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I keep failing to write. Today I feel very tired.

Last weekend was a bit of a quiet weekend, but we went to a colleague's house for a friends and family get-together.

There are a lot of school spring events. The spring concert was Thursday morning, and Erica was excited about field day on Friday.

Erica's friend George had a bit of a birthday get-together on Wednesday and is having a bigger party at Assembly Square Legoland today.

National news continues to be a complete scramble, but in local news, the MBTA (with the help of federal law enforcement) is cleaning house after several employees were involved in a time-card-fraud scam that involved faking Red Line track inspections.
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For Erica's school break, we fist spent six nights in Baltimore, meeting up with my parents there. Then for the second half, Julie flew back to Boston for some focus time, while I took a road trip with Erica and my parents back to Cleveland and spent a few extra days working there.

Was a really great trip. Erica, Julie, and I got in a side-trip to DC with Melissa, Erica got a chance to see the National Portrait Gallery. We got a return trip to Clavel in Baltimore and the new Edwins location at Nighttown in Cleveland. Julie and Erica and I got in a side-trip to DC with just Melissa, visited the National Portrait Gallery and Botanical Garden. Went swimming with the kids in the hotel pool. Seeing Erica swim really amplified Simon's interest in getting in the water. The weather in Baltimore was great, and it's such a lovely city.

Had a nice visit to Cleveland, too. Erica did a bunch of fun activities with my parents. We got in a visit to West Side Market and to the new Edwins location at Nighttown (very sad that left Shaker Square, but at least the Nighttown site is seeing someone make good use of it). There's a new cafe in Shaker Square, and at the very least it's a big step up from Bigby. It's a nice place to hang out! I walked in and the manager there recognized me because he was in the same sixth grade class.

And then on the national stage, things have just been scary and nuts! The administration rendering people to Salvadoran concentration camps in direct contravention of court orders. A 9-0 SCOTUS ruling against the administration, which the administration is defying and lying about. The administration trying to coerce more SDNY prosecutors into denouncing the now spiked case against Eric Adams, resulting in more resignations. (Just letting Adams off scott-free, as in fact happened, is not enough for the administration's pro-corruption agenda.) Tariffs were backed off to levels that are at the very least the most consequential change in trade policy and tax policy within the last many decades. And I'm probably 37 even more consequential things.

I finished reading Princess Academy to Erica and thought it was really good (the real superpower is education all along). Started reading the first Percy Jackson and the Olympians book, The Lightning Thief as her next bedtime-reading selection. We've also been watching the new Anne of Green Gables anime adaptation, Anne Shirley, together. It's really charming, Erica is enjoying it a lot.

On my own, I'm watching the last season of The Handmaid's Tale and I started watching The Bear.

Erica has been excited about a potential family trip to Japan, which I have penciled in for next year. Erica's been studying Japanese on Duolingo for the last number of weeks. (I'm well aware of the limitations of Duolingo, but she's having fun with it, and it seems a decent taste of a lot of aspects of language learning.) Erica got us to write some cards for my host parents, my host mom wrote back and sent Erica some really adorable picture books, which should be great kana practice (and are fortunately/unfortunately probably just about right for my current reading level).

Local election season seems to have started in Somerville, the primary for a contested mayoral election is in September. Current at-large city councilor Jake Wilson came to my door today canvassing in person. He's probably my favorite of the candidates at this point.
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This week is the week that the President decided to crash the economy intentionally, and it worked! Trump's new tariff policy seems to be totally bonkers, and predicated on the belief that trade deficits are the real de facto tariffs (he's described the US as "subsidizing" its trading partners before, so that's the other side of the same coin). The fact that the allegedly "reciprocal" tariffs are not reciprocal of other actual tariffs makes it hard to use as negotiating leverage, and the administration seems to believe several mutually-contradictory things about them (e.g. dropping tariffs will be negotiating leverage that will get other countries to make concessions and the tariffs will generate huge amounts of long-term revenue; the tariffs will cause a huge amount of import substitution and expand domestic production and the tariffs won't substantially raise prices).

There seems to be an assumption that trade deficits are the real in-and-of-themselves bad thing, equivalent to giving money away. But of course trade deficits are not giving money away, it's trade: You get goods and services in return! If there's one inclination of Trump's so deep that it seems like ideological consistency, it's that he's deeply skeptical of the idea of anything being positive-sum. He also seems to think have a Peronist or Maoist view that the country would be better off producing everything itself, and furthermore that domestic production will rise up automatically if imports are crushed. Crashing the economy will in fact reduce imports, but it could be short-term pain now for long-term pain later.

Meanwhile, people whose perception of economic reality seems to have become truly deranged under the Biden administration are jubilant. Crashing the economy is just revealing the hidden truth that the economy has been bad all along. That elation will last until... well, we'll see.

What else, let's talk something more local, more pastoral. Spring weather has finally arrived. It's nice to see all the birds singing in the neighborhood again. We've seen a woodpecker working insects out of some of the nearby trees, a variety of eagles. There have been some owls sighted nearby, I haven't seen one but I think I've heard one a few times.

Erica's friend George's grandpa visited her class a few weeks back. Meant to write about that but didn't. He's currently the poet laureate of the town of Arlington. The class had a good time reading some poetry and writing poems together. Meant to mention that earlier, but missed it.

I read The Two Princesses of Bamarre by Gail Carson Levine to Erica, and to continue the theme (sort of), we're now reading Princess Academy by Shannon Hale. Both recommendations/gifts from my sister.
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It seems the Republican plan to crash the economy intentionally is underway for real now. But of course the GOP has really become the party of economic heterodoxy: Cut taxes to lower deficits, cut interest rates to lower inflation, increase unemployment to raise wages, tariffs on our closest trading partners to boost manufacturing. Great ideas lads, what else you got?

Meanwhile, Europe seems on the verge of a broader war. JD Vance and Trump blew up negotiations with Ukraine, allegedly this is Zelensky's fault for insufficient pandering, as usual everyone has moral agency except Republicans.

In more trivial but possibly related matters, Boston Organics closed last week. It was bought by GrubMarket in 2022. Their prices went up pretty substantially this year. Between that and continued competition (HelloFresh was somewhat surprisingly promoting their business by canvassing door-to-door the other week), I guess they didn't retain enough of a customer base to keep going.

Any good news? Well, if you need a distraction, Frieren is on Netflix now. It's an incredibly good show (it jumped all the way to the top of the highest rated shows on MyAnimeList, which is no small feat; it's definitely one of my all-time favorites, I discussed it here before). If you like the fantasy genre at all and haven't caught it yet, maybe now's the opportunity to give it a try.
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This week is Erica's school break, and I took Erica to Cleveland to visit my parents while Julie gets a focus week back at home. Had the Monday holiday off, but the rest of the week was "working from elsewhere" for me.

Last Sunday, our travel day, was very snowy overnight and rain and heavy clouds all day in Boston. Bad weather in Cleveland, too. As a result, our 10AM flight became a 4PM flight. Erica had bought a matching sweater-and-sweatpants set with her allowance at Target on Sunday which she wanted especially for the trip, she definitely got the most use out of her airport loungewear. Still, overall it was a reasonably pleasant travel day. And it was in a way lucky that we had to wear boots in the morning to wade to our airport ride, and thus had to have our boots and couldn't neglect to pack them. It's been snowy all week here, so we've been wading through snow all week.

There was another brief delay in our flight as the plane had to do an abrupt go-around before landing on the second attempt. It was a pretty dramatic maneuver, and someone a few rows back form us was overcome by motion sickness and lost their lunch. But of course it could've been worse.

On Monday, we got to catch up with Dan and Anne and Isaac and baby Naomi, who has doubled in size since I last saw her and become extremely engaged and vocal. I also got to catch up with Markos Monday evening, played a bit of kitchen table Magic. Took me back, though I kept embarrassingly misreading the cards.

On Tuesday evening, we went to a concert at CIM featuring Olga and Daniel Kaler with Michelle Bushkova. Was really great. Had to duck out at intermission because of kid bedtime (but had thought that might be the case).

On Wednesday evening, we saw a "Picasso and Paper" special exhibit at the Cleveland Museum of Art.

On Thursday evening, we went out to dinner at Tita Flora's, a Filipino restaurant which was really good.

Friday evening, had a nice Shabbat dinner at home and my Uncle Jonathan came over.

And of course Erica has been up to all sorts of activities with my parents during my workdays.

For lunch, I made excursions to a bunch of places nearby, mostly on Larchmere. I did get to Michael's Diner in Shaker Square, which I love (it's a wonderful, classic train-station diner). But Shaker Square does seem, as always, a bit cursed. A new cafe will be opening in the again-vacant cafe spot soon, at least. Brandon Chrostowski's restaurants Edwins Restaurant and Edwins Too closed on Monday, relocating to the former Nighttown jazz club space. Didn't get to go there again, but fancy for a random weekday, but at least I did get to go a few times. Lovely memories. I'm sure they will make the most of the Nighttown space, too, it's a great space. I did go to the other Edwins restaurant in the area, their bakery and deli venture, which as far as I know is staying put. Had an excellent pastrami on rye. The restaurants are all run by Chrostowski's nonprofit, which has a mission of helping former prisoners with reentry support and job training in the hospitality industry.

Hopefully tomorrow's return trip will go smoothly. Weather will be better this time at least.
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One sad note from last week was news of the death of Donald Shoup, a titan of urban planning. I discussed his book, The High Cost of Free Parking, on my other blog many years ago. Shoup's studies centered around the thesis that suburban city-planning practices amount to a staggeringly high subsidy paid to drivers, especially as those spread back into urban areas. That subsidy is hidden because it doesn't come as cash transfers but via land use, either through direct allocation of public land, or through regulation of private land use (in particular parking minimums).

This car-centered design for some not great land-use choices in suburban areas, too: In terms of beauty and utility, no one enjoys a parking desert. But when you carry those practices back to urban areas, the subsidy becomes insane. Think of the costs of storing a car, for example, and you get the idea of the kind of value drivers are getting from space dedicated to roads and, especially, free-to-use parking.

This subsidy is high enough to leave the usual market tradeoffs between different transportation alternatives totally deranged, and the ones that are no out-of-pocket cost to drivers get a little further distorted by the "psychology of free". For example, the book describes how an alarming percentage of traffic in some areas is not transit between destinations but rather "cruising" in search of a free street parking spot. In some cases, this car subsidy distorts the market enough that alternatives aren't available. Or alternatives are outright prohibited, for example when someone who would prefer to buy an apartment without parking is unable to do so.

Shoup's central policy proposal was to increase the price of parking until it's only mostly full, similar with related goods. Public funds raised this way can be spent on a variety of things, effectively redirecting the subsidy, presumably to better uses than "more circling the block" or "more sitting in traffic".

This sort of stuff has been in the news lately with NYC's adoption of congestion pricing, which had some immediate, fairly dramatic benefits for drivers and non-drivers alike. Something that another, worse Donald is trying to crush. (Bike lanes, too, for good measure.) In the view of this sort of "conservatism", there is no concern for the effectiveness of markets or the rationality of policy tradeoffs, there is no subsidy too high for the favored mainstream. Despite this continuous opposition, the struggle for sound urban policy and real renewal has come a long way. I hope Donald Shoup's influence on the future of American cities far outlives Donald Trump's.
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DEI seems to be getting a lot of attention as the current administration's stalking horse, including in the aftermath of a deadly plane crash. It seems the usual pattern goes something like this:

1. "Racism and sexism are non-issues now, we need to get rid of this DEI stuff and replace it with hiring on pure merit!"
2. "Every time you see someone who's not a white man in basically any job, you call them a DEI hire and assume they're not qualified, doesn't that sort of undermine that premise?"
3. "But I wouldn't assume that if it weren't for all this DEI lowering standards."
4. The fact that people other than white men are hired for basically any job is used as evidence that DEI hasn't been rooted out hard enough, return to step 1.

(In the meantime, the current administration is working hard to restore their favored system of getting their preferred people into key jobs, nepotism.)
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It's been a week where I've been too late to write before I'm really tired.

Once of Trump's criminal cases came to (technically) an actual close this week, with a sentence of him getting told that he's been a very naughty boy and they hope that gives him something to think about while he's President. So the only thing that Trump gets epsilon more than zero consequences for is the least serious crime for which he's been criminally indicted: Committing petty frauds to be slightly more effective in covering up a scandal that would have sunk any previous Presidential candidate, in the immediate aftermath of another scandal that would have sunk any previous Presidential candidate. It's too crazy to contemplate.

I've been playing a lot of The Outer Wilds this week. Definitely a great game, I recommend it and recommend people play it as spoiler-free as possible. It's an exploration-focused game, and one of the interesting things about it is just how dedicated it is to knowledge being the thing that progresses you through the game: Not items, not ability upgrades, just knowledge. Fascinating setting and a great sci-fi yarn. (And a musical motif that is now perpetually running through my head.)

I've been watching some of the runs from AGDQ this week, and that's been a lot of fun, too.
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It's a new year.

Trip to Texas over winter break went all right. Wonderful Christmas together. Fun time with the cousins. Took a trip to the Fort Worth Stockyards to see the longhorn cattle drive, went to the Crayola Experience (like the Lego Discovery Center but swap blocks for crayons) on Erica's birthday.

Transitions impend. The Biden administration limps along as the lamest of ducks. Biden commuting the death sentences of most of the federal death row was the most notable good bit. Leaving a few exceptions out (the surviving Boston Marathon Bomber, e.g.) was, well, I can understand the choice. I would have preferred a more unequivocal rejection of the death penalty. But if Biden thinks it should be reserved for a narrower set of cases and grants clemency consistent with that, it's a step in the right direction.

I finished watching The Magicians before that show departs from Netflix in a few days. I'm glad I finished that and ambivalent about having started. It was at least an interesting take on its source material. I read Seasonal Fears, the sequel to Seanan McGuire's Middlegame, another dip in the highly-specific alchemical conspiracy American road-trip novel genre. Was good. I also read Nostalgebraist's latest bit of web-fiction, The Apocalypse of Herschel Schoen in which a mad prophet discovers the true meaning of Christmas. Like the author's other work, it's very interesting and well written.
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Went home with Julie and Erica for Thanksgiving. Quick trip this time, but was great to see the family. Melissa's family was in town, too.

This year I am thankful that of all the terrors at humanity's doorstep, some of them have been put off so far, and some could continue to.

Best reading from this weekend is Noah Smith's post No, You Are Not on Indigenous Land, a really cogent takedown of (including nominally-"decolonial") ethnonatialism.

The latest political news is Joe Biden's blanket pardon of his son, Hunter Biden. It is sad that we have come to this, and despicable that Biden is reneging on his promises. Unlike Charles Kushner, the father of Trump's son-in-law who he pardoned for witness tampering and then nominated for an ambassadorship, Hunter Biden surely wouldn't have been prosecuted but for his association with the President in question. But say, maybe Biden should just go ahead and pardon the January 6 criminals himself at this point. Surely they are more worthy: After all, not only their prosecutions but also their crimes would not have happened but for Trump.
l33tminion: ...you're &%$@ing kidding me, right? (Jon Stewart)
Americans have voted and it seems our President will once again be this guy. A lot of it seems to come down to "when there's inflation, some Americans will just flip the lever". (People hate unemployment, too, when it happens to them, but inflation happens to everyone.) But lot of it comes down to (however little it conforms to my taste) "Trump is liked, and Harris is not". There was a lot of ticket-splitting this election in Trump's favor: North Carolina is most notable for Dems winning five of six state-wide races while Harris lost, Dem Senators won Michigan and Wisconsin while Harris lost. It seems like Casey will lose Pennsylvania, but that remains as of yet too close to call long after the Presidential race in the state was called for Trump. Arizona hasn't been called, but Trump is likely to win and Lake likely to lose.

Harris 2024 did worse than Biden 2020 among virtually every cross-section. It was broad-based. Gen X have taken their place on the Boomer-throne as the generation that utterly prevents America from having anything nice. (Seniors have actually cooled a hair on Republicans because they might actually gut Social Security and Medicare this time and also tried to kill them all for the sake of the economy during COVID.) But Gen Z men in particular are also taking a hard-right turn. With luck like this America's going to end up with SK-level gender politics, which is real, real worrying.

Not doing a "reasons why Harris lost" breakdown (or even a "why the polls underestimated Trump"; they did by a little, but it doesn't seem that interesting, likely voter models just continually struggle with the guy's unique appeal). Nate Silver does a good enough job with that. Some of it's real "what can you possibly do about that?" stuff. Biden certainly should have stepped away from running for reelection much earlier. (And maybe he should've made a different choice for VP.) I'm hearing second-hand that some people cited the lack of a competitive Dem primary as a cause for them voting Trump over Harris, and that seems an insane (and probably dishonest) reason to prefer Trump over Harris. But people hate having the establishment govern their choices, and there are clearly no sly sophisticates trying to arm-twist anyone into thinking that voting for Trump is a good idea. Biden saved America from the disaster that was Trump, only to deliver America right back into the disaster that is Trump.

Harris should have gone on Rogan, I guess. In hindsight, seems like it couldn't have made matters worse.

2025 seems poised to be worse than 2017. And the years of the first Trump administration were a mess, despite starting in relatively sunny circumstances. This isn't the first Trump administration, but it is the first Presidential administration of the Party of Trump. This Trump administration won't (sometimes repeatedly) stock State, Defense, and Nat Sec posts with inveterate Trump-haters (apparently) who resist his (allegedly) brilliant ideas. Also, this Trump is really not holding it together physically or mentally and 2016 Trump didn't really have it together in the first place.

Moloch has seen its shadow and we're slated for four more years of chaos. Unfortunately, we will see how it goes.

Hollow Eve

Oct. 31st, 2024 09:54 pm
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Well, I got in a few days of regular writing before I dipped beneath the waves again.

Today is Halloween, and it's not even the scariest day in the next week. I really do want the madness to end. 2017-2020 was objectively nuts, and that was before the realignment within the Republican Party had really completed and Trump was still being arm-twisted into hiring people to important questions who resisted his dumbest ideas (a major restraint for someone so bad at in-person confrontation). Stuff like this is going to be hilarious if he loses (Four Seasons all over again), but for now I just can't deal with the fact that it's so close.

Took Erica trick-or-treating and she had a good time time, except for encountering someone in one of those stilt ghost costumes that she found completely terrifying. The weather was warm today, high of almost 80, so the evening was summery.

Work is very busy, and once again one of my more senior colleagues is changing teams. Too much churn this year.
l33tminion: ...you're &%$@ing kidding me, right? (Jon Stewart)
The quotes attributed to Trump in that Atlantic piece are just insane: "I need the kind of generals that Hitler had", "You guys [American soldiers] are all just killers", "It doesn't cost 60,000 bucks to bury a fucking Mexican!" [arguing why he should stiff the family of a murdered soldier whose funeral he'd offered to pay for]. It's all just lies, they'll say. People who say these things about Trump (people like his former chief of staff, other chief of staff, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary, other Defense Secretary, Vice President, Secretary of State, other Secretary of State, Secretary of the Navy, Secretary of Transportation, Secretary of Education, communications director, other communications director, other other communications director, various advisors, personal lawyer, White House lawyer, etc.) are just disloyal, deranged, and bad. (And Trump staffing his administration with so many such people reflects badly on anyone other than Trump himself.)

The whole thing is insane. It's insane this election even seems so close. And seems on pace to get even crazier. And for all I know it's just a lead-in to another nightmare Trump administration. (Looking back through my old posts a bit reminds me of just how chaotic it was, and also how much more I had to say in my writing.)
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As the election approaches, I continue to be filled with dread. The rhetoric from Trump and co is so much worse than it was in 2016. Which would've been kind of hard to imagine in 2016, but the "moderate Republicans" Trump felt he had to appeal to somewhat in 2016 are nonexistent now, at least as far as he's concerned.

The flood damage from the last hurricane was severe, the next hurricane looks terrifying. And it seems like the GOP will lie about and outright sabotage the federal response to any disaster because they believe an effective response would be to Harris's political advantage.

On the world stage, the now-year-long war between Israel and Hamas threatens to widen into a wider regional war. This reflection by Israeli-American historian Omer Bartov has been on my metaphorical desk for some time. I think it's insightful, though I don't have insight to add. I also want to share Scott Aaronson's post here and second his call for nations offering refugee status to those who seek to leave the conflict zone. (But I'm pretty much always in favor of more acceptance of refugees who seek to live their lives in peace.)

I really don't want another Trump Presidency. I really don't want to have to explain any of this.
l33tminion: fig. 1. America. (AMERICA!)
Well, didn't take long at all for me to get a face full of feathers. (Though much longer to get around to actually putting metaphorical pen to page.) Never bet against Pelosi!

I still don't like the panicky nature of the "hammer on the self-destruct button" ploy. The media gives Trump entirely too much of a pass, and seemed all in on making the Biden news instead of reporting it. It seemed like half the media wanted a Biden exit plan that was either "fantasy reality TV redo primary" (definitely not a thing) or "explode everything, month of chaos, followed by a repeat of '68" (very feasible, not a good idea). But the combination of Biden's insistence on a plan that was actually clearly better than the status quo and Pelosi's apparent ability to make that happen seems to have made the move go as well as it could have.

(I'm guessing that Pelosi had a carrot-and-stick sort of deal where the carrot was an orderly succession to presumptive-nominee Harris and the stick was who knows what but presumably something dramatic slated for the start of business on Monday. Plus having COVID and (I assume) feeling very not good probably put Biden in a "maybe I could do less" mood.)

Biden is loyal, and as the VP of an 81-year-old President, Harris was very much on the ticket to take that role if and when Biden stepped back or keeled over. So if he couldn't do it, Biden did not want her cast aside. Also, as a prosecutor, Harris is very capable of taking it to Trump, who is a liar, fraudster, cheat, and convicted criminal who surrounds himself with criminals.

Anyways, Dems who would have been fine with Biden seem to be happy to see the party suddenly surprisingly in array again. And as for the rest, well, while I can still argue that Biden is probably physically and mentally healthier than Trump by a lot of objective measures, that one shouldn't mistake Trump's manic nature for actual cognitive ability, that it's not a cover-up for an administration to be effective about mitigating the weaknesses of a leader who is strong overall, it's easier to just say, "Okay, Biden is gone, and Trump is real old and says crazy shit all the time and doesn't look like he's doing so hot!"

It's also great to see the Republicans in an absolute "no wait come back" panic, made worse by their terrible VP pick coming across as the sort of phony weirdo that he actually is.
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It's been a quiet two weeks without Erica away with grandparents, and now I have the place to myself a bit while Julie goes to pick Erica up and spend a long weekend hanging out with her family. So I have a moment to write and too much to note.

The news is all bad news, it seems.

Some crazy person took a shot at Trump (apparently a right-wing kid with the seeming motive of "wants to assassinate someone and it might not matter much who"), which is the sort of thing that inevitably makes a bad situation worse. I mean, it could have been even worse; little comfort for the loved ones of the bystander murdered in cold blood for absolutely no reason.

Judge Aileen Cannon took Justice Thomas's unsolicited advisory ruling in the Trump immunity case and ran with it, tossing the whole "Trump walked off with boxes and boxes of top secret documents and refused to return them" case on the basis of "special prosecutor, what's that, clearly not a thing". That will get overturned on appeal, but it's more delay.

The media has been fawning all over the Party of Trump's presentation of "unity" at their convention (the first in-person after Trump's utter takeover of the party was complete), without any context of how they're unifying: e.g. Haley utterly falling in line as a Trump loyalist, nothing material having changed about her view of Trump's utter unfitness for office and general moral turpitude, nothing motivating the change of heart except the exigencies of defeat. Trump picking J. "Trump is America's Hitler" D. Vance as his running mate. Vance once called out Trump as a con man, now he wants in on the con. (I called the Vance nom before it was official, the rest of the short list was too normal. "Normal" being very relative in this case. Trump doesn't mind taking someone who formerly had harsh words for him in that way, he likes to be magnanimous. He likes them debased.)

(Vance is a dangerous guy, too. He explicitly said he would have, if in Pence's shoes, which he's attempting to step into (why does this Trump guy need a new VP again?), just gone ahead and thrown out the votes of for starters everyone in Pennsylvania, plunging the US into (no exaggeration) the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War. He also advised Trump during his first term to fire vast swaths of civil servants and replace them with toadies, and to defy SCOTUS when it told him that was unlawful. Of course, that's now officially on the Trump "Project 2025" agenda and the "defying SCOTUS" part is a bit of a moot point because they've now explicitly said they're okay with it.)

Or what they're unifying behind: Literally holding up "Mass Deportation Now" signs, among other things. These are unimaginative people, but it's terrifying to imagine with any accuracy what the implementation of that plan would actually be like, or what would likely follow.

(Well, it was all fawning until Trump's speech, lol. Though he still got glowing reviews from some media outlets who apparently fell asleep for the second half. Like much of the audience.)

Meanwhile, the punditry is still salivating for a trip back to '68 on the Democrat side, which I maintain is still an insane reaction to "President is old and like 2% behind in the polls". Okay, maybe Biden will step down, and never bet against Pelosi, and Biden got COVID again (which I don't think is like "oh he got sick he's going to drop out" but it certainly could turn into something). Still, as the incumbent President and the person who won the primary, who can force Biden out? Will it really be a Party coup against the incumbent President by his own delegates? Sounds insane. Some of this is my anti-contrarian streak, "nothing ever happens", all this "who will be the nominee?" hand-wringing seems very late after the primary election. "How can Biden stay on after this, it's logically impossible!" The "Biden is nominee" betting market odds have bounced back up to 30% from a low of sub 20% as of now but that still seems insanely low to me. (Of course, maybe he'll drop tomorrow and I'll have to eat so much crow I'll be shitting feathers for weeks!)

That was all this week!

And then today like every Windows computer in the world crashed, bringing all the airlines etc. to their knees. That was also a thing.
l33tminion: fig. 1. America. (AMERICA!)
There's certainly things in my personal life that I should be writing about, but it's politics that has me in a mood. Due mainly to two things:

First, the July 1 SCOTUS ruling in Trump v. US held that Presidents have sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts. I was expecting some sort of hair-splitting decision on that one, but the ruling goes much further than I expected. Finding that Presidents have some sort of immunity from being prosecuted for how they exercise their core powers was expected. There are lots of cases where criminal immunity applies to how an official makes decisions within their discretion. For example, a judge can't be prosecuted for making an incorrect ruling or deciding on the wrong basis. Neither can a juror. Some state governors have that sort of criminal immunity written into their state constitutions (in a way that the federal Constitution, notably, does not).

But finding that such conduct is immune from being examined in prosecution of private crimes was not at all expected, and is wildly without basis in Constitutional text or precedent. To go back to the example of a judge or juror, neither can be prosecuted for making the wrong decision or deciding on the wrong basis. But either can be prosecuted for agreeing to use their power as their part in a criminal conspiracy, or for soliciting or accepting bribes. To give a more specific example, Rod Blagojevich was convicted in 2011 for attempting to sell Barack Obama's vacated Senate seat in 2008. Blagojevich definitely had the power to make that appointment and could not have been criminally prosecuted for appointing the wrong person or choosing an appointee for bad or stupid reasons. But he was held liable for soliciting bribes. (Up to the point where his sentence was commuted by Trump in 2020.)

The key element of crimes of corruption is usually unofficial (it's not an office-holder's job to solicit bribes), but deeply related to official conduct. It seems unreasonably difficult to prosecute someone for bribery, for example, while excluding evidence about the thing that they were bribed to do. The ruling makes it almost impossible to prosecute the President for their role in a criminal conspiracy, as long as their role involves corrupt use of their core powers (ordering the Justice Department to stop investigations or start baseless investigations, firing executive department employees who get in the way of the scheme, pardoning their co-conspirators (or themselves) for other Federal crimes). However, one could certainly construct scenarios where the solicitation and reception of bribes is also effectively accomplished by official action. International diplomacy, for example.

It seems to me that the DC and Georgia cases against Trump are likely to be shot, though that depends on the inevitable Supreme Court appeals later down the line that actually get to the question of what counts as an official act or not and what's able to override the "presumptive immunity" applied to the "outer perimeter" of Presidential duties. I'd guess it will end up with anything the President communicates to the Justice Department, politicians, or the general public, directly or indirectly, being immune. So no liability for the attempt to just toss state elections wholesale, as many as it takes, until the nominal election result is altered and the US is thrust into its worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War.

The classified documents case is less clear. It's not the job of the President to just walk off the job with boxes and boxes of classified documents. And the criminal charges are largely about stuff he did when he was not President (when he was given a zillion opportunities to sweep the whole thing under the rug and chose to lie and obstruct instead for at best completely petty personal reasons). Unfortunately, that case is before a judge who is willing to embrace absurdities for Trump's sake, and you could make absurd arguments like "you can't introduce evidence about which documents are classified, since declassifying documents is an official act; Trump says it's fine so you can't look into it, case dismissed".

The New York fraud conviction is delayed pre-sentencing, but maybe not shot. It's going to be hard for even this Supreme Court to argue that signing checks on behalf of Trump Org is part of Trump's job as President. But the decision definitely moves things towards the atextual world where the Supreme Court just rules whatever whenever and you can't predict what they'll rule on the basis of existing (broadly-construed) law (or, in that scenario, what the rest of the government will do as a result). So who knows.

Second, Biden had a bad debate and now the press is out for blood, taking his every verbal stumble as evidence of incapacity. This is a level of scrutiny Trump doesn't get because his voters don't seem to care, so there's no drama-driven incentive to even mention anything bad about Trump. I'd stand by a claim that Trump's physical and mental health is worse on relevant objective measures than Biden's. Trump is incontinent not only physically but mentally and morally. Trump never took the job seriously, half the "adults in the room" in his own previous cabinet think he's a dangerous maniac, and he's overtly planning to have an administration without that sort of person if he gets a second time around.

Democrats (certainly the too-online crowd) responded to the resulting media fusillade with wild pessimism about Biden's electoral prospects (polling averages have Biden trailing Trump by ~2% in the national popular vote, polling-based models seem to give Biden a 30-50% chance of winning, but this gets characterized as "Biden can't win") and wild optimism about the likely impact of emergency measures (some other candidates are polling marginally better, but there has to be some huge potential downsides to ejecting the incumbent President from the ticket post-primary). Harris is the obvious replacement, she's already on the ticket and standing in for the President if/when he's unable is the primary job she was elected for! But people who think Harris would make a good Biden replacement later already have that. If Harris should do more on the campaign trail, she can already do that. The people who think Harris is a necessary Biden replacement now are just going to throw her under the bus for not ejecting him sooner. Or whatever else. The idea of invoking the 25th is even more absurd. (Hey, didn't I go over this before?) It's for dealing with a President who is incapacitated, not situations like "the President is old" or "the debate went badly". It seems to me like the anti-Biden faction is hammering on the self-destruct button on the basis of thinking there's a better chance in the life pods. No way that can go wrong.
l33tminion: (Default)
Friday was Take Your Child to Work Day at Google, which Erica has been asking about for months, even before that was planned. So she was thrilled to go, and enjoyed the activities they planned for the day. Friday night we had dinner at the home of a potential collaborator for Julie's next business venture, it was nice to meet them and a lovely meal.

This weekend was packed with activities. Erica had her art lesson, she attended her friend George's birthday party, we went climbing. There was a Nepali Cultural Festival in Union Square Sunday evening, which was fun. I'm solo-parenting again, Julie is out of town Saturday for Monday for another conference, returning Wednesday.

In the news, it's pretty wild seeing Trump supporters in an absolute twist over Trump's criminal conviction. (Also, yeah, I called it!) The levels of cope are through the roof. I expect my anti-contrarianism will continue to serve me well here, since lots of people (including Trump) will want to spin this one as (or paranoidly worry that it will be) somehow good for Trump. No, bad things are actually bad, and being convicted of crimes is not, overall, a winning political strategy.

It's especially funny to see Trump supporters put forward the suggestion that the reason Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden only faced Republicans (Comey and Hur respectively) trying to put "there's no case" in the most negative possible terms is that Republicans were just too polite. Of course not! Also, basically all Democrats I've met are completely willing to bite the bullet that top politicians should face trial for any crime they've committed, where there's actual evidence that there was a crime that could plausibly prove that to a jury.
l33tminion: fig. 1. America. (AMERICA!)
I wanted to comment briefly on the Trump criminal trial(s) before the first one completes.

I think people are over-focusing on the possibility of a holdout hanging the jury. Possible, of course, but generally I think the outcome of a trial usually hangs on whether the case, the evidence, is good. And in this case, I think they have Trump dead to rights on the core elements of the crime, and even quite solid on the elements that make it a felony instead of a misdemeanor. (In NY law, falsification of business records is only a felony if you do it in service of some other sort of crime. Which seems kind of like a gimme, I mean it's hard to construct circumstances where someone is falsifying business records but it's not in service of something otherwise criminal. But they still want it to be a crime if the reason is unknown or someone is just doing that for the hell of it, I guess.) Trump's name is all over papers that say payments to Cohen were for "legal services", there's tons of documentary evidence and corroborated testimony that he knew it wasn't for that purpose. The retainer agreement the payments claim to be pursuant to just doesn't exist.

Don't put too much stake into polls saying that people would not vote for Trump if he's convicted of a felony, though. That's just a rationalization for ignoring all the relevant evidence if he's not convicted or it's not a felony or (expect the goalposts to move from there) it's not a "real" felony conviction because no jail-time or whatever. And to be clear, it is the sort of crime where "no jailtime" is a reasonably predictable outcome for someone in Trump's situation (elderly, nonviolent offense, no priors, literally was the President of the United States). And with any luck, Trump won't win the election in any case. But if he does serve any time in NY prison and does win, this will definitely create some of the most absurd legal scenarios possible.

It's so galling to keep in mind that this is a situation where the underlying conduct alone (as well as the conduct in the cover-up alone) would have been enough to sink the Presidential prospects of literally any previous US president. Trump is still the anti-candidate, it's a point of pride that he's awful. Hillary Clinton ran a shitty campaign, but she didn't lie about her opponent or his crowd.

And the other stuff is equally outlandish. Trump just walking out the the White House with boxes and boxes of top-secret stuff because he think it's cool and entertained the delusion that somehow the election would be takesied-backsied. Then throwing a fit when the government asked for the stuff back and gave repeated opportunities to quietly sweep the whole matter under the rug.

Plus the Jan 6 coup attempt. People will say it's absurd to characterize it that way, and it was absurd, but not because it wasn't a coup attempt. There's all this equivocation on the right between that and Democrats complaining about the unfairness of the 2000 election (where the election e.g. hinged alone on clearly anomalous and extremely likely erroneous votes for Buchanan in Palm Beach County) or complaining about the corruption of the 2016 election (where the Trump campaign was up to their ears in / actively welcoming help from Russia, including a bunch of crimes committed by both the Russians and members of the Trump campaign). The 2000 and 2016 complaints by the Democrats were not an illegal attempt, including criminal fraud and incitement, to just toss entire states' election after the legal process had already completed, starting with the closest and just going until it gets the job done. If Pence had gone along with it or the defense of the Capitol went just slightly worse, the US would have been thrust into its most severe constitutional crisis since the Civil War, no exaggeration.

It's possible that all this will catch up to Trump and he'll end up behind bars and it will be a weird piece of trivia how the Secret Service winds up managing all of that and Biden sweeps the election in a Reaganesque landslide. But it still remains possible that Trump will escape all meaningful consequences for all of this.

(Giuliani's still going to end up in jail somehow lol.)
l33tminion: Wandering into the wasteland (Exile)
I'll have time to talk about more prosaic things on the home front eventually, maybe, but to add to this year's parade of horrors, Israel is now at war, kicked off by Hamas launching a brutal series of cross-border terrorist attacks. It's been appalling to see some nominally-liberal people completely lose the plot with this, to the extent that they ever had it. Hamas are a bunch of nihilistic monsters. There's a difference between recognizing that injustice and desperation are conditions that bring out the worst in people (and help the already-worst people rise to prominence and power) and thinking that the worst in people is actually somehow good. Some means are never justified, and "ends justifies the means" arguments also require that the ends be both good and achievable. Hamas aren't going to accomplish any larger geopolitical end, and it would be terrible if they did.

I'm terrified that Israel is heading towards ends that are similarly genocidal. (Reports that the Netenyahu government actively bolstered Hamas and dismissed warnings about the current attack increase my fears that they are also willing or even hoping to have the situation tumble over some sort of precipice.) Hopes of a two-state solution seem dead, there's only so much de facto control someone can have over a territory before you start to seriously damage your ability to comprehend the situation by denying that de facto sovereignty, even if you were trying to hold space for some once-potential future.

Israel (the world, but especially Israel) has a powerful need to change the circumstances of the people in Gaza and the West Bank. As powerful, perhaps, as the Palestinians' need to change their own circumstances. Enacting that change through mass displacement or mass murder is simply not acceptable. Expecting that the status quo can be maintained while things get worse forever is not reasonable. It's too important to be about whose need is greater or who is more responsible. It's too important not to put the burden on whoever can get it done. Which includes Israel, if anyone. It sure seems like a task where having a functioning economy, an actual military, and pluralistic, democratic political institutions (to the extent that it does and can keep them) would help.

Then again, maybe no one is up to the task. It's easy to succumb to despair.

There is a powerful need in the world for justice and peace. You can't have the former without the latter. Good luck getting the latter without the former. An attitude of "we'll have peace after one last settling of scores" won't get it. There is some sense in which the wrongs of the past can never be righted, the past is immutable. At best you can right the wrongs of the present, a task that needs grounding in historical context but is not the same as turning back the clock.

Still, modern history does have its share of cases where vicious, hateful conflicts somehow managed to end. It's not impossible. It's maybe not impossible.
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