Wednesday, April 05, 2017
Partition
It's such a nice word, suggests hanging up some curtains to divide a room or maybe drawing some lines on a map. Gotta make some artificial borders which are going to run through towns and private property. Gotta militarize those borders. Gotta give somebody some guns to man those borders. Gotta divide up people from each other somewhat arbitrarily and enforce the whole thing. Gotta do all of this without making anybody too upset.
Yah, that's the least bad solution. What's the next bad one?
Yah, that's the least bad solution. What's the next bad one?
Onward to Syria
Obama certainly wasn't perfect on the issue of blowing up people in other places, but in some ways he did slow our perpetual march towards perpetual wars everywhere.
A play, in 3 simple acts:
Act 1: The Brookings Fellow, who says we Must. Do. Something. Even with Trump in charge! Even if it requires bashing Obama!
Act 2: The Moustache of Perpetual Destruction:
Act 3: The drunk at the end of the bar, I mean the president:
A play, in 3 simple acts:
Act 1: The Brookings Fellow, who says we Must. Do. Something. Even with Trump in charge! Even if it requires bashing Obama!
I honestly don't care if Trump needs to bash Obama on this to score political points; I only care that Trump actually does something now. https://t.co/2Q4WELoOO9
— Susan Hennessey (@Susan_Hennessey) April 5, 2017
Act 2: The Moustache of Perpetual Destruction:
The least bad solution is a partition of Syria and the creation of a primarily Sunni protected area — protected by an international force, including, if necessary, some U.S. troops. That should at least stop the killing — and the refugee flows that are fueling a populist-nationalist backlash all across the European Union.
Act 3: The drunk at the end of the bar, I mean the president:
President Trump says the chemical attack yesterday had a big impact on him and changed his attitude toward Syria and Assad. pic.twitter.com/AHsjsKaSRF
— Tamara Keith (@tamarakeithNPR) April 5, 2017
This Is The Trump Voter You Should Be Interviewing
These are the people that put Trump in office. We can rightly wonder why unemployed racists in Fritters voted for him, but this is really his base.
If you want to understand intra-GOP warfare, the decision-making process of our president, the implosion of the Republican healthcare plan, and the rest of the politics of the Trump era, you don’t need to know about Russian espionage tactics, the state of the white working class, or even the beliefs of the “alt-right.” You pretty much just need to be in semi-regular contact with a white, reasonably comfortable, male retiree. We are now ruled by men who think and act very much like that ordinary man you might know, and if you want to know why they believe so many strange and terrible things, you can basically blame the fact that a large and lucrative industry is dedicated to lying to them.
Everybody Thinks They Know How Things Really Work
Another thing about DC is everyone is a couple of degrees of separation from very important people, everybody gossips about very important things and people, and then that gossip solidifies into a kind of local lore. You know, the things that are important but somehow never quite make it onto cable news except as subtext, the information that only gets shared over drinks. Of course most of it is probably bullshit, or at least the emphasis is all wrong, but it gives everybody a sense that they are the ones who are truly in the know, that there are things mere mortals (other then the tens or hundreds of thousands of DC workers) can't know or comprehend.
I don't mean that all insider knowledge is bullshit, just that there are ways in which gossip gets transmuted into fact, and the things you know that other people supposedly don't generally seem more important than they are.
I don't mean that all insider knowledge is bullshit, just that there are ways in which gossip gets transmuted into fact, and the things you know that other people supposedly don't generally seem more important than they are.
Alternate Reality Bubbles
Back when I used to go to DC to scheme more often, I used to mostly visit with other outsider egg-thrower types, but of course sometimes I'd meet with more insider types. So many people in DC really do operate with a fundamentally different set of assumptions. Sometimes we needed a Rosetta Stone for translation to get through a conversation. I'm not saying I Is Right and They Is Wrong, but there were definitely too many people on team D who thought that watching Morning Joe was an important daily activity. If I ran the zoo, I'd ban cable news from all Dem congressional offices.
Priorities
Will is right - locking up innocent people is much more important than a few tacky bribes, though the latter matter too, of course.
As I've grown older and wiser, I've really come to see that knowingly locking up innocent people is mostly just racist sadism. On the teevee shows cops face this tremendous pressure to solve crimes. Except for the most high profile cases - usually involving white victims - I never see *any* public pressure to solve murder cases in this city. No one's job is on the line. The chief of police isn't getting beaten up regularly in the media. Those cop show devices like "the board" which force murder detectives to sweat their unsolved cases just don't seem to exist.
And knowingly locking up innocent people lets the actual perps go free. Two injustices. Two bigly injustices. Why do it? Just to stick another black guy behind bars for life, usually, because they can. He's probably guilty of something, anyway. Blackness, at least, and that's enough.
As I've grown older and wiser, I've really come to see that knowingly locking up innocent people is mostly just racist sadism. On the teevee shows cops face this tremendous pressure to solve crimes. Except for the most high profile cases - usually involving white victims - I never see *any* public pressure to solve murder cases in this city. No one's job is on the line. The chief of police isn't getting beaten up regularly in the media. Those cop show devices like "the board" which force murder detectives to sweat their unsolved cases just don't seem to exist.
And knowingly locking up innocent people lets the actual perps go free. Two injustices. Two bigly injustices. Why do it? Just to stick another black guy behind bars for life, usually, because they can. He's probably guilty of something, anyway. Blackness, at least, and that's enough.
It's Back!
Oh fantabulous day!
Guess they still need the money...
Later we will check in on the American Dream construction webcam!!! Exciting!!!!!
Triple Five senior vice president Sandi Danick said construction has restarted on the complex, which will be about 6M SF at full build-out. The Canadian mall owner, which bought the property once known as "Xanadu" in 2013, is targeting a fall 2018 opening.
As recently as March 23, construction on the site had stalled as Triple Five quietly planned its next move. Triple Five's lender has released funds for construction to resume, Danick said at Bisnow's National Retail Series event in Manhattan on Tuesday morning. She said the firm expects to close on $1.6B in permanent funding to finish construction in the coming months.
Guess they still need the money...
Later we will check in on the American Dream construction webcam!!! Exciting!!!!!
Supreme Plagiarism
As I've said I often think plagiarism "scandals" are overblown. Citation standards vary with context and type of publication. Not every publication has footnotes. Sometimes what should be well-known quotes are put in as callbacks and poetic references. Not every Bible quote needs to be prefaced with, "as it was written in the Bible," for example. Sometimes mere sloppiness is just that and is a forgivable offense.
But this is actually plagiarism. The key is that he cited the original sources while ripping off the secondary ones.
But this is actually plagiarism. The key is that he cited the original sources while ripping off the secondary ones.
In the most striking example, Gorsuch, in his book, appears to duplicate sentences from an Indiana Law Journal article written by Abigail Lawlis Kuzma without attributing her. Instead, he uses the same sources that Kuzma used: A 1982 Indiana court ruling that was later sealed, a well-known pediatrics textbook, “Rudolph’s Pediatrics,” and a 1983 article in the Bloomington Sunday Herald.
Tuesday, April 04, 2017
I'm Sure He'll Have A Lucrative Career
The kind of thing we are always assured Does Not Happen. More likely what usually Does Not Happen is that people get caught.
Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond President Jeffrey Lacker is resigning immediately, six months sooner than previously announced, after disclosing his role in the leak of information related to the central bank’s deliberations in 2012.
“I regret that in this instance I crossed the line to confirming information that should have remained confidential,” Lacker said in a statement on Tuesday sent by the law firm McGuireWoods in Richmond, Virginia. “In 2012, my conduct was inconsistent with those important confidentiality policies.”
Experts
I always love this formulation in news stories.
Anyway, call me in about 30 years if I'm still alive and we can discuss whether we think the just-around-the-corner self-driving cars will make things safer...
Experts expect self-driving cars to bring many benefits, chiefly curtailing the 1.25 million lives lost globally each year in motor vehicle crashes. But there will also be downsides, some of which may be tough to foresee. Most obvious is the disruptive impact on people who make a living driving today.
Anyway, call me in about 30 years if I'm still alive and we can discuss whether we think the just-around-the-corner self-driving cars will make things safer...
Translation For The Thick
McCain says he will vote for the rules change to confirm Gorsuch but says it's the beginning of the end of the Senate.
— Byron Tau (@ByronTau) April 3, 2017
McCain will vote to destroy the Senate if Democrats actually follow the rules.
I don't think that is "the beginning of the end of the Senate" (though that would be good!) but Republicans think, and many in the media agree, that certain perogatives under the rules that the minority party have are only there to be used if Republicans are the minority party. Obeying the rules, if you're a Democrat, is actually violating the rules. Not of the Senate, but of the rules of Washington, where Democrats just aren't supposed to do such things.
"Main Street"
I like the image at the top of this article, depicting an idealized small town "main street" which barely exists outside of resort towns in this country. The article is about small businesses. That term when used does invoke images of "mom and pop" shops, though what "small business" means from the perspective of the government and data collection doesn't have much to do with that. What qualifies as a "small business" depends on your industry classification, but quite often it's any business with fewer than 500 employees. Hardly small, and mostly not "mom and pop" shops.
I'm not saying that for purposes of official classification and data collection that's wrong, just that how that gets played into narratives about "small businesses" in the press which feature cute pictures of "main streets" is somewhat deceptive. Small businesses probably aren't what you think they are when you're hearing about them on NPR.
I'm not saying that for purposes of official classification and data collection that's wrong, just that how that gets played into narratives about "small businesses" in the press which feature cute pictures of "main streets" is somewhat deceptive. Small businesses probably aren't what you think they are when you're hearing about them on NPR.
Don't Trust Anybody Over 30
This is a point I make fairly regularly, every time there's an epidemic of The Kids Today articles, but while generational lines are arbitrary and silly to some degree, the original definition of "millennial" (and thus the name) involved people who came of age, roughly 18-20 in 2000 and after. So some of The Kids Today that people talk about in every "silly millennials" articles are 35+ and many are 30+.
One thing I've noticed in my life is the tendency to ratchet up the age at which people are considered "adult" - not in the technical sense, but in the sense of people no longer being shocked that you manage to have a "real job" or whatever. You know, achieved something other than a series of part time jobs. Those "30 under 30" profiles seem to have been replaced by "40 under 40" ones (not really, but you get the idea).
Millennials are old now. Time to start picking on the next generation!
One thing I've noticed in my life is the tendency to ratchet up the age at which people are considered "adult" - not in the technical sense, but in the sense of people no longer being shocked that you manage to have a "real job" or whatever. You know, achieved something other than a series of part time jobs. Those "30 under 30" profiles seem to have been replaced by "40 under 40" ones (not really, but you get the idea).
Millennials are old now. Time to start picking on the next generation!
Monday, April 03, 2017
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