The whirlwind of activity by juries and prosecutors over the last few days might make you think that a whole bunch of stuff is about to happen. Also, the severity of what has happened may make you think that Trump has suffered a major blow, that deeply nefarious actions have been finally exposed and we are now on our way to a resolution.
Neither of these things is true, and I’ll be happy to explain why. Continue reading When will the rest of the shoes drop (on Trump)?
Carlson suggests that white supremacy, the philosophy, is nearly absent in America. This assertion proves that Carlson has no spine, since he touts the white supremacist line at every opportunity. Admit it Tucker, you are talking about yourself.
Media Matters has this covered:
A new edition of Impeachment: A Handbook, New Edition
Charles L. Black Jr.’s classic guide to presidential impeachment, now in an updated edition with new material by Philip Bobbitt
Originally published at the height of the Watergate crisis and reissued in 1998, two months before the second impeachment of a U.S. president, Charles Black’s Impeachment became the premier guide to the subject of presidential impeachment. Now thoroughly updated, it is essential reading for every concerned citizen.
Praise for earlier editions of Impeachment:
“The most important book ever written on presidential impeachment.”—Lawfare
“A model of how so serious an act of state should be approached.”—Wall Street Journal
“The best essay written on the subject.”—Jeffrey Rosen, New Republic
“A citizen’s guide to impeachment. . . . Elegantly written, lucid, intelligent, and comprehensive.”—Mary Ann Gale, New York Times Book Review
I have been South Africa many times, and have essentially lived there in a variety of circumstances for quite a bit of time. South Africa is a large, complex, and diverse country with an incredibly complicated history, so I won’t pretend to fully understand the place. But I’m sure I get South Africa far more, and with more nuance and detail, than the vast majority of Americans. So, allow me to tell you something about that beautiful country.
I don’t know how many times I’ve found myself at the listening end of roughly the same sequence of stories, more or less, from always white, usually but not always male, generally older, always Afrikaner (that is one of the cultures) there. There are several stories you hear again and again. The way this white South African lady killed a black with a rigged right side mirror on her backie. The way some blacks hid under the leaves to hijack a white driver but got run over several times instead. And so on and so on.
Make no mistake, South Africa, at the time I was there, before, and since, has had more than its share of brutal crime. The place is a real mess. Large swaths of the society have a huge percentage of fetal alcohol syndrome because wineries paid employees in “tots” (drinks) rather than money. Poverty is deep. The rich and the poor tend to be very far apart. International outrage about apartheid was significantly larger in magnitude than international help after apartheid. And so on.
But the story that Donald Trump is trying to sell, about the violent attacks on white land owners and the taking of their land, is nothing other than yet another steaming pile of shit dished out but post Apartheid angry white supremacists, and picked up and amplified by Fox News.
There have been a lot of hurricanes in the Eastern Pacific, none of which hit the west coast. There have been an average to somewhat below average number of hurricanes in the Atlantic. Predictions that this would be a slightly above-average Atlantic season have been replaced by predictions that it will be a slightly below average season, given the high (ca 75%) chance of an El Nino forming later in the year.
Meanwhile, it is easy to forget that the United States spans a third hurricane basin. Hawaii is out there in the middle of the Pacific, but in an area that Hurricanes actually tend to avoid.
But not right now. Hurricane Lane is likely to either directly strike or come very close to one or more of the islands of Hawaii, as a Category 4 hurricane.
The details are complicated because Lane is turning around the same time that the storm is bearing down on the island state. Below is the current info from the National Hurricane Center.
Hurricane Lane is centered as of 2 a.m. HST (8 a.m. EDT) about 230 miles (370 km) south-southwest of Kailua-Kona and about 335 miles (540 km) south of Honolulu. On the forecast track, the center of Lane will move very close to or over the main Hawaiian Islands later today through Friday. Maximum sustained winds are near 130 mph (215 km/h) with higher gusts – a powerful category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Some weakening is forecast during the next day or so, with more significant weakening thereafter. Lane is expected to remain a hurricane as it approaches the islands.
A Hurricane Warning continues for Oahu, Maui County (including the islands of Maui, Lanai, Molokai and Kahoolawe) and Hawaii County. Preparations to protect life and property should be rushed to completion this morning. A Hurricane Watch continues for Kauai County, including the islands of Kauai and Niihau.
Here are the latest KEY MESSAGES:
1. Lane will pass dangerously close to the main Hawaiian Islands as a hurricane Thursday and Friday, and is expected to bring damaging winds. These winds can be accelerated over and downslope from elevated terrain, and will be higher in high rise buildings.
2. The slow movement of Lane also greatly increases the threat for prolonged heavy rainfall and extreme rainfall totals. This is expected to lead to life-threatening flash flooding and landslides over all Hawaiian Islands.
3. Large and damaging surf can be expected along exposed shorelines, especially along south and west facing coasts, with localized storm surge exacerbating the impacts of a prolonged period of damaging surf.
4. Do not focus on the exact forecast track or intensity of Lane, and be prepared for adjustments to the forecast. Although the official forecast does not explicitly indicate Lane’s center making landfall over any of the islands, this could still occur. Even if the center of Lane remains offshore, severe impacts could still be realized as they extend well away from the center.For storm information specific to your area, please monitor products issued by the National Weather Service office in Honolulu – www.prh.noaa.gov/pr/hnl/
The next complete advisory will be issued by NOAA’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center in Honolulu at 5 a.m. HST (11 a.m. EDT)
The book, now on Kindle cheap. You may not remember the movie, but if you do, you probably want the book.
Logan’s Run: Vintage Movie Classics (A Vintage Movie Classic)
The bestselling dystopian novel that inspired the 1970s science-fiction classic starring Michael York, Jenny Agutter, and Richard Jordan.
In 2116, it is against the law to live beyond the age of twenty-one years. When the crystal flower in the palm of your hand turns from red to black, you have reached your Lastday and you must report to a Sleepshop for processing. But the human will to survive is strong—stronger than any mere law.
Logan 3 is a Sandman, an enforcer who hunts down those Runners who refuse to accept Deep Sleep. The day before Logan’s palmflower shifts to black, a Runner accidentally reveals that he was racing toward a goal: Sanctuary. With this information driving him forward, Logan 3 assumes the role of the hunted and becomes a Runner.
As I noted here, we can expect to see very few convictions in the Trump-Russian scandal.
In the recent Paul Manafort trial, we now know that 11 out of 12 jurors saw the evidence to convict Manafort as overwhelming. They wanted to convict him on 18 counts. One single jury, this one, the one I warned you about, the deplorable Trump Is My Savior juror, held out on each one. Much of the time spent deliberating was spent with the 11 sane jurors trying to convince this one deplorable juror to do the right thing.
We are lucky there were any convictions at all in this trial. And, now that everyone knows that this strategy works so well (getting off on 10 felonies that you definitely committed) you can be sure that any Deplorable in the future who would otherwise try to get off jury duty in the Southern District of New York or Washington or nearby districts will not do so, just in case they get to be the wrench in the works of democracy.
Read the details of an interview with a juror, here. The interviewed juror is herself a Trump supporter, and didn’t want, she claims, Manafort to be guilty. But the evidence on all counts was overwhelming. So that’s good news, in that she did the right thing, or tried to. But if you listen to her comments carefully, you can see her treading fairly near a line that, once crossed, does not convict the guilty as long as they are Republicans, or supported by Trump.
This was not a trial about Trump, or the campaign, or the Russians. The interviewed jury actually referred to the consideration of a Trump-Russian scandal as “shenanigans,” suggesting that if she was on THAT jury she would enter the courtroom with a strong bias to acquit. As I say here, and as this particular interview confirms.
Some will suggest that no, this is not a problem of Deplorables being everywhere, but rather, one single juror perhaps being paid off by Manafort. I wouldn’t say that is impossible, and it may well be true. But when you hear hoof beats, your first guess should be horses, not zebras. One in three Americans, based on polling data, have attitudes that predict that on a jury testing the evidence in a case against Trump, his family, or anyone in his white house, will acquit. Perhaps the only way to see justice in this situation is to try to convict every single one of them on financial (or other) crimes unrelated to the Russian-Trump conspiracy. That wouldn’t really be justice, but it would be better than this country rubber stamping a Trump style presidency by doing nearly nothing to stop it officially.
There are two people who should be ashamed of themselves (other than the members of the Trump-Putin gang).
1) The juror in question here; and
2) You, if you are one of the vast majority of Americans who see getting out of jury duty as your sacred duty. It isn’t. Getting ON jury duty is what you should be doing if you have any love for civilization.
I’m done with quietly watching people in on-line communities proudly exchanging stories and information about getting out of jury duty. Don’t do that in front of me.
I put this here to note that this event and this interview is a little more than special.
This is a fun video. It includes a few pronunciation sweeps we don’t usually see.
Do you know the phrase “The furnace is broken, call Earl the oilman!” Which, in certain American English dialects sound like “… Oil the earlman.”
And you know “Paak the caa in Haavaaad yaaad” form the dialect that the “r’s” except the ones that aren’t there. When I lived in that region, I need to learn the specific dialect of Somerville Mass, otherwise it was impossible to do certain things like get off the bus. If you are in the back of the bus, you yell out “rear door” so the driver will open the back door for you. But if it doesn’t sound like “Reaa dohaaa” you will miss your stop.
I’m told I have a thick dialect. Amanda and I were at a restaurant the other day, and for reasons I can’t remember, the region of birth of the waiter and everyone else came up. He said to me, “you’re from New York, right?” and I said, “Yes, how did you know?” and Amanda and the waiter broke out laughing. I checked to see if I was wearing a hat or T-shirt that said something on it, but I wasn’t.
OK here’s another one:
I’ll tell you two Minnesota dialect stories. First, I’ll mention that Minnesota itself has multiple dialects, and at least one of them runs well into Wisconsin, but not Milwaukee or the cities down near Chicago.
When I first moved to Minnesota, I got a local friend who ended up showing me around the Twin Cities (mainly Minneapolis), showing me the ropes and all that. I noticed she had certain mannerisms of speech other than the usual Minnesota accent. I didn’t hear these things from anyone else, so I figured it was just her.
Then, I met my wife, years later, and got to know a lot of people in the western Suburbs. Eventually I realized that my wife and my friend had the same mannerisms. Turns out this was a eastern Plymouth/Golden Valley accent, pretty much developed in the Robinsdale school district (Neil Armstrong High).
One of my first times out state (the increasingly considered no-no-term for “rural Minnesota”) and which is roughly like “up state” in New York, this happened. We had been up to Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi (and no, “Itasca” is meant to sound a little Indian but it is actually derived clumsily from the Latin, something about a head). Up there, you don’t meet too many local people, and in fact, I didn’t. But on the way back, we stopped for a brat at a local S.A. (all hardware stores, grocery stores, and gas stations in Minnesota are also little restaurants, or at least, were when I first moved here, but many have dropped that tradition with the arrival of fast food). Anyway, I ordered the brats, gave the young girl (maybe 15) the money, and she returned my change. Then, she said as I was leaving, “Gudatcha!”
I said, “what?”
She said, “Gudatcha!”
That happened a few times. Finally I smiled and said, “you too” and left.
Eventually, I figured out what it meant. Can you?
I’ll end with this one. It is a classic. NOT WORK SAFE MAY BE OFFENSIVE
I have a feeling we are going to need this tidbit of grammar with increasing frequency over coming weeks or months.
It is said by grammar mavens that pleaded is more correct, but pled seems to be more often used in spoken language, and frankly, sounds way better to me.
I google N-gramed (or is that “Ned-gram”) the two words and got this interesting chart:
So, pleaded wins by a mile.
But what about that long term change over time? I’m thinking this means that the word “plea” in all its forms was being used in regular English text (“I plea you give no truck to the wasterel, me’lord,” and the like), where now it is mostly used in phrases like “Trump’s lawyer and fixer, wise-guy Michael Cohen, pled guilty to helping Trump fix the election,” or “Trump’s former campaign manager and well known wise guy Paul Manafort could have pleaded guilty and gotten a deal, but he may have been more concerned with being rubbed out by the Russians than about a few years in jail” or “Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, pled guilty rather than stand trial” and so on.
Anyway, pleaded is more correct, pled is preferred. Now you know. Now, you can no longer plea ignorance on this question.
The Manafort conviction, of a sundry eight counts of tax evasion and bank fraud, seems like a big deal because there was so much fanfare, because the judge made a fool of himself a number of times, and because the jury took a while to decide. But the bigger event today was probably Cohen’s guilty plea to charges of tax evasion and election violations. That took much less time, no trial, presumably a bargain struck.
Here’s the important part: Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s fixer and wise guy, pled guilty to paying off two women to keep them silent about affairs they had had with Trump, in coordination with Trump. Cohen explicitly said that he participated in this silencing arrangement “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” So there you go.
Cohen will probably spend 3 years or so in the stir for that set of guilty pleas (which also involved tax fraud). It remains to be seen how much the former candidate, who apparently colluded, to use a certain term, with Cohen in that matter, will spend in prison. Keep in mind, of course, that the federal election law violation may be only a small part of Cohen’s likely multi-year conviction.
Tomorrow morning is a morning you may want to saunter down to the local news stand and pick up a copy of any respectable national newspaper. The front page is going to have an interesting set of headlines on it, I’ll wager.
Here’s an internet version for you in case you don’t actually have a news stand down the street:
In order to make such a momentous decision, I insist that you learn the very interesting evolutionary biology behind it.
Start with this paragraph:
But for modern medical science, a baby’s sex would remain unknown until birth. But many mothers today know long beforehand whether a baby will be male or female. Routine ultrasound scans reveal fetal genitals a third of the way through pregnancy, and genetic tests identify sex even earlier. Yet basic questions remain. Is a baby’s sex like coin tossing, or can the male:female ratio be skewed? If sex bias occurs, does it happen through sperm sorting before fertilization or mortality differences in the womb after conception?
Then, CLICK HERE to read the rest of the story, by Robert Martin, expert on such things.
The Birthday of the World: And Other Stories
For more than four decades, Ursula K. Le Guin has enthralled readers with her imagination, clarity, and moral vision. The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and five Hugo and five Nebula Awards, this renowned writer has, in each story and novel, created a provocative, ever-evolving universe filled with diverse worlds and rich characters reminiscent of our earthly selves. Now, in The Birthday of the World, this gifted artist returns to these worlds in eight brilliant short works, including a never-before-published novella, each of which probes the essence of humanity.
Here are stories that explore complex social interactions and troublesome issues of gender and sex; that define and defy notions of personal relationships and of society itself; that examine loyalty, survival, and introversion; that bring to light the vicissitudes of slavery and the meaning of transformation, religion, and history.
The first six tales in this spectacular volume are set in the author’s signature world of the Ekumen, “my pseudo-coherent universe with holes in the elbows,” as Le Guin describes it — a world made familiar in her award-winning novel The Left Hand of Darkness. The seventh, title story was hailed by Publishers Weekly as “remarkable . . . a standout.” The final offering in the collection, Paradises Lost, is a mesmerizing novella of space exploration and the pursuit of happiness.
In her foreword, Ursula K. Le Guin writes, “to create difference-to establish strangeness-then to let the fiery arc of human emotion leap and close the gap: this acrobatics of the imagination fascinates and satisfies me as no other.” In The Birthday of the World, this gifted literary acrobat exhibits a dazzling array of skills that will fascinate and satisfy us all.
The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos
The bestselling author of The Elegant Universe and The Fabric of the Cosmos tackles perhaps the most mind-bending question in modern physics and cosmology: Is our universe the only universe?
There was a time when “universe” meant all there is. Everything. Yet, a number of theories are converging on the possibility that our universe may be but one among many parallel universes populating a vast multiverse. Here, Briane Greene, one of our foremost physicists and science writers, takes us on a breathtaking journey to a multiverse comprising an endless series of big bangs, a multiverse with duplicates of every one of us, a multiverse populated by vast sheets of spacetime, a multiverse in which all we consider real are holographic illusions, and even a multiverse made purely of math–and reveals the reality hidden within each.
Using his trademark wit and precision, Greene presents a thrilling survey of cutting-edge physics and confronts the inevitable question: How can fundamental science progress if great swaths of reality lie beyond our reach? The Hidden Reality is a remarkable adventure through a world more vast and strange than anything we could have imagined.
This is about birds in the Mohave desert. I covered it over on 10,000 Birds, where I write now and then.
I hear President Obama is reading Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World–and Why Things Are Better Than You Think
When asked simple questions about global trends?what percentage of the world’s population live in poverty; why the world’s population is increasing; how many girls finish school?we systematically get the answers wrong. So wrong that a chimpanzee choosing answers at random will consistently outguess teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates, and investment bankers.
In Factfulness, Professor of International Health and global TED phenomenon Hans Rosling, together with his two long-time collaborators, Anna and Ola, offers a radical new explanation of why this happens. They reveal the ten instincts that distort our perspective?from our tendency to divide the world into two camps (usually some version of us and them) to the way we consume media (where fear rules) to how we perceive progress (believing that most things are getting worse).
Our problem is that we don’t know what we don’t know, and even our guesses are informed by unconscious and predictable biases.
It turns out that the world, for all its imperfections, is in a much better state than we might think. That doesn’t mean there aren’t real concerns. But when we worry about everything all the time instead of embracing a worldview based on facts, we can lose our ability to focus on the things that threaten us most.
Meanwhile, Mike Haubrich and I just recorded the next Ikonokast Podcast and our guest recommended The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters
Technology and increasing levels of education have exposed people to more information than ever before. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything: with only a quick trip through WebMD or Wikipedia, average citizens believe themselves to be on an equal intellectual footing with doctors and diplomats. All voices, even the most ridiculous, demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.
Tom Nichols’ The Death of Expertise shows how this rejection of experts has occurred: the openness of the internet, the emergence of a customer satisfaction model in higher education, and the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, among other reasons. Paradoxically, the increasingly democratic dissemination of information, rather than producing an educated public, has instead created an army of ill-informed and angry citizens who denounce intellectual achievement. When ordinary citizens believe that no one knows more than anyone else, democratic institutions themselves are in danger of falling either to populism or to technocracy or, in the worst case, a combination of both. An update to the 2017breakout hit, the paperback edition of The Death of Expertise provides a new foreword to cover the alarming exacerbation of these trends in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election. Judging from events on the ground since it first published, The Death of Expertise issues a warning about the stability and survival of modern democracy in the Information Age that is even more important today.
