Eric The Blue

Messing with Texas

War, according to someone, is God's way of teaching Americans some geography.  Floods of biblical proportions can work, too.  I anyway have been reading up on Houston, facts and figures and the current catastrophe, which has in turn led me down a few byways that, being of interest to me, I'll set down here.

1. I bet many Americans have been surprised to learn that Houston is our fourth largest city, behind only New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.  It has a population of about 2.2 million and a metropolitan area of 6.8 million, which is somewhat greater than that of the state in which I live (not a small one: Minnesota).  When you think of a city of that size taking a punch like the one delivered by Harvey--the human toll is discouraging to contemplate.  So many people counting on essentially the same compromised public infrastructure. The police chief mentioned yesterday that the ongoing need to assist and rescue people is so acute that there has been no damage assessment.  He's nervous about what will be discovered when they start going into flooded out buildings.
2. Texas is huge and more urban than people perhaps think.  Of the country's twenty largest cities, six are in Texas: besides Houston, there is San Antonio (7), Dallas (9), Austin (11), Fort Worth(16), and El Paso (19).  The familiar rural-urban political divide is on full display in the Lone Star State.  For example, in the last presidential election, Clinton carried five of the six counties that are home to these big cities.   The exception was Tarrant County, home of Fort Worth, which Trump won, 52-43.  Houston is in Harris County, which went for Clinton by 54-42.  That was actually Trump's second best outcome in those six counties.  Clinton got more than 60 per cent of the vote in Dallas County, Traverse County (Austin), and El Paso County.  It's the state's  physical vastness that boosts the pull of the town and rural vote and makes Texas reliably Republican.  A Democrat has not won a statewide race for fifteen years.
3. Some terms get tossed around too easily in coverage of the flood.  I'm sure that to most people a phrase such as "100-year flood" means "something that happens once a century" or, more generally, "something that's so rare you need not worry about it."  The term has a specific definition, however: a 100-year flood is one that, in a particular year in a particular place, has a 1% chance of occurring.  Now, if there is a 99% chance of an event not occurring, then the chance of it not occurring for n times in a row is given by 0.99ⁿ.  So, for instance, the chance of a "100-year flood" occurring over a 25-year period is given by 1 - (0.99)²⁵ = 1 - 0.78 = 0.22.  In other words, one-in-five understates the likelihood of a 100-year flood occurring within a 25-year span.  The point is that these events are more common than you probably think.  They happen, inevitably.  The same principles and calculations apply to a 500-year flood--that is, there is a 0.2% chance of such a flood occurring in a particular place in a particular year.  This Washington Post article does a good job of explaining and amplifying these points.  Probably the most important amplification is that a catastrophe does not inoculate against additional catastrophes.  Suppose Houston suffers a 500-year flood in 2017.  The chance it suffers another 500-year flood in 2018 is 0.2%.  The chance it suffers a 100-year flood in 2018 is 1%.  
4. I'm skeptical of the notion that citizens of a particular city or region, and the anthropomorphized geographic location itself, are marked by a certain "personality."  Is Chicago really the "city of big shoulders"?  Is Garrison Keillor onto something about small-town Minnesota?  At least it seems suspicious that, when tragedy strikes, the moral character of the afflicted is alleged to soar.  After 9/11, people in the habit of deriding "New York values" were temporarily converted to a new religion in which New Yorkers are all brave, plucky, and selfless. Probably we believe what it pleases us to believe, and, since today I'm pleased to love Houston, consider this, an evident fact about the city: 

   Though all 50 states have accepted some refugees, Texas typically takes about 10.5 percent of the national total, according to U.S. State Department numbers. More of them come to the Houston area than to anywhere else in Texas. In fiscal year 2014, the state health services department reported, nearly 30 percent of Texas' refugees landed in Harris County.

   Taken together, this data means that Harris County alone welcomes about 25 of every 1,000 refugees that the U.N. resettles anywhere in the world — more than any other American city, and more than most other nations. If Greater Houston were a country, it would rank fourth in the world for refugee resettlement.

#Harvey

There's a lot to like about this picture.  Check the expression on the little boy's face.  The magnitude of the disaster is beyond his ken. It is so cool that, even being carried up high like this, I can drag my toes in the flood water!  In my own driveway!

Our president is making an ass of himself, naturally.  His tweets today included:

I will also be going to a wonderful state, Missouri, that I won by a lot in '16. Dem C.M. is opposed to big tax cuts. Republican will win S!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 27, 2017

C.M. is Claire McCaskill, Missouri's Democratic U.S. senator who is up for re-election in 2018.  I think Trump may have a super-sized appendix, that useless organ having colonized the cavity where the soul is supposed to reside.

Here are some links to charities active, and now in overdrive, in southeast Texas:

Galveston County Food Bank

Corpus Christi Food Bank

Houston Food Bank

Texas Diaper Bank

SPCA of Texas

Houston Coalition for the Homeless

Southern Baptist Disaster Relief

H/t Jia Tolentino, a daughter of Houston.  She has more here.

Here's a picture of some westbound traffic in western Louisiana after some PDs in the hurricane zone publicized their need for boat owners to assist with water rescues.

Luck, good and bad

What is the truest bit of overused conventional wisdom?  I mean "sayings" such as "look before you leap" or "he who hesitates is lost."  Either of these might pretty often be good advice but it seems obvious that neither has a claim to qualifying as a universal principle.  The adherents of one keep the divorce rate high, while adherents of the other multiply the numbers of fretting mothers of thirty-somethings.  When one is good advice, the other is bad.  I'm looking for triteness that's always true, or at least possesses explanatory power across a range of situations.

My leading candidate is, "Better to be lucky than good."  I thought of it the other day when, having backed the car down the drive, I remembered that we have a 9-year-old and a 6-year-old and the next door neighbor has a 5-year-old and a 2-year-old.  Being less than fully attentive under these circumstances did not make it into any stone tablet inscribed on a mountaintop but clearly it could cause death.  You hear about it happening in the news at least once a summer it seems.  The "guilty" driver likely wasn't any more careless than I had just been.  You might feel entitled to the modest degree of luck necessary to avoid such a catastrophe but some people weren't granted it.

Also, when you listen to people brag, and try to "unwrap" it, my fairly consistent conclusion is that they're crowing about their good luck.  The treasury secretary's wife with the social media post hashtagging all the designer brands she was wearing on her "day trip" to Kentucky--she isn't better than the woman in Oregon with whom she got into a spat.  She's prettier, which is probably what attracted Steve Mnuchin, and being pretty is a matter of luck.  Mnuchin is smart enough to have figured out how to make millions from the mortgage meltdown of the last decade.  Being smart is lucky, too.  That these two should have married isn't a shock.  People who have enjoyed good luck do not usually marry people who have had a lot of bad luck.

Mnuchin & wife are a gift from the God who made it pleasurable to hate.  Acknowledging the high place of luck in life can have a deflating effect, too.  In her essay "Citizen Updike," Elizabeth Hardwick, taking the measure of her subject's prodigious output, and noting the seemingly effortless "long flow of attention and feeling" that recommends the Rabbit Angstrom novels, declares the author to be among "Augustine's 'fair' and 'fit.'"  She's saying he had the good luck to receive such a gift.  Yes, he "worked hard," but lots of people work hard without getting anywhere.  It must be relatively easy to stay hard at it when the results are so glittering.  

Look very closely into any great success and you are apt to discover that it's built upon a foundation of what might plausibly be called good luck.

And then there is bad luck.  In the sentencing phase of a capital trial, the defense is given the opportunity to place in evidence "extenuating circumstances" that might have the effect of mitigating guilt.  "Extenuating circumstances" is a polysyllabic expression meaning "bad luck."  For example, surveys indicate that the part of the male prison population that has suffered a traumatic brain injury is in the range of 50 to 80 percent, compared to less than 10 percent of the general population.  It's bad luck to have been injured in this way.  Since a brain injury is just one category of bad luck, we could probably not afford to have a sentencing phase for such everyday crimes as assault, larceny, and criminal sexual misconduct.  There aren't enough judges to hear all the "sob stories" arising from the fact that people, before they are born, aren't asked to fill out a questionnaire in which they indicate what traits they would like for their parents to have.  

One of Errol Morris's many great movies is The Thin Blue Line, about a Texas drifter who was wrongly convicted of killing a cop.  It's somewhat satisfying to watch as the movie, unlike the justice system, succeeds at placing guilt upon the correct person, a juvenile offender who had hooked up with the drifter to watch a soft-core film at a drive-in in the hours before the shooting.  The drifter is interviewed on camera in several sequences, and he's a rather engaging fellow, which adds to the satisfaction one feels as the movie proves he didn't really do it.  Then, when it's pretty well settled who did it, the real killer, now an adult incarcerated for a different offense, is interviewed on camera and gives an eerily casual account of why he thinks his life went bad.  When he was very young, he had been playing with his toddler brother in one of those little plastic kiddie pools.  Their father left the boys unattended for a brief period, and the younger one drowned.  The father, probably unable to cope with his own guilt, perpetuated a family myth concerning how the surviving boy had allowed his little brother to drown.  Really bad luck, as bad or worse than a physical brain injury.

Trumped like a hangover

Once in the long-ago of my misspent youth I one evening sallied forth despite having a terrible cold.  Before the night was done I'd met up with an irresponsible bartender who was happy to over serve me.  Next day, I was miserable, but by around supper time the poison had seeped out of my tissues and I was then distressed to remember that I still had a bad cold.

And that's what the Trump presidency seems like to me.  The ill health of today extinguishes the symptoms of the last uncured sickness. On Twitter today, David Frum, who worked in the last Republican administration, noted that it hasn't been three weeks yet since Trump urged cops to crack the heads of people they were arresting on the hoods of their cop cars when helping them into the back seat.  Chiefs of police from California to the New York Island felt obliged to put out statements saying, No, no, no, no, no.  Who remembers now?  Since that happened, our president has been similarly rebuked by titans of American business and the Joint Chiefs of Staff for his generous take on violent, racist punks.  Many fine people on both sides, says he.  Plainly angry about the way some people are so quick to condemn.  Don't have the facts.

Let's see.  Law enforcement.  Corporate America.  The military.  Is there a Republican-leaning group, excepting bigots, whose leaders haven't felt compelled to run from Trump?  Yes, evangelical Christians!  What are they waiting for?  A tape recording of Trump bragging about how he grabs women by the pussy?  

The clouding effect of Trump's sensational badness isn't always temporal.  Sometimes, within the same general event, small details are obscured by the exploding rubble.  For example, as he walked away from the podium at his recent presser, a reporter shouted, "Are you going to go to Charlottesville?"  It's safe to assume that this journalist had in mind the possibility that Trump might think it would be salutary to travel to the scene and, in the manner of a president, "bind up the nation's wounds."  Trump replied by talking about the beautiful winery he owns in Charlottesville.  He went on about it for a minute or so.  One of the biggest wineries in the country and he owns it.  No plans to visit his beautiful winery in the immediate future, however.

He can't succeed as a president.  His failure as a human being is thoroughgoing.

Drawing lines

This article, by Dave Wasserman at FiveThirtyEight blog, has attracted a lot of attention among people interested in American electoral politics.  Here is (for us Democrats) the dispiriting bottom line:

Even if Democrats were to win every single 2018 House and Senate race for seats representing places that Hillary Clinton won or that Trump won by less than 3 percentage points — a pretty good midterm by historical standards — they could still fall short of the House majority and lose five Senate seats.

In amplification, let's consider the House side of the equation first.  In the last presidential election Trump, though he lost the national popular vote by nearly 3 million, carried 230 congressional districts, to 205 for Clinton.  Meanwhile, in the races for US House, Republican candidates won a narrow majority of all votes cast, and 241 seats to 194 for the Democrats.  It's not my main point, but I don't want to pass up a chance to note that Trump's claim to have carried the Republicans to victory doesn't square with the data: in the country, he actually ran somewhat behind Republican House candidates. 

My main point is just that Democratic congressional districts tend to be overwhelmingly Democratic--that is why Democrats can simultaneously win a lot more votes in the country and a lot fewer seats in the House of Representatives.  This hasn't happened by accident.  It's the gerrymandered districts, stupid.  Also, Democratic voters abet the efforts of Republicans to pack us all into a few districts by hording together in the country's urban centers.  Manhattanites, disperse!  Won't your boss let you work remotely from the town in Indiana from whence you came?

The situation is probably more dire in the Senate.  Every two years, a third of the seats are filled, and it happens that the 2018 lineup heavily favors Republicans.  The Democrats only very plausible chance of a pick-up is in Nevada, a state that is trending blue.  To gain a majority, however, Democrats need a net gain of three, and they have to defend seats in places like Missouri, Indiana, West Virginia, Montana, and North Dakota.  Trump won all those states, and his narrowest margin was 19 points, 57-38 (both Indiana and Missouri). Thus the dim outlook in the Senate for 2018.

But that is in part the luck of the draw.  Of course the last presidential election occurred in all fifty states, and, as with the House, it seems reasonable to gauge the true lay of the land by superimposing the presidential result on the Senate.  Clinton, with a plurality of nearly 3 million popular ballots, won the electoral votes of twenty states, compared to thirty for Trump.  If we give the Trump states two Republican senators, and the Clinton states two Democratic senators, the result is a veto-proof majority . . . for the party that received 3 million fewer votes!  

I don't know what the solution is.  It's not enough for Manhattanites to disperse.  I suppose we could start by splitting California in two by an east-west line drawn anywhere between Dodger Stadium and San Francisco Bay.  That would net two more Democratic senators.  Then we could do something similar with New York: just make Long Island, including Brooklyn and Queens, its own state, perhaps. You'd have to be careful where you drew the lines--as careful as Republicans have been when drawing congressional districts.  I assume that Lincoln, if he could have seen forward 150 years, would simply have allowed the South to secede. 

 

Charlottesville

Condolences to the family of the young woman killed today, and best regards to all of those injured, in Charlottesville, Virginia. So sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2017

Sounds like it was tweeted out from a golf cart between the practice putting green and first  tee.

Regarding James Alex Fields Jr., the young owner of the Dodge Challenger: I've been stewing about how, according to his mother, he dropped off his cat with her before heading to Charlottesville for a long weekend.  It doesn't seem like something you should have to do before embarking on a road trip for the purpose of attending a white supremacist rally.  Maybe he's a 21st-century version of Chaucer's Madame Eglantine, who used up her two spoonfuls of humanity on her pets. Or maybe I, a cat lover, just don't like sharing any characteristics with this specimen of stunted humanity.  In any event, I'm not giving up golf.

Watching the coverage on cable-tv, I at first felt inclined to demur from all the handwringing.  What these nuts deserve is not earnest analysis but dismissive disdain of the kind spouted by someone I follow on Twitter: 

Without white supremacists the art of using facial hair to create the illusion of a chin would be lost to the ages

— Erin 🎶Gloria🎶 Ryan (@morninggloria) August 12, 2017

And it is indeed true that by the light of their tiki torches one does not detect any signs of The Master Race.  On the other hand, someone was killed on Saturday, which is nothing to snark about, and our president seems confused about whom to blame.  Don't vex him, however.  He could cause a million people to die before we have a chance to enjoy another summer weekend.

Trump's fire and fury

That Trump's "fire and fury" statement yesterday was delivered as an answer to a reporter's question tossed out during a forum on opioid addiction at a golf course in New Jersey caused me to wonder whether it might not be best understood as another embarrassing Trumpean "riff" of the kind Trumpologists explain with disquisitions on the difference between taking him "literally" versus taking him "seriously,"  etc.  Now, however, I've seen the tape, and it appears to me that the question was anticipated and that his statement was a prepared, considered answer.  Ever the poor student, he recited the script imperfectly, which made it sound improvised, but, nevertheless, the answer was prepared.

Prepared by whom?  It's not the way any of his generals talk, so natural suspects like Kelly, McMaster, and Mattis are out.  The words sound like they are Trump's own, especially the grandiloquent "the likes of which the world has never seen," which he has deployed previously when he clearly was "riffing"--for example, when he has described himself as the founder of "a movement the likes of which the world has never seen before."  (Only three million fewer votes than his vanquished opponent!  A movement never seen before!)

So I continue to credit the notion that the statement is more the improvisation of a megalomaniac than the policy of our government.  And indeed today we have heard from people in the administration who sound as if they are trying to walk back Trump's statement without being too obvious about it.  Secretary of State Tillerson told reporters that Trump's language was meant for Kim Jong-un, who, he says, "does not understand diplomatic language."  This raises a few questions, including why in that case the message was not communicated privately to Kim Jong-un instead of to an American reporter at a forum on opioid addiction.  It makes sense, however, if you take the view that Tillerson's objective is to excuse Trump's histrionics while suggesting that our government isn't actually as crazy as the president sounds. 

Perhaps the craziest aspect of Trump's statement is the way in which it threatens North Korea with "fire and fury" merely for feints and maintaining an aggressive posture.  You'd think a response the likes of which the world has never seen would be reserved for an actual attack on us or our interests. By immediately issuing threats against Guam, North Korea has shown that Trump's talk was bluster.  I take it on faith that we aren't going to war over a threat to move against Guam.  Tillerson says Kim doesn't understand the dance but he's not doing any worse than Trump.

Today is the 72nd anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, which, coming as it did just three days after the destruction of Hiroshima, has always seemed to me even harder to defend.  If the whole idea is to get Japan to surrender, give them a week or a month to take in the effect of the first explosion.  Why so eager to achieve another six-figure body count of Japanese civilians?  But the real reason for history's only atomic bombings probably has less to do with the moral depravity of President Truman, or with the diabolical Japanese who are invoked by those who argue on the other side, than it has to do with more ordinary human failings.  People, especially when organized in bureaucracies, drift toward portentous "decisions" without being entirely conscious of it.  Questions are settled by an irresistible bureaucratic momentum, the force of which is augmented by the weariness of the individuals who have participated in the long process.  They just want to be done with it.  This case was made years ago by the social scientist Kai Erickson (pictured above), whose essay "Of Accidental Judgments and Casual Slaughters" argues that war weariness and the tremendous expense of labor, treasure, and talent devoted to the Manhattan Project made the use of the atomic bomb a foregone conclusion.  It is impossible not to take the last few steps if the road already travelled is very far.  Erickson took his title from the penultimate speech in Hamlet, Horatio's interpretation of what happened at the end of that play:

And let me speak to th' yet-unknowing world

How these things came about. So shall you hear

Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts,

Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters,

Of deaths put on by cunning and forced cause,

And, in this upshot, purposes mistook

Fall'n on th' inventors' heads.

 

My take-away is that nuclear holocaust is apt to be perpetuated, not as a deliberate policy executed by madmen, but rather by ordinary stumblebums who are in over their heads and just blunder into it.  That North Korea has their oaf and we have ours is therefore alarming in the extreme.  I'm bucking myself up with the thought that the prospect of a nuclear holocaust makes me feel marginally better about having devoted so much time to watching what my wife calls "sportsers" on TV.  

Soliciting at Fox News

The lede to a Politico story:

Fox News has suspended anchor Eric Bolling, a spokesperson confirmed Saturday, after allegations surfaced that he sent unsolicited lewd text messages to female co-workers.

I'm not able to muster anything like surprise over the activities of the put-upon white males at Fox and so am free to contemplate verbal constructions such as "unsolicited lewd text messages."  I guess "unsolicited" is needed because, had any of Fox's big-haired blondes beseeched one of these fellows to send her a dick-pic, everything would have been on the up-and-up and there'd be no story.  Is that the idea?  I'm trying to imagine the details of the "courageous conversations" that go on at Fox.

Executive: Annabelle tells me she received from you an unsolicited dick-pic.

Fox Anchor: No, it was solicited.

Executive:  She asked you to send her a dick-pic?

Fox Anchor:  That's right, sir.

Executive:  In an e-mail?

Fox Anchor: No sir, it was just a verbal request from her.  There's no evidence.

Executive: Well, she seems quite upset now.

Fox Anchor:  Sir, with respect, it then seems that we're into a he-said-she-said sort of scenario.

Executive: Yes.  But you should be more careful.  Document conversations, like Jim Comey.  Know what I mean?

Fox Anchor: Sir, I will in the future proceed with more caution.

Executive:  Good, carry on.  By the way, that was a nice segment on the moral degeneracy of liberals on Tuesday's show.

Fox Anchor:  Thank you, sir!

I have to admit--statement against interest--that in my 32-year career in government service, no  colleague ever asked me to send her (or him) lewd messages, and I never received any myself.  So maybe it's more of a Fox News sort of thing than a deep state sort of thing. 

Fondly do I hope, fervently do I pray, that I'm not more revolting than the on-air personalities at Fox.

At the movies

I saw, with our 14-year-old, the R-rated "Big Sick" at the Lagoon Cinema: forgot it was the weekend of the Uptown Art Fair or would have either driven to the suburbs or walked the whole three miles, or whatever it is, to the Lagoon from our house.

But what a sweet movie!  Here's a sketch of the plot.  A guy, a woman, both attractive , likable, and single--they ought to be together.  Sitting in your chair, you really, really want them to end up with each other.  But there is an obstacle, some ups and downs as the height of the obstacle alternately rises and falls until, toward the very end, it's high as it's ever been but then suddenly crumbles just before the credits roll.  I've seen a few other movies that could be described in just this way but not many are as enjoyable as "The Big Sick."

Cultural note: 9/11 is now something that can be joked about.  The fellow, an immigrant from Pakistan, is asked by the father of his love interest, in their first ever conversation, his "opinion" of the events of that day.  He announces himself opposed and, after a short pause, explains that "we lost nineteen of our best men that day."

Highly recommended.  Probably okay to take your teen-ager, if you have one.  Some "adult situations," and quite a few f-bombs, but, as ours told me afterwards, not as many as at the house when mom's home.

Disarray in high places

 

I think it went like this. Spicer quit because The Mooch was hired. Then Mooch, in his own inimitable fashion, moved against  Priebus, who was fired. Priebus was replaced by Kelly, who, upon taking charge, immediately fired Mooch. This was all accomplished (so to speak) in about a week and a half.  

More 3-d chess?  Hired The Mooch in order to get rid of Spicer and Priebus?

But why couldn't Trump just cashier them himself?  No, this is another case for Occam's Razor. The administration appears to be in disarray because the administration is in disarray.