Month: February 2024

The Mar-a-Lago Raid and Election 2024

Earlier today I posted “Trump vs. Biden: 7 (My Unvarnished Perspective)“, in which I said this:

Regardless of the polls and betting odds, I believe (today) that Trump will lose the election….

[Much discussion follows.]

That’s how it looks from here — as of today. Who knows what will happen in the next several months, or how it will affect the outcome of the election? I don’t.

Soon after that, Tristan Justice posted “Former Director Gina Haspel Hid the CIA’s Role in Russiagate for Years” (The Federalist, February 15, 2024). (He calls it Russiagate; I call it Obamagate, for reasons you will understand if you read my page, “Obamagate and Beyond“.)

There are two striking things about Justice’s post. The first is that it points to the kind of event that could drastically affect the outcome of this year’s presidential election — possibly moving the needle sharply in Trump’s direction. Here’s why (from Justice’s post):

The FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago last summer might have been a plot to protect deep state intelligence officials, according to sources who spoke with a team of independent journalists this week.

On Wednesday, journalists Michael Shellenberger, Matt Taibbi, and Alex Gutentag published part 2 of an expose on the role of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in orchestrating the years-long crusade to frame former President Donald Trump as a Russian plant. The article posted on Shellenberger’s Substack, Public, outlined how intelligence officials fretted over the presence of a classified “binder” in Trump’s possession that former CIA Director Gina Haspel had guarded for years….

One unnamed source cited as “knowledgeable about the case” called the binder “Trump’s insurance policy.” Trump was apparently “very concerned about having it and taking it with him because it was his road map” of the Russian collusion hoax….

“The documents in question are said to contain information about the legal justification for those investigations, or more specifically, the lack of justification, among other things. Should more of that information be made public, it might implicate a long list of officials in serious abuses,” Public reported. “Questions like these may be answered if the 10-inch thick binder of sensitive documents about the origins of the Russia probe is made public. Fear for reputations and careers, not national security, is what has intelligence officials panicked.”

The second striking thing is that I surmised the true purpose of the Mar-a-Lago raid on September 13, 2022, when I posted “Why the Mar-a-Lago Raid?“. There, I summarized the conspiracy against Trump which I detail in “Obamagate and Beyond“, and added this:

Where does the raid on Mar-a-Lago fit into all of this? The raid was a fishing expedition to see how much information Trump had acquired about the origins and workings of the [Trump-Russia hoax] conspiracy. The unprecedented nature of the raid, the obviously flimsy pretext for it, and the selective leaks by the FBI all suggest desperation on the part of the conspirators.

One of those conspirators is Biden, of course, who was vice president when the conspiracy began and who has much to gain from discrediting Trump, staying in office, and using his power to minimize the consequences of the exposure of his role in the Biden family’s influence-peddling scheme.

Trump vs. Biden: 7 (My Unvarnished Perspective)

The polls, on average, favor Trump. Although his lead isn’t statistically greater than zero, that’s okay for a Republican.

The betting odds are going against Biden. Bettors see him as much less likely to win than they did a week ago, mainly because of this passage from Special Prosecutor Robert Hur’s report on Biden’s “mishandling” of classified documents:

[A]t trial, Mr. Eiden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview of him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory. Based on our direct interactions with and observations of him, he is someone for whom many jurors will want to identify reasonable doubt. It would be difficult to convince a jury that they should convict him-by then a former president well into his eighties-of a serious felony that requires a mental state of willfulness.

Regardless of the polls and betting odds, I believe (today) that Trump will lose the election. It will happen because of his baggage (e.g., openly vindictive personality and resulting feuds, indictments, possible convictions), which will begin to weigh more heavily as voters actually decide which way to go.

With narrow wins in a few key States, Trump could win the election even if the overall popular vote goes against him by a couple of percentage points (just as he did in 2016). That’s what happened in 2016. I attribute that win to luck and surprise. Clinton’s lead in the polls and betting markets was so large that she seemed to be a shoo-in. As a result, the Democrats didn’t gear up to manufacture enough votes to win the close races that went Trump’s way and gave him an edge in the Electoral College.

Democrats geared up with a vengeance in 2020, with a lot of help from the Covid pandemic which boosted mail-in voting — the happy hunting ground of electoral fraudsters. Democrats will build on their successes of four years ago, while the GOP will try to play catch-up ball. But the GOP will fall short because (for the most part) it will confine its vote-generating operations to legal methods. Democrats (being leftists) will pull out all the stops and officials and judges (mostly Democrats and never-Trumpers) will cover for them.

There are people like me who will vote for Trump if he’s the GOP nominee only because we can’t abide what the Democrats are doing to the country. But there aren’t enough of us, I believe, to overcome Trump’s baggage. Moreover, Democrats still have plenty of time in which to recover from last week’s Biden fiasco — and they find a way to do it, with the enthusiastic aid of most of the media. In the end Biden — or whomever the Democrats nominate — will win in a rerun of 2020.

That’s how it looks from here — as of today. Who knows what will happen in the next several months, or how it will affect the outcome of the election? I don’t.

About the CIA and Trump

In case you missed the reports of how the CIA instigated spying by foreign intelligence agencies on Trump’s 2016 campaign, see Margot Cleveland’s “Sources Say U.S. Intelligence Agencies Tasked Foreign Partners with Spying on Trump’s 2016 Campaign“ (The Federalist, February 14, 2024). There’s more detail in Margot Cleveland’s “Did Our Intelligence Agencies Suggest the Russia Hoax to Hillary Clinton’s Campaign?” (The Federalist, February 15, 2024).

For a more complete picture of anti-Trump activities since 2016, see my page “Obamagate and Beyond“.

The Residue of a Powerful Government

The aphorism “luck is the residue of design” is attributed to Branch Rickey, a baseball, player, manager, and executive. Rickey’s long and successful career as a manager, general manager, and c0-owner of major league teams was marked the breaking baseball’s “color barrier” by signing Jackie Robinson, a future Hall-of-Famer, to a minor league contract.

It is widely believed that John Milton wrote something to the same effect, but I can’t find a source for that assertion.

There is a saying attributed to Seneca the Younger, a Roman philosopher: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” But that attribution is also doubtful. The saying attributed to Seneca the Younger is however a better expression of the concept that “luck is residue of design” is meant to capture.

Now that I’m done with that bit of etymology, I want to expand on the idea that luck is the residue of design.*

Design, or preparation, is the residue (result) of assiduous thought and planning Assiduous though and careful planning arise from conscientiousness and intelligence.

There are some cultures in which such traits are prized and rewarded. Those cultures become peaceful and prosperous. But when assiduous thought, careful planning, conscientiousness, and intelligence are no longer prized and rewarded, the culture is doomed to subside into mediocrity or worse.

When government goes beyond the bounds of defending citizens from each other and foreign enemies, and ventures into the realm of economic and social engineering, it undermines the system of rewards for assiduous thought, careful planning, conscientiousness, and intelligence. Worse yet, it fosters a culture that denigrates those traits.

Having observed the evolution of the culture of the United States for several decades, I can assure you that unless the power of government isn’t curtailed sharply and soon, it won’t be long before America resembles a third-world country — complete with a wealthy, smug oligarchy that doesn’t give a damn about the rest of us.

* Thanks to an esteemed correspondent, I have learned of two more — and better — quotations in the same vein. One is spuriously attributed to Thomas Jefferson: “The harder I work, the luckier I get.” The other is genuinely attributed to Louis Pasteur: “Dans les champs de l’observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés.” (“In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” From a lecture at the University of Lille on 7 December 1854.)

The Mainstream

When I hear the complaint that conservatives are “out of the mainstream,” this is what I visualize:

THE MAINSTREAM THEN


THE MAINSTREAM NOW

The mainstream has shifted considerably to the left in the past 90 years. Being in the mainstream of current political thought is no virtue; being out of the mainstream of current political thought is no vice.

“Licking” in the Age of Wokeness

Eons ago, when I was a freshman in college, I learned that “licking” was the art of adapting a story or novel to a movie script. That use of “licking” seems to have vanished, which is unsurprising in an age when actual licking (and other such things) is a staple of film fare.

In any event, I use “licking” here to mean the adaptation of a piece of literature to a script. The script in this case is that of Lessons in Chemistry, a 2023 release on Apple TV+, which in eight episodes veers wildly from the novel on which it is based: Lessons in Chemistry: A Novel, by Bonnie Garmus. The novel and the TV adaptation are set in the 1950s.

“Licking” sometimes involved changing the ending of the story. And the writers of the TV version certainly did that. But that was the least of their sins. The most of their sins was their feat of making Garmus’s story even more woke than the print version.

The book is a long, feminist rant. The TV adaptation is a feminist, racist rant, amplified through a bullhorn. Things that aren’t in the book but which are in the TV version:

  • Calvin Evans (the white, male protagonist) and Elizabeth Zott (the white, female protagonist) live in a black neighborhood.
  • There is a black neighbor woman (more about her below) who abandoned her law career to put her husband through medical school.
  • The same black woman leads a crusade to keep the corrupt, all-white, city council and greedy developers from replacing the neighborhood with a freeway.
  • Elizabeth Zott, who (for reason too convoluted to discuss here) becomes the host of a successful TV show about cooking (an early Julia Child). That much is in the books. But when Elizabeth alienates her sponsor — the maker of a hydrogenated shortening — she manages to replace that sponsor with … Tampax. Not in the book, but essential to the arch-feminist tone of the TV series.
  • Calvin Evans, as a child, is placed in an orphanage run by Catholic priests. That’s in the book. What’s not in the book is that he’s held back from adoption because the priests exploit his nascent brilliance as a chemist to distill and sell bootleg whiskey.
  • A clergyman — white in the book, black in the TV show — helps Calvin’s daughter, Mad Zott, find the orphanage. The book’s clergyman didn’t know Calvin; the TV’s show’s clergyman was a long-lost friend.

Similar things can happen relatively infrequently -in life but when they’re packed into a single TV series, you know that you’re getting a message like this one:

  • White folks and black folks can get along just fine — as long as white folks are willing.
  • White folks who live among and socialize with black folks are open-minded, loving people. (How about white folks who live among or near violent black folks? Are they open-minded and loving or just stupid or too poor to move?)
  • Bad things happen to black folks because of white folks. (Hmm … that’s the theme of CRT, which fails to acknowledge the weighty burdens of lower intelligence and a culture of irresponsibility and violence.)
  • Catholic priests are b-a-a-d people, unless they’re homosexuals. (Sodomizing young boys is really bad, but it’s usually done by homosexuals, which is why the badness shown in the TV version skirted that issue.)

About that black neighbor woman: Like the black neighborhood, she didn’t exist in the book. The middle-aged, white housewife who befriended Elizabeth in the book had to be replaced by a younger, black housewife-lawyer-crusader. In other words, more of the same: arch-feminism and racism.

The book was a feel-good story that probably appealed mainly to white women in search of escape and a bit of inner rebellion. The TV series is a feel-good story for well-off white folks of the kind who hate Donald Trump and believe that anyone who might vote for him is a misogynist, racist Neanderthal.

Zeno Revisited (Again)

Bill Vallicella (Maverick Philosopher) asserts that

No one has successfully answered Zeno’s Paradoxes of Motion.  (No, kiddies, Wesley Salmon did not successfully rebut them; the ‘calculus solution’  is not a definitive (philosophically dispositive) solution.)

The link in the quoted passage leads to a post from 2009 in which BV addresses Zeno’s Regressive Dichotomy:

The Regressive Dichotomy is one of Zeno’s paradoxes of motion. How can I get from point A, where I am, to point B, where I want to be? It seems I can’t get started.

A_______1/8_______1/4_______________1/2_________________________________ B

To get from A to B, I must go halfway. But to travel halfway, I must first traverse half of the halfway distance, and thus 1/4 of the total distance. But to do this I must move 1/8 of the total distance. And so on. The sequence of runs I must complete in order to reach my goal has the form of an infinite regress with no first term:

. . . 1/16, 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, 1.

Since there is no first term, I can’t get started.

Zeno’s paradox rests on the assumption that a first step is an infinitesimal fraction of the distance to be traversed, a fraction that can never be resolved mathematically. But that is an obviously false and arbitrary assumption.

Zeno, had he been less provocative (though mundane), would have observed that first step in going from A to B is a random distance that depends on the stride of the traveler; it has nothing to do with the distance to be traversed.

Thus, the distance from point A to point B can be traversed in x strides, where

x = d/l

and

d = distance from A to B

l = average length of stride.

That’s all f-f-folks.

See also “Achilles and the Tortoise Revisited“.

What Does the “G” in “GDP” Stand For?

It stands for product, that is, the output of goods and services, denominated in dollars (current and inflation-adjusted).

It is therefore mystifying to read this, by Arnold Kling:

What is GDP supposed to measure? I think of it as a measure of economic activity, meaning goods and services bought in the market.

The fact that GDP omits the value of home production (cooking, cleaning, lawn-mowing, etc.) means that GDP is an incomplete measure of the total output of goods and services. The remedy for that omission would be to estimate the dollar value of those services if they were purchased at market prices.

Kling tries to get around that objection:

If I pay you to mow my lawn, your labor counts in GDP. If I mow my own lawn, my labor does not count in GDP. That might seem wrong, but I believe it is exactly right. I think of economic activity as specialization and trade. We exploit comparative advantage and the division of labor. The more we outsource, the better off we are….

People who think in terms of production complain that housework belongs in GDP. But I say that if a woman (or a man) engages in housework, that is economic malfunctioning. She should be able to outsource housework to machinery and/or someone she employs.

Economic activity isn’t specialization and trade. It’s the production and consumption of goods and services, however inefficiently. Those that are produced at home (or on the farm) aren’t necessarily inferior to those that are produced by someone else. A lot of people actually enjoy producing and consuming their own goods and services. To them, those goods and services are just as valuable (perhaps more valuable) than the things they could buy from someone else. I am also bothered by the implication that housework has no value unless it’s outsources, which demeans those women (and men) who do their own housework because they can’t afford to outsource it.

Take the case of an apple farmer who reserves a part of his output for consumption in the form of apples (simply eaten), applesauce, apple butter, apple pies and tarts, desserts that include apples and other fruits, etc. If he raises hogs, he probably includes apple peels in their slop. Why should those parts of his apple crop not be counted in GDP just because the farmer uses the apples instead of selling them?

Kling is on the wrong path. He should use his formidable brainpower to think of ways to count home production in GDP so that it better measures what it’s supposed to measure: the total value of things produced in the U.S.

A Weak Argument for Freedom of Speech

Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression), is (of course) an ardent proponent of freedom of speech. I like most of what Lukianoff posts on his Substack blog, The Eternally Radical Idea, but a recent post falls short of what I expect from him.

In “Mill’s Trident: An Argument Every Fan (or Opponent) of Free Speech Must Know“, Lukianoff writes:

John Stuart Mill’s observ[es] in his 1859 masterpiece “On Liberty” that in any argument there are only three possibilities: You are either wholly wrong, partially wrong, or wholly correct — and in each case free speech is critical to improving or protecting those positions.

Why? According to Lukianoff:

  • If you are wrong, freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.
  • If you are partially wrong, free speech and contrary viewpoints will help you get even closer to the truth.
  • If you are 100% correct (which is unlikely) you still need free speech for dissent, disagreement, and attempts to disprove you, both to check your arguments and to strengthen them.

This is an excellent example of preaching to the choir, albeit a relatively small one.

Mill’s arguments for freedom of speech omit a crucial assumption. There are people out there — perhaps a vast majority — who don’t seek the truth. They seek comfort in beliefs that they have acquired (often as a matter of belonging to the “right” group), and they seek to enforce those beliefs. Enforcement these days, is usually accomplished by laws, regulations, and the coercive use of state power (e.g., suppression of dissent from the Covid narrative by Big Tech execs anxious to retain their exemption from liability laws). Truth only gets in the way of comfort and power, the latter of which is a powerful elixir.

The truth, in short, is an inconvenience sought by the naïve, the powerless, and the increasingly rare person of principle.

As for On Liberty, it doesn’t deserve Lukianoff’s praise (or anyone else’s). See “On Liberty“, “My View of Mill, Endorsed“, and “The Harm Principle Revisited: Mill Conflates Society and State“.

Cloaks of Authority

From a commentary about the biblical significance of the cloak:

The use of cloaks as a symbol of authority is prevalent throughout the Old Testament. In ancient times, a cloak was a sign of status and power and was often worn by kings, priests, and other high-ranking officials.

There are many other symbols of authority; for example, a judge’s robe, a crown, a scepter, stars (on an epaulet), a corner office on the top floor of an elegant office building, and the Oval Office in the West Wing of the White House. Titles also confer authority, even without the trappings of a robe, a crown, and so on. But let us here call all such things cloaks of authority.

Cloaks of authority used to obscure the human beings in whom authority is vested. That is no longer the case in the age of the internet, which spreads truth and fiction in equal measure — and leaves it to the individual person to sort them. The sorting, of course, is done mainly in accordance with the individual’s preconceptions about who is “good” and who is “bad”. And most persons, it seems, seek out the truth or fiction that supports their preconceptions.

Nowhere is this state of affairs more evident than with respect to the presidency of the United States. Perhaps it’s just my faulty memory, but it seems to me that most voters used to believe that one candidate was better than the other, and they accordingly voted for that candidate. Now, it seems that most voters are fearful of what one or the other candidate might do if elected and vote against that candidate because he represents the greater of two evils.

Given that, the presidency (among many other positions of authority) is no longer held in awe, though it is regarded in fear by about half the populace. But even those citizens who support the incumbent do so, for the most part, because he is considered to be the lesser of two evils.

One might say that the imperial presidency is in decline because the “emperor” has no cloak.