unraveling

30.Oct.2024

Closing time

Perhaps we've had this talk before, but I don't remember "closing arguments" being a thing, or as consequential in previous presidential campaigns. Maybe the October surprises of the last several have knocked it out of memory? I haven't read through my copy of the Harris-Walz press release with the remarks prepared for the vice president to deliver in front of a 75,000-person crowd last night, but it's in my inbox. And on C-SPAN, or PBS, edited a little more succinctly.

I am very much all for “turning the page” on the dark hallucinations of her opponent, with a vision to "put country before party and self to address the priorities of the American people." The whole "to-do list" rather than the "enemies list" thing.

There was an anti-Harris ad I accidentally didn't skip during last night's baseball game, punching down bigly on the transgender issue, and ending with the preposterous claim that Trump "is for you." Just as pigs can fly over the moon.

Contrast the scene—this year—at the Ellipse, with the Madison Square Garden Sunday night. That went so putrescent, the Trump campaign actually tried to walk back their implicit endorsement of the worst remarks from a warm-up act. From my favorite daily historian:

"The racism and fascism Trump’s MAGA Republicans displayed at Madison Square Garden is usually expressed within their media bubble, where it passes for normal conversation. The backlash against it among people in the real world appears to have shocked the Trump campaign so much that the candidate is running away from his own closing argument.

"On Monday, Trump felt obliged to tell an audience in Georgia, “I’m not a Nazi.”

Not quite 51 years ago, Richard Milhous Nixon stood up before a gathering of the press at Walt Disney World and fantasized that he "had never obstructed justice." And so memorably insisted that

"I welcome this kind of examination, because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well I'm not a crook."

As it turned out—spoiler alert!—he actually was a crook, and within a year, just ahead of a bipartisan Congressional effort to remove him from office, he resigned. (And then was pardoned by his successor, appointed to replace the crooked vice president he was elected with, for any and all of his crimes. In that golden pre-John "balls and strikes" Roberts era when presidents weren't quite above the law.)

29.Oct.2024

The rise and fall of oligarchies

HCR's latest daily started with talk of Manon Lescaut at the MET last night, and I was trying to remember the plot (from seeing... Manon 5 years ago). I see its title was shortened from the novel's, L'histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, and there was competition to set it. Jules Massenet and libretticists Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille went first, creating "the quintessential example of the charm and vitality of the music and culture of the Parisian Belle Époque" in 1884 (as Manon) before Giacomo Puccini and the gang put on Manon Lescaut almost a decade later.

The flashbulbs distracted me from seeing that HCR was writing about 95 years ago, the day before Black Tuesday. (So, the swells were out at the opera on a school night?!) Not that we're on the verge of "a slide that seemingly would not end," are we? It's just that date, right?

After the austerity program to squeeze the working class harder than ever didn't pan out for Herbert Hoover, the country elected FDR four times, Truman once, and Eisenhower twice, and the triumph over fascism, and eventually communism, was a smashing success over the course of my lifetime (so far), starting with this birthright:

"Politicians and commentators agreed that most Democrats and Republicans shared a “liberal consensus” that the government should regulate business, provide for basic social welfare, promote infrastructure, and protect civil rights. It seemed the country had finally created a government that best reflected democratic values."

Those were the good old days, from my point of view, with ample not-so-good between the lines and in the footnotes.

After taking that for granted through ups and downs, wars and peace, we seem to be struggling to decide whether to kick off a Nouveau Mal Époque, with one leading character on the verge of madness and epic accountability, and another comically leaping beside him in an attempt to dodge the law, and gravity. Robert Reich: Why Elon Musk thinks he’ll be f*cked if Trump loses. Our modern-day Jay and Daisy are promising to smash things up like never before.

I went to Texas to see Musk's business registration for "United States of America, Inc.," and see that I can search for the statorily established fee of $1. (I didn't want it that badly.) Then looked to Forbes for the story, which is behind a paywall. Naturally. They'll show me their home page, anyway, with breaking news that Bitcoin is at a 5-month high, Trump Media shares halted repeatedly for volatile trading after spikes and drops, Joe Rogan says he had issues with YouTube search, How Trump Built A Golf Empire With Secret Financing, and "Tesla Billionaire Elon Musk" declaring that "Your money is being wasted."

Oh, and Trump Hasn’t Spent A Dime Of His Own Money On His 2024 Campaign, because of course he hasn't. What Reich wrote on his substack:

"Since Musk was born in South Africa, he’s ineligible to become president of the United States. But that doesn’t seem to be stopping him. He’s planning to become CEO of the United States of America, Inc.

"The anti-democracy movement includes Musk, along with Peter Thiel (the self-styled libertarian who once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible” and who invested $15 million in JD Vance’s bid for the Senate), JD Vance, Blake Masters (in whose Senate bid Thiel invested $10 million), tech entrepreneur David Sacks, and blogger Curtis Yarvin."

Blogger who now?

"Yarvin, who comes as close as anyone to being the intellectual godfather of the anti-democracy movement, has written that real political power in the United States is held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream press, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding the social order.

"Yarvin believes democratic governments should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.

"How to achieve Yarvin’s vision? The first step, as Vance offered in a 2021 podcast, is to replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people.”

Update:
Thom Hartmann is on the nobless oblige is dead beat today, too. Today’s Wealthy Elite Just Don’t Give a Damn.

"Last Sunday the richest man in America — who owes most of his wealth to President Obama bailing out his electric car company and government contracts — endorsed a man for president who’s a naked racist, fascist, and xenophobe who famously said:

“My whole life I’ve been greedy, greedy, greedy. I’ve grabbed all the money I could get. I’m so greedy. … I want to grab all that money.”

28.Oct.2024

Are you ready to rumble?

As we prepare to set our clocks back between an hour and 85 years, the October surprise is coming into unbelievably dark focus. Heather Cox Richardson's description is more comprehensive than I'm prepared to write (and reminding me it's past time for a paid subscription*). It sounds like all that was missing was the swastikas, but there's still a week to go. On Saturday, I crossed paths with a pickup truck parade of +rumpanistas, one near the front sporting five full-sized flags. I didn't see the end of it, but I hear they made an appearance all around the town. Oh the places they will go!

"I stand corrected. I thought this year’s October surprise was the reality that Trump’s mental state had slipped so badly he could not campaign in any coherent way.

"It turns out that the 2024 October surprise was the Trump campaign’s fascist rally at Madison Square Garden, a rally so extreme that Republicans running for office have been denouncing it all over social media tonight."

The headliners, so to speak, were the deepest sycophants, from his running mate on down: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Rep. Elise Stefanik, Rep. Byron Donalds, Elon Musk, Rudy Giuliani, RFK Jr., Tucker Carlson, Donold Jr., Eric, and the co-chair of the RNC family business, Lara Trump. And the voice of the neo-Nazi movement, Stephen “America is for Americans and Americans only” Miller.

"Trump perhaps gave away the game with his inflammatory language and with an aside, seemingly aimed at House speaker Johnson. “I think with our little secret we are gonna do really well with the House, right? Our little secret is having a big impact, he and I have a secret, we will tell you what it is when the race is over,” Trump said."

From HCR's reference links:

• The New York Times interactive, DONALD TRUMP SAYS HE WILL
• Elon "illegal should be shut down" Musk, enemy of 'open borders,' launched his career working illegally
• Will Bunch, for The Philadelphia Inquirer, Billionaire cowards at Washington Post, L.A. Times show what life under a dictator is really like. "Rule No. 1 of fighting fascism — do not obey in advance — crumbles as major newspapers kill endorsements to appease Trump."

* Looked back through the blog to see the first time I mentioned her writing was in 2012, for a review in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History, and the first mention of her substack blog was June, 2020, headlind "A danger to the national security of the United States." What she had to say about what Carl Berstein had to say about Trump's phone calls with world leaders (my emphasis added):

Trump is unprepared, boastful, and deferential to Putin and Turkey’s autocratic ruler Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, with whom he talks frequently. When he picks up the phone, he is unable to distinguish between his own interests in revenge and reelection and the interests of the nation. According to Bernstein, U.S. withdrawal from northeastern Syria and abandonment of our Kurdish allies to a Turkish invasion last fall was at Erdoğan’s urging.

Trump caves to autocrats but bullies allies, including Germany’s Angela Merkel and former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom Theresa May. He also denigrates former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush to foreign leaders.

According to the piece, Trump’s senior officials, “including his former secretaries of state and defense, two national security advisers and his longest-serving chief of staff,” have concluded “that the President himself" is "a danger to the national security of the United States.”

Four years on, he and his tight cadre of MAGA are an even more grave danger to our national security, with nearly half the electorate seemingly drunk on his Kool-aid.

26.Oct.2024

Some straight poop

Walking the backstreets of Haines, Alaska, I came across this imposing (bigger than a Dumpster) device, with the iconic "Kohler" brand, named after an Austrian guy, whose family was named after cabbage, I guess. Just up the coast from Milwaukee, Kohler, Wisconsin impressed its name on me in my early years by the "KOHLER of KOHLER" imprint on bathroom fixtures. The town is up by Sheboygan, hey, between the lakeside city that has sprawled out of its eponymous county, and Sheboygan Falls, up the meandering Sheboygan River.

Wandering through the Wikipedia links, I see the company was founded more than a century and half ago, with a handsome patriarch (who died rather young, sadly) in the lead; it was originally "Kohler & Silberzahn" (so, Cabbage and Silvertooth); there were a couple of Wisconsin Governor Kohlers; and Kohler was—and still is—a company town, where "final authority over the design of home and business additions, outbuildings and fences in the village" are "[kept] within a certain aesthetic standard." It's privately held, and now led by the fourth generation of Kohlers.

It also includes the origin story of the word "bubbler" applied to drinking fountains in that stretch of Wisconsin—a "bubbling valve" from which water shot vertically. I was familiar with Kohler power, in the form of small gasoline engines, including the single-cylinder, 4 horsepower ("lawnmower") engine that made the scooter my older brother and uncle built go. After my brother graduated to real motorcycles, it became my hand-me-down first motorized ride.

Kohler grew up to have a whole Energy Division, comprising "Power Systems, Engines, Home Energy, Kohler Uninterruptible Power, Clarke Energy, Curtis Instruments, and Heila Technologies," before they announced they were spinning it off a year ago.

The newly independent company jumbled its name into Rehlko, put up a hero image of the Cap de Formentor lighthouse on Majorca, and marked its history from 1920, with "the first modern generator, the Kohler Automatic Power & Light." Rather grandly, they claim "we have always met the world's energy needs while planning for the future," and now harken to "an energy resilient world for a better future." The new motto is "resilience is reinvention," under the very well-produced video, still featuring the good old KOHLER name on everything.

The history slide show includes the 1966 celebration of 1,000,000 KOHLER ENGINES; the Generator Division's plant entrance with its founder on a shiny, super-sized medallion (in Mosel, Wis.); and a 4MW diesel genderator from 2020. And this gem, from 1929:

"KOHLER generators join Admiral Richard Byrd [pictured] on his historic South Pole expedition. The generators are the crew’s sole power source. When the mission ends, Byrd abandons the generators. In 1933, he returns and digs them out of the snow. The generators start on the first attempt; word quickly spreads."

I didn't have nearly as much success learning more about the "KOHLER POWER SYSTEMS" product I saw in Haines. It appears that the TURD product name has been flushed with the transition to Rehlko. No sign of it in the USPTO trademark database. Bryan M Bell's "TURD" candy has been abandoned, along with many compound turd words. Bird Turd is live, pending, for fertilizers; Turd Burglars are live and registered (for pet waste removal), and Turd Burglar, singularly out of North Dakota for septic tank pumping. It's hard to get away from the core reference, it seems. The Kohler product name mystery abides.

While searching, I did come across a LinkedIn profile for "turd furguson" who lists his occupation as "polisher at Kohler Co." for a larf.

25.Oct.2024

The pig in a poke, and the camel's nose

We've learned so much from the animals, haven't we? While our fabulating former guy weaves his business guy persona into a song and dance routine for credulous rubes who imagine they're in on the joke, the real action is behind the scenes. Ken Bensinger and David A. Fahrenthold give us a peek behind the curtain at the America First Policy Institute, hatched at the end of +rump's first debacular go at president. It's "not just a think tank, we have to be a do tank," as one of its founders put it. The dek says it's "poised to be more influential than Project 2025." Since we're near the end of the month (and Republic), a gift link to the NYT: The Group at the Center of Trump’s Planning for a Second Term Is One You Haven’t Heard of. Your oligarchical flavor of the day is heavy with Texas BBQ sauce:

"Founded by three wealthy Texans in late 2020, the group, known as AFPI, has quickly inserted itself into nearly every corner of Mr. Trump’s political machine, and is closer than any other outside player in his planning for a second term.

"Mr. Trump chose one of its leaders, Linda McMahon, a former member of Mr. Trump’s cabinet and a longtime friend, as co-chair of his official transition team. Brooke Rollins, who also worked in the Trump administration and is currently the nonprofit’s chief executive, has been discussed as a candidate to be Mr. Trump’s chief of staff. The institute’s ranks are stocked with other former Trump administration officials who have spent the past several years planning for a return, and in recent weeks several have quietly moved over to work full time for the campaign’s transition team."

Linda McMahon's name should ring a bell: she and her husband Vince founded Titan Sports, Inc., later World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc., in the middle of a family dynasty in fakery. She was occasionally on-screen talent as well as being the brains of the outfit for a while, tried (and failed) to get elected to the Senate for Connecticut twice, and was nominated and breezily approved to be Administrator of the Small Business Administration in 2017-2019.

The AFPI is ready to hit the ground running, with "a plan for staffing and setting the policy agenda for every federal agency," and "has already drafted nearly 300 executive orders ready for" the big man's Sharpie scribble.

That's a hell of a jump in the link in that quote, to an hour 22 minute AFPI video of the "America First Women's Agenda" show in Atlanta 6 months ago. I did not wade through it all (or find the draft executive orders), but I took a gander. The 2nd of the named founders, president, CEO and formerly "Domestic Policy Chief" in the last administration, Brooke Rollins, comes out after Linda McMahon's introduction with "shining beacon and warrior" energy, exhorting her lady troops that "WE are the party for women." They've got a "business plan" to "save America."

She is a breathlessly enthusiastic cheerleader for "the most transformational, game-changing, disruptive president of our lifetimes" [Applause]. So we have some points of agreement there. "Everything is possible!"

And obtw, "we have watched the left systematically [sic] destroy [sic] everything that is great about America," and "systematically undo our economic prosperity [sic] and you see inflation and affordability and the cost of a dozen eggs increased by almost 50% in just the last three years," and "a world that is falling apart."

She's a fast talker, and nobody in the audience was about to fact-check her dreamy claim that the last adminstration had "no soldiers lost abroad" on the former guy's watch. In fact, the Defense Casualty Analysis System shows there were at least 65 active duty deaths due to "hostile action" over 2017-2020. It's a hell of a thing to lie about. (159 more deaths are still shown as "Pending" or "Undetermined." Of the 3,734 total, "self-inflicted" was the number one cause [1,453], and "accident" second [1,239].)

"We were energy-independent [sic], we lost that [sic] almost immediately." Which all comes down on "the single mom" (she had one, herself), "who has to decide between heating, and eating because of the policies of this administration."

She's also celebrating the more women than ever before in the senior staff of that bygone administration, really? "Five of us," "give or take" [wut?] "you know it was Ivanka Trump and Mercedes Schlapp and uh Sarah [Huckabee] Sanders and Hope Hicks and some incredible ladies," "that between us we had nineteen school age children, between us."

Not only are their great ideas "righteous, not only are they grounded in scripture, not only are they called and given to us as God's calling to us to fulfill, but they work." She also touted "the lowest poverty rates in the history of our country." The history of that statistic started in 1959, when it was estimated 22.4% of all people were below the "poverty" level of income. A little fact-checking showed this claim to be accurate. After the financial crisis and "Great Recession" at the end of the George W. Bush administration, a record-long expansion began in 2009 and continued until the pandemic. The poverty rate had hit a local peak of 15.1% in 2010, started to come down slowly, and then went down steeply in Obama's last two years in office, to 12.7% in 2016. In 2019, it had fallen to 10.5%, the lowest on record. The reversal of the pandemic raised it to 11.5% in 2020 (still lower than most of 1959-2023). In 2023, it was 11.1%, lower than the first three years of the Trump administration.

You know the whole American Carnage schtick is b.s., but that's no impediment to harking back to the supposedly halcyon days. Even stranger, given the racist, xenophobic core message of trumpism, going back to the golden escalator, "the American First tent" is getting

"bigger and bigger, as we welcome new Hispanic Americans into the tent, as we welcome new African-Americans into the tent, as we welcome more women into the tent, as our Jewish brothers and sisters realize that the Democrats [she's chuckling as she says this] have completely abandoned with this fight for Israel, we–welcome–them–into–the–tent..."

Blue collar workers too! It's a really big tent! (To which no Democrats need apply.) Reading from her script, Rollins contrasts all the greatness we used to have before "the ruling class that despises" the ordinary people made their lives hell. Frankly [sic] it's "this war between good and evil and light and dark." On her side, "advanc[ing] an agenda that is for women and by women" includes a lack of autonomy for healthcare, miraculously, and all y'all who aren't with the program "are being fed a bucket of lies and untruths about what we in this room stand for." Taking the AFPI vision at its word, here some of what it offers to women:

"It calls for halting federal funding for Planned Parenthood and for mandatory ultrasounds before abortions, including those carried out with medication. It seeks to make concealed weapons permits reciprocal in all 50 states, increase petroleum production, remove the United States from the Paris Agreement, impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients and establish legally only two genders."

And promises to remake the civil service to full sychophancy:

"calling for the elimination of nearly all civil service protections for federal workers by making them at-will employees... “Agencies should be free to remove employees for any nondiscriminatory reason, with no external appeals,” the institute’s policy book states.

"That change could allow officials to try to fire civil servants for almost any reason, including for defying Mr. Trump or speaking out on positions like acknowledging climate change that challenge administration policies."

We're more than halfway through the story when we find out who the third Texan behind AFPI is: Tim Dunn, billionaire Texas oilman, with a long-time "agenda of reshaping Texas politics, pushing the State Legislature to send public funding to private schools and to increase Christianity’s role in civic life."

There are more deep pockets in the list. Goya Foods' CEO, what a surprise. Another's a Scientologist, naturally. "The group fast became a landing pad where former Trump aides could collect six-figure salaries while awaiting the next election." How deep? Real deep:

"Current board members have collectively donated more than $31 million to Mr. Trump’s super PAC, Make America Great Again Inc., during the current election cycle, including $20 million from Ms. McMahon alone....

And the grift goes on: "All three of its annual fund-raiser galas have been held at Mar-a-Lago."

24.Oct.24

Fox beclowned in service to Dear Leader

It's ancient news already, Greg Sargent responding to the week-ago appearance of Vice President Kamala Harris on Fox News, Bret Baier's embarrassing impersonation of an attack dog. "Just brutal" is the kibetzy red superhed, and what I take as the nut graf, with my emphasis added:

"[T]his is a seminal moment for another reason as well. It starkly revealed the degree to which Fox News—and by extension Trump’s other right-wing media propagandists—has constructed an informational universe around Trump that, at the most fundamental level, is comprehensively fictional."

The same comprehensive fiction that styles a grifting landlord, real estate developer, and casino bankrupter as a "businessman," who, based on a half dozen bankruptcies, countless lawsuit settlements, felony convictions, and criminal associates would just have to be "better on the economy" than any alternative, right?

Baier's pantsed moment came when Harris saw what he did there, clipping out the very admission Trump made in his "town hall" ragefest.

"What Harris revealed here is that, at the most basic level of all, Trump is campaigning on an explicit vow to treat the opposition and its voters as sub-American. He has threatened persecution of the “vermin” opposition, vowed to use federal disaster relief money to extort blue states into doing his bidding, floated sending the military into Democratic-run cities, and, now, made it all even more explicit with his latest “enemy within” rants.

"Trump is essentially running on an open promise to serially violate his oath of office to carry out a kind of scorched-earth campaign against blue America. Baier knows all this is toxic among swing voters. And so the picture of Trump he presented was one in which the only victim of persecution is Trump himself."

Just a couple days later, the guy who's sure he knows more about economics (and tariffs) than anyone in the world tried to "weave" his way through an interview with Bloomberg News. Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John Micklethwait wasn't having it. The Rolling Stone's reporters blunt assessment: "the former president was incoherent when pressed with real questions about his policies.

"[Bloomberg Editor-In-Chief John] Micklethwait spent most of the interview attempting to break Trump out of what the former president repeatedly referred to as “the weave,” his term for his rambling digressions — with ever-decreasing intelligibility — and general inability to focus on a given topic for more than a few seconds during his rallies and interviews."

The Homogeneity, Inequity and Exclusion task force

The right-wing of our Idaho legislature is doing all it can to stamp out the demons of DEI. They've managed to pass into our Code three, count 'em three, bills designed to guard against diversity, equity, and inclusion, and you know, anything with a whiff of that nasty social justice ideology. (The kinds of things Jesus used to preach about, coincidentally, so that's a bit hard to square with the parade of piety that our lawmakers love to attend.)

In Laura Guido's coverage of the meeting of the anti-DEI task force for the Idaho Press, this gem waits for you, 5 paragraphs in, and under the WHAT IS DEI? subhead:

"The definition of what they were looking for when it came to diversity, equity and inclusion was unclear."

It's something like obscenity, I'm sure. We know it when we see it. And we'll be damned if we're going to have any of our higher education dollars go to toward it. Don't you dare use a “diversity statement” in hiring. God bless the sole Democrat on the committee, Sen. Melissa Wintrow, who pointed out that

“It’s important that we all understand what we’re talking about and really just be honest about what the goal is. Because I think we all agree that discrimination is bad and we shouldn’t have it and we have certain offices to investigate that.”

One of the co-chairs, Republican Sen. Todd Lakey of Nampa, gets the last, weird word:

“We do have to try and eat this elephant one bite at a time, so to speak,” Lakey said.

Then they'll meet again in December, and before you know it, a new legislative session, with novel attacks on public education generally, and higher education in particular will get under way.

23.Oct.2024

This dangerous moment

As election season winds down to its stunning conclusion (and another round of insurrection), I'm not finding a way to argue with Jim Wright's dark take:

"The people who know Trump best, the ones who worked directly with him and saw him every day, say he's a moron, a fascist, a dangerous power mad lunatic. We all believe it. Left, right, we all know it's true.

"ALL of us.

"The difference is Republicans love the idea, because they never liked democracy, liberty, justice, or freedom FOR ALL in the first place. They want an oligarchy in the Russia model, where naked power and guns decide who gets rich and those they don't like are beaten down and made to know their place."

I guess I might quibble about the "moron" and "lunatic" parts. Trump's nothing if not crafty in all the negative senses of that word, using his guile to feed the relentless maw of his need for self-gratification. Charisma is probably a factor in his success, illustrating that that quality has a dark side, too. Very dark.

He's managed to pull a lot of money out of the woodwork, too. Steven Greenhouse reports in Slate that "More than 60 billionaires have opened their wallets to help elect Donald Trump, with some giving $10 million, $20 million, or more, indicating that many plutocrats are far more worried about the prospect of Democrats increasing their taxes than about the threat that Trump poses to our democracy."

Timothy Mellon (with that name and inheritance from the first Gilded Age), $125 million. Casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson's widow, $100 million. Rupert Murdoch's in-kind donation, "turning Fox News into a truth-bending, immigrant-bashing, pro-Trump propaganda machine." Mr. T's $250 billion side-man, Elon Musk, has chipped in "at least $75 million," and leveraged the wasting asset of his antisocial media platform, X.

For the low-information section of the audience (including Bret Stephens, for one, dismissing direct talk of fascism as "tired and meaningless"), our horse race and dog and pony show featured the party hijacker and proto-fascist having a play-date at McDonalds to show how "normal" he is, before or after (I forget), he extolled the supposedly unusually large genitalia of a famous (dead) golfer. It's been quite the week in fake news.

Historian Timothy Snyder has put himself on video to talk about fascism on television, inspired by the ads that are running on TV sports right now.

"Fascism is about emotion over reason, it's about will over reason, it's about fear over facts, it's about doom over hope." "The Leader decides what you fear, and then rules you by your fears.... Fake problems are generated... to make you feel frightened."

In due course, the Leader declares the problem resolved, and new fears will be generated to repeat the cycle, while the rich get richer.

I'll give Anne Applebaum the last word for this moment, with her "citizen’s guide to defending the 2024 election": The Danger Is Greater Than in 2020. Be Prepared. She quotes herself from 2020 to begin:

“In normal times, Americans don’t think much about democracy. Our Constitution, with its guarantees of free press, speech, and assembly, was written more than two centuries ago. Our electoral system has never failed, not during two world wars, not even during the Civil War. Citizenship requires very little of us, only that we show up to vote occasionally. Many of us are so complacent that we don’t bother. We treat democracy like clean water, something that just comes out of the tap, something we exert no effort to procure."

Just as the folks in Flint, Michigan found out about clean water, we can't take democracy for granted. "We can be absolutely certain that an attempt will be made to steal the 2024 election if Kamala Harris wins."

21.Oct.2024

Cheatoh's subversion plan

Not sure I've got a whole 10 minutes for Tim Miller talking about the burger flipping photo-op at a McDonalds that was closed for the occasion, but yeah, "classic +rump":

"What he's doing is fake. His exchange is fake. The 'news' is covering it, giving him more attention and more PR than he deserves."

Better we're talking about the enfeebled felon pretending he can handle a real job (for 15 minutes) than his obsession with other people's genitalia, you know?

But it's not about flipping burgers. Let's try to keep our eye on what matters. As retired General Mark Milley said, as he finished a four year stint as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

"We don't take an oath to a tribe. We don't take an oath to a religion. We don't take an oath to a king, or queen, or tyrant, or a dictator. And we don't take an oath to a wannabe dictator.

"We take an oath to the Constitution and we take an oath to the idea that is America, and we're willing to die to protect it.

"Every soldier, sailor, airman, marine, guardian and coast guard — each of us commits our very life to protect and defend that document, regardless of personal price."

Earlier last year, while Milley was still in office, he spoke to Bob Woodward, and is now quoted in Woodward's book, War (and in Tom Nichols' latest piece, for The Atlantic):

“He is the most dangerous person ever. I had suspicions when I talked to you about his mental decline and so forth, but now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”

“A fascist to the core!”

Nichols was a professor at the Naval War College, and details his concerns about a current military officer making that kind of statement, even within someone else's future book deal, and even as he acknowledges the provocation to speak up about the former guy:

+rump "is not only unhinged in his narcissistic self-obsessions, a problem which itself renders him unfit for office; he is also an aspiring dictator who demands that all political life centers on him. He identifies his fellow Americans as “enemies” because they are of a different race, national origin, or political view. And he has threatened to use the powerful machinery of the state and its military forces to inflict brutality on those fellow citizens."

Named enemies, such as "the Pelosis," former Speaker and current member of the House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi, and her husband, who has already been brutally attacked by a trumper inspired to stochastic violence by the former president. Two years ago this month.

A significant element of the trumpian "program," (nevermind "policy," or "platform") is to free his storm stroopers. Marcy Wheeler, in her post about the latest filing in the criminal case against Trump for his attempts to subvert the 2020 election quotes from the government's appendix, the record of "statements that post-date his time as President in which he has blamed Pence and approved of the actions of his supporters who breached the Capitol and obstructed the certification proceeding, thus providing evidence of his intent on January 6." Including: a 7/10/2021 interview ; Conroe Rally 1/29/2022; Interview 02/01/2022; Faith and Freedom Coalition 06/17/2022; Interview 9/01/2022; Waco Rally 3/25/2023; CNN Town Hall 5/10/2023; Campaign Statement 2024; Interview 8/23/2023; Interview on Meet the Press 9/17/2023; Greensboro Rally 3/02/2024; Truth Social Post 3/11/2024. Wheeler:

"The GOP candidate for President has a criminal docket. And in that criminal docket, today, the government included a post promising to free seditionists and cop-assailants with the same urgency with which Donald Trump promises to close the border. “My first acts,” the GOP standard-bearer stated, would include freeing the people who assaulted the Capitol on January 6."

18.Oct.2024

The Open Primary initiative - Vote YES on 1

We went to the Idaho Statesman's and Boise State’s Institute for Advancing American Values' debate between the prime mover of Idaho's Propostion 1 and some guy from Oklahoma. When I first saw Trent England, representing an organization called "Save Our States," I though huh, he looks kind of like J.D. Vance.

On the debate stage, he was even less impressive. Soft spoken, rambling, not very well prepared, and never really forming a cogent argument against the ideas of an open primary, and ranked choice voting, which Prop. 1 seeks to implement. One argument he tried was that there are lots of problems with partisan politics around the world, not just in Idaho, so why should we have a special system?

Another tack was that it will make parties weaker, somehow. And another was that sure, smart and motivated folks like those willing to turn out on a weeknight for a debate can understand how this works, but the average guy on the street couldn't explain it to another average guy on the street, right? It's just too complicated, in other words.

Oh, and mistakes have been made, such as when Almeda County (California) had a 2022 school board election go pear-shaped, when somebody misconfigured the tally system. The San Francisco Chronicle headlined it as "rais[ing] big questions." The people who are doing their best to erode confidence in elections, in service to 2020's biggest loser, pointed at the single race going sour as another reason "so many have lost confidence in election results."

In spite of "San Francisco voters [having] adopted ranked-choice voting in March 2002, and the system [being] used in local races since 2004," without anything bad-newsworthy happening. In the race in question, there were 200-some ballots at issue, less than 1% of the more than 26,000 cast. With some voters failing to list a first choice, their second choice was supposed to be taken as first, and with the trailing two candidates only 39 votes apart, the wrong person was eliminated for round two.

Of all the possible vote errors, failing to select your first choice is not one I would have anticipated. How to reinterpret votes that don't follow instructions is a detail for the fine print, and, from California's experience, at least, a very rare issue.

But it fed England's "too complicated" complaint. He's used the "black box" metaphor to further it, prompting Mayville to explain exactly how the proposed system would work. (It's not that complicated.) Also, fun fact, at least here in Ada County, ballots literally go into a black box below the scanner.

Jeanette spoke to the debate moderator, the Idaho Statesman's opinion editor, Scott McInosh, afterwards, and pointed out that one source of error, undervoting (which is what those folks in Alameda County did, essentially) is flagged by Ada County's voting system. The scanner will kick out an undervoted ballot, and the voter has to affirm that's what they meant to do. (No help for an absentee voter, though.) Weirdly, McIntosh pivoted to rebut her private comment to him, bringing up the estimated expense of the necessary system changes. (That hadn't received much attention in the debate. Another failing of England, to highlight the simplest and perhaps most compelling argument for those who want Prop 1 defeated.)

In the debate, Mayville kept coming back to the big picture: an open primary, and ranked choice voting in the general election will provide for candidates who are satisfactory to more of the community, and will re-enfranchise the hundreds of thousands of primary election voters who do not want to register for Idaho's main party with a closed primary.

Most importantly, the Republican-closed system we currently have has only been in place for 12 years, a period during which the Republican party in our state (and yes, elsewhere) has become more and more extreme, and less and less representative for the majority of voters.

The Idaho Capital Sun has a long background piece on the effort, and the money for and against it. Curiously, Idahoans for Open Primaries, the group "spearheading the financial support for Proposition 1," has raised $2.8 million but "has only spent $350,00on electioneering communications," through September, I imagine, given our Sunshine reporting requirements, but the story doesn't say. Meanwhile, "Groups opposing Proposition 1 have spent more than $460,000 in electioneering communications this year."

Mayville "said he is not surprised to see wealthy donors and special interest groups oppose the open primaries initiative."

“Wealthy donors and special interest groups tend to love closed primaries because closed primary elections are low turnout contests where very few people vote, and it’s much easier to control the outcome with money,” Mayville said.

Former Idaho Attorney General and Supreme Court Justice Jim Jones, detailed the most extreme of the extremists opposing this election reform, on IdahoEd News. Bryan Smith, Sen. Dan Foreman, Christy Zito, House Speaker Mike Moyle, and of course state party chair Dorothy "over the" Moon. The nay-sayers, judging by signage, are the most extreme right of the Republican Party.

17.Oct.2024

Like nobody has ever seen before

Every so often I think about how three-fourths of Idaho's congressional delegation used to be reasonable men. (The other fourth, Russ Fulcher, has been off the edge from the get-go.) Staunchly conservative, to be sure, self-interested for maintaining their sinecure, but trying to do right by what they imagine is best for Idaho (at least some of the time). That was pre-Trump. Now, they're all-in, in the worst possible way: silently assenting to whatever, not making any waves, lest the rabid right come after them.

I've attempted correspondence from time to time. From their side, never got beyond the boilerplate responses thanking me (effusively!) for contacting them and dodging everything I had to say, and not addressing the increasingly demented elephant in the room.

This comes to mind reading Matt Bai's opinion in the WaPo, addressed to "all the longtime Republican lawmakers and strategists in Washington, a lot of whom I’ve known over the years." Think hard, Republicans. You really want to do this again?

"Maybe you saw Liz Cheney’s bracing interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this past Sunday, because she went on the air right after House Speaker Mike Johnson, and maybe you were too lazy to change the channel. Maybe you heard her say that Johnson knew “with specificity” that Trump had lost the 2020 election, and yet he signed his name to legal briefs and refused to certify the election."

I'd heard about Cheney's Sunday talk, but took the jump to have a look for myself. Speaking of the Speaker, she started with this:

"I do not have faith that Mike Johnson will fulfill his Constitutional obligations."

Look at what he did in 2020, she said. "He knew, and he knew with specificity that the claims of fraud that Donald Trump was making, and that he was repeating, he knew those to be false." And she said that she and Johnson "had very clear and specific conversations about that."

"He has a record, repeatedly, of doing things that he knows to be wrong, he knows to be unconstitutional, in order to placate Donald Trump." And "I think it's very important that the Republicans not be in the majority in the House, come January, 2025."

And for those who remain in Trump's party, suffering from amnesia of late, she reminded them of the "depravity" of what Trump did on January 6, watching the mob he unleashed on the Capitol, and doing nothing, for three hours. It was "fundamentally cruel," and "that kind of cruelty makes him unfit for the office"

So I clicked up the Meet the Press segment that came before that, the interview with Speaker Mike Johnson. What is our Speaker up to these days, with Congress on holiday until after the election, to earn his 28% pay bump over regular house members?

"I've been travelin' around the country, ok, I've done campaign events in over 200 cities in 40 states, I'll do many more this month, I'm on the road again this morning."

And lo and behold he finds "the American people's" concerns line up exactly with Republican talking points! The cost of living! Right after that is "the wide open [sic] border" (which is entirely Kamala Harris' fault, somehow). And this:

"They're worried about the weakness on world stage, that Biden and Harris have projected that's got us into the most dangerous situation since World War II."

Asked to respond to Trump's tireless lying, with three of the most outrageous falsehoods listed, "Mr. Speaker, all of those claims have been debunked," he interrupts to say "no, they haven't," and repeating himself while shaking his head and giving a little sad chuckle.

But yes, they have.

Johnson can't get anywhere with a policy-based presentation, so he shunts the question aside, and goes full North Korean News on national TV.

"President [sic] Trump is making all sorts of arguments [true!], constantly, he works 24 hours a day [not true!]. I saw that Kamala Harris issued her medical records, congratulations" he went on, with the flat-line of his resting bitch face twisting to a sarcastic smile.

"Donald Trump's health is on display for the entire country, every hour of every day. He has more stamina, and mental acumen and strength than any political figure in, probably in the history of the country, that I can remember. He goes non-stop. What he's talking about are the things that the American people care about."

Somehow, we got off the subject of the outrageous lies, and into how the current administration is destroying the country. (Just take a look at the stock market! The jobs report! Inflation in check! GDP growth! If you like those sorts of things.)

Speaking of outrageous lies. He did try to rebut the lie about redirecting FEMA funds, and the fact that "FEMA funds were redirected on Donald Trump's watch, to deal with the migrant issue, with this (after shaking his head and saying "facts are important," ha, ha):

"That is a new program that started in 2020, under Joe Biden."

That's funny, because Joe Biden wasn't president in 2020. For any of 2020.

"Because we secured the border," he went on, as if it that were a fact, wrapping up the farrago with "and everybody knows it," with his tight-lipped, nodding tell.

Circled back to health records, this much of what Johnson said, at least, is true: "Donald Trump's health is on display. Everyone can see it."

Johnson evaded the question by going off about "strength" (manliness!). "You have to have strength. You have to have a steady hand, you have to have a Commander in Chief that our allies respect, and our enemies fear."

It's been evident for quite some time that our allies fear Trump, and our enemies are delighted to have an American leader so easily manipulated.

"It's unnecessary! It's on display!"

Yes, we've seen the unmistakeable signs of cognitive decline on display, the disconnection from reality, the rambling speeches, the erratic word salad bar, the excessive verbal incoherence, the failure on the debate stage. Asked "whether he regretted anything he’d done during the January 6 insurrection, Trump said":

"I have said “blood bash—bath.” It was a different term, and it was a term that related to energy, because they have destroyed our energy business. That was where bloodbath was. Also, on Charlottesville, that story has been, as you would say, debunked. Laura Ingraham, Sean Hannity, Jesse—all of these people, they covered it. If they go an extra sentence, they will see it was perfect. It was debunked in almost every newspaper. But they still bring it up, just like they bring 2025 up. They bring all of this stuff up. I ask you this: You talk about the Capitol. Why are we allowing these millions of people to come through on the southern border? How come she’s not doing anything—and I’ll tell you what I would do. And I would be very proud to do it."

Richard Friedman acknowledges that "evading the question is an age-old debate-winning tactic."

"But Trump’s response seems to go beyond evasion. It is both tangential, in that it is completely irrelevant to the question, and circumstantial, in that it is rambling and never gets to a point. Circumstantial and tangential speech can indicate a fundamental problem with an underlying cognitive process, such as logical and goal-oriented thinking."

So, the Speaker insists medical records—which is to say the assessment of the former president's physical and mental "acumen"—are "irrelevant!" Saying over and over what "the American people" think, as if his sorry faction were all.

His closing argument is another outrageous lie, that Harris is "uniquely unqualified to be the Commander in Chief." Uniquely? Of course he provides no support for his casual slander.

"That's a fact," he says, with a little twist of his face, before pressing his thin lips together, nodding to himself to affirm his fatuous conclusion.

Finally, he's asked if he will uphold his constitutional duty to certify the results of next month's election, if Donald Trump loses it. Johnson insists he will, because he's "a constitutional law attorney that dedicated my life," and "demonstrated every day" that he'll uphold the Constitution. Asked to affirm that one more time, he adds an asterisk: "If the election is free, and fair, and legal."

Liz Cheney doesn't think he can be counted on to do the right thing. Just as he demonstrated with one more outrageous lie, that "we did [have a peaceful transfer of power] in 2020."

Mike Johnson performing for the camera makes my skin crawl. He is a remarkably facile, oleaginous liar who's given us no reason to trust him, and ample reason to distrust what he says, every step of the way.

Back to what got me started, Matt Bai's opinion, and his appeal to the longtime Republican leaders who might muster something other than mindless, cowardly sycophancy.

"You’re not going to do the right thing because it’s right, and I’m not going keep pushing that particular boulder up a hill.

"Instead, I will appeal to your self-interest. Because if we’re clear-eyed and mercenary about this, you could be on the verge of a huge political opportunity — and clinging to Trump amid another constitutional crisis might be the only way to screw it up. ...

"Unless, that is, you’re so frightened of losing your next primary to a MAGA opponent that you’re willing to follow Trump down the same old rabbit hole and spend every interview sidestepping questions about fraud that you know doesn’t exist — or, worse yet, about the tragic violence you knew was coming and did nothing to stop.

"No one’s expecting you to do what’s right. But maybe what’s smart isn’t out of the question."

16.Oct.2024

Not so funny

While going about non-political business on Facebook, I came across Jim "Stonekettle" Wright's morning post, boiling down our current Zeitgeist well, over an item from Joy Reid: "Asked about political executions, Michael Flynn says 'gates of hell' will be unleashed under Trump." What Wright said, in its entirety, dancing around the Facebook filtration against calling a spade a spade. A little formatting added:

Extremism only ever gets MORE extreme
Trump's rhetoric, like a certain specific example from 1930's Germany, started out angry and bombastic and full of imagined enemies and persecution. Over the last decade he's become more and more extreme until today his message is nothing but manufactured rage and seething hate and an all consuming desire for revenge focused on enemies who are now very real targets.

If he gains power again, Trump's enemies will be AMERICA'S enemies.

And there's only one way that ends: exactly the same as it did in 1940s Germany.

Wright's worth a follow, your choice of Facebook, Instagram, Threads (which I have yet to dive into), and his blog. For both the politics, and his stunning photographic artistry. Looks like the blog is not getting very regular attention of late, but it's where he goes long form. A introductory sample, on the topic of Facebook filtering (et al.), from July 2: The Republic is Dead, Long Live the Republic.

15.Oct.2024

The Big Bopper glitches on stage

Back before Twitter had become the black hole of X, I followed Seth Abramson a while, but it got to be too much, too replete with conspiracies, too breathless, too unedited. Hadn't thought of him in a while, but just saw him snap-quoted on Mastodon extolling "the best three paragraphs about Elon Musk [he'd] ever read," and I went to look at the original to find that only the first two (single-sentence) paragraphs were free. Seems a bit self-defeating to draw the line that high, so I'll give you the big paragraph as seen on a free medium and let you decide. From Musk in Despair; On sin and the 2024 election, by Virginia Heffernan:

"Last week, MAGA’s biggest donor and most zealous convert, Elon Musk, showed up at a Trump rally and declared, “I’m dark MAGA.”

"He then jumped up and down.

"Musk, who has described himself as mentally ill and a heavy user of drugs, went hard right during the pandemic, because he briefly had to close Tesla factories. Then he whipped himself up to actual sulphur—dark MAGA—when his daughter transitioned. When he savaged her in public as dead to him, she called him a desperate serial adulterer who neglects his 12 children—and abuses a few of them, including her. He also gambled and lost $200 billion—the most anyone has ever lost in history. He seems now to care about nothing."

Speaking of raging pyschopaths who are increasingly appearing unwell, the Musk endorsee, Donold. Heather Cox Richardson's Oct. 14 letter (which is to say the one in my inbox this morning) has a compendium from "the final sprint" to Election Day. While Kamala Harris and Tim Walz are saying normal things, making normal appearances, and so on, Donold Trump is not.

Having shown increasingly significant signs of mental decline, he went on a counteroffensive of sorts, "truthing" in the middle of the night that Kamala Harris should have to "pass a test on Cognitive Stamina and Agility," something currently beyond his own reach. His accusations are admissions. There could be something very wrong with me.

And then the rally in Oaks, Pennsylvania, supposed to be salted with planted questions and South Dakota's dog-killing governor, Kristi Noem. Word is, "his answers were all over the place and he urged people to vote on January 5," before a couple took ill and then...

"And then he stood on stage and swayed for 39 minutes of songs from his personal playlist before seeming to recall that he was supposed to be talking about the election, which he suddenly told the confused crowd was “the most important election in the history of our country” before turning back to the music."

The Atlantic's David Graham breaks it down for us (gift link), what with the NYT sanewashing, and the third medical emergency of the night with Don's breakdown, playing out in the playlist:

Last night, he might have been sending a pointed message to himself, with the help of an Andrea Bocelli and Sarah Brightman hit: “It’s time to say goodbye.”

Get your VOTE on (early)

Thanks to our Ada County Highway District Commissioner Alexis Pickering for a handy list of the early, in-person voting opportunities in our neighborhood, STARTING TODAY, and continuing through the next three weeks:

Oct 15—Nov 1 • Mon—Fri • 8am—5pm

• Ada County Elections, 400 N Benjamin Ln, Boise
• Boise City Hall, 150 N Capitol Blvd, Boise
• Library! At Bown Crossing, 2153 E. Riverwalk Dr, Boise
• Meridian City Hall, 33 E Broadway Ave, Meridian
• Kuna City Hall, 751 W 4th St, Kuna
• Eagle Public Library, 100 N Stierman Way, Eagle

She also mentioned the Mobile Voting Unit, and some of its stops over the same 14 days, with a link to Ada County's Early Voting page with the full itinerary, including schools and libraries in Meridian, Boise, Garden City, and Star.

Had any good insurance lately?

Insurance is the nexus of the facts of life, capitalism, and collectivism. It's a form of risk management, Wikipedia tells us, at the top of its long treatise, with an overview of its forms in four or five millennia of human history. That includes an estimate of the economic size (under "Across the world"), as nearly $7 trillion in "direct premiums" annually (not counting reinsurance—which is to say, insurance insurance).

One of my early lessons in insurance came after I'd racked up more than my share of "points" on my teenage driver's license, had it suspended, and then revoked (that for not getting the message to stop driving, basically). In order to get it back, I had to "show proof of financial responsibility," which, under the circumstances, was expensive. It provided a monetary incentive to bicycle, which I put to good use over the rest of my teen years and into adulthood, reaping the benefit for the rest of my life. Good fortune comes in various forms.

Like most people, I've paid more into insurance pools than I've got back in benefits. That's the way insurance works. It's ok! It's good to not have to use your insurance. And when you need it, it's especially good to have insurance. Cars and houses can be really expensive to fix (or replace), and don't even get me started on health insurance, which can be really uninteresting for a long time before it gets to be very interesting.

The business of everyday calamity is almost cut and dried. Actuarial science, applied to large risk pools, sometimes helped along by legal mandates to buy insurance (such as for automobile owners in all states except New Hampshire—Live Free!—and Virginia—For Lovers!) is a dismal science within a dismal science, but it works.

I'm thinking about insurance because of the Popular Information team's recent piece about the aftermath of widespread weather catastrophe: How insurance companies could stiff the victims of Hurricane Milton. (I imagine it applies to victims of Hurricane Helene, too.) It's the fine print, don't you know, following my rule of thumb for complicated contracts in all instances: it benefits the party writing the fine print, which is almost never you.

"Rick Tutwiler, a public adjuster based in Tampa who represents property owners in disputes with their insurance companies, told the Wall Street Journal that, across the board, '[i]nsurers have become significantly tougher on hurricane claims.' Tutwiler says the insurance industry is 'dominated by exclusions, diminishing coverages, and even harsher policy terms.' Many insurance policies now include 'higher deductibles for wind damage, reduced payouts for older roofs, limits on interior water damage, and exclusions for damage from wind-driven rain.' These restrictions are being imposed along with massive rate increases for home insurance — up 20% nationwide since last year."

Oh, and the Florida legislature and governor gave the business a big, sloppy, wet(!) kiss with SB 2-A two years ago, a "105-page rewrite of the state's property insurance laws," cooke up in a 3-day special session. Ron DeSantis promised that would "make a huge, huge difference," and the insurance industry thought so too. Mother Jones' report from a year ago August: Insurers Gave Ron DeSantis Millions. He Made It Harder to Sue Them.

"[T]he legislation shortened the window in which policy holders can file claims with their insurers, invested $1 billion of taxpayer funds into a state-run reinsurance fund to help insurance companies mitigate their losses in the event of catastrophic events, and narrowed eligibility for Citizens, Florida’s state-run nonprofit insurance company that provides insurance to people who cannot find affordable coverage on the regular market."

The thing is, there's a lot about climate change that won't be "affordable." The Congressional Budget Office reported on Climate Change, Disaster Risk, and Homeowner's Insurance in August. The summary introduction notes that "If state regulators do not allow higher premiums, insurers may exit high-risk areas, reducing the availability of insurance."

The Florida legislature and its governor have done their best to scrub "climate change" from Florida code, which oddly enough, has not really mitigated the effects of climate change on the low-lying state. CBO's opening paragraph in chapter 1 provides this "big picture" stat: adjusted for inflation, "the average annual cost of billion-dollar disasters from 2019 to 2023 was three times their annual cost from 1990 to 1994." Illustrated in Figure 1-1 (page 6 of the PDF, and interactive on the page linked above), they note that "in most years, hurricanes are the costliest type of billion-dollar disaster."

A year ago, the NYT reported that As Climate Shocks Grow, Lawmakers Investigate Insurers Fleeing Risky Areas (gift link); "Insurers are already pulling back from California, Florida and Louisiana. Senate Democrats are trying to find out which states could be next." They sent letters to 40 insurance companies, and gave them until Nov. 17 to respond. Here's the deal:

"In May, State Farm announced it would stop selling coverage to homeowners in California. In July, Farmers Insurance said it would stop renewing some coverage in Florida, where the insurance market faces continued fallout from Hurricane Ian last year. A number of insurers have left Louisiana since a series of major hurricanes hit the state in 2020 and 2021."

There was press release for the launch, then what happened? Seven months later, a full committe hearing in June, with an Oklahoma insurance commissioner, a principal for Finity Consulting, an assistant professor of finance from Harvard Business School, a Florida resident, and a research fellow from the Heritage Foundation who testified. I took a look at the opening remarks of Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, and was a bit shocked (but not surprised) at how vapid and useless his political posturing was. While blaming everything on Democrats, and cluelessly complaining about corporate profit-taking, he pontificated that "Expensive liberal policies, not climate change, are much to blame for these market dynamics." Sad little man.

The Heritage guy blamed everything on inflation, with a little "increase in general lawlessness since 2020," and people moving into harm's way. He claimed that "Attributing any significant impact on the insurance industry from climate change is not based on empirical evidence," citing a paper out of the Hoover Institution that has been cited by zero, according to ScienceDirect, where it's hosted.

Chairman Sheldon Whitehouse's opening statement had its political elements too, but it was at least focused on the topic, and did cite some measureable facts. Did you know that "10% of our nation's homeowners live in Florida"? I did not know.

"Florida homeowners pay on average over $6,000 for insurance, the highest in the country and more than three times the national average, $1,700. Florida’s average premium doubled between 2020 and 2023.... In Florida, insured losses grew by 206% between 2003 and 2018....

"In 2022 and 2023, more than a dozen insurance companies left the Florida residential market, including national insurers like Farmers. Residents fled to Citizens Property Insurance, the statebacked insurer of last resort, which ballooned from a 4% market share in 2019 to as much as 17% last year. If it has to pay out claims that exceed its reserves, Citizens can levy a surcharge on Florida insurance policyholders across the state....

"To depopulate its books, Citizens lets private insurers cherry-pick its least-risk policies. Those private insurers may have problems of their own, as we will learn. It looks like an insurance market that is swirling the drain. As one of our witnesses put it, “unreliable insurance could result in a situation where large climate shocks may cause property damage at the exact time that the property insurer becomes insolvent, increasing household default incentives and losses given default.” What will the collision of increasingly unreliable insurance and greater mortgage defaults mean? Who will be left holding the bag?"

14.Oct.2024

Beware

Are nuggets of wisdom inherently the size of a quickmeme? Just a notion that occurred to me seeing one posted to Facebook by philosopher Tom Digby.

His Facebook feed has a ton of them if you like, lots about the lost mariner who "discovered" some islands in the middle of the western hemisphere. Here on Indigenous Peoples' Day. Then I followed the jump to G.S. Ząbik's profile and got lots more,but tired before reaching this one, I wanted to quote for you:

"America has the most robust economy in the world, and a person with 6 bankruptcies wants to run it."

But I digress (as usual). What I came her to share was this one, from four days ago. The original has "Christian movement," I made it more general. Since the current fascist political movement is not any form of actual Christianity.

Beware of any politician or religion that acts as though the world is full of enemies to be destroyed rather than full of neighbors to be loved.

Beware of any politician or religion that demands the government be an instrument of God's wrath but never a source of God's mercy, generosity, or compassion.

Update:
A related caution, in quickmeme form (but text turned into an image, ugh) on Mastodon, from The Icarian. Back to text here:

$364 million verdict in civil fraud case
$2 million charity abuse judgement
$88.3 million sexual abuse verdict
26 sexual assault allegations
$25 million fraud settlement
1 fake university shut down
1 fake charity shut down
1 convicted company
5 draft deferments
91 criminal charges
2 impeachments
6 bankruptcies
4 indictments

The half shadowed portrait of the former guy at lower left that the text is shaped around reminds me of that original Star Trek episode, Let That Be Your Last Battlefield, but it really underplays Donold's shadow side, which is something over 90%.

13.Oct.2024

Antifa 2024

Timothy Snyder's catchy headline—How to Stop Fascism— caught my attention first thing this morning. It's an audio podcastversion of his blog post back in July, "which seemed timely now." The lede, with my emphasis added:

"As the United States hovers at the edge of fascism, the history of Germany can help.

"To be sure, Americans have other histories to ponder, including their own. Some American states, right now, are laboratories of authoritarian rule (and resistance). The American 1860s and American 1930s reveal tactics authoritarians use, as well as the weaknesses of the American system, such as slavery and its legacy. At those times, though, Americans were lucky in their leadership. Lincoln and Roosevelt were in office at the critical moments. And so we lack the experience of the collapse of the republic."

He gets right to the point. Six and a half minutes to listen, less to read (the text below the audio widget). It's hella sobering, but also deeply instructive (in five easy lessons). We can learn from history. We can avoid catastrophe. The outline of his "five basic political lessons from 1933":

1. Voting matters. (In the American system, “voting” means not just going to the polls yourself, but making donations, phone-banking, and knocking on doors.)
2. Coalitions are necessary.
3. Conservatives should be conservative. ("Which way the center-right turns can be decisive.")
4. Big business should support democracy. (Because it's good for business. Have you seen the stock market lately?)
5. Citizens should not obey in advance. "The crucial thing is the individual decision to act, along with others, a little something each day, regardless of the atmospherics and the polls and the media and the moods."

12.Oct.2024

Generation gap

My alma mater asked me to participate in a first-year engineering class, in a small way. ENGR 123, 2 credits for “First Year Engineering,” focusing on "professional communication, teamwork, leadership, and career exploration." The commitment was "one hour," I think supposed to be two individual, 30 minute conversations, but then modified to have two students paired up. (Speaking of "professional communication," you should Bcc that list of 87 volunteers instead of putting it in the public "To" list, hmm?)

My part of the assignment was to take the phone call, and answer some questions. Did they tell me what the questions were? I forget. That list of four items is more territory than can be covered in an hour. I suggested we do it via Zoom, since, why not? That gave me a chance to show off the back wall of my office, gesticulate occasionally for emphasis, and to see my two protégés, which was a bit more satisfying than just hearing voices. We fit our confab into the 40 minute meeting on my free account.

Whether it was my (not-)doing or theirs, I never did get a clear sense of what questions they were supposed to get answers to. (I did invite them to follow-up if they wanted/needed more.) But we had an interesting conversation across the gulf of a lot of years, and astounding changes in technology. They were both freshman, fresh out of high school, and still teenagers! (Both younger than all of our grandchildren, as it happens.) The age I was half a century ago.

I gave them the very short version of my collegiate perambulation, my 20+ years in Big Corp engineering, and less than an elevator speech about my after-corp kicker in web app software (not really "engineering"). One of them was starting in mechanical engineering, with an aspiration to "leadership," and the other in chemical engineering, inspired by an exceptional chemistry teacher in high school.

I did proffer the advice to find and take a course in organizational development. And to learn basic accounting. I'd done the former in graduate school, almost a decade into my career, and the latter with a crash self-study for the EIT ("Engineer-in-Training") exam at the end of engineering school. Accounting is what informs decision-making, I said, and determines what an organization's capabilities are. Damn sage advice, it might come in handy for them five or 20 years from now.

Their college experience will be almost nothing like mine, and their careers, likewise. "Every one's journey is unique," I told them. I tried to cast my mind back to my first years in college, and "had a lot of fun" was top of the list. So, my advice is to have some fun to balance out the hard work. It's early October, they're just past "mid-terms," incredibly, stressed about grades and assignments, I imagine, and they're supposed to be learning something about the arc of a career? It seems a bit premature.

And my hoary experience feels hopelessly dated. We had television, and automobiles back in the early 80s, computers (just barely), and shoe phones. Our existential crisis was avoiding nuclear annihilation (so far, so good); theirs will be mitigating the climate catastrophe wrought by the industrial revolution and human population explosion. (While still under the threat of nuclear annihilation, go figure.)

11.Oct.2024

On a less comedic note

From Robert Reich's blog: The Axis of Tyranny in America and Russia. "Trump and Putin are stronger allies than we even knew." You don't need to be a master artisan to connect the dots:

"Trump has repeatedly avoided criticizing Putin, even going so far as to praise him as a “genius” and “very savvy” for his unprovoked invasion. At the same time, Trump has been critical of the Biden administration’s aid to Ukraine in the wake of Russia’s invasion.

"During the presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris last month, Trump refused to say he wanted to see Ukraine win the war against Russia.

"Earlier this year, Trump suggested he’d encourage Russia to do “whatever the hell they want” if a NATO ally wasn’t paying their fair share to the alliance."

Which is to say: "If Trump wins the election, he’ll likely do whatever Putin wants, including allowing Putin to take much, if not all, of Ukraine." Reich has a list of things he used to believe that have been proven false. Last but not least: Democracy is inevitable.

Historian Timothy Snyder's been on that message too. From the Storm to the Stormtroopers explains how the imbecility of blaiming meteorologists for the weather, and climate scientists for the coming catastrophe—"impotence politics"—fits the logic of fascism.

"In impotence politics, nothing is true except our emotions, and so we cannot see the sources of problems, and do not really expect to solve them. Once we accept that government is useless, we respond to crisis by turning against one another. Politics then begins not from improving life together but by choosing an enemy within.

"This is very comfortable for the impotence politicians, who rule not by addressing problems but by defining enemies."

The Trump show is all about defining enemies. The pixels were barely dry on the paragraphs above when the NYT Evening came in with his "scaled up efforts to stoke immigration fears."

"At a campaign rally this afternoon in Aurora, Colo., [he] depicted America as a country “occupied” by immigrants. He promised the large crowd in attendance that he would save their communities by ridding them of illegal migrants. And he unveiled a new plan to deport migrants suspected of being in a gang under a 1798 law that allows for removal of people from countries that have invaded the U.S.

You might remember (I didn't) that Trump "has repeatedly and falsely claimed that the Denver suburb was overtaken by violent immigrants." There is a crime wave from the Trump family, to be sure. Immigrants, not so much.

Neigh-sayers

None of this is funny (ha ha), but still, maintaining a sense of humor is important in dark times. (That makes me think of the Grateful Dead's music video, cutely labeled "Official," for Hell in a Bucket; at least we're enjoying the ride! Yeah. Ride, ride, ride.)

We've all lost count of the scandalous political bombshells that trail in +rump's wake like toilet paper on his shoe, each one seemingly more damning than the last. I don't understand how someone can be Bob Woodward and sit on the kind of inside information he's collected to promote yet another book, when who's got time to read books, anyway? It's been obvious seven or eight years that the felon idolizes dictators generally, and Vlad Putin in particular, so the fact that Donny sent Pooty hard-to-find Covid testing equipment in the depth of the pandemic—for Putin's personal use, no less—is shocking but not surprising. Ditto for Putin telling him to keep it a secret, and Trump following orders. And 7 follow-up conversations since he left office? Not surprising, especially not if you saw him coming out of the private meeting in Helsinki looking like a beaten puppy on a chain.

Spox Steven Cheung's spluttering denial is mildly amusing for the Kabuki quality of its classic "I know you are but what am I" form, alliterating demented, deranged, and debilitating for effect. Who's "an angry little man," "a total sleazebag who has lost it mentally" and a "slow, lethargic, incompetent" person again? Considered the implied contrasting antonyms for his boss: Jolly?! Big? Quick, energetic, competent. If only.

Speaking of Kabuki, Woodward indirects that "One of Donald Trump's closest confidantes" and "golfing buddy," Lindsey Graham "reportedly said: 'Going to Mar-a-Lago is little bit like going to North Korea. Everybody stands up and claps every time Trump comes in.'"

Meanwhile, in the realm of horse-race politics, HCR's Oct. 10 Letter from an American has this, after the good news that Hurricane Milton did not turn out to be the worst-case scenario (only 38 tornadoes, 10 to 20 inches of rain in the Tampa area, eleven dead and 3 million without power), and that The Atlantic made its fifth-ever presidential endorsement in 167 years (Lincoln, LBJ, and the three people opposing Trump):

"In Public Notice today, Noah Berlatsky listed the many articles claiming that Harris is avoiding the press, including most recently a social media post from Politico’s Playbook that read: “After avoiding the media for neigh [sic] on her whole campaign, Kamala Harris is... still largely avoiding the media.” Berlatsky pointed out that Harris has taken questions from reporters as she campaigns and has sat down with the National Association of Black Journalists, CNN, Spanish language radio station Uforia, and Action News in Pennsylvania, and did a presidential debate with ABC News. Earlier this week, she appeared on 60 Minutes."

Also, the podcast Call Her Daddy, Howard Stern’s radio show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The View, The Weather Channel, and a town hall hosted by Univision.

Here's a gift link to The Atlantic's endorsement. We've got one candidate who is "even more vicious and erratic than in the past, and the ideas of his closest advisers are more extreme," here at a profound turning point in American history. The alternative does not require perusing minutiae of policy proposals:

"Having devoted her life to public service, Harris respects the law and the Constitution. She believes in the freedom, equality, and dignity of all Americans. She’s untainted by corruption, let alone a felony record or a history of sexual assault. She doesn’t embarrass her compatriots with her language and behavior, or pit them against one another. She doesn’t curry favor with dictators. She won’t abuse the power of the highest office in order to keep it. She believes in democracy."

9.Oct.2024

Jack Goldsmith owes us a much better try at scolding

He's got a NYT op-ed declaring that Jack Smith owes us an explanation, which is impossible for me to take seriously. The TL;DR is that it's too close to Election Day for Smith to file and have a judge unseal his 165-page brief "with damaging revelations about Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election." The revelations are not exactly breaking news; it was the crime of the century 4 years ago, carried out largely in full public view. Goldsmith complains that

"This event is the latest of many examples of Biden administration officials paying insufficient public attention to executive branch rules that are designed to ensure that prosecutions are, in appearance and reality, conducted fairly and apolitically."

This case should certainly have already been adjudicated, but the tag team of trumpian lawyers and the Supreme Court have delayed, delayed, delayed, and then, from the latter, dropped a bombshell of judicial activism, giving the former president retroactive immunity for his myriad crimes while in office. The timing of this particular brief, is AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, given the interference. Trump wanted to push it out past the election, and, if he were able to prevail in that, there will be no more "executive branch rules," period. There will be no prosecutions that "are, in appearance and reality, conducted fairly and apolitically." If elected, Trump will most certainly make good on his campaign promises of retribution, and revenge.

Goldsmith leans into his bureaucratic devil's advocate two-step. "Mr. Smith never explained the need for speed," he complains. There's an "appearance of impropriety," seriously? In the highest dudgeon, he puts the supposedly too-speedy attempts to hold Trump accountable for his crimes as a cause "near the top of the list" for the "the sharp decline in distrust [sic] of our justice institutions."

Even if he hadn't blundered the final sentence, his argument is absurd.

Be prepared; then VOTE

You can watch the 48 sec. video version, and follow the easy-peasy recipe. My version gets it done in 3 steps instead of 4, but voteidaho.gov is always a good place to visit.

Step 1: Go to "Find your sample ballot" on the sos.idaho.gov site
Step 2: Enter your voter info (name, DOB)
Step 3: Print or save for easy reference

They could've gone by address, rather than voter, but this way you can also see confirmation that you are registered to vote (or not!), and request an absentee ballot (through Oct. 25). (I'm going to vote early; that starts next Tuesday, Oct. 15 in Ada Co.)

If I were voting on Election Day, I see one odd bit: it shows one poll location for the Nov. 2024 election, which is different than my "Standard" location. Huh.

My sample ballot, for Precinct 1615-A (no idea what the "A" is doing there), is three pages. We have NINE, count 'em, 9 candidates on the ballot for President, and space for a write-in. (Could you come up with someone more random than RFK Jr., Chase Oliver, Joel Skousen, Randall Terry, Shiva Ayyadurai, Claudia De la Cruz, or more vile and perverted than Donald J. Trump? It's much easier to do the right thing and VOTE HARRIS-WALZ you know.)

One seat in Congress, three seats in our state legislature, four county offices, and one seat for the Ada County Highway District are contested. Sixteen magistrates await the "Yes" or "No" votes to be retained in office, which will almost surely tally up to 75% "Yes." Four seats on the College of Western Idaho board have one candidate to affirm.

And finally, on page 3, there is the utterly superfluous proposed amendment to the state constitution, and the crucially import Proposition 1, offering a way out of the spiral into right-wing extremism that our current closed Republican primary system has enabled.

8.Oct.2024

Storm warning

Way back in the day, after I'd gone through ground school, and on-boat training, and had my license from the UW Hoofers to take out a Tech dinghy on my own, I earned my "heavy weather" rating, letting me go out when the wind was freshening past "small craft advisory" but not all the way to "gale." It's too long ago to remember what all I had to do for that, but the big thing was to intentionally capsize, right the ship (so to speak), and get it back to the dock. After enjoying spring weather on Lake Mendota, I segued into a summer job as an instructor, for which I mostly got to go for boat rides, and tell newbies what to do, without worrying too much about the mistakes they might make. What's the worse they could do? (None of my students ever capsized while I was in the boat.)

After moving from lake-rich Wisconsin to a relatively lakeless part of Idaho, the UI Outdoor Program offered a spring break sailing trip to the San Juan Islands in the Salish Sea, and I got my first taste of salt water. I was among a "crew" of five on a Columbia 30, with two other similar-sized boats in a mini-fleet, and everybody having the time of our lives. After a captain's meeting in Friday Harbor, the lead fellow decided that he was willing to give it a go in spite of a high wind forecast (was it gusts of 50 mph?). The other two (wisely) demurred, while we went out of the protected marina on just the main sail, and were not able to hoist the storm jib as we got closer to the full force of the northwest wind coming down the San Juan Channel. The bunched sail got fouled with the anchor, and I was sent to the bow to clean that up, managed to get the anchor back on board, the sail unclipped and stuffed down the forward hatch, and then figured to ride out the wild bucking just behind the bowsprit.

After a couple failed attempts to tack, the captain decided the only way out (i.e. to turn around and get our butts back into the harbor) was to jibe. That maneuver started well, but as the turn brought the wind behind the sail and the boom flew across, it caught on the slacked backstay, and our home-away-from-home broached about full sideways. I saw a lot more of the keel than I'd ever seen before (or since!), but the weight of it brought us back upright and whew.

Fast forward not quite half a century, and we're just back from our first "cruise," out of Seattle, out the Strait of Juan de Fuca and up as far as the Hubbard Glacier near where Alaska, British Columbia and the Yukon meet, and ice is calving off into Disenchantment Bay and floating out to Yakutat Bay and the Gulf of Alaska. At the bottom of the glacier's Wikipedia entry, I see the item headed "Collision."

"On June 25, 2022, the cruise ship Norwegian Sun collided into a growler (a chunk of ice smaller than an iceberg) in foggy conditions as it approached the Hubbard Glacier for sightseeing. The ship was damaged but it was considered safe. It cut its cruise itinerary short and sailed back to Juneau for assessment, and then Seattle for repairs without further incident."

There's a link to the June 28, 2022 story on CruiseHive, calling the growler "a small iceberg." Happily, our visit to sightsee the glacier on the Sun last week did not include such disenchantment. We did skip our scheduled stop in Ketchikan due to high wind and waves, but other than that change to the itinerary, our 10-day outing went to plan.

That's all by way of explanation for the 12-day hiatus in the blog, and introduction to the bigger weather news right now, with the widespread devastation from Hurricane Helene still being sorted out as the major Hurricane Milton is north of the Yucatán and forecast to start hitting Florida's west coast tomorrow. The current advisory from the National Hurricane Center shows it still "major," but down from Cat 5 to Cat 4, before it crosses the Gulf of Mexico.

Its Wikipedia entry, as of this morning, gives the meteorological history from "an area for possible development" being identified in the western Caribbean on Sept. 26, through its rapid intensification yesterday to a peak of 180 mph winds overnight, "enabled by highly favorable [that's favorable from the hurricane perspective] environmental conditions consisting of very warm sea surface temperatures near 31°C (88°F), high mid-level relative humidity values and low wind shear."

That's way beyond "batten the hatches" and well into "get the hell out of the way." Hurricane Helene's winds reached 140 mph, for comparison.

Atmospheric and Environmental Scientist, and fellow of the American Meteorological Society John Morales wrote a column for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the end of last month, before Milton was named: Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future. He wrote about Helene undergoing rapid intensification, too, going from "an 80-mph (130 km/hr) low-end Category 1 hurricane one day to a 140 mph (225 km/hr) Category 4 cyclone the next." He goes on to provide technical detail about how massive the storm was, and how (and why) it was so destructive, across four states, before the punch line:

"For decades I had felt in control. Not in control of the weather, of course. But in control of the message that, if my audience was prepared and well informed, I could confidently guide them through any weather threat, and we’d all make it through safely. Today as a result of so many compounding climate-driven factors, the warming world has forcibly shifted my manner from calm concern to agitated dismay.

"Now I look at storms differently. And I communicate differently. I don’t need to be told “you’ve changed” to know that I’m not the same. Perhaps those who have known me as the just-the-facts non-alarmist meteorologist can’t get used to the new me. That’s why they bicker and accuse me over overhyping emerging weather threats.

"But no one can hide from the truth. Extreme weather events, including hurricanes, are becoming more extreme. I must communicate the growing threats from the climate crisis come hell or high water—pun intended."

What in that hell could possibly be political? You probably already know that "climate change alarmism" is a punching bag for the extreme right (aka "the right") these days. Florida's legislature decided to delete any mention of climate change in state laws this spring, and Gov. Ron DeSantis signed the law that would make addressing climate change no longer a priority. Keep on the sunny side! From Heather Cox Richardson's latest daily:

"Project 2025 says the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, whose duties include issuing hurricane warnings, is “one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity.” It calls for either eliminating its functions, sending them to other agencies, privatizing them, or putting them under the control of states and territories."

HCR's October 6 letter focused on Donald Trump has been lying to try to leverage weather catastrophe for his own advantage, the ongoing and "well-documented strategy to overturn democracy by using modern media to create a false political world," following the Russian "political technology" of disinformation to enclose his followers in an epistemic bubble where anything he says is taken as the only truth. As in Steve "P1" Bannon's infamous "flooding the zone with shit," not least for the result of the 2020 election.

Now quoted in Special Counsel Jack Smith's latest unsealed court filing: "And what Trump's going to do is just declare victory. Right? He's going to declare victory. That doesn't mean he's the winner, he's just going to say he's the winner.” Richardson continues, with the link to Will Bunch's column brought in line:

"The MAGA movement is now based in the Big Lie. Its leaders refuse to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election. Trump’s running mate, Ohio senator J.D. Vance, two days ago actually said Trump won, and as media figures more frequently ask the question of MAGA lawmakers, they continue to dodge it, as Arkansas senator Tom Cotton did today on NBC’s Meet the Press, and as House speaker Mike Johnson did on ABC News’s “This Week.”

"Now, though, their lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene show that they are completely committed to disinformation. As Will Bunch noted today in the Philadelphia Inquirer, when Vance lied again at the vice presidential debate about the legal status of the Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, and complained when moderator Margaret Brennan corrected him, he gave up the whole game. “Margaret,” Vance said, “the rules were that you guys weren’t going to fact-check.” He continued to argue until the moderators cut his microphone.

"Bunch points out that MAGA Republicans insist on the right to lie, considering any fact-checking “censorship,” a position to which Vance pivoted when Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked him if Trump won the 2020 election.

"Just as Russian political theorists advocated to overturn democracy, MAGA Republicans have created an alternative political reality, aided in large part by the disinformation spread on social media by X owner and Trump supporter Elon Musk."

raveling

Tom von Alten