steven Chu and MIT’s Ernest Moniz to the position. Both are physicists. Chu has a Nobel Prize. By contrast, Perry took four chemistry courses and got two Cs, a D and an F. He got a C in physics. And a D in something called “Meat.”

So did Perry apologize to Trump or not? After all, Perry did say:

“He is without substance when one scratches below the surface. He offers a barking carnival act that can be best described as Trumpism: A toxic mix of demagoguery and mean-spiritedness and nonsense that will lead the Republican Party to perdition if pursued,” Perry said. “Let no one be mistaken — Donald Trump’s candidacy is a cancer on conservatism, and it must be clearly diagnosed, excised and discarded.”

Bankruptcy looming? Was he just drinking that night and didn’t mean it?

Or no cojones?

If I must be, reluctantly, open-minded, then perhaps Perry hopes to offer mature guidance to Trump. Although it’s not clear that Trump has any interest in that sort of thing.

Continuing the theme, this would be an upcoming scandal, so really a little out of bounds: David Frum points out that one of the defining policies of the Trump campaign is unlikely to happen:

OK here’s the best part: the only thing in the 2013 bill that bothered Puzder was … more border security.

Andrew Puzder is Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Labor, and a strong advocate of immigrant labor … because it keeps the cost of running fast food restaurants down and his profits up, as he’s CEO of CKE, which runs Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.

At best, there’ll a split right down the middle on this issue.

Rebecca Ingber on Lawfare discusses the long term consequences of a Trump Administration in which the bureaucracy may or may not work as an emergency brake on a President careless of safeguards. Noting that, at best, it will be an imperfect mechanism, she next addresses the problems facing the President following Trump in the arena of power accruing to the the Presidency:

… there is a catch-22 for presidents rising to power on promises to rein in the overreach of a predecessor on both process and substance. Remediating process fouls may make it more difficult to effect quick substantive change. Continuing to skirt the process norms of the executive branch in order to impose one’s substantive views entrenches the process errors. And yet a post-Trump president may well need to tackle both. For future presidential administrations, there are potential avenues for dialing back prior claims to power while still employing an inclusive decision-making process. Dialing back substantive claims to power of a predecessor are most effectively done immediately, upon taking office. For matters that require determining and implementing new legal positions or policies, decision-making should be channeled into processes that can examine problems ex ante and in a fashion removed from the pressures of addressing the facts on the ground inherited from the last administration, even if those pressures exist and are ongoing (i.e. forward-looking task forces to address best practices or legal positions, versus defensive litigation geared toward protecting power to defend actions already taken).

More urgently, for presidential administrations hoping to entrench internal constraints on future presidents: lay out your legal theories for action as clearly as you can; rest them on a specific theory and not in-the-alternative options; have the authors sign their legal positions to ensure accountability; publish them to ensure transparency; and include written redlines so there can be no confusion about the existence of outer legal limits on the president’s authority. The Obama Administration’s speeches, released legal memoranda, briefs, and the commendable recently released “Report on the Legal and Policy Frameworks Guiding the U.S. Use of Military Force” have over time checked several of these boxes on key national security issues.

I think it’ll be incumbent on the media and electorate that one of the discussion topics of the next campaign must be identification of power accrual and a discussion of whether this is detrimental to the Republic or not. Note this is different from the question of whether it’s good for the Presidency; the two are fundamentally different, as the Republic exists to promote the welfare of the citizenry, while the Presidency, though having a valid role in the Republic’s goal, is in itself an anti-democratic institution; only in relation to the limits set by the other two branches of government is it a tolerable institution, Therefore, arguing that limiting its power limits its efficacy is irrelevant; only in the context of the Republic as a whole can such arguments be properly judged as to their legitimacy, in terms of the dangers as well as the advantages that more power in the Presidency will cause.

I wonder if substantial portions of the electorate are up for such a discussion.

And no doubt more than one ship has been lost to these. LiveScience reports:

Source: FindLatitudeAndLongitude.com

A monstrous swell in the North Atlantic that rose up as high as a six-story building is now the world‘s tallest wave measured by a buoy, according to the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

The wave crashed down the morning of Feb. 4, 2013, in the watery expanse between Iceland and the United Kingdom, at approximately 59 degrees N, 11 degrees W. It occurred after a strong cold front passed through the area, producing winds of up to 50.4 mph (43.8 knots), the WMO reported. …

The WMO added that the new record isn’t from one wave, but rather an average of 10 to 15 wave heights, which “is a more reliable measure of wave height than that of a single wave,” said Randall Cerveny, a scientist at the WMO. “Of course, maximum waves have been recorded up to 29 meters [95.1 feet],” Cerveny told Live Science, but the WMO began using averages in 2007 so that their records would be more accurate, he said.

I suspect we don’t have enough data to see maximum wave sizes plotted against time and make any sensible conclusions in concert with climate change. But it’s an interesting thought.

A reader comments on automation in general:

Fascinating is not the word I’d have chosen. This is happening right now in America, and in other industrial OECD counties.

If “conservatives” believe we should reduce corporate income tax rates, but those same corporations replace 10,000 workers with 100 robots each (so to speak), and the 1,000 largest corporations avail themselves to this opportunity — then what? That’s conceivably 10 million fewer taxpayers at the same time those more profitable corporations are now paying less tax. Seems like federal government revenue will go down significantly over next decade, absent any changes from this effect. Reduce corporate income tax rates will likely reduce that revenue further.

Of course, this is just for the sake of argument and many of those 10 million now “out of work” people will find something else to do and have to pay taxes. We hope.

But does this maybe call from something like a VAT or a federal consumption tax?

Possibly. I remain interested in UBI, as that might reduce societal unrest as jobs disappear and retraining becomes necessary. Knowing that you aren’t going to starve while retraining might make the mind more receptive in many folks, although I grant there will be some who resent the entire situation. And I have little sympathy with whining about corporate taxes going up to cover UBI, as it’s a relatively small amount to pay to ensure the corporate HQ doesn’t get burned down in the middle of the night by those former employees.

And the drop in federal revenue could be covered by taxing the automation hardware, although I suspect the devil will be in the details on that legislation.

While reading Steve Benen’s commentary on the nominee for Secretary of State, Rex Tillerson, it occurred to me that his remarks about motivations, namely,

Note, Trump has chosen ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, a close Putin ally, as his Secretary of State nominee – and Tillerson has publicly criticized U.S. sanctions on Russia for years.

… may actually be more serious than Steve himself realizes.

What is citizenship? The common response is a passive “member of a country”, I suggest, and this is actually a poor response. Citizenship, among other things, presupposes a shared motivation when it comes to national survival; that is, we all value national survival in roughly equal amounts. How to attain it may be a matter of controversy, but it’s a valid and valuable controversy.

But now let’s ask this about Mr. Tillerson. He is the CEO, and reportedly lifelong employee of ExxonMobil, a true multinational corporation. Where does his interests lie?

Does he really have the same view of the national survival of the United States as do the majority of the citizens?

Or are his motivations so tied up in his corporation that they now diverge from the common citizen’s concerns about our traditional enemy? His experience of Russia may be more extensive, but that doesn’t make it better, because the lens in front of his eye is tainted, as it were, with ExxonMobil, a company that can always move away from the USA if necessary, perhaps even to Russia. Nothing really stops it – insofar as the US becomes unattractive to ExxonMobil. And that’s where his self-interest lies – in all the stock, all the money he has tied up in ExxonMobil.

Something to gnaw on going forward.

Quinta Jurecic on Lawfare surveys Trump as an actor in the Carl Schmitt drama. Herr Schmitt was a German legal theorist of the early 1900s who formulated the theory of exception, the idea that the sovereign can choose to act outside the law in exceptional circumstances. After discussing the concept and its problems, Quinta brings it around to our President-elect.

Trump has given us genuine reason for concern that he may actually represent the Schmittian nightmare feared by many on the left and in the civil libertarian community after 9/11. His offhand campaign promise to House Republicans to uphold the Constitution’s nonexistent Article XII raised concern at the time over his lack of textual knowledge of the document, but even this isn’t the important thing. Not every President has had detailed textual knowledge of the Constitution, though most have been better at glossing over that fact than has Trump. What’s key is Trump’s apparent lack of understanding of the document’s significance and power as the bedrock of democracy and the rule of law—an understanding that normally commits the President to behaving in a constitutional fashion by heeding the good-faith advice of legal counsel.

Trump, on the other hand, has displayed precious little respect for these underlying constitutional principles: recall his hedging on whether he would accept the results of the election, and his eventual declaration that he would do so “if I win.” And to paraphrase an astute acquaintance I spoke to in the days after the election, while Trump might want to be a good President for the American people, he has shown no sign of wanting to be a good participant in the American system of governance. Her comments were echoed recently by Representative Justin Amash (R-MI), who criticized Trump for his “extra-constitutional” view of the presidency: “I think he just views the job [of the presidency as] … outside the Constitution,” Amash said. “I don’t think our framework [of law] in this country really comes into play when he’s thinking about how the job should operate.”

Amash’s formulation is apt: think of Trump’s statement to the New York Times that “the president can’t have a conflict of interest,” and therefore can’t be in violation of the Emoluments Clause. As many have noted, it’s hard not to hear the echoes of Nixon’s infamous declaration, “When the President does it, that means it is not illegal.”

“Extra-constitutional” is also a good way of describing Carl Schmitt’s sovereign power, which is not exactly above the law but, rather, outside it. The sovereign determines when law applies and to whom, and the sovereign’s decision is unreviewable by the courts or any other actor because it exists outside the structure of legal review entirely.

So let’s consider the case that Trump might be the real Schmittian. You can see hints of such an extra-constitutional self-understanding not only in Trump’s apparent lack of respect for the Emoluments Clause, but also in his contempt for the work of the courts.

She then goes on to examine the Judge Curiel and “lock up Clinton” controversies. There’s a lot of good stuff here, and it leads me to think the Trump Administration is going to be marked by a heckuva lot of litigation – and quite possibly some refusals to accept Presidential orders by the bureaucracy, and a subsequent figurative bloody nose for Trump.

Archaeology Magazine’s Samir Patel investigates the status of the wreck of the USS Arizona in Pearl Harbor. I didn’t know this about its fuel tanks:

National Park Service/eTrac ROV via Archaeology.org

“What we learned is that, yes, Arizona is corroding. Yes, Arizona is rusting. And yes, Arizona is changing,” says Conlin, “but it’s changing very, very slowly, and the best science that we have tells us that Arizona will still have significant structural integrity for at least another 150 years.” The risk of a catastrophic spill is low, he adds. Battleships don’t hold oil in a single tank, but in hundreds of cells. A recent SRC study found that, of the several places where oil emerges from the wreck, only one appears to be closely connected to a fuel storage area. The rest of the leaking oil follows a circuitous path through interior spaces, which suggests that it is distributed around the ship. Furthermore, it is thought that the oil inside inhibits the degradation of the metal and provides a buoyant force for its structure. And there’s no way to remove the oil without deeply impacting or damaging a war grave. “We are getting smarter about how we can understand Arizona,” Conlin says, “and also how we can manage Arizona.”

USS Arizona Memorial. Source: National Park Service

I wonder if that applies to other types of ships sunk during World War II – and since then. However, wrecks may contain other potential disastrous materials, as noted here.

On this thread, the reader responds:

I’m not assuming a permanent political split, but I am assuming that in matters of POTUS, Roberts, Alito, Scalia are guaranteed for the GOP. Pretty risky to go after with an 8 member court.

I presume that the reader meant Thomas, not Scalia. The Court should be simply working on matters of law, and Lessig’s argument appears to depend on a proper appreciation of how the law has been interpreted in the past. Would the Court simply split along political lines? Are our Justices really that poor as a whole?

Also, I really think that if Lessig truly thinks this is a legit argument he should get ready to file it. Sooner rather than later.

I wonder if he would have standing. It’s not a subject I understand well.

A reader elucidates my point further regarding the Iraq War and the CIA:

I pointed this out elsewhere: the CIA was the least supportive of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld/et al’s claim there were WMD. Most of the claims came from the aforementioned along with a few other direct reports. Moreover, the strongest Intelligence Community support came from the DIA, directly under Rumsfeld’s chain of command being part of the DoD. The CIA was highly reluctant to support the assertion.

Which makes his reluctance to trust the CIA – regarding a report roughly 15 years old, no less – just that much more disturbing. Keeping in mind Trump was for the war, this makes the CIA more accurate than some minor businessman in New York City – which is certainly what one would hope. Or we can ask Donald why, in 2000, he had spies operating in deep cover in Iraq, and see if he chokes on it.

In case you’re not up to speed on the various unemployment measures, the WaPo has published an article on it:

There are actually six versions of the unemployment rate produced monthly by the department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics. The official unemployment rate is U-3, which reflects people who are actively seeking jobs but cannot find one. Here are the six rates, with the percent unemployed as of November.

• U-1: Persons unemployed 15 weeks or longer, as a percent of the civilian labor force (1.8 percent)
• U-2: Job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs, as a percent of the civilian labor force (2.2 percent)
• U-3: Total unemployed, as a percent of the civilian labor force (4.6 percent)
• U-4: Total unemployed plus discouraged workers, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus discouraged workers (5 percent)
• U-5: Total unemployed, plus discouraged workers, plus all other persons marginally attached to the labor force, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force (5.8 percent)
• U-6: Total unemployed, plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force, plus total employed part time for economic reasons, as a percent of the civilian labor force plus all persons marginally attached to the labor force (9.3 percent)

So Donald’s claim that we actually have a 42% unemployment rate? Either you’re wrong (but such a smart person! Oyez!) or you lied through your teeth. You choose, Donald.

Please, don’t look at other students’ answers.

Steve Benen on MaddowBlog has been harping on Trump’s sharp disagreements with the CIA recently:

The news on Friday night was a bombshell: The CIA not only believes Russia interfered directly in America’s presidential election, the foreign adversary did so because Vladimir Putin’s government hoped to put Donald Trump in the White House.

Trump’s first instinct wasn’t to deny the accuracy of the reporting, but rather, to attack the CIA: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” It was the latest in a lengthy series of instances in which Trump has questioned the integrity and the professionalism of U.S. intelligence agencies – a pattern that began months before Election Day.

But Steve never mentions that this, too, could be construed to be yet another Trump lie. As I recall, one of the tremendous Bush scandals was that the Iraq invasion’s pretext of WMDs possessed by Hussein turned out to be false – and that our intelligence agencies knew that. So I did some research, and it turns out that the CIA tried to satisfy the Administration’s desire to pin WMDs on Hussein – but couldn’t quite get there. From Jason Leopold on Vice News:

An example of that: According to the newly declassified NIE, the intelligence community concluded that Iraq “probably has renovated a [vaccine] production plant” to manufacture biological weapons “but we are unable to determine whether [biological weapons] agent research has resumed.” The NIE also said Hussein did not have “sufficient material” to manufacture any nuclear weapons and “the information we have on Iraqi nuclear personnel does not appear consistent with a coherent effort to reconstitute a nuclear weapons program.”

But in an October 7, 2002 speech in Cincinnati, Ohio, then-President George W. Bush simply said Iraq, “possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons” and “the evidence indicates that Iraq is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.”

One of the most significant parts of the NIE revealed for the first time is the section pertaining to Iraq’s alleged links to al Qaeda. In September 2002, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claimed the US had “bulletproof” evidence linking Hussein’s regime to the terrorist group.

“We do have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad,” Rumsfeld said. “We have what we consider to be very reliable reporting of senior-level contacts going back a decade, and of possible chemical- and biological-agent training.”

But the NIE said its information about a working relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq was based on “sources of varying reliability” — like Iraqi defectors — and it was not at all clear that Hussein had even been aware of a relationship, if in fact there were one.

By the time Bush & Co discussed the report with the public, all the qualifiers are gone and everything is definite.

So, does Trump ring the bell yet again? In my book, keeping in mind that I’m an engineer who is forced to be precise, yes, I think so. I think Trump is hearing information from the intelligence agencies he doesn’t like, so he’s searching for an excuse to ignore them – and thinks he found it.

UNFORTUNATELY for him, this just makes him into Donald J. Trump Bush, Jr. Yep, that’s right, we’ve got ourselves a Bush & Cheney again, not grounded in reality, but rather in the fantasies going on in their heads.

And the American people are the ones likely to pay for it.

Regarding the new legal strategy against the Electoral College, the reader responds:

You need Garland seated to have a 5-4 split of the court, because both postponing the EC vote and Lessig’s argument go to SCOTUS.

Which presumes SCOTUS is permanently politically polarized. Is this a viable assumption? Justice Kennedy is the well known swing vote, which no one can predict, but Chief Justice Roberts remains a question mark, a cipher. While he may be one of the godfathers of the dreadful arbitration decisions, he also salvaged the ACA when Kennedy voted against it. Roberts’ sense of legacy is interesting, and he may look at a chance to rupture the Electoral College as a prime opportunity to stamp The  Roberts Court on American history – or even to save the country, if he’s an alarmist.

And, of course, this assumes the usual liberals would vote to circumvent the Electoral College – again, a political assumption.

The next confrontation over a pipeline may take place in Florida: the Sabal Trail Pipeline. Take Today I received a change.org petition concerning the matter. Newsweek via Fusion already has coverage:

The Bells are just one of many families in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida who are being impacted by the Sabal Trail Transmission, a $3 billion project with the goal of beginning service by May 1, 2017. The 515-mile pipeline would help power Florida’s growing energy demand—more than 60 percent of the Sunshine State’s utilities are reliant on gas.

Behind the project are Spectra Energy Corp, NextEra Energy, Inc., and Duke Energy; the natural gas will be provided to Florida Power and Light, owned by NextEra and Duke. …

In a letter written to the Federal Environmental Regulation Commission by four Georgia Democratic congressmen last October, the officials expressed concerns over “serious environmental justice issues” with Sabal Trail, as well as possible health problems that residents in its vicinity could encounter:

Sabal Trail’s proposed pipeline and compressor station will further burden an already overburdened and disadvantaged African-American community in this area. Sabal Trail’s proposed route will go through Albany and Dougherty County and will run through low-income African-American neighborhoods. The proposed industrial compressor station facility would sit right in the middle of an African-American residential neighborhood comprised of two large subdivisions, a mobile home park, schools, recreational facilities, and the 5,000-plus member Mount Zion Baptist Church, a predominantly African-American congregation.

For the environmental justice community, the location of heavy industry near low-income and minority neighborhoods isnothing new.

In March, the Georgia House of Representatives voted 128-34 against a bill that would have given the pipeline project power to seize property.

“This does not serve our citizens,” Republican Rep. Regina Quick told the Georgia Report, a news outlet covering Georgia politics. “I will not be complicit in this scheme for the federal government or anyone else.”

To add to the controversy, Florida Gov. Rick Scott owned $53,000 in Spectra Energy stock in 2013, the same year he signed into law two bills designed to speed up permitting for the Sabal Trail Transmission, according to The Miami Herald. While the stock was part of a blind trust, Florida’s ethics laws historically prohibit public officials from owning stock in businesses subject to their regulation.

There must be some irony that the “Sunshine State” isn’t powered by sunshine, but by natural gas. I’d be tempted to propose giving the state a new nickname, except it’ll eventually become The Drowned State, sadly enough. There have already been arrests in the matter, as WCJB reports:

30 days ago 14 protesters at the Sabal Trail Pipeline were arrested in Gilchrist County. Saturday, two more arrests were made.

An arrest at the Sabal Trail Pipeline in Gilchrist Co. Saturday had protesters stirred up.

“This past Saturday I hosted an event, an educational caravan tour to try to educate people about the Sabal Trail,” said long-time protester and tour organizer Karrie Ford.

A video shows what happened when a Gilchrist County Deputy pulled over Katherine Cavanaugh, one of the tour guides.

“KC is just in her vehicle, and she’s asked by the police officer to step out of the vehicle and she asks why am I being arrested and he wouldn’t really tell her anything,” said Ford.

This comes just 30 days after more than a dozen protesters were arrested. Ford was one of those protesters, who said in reference to her arrest last month, “The arrests were unexpected. A lot of us were out there carrying signs and just, not even yelling or chanting or anything.”

No doubt the local cops are trying to nip this in the bud.

Bloomberg Politics reports on a recent SCOTUS decision not to hear a taxation case:

The U.S. Supreme Court let stand a Colorado law that imposes reporting requirements on internet retailers in an effort to get customers to pay the sales taxes they owe.

The justices Monday turned away an appeal by a retail-industry trade group that challenged the measure as violating the U.S. Constitution.

The case raised questions about a 1992 Supreme Court ruling that bars states from requiring merchants to collect taxes unless they have a physical presence in the state. States lose $23 billion every year in uncollected sales taxes from web and catalog purchases, according to a 2012 estimate by the National Conference of State Legislatures, the most recent figures available.

Although consumers are supposed to pay the taxes themselves, few do unless the seller collects the money.

The Colorado law requires internet retailers to turn over customers’ names, addresses and purchase amounts to tax authorities. Merchants also must notify consumers of their obligation to pay taxes and provide a purchase summary to people who spend more than $500 in a year.

This is the fundamental disconnect between what began as a federation of nations and an economic engine that completely disregards the political structure. Can the political system enforce its inchoate will on the economic engine, perhaps through some centralized technological engine of their own, that automatically assesses the proper state sales tax based on the location of the consumer? Or will the economic engine actually force the State structure to its own will, perhaps by simply obviating sales taxes, or, more radically, causing States to merge into multi-States with more power to enforce taxation? Or, even, the final retirement of the States’ right to tax commerce?

I previously noted the discovery of the wreck of the HMS Erebus, part of a two ship fleet heading for the Arctic that were never heard from again. The other ship, HMS Terror, has now been found, as noted by Daniel Weiss in Archaeology Magazine:

Terror was located in September 2016 by an Arctic Research Foundation vessel that detoured to the wreck’s location based on a report from an Inuit crewmember who recalled seeing a piece of wood that looked like a mast sticking out of the ice covering Terror Bay six years earlier. Divers found the ship 80 feet underwater and in extremely good shape. Two weeks later, Parks Canada confirmed the identification, opening a new chapter in the story.

cschaffner on Promoting Urban Sustainability in the Arctic notes this wasn’t purely a research expedition:

HMS Terror, by George Back.
Source: Wikipedia/National Archives of Canada

While the rediscovery presents the opportunity for polar historians to learn what really happened to the Franklin expedition, the motives for finding these historical ships has far more to do with politics and national identity. As the Arctic warms and seasonal ice dwindles, the Northwest Passage may become a viable shipping option through the Arctic, and Canada is anxious to proclaim its sovereignty over the passage. Canada inherited Great Britain’s historical claims to Arctic waters, and a 1997 agreement between Canada and Britain secure Canadian ownership of the ships, with separate provisions for the artefacts and gold that might be found on them. The rediscovery of the HMS Terror and HMS Erebus demonstrate those historical claims to Arctic waters, and focus the country’s attention on a region that is of increasing importance for both the economy and national security.

SCOTUS has refused to hear an appeal concerning the settlement of the concussion issue in the NFL, as reported by Reuters:

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the National Football League’s estimated $1 billion settlement of concussion-related lawsuits with thousands of retired players to take effect, rejecting a challenge brought by a small group of dissenters.

The eight justices refused to hear an appeal of a lower court ruling in April upholding the settlement, which resolved litigation brought by players who accused the NFL of covering up information that tied head trauma like that suffered playing football to permanent brain damage.

The settlement enables the NFL, the most popular U.S. sports league with billions of dollars in annual revenue, to avoid litigation that could have led to huge sums in damages and provided embarrassing details about how it has dealt with the dangers posed by head trauma in the violent sport.

Perhaps unfortunate for future NFLers, but maybe necessary for past NFLers who need help immediately. Although I would hope a beginning sum could have been negotiated while the issue received the airing-out it really requires.

If I had a child, I would not encourage them to play football.

Regarding a lawsuit based on the injustice of Winner Take All rules in most States for the Presidential election, a reader writes:

I’m thinking to make the argument, a couple things have to happen. (1) Stop the electors from meeting on Dec 19. That date is not mandated, it could be changed. It just has to happen before the inauguration. Get an injunction till the investigation(s) are complete. (2) The Jan 3 mad dash to get Garland seated. You’ve read that one, right? Jan 3 all the Senators who won election have to go get sworn in. At that moment, there would be 30 R and 34 D Senators, plus Biden. Biden calls the Senate back into session, the 34 Dems vote Yea on Garland, Biden puts it back in recess. That would take chutzpah and coordination (the Dems are not good at either). Plus the red state Dems (like my own Sen Tester) who are up for election in 2018 have to really do the right thing. So yeah. No chance.

Re (2), I mentioned it earlier on this thread here. I’m not quite sure what item #2 has to do with making the WTA argument, though. I suspect all SCOTUS has to do is declare WTA is not Constitutional and then the calculations have to be redone, on the basis of what’s considered to be the cutoff – if any. An addendum to Professor Lessig’s article points out that without a cutoff, the risk of throwing the election to the House of Representatives increases, at least in the current example, and that would be equivalent to depriving the citizenry of the right to select their President – a perhaps perilous assertion, since the voters had their chance:

It would seem that the most reasonable practical answer would be a proportional allocation of electors with a cutoff at a de minimis percentage of the total vote. The percentage should represent a reasonable balancing of the right of every voter to participate in the election in a meaningful way and the risk of taking the election entirely away from the voters by sending it to the House of Representatives. A reasonable cutoff would probably be in the range of 10 to 15 percent of the total vote; but any cutoff percentage should be based on a detailed probability analysis which, for obvious reasons, has yet to be conducted.

I had to look up de minimis:

… is a Latin expression meaning about minimal things, normally in the locutions de minimis non curat praetor (“The praetor does not concern himself with trifles”) or de minimis non curat lex (“The law does not concern itself with trifles”) a legal doctrine by which a court refuses to consider trifling matters.

In context? Maybe he wants to show he knows Latin. Since he then defines what the percentage should be, it’s hardly trifling. No doubt I am not subtle enough to understand. But it does seem to me that picking the proper percentage will become a political football, or perhaps gold mine, although I have to think most of Congress will not possess the sort of mind that could comprehend picking a proper number to advantage their side – but the GOP is good at following orders blindly, so just one smart person is enough.