Month: March 2021

You cannot have a competent government if you don’t get rock solid scientific advice, and that starts with the fed’s scientific advisory panels. At the moment, the Republicans have political and ideological reasons for rejecting the scientific consensus on a host of issues, so during the Trump administration they manipulated things so that these panels were skewed toward industrial interests rather than dispassionate expertise. One simple way they did this was to make anyone who received a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency ineligible to serve on a board, the pretense being that they’d have a conflict of interest. The effect was to weed out people who know what they’re talking about on climate and pollution. Eventually, a federal court said this practice is illegal, but that didn’t undo the damage.

The Biden administration is rectifying the problem, and they’re not being shy about it.

Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Michael Regan will purge more than 40 outside experts appointed by President Donald Trump from two key advisory panels, a move he says will help restore the role of science at the agency and reduce the heavy influence of industry over environmental regulations.

The unusual decision, announced Wednesday, will sweep away outside researchers picked under the previous administration whose expert advice helped the agency craft regulations related to air pollution, fracking and other issues.

Critics say that under Trump, membership of the two panels — the EPA’s Science Advisory Board (SAB) and Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (CASAC) — tilted too heavily toward regulated industries and their positions sometimes contradicted scientific consensus.

You can look at this as a purge of Trumpists, but it’s more than that. It’s a genuine effort to make these panels operate as they’re supposed to, and this is critical for the country. We can’t make good decisions if we make ourselves intentionally stupid.

Another midweek is here.

Late last week I read that some 80-something jazz legends like Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, and Gary Bartz were dropping new albums this year. Some of them are working with electronica artists of one sort or another. Archie Shepp is doing a sax duo. This will be a good year for jazz, in which some fans can listen to the latest statements by some great artists at the twilight of their respective careers. I’ll start out with Pharoah Sanders for now. This new album is a collaboration with Floating Points, and the London Symphony Orchestra makes an appearance. The results are sublime. It comes across almost like an ambient recording, but with a bit of a nod to some of the quieter avant-jazz of the the 1970s. It’s gorgeous. The album is called Promises. Here is the whole thing:

Some peace and love to keep us cool the rest of this week.

The jukebox is operating and the bar is open. Drinks are on the house.

Cheers!

I don’t have the energy to fully respond to Freddie DeBoer’s latest opus, and there’s plenty there I could mock. It’s a bit much to watch him complain about the cynicism and condescension running rampant in the zeitgeist while he mocks nearly everyone who holds a heartfelt opinion. But he’s right about several important things.

First, virtually no one is making real money writing today, and good luck emulating the few exceptions. Second, too many people are speaking in the same voice. Finally, the second problem is largely caused by the third problem, which is, as he puts it, that it’s “an industry now made up only of snitches and nuns” that “does not need more hall monitors or commissars.”

If deBoer offers one piece of advice for writers that I can solidly endorse it’s “be ruthless in asking yourself whether you actually hold a position or if you are just afraid of the consequences of appearing to not hold it.”

Too often, this posture takes the form of making apologies for being a shithead. If the position you’re afraid to hold resembles the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, then just go ahead and continue to live in fear. The problem isn’t that people are afraid to freely express shitty mean-spirited science-challenged opinions. It’s more that too much energy is going into enforcing conformity and policing the acceptable parameters of debate.

That’s death for a writer because standing apart is what makes you interesting. Challenging assumptions is more stimulating than playing Wac-a-Mole with anyone who expresses an unorthodox or unvetted opinion.

At the moment, one half of our country is rebelling against this by rewarding anyone who’s willing to be offensive. It’s like an arms race to divide the world into bigots and cranks on one side and morally superior signalers on the other. Writers who fall into either category are going to be crap, and the scolds are going to be boring too.

I can’t offer advice on how to make money as a writer because I don’t make any (prove me wrong and get a subscription, please), but I can say that I’ve built a loyal audience that helps me pay the bills by focusing heavily on the things I see as wrong with my own portion of the political spectrum. I write about everything that is wrong with Republicans, but I am unsparing with progressives, too. And this hasn’t made me a whipping boy for progressives but rather a valued voice within progressive politics. I did this when consulting for Howard Dean’s Democracy for America outfit, and I did it for seven years at the Washington Monthly. I can operate on both ends of the Democratic world mainly because I’m not echoing what everyone else is saying.

It’s not the easiest path because you don’t make anyone truly happy, but good writing is not about making people comfortable, and if your readers are just shaking their heads in agreement all the time, they will soon get bored.

Most political writing these days bores the hell out of me, and it’s mainly because I find so little of it surprising. As a writer, even if you have conventional and inoffensive beliefs and opinions, you probably shouldn’t bother saying what’s already been said, or will be said, by countless others. My advice is to focus on areas where you have something contrary to say, and that doesn’t mean being offensive just to get attention.

In the third season of David Simon’s “The Wire,” Police Major “Bunny” Colvin reaches a breaking point when one of his officers is shot while trying to buy three small vials of cocaine during an undercover operation. He launched what came to be known as “Hamsterdam” with this speech.

Colvin cordoned off a section of his district where “corner boys” could sell drugs and prostitutes could sell sex without getting arrested. Eventually, they brought in public health specialists to work with the buyers to limit the spread of diseases.

In that fictional world, the result was that violent crime and robberies were reduced significantly in Colvin’s district as his officers focused on “real police work.” But he kept his methods a secret. Once word got out about what he was doing, the city shut Hamsterdam down.

The reason I’m recalling those episodes of “The Wire” is that State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby initiated a city-wide replication of Hamsterdam at the start of the coronavirus pandemic. She announced that the city would no longer prosecute drug possession, prostitution, trespassing and other minor charges, to keep people out of jail and limit the spread of the deadly virus. Much like the fictional account, Mosby brought in behavioral health services as an alternative to law enforcement. The results were astounding.

And then crime went down in Baltimore. A lot. While violent crime and homicides skyrocketedin most other big American cities last year, violent crime in Baltimore dropped 20 percent from last March to this month, property crime decreased 36 percent, and there were 13 fewer homicides compared with the previous year. This happened while 39 percent fewer people entered the city’s criminal justice system in the one-year period, and 20 percent fewer people landed in jail after Mosby’s office dismissed more than 1,400 pending cases and tossed out more than 1,400 warrants for nonviolent crimes.

Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison was completely on board with Mosby’s effort.

“The officers told me they did not agree with that paradigm shift,” Harrison said. He said he had to “socialize” both officers and citizens to this new approach. Harrison expected crime to rise. “It did not,” the chief said. “It continued to go down through 2020. As a practitioner, as an academic, I can say there’s a correlation between the fact that we stopped making these arrests and crime did not go up.”

What we can say right now is that there is a “correlation” between these efforts and a reduction in crime because there is no proof of causation. But it is still possible that the data can be developed. On Friday, Mosby announced that she would make her temporary initiative permanent.

“A year ago, we underwent an experiment in Baltimore,” Mosby said in an interview, describing steps she took after consulting with public health and state officials to reduce the public’s exposure to the coronavirus, including not prosecuting nonviolent offenses. “What we learned in that year, and it’s so incredibly exciting, is there’s no public safety value in prosecuting these low-level offenses. These low-level offenses were being, and have been, discriminately enforced against Black and Brown people.

“The era of ‘tough on crime’ prosecutors is over in Baltimore,” Mosby said. “We have to rebuild the community’s trust in the criminal justice system and that’s what we will do, so we can focus on violent crime.” In a city that still struggles with a high homicide rate and gun violence, even with the decline in crime, she said the policy shift will enable more prosecutors to be assigned to homicides and other major cases instead of misdemeanor court.

Take a bow David Simon…you were right all along.

This is the strangest thing:

For years, campaigns and other groups have distributed water, sent food trucks and had pizza delivered to voters waiting in long lines to cast a ballot. Amid a nationwide effort by Republican lawmakers to tighten voting laws in the wake of an election their nominee lost, the practice has come under fire.

It’s tempting to think the intention here is simple cruelty, but I think it’s even dumber than that. It’s not that the Republicans are overly interested in voters being hungry and thirsty, but rather that they’ve convinced themselves that these practices actually harm their chances of winning elections.

It’s not entirely clear why they think this, but one factor is that it diminishes the suppressive effect of long lines. If someone gets hungry enough or thirsty enough, they might change their mind about voting. But that’s true about the loss of time involved in waiting in a long queue, where simple frustration or competing obligations might force someone to bail before their vote is cast. The benefit here is marginal, and that’s before you account for the added determination these measures inspire in folks. It gives the Democrats very valuable ammunition when they’re doing voter registration and get-out-the-vote campaigns when they can point to this blatant kind of suppressive behavior. I think the black community is especially responsive to this kind of messaging, and they tend to be clustered in the urban districts where long lines are most likely to form.

There’s one other factor here that has a bit more justification. We try to keep campaigns away from polling station lines to protect people from harassment or intimidation, and we don’t want voters paid off to vote one way or another. Theoretically, a campaign that’s offering pizza to everyone in line might win over a few votes, although I don’t think very many people make up their minds in this way. In most of these urban lines, the Republicans aren’t going to get more than a handful of votes in any case, and they’d be more likely to benefit from some cockamamie plan to sway voters with food and drink.

I have trouble believing that even in their imaginations the Republicans believe these restrictions will help them much. Yet, they’ve seized on this as a key component of their state-level election “reforms.”

Florida Republicans are considering a bill that would effectively make it a crime to give voters food or drink, including water, within 150 feet of polling places.

State law currently prohibits campaigning within 100 feet of polling locations, but an elections bill introduced last week, H.B. 7041, expands that zone to 150 feet and includes a prohibition on giving “any item” to voters or “interacting or attempting to interact” with voters within that zone…

…The proposal is similar to a measure in Georgia’s sweeping new election law that bans giving water, food or gifts to voters waiting in line, among many other restrictions.

In my view, this is a gigantic gift to the Democrats. It gives them a devastating talking point and provides cover for Democratic senators who might want to eliminate the filibuster to pass overriding federal legislation that will nullify these state laws. This is so obvious that it’s impossible to see the advantage in the Republicans including these measures in the first place.

It could just be as simple as that they’ve suffering from a collective brain rot. I have no better theory.

I received my second (Pfizer) COVID-19 vaccination about 24 hours ago. I was prepared to feel like I had a bad case of the flu, perhaps for a couple of days, but I’m just a little groggy and feel like someone punched me very hard in the shoulder. I slept a lot and might sleep some more, but the first shot actually created a more noticeable immune reaction. In that case, I felt weird almost immediately and eventually had some brief tooth-rattling chills, but they lasted about ten minutes. If the statistics are accurate, I’m now very unlikely to have an infection from the actual virus for at least six months, and maybe much longer than that. They say it will be three weeks before my immune protection reaches full power.

One of our three kids has had his first shot, our surviving parents are all vaccinated, and we feel like we’re filling in the boxes to get back to a some sense of normalcy. If you have any hesitancy about getting inoculated, I’d advise you to go ahead and do it. It brings peace of mind, and it helps everyone because each time there is a new infection there is an opportunity for someone to die or for the virus to mutate into something we cannot manage.

We had to go through some major hoops to get this done because my home county is only now indicating that they might have a vaccine for me, and that’s why my focus has been on the shortage of vaccines rather than the folks who could be vaccinated but are opting against it.

That’s going to change now as states move to get shots to everyone, not just those at higher risk. It becomes less of a private battle to protect yourself and your family and more of a collective effort to create herd immunity and stamp this virus out, or at least tamp it down to the threat level of the seasonal flu. The Biden administration will be ramping up their messaging around this idea and using a billion dollars of tax dollars to do it. But you can contribute for free by sharing your experiences and reassuring folks that the vaccine is safe and effective.

I’d also like to point out for those who hate shots and are afraid of needles that I didn’t even realize I’d been stuck the first time until I was told. To say that this shot doesn’t hurt is a major understatement. The pain comes later when the body reacts to the intruder, and it’s a minor annoyance easily handled by some Tylenol.

So, don’t be a hold out. When you get the chance, go ahead and do it, and bring as many people with you as you can. We need to get past this epidemic, and we each have our own part to play in making that happen.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the painting of the Connor Hotel in Jerome, Arizona. The photo that I’m using (My own from a recent visit.) is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 9×9 inch canvas panel.

When last seen the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

There are many revisions for this week’s cycle. The sky has been overpainted in a blue that contrasts nicely with the color of the building. The lower story of the building has been completed as well as the street and cars. Note the store to the far rear. Finally, I have added the suggestion of the building’s name in the upper story without actually painting it. The painting is now finished.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week. See you then.

As my son and I have embraced chess over the last three years, I’ve also learned about the history of the game, the tendencies of the great grandmasters, and come to know the current crop of brilliant players which is undoubtedly the most talented bunch ever seen. The World Champion, Magnus Carlson of Norway, is a fantastic ambassador for the game. He gracious, young and handsome, and he’s immensely generous with his time and committed to helping the sport grow. In America, Hikaru Nakamura is about the best spokesman you could imagine, and he’s mastered the streaming aspect which has boomed during the COVID-19 epidemic. These aren’t stereotypical socially awkward nerds even if they’re some of the smartest people who have ever lived.

But online chess has its downsides, as it’s very hard to prevent cheating. Anyone with a phone can use a chess engine to assist them and play better than any grandmaster. That’s what led to the most-streamed chess match in history, which occurred this past week in Indonesia.

I have a lot of mixed feelings about how it turned out.

Here’s the basics.

An International Master named Levy Rozman has a streaming show on Twitch where he plays all comers, and on March 2, 2021, he lost a match to some dude pseudonymously named Dewa Kipas. But he could tell his opponent was cheating and he reported them to Chess.com, which after analyzing his games decided to ban his account.

That’s when things got ugly. It turns out that Dewa Kipas is really Dadang Subur and lives in Indonesia.

Soon after, the son of @Dewa_Kipas, the 24-year-old Ali Akbar, started a protest. Wired reports that Akbar posted a message on Facebook, where he has 3,500 followers, saying that his father, Dadang Subur, is a strong player and that the account was unfairly blocked. Akbar also suggested that Rozman’s fans had mass-reported his father’s account.

The post went viral. Over the following weeks, Rozman started to receive unfriendly messages on his Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube accounts. The messages were mostly coming from Indonesia in support of Subur, and some of them even included death threats.

Rozman tried to explain that he has no real influence over Chess.com’s process of banning accounts but as the aggressive messages continued coming in, he was temporarily forced to lock his social media accounts.

Passions got aroused and suddenly the incident was big news, especially in Indonesia. Mr. Subur was challenged by some of the country’s strongest players but he declined even while insisting he had been wrongly accused.

But then he got a challenge he didn’t refuse. Indonesian International Master Irene Sukandar went on television to explain why he was suspected of cheating and said he should play her, presumably to prove his innocence. When he accepted, she felt like she had to follow through and have a match.

But the match was no small event.

The match between Sukandar and Subur (the latter being promoted with his online moniker of Dewa Kipas) peaked at 1.25 million concurrent spectators on YouTube, about 10 times that of the most-watched live-streamed chess events in history such as the classical world championship and Pogchamps.

The match was organized by Deddy Corbuzier, an Indonesian actor, television presenter, and YouTuber, who runs the popular #CloseTheDoor Corbuzier podcast on YouTube that has 13.8 million subscribers. The games were played in Corbuzier’s studio in Jakarta.

The broadcast, which had commentary by GM Susanto Megaranto and WIM Chelsie Monica, lasted an hour and 21 minutes and has collected 8.7 million views so far.

Importantly, there was prize money.

The Indonesian technology and e-commerce company Tokopedia appeared to be the main sponsor, providing the equivalent of $10,500 that was then doubled by Indra Kesuma, an Indonesian businessman and YouTuber.

Two-thirds would go to the winner and one-third to the loser.

Of course, Subur was exposed as a cheater, as his level of play (as assessed by computers) was not quite at the level of my son, while his games on Chess.com had rated higher than even world champion Magnus Carlson can manage.

But he walked away with $7,000.

Obviously, this is a great example of things getting out of hand. A dude decided to cheat against an International Master on a popular chess streaming show and then his son defended his honor to his sizable online following, and the next thing you know you have a global incident and millions of people watching chess.

As for the victim, Mr. Rozman is looking on the bright side.

Rozman is now focusing on turning the whole episode into something positive. For instance, he plans to organize a charity stream with Indonesian players.

In a tweet, he expressed his joy about the high view numbers of the Sukandar-Subur match and that it has led to higher interest in chess in Indonesia. Similarly, Chess.com on Monday experienced about 40 times the normal number of registrations from Indonesia in only a few hours.

If this whole spectacle got more people interested in chess, I’m happy it happened. I just wish one of the lessons wasn’t that cheating doesn’t pay except when it does.

This looks familiar:

One candidate resigned the Missouri governorship in disgrace, facing criminal charges and allegations that an extramarital affair had turned violent.

Another, an Alabama congressman, served as President Donald Trump’s warm-up act for the “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, urging participants to “start taking down names and kicking ass.”

A third recently had his Twitter account temporarily suspended when the Ohio hopeful referred to some of the people crossing the southern border as “Muslim Terrorists” and “Mexican Gangbangers.”
And that could be just the beginning.

Mike DeBonis of the Washington Post is referring to Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate in 2022. The Missouri ex-governor is Eric Greitens who is most famous for an incident of dungeon rape. The U.S. Representative from Alabama is Mo Brooks who is rapidly making us all forget about Rep. Steve King of Iowa who was so racist that he was stripped of all his committee assignment and defeated in a Republican primary. The Ohio candidate is former state treasurer Josh Mandel, a COVID-19 vaccine and election fraud truther who is a darling of the Trumpian right.

The point of DeBonis’s piece is that lunatic candidates are giving the Republican Party headaches. But maybe these lunatic candidates not so much:

Several GOP operatives, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly describe internal thinking, said the emerging field of Republican candidates is raising concerns, although they believe the issue is manageable since Brooks, Greitens and Mandel are running in favorable states for Republicans.

To be clear, then, the GOP insider view is that Greitens, Brooks and Mandel are probably electable. They’re most likely “manageable” headaches. A problem only arises in realistically contested races. Maybe running Lara Trump for Senate in North Carolina is a bridge too far. Perhaps Kelli Ward has established herself as a shitty candidate in Arizona. If the Republicans aren’t careful they could blow any chance to retain Pat Toomey’s Pennsylvania seat in the Senate.

I’d remind people, first of all, that Democrat Sherrod Brown keeps finding a way to get reelected in Ohio, so I wouldn’t pencil Josh Mandel in as a winner just yet. On the overall point, I’d agree that almost any Republican can win in Missouri or Alabama, but we’ve seen counterexamples. Missouri’s Claire McCaskill beat the “legitimate rape” guy in 2012 and Alabama’s Doug Jones beat a child molester in 2017. Hell, Kansas has Democratic governor thanks to the horrible record of Sam Brownback and the ridiculous candidate the GOP put up to succeed him.

What makes me sick is the attitude of these GOP operatives. Why would you want lunatics to win? Why are looking at these candidates like “manageable” problems? There are Democrats I absolutely do not want to win primaries and do not want to serve in the U.S. Senate. I don’t look at people like Anthony Weiner or Alan Grayson as problems I can live with but as threats to everything I value and believe in. Sure, they were both brilliant at exciting the base, but that’s the problem. That’s what made them dangerous.

At a certain point, I’d leave a party that kept nominating unethical and unhinged candidates. I certainly wouldn’t quietly root for those candidates on some theory that it’s for the greater good. I never shy away from telling progressives things they don’t want to hear, and I don’t do it because I don’t like progressives. I do it because it’s basic housekeeping. The Republicans should try it.

The wonks at Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog have looked at the numbers and come to the same conclusion I did about what is happening on our southern border: it is not a “crisis” created by the Biden administration’s policies. While it’s true that there is currently a surge of migrants being apprehended, they found two reasons to explain the situation.

First of all, they note the seasonal nature of migration.

[T]he CBP’s numbers reveal that undocumented immigration is seasonal, shifting upward this time of year. During fiscal year 2019, under the Trump administration, total apprehensions increased 31 percent during the same period, a bigger jump than we’re seeing now…migrants start coming when winter ends and the weather gets a bit warmer…[they] stop coming in the hotter summer months when the desert is deadly. That means we should expect decreases from May to June and June to July.

To demonstrate this seasonal pattern, here is a graph of border apprehensions per month dating back to 2000 from Reuters.

2020 was the pandemic, when movement dropped dramatically. Countries around the world closed their borders. Here in the United States, the Trump administration invoked Title 42, a provision from the 1944 Public Health Act, to summarily expel migrants attempting to enter the United States without proper documentation.

That led to the second reason we’re seeing increased numbers in 2021.

[I]n fiscal year 2021, it appears that migrants are continuing to enter the United States in the same numbers as in fiscal year 2019 — plus the pent-up demand from people who would have come in fiscal year 2020, but for the pandemic…This suggests that Title 42 expulsions delayed prospective migrants rather than deterred them — and they’re arriving now.

That would be consistent with nearly three decades of research in political science…Scholars consistently find that border security policies do not necessarily deter migration; rather, they delay migrants’ decisions to travel, and change the routes they take.

Here’s their conclusion:

So have Biden administration policies caused a crisis at the southern border? Evidence suggests not. The Trump administration oversaw a record in apprehensions in fiscal year 2019, before the pandemic shut the border. This year looks like the usual seasonal increase plus migrants who would have come last year, but could not.

Nevertheless, it is not just Republicans who are stirring up a panic about what’s happening. Both television networks and cable news have been giving the “crisis” saturation coverage. Here’s Chuck Todd’s entry on Meet the Press.

Good Sunday Morning —

It's fair to call the deteriorating situation at the US-Mexican border a crisis — even if the Biden administration refuses to use that word.

But it's more than that: It's a political crisis for the new president, with no easy way out. pic.twitter.com/7mHiB8FbCl

— Meet the Press (@MeetThePress) March 21, 2021

Todd starts off by suggesting that it’s fair to call the “deteriorating situation” on our southern border a “crisis.” He then launches into a couple of renditions of bothersiderism before bizarrely referring to an intelligence report about domestic terror groups (read: white nationalists). That is nothing short of abominable reporting.

As all of this unfolds, I have been reminded of the panic the media induced about Ebola in the run-up to the 2014 midterms. They are proving once again that they are still suckers for Republican fear-mongering. Of course, the situation is even worse on Fox News and other right wing media outlets. But too many mainstream outlets are complicit as well.