It's not Donald's problem

The view from Cristiano Ronaldo's $18.5-million apartment, via Business Insider.

Verbatim David Brooks, "The View from Trump Tower", New York Times, November 11 2016:

Trump’s main problem in governing is not going to be some fascistic ideology; his main problem is going to be his own attention span, ignorance and incompetence.

I'll buy that. Fascistic ideology is never a problem in governing, come to think of it. In fact it makes things a lot easier. You just say, "I'm the Leader and this is what I want," and everybody has to do it. It's a lot like running the Trump Organization. Could be a problem for the rest of us, though.

Barack Obama's Art of War

Via QuotesGram.

Nice meeting, from the turkey's point of view:

This was a meeting that was going to last for maybe 10 or 15 minutes and we were just going to get to know each other. We had never met each other. I have great respect – the meeting lasted for almost an hour and a half, and it could have, as far as I’m concerned, it could have gone on for a lot longer. We really, we discussed a lot of different situations, some wonderful and some difficulties. I very much look forward to dealing with the president in the future, including counsel. He’s explained some of the difficulties, some of the high-flying assets and some of the really great things that have been achieved. So Mr President, it was a great honor being with you, and I look forward to being with you many, many more times in the future.

Looks like Obama is following the Putin rule of negotiating with Trump, as Trump formulated it: "'If he says great things about me, I'm going to say great things about him." And Trump has met somebody he thinks is worth taking advice from. Is that the first time he's ever even said something like that about anybody? As far as I remember, last time he talked about taking advice he said "I'm speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I've said a lot of things." This is a distinct improvement.

Demographic note

Aritzona primary, August 2016, via AZCentral.

Yesterday I posted my picture of big lines around my polling place, and all over the country journalists and twitterati were doing the same, in the liberal equivalent of measuring a candidate's popularity by the number of yard signs (forgetting, among other things, that more Democrats live in urban settings and/or have less money and are therefore less likely to have a yard to put their sign in), and assuming a massive, groundbreaking turnout, the most ever, because everyplace I went seemed to have a pretty fantastic turnout, and what's that you say? I only went to one place?

And a lot of people probably still think there was a heavy turnout, but there wasn't, as it happens. In fact it was pretty mediocre all round, as we learn from the numbers collected by the US Elections Project, and by a considerable way the lowest since the dreadful year 2000 (though far from as bad as it was in 1996, the year of the Great Triangulation):

The morning after

"You have one day to make every dream you've ever dreamed for your family come true," said Trump in Raleigh on Monday, but every dream the good people of Raleigh have ever dreamed for their families is not going to come true.

There won't be a wall, either, or a ban on Muslims entering the US or any "vetting" of entering Muslims that's any more extreme than what already exists. And they're not going to "lock her up", either, because the defeated candidate hasn't in fact committed any crimes.

None of the things Donald Trump has promised on his own account in his Reverend Ike messages ("You can't lose with the stuff I use," Reverend Ike used to say) is going to happen, the nice ones or the terrifying ones. They are impossible and silly ideas. Where was he planning to put that wall, with respect to the Rio Grande? But...

Yipes

Never seen a line out here after 9:00, let alone 10:00. This is going to be some turnout. Hope it's like when your tomato plants get overenthusiastic and somebody figures out a way of canning this for 2018.

Vote!

I'm winning with women! Apparently. And women are winning with me! Image via Hotline Bling.

Shorter David Brooks, "Let's Not Do This Again", New York Times, November 8 2016:

This horrible election has shown that our country is coming violently apart, much more deeply divided than we realized, on class and ethnic lines that have come to match the partisan divide. I've always opposed the idea of a third major party, mainly because of the structural barriers it faces, but now I think a third party confidently opposed to populism is necessary, because the only way to unify our country is if we divide it three ways instead of two.

I might get back to this column later, but it's pretty silly. I have to vote! And do some stuff!

Election Eve cheap shots

Alexandre Colin, The Three Witches from Macbeth, 1827, via Emory University.

One of the most repellent Trump trolls in my TL is this guy who calls himself "Elizabeth", who has recenly begun to take on a pose of weepy religiosity:

Obama only cares abt passing on Soros terror to the next generation. Hill & OB are Soros evil puppets, wichcraft child trafficking etc. https://t.co/pDZsgmC9GT

— Deplorable Elizabeth (@pteet1) November 7, 2016

This was the one for me. I've been seeing references to anti-Semitism in the Trump campaign as it works its way toward Göpperdämmerung, most scarily as noted by Josh Marshall, but it's this one that spoke to me really directly as a postmodern Blood Libel, bringing together the ultrapowerful Jewish financier, the black magic, and the torture of children, as if to say directly that Hillary Clinton kills Christian babies to obtain blood as an ingredient for George Soros's matzoh. That's what I saw in this deeply wicked tweet.

And on the lighter side...

Who created Trump? A new theory from the Monsignor

Salvador Dalí, The Tempation of St. Anthony (1946), via Wikiart.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has been puzzling for months over what dark and dreadful forces have conjoined to bring us the Trump phenomenon—the liberals? the media? Caesarist President Obama in person? and, since both sides always do it, the other thing too of course, and on Sunday ("The Post-Familial Election")  he was asking again:

HOW did we get here? How did it come to this? Not just to the Donald Trump phenomenon, but to the whole choice facing us on Tuesday, in which a managerial liberalism and an authoritarian nationalism — two visions of the president as essentially a Great Protector: a feisty grandmother or fierce sky father — are contending for the votes of an ostensibly free people?

Never mind that "managerial liberalism" (that's what he's been calling "Caesarism" all year, if I'm not mistaken) and authoritarian nationalism have been pretty prominent parts of our civic discourse in one form or another for an awfully long time, and first fought for the presidency probably in 1824 when John Quincy Adams took the prize in an actually rigged maneuver from Andrew Jackson, after nobody managed to win in the normal way (to be fair to Adams, the mechanism literally had to be rigged—like repairing a plane in mid-flight—because it was broken). You must tell me some time how George W. Bush wasn't posing as "fierce sky father" when he descended from his machina onto the deck of the aircraft carrier, codpiece and all.

So as usual, no, what he's upset about is still just Trump, and the abnormality of the situation in which he feels he just can't vote for this particular sky father, unlike all the other authoritarian nationalists he's voted for or otherwise venerated in the course of his life, and the awful problem of finding yet another somebody or something to blame for Trump other than Republicans, or conservatives, or himself.

Which is, for this final Douthat emission before Election Day—wait for it—

I look forward to your apology, @jasoninthehouse, please RT

"But hey kids, we did have fun, didn't we?" Jason Chaffez, photo by Kristin Murphy/Deseret News. 

Well, what do we have here, Mr. Director?

The FBI has determined that a new batch of emails apparently related to Hillary Clinton’s private email server “have not changed our conclusion” that she committed no criminal wrongdoing, FBI director James Comey told congressional leaders in a letter on Sunday.

As campaigning continued ahead of Tuesday’s presidential election, a Clinton spokeswoman said the candidate was “glad this matter is resolved”. (Via Guardian)

Or as I put it over on the Twitter machine,

Looks like Director Comey has finished his inquiry into those emails. No smoking Weiner. https://t.co/5DL32ebzxp

— NASTYeblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) November 6, 2016

Human weasel Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah, shiftiest eyes in Congress) was quick to put out an acknowledgment that he and his friends in the FBI Rogue Agent division have been misleading the public for the past nine days, immediately before a presidential election, with their hints of massive Clintonian illegalities to be discovered on the Weiner laptop. Hahaha, I kid of course. He sent a weasel Tweet designed to cover his ass without acknowledging anything:

.@jasoninthehouse Thanks. I look forward to your apology for the harm you have done with these baseless calumnies.

— NASTYeblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) November 6, 2016

Par for the course.

"We'll always have Benghazi!"

Annals of Derp: Handicapping the 2016 race

Hi MBRU Cowpokes, and thanks as ever, Blogenfreude!

Clara Bow in William Wellman's Wings (1927), from somebody's Pinterest.

.@Elaine1Cox @mitchellvii So back to Jim Crow for real, y'all succeeded in stopping black people from voting?

We'll see.

— NASTYeblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) November 5, 2016

Watching all day in wonder as the Twitter reports extraordinary volumes of early voting in Florida, Nevada, and North Carolina (contrary to Elaine's tweet there), with the implications of higher than expected participation by women, Latinos, and African Americans and concomitant higher hopes for Democrats in those states, and FiveThirtyEight continues not to reflect this sort of thing, by design, as Silver explains:

Getting by aimlessly

Not clear to me that anybody noticed it, but Monsignor Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street ("An Election is Not a Suicide Pact"), seems to have endorsed Clinton, or at least un-endorsed non-Clinton, for slightly exotic reasons. Shorter:

You might agree that the authoritarian abuse, condoned racism and violence, and general chaos on the international as well as the domestic stage that would ensue from electing Trump would be OK because we must stop abortion by any means necessary, and that means war, in which authoritarian abuse, violence, and chaos are just what you get. Which is true, but it wouldn't be a just war, according to the most widely standards accepted by the Doctors of the Church, in that we have not yet exhausted all the means of peace, and we might not win, and, crucially, "the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders greater than the evil to be eliminated," which may sound like I just said abortion is a lesser of two evils, but I'll just ignore that, and in any case although grave evils will follow from electing Clinton you probably won't go to hell for allowing it to happen.

Both sides are "Caesarist", in the Monsignor's strenuously anti-imperial view, but Trump is Elagabalus. I guess that means Hillary is the 14-year-old Severus Alexander, who studied Christianity and defeated Persia, but got himself assassinated at 26 for trying to make peace with the Germans, bringing that dynasty to an end, none too soon.

Or shorter still, as the headline suggests,

Singularity Watch: National Review fail of the week

Corporate overlord: The Colossus of Rhodes as visualized in the 1911 Grolier Encyclopedia, via Wikipedia.

National Review's human exceptionalism troll (I'm not kidding, that's really a thing, situating anti-abortion arguments in a frame of hysterical H. sapiens species patriotism) Wesley J. Smith has found something new to panic about:

In order to receive a patent, the subject of the protection must be a human invention.

Some want to change that and allow computers programmed to “artificial intelligence” sophistication to receive patents. From the Science Daily story:

New research published by the University of Surrey in Boston College Law Review is calling for inventions by computers to be legally granted patents.
The research states that the rapid increase in computer power is posing new challenges when it comes to patenting an invention. Artificial intelligence is playing an ever larger role in innovation — with major players such as IBM, Pfizer and Google investing heavily in creative computing — but current patent law does not recognise computers as inventors.
Without a change in the law, the findings warn that there will be less innovation, caused by uncertainty, which would prevent industry from capitalising on the huge potential of creative computers. We are also likely to see disputes over inventorship, with individuals taking credit for inventions that are not genuinely theirs.

Brazile nuts

Diabolical Donna tips the scales, just like she did for President Gore. Photo via CNN.

So they're saying that sneaky old Donna Brazile violated all the sacred rules of CNN journalism, the most ethical news station in the known universe, which would never knowingly tolerate having an actively partisan person on its payroll (unless Donald Trump was paying him to be partisan) and had to be fired:

The announcement followed the release of new emails on Monday that included a message from Ms. Brazile on the day before a CNN-sponsored Democratic primary debate in Flint, Mich., in March. Her subject line: “One of the questions directed to HRC tomorrow is from a woman with a rash.”

Her family has lead poison and she will ask what, if anything, will Hillary do as president to help the ppl of Flint,” Ms. Brazile wrote to John D. Podesta, the Clinton campaign chairman, and Jennifer Palmieri, the candidate’s communications director.

Because nobody could have suspected that at a debate HELD IN FLINT, MICHIGAN, A CITY WHERE LARGE NUMBERS OF MOSTLY BLACK PEOPLE INCLUDING MANY SMALL CHILDREN WERE BEING POISONED BY LEAD DUE TO THE CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE OF THE STATE'S REPUBLICAN ADMINISTRATION BECAUSE THE CANDIDATES ASKED TO HAVE IT THERE, that any questions would be asked about what Bernie or Hillary would want to do as president to alleviate their situation. I mean, why would anybody think of asking such a question in Flint? It was a million to one shot.

Thus, at the debate in question, on March 6, Sanders started off,

Warring monologues

Martin Buber, via Wikipedia.

Yesterday was philosophy day in Brooksville! "Read Buber, Not the Polls!"

There has been so much bad communication over the past year: people talking in warring monologues past each other, ignoring the facts and using lazy stereotypes like “elites” and “Trumpeans” to reduce complex individuals into simplistic categories. Meanwhile, our main candidates are poor connectors. We’ve got the self-enclosed narcissism of Donald Trump and, to a lesser degree, the mistrustful defensiveness of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

Using a lazy stereotype like "mistrustful defensiveness" to reduce Hillary Clinton to a simplistic category.

As an antidote for all this, I’ve been reading the work of Martin Buber, the early 20th century Jewish theologian who dedicated his career to understanding deep intimacy. Buber is famous for the distinction between I-It relationships and I-Thou relationships.

Question to Radio Yerevan: Did Martin Buber, the early 20th-century theologian, dedicate his career to understanding deep intimacy?

Bliss was it in that time to be alive

...but to be conservative was pretty remunerative as well...

Mary Pickford and Buddy Rogers in Sam Taylor's My Best Girl (1927).

Last Friday Brooks was back lamenting the decadence of today's conservatives, so inferior to the lovely, charismatic conservatives of the past, who used to patronize him at old Mr. Buckley's dinner table and make him feel witty and important. In the room the women came and went, talking of T.S. Eliot. So to speak. There was a pretty little bit of deserved spite against today's conservatives:

Many [conservatives of Irving Kristol's generation] grew up poor, which cured them of the anti-elitist pose that many of today’s conservative figures adopt, especially if they come from Princeton (Ted Cruz), Cornell (Ann Coulter) or Dartmouth (Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza). 

But you can't help thinking that what he really objects to is that nobody in that crowd seems wholly aware that he exists. And he can't stop implicitly taking a pro-elitist stance himself, that being what conservatism is if you boil it down to the essence.

Krugman covered the piece in a blog post, in which he actually name-checked Brooks and Douthat for a change, and pointed out that the glorious time Brooks remembers is a figment of the Brooksian imagination:

Parents Must Stick

I never noticed how remarkably peniform it is. Donald Trump's new lingam, the Old Post Office Pavilion on Pennsylvania Avenue, via Wikipedia.

The valedictory tone of some of Trump's recent verse seems to be intensified in this piece, from his recent reading in Charlotte, NC (October 26)—it doesn't matter, he seems to be saying, if he doesn't make it to the White House, since he's got some property on Pennsylvania Ave., the Old Post Office, "and it's mine", he plaintively reminds us.

And whatever it is, he did it to encourage the children.

Parents Must Stick

a poem

by Donald J. Trump

1. Now is the time to embrace a new direction

I’ve been very lucky and I’ve led a great life.
Now I want to give back to the country
which I love and which has been so good to me.

I just left a hotel – beautiful, beautiful building.
It was the Old Post Office on Pennsylvania Avenue
in Washington D.C. and it’s mine.

And it was just built. It’s right between
the Capitol building and the White House.
So this way, I figure I’ll get to Washington
one way or the other, right?

Sunday Tweets

Hope this holds https://t.co/B9DtO1wCxP pic.twitter.com/Lad1y2FDDV

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 30, 2016

I want to say I thought this was kind of encouraging; not that these numbers have any kind of predictive application I can see, but in that 13% of Clinton voters saying the FBI director's weird maneuvers actually make them more likely to vote for her, substantive signs of a sentiment I hope would take hold, of just rage at the way these dark and powerful forces are trying to manipulate us, and determination not to be manipulated.

(While the Republicans who say they're less likely to vote for her are wrong; they couldn't be any less likely than they already were.)

Had a sort of popular tweet referring to the wonderful David Farenthold report on the generosity of the Trump Foundation

.@realDonaldTrump self-dealings: down to $7 from Foundation to pay Boy Scouts that he's too cheap to pay himself. pic.twitter.com/2EMngTXA20

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 30, 2016

and a not-so-popular one, or frankly a wholly ignored one that I liked a lot, using a format related to the Radio Yerevan joke, as in "In Soviet Russia, television watch you":

In Trumpiet Union, charity give money to billionaire! https://t.co/V2mjKzDaQ3 pic.twitter.com/UL7e9kjZji

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 30, 2016

Significant risk of being misunderstood

Cassoulet stage 9, via Meilleur du Chef.

...said Comey, working as hard to create a misleading impression as he could by withholding every detail. pic.twitter.com/JJK196NEXs

— Ghastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) October 29, 2016

There is no chance, as far as I'm concerned, and based on what actual journalists are reporting, that the FBI has any new information that is of any relevance to the question whether or not Hillary Clinton ought to be president, regardless of your feelings about that question, since the emails that "may have been related to" Clinton's private server, which Huma Abedin seems to have chosen to print from a home laptop that was also used by Anthony Weiner to transmit pictures of his penis, or not, as the case may be, are neither from Clinton nor to Clinton, and are absolutely not documents that have been withheld from the investigation; the FBI is already perfectly familiar with their content, at least so far (there are thousands, naturally, and it will take many weeks, until long after the election is over, to finish looking at them). They could conceivably be relevant to the question whether Huma Abedin mishandled classified data, but nobody's saying that there's any likelihood of that either; they're just checking them out from an "abundance of caution".

Why does David Brooks like prosperity gospel cult churches best?

New York Post, which seems to think on Brooksian lines, says the sexiest congregation in New York is the 7 PM Mass at St. Patrick's Old Cathedral. Photo by Stephen Yang.

Because they have the cutest congregations! I'm not even kidding:

the polls now suggest Millennials are becoming disaffected from religion, and I get that. But as I go around, especially to cities, I see just an exploding religion that, believe me, is deeply religious but the opposite of Trumpism.

Say, pick New York City. There is a burgeoning supply of these churches, these Trinity Grace churches that are all around the city. There’s C3 churches, which I went to one in Williamsburg in Brooklyn a few months ago, and every beautiful hipster in New York seemed to be at that church. If you wanted to be where the cool crowd was, that church was it. And the Redeemer plants that are spreading.

Some Fraction of More Than 6.5 Million Wealthy Americans Threatened with Massive Health Care Premium Increases

Updated Friday afternoon to fix some bad numbers

Could see their premiums skyrocket. Liberal writers are poor enough to get government subsidies. Then again subsidies from the Koch brothers are pretty generous.

That's how the headlines should have been reading in the serious media (New York Times, Guardian, NPR, Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert) but it's not how they've gone at all. Nearly all of these sources imply in their ledes that premiums are going up for some kind of everybody, either everybody who has health insurance or for the more sophisticated everybody in the much smaller group who have "Obamacare" proper, Marketplace policies; and if they make an attempt to correct the impression in the body paragraphs—yes, it's not quite that bad—continue to suggest that it's terrible and nobody can really know how bad it is because that's a total mystery and anyway it's "out there" and "people are saying" etc., like Renée Montagne on NPR Wednesday morning, apparently utterly baffled and incapable of understanding what her expert is trying to tell her: