Sons of Their Fathers

The lives of the last four presidents make an interesting contrast.  The two Rs were both sons of already very rich and powerful fathers, and the sons had numerous catastrophes of their own making, several of which would have put them into prison and would have ruined anyone without a father who was fabulously wealthy and powerful.

On the other hand the last two D presidents lost their fathers early and were raised mainly by their mother, impressive women both, and both had stepfathers that were completely out of their lives by the time they went to college.  Neither had much money and both got into and through the Ivy League entirely on their own merit.

Bill Clinton's father and stepfather were both salesmen.  His father died in an auto accident before Bill was born and his mother remarried a few years later--this time to a car dealer.   His mother was a waitress when Bill was born but became a nurse.  Bill did very well in school and got into Georgetown, became a Rhodes Scholar and went to Oxford, and Yale Law School, where he met Hillary Rodham.  Clinton opposed the Vietnam war and did not enlist, and due to a lucky high lottery number (311) was not drafted.  He went into politics almost immediately after graduating from law school.

George W Bush's father was George Herbert Walker Bush, 41st president and himself the son of an important politician, Prescott Bush.  His mother Barbara was descended from the brother of Franklin Pierce, 14th president.  The Bushes had strong connections to the oil business.  His father's connections got him enrolled in the Texas Air National Guard, where he learned to fly jets.  He received low ratings as a pilot, and went AWOL in 1972 until he was discharged in 1974, but apparently due to his connections, was honorably discharged.  He failed to get into law school, but did get into Yale business school, again, apparently because of his father.  His grades were mediocre and he was a heavy drinker.  Friends of his father set him up with an oil drilling company, which would never succeed but eventually would be bought out by another company, and George sold his shares and bought into the Texas Rangers baseball team.  He would sell these shares for a 3000% profit while he was governor.  His first political office was governor of Texas, and when he ran for president, he lost the popular vote by more than half a million votes, but won just barely enough electoral votes to get in, with a boost from Florida, where his margin was 500 votes, his brother was governor, and the secretary of state was his campaign manager, and there were tens of thousands of democratic votes suppressed.

Barack Obama's father was a talented student from Kenya who divorced his mother when he was 3.  The last time young Barack saw his father was when he was ten.  Obama Sr died a few years later.  Obama Jr's mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was an anthropology student from Kansas who would earn a masters degree while Barack was still young and a PhD while he was in college.  Barack got into Columbia with a full scholarship and Harvard Law, where he was president of the Law Review.  He would work as a law professor for a while before going into politics.

Donald Trump's father Fred was a very wealthy real estate tycoon in Queens, NY, who inherited the core of his business from his father.  It seems that the brains of the outfit was actually Fred's mother.  Fred was known to be ruthless and terribly racist and left in his wake mostly slums.  Donald was big and strong and pretty wild , repeatedly beating up other kids to steal their lunch money.  Trying to get him to behave, Fred would send him to military school, where Donald finally thrived, apparently because he was pretty good at running scams to get others to do things for him.  A big, strong kid, he enjoyed baseball and other sports.  He got into college, apparently, because he paid a smarter kid to take the SAT for him, and eventually got into UPenn and obtained an undergraduate degree in Economics, which he clearly knows almost nothing about.   It's not clear he actually did much of the work for himself as he was absent for most of his senior year.   He was a millionaire before he was 5 and his father gave him $5 million to start his own real estate business while he was still in college, and would eventually inherit his father's business.   He had a small number of successes, but many, many failures.   His father bailed him out many times, yet he went bankrupt at least 6 times.  He also seems to have been further bailed out by money given to him by a division of Deutsche Bank which mainly deals with Russia, and many deals more directly with Russian oligarchs.   His main source of income since his father died in 1999 seems to have been money laundering for Russians and his salary from his TV career and a series of frauds and cons.   Don, born the same year as Clinton and Bush, got out of Vietnam service when a doctor said he had bone spurs in his feet.  In his very first political election, Don lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million but won a narrow victory in the electoral college, strongly boosted by smears to his opponent that came from Russia and one from the FBI.

Antifa?

 I'm pretty sure "Antifa" is just a placeholder for right wingers to aim attacks.  There are obviously lots of people people who are anti-fascist--I certainly am--but the number who are likely to do violent or destructive things is almost certainly minuscule. 

Here are some categories:

Peaceful Demonstrator:   These can be from any issue and with only a few very narrow exceptions, their activities are protected free speech.  I have participated in many, many peaceful demonstrations, such as the Women's marches, Anti-War demonstrations in the 1960s and early 70s and 2003 and have never once seen any sort of violence.

Rioter:  There has been some rioting in a tiny number of this years demonstrations.  I haven't actually seen any in person but I've seen a little on TV.  Rioting nearly always is counterproductive to any cause being peacefully demonstrated for.

Provocateur.  Nearly always, these are people who show up to undermine a peaceful protest.  Many strategies are used, such as starting fights, throwing rocks or other things, especially at police or windows.  They fall into two classes:

Opponents of the cause:  e.g. a right wing provocateur will infiltrate a left wing crowd and stir up trouble.  There were a lot of these in the protests this summer.

Nihilists.  Incorrectly called "anarchists", these are people who find pleasure in violence and mayhem.  They generally have little or no ideology.

The Cops:  Many cops actively oppose progressive causes and in the case of Black Lives Matter, they are representatives of the problematic group.  When they commit acts of violence against previously peaceful protesters, it is not the fault of the protesters that they get angry.   I think it's very significant that the violence in the BLM protests almost completely evaporated when the cops stopped enforcing curfew.

Looter:  like provocateurs, they are at the protest for a reason which is not aligned with the protest itself.  Some of them are there because they agree, but once there is a little broken glass, their main objective is to take advantage.

Anarchist:  There is a legitimate political strategy called anarchism, most conspicuously described by Kropotkin, but it has rarely gotten very far in practice. Kropotkin's idea was to antagonize the ruling class so they would crack down and make support for their uprising nearly universal.   Unfortunately for the strategy, there's an easy way to undermine this: punish the criminal and make a point of not cracking down.   The Portland/Eugene area seems to be a hotbed of people who call themselves anarchists.  They are not.  They are nihilists, who show up at riots wearing black with their identities obscured, and just there to make trouble.

White Supremacists:  This is by far the largest source of terrorism and organized violence in America.  Before Trump was elected, they were active but understood most people were against them, although the vast majority of mass bombings and shootings were done by them.  The vast majority of people arrested for doing violence in Black Lives Matters protests this summer were White Supremacists, trying to undermine the cause.

Religious Extremists:  This is #2 to the racists and they are often the same people, shooting up abortion clinics and so forth.

Antifa:  Appears to be a fictional group made up to be a stalking horse.   Every sane person is anti-fascists, although many Racists and Religious extremists are pro-fascist.  Not all, but enough to be a problem.   Nobody has been able to identify any actual antifa group although occasional a person arrested will admit that they are antifa.  I'll be interested to learn more about the person who was killed by the cops last week who apparently fits this category.

I live less than 10 blocks from virtually all of the protests that occurred in Seattle this summer.  Without the curfew announcements, the news reporting and the occasional news helicopter overhead, I would have had no idea it was happening. 

Worst Second Term Defeats

The incumbent president enjoys such an enormous political advantage, that he has usually won re-election.   There are a few exceptions, mainly when the incumbent is so unpopular it overcomes his structural advantages.  Here are all the failures to be re-elected, ordered by date.   All of them are interesting in some way.

1800 Thomas Jefferson v John Adams

    41,330 to 25,952  (15,378 difference)

    61.4% to 38.6% (22.8% difference)

    73 to 65 electors

1828 Andrew Jackson v John Quincy Adams

     642.553 to 500,897 (141,656 difference)

     56.4% to 43.3% (13.1% difference)

     178 to 83 electors.

     Jackson had a plurality of votes in 1824 but Adams and Clay had made what Jackson called a "corrupt bargain" to win the presidency.   Jackson started running again immediately and won decisively.

1840 William Henry Harrison vs Martin van Buren

   1,275,390 to 1,128,854      (146,536 difference)

   52.9% to 46.8% (6.1% difference)

   234 to 60 electors

1888 Benjamin Harrison v Grover Cleveland

   5,433,892 to 5,534,438 (-100,546 difference)

   47.8% to 48.6% (-0.8% difference)

   233 to 168 electors

   one of the 5 times the popular vote loser won the electoral college.

1892 Grover Cleveland v Benjamin Harrison v James B Weaver

    5,556,918 to 5,176,108 to 1,041,028 (380,480 difference)

    46% to 43% to 8.5% (3% difference)

    277 to 145 to 22 electors.

    Cleveland won the popular vote 3 times in a row but lost the electoral college in the middle.

1912 Woodrow Wilson v William H Taft v Theodore Roosevelt v Eugene Debs

     6,296,284 to 3,486,242 to 4,122,721 to 901,551

     41.8% to 23.2% to 27.4% to 6%.

     435 to 8 to 88 electors

     TR's selection to replace him, Taft, proved to be a normal republican and reversed many of his progressive policies, incensing TR, so he ran against him and beat him soundly.  Unfortunately for him, this split the R vote and gave the election to Wilson. 

1932: FDR & John Nance Garner vs Herbert Hoover & Charles Curtis
       22,821,277 to 15,761,254 (7,060,023 difference)

       57.4% to 39.7% (17.7%)

       472 to 59 electors
      Hoover presided over the start of the Great Depression and exacerbated it immensely with his misguided policies.

       

1976 Jimmy Carter v Gerald Ford

    40,831,881 to 39,148,634 (1,683,247 difference)

    50.1% to 48.0% (2.1% difference)

    297 to 240 electors

    Ford is the only president to have never won a national election: he was appointed to replace Agnew when he was forced to resign, and had pardoned Nixon.   He proved fairly feckless as president.

1980 Ronald Reagan v Jimmy Carter v John Anderson

    43,903,230 to 35,480,115 to 5,719,850 (8,423,115 difference)

    50.7% to 41% to 6.6%  (9.7% or 2.1% if all Anderson votes went to Carter)

    489 to 49 electors

    Anderson was a liberal republican, running as independent and far to the left of his historical positions.  He was obviously running as a spoiler.  It looks like a bigger landslide than it really was.

1992 Bill Clinton v GHW Bush v H Ross Perot

     44,909,889 to 39,104,550 to 19,743,821 (5,805,339 difference)

     43.0% to 37.4% to 18.9%  (5.6% difference)

     370 to 168 to 0 electors

     Perot probably took more votes from Bush than from Clinton, but not enough to swing the election.  Most of the states where Perot did well were won by Bush despite him, so there wouldn't have been much change in the electoral college.  Bush was the inheritor of Reagan's legacy (and dirty tricks) but did not have the personal charm to carry it off.

2020 Joe Biden v Donald Trump

    79,787,724 to 73,767,408 (6,020,316 difference)   (as of 21 Nov 2020)

    51.0% to 47.2%  (3.8% difference)

    306 to 232 electors

    By far our most incompetent and corrupt president.

    

The biggest defeat to an incumbent was Jefferson v Adams, 22.8%.  There were only 65,000 voters so a swing this large is not too unlikely.   This was an incredibly dirty campaign and the two former friends were alienated for years.

The largest defeat with a statistically significant number of voters was FDR v Hoover in 1932, 17.7%.  

Longest Interval Between Adding a New State

 The interval between adding each state, since the original 13.  We are presently in the longest interval ever, 61 years and counting.   The second longest was between Arizona and Alaska

Hawaii  21 Aug 1959  61 yrs 1 month before present

Alaska  3 Jan 1959 8 Months before Hawaii

Arizona 14 Feb 1912 46 yrs 11 mo before Alaska

New Mexico 3 Jan 1912 1 month before Arizona

Oklahoma 16 Nov 1907 8 yrs 1 month before New Mexico

Utah    4 Jan 1896   11 yrs 10 mo before Oklahoma

Wyoming 10 Jul 1890 5 yrs 5 mo before Utah

Idaho 3 Jul 1890 7 days before Wyoming

Washington 11 Nov 1889 10 yrs 9 months before Idaho

Montana 8 Nov 1889 3 days before Washington

South Dakota 2 Nov 1889 6 days before Montana

North Dakota 2 Nov 1889  same day as South Dakota

Colorado   1 Aug 1876 13 yrs 3 mo before North Dakota

Nebraska 1 Mar 1867 9 yrs 5 mo before Colorado

Nevada 31 Oct 1864 2 yrs 4 mo before Nebraska

West Virginia 20 Jun 1863 1 yr 4.5 mo before Nevada

Kansas 29 Jan 1861 2 yr 4.5 mo before West Virginia

Oregon 14 Feb 1859 1 yr 11.5 months before Kanasa

Minnesota 11 May 1858 1 yr 9 months before Oregon

California 9 Sep 1850 7 yr 8 mo before Minnesota

Wisconsin 29 May 1848 2 yr 3 mo before California

Iowa 28 Dec 1846 1 yr 5 moth before Wisconsin

Texas 29 Dec 1845 1 yr before Iowa

Florida 3 Mar 1845 10 months before Texas

Michigan 26 Jan 1837 8 yrs 1 mo before Florida

Arkansas 15 Jun 1836 6.5 mo before Michigan

Missouri 10 Aug 1821 15 yrs 2 mo before Arkansas

Maine 15 Mar 1820 1 yr 5 mo before Missouri

Alabama 14 Dec 1819 3 mo before Maine

Illinois 3 Dec 1818 1 yr before Alabama

Mississippi 10 Dec 1817 1 yr before Alabama

Indiana 11 Dec 1816 1 yr before Mississippi

Louisiana 30 Apr 1812 4 yrs 7 mo before Indiana

Ohio 1 Mar 1803 9 yrs 2 mo before Louisiana

Tennessee 1 Jul 1796 6 yrs 8 mo before Ohio

Kentucky 1 Jun 1792 4 yrs 1 mo before Tennessee

Vermont 4 Mar 1791 1 yr 2 mo before Kentucky

Time before election for supreme court nominations

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg died today, less than 2 months from the election and 4 months from the inauguration. About 5 years ago when Justice Scalia died, Senate Majority Leader McConnell announced that he would accept no nominee to replace him due to the proximity of the election, 9 months later.

Between WWII and today, there has only been one Supreme Court seat made open nearer to the election than Scalia's.  It came when Sherman Minton retired in Oct, 1956, just a month before the 1956 election, for health reasons.   President Eisenhower quickly made a recess nomination of William Brennan.    Eisenhower chose Brennan substantially because he was a liberal democrat, to assure acceptance by the opposing party.  Ike was extremely popular and won that election in a 57.4 to 42 % landslide, with only 73 electoral college votes going to his opponent.  Nevertheless, hearings were deferred until two months after the inauguration, at which point Brennan was confirmed by acclimation.  He would go on to be a very popular justice.

The columns here are the name of the new justice, the name of the justice replaced, the date the new seat became open, and how many months prior to the subsequent inauguration that opening occurred.  

Kavanaugh  <-Kennedy 31 Oct 2018  27 months

Gorsuch <- Scalia 13 Feb 2016   12 Months

Kagan <- Stevens    29 Jun 2010  31 Months

Sotomayor <-Souter 29 Jun 2009 43 Months

Alito <- O'Connor 31 Jan 2006 36 Months

Roberts <- Rehnquist 3 Sep 2005 40 Months

Breyer <- Blackmun  3 Aug 1994 30 Months

Ginsberg <- White   28 Jun 1993  43 Months

Thomas <- Marshall 1 Oct 1991   16 Months

Souter <- Brennan  20 Jul 1990   30 Months

Kennedy <- Powell 26 Jul 1987   18 Months

Scalia <- Rehnquist 26 Sep 1986  28 Months

Rehnquist <- Burger 26 Sep 1986 28 Months

O'Connor <- Stewart 3 Jul 1981   43 Months

Stevens <- Douglas 12 Nov 1975 14 Months

Rehnquist <- Harlan 23 Sep 1971 16 Months

Powell <- Black 17 Sep 1971  16 Months

Blackmun <- Fortas 14 May 1969 45 Months

Burger <- Warren 23 Jun 1969 44 Months

Marshall <- Clark 12 Jun 1967 20 Months

Fortas <- Goldberg 25 Jul 1965 42 Months

Goldberg <- Frankfurter 28 Aug 1957 42 Months

White <- Whittaker 31 Mar 1962  34 Months

Stewart <- Burton 13 Oct 1958 28 Months

Whittaker <- Reed 25 Feb 1957 35 Months

Brennan <- Minton 15 Oct 1956 4 Months

Harlan <- Jackson 9 Oct 1954 28 Months

Warren <- Vinson 8 Sep 1953 39 Months

Minton <- Rutledge 10 Sep 1949 30 Months

Clark <- Murphy 19 Jul 1949 31 Months

Why Large Scale Communism is Impossible

For purposes of this discussion, communism a method of of social and economic organization such that all means of production is controlled by the public.  Socialism is quite different, in that some of the means of production is publicly controlled, but some is controlled by individuals or limited groups.  Laissez faire is a form of society where none of the means of production are controlled by the public.   Capitalism is a means of doing trade, and is at least nominally a part of all of these.

Just as there have been no successful large scale societies that have been Laissez faire, there have been none that have been communist.  The nearest are Castro's Cuba and Mao's China.  Provided that the dictator is benevolent, people can have good lives in them, and if the dictator is willing to share most of his or her power, they can even be successful at some level.  But without a strong leader, there are too many people in a large society that lust for power, that benevolence cannot last long.  All successful communist societies, such as the Kibbutzes of Israel or small communes around the world, have been small enough that the lust for power can be overcome...generally by a leader who is both strong enough and benevolent enough to keep it in check.   Just about all communist groups have a dominant leader--whether life in the commune is good or bad depends almost entirely on that person's benevolence and degree of influence.   I am far from the first to make this point. The earliest I know of is Will Durant, writing about 100 years ago about the then brand new Soviet Union, but I'd be surprised if he was the first.

Laissez-faire is even worse: an excess of Lassez-faire quickly leads to corruption and banditry.  Individual groups attempting to create something useful invariably need to put a very large share of their resources into basic security, and there's nobody building basic infrastructure.  It is fair refer to Laissez-fair as equivalent to Anarchy or a Dark Dark age.

What I'm calling socialism is the only compromise that can work for a group of more than a few hundred individuals or the political lifetime of an individual.  All successful societies, ancient and modern, have some central authority providing security, standards of trade, judiciary, etc.    How much of that is optimal varies with history and psychology.  All we really have to figure it out is trial and error.  When there are market failures, we need a little more government intervention.  But when this happens, there are losers, so we want to minimize this intervention, and where possible, realign things so that the old participants play fairly and productively without losing too much.


There are lots of cases where this was successful: the consent decree that allowed AT&T to retain a strongly regulated monopoly, the USRA that rebuilt the railroads and restored them to profitability during WWI, the breakup of Standard Oil, many, many more. 

Is it Duct Tape or Duck Tape?

One of the most useful inventions ever is called Duck Tape or Duct Tape.  The earliest version appears to have been made from cotton duck cloth sealed with linseed oil and used to water proof things, and first appeared in the 1890s.  Later versions used rubber or various other flexible, water resistant coatings, mostly over cotton duck.  The Revolite division of Johnson and Johnson made a version that was easy to tear, so you didn't need to use scissors or a knife, and was used to waterproof ammunition cases during World War II, and became widespread among the troops for this and many other uses.  This stuff was found to be so useful that other manufacturers started making copies.

The fiber reinforcement makes the tape very strong, and the plastic or rubber makes it relatively water resistant, depending upon the adhesive used.  It's traditionally shiny grey although it can be obtained in just about every color imaginable, including transparent, and printed patterns, and it's usually 2 inches (50 mm) wide, although other widths are available.   Some time around 1960, the name somehow became conflated with the tape used for sealing furnace ducts.  This is one of the very few things it's not particularly good at: the heat tends to make it dry out and become brittle over time.   There is heat resistant foil tape which is actually the right thing for this.  Nevertheless the name change stuck, and a company was able to copyright the name "Duck Tape".

Present versions are usually based on a thin "scrim" which is a loose weave of some sort of fabric--all sorts, cotton, rayon, nylon, even fiberglass, depending upon the strength needed, and the grey part is usually Low Density Polyethylene (LDPE--type 3 plastic) colored with aluminum powder.  The adhesive is generally relatively strong, but relatively cheap, and tends to leave a sticky residue behind when it's removed.  Gaffer Tape is a variety that doesn't leave a sticky residue and is reinforced by stronger fabric, so it needs a knife or scissors to cut.   Preservation Tape is a variety that doesn't leave the sticky residue and doesn't have much or any reinforcement, so it's easy to tear.  Speed Tape, sometimes called Racer Tape,  is a variety that has a smooth surface and strong enough adhesive to tolerate the high wind of a racing car or airplane.  There are 100mph, 200mph, etc., versions.   It's sometimes used to make temporary repairs to airliners before a more permanent repair can be made.

There has been at least one roll of Duct tape on every US manned space mission since Gemini, and it played a major role in the rescue of Apollo 13.  It was also used to extend the fenders on the moon rover on Apollo 17 when they sprayed too much moon dust around.   It works, at least for a little while, in the vacuum of space.

It is most correctly called "Duck tape", although because of the copyright, it might have to be called "Duct tape" sometimes.

It is, as Red Green says, the Handyman's secret weapon.

Youngest Doctor

Last night one of the local PBS stations aired two old Dr Who stories from the late '60s, The Mind Robber, and the Krotons, staring Patrick Troughton, Wendy Padbury and Frazer Hines.  I'd been under the impression that most of the Second Doctor serials had been lost and was quite pleasantly surprised to see these two delightful stories for the first time.  There is so much less pretense and so much more fun than in the current productions.  One thing that I really noticed was that the second doctor was playing a slightly befuddled but wise grandfatherly character, which really makes sense.  All the modern doctors are played by attractive younger people and the grandfatherly wisdom comes out as strident and juvenile.


William Hartnell, 1908-1975, 1st Doctor 1963-66.  age 55-58.  He seemed much older
Patrick Troughton 1920-1987, 2nd Doctor 1966-69.  age 46-49.  He too seemed older
John Pertwee 1919-1996,        3rd Doctor 1970-74.  age 51-55.
Tom Baker  1934-             4th Doctor 1974-81.  age 40-47.
Peter Davison 1951-         5th Doctor 1981-84.  age 30-34.  The first young doctor.  He pulled it off.
Colin Baker 1943-            6th Doctor, 1984-86 age 41-43.
Sylvester McCoy 1943-   7th Doctor, 1986-89.  age 43-46.
Christopher Eccleston 1974-  9th Doctor, 2005.  age 31.
David Tennant 1971-        10th Doctor 2005-10, age 34-39.  crippled by /terrible/ writing.
Matt Smith 1982-              11th Doctor 2010-14, age 28-31.
Peter Capaldi 1958-           12th Doctor 2014-17, age 56-59
Jodie Whittaker 1982-       13th Doctor, 2017-     age 35-

In order of age:
Matt Smith, Peter Davison, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, Jodie Whittaker, Tom Baker, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, William Hartnell, Peter Capaldi.

My favorites:
Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Patrick Troughton, John Pertwee, Peter Capaldi, Jodie Whittaker, William Hartnell, Sylvester McCoy, David Tennant, Christopher Eccleston, Matt Smith, Colin Baker.

As far as I'm concerned, Colin Baker killed the show, he was so bad.  I'm not sure how much of this was bad writing and how much was the actor and his sidekick, the almost-as-bad Perpugiliam,  played by english actress Nicola Bryant pretending, incompetently, to be an American.   Sylvester McCoy was way better than Colin Baker, but not better enough to recover.  The 21st century reboot has yet to reach the highs of the Tom Baker-Peter Davison era.
  

Impeachments, Near and Far

Three presidents have been impeached, and none have been convicted.  There have been quite a few others that nearly earned this distinction.

John Tyler was the first vice president to be elevated to the presidency by death of a president. The constitution left unclear exactly how this elevation would work, and Tyler arrogated all the powers of his predecessor, which alienated his partisan opponents, and vetoed a number of their bills, which alienated them even further.  He was also a slave holding southerner, which didn't endear him to the abolitionists in congress.  Articles of impeachment were drawn up but were soundly defeated by the full congress.

Andrew Johnson's impeachment was crassly partisan, for violating a law so terrible that it was soon overturned.  He was a terrible president and we owe a lot of the horrible race relations of the present time to his idiotic support of the persecution of ex-slaves in the south.

Warren Harding was perhaps an even worse president than Johnson and probably would have been impeached for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal had he not died.

Richard Nixon came the closest to actually being convicted.  Articles of Impeachment had been drawn up and it was obvious he was going to go down, so he quit first. 

Ronald Reagan unquestionably committed Iran Contra and he probably should have been impeached and removed, but Sen Monyihan judged that his popularity would make that unlikely to succeed and would cause more political strife than it was worth.

Bill Clinton did lie about an affair with Monica Lewinski, but that is nowhere near a high enough crime to justify impeachment.  He was impeached but not convicted in a wholly partisan process.  The country understood that it was just a show, and voted out many of the perpetrators, but they held the trial during the lame-duck period.  As Monyihan had predicted about Reagan's potential impeachment, the broader consequences of the impeachment were far worse than the actual offense.

George W Bush lied us into a war with Iraq and supported torture during that war.  After Trump, he was the most deserving of impeachment of any president.

Donald Trump collaborated with Russian leadership numerous times, to get elected, to undermine intelligence, and more.  He also has been sabotaging the free press, used the military and foreign aid for partisan purposes, and numerous other crimes.   He was deservedly impeached, but he was acquitted--mostly because Trump and his supporters intimidated Republican senators.  Sen Collins rightly explained that Trump had learned a lesson from impeachment, but where she'd thought he'd be chastened, he took it as license to do anything he wanted, no matter how criminal or destructive.

Degrees of Murder

This is mostly intended to pull together the definitions for my own edification.

Murder is the intentional killing of someone.  Intentional-ness is defined by statute.  Killing someone is not necessarily a crime unless it is defined that way by statute.  If you kill someone in self defense or defense of others, it probably not a crime.   Feticide (abortion) is not murder unless specifically defined to be by statute.

First degree murder is killing someone with "malice aforethought".   The killer intends for their victim to be dead and had enough time to consider the ramifications of what they were doing.  If the killing took place during the commission of another felony, it is sometimes considered first degree, although under some circumstances it's voluntary manslaughter.
 
Second degree murder is killing someone in the heat of action, without forethought.  For example a bar room brawl.  The killer may have meant to kill the victim at that moment, but had they had a chance to consider they would probably not have done it.

Voluntary manslaughter is mainly reserved for crimes of passion and for unplanned murders committed during another felony.  It used to be second degree murder but in recent years a distinction has been made.  The standard example is discovering your spouse with another lover and killing them on the spot. 

Killing someone (usually second degree murder but also manslaughter) with depraved indifference is acting in a way that is the killer knows is likely to bring about death, but not specifically intending to kill the person.


Third degree murder is only defined by a few states: MN, PA and FL.  It is basically the same thing as murder with depraved indifference.

Involuntary Manslaughter is the accidental killing of someone while acting in a reckless but not felonious way.  There is no intent or malice, either aforethought or otherwise.  Negligent homicide is essentially the same thing.


It's pretty clear that third degree murder is actually the correct charge for at least some of what happened to George Floyd.   I suspect a lot of the outrage is that most states don't define the crime and people don't understand what it is.  More seriously though, bystanders were yelling at Mr. Chauvin that he was killing him, yet he continued to compress Mr. Floyd's neck for nearly 9 minutes, while he was handcuffed, including a few minutes after he'd passed out from asphyxiation.  I think it became first degree murder somewhere around 3 minutes into this.  I've watched quite a few videos, including one that showed the police arrival at the scene.  Mr. Floyd never did anything in any way violent or threatening, although he was clearly upset at being arrested, which is pretty understandable.  He may have said something threatening and he was a very big, strong guy, so there might be some possible justification in acting defensively, but once he was handcuffed and on the ground, the threat was over, especially since there were 3 other cops on the scene. Ten seconds of knee on neck would have been ample, even had Mr. Floyd been acting violently, which he wasn't.

Should We Allow Rich People to Buy College Admission?

I went to college in the mid 1970s.  This was a time of transition for many things.  One of them was a change in admissions policies that mostly opened it to better scrutiny.  By and large, this was a good thing.   Policies that had been discriminatory were changed, and lots of people who had been denied college were able to go.  For most people, a college degree opens lots of doors.  When I went to college, most people didn't have college aspirations, although many people took advantage of Junior College and the specialized trade schools.  Today, most people do have college aspirations, including the vast majority who do not have the aptitude for it.  This has opened a gigantic market for scam colleges and perhaps even worse, scam college lenders.

Wealthy and upper middle class families have always seen college as a natural step for their children and the vast majority saw to it that their kids got in.  Most got in through the various aptitude measurements, but plenty of kids really didn't have the aptitude.  In the old days, the college was happy to take a kid that wouldn't have otherwise made it, in return for a nice donation.  This would be sufficient to provide the kid with tutoring and other needed support, and in most cases it was sufficient to give a scholarship to a bunch of other kids who did deserve it but couldn't afford it.  This was a good arrangement.  Everybody understood that the kid was there on the merits of daddy's donation, and kid would end up having career undistinguished by anything but the nice diploma and probably a large bar tab and perhaps a few racy scenes in the tabloids.   It was corrupt, but openly so, and the good it did far outweighed the bad.

The new admissions schemes have ended most of the corruption.  But not all.  Good parents will do their very best to open doors for their kids, and if open corruption is blocked, they will find ways around the rules.  The recent scandal involving sports recruiters getting students admitted on the basis of non-existent talent, mostly in relatively obscure sports, is an example of this.  Lori Loughlin apparently spent $500,000 getting her two kids into USC.  Had this been open, that could have provided 12-15 student-years of free rides for deserving students.  Instead, it mostly went to various scammers.

Most of the people who went to college this way in the old days lived undistinguished lives.  There are a few exceptions though.  It's pretty clear that Donald Trump doesn't have the mental wherewithal to get into a decent college, much less a good one like UPenn.  Daddy Fred plainly found a way to open the door though.   Don apparently did attend a few classes, but managed to be remembered mostly for being absent from most of his senior year while he started his real estate business in New York, and somehow graduating anyway.

I say: This is ok, but there should be a clear paper trail to be found by anyone who is curious, such as grad schools and newspaper reporters.    If each undeserving student pays for a half dozen or more deserving ones, that's an acceptable price, provided the undeserving student can be prevented from using their purchased diploma for evil, as the Trumps did.  An undeserved admission should never be used for admission to subsequent education, such as medical school.  On the other hand, there are plenty of cases of bad students waking up during their college years and going on to do something great, so it shouldn't be a barrier either.   MCATs, GREs, LSATs, and actual decent college grades should be sufficient to separate the wheat from the chaff.

What to do About the Novel Coronavirus

The novel coronavirus, COVID-19, was first discovered in late 2019 in Wuhan, China.   There is no vaccine, humans have no pre-existing immunities like we do to the Flu, and it weakens us in a way that may kill us on its own, or it might expose us to opportunistic infections.  It is fairly infectious, including for a week or more before we show any signs of being ill.  Around half of people recover before they show any symptoms, yet they were infectious the whole time.  There are no known palliative measures, although a few have briefly shown some promise.  So far, none have panned out.

The Trump administration chose to abandon all pandemic preparations made during previous administrations.  This included demoting or firing most of the people who had any real expertise, such as the Pandemic Response Team, tossing their extensive plans, and installing a toadie as head of the CDC.  The first Trump CDC director was pushed out for blatant corruption, the second seems to have engaged largely in preventing the CDC from doing its job properly.

Trump has consistently poo poohed the need for testing, and has consistently lied about it.  He has also obstructed the distribution of medical ventilators, and most alarming of all, has obstructed the distribution of all types of Personal Protective Equipment: masks, gloves, gowns, etc.   We're 3 months into this thing and while it's finally possible to get a simple mask, it is still not possible to get an N95 without a special connection.  Most of this can be categorized as negligence, but two things: forcing the distribution to be exclusively on the open market, which has led to enormous gouging, and numerous cases of federal agencies swooping in and confiscating PPEs just before they got to their end user, have massively and needlessly exacerbated the problem.

So what should we do?  In the absence of anything better, quarantine.  The bubonic plague has been pretty much eliminated through quarantine.  Smallpox was substantially suppressed with quarantine, although its final elimination didn't come about until we had a vaccine. And so on.

But there's all this asymptomatic contagion.  The first step was stay-at-home orders for just about everybody.  Unfortunately we need medical attention and groceries, so there has to be some big holes, which allows a lot of spread.  Fortunately, we already have several tests, but unfortunately, the knucklehead in charge at the CDC screwed up when it was discovered that there had been a mistake, and Trump has insisted on the vicissitudes of the free market governing availability.  This would have been a perfect use for the defense authorization act, but no.  He has several times suggested that he doesn't like testing, and the reason always seems to be that he's afraid that knowing the truth will make him look bad.  On this I am sure he is correct.  How about fixing this problem by not being such a pathological idiot?

The first and most important thing we need to do is to get a lot more testing.  As of today (May 17), we are doing about 200,000 tests a day.    People who regularly come into contact with the disease, mainly medical people, should be tested every day.  There are 1.1 million doctors and 3.8 million nurses in the country.  Not all of them are working COVID.  Let's estimate that 2 million of them are.  In addition, there are around 20 million people who have jobs rated "essential" (e.g. grocery clerk) that come into contact with a lot of people, but only a few of them are likely sick, and with barriers and similar measures, we can reduce their risk, but not eliminate it.  We should probably test them once a week.  That's another 3 million tests a day for a total of 5 million.   This is the bare minimum.

We need to test the people in nursing homes.  These are people who are especially vulnerable and they're living in very close contact with each other.   There are about 1.5M of them.    they, and the people who take care of them, should probably be tested pretty often.  Lets say 300,000 tests a day nationwide.   The prisons are roughly the same size.   There are only about 70,000 people in the meat slaughtering and packing business, but they work in very close contact and there have been several bad outbreaks.   They should probably be tested a couple of times a week.  There are probably a bunch of other such occupations.

I'm thinking we should probably test everybody at least every other month or so.  There are 320M of us, but subtracting the people from other categories, it's a bit under 300M.  If we test each of them every 60 days, that's another 5 million tests a day.   We're up to a total of 10 million tests.  That means we're undertesting by a factor of 50.

Marion Medeiros

Marion was a teammate of mine on the cross country and track teams at Cupertino High School in the early '70s.   I stumbled on this last night, which is an obituary from the San Jose Mercury.   He was a sophomore when I was a senior, but we were pretty good friends anyway.  He was a good kid and a great runner and pole vaulter.  He set the school pole vault record as a sophomore and seemed destined to go quite a bit farther. 

He had been teased as a child about having a girls name so he usually pronounced his name "Morion".  He was definitely not a girl, although I have no idea about his sexuality.   We talked about all sorts of things in the two years we were teammates.  I think he thought of me as a sort of mentor, although he was a better runner than I was by far.


His older brother Baron was also a teammate and I knew him well too.  The last time I saw either of them, Baron had just enlisted in the army, and would join up after finishing high school.  Apparently Marion joined the army too and worked as a recruiter.

The article says Marion had a stroke which made him quadriplegic.  It doesn't give a date, but it looks like it happened in 1990, give or take.  Marion would have been about 38.  19 years later, in July 2009, the house he and his family had grown up in burned.  His mother was able to get out, but Marion was not. (This house was in Rancho Rinconada, a housing development in Cupertino, not far from the High School)

My heart aches.  Rest in peace, Marion.

Date of Stay at Home Orders

19 Mar
California
21 Mar
Illinois
New Jersey
22 Mar
New York
23 Mar
Connecticut
Louisiana
Ohio
Oregon
Washington
24 Mar
Delaware
Indiana
Massachusetts
Michigan
New Mexico
West Virginia
25 Mar
Hawaii
Idaho
Vermont
Wisconsin 
26 Mar
Colorado
Kentucky 
27 Mar
Minnesota
New Hampshire
28 Mar
Alaska
Montana
Rhode Island
30 Mar
Kansas Maryland 
North Carolina
Virginia 
31 Mar
Arizona
1 Apr
Nevada
Pennsylvania
2 Apr
Maine
Texas
Tennessee
3 Apr
Alabama
Florida 
Georgia
Mississippi
Missour
7 Apr
South Carolina

Cities have orders but no statewide
Oklahoma
Utah
Wyoming

No Orders
Arkansas
South Dakota
North Dakota
Iowa
Nebraska

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-stay-at-home-order.html

Politifact Lie of the Year.

I haven't done one of these in a few years, mainly because the election of Donald Trump has resulted in an almost constant stream of pants on fire level lies coming out of the liar-in-chief.    One of the effects of this is that Politifact only has a hard time choosing among Trump and his allies lies for the the worst of the year, and none of the D's minor lies or misstatements rises even close to competing.


2019: Trump's repeated false claim that the whistleblower got Trump's Ukraine call almost completely wrong
2018: Online smear machine tries to take down Parkland high school students
2017: Trump's repeated false assertions that Russian election interference is a "made up story"
2016: Fake News
2015: Trump's campaign lies
2014: The Ebola Scare.
2013: If you like your health care you can keep it.  (Had this been expressed "If you like your qualifying health care, you can keep it" it would have been true: the plans that were closed by ACA were fraudulent in some way.   In 2008, they had rated this same statement as true)
2012: Romney/Ryan completely false claims that Jeep was moving its factory to China
2011: Democrat's completely true statement that Republicans voted to end medicare as we know it.
2010: Republican's absurdly false claims that the ACA is a government takeover of healthcare.
2009: Republican's dangerously false claims about death panels.
 

Coronovirus Statistics

As I write this (18Mar2020) the deaths from the Novel Coronavirus have risen to just under 9000 worldwide, 150 in the US.  China appears to be the only country that has a declining number of new cases, after draconian measures sharply reduced the spread of the disease.  They so far have had just under 81,000 cases, nearly 70,000 of them have recovered.
 
The incubation period is between 2 and 14 days, with a peak between 3 and 7.  The disease itself seems to last about 2 weeks if symptoms are mild, 3-6 weeks if they're severe.   Severe cases seem to become severe about one week from the onset of symptoms.  The cause of death seems mostly to be hypoxia (shortness of breath: can't get enough oxygen into the blood), either from the disease itself or from opportunistic infections, mostly pneumonia.

The symptoms start out with malaise, muscle pain and low-grade fever, sharpening to higher fever and a dry cough.  Oddly, very few cases seem to have a runny nose, sneezing or sore throat.  The patients that do have these symptoms seem to have simultaneously had a cold or some other issue.

The death rate for previously healthy patients is under 1%.   Heart disease, Diabetes, Chronic Respiratory disease, Hypertension and Cancer multiply the death rate by 7-14x.

The worst case scenario I've seen is that we will need nearly 1 million medical ventilators at the peak of the crisis.  There are presently about 160K, about 100K of them obsolete but could be used in an emergency.  The problem is not just the disease itself.   The US loses about 2.8M people a year.  The top causes are Heart disease (650K), Cancer (600K) Accidents (170K),  Chronic Respiratory diseases (160K), Stroke (146K).  Normally, something like a million people a year require a ventilator--about 60K at a time.  If at the peak of the crisis, we need 150K ventilators, we will only lose 30K of them.  A terrible catastrophe, but small on the scale of heart disease and so forth.  It's obviously cold comfort if one of them is someone you cared about.   If, at the peak of the crisis, we need 500K ventilators, we will lose nearly 400K.  A great many of them will be people who never had coronavirus at all, but did have a life threatening condition that required medical assistance and/or ventilation. 

The appallingly terrible response by the Trump administration has made the problem much worse than it needed to be. China sprang into action very aggressively and used many tools which are not really available in the US.  China may manage to keep its deaths under 5,000.   While they've only had about 3000 deaths so far, Italians are dying at over 450 a day and it's unlikely this will slow down for some time.  They have 35K cases and had 4200 new ones today.  Extrapolating the curve looks like 30-50K deaths.   The US is much bigger and our response has been in many ways worse.

e.g.: Trump poo poohed the problem and did literally nothing for over a month.
The original tests provided by the CDC were defective and there are still far too few tests available.   This cost us a month or more.
He fired the team of advisors that would have been the most useful in 2018--apparently because they were warning him that something like this might happen.
He's given a very mixed message on the border controls, such as announcing that all trips from Europe except the UK (where he owns resorts) would be cancelled, triggering panic travel, massively overwhelming the medical checks for re-entry.  If any one of those people actually did have the disease, there are now a thousand new vectors, and sure enough, New York and California, which previously hadn't had many cases, immediately because major centers.   If you're going to close the border, close it completely and immediately.   Better yet: leave the border open, and be prepared to maintain distancing while you're doing your entry checks on what would be normal travel levels.  He got this exactly backwards.

There are lots of other terrible problems.  I rank the new coronavirus as only 3rd or 4th on the list, although its pressing and immediate.   The most pressing, immediate problems is that we must remove Donald Trump and his toadies from power as soon as possible.   I think when the accounting is done, Trump will have killed over a million Americans.


https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries

The Spectrum

Here's the way I see the present economic spectrum

Communist:
  There hasn't ever been a communist with national political creds in the United States. The nearest is probably the Wobblys (IWW) of the John Reed era or Longshore chief Harry Bridges.  There have been numerous small communes that were somewhat successful over the years, but they are imbeded in the larger culture.  By Communist, I mean that most or all of the means of production is owned and controlled by "the people", meaning the state.  Whether this state is democratic, authoritarian or something else is a separate issue, although the large ones have all been authoritarian.  Significant free enterprise is not allowed although there may be small businesses with government licenses.

Socialist:
 There have been a few socialist politicians with national credibility.  The most important was probably Eugene Debs. Most of the present national people who call themselves socialists really are Democratic Socialists.  By Socialist, I mean that a sizable share of the means of production is owned by the state, but significant free enterprise is allowed although with regulation.  Again, whether the state is democratic, authoritarian or something else is a separate issue.

Democratic Socialist:
  Most successful countries over the last century have been Democratic Socialists.  Major US leadership figures include Franklin Roosevelt, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and arguably, Abraham Lincoln.   By Democratic Socialism, I mean that the majority of the means of production is free enterprise, but a significant amount are operated by the government or at least strongly regulated.  Usually these are those industries that have been in some sort of market failure. The associate government is democratic or republican.

Capitalist:
   Most successful countries have passed through a capitalist phase.  By capitalist, I mean that the vast majority of the means of production is individually owned, there is little regulation, and there are few industries in market failure.  It is inherently an unstable circumstance: businesses will try to grow and dominate markets, and without limits, some will succeed and drive the others out.  It also tends to breed various labor abuses, including chattel slavery, wage slavery, debt slavery.  The capitalist era in the US ended with the rise of  "the guilded age" after the civil war.  Most "businesses" were family farms and most industries were small and isolated enough that there was no monopoly.  Interestingly some of the most successful were substantially sponsored by the government, e.g. the Springfield Armory.

  Those that profited most, and those who see only the opportunity to maximize profit and not the collateral damage of capitalism and the unique circumstances that make it possible are always trying to "revert" to capitalism.  Capitalism is highly transitional and can only thrive while there are literally hundreds of businesses in each market: enough to allow true competition and natural selection.

Oligarchist:
  What happens when a capitalist society fails to deal with market failure.  Individual businesses grow so large and powerful that they dominate their markets--often with tacit or explicit collusion from their competitors.  Before long they can afford to buy any regulation they may face.  Sometimes growth is for the good, but more often, the giant prioritizes profit over providing good service or decent wages.

Laissez Faire:
  There has never been a successful Laissez Faire society.  There are two failure modes: Chile and several others gave it a try but it went so badly they needed to put down near constant rebellions with extreme force, including secret disappearances.   The other way tends to last longer: it's called A Dark Age.  The tools of civil society break down--banditry is rampant and there is little or no distinction between bandits and police.  There is no rule of law. There are people who claim to advocate Laissez Faire.  They're profoundly ignorant.

There's also a political axis.  How leaders are selected and replaced, what powers they have, how they respond to popular opinion, etc.

Authoritarian:
   Leaders grab power by force, are free to do anything they want including manipulate the selection process.  They invariably are subject to frequent coups d'etat, especially after a previous leader dies.  There is usually extensive manipulation of media to quell almost constant grumbling from the powerless.  How the economy works, whether there is rule of law or not, etc., are separate issues.

Aristocracy:
  Leaders initially gain power by force but agree that replacement will be based on some predictable scheme, usually hereditary.  This tends to reduce the violence after a leader has died.   Again, the workings of the economy is separate.  Monarchy is a different name for the same thing.

Republic:
   Representatives gather and make decisions about what to do.  How the representatives are selected is based on various mechanisms--sometimes they're elected, sometimes they are land owners, Ancient Athens drew lots to decide who would lead, various other systems have been used.

Constitutional Monarchy:
   The same as a Republic but there is an aristocratic figurehead who may or may not have some power.

Democracy:
  The people vote on most things.  There have been no successful democracies larger than a few hundred voters.   All have either regressed in some way or have functionally been a republic.



Fascism is Authoritarian Oligarchy:  a dominant leader grabs and maintains power through alliance with monopolist or near monopolist businesses.  There are some stylistic things that usually accompany fascism: persecuted people who are supposedly the cause of all of these problems, state control of an extremely dishonest media, etc.  Technically, there are other ways to be Authoritarian Oligarchist, but fascism is the most common.

Chinese and Soviet Communism is Authoritarian Communism or Socialism.

There are several democratic socialist monarchies in western Europe: Holland, Sweden, etc.  Politically, these are republics but they retain a figurehead.  For example, functionally the German and Swedish political systems are pretty similar, but Sweden has a ceremonial king.  Saudi Arabia is an oligarchic aristocracy.  The US has regressed to its second oligarchic phase, having advanced to democratic socialism for most of the 20th century.   The current president has very, very strong authoritarian tendencies and we may go all the way to Fascism if we're not careful.

  

2020 Calendar

Wed 1 Jan      New Year's Day
Mon 20 Jan   Martin Luther King Day (Holiday)
Sat 25 Jan     Chinese New Year, begins year of the Rat, 4718
Sun 2 Feb      Groundhog's (midwinter) Day
Sun 2 Feb     Superbowl LIV, Miami, FL
Mon 17 Feb  Presidents Day (Holiday) 
Tue 25 Feb   Mardi Gras
Sun 8 Mar    Daylight Savings Time begins  
Fri 20 Mar  03:50UT (Thu19Mar 20:50PDT)  Spring Equinox
Wed 8 Apr     Passover begins at sundown
Sun 12 Apr      Easter
Thu 16 Apr      Passover ends at sundown
Thu 23 Apr  Ramadan begins
Sat 24 May       Ramadan ends 
Fri 1 May     May Day (midspring)
Mon 25 May  Memorial Day (Holiday) 
Sat 20 Jun    21:44UT (14:44PDT) Summer Solstice
Fri 3 Jul       Independence Day (Holiday)
Sat 1 Aug     Midsummer day   
Mon 7 Sep     Labor Day (Holiday)
Tue 22 Sep     13:31UT (08:31PDT) Autumn Equinox
Fri 18 Sep      Sundown Rosh Hashana begins year 5781
Sun 27 Sep       Sundown Yom Kippur
Mon 12 Oct    Columbus Day (Holiday for some people)
Sat 31 Oct     Hallowe'en
Sun 1 Nov      Mid autumn day
Sun 1 Nov      Daylight Savings Time ends 
Wed 11 Nov    Veterans Day  
Thu 26 Nov   Thanksgiving (Holiday)
Fri 27 Nov     Holiday
Thu 10 Dec     Sundown  Hannuka begins
Fri 18 Dec   Sundown, Hannuka ends
Mon 21 Dec    10:02UT (02:02PST) Winter Solstice 
Fri 25 Dec   Christmas (Holiday)



Days off work in bold

Astronomical and calendar events in italic