Eric The Blue

Hinderaker swings, misses

In a column about blue states "sucking," John Hinderaker, of the wing-nut Power Line blog, writes:

The fact that red states are doing better than blue states is no surprise. People are abandoning New York, California, Illinois, and Minnesota, and moving to Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and South Carolina. These basic migration patterns, and parallel changes in economic growth, are driven by red-state economic policies—low taxation, controlled spending and rational regulation.

Since his essay contains no data—no statistics supporting the "fact" regarding red states "doing better" and being responsible for a disproportionate share of economic growth—one is left to uncover the evidence oneself. It's pretty easy to google, for example, "household income by state." Here are the top ten states by median household income:

1. Maryland
2. New Jersey
3. Hawaii
4. Massachusetts
5. Connecticut
6. Alaska
7. New Hampshire
8. California
9. Virginia
10. Washington

And the bottom ten:

41. Tennessee
42. South Carolina
43. Oklahoma
44. Kentucky
45. Alabama
46. New Mexico
47. Louisiana
48. Arkansas
49. West Virginia
50. Mississippi

If a state is deemed red or blue based on the result of the last presidential election, then 9 of the 10 highest-income states are blue (the exception being Alaska) and 9 of the 10 lowest-income states are red (the exception being New Mexico). And the highest-income states tend to be navy blue while the poor ones are crimson: Biden, for example, won seven of the highest-income states by more than 10 points, and Trump won nine of the lowest-income states by double-digits. It's also interesting that, of the four states Hinderaker singles out for being rising economic powers that are attracting new residents, two (South Carolina and Tennessee) are in the bottom ten for median household income. Neither South Carolina nor Tennessee gained a congressional district on account of the 2020 census. Texas is undeniably growing; it's the only state that gained two congressional districts after the census. But it would be a stretch to say that it's growing because people are voting with their feet for Republican policies. In 2012, Obama lost Texas by 16 points. Four years later, Clinton lost it by 9 points. Four years later, Biden lost it by 6 points. The more Texas grows, the less Republican it becomes. 

Maybe median household incomes within states, election returns, and census data are not the way to evaluate Hinderaker's claims. But we are left to wonder what might justify them, because he doesn't supply any evidence himself. GDPs in different areas? According to Brookings, the 509 counties nationwide that voted for Biden are responsible for 71% of the country's economic output. Trump carried more than 2500 counties but they produce only 29% of our GDP. It might be objected  that this just reflects the rural versus metropolitan divide.  Yes, but isn't the argument caving in on itself? It isn't true that people are flocking to red areas because Republican policies have made them economic dynamos. The opposite is closer to the truth. 

Sober Greeks

I finished reading Plato's Symposium, and have concluded that my initial reaction was harsh. According to one view (my new one), the parts that bored me might be intentionally boring, and it gets interesting in the second half. The setting is a dinner party, and the guests, after deciding they won't participate in an alcoholic revel, as they had the night before, settle on an alternate entertainment: they will take turns speaking in honor of love, which, one of them says, has been insufficiently praised by poets. Really? But no one objects, or says that if it's between drinking and a contemporaneous speaking contest they want to change their vote, and the speeches commence.

This is the dull part. I won't say it's like reading your way through the Hallmark shop, but suffice it to say that the speakers in turn extoll the wonders of love. That was the contest, after all: to see who could praise it best. Fairly conventional stuff, excepting the homoeroticism. What might keep you going is the knowledge that Socrates is in attendance, listening. What is he thinking? What's going to happen when he gets his turn? This is how the dialog "works" as dramatic literature. It's going to be a bust if Socrates merely o'er-tops the others in praise, but if you have experience with these Platonic dialogs, you know to expect a contrarian view. 

And Socrates delivers, though not in the way anyone would have expected. One thing that can be tedious about these Platonic dialogs is the character of Socrates, a super-hero always leading his interlocuters to wisdom. But the interlocuters: such patsies! They may put you in mind of the Harlem Globetrotters' opponent, just out there to make the star look good. When they're being so agreeable—Why, yes, Socrates, what you say is indeed of necessity true—who hasn't wanted to put objections into their mouths? The Symposium offers a bit of relief from this annoyance, since Socrates, when he at last speaks, mainly just relates a conversation he had with a woman, Diotima, who in Socrates's telling had schooled him somewhat in the same manner that he more usually instructs his entourage. 

And Diotima seems to have been ahead of her time. We are familiar with the view that Darwin insulted humanity by assembling the evidence for our continuity with the other animals. But in the Symposium, which was written around 2400 years ago, Socrates relates how Diotima gently mocked him for failing to notice that what's often called "love" is just a procreative drive that we share with every beast, great and small. We claim as special to ourselves, and invest with elevated significance, the finest human feeling, something that's common to man, rat, and dog. It's not her main point, and she doesn't say it in quite those words (at least not in the Jowett translation), but it's what she means.

It is as if Diotima, in about 400 BCE, anticipates Darwin's dangerous idea, first published in 1859. The Symposium turns bracing soon as Socrates (or Plato) interjects her views. She even succeeds at making the dull parts retrospectively interesting. One of the earlier speakers, Aristophanes, had propounded a view that a contemporary American might recognize as a version of the "soul mate hypothesis": love drives people to complete themselves by finding and annexing their missing half.  Diotima's views, reported by Socrates, may be viewed as a retort. But is it possible, looking backwards, to detect in Aristophanes' speech an undercurrent of playful satire? That is, was he making fun of the view he purported to be advancing? If so, did Socrates fail to detect the satire, and so feel compelled to refute what he mistakenly took to be an earnest opinion? What did Plato intend? None of his extant dialogs seem as rich and layered as the Symposium. Socrates is off his pedestal and a woman is the star of the show. So far as I know it's the only dialog in which a female voice is heard, except as background murmur—which it arguably is here too, inasmuch as her views are heard only second hand through Socrates. 

Sportz talk

Heard by chance on the car radio this morning some Wisconsin sports talk. Two guys competing with each other to be more scornfully dismissive than the other of the local team's effort. In their eagerness the Badgers are guilty of every sin, including mutually exclusive ones. It's sort of like Fox News. The new variant is a fake! But if Trump were president he'd have a vaccine for it! The vaccines don't work!

#schadenfreude

Wisconsin lost four football games (so far) this season—to Penn State, Michigan, Notre Dame, and Minnesota. They've got a nice club, but, assuming they want to take a step up and join the elite, they're going to have to find a way occasionally to beat a perennial power. 

#skiumah    

 

Robert Bly, 1926-2021

 

The picture is of two American poets, Galway Kinnell and Robert Bly, in a Manhattan eatery sometime in the 1970s. Bly is the one leaning forward and pointing, quite possibly a characteristic posture, judging by his poems. By the time this picture was taken he had already co-founded American Writers Against the Vietnam War (1966) and won a National Book Award (1968) for the poems collected in The Light Around the Body. One of the poems is called "Three Presidents," which is about (sort of) Andrew Jackson, TR, and JFK, but it's JFK's successor who makes the longest shadow in the book. Another of the poems is "The Great Society," the title referring to President Johnson's domestic program but also to the state of the union according to Robert Bly. It begins:

Dentists continue to water their lawns even in the rain

The whole poem is here. One section of The Light Around the Body is called "The Vietnam War." You might think that poems about current events would inevitably decline in significance; Bly would have been familiar with “Drum Taps,” the section within Leaves of Grass about the Civil War, and must have been trying to do for the Vietnam War what Whitman had done for the one he lived through. Whitman's war poems are full of tenderness; the tone is of modulated sorrow. Bly's are savage. Here is one of especial regional interest called "Driving Through Minnesota During the Hanoi Bombings." (Bly grew up on a farm in Lac Qui Parle county, near the town of Madison in west central Minnesota.) The very best, I think, are characterized by a kind of restrained fury, like "Counting Small-Boned Bodies":

Let's count the bodies over again.

If we could only make the bodies smaller,
The size of skulls,
We could make a whole plain white with skulls in the moonlight!

If we could only make the bodies smaller,
Maybe we could get
A whole year's kill in front of us on a desk!

If we could only make the bodies smaller,
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring, for a keep-sake forever.

Bly, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's for about a decade, died Sunday at his home in Minneapolis. He was 94. 

The title picture in the Big Ten West

After last Saturday's college football games, I thought the Gophers were out of contention for the Big Ten West title. Iowa was 6-2, we were 5-3, and there was one game left in the regular season. We could tie Iowa, but we couldn't finish ahead of them, and they held the tie-breaker, having defeated us in Iowa City a couple weeks ago. Checkmate (I thought).

But I know now that was too simple and that the Gophers have a nontrivial chance of representing the West Division in the Big Ten championship game. It's a little complicated, but let me try and explain: if nothing else, the exercise might clarify things for the author.

My error was in thinking of us as a potential co-champion with Iowa only. But for us to tie Iowa, we have to beat Wisconsin, and the Badgers, like the Hawkeyes, currently stand at 6-2. So if we beat Wisconsin, and Iowa loses their game at Nebraska, all three teams will be 6-3. We cannot tie with Iowa only. That alone doesn't do it for us, however. The tie-breaker, in the event of a multi-team tie, is your record against the other co-champions. We lost to Iowa but would have just beaten Wisconsin. Iowa beat us but lost to Wisconsin. Wisconsin beat Iowa but would have just lost to us. All three teams, then, would be 1-1 against the other two. The next tie-breaking mechanism is record in all games against Big Ten West foes. Wisconsin is so far undefeated in the West, so their only blemish would be the loss to the Gophers, and they would advance to the Big Ten championship game.

But wait! Purdue is also 5-3 and their remaining game is against last-place Indiana.  A 4-way tie atop the division is therefore more likely than a 3-way tie. Purdue beat Iowa but lost to us and Wisconsin. In the event of a 4-way tie, that would make us and Wisconsin 2-1 against the other co-champions, and Iowa and Purdue, both 1-2, would be eliminated. It's between us and Wisconsin, and we beat them. We're in!

To summarize, then. The Gophers will represent the Big Ten West in the conference championship game if three of Saturday's contests turn out right for us. We have to beat Wisconsin. Nebraska has to beat Iowa. And Purdue has to beat Indiana. 

Anything can happen, I know, but Indiana is a doormat, and I think Purdue will probably hammer them pretty good. Nebraska has only one Big Ten win—56-7 over Northwestern. But their seven losses include a 9-point loss to Ohio State, a 5-point loss to Purdue, 7-point losses to both Minnesota and Wisconsin, and 3-point losses to both Michigan and Michigan State. They've played everyone tough, and will be at home, in Lincoln, against the Hawkeyes. I almost feel like a sucka for holding out hope, but if Minnesota can play a strong game and beat the Badgers, our chances of playing in the Big Ten championship game aren't much worse than 50-50. 

If the Gophers aren't your team, but you're still interested, I hope I've said enough to indicate all the possibilities. Executive summary:

If Wisconsin beats Minnesota, they're in, because only Iowa could tie them and the Badgers won the Iowa-Wisconsin game. 

If Minnesota beats Wisconsin, Iowa's in so long as they beat Nebraska. 

If Wisconsin loses to Minnesota, they could still stumble into the championship, but it would require Iowa losing to Nebraska AND Indiana upsetting Purdue.

A 4-way tie makes the Gophers champion. The path for that, again: Minnesota over Wisconsin, Nebraska over Iowa, and Purdue over Indiana.

Purdue can finish in a tie for first but has no path to the championship via tie-breakers.

Ugh, I just saw that Nebraska's quarterback, Adrian Martinez, is injured and won't play in Saturday's game against the Hawkeyes. Hurts Gophers chances considerably.

The game Saturday against Wisconsin is high stakes. A win could propel us into the Big Ten championship game. A loss would mean we finish just 5-4 in conference games despite a favorable schedule—no game against Michigan, Michigan State, or Penn State. We will have lost again the border rivalry games against Iowa and Wisconsin. And we will have befouled our home field in the homecoming game by losing to . . . Bowling Green. 

Red Dirt Girl

 

"Amusing Ourselves to Death" is the title of Neil Postman's meditation on the Zeitgeist, and I'd say I have a pretty good start. Though "amused" might come up short as a description for how I feel about the above YouTube video, which I've played around a dozen times today. The couple look almost as if they walked out of the frame of "American Gothic" to cover this great song by Emmylou Harris.  The woman, however, is too young and feels the music too much. I thought Mr Cornflakes was just there to play guitar, maybe a little too fast, and it's lucky I was sitting when he joined in the singing. He's like the Joe Friday of backup vocalists: "Just the facts" (of a dirge). I'd say the effect made by the space between, on the one hand, the meaning of the lyrics and his partner's voice, and on the other his businesslike accompaniment, is indescribable—because why try to describe it, you can just watch.

Here is Harris performing it herself (below). The majority of her own recordings are covers too and it's America's loss if she could have been writing more songs as good as "Red Dirt Girl." I think every state has a state bird and a state flower but maybe only Alabama has a state soil: red, because of the oxidized iron. 

 

 

 

Notes, political and legal

POLITICAL

Though not one to watch while into and then through morning's wee hours a Republican bloviates on the floor of the House of Representatives, I feel inspired to evaluate the evaluators of Kevin McCarthy's all-night performance. Bronze goes to AOC who, according to Jamie Raskin, with whom she was watching the show, shouted "I did!" after McCarthy averred, "No one elected Joe Biden to be FDR." The silver goes to Raskin himself. Having contemplated the visages of stern-faced old white men sitting directly behind McCarthy, he tweeted, about the same time over-served revelers were considering their transportation options:

We are hearing rumors that the front row of GOP hostages behind Kevin McCarthy are asking whether they can just be censured instead.

— Rep. Jamie Raskin (@RepRaskin) November 19, 2021

Gold goes to Washington insider Stuart Rothenberg. Here's his tweet:

Watching Kevin McCarthy “speech,” I’m struck by the fact that he lacks Mitch McConnell’s charisma.

— Stuart Rothenberg (@StuPolitics) November 19, 2021

 

LEGAL

If the verdict in the Rittenhouse case was in line with the law and the evidence, then what follows from that? Suppose a BLM protester had shot Rittenhouse just as he was pumping the fourth bullet into his first victim. I think that protester would have had a stronger self-defense claim than Rittenhouse did. The person he shot, unlike Rittenhouse's first victim, was armed. He would have been observed shooting someone four times at close range with an assault-style rifle. What might he have done next? A lawyer could have advised this defendant to say on the stand "I shot Mr Rittenhouse in order to stop the threat" and it would have been at least as plausible as when Rittenhouse said it.

It seems that when there is a dispute and neurotransmitters are bombarding the synapses of people bearing guns, anyone is justified in shooting anyone, because everyone for good reason feels threatened. Who wants to live in such a society? The governmental end of promoting public safety has been cashiered so that wing-nuts can have their strained interpretation of the Second Amendment.

 

Hung over Greeks

I'm reading Plato's Symposium and am sorry to say that it looks as if the high point is going to occur near the very beginning. This is the dialog in which Socrates, out walking, stumbles upon an acquaintance, Aristodemus, who's on his way to a dinner party. Aristodemus invites Socrates to come along. As they approach the host's house, Socrates falls behind Aristodemus and, at the door, has gone altogether missing. Aristodemus reports to the host that he was just here! A servant, sent to reconnoiter, reports that Socrates has been located, "in a fit of abstraction," on the neighbor's portico. This is apparently fairly typical behavior and the decision is made to just leave him be: eventually he'll snap out of it and let himself in. Supper is served and Socrates indeed does appear when it's about half over. Then comes the passage I love:

Socrates took his place on the couch, and supped with the rest; and then libations were offered, and after a hymn had been sung to the god, and there had been the usual ceremonies, they were about to commence drinking, when Pausanius said, And now, my friends, how can we drink with least injury to ourselves? I can assure you that I feel severely the effect of yesterday's potations, and must have time to recover; and I suspect that most of you are in the same predicament, for you were of the party yesterday. Consider then: how can the drinking be made easiest?

I entirely agree, said Aristophanes, that we should, by all means, avoid hard drinking, for I was myself one of those who were yesterday drowned in drink.

I think that you are right, said Eryximachus, the son of Acumenus; but I should like to hear one other person speak: Is Agathon able to drink hard? 

I am not equal to it, said Agathon.

Then, said Eryximachus, the weak heads like myself, Aristodemus, Phaedrus, and others who never can drink, are fortunate in finding that the stronger ones are not in a drinking mood. (I do not include Socrates, who is able either to drink or abstain, and will not mind, whichever we do.) Well, as none of the company seem inclined to drink much, I may be forgiven for saying, as a physician, that drinking deep is a bad practice, which I never follow, and certainly do not recommend to another, least of all to any one who still feels the effects of yesterday's carouse.

I always do what you advise, and especially what you prescribe as a physician, rejoined Phaedrus the Myrrhinusian, and the rest of the company, if they are wise, will do the same. 

It was agreed that drinking was not to be the order of the day . . . .

I feel I've been in these conversations, like on the second day of out-of-town weekend softball tournaments, only the talk was not so elevated: similar subject matter, dissimilar word choice. ("I am not equal to it," confesses Agathon, who, we may conclude, "feels severely the effect of yesterday's potations.") Is it a stilted translation or is this the way the ancient Greeks talked about their hangovers?  Maybe they were trying to supply Monty Python with material 20-some centuries hence. It could just be a case of projection, but it seems to me the point of the otherwise pointlessly elaborated passage is to show that no one wants to drink and also that no one is eager to reveal to masculine friends that they are set against drinking.  I say "a case of projection" because I remember adopting a secret strategy of lying low on Night 1 so that I might then have a chance of keeping up on Night 2. Youth is wasted on the young.

Also like the parenthetic observation on Socrates's habitual willingness to go with the flow. If you want to know what Socrates was like, you come up against the problem that the source for  information is Plato's dialogs, and, especially on philosophical matter, it seems likely that there's a lot of Plato in Plato's characterization of Socrates. The incidental droppings might well be the more trustworthy biographical bits, so it's fun to see that, when the question at hand was whether or not to "drink deeply,"  Socrates's friends assumed he would if they would. 

College towns and vaccine efficacy

The anti-vaxxers are still beating the drum, and it seems the only drum they own pertains to the phenomenon of breakthrough infections, which are rising as a percentage of all cases. (But they should google "base rate fallacy.") Of course, if everyone were vaccinated, then 100 percent of cases would be of vaccinated people, and the Big Lie of vaccine effectiveness would be obvious to all. Anti-vaxxers should get vaccinated so that the scandal would be revealed even to the less perspicacious among us!

The accompanying map from The New York Times shows the average daily coronavirus caseload per 100,000 population over the past week. The epidemic has receded in Dixie, causing its benighted apologists to claim that the region's casual approach has been vindicated. This seems to me roughly analogous to a football fan crowing, after his team's been drubbed 56-10, that "we played 'em tough in the fourth quarter."  

Yeah, right, great.

A kind of fatalism has been a sidelight of the anti-vax case. One form of this argument is that there's nothing to be done since the epidemic follows a "seasonal" or "climatological" logic that's impervious to human intervention. I don't know what it would take to cause this argument to be withdrawn. It was advanced by President Trump in the early spring of 2020. "The disease will vanish with the warm weather and the churches will be full on Easter!" This did not come to pass. That it's now near winter and Minnesota and North Dakota are faring worse than Dixie has encouraged some to reassert the argument, which conveniently elides the fact that the hardest hit states currently include New Mexico and Arizona. There are a lot of strong arguments if only you resolve to ignore their weak points!

One cool thing about the above map is that, at the actual site, you can zoom in on particular areas. The above screen-grab of the whole country provides a national overview of regional differences, but it disguises differences within states. I'm always curious about university towns, which are often in mid-sized or smallish cities, with the result that you have a county with a prevailing liberal culture, created by the university, surrounded by very rural and conservative counties. What might this mean for coronavirus infections?  Well, here's what the map looks like around Dane County, home to the University of Wisconsin, in Madison:

Here's a portion of the map in eastern Michigan. The University of Michigan is at Ann Arbor.

Now we're in Indiana. IU is at Bloomington.

Central Pennsylvania. The borough of State College, home to Penn State University, is in the southern part of the county labeled "Pennsylvania," just across the border from the county with an even lighter color. 

 

It's not just a Big Ten thing. The below map is for a portion of upstate New York. Cornell University is at Ithaca.

The differences are stark, but I'm pretty sure they'd be even starker if not for the fact that universities have strict testing regimens and their counties therefore end up detecting a higher percentage of all cases than the surrounding ones do. Of course, the universities also have vaccine requirements, and a county populace inclined to get vaccinated whether it's mandated or not. The vaccination rates in the university counties are high compared to those in the surrounding counties, where coronavirus disease is also much more prevalent. In a different view of the map, you can see vaccination rates by county, so check my conclusions if you're dubious. The fact is that the vaccines work. If everyone were vaccinated, then as I said every case would be a breakthrough case (obviously)—but the total number of cases (as well as hospitalizations and deaths) would be a small fraction of what we're still experiencing, unnecessarily. 

Tolstoy or Dostoevsky

Came to the end this morning of Crime and Punishment. Since Dostoevsky and Tolstoy are regarded as among the world's best novelists, and were alive and writing in Russia at the same time (middle of the 19th-century), it's become customary to think of them together and to profess a preference for one over the other. Tolstoy gets my vote, on the ground that I'm more interested in normal psychology than abnormal psychology. Also, I think they share a weakness that is comparatively obscure or hidden in Tolstoy: both are sentimental, or pious, about people who are below them on some kind of human status meter. 

Tolstoy came from one of the richest families in Russia. His characters are from the aristocracy, but the scope is so wide, his ambition so high, that ultimately just about everything in the world attracts his attention. (Someone facetiously criticized War and Peace for not having included a single boat race.)  Peasants therefore make their appearance, and, when they do, everything that's wonderful about everything else dissipates into worshipful stupidity. Their lives are simple and beautiful. They are guided by religious faith and folk wisdom. They are sturdy and morally upright. One speculates that very occasionally one of them might have too much to drink, or cheat for profit, or be cruel to a spouse, but one does not learn about this from Tolstoy. He never even tries to develop one as a character; the peasantry exists only as a monochromatic class of humanity. Thankfully, he doesn't dwell on them. Back to Levin and Kitty and Anna and Vronsky, et al. 

With Dostoevsky, it's different but kind of the same. He wasn't rich. His novels are so long partly because he was chronically short of funds and therefore always racing toward publication and a payday. He didn't have time for editing, and besides, was sometimes paid by the page. His novels are filled with people who are brilliant and tortured, like him. But then there are these other characters, the Sonyas and Alyoshas, saints who are idealized well beyond the point of being believable as people. These are the characters who to me seem to be in the place of Tolstoy's peasants, but, unlike Tolstoy's peasants, someone like Sonya is close to the center of Crime and Punishment. Her simple and unquestioning faith is what's recommended, and the extolling of her  virtues, which begins before she appears on stage, never relents. It's wearisome.

Report card

My fifth grader came home with her report card for the first quarter today. I scanned it up and down but no grade for Critical Race Theory. I don't think Drag Queen Story Hour is a thing either because I just asked her and she doesn't even know what a drag queen is. Fifth grade! The home environment here is fairly sterile. I was counting on the schools but apparently it's all math, science, language arts, blah, blah, blah. 

Kyle Rittenhouse on trial

I had the TV on yesterday and saw by chance that Kyle Rittenhouse was on the stand in Kenosha. So I  started watching and found myself getting more and more interested—mainly in the judge, Bruce Schroeder, who is 75. As if to prove his age, the judge failed to turn off his cell phone while sitting on the bench in a nationally televised trial. When someone called, like maybe about his car warranty, it was revealed to the world that his ring tone is Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA." This is the song to which Trump typically takes the stage at a MAGA rally. Well, maybe Judge Schroeder loves a cheesy patriotic song, lots of people do, especially septuagenarians. Fine.

But the evidence of his hostility to the prosecution is like an icy gust off Lake Michigan—impossible not to notice. Almost the first thing I saw was him ripping into the prosecutor for how he began his cross examination of Rittenhouse. The direct examination of the defendant by his attorney had been very smooth—obviously rehearsed or, perhaps more accurate, choreographed. He and his AR-15 had gone to Kenosha to protect businesses, put out fires, and administer first aid. Sure, sure. Of course they're free to get their story straight by practicing beforehand and the jurors are free to notice, too. The prosecutor's opening line of questioning seemed intended to highlight the point: Rittenhouse had kept quiet for months and was now tailoring rehearsed answers to fit the evidence assembled by the state. This seemed to me transparently true but apparently—I'm hobbled here by a lack of a legal education—drawing the jury's attention to it runs afoul of the defendant's right to remain silent? Even though the defendant had now chosen to testify? I'm just a Law & Order viewer, but I thought the way it'd  work is the judge could shut down that line of questioning, probably by sustaining the defense's objection. In this case, he excused the jury so he could yell at the  prosecutor for around 15 minutes. As the afternoon wore on, I began to wonder why he had troubled to dismiss the jury. When the prosecution was leading Rittenhouse through the video evidence, asking him what he was thinking now and now and now and now, the judge, without the defense having objected, cut in to question the appropriateness. When the prosecutor said what the witness was thinking was central to the case, Schroeder said something like, Well, ok, but move it along.

Luckily I wasn't the prosecutor as I think I'd have asked Judge Schroeder whether his dinner rez was at 5.

Now I've been reading more about the judge this morning. I guess that before the trial started he ruled that no one could refer to the people Rittenhouse shot and killed as "victims"—too prejudicial. I thought that was interesting because I distinctly remember a defense attorney referring yesterday, with obvious derision, to the "protesters or rioters or whatever you want to call them" who (like his client) were in downtown Kenosha against police order that night. No rebuke from the judge for that! I understand trial began this morning with a Veterans Day observance. The judge wanted to recognize anyone in the courtroom who was a veteran, and by chance there was only one: the defense's first witness for the day. So the judge led a round of applause for him. Day 8 of the trial began with everyone in the courtroom (unless they failed to follow the judge's prompt) applauding the defense's first witness before he began testifying!

Unbelievable. 

The logic to acquitting Rittenhouse, which everyone thinks is assured, depends upon a kind of domino theory. Once he had shot someone, he was in the clear for any subsequent shooting, since people who saw him shoot the first guy were mad about it and he was therefore right to feel "threatened" by them. If the first homicide was justified, they all were: a discount for volume. The first victim was unarmed, but Rittenhouse said the man grabbed the barrel of his gun and was trying to take it from him. Thus he had no choice but to shoot him four times. By his own account, then, a fight over a gun resulted in multiple shootings. If he hadn't had a gun, no one would have been shot or killed. As it is, Rittenhouse shot three people, two are dead, and almost everyone agrees the verdict will be that no laws were broken. God bless the USA!

The news cycle

In case you haven't been following the news out of Washington, D.C., for the past three days, let me summarize the tenor of the journalistic emanations.

Sixty hours ago: The election results in Virginia and New Jersey show that the Democrats are toast. No one without a lot of melanin or an advanced degree will ever vote for them again. The progressives and the moderates within the caucus are like the Hatfields and McCoys. Also, they have an intractable "messaging problem." Biden is feeble and feckless, Pelosi needs a walker, and they may both be the illegitimate spawn of Steny Hoyer. They are certain to lose their majorities in House and Senate in the midterms next year, and Trump will be elected president in 2024. Then the election laws will all get rigged against them, not that it would even be necessary, given their eternal ineptitude.

Thirty hours ago: Biden is a plow horse in a town of high-stepping prancers, and Pelosi might be the single most effective Speaker of the House in history. In October, payrolls expanded by well over a half million, and the disappointing jobs report from September has been adjusted upwards. The stock market is at a record high. More than 70 percent of adults have now been fully vaccinated against COVID, which from California to the New York island is in retreat. The Republicans talked about repairing the country's sagging infrastructure for all four years of the Trump Administration, but they never did anything, and now Biden and the Democrats have. While Republicans whine about their kids having to read in school novels by Toni Morrison, Democrats address the country's problems. They're on a roll.

Stay tuned for upcoming developments. Only thing that's certain is that for the next few months the clock in my minivan will display the correct time again.

At the Supreme Court

In a colloquy with New York’s solicitor general, Justice Alito expresses empathy for working class New Yorkers forced to brave the city’s allegedly crime-infested subways on the way home from work, asking: Don’t they need to carry concealed guns to protect themselves? pic.twitter.com/n485J1Qy2m

— Mark Joseph Stern (@mjs_DC) November 3, 2021

According to polls, more and more Americans regard the Supreme Court with disfavor. The trend is said to be of concern to the Chief Justice, and it probably also explains the recent and somewhat testy public statements from individual justices to the effect that they are jurists, not political hacks, and people should be more respectful of their services to The Law. Amy Coney Barrett's contribution to the genre was delivered while Mitch McConnell sat beside her at a building named for Mitch McConnell. "We aren't partisans," she said, as her sponsor, Washington's preeminent partisan, nodded approvingly.

The justices don't always advance the cause of the Court's prestige when it's in session, either. The above audio clips are from the oral argument, earlier this week, in a case challenging a limitation on conceal-and-carry in New York City. In the second clip, Justice Alito, while questioning the City's lawyer, repeats a right-wing talking point about the need to defend oneself against crime by packing heat. This is a zombie argument—wingnuts will never retire it even though there's no evidence crimes are forestalled by gun-toting citizens. Gun laws are as relaxed right now as they've ever been, and wingnuts are raising an alarm about skyrocketing crime—which, if it were true, would count against their argument concerning the utility of guns. But nothing could ever count against that argument, or cause it to be withdrawn. 

Maybe too many people are home watching Fox News when they could be out and about, fighting crime, shooting at criminals. 

It's bad enough that Justice Alito can't think of his own bad ideas and so just reads from the Republican playbook during arguments at the Supreme Court. At least it'd be less nauseating if he didn't dress it up with phony concern for the working class. The poor dishwashers and office cleaners who cannot currently defend themselves while riding the subway home at night! The law, in its majesty, forbids rich and poor alike from sleeping beneath bridges—but our egalitarian principles will remain unrealized until everyone in the subway is carrying a loaded gun. 

Mathing

At supper, I asked the kids if they had any jokes and was rewarded with:

Why are math books depressed?

They have so many problems.

Volunteered by fifth grader. Fortunately, eighth grader later in the evening reported being over challenged by one such problem, which spared me the agony of watching either election returns or a dull World Series game, the outcome of which (I'm talking about the ballgame only) did not interest me in the least. She was supposed to calculate the area of a regular hexagon that's 20 centimeters on a side.

I hemmed and hawed embarrassingly for a couple of minutes. In my defense, she had the advantage of stewing about it for 15 minutes, or more likely 15 seconds, before submitting the problem to dad and expecting instant insight. My first idea was to think of the hexagon as being inscribed within a rectangle, then subtracting the areas of four identical right triangles at the corners of that rectangle. But what is known about the triangles? Only that their hypotenuse is 20 cm and their angles 30º--60º--90º. That's enough, but it's a trigonometry problem, and her class is geometry. I asked whether the phrase "cosine of thirty degrees" meant anything to her and got the gaze I associate with a prizefighter regarding his opponent while the referee gives instructions before the fight. 

I could see from the other problems that the lesson seemed to be "applications of the Pythagorean Theorem," and what ended up working was to carve up the hexagon into triangles. She knew that the interior angles were all 120º—goes up by 180º for every side added, so 540º for a pentagon (108 per angle), 720º for a hexagon (120 per angle), &c. The "spokes" bisect these angles, so the resulting triangles have to be equilateral:

We don't have right triangles yet, but each equilateral triangle can be divided into two identical right triangles that look like this: 

The area of these right triangles, each one-twelfth of the hexagon, is given by the product of half the base and the height. Half the base is 5. She knew how to use the Pythagorean Theorem to find h:

10² + h² = 20²------->h = √300 = 10√3.

So the area of each right triangle is 50√3 and the area of the whole hexagon is (12)(50)(√3), or 600√3 sq cm. She endured me pointing out that the same strategy can be used to derive a general formula for the area of a regular hexagon with the length of a side equal to s, for the triangles then look like:

And, by the Pythagorean Theorem:

(s/2)² + h² = s²------>h² = s² - (s/2)² = s² - s²/4 = 3s²/4----->h = s√3/2.

The area of each right triangle is then half the base (s/4) times the height (s√3/2), which equals s²√3/8. Since the regular hexagon is made of 12 of these right triangles, the general formula for its area is:

12 s² √3/8 = (3/2) (s²) (√3). 

As to the so-called election "results," I now sleep in camo and have loaded my weapons into the minivan. I assume we'll be marching on Richmond but am awaiting specific instructions from Soros and Hillary. 

Aim better

I'm angry at Manchin but I'm angrier at Sen Dems. It's totally ridiculous that they cannot do what they've been elected to do and I'm beyond tired of excuses.

— Jennifer A. Frey (@jennfrey) October 28, 2021

 

I'm sort of mystified by "takes" like the above, which however are common right now as a raw wind in November. It's news reports that Democrats have dropped family and parental leave from the Build Back Better legislation that have set her off. But, of 100 senators, 50 are Republicans, 50 are Democrats. All 50 Republicans are against family leave. Of the 50 Democrats, 48 are in favor.  How does it make sense to be disgusted with the Democrats? 

It's hard to accomplish big things with slender majorities. "Biden's no FDR," is something else you hear. Well, no, he's Biden, but I just checked the partisan alignment of the 74th Congress, which met from January 1935 to January 1937 and, among other things, passed the Social Security Act, which Roosevelt then signed into law on August 14, 1935. In the House, there were 322 Democrats, 103 Republicans, 7 members of the Progressive Party, and 3 members of the Farmer-Labor Party. In the Senate, there were 68 Democrats, 25 Republicans, a Progressive, a Farmer-Laborite, and a vacancy. 

By now, everyone knows that Manchin is skeptical of family leave. Regarding Kirsten Sinema, it seems you have to be a wealthy contributor to her campaigns to be favored with her opinion about anything. I'd like to know what some Republicans think, especially those who occupy a position analogous to that of Manchin and Sinema with the Democrats—say, Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. They've voted against even allowing the matter to be debated, but what are their reasons? The blanket opposition of Republicans is just assumed and the Democrats are castigated if they struggle to overcome it.

Actually, speaking of the Social Security Act, I think Republicans should be asked too whether they support its repeal. Here's how it works. Money is deducted from the pay checks of the workers who earned it and deposited into a giant trust fund administered by the federal government, which then redistributes the proceeds to people who, in the government's estimation, need the money more than the people who earned it—mainly, the elderly, and also widows, orphans, and the disabled. I think the word for this is "socialism," thus "social" security, and I'm foggy about whether Republicans think it should be allowed to persist. They're never asked!

FDR signs Social Security Act, August 14, 1935