unraveling

31.Dec.2024

Swinging around our star

Just about time to close the books on the year, and for part of my celebration (I guess), I slept in until almost 8:00, an hour or two past my usual of late. I was still ahead of the sunrise, though, which is stuck at 8:18 am around here. Wanting to know when that would turn around, I reviewed my sunrise tables for 2024 and 2025 (used for my wind report for local sailors) to see the fun facts that our earliest sunset (5:08 pm) came on Dec. 4 and stayed around until the 13th; our shortest days (8h 56m) came and went from Dec. 18 to Christmas Eve; and our latest sunrise is here to stay from Dec. 27 until January 8.

While calculating and tabulating all that, I thought I'd make a note of perihelion, too, somewhere between New Year's Day and the Feast of the Epiphany. When is that, exactly?

DuckDuckGo's search result for "perihelion 2025" featured TimeAndDate, the Farmer's Almanac, videos... and a top-right box from "DuckAssist," tagged as BETA. That box included the answer I was looking for, "January 4 at 8:28 AM EST," complete with citations to EarthSky, Time and Date, and a disclaimer: "Auto-generated based on listed sources. May contain inaccuracies."

It's a clever little boxful of stuff, including an info link to more about DuckAssist, a Settings gear, and a thumb up/down feedback affordance. I gave them a thumbs-up, and it pops a Quack! We're so glad dialog, with complimentary lozenges I might choose from. Up-to-date information, Relevant, Helpful, Accurate, Trustworthy source, Something else. Yes, yes, yes, yes (AFAIK), yes, and N/A. Except that the labeled buttons were radio buttons (i.e. pick only one) rather than multiply selectable. I said "something else" so I could say yes to all 5, credit where due.

I'd been looking a bit askance at timeanddate.com for some reason I can't remember (assuming it was an advertising machine?), but after comparing Google's performance (more in a minute), and taking the jump to their Perihelion and Aphelion page, I was delighted with the whole presentation. The little graphic explainer was pleasant enough (for Google to scrape and use in its presentation), a short explanation, and then the BINGO of a tabulation of both helia for 2024-2028, all in my local timezone. With an affordance to change to another city('s timezone) if I wanted. The section for Is the Timing a Coincidence? has these fun facts:

"In 1246, the December Solstice was on the same day as the Earth reached its perihelion. Since then, the perihelion and aphelion dates have drifted by a day every 58 years."

Now then, the once-vaunted (by me, even, now downgraded to an "historical interest" footnote, see last item, here) Google. That now features its own "AI Overview" which confidently states January 4 at 7:28 AM which would be the correct answer if they'd included the CST timezone they chose for whatever (wrong) reason. Their sidebox (also AI-driven, it appears) cites Time and Date (but not fully enough to show the complete answer), and the University of Colorado Boulder. The latter is a colorful, but unfortunately dumbed down treatment not really worth the featured link.

The "Show more" expansion of the AI Overview includes terse explanation that might have been of interest if I'd searched just "perihelion," and with a footnote that "Generative AI is experimental." Yes, I can see that.

Since I was poking around, I took the jump to the storied Farmers' Almanac ("since 1818"), even though no farmer worth his salt need give a hoot about the subtle ellipticity of our planet's orbit. The FA is content with providing the date alone (which, ok, maybe that should have contented me, too), and ends with a gratuitous jab at the (unnamed, on the page) author's ninth grade earth science teacher's "climatological fallacy." Get over it, man.

Oh, and then I paid slightly more attention to TimeAndDate to note this even funner fact (my emphasis added):

Orbit Changes Shape
[The Earth's orbital] path's shape varies due to the gravitational influences of other planetary objects, particularly the Moon. Approximately every 100,000 years, the Earth's orbital path changes from being nearly circular to elliptical....

No link to tell me more about that glorious complication, unfortunately. But another easy search ("variation in earth orbit ellipticity") takes me to Wikipedia's treatise on Milankovitch cycles, with a short, satisfying summary of the main article on Orbital eccentricity.

Earth's eccentricity is currently running 0.0167, enough for insolation to be almost 7% greater at perihelion than aphelion. (Feel the burn!) The ellipticity has run four times higher (0.0679) in the last quarter billion years, still rather circular as orbits go. The table in the 2nd Wikipedia article shows Mercury's orbit as the most elliptical (0.2056) of the planets. Pluto 0.2488. Halley's Comet 0.9671. Hey, eccentricity can go past 1, which is the transition to hyperbolic. We know about two such interstellar objects "just passing through": ʻOumuamua, and 2I/Borisov ("2I" for 2nd interstellar), with eccentricities of 1.20 and 3.36 respectively.

30.Dec.2024

Set to music

The explainer in the opening scene: "This American Life asked songwriter Sara Bareilles to imagine the thoughts Barack Obama is not saying publicly about this election and Donald Trump." Leslie Odom Jr. brought the words to life with his beautiful voice. Seriously. Four amazing minutes.

The Roaring Twenties

On the verge of the Gilded Age sequel, Marc Johnson outlines just what kakistocracy—government by the worst people—could bring us, with the collapse of Assad in Syria, in "the way of all tryants" as an object lesson.

"Authoritarians seem invincible until they aren’t. I wrote recently that the corruption in the next administration will soon enough become obvious, and for a while it will seem merely odious and then suddenly it will engulf everything around it."

Halfway through the decade, Robert Reich's assessment on the tech bros and psychopath about to take over the executive branch: What are they really seeking? "Something quite different from what the previous generation of conservatives sought." Consider the source, "where they came from, who mentored them, who pushed them on Trump, and who continues to exercise influence on them: Peter Thiel." Quoting Thiel on cato-unbound.org, from 2009:

“The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

"Tough for libertarians" in the context makes it plain enough that "libertarian" is a working synonym for "sociopath." Reich:

"Not incidentally, the 1920s marked the last gasp of the Gilded Age, when America’s robber barons ripped off so much of the nation’s wealth that the rest of the U.S. had to go deep into debt both to maintain their standard of living and to maintain overall demand for the goods and services the nation produced."

The whole thing is worth a (short) read, if nothing else for the list of some of the tech bros and Thiel protégés about to be embedded in the swamp. Subaltern JD Vance, of course; DOGE-man and soon-to-be shadow-president Elon Musk; incoming “AI and crypto czar” David Sachs; Jim O’Neill (in charge of Thiel’s personal foundation) to deputy secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services; and "Thiel Capital’s former chief of staff Michael Kratsios[,] reportedly handling tech policy during the Trump transition."

"If America learned anything from the first Gilded Age and the fascism that grew like a cancer in the 1930s, it should have been that gross inequalities of income and wealth fuel gross inequalities of political power ... which in turn generate strongmen who destroy both democracy and freedom."

Jimmy Carter, RIP

President Jimmy Carter's obituary by Peter Baker and Roy Reed for the New York Times leads with a video of "a never-before-seen interview with The Times in 2006." Seems wild that they sat on it for almost two decades; I guess they couldn't imagine he'd live this long.

The interview focuses on "his life and work as a Cold War leader, Middle East peace broker and post-presidential career as a citizen diplomat." Along the way, there's a stark contrast between his aspiration to "always tell the truth" and the usual way of things, not least Ronald Reagan's cynical use of the Iran hostage crisis in his campaign, the gateway to his later perfidy in Iran-Contra. His idea that this country should be "the most generous of nations," compared to Bush II's "War on Terror" greenlighting torture to serve the "homeland."

I cast my first vote in a presidential election for Carter in 1976 (and my second one, in 1980). Just like the country, I was 50-50 through 2020. And now, the whirlwind.

Robert Reich's remembrance focuses on Carter's message in a bottle (as it were) from our civilization to an unknown one, in a distant, far future. From "a religious man," who never wavered in his optimism.

Christmas, 2024

Ho ho ho

Thom Hartmann's holiday column: Here Comes the Republican Santa Scam Again. The "hopefully" dek asking for "Democratic politicians and our media [to] finally call the GOP out on [Jude] Wanniski’s and Reagan’s Two Santa Clauses scam and put an end to it once and for all" is a bit wan. But it's a fascinating, big-picture outline of the nexus of politics and economics over the last 5 decades.

"Wanniski’s “Two Santas” strategy dictates, when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and cut taxes on the rich, all to intentionally run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible. ...

"Then comes part two of the one-two punch: when a Democrat is in the White House, Republicans must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “you must cut spending to solve the crisis!”

Idaho's senior senator, Mike Crapo, about to become the chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, has embodied the Two Santas scam throughout his three decades in Congress. He'll be all in favor of more tax cuts for the New Year, I'm sure.

24.Dec.24

The United States of America feels what now?

So many eves stacking up today, Christmas, almost New Year's, and what feels like it could be the end of our dalliance with liberal democracy. There is no sane-washing that could normalize what's happening, but the unceasing stream of tawdry scandal seems to lead inevitably to outrage fatigue, and desensitization. While Republican-controlled state legislatures work to stamp out diversity, equity, and inclusion in their promotion of Christian nationalism, the embarrassing clown show of our House of Representatives keeps setting new lows. Just in time for the holidays, they did manage to keep the government lights on, until their next manufactured crisis (scheduled for March), just barely. All of the 196 Democrats voting joined 170 Republicans to exceed the 2/3rds "special procedure" threshold, and thwart the demands of our shadow president and "gray area" immigrant, Melon Usk, to just turn everything off until his bought and paid for puppet is back in charge.

My nominal "news" consumption has decreased since last month's election, but it seems my ability to track current events (and more than enough "breaking news") is relatively undiminished, by focusing on quality sources. One of those is without a doubt historian Heather Cox Richardson, and her daily Letters from an American blog posts on substack. The December 23, 2024 edition is one of a long series of corkers. It starts with the cloud of über-scandal surrounding the man who was Trump II's first pick for Attorney General, the highest law-enforcement officer in the executive branch. Thanks to two of the five Republicans on the House Ethics Committee flipping on the disclosure question, we now know that

the committee found “substantial evidence” that Gaetz had, in fact, “regularly paid women for engaging in sexual activity with him”; “engaged in sexual activity with a 17-year-old girl”; “used or possessed illegal drugs, including cocaine and ecstasy, on multiple occasions”; “accepted gifts…in excess of permissible amounts”; arranged official help for one of his sexual partners, whom he falsely identified to the State Department as a constituent, in getting a passport; tried to obstruct the committee’s investigation; and “acted in a manner that reflects discreditably upon the House.”

The committee concluded that “there was substantial evidence that Representative Gaetz violated House Rules, state and federal laws, and other standards of conduct prohibiting prostitution, statutory rape, illicit drug use, acceptance of impermissible gifts, the provision of special favors and privileges, and obstruction of Congress.”

As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse put it, "you had a guy who Donald Trump was proposing to be the top prosecutor for the United States of America whose only experience with criminal investigations was to be the subject of them." "The reflection of this on the judgment of Trump is perhaps the most remarkable part of this story..." For his part, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson tried to keep the report and its salacious details under the covers. Shades of My Cousin Vinny, Johnson said he would “strongly request” that the Ethics Committee bury the report after Gaetz quit the House and was still Trump's hair apparent. Something something Pandora's Box if you can believe that; apparently there isn't an appropriate Bible verse to cite.

HCR connects the historical dots to the Nixon era (!) strategy of "positive polarization," "They believed that dividing the country was a positive development because it stoked the anger they needed to get their voters to turn out." To Newt Gingrich and his list of words to use when talking about Democrats, “decay,” “sick,” “greed,” “corruption, “radical,” and “traitor.” (As opposed to good God-fearing Republicans, “opportunity,” “courage,” “principle(d),” “caring,” and “peace.”)

Then to Sunday's "AmericaFest," put on by Charlie Kirk's youth-grooming Turning Point USA, with Trump "enter[ing] as if he were at a professional wrestling event," and giving "a speech much like his campaign speeches," including a couple of things on his Christmas list:

He claimed that Panama is not treating the U.S. well, and threatened that he will “demand that the Panama Canal be returned to the United States of America in full, quickly, and without question.” On Sunday he posted on social media that he wants Greenland too. “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.”

Making Canada the 51st state was just a joke, according to that country's Public Safety Minister, Dominic LeBlanc. "Light-hearted" banter. A sign of warm and cordial relations. Which as we all know, Trump is famous for.

Christmas Eve Eve, 2024

Swinging around the sun one more time

The YouTube post is from 13 years ago, but somehow it seems brand new to me. (It might be brand new, and I might also have a copy of his album Midwinter somewhere in the house. It's hard to keep track any more.) The Longest Night, is just 4½ minutes when turned into a beautiful song. Worth a listen.

Rode my bike to the grocery store in the middle of the day today, after the rain let up, and the sun peeked through the clouds and showed me some blue. It was back to gray before I got going, and took the long way to get there (as I've been enjoying doing of late), and then the sun was back out for my ride home, and so very cheery and bright to see this time of year.

The energy at our regular store was different today, more crowded than my usual shopping times, more old people, more families, more shopping cart drivers who seemed new at the business, and more cart dancing needed to get through the aisles. I was well under the 15-item limit, quantities managed to what was easy to bicycle with, and while I don't mind waiting for a check-out clerk, the lines were too big today, and I went for the cash self-service line, as one fellow had pushed that 15-item limit was gently semi-warned away from the card-only section. "I trust your judgment," the store monitor told him in regard to his counting, not giving him the straight boot.

Larger than usual meals are being planned. People Are Coming Over. I splurged for a pseudo half-gallon of egg nog, something like $6 for that, what with all the bird flu wiping out flocks. (At 59 fl. oz., it looks "just like" a real half-gallon, at 92% of the ones I used to know.)

Solstice #2, 2024

"Buckle up: This is going to be a wild ride."

Do you need a spoiler alert if it's all in plain sight? That's the last line of Thom Hartmann's Dec. 19 post, How Trump Transforms Democracy to Dictatorship: A Warning America Can’t Afford to Ignore. Hartmann is the shrillest commentator on the left who I'm reading regularly, but I can't see where he's exaggerating much. There's some history to apply to our present situation, after all.

"[I]t's a formula as old as republican forms of government. It’s how the Greek democracy ended, how Rome was brought down, and how every autocratic government on Earth that started out as a democracy got to where they are today. Russia, Hungary, Egypt, the Philippines, Malaysia, Singapore, Venezuela, Turkey, etc."

Said formula:

"While all authoritarians who take over democracies initially come to power on a wave of popular sentiment, presenting themselves as normal politicians bent on “shaking up the system,” once they begin their crackdowns against political opposition their popularity typically collapses. At that point, they need three things:

— A compliant, financially, and politically dependent media;
— subservient, terrified, or complicit politicians;
— and a captured, corrupt judiciary loyal to the idea of oligarchy and beholden to wealthy sponsors (think Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito).

"With these three elements of democratic capture they can gaslight the public, shovel money to their oligarch buddies, and expand their own power in defiance of increasingly feeble popular, political, and legal challenges."

Robert Reich is on the same theme, a day later: The American oligarchy is back, and it’s out of control. "It’s the third time in the nation’s history that a small group of hyper-wealthy people have gained political power over the rest of us. Here’s what we must do." It's not breaking news, since the "third Amercian oligarchy" emerged "starting around 1980."

"The richest 1 percent of Americans now has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined.

"The only other country with similarly high levels of wealth concentration is Russia, another oligarchy.

"All this has been accompanied by a dramatic increase in the political power of the super-wealthy and an equally dramatic decline in the political influence of everyone else."

20.Dec.2024

"There's still time to do the right thing"

Stumbled into Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre's briefing today, politics slipping into my Facebook feed, go figure. Most of the convo was how broken the House is, thanks to our president-elect and his billionaire court jester scuttling the bipartisan deal that was assembled earlier this week to avoid shutting down the federal government just in time for Christmas. Has our current President spoken to the Speaker of the House? Apparently not. (She didn't want to come right out and say "no," for whatever reason.)

"Speaker Johnson created this mess, he needs to fix it."

She claims that Republicans know how to fix it. "This is their number one job, to keep the government open." The fundamental rule of politics and circuses applies: elect a clown, expect a circus.

"Republicans are breaking their word."

Update:
After the press gaggle, the next thing I saw was Jim Wright's explainer, let's call it, which is better informed than I am, and more colorfully written then I plan on doing. The opening flavor of it, in case you don't do Facebook:

"The House had a bipartisan deal that would have kept government running.

"That's the House's job. That's the Speaker's job. That's GOVERNMENT's job, to compromise and keep the country running for the betterment of its citizens. That's what the oath of office, the Constitution, and our way of life demand. No more, no less.

"But, an unelected billionaire with his own private social media platform didn't like the deal for no particular reason outside of ketamine fueled fever dreams, so he spent the day tweeting increasingly untrue and unhinged rants against the deal.

"So, then an easily manipulated Trump who craves the approval of dictators and oligarchs, thinking it was his own idea, and with absolutely no plan of any kind, told Republicans to back out of the deal.

"Republicans, being the groveling servile stooges they are, did.

"Speaker Bowtie Johnson, in a panic, without any plan for such a completely predictable eventuality, or any ability to resist Trump(really Musk), nearly in tears, pleaded with House Republicans to come up with something, anything, Musk would let pass and keep the government open.

"House Republicans threw together a bullshit bit of legislation WITHOUT any Democratic input that was so bad 38 REPUBLICANS wouldn't vote for it even when Trump (really Musk) told them to. Repeat: It was so bad, even the Republicans who came up with it wouldn't vote for it.

"So, now, according to Trump, somehow this is the DEMOCRATS' fault because sure as hell neither Trump nor Shadow President Elect Musk will take responsibility for anything. Ever."

It gets more colorful from there, but no amount of lipstick will make this pig of a Congress more attractive, I'm afraid. He ends by telling us we'd "better get used to it."

"Because this is our government for the foreseeable future."

On the holy eve of another year 'round

Here's a nice reminder from the Christian Democrats of America Facebook page, for those who might aspire to be more goodly, working toward heaven rather than just waving the flag of heaven. They did it up in gold and purple, but here's the text of it:

A Christian Nation Does Christian Things:

• It feeds the poor.
• It houses the homeless.
• It freely educates the masses.
• It heals the sick.
• It provides livable wages.
• It helps all people to work together for the greater good of all creatures on planet Earth.

Speaking of Earth, they had another post this month about the other choice that comes out of our big election, adorned with a broken heart emoji:

"By ignoring science and prioritizing short-term gains over our planet’s future, we’re risking untold suffering—not just for ourselves but for generations to come.

"Those who voted for leaders like Trump this year made a choice that will impact their own grandchildren—leaving behind a legacy of rising seas, deadly heatwaves, and a planet in peril."

19.Dec.2024

Year in review, prelude

You know it's time when the time comes. Here we are less than two days from the solstice (2:21 am MST Dec. 21), and then all the other stuff, and we turn the page on 2024.

The headline from the relentlessly positive Kelly Corrigan Wonders podcast caught my eye this morning (after wading through a semi-ream of medical paperwork and claim forms): A look back at the Crappiest of 2024. (It's a two-parter, with the sequel looking at the "Happy Files.") The email teaser includes Corrigan's summary "takeaways" which is clever in case you don't get to tlisten to the hour-long conversation, or to focus your attention if you do. The observations include these:

3. No one will ever care about our tiny concerns the way our parents did.

and

5. Guard the hope of the young.

In the same vein of (beginning) wrap-up, Joyce Vance's yesterday column, Finals, speaks of the "sense of love and optimism" that teaching gives her,

"when I see a semester’s study come to fruition, and I see the progress these people who are going to commit their lives to law and justice are making with sheer grit and hard work. We owe it to them to get as much right as we possibly can before it’s their turn!"

17.Dec.2024

The Weigh in

Judd Legum's Popular Information rounds up "a few highlights" from the past few weeks. Take the jump for the individual stories, I just liked the way the four items capture our Zeitgeist. (Un-spoiler alert on the "what really happened item": it worked out better than some "experts" predicted it would.)

• A Chinese national, charged with fraud by the SEC, just sent Donald Trump $18 million Dec 2
• What really happened after California raised its minimum wage to $20 for fast food workers Dec 3
• 13 things everyone should know about Pete Hegseth Nov 18
• Jared Kushner's $3 billion conflict of interest Nov 13

16.Dec.2024

On shared humanity

Exceptional conversation between host Sara LaWall, and Britt Hartley, author of No Nonsense Spirituality, on the In The Den with Mama Dragons podcast. An excerpt (lightly edited), from near the end of it:

LaWall: What about you is inspiring you right now?

Hartley: I have never been asked that question, as a Mormon woman, because it always has to be the proper authority, and the proper priesthood channels....

LaWall: What are you fierce about?

Hartley: Half of Americans think that people on the other side of the political aisle are fundamentally evil. And that really scares me... What I'm really fierce about right now is fighting for our shared humanity. When we stop seeing the other side as human ... that's when we can do violence to each other. ... The conversations have to continue ... when the conversations stop, that's when violence begins.

Open letters

Blogging is kind of like writing open letters. While poking around Substack, I found this author using it as a more explicit theme: Open Letters by Mersault. Not much in the way of an "about," but with the tagline of "expos[ing] the GOP’s assault on democracy—man-child Trump and his delusional cult laid bare, no mercy, just truth." The teaser to An Open Letter to My Gloating MAGA Neighbor is what drew me in.

"Let’s be honest. Trumpism was never about making America great again. It’s about weaponizing your fear and resentment. Immigrants, women daring to expect control over their own bodies, trans kids, and “wokeness”—these weren’t your enemies until he told you they were. Trumpism isn’t about policy, principles, or progress; it’s a spectacle, a theater of grievance where you gleefully cast yourself as the victim while ignoring the real threats tearing this country apart."

The most prominent threat being the enemy about to be back within the White House, working through the authoritarian playbook, page by page. The lineup of seven Person of the Year covers of TIME is one of the more striking posts in this 3-month old blog.

This is serious

A Substack teaser sent me into various of their Notes today, including two from Andy Borowitz, who as far as I knew has been in the humor business, biting satire subdivision. This one reads like nearly straight news (about our crooked times):

"Republican senators’ claim that they will only pay attention to Hegseth’s accuser if she comes forward is 100% gaslighting. Clarence Thomas’s and Brett Kavanaugh’s accusers came forward and their credible accusations were totally ignored."

Also, not actually investigated, because the backroom decision included burying the facts. The fix was in. The second item teased a full-on, paid subscriber post from a month ago, connecting its dot about gaslighting to the more recent meta-news that "the disgraceful surrender by ABC News is just the latest example of why people are turning off corporate news."

But Borowitz's notes are free to follow, pithy one-liners that get to the point, such as "Hegseth Offers to Connect Breathalyzer to Nuclear Arsenal" or Reopening of Notre-Dame Marred by Appearance of Antichrist.

Four days ago, he covered the Food Prices bait-and-switch, kind of straight up. Asked about food prices (using the new word he coined, "groceries"), after his campaign promise to the credulous that "immediately bring prices down starting on day one," will he be a failure if prices don't go down?

"I don't think so. Look, they got them up. I'd like to bring them down," Trump said. "It's hard to bring things down once they're up. You know, it's very hard. But I think that they will."

Psyche!

13.Dec.2024

Cue the seasonal music!

A traveling friend said she wasn't hearing the sort of holiday songs she liked in a English hotel so was going to post one a day of the ones she liked. Started with Dar Williams' 1996 number, The Christians and the Pagans, and I think I'm in love.

There isn't really a seasonal segue to the second video, but YouTube knows what I like and sends it my way, so here's that, too: Jon Batiste's latest visit to The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Batiste is a shining star, even just talking about music. Joy.

And while we're at that, how about some SNOW in the forecast, hmm?

Update: Ok, this is seasonl, too: Gurdeep Pandher of the Yukon, ever brimming with positivity. Brighten your day some more.

Forecast: gathering darkness

Robert Reich, from our "queasy interregnum":

"The person Trump wants to run the FBI is pledging a campaign of vengeance against his political enemies. The people he wants to put in charge of the military and the border are promising a mass roundup and deportation of undocumented immigrants. The billionaires he’s put in charge of eliminating “waste” are gunning for Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. The person he wants to run the nation’s health is a nutcase who doesn’t believe in vaccinations. And so on."

The possible impediment to a new FBI Director, the current one, with two years left in his term (which started after Trump I fired the previous director, for insufficient subservience) announced he'll obey in advance, and quit at the end of Biden's administration. Something something "avoid dragging the Bureau deeper into the fray, while reinforcing the values and principles that are so important to how we do our work" in his swan song. If Kash Patel makes it through Senate confirmation (or a "recess appointment" stunt), an outrageous proposition all in itself, the Bureau will be deeper into the frayed swamp than it has been since J. Edgar Hoover's reign of terror.

Heather Cox Richardson reminds us that Hoover led the FBI for more than 40 years and it was the wake of Watergate that led to the establishment of 10 year terms for the job. Remember that "third rate burglary," and the bungling cover-up that ended a presidency? Back when scandals mattered, somehow. Now the call is coming from inside the house; witness veep-elect J.D. Vance plowing the ground of "conspiracy theory" to justify Trump's promise to pardon those that have been held accountable for mayhem in the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

Thom Hartmann's Daily Take on Wednesday gives an unfortunately plausible description of what may follow Dictator On Day One: A Call to Arms? Trump’s Pardon Pledge and the Rise of Militant Extremism. The model of fascism from Viktor Orbán’s Hungary is fresh in mind (especially Stephen Miller's mind).

"It’s worth remembering that the people Trump says he wants to pardon not only include almost exclusively white men who killed civilians and police officers, but who also tried to hang the Vice President and murder the Speaker of the House of Representatives. These are actions that typically only happen in countries experiencing a live civil war.

"Which is exactly what Trump’s Defense nominee Pete Hegseth has argued we’re on the verge of. In his 2020 book American Crusade, Hegseth described leftists as the nation’s “internal adversaries”:

“The military and police, both bastions of freedom-loving patriots, will be forced to make a choice,” Hegseth further wrote. “It will not be good. Yes, there will be some form of civil war.”

"More recently, in his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth asserted that because of Democrats “America today is in a cold civil war,” claiming that the country is “under siege by confederacy radicals.”

"Donald Trump himself has said that he expects his plan to deport millions of undocumented workers in America to be “bloody.”

Latest sample of veepy-creepy: J.D. Vance has invited Daniel Penny to be his personal guest at the Army-Navy game this weekend. (If you're wondering, who? The 24-yo former Marine who choked a homeless man to death on a New York subway, just found not guilty of criminally negligent homicide.) What Jamelle Bouie said: "If you kill a disfavored person in the street the leaders of the republican party will try to make you a national hero."

12 + 12 = 24

Farewell addresses

It's not easy to keep of reality these days, what with the preparations for insanity being made next month. It didn't make "Breaking News" that I saw, I supposed because it was too normal? But for posterity, when we long for any whiff of normality, I make note of Heather Cox Richardson's December 11, 2024 Letter from an American. Since everyone seems to agree "it's the economy, stupid," even if no one reads the tea leaves the same way, some shared facts would be welcome, hmm? With HCR's footnote link brought in-line, and a soupçon of bold face in the 3d paragraph:

"[On Dec. 10], President Joe Biden spoke at the Brookings Institution, where he gave a major speech on the American economy. He contrasted his approach with the supply-side economics of the forty years before he took office, an approach the incoming administration of Donald Trump has said he would reinstate. Biden urged Trump and his team not to destroy the seeds of growth planted over the past four years. And he laid out the extraordinary successes of his administration as a benchmark going forward."

The WH Briefing Room version says he said "last month, I spoke to the Economic Club of Washington D.C.," but it appears that that was almost three months ago, when he celebrated the Federal Reserve's lowering interest rates as "a declaration of progress." Reluctant to oversell the economic successes when the relentless marketing from Kamala Harris' opponent was doom, gloom, poverty, and hopelessness?

"The president noted that Trump is inheriting a strong economy. Biden shifted the U.S. economy from 40 years of supply-side economics that had transferred about $50 trillion from the bottom 90% to the top 1% and hollowed out the middle class.

"By investing in the American people, the Biden team expanded the economy from “the middle out and the bottom up,” as Biden says, and created an economy that he rightfully called “the envy of the world.” Biden listed the numbers: more than 16 million new jobs, the most in any four-year presidential term in U.S. history; low unemployment; a record 20 million applications for the establishment of new businesses; the stock market hitting record highs."

In the months and years to come, save this WH record as a touchstone of our current, halcyon days, complete with an embedded correction, and cheerleading for American exceptionalism:

"Like most grace [great] economic developments, this one is neither red nor blue, and America’s progress is everyone’s progress."

Just as the pain from the pandemic, and from Russia's invasion of Ukraine was everyone's pain, even as it was painted red or blue for partisan advantage. As we snap back to the long-discredited trickle-down theory providing cover for good old fashioned smash and grab economics, and Melon Usk's plan to scrap the federal government and sell off the parts, remember this moment.

Oh, and speaking of abnormality, Idaho's Senator Mike Crapo, long-time make-believe "deficit hawk," who signed off on the budget-busting voodoo tax cuts in 2017, gets a shout-out:

"Republicans who will chair the House and Senate finance committees, Representative Jason Smith (R-MO) and Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID), say that extending the cuts shouldn’t count as adding to the deficit because they would simply be extending the status quo."

Shouldn't count? Oh, Mike.

11.Dec.2024

Controlling the narrative

In the spirit of George Lakoff, let's start with essential facts: Prosperity is built upon a foundation of public resources. "Private enterprise and private life utterly depend on public resources." Roads and bridges, public education, a national bank, a patent office, courts for business cases, interstate commerce support, the criminal justice system, sewers, water and electricity, research universities and research support, which brought us the internet, pharmaceuticals, modern medicine, satellite communication, GPS systems, and cell phones. Thanks to public servants, and good government.

That insufficiently emphasized reality was spelled out 8 years ago when the alternative was on the rise, and still seemed like an absurd joke. Jason "LOLGOP" Sattler's latest post in The Cause has more on the subject which is unfortuntately not going away anytime soon: Here's what Trump is terribly good at.

"He’s a master of what Republicans have spent the last half-century since Watergate creating—being the heroes of an alternate reality where Republicans are simultaneously persecuted and powerful. Everything about Fox and Trump reinforces the Conservative Moral Hierarchy as laid out by the great George Lakoff:

• God above Man
• Man above Nature
• The Disciplined (Strong) above the Undisciplined (Weak)
• The Rich above the Poor
• Employers above Employees
• Adults above Children
• Western culture above other cultures
• America above other countries
• Men above women
• Whites above non-whites
• Christians above non-Christians
• Straights above LGBT

That reminder (and exposition of the radical Christian Nationalists plotting for a takeover under Trump) in March of this year. Back in 2016, Lakoff explained the great polarization:

"[W]e tend to understand the nation metaphorically in family terms: We have founding fathers. We send our sons and daughters to war. We have homeland security. The conservative and progressive worldviews dividing our country can most readily be understood in terms of moral worldviews that are encapsulated in two very different common forms of family life: The Nurturant Parent family (progressive) and the Strict Father family (conservative)....

"In the strict father family, father knows best. He knows right from wrong and has the ultimate authority to make sure his children and his spouse do what he says, which is taken to be what is right."

Even after daddy turns out to be a fraud, and felon. Lakoff explained succinctly Why His Lack of Policy Detail Doesn’t Matter: imposing "strict father morality in all areas of life" was the only job.

"If they have the Congress, and the Presidency and the Supreme Court, they could achieve this. They don’t need to name policies, because the Republicans already have hundreds of policies ready to go. They just need to be in complete power."

And yes, we're still feeding the ultimate troll by talking about him, 8 years on. Lakoff finished with a section headed "How Can Democrats Do Better?" which they didn't do in 2016, did manage in 2020, and here we are, five and a half weeks from Big Daddy being sworn in. (Assuming John Roberts will violate the 14th Amendment with impunity come January 20.)

10.Dec.2024

Worst case scenario

Cleaning up old notes (on scraps of magnetic bits these days, instead of paper, although god knows there is still plenty of paper around), I came across Jonathan V. Last's item for The Bulwark, from Nov. 18, which, spoiler alert, is for paid subscribers. After a generous teaser, we're left hanging for "something like the worst-case scenario," not the literal “nuclear holocaust and everyone dies” one, but "a 90th percentile variant." And then a "second idea[,] that I’m going to try to persuade you that if Trump were actively pursuing such a set of outcomes, it would look very much like what we’re already seeing, right now." It’s Time to Consider the Worst-Case Scenario starts with a quote of someone else's "won't be that bad" sop, because the "first Trump term was it wasn’t as terrible as people predicted" and "we’ve also had a worse presidential administration in clear living memory." Really? Freddie Deboer doesn't explain himself on his semi-paywalled substack blog either.

I looked around to see if someone had made a copy of Last's work available, didn't find it, but did see that he's worked the "worst-case scenario" trope for a good while. (Justifiably, it seems.) Another Bulwark one before the 2022 midterms, and here's a whole one, It's Time to Prepare for the Worst from July, with hand-wringing about how Sonia Sotomayor should retire immediately (wut?), courts martial (given the reinstated former guy "will seek to put pressure on the court-martial system to make it harder for soldiers to refuse illegal orders"), and J.D. Vance buying his way onto a ticket:

"Of all J.D. Vance’s hypocrisies, the best is that this proud, self-described hillbilly is the cat’s paw of Peter Thiel—the gay Silicon Valley tech titan who wants to live forever using the blood of young people."

That was back before Joe Biden bowed out, and all, and militias were recruiting off the assassination attempt on the former guy. "Because they’re coming for us" seems to be the one organizing principle that endures, no matter how scant the evidence.

More usefully, Carole Cadwalladr put together "20 lessons for the post-truth world" last month, How to survive the broligarchy, in The Guardian.

1 When someone tells you who they are, believe them. Last week Donald Trump appointed a director of intelligence who spouts Russian propaganda, a Christian nationalist crusader as secretary of defence, and a secretary of health who is a vaccine sceptic. If Trump was seeking to destroy American democracy, the American state and American values, this is how he’d do it.

2 Journalists are first, but everyone else is next....

The former-and-future Füror hasn't appointed anyone yet, but he has been rolling out his planned nominees. If the Republican side of the Senate is as spineless as Idaho's pair, maybe that's a distinction without a difference, but it remains to be seen whether Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, and Robert F Kennedy Jr will be confirmed for the various positions they're so wholly unsuited to fill. Still, it's a good list to keep in mind, and a worthwhile, short read.

You have more power than you think. ... Protect your private life. ... Pay in cash. ... There is such a thing as truth.

6.Dec.2024

In the poisoned well of fake news

Good advice from Elizabeth Lopatto, on The Verge: Stop using generative AI as a search engine. Her case in point is a pattern of hallucinated "popularized" results regarding the currently tending topic of presidential pardons of relatives.

Facts first: George H.W. Bush did not pardon his son, Neil. Jimmy Carter did not pardon his brother Billy. And, in the realm of more distant relatives and in-laws (weirdly, is it?), Trump's pardon of his son-in-law's father, Charles Kushner (in line to be Ambassador to France!) isn't popping up in AI search results.

5.Dec.2024

Obeying in advance

David Frum went a little too raw for MSNBC's Morning Joe, it seems. I've got no time for couples therapy such as Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski act out regularly for MSNBC, but The Sound of Fear gives the chilly willies.

"In 1989, President George H. W. Bush nominated John Tower, senator from Texas, for secretary of defense. Tower was a very considerable person, a real defense intellectual, someone who deeply understood defense, unlike the current nominee. It emerged that Tower had a drinking problem, and when he was drinking too much he would make himself a nuisance or worse to women around him. And for that reason, his nomination collapsed in 1989. You don’t want to think that our moral standards have declined so much that you can say: Let’s take all the drinking, all the sex-pesting, subtract any knowledge of defense, subtract any leadership, and there is your next secretary of defense for the 21st century."

Frum relates that he "told this story in pungent terms," and "introduced the discussion with a joke: “If you’re too drunk for Fox News, you’re very, very drunk indeed.” Ouch.

That was a bridge too far for MSNBC, and after he was excused, Brzezinski read an apology on-air for his remarks. I have no idea what norms (if any) exist for the commentariat these days, but it's safe to say the "stars" of the FN universe do a lot worse than this on their shows. (Case in point.)

I came in to the discussion via Thomas Zimmer's BlueSky thread. Aaron Rupar provides a clip of Joe trying to walk it back, and I'm thinking about the first rule of holes. (When you're in one, STOP DIGGING.) Walked back the apology as not an apology, srsly?

Here's a more serious discussion (about foreign relations), between Frum and Walter Isaacson, on Amanpour and Company.

3.Dec.2024

Pardon season

Jon Stewart, in his role as dean of late night comedy (I guess you'd say) enjoys a field day in his monologue, punching down, and all over, at everyone (but mostly Democrats, this week) who should Do Better in his humble opinion. Then has a more serious talk with former Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, who said this about the Department of Justice:

"I think it's really important that we hold these insitutions, and the people who work there and are in charge of them accountable."

The gulf between aspiration and realization is wide, and about to get wider. The "Equal Justice" promise we praise when convenient, seems to be receding in the rear view mirror. It was (checks calendar) just this year that the Supreme Court set itself (first of all), and then one particular (ex-)president firmly above the law. As a result, and not to put too fine a point on it, Yates said:

"Donald Trump poses a unique threat to our criminal justice system, and to that concept of equal justice. He's made really clear over and over again that he views the Department of Justice as his own personal goon squad... to go after the people that he wants to retaliate against, whether those are folks who have crossed him politically, whether it's people who just disagreed with him, whether it's people who wouldn't carry his water, that he wants to use the power of the state to literally criminally investigate them and try to send them to prison."

Stewart offers a devil's advocate defense of, well, kind of the devil, himself. The "they did it to me" whinging that we've been listening to for the entirety of Trump's political career. It's already been adjudicated that he can lie with full impunity, as long as he tap dances or takes the 5th when he's (so rarely) testifying under oath. Just because he thinks something (if he actually thinks what he pretends to), "that doesn't make it true," Yates says.

And Stewart goes on about his imagined Marquess of Queensbury rules. "False equivalence" just needs to be "close enough" to "give you pause"? Yes, for late night comedy. But Yates makes the point about a Special Counsel that maybe hasn't been made often (or clearly) enough: investigations should be about alleged acts, not about a person.

The takes from my go-to pundits seem smartest to me (which is of course why they're my daily—make your own judgment on my confirmation bias):

Joyce Vance, The Week Ahead, for Dec. 1. "Hunter Biden would likely not have been charged on these facts if he was anyone else."

"Donald Trump famously pardoned or granted clemency to a number of people, including his son-in-law’s father and future ambassador to France, Charles Kushner, Roger Stone, who was accused of interfering in an investigation that involved Trump himself, Paul Manfort, Trump’s former campaign manager, and former General Michael Flynn. Like the younger Biden, Flynn pled guilty to the charges before he received a pardon."

Heather Cox Richardson, Dec. 2 Letter from an American (after opening with the noisome swamp from which T2's SecDef pick, Pete Hegseth has crawled):

"Ron Filipkowski of MeidasTouch ... studies right-wing media and points out that [Donald Trump's 2nd pick to lead the FBI after he fires its director for the second time, Kash] Patel’s many appearances there suggest he is obsessed with Hunter Biden, especially the story of his laptop, which Patel insists shows that Hunter and Joe Biden engaged in crimes with Ukraine and China.

"House Oversight Committee chair James Comer (R-KY) spent two years investigating these allegations and turned up nothing..."

And Robert Reich, Pardon me, worried about the "ammunition" this will give Republicans for trying and convicting Democrats for hypocrisy and lawfare, as if there were a shortage of ammo in the made-it-up-o-sphere.

The son-in-law's father-in-law pardon four years ago this month shows Hunter Biden's deal to be penny ante (except for the "blanket" part of Hunter's, going back to a decade of "whatever"). From NJ.com's report on Christmas Eve, 2020, about just one of the wave of Trump's 49 pardons in two days, what former NJ Governor Chris Christie called “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted when I was U.S. attorney.”

“Mr. Kushner pled guilty, he admitted the crimes. So what am I supposed to do as a prosecutor? If a guy hires a prostitute to seduce his brother-in-law, and videotapes it, and then sends the videotape to his sister in an attempt to intimidate her from testifying before a grand jury, do I really need any more justification than that?”

In case you missed it, the DOJ has a helpful tabulation of Pardons Granted by President Donald J. Trump (2017-2021).

Jeffrey Toobin, for the NYT is all about a moral standard that few presidents have met, and how Joe Biden hasn't given out nearly enough pardons (so far). He finally gets around to breezing by Bill Clinton's half brother, and George H.W. Bush (no biggie, just "all of the defendants in [independent counsel Lawrence] Walsh's prosecutions in the Iran-contra affair," that Reagan administration misadventure that GHWB himself participated in in. Anyone else?

"On his way out of office in 2021, Mr. Trump displayed both nepotism and vengeance. Amid dozens of dubious (and worse) acts of clemency in those final days, he pardoned his son-in-law Jared Kushner’s father, Charles Kushner, who had been convicted of 18 counts of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering. (Last week, Mr. Trump announced he plans to nominate Mr. Kushner as ambassador to France.) Mr. Trump also pardoned those prosecuted by Robert Mueller, the special counsel who investigated Russia’s role in the 2016 election."

That's without even starting on what's surely planned for on his way into office in 2025, and the counter-revolution of the Trump II Retribution Tour, pretty much the reason for innoculating Hunter just now.

2.Dec.2024

Speaking of the price of eggs

Thom Hartmann's "what you may have missed" feature amplifies items that slipped below the scroll of the inbox. Here's his Nov. 25, 2024 "Daily Take," with the story in the hed and dek: The Next Pandemic Could Be Brewing: Is Trump’s Team Ready to Fail Us Again? "Incompetence and conspiracy theories meet a deadly virus: Will history repeat itself, or will we face an even deadlier disaster with unprepared leaders at the helm?"

There's also a nice pull quote from Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban, quoting Jared Kushner’s team in March, 2020:

“The political folks believed that because [Covid] was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy.”

By the way, have you had your seasonal flu shot this year? Because the century-ago pandemic from the H1N1 variant killed over 50 million people worldwide, and the current H5N1 avian influenza virus is "brewing," you might say, spreading, and evolving. In October, in Oregon, "a pig farm discovered five of their pigs were sick with bird flu," for example.

1.Dec.2024

TrumpoМоско́вия

The first draft of history had a few typos, I noticed, the end of a sentence dropped, "baked" pictures instead of naked ones. Those two, at least, were fixed in the (unillustrated, sorry, or you're welcome) substack-posted version of what landed in my inbox yesterday, from Professor Timothy Snyder: Four scenarios of Trumpomuskovia.

"History grounds us," he begins. "History can help us find our footing."

His scenarios sample the tumultuous 1790s, 1860s, 1930s, 1990s. I just happen to have retreated (a bit) into the Poldark saga which taps the first of those (but mostly in the realm of England's Cornwall peninsula and France, not east to Poland and Ukraine), and the other three are familiar topics. Only one is in the realm of lived history for the general populace. For that one, we personally witnessed a small part of the Russian scene, when we visited St. Petersburg in 1999. That was when the Russian rouble was formally around 25 to the dollar; I was mildly shocked to read this morning that it's now below 100 to the dollar, which is to say 1₽ is less than 1¢.

107.74 roubles to the dollar as of this morning's report. It had slipped even lower than that last week, and there were news headlines with 'Panic' in them. That story says "This time two years ago, it was hovering around the 60 mark. Fifteen years ago, it was as low as 30." (Which is to say it was as high as 30 to the dollar.)

"The obsession with the exchange rate is a historical hangover. During Soviet times, only the elite were allowed to own foreign currency and it meant a higher standard of living, like holidays abroad and luxury imports at home.

"During the chaos and hyperinflation of the 90s, those who didn't have hard currency saw much of their savings wiped out when the rouble was devalued."

It doesn't quite sound like "hyper" inflation to me, but says there, it's running around 8% in Russia right now, not quite as high as our bout with Covid-19 in 2022, which topped out just above 9% (per one convenient source), before easing back to 3% and less this summer. That wasn't good enough to save us from the tipping point. Eggs were expensive. Nobody cared if it was because of H5N1. Gas is still cheap. Not cheap enough to elect competence, decency, civility over the Worldwide Wrestling Entertainment psychopath. Kamala's laugh was odd, or something. So now we'll see how this works. Place your bets.

The 1790s. Rescuing Russia
The 1860s. Secession
The 1930s: Electoral Fascism
The 1990s: Reliving Russia

Or something newly catastrophic. Or great! You never know.

Update (6.Dec):
The Counteroffensive with Tim Mak blog reports on The collapse of the Russian economy. "The dramatic decline in the Ruble offers hope that the outcome of the war might be decided off the battlefield—and that pressures on the Russian home front could be decisive in what happens next."

raveling

Tom von Alten