Midterms

Midterm elections are traditionally brutal for the party in power. What if this November, however, is as atypical as November 2016?

Trump is a singularly energetic campaigner. His efforts this year will likely move more Republicans and Republican-leaning independents to the polls. Seeing large arenas overflowing with animated Trump-supporters is probably a drag on Democrats. His simple message at these rallies is perfect: things are going well, but the Democrats will take it all away and stop any further progress, so we need more Republicans in Congress.

Re widely publicized negative job-approval ratings for President Trump:

Factors such as the Bradley/Wilder Effect and the "job performance" vs. "handling" question might each count for 5% or more by themselves. If the above factors average just 1% each, the approval picture for Trump changes dramatically, and the GOP's election prospects change dramatically.

[Real Clear Politics's] polling average for the direction of the country is at a five-year high and has been steadily rising for the last year. The peak under Obama was in June of 2009, with 45.8% of those polled saying the country was moving in the right direction. Two years later, Obama bottomed at 17%. On election day 2016, it was 31%. Today it stands at 41%. Because of Trump's unprecedented commitment to keeping his campaign promises, for the first time in a generation, Republicans have a chance to vote with great enthusiasm. They should ignore the polls and do so.

It is my fervent hope that the American electorate is disgusted with the dumpster-fire known as The Resistance and will show up at the polls to do something about it. And that goes double for the next primaries affecting any Senators who wobble on this nomination.

"Some" Irked by Superstar Haley?

Well, not me, pal. I like it when she does her thing. Trump is good at a certain kind of rhetoric, but it's not the only kind. Haley's much easier to take seriously (or even literally). She seems fearless and determined. We've rarely had such a good advocate.

Groupthink

From Jim Geraghty in the National Review, wondering how a general indictment of the toxic sex culture at Yale Law School plays out to its logical conclusion:

If, in an effort to get Kavanaugh, the left wants to retroactively declare that Yale University and its law school are and always were some sort of teeming cesspool of abuse and exploitation and elitist unaccountability . . . go ahead, fellas. Of course, a declaration like that spurs some questions about what the likes of Booker and Blumenthal saw and did when they were there. If this “institutional culture” of harassment and protecting the powerful was so deeply ingrained and so pervasive in the school for so long, how could those men somehow emerge with clear consciences? How could they themselves remain silent about it for so long?

There are a lot of Yale Law School graduates in the highest ranks of the progressive legal world — no doubt all of them should face the same suspicions. Were they complicit in continuing or even promoting and strengthening an exploitational culture?

If the aftermath of this whole angry mess is that Yale Law School has a permanent cloud over it, and everyone who went there is regarded with newfound suspicion . . . which side of the political divide do you think is going to pay the higher price?

When you try to indict a man by indicting the culture around him, you end up indicting a lot of other people in the process.

Every time I'm in a jury pool, I see people struggling with the need to abide by difficult evidentiary rules designed to keep verdicts from depending on the kind of thinking that runs: "I don't know if there's any actual proof, but that's less important than the fact that this seems like the kind of thing a guy from his kind of neighborhood would do."

Providing Protection

At The Federalist, Melissa Danford writes about her fears for her husband and sons.

My husband is in the military, so I am no stranger to a culture of double standards, but until now we thought it was more isolated. In the military it is common knowledge, whether senior leaders will acknowledge it or not, that a mere accusation of sexual harassment or assault, proven or not, is enough to end a man’s career....

All indications now are that too many in our society have abandoned the idea that all people, men and women, are innocent until proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt through due process. Instead people want a guilty until proven innocent standard for men accused of sexual assault. People think mere accusations, made without evidence and decades after the fact, should result in intrusive and embarrassing investigations simply because a woman made them.... Likewise, many seem to think that men and women should be judged by different standards. This is the opposite of equality before the law. Without equality before the law, how can we say the law rules and not men (or women)? As we make this turn toward “believe women” regardless of a trial or presence of proof, our society will only get worse.

Many also seem willing to abandon all statutes of limitation and questions of jurisdiction.

She mentions the military's zero tolerance of accusations of sexual misconduct, but that is probably not the proximate precursor to what we are seeing right now. I would argue that the Title IX kangaroo courts the Obama administration set up at universities served as a model and training ground for this. They normalized extrajudicial handling of such accusations with none of the normal protections or standards of evidence.

Double the Pleasure

A new study suggests that there are twice as many illegal aliens in America as previously believed.

AVI: Irony

If you had told me while I was in college in 1971 that a few decades later, a US Supreme Court justice was going to be questioned hard on whether there was too much sex and alcohol at his high school, I would have been petrified that the conservatives had somehow achieved total power, possibly by violence, and were imposing some sort of Puritan standards of a type later fictionalised in The Handmaid's Tale.

These are strange days.

Well, This Will Be A Fun Week

Rosenstein resigns, leaving a Trump appointee in charge of the Mueller investigation. The matter that men are not supposed to discuss has gotten psychotic. Trump is at the UN, talking DPRK nukes and national sovereignty. Also, this week is the end of the fiscal year, so government bureaucrats who have unspent money have to do something with it or lose it.

Should be quite an interesting few days for those of us who have to deal with the government.

UPDATE: The Rosenstein report was apparently false; for now he remains in place.

Last Light of Summer

P-hacking vs. the Kaballah

The replication crisis in psych research:

Let’s just put a bright line down right now. 2016 is year 1. Everything published before 2016 is provisional. Don’t take publication as meaning much of anything, and just cos a paper’s been cited approvingly, that’s not enough either. You have to read each paper on its own. Anything published in 2015 or earlier is part of the “too big to fail” era, it’s potentially a junk bond supported by toxic loans and you shouldn’t rely on it.

Cyberpunk 2020

More or less on schedule?

Researchers claim to have developed a simulator which can feed information directly into a person’s brain and teach them new skills in a shorter amount of time, comparing it to “life imitating art”.

They cite "The Matrix" for this, but the idea was fully formed in William Gibson's early works.

UPDATE: The splintering of cyberspace.

Project Veritas "Deep State" Videos

These are not as explosive as they'd like them to be, but they certainly are telling. Now they've gotten their first scalp, at least temporarily. I'll be surprised if 'removed from duties' translates into 'fired,' given that it's a government employee.

Wrong House

This sort of thing happens from time to time. It's a good reason not to raid people's houses unless there's suspicion of something going on there that is worth the risk of loss of innocent life -- including police life.

A View of Florence

From inside a storm-cloud as they rolled across these mountains.

Beer Hall in Seattle

Seems like a nice place.

Meanwhile, the open kitchen will be inspired by the idea of a Viking butcher shop and will feature bar bites and shared plates that explore wild flavors from the woods and sea. Imagine being at a gathering “near a roaring fire at the edge of a fjord,” said McQueen. There will be game, meat skewers, a large rotisserie for chicken, pork, and rabbit. “We’ll also have lamb and pork sausages, potato dumplings and pickled herring,” revealed McQueen[.]

Just Shut Up

All right, Senator. You got it. No more talk. We'll just get on with doing what we take to be right.

A Eulogy Fit for a Warrior - Ari Fuld, Rest in Peace.

Yesterday in Israel, Ari Fuld was killed by a knife wielding terrorist who had stabbed him in the back.  Before he collapsed, he turned, drew his weapon, climbed over a fence to chase after the attacker and fired on him hitting him multiple times, wounding him.

The Eulogy given by his wife, Miriam, was fitting for a man who was truly a warrior- and clearly she, a fitting match for him.

"When they sent you your discharge papers from the army at age 40, you tore them up. because the greatest [joy] you had was to serve in the Israeli Jewish army." - @arifuld's wife at his funeral tonight

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) September 16, 2018

"No-one knew [your life] would be cut so short this morning on your way to do shopping I asked you to do. You always ran towards danger, instead of away from it and you never backed down from a fight. Because you knew you were in the right. You fought for what you believed in."

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) September 16, 2018

There is more in that thread, and it's worth reading.

For Some Sad Men Among Us

Once even David Allan Coe knew what it was to be lonely. There's hope for you yet. You know who you are.

Haga of the First Water

I wish I could remember where I read the suggestion -- Dad29 only hints at it -- but sometime around Friday I read someone who suggested that the Kavanaugh accuser would turn out to have had first made the accusation in a therapy session, many years after the fact. The idea is that 'recovered' (but actually false) memories in psychology work are a known issue, and this was likely enough to turn out to be one.

Now it may be that the accusation is true, although both of the people she names as having been there deny that it or anything like it ever happened. But the psychotherapy-created-memory idea doesn't sound implausible to me given the facts. For one thing, it did in fact first come up in a therapy session in 2012, when she and her husband were having trouble and she needed a way to try to right that ship. But also:

She did tell someone about this years before Kavanaugh was nominated — but never mentioned his name. She doesn’t remember where or even when exactly the incident happened, but she does remember the names of two other people who were allegedly there. (Neither responded to WaPo’s request for comments.) She passed a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent but her own therapist had notes saying four boys were involved, not two, which Ford blames on a misunderstanding.

All of that is explicable if the hypothesis is correct. The fuzziness on exactly where and when this happened arises from the fact that it never did happen, as does the fuzziness on just who was responsible or how many people were present at the time. But also the polygraph: she could readily pass one, per hypothesis, because she isn't lying. She's telling the truth of what she thinks she remembers.

(UPDATE: Paragraph removed due to inaccurate source. I regret the error.)

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was in fact the truth. Kavanaugh has passed six FBI background checks, none of which turned up anything like this; there's no pattern of behavior, as you'd expect if this accusation were true. But that doesn't mean she is lying, not in the strict sense. She is quite possibly telling the truth as she believes she understands it.

Defenders might say that a good reason for being unstable is having suffered a rape attempt in your young adulthood, and perhaps that's fair. In the end, both hypotheses are possible. We just have to decide which one is more plausible. Or maybe not even that; a 17 year old's bad behavior, even if proven at law rather than being alleged after the statute of limitations had passed seven times over, would normally be sealed in juvenile records just because we wouldn't want it to prevent them from reforming and living a responsible life as an adult. By all indications, he has led a responsible life as an adult. Maybe we don't have to decide what is true about the one allegation from 35 years ago to know the right way to proceed now.

All of that involves taking this accusation seriously. It leads us to the same place we would get to if we didn't take it seriously at all, as well we might not given the way the Democratic leadership sat on the thing for a month until they could raise it at the last minute to cause chaos. I'm open to the idea that we shouldn't given them an inch given how they've behaved; but a lot more is at stake than punishing Sen. Feinstein for her perfidy. I'm willing to take the matter seriously. All the same, I think that absent any new evidence or additional accusers, the course is clear.

BB: Interview with Ms. Chelsea Clinton

The Bee gently mocks her latest. “I’m a devout Christian, but suggesting that I need to believe Christian things that would go against my political platform is the very definition of the war on women.”

The week in pictures

PS, Our little non-hurricane mostly passed through during the night. We had 4.2 inches yesterday, bringing our September total to 15-1/2. Not a problem here at Chez Tex, of course, where we have learned that weather continues to happen.