General Update & Some Uplifting Thoughts

Do you need a cup of coffee and a pat on the back? 

Attaboy! . . . pat, pat . . . Keep it up! ☕☕

Out in the heartland: The news about American politics is so consistently bad now that it's not clear what to say or do. Many folks at pro-Trump sites are vicious, rigidly but enthusiastically incoherent and reality-untethered most of the time. That makes trying to reach out to them pointless and unpleasant. If there was at least some evidence of some open minds quietly lurking about, it would be useful to stay engaged. Since there is not much evidence if that, I'll give that outreach effort a rest for a while. It was no fun, that's for sure.

Hypocrites on parade: In general, GOP cynicism and hypocrisy are off the charts. For example, the Ginsberg replacement process will take place, regardless of what GOP senators have said in the past.[1] Empty GOP words are just plain empty. And, hypocrisy is hypocrisy. That is a reminder that neither lies nor hypocrisy are illegal. It all just dark free speech -- fun, legal and effective. At one time lies and hypocrisy came with at least a little blowback, but those principled halcyon days are behind us, for at least the next decade or two.

We break it, we remove it: The president continues to break and politicize government functions. At the moment, he is finishing NOAA and the CDC[2] off by crushing their competence into non-existence with his crackpot political hack replacements. This is part of a long-held GOP dream to get rid of the federal government. First they break government functions, then they complain that the government functions are broken, and finally they dismantle most of what they broke and drown the remnants in a bathtub full of GOP lies, corruption and radical conservative hypocrisy. That process is finally proceeding nicely from their point of view. For the most part, or completely, the GOP base apparently loves it.

Eroding democracy: For me, the most disturbing recent finding has been that WaPo article a couple of days ago showing that American democracy is succumbing to a rising authoritarianism and we may have passed a point of no return (my discussion on that is here). That was a real bummer. Well, at least now when I assert that America is seriously moving toward some sort of a corrupt demagogic-Christian theocratic dictatorship, I can now respond to people who tell me I'm full of baloney (or something worse) with some data. That data supports what I believed I had been seeing since shortly after the president took power in January of 2017. What I saw included erosion of nice things like democracy, the rule of law and at least some trust in professional news reporting. Faux News & Cruel Entertainment is now the accepted information source for most conservatives and the GOP.

Hm. Did I overlook anything? Think . . . . think . . . . oh, yeah!

Hey gang, I've got an idea -- let's divert some more money to the pentagon!: There's this uplifting blurb in the WaPo this morning: "Pentagon used taxpayer money meant for masks and swabs to make jet engine parts and body armor  Shortly after Congress passed the Cares Act, the Pentagon began directing pandemic-related money to defense contractors."

No wonder America's federal COVID-19 response has been so amazingly awful. There never was any serious attempt to respond. This news about diverting SARS-CoV-2 money to the pentagon for jet engine parts and whatnot ought to increase the president's approval rating a point or two. 

Footnotes: 

1. For example, there's this gem in the NYT today: "Senator Lindsey Graham said he would refuse to confirm a Republican’s Supreme Court nominee in a presidential election year. Now he is rushing to deliver President Trump’s third justice." 

2. WaPo writes this today: "The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday removed language from its website that said the novel coronavirus spreads via airborne transmission, the latest example of the agency backtracking from its own guidance. The agency said the guidance, which went up on Friday and largely went without notice until late Sunday, should not have been posted because it was an early draft." 

Yeah right, early draft. What a lie. Trump just doesn't want that information to reach the public because he thinks it makes him look like the cruel, grossly incompetent president that he actually is.

The State of American Democracy: Very Bad, Maybe Irreparably Damaged

Mapping the death of American democracy

An article in the Washington Post describes indicators of the state of democracy in the US. The data indicates that the US is accelerating its move into a corrupt authoritarianism. The extent of erosion of democracy may now have passed a point of reversibility. The WaPo writes:

“Three years into the Trump administration, American democracy has eroded to a point that more often than not leads to full-blown autocracy, according to a project that tracks the health of representative government in nations around the world.

The project, called V-Dem, or Varieties of Democracy, is an effort to precisely quantify global democracy at the country level based on hundreds indicators assessed annually by thousands of individual experts. It’s one of several ongoing projects by political scientists that have registered a weakening of democratic values in the United States in recent years.

V-Dem’s findings are bracing: The United States is undergoing “substantial autocratization” — defined as the loss of democratic traits — that has accelerated precipitously under President Trump. This is particularly alarming in light of what the group’s historic data show: Only 1 in 5 democracies that start down this path are able to reverse the damage before succumbing to full-blown autocracy.

“The United States is not unique” in its decline, said Staffan I. Lindberg, a political scientist at Sweden’s University of Gothenburg and a founding director of the project. “Everything we see in terms of decline on these indicators is exactly the pattern of decline” seen in other autocratizing nations, like Turkey and Hungary, both of which ceased to be classified as democracies in recent years.

Each year, the V-Dem project asks its experts to rate their respective nations on hundreds of measures of democracy, such as the presence of legislative checks on executive power, freedom of personal expression, the civility of political discourse, free and open elections, and executive branch corruption, among others.

The United States is backsliding on all of those measures. ‘Executive respect for the Constitution is now at the lowest level since 1865,’ said Michael Coppedge, a Notre Dame political scientist and one of the project’s chief investigators. ‘Corruption in the executive branch is basically the worst since Harding.’

Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College, said that “experts rate U.S. democracy as getting worse on average,” but there are considerable differences in “how they characterize the severity of the decline we’ve experienced and what they expect in the future.”

Nyhan says he is most concerned about Trump’s repeated attacks on the integrity of U.S. elections. Trump recently said that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged,” for instance, and habitually casts vote-by-mail efforts as inherently fraudulent. Both beliefs are false.”

 

“Dictator drift” -- dictators attack foundations of democracy

such as the integrity of elections 

Ruth Bader Ginsberg has Died

Everyone is reporting that Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg has died. Now the radical conservative Leviathan comes alive and rises in its rage and self-righteous vengeance.

The hypocrite Moscow Mitch McConnell said in May of 2019 that he would replace any supreme court dead supreme court justice even during the 2020 election. He could not care less about his hypocrisy over what happened after Scalia died in early 2012. I've said it many times before, and I say it again: Hypocrisy does not faze hard core republican partisans in the slightest. Actually, hypocrisy doesn't faze many hard core republican partisans in the slightest, republican or not. For those folks and presumably most Trump supporters, this is about winning, not truth, consistency, facts or reason. This is about power and wealth.

I take zero pleasure in having predicted this outcome years ago. RBG was obviously very sick and I knew she would not survive any republican administration. She was obviously sick years ago and now she has died. Years ago in 2011 and 2012 people pleaded with her to resign, but she refused. 

Now, there is going to be a rock solid 6-3 radical conservative white male Christian theocratic majority on the supreme court for the next 25-30 years.That will be the case even if the Federalist society tells Trump to appoint a woman or any non-white Christian of any or no gender. We are past that now. Now self-righteous conservative rage, hate and vengeance will ooze out of the federal courts. 

Roe v. Wade is toast. Toast. Women living in red states are going to have to go to states that still allow abortions if they want one. 

Will this focus the democratic opposition? Maybe. Maybe not. But even if it does, I would not bet on democrats doing anything significant, including using their control of the House.

Democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law are now going to see the wrath of republican hate and vengeance.

How Social Media Works: Intentional Manipulation

In a fascinating movie review on the Neurologica blog, Steven Novella discusses the movie The Social Dilemma. It goes into the details of how social media works and how powerful it is in doing bad things to people and societies, e.g., it can make people depressed. The bad things also include creating false realities, undermining facts and truths and sapping the credibility of experts. Dr. Novella writes:

“Also, social media lends itself to information bubbles. When we rely mostly on social media for our news and information, over time that information is increasing curated to cater to a particular point of view. We can go down rabbit holes of subculture, conspiracy theories, and radical political perspectives. Social media algorithms have essentially convinced people that the Earth is flat, that JFK Jr. is alive and secretly working for Trump, and that the experts are all lying to us.

This is where I think the documentary was very persuasive and the conclusions resonated. They argued that increasingly people of different political identities are literally living in different worlds. They are cocooned in an information ecosystem that not only has its own set of opinions but its own set of facts. This makes a conversation between different camps impossible. There is no common ground of a shared reality. In fact, the idea of facts, truth, and reality fades away and is replaced entirely with opinion and perspective, and a false equivalency that erases expertise, process, and any measure of validity

The documentary was also persuasive (again, nothing new) in arguing that this system is ripe for exploitation, by foreign powers, oligarchs, and dictators. It is an incredible amount of power to put at the fingertips of a totalitarian government. They can control what their citizens think, without their citizens really even being aware of it. It is a propagandist’s wet dream, and blows away the worst nightmares of 1984.

Social media clearly is playing a critical role in the increased polarization we are experiencing, and the rise of populists.

To anyone paying attention, none of this was new, but it is instructive to have it all laid out systematically. What I thought was new, at least to me, was the degree to which the consequences of social media are apparently by design. My prior sense was that social media algorithms were optimized to give users what they want in order to get them and keep them using their platform. But really, the manipulation goes deeper and is much more conscious and intentional. Having social media rabbit holes of conspiracy theories, for example, is not an unintended side effect of social media algorithms – it’s a deliberate feature. The industry is deliberately psychologically manipulating users (that’s us) in order to maximize attention harvesting in order to directly monetize that attention, and gather data so that the data itself can be monetized and used to further harvest our attention. This isn’t surprising, it was just way more explicit than I had imagined.”

Novella goes on to criticize the movie for having too narrow a focus on social media and not putting this in a broader social context. He also criticizes the time the film spent on discussing possible fixes as being too limited. He correctly points out that the industry needs regulation and cannot or will not do it alone because it is trapped in a for-profit business model. 

Some things that people can do include not clicking on recommended things, and sampling different sources of news and content. That avoids rewarding click-bait. Novella agrees with the film’s conclusion that a healthy and functioning democracy requires us to figure this out and try to regulate the inherent badness into something less socially divisive and toxic.

The President’s Sabotage of the COVID-19 Response

Resigned but still blind Mike Pence aide Olivia Troye

Trump regarding the pandemic: maybe the pandemic is a good thing because 

he does not have to shake hands with all the

 “disgusting people” at his rallies and public events 

The New York Times reports that a widely criticized CDC recommendation to not test asymptomatic people who had been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 virus was in fact not written by the CDC. It was written by the president and posted on the CDC website under the CDC’s name. The president’s intent was to deceive the American people. That amounted to sabotage of the pandemic response for the sake of the president’s personal political advantage. That some people may needlessly die due to the deceit was of no apparent concern. The overriding concern was re-election. The NYT writes:

A heavily criticized recommendation from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last month about who should be tested for the coronavirus was not written by C.D.C. scientists and was posted to the agency’s website despite their serious objections, according to several people familiar with the matter as well as internal documents obtained by The New York Times.

The guidance said it was not necessary to test people without symptoms of Covid-19 even if they had been exposed to the virus. It came at a time when public health experts were pushing for more testing rather than less, and administration officials told The Times that the document was a C.D.C. product and had been revised with input from the agency’s director, Dr. Robert Redfield.

But officials told The Times this week that the Department of Health and Human Services did the rewriting and then “dropped” it into the C.D.C.’s public website, flouting the agency’s strict scientific review process.

‘That was a doc that came from the top down, from the H.H.S. and the task force,’ said a federal official with knowledge of the matter, referring to the White House task force on the coronavirus. ‘That policy does not reflect what many people at the C.D.C. feel should be the policy.’”

The NYT goes on to point out that the recommendation contained several basic errors that CDC experts would not have made. Specifically, the president’s document “testing for Covid-19,” not testing for the virus that causes it. Other errors were inconsistencies with the C.D.C.’s known policy positions, marking the origin of the document as not from the CDC.

In addition to that fake CDC document, the president had released a second fake CDC document that fits with how the president want to deal with the pandemic. That document argued for “the importance of reopening schools,” which contradicted the C.D.C.’s typical neutral, scientific tone. Other important self-serving deceit of the public by the president was his political appointees’ meddling with the CDC’s weekly science reports on scientific research. 

How incredibly hard it is for even honest, principled republicans to see truth & reality

In a related but frightening story, Mike Pence aide Olivia Troye has resigned, blasting the president for his failure to even try to deal with the pandemic in the public interest. Troye was the Pence adviser for homeland security until late July. She had coordinated the Pence pandemic response effort and was intimately familiar with what the president was concerned with. His concern was his re-election, not protecting the public or dealing with the pandemic. The New Yorker Magazine writes:

“When I spoke with Olivia Troye on Thursday afternoon, she sounded more than a little scared. She was about to go public with a scorching video, in which she would denounce President Donald Trump and his stewardship of the country during the coronavirus pandemic. Troye, who served as Vice-President Mike Pence’s adviser for homeland security until late July, has witnessed the Administration’s response to the crisis, as Pence’s top aide on the White House coronavirus task force. She had seen Trump rant in private about Fox News coverage as his public-health advisers desperately tried to get him to focus on a disease that has now killed some two hundred thousand Americans. She had decided that Trump was lying to the American public about the disease, and that “words matter, especially when you’re the President of the United States,” and that it was time to speak out. She was nervous and scared and worried for her family and her career. But she plunged ahead anyway.

I asked about her firsthand observation of the President during the crisis. She said that Trump was “disruptive.” That he could not “focus.” That he was consumed by himself and his prospects in November. “For him, it was all about the election,” Troye told me. “He just can’t seem to care about anyone else besides himself.”

Troye joined the coronavirus task force when it was first established, in late January, before any Americans had died from covid-19. Her experience on it, Troye told me, convinced her that Trump’s handling of the situation—the conscious spreading of disinformation, the disregard for the task force’s work—had made the crisis far worse for Americans. She warned about the President’s push for a vaccine before the November election and said that she did not trust him to do the right thing for the country’s health and safety. “What I’m really concerned about is if they rush this vaccine and pressure people and get something out because they want to save the election,” she said.

In the end, this is what struck me most during my conversation with Troye: she is young, only forty-three years old, with a long career ahead of her, and she was willing to put it all on the line publicly, whereas people like Mattis and Kelly were not. That contrast could not have been more stark as I read a Coats Op-Ed in the Times that published the same day as Troye’s video. Coats, clearly referring to Trump’s recent undermining of faith in the upcoming election, said that a national commission should be established by Congress to insure confidence in this fall’s voting. Coats never once referenced Trump by name, and he has never publicly come forward to share with Americans his misgivings about the President. Why not? He is a veteran U.S. senator and a former U.S. ambassador who closed out his career as the head of the massive U.S. intelligence bureaucracy. What does he have to risk?”

What is frightening about this not just the president’s lack of concern for the safety of the American people. Just as frightening is how long it took for Troye to reach the breaking point. But even now she still cannot fully understand the situation she operated in. Her mind traps her in a false reality. 

After her video criticizing the president came out, Pence said that she lacked moral courage to bring her complaints to him and the coronavirus team. He dismisses Troye as just another disgruntled employee with nothing of importance or truth to say and no moral courage for having resigned in public protest. By contrast, Troye still believes that Pence is a decent, honest person doing the best he can under difficult circumstances. She simply cannot see that Pence is a willing participant in the president’s cynical deceit-based pandemic strategy in service to his re-election effort. Pence and his boss are the ones with no moral courage, not Troye. 

Here is the problem in a nutshell: A principled, morally courageous person like Troye acted out of principle and destroyed her career in politics. Nonetheless, she still remains significantly blind to the reality she was immersed in. She still sees Pence as blameless in all of this. In view of that scary reality, how many less honest or less principled republicans who still support the president are there who can bring themselves to at least partially see the reality of what they are doing like Troye did? My guess is maybe ~3%, maybe less. Even people like Coats, Mattis and Kelly did not have the guts to come forward. They have far less to lose than Troye had. Moral courage among hard core republican partisans is a precious and rare thing. 

This exemplifies why the president’s supporters and enablers still support and enable this awful human being. That being, our president, likes the pandemic because he does not have to shake hands with all those “disgusting people” at his rallies and public events. 

So, who are the disgusting people here? People like Troye who wrecked her career once she finally could not take it any more? The president’s enablers, e.g., his liar aides and the complicit republicans in congress? 

What about his supporters? These people are trapped in their false realities by their tribal minds just like Troye was. Maybe they are not disgusting. Maybe they are just deceived, manipulated, used and betrayed people who for the most part are not disgusting.

Every State, Ranked by How Miserable Its Winters Are

 

In most of America, winter sucks. It is cold out. You don’t feel like doing anything, so you get fat. Pipes freeze. Lips, noses, and cheeks get chapped and raw. Black ice kills. Polar vortex enters the lexicon.

But which state is the MOST horrible in the icy depths of winter? After an intense period of research and debate among friends and colleagues -- factoring in everything from weather patterns and average temperatures to the efficacy with which state governments keep roads clear to the historical success rates of their winter-season sports teams -- we ranked each and every state from best to worst. This is one of those things where you probably actually want to finish last.

https://www.thrillist.com/travel/nation/states-with-the-worst-winters-worst-us-states-for-winter

1. Minnesota

Presented by Minnesota's No. 1 SNOWFLAKE