Eric The Blue

Mom's birthday

My mom would have been 84 today.  I miss talking to her.  Here's a conversation I remember from around ten years ago.  She'd had cancer, all the aggressive treatments, and then the regular exams after the treatments were done.  One day I called her from work for some reason.  She mentioned that she'd been to the doctor a few days earlier, and had been told she'd been free of disease for long enough to be considered "cured."  I told her that was great news.

"Yes," she said, "I suppose it is."  Nothing for a second or two, then, "But you know, Eric, I'm going to have to start going to the dentist again."

Socrates at the bar (of justice)

In college, reading the Platonic dialogues about the last days of Socrates--his trial (Apology), death-row imprisonment (Crito), and death (Phaedo)--I remember feeling irritated with the main character's interlocuters, who seemed to me too pliant and worshipful, like they were only in the game to make Socrates look good, the philosophical version of the Washington Generals standing around as the Harlem Globetrotters perform their tricks.  Now I've reread them, and I sometimes feel the same way, but I have to say that I like the Apology a lot.

There isn't very much philosophy in the Apology.  It's more like a defense of a lifestyle alternative to getting and spending, and then there is also the literary interest afforded by one of the first and best courtroom dramas.  Despite the passage of 2400 years, neither aspect seems out of date.  The former provides the context for the most famous Socratic doctrine, that "the unexamined life is not worth living," and the latter seems fresh and original inasmuch as it eschews most of the easy pickings of the genre.  The author doesn't develop any cliffhanger interest around the question of how it's going to turn out for Socrates.  Nor is there any, or very much, melodrama.  The qualification is to acknowledge that there is a whiff of melodrama perhaps in the figure of the lone hero standing before his accusers and facing them down--a satisfyingly great performance by a doomed underdog.  

But you have to say that the melodrama, what there is of it, gets tamped down considerably by being the target for some of Socrates's arrows.  He points out that by groveling before the court, and producing sobbing family members, he might succeed at escaping the death penalty, or maybe even conviction.  After all, everyone else in his position does it, and frequently the desired result is achieved.  Socrates, however, considers such tactics unworthy.  His view is that reason should dictate his fate, as it has his life heretofore, and the opposite of reason, in this instance, is not pathos but a repugnant flavoring of flattery.  Notwithstanding his politeness, Socrates considers himself the superior of his judges, who of course have all the power, and he will not escape by flattering his inferiors, even if they have become so accustomed to it that its absence is apt to tilt them against him.  He says this to them directly, which has the effect of a challenge, a dare.  His effrontery reaches soaring heights when he takes up the subject of an alternative penalty to death.  Customary options would be fines or exile.  These he rejects.  His penalty should be "what he is due," and, as his argument is that he's not only not guilty but actually a benefactor of the state, an under appreciated instructor in virtue, what he's "due" is something like a sinecure, or stipend: his philosophizing should be honored and even bankrolled by the Athenian government.   

For me, the appeal of the Apology is in some measure that Socrates, again notwithstanding the span of 2400 intervening years, appears hostile to widely accepted contemporary customs, including the manner in which something like melodrama infects legal procedures.  In reporting of contemporary criminal trials in America, it seems the judge is always rebuking the convicted defendant for exhibiting insufficient remorse.  Well, since there was a trial, he (or she) must have entered a plea of not guilty.  Might that account for the lack of remorse?--stipulating, for the moment, that the judge is able to discern the true state of affairs regarding the presence or absence of remorse in the convicted person.  I also don't understand the practice of allowing, during the sentencing phase, the crime victim and her or his family and friends to make statements to the court about how their lives have been affected--impacted, they say.  In assigning a sentence, is the judge supposed to consider at all what they say?  The answer must be yes, or they wouldn't be admitted in the first place, but then it seems that the sentence depends to some degree not on the criminal act but on the status of the person who suffered it.  Socrates would not approve, though in truth almost all his precepts are in the category of "more honored in the breach."

James Holzhauer, Jeopardy prodigy

Like retired dweebs everywhere I watch Jeopardy on TV and am enjoying the run of the current champion, James Holzhauer, a professional sports bettor from Las Vegas who has won a total of $1,225,987 in his sixteeen consecutive victories.  James's dominance makes me wonder whether the bell-curve distribution applies to Jeopardy contestants.  Before him, the record take from a single game was $77,000.  James has gone over $100,000 several times now.  His average amount won per game is within a few hundred dollars of the previous single-game record.  

There are it seems to me only a few elements to Jeopardy stardom.  The most obvious is having a head full of knowledge on diverse topics.  Another is physical reflexes.  From what I understand, after the question is asked there is a short period of time in which you cannot "ring in."  Moreover, if you do ring in early, you are locked out for another flash of time--long enough so that one of your opponents will likely beat you to the draw.  Of course, if you're too slow you'll lose out, too.  So there is an art and rhythm to working the signaling device, and if you're not good at that you'll never win: the other contestants have heads full of knowledge, too, else they wouldn't be on Jeopardy.  

But these elements are on the bell-curve continuum.  James is way out to the right on both, and this can plausibly account for 16 wins in a row, but not for the way in which he laps the field in race after race.  The credit for that, I think, must go to superior strategy.  James's Jeopardy run has elicited a lot of commentary, much of it relating to his aggressive betting, which is the hallmark of his in-game strategy, but I think there is a psychological aspect to it that I haven't seen anyone discuss.  Since I don't want to get into the details of Jeopardy rules, how you win and all that, consider the following simpler game that mimics a common Jeopardy dilemma--it's no doubt the source for the name, Jeopardy:

Suppose you're given a chance to win money by answering a lot of questions.  If you choose to answer, and you're correct, you win $500, but you have to pay $500 if you're wrong.  So you answer the question if you can, and pass if you don't know.  There are a lot of questions.  You're doing really well and have given enough correct answers to earn $20,000.  Now suddenly for one question the game changes. Before hearing the question, you have to bet any amount, up to the whole $20,000 you've won, that you can answer it correctly.  After you make your wager, the question is read, and if you answer correctly you add whatever you bet to your 20k.  Naturally you lose the same amount if you answer incorrectly.  No passing allowed on this question.  If you don't know, and you bet a lot, you're going to lose a lot.  Of course there is a high potential upside, too.  How much should you bet?

It obviously depends on how likely you are to answer correctly.  But let's say that so far you've known about two-thirds of the answers, and you trust that the game is honest--the question will be about as hard as all the others that you could pass on if you wanted.  In that case, shouldn't you bet the whole $20,000, assuming your goal is to win as much money as possible?  It's a matter of "expected return."  If you have a two-thirds chance of answering correctly, and you play three times, betting everything each time, you'd win $40,000 twice and nothing once for a total of $80,000.  Divide by three games to get an expected return per game of $26,667.  If you bet anything less than the whole $20,000, your expected return is less.  For example, if you are really conservative, and bet nothing, your expected (and actual) return is just $20,000.  So long as you have a better than even chance of answering correctly, bet everything to maximize your expected return.

If you were playing this game in "real life," personal considerations might require a more conservative approach.  If, for example, you start the game with only the shirt on your back and an $18,000 debt to a loan shark, due and payable in a week, you should probably bet $2,000 at the most, even if you're pretty sure you'll know the answer.  But the details of how the Jeopardy game work cut in another direction.  It's more like three people are playing the above game simultaneously, and only the one who accrues the most money gets to keep the money--the other two get comparatively worthless consolation prizes.  In such a game, betting very aggressively is the best strategy, assuming you know most of the answers--and I assume the vetting process for potential contestants guarantees that they all will know most of the answers.

And here's the thing:  James is a very aggressive bettor, but a lot of contestants aren't.  I think that for most of us regulars there is something psychologically or emotionally repellent about the prospect of losing in one trial everything we'd accumulated over time by getting a lot of things right.  What a blow that would be!  We just can't bring ourselves to risk it, even if, in our head, we know it's the right thing to do.  It's possible to dive deeper into the psychology of Jeopardy.  Speaking for myself, I am the kind of person who'd really hate to lose everything I'd painstakingly acquired.  I also am the kind of person who'd figure out that, to win, I really should take big risks.  So I would force myself to do what I am uncomfortable with doing, and the result of that is I'd probably be less apt to answer the question correctly.  My brain might freeze on a question about the Minnesota Twins!  I think it's interesting that James's day job is  Las Vegas sports bettor, a line of work that I assume involves pretty routinely a mix of big wins and big losses.  Pursuing the optimal strategy doesn't phase him in the least.  

The CW on impeachment

The CW (conventional wisdom) among professional, inside-the-beltway opinion leaders relating to the Mueller Report and the prospect of impeachment seems to be that

i. Trump's behavior as described in the Report is shocking, lawless, and impeachable; and

ii. if the Democratic-controlled House does nothing, future presidents will be as unconstrained by law and decency as Trump has been; but

iii. there is no prospect of winning a conviction in the Republican-controlled Senate, and the inevitable acquittal would redound to Trump's advantage, elevating his political prospects above those of the bitter impeachers in the Democratic party.

But if all three are true, then someone isn't thinking straight, right?  Logically, the opposite of (iii.) follows from (i.) and (ii.) both being true.  That is, if (i.) and (ii.) are true, then Republicans should pay a political price for voting for "no consequences," and the result of impeachment is that either Trump is convicted in the Senate and removed from office or else his party is punished at the polls. 

I'm not saying that all three can't be true.  Maybe the "someone" who "isn't thinking straight" is "American voters."  It seems that in that case we arrive at the conclusion of the CW:

iv. therefore, the Democrats are "in a box."

I'm going to pause here to whine.  It's so unfair!  Trump is a Republican, so why does it go without saying that what to do about him is the Democrats' problem?  According to the CW, which so far as I know could be correct, it's just a given that the Republicans will line up behind Trump, despite his manifest unfitness, without incurring an electoral penalty.  The Democrats, however, will be penalized for any miscalculation regarding a treatment plan for the other side's disease.  Nor is this the only example of the general principle.  Why does Al Franken have to resign in a world in which Trump is president?  The Democrats hold the bar high for their own while agonizing over whether Trump's depravity merits any action on their part at all.

Well, they have to decide what to do.  That (i.) and (ii.) above are true may be verified by the obvious thought experiment wherein a Democratic president is inserted into the same fact background.  Since in that case the only people who deny the truth of (i.) and (ii.) would be vehemently asserting both (i.) and (ii.)*, it seems there is agreement that the behavior, considered apart from the miscreant's party, merits the constitutional remedy of impeachment.  Is (iii.) true?  Some have suggested that the Dems can finesse this question by conducting an inquiry into Trump's conduct that would not be called an impeachment inquiry even though in fact it would be an impeachment inquiry.  There is a through-the-looking-glass aspect to this suggestion that I at first thought made it ridiculous but which, on reflection, considering how much logic has to do with any of this, might actually recommend it.  The idea is that  the answer to (iii.) might then be discerned without risking the dreaded consequence of propping up Trump by having tried, but failed, to remove him from office through impeachment.  If a public airing of Trump's behavior did not cause his support within his party to collapse, the Dems would "pivot"--quotes intended to acknowledge a cliché--to health care, climate change, reform of democratic institutions, ethics in government, etc., etc., etc.  

In other words, they'd "leave it to the voters," who, it would be solemnly averred, get to choose the president (subject to the whims of the electoral college).  If Trump were to be reelected with another popular vote deficit, we could console ourselves with the thought that we got what we deserved for not having organized a migration plan for the purpose of colonizing the red states.

____________________

*See, for example, the split-screen images of Lindsey Graham expostulating on impeachment in 1998 and 2019.  As someone has observed, only the bad haircut is consistent.

Notes on Mueller Time (4)

Back on March 25, when all we had was Attorney General William Barr's summary of the contents of the Mueller Report, I suggested that Rudy Giuliani's announcement that the summary was "better than I expected" should probably be regarded as Rudy "tacitly acknowledging that Barr's summary . . .  is as friendly to the president as is possible without leaving him (Barr) open to the charge of lying--in the event we eventually get to see the Report ourselves."  At the time, I thought this was not only likely but, I confess, stylishly cynical.  Now that I've read the redacted Report, I think the cynicism I was proud of was wholly inadequate.  Barr's summary was such a thoroughgoing whitewash that, contrary to the limit I placed on his disingenuousness, he has left himself open to the charge of lying.  If the summary had been his last word, I would have thought that at the time he wrote it he must have expected he'd be able to keep the Report secret, but then of course he applied a second coat of whitewash at the press conference held a couple of hours before he knew the redacted Report was going to be released.  So it's evident he wants the world to know that he's in Trump's pocket.  

Barr's summary does exhibit some level of lawyerly sophistication, for the claim that it is a lie, and intended to deceive, depends upon the concept of "total effect."  You might say that the finished tapestry is indefensibly soiled even though the individual bad weavings might allow for some eyebrow-arching defenses to be advanced.  In what follows I'm just going to set down a few particulars of his dishonesty, proceeding from the most granular to the more generalized.

(a) Before the Report was released, many people noted that, while Barr's summary quoted some of the Report's words, it did not quote a single complete sentence.  Among people who can now boast of having been proven appropriately cynical, there arose the suspicion that there was a hidden art to Barr's selection of fragments.  For example, one of his more load-bearing sentences--

As the report states: "[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities"--

inspired CNN Legal Analyst Elie Honig to surmise that the first word of the sentence from which the quoted words are lifted might be "Although."  And now that we have the Report, we can read the whole sentence:

Although the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts, the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.

Cynicism justified.  Fake News makes correct call.

(b) The opening sentence of Barr's summary of the obstruction of justice portion of the Report is:

The report's second part addresses a number of actions by the President--most of which have been the subject of public reporting--that the Special Counsel investigated as potentially raising obstruction-of-justice concerns.

This is quite a slippery onslaught.  Obstruction of justice is a noun and a crime, not an adjectival modifier of mere "concerns" that are further diminished by "potentially."  The parenthetic aside is meant to communicate the idea that there is little or nothing new in the Report, but that isn't true: some presidential actions that hadn't been in media reports are the very most damaging to Trump, and Barr fails to mention, with respect to the acts that have been the subject of public reporting, that Trump has vehemently denied he did the things that first journalists and now Mueller report that he did in fact do.  The "fake news," according to Mueller, was the truth.

The remarkable saga of Trump's effort to arrange the firing of Mueller exhibits several of the elements sketched above.  We knew, from reporting in both The New York Times and Washington Post, that in the summer of 2017 Trump had directed White House Counsel Don McGahn to call Rod Rosenstein, Mueller's boss at the Department of Justice, and tell him that Mueller was "conflicted" and had to go.  McGahn determined that he would quit rather than carry out this order.  He gave Trump the impression he would do as told, and prepared to resign, but was talked out of it by Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon.  Trump did not subsequently ask whether McGahn had conveyed the message to Rosenstein, and the matter blew over until, in early 2018, both the Times and the Post reported that Trump had ordered McGahn to set in motion the firing of Mueller.  This reporting infuriated Trump, and what we hadn't before known is the steps he took to "rebut" the work of the two newspapers.  From Mueller's Report (Volume 2, pages 115-116):

The next day, on February 5, 2018, the President complained about the Times article to Porter [who subsequently left the White House after it was revealed that he serially beat his wives].  The President told Porter that the article was "bullshit" and he had not sought to terminate the Special Counsel. . . .  The President then directed Porter to tell McGahn to create a record to make clear that the President never directed McGahn to fire the Special Counsel.  Porter thought the matter should be handled by the White House communications office, but the President said he wanted McGahn to write a letter to the file "for our records" and wanted something beyond a press statement to demonstrate that the reporting was inaccurate. . . .

Later that day, Porter spoke to McGahn to deliver the President's message.  Porter told McGahn that he had to write a letter to dispute that he was ever ordered to terminate the Special Counsel.  McGahn shrugged off the request, explaining that the media reports were true.

Not sure whether to say that the flat narration obscures or highlights that the President of the United States ordered the White House Counsel to manufacture a piece of false, exculpatory evidence "for our files."  Clearly obstruction of justice, and as outrageous as anything described in the Articles of Impeachment adopted against Nixon.  I love the detail concerning how McGahn "shrugged it off."  All in a day's work at the Trump White House!

Here again, from Barr's summary of these and other events: "The report's second part addresses a number of actions by the President--most of which have been the subject of public reporting--that the Special Counsel investigated as potentially raising obstruction-of-justice concerns."

(c) Barr's most general misrepresentation relates to the impression he creates that, with respect to obstruction of justice, Mueller was unable to reach a conclusion, so close was the call, and that therefore it was left to him, Barr, with the assistance of Deputy Attorney General Rosenstein, to resolve the matter, which they did in favor of Trump.  The last sentence of this paragraph--the whole summary is available here--states:

Our determination was made without regard to, and is not based on, the constitutional considerations that surround the indictment and criminal prosecution of a sitting president.

This refers to the Justice Department's policy against indicting a sitting president.  Barr is saying he first determined that Trump's actions did not rise to the level of obstruction of justice, and that consequently he didn't have to come to any conclusion about whether one could proceed with a criminal action against the current president.  But Mueller's method, which Barr is supposedly summarizing, was exactly the other way around.  From the Report:

[A] traditional prosecution or declination decision entails a binary determination to initiate or decline a prosecution, but we determined not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment.  The Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) has issued an opinion finding that "the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting president would impermissibly undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally defined functions" in violation of "the constitutional separation of powers."  Given the role of the Special Counsel as an attorney in the Department of Justice and the framework of the Special Counsel regulations . . . this Office accepted OLC's legal conclusion. . . .

[Snip]

[W]e considered whether to evaluate the conduct we investigated under the Justice Manual standards governing prosecution and declination decisions, but we determined not to apply an approach that could potentially result in a judgment that the President committed crimes. . . .  Fairness concerns counselled against potentially reaching that judgment when no charges can be brought.

Mueller couldn't be more clear.  He was never going to say that Trump committed crimes.  He couldn't indict him, because of the OLC policy against indicting a sitting president, and he therefore wasn't going to conclude that the president had committed crimes--that wouldn't be fair, considering that the president, unlike a regular person who can be indicted and charged with a criminal offense, would not be able to clear his name in a criminal trial.  The accusation would just be hanging.  What Mueller says he will do is investigate the behavior and, if possible, exonerate the president--which, in the end, regarding obstruction of justice, he very pointedly chose not to do.  

Barr's summary, by remaining silent on the subject of Mueller's presuppositions and method, is able to represent the decision not to conclude that Trump committed crimes as the result of a hard case, a hung jury, a close call, a tie that Barr is just the man to break.  It would be pretty bad, I think, if the President of the United States had come that close to obstructing justice, but Mueller's Report makes plain that, on the evidence, things are a lot worse than that.

Practical Philosophy

A college friend, a casual sports fan whose best language might be the Greek of Plato and Aristotle, informs me via text message that "Eddie Rosario is highly skilled in the techniques of baseball."

Somehow this reminds me of the story concerning those party animals Mike Tyson, Naomi Campbell, and A.J. Ayer.  Ayer (1910-1989) probably needs an introductory gloss.  He's a British philosopher, widely
regarded as the principal English-language proponent of Logical Positivism on account of his book, Language, Truth, and Logic, published in 1936, when he was still in his mid-20s.  His biography is not that of most philosophers--lots of parties, many girlfriends, several wives, fashionable friends who might have been the subjects of write-ups in grocery-checkout magazines. 

Once, when he was well into his 70s, Ayer was attending a house party thrown by the underwear designer Fernando Sanchez.  He was minding his own business, chatting happily with a group of models and designers, when a woman rushed up to them and said that her friend, Naomi Campbell, was being accosted by Mike Tyson in a bedroom.  Ayer left to investigate and found Tyson alone with a plainly nervous Campbell. 

Ayer told Tyson he should leave her alone.  Tyson replied, "Do you know who the fuck I am?  I'm the heavyweight champion of the world."

Ayer replied, "Well, at my retirement I was the Wykeham Professor of Logic at New College, Oxford.  Perhaps we should discuss this matter in a way befitting the leading men of our respective fields."

A short conversation ensued, during which Campbell slipped away.

Notes on Mueller Time (3)

The second sentence of the Mueller Report is: "The Russian government interfered in the 2016 presidential election in sweeping and systematic fashion."  The whole of Volume 1 of the Report may be read as an elaboration on this conclusion, a presentation of the evidence justifying the view that said interference--not "meddling"--was "sweeping and systematic."

So some obvious questions arise.  Does the Trump Administration agree with this assessment?  If it does, what remedial steps has it taken?  

It seems the best answer to the first question is that people around Trump agree with the assessment, but the president himself is embarrassed by it, or in denial about it, on account of the inference that the Rooskies may well have put him over the top in the election, and that the tension between "what sane officials know to be true" and "equivocations necessitated by the top dog's insecurities" accounts for the lack of clarity on an urgent national security matter.  A symptom of the same underlying pathology concerns the way in which, according to the Report, White House officials judge for themselves which of the president's directives are legitimate and should be carried out and which fall into the category of what White House Counsel Don McGahn called "crazy shit" that has to be ignored.  

The answer to the second question is that it hasn't done anything, because--same reason as above, the president's sensibilities won't allow it.

Notes on Mueller Time (2)

The New Yorker magazine used to place little funnies at the bottoms of columns that consisted of short passages of print journalism from around the country.  One was called (if memory serves) "Department of No Comment."  The other genres, like one called "Constabulary Notes from All Over," generally involved setting out something ridiculous that had gotten into print, often in a small town newspaper, and then pointing up the absurdity with a laconic comment appended by the magazine's witty editor.  The "Department of No Comment" items were, as you'd then expect, a variation on this theme wherein the passage was deemed to be of such dumbfounding illogic or unintended hilarity that no wry comment could possibly amplify the effect of the naked words themselves, which would just be set out as they'd appeared in the paper but now beneath the headline "Department of No Comment."  I was reminded of this extinct feature while reading the following paragraph from the Mueller Report (Volume 2, page 117):

The President also asked McGahn in the meeting why he had told the Special Counsel's Office investigators that the President had told him to have the Special Counsel removed.  McGahn responded that he had to and that his conversations with the President were not protected by attorney-client privilege.  The President then asked, "What about these notes?  Why do you take notes?  Lawyers don't take notes.  I never had a lawyer who took notes."  McGahn responded that he keeps notes because he is a "real lawyer" and explained that notes create a record and are not a bad thing.  The President said, "I've had a lot of great lawyers, like Roy Cohn.  He did not take notes."

Notes on Mueller Time (1)

 

For whatever reason, the portrait of Sarah Huckabee Sanders has seemed to me the most repulsive gargoyle in the Rogues' Gallery of White House officials.  I suppose it has to do with the manner in which she joins smarmy piety to lies and deceit, a repulsive combo that, considering her patrimony, she comes by honestly.  Schadenfreude therefore dictates that, among the byways of the Mueller Report, the following from Volume 2, page 72, is delectable:  

In the afternoon of May 10, 2017, deputy press secretary Sarah Sanders spoke to the President about his decision to fire Comey and then spoke to reporters in a televised press conference.  Sanders tole reporters that the President, the Department of Justice, and bipartisan members of Congress had lost confidence in Comey, "[a]nd most importantly, the rank and file of the FBI had lost confidence in their director.  Accordingly the President accepted the recommendation of his Deputy Attorney General to remove James Comey from his position."  In response to questions from reporters, Sanders said that Rosenstein decided "on his own" to review Comey's performance and that Rosenstein decided "on his own" to come to the President on Monday, May 8 to express his concerns about Comey.  When a reporter indicated that the "vast majority" of FBI agents supported Comey, Sanders said, "Look, we've heard from countless members of the FBI that say very different things."  Following the press conference, Sanders spoke to the President, who told her she did a good job and did not point out any inaccuracies in her comments.  Sanders told this office that her reference to hearing from "countless members of the FBI" was a "slip of the tongue."  She also recalled that her statement in a separate press interview that rank-and-file FBI agents had lost confidence in Comey was a comment she made "in the heat of the moment that was not founded on anything."

The video at the top of this post is from the press conference in question.  Watch it, if you want, and see if you can't detect the moment when her tongue slips.

I remember watching this performance when it happened--or maybe it was a clip on a news show later that day--and thinking:  She's lying, the reporters all know she's lying, and everyone who's watching must know she's lying, yet she just keeps lying, and it seems the conventions of journalism prohibit anyone from saying, "She's lying, of course no one's contacting her about their Comey concerns, it's just a laughably thin cover story for the real reason Comey was fired, which is that he was investigating Trump, whose conscience is clear as OJ's."  This must be why it's so satisfying to see that, under oath, she was forced to acknowledge, "Yeah, I was lying." I mean, it's not as if this section of the Report is newsworthy--"contrary to what everyone had supposed, it turns out that Sarah Huckabee Sanders is a liar!"  Indeed today she's back on TV lying.  

Speaking of having a clear conscience, here is the section of the Report describing the scene when, a week later, Trump finds out that a Special Counsel has been appointed:

On May 17, 2017, Acting Attorney General Rosenstein appointed Robert S Mueller, III as Special Counsel and authorized him to conduct the Russia investigation and matters that arose from the investigation. The President learned of the Special Counsel's appointment from Sessions, who was with the President, Hunt, and McGahn conducting interviews for a new FBI Director.  Sessions stepped out of the Oval Office to take a call from Rosenstein, who told him about the Special Counsel appointment, and Sessions then returned to inform the President of the news.  According to notes written by Hunt, when Sessions told the President that a Special Counsel had been appointed, the President slumped back in his chair and said, "Oh my God.  This is terrible.  This is the end of my Presidency.  I'm fucked."

Who can read these words without hearing in their head the opening notes of "Hail to the Chief"?

Trumps do mental math

 

Yesterday, I came upon this video of Trump & Son, on the air with Howard Stern, trying to do 17 x 6 in their heads.  Junior first guesses 96, which is close, sort of, considering that 16 x 6 = 96.  His next guess is 94.  Heading the wrong direction, son!  Ivanka, who according to her dad is "good with numbers," good enough to be a candidate for the top job at the World Bank, then butts in to protect her brother, offering the defense that the problem is not "practical."  The current president weighs in, announcing authoritatively that the answer is 1,112.  He pronounces it "eleven-twelve." 

Though it seems impossible, things go downhill from there.

Yes, yes, when young I made jokes about the kids who took the short bus, but I now realize that was wrong, and I wouldn't mention the troubles of the Trumps if it were not for the fact that, on the same day I saw this video, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, chatting on Fox with Chris Wallace about congressional efforts to obtain Trump's tax returns, said:

This is a dangerous, dangerous road and, frankly Chris, I don't think Congress, particularly not this group of Congressmen and women, are smart enough to look through the thousands of pages that I would assume that President Trump's taxes would be.

Having been a Sarah Huckabee Sanders watcher for a couple years now, I know to perk up my ears when she indicates her intention to be "frank," because it's how she signals she's about to add something impolitic to her normal blend of word salad falsehoods.  Wallace should have asked if Trump's returns are also too tricky for the top dogs at the IRS, since they've been "under audit" now since before the president earned his negative-three-million mandate in November, 2016.  

How do you do 17 x 6 in your head?  As the nosy, dweeby parent of some inner city public school students, I know that, in the elementary years, they have units called "mental math" wherein they receive instruction in diverse strategies.  For example, can you count by 17s?--17, 34, 51, that's three of them, so six would be twice 51, or 102.  Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding!  Howard Stern would have been impressed! There is also something called the Distributive Property, under the terms of which you are permitted to conceive of 17 x 6 as

(10 x 6) + (7 x 6),

which is clearly 60 + 42, which is clearly 102.  So all signs point toward 102!  In addition to learning techniques of "mental math," Minneapolis public school students are encouraged to develop what their workbooks call "number sense."  For example, in the fourth grade, while learning to work problems like 993 x 55, students are instructed to take note of the fact that the precise answer they derive from exercising the normal method had better be a little less than 55,000 (since 1000 x 55 = 55,000 and 993 < 1000).  This guards against common mistakes, such as when normal methods tempt you to claim that 17 x 6 = "eleven-twelve."

Transport and release

Just going to set down some things about Trump's scheme to transport migrants to sanctuary cities, where they will be released to punish the liberal politicians who represent those cities and to rape and murder the liberal voters who put Trump's political foes into office.  

There is a Keystone Kops aspect to the story, which began with journalists discovering that the Administration was at least considering implementation of "transport and release." On Thursday, when Deputy White House Press Secretary Hogan Gidley was asked about it, he said the Administration had a lot of ideas and that the possibility of transporting migrants to sanctuary cities was one that had been raised and quickly dismissed.  But then yesterday Trump tweeted:

Due to the fact that Democrats are unwilling to change our very dangerous immigration laws, we are indeed, as reported, giving strong considerations to placing illegal immigrants in Sanctuary Cities only . . . .

Later in the day, Gidley, having crawled out from beneath the team bus, put out a statement urging Democrats to work with Trump on moving immigrants to sanctuary cities.  This was 24 hours, give or take, after he had told the same journalists to whom his statement was addressed that the idea had been raised and quickly dismissed.  ICE doesn't think it has the legal authority to transport migrants to distant cities--which, as it doesn't have the money, is almost beside the point.

A well oiled machine.

Some have pointed out that Trump isn't even pretending that transport and release is wise policy.  His whole purpose--he freely admits it--is just to punish political opponents.  Here, for example, is Gerald Nadler, Democrat of New York:

What the president is talking about here is spending taxpayer dollars to use immigrant families--mothers, fathers and young children--as pawns for political retribution.  This is both morally repugnant and probably illegal.

True, but, by this time, a little quaint.  Morally repugnant and probably illegal, and therefore an abuse of power, which is an impeachable offense--Nadler is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee--but Team Trump's eternally effective parry is that, impeachment being a grave matter, none of the president's daily depredations can possibly qualify.  Trump's monochromatic sleaze and depravity functions like protective coloration--hard to detect because offset by no redeeming qualities.

But let's set aside the ethics.  We're talking about Trump, so always set aside the ethics.  Transport and release is intended as political jujitsu, and, on those terms, too, is plainly ridiculous.  It won't be implemented, but if it were, Trump would be in the position of the Grinch toward the end of Dr Seuss's beloved  tale, sitting on his mountain, ear inclined toward the distant townsmen he hates, waiting eagerly for sounds of their misery.  But there wouldn't be any sounds of misery.  The equivalent of the Whos' caroling would be news stories about the churches and charities and residents of sanctuary cities welcoming the migrants and setting about the work of assisting them.  David French of the right-wing National Review understands.  Why doesn't anyone in the Trump Administration?

Well, I suppose some of them probably do.  Most likely Gidley was providing the true broad outline of how the plan evolved.  It came up, thanks to some knucklehead, then leveler heads prevailed and the idea was killed . . . until the ambulatory shit-show that is the President of the United States resurrected it on Twitter.  

The presidential election of 1800

The presidential election of 1800 pitted the incumbent, John Adams of Massachusetts, against Virginian Thomas Jefferson.  The campaign was bitter and the result, close: Jefferson won 73 electoral votes to 65 for Adams.  Though popular vote totals were not recorded until the Election of 1824, it seems likely that Adams, who won most of his electoral votes in the more populated northern states, was the choice of more individual voters.  In states where slavery was legal, Jefferson won 53 of 65 electoral votes.  In free states, Adams defeated Jefferson by 53 to 20.  

There can be no question but that the Constitution's notorious three-fifths compromise, working together with the electoral college, put Jefferson over the top.  Here is a rough-and-ready estimate of the arithmetic.  Virginia, with 21 electoral votes, was the single biggest electoral prize in 1800.  But 40 percent of its population was black slaves who of course had no political rights whatever.  Since three-fifths of 40 is 24, approximately a quarter of Virginia's electoral votes--let's say, five out of its 21--"represented" its slave population.  The slaves of just Virginia therefore accounted for at least half of Jefferson's electoral college margin, and, while Virginia was the biggest slave state, it was only one of eight.  Had electoral votes been allotted by the population of eligible voters (free men), Adams would have won more than half of them.

I haven't weighed in on the question of the degree to which the electoral college was or wasn't a sop to the slave-holding states.  That's because I think the focus should be on whether it's a good or bad way to elect the president.  I can imagine that it's possible for the operation of ignoble purposes to have hit upon by luck a funky arrangement that in a different world more than 200 years hence makes sense.  Unintended consequences, in other words, can be propitious.  Similarly, if the electoral college was created according to some lofty political principle, without any calculation regarding the perpetuation of slavery, it might still have proven itself a truly horrible way to select the president.

I think that, no matter its back story, the electoral college is a godawful way to choose the president.  If, however, one wants to arrive at an estimation of the role slavery played in its formation, a reasonable question to ask might be:  Who or what benefited?   And the answer to that is: pro-slavery interests benefited.  It seems unlikely that this was by chance.  Two senators for every state, regardless of population, and the three-fifths compromise boosted the representation of slave-holding interests in the Senate and House, respectively.  Since a state's electoral vote tally is the sum of its representatives and senators, the same quiddities endowed slave states with an outsized influence in the selection of the president, too.  The Constitution's most eccentric provisions, including the electoral college, had a consistent effect--of advancing the interests of slave owners, of shielding them from "the tyranny of the majority" whose livelihood did not depend on the free labor of African slaves.

For an excellent overview showing how the actual arguments advanced at the Constitutional Convention are in line with the above analysis, see this (Paul Finkelman, "The Proslavery Origins of the Electoral College," in Cardozo Law Review, Vol 23:4).  It's worth noting, with regard to the creation of the electoral college, that the method of choosing the president had been discussed, tabled, and then taken up again after the three-fifths compromise had been settled on.  At the time the electoral college was created, the verdict it would render in the Election of 1800 was not just predictable but  intended, especially considering that the state-by-state allotment of electoral votes was to take account of the slave populations.  

As Finkelman notes, the course of American history might have been somewhat different if Adams, an opponent of slavery, had been president at the time of the Louisiana Purchase.  Maybe Lincoln would have lived out his life as an Illinois lawyer, who knows?  But if you are inclined to regard the electoral college as the corrupt fruit of a poisoned tree, be my guest, I think you're justified, though there is a lot more to say against it, too.

Last word on Arthur Schopenhauer, pessimist

One more time I'm going to force my current reading on millions of loyal readers.  My Schopenhauer volume is approaching its due date back at the library, so this might be the last thing you ever have to hear about him.  I was the other night alone in bed with his book and my cat when I came to a section on "politeness" and scared off the cat by chuckling out loud at around 1 in the morning.  I think for once Schopenhauer was actually trying to be funny, and succeeding, though simultaneously setting out his dour view of things in fairly straightforward fashion.  

Thanks to Trump, we sometimes hear in the news these days from mental health professionals who speculate on what disease he may be suffering from, one of the leading candidates being Narcissistic Personality Disorder.  Schopenhauer would probably demur.  For the grasping, self-seeking egoism that we attribute to a mental disorder he'd be more apt to regard as just an unusually threadbare disguise.  At bottom, according to Schopenhauer, we're all Trump.  It's just that people of tact and good breeding have learned to hide it.  The conventions of social life function to obscure from us our essential bestial selves--a necessary ruse, since what we essentially are is too repulsive to contemplate.  Our decorous behavior in all trivial interactions is like a conspiracy not to mention that the king is naked, and in time, we come to believe the conspiracy: we conclude that we aren't like the animals.  This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it amounts to a false and flattering portrait, and, on the practical side, it makes us too touchy.  Schopenhauer concludes:

If most people resent the slightest hint that any blame attaches to them, you may imagine their feelings if they were to overhear what their acquaintances say about them.  You should never lose sight of the fact that ordinary politeness is only a grinning mask: if it shifts its place a little, or is removed for a moment, there is no use raising a hue and cry.  When a man is downright rude, it is as though he had taken off all his clothes, and stood before you in puris naturalibus.  Like most men in this condition, he does not present a very attractive appearance.

In puris naturalibus--Latin for "in a purely natural state," that is, naked.  Maybe it's not that funny.  But I once worked for a guy, a conservative Catholic fellow who one day in the lunchroom was forced to listen to some of his boisterous charges carry on about what they'd seen on a nude beach while cruising in the Caribbean.  He sat in silence, eating his bag lunch--he never went out for lunch, he sure as hell didn't go on cruises--until, having finished, he said, while rising to leave, "Yes, almost everyone looks better with some clothes on."  That cracked me up.  He was such a decent guy, and I hadn't thought of him for so long, and it took Schopenhauer to remind me of how much I had liked someone.  

Two short plays

I.

Sane Person: The baseball season is a marathon, not a sprint.

Me: The Twins have won five of their first eight games!  These games count, too!  The season is five percent done and we're on pace for a hundred wins!

 

II.

Trump: I've been completely exonerated and vindicated by the Mueller Report!  

Sane people everywhere:  Ok, let's see the Mueller Report.

Team Trump: (In an undertone) Uh, maybe later.  (Perking up) No collusion!  No obstruction! 

Trump: I forgot to say that Democrats hate Jews!

(Curtain falls on sane person pouring a drink)

Big-leaguers killing time on the road

On the principle that we pointy-headed bleeding-heart types should stick together, I think my favorite big-leaguer, after the Twins' Willians Astudillo, is Washington Nationals' relief pitcher Sean Doolittle.  The Nationals are in New York this weekend, playing the Mets, and Doolittle tweeted, day before the series began:

 

— Sean Doolittle (@whatwouldDOOdo) April 6, 2019

Intrigued, I looked up the Wikipedia article on him, and read:

Doolittle is active off the field with a number of charities, and was recognized for his work in 2016 by being nominated for the Roberto Clemente Award.  Doolittle supports Operation Finally Home, a nonprofit dedicated to providing housing for U.S. military veterans and their families, and Swords to Ploughshares, a Bay Area organization devoted to helping veterans with housing and employment.  In June 2015, when the Oakland Athletics Pride Night received backlash from some fans for the team's support of LGBT rights, Doolittle and then-girlfriend [they are now married] Eireann Dolan bought hundreds of game tickets, which they donated to local LGBT groups, and raised an additional $40,000 in donations.  

And he's a good pitcher--a two-time all-star with a sub-3 career ERA over seven major-league seasons.  Thinking of Doolittle's indie bookstore project reminds me of a minor incident from my own life.  Sometime in the early-80s, when I had started living in south Minneapolis, I went one day to an exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, which is in a poor neighborhood just beyond the fringe of the business loop.  There was a guest book in which you could sign your name and address as you entered the exhibit, and, scanning up the page after I'd signed, I saw "Cecil Cooper, County Stadium, Milwaukee WI."  So that's what the Brewers' all-star first baseman was up to on his off day in Minneapolis.  

The electoral college and the presidential election of 1860

So it's a public record that I am in favor of abolishing the electoral college.  Here, here, here, elsewhere &c.  It is with me an article of faith, augmented by experience and observation, that the uniformly weak arguments advanced in defense of the electoral college are persuasive evidence of its iniquitous bastardhood.  Frequently these doddering defenses cross a line into manifest lying or, if we are really determined to be charitable, mere bad faith.  I came upon one of these this morning while reconnoitering behind enemy lines at the website of National Review.  In an article entitled "Correcting the Record on the Electoral College," Yuval Levin quotes fawningly the following excerpt from "a great National Affairs essay"--Levin's characterization--by Allen Guelzo:

Ultimately, the Electoral College contributed to ending slavery, since Abraham Lincoln, having received only 39.9% of the popular vote in 1860, nevertheless won a crushing victory in the Electoral College--leading many Southern slaveholders to stampede to secession in 1860 and 1861.  They could run the numbers as well as anyone, and realized that the Electoral College would only produce more anti-slavery northern presidents.

Here is a theory: a relevant bit of information is elided from the above "analysis" of the presidential election of 1860--namely, that Lincoln's 39.9% of the popular vote was 10 percent more than any other candidate got.  Here are the four main candidates, together with their vote totals and percentages:

Lincoln                    1,865,908    39.82%

Stephen Douglas      1,380,202    29.46%

John Breckinridge        848,019    18.10%

John Bell                     590,901    12.61%

Yes, if you win the popular vote by a double-digit percentage margin, the electoral college will very likely reflect the will of the voters as expressed in the national vote.  The electoral college did not in 1860 reverse the popular ballot outcome:  if there had been no electoral college, and the popular ballot winner claimed the prize, it would still have been President Lincoln.  It's therefore pretty, er, slippery to insist that the electoral college put Lincoln in the White House and ended slavery!

Schopenhauer's seamstress

I've been reading the essays collected in Arthur Schopenhauer's Counsels and Maxims, which are extracted from his last major work, Parerga and Paralipomena (1851).  The title, Greek for "Appendices and Omissions," is explained, I believe, by Schopenhauer's view that he had published in 1818, when he was 30, a complete exposition of his philosophy, The World as Will and Idea.  He seems to have thought it did not receive the attention, perhaps the word is adulation, it deserved, and subsequent works function like advertisements for an overlooked masterpiece.  Most of his fame came posthumously, a circumstance he would have regarded as confirmation of his generally bleak outlook.  Here he is in "Our Relation to Ourselves" from Counsels and Maxims:

We often try to banish the gloom and despondency of the present by speculating upon our chances for success in the future; a process which leads us to invent a great many chimerical hopes.  Every one of them contains the germ of illusion, and disappointment is inevitable when our hopes are shattered by the hard facts of life.

So he was not a forerunner of today's "motivational speakers," those hustlers your company probably hires to come in and tell you how anything is possible if you only have a "positive attitude," etc., etc., etc.  Maybe I shouldn't suggest that they are charlatans as they probably believe their own bullshit.  Anyway, my (very) short biography of Schopenhauer is here.  I described a peculiar incident from his life that I thought of yesterday while reading his "counsels."  In 1821, he got in an altercation with a seamstress who was a co-tenant in the Berlin rooming house where he lived.  It seems she was in the habit of talking loudly on trivial matters outside his door, disrupting his concentration.  One day the philosopher could no longer abide her chatter, but when he told her to "keep it down," or whatever, she talked back, the confrontation escalated, and it ended when he pushed her down some stairs.  She sued him, alleging that injuries incurred made it difficult for her to continue working as a seamstress.  Though Schopenhauer vigorously defended against her suit, he was eventually ordered to pay her 60 talers--from what I can tell perhaps a couple months' pay for a seamstress--per year for the rest of her life.  When she died in 1852, Schopenhauer had to present to the court a copy of her death certificate, on which he'd written Obit anus, abit onus, Latin for "the old woman dies, the debt departs."

So I'm reading along yesterday, it's all quite earnest and serious, on a high plane notwithstanding Schopenhauer's plain, vigorous style, completely free of jargon, which is partly why he's a favorite among nonprofessional philosophers, and he's making the case that human sociability is best explained by people being basically empty husks, unable to sustain themselves with their own thoughts and pastimes, so they have to fill the emptiness with, for example, card playing.  It's better, for those people who can, to withdraw from social life and tend to their own interior lives.  And then, suddenly:

But there is nothing in life which has not some drawback--nihil est ab omni parte beatum, as Horace says; or, in the words of an Indian proverb, no lotus without a stalk.  Seclusion, which has so many advantages, has also its little annoyances and drawbacks, which are small, however, in comparison with those of society; hence anyone who is worth much in himself will get on better without other people than with them.  But amongst the disadvantages of seclusion there is one which is not so easy to see as the rest.  It is this: when people remain indoors all day, they become physically very sensitive to atmospheric changes, so that every little draught is enough to make them ill; so with our temper; a long course of seclusion makes it so sensitive that the most trivial incidents, words, or even looks, are sufficient to disturb or to vex and offend us--little things which are unnoticed by those who live in the turmoil of life.

I just got a kick out of this, because it feels like Schopenhauer descends into autobiography, and that the seamstress is lurking behind the paragraph's concluding clauses.