Rio 2016: Photos From Days 4-6

In Focus with Rio 2016: Photos From Days 4 through 6 "Hundreds of photographers have gathered in Rio to follow the action in the Olympic arenas, swimming pools, racetracks, and more. Over the next two weeks I’ll be featuring some amazing images from recent Olympic events. Today’s entry encompasses cycling, archery, volleyball, weightlifting, diving, sailing, judo, a passing capybara, and much more."

The Republicans’ Big Gerrymander Could Backfire in a Major Way

John Gastil in Monkey Cage thinks The Republicans’ big gerrymander could backfire in a major way

After the 2010 Census, the Republican Party put in motion its plan to redraw congressional districts more favorable to conservative candidates. Whereas bipartisan gerrymandering creates safe districts for both parties, the GOP undertook partisan gerrymandering, which packs the other party’s voters into as few districts as possible and spreads out the gerrymandering party’s voters across many districts, each of which that party can win but often by uncomfortably narrow margins.

If the Trump collapse and Clinton surge continue, they could reveal the perils of partisan redistricting. That strategy created so many marginal Republican districts that if the GOP loses the bulk of the seats at or below R+2, it would also lose its congressional majority. A catastrophe that claimed every GOP seat at or below R+4 would bring the GOP caucus close to the size of today’s House Democrats.

Get Ready for the 2016 Perseids

Universe Today says Get Ready for the 2016 Perseids "The 2016 Perseids present a few challenges, though persistent observers should still see a descent show. The Perseids are typically active from July 17th to August 24th, with the peak arriving this year right around 13:00 to 15:30 Universal Time on Friday, August 12th. This will place the radiant for the Perseids high in the sky after local midnight for observers in the northern Pacific, though observers worldwide should be vigilant over the next week. Meteor showers don’t read predictions and prognostications, and an arrival of the peak just a few hours early would place North America in the cross-hairs this coming Friday. The Perseids typically produce an average Zenithal Hourly Rate of 60-200 per hour, and the International Meteor Organization predicts a ZHR of 150 for 2016."

So for me, I'll be out after midnight Thursday night.

Olympics 2016 in Rio

In Focus shows Rio 2016: Photos From the First Weekend "Hundreds of photographers have gathered in Rio to follow the action in the Olympic arenas, swimming pools, racetracks, and more. Over the next two weeks I’ll be featuring some amazing images from recent Olympic events. Today’s entry encompasses fencing, basketball, handball, swimming, diving, eventing, table tennis, archery, and much more."

There are a number of phenomenal photos. I think this is my favorite:

I've been watching the Olympics all weekend. I have the TiVo set to record everything and I'm watching through. I skip the common sports, soccer, tennis, basketball, boxing, I can watch them anytime and I'm not particularly interested in them throughout the year, so I have no interest during the Olympics. But I enjoy watching the unusual sports every four years. So I'm recording three channels and skimming lots and finding what interests me.

Swimming is fun, but there are too many variations (distance, stroke, relay, etc.) and too many heats in each. I'm about reaching my fill, but it's fun to see how many medals Ledecki and Phelps can rack up.

Gymnastics is just amazing to watch what these people can do, and how dominant the US women are. I'm still looking forward to seeing more.

For me this year, I'm surprised that I'm really enjoying Team Handball. I didn't know much about it and I remember not being interested in previous years, but it seems to be perfectly constructed for watching a team put a thing in a goal. It's kinda like water polo on land, but that means you can see all the action. It's played on a court about twice the size of a basketball court, so the camera can show a whole half at once letting you see strategy but all individuals (unlike soccer). It's fast but not too fast so the camera isn't chasing the puck like in ice hockey. There's about a score a minute so that way more interesting than soccer and not too frequent like in basketball where only the end matters. Players are still really happy when they score, it's not rote like basketball. The goal isn't too big but goalies seem to be about 35% effective in making a stop, so it's rare but exciting if they do. A game is an hour, in two halves. The clock runs for each half, stopping only for injuries or to clean the court, and timeout are limited, so there's no end of game annoyance as in basketball. And there's no odd equipment like in field hockey where everyone runs bent over. I haven't figured out the rules but there's more contact than basketball and less than in ice hockey. I've seen two women's games and the Brazilians are particularly fun to watch. I've seen one men's game and it didn't quite have the same feel.

Equestrian has been my least favorite, particularly the dressage. The cross country was entertaining for a horse or two.

I'm liking indoor volleyball more than beach volleyball. In the latter they need more players on the court. They have too much ground to cover and the rallies are too short, it's very rare to see a point with more than two net crossings.

Table tennis at this level is just crazy to watch. It's interesting that there are so many different styles and all seem competitive at this level. I don't remember seeing a "tomahawk serve" before. On the other hand judo and fencing seem like the sports equivalents of pure breeding going too far. There are lots of common actions but to score a point you have to do in such a particular way that the participants don't know what happened until asking the judge. If the fencing were real, both parties would be stabbed and one a microsecond before the other.

Then there are the specific skill sports like weight lifting, archery and shooting that are definitely fun in small doses. NBC needs to do better at showing a camera angle that shows the distance they're shooting from and the (in the case of shooting ridiculously) tiny targets they're hitting.

Fun stuff.

Joe Scarborough Claims Trump Asked About Using Nuclear Weapons Three Times in a Briefing

I'm no fan of Joe Scarborough but I saw a tweet this morning pointing to this segment from today's show:

Watch: What are some major concerns about Trump's handling of national security? Hayden and #morningjoe weigh in. https://t.co/FyFoSmJlJI

— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) August 3, 2016

"A foreign policy expert, international level, went to advise Donald Trump, and three times he asked about the use of nuclear weapons. Three times he asked at one point, 'if we have them, why can't we use them?' ... Three times in an hour briefing why can't we use nuclear weapons."

It struck me as an odd thing to throw in as an aside, particularly from an anonymous source that apparently happened several months ago. I have all the same questions as the Washington Post, I have a few questions for ‘Morning Joe’…:

1. Exactly when did you find out about this information?
2. Was this conversation with your source off the record?
3. Who was the expert?!
4. How do you feel about your show’s take on Trump in 2015?

This is a frightful claim, intended to scare us (and make news) and it's completely unsourced and vague. It's bad journalism. It's not like there aren't real ways to knock Trump, there's no need to make stuff up, but you have to have evidence.

Remakes Better Than the Originals

Following on from Monday's post here are movie remakes that are better than the originals. I'm not counting remakes into a different language, that would be far too many films. I'm also not counting made-for-TV versions.

I probably shouldn't count remakes of a silent film into a talkie, that strikes me as huge shift in the medium, but I'm leaving them in and have marked the four affected films.

• 1932 Tarzan the Ape Man - from silent
• 1938 Wizard of Oz - from silent
• 1940 His Girl Friday
• 1941 The Maltese Falcon
• 1954 A Star Is Born
• 1956 The Man Who Knew Too Much
• 1956 The Ten Commandments - from silent
• 1957 An Affair to Remember
• 1959 Ben-Hur - from silent
• 1968 Romeo and Juliet
• 1982 The Thing
• 1986 The Fly
• 1986 Little Shop of Horrors
• 1988 Dirty Rotten Scoundrels
• 1995 Heat
• 1999 The Thomas Crown Affair
• 2001 Ocean's Eleven
• 2002 The Quiet American
• 2005 Batman Begins
• 2007 3:10 to Yuma
• 2012 Dredd

I'm not sure any of these belong here, but I've seen them argued on several lists.

• 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers
• 1979 Nosferatu the Vampyre
• 1983 Scarface
• 1991 Cape Fear
• 1996 Ransom
• 2000 Gone in Sixty Seconds
• 2003 Freaky Friday
• 2003 The Italian Job
• 2004 Dawn of the Dead
• 2007 I Am Legend
• 2010 True Grit

Okay, what am I missing or wrong about?

Trump's Appetite for Destruction: How Disastrous Convention Doomed GOP

Matt Taibbi writes in Rolling Stone about the RNC, Trump's Appetite for Destruction: How Disastrous Convention Doomed GOP. It's standard Taibbi fun. First he imagines an RNC that would have been ridiculously entertaining:

It wasn't what we expected. We thought Donald Trump's version of the Republican National Convention would be a brilliantly bawdy exercise in Nazistic excess. We expected thousand-foot light columns, a 400-piece horn section where the delegates usually sit (they would be in cages out back with guns to their heads). Onstage, a chorus line of pageant girls in gold bikinis would be twerking furiously to a techno version of "New York, New York" while an army of Broadway dancers spent all four days building a Big Beautiful Wall that read winning, the ceremonial last brick timed to the start of Donald's acceptance speech...

Then he explains how the media will now cover Trump:

Thanks to Trump, we in the media can no longer cast politics as a sports story, because the illusion that both sides have a compelling chance at victory is now a tougher sell. Instead, we will sell it as a freak show, a tent full of bearded ladies and pinheads at which to gape. Next to sports, freak shows are what the media do best, so it'll be an easy switch. Shows like Anderson Cooper 360° will become high-tech versions of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo or The Biggest Loser, destinations for Americans to tune in for a bit to feel superior to the mutants debasing themselves onscreen.

Finally he outlines what Trump should have done:

Of course, the Republicans blew the one chance they had to save themselves. They could have turned the internal discord to their advantage and held an open convention of ideas, dispensing with the pretense of unity and presenting themselves instead as a big enough tent to embrace and accept many different viewpoints.

Trump should have invited his fiercest critics, the Mike Lees and George Wills of the world, to come onstage and explain why they so fervently disagreed with his tactics and rhetoric. He even should have stopped short of demanding endorsements from all of them. A smart Donald Trump – such a thing is difficult to imagine, but let's say – would have given his opponents a forum to just whale away at him, even removing time constraints. It would have helped make Trump look more like presidential material.

And this would have accomplished two other things.

First, and most important, it would have rescued the immediate future of the party in the highly likely event that Trump goes on to lose in November.

The Republican leadership from Ryan on down could have walked away from this convention with their pseudo-dignity intact, having spoken out against Trump's more naked and vulgar form of racism, standing instead on the principle of a more covert, more subterranean, more dog-whistle-y form of race politics – you know, like Mitt Romney lecturing the NAACP about black people wanting "free stuff."

Second, it would have made for a fascinating run-up to Trump's final address. Here was a man famous for being so thin-skinned that he stays up at night tweeting insults at judges and editors of New Hampshire newspapers, giving the world's biggest stage to his critics.

Then he could have ascended the podium on the concluding night and delivered his apocalyptic argument, which he'd describe as believing in so strongly he stacked it up against his fiercest critics. And he'd have plenty of fodder to swing back at, with decades of Republican inaction, corruption and failure to save American jobs to use in service of his case for a radical change of leadership.

The RNC should just hire him for next time. They'll have a lot of openings.

Sharp differences over who is hurt, helped by their race

Pew Research Center reports Sharp differences over who is hurt, helped by their race "Black and white Americans have profoundly different views on racial equality, and a new survey finds they also differ on the extent to which a person’s race can be a burden or a benefit. For blacks, the answer is clear: 65% say ‘it is a lot more difficult to be black in this country than it is to be white.’ Fewer than half as many whites (27%) agree."

The difference in views between Hillary and Trump supports is stark.

Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees

The New York Times puts things in perspective, Only 9% of America Chose Trump and Clinton as the Nominees. I don't know why this is interactive instead of a single static graph. I wish this version showed the point, "103 million of them are children, noncitizens or ineligible felons, and they do not have the right to vote."

Sequels Better than the Original

I've been meaning to make this list for a while and it came up again last night. Sequels are usually not better than the original, but sometimes they are. Here's a list ordered by year of the sequel. I'm open to suggestions and criticisms. I'll follow this up with other variations (remakes better than original and series where the best one is one of the later films).

• 1934 Tarzan and His Mate
• 1935 Bride of Frankenstein
• 1963 From Russia With Love
• 1964 A Shot in the Dark
• 1974 The Godfather Part II
• 1978 Dawn of the Dead
• 1980 The Empire Strikes Back
• 1981 Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
• 1982 Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
• 1987 Evil Dead II
• 1991 Silence of the Lambs
• 1991 Terminator 2: Judgement Day
• 1993 The Wrong Trousers
• 1995 Desperado
• 1999 Toy Story 2
• 2003 Oldboy
• 2003 X-Men 2
• 2004 Spider-Man 2
• 2008 The Dark Knight
• 2013 Hunger Games: Catching Fire
• 2014 Captain America: The Winter Soldier

These are arguably better (well I've seen arguments at least)

• 1979 Aliens
• 1980 Superman II
• 1985 Rambo: First Blood Part II

Trump Bullshits on Ukraine

ThinkProgress stating the obvious: Trump Appears To Be Ignorant of a Major International Conflict.

Asked about the scrubbing of pro-Ukrainian language from the Republican platform, Trump offered up a word salad in which he seemed unaware that Russian President Vladimir Putin has been meddling in Ukrainian politics for years.

‘[Putin’s] not going into Ukraine, okay, just so you understand. He’s not going to go into Ukraine, all right? You can mark it down. You can put it down. You can take it anywhere you want,’ Trump said.

Stephanopoulos pushed back, reminding Trump that Putin’s ‘already there, isn’t he?’ Trump quickly changed the topic to Obama bashing.

‘Okay — well, he’s there in a certain way. But I’m not there. You have Obama there,’ Trump said. ‘And frankly, that whole part of the world is a mess under Obama with all the strength that you’re talking about and all of the power of NATO and all of this. In the meantime, he’s going away. He takes Crimea.’"

We have 99 days left of increased scrutiny on Trumps knowledge, abilities and past. This should be fun (at least it had better be).

The ‘Smoking Gun’ Proving North Carolina Republicans Tried To Disenfranchise Black Voters

The Washington Post reports on The ‘smoking gun’ proving North Carolina Republicans tried to disenfranchise black voters.

In particular, the court found that North Carolina lawmakers requested data on racial differences in voting behaviors in the state. 'This data showed that African Americans disproportionately lacked the most common kind of photo ID, those issued by the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV),' the judges wrote.

So the legislators made it so that the only acceptable forms of voter identification were the ones disproportionately used by white people. 'With race data in hand, the legislature amended the bill to exclude many of the alternative photo IDs used by African Americans,' the judges wrote. 'The bill retained only the kinds of IDs that white North Carolinians were more likely to possess.'

The data also showed that black voters were more likely to make use of early voting — particularly the first seven days out of North Carolina's 17-day voting period. So lawmakers eliminated these seven days of voting. 'After receipt of this racial data, the General Assembly amended the bill to eliminate the first week of early voting, shortening the total early voting period from seventeen to ten days,' the court found.

Most strikingly, the judges point to a 'smoking gun' in North Carolina's justification for the law, proving discriminatory intent. The state argued in court that 'counties with Sunday voting in 2014 were disproportionately black' and 'disproportionately Democratic,' and said it did away with Sunday voting as a result.

'Thus, in what comes as close to a smoking gun as we are likely to see in modern times, the State’s very justification for a challenged statute hinges explicitly on race — specifically its concern that African Americans, who had overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, had too much access to the franchise,' the judges write in their decision.

Evidently we all knew this would happen except for John Roberts.

Let's all say goodbye to the Philae comet lander, which we'll never hear from again

The Verge recommends Let's all say goodbye to the Philae comet lander, which we'll never hear from again "There’s still some time left before Europe’s Rosetta mission comes to an end in September, but it’s already time to say goodbye to the mission’s Philae lander — the first spacecraft ever to touch down on a comet. Tomorrow at 5AM ET, the European Space Agency will switch off the Electrical Support System Processor Unit (ESS) on the Rosetta spacecraft, which is currently orbiting around the comet that Philae landed on. The ESS is the system Rosetta uses to communicate with Philae, but researchers need to power it down to prepare for the end of the mission. Once it’s off, there will be no way for the two spacecraft to talk to each other."

The Gel That's Revolutionizing Pain Treatment - The Atlantic

The Atlantic reports on The Gel That's Revolutionizing Pain Treatment

Researchers have created a gel that can attach to inflammation sites and slowly deliver drugs to combat a wide variety of ailments—ulcerative colitis, arthritis and mucositis, to name a few. Inflammation is part of the body’s immune response, bringing extra blood to an injured area, but in cases of chronic inflammation, the heat, pain, and swelling become a problem. Developed at the Laboratory for Accelerated Medical Innovation at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the hydrogel—a solid material with high water content—can carry a combination of drugs, and matches its drug release to the level of inflammation around it.

When the gel is injected into the joint of an arthritis patient, for example, it will only release its anti-inflammatory payload when the patient is experiencing a flare, a spike in pain and swelling. When it encounters healthy tissue, it stays intact and does not release its payload."

A Republican Intellectual Explains Why the Republican Party is Going to Die

Vox writes A Republican intellectual explains why the Republican Party is going to die

Avik Roy is a Republican’s Republican. A health care wonk and editor at Forbes, he has worked for three Republican presidential hopefuls — Mitt Romney, Rick Perry, and Marco Rubio. Much of his adult life has been dedicated to advancing the Republican Party and conservative ideals."

Roy isn’t happy about this: He believes it means the Democrats will dominate national American politics for some time. But he also believes the Republican Party has lost its right to govern, because it is driven by white nationalism rather than a true commitment to equality for all Americans. “Until the conservative movement can stand up and live by that principle, it will not have the moral authority to lead the country,” he told me.

His history of conservatism was a Greek tragedy. It begins with a fatal error in 1964, survived on the willful self-delusion of people like Roy himself, and ended with Donald Trump.

“The fact is, today, the Republican coalition has inherited the people who opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 — the Southern Democrats who are now Republicans,” Roy says. “Conservatives and Republicans have not come to terms with that problem.”

Yet Republican intellectuals have long denied this, fabricating a revisionist history in which Republicans were and always have been the party of civil rights. In 2012, National Review ran a lengthy cover story arguing that the standard history recounted by Roy was “popular but indefensible.”

This revisionism, according to Roy, points to a much bigger conservative delusion: They cannot admit that their party’s voters are motivated far more by white identity politics than by conservative ideals.

“Conservative intellectuals, and conservative politicians, have been in kind of a bubble,” Roy says. “We’ve had this view that the voters were with us on conservatism — philosophical, economic conservatism. In reality, the gravitational center of the Republican Party is white nationalism.”

A week ago I linked to this FiveThirtyEight article, The End Of A Republican Party. I didn't pull quote this, but it's what's stuck with me most from the article:

[Redstate.com contributor Ben] Howe’s theory for the racial animus of Trump supporters boils down to simple attrition: “Everybody who was reasonable seems to have gone home in 2012,” he said. Romney’s loss in 2012 discouraged many of the once-energized fiscal conservative activists.

“This isn’t the most artful way to say it, but it’s like, where do you go when the only people who seem to agree with you on taxes hate black people?” Howe laughed ruefully. “I think what you do is you say, ‘Well, I may lose but I can’t align myself with them.’”

But instead, Howe said, he made moral compromises he regrets.

“There are some things that I don’t have core values about, that I can be negotiable on, compromise on. But then there are other things that I can’t budge on,” he said. “I think I thought I had to budge on some things: ‘Yeah, this guy talking to me right now just said he agrees with my taxes and also we need to get that Kenyan out of office.’ Why did I stand there and say, ‘Yeah’? You know? I shouldn’t have done that. I should’ve said, ‘Wait, what? No, that’s stupid. You’re stupid. Don’t be stupid.’”

My thought is that when faced with this conundrum you should perhaps question your tax position, maybe there's something racist about it? I'm glad that some conservative intellectuals are seeing the Republican for what it is, but honestly where have they been? They've been on Fox News, have they never watched it? Did they never listen to or read any criticism of the Republican party? Did they never hear of the birther movement or see its at least tacit support by Fox News (let alone any conservative talk radio)? They must have seen President Bush repeat that Islam is not our enemy, who did they think he was talking to?

I've long said that I'm willing to debate conservative positions on things, but the Republican party platforms and policies were crazy (climate change is not a hoax, inflation is in fact low, Obamacare has not destroyed America and is lowering the deficit, maybe more guns isn't the solution, BlackLivesMatter doesn't mean BlueLivesDon't, their budgets don't add up, people don't choose to be gay and therefore deserve equal rights, tort reform alone won't fix healthcare access, etc.) I've also said that the Republican intellectuals, like Reihan Salam, David Brooks, Ross Douthat, and George Will don't actually describe what the Republican Party represents. Nice to see that some of them are realizing this, but forgive me if I still reserve some judgement on their future pronouncements, their track record still isn't great.

Are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin Really BFFs?

I read a bunch of articles on the DNC email leaks and whether Russia is behind it (probably). There are also allegations as Kevin Drum wonders Are Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin Really BFFs? "The evidence the Putin would like to install Donald Trump in the White House is pretty strong. The evidence that Trump would pursue Russia-friendly policies in return is much more circumstantial, but still pretty substantial. Manchurian candidate jokes aside, this is something that deserves a lot more coverage than whatever Trump happened to tweet last night."

I hope journalists are investigating and we get to the bottom of this. I tweeted to @HowardLikedThis this Josh Marshall article from yesterday, Trump & Putin. Yes, It's Really a Thing

Not Politics: Some Random Tech Stuff

Researchers find over 100 spying Tor nodes that attempt to compromise darknet sites

These nodes -- ordinary nodes, not exit nodes -- sorted through all the traffic that passed through them, looking for anything bound for a hidden service, which allowed them to discover hidden services that had not been advertised. These nodes then attacked the hidden services by making connections to them and trying common exploits against the server-software running on them, seeking to compromise and take them over.

The researchers used "honeypot" .onion servers to find the spying computers: these honeypots were .onion sites that the researchers set up in their own lab and then connected to repeatedly over the Tor network, thus seeding many Tor nodes with the information of the honions' existence. They didn't advertise the honions' existence in any other way and there was nothing of interest at these sites, and so when the sites logged new connections, the researchers could infer that they were being contacted by a system that had spied on one of their Tor network circuits.

MIT’s anonymous online communications protocol Riffle could beat Tor at its own game

In addition to wrapping messages in multiple layers of encryption (the eponymous technique of Tor, “The Onion Router”), Riffle adds two extra measures meant to baffle would-be attackers.

First, servers switch up the order in which received messages are passed on to the next node, preventing anyone scrutinizing incoming and outgoing traffic from tracking packets using metadata.

Then comes a two-part measure to prevent a malicious server from simply replacing real messages with dummies and tracking a single target one. Messages are sent from the user to all servers, not just one — and outgoing messages must be signed with an independently verifiable mathematical proof that they are the ones the server received. This way, any server tampering with messages will be spotted at once.

LittleSis is a free database of who-knows-who at the heights of business and government. "A unique resource for investigating cronyism, conflicts of interest, and systemic corruption."

Ars describes Learning to code as a 30-year-old kid with Apple’s Swift Playgrounds

Pretty interesting story of how Feedly tracked down a performance problem: What Goes Down Better Come Up a.k.a. Adventures in Hbase Diagnostics

Here's another where Stack Overflow fixed an outage because of a malformed post an regular expressions: Outage Postmortem - July 20, 2016

Bye Bye GOP?

Digby says Bye Bye GOP. I'm not sure I agree on all of this, but it's a pleasant read.

The last two decades have been disastrous for the conservative movement and not just because it 'ran its course' or 'matured.' The three pillars of conservatism, traditional values, free market economics and a strong national defense all failed and failed in rather spectacular fashion.

Social conservatism has been reduced from what was once a dominant political and cultural force to a rear guard action fighting to roll back abortion rights in the states and tilting at windmills to ban birth control.  The gay rights movement has successfully left them reeling, so much so that even Donald Trump gave an awkward shout out to the LGBTQ community in his speech last night promising to protect them from Muslim terrorists. The culture warriors are still toiling away, particularly on their new 'religious liberty' legal line of attack but the fact that the large evangelical base is ardent in their support for a New York libertine with children from three different wives has exposed their heretofore unseen flexible virtue. They will no longer be able to credibly attack the Democrats for their allegedly loose morals.

The failure of the conservative national security philosophy was laid bare by the Bush administration's Iraq war debacle. The vast majority of the people in that hall in Cleveland undoubtedly cheered George Bush's disastrous policies at the time assuming that all wars would be glorious antiseptic (for America) successes like the first Gulf War. Their Vietnam propaganda had led them to misunderstand the practical restraints that exist around US military power and they believed that the war machine in the hands of a Republican could only bring victory. They learned otherwise and today they are supporting a man whose national security policy is completely incoherent but who promises to make the world 'respect' us again.

Finally the financial crisis exposed the risk inherent in free-market economics and the idea that all you have to do is keep interest rates low, cut taxes and let the brilliant masters of the universe do their magic. It turned out that without some restraints these financial geniuses could not help but turn into degenerate gamblers and the low tax dogma resulted in dangerous income inequality. The instability of the middle class and the stalling out of traditional social and economic mobility created the environment for a flim flam artist like Trump to exploit the resultant insecurity.

All that's left of the 'three-legged stool' of conservatism is the seat --- racism, nativism and xenophobia. That's what Trump is running on. And it's also failing. As you can see by the words of Ana Navarro or Ted Cruz, John Kasich or Jeb Bush or the whole staff of National Review, the party is splitting over that issue as well. The conservative movement as we've known it is disintegrating."

I think nationally conservatism is losing, but not at the state level, conservatism is alive and strong there. And regardless of what happens, Republicans will still "attack the Democrats for their allegedly loose morals". While many are no longer interested in fighting far off wars, I don't think they understand the financial crisis well enough to blame on the free market, instead they blame Barney Frank and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

WonkBlog says However divided you think our politics are, this chart shows that it’s actually way worse.

This new analysis has some important similarities and differences with other measures of polarization. The most well-known partisanship metric is based on lawmakers' votes, not on their speech. That measure also shows partisanship rising sharply in the modern era.

But the vote-based measure shows the increase starting in about the 1970s, rather than the mid-1990s. And it also shows a high degree of polarization back in the late 1800s. This has led many political scientists to argue that our current divided politics aren't necessarily an anomaly, but rather a return to a historic norm after a period of relative partisan unity.

But the economists' analysis of political language tells a very different story, one in which the current state of partisan warfare is unprecedented. You can see how the two measures differ in the following chart from the economists' paper.

It may boil down to a difference between action and speech. Politicians today may be voting along partisan lines similar to how lawmakers worked in the late 1800s. But today's political rhetoric — the ways lawmakers frame their arguments and try to portray the arguments of the opposing side — may be more radically divided than they've been at any point in the historic record.

Trump

Vox did a Fact check: Donald Trump’s speech at the Republican National Convention, not that it will sway anyone.

FactCheck.org did theirs too, FactChecking Trump’s Big Speech

Matt Yglesias points out Donald Trump’s law and order acceptance speech didn’t feature any actual crime policies.

Donald Trump devoted all of one sentence to his solution for what he cited as the biggest problem facing the nation in his acceptance speech for the Republican nomination:

I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job done.

That’s it.

He’s been running for president for more than a year, and crime has never been part of his program. He and his campaign manager just ginned it up over the past couple of weeks as an opportunistic reaction to the shootings of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge. There’s nothing all that unusual about campaigns pivoting to new issues rapidly. But when a normal campaign decides it wants to talk about an issue, it has the team put together some policy ideas.

Usually there’s a PDF, a short-form summary, and then some bullet points that can be referenced in speeches or television ads or picked up by surrogates. But to do that, you need a candidate who’s willing to put in the work. He needs to build a campaign team. He needs to consult with experts. He needs to decide what he thinks. Trump can’t be bothered.

The reason Trump doesn’t have anything to say about any of this is that he’s too lazy to look into it and come up with anything. And that’s why even his one lame idea — hire the best people and work with them — can’t be counted on. The president really does have to do a lot of hiring of people and a lot of managing of the interagency and intergovernmental process, and, like a lot of presidential stuff, it can all get a little tedious.

And given his picks so far, of his staff and of his convention speakers, he hasn't demonstrated the ability to hire the best people. This follows Matt's piece from yesterday Donald Trump's New York Times interview reveals a dangerously lazy mind at work.

The problem with Trump is not just the specific things he says but the casual way in which he says them and the comical “logic” that ties them together. Most of all, it’s the repetition — the fact that it keeps happening without Trump showing any capacity for growth or any interest in doing the work that would make him better at answering questions. For better or worse, Trump is now the GOP nominee, and there are hundreds of professional Republican Party politicians and operatives around the country who would gladly help him become a sharper, better-informed candidate. It doesn’t happen because he can’t be bothered. It’s terrifying.

And today he says This week we saw that the Republican Party — not just Trump — is the problem.

But these establishment speeches were, on their own terms, fairly bonkers. Their slams on Clinton veered, repeatedly, into tinfoil hat territory. They were completely out of touch with the state of the economic recovery. They relied heavily on the idea that President Obama could defeat ISIS through rote incantation of magic words. And while they avoided most of Trump’s big crazy policy ideas, they did so mostly by avoiding speaking about any policy ideas at all.

The problem wasn’t Trump’s relatives or Scott Baio; it was largely the delegates themselves. Rank and file activists reared on a generation’s worth of Rush Limbaugh and Fox News sat through a pathetic conclave in which governors and senators stooped to talk-radio antics in a desperate quest for applause, only to be trounced by Laura Ingraham — a real deal talk radio host who, even more than Trump himself, perfectly captured the mood of a party that’s become completely indifferent to the work of governance.

Andrew Prokop says Donald Trump is a con artist, and his RNC speech is his biggest con yet.

Trump’s speech hinges on the idea that crime is surging to terrifying levels. But this simply isn’t borne out by the evidence. So to make his case, Trump uses a combination of cherry-picked and out-of-context statistics, incomplete data, and flat out erroneous information to invent a crisis.

Donald Trump just cited our data on homicides. Here's that 17% increase he mentioned. https://t.co/HZkEr0nfd2 pic.twitter.com/WDxQYrN8X5

— Max Ehrenfreund (@MaxEhrenfreund) July 22, 2016

Usually when I read [Donald Trump’s Convention Speech Rings Terrifying Historical Alarm Bells](https://theintercept.com/2016/07/21/donald-trumps-convention-speech-rings-terrifying-historical-alarm-bells/) it's referring to Germany in the 1930s, not Plato's *Republic* from 2,400 years ago.

Tyranny, says Socrates in The Republic, is actually “an outgrowth of democracy.” And would-be tyrants always in every instance claim to be shielding regular people from terrible danger: “This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when he first appears above ground he is a protector.”

And today's Trump press conference was crazy. Trump Goes Nuts in Post-Convention Press Conference

Ivanka Trump introduces Donald, reads aloud from DNC platform.

Jessica Winter writes in Slate, Ivanka Trump introduces Donald, reads aloud from DNC platform.

Let’s pause for a moment. Ivanka Trump is talking about a man who once said, “I think that putting a wife to work is a very dangerous thing.” A man whose campaign has been sued for gender discrimination and that, according to an analysis by the Boston Globe, pays its female employees one-third less than its male employees. A man who once called pregnancy “an inconvenience for a business” and who threw a tantrum when a lawyer in a deposition needed to take a preplanned break to pump breast milk for her three-month-old baby, calling her “disgusting.” A man whose campaign manager, Paul Manafort, stated shortly before her speech that Trump can appeal to women because “their husbands can't afford to be paying for the family bills.” This is the man, according to Ivanka Trump, whom we can trust to end pregnancy discrimination, close the gender wage gap, and bring affordable, presumably subsidized childcare to American families, despite no evidence of any of these plans in his performance as an executive, in his campaigning thus far, or in the Republican Party platform.

Donald Trump doesn’t want to make America great. He wants to make it afraid.

Ezra Klein, preaching to the choir, Donald Trump doesn’t want to make America great. He wants to make it afraid.

And this is what made Trump’s speech so truly ugly. It is one thing to whip up fear of the Other when the Other is a threat. But it is fully another to try to scare the shit out of Americans because you’re afraid they won’t vote for you unless they’re terrified. It is demagogic to warn, on national television, of foreign criminals 'roaming' our streets simply because you’re behind in the polls. It’s telling that Trump fears only the threats that can be blamed on outsiders while ignoring the more lethal, more pervasive killers that afflict the citizenry.

Trump’s speech was a procession of horrors for which he did not even bother to propose real solutions. He has no actual fix to immigration, no theories on how to reduce crime. Here, his statement bordered on self-parody. 'I have a message for all of you: The crime and violence that today afflicts our nation will soon come to an end,' he said. 'Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.'

But then, perhaps there’s truth to his absurd promises: When the crisis is invented, the solution is simpler. Once Trump no longer needs the nation to be afraid, he will stop scaring it. It is his nightmare, and only he can wake us from it."

The Divinity of Donald Trump

Really liked this segment from last night. "Jordan Klepper speaks to Pastor Mark Burns, one of Donald Trump's religious supporters, to find out how the GOP presidential hopeful stacks up as a Christian." The best part is at the end.

Donald Trump’s NATO comments are the scariest thing he’s said

Vox: Donald Trump’s NATO comments are the scariest thing he’s said

The absolutely crucial point about NATO is that it functions on the basis of credible guarantee. The point of NATO is to deter war, by convincing hostile powers like Russia that the US would 100 percent defend its NATO allies. But since there’s no formal legal way to force the United States to defend its allies, this deterrence hinges on the idea that the American leadership is deeply committed to upholding its word and agreements in Europe.

This is why, historically, there has been an ironclad, bipartisan commitment to NATO allies. For NATO to work, everyone needs to understand that America’s commitment to its allies is not a partisan football, hinging on who happens to win an election in any given year. It is a fundamental, unchanging part of American grand strategy, one that is and always will be a core American commitment.

With a few stray words, Trump has done serious damage to perception. He has made it seem that US commitment to NATO is much weaker than it is, that it could be overturned with any one election.

He goes on:

But note that Trump also refused to say unequivocally that he wouldn’t abide by the NATO treaty. “I don’t want to tell you what I’d do because I don’t want Putin to know what I’d do,” he said.

But the entire point of NATO is that Putin needs to know what America will do. If he knows the US will defend the Baltics, then he will likely back off. If he knows the US won’t defend the Baltics, then we can have the break up of NATO — which would be quite bad, but wouldn’t immediately risk World War III.

The nightmare scenario, though, is that Putin’s confidence in NATO is undermined even though the United States, under either Trump or Clinton, remains committed to defending its treaty allies. That’s the scenario under which misperceptions potentially escalate into an actual war between the world’s two largest nuclear powers.

Matt Yglesias rips apart his comments, Donald Trump's New York Times interview reveals a dangerously lazy mind at work. Which completely fits with the idea that he's going to delegate *everything* to his VP.

Movie Review: Ghostbusters

I watched the original Ghostbusters a couple of years ago and really enjoyed it. It's funny, had an original story, memorable characters and lines. The original is 30 years old, so I guess it's time for a remake. There was controversy that it's an all-female cast but I didn't care about that. Once Starbuck was recast as a woman in the Battlestar Galactica reboot it should be clear that you have to wait and see what happens. While I'm not a huge fan of Melissa McCarthy she's clearly a comedy star of the moment. And Kristen Wiig, Kate McKinnon and Leslie Jones are all very funny on SNL (though I grew a bit tired of Wiig).

So how is the new Ghostbusters? Meh. And I think that's being a bit generous. While it has moments, I didn't find it that funny and it doesn't hold together as a story. It's not character driven, it's a collection of lines.

First off, there was talk of this being a soft remake or following on from the original film. This isn't that, it's a remake. This is not a world where Venkman, Ray,, Egon and Winston saved NYC from ghosts. That's fine. I'm going to compare it to the original because it's begging to be. It's called Ghostbusters, it uses three versions of the original theme, the premise is the same, and there are cameos by practically every member of the original cast and some of the same catch phrases are used.

There are two big flaws with this movie, characters and story. Let's start with characters.

The original has the dorky genius (Egon), the boyish genius (Ray) and the smart-alec lazy scammer (Venkman). Bill Murray drove the plot, getthing them thrown out of university, starting a business, trying to date Sigourney Weaver. He was also our entry point into the story since he didn't believe in ghosts at first either. You believe in the tech in this world because Egon is so smart he could probably make it all. And Ray is the go between, smart enough to have a conversation with Egon, and boyish enough to relate to Venkman and to have fun, which lets us have fun. Winston is just tacked on but the other supporting characters work. Dana is the everywoman who's then posessed, Rick Moranis is silly, Annie Potts is snarky and Walter Peck is the asshole villain though he also just wants to protect the city, just from our heroes.

In the remake the characters are more like SNL skit characters. Abby is the character McCarthy always plays, brash and trying to be smart but actually really dumb. It's worked for her in many films, but I never liked this character. My favorite parts of Spy were when she was actually competent. Erin (Wiig) is supposed to be smart, she's about to get tenure and thinks Abby silly but she's constantly doing dumb things and acting silly; which is just wrong for a character who is setup to redeem herself. Holtzmann (McKinnon) is the Egon character, she's more in the background and invents all the crazy tech. She's always doing weird things in the back of a scene, kind of reminding of Bang Bang in The Brothers Bloom though she has more of a role. I found her very funny in this but was always reminded of her SNL characters. The glasses and funny looks worked well, the cut away to randomly eating a can of Pringles ("salty parabolas") didn't. Patty is the most believable character and like Winston joins the group halfway through. If you've ever seen Leslie Jones just picture how she would react to anything in Ghostbusters and you have this character. She's loud and angry and very funny ("Baby, if I knew what is was, I wouldn't have called it a 'weird sparking thing'.").

The other main character is the secretary Kevin played by Chris Hemsworth. He's funny but is so dumb that's he's just a caricature; he covers his eyes (though his lensless glasses) when he hears loud noises. He's clearly meant to be a gender reversed hot dumb secretary, but in the original Annie Potts was perhaps the most competent person in the company. Is it funny that Wiig can't see his incompetance because of his hotness? Perhaps, though it's less funny than social commentary. It also seems completely against her character. McCarthy can see his incompetance but doesn't acknowledge his hotness. Is that funny? It wasn't to me and it's not a social commentary so it just seemed silly.

The real problem with the characters is that they aren't used to drive the story. No one really has an arc. The closest thing to one is Erin wanting to get tenure or recognition, but that's dropped completely. The original had the Ghostbusters become famous and that's before they saved the whole city. This one oddly doesn't do that, even when they save an entire rock concert in which no one runs away from a giant ghost even when they realize it's not part of the act. The city government wants to shut them down to prevent panic, but no one is panicing or even recognizing them. And the city says they know of the ghosts and will deal with them when they clearly don't and can't.

The original had a bad government guy that felt the Ghostbusters were unsafe (they were) and was driven mad by Venkman's taunts; it was character driven. The mayor wasn't a fool. He just didn't believe in ghosts at first (which is a plot point because all the normal characters don't) and then is swayed by logic which also happened to be funny: "If I'm wrong, nothing happens! We go to jail - peacefully, quietly. We'll enjoy it! But if I'm right, and we can stop this thing... Lenny, you will have saved the lives of millions of registered voters." Dan Ackroid's boyishness (remember him loving the fire pole) pays off at the end with him being the cause of the giant marshmallow man. In this one we just get a giant dough boy for no real reason.

There are certainly bits I laughed at, and I think that everyone will laugh at something, but at least in my theater, there was nothing that everyone laughed at, in fact it there were only a few things that more than a few people laughed at together. They just threw together at a lot of individual lines and hoped enough sticks to find something for everyone. I'm not impressed by that. The only running joke is about McCarthy getting take out soup and while it works it's not related to the plot or the story.

I'm happy to see that Half in the Bag agrees with me, though they liked it way less than I did. I thought lines and some of the minor characters were funny, but not enough to sustain a two hour movie.

Even the Opening Prayer Was Outrageous

Here's the benediction from day one of the RNC:

Hello Republicans! I'm paster Mark Burns from the great state of South Carolina. I'm gonna pray and I'm gonna give the benediction. You know why? Because we are electing a man in Donald Trump who believes in the name of Jesus Christ! And Republicans we got to be united because our enemy is not other Republicans but is Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party! Let's pray together.

Father God, in the name of Jesus, Lord, we’re so thankful for the life of Donald Trump. We’re thankful that you are guiding him, you're are giving him the words to unite this party, this country, that we together can defeat the liberal Democratic Party, to keep us divided and not united, because we are the United States of America, and we are the conservative party under God.

To defeat every attack that comes against us protect the life of Donald Trump, give him the words, give him the peace, give him the power and the authority to be the next president of the United States of America. In Jesus' name, if you believe it shout Amen!

I know that this is religion and not logic, but I don't understand. Does he want to be united or divided? Does he want to unite the country or defeat Democrats? The only way this construct makes sense if Democrats aren't part of the country and I've got a problem with that.