The Unbearable Epiphenomenality of Firearms

Genteel Victorian elite, via Petticoats and Pistols.

Shorter David Brooks, "Guns and the Soul of America":

Well, so according to fellow Canadian and fellow David David Frum, whenever there's one of these grotesque mass shootings, America's state legislatures jump into action to start passing gun laws, only not the way you might imagine. Instead of passing laws to make mass shootings less likely, they start passing laws to make guns easier to get, or easier to carry around. 

In fact Luca, Malhotra, and Poliquin 2016 found that a single mass shooting in a given state raises the number of firearms bills that will be introduced in that state's legislature that year by 15%, and the number of enacted laws that loosen gun restrictions instead of tightening them will be 75% higher, if it's a Republican-controlled state, though not a Democrat-controlled one.

Which really blew my mind, because how are you going to explain this result other than by saying that the Republican party and the National Rifle Association exploit every such shooting as an opportunity to poison the population with fear and the irrational sense that they'll be safer if they just own more guns, and bring them to more different places, like schools, bars, and churches? 

Which is obviously ridiculous, I mean, what could the Republican party and the National Rifle Association have to do with that?

So I think the first thing has to be that it's not about guns at all. Guns are merely an epiphenomenon. The reason Republican state legislatures pass so many more bills loosening gun restrictions after a horrifying gun tragedy must be postindustrialization. The more we keep postindustrializing, the more the voters will demand more restriction-loosening gun laws. That just stands to reason.

And what can we do about this situation? What I've been telling you forever, moar narrativium! We need a new story on the postindustrialization/populism front, like Theodore Roosevelt's new American nationalism, but like different. And I want mine with extra mayo, don't disappoint me.

I know you all hate Frum, but let's just say The Atlantic has much better editors than the Bush administration did and his work is a lot better than it was in the Axis of Evil days. I may disagree with what he says, but I will defend to the death his right to say he did his homework, if I think he did, which I do at least in this case.

Which I can't, as usual, say about David F. Brooks:

For the Record: Can you name one rightwing group persecuted by Hitler?

Jean-Léon Gérôme, 1883, The Christian Martyrs' Last Prayer, via Wikipedia.

Yes, because Hitler was right wing who killed leftists and he can't name a single RW group the Nazis targeted. #TheBigLie

— 🃏The Joker 🃏🏴 (@ATrueJoker) October 5, 2017

Yes, I can! Hitler targeted the churches and imprisoned or killed innumerable Christians who resisted Nazism in the name of their faith https://t.co/SxzyEWz1Pz

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) October 6, 2017

I love that. "I can so!"

But can he? It's true that most of the 2,720 clergy imprisoned at Dachau (of 160,000 prisoners total, over 100,000 of them political prisoners) were Catholic priests, but I don't find any record of any of them being killed, while Nazis killed between 80,000 and 200,000 Freemasons and 2,500-5,000 Jehovah's Witnesses (because of their refusal to swear fealty to the Reich)...

Wait, you define Christianity as "a rightwing group"?

Annals of Derp: Does the NRA buy influence?

Marco Rubio chomps on a moneyburger, as Mr. Adelson and Mr. Koch look on benignly, via Cuban Insider.

According to Mr. Bret Stephens:

The National Rifle Association does not have Republican “balls in a money clip,” as Jimmy Kimmel put it the other night. The N.R.A. has donated a paltry $3,533,294 to all current members of Congress since 1998, according to The Washington Post, equivalent to about three months of Kimmel’s salary. The N.R.A. doesn’t need to buy influence: It’s powerful because it’s popular.

That's funny, Bret, because according to OpenSecrets.org, writing last November, the NRA spent $3.2 million on Marco Rubio's 2016 Senate race alone:

Emperor News

Photo via Flying Penguin.

David Graham of the Atlantic turned up on my radio this morning discussing the Emperor's Puerto Rico visit, which he has described for his magazine with some extremely pithy elegance:

Throughout the aftermath of the storm, Trump has often appeared more interested in the political ramifications of the storm than on the human effects, focusing on approval of himself and the federal government (though he doesn’t really draw a distinction between the two). This was also true at Muñiz Air Force Base. In praising Governor Ricardo Rosselló, for example, Trump reached for the lens of partisan affiliation.

“He’s not even from my party and he started right at the beginning appreciating what we did,” Trump said. “Right from the beginning, this governor did not play politics. He was saying it like it was, and he gave us the highest rates.”

This was an implicit jab at San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, who has been critical of relief efforts, and whom Trump claimed over the weekend was doing so because Democrats had put her up to it. As I noted, his broadside against Cruz serves as a warning to politicians like Rosselló not to follow her lead, lest Trump punish them too. (Speaking in Washington Tuesday, before taking off, Trump said of Cruz, “Well, I think she’s come back a long way. I think it’s now acknowledged what a great job we’ve done, and people are looking at that.” It’s unclear what he is referring to. She attended Tuesday’s briefing.)

(Incidentally, Cruz, not Yulín, is the family name, in full Cruz Soto;  I've checked this, and "Yulín" is the second part of her given name, transmitted from a grandmother.)

On the air (bit starting around 16:00), he said something that struck me as kind of shocking, to the effect that Cruz handled the situation badly in comparison to Rosselló (I think there's some speculation she may be running for governor herself, and in that sense competing with Rosselló): because she made Trump mad, which could be bad for San Juan, and Rosselló made him happy, which would be good for the island. She's not "politically astute". Better to flatter him! And we'll learn later "whether that was the right strategy or not."

Trumpzilla

From "Doctor Strange and Doctor Doom: Triumph and Torment", Marvel 1990, via Bleeding Cool.

David F. Brooks opens up like a classic monster movie, where the Orange Swamp Thing that had been ravaging the countryside has made his way into the metropolis and crunches up and down its avenues as girls in attractive déshabille scream by—crushing buildings underfoot and sweeping airplanes out of the sky with his careless hand: all the best guys bring out their best guns, one at a time, but to no avail ("The Philosophical Assault on Trumpism"):

Establishment Republicans have tried five ways to defeat or control Donald Trump, and they have all failed. Jeb Bush tried to outlast Trump, and let him destroy himself. That failed. Marco Rubio and others tried to denounce Trump by attacking his character. That failed. Reince Priebus tried to co-opt Trump to make him a more normal Republican. That failed.

Paul Ryan tried to use Trump; Congress would pass Republican legislation and Trump would just sign it. That failed. Mitch McConnell tried to outmaneuver Trump and Trumpism by containing his power and reach. In the Senate race in Alabama last week and everywhere else, that has failed.

I think there are some missing elements in that picture, like J.E.B.! and Little Marco were pretty busy trying to destroy each other, while the Wisconsin lads were working fairly closely together with the Majority Leader on what counts as a single project, not three different ones. If I were making this movie, I'd start off—after the requisite shot of the massive orange head lifting out of the mud, early morning light, and blinking—in a busy open-plan office, guys in shirtsleeves and rep ties rushing by the desks, with Reince and Ryan in hot conversation on some huge urban demolition plan that will net them billions of dollars but so destructive to human life that the authorities won't sign off on it, so that afterwards, when the Thing is ravaging the city, you see the two of them look at each other with a shock of realization: If we could just guide this creature somehow, like dangling a carrot in front of a mule, we could get our job done! They'd never be able to stop us! And old Uncle Mitch, beaming at the lads, giving them the go-ahead with the slightest of nods.

But then of course Brooks isn't making that movie, is he? He isn't concerned about the toll in human life and property damage. To Brooks, the problem with the Thing is that he's making the Republicans look bad:

Thoughts 'n' Prayers Day

The Classics IV in 1968.

Happy Thoughts 'n' Prayers Day, folks! Today's the day we have thoughts 'n' prayers, because it's Too Soon to have anything else.

Gun control is a legitimate issue, but for the Dems already raising it after Las Vegas massacre, could we just have a day before plunging in

— HowardKurtz (@HowardKurtz) October 2, 2017

While

Ross Douthat writes about Bill Clinton

Woodcuts from the Dance of Death, Hans Holbein the Younger, ca. 1525, via WikiArt.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic nuncio to 42nd Street, thunders old Hefner into hell with apocalyptic hatred ("Speaking Ill of Hugh Hefner"):

Hugh Hefner, gone to his reward at the age of 91, was a pornographer and chauvinist who got rich on masturbation, consumerism and the exploitation of women, aged into a leering grotesque in a captain’s hat, and died a pack rat in a decaying manse where porn blared during his pathetic orgies.

Hef was the grinning pimp of the sexual revolution, with quaaludes for the ladies and Viagra for himself — a father of smut addictions and eating disorders, abortions and divorce and syphilis, a pretentious huckster who published Updike stories no one read while doing flesh procurement for celebrities, a revolutionary whose revolution chiefly benefited men much like himself.

Poor Updike!

Speaking for myself, I'm here to bury Hefner, not to praise him, or not even that—let the dead bury their dead. If you want to read about Hefner, blogfriend Lance Mannion did a great post.

The Monsignor doesn't really want to write about Hefner either, but he can hardly stop himself with the fulminations, paragraph after paragraph. He really wants to write about Bill Cosby, the nightmare Negro rapist, who literally did to women the things that liberalism figuratively does to Ross's raw heart all day long and thus proved that Ross's terrors are justified—and what he wants most of all is to link three names with hyphens, toward the end:

What the emperor did for Puerto Rico

Bankruptcy photo, via CNN Money.

It is totally unfair, as the Washington Post fact checkers say ("Three Pinocchios", though PolitiFact gives it a less dismissive "Half-True"), to suggest that Donald Trump is in any way responsible for the $33 million added to Puerto Rico's debt by the failure of the Trump International Golf Club Puerto Rico (formerly known as the Coco Beach Golf and Country Club).

The worst you can say is that he took something north of $600,000 ($600K for the first five years of the deal), or "many millions" according to Eric Trump,  to rescue Puerto Rico from the debt, without doing a goddamned thing, in spite of his promises that he would be "very actively involved" and substantially invested financially.

“Puerto Rico is a fantastic place and deserves the best, which is what we will deliver,” Trump said at a 2008 news conference on the island. “Every detail will be important to me.”

Eric Trump, appearing at the same news conference, said that the Trumps would be “very actively involved in this development at all levels” and that they had “a very substantial equity contribution” in the project.

But public records filed as part of the bankruptcy show that the Trumps had no equity in the property.

The emperor is displeased

Downtown San Juan at night, a week after the hurricane, photo by Carolyn Cole/Los Angeles Times/Getty via CNBC.

On Wednesday September 20, Hurricane Maria, the tenth most intense Atlantic storm in history, the strongest to hit the US possession of Puerto Rico since 1928 and the second wettest, dumping almost 38 inches of water on the eastern mountain city of Caguas, began wiping out 100% of the power grid on the island, leaving 3.4 millions American citizens without electricity, and with no access to food and safe drinking water beyond what they'd managed to lay in getting ready for the storm, or gas.

On Thursday the 21st, President Trump headed off for a long weekend at his Bedminster golf club, interrupted only by a visit to Alabama (campaigning for Senator Luther Strange, who lost his primary on the 26th).

There's always something multilayered

Taylor Swift in "Look What You Made Me Do". As Lionel Trilling writes, "Society requires of us that we present ourselves as being sincere, and the most efficacious way of satisfying this demand is to see to it that we really are sincere, that we actually are what we want our community to know we are. In short, we play the role of being ourselves, we sincerely act the part of the sincere person, with the result that a judgement may be passed upon our sincerity that it is not authentic."

It's world-famous music critic David F. Brooks with an exciting new discovery ("What Sincerity Looks Like"): Chance the Rapper. He is sincere, whereas Taylor Swift is merely authentic.

In Lionel Trilling’s old distinction, sincerity is what you shoot for in a trusting society. You try to live honestly and straightforwardly into your social roles and relationships. Authenticity is what you shoot for in a distrustful society. You try to liberate your own personality by rebelling against the world around you, by aggressively fighting against the society you find so vicious and corrupt.

No, really. Swift's recent "This is What You Made Me Do" is "a song for a society without social trust." It "contains a string of references to Swift’s various public beefs — with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, and so on. If Donald Trump or his political enemies made a video about their Twitter wars, it would look like this." Its crucial lyric is 'I don’t trust nobody and nobody trusts me.' The world is full of snakes. The only way to survive is through combat."

In this Taylor Swift "has lost touch with herself and seems to have been swallowed by the ethos of the Trump era." She resembles Johnny Cash in his work of the 1950s:

For the Record. III: Big Switch

Fanny Lou Hamer of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. Via Ujima Magazine.

Imagine if violent criminals claimed there was a "big switch" in which criminals became cops & cops became criminals--sounds absurd, right? pic.twitter.com/LvEcPraBO9

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) September 27, 2017

Imagine if scientists claimed a "big switch" in which all the young people turned old while olds died and were replaced by new youngs

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 27, 2017

For the Record. II: God Bless America

Irving Berlin in 1906 (18 years old), already unable to play in any key other than F#, via Wikipedia.

The whole point of sports is to be a diversion and since the NFL refuses to to let this be the case, what's the point of watching football?

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) September 27, 2017

It's revolting not only for us atheists but Buddhists and Hindus, and for monotheists like this Methodist minister https://t.co/Pt25NAeomG

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 28, 2017

So we might kvetch and we might refuse to stand up and sing and we might ask them to stop it altogether. https://t.co/BumAw3nrQP

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 28, 2017

If you really like baseball you just don't give a fuck about this silliness. Let them make fools of themselves according to Matthew 6:5!

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 28, 2017

Then you weren't really meant to watch football in the first place. Go ahead and turn it off. It won't miss you.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 28, 2017

And "America The Beautiful" is such a better song!

— Thornton Hall (@ThorntonHall1) September 28, 2017

Too environmental! And everybody knows the text is by a lesbian. America the Beautiful is a liberal conspiracy.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 28, 2017

For the Record. I: Socialist Hitler

"We are socialists, enemies of the capitalist system of exploitation & determined to destroy this system under all conditions"--who said it?

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) September 27, 2017

Hitler in 1927, paraphrasing Gregor Strasser https://t.co/wMq1lL2mi3 Leader of the left wing of NSDAP. https://t.co/uGHWmOkf1l

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 27, 2017

In the Night of the Long Knives, when Hitler purged all the leftists in the party.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 27, 2017

.@DineshDSouza , who calls everybody a liar, insists Hitler was telling the truth about his views in 1927.

— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) September 27, 2017

The travel ban, whatever it is

Wabash River, via Indiana Policy Review.

Why Sudanese Are No Longer Banned from Traveling in the United States but North Koreans Are, Even Though Their Goverment Doesn't Allow Them to Try to Get In

A Poem

by Donald J. Trump

Well, the people —
yeah, the people allowed —
certain countries — but
we can add countries very easily
and we can take countries away.

And as far as the travel ban
is concerned, whatever it is,
I want the toughest
travel ban you can have.

So I’ll see you in Indiana.
We’re going to go over
some more points that
have not been talked about.

Text from Think Progress.

Ill-educated But Well-off White Sexagenarians are the Real Hippies

Mungo Thomson, "Levitating Pentagon", colored pencil on paper, 2004, via Kenneth Pobo.

But before I get to David F. Brooks, in breaking news, the Senate just did something: confirmed Trump's second nominee to the National Labor Relations Board, corporate lawyer William Emanuel, giving it a Republican majority which is expected to take away some of the gains achieved by workers during the past three or so years (for most of Obama's two terms, Senate Republicans wouldn't allow him to have a functioning National Labor Relations Board at all). Or at least that's what Senators Warren and Murray are worried about (I'm quoting from Fortune):

that he would favor industry over workers on a board they view as tasked with protecting fair working conditions and the right to collective bargaining.

However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said the board should act as a neutral party in the resolution of labor disputes, rather than explicitly protecting workers as his Democratic colleagues suggested. He said the board had become too activist under Obama and expressed hope that Emanuel could return it to impartiality.

For their part, industry groups said they welcomed the addition and hoped Emanuel would soon lead the board to undo Obama-era policies, including allowing employees to organize in “micro-unions” and holding franchisors responsible for franchisees’ violations of labor law.

Love how McConnell objects to fairness because that's not neutral and feels the Board needs to be more passive (its official mission is to enforce the 1935 National Labor Relations Act protecting the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively, not to beam equally on the parties to a dispute and ask them to get along).

Anyway I guess that must be what Brooks is getting at with his lede this morning:

Left narrowly wins German election!

Not exactly, but:

Seat apportionment after Sunday's election, via Frankfurter Allgemeine.

If you added up all the seats won by the right—the "Union" parties of the Christian Democrats and their "Christian Social" Bavarian branch (down from 41.5% of the vote four years ago to not quite 33% this year, in their worst showing in the history of the Federal Republic) plus the Nazioid Alternativ für Deutschland which will be in parliament for the first time, with a frightening 96 seats—they'd be six representatives short of a majority; and if you added up all those of the non-right, including the miserable Social Democrats (also in their worst showing in the history of the Federal Republic, down from 25.7 to 20.8%), the resurgent Federal Democrats ("liberals" in the old free-trader sense like the old British Liberal Democrats or the new French "République en Marche") who were shut out four years ago and are now back, the Greens and the solidly anti-capitalist Left, you'd have enough to form a government.

Not that that's going to happen. It looks like there's going to be what they're calling a "Jamaica coalition"—black, gold, and green, meaning conservatives, "liberals", and Greens, and I have no idea how that's supposed to work (somebody on BBC was saying that the Greens and the Bavarian conservatives hate each other with a keenness that goes beyond the bounds of German normal).

The Sozis will be leaving the coalition to serve as the Official Opposition, which is a thing in Germany, and there's apparently something more to that than just trying to prove they're different from Merkel's conservatives; if they had stayed in the coalition, the Nazioid AfD would be the Official Opposition, with little constitutional power, but an extended right to committee seats and a front rank in questioning and criticizing the government, and it looks as if everybody else has agreed that they need to avoid that.

The AfD's 13% of the vote, and the 96 seats in the Bundestag it gets them, feel very shocking, but it could be worse. Remember Marine Le Pen got 21.3% in the first round of the French presidential, and 33-something in the second round. I wish the Sozis could think of something to get votes with, but in the meantime nobody in German politics is quite like a Republican, and they've got an incredible health care system.

Jamaican flag via.

Monsignor thinks it would be better to change the subject

Concerned cat. Uncredited photo from Washington Post.

Well, we've got a request from Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, which is ("The Health Care Cul-de-Sac") would everybody please stop talking about health care?

sometimes, when a party has spent most of a year producing health care bills that excite almost nobody and that even the senators voting for them can’t effectively defend, it’s worth stepping back and thinking about our national priorities.

This goes for both parties: not only the stepping-on-rakes Republicans, but the suddenly single-payer-dreaming Democrats.

I wouldn't say those Republican health care bills excite almost nobody: somebody must be excited over the thought of getting rid of the Obamacare brand, or the employer mandate, or above all the concept of eliminating Medicaid as a federal program, or these things wouldn't keep coming back again and again from their zombie graves.

On the other hand, it's still less accurate to say the Democrats have spent most of a year producing unexciting health care bills that the Senators voting for them haven't been able to defend. Democrats have spent some time working on drafts of bills nobody's had a chance to vote on, inspiring various degrees of excitement, including the Sanders "Medicare for All" proposal launched on September 13 with endorsements from a really startling number of Democratic Senators including Tammy Baldwin, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Al Franken, Patrick Leahy, Jeanne Shaheen, Mazie Hirono, Brian Schatz (though he's offering a bill of his own as well), Kamala Harris, and Cory Booker, and more, as well as 60% of the Democratic caucus in the House, and a public that may have gone back to its longstanding desire for government-guaranteed universal health care after giving up on it while we were waiting for the PPACA to come into effect—

Nambia

 Image from Steve D at Bits and Pieces.

There was an old fellow from Nambia
Who traded in pepper and gambier.
     When he asked, "Am I tough?"
     They said, "Hardly enough—
You're just getting Nambia-pambier!"

Exorcising the history of conservatism, Part 1,727

Sam Francis, untitled painting 1962, Jacobson Gallery, via WideWalls.

David Brooks discusses the reactionary, anti-immigrant and (at least theologically) pro-slavery, Machiavellian writer Samuel T. Francis (1947-2005) , not to be confused with Sam Francis (1923-94), the wonderful abstract expressionist colorist ("The Coming War on Business"):

The only time I saw Sam Francis face-to-face — in the Washington Times cafeteria sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s — I thought he was a crank, but it’s clear now that he was at that moment becoming one of the most prescient writers of the past 50 years. There’s very little Donald Trump has done or said that Francis didn’t champion a quarter century ago.

OK, I'm going to stick my neck out and say it was probably 1986, the year David Brooks left his first adult job, at the Moonie Times as we call it, to move on to the more respectable Wall Street Journal, and Samuel T. Francis, then 39, joined the Times as a columnist. It seems easier to imagine them being in the paper's cafeteria at the same time during however many months it was both of them worked there than at any other time. "Prescient" is a really peculiar word choice: Francis wasn't foreseeing the advent of Trumpery on the basis of interesting theoretical labors, or a prophetic gift, he was actively working for it, in the form of what Pat Buchanan called "paleoconservatism".

This is going to be one of those efforts to show how completely unexpected and foreign Trumpery is to the Republican Party and the conservative movement, waltzing into the Washington Times cafeteria one day out of nowhere. The thesis is that it was Francis, "wickedly brilliant" but sadly "infected with racism"—

Stinkeroo

Nancy: "He can't use chopsticks, can he?" Chuck: "He can't use judgment." Via New York Daily News.

I can't really stand to write about the congressional health care agita unless I can see a glimmer of hope somewhere, and it's obviously been looking very bleak for the last week or two over there and getting bleaker, reaching a kind of climax of awfulness yesterday, when Lamar Alexander of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee announced he was giving up on the bipartisan bill he and Patty Murray had been working on to keep the Obamacare marketplace going through another year, just as it had started to sound like a negotiating breakthrough, and the project of saving the PPACA that had seemed so hopeful a week or two ago was dead.

Then there was something weird about that: according to the Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin (yes, in this brave new world I can be reduced from time to time to quoting Jennifer Rubin, and retweeting David Frum too), it wasn't an inability to bridge that partisan divide that had killed the Alexander-Murray bill, it was Majority Leader McConnell: