Eric The Blue

IVF, my 2 cents

Preemptive confession: If you ever see me all emotional over the demise of a frozen embryo, it's an act.

My only contribution to the current debate is that I think controversy might have erupted earlier if those inclined to oppose IVF had thought very deeply about how the semen is collected. It's not as if they suck it out with a syringe while the dad-to-be watches a Prager U video to dull the discomfort. Pretty sure there is very little discomfort. 

Supremes say no to Colorado?

I've gotten used to thinking of the law firm Roberts Thomas Alito Gorsuch Kavanaugh & Barrett as the Supreme Court of the Republican party. It appears, though, that they are poised to overturn the Colorado Supreme Court on the question of Trump's ballot eligibility, and in that event I'll have to admit that they missed a chance to perform a service to the GOP. For if you're up to speed on the daydreams of the party's Big Thinkers, you know they're distressed by the prospect of Trump Again, and are praying for a miracle that the party's unwashed voters are plainly going to deny them.

But Roberts et al could have delivered the miracle. Actually, it wouldn't even have qualified as a miracle, since it would only have required them to be faithful to the school of constitutional interpretation they profess to revere. Words have meaning, the 14th Amendment says what it says, and Trump, having done what he's done, must be disqualified as surely as if he hadn't attained the age of 35. The justices might regret having to say it—hell, no president appointed more of them than Trump—but they're just umpires making the calls. Outside, ball, according to Amendment No. 14, Section 3, retire to a Florida country club and tee off from the red markers if you please. 

Side note: the founders are spoken of as if they resided on Olympus, not Boston or plantations in Virginia, and should probably be represented in print as The Founders, to convey the hushed reverential tones one adopts before pronouncing their names and bowing before their mighty works, yet I detect evidence of their fallibility in the existence of a minimum age (35) for holding the presidency, but no maximum one. 

To me, the most amusing aspect of the oral argument in the Colorado case was this notion that, oh my god, are we really going to say that one state can determine who becomes president? I think 2000 was an election year and that Florida is one state.  I'm also pretty sure that 48 states deliver all their electoral votes to the statewide winner, while two, Maine and Nebraska, divvy it up by congressional district. If every state can decide how it wants to do things, and apparently they can, then why can't Colorado exclude a traitor from its ballot? Besides, the idea that Colorado would then be determining the outcome of the election betrays innocence about how things actually work. Colorado would be depriving Trump of some electoral votes that he isn't going to win anyway. What would count for something is if Colorado didn't put him on the ballot in a national, popular vote election—but that's not what we have.

Our election laws and customs are so bizarre that an innocent observer might debate with himself whether a presidential race is a national election, or 50 state elections, the ambiguity arising from the fact that it's a hybrid with rules invented by judges when the contradictions achieve a certain critical mass. 

Edmund Wilson's last decade

"Happily sunk in Balzac again," writes Edmund Wilson, in one of his last Journal entries before dying, age 77, on June 12, 1972, at Talcottville, New York. This is on page 881 of the Journal entitled The Sixties, which, to get him to his finish, slops over into the 1970s. There are also The Fifties, The Forties, The Thirties, and The Twenties. Though they aren't all of such daunting length, none is slim, and you can see how someone might aspire to approach their end happily sunk in Wilson again. A page in my edition of The Sixties bears the heading "Books by Edmund Wilson" and lists, besides the five Journals (five is about the number of decades of adult life we can hope for), 28 other titles, many of them door stops too. Hemingway's suicide early in The Sixties elicits the observation that it was a bad end for one who had advised other writers "to survive and get your work done." Wilson took the advice.

The Sixties makes for pleasant reading late at night since you don't have to worry about anything like losing the plot. I just perk up naturally when the occasion demands. Not interested in the decor of his hotel room in Montreal? Mixing up the identities of his neighbors in Talcottville? Just forge ahead, it's like listening to someone smart talk: never dull for long. Though sometimes I wonder if I missed something. A continuing theme is his troubles with the income tax, and unless I drowsed through it, he never explains the genesis. I know from another source that he simply failed to file a return for several years running. He would probably have agreed with the Saul Bellow character who can't forgive the government for compelling us all to be accountants. Wilson had other things to do, and it occurs to me that the tax code is likely not kind to someone like him, a freelance intellectual who labors away steadily for years, earning very little, and then the government taxes him like a rich man when one year he publishes a book that sells well. 

I'll tell you this, he could afford to buy liquor even in the lean years. Lots of drinking. He also liked the ladies and, for a guy short, fat, and sallow, enjoyed considerable success in this realm. It really seems to be the case that all you have to do is ask. At the beginning of The Sixties, he's 65, and encroaching senescence, as a theme, laps the tax trouble. The following poem, addressed to his fourth and last wife, Elena, gets dropped into the end of the Journal:

Is that a bird or a leaf?
Good grief!
My eyes are old and dim,
And I am getting deaf, my dear,
Your words are no more clear
And I can hardly swim.
I find this rather grim.

Of his flagging capacities, however, the following passage is a fairer representative of what he rued most:

Last year, alone here all summer, I felt, when I had an erection, what a pity it was that so splendid a thing should not have a chance to enjoy itself. This summer I have fewer erections and do not have such vivid feelings about them. I think that I have aged in the last year, but I hope that this does not mean that an abrupt drop has taken place. 

This perhaps calls for a gloss. He was alone at Talcottville, where he lived around half the time in what he called "the old stone house" that had been in the family for years. Elena hated it there and stayed away to the degree possible. It's remote: nearest town of any significance is Rome, and if Rome doesn't count then Utica. It's more than 150 miles to Rochester and around 60 more to Buffalo. Wilson knew families in the area from time spent there as a kid and seems to have enjoyed the contrast with his life among the literati of NYC and Wellfleet on Cape Cod. He engaged an immigrant drug store clerk to teach him Hungarian and studied the flora of the area with a biologist from Syracuse. To Elena, who could not be sustained by such interests, Talcottville could as well have been a Siberian prison camp. The nearest restaurant was at a town with the unprepossessing name of Boonville. To the troubles with the IRS and the problems of advancing age may be added, as a theme to Wilson's Journal, that old reliable, "domestic disputes." For things did not always improve markedly when Elena was on the scene:

After the Sharps left, I drank another glass of the horrible wine, and though I hadn't had much to drink, I set off a quarrel with Elena, telling her that she hadn't been to bed with me for weeks—which led to her ungraciousness about birthday gifts, etc. She hadn't shown me much affection or sympathy since she came to Talcottville, had told me to "snap out of it" and not "pity myself" when I had told her how depressed I was, and, when I said that I needed sympathy, had said, "Everybody needs sympathy." She thought Helen was at the store but then it turned out she was in her room and had, I suppose, been hearing it all through the radiator pipe in the living-room ceiling. This made the situation worse. The next thing I remember, I was sitting in my chair in the big downstairs room and threw at her an old copy of Scrutiny, which hit the wall just to the right of the doorway, outside of which she was standing. She went upstairs, but then came down again and said sadly and propitiatingly, "Good night." I should have met her on this, gone and kissed her; but I threw at her another magazine, a larger and thinner one, which flapped and fell on the floor. Upstairs she spat at me about Mary Pcolar and told me she didn't like my "spongy body"—which may well be true.

Helen is their daughter, a teenager. The physical characteristics of Mary Pcolar, the drugstore clerk and Hungarian tutor, have been previously described in the Journal. Poor Wilson mourning his lonely erections, then suffering even more when Elena came to Talcottville, reminds me that according to Oscar Wilde only two things ever go wrong in life: the first is not getting what you want, the second is getting what you want. 

Political notes on Long Island &c

Scott Shapiro, one of the great shit-posters on Twitter, I mean X, likes to say on days like this that Trump is now, finally, "toast"—the point of course being just the opposite, else Shapiro would not be saying, for the 20 jillionth time, "Trump is toast." I think I mentioned once before that sociologist Brooke Harrington, whom I also know only as a tweeter, has supplied an explanation for why Trump is never toast. It has to do with the psychology of the mark: when you've been had by an obvious con, it's sort of hard to contact the Better Business Bureau, or whoever, and say, basically, "I fell for it." Turns out that this is the finding, or argument, of a famous paper in social science, "On Cooling the Mark Out," by Erving Goffman. In a weird dance, the sucker, who has an interest in saving face, and the con, who has an interest in keeping his frauds undetected, find themselves in league against the guardians of societal norms, such as the Better Business Bureau, the courts, "the Rule of Law," the state attorney general, and the favored sayings of school principals and Cub Scout den mothers. I'm updating some of the details for the Age of Trump. There has to be some way to account for his resilience. His "university" was a fraud. His "foundation" was a fraud. For a long time now, the only thing he's made money from is a reality TV show aimed at the same demographic from which the enrollees of Trump U were drawn. The presidency was just another hustle. Now he wants to be president again as otherwise he'll go to prison. Yet a sizable minority adore him, none more than his victims, who have on occasion compared his travails to those of Jesus. (Trump's been divorced twice and almost the least of his legal troubles arises from a campaign finance law he ran afoul of while trying to cover his fling with an adult film actress he was boffing while his current wife was home with baby Barron.)  

It seems to me that the psychology of the mark, as set out by Goffman, provides a way of making some sense out of this really pretty crazy fact background.

I was surprised to read that the Long Island congressional district formerly represented by another Republican con, George Santos, is the richest in New York State, and the fourth richest in the country. It contains a portion of eastern Queens, a NYC borough not famous for affluence, and doesn't extend anywhere near as far east as the Hamptons, which in my ignorance is where I thought the real money was. Anyway, another thing that needs explaining is how an election district of more than a half million residents could go for Biden by 8 points, then for Santos by 8 points, then for a Democrat by 8 points in last week's special election to replace Santos. My tentative theory is that when Trump is on their mind, the conforming normies recoil in alarm, but when paying less attention all they know is that they don't like taxes. The district's to-and-fro suggests that the Republican party, having become a wholly owned Trump subsidiary, is no longer the automatic choice of people who mainly want to be left alone to enjoy the stuff advertised on TV during golf tournaments. 

Golf in February, no hoax

After today, I've played golf in Minnesota in every month except January. General impression: the ball does not go as far in chilly air, but it rolls farther over frozen ground, and, since the latter effect is stronger than the former, I see even more of the untended parts of the course than usual. 

Could have played in January, too. Probably would have had to subject arthritic knees to limping the course, however. "A nice walk ruined" is the title of a book about golf, but I prefer to ruin a cart ride, and it's not even altogether ruined as the carts have cup holders. Though you don't get as thirsty in 50 degrees as you do in 80. Anyway, it's been warm for so long now that things have dried out and you can ride again.  

I think it was 56 in the Twin Cities yesterday, a record high temperature for the date, and it was 50-something again today. The fellas who crow about the "hoax" of global warming every time there's a cold snap have been quiet for awhile. Maybe they play golf too, but I think they're more likely to be snowmobilers, in which case they should have time on their hands. 

The Power Line blog is my window on the right-wing zeitgeist, and it's sort of fun to use the search engine they supply to track their history of error on climate change. The authors are lawyers, not scientists, and back in 2007 one of them, John Hinderaker, set about the lawyerly task of finding an expert witness who would say, with him, again and again and again, and again, that the real problem was not the warming earth but another Little Ice Age that was coming at us. And he found one, R. Timothy Patterson, a Canadian geologist who warned:

... by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age, should be a priority for governments. It is global cooling, not warming, that is the major climate threat to the world....

Hinderaker then comments:

Will it happen that way? I don't know; ask me in 20 years. Climate science is, as Dr. Patterson says, in its infancy, and nothing is settled. It is unquestionably true, however, that the threat posed by global cooling, should it occur, exceeds any possible danger of global warming.

Since it was in 2007 that he was putting forward the heterodox views of this one scientist, the 20 years aren't up yet. But I'm ready to make a call. We're four years past 2020, when we were supposed to be experiencing the onset of a new Little Ice Age, and the ten hottest years on record are . . . the last ten. In other words, every year since 2014 has been among the ten hottest on record. (Last year, 2023, was the hottest.) It seems the hoax is walloping the dreaded Schwabe solar cycle. 

Getting the job done in Alabama

I've been reading, here and here, about Alabama's execution, last Thursday, of a man in a murder-for-hire plot instigated by a clergyman who evidently preferred a life insurance payout to the company of his wife. There isn't anything about the case that makes one proud to be human. Let's set aside questions of morality and consider basic competence. Alabama had tried to kill this guy once before, by lethal injection, but failed, because the warrant stipulates a certain timeframe in which the execution must occur, and the executioners were not able to find a vein in time. This has been a theme in Alabama's executions. In 2022, scrambling to kill a guy before the clock struck midnight, they just cut directly into his arm in order to expose a vein in which to dump the poison. That, anyway, is my interpretation of the following sentence in one of The New York Times's reports linked to above:

In 2022, executioners tried for hours to access Joe Nathan James's veins, ultimately slicing into one of his arms in what is known as a "cutdown" in order to administer the fatal drugs, according to a private autopsy.

"For hours." The warrant gives them a lot of time but it's not enough. In this more recent case, they instead gave up and escorted the minister's hit man back into the prison, where he waited for a new execution date while the authorities tried to figure out a better way to kill him. Eventually they settled on the method of nitrogen hypoxia and had another go at it after courts ruled that nothing about the state's bungling attempts had caused the penalty to cross a line into the realm of cruel and unusual.  This time they at least produced a corpse. Before the execution, Alabama had argued in court that nitrogen gas, administered through a mask, would "within seconds" render the condemned man unconscious and then kill him. After the execution, a spokesperson for the state said everything had gone smoothly and as expected. Journalists allowed to witness the execution disputed this assessment. One wrote:

For four minutes, he was gasping for air. He appeared to be conscious. He was convulsing, he was writhing, the gurney [to which he was strapped] was shaking noticeably.

Another witness, the son of the murdered woman, said:

We were told by some people that worked [in the prison system] that he'd take two or three breaths and he'd be out and gone. That ain't what happened. After about two or three breaths, that's when the struggling started. Other people kept saying he was trying to raise himself up. Yeah, he was. I'd probably try and do the same, try and get off the table. . . .  With all that struggling and jerking and trying to get off that table, more or less, it's just something I don't ever want to see again.

What actually happens when people are executed tends to reinforce the arguments against the death penalty. It's barbaric, and the barbarity is enhanced, I think, by ghoulish rituals, such as the last meal. From the Times's account, again:

Mr. Smith . . . ate his last meal on Thursday morning: a T-bone steak, hash browns and eggs, all from Waffle House and slathered with steak sauce. Prison officials said that to reduce the likelihood of Mr. Smith vomiting during the execution, he would not be permitted to eat after 10 a.m.

It doesn't mention that this was, presumably, Smith's second "last meal." Probably would have enjoyed the first one more if he'd known his executioners weren't up to the challenge of killing him. The manifest incompetence of people working in "the system" perhaps explains to a degree why death row inmates are quite regularly exonerated. Death penalty foes also argue that it's administered unevenly and capriciously, so I'll conclude by noting that, in the penalty phase of Smith's trial, the jury voted 11-1 for life in prison only to be overruled by the judge, who instead imposed the death penalty. What is the point of having a jury of the defendant's peers hear evidence in a penalty hearing if the judge can simply overrule their judgment? It seems Alabama couldn't answer this question. The state therefore withdrew this power from judges—but allowed the executions of those sentenced to death under the incoherent, rescinded rule to go forward.

Tin ear

 

In the category of favorite Trump obsessions, minor import only, I think the former president's persistent boasting about having "aced" the cognitive test used to diagnose dementia has slipped past his abiding interest in the volume of water flowing in bathroom fixtures and is now alone in first place. Probably it's a currency thing. If he's been talking lately about needing to flush thrice or the trouble he has getting his thick mane sufficiently wet in the shower, I missed it—but his pride in the dementia test result is something he won't stop talking about. I've attached above just one of the amusing installments from a few years ago; google something like "Trump brags cognitive test" if you want a full slate, including the most current specimens.

If you "ace" the cognitive test, and are unduly proud of it, to what degree is the test result called into question? I'm guessing that most people who can count backwards by 7s wouldn't think to brag about it. 

It's tempting to say that Trump has dumbed down the GOP to his own level, but to do so introduces a chicken-or-egg problem. However you account for the sights to be seen, you must admit they're arresting. Governor DeSantis ran against Disney, and that proved to be such campaign rocket fuel that now they want to run against Taylor and Travis, too!

Political consultant: Your side is bedeviled by an enormous gender gap, and young women in particular can't stand you.

GOP: I know, it's terrible! How about we gob spit on Taylor Swift?