Dare I Eat a Peach

Prunus Persica by Otto Wilhelm Thomé (from Wikipedia)

In an interview conducted Wednesday with Krystal Ball and Saagar Enjeti of The Hill's daily morning news show Rising on Wednesday, Hawaii Congresswoman and 2020 Democratic hopeful Tulsi Gabbard was unequivocal in her position that "impeachment would be a divisive process and that voters must be the ones to remove President Trump from office."  She went on to say that at her rallies she hands out copies of the Constitution and Bill of Rights to those in attendance to remind them of what's at stake in the election.  Perhaps in the meanwhile since that interview, she has read the part about how "Congress shall have the sole Power of Impeachment" because 2 days later, she dis-unequivocated and now says on reading the transcript of Trump's conversation with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in July and details of the whistleblower complaint released late in the week, "not impeaching the president would set a very dangerous precedent," to whit:

Future presidents, as well as anyone in positions of power in the government, will conclude that they can abuse their position for personal gain, without fear of accountability or consequences.

Also late to the impeachment game were a quintuple of freshman congresswomen (no, not them-- they came ready) who refer to themselves as "badasses" on the basis of their military and intelligence experience prior to their election to congress.  I'm not especially persuaded by the military and intelligence credentials-- after too much familiarity with the spectacle of medals or CIA experience being paraded around as a license to conduct mischief (see General Kelly, Oliver North, Alexander Haig, General Petraeus, John Brennan, James Clapper, Michael Hayden), I need a lot more to go on than a career choice-- but I know many will be.  But the Badasses along with fellow "national security" democratic congresspersons Gil Cisneros and Jason Crow lay out a pretty good case in an op ed to the Washington Post:

The president of the United States may have used his position to pressure a foreign country into investigating a political opponent, and he sought to use U.S. taxpayer dollars as leverage to do it. He allegedly sought to use the very security assistance dollars appropriated by Congress to create stability in the world, to help root out corruption and to protect our national security interests, for his own personal gain. These allegations are stunning, both in the national security threat they pose and the potential corruption they represent. We also know that on Sept. 9, the inspector general for the intelligence community notified Congress of a “credible” and “urgent” whistleblower complaint related to national security and potentially involving these allegations. Despite federal law requiring the disclosure of this complaint to Congress, the administration has blocked its release to Congress.

As a citizen who is already on board with the idea that Trump has engaged in a requisite amount of High Crimes and Misdemeanors for impeachment to remain a threat to him (here's a running list), this makes a further convincing case to me for an impeachment inquiry, and it may have tipped the scales for other members of congress, including the Footdragger of the House Nancy Pelosi who until recently had an opinion more in line with Tulsi Gabbard's pre-Friday.

Speaking of Speakers of the House, as revealed in an incredibly satisfying article in Vanity Fair that came out this week, Former Speaker Paul Ryan of Wisconsin who has recently joined the board at Fox News after matriculating out of Congress following the 2018 election is himself moving toward the impeach column.*  Said one Fox executive, “Paul is embarrassed about Trump and now he has the power to do something about it,”  (emphasis mine.  ^_^)  Courageous bunch of leaders we have in this country, wouldn't you say?   You might call them a bunch of real peaches.

The chaos at Fox undermines a bit the political case that many have made and some continue for now to hold, that Impeachment is not a smart political move for House Democrats since, requiring 67 votes to succeed in the Senate, it will fail in formal proceedings if it moves to the Republican controlled chamber.  There is necessarily a political component to the undertaking of any Impeachment, but there is a prudent alternative to "letting the voters decide" versus "rushing through a doomed-to-fail impeachment for the sake of having it done".  The option of impeachment is in place to serve as a contingency for removing from office an Executive whose actions have been demonstrated to enrich himself or to harm the country.  Popularity with the President's base is nowhere to be accounted for in the duties laid out in the Constitution.  Might I suggest taking seriously the responsibility of Congress to conduct the proceedings as thoroughly, judiciously, transparently and free of politics as duty calls for.  A poorly conducted inquiry that accidentally "exonerates" the president on a technicality would be disastrous.

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* Now that's it's a distinct possibility, Bill Maher in typical crotchety old man fashion has gone the other direction; after months of whining for impeachment during the largely baseless and fruitless Mueller investigation, he's suddenly against it.

Joe Biden Presses the Flesh

If you've been paying attention to the 2020 Democratic Presidential race at all so far, it can't have escaped your notice that something is not right with Joe Biden.  He was already bad but in the years since he has left the White House (going by history and not by Biden's delusional accounting) he has apparently declined from mere conventional terribleness to abject Hall of Horrors wretchedness as a candidate.  Already this season-- above and beyond betraying in his off-the-cuff remarks a loose idea of where he is at any given moment in the space-time continuum and a tenuous grasp on logic let alone the English language-- he has invited public reflection on his very troubling record with regard to race by reminiscing fondly about cooperating on legislation with segregationists (after opening his campaign with a message condemning Donald Trump's softness on racists); he's expressed a (no joke!) lack of empathy for millenials with regard to the way the outrageous cost of their educations have put them deeply and possibly permanently in debt at the start of their working lives; he has broken a pledge to take no money from fossil fuel executives at least twice; he has had to promise to "do better" in the area of unwelcome touching (while openly mocking the need to).  When his mouth opens you'd better believe his handlers tremble in fear of what could come out.  In this way he bears a strong resemblance to what he and a large contingent in the media presume will be his foe in the general election, and this could well be what inspires his backers most.

The loose cannon excitement of Donald Trump but filtered through the sensibility of an eager-to-compromise Centrist Neo-liberal democrat? How could he lose?  I'll tell you how: because if you like Donald Trump, the weak tea Democratic knockoff is not going to appeal to you in the least, and you can be sure the ones whose abstention from voting for centrist Hillary Clinton in 2016 enabled Trump's electoral victory will find better things to do on election day than vote for Joe Biden.

This invites the pondering of 2 mysteries.  First, given his propensity for extreme incoherence on every position of importance and the folksy logorrheic chaos that spews from his loose-dentured maw, why does he continue to remain at the top of the polls?  Even given the kid glove treatment that Biden, who is as solid a member of the establishment as there is, gets from the mainstream media, it would take pathological cluelessness to miss that the wires are coming loose.   My theory is that if Joe Biden is your candidate, you are not paying attention to the 2020 Democratic Presidential race.  The very act of preferring Joe Biden is an advertisement that you do not pay attention.   If you can't be moved from the hope that Biden must defeat Trump, taking the ostrich approach to how things are going with your candidate might be the only way for the hope to survive.  But will his supporters wake up in time to keep from making a monumental blunder come primary season?

Second, why is Trump's team apparently actively working on sabotaging Biden before the first primary vote has been cast?  You would be forgiven for thinking it's because they do not want Biden to be Trump's opponent.  But this makes no sense.  On the playing field in which Joe Biden and Donald Trump play, Trump is the hands down winner. Trump will chew Sloppy Joe up and spit him out within seconds of facing off against him in a debate.   The negative ads write themselves. Defending him against the attacks his behavior will invite will be a chore few will be eager to rise to. No, I don't think they want to prevent Biden from winning the nomination.  I think they are convinced Biden will be the nominee and, starting as they are from a very well deserved gigantic deficit in voter support themselves,  they aim to start chipping away now at the will to elect he who they assume, right or wrong, will be their opponent in the general election (provided their efforts aren't their own undoing).  In this fashion they expect to repeat the successful strategy that they employed and took advantage of against Hillary Clinton 4 years earlier.

It's not too late to thwart them from making 2020 a rerun of 2016, but it's going to call for the paying of attention beforehand.  As an appetizer, here, from Twitter, is a little slice of life on the Biden 30330 campaign trail that illustrates so much of why Joe Biden is so wrong for the job. 

🏭 @JoeBiden's climate plan doesn't call for a ban on fracking natural gas

🏭🏭 Andrew Goldman, who recently hosted a fundraiser for Biden, co-founded a natural gas company

🏭🏭🏭 Heather Zichal (Biden's climate adviser) has made a million dollars off of natural gas

🤔🤔🤔🤔 pic.twitter.com/dbDQZIuRC5

— Sunrise Movement 🌅 (@sunrisemvmt) September 23, 2019

Let's Make a Hash of It

Speaking of not knowing what one is talking about, a media blogger I occasionally read (and have been frequently infotained by for many years) was for an extended period a while back writing almost exclusively about how bad popular math and science books are … because he doesn’t understand them.  I was shocked one day to read in the comments of one of his diatribes on the quality of a particular biography of a 20th century mathematician that someone remembered that the blogger had had trouble with the Monty Hall problem years ago (2 administrations ago as it turns out).

For anyone who does not know, the Monty Hall Problem (named for the host of a wacky game show of my youth called Let's Make a Deal)  goes in a nutshell like this: You are a contestant on Let's Make a Deal.  Monty Hall shows you three doors on stage, behind two of which are goats-- but let's say piles of goat manure to remove an incentive for animal lovers-- and behind the other, in the original framing is a brand new car,  but to make it extra interesting, let's say $100,000,000.

You are instructed to select one of the doors.  Whatever is behind it is your prize. All things being equal, you have one chance in three of picking the door hiding the money.  At this point, one door is just as good as any so you pick one--let's say Door Number 1-- and announce your selection.  Instead of simply opening the door you picked, Monty opens one of the two remaining doors (let's say Door 3) to reveal a pile of goat manure.  He then offers (in a suspiciously assertive way as was his wont) to let you switch your pick from Door 1 to Door 2.  Should you switch?

Think about that for a moment.  Remember there's $100,000,000 at stake.  I'll wait. < Unloads dishwasher ... Paints house ... Reads Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century >

Ready?  The spoiler follows.  The blogger, in pretty typical fashion for initiates to the problem, insisted that on having your choices reduced to 2 by Monty Hall (i.e., from Doors 1, 2 and 3 to merely Doors 1 & 2), you actually now had a 50% chance of being right so you might as well resist the pressure and stay put with Door 1.  This is the choice that contestants on the actual game show made all the time.   As it turns out, and as Monty Hall well knew, it is not correct.  The rather surprising answer is that you should switch because 2 times out of 3, when you switch you get the money.  Our blogger, in light of the fact that the problem was being posed to him and the solution explained in the pages of the New York Times, not only strongly disagreed with the solution but confidently skewered the paper for spreading disinformation yet again.

What surprised me about the comment that I came across in the recent post was that on the day in question all those years ago, I actually helpfully emailed the blogger (very uncharacteristically on my part) to try to explain why switching when Monty Hall opens a door with a goat behind it paid off with a car 2/3 of the time.  The very next day, the blogger acknowledged (very uncharacteristically) that he’d received emails that suggested he might need to re-evaluate the situation, but he doubled down on his assessment based on the New York Times statement of the problem which he was originally critiquing.  (He was still wrong!)   I don't recall that it was ever mentioned again, and I thought I was the only person to remember the incident, but apparently there are traces of it still out there on the web—not just on the blogger's site.

My explanation went something like this.  Imagine instead of 3 doors, there are 4-- goat manure behind 3 of them and the fortune behind one.  In this case, you have a 1 in 4 chance of picking the right door the first time.   After hearing your choice, instead of one door, Monty reveals goat piles behind 2 of the remaining doors.   Now how confident are you in your first choice?  Do you still think your first choice jumped from 25% to 50% likely to be correct?

Not yet convinced?   Let's say there are 1000 doors.  999 of them have goat manure piled up behind them and 1 has $100,000,000 behind it.  You have 5 seconds to pick and nothing to lose so you pick door number 451.  Now Monty on hearing your selection, opens 998 of the remaining doors to reveal goat manure leaving only your choice and door number 778 closed.  There are once again only two choices left, but are you still confident that the original odds that door number 451 has the money behind it went from 0.1% to 50.0%?

The factor that your mind edits out with 3 doors is that Monty Hall knows where the money is.  His choice of door to reveal manure behind is never random.  He'll never randomly show you the money before offering to let you switch.  The reveal is done to fool you into thinking your odds of having chosen the right door on the first try have increased.  In truth they've never changed.  What changes is a stark reframing of the act of choosing on the second try.  By having manure revealed behind one of the 2 unchosen doors, your odds do not change, but your choice is simplified to Switch or Don't.   If you feel confident that your first choice was correct, stick with your first choice.  If you feel it's more likely that your first choice was incorrect, change your choice.  Staying with your first choice, you don't always lose, but by straightforward probability you do lose 2 out of 3 times whether Monty takes one of the doors out of play or not.  Switching to what Monty has conveniently made the only other option on your second chance, you win 2 out of 3 times-- twice as often as staying put.

What have we learned?  For one thing, we've learned that when Monty Hall gives you a chance to change doors, no matter how many doors you have to choose from and even no matter how many other doors hiding manure he reveals before asking for your decision, you're always at least somewhat better off switching.   Moreover, if I have done my job, I hope we've all learned and can take to heart that contrary to all other evidence day in and day out from time immemorial, on one day in 2006, the New York Times was actually correct about something.

Hot Topics

Satellite evidence confirming record number of fires in the Amazon rainforest, August 15-22, 2019.  (NASA Earth Observatory/Joshua Stevens)

I don't do well with live TV.   Awards shows, debates, breaking news, sporting events give me hives.  I have a hard enough time with live life.  Where is the escape in watching life unfold spontaneously on my television?  Naturally I had trepidations about CNN's 7-hour Climate Crisis Town Hall on Wednesday night with 10 2020 Democratic candidates.  But I wanted to see certain of the participants, and as it happened, 4 of the top names on my list appeared back-to-back at the time I tuned in.  I caught Joe Biden's turn part-way through. I was tuned in long enough to see him squirm to the point of popping a blood vessel in his eye when confronted by an audience question concerning his plan to attend a fundraiser the following night hosted by natural gas entrepreneur Andrew Goldman, in violation of Biden's pledge not to take  money from fossil fuel executives. Goldman, though not currently an executive in a strict pedantic sense, co-founded the natural gas company Western LNG (which stands for Liquefied Natural Gas) in Houston.  (Contrary to Biden's shocked response when confronted with the fact about his donor on Wednesday, and an indication that he would not attend if found to be true on his review, he attended the fundraiser with open palms on Thursday anyway).  Of all the candidates running, Joe Biden is perhaps the only one who could be pointed to whose entire political career has arguably been contributing to the problem of inaction-- sorry, bipartisan inaction-- on climate change.  Tenuous frontrunner Biden's lack of interest in the topic (manifested in his ill-prepared off-the-cuff manner of winging it in this nationally televised forum on the issue) is a major factor in why the DNC rejected a Climate Change themed debate of their own.  Based on his performance on Wednesday night, he doesn't seem especially eager to make amends.  (His lack of empathy for millenials apparently doesn't stop with their unique and worsening situation with college debt.)

I also saw Elizabeth Warren, who acquitted herself rather well I thought, appropriately skewering the greed of fossil fuel billionaires as behind our current predicament, before contradicting herself on the question of whether utilities should be public rather than private by suggesting capitalism that rescues us from the catastrophe capitalism created is to be encouraged.  (I'm not fully convinced.)   Her performance coming on the heels of Bernie Sanders's tour de force was strong enough that it made a couple of tough acts for small town Mayor Pete Buttigieg to follow.  Buttigieg's performance was leagues beyond the low bar set by Biden naturally, but his run-of-the-mill technocratic adroit-on-his-feet approach suffered by comparison to the bold mastery of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and was about where my attention started flagging.

Bernie Sanders who immediately followed Joe Biden provided a startlingly competent and refreshingly lucid counterpoint to the former Vice President's performance.  The questions were for the most part excellent and Sanders remained on point.  While it was encouraging to learn after the fact how many of the candidates rose to the occasion, of all the plans discussed, Bernie Sanders' is the most aggressive, the most far-reaching and the least compromising on the uncompromisable.

To be honest, in retrospect, there was that one moment from his segment that struck a bit of an odd chord with me, and I was not too surprised to discover by checking Google News on the CNN event on Thursday that it was the day-after talk of alt-right media.  The question was addressed to him by a teacher, the crawl informed us, Martha Readyoff:

I realize this is a poisonous topic for politicians, but it is crucial to face.  Empowering women and educating everyone on the need to curb population growth seems a reasonable campaign to enact. Would you be courageous enough to discuss this issue and make it a key feature of a plan to address climate catastrophe?

The answer I formulated in my head for Sen. Sanders as I watched mouth agape was something like this:

Well Martha the answer is no, and let me tell you why.  While I will always support a woman's right to choose and will do everything in my power to protect that right which has become precarious under the Trump administration due to its manipulations of the Supreme Court with the assistance of a Republican controlled Senate, I would not presume to encourage a woman to choose birth control for any reason.  A woman who chooses on her own to be childless in response to scientific predictions about the effects of climate change on future generations and perhaps in an effort to personally address issues of population expansion should have the right to whatever means make her choice possible.  But, no,  I do not believe government should be in the business of interceding in what should only be a matter between a woman and her physician.

The precedent for rejecting the premise of a question had already been set by his response to an Andrew Yang supporter seeking his opinion on exploring advances in nuclear power as an alternative energy resource.  To that question, Sanders expertly rejected the idea on the well established objections to the concomitant and as yet intractable problem of what to do with the millenially radioactive waste that is a proliferating by-product of the technology.  But to Readyoff's question concerning birth control, this is the answer that Bernie gave:

Well Martha the answer is yes, and the answer has everything to do with the fact that women in the United States of America, by the way, have a right to control their own bodies, and make reproductive decisions... The Mexico City agreement, which denies American aide to those organizations around the world that allow women to have abortions or even get involved in birth control to me is totally absurd. So I think, especially in poor countries around the world where women do not necessarily want to have large numbers of babies, and where they can have the opportunity through birth control to control the number of kids they have, is something I very, very strongly support.

I think the spirit of the answer I formed is in there, but I'm not sure that Sen. Sanders was tuned into the social engineering undertones of Readyoff's question that I picked up on (and could well have imagined) and their resonance with disturbing histories of eugenics.  If anything Sanders' tangent about the Mexico City agreement addressed the mirror image kind of social engineering policy that undermines a woman's right to choose-- if not within the US where it was at least until recently more fully protected, than outside the borders where we proffer aid.  I'll just say, Sanders answer surprised me nearly as much as Readyoff's question alarmed me.  But on sober reflection, I am less sure that the question was a trap to corner Sanders into publicly endorsing a draconian baby-culling social policy and more to see it in the light that no doubt Sanders did, as a somewhat fuzzy way to tie the very real threat to women's reproductive freedom posed by Trump, the Supreme Court influenced by his two picks thus far,  the Senate and an insidious Republican domination of State governments across the country to the issue, equally antithetical to the right, of climate change.  Nowhere does Sanders (contrary to what the shit storm of right wing media-slash-propaganda outlets simultaneously suggested) talk about government promotion of abortion-- his response as he states in the opening of it is-- as it should be-- all about the freedom of a woman to control her own reproductive destiny through whatever means of birth control are at her disposal.

Let me be perfectly clear:  I am opposed to sidetracking the government's response to climate change with formulating policy around the question of the ethics of procreation.  Population control could well be a path for individuals to consider, and seems to be a perfectly fine focus of a private sector non-profit.  It's not the place of government to do anything other than clear obstacles to the pursuit of birth control for those who see fit to practice it.  For my part- -and I'm not Bernie Sanders so I can be blunt-- this is probably not in my top 100 steps we could take to address the climate.  I do not think birth control should be a "key feature" of a government plan to address climate change. For one thing, it's too slow.   It's post hoc-- more a response and reaction to climate change and not necessarily a proactive step to mitigate it.*  I'm not convinced the invasiveness of the proposition of influencing individual women's choices to have children is warranted enough to require the involvement of the Federal government. While I'm more and more for social solutions to problems caused for the large part by unfettered havoc on the planet on the part of very powerful private interests, reproductive freedom is one area that I feel should remain forever free-- and procuring, protecting and preserving the freedom of it should be the extent of government's role in it.

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*Although fewer humans to engage in human caused global warming could not be a bad thing in the long run, given the concentration of blame for the climate crisis on less than 1% of humanity, the kind of humans being prevented is not irrelevant to its potential as an effective countermeasure.  In short, while I don't support government promotion of birth control as a solution in principle, forced castration of fossil fuel executives and their financial and legislative enablers (and for good measure their heirs) should not be off the table.