Sam's L33t Journal

It's weird observing this complete farce of a GOP primary process, where the front-runner doesn't bother to show up and the rest of the candidates don't have a plausible theory of why they should be the nominee aside from "maybe Trump will literally die" (and they can't even say that bit aloud). If we're at the unbelievable point point where it actually becomes acceptable in the GOP to say something like "President Trump was President for four years and never once took the job seriously, and also tried to spark the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War just as a long-shot bid to stay in power after losing the election," then we're at a point where the most likely nominee is some dark-horse candidate from the I Told You So Party. (Not likely in 2024. Odds are slim that Trump won't be the nominee of the Party of Trump, and that slim slice is mostly scenarios where Trump does literally die, with a thin sliver of "alive but in jail".)

Republicans have spent so much time covering for Trump's complete nonsense that they've become a bit delusional about Trump's mental acuity and slightly more (delusional in the opposite direction) than they would have been in some odd non-Trump-but-still-Biden counterfactual about Biden's. Trump apparently confusing Jeb(!) Bush with the one who got the US into the Iraq War just gets a kind of shrug. Any fears of Trump experiencing some sort of age-related mental decline just don't stand out when there's not that much to decline from, plus in an era of GOP governance-by-trolling it's all part of the bit. And I guess you can confuse a sort of generalized mania with sharpness.

(Still think it's entirely possible that the Republican Party will implode (still probably temporarily) post-2024 after a positively Reaganesque Biden landslide, but 2024 is going to be madness. And there's still the full range of possibilities, including another full dive into the Trump zone. Which is nuts.)

Senator Diane Fienstein died yesterday, and all I can say is I'm sorry she didn't get to enjoy a long retirement. The GOP will of course use the moment to extract whatever sliver of advantage they can from Dems momentarily losing their Senate majority. In that way, it's similar to the situation with RBG. It's worth noting that there's a difference between a failure to embrace realpolitikal concerns about timing your retirement in a way that doesn't completely screw over your political coalition, even though you're still up to the job, and a failure to leave your job before you're both no longer capable of doing the job and no longer capable of recognizing and responding rationally to the former.

This is going on about the same topic two posts in a row, but it's not often a former US President gets indicted on fairly obvious federal felonies (at least, not until that happens another two times later this year), crimes where the would be nigh-universal agreement about their seriousness only a few years (or, in some cases, days) ago.

I wish people who are suggesting that it's "too divisive" or whatever to prosecute Trump to really engage with the question of what should be done about an ex-President who overtly commits serious crimes out of a motivation that amounts to "who cares" or "I don't wanna".

(Someone on Twitter, who I fail to credit by forgetting exactly who they were, called this the "My. Boxes." theory of Trump's motivation in this case. Trump had fun showing around his cool official secret documents during his Presidency (which, I reiterate, he never took seriously), he wanted to continue doing that during his post-Presidency (whether or not he entertained delusions that the whole "not getting reelected" thing was on the verge of being straightened out). When NARA asked for stuff back, it all seemed like bureaucratic BS to Trump. He wondered why he couldn't just hide the documents, or get rid of the documents, or tell them to get bent, or get them to go away, anything that didn't involve handing over his collection.)

Trump's lack of seriousness in motive doesn't make the crime less serious in consequences. For one thing, Trump has a lot of ways of lining up things such that he can make his financial interests line up against America's interest without any specific quid-pro-quos. Trump makes it easy to pay money to get access to Trump, and to the areas where these documents were (apparently) just piled around. And Trump might not be much for making plans, but people near him were (allegedly) willing to solicit quid pro quos on the assurance that they could bend the big guy's ear.

(Yeah, "don't elect a guy who does that sort of thing" is good advice, but that ship has sailed.)

Some people have been bringing up the Presidential Records Act and pointing out that Presidents have a lot of discretion what counts as personal versus Presidential records under that act. That's irrelevant to this indictment, even though NARA was the one that came calling about the misplaced documents. That isn't about classified documents or national defense information, the sort of thing that the Presidential Records Act gives Presidents discretion about is documents about or by a President, think personal notes or recorded conversations. People have been bringing up a Clinton era scandal (???) on that point re taped interviews stored in the back of a drawer of socks, which were arguably "Presidential records" (in that they were literal recordings of a President), and a court deferred to Clinton in saying those were personal, not official. Needless to say, those weren't classified and didn't include state secrets that were waved around in front of whoever.

One thing that stood out to me in all this discussion was a blog post written by lawyer Ken White, a follow up on a podcast episode where he discussed the indictment, including the possibility that it might have negative consequences. Was it unwise to indict? Ken points out that the Principles of Federal Prosecution list four reasons not to prosecute:

1. You can't prove the case.
2. Prosecution serves no compelling Federal interest.
3. Criminal prosecution is already being done elsewhere.
4. There exists an adequate non-criminal alternative to prosecution.

From that indictment, 1 doesn't apply to this case. 2 doesn't apply, the Federal government does have a clear interest in state secrets not being shown to just whoever and FBI etc. not being impeded in their investigations. 3 doesn't apply. 4 doesn't either, measures short of this were extensively tried before the FBI even got involved, and I don't know what other process exists to prevent Trump from continuing to commit the same sorts of crimes any time he feels like it, including showing off other classified documents still in his possession.

That same manual also considers the situation where a prosecutor might doubt that they can obtain a conviction for political reasons, or just because the defendant is very popular. The answer it gives is that prosecution should move forward anyways. Basically, there's a system for trying to obtain fair judges and impartial juries, no system is perfect, but it's the system we've got and you need to try to make it work. Judge Cannon certainly could do things that would torpedo the case, to give one example, a judge can deliver an acquittal as a matter of law. And that's final, as far as prosecution of the defendant is concerned. But just as many on "Team Trump" turn out not to be on "team go to jail for the guy", Cannon's extraordinary (and rebuked-on-appeal) deference to Trump on procedural motions is not at all the same as just fabricating an acquittal out of whole cloth. (And if the outcome Cannon wants is for Trump to get away with whatever at any cost, the DOJ certainly shouldn't achieve that result for her.)

I'm so terribly tired and not finding time to write. Household schedule is running me into the ground.

Julie watched Erica last Friday evening so I could catch Suzume in theaters, the latest work by Makoto Shinkai, one of Japan's most successful anime directors, one who a great essayist once described as a genius hack filmmaker. Suzume isn't so different from Shinkai's usual, but I liked the surrealist-fantasy road-trip.

The farmers market started up again for the year. Somerville Porchfest was last Saturday, a music festival like a city-wide party, that was a lot of fun. Went out for a very nice dinner at Juliet for Mothers Day on Sunday.

The news has been eventful. President Trump was found liable to the tune of $5M for defamation and sexual assault. It's turns out "that sounds like the sort of thing I could get away with doing" is not the best legal defense. Representative George Santos was also arrested for defrauding his supporters and related crimes. He won't be expelled from Congress because Republicans like that shit now.

What else? Probably a million things.

Erica's started building her own Magic decks somehow.

I've been playing Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and it is fantastic. Captures the joy of exploration as well as the original but with more to explore and more ways to do it, has a toolset that fits together so well that it's basically "wait you can do that!?" the game.

Apparently, noted comic artist / crazy guy Scott Adams has wrecked literally all of his business relationships by calling black Americans in general a "hate group", advising "white people [should] get the hell away from black people", and saying, "I'm going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off." (A little lost on what helpfulness specifically he has to back off from.) This in response to a Rassmussen poll that found 26% "disagree", 21% "not sure" in response to the statement "It's OK to be White". This seems like bait, of course, and Rassmussen sure landed their fish in this case! My guess about the ~27 not sure and ~34 disagree responses described in that number (according to sample size/composition referenced here) is that there was some combination of:

1. Some awareness of context (worth noting that Adams in particular seems very allergic to people responding to the subtext of statements even when that subtext is very obvious, though some of that struck me as deliberate obtuseness about the very obvious subtext of his own statements as an annoying rhetorical tactic)

2. Baseline ridiculousness in poll answers

3. Respondents noticing that the poll is obviously trolling and responding in kind

Due to a recent security breach at LastPass, I've migrated to Bitwarden and rotated passwords (at least the most important ones).

I don't think my passwords were compromised by the breach, the attacker would need to break my master password to decrypt them. And I still thinking using a cloud password manager is a good tradeoff for the convenience of generating and recalling strong unique passwords. If you use the same password everywhere, there are lots of weak points that will compromise all your passwords. If you use a password manager, there's one hopefully strong point, plus the (also strong and unique) master password protecting access to that. But I am belatedly noticing that LastPass no longer looks like a strong point. This thread by former LastPass proponent Jeremi Gosney goes into detail, suggesting that cloud password managers are still a good tradeoff, but recommending Bitwarden or 1Password.

What a wild week.

I was pretty worried about the midterms, but this seems like quite a good showing for the Dems. Really quite remarkable for any party to hold their own against many US voters' tendency to behave like an inane pendulum as long as there are visible problems in the world (voters who are not likely to take lower inflation or long-term investment as a positive, or to look at the spectacular inflation-fighting results achieved by populist conservatives in places like the UK before deciding to support those who would try the same plan here). Dems held the Senate! Probably still not holding the House, but amazing it's even in question, and it will at least be entertaining to see the Republicans try to hold together a majority that requires the cooperation of the House GOP's most unhinged. (Hunter Biden still might want to clear his schedule. He can ask Fmr. Sec. Clinton for tips.)

Also, the Elon "The Muskrat" Musk era has begun at Twitter with characteristic (of both) hilarity and chaos. As befitting their branding, the business plan seems very... winged. The Verge's Welcom to hell, Elon is a pretty good take on the subject. Also Noah Smith's summary of Twitter's problems. Twitter is a jumper-cable of a site, a weird nexus whose unique popularity and whose extreme facilitation of the social interaction of the pile-on makes it a high-voltage connection between the most mainstream and the most online. (As uniquely epitomized by actual internet troll and actual President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, at least before he got perma-banned from Twitter and at least temp-banned from the Presidency.) Probably Twitter the service will continue to stumble on much as before for a good while. But who knows! Social media sites don't go anywhere until they do, and you definitely can create problems with enough "move fast and break" plus suddenly cutting half your staff. So Musk does seem to be making a go at the tech bankruptcy speedrun. Find me on Mastodon at some point probably.

* Unfortunately, .suite is not actually one of the zillion new vanity TLDs, depriving the world of the perfect Mastondon server name. :-(

It's been a tiring week. Julie's been so busy. But she did take Eris out this morning to get a gift for a school-friend's upcoming birthday. I went to the farmers market this morning and got a variety of nice things.

I've been meaning to return to my essay blog, and I wrote a brief piece this morning about the topic of imagination in children's television.

Current events are very sad. Apropos of potentially lots of things (news, the upcoming Memorial Day holiday, increased general awareness of history), kid has developed a strong interest in past calamity, asking e.g. what's the worst disaster to ever happen in Boston, or who was the worst person to exist during my lifetime, or what would happen to someone if deprived of necessities (sleep, water, food, etc.). It's not like she can escape awareness that people die, that evil people exist, that no one is invincible or invulnerable to misfortune and tragedy. I don't want to be unwilling to talk about hard topics, but I also don't want to dwell on bad things, or to frighten with gruesome and unlikely possibilities. I want to share my overall sense of optimism. People are resilient, life is good even in the face of tragedy (though it's right and natural to want more), "look for the helpers".

I took Eris to the Children's Museum today, for the first time in two years. Aside from face-masks, and some changes to the museum's organization and schedule, and eating outside in still pretty chilly weather (none of which I particularly mind), this was the most normal day I've had with the kid since the start of the pandemic. I had been meaning to get more travel into town and more activities once we all were vaccinated, then that was pushed off until after the omicron surge, and then further delayed when we got and recovered from COVID. But those conditions are looking pretty good again locally, at least for now.

This reemergence of the Cold War sure is unsettling. It seems that the US and NATO are holding off from specific military actions that they would definitely otherwise take for fear that Russia will activate the (metaphorical but it's not much of a metaphor) doomsday device of nuclear retaliation. Of course, escalation clearly increases the hazards of accident and/or madness. But given that the feared nuclear escalation is suicidal in any case, it's less about rational responses and more about what circumstances the ultimate in omni-destructive irrationality can/will be initiated and carried out. The realpolitik (realpsychologie?) of nuclear insanity.

The open-source stuff I've been working on for work is now out in the wild, though not quite ready for primetime. I want to make some improvements to the documentation and build/test setup before we publicize it further. Still, it's there on my GitHub.

I keep meaning to write, I keep meaning to write, I keep meaning to write...

So here comes a flood of unrelated things.

Thanksgiving came and went. I made ~seven meals worth of food for the occasion. Bought gravy, green bean casserole, a stuffed turkey breast roast (to cook at home), small pies (pumpkin, apple, and pecan from Mariposa), and ice cream (cinnamon and maple walnut from Gracie's). My parents sent some cranberry chutney (my Thanksgiving fave). I made mashed potatoes (with buttermilk and celeriac puree), sweet potato casserole (with chopped dates and pecans and cultured butter and egg, topped with brown sugar and more pecans and marshmallows), buttermilk biscuits, honey-butter, cranberry sauce, and maple whipped cream. I did most of the food prep in advance so that the day of was just cooking the turkey and making sure things were ready at approximately the same time. Start cooking after breakfast, have a relaxing midday dinner, put off dessert until the late afternoon to the point where you're basically having a full dinner's worth of pie, that's the way to go! Then 3-5 days of leftovers, adding items as necessary to round things out (no soup this year, but I did make leftovers sandwiches and a sort of turkey stroganoff).

I spent some time this week watching various bits of testimony and the prosecution's closing statements from the Ahmaud Arbery murder trial, and the thing that struck me was what a relatively straightforward application of the law to the facts the verdict seemed to be. The felony assault statute in question didn't require intent or injury, just action that would reasonably cause someone to fear serious injury. The self-defense law and jurisprudence in question didn't allow someone to claim self-defensive in the midst of committing a felony. And the citizen's arrest statute that was in place at the time required "immediate knowledge" of someone committing a crime (not just vague suspicion that they'd maybe done something at some point) to justify detaining them by force (and even then only reasonable force).

Striking to compare that to what a convoluted process it was to actually get the law to be applied. (The first of three prosecutors to look at the case has now been criminally indicted for obstructing it, which is really unusual!)

And then in the news this week there's Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health, the case that's going to overturn Roe, catapulting the country into a new political era that's going to be weirder than people expect (even given the expectation that it's going to be weirder etc.). I guess I can't rule out the whole range of outcomes, but I don't think "approximately uphold the central etc. of Roe/Casey etc." has the votes. "Zygotes have the same suite of constitutional rights as human adults" probably doesn't either (maybe three). But I think there's a really broad set of plausible outcomes in between. History in the making. :-/

Kid got her second COVID vaccine. Was much more crowded at the vaccine center than for the first one, we had to wait in line for about 90 minutes. The new variant will surely be here soon. We're looking forward to traveling for the holidays for the first time in a long time. We'll see we'll see we'll see.

On my mind today: This video essay about MrBeast's latest large-scale YouTube production. The guy is an entertainer of note for sure, a bit of a marketing genius.

Eristic improvements: Recognizing more words by sight, improved arithmetic skills, sounding out words some (in both directions).

One of the interesting bits of news to come out this past week is that the Trump administration did try to pressure Pence to go with the "the VP can just pick the next President unilaterally right?" version of the "something somehow" steal the election plan. Put in writing by campaign lawyer and (former*) law professor John Eastman, specifically pushed for by Trump, and seriously considered, though not ultimately tried, by Mike Pence.

(*Eastman "retired" after he gave a speech to a certain crowd before they stormed into the US Capitol, his colleagues did not approve.)

Even if you treat "the Vice President can throw out entire states' elections unilaterally" as a reasonable good-faith reading of the Twelfth Amendment (it's definitely not!), giving legal advice that's along the lines of "you should just ignore the law and dare the courts to stop you" seems like the kind of thing that might be sanctionable conduct for a lawyer. Telling someone to break the law with the goal of trying to make someone other than the person who in fact got a majority of the electoral votes into the next President of the United States also seems like it might be crime!

Anyways, this leads to unexpected questions such as, "Did Dan Quayle save American democracy?" and, "If Quayle had told Pence, 'Sure man, just go for it!' instead of the actual something like, 'No, the Vice President obviously can't just choose the next President, that's not how the Constitution works,' would that plan have actually worked?" The answers are, "Maybe not, but it sure is a good thing that Quayle answered as he did!" and, "No, that wouldn't have been enough."

Eastman's memo proposes that Democrats would be in a double-bind between accepting the lie that seven states didn't cast electoral votes so Trump is reelected and accepting the lie that seven states didn't cast electoral votes so it's decided by Congressional state delegations in a joint session (where Eastman presumes, maybe correctly, that Republicans would have total unanimity in selecting the guy who didn't win). But Democrats wouldn't accept that lie, why would they?! After all, you can't have a joint session of Congress without the House, the office of President and VP become vacant on January 20 without that joint session, Nancy Pelosi is Acting President if those offices become vacant, and you can't change that without legislation.

Of course, that's a serious Constitutional crisis ("a House majority can unilaterally make the Speaker of the House the Acting President" isn't great either!), with two full weeks for additional mischief and opportunities for Trump to escalate even further into extralegal territory.

Edited to add: Want to point out (though it's also linked from the post) that the author of the blog post in that last link should get a lot of credit for writing an extensive and prescient law-review article on the topic in 2019 (published in early 2020). (Though it mainly contemplates the situation where Republicans actually got state governments to provide competing slates of electors. It does consider the "even with only one set of electors, Pence could just toss it" scenario in a footnote, but thinks that's a stretch.)