Thy Hand, Great Anarch! Two kinds of stupid

 

I

Apparently President Putin has spent the last four days raining death and destruction on Ukrainian civilians not because it's some kind of military strategy—wrong, it's of no strategic value at all—and also not because he just has too much weaponry and is trying to use it up, like trad Catholics using up all the animal fat in the house on Pancake Tuesday, but out of fear of people in his orbit who are even more rabid than he is. It's the "more serious" response he was promising last month if Ukraine continued refusing to be conquered:

“Recently, the Russian armed forces have inflicted a couple of sensitive blows. Let’s assume they’re a warning. If the situation continues to develop like this, then the response will be more serious,” he said.

Though there's nothing serious about it, other than that he seems to be seriously afraid of his own puppets:

Literary Corner: Vulnerable to the Reliability

I call this his "deer in the headlines" look. Via Fox News.

If the Supreme Court really comes up with a way of finding the Texas Posse Postcoitum Act constitutional, I'm going to demand that New York State enact a bill deputizing private citizens to enforce libel law by filing suits against liars on behalf of reality itself, and spend the rest of my life hunting bounties, $10,000 at a clip from all the Republicans I can catch. 

I'm not sure I'll go after Senator Manchin, because his stupid act is getting so convincing I'm not at all sure he's lying, as in this interview with Dana Bash at CNN:

The Urgency That We Have

by Joseph Manchin III

What's the urgency? What's
the urgency that we have? It's not
the same urgency that we have
with the American Rescue Plan. We
got that out the door quick, it was
about $2 billion — $2 trillion. And
on top of that, all the things we
have got with the CARES package,
everything leading up to that. So,
we have done an awful lot and there's
still an awful lot of people that need help.

But you have 11 million jobs that aren't
filled right now. 8 million people are still
unemployed. Something's not matching up.
Don't you think we ought to hit the pause
and find out? The vulnerability that we have,
Dana, right now, we don't know what is happening
with this COVID. It's awful, coming back
the way it is with a vengeance. And
we don't know about inflation. We know
it's running rampant right now. I can tell you,
in West Virginia, inflation's running rampant.

And, on top of that, the challenges we're
going to have, geopolitical challenges.
Shouldn't we be prepared?

Literary Corner: Holy Fool

The holy fool Private Kozma Prutkov, creation of the 19th-century novelist and satirist Aleksei Tolstoy, in a drawing by M. Dormer (Nature, June 2000). Asked which was more important, the sun or the moon, he replied, "The moon, of course! It shines at night, when we need the light, while the sun only shines in the daytime!" (Probably stolen by the Russians from the Muslim folk hero Mullah Nasreddin.)

 

The Moon's Orbit Is Apparently Changing Some

by Louis Buller Gohmert, Jr.

Yeah, well, we can't
do anything substantive
about the climate change
right now,

when the moon's orbit
is apparently changing some,
the earth's orbit is changing some,
according to NASA.

But we can do something
about people that will continue
to die getting across
our border.

More Power to Dr. Krugman!

Pensacola, May 2014, via Washington Post.

Don't know exactly what the program is in this polemic in the Atlantic by Sebastian Mallaby disguised as a review of a new collection of Dr. Krugman's newspaper journalism, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future. But it's kind of peculiar, a review that can't make up its mind, lurching between extravagant praise and angry blame—as in, Krugman "writes amusingly and fluently" but has a "furious and bitter voice". Serially or in parallel? He's a "dazzling academic" but also an "undiscriminating guillotine".

His combination of analytic brilliance and linguistic facility recalls Milton Friedman or John Maynard Keynes. But Krugman can also sound like a cross between a bloodthirsty Robespierre and a rebarbative GIF. Week after week, he shakes his fist righteously at Republicans and anyone who defends them: You’re shilling for the fat cats. You’re shilling for the fat cats. Over and over. Again and again.

Oh, I get it: Dr. K. is uncivil. He's ought to be a perfect member of the neutral party, the team of the scholarly, with his Nobel and his urbanity. How could he demean themselves by taking some kind of political "side" as if one were better than the other?

Unlike that charming Milton Friedman (whom Krugman always mentions with extravagant respect), whose famous 1970 New York Times Magazine article on businessmen with the gall to talk about the "social responsibility" of corporations says

Literary Corner: Shapiro

Why I'm Not Worried About Global Warming

by Ben Shapiro

so let's say
let's say
for the sake of argument
that all of the water levels
around the world rise
let's say
by five feet
over the next hundred years
say ten feet
by the next hundred years
and put all the low-lying areas
on the coast under water
which let's say all that happens

you think the people aren't
just going to sell their homes
and move?

"Whaddaya mean, trouble finding a buyer? What about all the subscribers to my newsletter?" Image via.

The Boy Who Cried "Invasion!"

The Los Laureles water reservoir, which supplies water to the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa, except not when it doesn't have any water, as in this photo taken 10 March (by Orlando Sierra/AFP).

Cute headline from the Washington Post:
Power Up: Nielsen's ouster signals even tougher Trump border rhetoric

Rhetoric alert! We can expect severe invective storms over the next few weeks, with frequent outbreaks of junior-high sarcasm, malicious lies, and sweeping stereotypes.

One of the things about Trump's border policy that's not getting enough attention is that, while we're knee deep in rhetoric, the policy itself has been a huge fail in its own terms, in its key aim of discouraging asylum applicants from Central America, now arriving in record numbers and overwhelming the border authorities, who are driven to expedients like that El Paso encampment of the end of March:

For the Record: Alexandria Duet

Ancient Alexandria as imagined by the 16th-century Netherlandish painter Maarten van Heemskerck, via Short History.

Wingnuts went crazier than usual when Alexandria Ocasio-Córtez seemed to be saying that after overwhelming Democratic majorities pushed through the New Deal the Republicans stopped FDR from winning a third election by passing term limits, which makes no sense (how could they, if Democrats had overwhelming majorities?) and is also historically not true (that's the part the wingnuts noticed). Hahahaha, is your cute congresswoman really that ignorant?

Sadly, no, as a great blog team used to say. She's not perfect, but what she did was to blow a line she's been using correctly since well before her election:

First Semester Report Card @AOC

US History F
Econ 101 F
Math 101 F
Meteorology F
Interpretive Dance A https://t.co/lkM1PCTkLe

— Eric Bolling🇺🇸 (@ericbolling) March 31, 2019

She knows perfectly well what happened, as she has noted before at her Facebook page. https://t.co/8lGzxUIH1F This is a trivial flub, not ignorance. pic.twitter.com/v5dJqCxDYF

— Collusion Delusion (@Yastreblyansky) March 31, 2019

Life Goes On

Cambrian ocean scene, featuring an Anomalocaris canadensis ("anomalous Canadian shrimp") chasing trilobites. Image by diorama artist Ken Doud.

In fact it's likely she meant the Cambrian, and I think it's very likely that a system of global warming, rising sea levels, and coastal erosion, worked in at least as disruptive fashion as it does now, if I'm getting this great post from Science News for Students and a Britannica article right. In a sense, I'll show, conservatives are right in their claim that the climate change phenomena we're experiencing now aren't that different from the climate change phenomena that have been around forever, and they certainly weren't caused by humans then. But don't get too comfortable, conservatives.

For the Record: McArdle on Climate Change

There goes the Virgin Mary down a flooded street in Venice, Italy...seems about right. pic.twitter.com/cdoGq59CBC

— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) November 3, 2018

This video is so funny and at the same time so deeply frightening, like a Buñuel film. [Update: It's not Venice, obviously, as Arundel notes in comments: turns out to be Tenerife, in the Canary Islands, and the video is doctored. I stand by my Buñuel remark.]  It probably wouldn't bother Megan McArdle:

She'd calmly point out that Venetians [or Canarios as the case may be] in the pre-Cambrian era managed to make it through. Oh wait, there was no life, plant or animal, on land at the time, so perhaps nobody minded in those days. The hard-shelled creatures that had just started evolving at the end of the period, 540 million years ago, might have enjoyed watching the coasts wash away.

Literary Corner: Which Group Drew It?

From World Habitat Day 2011, via.  That's a Russian factory (zavod) over on the left, in the land of industrial pollution,  and I imagine the drawing was made by a Russian kid, who might be imagining the West as a land of joy and balloons and cafés of course, in contrast to his blighted Ekaterinburg or Smolensk, but there seems to be a time dimension represented in the rainbow-sailed boat headed over the waterfall, and my sense is that the picture should be seen as a story, not an invidious contrast, and a warning, not to just one country but all of us.

On the Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

by Donald J. Trump

It was given to me, and
I want to look at who drew it.
You know, which group drew it.
Because I can give you reports
that are fabulous and I can give
you reports that aren’t so good.
But I will be looking at it, absolutely.

Text via Talking Points Memo. Sometimes it gets to be just too much. Who talks like that? "I want to know who drew it." Have they prepared a special graphic version for him—"The End of the World as We Know It in Twenty Years, for Dummies"?

A "fabulous" report is one that suggests that he's doing the right thing in whatever realm it deals with, and it's done, or drawn, by a good person, obviously, in the sense that the actual meaning of "good" is "in support of Donald J. Trump". A "not so good" report is one that suggests he might be doing the wrong thing, and that's done by a wicked person. So he needs to find out in the first place who that United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is, exactly, before he can really comment. But who would say that?

Pruitt: Not Just Funny

A leaner but not hungrier Scott Pruitt, from your Rectification Central, exposing the former Oklahoma attorney general as a liar since March 2015. 

When you're enjoying the latest story about EPA administrator Scott Pruitt's corruption—he tried, during work hours and from his office and in clear contravention of ethics law, to pressure the CEO of the Chick-fil-A company into getting his wife a restaurant franchise because it was too much work for her to apply for it in the normal way, and succeeded in getting the chief of Concordia Partnerships of Social Impact to give her a gig ($2000 plus travel expenses) to "help organize" their Annual Summit in New York last September, in a more ordinary kind of Republican welfare—don't forget that these antics are directly connected to the protection of our natural environment.

That is, while Pruitt seems to be spending all his time shopping for luxury furnishings for his office and his apartment, or rather (illegally) forcing the EPA's employees to work as his personal shoppers, for everything from $130 gift pens to $2000 mattresses to be obtained on the cheap from Trump's Pennsylvania Avenue hotel, he is in fact working to prevent the EPA from doing its work, for instance as in last October's attempt to repeal Obama's Clean Power Plan, which will, hopefully, fail, but not for want of effort on Pruitt's part, because Pruitt doesn't believe carbon dioxide emissions have anything to do with global warming, as you can read today from Ars Technica:

Literary Corner: There Is a Cooling, And There's a Heating

Long-term sea ice concentration for January 27 2018, compared to median value for this day, 1981-2010, as indicated by red line. Setting records! Via National Snow and Ice Data Center.

In his year at the heart of world political power, it's remarkable how much Donald Trump has retained his capacity for childlike wonder, as in the fresh, almost dewy trimeter lines of this lyrical response to a question on the 2016 Paris Agreement, which he has announced the United States will leave in November 2020, from his interview with British fashion icon Piers Morgan on ITV (see today's Independent story, "Donald Trump appears to misunderstand basic facts of climate change in Piers Morgan interview"), when he talks about his longing to rejoin the agreement, because of his fondness for the president of France, but fears he can't unless it's a different agreement, as if Mom had said he couldn't:

It Used to Be Global Warming

by Donald J. Trump

I. If Somebody Said, Go Back

If somebody said, go back
into the Paris accord,
it would have to be a completely
different deal because
we had a horrible deal.

Would I go back in?
Yeah, I'd go back in.
I like, as you know, I like
Emmanuel. I would love to,
but it's got to be a good
deal for the United States.

Davos, Man!

Some of Davos from the Snow Train. Check that out, it's a video!

Mr. Bret Stephens ("Davos Man Meets America First", a grammatically peculiar headline) trots out the old Bill Safire device of speaking for the leader in what he hopes sounds like an impression of the leader's voice, with what's introduced as a leaked text of the keynote address Trumpy's going to give to the World Economic Forum in Davos, only with a complex Trumpian wrinkle, not in the strangled cadence in which Stephen Miller has (I presume) written it, but at he imagines Trump might have written a speech himself, with all the "like"s and "believe me"s written in in advance, and the cheery tone of one of his rally speeches instead of Miller's characteristic paranoid gloom. But Stephens makes a ponderous clown, and he mucks up the parody something terrible, with polysyllables and elaborately if not elegantly structured sentences studded with parentheses:

Fellow plutocrats!

I know you’re as glad to see me as I am to see you. No, really. Like, I know you voted for Trump. Or maybe you didn’t vote for me, because your wives, if you had voted for me, they’d withhold sex. But, when I won, in your hearts, you were very happy. And now you’re all so much richer, and your wives, girlfriends, boyfriends, whatever — I’m a very tolerant person — they aren’t withholding, probably.

Am I right? I’m right.

And the idea of Trump publicly acknowledging that women hate him so much they'd go on a sex strike to stop him being elected! That will never happen, though Stephens's hypothesis that a sex strike took place could be true, for all I know. Though it's certainly realistic to picture him assuming everybody in the audience is a man and a US citizen/voter (there won't be anybody from the shithole countries, because they've all decided to walk out, and good for them), and that everybody's getting lots of sex out of the ongoing equities bubble, but then maybe that's Stephens as well.

The Fire Next Time

Abraham and Lot separate because their household servants and herdsmen won't stop fighting with each other, Genesis 13:7. Etching by Wenceslas Hollar (1607-77), via fandom.

Shorter David Brooks, "Harvey, Irma, Jose, and ... Noah", New York Times, September 12 2017:

In this fearful season of wind, storm, and flood, we naturally find ourselves asking whether humanity can learn anything from these events, in the form of questions like, Who was the best biblical patriarch, Noah, who had to deal with a worldwide flood, or Abraham, who didn't? Clearly, as many rabbis have said, Noah, who failed to argue with God and try to stop him from drowning all of humanity except for the Noah family, lacked the leadership qualities of Abraham, who protested against the destruction of Sodom. It is possible that Noah drank out of survivor guilt. Noah took an attitude of blind obedience, whereas Abraham had what Rabbi Sacks calls a "hearkening mentality". This is why Noah failed to recreate the world successfully, because he wasn't a strong individual willing to link himself to collective institutions. What, did I say that?

Bonus snuck-in climate change denial:

Today we live amid many floods. Some, like Harvey or Irma, are natural. Others are man-made.

Paradise Paved

Bison hunters bringing hides to market, Taylor County, TX, sometime around maybe 1870, via TexasBeyondHistory.

A huge landmark moment in media coverage of climate science occurred yesterday, but nobody seems to have noticed it, including the writer who did it, David Leonhardt ("Harvey, the Storm that Humans Helped Cause"), in The New York Times:

The daily surface temperature of the Gulf of Mexico last winter never dropped below 73 degrees. You can probably guess how many previous times that had happened: Zero.

This sort of heat has a specific effect on storms: Warmer weather causes heavier rainfall. Why? When the seas warm, more moisture evaporates into the air, and when the air warms — which has also been happening in Texas — it can carry more moisture.

The severity of Harvey, in other words, is almost certainly related to climate change.

Yes, I know the sober warning that’s issued whenever an extreme weather disaster occurs: No individual storm can be definitively blamed on climate change. It’s true, too. Some version of Harvey probably would have happened without climate change, and we’ll never know the hypothetical truth.

Not sure what the "hypothetical truth" is doing in that sentence, actually. I'd say the hypothetical truth is what we do know, and what we'll never know is whether it's wrong.

But that sober warning is no longer regarded as quite true, is the thing. I can't remember where I first saw it, sometime in the last few months, but the science is now there; the new scientific consensus is that, while you can't blame a particular extreme weather event on human-caused global warming, you can blame that for the extremity, within certain probability limits.

Global Tepiding

Via Guardian, where there's more on global lukewarming as the third stage of denial

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("Neither Hot Nor Cold on Climate"), illustrates an emerging reactionary approach to climate change, the non-denial denial of the "lukewarmers": sure it's happening, but do we have to make a federal case out of it?

Lukewarmers accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO₂ emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised. And they raise an eyebrow at the contrast between the apocalyptic, absolutist rhetoric with which these schemes are regularly defended and their actual details, which seem mostly designed to enable the globe’s statesmen to greenwash the pursuit of economic and political self-interest.

Shorter:

1. It's not "unique"—my goodness, we have lots of problems, so why should we try to solve this one?
2. The proposed solution might not work, so surely it's better not to try it! That smallpox vaccination sounds like a far from decent operation, putting some sort of pus in my arm, and you're not even 100% sure it will keep me from getting the disease!
3. Dark forces (i.e.,  my political opponents), may benefit from these efforts, so that even if they did save the human environment from destruction, as I just acknowledged they might, that's not the real reason. Better to burn than to allow those dreadful people to gain some advantage from putting the fire out.

Followed by a very Douthatian denial non-denial critique of the position he just laid out:

For the Record: Two Rants

Updated

Jeffeson Memorial after a 25-foot rise in sea level (that's centuries away, but we could see five feet in another hundred years). Image by Nickolay Lamm/Storage Front.

The big story is the "unmasking and surveillance" of people that took place during the Obama Administration.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 1, 2017

Or the big story that in catching Manafort, Page, Stone, Flynn, and hopefully Trump NSA turns out to be working exactly the way it should.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2017

Turns out the feared abuse of the system didn't happen. Instead it unmasked Trump minions letting Russia compromise our security.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) June 1, 2017

And one on this afternoon's big announcement from the Rose Garden:

Bret Smart

Sugarcane field burning in Brazil, 2007, in a consequence of the drive to replace fossil fuels with "renewable" biofuels. UN photo by Eskinder Debebe via NASA's earthobservatory website, part of the NASA climate research program Donald Trump proposes to shut down because as Mick Mulvaney says, "We're not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money to go out and do that." But Bret Stephens, while he certainly would say that's not smart, thinks it's more important to remind us that scientists do bad things too.

Shorter Bret Stephens, "Climate of Unintended Consequences", New York Times, May 4 2017:

What part of "I'm smarter than you" don't you understand?

Actually, he wrote his own shorter,  published on Monday, in replies to questions on his awful début:

A decade ago we were plowing money into ethanol subsidies as one response to climate change. But that turned out to be not just environmentally destructive but was also arguably responsible for the spike in food prices that soon followed, as farmers turned away from cultivating corn for human consumption to cultivating it for ethanol production. 

And today, still defending himself, spinning that bit out to 14 paragraphs plus a conclusion tacked on to the effect that we really can't do anything about global warming until we've done some more research because biofuels are a failure, and already Germans are paying the highest electricity bills on earth, which I'm not going to get to in this piece if ever.

Only for one thing the biofuels movement, as it worked out in the US under the George W. Bush administration ethanol push, wasn't a response to climate change.

Miscellaneous

Civilians fleeing toward rebel-held territory, Aleppo, by an anonymous AFP stringer, via Wired, and better you should read their searing article, tweets from the powerless at the front, than these, if you had to choose one.

I spent way too much time with the Twitter today to do a proper post, and more contemplating the horror of Aleppo being destroyed by mostly Syrian government and Russian forces and their enemies of the Nusra Front, whose new name I still can't make myself learn, and just nothing I can say at all, except this one faint ray of hopefulness from a pretty unexpected quarter:

Iran VP: Syria war images 'bother me' @AJEnglish https://t.co/RF0sngUpEq courage and compassion in Iran power structure

— (((Yastreblyansky))) (@Yastreblyansky) December 14, 2016

In more trivial news, former George W. Bush spokesperson Dana Perino was upset by the bad attitude shown by climate scientists in response to a series of Trump moves that frankly sounded fairly scary to me:

Cheap shots: Gunga Dinesh's razor-sharp logic

Image via Gawker.

If humans are the cause of climate change, did the climate not change before there were humans? pic.twitter.com/u47c39rlCs

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) March 27, 2016

Gosh, Professor D'Souza, I guess you stumped me there! If an enlarged prostate is the cause of health problems, do women ever get sick? If the Great Leap Forward caused the deaths of millions of Chinese, were all Chinese people immortal up till then? If pork is meat are Jews and Muslims vegetarians? If everything you say fills me with helpless screaming rage, was everybody better off before you were born?

Well, of course yes on that last one, but only in a specific and limited way.