Month: April 2021

Hey, the lights were off for a little bit, but it looks like the we’re back. So, here’s some vintage mid-1980s industrial music.

I’ve been a fan of the Cabs for a while. Richard Kirk’s and Mal’s various solo endeavors have been fun to listen to as well.

I’m glad to have my daily fix of Progress Pond again. So, please leave our host a tip.

In the meantime, it looks like the jukebox is working and the bar is open.

Cheers!

Most of the calls for police reform include policies that are necessary, but will eventually prove insufficient. For example, last month Democrats in the House passed the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act.

One provision in the bill addresses qualified immunity, a legal precedent that gives government officials, including police officers, broad protections against lawsuits. Among other things, the bill would also create a national database of police misconduct and require federal law enforcement officials to use body and dash cameras. To curtail deaths, the legislation bans federal law enforcement from using chokeholds like the one that ended Floyd’s life, and from using no-knock warrants in drug cases — Taylor was killed when police burst into her homeusing such a warrant in March 2020.

While it prohibits some behaviors that have led to abuses, it fails to get at the root causes of the problems with policing. And no…simply providing more training won’t accomplish that either.

As many have suggested, it is the “warrior mentality” in policing that is at the heart of the problem.

The warrior mindset now instructs officers on how to approach every aspect of their job. From their earliest days in the academy, would-be officers are told that their primary objective is to go home at the end of every shift. But, they are taught, they live in an intensely hostile world—one that is, quite literally, gunning for them…

In this worldview, officers are warriors combatting unknown and unpredictable—but highly lethal—enemies. They learn to be afraid. Officers don’t use that word, of course. Vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, or observant are the terms that appear most often in police publications. But officers learn to be vigilant, attentive, cautious, alert, and observant because they are afraid, and they afraid because they’re taught to be.

As a result, officers learn to treat every individual they interact with as an armed threat and every situation as a deadly force encounter in the making.

But the warrior mindset doesn’t begin with training. It begins with recruitment, screening, and hiring. For example, take a look at this recruitment video for the Newport Beach Police Department. They are telegraphing that they want (white male) warriors.

As long as police departments recruit warriors and fail to screen them out in their hiring processes, policing in this country won’t change—no matter how many reform laws are passed.

Back in the early 1990s I got an up close and personal look at what it could mean to re-imagine the role of policing. I was working closely with the Deputy Chief of an urban police department on fundraising for a charitable campaign during the time that the department hired a new Chief who was dedicated to implementing community policing initiatives. One potential donor we met with was obviously more interested in those changes at the police department than he was in our charitable cause. At one point the Deputy Chief said, “This police department will be where it needs to be when over half the officers are women, because police work is mostly about negotiating and women tend to be better at that.”

Of course, the idea that women are better at negotiating is tinged with sexism. But when have we heard an officer say that policing is mostly about negotiating (another way of talking about de-escalating)? What if police departments focused their recruitment, screening, and hiring on skills like negotiation and de-escalation? That would be one way to reimagine policing. The Deputy Chief I worked with is right to suggest that more officers would be women, but that would be a byproduct, not a goal.

What I am suggesting as a re-imagination of policing isn’t new. Lately people are contrasting the “warrior mentality” with the “guardian mentality.”

Both Warriors and Guardians seek to protect the communities they serve, of course, but the guardian mindset takes both a broader and a longer view of how to achieve that goal. Put simply, the guardian mindset prioritizes service over crime-fighting, and it values the dynamics of short-term encounters as a way to create long-term relationships. It instructs officers that their interactions with community members must be more than legally justified; they must also be empowering, fair, respectful, and considerate. It emphasizes communication over command, cooperation over compliance, and legitimacy over authority. In the use-of-force context, the Guardian mindset emphasizes restraint over control, stability over action. But the concept is even broader; it seeks to protect civilians not just from crime and violence, but also from indignity and humiliation.

What hasn’t been included in reform efforts is to tie the recruitment, screening, and hiring of police officers to the guardian mentality.

The much-faulted crime control bill of 1994 contained new money for policing, but it was tied to efforts to implement community policing—a precursor to the guardian mentality. A similar reform could limit federal policing funds to departments that make a commitment to the guardian mentality. One way to demonstrate that would be via their recruitment, screening, and hiring practices.

We know that police departments across the country were recruited to implement the “war on drugs” with federal money that was tied to those efforts. So even while they are primarily under local control, federal dollars can influence a department’s priorities. It is high time we used that leverage to re-imagine policing.

I have no reason to doubt the findings of a new study by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers that examines how COVID-19 is transmitted in indoor spaces. In fact, the findings comport with what I surmised or at least intuitively believed from an early stage of the pandemic.

The first outbreaks I examined involved cruise ships, one particular woman who served as a super-spreader in South Korea, and the outbreak in Washington state, which included a choir practice. From all of those examples, I concluded that transmission was primarily airborne and based on the concentration or build up of viral particulates in the air. That didn’t mean we couldn’t get infected in the more traditional way, by touching a water faucet or door knob, but it meant that the early focus on disinfecting surfaces was at least insufficient to provide protection.

Health authorities were very late in coming to this conclusion, in part I believe because they understood how economically disruptive it would be if they told people it is unsafe to gather indoors. But I, as a non-scientist, was convinced of the danger from nearly the beginning and acted accordingly.

I studied whatever I could find on how air moves when people breath, and I concluded that outdoor activities were almost certainly safe, which is why I allowed my son to play baseball and soccer throughout 2020 and beginning again in February of 2021. I did not allow him to attend indoor practices, although I’ve recently relented on a weekly baseball practice with a lone instructor which is conducted in a very large high-ceilinged gym.

The MIT findings give me some pause on that decision, as it’s clear that 60 feet of distance isn’t any safer than six feet in indoor spaces. But, ultimately, it’s very hard for me to picture how viral particulates could become concentrated in that gym. It also helps that everyone in the family except my son is now vaccinated.

The authors of the study make an important point when they suggest that we can use carbon dioxide levels as a proxy for determining the risk level of indoor spaces. This tells us how much exhaled air is circulating, and it’s not hard to envision how some rooms might quickly become dangerous while others almost certainly won’t, particularly if fresh air is constantly introduced. Just picture astronauts trapped in a small capsule without fresh oxygen. The carbon dioxide buildup from their exhalations will eventually overwhelm them, and it won’t matter if they keep six feet of distance from each other.

I do worry that the study’s findings will be misused. The tenor of the CNBC article cited above is that we’re overreacting and keeping too many businesses shuttered or restricted. But the results actually show that in one important way, indoor spaces are more dangerous than previously believed. Social distancing is not very helpful if you’re in a room with a high concentration of COVID-19 circulating, especially if you spend a lot of time in that space. So, you might keep your distance from everyone else while you’re in the store, but if the store has low ceilings and poor circulation, it’s still quite risky to linger. You definitely would not want to work there.

The findings also confirm that outdoors spaces are extremely safe, although infection is still possible if two people are close enough for long enough. Variants are also a concern, as some are substantially more transmissible. I assume this simply means that infection can occur at lower concentrations, so what might have been safe last year might not be safe this year or in the near future.

The vaccines seem to reduce the likelihood of infection and also to vastly reduce the lethality of infection, so they are the best protection available. Still, they’re not foolproof, so the best idea is to choose your indoor activities carefully and to get in and get out whenever you can. Sitting through a two-hour movie is probably an unnecessary risk, but briskly walking through the grocery store is probably fine, especially if you’ve been vaccinated.

Vaccines are also important for limiting how many variants emerge and for hopefully getting the COVID-19 genie back in the bottle at some point through herd immunity. So, please get vaccinated. And, be smart. You don’t need to stress about every single thing, but having good information about how the disease spreads can help you make good decisions.

My perennial complaint about David Brooks is that he absolves himself of all responsibility for everything always. Every so often he looks around and is dumbfounded at the condition of the Republican Party or the American right, and then he accurately describes this deplorable condition before moving on and behaving as if there’s no real crisis. Then something new appalls him and the cycle begins again.

I did my definitive takedown of Brooks over five years ago (“Letting this man contemplate the great moral questions in public is exactly like handing a three year old a running chainsaw.”), and I stand by that work. As someone who said in 2007 that “the foray into Iraq was one of the noblest endeavors the United States, or any great power, has ever undertaken,” it’s probably hard for Brooks to understand how the lies that led to that adventure could have also led to Sarah Palin or Donald Trump. After all, he helped to tell those lies. He’s accountable.

As of today, he’s alarmed to discover that the movement that has fed him and that he has served is acting like a Hale-Bopp comet death cult.

It’s as if the Trump base felt some security when their man was at the top, and that’s now gone. Maybe Trump was the restraining force.

What’s happening can only be called a venomous panic attack. Since the election, large swathes of the Trumpian right have decided America is facing a crisis like never before and they are the small army of warriors fighting with Alamo-level desperation to ensure the survival of the country as they conceive it.

Where David Brooks, a bookish kid raised in a Jewish family in Manhattan and Philadelphia’s Main Line, thinks he fits in the right’s vision of the future is a good question. He isn’t welcome in the Anglo-Saxon caucus, that’s for sure. What’s unclear is why he couldn’t see these stormtroopers coming from miles away.

The thing is, he does see them on a fairly regular basis. And then he forgets about them, perhaps because he has no role if his role isn’t placed somewhere on the right side of the political spectrum.

So, he manages to write about this “venomous panic attack” fueled by “Alamo-level desperation” without once mentioning that it’s all about white supremacy. I’m talking the old school kind, too, not the type that makes allowances for people who can pass for white but aren’t “Anglo-Saxon.”

I’m long past the point of giving Brooks allowances to figure this out on his own time. His column on this would be good if I didn’t know he’d be acting like he’d never written by early next week.

I want to apologize for the interrupted service over the last week. I’ve been living through a tech nightmare since last Thursday when my server apparently reached its memory limit with no warning and the database collapsed as a result. Between epically bad customer service from my server company and the guy I was hiring to fix the problem taking a different job instead, I’ve been left in a no man’s land as far as trying to get things repaired. An old friend stepped up to help last night and he’s making good progress, but there’s a lot of work to do before we’re back to where we need to be, especially in terms of site speed.

My main concern is the user’s experience, and so my goal now is to wind up with a site that loads faster than ever before. That’s going to require an investment in a new server and a new server set-up, and I only have a vague idea of my options and the associated costs right now. But it’s an investment I’m eager to make after spending a week cut-off from you and my site.

Until that gets done, we will probably still have some problems because there’s just not enough memory available to continue using the current server. Hopefully, the site will remain up and mostly functioning but we should expect to load slowly. For the last couple of days, I didn’t even access to the back end, which meant I couldn’t create any new content even if I wanted to, and I couldn’t do basic administrative tasks. That’s appears to be fixed now, thankfully, and we’ll just take baby steps from here.

Thank you for your patience. This has been embarrassing for me, but it’s been unfair and inconvenient for you. I apologize and hope things we’ll soon be vastly improved from the way they were before these problems began.

Tucker Carlson’s recent defense of the Great Replacement Theory garnered a lot of media attention, including condemnation by the Anti-Defamation League. But it is spreading like wildfire on the right. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Carlson’s segment was heralded by the likes of Charlie Kirk and white working class defender J.D. Vance.  It is, however, worth noting that it has been picked up by Republican politicians.

During a hearing on the root causes of migration from Central American countries last week, Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) said this:

“For many Americans,” Perry began, “what seems to be happening or what they believe right now is happening is, what appears to them is we’re replacing national-born American — native-born Americans to permanently transform the political landscape of this very nation.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like, weighed in as well.

https://twitter.com/bad_takes/status/1382816810253307913?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1382816810253307913%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F2021%2F04%2Fthe-kkk-ification-of-republican-party.html

It is important to keep in mind that the Great Replacement Theory spurred killing sprees in Christchurch, New Zealand; Poway, California; and El Paso, Texas, indicating that this kind of rhetoric has the potential to be deadly—even as it becomes a mainstay of the Republican Party.

Following Carlson’s recent use of the rhetoric, Fox Corp. stood behind their television personality. Perhaps that is because what he said has been repeated on that network many times. Take a look at this compilation put together by Media Matters almost two years ago.

They have recently updated that compilation.

https://twitter.com/mmfa/status/1382136627045277703?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1382136627045277703%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=http%3A%2F%2Fimmasmartypants.blogspot.com%2F2021%2F04%2Fthe-kkk-ification-of-republican-party.html

While several “rationales” are used to justify this fear of “foreign invaders,” the most common is that it is a ploy by Democrats to build their voter base, indicating that the Republican Party either can’t or won’t win their votes. That is despite the fact that pundits have been focusing on the increase in Hispanic support for Trump in 2020. One can only surmise that ginning up the racist fears of their white supporters is more important than garnering votes from immigrants or people of color.

This is how things work in the Republican Party these days. Toxic ideas are introduced on right wing media and eventually saturate their viewers sufficiently that elected Republicans pick them up. That is how the GOP became the party that openly embraces KKK ideology.

There are many things that have triggered this alignment of the GOP with KKK ideology. But white supremacists Richard Spencer articulated the reason for its most recent escalation back in 2015.

“Trump, on a gut level, kind of senses that this is about demographics, ultimately. We’re moving into a new America.” He said, “I don’t think Trump is a white nationalist,” but he did believe that Trump reflected “an unconscious vision that white people have – that their grandchildren might be a hated minority in their own country. I think that scares us. They probably aren’t able to articulate it. I think it’s there. I think that, to a great degree, explains the Trump phenomenon.”

The idea that white people will become a minority due to an “invasion” of foreigners immigrating to this country is—interestingly enough—not only racist, but a lie. Back in 2018, Trump proposed some drastic changes to our immigration system that were undoubtably crafted by white supremacist Stephen Miller. The Washington Post analyzed their impact and concluded that they would merely “delay the date that white Americans become a minority of the population by as few as one or as many as five additional years.” Here’s why:

[W]hile these effects of delaying the United States’ diversification would be significant, they would not fundamentally change the country’s demographic destiny. Experts say the main driver of diversification in the United States is the native-born Hispanic population, which grew by about 5 million from 2010 to 2016, just as the native-born white population shrank by about 400,000 over the same period, according to Census Bureau data…

“You can shut the door to everyone in the world and that won’t change,” said Roberto Suro, an immigration and demography expert at the University of Southern California. “The president can’t do anything about that. If your primary concern is that the American population is becoming less white, it’s already too late.”

Republicans can howl all they want about “foreign invaders,” but this country’s demographic destiny is already baked in the cake. The party of the KKK refuses to accept that, meaning that the next few years are going to be a pretty rocky ride.

I recently watched the movie, Son of the South, which is based on the true story of white civil rights activist Bob Zellner. I was particularly struck by a scene that happened early in the movie where Rosa Parks (played by Sharrone Lanier) offers a warning to Zellner (played by Lucas Till). It comes at about the 1:35 mark in this trailer.

Ms. Parks says: “There’s gonna come a time when something really bad happens and you’re gonna have to decide which side you’re on. Not choosing is a choice.”

History is about to repeat itself. One way or another, I suspect that every one of us will have to chose a side in this struggle, because not choosing is a choice.

President Biden currently enjoys an 53.2 percent approval rating in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls, which is not great by historical standards but much better than Trump’s numbers at any point in his one term in the Oval Office. What might be more important is that he’s major policy initiatives on COVID-19, the economy, and infrastructure all poll better than he does.

Sometimes it’s necessary to do unpopular things, and some things are unpopular in the beginning but later win widespread support and approval. But it’s obviously easier politically to do stuff that people like. If they like the stuff you’re doing more than they like you personally, that’s very good news for you and the political party you lead. It makes it more likely that you’ll be able to do more stuff, including stuff that doesn’t poll well.

It also makes it less likely that voters will sour on you causing your personal approval numbers to go down.

So, Biden is sitting pretty right now and Democrats should be pleased. As Aaron Blake of the Washington Post notes, the Republicans are really struggling to lay a glove on him.

The Hill’s Jordain Carney spoke with a number of GOP senators who either tacitly or explicitly acknowledged their inability to set a tone in opposing Biden. Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said the GOP was doing “poorly” on this front. The No. 2-ranking Senate Republican, Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), said, “We need to get better at it.” But “it’s probably harder to attack somebody who is relatable and likable,” he added. The party’s former No. 2 senator, John Cornyn (R-Tex.), agreed that “it’s always harder to fight against a nice person.”

The thing about Biden is that being nice isn’t some veneer or brand he puts on but just a basic character trait that even his political enemies recognize and acknowledge. This is why even the horrible unfounded charge of sexual assault he suffered in the primaries didn’t make a dent. Voters couldn’t picture it and they didn’t credit it. The same is true of the Republican accusation that he’s personally corrupt–which is what all the Hunter Biden hype was all about.

Superman’s weakness was kryptonite, a rare substance from his home planet that sapped his superpowers. Biden’s character is kryptonite to the Republicans’ playbook for combatting a Democratic president. But his policies, so far, serve the same end.

When Bill Clinton and Barack Obama entered the White House they had stronger majorities in Congress but they each pursued policies that proved less popular than they were, and it led to catastrophic midterm elections. It doesn’t look like Biden is heading in that direction.

Yet, he still has to get things done, and that will be more difficult now and more challenging than it was for Clinton and Obama. I hope vulnerable Democrats like Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia understand that his best shot at reelection comes if Biden’s popular policies are enacted. Biden will never be the first choice of West Virginians but they may warm to him a bit if he’s delivering things they like. It’s better overall that people approve of what he’s doing than that they approve of him as a person, but the two things are interrelated. Republicans will struggle in the midterms if they can’t develop a coherent attack against either the president or his policies.

We don’t live in a meritocracy and we never have. Frankly, I don’t think we should aspire to it, either. There could never be a perfect arbiter of merit and any set of metrics one might choose to measure intrinsic value would be at least somewhat arbitrary and discriminatory. But we do want folks to get a fair shake and proper compensation and recognition for their work. We want to give the maximum number of people an opportunity to succeed.

When it comes to writing books, there are great authors who have to self-publish and great books that don’t sell because they aren’t properly promoted. Often an author is long dead by the time the world recognizes the timelessness of their creations. I don’t want to try to legislate away unfairness or unfortunate quirks of fate.

If a book sells, it obviously has value to people even if the reviewers think it’s crap. That’s meritocratic enough for me.

But it does seem wrong for authors to reach the best seller list through bulk purchases from their rich friends and political allies. And, as Paul Farhi of the Washington Post reports, bulk purchases of politicians’ books can also run afoul of campaign finance rules and ethics guidelines.

This seems to be common practice among Republican lawmakers, but there’s not much evidence of the Democrats doing the same. To give one example, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), spent nearly $400,000 on former Navy SEAL Dan Crenshaw’s book, Fortitude: American Resilience in the Era of Outrage. This put it on the best seller list and helped him become an elected U.S. congressman representing a district in Texas. The NRCC claims it used these books to help fundraise for Crenshaw’s candidacy, but now he’s a best-selling author and some poor schlub was pushed off the list and won’t get as big of an advance for his or her next book.

To keep compliant with the law, the purchase was made straight from the publisher which made sure not to pay out royalties to Crenshaw since that would be a corrupt use of political fundraising money. Sen. Ted Cruz violated that law when used his own campaign’s money to buy his book in bulk from online retailers Books-a-Million and Barnes & Noble, neither of which is equipped to report to the publisher on which purchases should spur royalty payments and which should not. This means that Cruz will probably have to return the royalties to avoid legal problems. But he’ll still have benefited in other ways that don’t seem fair.

Believe me, I wish I could author a book and have friends and allies bulk purchase it onto the best seller list. That’s so much easier than making sales based on the merit of my work. But I recognize that the world isn’t fair and I’m not asking that anyone try to make it fair.

Still, I reserve the right to complain that conservative writers get this hand up routinely and it’s not something creative people on the left ever seem to enjoy.

Thanks to a disinformation campaign by former Attorney General William Barr, the biggest Trump lie embraced by mainstream media was the one about how special counsel Robert Mueller found no collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Mueller’s report was clear. He documented massive collusion. In case you have forgotten, Rep. Adam Schiff broke it down.

As Schiff noted, Mueller was not able to document proof of a criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

That is the context for news from the Treasury Department that the Trump campaign’s data Paul Manafort turned over to Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnick was passed on to Russian intelligence. At best, it only deepens the story of collusion.

What we still don’t know is whether the 45th president of the United States was acting as a Russian asset. That is because the Trump administration effectively shut down a counterintelligence investigation into the matter. Here is what Schiff told Philip Bump a few weeks after Mueller released his report.

Just as a reminder, this all began as an FBI counterintelligence investigation into whether people around then-candidate Trump were acting as witting or unwitting agents of a foreign power. So it began as a counterintelligence investigation, not as a criminal investigation. Now obviously a criminal case — many criminal cases — were spun off of this but we don’t know what happened to the counterintelligence investigation that James Comey opened.

Schiff told Bump that once FBI Director James Comey was fired in May 2017, intelligence briefings on this matter ended and he had not been able to determine if the counterintelligence investigation had been closed. Apparently it had, which is what Michael Schmidt reported in the New York Times.

The Justice Department secretly took steps in 2017 to narrow the investigation into Russian election interference and any links to the Trump campaign, according to former law enforcement officials, keeping investigators from completing an examination of President Trump’s decades-long personal and business ties to Russia…

[L]aw enforcement officials never fully investigated Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Russia, even though some career F.B.I. counterintelligence investigators thought his ties posed such a national security threat that they took the extraordinary step of opening an inquiry into them. Within days, the former deputy attorney general Rod J. Rosenstein curtailed the investigation without telling the bureau, all but ensuring it would go nowhere.

Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe said that Rosenstein led him to believe that such a counterintelligence investigation would be handled by Mueller. But sources told Schmidt that “privately, Mr. Rosenstein instructed Mr. Mueller to conduct only a criminal investigation into whether anyone broke the law in connection with Russia’s 2016 election interference.” So when Mueller appeared before congress, he told them that a counterintelligence probe would be under the purview of the FBI.

This is why the whole discussion about whether the Trump campaign “colluded” with Russia is perhaps the most successful distraction ever concocted by right wingers. The case for collusion has been made beyond any reasonable doubt. If, in fact, Trump was acting as a Russian asset during his presidency, that might qualify as the biggest scandal in U.S. history. There is more than adequate information pointing in that direction. We deserve some answers.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will be continuing with the castle scene. The photo that I’m using is seen directly below.

I’ll be using my usual acrylic paints on a 8×8 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 some limited changes for this week’s cycle. I have now added paint to both the lit and shadowed portions of the castle. Below, I have paint added to the water and reflection. There is still a long way to go.

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

I’ll have more progress to show you next week. See you then.