The blog is having what I think are some cache problems. This is a test post.
Seems to be working now.
Question: if you usually access the blog from a phone or pad, did the McCarthy post and quantum post (the two posts right under this) show up this afternoon, or did they just appear?
I agree with McCarthy that this should make everyone afraid.
But it doesn’t. Some are applauding.
Well, as the New York Times notes, the New York state charges filed Wednesday are based on bank loans that were part of the fraud charges brought by Robert Mueller in the Virginia case. The Times says that “the Manhattan prosecutors deferred their inquiry in order not to interfere with Mr. Mueller’s larger investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election.” Having been in these tussles, I don’t buy that. The Manhattan prosecutors stood down because, once Mueller’s federal case went forward, they were out of luck.
And now, gamesmanship is the order of the day: The state prosecutors have brought a case they otherwise never would waste time on — not because the case should be done, but to try to block a pardon [by Trump, who can only pardon in federal cases].
This raw politicization of prosecutorial power ought to frighten everyone. Yet, solely because of Donald Trump and Paul Manafort, New York Democrats have been pushing to water down state double jeopardy protection — shamefully, as if civil rights were only for the ruling class’s political friends.
If Trump were to pardon Manafort, that would vitiate the federal prosecution. The point of the pardon is to excuse the offense as if it never happened. So, the idea is that if Manafort’s federal prosecution were to be voided, there would be no state double jeopardy bar against a subsequent New York State prosecution.
Everyone knows this is only happening because Manafort was thought to be a possible conduit towards getting Trump on some charge or other. So far it hasn’t worked. Everyone also knows that Manafort is almost certainly guilty. But that doesn’t mean he should be subject to double jeopardy.
McCarthy’s suggestion:
If I were representing Manafort, I would consider asking for a commutation, not a pardon. In a commutation, the president can reduce the sentence down to time served and spare the person any further prison time on the offense. Yet, the convictions stand.
I believe that as long as the federal convictions remain in place, Manafort would maintain his double-jeopardy protection against a future New York State prosecution based on the same conduct.
I’m not entirely sure that I understand this, but I’m entirely sure that it’s interesting:
Taking quantum mechanics seriously predicts a unique, single quantum reality underlying the multiverse. The homogeneity and the tiny temperature fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background, which indicate that our observable universe can be traced back to a single quantum state, usually identified with the quantum field that fuels primordial inflation, support this view.
Moreover, this conclusion extends to other multiverse concepts such as different laws of physics in the various valleys of the “string theory landscape” or other “baby universes” popping up in eternal cosmological inflation. Since entanglement is universal, it doesn’t stop at the boundary of our cosmic patch. Whatever multiverse you have, when you adopt quantum monism they are all part of an integrated whole: There always is a more fundamental layer of reality underlying the many universes within the multiverse, and that layer is unique.
When I read about the college entrance bribe scandal, the first question that came to my mind was what did these parents think was going to happen when their kids got into a school for which they were neither prepared nor qualified?
But then it occurred to me that the parents probably thought their children would be just fine. The parents might be planning to continue to cheat and bribe on their offspring’s behalf. Or, perhaps they thought that biggest hurdle in college is getting in, and after that it’s all trophies, for everyone, all the time.
This passage caught my eye:
No students were charged, and authorities said in many cases they were kept in the dark about the alleged scam.
It seems pretty obvious that in the cases in which the parents hired surrogates to take the SATs and other tests, the children would have had to be in on the scam. But apparently that was not the bulk of the cases. And for those students whose parents did this without the kids’ knowledge, can you imagine how mortified those particular children must feel now? I wrote “must feel,” but that’s not strictly true. It’s really “might feel,” because with parents with such ethical standards, it’s hard to know what their children have learned about right and wrong.
Not to mention how frightened and even perhaps guilty the children—even the ones who hadn’t a clue—probably feel at the prospect of their parents’ spending time in prison for something the parents will say they did for their kids. The whole thing is a form of child abuse, among other things—unless the impetus came from the kids, which I very much doubt.
And the magnitude of what some parents paid is mind-boggling to us regular folks:
Some of the parents spent between $200,000 to $6.5 million to ensure that their children received guaranteed admission at the schools of their choice, John Bonavolonta, FBI special agent in charge, said.
“Their actions were, without a doubt, insidious, selfish and shameful,” he added.
More:
Of the 50 people charged so far, 33 are parents and nine were college coaches. The others were a mix of standardized test administrators, a test proctor and Singer associates, authorities said.
“We believe everyone charged here today had a role in fostering a culture of corruption and greed that created an uneven playing field for students trying to get into these schools the right way through hard work, good grades and community service,” Bonavolonta said.
True.
However, I’m a bit tired of this “level playing field” assumption. It doesn’t really seem that hard work, good grades, and community service work to achieve the same result for everyone.
Of course I’m not in favor of bribes and/or cheating, and the rules should be applied equally to all. That’s obvious and inarguable. But there are ways around the rules, legal ways. There are legacies. There are racial preferences (ask any Asian if the playing field is level for him or her, for example).
The playing field is never level and all efforts to make it level can never make it so. In fact, some make it less so. Most of the time we can’t properly evaluate advantages and disadvantages for categories of people, or even for individuals. For example, very wealthy people can give their children material things that poor people and even financially comfortable people can’t. But it’s also not clear how to measure those advantages the extremely rich have—for example, did these particular mega-rich people give their kids a sense of purpose or integrity? And aren’t those things extremely important, probably more important than nice clothes and a big house and jet-setting all over the world (whether these kids or parents are aware of it or not)? There are so many children of the ultra-wealthy who are messed up that it’s almost a cliche—actually, it is a cliche: “poor little rich girl.”
Which has nothing to do with cheating. At least, we can be very clear about our condemnation of those who cheat. But I don’t think we’re all that clear on much else in terms of college admissions and the manifold efforts to be “fair.”
It’s official; the Boeing 737 Max has been temporarily grounded everywhere:
The US plane-maker said it would suspend all 371 of the aircraft.
The Federal Aviation Administration said fresh evidence as well as newly refined satellite data prompted the decision to temporarily ban the jets…
The FAA has a team investigating the disaster at the Ethiopian Airlines crash site working with the National Transportation Safety Board.
Dan Elwell, acting administrator at the FAA, said on Wednesday: “It became clear to all parties that the track of the Ethiopian Airlines [flight] was very close and behaved very similarly to the Lion Air flight.”
He added that “the evidence we found on the ground made it even more likely the flight path was very close to Lion Air’s”.
It’s not an admission that the aircraft design is at fault. But it’s an admission that there’s reason to believe it might be.
More information here:
One of Boeing’s internal guidelines for [updating the 737 design] was that any changes must be achievable without the need for any pilot retraining. But the engines Boeing wanted to use were larger than the old versions and had to be mounted higher and farther forward on the wings. These larger engines could cause the aircraft to destabilize under certain conditions, including high-banked turns at low speed.
To counter this, Boeing developed MCAS (Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System). MCAS is an additional software package intended to prevent stall under certain circumstances by pushing the plane’s nose downwards. Boeing didn’t try to hide the system — it’s disclosed in the plane repair manuals — but they didn’t disclose it to pilots or make any kind of effort to train crew members on its existence. Boeing’s argument throughout this process has been that the 737 Max 8 is a perfectly safe plane and that all existing crew training is sufficient to respond to any emergency situation they might encounter…
There have been reports that Ethiopian Air Flight 302 “smoked and shuddered” before its plunge. If these prove true, it could point away from the MCAS system. It’s also possible that the MCAS system overrode any action the pilots were attempting to take to return the plane to proper control as a result of an engine or another component failure. Right now, we simply don’t know. Boeing is preparing a software update for the 737 Max 8, but that update was already in the works last month before Flight 302 fell out of the sky.
I haven’t gotten around to writing about this story yet, and I probably won’t get to it today. Most likely tomorrow.
But I thought you might want to talk about it here.
Or about anything else that interests you.
Remember Lisa Page? Her testimony has been made public [emphasis mine]:
Newly released transcripts from Page’s private testimony in front of a joint task force of the House Judiciary and Oversight committees in July 2018 sheds new light on the internal discussions about an investigation into Clinton’s emails…
Comey cleared Clinton of all charges in a press conference on July 5, 2016.
Page told the committee that the FBI “did not blow over gross negligence.” Responding to a question from Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Texas, Page testified the FBI, including Comey, believed Clinton may have committed gross negligence. “We, in fact — and, in fact, the Director — because, on its face, it did seem like, well, maybe there’s a potential here for this to be the charge. And we had multiple conversations, multiple conversations with the Justice Department about charging gross negligence,” she said.
Page further testified the DOJ put a stop to that: “The Justice Department’s assessment was that it was both constitutionally vague, so that they did not actually feel that they could permissibly bring that charge.” The specific statute being referenced, 18 U.S. Code § 793, deals in part with “gross negligence” in the handling of national defense information, which Clinton came under scrutiny for possibly violating.
Page said Comey and the FBI spoke with DOJ about a gross negligence charge for Clinton multiple times, but that the DOJ consistently pushed back on it. “We had multiple conversations with the Justice Department about bringing a gross negligence charge. And that’s, as I said, the advice that we got from the Department was that they did not think — that it was constitutionally vague and not sustainable,” she said.
Ratcliffe asked if the decision not to charge Clinton with gross negligence was a direct order from the DOJ. “When you say advice you got from the Department, you’re making it sound like it was the Department that told you: ‘You’re not going to charge gross negligence because we’re the prosecutors and we’re telling you we’re not going to,’” he said.
Page responded: “That’s correct.”…
When asked if she knew why DOJ believed that, Page replied: “I really don’t know… I am confident that it was based on their own research in consultation with others, but I don’t have personal knowledge about what the Department did in order to come to that conclusion.”
When Comey made his announcement back in July of 2016, listeners on the right (including me) immediately noted the strangeness—in the legal sense—of what he was saying (see also this as well as this and this). It just didn’t make sense. It was as though they had come to the conclusion that they would not charge Clinton, and had to come up with an excuse after the fact. The excuse was absurd, but it was all they could conjure up, and they went with it.
What Page said supports that idea.
More:
At the time, the National Review’s Andy McCarthy wrote, “According to Director James Comey, Hillary Clinton checked every box required for a felony violation of Section 793(f) of the federal penal code … and, in essence, in order to give Mrs. Clinton a pass, the FBI rewrote the statute.”
It was speculated at the time that the DOJ was behind the FBI’s action, and that part of the impetus was that tarmac meeting between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton, after which Lynch refused to recuse herself but said that she would abide by the FBI’s decision.
And then, apparently, the DOJ told the FBI what to do.
Unfortunately, it seems that the only people who care about all of this are on the right.
I’m often struck by how artificial most politicians are when they speak. So little of what they say seems unguarded, natural, spontaneous, or sincere. Everything is strategic.
That doesn’t mean that everything a politician says is effective as a tactic. What it does mean, for so many of them, is that it is a tactic rather than the utterance of what appears to be a normal human being speaking his or her mind.
I was thinking this while I was analyzing one of Nancy Pelosi’s statements for my previous post today. I found myself in a sort of awe at how much she packed into a couple of seemingly simple sentences: so much hypocrisy, so much unctuous fake nobility, so much artificiality, a little hidden dagger, so many hidden messages. You might say I was reading too much into her statement, but I don’t think so.
It’s not just Pelosi’s statements one can parse that way (I tend to see it more on the left, but it certainly exists on the right). Obama was a master at it. One difference, though, is that when Pelosi speaks I can almost see the wheels in her head turning, but when Obama did it, it was more smooth. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons he was able to succeed in his run for national elected office, and why Pelosi always kept her election bids to re-election in her safe district and made her power moves for advancement within Congress itself. Perhaps she’s too obviously contrived to have won national office.
Perhaps that was Hillary’s problem, too. Maybe she should have kept her power moves within the government structure itself, too, and not sought national elective office from voters. She was just so artificial—among other things—whereas her equally strategic husband had perfected the art of seeming natural.
So, where does Trump fall on this spectrum? The first time I ever watched him give a political speech—and this was back when I thought he’d be a disaster for the right—I was impressed by a number of things and wrote:
Anyone who reads this blog knows that I’m not a Trump supporter, but that I also get his appeal. Watching him speak at length, I “got” it even more. He makes all other politicians look boring and stilted (hey, many of them are boring and stilted). He makes it all sound so simple—just as Obama did, but in a completely different direction and with a completely, and I mean completely, different style. Populist appeal is a neat trick in a man who’s a multi-billionaire and who grew up in enormous wealth and graduated from Wharton. But he’s got it, and although I’m sure he carefully nurtures it he manages to make it look natural.
When I started writing this post, I hadn’t looked back at that quote yet. I had planned to say a certain thing today, but as I read what I wrote in that post of three and a half years ago, I find it’s the same thing. All this time has passed and that aspect of Trump hasn’t faltered: he makes all other politicians look boring and he looks natural doing whatever it is that he does.
That’s an art, and in addition to any art of the deal, it’s one of the arts that got him elected. It’s also something that lends itself to misinterpretation. Some people think he’s stupid, but I’ve never (even when I was very much against him during the primaries) said or thought that he was stupid. He also has unusually keen intuition, which can be more precious than intelligence, and certainly doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with it.
Trump’s enemies on left and right (and he certainly has them on both sides) tend not just to dislike what he does. In fact I’m not at all sure that his enemies on the right hate him because of what he does; I think they hate him in spite of it. But those who really really really dislike Trump seem to dislike him in very visceral and personal terms. One thing the ones on the right don’t like is his lack of intellectualism. Another thing his enemies on both sides don’t like is that they interpret the seeming naturalism of his speech as meaning that he is someone who says whatever pops into his head, with no filter and little thought. I think nothing could be further from the truth.
I think what’s happening is that Trump is every bit as strategic/tactical as any politician, perhaps even more so. But he also seems to be authentic when he speaks; he seems to be himself, whatever that means. He projects a naturalness and spontaneity. I think this combination of strategy and everyman-type naturalness is utterly unique to Trump. I’m not sure where it comes from. Perhaps it’s because he is a man who is strategic to his core: it comes naturally to him. Perhaps he just has a populist gift. Perhaps he is sincerely strategic, if that makes any sense.
But whatever it is about, I think that, without that trait, Trump would not have been elected president.
There’s been a lot of discussion about what Pelosi meant when she said this about impeaching Trump:
But since you asked, and I’ve been thinking about this: Impeachment is so divisive to the country that unless there’s something so compelling and overwhelming and bipartisan, I don’t think we should go down that path, because it divides the country. And he’s just not worth it.
Here’s my take:
(1) She’s just “been thinking” about it. She can always do some more thinking and change her mind.
(2) She’s on record as being against dividing the country. Pretty funny, that. Nancy Pelosi, the Great Uniter.
(3) She’s setting yourself up as a “good cop” to AOC et al’s “bad cop.”
(4) She’s belittling Trump as of no import. Note she says he’s not worth it, not that it’s not worth it to impeach him.
(5) Despite the extra diss of “he’s not worth it,” a la #4 above, the impeachment process itself probably isn’t worth it unless the impeachment forces can convict Trump in the Senate, and they don’t have the votes for that. It’s been my opinion for a long long time that they won’t impeach for that reason, and although I could be wrong, I haven’t changed my opinion. Impeachment without conviction can be seen as a divisive waste of time and backfire on the impeachers, and a vindictive move rather than a valid response to “high crimes and misdemeanors” that don’t seem to be there.
(6) The Mueller report probably isn’t going to provide the Democrats with the longed-for evidence of said “high crimes and misdemeanors.” It was always the idea that it might, and that enough Republicans might get on board to convict Trump in the Senate.
(7) Impeachment also is not worth it because it would put in place a President Pence. Pence may be many things, but he’s much less of a lightning rod for campaign hate, which is what the Democrats plan to go on in 2020. They feel they can defeat Trump, so why remove him and elevate Pence and have to come up with a whole new strategy to defeat him—or, if he chose not to run in 2020, some other Republican? They’ve been demonizing Trump for two years, and they believe they’ve paved the way for a resounding defeat no matter who they run.
I really knew next to nothing about hula as an art form. But here’s a video that taught me a bit. Enjoy!:
Basically, our youth has suffered from a form of child abuse by their teachers and the media. They have been told, implicitly and explicitly, from earliest childhood that socialism is the preferable system because of “fairness.”
The next election is likely to be some form of socialism versus capitalism, no matter who the Democrats nominate. If Bernie Sanders, it will be front and center, but it won’t be far away with other candidates. Every election is said to be the most consequential. This one really is. It’s about a lot more than the individuals running.
So as Lenin himself would have put it, what is to be done?
Trump has to be prepared as never before to be the spokesperson for the free market system and its attendant freedoms…
Rather than relying on obvious sloganeering, even if it’s accurate, or pointing to his own business success or even a booming economy, he has to be mindful of his audience. It is not, in this instance, the “deplorables,” who already understand the situation. It is the youth of America — our future — who must be educated from the ground up, actually re-educated.
This takes patience and it takes clarity, but is also an opportunity to make this election even more important. Our youth must be walked through basic economics and have history explained to them. (As an example, merely pointing out Bernie’s love affair with the Soviet Union is not enough, since our young don’t have a clue what the USSR really was…)
To do this educating, Trump will have to rely on speech-writers and prepared remarks more than he likes. But, as I have said, this election is about far more than Donald, no matter what you think of him.
Trump may or may not be up to the task. But I’m not sure who would be, if anyone, because the task is nothing less than a deprogramming from an inculcated worldview that is built not just on a couple of facts that are incorrect, but a deeply-held, emotionally-satisfying, lifelong (since first attending school, anyway, for these young people) belief system, one that’s been rewarded in school, applauded by peers, and constantly reinforced.
I hate to be pessimistic. But we all know that a mind can be a difficult thing to change. The shortest and most powerful way to change a mind is if a belief-system is contradicted by a person’s lived experience. But since those who promote socialism here for the most part have lived under a relatively socialism-free and relatively capitalistic system, and reaped the benefits thereof without necessarily even noticing the source of those benefits (but have been repeatedly told the drawbacks), it’s not even clear that living under the yoke of socialism would drive home the lesson.
Certainly, they’re not likely to listen to Trump. For him to be an effective educator it would require that young people who already hate him actually listen to him with some sort of open mind. I just don’t see that happening, although I hope I’m wrong.
What is needed is a long-term overhaul of the educational system. Since at the moment the left has a tight grip on it, I’m not sure how that could happen in the foreseeable future.
What I hope is that somehow there are enough voters around to see through the left’s promises. I hope that somehow no leftist Democratic leader emerges who energizes the base.
I’ll close with this cartoon, which I found in the comments section to Simon’s post:
In her interview with Tim Alberta for “The Democrats’ dilemma,” Omar disparaged the sainted Barack Obama by asserting that in critical respects he was as bad as Trump is. She then denied the accuracy of the quote on Twitter while posting the audio clip that proved the accuracy of Alberta’s quote. Is she stupid? If so, it would be one of her more attractive traits.
When Alberta pushed back, Omar deleted the tweet without expression of regret or apology. She just sought to avoid further self-embarrassment while availing herself of the Orwellian memory hole.
Recently, it’s been Ilhan Omar’s anti-Semitism and boldness vis a vis Nancy Pelosi that have been the special foci of commentary about her. The audio tweet has taken somewhat of a back seat, although it’s gotten attention, too. But I want to explore the audio issue a little bit more.
When something like this happens, I wonder “why?”. Why did Omar post the audio clip in the first place if it didn’t prove what she said it proved? I’m assuming that most people believe she posted it in error, and it’s certainly highly possible that’s the case—that is, that Omar posted it with careless disregard for truth, perhaps without even listening to the relevant part. Perhaps she actually thought it proved what she said it did. Perhaps her memory was as faulty as her attention to detail.
And then, when she was criticized, Omar merely removed the proof of her initial statements in what Johnson aptly calls “avoid[ing] further self-embarrassment while availing herself of the Orwellian memory hole.”
But I wonder if that’s quite the whole story. I will hypothesize another possibility for Omar’s actions—one that is far worse, although I don’t know whether what I’m about to propose is correct.
It may be that the “Orwellian” nature of what Omar did goes much deeper. She may simply have not cared whether the audio proved her point or not. It was offered as “proof,” she stated that it constituted proof, and perhaps she was expecting its truth to be taken for granted by those on her side without their checking it by listening in an objective fashion.
In fact, does objectivity even exist as a principle to be followed on the left? Isn’t truth what the Party says it is? And isn’t that the deeper Orwellian nature of the left?
I’ve noticed this quite a bit: the left’s lie can be quite flagrant, and yet the person making it is confident that he or she won’t be called on it by anyone who matters. The person isn’t addressing the skeptical; the person is addressing followers, admirers, and/or true believers on the left.
Omar may have been operating in this way. She may have gotten away with it most of the time in the past. She’s used to those who support her and would-be supporters not bothering to follow through and check her out. She’s used to people (Nancy Pelosi being the latest) making excuses for everything wrong that Omar may do or say.
She’s used to people forgetting. She’s used to not facing any consequences for bold lies. She’s used to being admired nevertheless, and to going from strength to strength.
This is “Orwellian” in the sense of “Two plus two equals five, if I say so. And if you ever believed otherwise, then forget it and move on.”