The Weekly Sift

Monday, June 13, 2016

Unthinkable

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought -- that is, a thought diverging from the principles of IngSoc -- should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

-- George Orwell, "The Principles of Newspeak"

This week's featured posts are "What Should 'Racism' Mean? Part II" and "About Those Emails".

The last two days, everyone has been talking about the Orlando shooting

It certainly deserves top billing. Looking at my Facebook news feed, it seems to be what's on everybody's mind, and it's certainly on mine. I wish I had something comforting or hopeful or inspiring to say about it, or even something accusatory that directed blame to more appropriate places than it would otherwise go.

But I don't. And I don't want to cheapen the discussion by launching a canned rant about guns or terrorism or some other related issue. Maybe by next week I'll have something more insightful to say.

One thing I have noticed, though: In previous mass killings, there has been a "We are all ..." meme. "We are all Americans", "Je suis Charlie", and so on. But one measure of the power of LGBT prejudice is that nothing similar seems to be happening this time. There is no "We are all queer" meme.

I'm reminded of a criticism made by a character in the Richard Condon novel Winter Kills about a fictional president who resembles JFK: "He went to Germany and said 'I am a Berliner', but he never went to Mississippi and said 'I am a nigger'."

Until then, everybody had been talking about the first woman to clinch a major-party nomination

It was a good week for Hillary Clinton. Monday night AP's and NBC's running total of Clinton delegates (both pledged and super) went over the magic number of 2383, clinching the nomination for her. Tuesday she won four of the five primaries (and lost the North Dakota caucus, where 394 people voted), including getting a surprisingly large margin in California.

With the race decided, the heavyweight endorsements came in: Obama, Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren. Unlike what's happening the Republican side, all her endorsers seem enthusiastic about getting out and campaigning for her.

Bernie Sanders still hasn't quite come around yet, but I hope nobody's pushing him too hard. Clinton would benefit more from a quality endorsement than a prompt one. Better if it takes him a few weeks to endorse Clinton, but it's clear that he genuinely wants to reconcile his supporters to the Democratic nominee, than if he offers some quick gritted-teeth statement and then stomps off to Vermont until after the election.

The bad news about Clinton looks to be wildly exaggerated: The Clinton Foundation donor who got appointed to a national security board actually did have some reason to be there.

Sanders supporters have been making the point that, since superdelegates could still change their votes, Clinton hasn't really clinched anything yet.

If you want to get into legalisms, though, no one has ever clinched a nomination before the convention actually voted. Because superdelegates aren't the only issue: Every convention is a law unto itself, and can change its own rules. So the convention of either party could free its pledged delegates from any previous obligation. In an absolutely literal sense, then, neither Clinton nor Trump has clinched the nomination, and neither had Obama or Romney at this point four years ago.

The Atlantic took this a step further:

If the Sanders camp truly wants to reserve use of the term [presumptive nominee] until every doubt is gone, then it should advocate that people never use it. Even post-convention, a party could put forth a replacement if the nominee dropped out or died.

However, if you cover the 2016 Democratic race the way every race in history has been covered before now -- i.e., counting pledged delegates and believing unpledged delegates when they say they are voting for a particular candidate -- then Clinton clinched the nomination last Monday and is the presumptive nominee.

Long but interesting Facebook article on Clinton's long-term popularity/unpopularity.

So what do we see in this data? What I see is that the public view of Hillary Clinton does not seem to be correlated to “scandals” or issues of character or whether she murdered Vince Foster. No, the one thing that seems to most negatively and consistently affect public perception of Hillary is any attempt by her to seek power. Once she actually has that power her polls go up again. But whenever she asks for it her numbers drop like a manhole cover.

I'll probably talk about this article more in some future week, but the gist is that there is an underlying, usually unconscious, sexism at work: Patriarchal culture trains us to accept power-seeking in men, but to see power-seeking women as unattractive.

and Trump's bad week

Before Orlando, outrage over Trump's repeated anti-Hispanic comments against Judge Curiel had been dominating the news, sometimes overwhelming the history Clinton was making. Many statements from Republican leaders either denounced Trump or distanced themselves from him. I link to several in the featured post "What Should 'Racism' Mean? Part II."

The Clinton campaign's mock Trump University ad is pretty funny.

A true factoid has been bouncing around Facebook since Obama's endorsement of Clinton: Only five living people know what it's like to be president. The three Democrats (Carter, Bill Clinton, Obama) have endorsed Clinton, but the two Republicans (Bush and Bush) have not endorsed Trump.

David Brooks has harsh words for Paul Ryan, who agrees that Trump says racist things, but urges the Republican Party to unite around him anyway.

Ryan’s argument ... puts political positions first and character and morality second. Sure Trump’s a scoundrel, but he might agree with our tax proposal. Sure, he is a racist, but he might like our position on the defense budget. Policy agreement can paper over a moral chasm. Nobody calling themselves a conservative can agree to this hierarchy of values.

USA Today examined the 3500 lawsuits Trump and his companies have been involved in, and drew this conclusion:

The actions in total paint a portrait of Trump’s sprawling organization frequently failing to pay small businesses and individuals, then sometimes tying them up in court and other negotiations for years. In some cases, the Trump teams financially overpower and outlast much smaller opponents, draining their resources. Some just give up the fight, or settle for less; some have ended up in bankruptcy or out of business altogether.

Republicans who are counting on President Trump to stand by his promises (like choosing Supreme Court nominees from his list) should bear this pattern in mind: Once Trump has gotten what he wants from you, he'll try to negotiate about whether he should fulfill his side of the deal. He usually wants some additional concession in exchange for delivering what he already owes you.

The number of companies and others alleging he hasn’t paid suggests that either his companies have a poor track record hiring workers and assessing contractors, or that Trump businesses renege on contracts, refuse to pay, or consistently attempt to change payment terms after work is complete as is alleged in dozens of court cases.

The New York Times casts a similar light on Trump's Atlantic City casinos, all of which are either bankrupt now or owned by somebody else.

But even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.

The same could be said about Trump Tower Tampa (where Trump made money while investors lost their deposits on condos that were never built) and several other Trump projects.

Those who invested early in the visions of businessmen like Sam Walton and Bill Gates got rich -- sometimes very, very rich. But partnering with Trump has often meant that he winds up with your money.

One of my Facebook friends raised a question about why these stories are coming out now. Didn't any of the 16 other Republican campaigns have opposition research departments that could feed reporters info about Trump's shady record?

This illuminates an important difference between the Republican primaries and the general election. Inside the conservative bubble, it's heresy to point out that some rich people are more deserving than others. They're all job creators who should get more tax cuts. Attempting to portray any rich man negatively is just "class warfare" or "the politics of envy".

But the general electorate understands well that, while some people get rich through talent and hard work and visionary ideas, others make money by being scoundrels.

and that rape case

Since there's a sports angle, a really good summary is in Sports Illustrated. The details bear out the impression you've probably already gotten from the headlines: A handsome young athlete (Brock Turner) from an elite university (Stanford) becomes an object of a judge's empathy, moreso than the woman he sexually assaulted. So Turner gets a 6-month sentence (which could be as little as 3 months if he doesn't get into any trouble in jail).

Two heroes of the story are Swedish grad students, who happened to be biking past a frat house when they noticed that the female half of the couple apparently having sex by the dumpster was actually unconscious. Rather than decide it wasn't their business, they asked what was going on, chased Turner down when he ran away, called police, and testified at the trial. I'd like to think young American men would have done the same, but I'm not sure.

At the trial, Turner claimed the woman consented, which seems hard to square with her being unconscious. That points out one of the weird things in the way we discuss rape: When we talk about sex, consent becomes a tricky concept. But in money discussions, consent is totally straightforward.

For example, imagine I ask you for money and you say no. If I then take your wallet, I'm a thief. It doesn't matter at all whether you've given me money in the past, or if you've been giving money to lots of other guys. Maybe your jeans are so tight that the wallet in your pocket is totally obvious, leaving nothing to my imagination. Maybe hundred dollar bills are hanging out of your blouse pocket. Maybe we're both drunk and you pass out before you get done turning me down. None of that matters. If you never said "Here, take my money" I'm a thief.

In discussions of rape, we use phrases like consensual sex. Try to imagine a similar phrase in the money example. It redundant to talk about a consensual gift or a consensual loan, because there is no gift or loan without consent; there's just theft.

and you might also be interested in

Clinton's charge that Trump is "temperamentally unfit" to be president -- which looks like it's going to be a major theme of her campaign -- brings up some fascinating history I hadn't known.

During the 1964 campaign Fact magazine asked 12,000 psychiatrists, whether Barry Goldwater was "psychologically fit" for the presidency. Most ignored the mailing, but 1189 responded that he wasn't, and some added colorful comments that made for a sensational article.

It took a few years, but Goldwater won his lawsuit against Fact, and the American Psychiatric Association decided that the profession didn't need this kind of publicity. So now the official code of ethics contains a "Goldwater Rule".

On occasion psychiatrists are asked for an opinion about an individual who is in the light of public attention or who has disclosed information about himself/herself through public media. In such circumstances, a psychiatrist may share with the public his or her expertise about psychiatric issues in general. However, it is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.

Samantha Bee explains how it came down to Trump.

and let's close with the generic TED talk

John Barth once wrote a short story called "Title", in which every element of the story -- including the title -- is a placeholder or a generic description. Pat Kelly has now done the same thing for TED talks.

Monday, June 6, 2016

Float and Sting

Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.
The hands can't hit what the eyes can't see.

-- Muhammad Ali

This week's featured post is "Preserving the Cult of the Job Creator".

This week everybody was talking about Muhammad Ali

who died Friday at age 74.

Boxing has declined in the last few decades, to the point that it's now on the fringes of most sports fans' attention. I had to look up who the heavyweight champion of the world is now, and didn't recognize any of the names I saw.

If you grew up in this era of decline, you may not have any notion of what the heavyweight boxing title used to mean. I can't think of anything to compare it to today. It had a mythic quality; the Champ wasn't just a star athlete, he was the current avatar of some essential aspect of manliness. In recent years, probably no athlete has stood as high as Michael Jordan did in the 1990s, but even he was just a man playing a game. Half a century ago, the Champion of the World was more than that.

So it mattered who the Champ was, even if you didn't care about boxing as a sport. That a black man like Joe Louis could be Champ in the 1930s and 40s (not just beating all comers, but representing America against foreigners like Nazi Germany's Max Schmeling) didn't just inspire his fellow blacks, but influenced many whites' thinking about race, and probably played a role in the acceptability of the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 60s.

In pure sporting terms, Muhammad Ali was a figure on the scale of Tiger Woods or LeBron James. He changed his sport with a style that was light and graceful. Previous champions had been powerful punchers. But Ali's quickness made opponents miss by embarrassing margins, letting him strike back while they were off balance.

And then there was his beyond-sports significance. Joe Louis had epitomized the soft-spoken black man who knew not to overstep. Satchel Paige played the minstrel and clown, hoping to avoid white hatred by keeping things light. Jackie Robinson understood that his play on the field could be his only response to racist abuse. But Ali got in America's face. "I am the greatest!" he announced bluntly. He set the stage for the black-power turn in the civil rights movement. Why did a successful black have to be humble and take care not to offend? Why couldn't he be as brash as any white man?

And why did he have to be Christian? Already celebrated as Cassius Clay, he rejected that as a "slave name" when he converted to Islam. By insisting that the public use his Muslim name, Ali blazed a path later followed by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and many other sports stars.

At the height of his career, Ali refused to be drafted for the Vietnam War, catalyzing a national debate about whether black men should fight yellow men to maintain white men's power. ("No Viet Cong ever called me nigger," he said.) After being refused conscientious-objector status, he was convicted of draft evasion (later overturned by the Supreme Court on a technicality) and banned from boxing for more than three years.

Then he returned to take the championship back from Joe Frazier. The three Ali/Frazier bouts were Super-Bowl-level events; for a few days all other sporting news faded to insignificance.

So if Ali's heyday happened before your time, this is what I would like you to understand: He filled a role in society that does not exist any more. There is literally no one like him.

and (yet again this week) Donald Trump

Whatever else you may think of Trump, he is a genius at drawing media attention. Hillary Clinton got a lot of buzz for her foreign-policy speech Thursday, but only because she was talking about Trump. Afterwards, conservatives criticized Clinton's speech because it unveiled no new foreign-policy ideas ... as if anyone would have covered an actual Clinton-doctrine speech that wasn't about Trump.

Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different – they are dangerously incoherent. They’re not even really ideas – just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds, and outright lies. He is not just unprepared – he is temperamentally unfit to hold an office that requires knowledge, stability and immense responsibility.

The Trump University fraud suits got major coverage this week. The basic story is the same one I summarized in March. What was new was how Trump doubled down on vilifying the judge in the San Diego suit, claiming that he must be biased against Trump because he is "Mexican" (actually an American born in Indiana to legal Mexican-immigrant parents). He also suggested that a Muslim judge might be also be biased against him.

Try to imagine any comparable situation. Picture, say, President Nixon denouncing Judge Sirica for being Italian, or Ted Cruz blaming the same-sex marriage decision on Justices Kagan, Breyer, and Ginsburg being Jewish.

The Atlantic notes an appellate court's comment on a case in the 90s where similar objections were made:

“Courts have repeatedly held that matters such as race or ethnicity are improper bases for challenging a judge's impartiality,” wrote the chief judge, Ralph Winter, a Reagan appointee. “Nor should one charge that a judge is not impartial solely because an attorney is embroiled in a controversy with the administration that appointed the judge. … Finally, appointment by a particular administration and membership in a particular racial or ethnic group are in combination not grounds for questioning a judge's impartiality. Zero plus zero is zero.”

Vox makes this observation:

For a man who's quick to claim that "the Hispanics" love him, Trump certainly seems quick to assume that actual Hispanics do not.

Trump's other defense was to release a video in which Trump U customers praised the seminars they attended. AP discovered that these were not "typical" Trump U customers at all, but were "beholden to Trump" in some other way. For example, one owed Trump a favor for providing a blurb for her son's self-help book. Another is a businessman who sells products through Trump's golf courses, restaurants, and resorts.

As for why there are lawsuits in only two states, Vox reports: "State attorneys general who dropped Trump University fraud inquiries subsequently got Trump donations." A former Texas official told The Dallas Morning News:

The decision not to sue him was political. Had [Trump] not been involved in politics to the extent he was at the time, we would have gotten approval. Had he been just some other scam artist, we would have sued him.

Tuesday, Trump lit into the press for doing its job too well.

Recapping the story from the beginning: Back in August, Fox News hosted a Republican debate. Megyn Kelly's questions to Trump were tougher than he liked, so he tried to intimidate Fox into removing her five months later when Fox News held the last debate before the Iowa caucuses in January. Fox refused, so Trump boycotted the debate and staged a rival event, which he promoted heavily and billed as a fund-raiser for veterans groups. He claimed to raise $6 million, of which he supposedly donated $1 million himself.

In any other campaign, reporters would routinely ask the campaign office for proof that the money had been distributed, some staffer would assemble the paperwork and put out a press release, and that would be the end of it, probably without you ever hearing about the follow-up. But the Trump campaign didn't do its part, so The Washington Post started contacting veterans groups to see if they'd gotten the promised money.

The Post's David Fahrentholt first wrote about it in March, when he could only account for half the money. He came back to the topic on May 21, and got Trump's campaign manager to admit that they only collected $4.5 million. He wouldn't say whether Trump's million was part of that or not.

Then on May 24, the checks suddenly went out.

Summing up: When Trump made a claim that garnered him good publicity, at least one hard-working reporter checked to see if it was actually true. It turned out to be only half-true, and the reporter's scrutiny shamed Trump into making good on his promises. That's good journalism. Any veterans group that got a check dated May 24 should send David Fahrenthold a thank-you note.

But Trump went into a tirade against the press corps as a whole, calling an ABC reporter "a sleaze".

The unprecedented scale of Donald Trump's disconnection from the truth has swamped ordinary notions of fact-checking. (PolitiFact has identified 29 Trump pants-on-fire lies, compared to 3 from Clinton and none from Sanders.) How the media should adjust has become a topic of discussion. Here, CNN tried out something new: fact-checking him in real time.

A number of American writers, some as famous as Stephen King and Amy Tan, published "An Open Letter to the American People" speaking out against Donald Trump. Unfortunately, it included this line:

Because American history, despite periods of nativism and bigotry, has from the first been a grand experiment in bringing people of different backgrounds together, not pitting them against one another

which Daniel José Older described as

not only empirically false, it’s a continuation of the ongoing legacy of sanitized lies America has shoved down its own throat since its creation

I guess I'd say that from the beginning, the two impulses have struggled for dominance. In every generation, America was bringing people of diverse backgrounds together in new ways, and also pitting people against each other. ("All men are created equal," the slave-owner wrote earnestly.) Over time, I think the bringing-people-together impulse has been slowly winning out, as movements for abolition, women's suffrage, civil rights, gender rights, gay rights, (and so on) attest. But I think it's a mistake to minimize either the authenticity of the idealism that has animated Americans through the centuries or its consistent failure to fully manifest in a fair society.

And yes, electing Trump would be a lurch back towards nativism and bigotry.

and the Democrats

Tomorrow is the last big round of primaries, with only D.C.'s primary next week still left. California is the big one and may be close, but probably it will also be anticlimactic. New Jersey is in the Eastern time zone and Clinton should win it easily. That should give her more than enough delegates have the nomination already clinched before California is called.

Then Wednesday, we get to the moment everyone has been speculating about: What will Bernie do? At this point I think I'll just wait and see.

Hard to say what's going on with the general-election polls. Some show a close race between Trump and Clinton, while others don't.

and the gorilla that got killed

Harambe, a gorilla at the Cincinnati Zoo, was killed the Saturday before Memorial Day after a 3-year-old boy fell into the gorilla enclosure and seemed to be in danger.

This set off a storm of social media commentary because it wasn't Harambe's fault, maybe the boy could have been saved without killing the gorilla (though I wouldn't want to be the guy who made that decision if the boy then died), and so on.

One major target was the boy's mother, for not keeping better track of him. She has four children (who I assume were all at the zoo with her, though I haven't seen anybody verify that explicitly). The fact that the family is black raised the old stereotype of irresponsible black women who have more children than they can manage. And it came out that the children's father had served a year in jail on a drug charge, as if that had some relevance.

It's a shame there isn't more sympathy for a mother who clearly must have believed her child was about to die right in front of her.

My wife and I are that couple you know who likes kids but have none of their own, so we've had lots of conversations with parents who were letting their hair down. I think every parent I've known can tell a story about a moment when their kid was suddenly gone, and then just as suddenly reappeared someplace he or she couldn't possibly be. Kids are ingenious little buggers who can spot momentary distractions and take advantage by moving really, really fast.

Here's my negligent-adult story: I was out in the yard with a friend's daughter. At one point she was standing securely on my shoulders, perfectly balanced between my raised arms, which she could grab if she got unsteady. But then she jumped off at a moment and in a direction that I completely did not expect. My dive to catch her was too slow, and we stayed in eye contact all the way to the ground, which seemed like a very long time. Landing on her back scared her and knocked the wind out of her, but she was otherwise unharmed.

All the stories I know personally are like that: The shield of adult protection momentarily fails, and something really bad could happen, but it doesn't. Cars stop inches short, human or animal predators don't happen to appear during the defenseless instant, the ER people get the stomach pumped out in time, and so on. That's what happens almost every time adult vigilance fails. Some people get unlucky, but the rest of us (if we're honest) have to admit this truth: If perfection were the standard, then nobody would deserve to have healthy children.

So the reactions I empathized with were like Amanda Marcotte's:

The expectation that you spend the next 18 years of your life never being less than perfect for a moment is one reason I don’t want kids.

And Kimberley Harrington's:

If you want to know why mothers — especially mothers in this country — are so batshit crazy, maybe it has something to do with the fact that we are blamed for every. god damn. thing. BY STRANGERS. Work full time? Why are you letting someone else raise your kid? Stay at home mom? Why aren’t you teaching them to be independent go-getters? Breastfeeding, formula feeding, fucking wilderness schools, grit, financial savvy, watching them all of the time, watching them none of the time, free range, Tiger Mom-ing ALL OF THE THINGS OH MY GOD INTERNET MAKE UP YOUR FUCKING MINDS.

but I need to fix a mistake

Last week I got taken in by some of the bad reporting on a case of an antibiotic-resistant infection. A commenter linked to a more accurate article from Ars Technica.

While, again, this isn’t exactly good news, it’s not catastrophic. There are several last-resort antibiotics, and doctors can try different combinations and strengths of prescriptions before an infection may be deemed untreatable.

The somewhat more detailed summary goes like this:

Thursday’s report of a mcr-1-based colistin-resistant bacterial infection in a US patient is concerning, but unsurprising. The plasmid based resistant gene threatens to spread to other bacteria, potentially to ones that are already resistant to last resort drugs, such as CRE. However, the trajectory of mcr-1's emergence and its contribution to drug resistant infection trends is not yet clear. For now, the case serves mostly to highlight the ongoing crisis of rising antibiotic resistance and furthers the need for better stewardship of old antibiotics and development of new ones.

My mistake in falling for -- and worse, promoting -- the more apocalyptic version of the story (that the bacteria was resistant to all antibiotics) demonstrates a type of error I think everybody needs to watch out for: I've been watching the erosion of antibiotic effectiveness for years now and trying to call my readers' attention to it. So when reputable news outlets seemed to be saying that the disaster I'd been warning about was finally here, I didn't check the details the way I should have.

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In case you missed it, here's the town hall meeting President Obama had Wednesday in Elkhart, Indiana.

And he answered more questions afterward, like this one about gun control.

I guess it's not that surprising to hear that there's a 50th-anniversary Monkees album. But the fact that it's getting good reviews is a shock.

and let's close with something hopeful

José Picardo is a high school assistant principal who thinks the kids might be all right. In an article published on Medium, he recalled this photo that went viral on the internet last year, apparently showing teen-agers at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam staring into their phones while ignoring Rembrandt's masterpiece "The Night Watch" on the wall behind them.

Lots of folks took the photo as "a perfect metaphor for our age", in which young people are so addicted to technology that the beauty of the real world escapes them.

But what were they doing? Texting? Playing Angry Birds? Checking how many Likes their selfies were getting?

Not exactly.

It turns out that the Rijksmuseum has an app that, among other things, contains guided tours and further information about the works on display. As part of their visit to the museum, the children, who minutes earlier had admired the art and listened attentively to explanations by expert adults, had been instructed to complete an assignment by their school teachers, using, among other things, the museum’s excellent smartphone app.

Monday, May 30, 2016

Thrones and Crowns

When wilt thou save the people?
Oh God of mercy when?
The people, Lord, the people
Not thrones and crowns, but men.

-- "Save the People" from Godspell

This week's featured post is "The Election is About the Country, Not the Candidates". I also wrote a column about Humanism for UU World.

This week everybody was talking about the presidential race

The Inspector General for the State Department put out a report on the Clinton email affair. I had a hard time finding an article that I thought put the proper importance on this story, neither overblowing it nor completely writing it off. I found myself more-or-less on the same page as The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza:

So this scandal is like so many that have dogged the Clintons: while it’s more molehill than mountain, it does genuinely revolve around a serious issue (Clinton’s commitment to transparency); her initial response was less than forthcoming; and the critics exaggerating the degree of wrongdoing have demonstrated more interest in damaging her politically than fixing the underlying government-wide problem that the e-mail imbroglio has revealed.

Two polls of the California Democratic Party came out last Monday: PPIC had Clinton up by 2%, 46%-44%. SurveyUSA had Clinton up by 18%, 57%-39%. The close-race poll makes a better headline than the it's-not-close poll, so that's the one that got all the attention.

Of course both polls were before the inspector general's report on Clinton's emails, which can't have done her any good.

In North Dakota Thursday, Trump laid out his energy policy, which is all fossil fuels all the time, including coal.

He did not explicitly address the scientific legitimacy of human-caused climate change, but said, “We’re going to deal with real environmental challenges, not the phony ones we’ve been hearing about. ... Regulations that shut down hundreds of coal-fired power plants and block the construction of new ones — how stupid is that?"

He also pledged to restart the Keystone XL pipeline project, cancel the Paris climate agreement, and stop the Obama/Clinton policy of foreign aid to help poorer countries adapt to climate change. (Just to give one example, by 2050 rising seas are expected to drive about 18 million Bangladeshis from their homes. Where will they go?)

It's hard for me to get excited about the climate-policy differences between Clinton and Sanders when Trump is sounding like a Bond villain.

The biggest non-story of the week was the Trump/Sanders debate, which took over the news cycle for two whole days, even though it should have been completely obvious that Trump would never do it.

It got covered as Trump-and-Sanders-will-gang-up-on-Hillary, but that's not where Bernie was headed, and probably wouldn't have done him any good anyway. Sanders' closing argument is that he's the better candidate to run against Trump, so that's what he would have been trying to prove. Agreeing with Trump about "crooked Hillary" would have turned off more Democratic voters than it attracted.

Trump, conversely, had nothing to gain. Sanders would be trying out liberal anti-Trump arguments, letting Clinton see how Trump handles them. And even if Trump managed a smashing victory, he would just have been scoring points against somebody he wouldn't run against anyway.

Of course, Trump would accept the initial challenge, because that's the image he wants to project. But just as obviously, he'd make up conditions that couldn't be met so that he could back out. And that's what happened.

Even Rachel Maddow, who ought to be smarter than this, devoted half of a 20-minute segment to this topic Thursday, and got all whipped up about it.

Violence between pro-Trump and anti-Trump people broke out outside Trump's San Diego rally Friday night. There had previously been protests outside Trump's Fresno rally.

If anti-Trump protests are going to be a thing -- and it looks like they are -- it seems likely that there will be more fights and arrests and so forth. No matter who is actually at fault, I suspect the anti-Trump people will get blamed.

That's why I'm hoping that Clinton will distance herself from the anti-Trump protests, and denounce any violence in strong terms. Something like: "If you want to protest peacefully against Donald Trump, that's your right as an American. But don't do it on my account. If you want to work for my campaign, we have lots of more useful jobs for you to do."

Jonathan Weisman describes how he became a social-media target of Trump-supporting anti-Semites. Meanwhile, BuzzFeed's Rosie Gray reports on the excitement Trump has raised at the white-nationalist American Renaissance conference. That's not to claim that Trump is actively anti-Semitic or a white nationalist himself. But at some point you do have a responsibility to notice and comment on the things that are being done in your name.

Something Trump himself did do is use 12 minutes of a public rally to bash by name the judge who presides over the San Diego version of the Trump University fraud suit. (There's a separate New York suit. Neither will go to trial before the election.) Trump described the judge as a "Mexican" and a "hater".

I’m telling you, this court system, judges in this court system, federal court, they ought to look into Judge Curiel. Because what Judge Curiel is doing is a total disgrace, OK?

On and on like that for 12 minutes.

James Fallows makes the historical comparison:

When the results of an established process turn against them, presidents and presidential aspirants must defend the process. That’s the difference between rule-of-law and rule-of-men. Richard Nixon disagreed with the Supreme Court’s rulings against him but did not question their legitimacy or say he would try to get back at the Justices. Al Gore had far better logical and jurisprudential grounds for questioning the ruling in Bush v. Gore, but while he made clear that he bitterly disagreed, he of course complied. He did not mention the ethnicity of the Justices or say that they should be “looked into.”

I'll take that a step farther: When you're talking to a room filled with your rabid fans, and your speech is likely to get covered on national TV, how hard is it to imagine one lunatic deciding to impress you by doing something about that hater judge?

Vox' Liz Plank takes on Trump's talk about Hillary's "woman card", when he went on to say: "We're petrified to speak to women any more." She lists a number of things that women might be afraid of, like, say, rape, or having their concerns ignored by a Congress that is 80% male.

But yeah, men's fear of being labeled as sexist when they clearly say things that are definitely sexist ... definitely trumps the very well documented systemic sexism that women face every day.

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Obama went to Hiroshima and said this:

Those who died, they are like us. Ordinary people understand this, I think. They do not want more war. They would rather that the wonders of science be focused on improving life and not eliminating it. When the choices made by nations, when the choices made by leaders, reflect this simple wisdom, then the lesson of Hiroshima is done.

The world was forever changed here, but today the children of this city will go through their day in peace. What a precious thing that is. It is worth protecting, and then extending to every child. That is a future we can choose, a future in which Hiroshima and Nagasaki are known not as the dawn of atomic warfare but as the start of our own moral awakening.

It's been great, these last seven years, to have a president I can take pride in.

One of those simple stats that speaks volumes: Home ownership is at its lowest rate since 1967. The millennial generation's path through life is going to be different than previous generations.

Thursday, health officials announced the first incidence in the U.S. of a bacterial infection that is immune to all known antibiotics. This has been coming for a long time, but now it's here.

Venezuela is spiraling downward.

An important lesson in structural racism: A Pro Publica investigation shows that a widely used algorithm to predict whether criminals will commit more crimes -- producing "risk scores" that judges and parole boards use to decide on sentences -- is biased against blacks. It over-estimates the risk that blacks will commit future crimes, and under-estimates the risk that whites will.

There's no evidence that anybody did this intentionally, but factors that seem to make sense on an individual basis have the effect of reproducing the culture of mass incarceration.

Race is not one of the questions. The survey asks defendants such things as: “Was one of your parents ever sent to jail or prison?” “How many of your friends/acquaintances are taking drugs illegally?” and “How often did you get in fights while at school?” The questionnaire also asks people to agree or disagree with statements such as “A hungry person has a right to steal” and “If people make me angry or lose my temper, I can be dangerous.”

Since blacks are imprisoned at much higher rates than whites, their children will have worse risk scores. If you attend a bad public school, with lots of violence and drugs, it will count against you. And so on.

Due to some really bad reporting, a lot of people now believe that scientists have shown at long last that cellphones cause cancer. Vox' Brad Palmer does the kind of careful science reporting that is too boring for most media outlets.

So here's what happened, more or less: Researchers bombarded some rats with more cellphone radiation than any human is likely to be exposed to, and they did get more tumors of two particular types in those rats than in the control group. On the other hand, we've been conducting an unofficial experiment by having lots of humans use cellphones, and we're not seeing the kinds of increases in cancer that we would if there were a large effect. (And BTW: the irradiated mice on average lived longer than the control group.)

In short, it's the kind of study that should make people go "Hmmm", not "OMG, we're all going to die!"

Look: Science moves slowly. Individual studies are often wrong, and it's rare for one paper to completely upend everything we know about a topic. There are very few genuinely "game-changing" studies. And reporters need to do a better job of putting this incrementalism in context — rather than preying on people's fears for clicks.

and let's close with something cute

At the end of a long day, Momma Raccoon makes sure all the kids get home safe.

Monday, May 23, 2016

One Purpose

Whether you voted for me or you voted for Barack, the time is now to unite as a single party with a single purpose. We are on the same team, and none of us can afford to sit on the sidelines. ... Barack Obama is my candidate, and he must be our president.

-- Hillary Clinton, 2008 Democratic Convention (8-26-2008)

This week's featured post is "Fears of Democratic Disunity: talking myself down".

This week everybody was talking about a plane crash

The usual news sites can be confusing places to keep track of an unfolding story like the loss of EgyptAir Flight 804. They focus too much on what information is new today, and it's often hard to tell whether they're reporting or speculating. I recommend checking the Wikipedia page from time to time. That way you get the whole story as it is currently understood.

and whether the Democrats can unify

In the featured post, I let my fears run wild and then talk myself down.

while the Republicans unite around Trump

Interesting article in The Atlantic about Trump's message to coal country versus Clinton's.

[Trump's] plan is very easy to envision: You’ll have your job back, and your old lives. This is the power of Trump’s blame-based worldview. When curing a community’s malaise is as simple as getting rid of the bad actor who caused it—in this case, Obama’s environmental regulations—the rewards feel more certain, more tangible. “When you say, ‘I’m going to give your job back,’ that’s a very immediate solution to the problem,” said Erin Cassese, an associate professor of political science at West Virginia University. “If you want to find fault with Clinton’s plan or Sanders’s plan, it’s that they're really vague. People don’t have a clear vision of what their lives are going to be like in four years. It’s more abstract, and that’s why it has less resonance with voters." The problem is that Trump’s plan has almost no chance of success. A U.S. president has no power to stoke global demand for coal, or pump up the price of natural gas; the most Trump could do is repeal Obama’s environmental rules, and economists agree that would have a minimal effect on employment.

In the fall campaign, that's going to be the argument across the board. Clinton will offer a detailed program to make things better than they are now; Trump will pledge to make things right again, but offer either no plan or one based in fantasy. It's going to be a serious test of the wisdom of the electorate.

Trump put out a list of the 11 white people he would consider nominating to replace Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. In general, conservatives consider this a good list and liberals don't, but getting into that argument misses the obvious: Once in office, Trump will do what he wants, independent of anything he's said in past or is saying now. Look at what we've already seen: He publishes a tax plan, and then distances himself from it. One of his top surrogates now says his Mexican Wall would be "virtual" and his deportation promise "rhetorical". As Kyle Kondik of Sabato's Crystal Ball put it:

Tackling Trump on the issues will be tricky because he just changes his positions all the time.

So in January, if Trump pulls a Caligula and nominates his horse to the Court, I can imagine what he'll say if anybody mentions this list. "That was a good list, a great list, and those 11 judges are really top people, totally first rate. But America's Greatness -- have you seen him? -- what a horse he is!"

but a lot of important things have been happening the in the world while we've been focused on presidential politics (and bathrooms)

I haven't given this stuff nearly the attention it deserves. Fortunately, Vox been on the case. Brexit. The European Union is at a tricky point. Its member countries are unified enough that the EU limits the actions of the national governments, but not so unified as to provide the kind of benefits that, say, the states of the US see from our federal government. (For example, if our states had the kind of loose relationship EU countries do, Florida might have had to go bankrupt in the 2008 real estate crash, or New Jersey after Hurricane Sandy.) Previously, this has come to a head with regard to the Greek economic crisis, and the "Greek exit" option got smushed down to "Grexit". (Greece decided to stay in the EU for now.) Now Britain, a much larger, richer economy, is facing a referendum to leave the EU. Britain has always had an ambivalent relationship with the European mainland, which is symbolized by the fact that it has retained the pound, rather than merge into the EuroZone. That limits some of the hassle of being in the EU, and would limit some of the impact of a Brexit. (For example, Britain's national debt is in its own currency, which it could print if it needed a quick way out of a debt crisis. Greece, on the other hand, owes Euros, which it doesn't control.) Vox has a good explanatory article. An exit vote on the UK referendum on June 23 would trigger the negotiation of an exit agreement with the EU, which would then have to be approved. So the referendum is a move towards exit, but not a direct exit. The biggest worry, though, isn't Brexit itself, but the larger nationalistic process it might be part of.

Brexit is the British manifestation of a broader popular revolt against European integration that is gradually spreading across Europe. If the British people choose to abandon the EU at this vulnerable moment, it might well be the catalyst that causes the cancer of populism and disintegration — which is helping to drive this campaign in the UK — to metastasize across Europe at a dramatically faster rate.

The Brazilian impeachment. Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff has been impeached by the Senate, which under the Brazilian system means that she immediately steps down until cleared.

This is a weird story about Brazil's weird version of democracy, in which a clear majority of Congress is under investigation for corruption.

Ever since colonial times, Brazil has been dominated by wealthy elites who thought they could get away with anything — mostly because they usually did.

Rousseff probably will be removed permanently, and it's hard to feel too bad about that, because she is corrupt. But she might well be less corrupt than either the people who are impeaching her or the VP who will take over. The Zika virus. Brazil is also ground zero for an outbreak of the Zika virus. But Zika isn't just somebody else's problem. There's already been a death in Puerto Rico, and much of the Southern U.S. is at risk. The Obama administration has asked for $1.9 billion to fight the disease, but this apparently is the kind of "wasteful government spending" that Republicans feel obliged to block. The Senate is trying to pass a $1.1 billion bill, while the House is only willing to spend $622 million -- and funding it by taking the money away from anti-Ebola work. God forbid that we increase our public health budget just because there's a public health problem. Puerto Rico. It looks like Congress will pass a bill to deal with the Puerto Rican debt crisis. Matt Yglesias describes the proposal as "in effect ... bankruptcy" because the lenders and bond holders will get less than 100% of what they're owed on paper. No federal money is appropriated to bail anybody out.

and you might also be interested in

Larry Wilmore appeared on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show Wednesday, and an interesting point came up: We're at the point where people will start wondering what history will make of the Obama administration. Like Wilmore, I think Obama is going to come out pretty well. Not only is ObamaCare ultimately going to be remembered as a major accomplishment, but he's going to get credit for the way he held things together in the face of the horrible conditions he inherited from Bush and unprecedented obstruction from the opposing party. Anyway, more about that in January. But it seemed like a good time to review my end-of-term assessment of George W. Bush in 2009. I'm standing by all of it: In hindsight, I don't see any reason to look more kindly on what he did.

Oklahoma's legislature just passed a bill criminalizing abortion, but the governor vetoed it. I think of these sorts of laws as Lawyer Full Employment acts. The only thing they accomplish is to create court cases whose outcomes are known before they begin.

George Zimmerman just sold the gun he used to kill Trayvon Martin for $250,000. This looks to me like a pioneering transaction that brings a whole new market into the capitalist system. Imagine the possibilities: "Of course I didn't hire that guy to kill my parents (and besides, there wasn't enough evidence to convict him). But after I got my inheritance, how could I turn down the opportunity to own an artifact of such personal significance to my family?"

and let's close with something unexpected

The sidewalks of Boston are covered with secret poems that you can only see when it rains.

Monday, May 16, 2016

Truth and Fantasy

I play to people’s fantasies. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.

-- Donald J. Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987)

This week's featured post is "Four False Things You Might Believe About Donald Trump".

This week everybody was talking about the Trump-Ryan meeting

Trump dominated the news cycle even more than usual this week. His meeting with Paul Ryan was covered like an international summit, even though there was really nothing to say about it: We're not sure what they talked about and nobody expected a clear result. It sounds like they have agreed to agree at some point in the future, though the content of that agreement has been left open. In general, and with a few notable exceptions, this was the week when elected Republicans realized they have no choice: Trump is their nominee, and his positions are vague enough to leave room for imagining that he will do something they'll like.

Trump is still refusing to release his tax returns, giving very implausible excuses for his refusal. It's hard to imagine what could be in there that is worse than what the media is already imagining. I think the most likely thing we'd learn is that he's not nearly so rich as he claims. Using a separate source of information, Crane's New York Business argues that his annual income must be less than $500K.

The NYT did a deeply researched article into Trump's interactions with women. Trump thinks it's a hit piece, but it actually captures some of the ambivalence of his character: On the one hand, Trump made room for women to advance in his organization, giving them opportunities they would not easily find elsewhere in the real-estate-development business. On the other, he feels like this should give him cover when he misbehaves, which he frequently does.

The other Trump news story falls into the WTF category: The Washington Post released a tape of a 1991 conversation in which Trump is posing as his own publicist and talking to a gossip columnist. The conversation is largely about all the women who either want Trump or want him back. I'm a bit at a loss about how much importance to give this. It doesn't fall into any of the usual political-scandal categories. It's more like: "Who does that kind of thing?" I'm reminded of the damaging YouTube of John Edwards primping his hair. Trump's response is more telling than the story itself: He reiterated his threat that the Trump administration would start an antitrust case against Amazon, whose owner (Jeff Bezos) also owns the WaPo. Josh Marshall comments:

Let's all take stock of this being a thing: Donald Trump routinely threatens to use government power (DOJ, IRS, etc.) to attack his personal enemies once he becomes President. In other words, Trump openly promises to do what Republican propagandists and fever swamp nutballs have pretended or imagine Democratic presidents do.

and polls

Lots of Democrats freaked when a Quinnipiac poll showed tight Clinton/Trump races in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania -- i.e., the states that have been the deciders in most recent elections. Slate's Jamelle Bouie dug into the numbers to see what was going on, and discovered something interesting: Quinnipiac is assuming that these states will have a significantly whiter electorate than in 2008 or 2012.

The standard narrative for nonwhite voting in a presidential year is this: Before Barack Obama, blacks and Latinos turned out to vote in modest and static numbers. After Obama’s 2008 campaign, they began to vote in droves, transforming the American electorate. Now, with Obama and his historic candidacy off of the ballot, they’ll return to the sidelines.

Every part of this narrative is wrong.

To me, the compelling part of Bouie's counter-narrative is the Hispanic vote, where turnout is traditionally low, but went up to 50% in 2008 and 48% in 2012. Somehow, I think Trump is going to inspire a lot of Hispanic voter turnout. So the Q poll should be read as more of a cautionary tale than a prediction: If Democrats forget about non-white turnout, or if Clinton makes the mistake of competing too hard for the angry white voter and blurs the choice between herself and Trump, things could get close.

In general, you shouldn't let yourself get too upset by any one poll. The media has a tendency to publicize polls precisely because they say something unexpected. (In the primaries, any poll showing Sanders unexpectedly close to Clinton made headlines, while polls showing Clinton comfortably ahead didn't.) In practice, that means that the polls you're most likely to hear about are the outliers, the ones fall outside the range of the other polls. Those are precisely the ones you should be most suspicious of.

and bathrooms

The Obama administration has sent a letter to all the school districts in the country, warning them that bathroom rules discriminating against transgender students (like the ones mandated in North Carolina by HB2) will be seen as violations of Title IX of the Civil Rights Act. Vox has an informative article about this.

[Until they are tested in court] the Obama administration's guidelines are simply a legally non-binding guidance. Still, they suggest that the Obama administration will attempt legal action against violators. And if courts do ultimately rule in the administration's favor, schools and states could lose billions in federal education funding for violating civil rights laws — a position no public official wants to be caught in.

The article also contains a map showing all the states where some kind of transgender-rights protection already exists. In other words, there's no reason why opponents of trans rights need to make up hypothetical examples of men claiming to be trans so that they can enter women's bathrooms and locker rooms for whatever nefarious purposes. If such things are going to happen, they should already be happening all over the country. For example, last week I watched Bill O'Reilly raise these kinds of fears on his TV show. Bill's show comes out of New York, where the law already includes protections of trans rights. So if trans rights cause a problem, he's perfectly situated to report on that problem, not speculate hypothetically about it.

Religion writer Jonathan Merritt has written an interesting article about how the religious right is playing this issue. His claim is that they learned nothing from their battles against gay rights, and so they're making all the same mistakes: They're making abstract arguments based on dogma and stereotypes, and aren't paying attention either to the experiences of real people or to what science is finding out.

When it comes to transgender issues, conservative Christians advocate for a privileged majority that is not currently under threat while ignoring the plight of an oppressed minority that is currently being harassed. Are you starting to see the parallels to the way Christian activists bungled the gay rights fight? In the early 2000s I began predicting that the battle over gay marriage was already over. My conservative friends called me crazy, but time proved who was right. Because conservative Christians seem hellbent on perpetually making the same mistakes ad infinitum, today I’m predicting that the transgender conversation is over. And once again, conservative Christians will be the authors of their own demise.

Scare tactics only work until real experience starts to develop. Conservative Christians could claim anything they wanted about same-sex marriage leading to the fall of Civilization as long as no states had legalized it. But eventually you could go to Massachusetts or Canada and see for yourself that Civilization was doing just fine.

and you might also be interested in

Mistakes are bigger in Texas. This TCU typo is the worst since the commencement of the University of Texas Lyndon B. Johnson School of Pubic Affairs in 2012. I'm not making that one up either.

Also in Texas: An 8th-grade girl in Houston was held by police after she tried to buy her school lunch with a $2 bill her grandmother had given her. The bill failed the current counterfeiting test because it was printed in 1953. The link (from the local ABC affiliate) tells of numerous other cases in which school officials and police have treated students like adult felons rather than give them the benefit of the doubt while an anomaly is investigated. Oddly, this seems to happen almost entirely to non-white students.

West Virginia Democrats are a confusing bunch. In their presidential primary, they picked Sanders over Clinton 51%-36%. But on the same day, in the governor's race, they nominated a billionaire coal baron who denies global warming and has a history of safety violations in his mines.

and let's close with something big

A life-size Foosball game.

Monday, May 9, 2016

Say Never

This is a Joe McCarthy moment. People will be judged by where they stood at this time. Those who walked with Trump will be tainted forever after.

-- David Brooks, "If Not Trump, What?" (4-29-2016)

This week's featured post is "What Will Republicans Do Now?"

If you're wondering where I was last week, check out the Mayday service I gave at the Unitarian Church of Quincy, Illinois.

These last two weeks, everybody has been talking about the end of the Republican primary campaign

Two weeks ago, the plan to stop Donald Trump at the convention was still iffy, but didn't seem completely daft. Then very quickly, Trump won the Middle Atlantic primaries by wide margins and Cruz collapsed in Indiana. Suddenly Cruz and Kasich were out and Trump was the last man standing.

I talk about the still-splintered Republican Party in the featured post.

Before Cruz went out, though, he unleashed the kind of scathing diatribe you can't take back, calling Trump a "pathological liar" who "lies [with] practically every word that comes out of his mouth".

In a response that I think comes straight out of a psychology textbook, his response is to accuse everyone else of lying. ... And it's simply a mindless yell. Whatever he does, he accuses everyone else of doing.

This is actually a sound insight. In particular, I think it applies to Trump's recent attack on Hillary Clinton:

Frankly, if Hillary Clinton were a man, I don't think she'd get 5 percent of the vote. The only thing she's got going is the women's card.

Reverse that and see how much better it fits. Would anyone support Donald Trump if he weren't a white man? Isn't he constantly playing the white man card, stoking up white male resentment against Hispanics, against women, against blacks, against Middle Easterners?

Another frequent Trump claim is that Hillary either will or should be indicted over the email affair. But the more we learn, the more clear it is that she broke no laws. It is Trump, on the other hand, who has a legal problem: The Trump University fraud lawsuit will be heard shortly after the election.

and political comedy

At his last White House Press Correspondents' Dinner, President Obama proved once again that he has a career in stand-up waiting, if he wants it. And Jimmy Kimmel did a funny but effective piece about climate change. The Daily Show turned real Donald Trump quotes into a rap video.

That video illustrates one reason I think liberals will do better against Trump than conservatives did: Trump deserves to be laughed at, and we have much better comedians.

Meanwhile, the last week of the Ted Cruz campaign was full of unintentional yucks: Ted accidentally elbowed his wife in the face. His would-be VP, Carly Fiorina, diverted attention from the entrance of the Cruz family by falling off the stage. And in a WTF moment, Carly started singing. When Hollywood eventually makes a comedy about the 2016 campaign, those moments will have to be included.

and Puerto Rico

The first time I noticed that Puerto Rico had a debt problem was when I started seeing this ad. It was paid for by one of those dark-money groups with an amorphous name: the Center for Individual Freedom. So of course you can trust everything they tell you.

To get a better idea of what's involved, watch this John Oliver segment (which features Puerto-Rican-born Lin-Manuel Miranda of Hamilton).

The general theme here is the problem of colonialism: Puerto Rico may have its own government, but the rules it operates under are circumscribed by what Congress allows, and Congress often makes new rules affecting Puerto Rico either by accident (just failing to mention it in the law) or in order to achieve some purpose on the mainland, with the effect on the island being mostly an afterthought.

Right now, Puerto Rico owes $70 billion, or about $20,000 per person. The debt simply can't be paid, and as the laws currently stand, the island's government has to pay its bonds before providing services like public health and education. If they do that, it seems clear that people will die; that's why they're currently in violation of the law.

Mainlanders who want to write Puerto Ricans off because they're Hispanics might want to think again: Since Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory, all its people are American citizens. They don't have to cross any borders or jump any walls to resettle in your town; they just need a plane ticket.

and Cinco de Mayo

For an explanation of why wearing a sombrero, eating nachos, and drinking too much tequila is not a proper way for Anglos to celebrate Cinco de Mayo, listen to Liz Martinez , or watch this. For what Cinco de Mayo really means, see Wikipedia.

For non-Hispanic Americans, Cinco de Mayo should be an annual opportunity to think about cultural appropriation, the tendency of powerful cultures to steal anything that looks like fun from less powerful cultures. (I discussed this a few years ago in "A Brief Meditation on White Twerking".) Done badly, the powerful culture's megaphone drowns out the authentic tradition, ruining practices and celebrations for the people they ought to belong to.

There are respectful ways to mark holidays of cultures you don't belong to. For example, if you're a Gentile and your Jewish friends invite you over for a Passover Seder, you can attend without worrying about cultural appropriation, as long as you don't try to make yourself the center of attention. That's way different from dressing up like Moses and inviting a bunch of other Gentiles over to eat matzo shaped like the 10 commandments and drink a lot of Manischewitz.

The question is who's in control. One key symptom of privilege is the tendency to assume that you ought to be in control. If someone else is offended by what you do, you'll be the judge of whether their objection is justified. You'll examine your own intentions, and if you decide you meant well, that's all that matters. If that doesn't satisfy some people, well, that's their problem.

You can see that process at work in Washington Redskins' owner Daniel Snyder: He knows he doesn't intend to insult Native Americans, so if they take offense they're just wrong. "The truth is on our side," he says.

A current example is Donald Trump's Cinco de Mayo tweet. All the elements of cultural appropriation are on display: A white guy eats a white imitation of Mexican food while proclaiming (falsely, according to New York Eater, which judged the Trump Tower Grill's taco bowls to be "an insult to Mexicans every bit as profound as Trump’s previous pronouncements") that his people do it better than actual Mexicans. It's textbook. No wonder California Republican Dennis Hollingsworth tweeted in response: "Holy guacamole, what a dipshit."

Like Hollingsworth, many interpreted Trump's tweet as a clueless attempt to reach out to Hispanic-American voters. (Reince Priebus' generous interpretation was that Trump is "trying".) But I see something more clever. Trump knows the Hispanic vote is beyond his reach. His actual purpose here is to convince other clueless Anglos that he's not anti-Hispanic, so they can vote for him without feeling like bigots.

The goal was to get the response he got from Bill O'Reilly (and Neil Cavuto): that the objections to his tweet demonstrate the "political madness" of this campaign. No doubt O'Reilly's aging white audience is saying, "Look at how crazy those people are! Trump says he loves them, and they're mad." Just what the Donald wanted.

and HB2

The plot thickens regarding North Carolina's HB2 law, the one that polices the state's bathrooms and prevents local governments from protecting any rights the state doesn't recognize -- particularly gay or trans rights.

Wednesday, the U. S. Justice Department sent Gov. Pat McCrory a letter notifying him that the law violates federal laws against sex-based discrimination in the workplace. The feds wanted assurance by today that North Carolina will not be enforcing the law, which Gov. McCrory is not going to give, calling the letter "Washington overreach". Billions in federal funds are potentially at risk.

Basically, McCrory is taking the same path that Southern governors like George Wallace and Ross Barnett did during the civil rights era: calling for delay and invoking states rights.

One possible way out is if the city of Charlotte agrees to repeal the LGBT-rights ordinance that HB2 was passed to undo. Then the state might amend HB2 in some way acceptable to the Justice Department. So far, though, Charlotte seems to be taking the view that they didn't make this problem.

and let's close with something time-devouring

Polygraph has constructed the most addictive web site I've ever linked to. Start at any date you want (after 1958; 1997 is the default), and then watch (and hear) the Billboard Top 5 songs evolve week by week, with a running total of how many weeks each artist stayed at #1. "Maybe I'll just watch another couple of months," I say. "Aren't the Beatles due to show up soon? How long will it take them to catch Elvis?"