Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires Republicans to act in good faith.

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

Since we are repeating ourselves, let me just say fuck that.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

There are some who say that there are too many strawmen arguments on this blog.

America is going up in flames. The NYTimes fawns over MAGA celebrities. No longer a real newspaper.

A tremendous foreign policy asset… to all of our adversaries.

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. keep building.

Speaking of republicans, is there a way for a political party to declare intellectual bankruptcy?

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

The rest of the comments were smacking Boebert like she was a piñata.

Just because you believe it, that does not make it true.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Not loving this new fraud based economy.

Narcissists are always shocked to discover other people have agency.

… riddled with inexplicable and elementary errors of law and fact

How any woman could possibly vote for this smug smarmy piece of misogynistic crap is beyond understanding.

You cannot shame the shameless.

Is trump is trying to break black America over his knee? signs point to ‘yes’.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

I really should read my own blog.

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Late Night Open Thread: Prosecutors Consider Sam Bankman-Fried Incorrigible

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And they make a good argument, IMO. Per the Associated Press:

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s orchestration of one of history’s largest financial frauds in his quest to dominate the cryptocurrency world deserves a prison sentence of 40 to 50 years, federal prosecutors on Friday told a federal judge.

Prosecutors made the recommendation in papers filed in Manhattan federal court in advance of a March 28 sentencing, where a judge will also consider a 100-year prison sentence recommended by the court’s probation officers and a request by defense lawyers for leniency and a term of imprisonment not to exceed single digits.

Bankman-Fried, 32, was convicted in November on fraud and conspiracy charges after his dramatic fall from a year earlier when he and his companies seemed to be riding a crest of success that had resulted in a Super Bowl advertisement and celebrity endorsements from stars like quarterback Tom Brady and comedian Larry David.

Some of his biggest successes, though, resulted from stealing at least $10 billion from investors and customers between 2017 and 2022 to buy luxury real estate, make risky investments, dispense outsized charitable donations and political contributions and to buy praise from celebrities, prosecutors said.

“His life in recent years has been one of unmatched greed and hubris; of ambition and rationalization; and courting risk and gambling repeatedly with other people’s money. And even now Bankman-Fried refuses to admit what he did was wrong,” prosecutors wrote…

They said crimes reflecting a “brazen disrespect for the rule of law” had depleted the retirement funds and nest eggs of people who could least afford to lose money, including some in war-torn or financially insecure countries, and had harmed others who sought to “break generational poverty” only to be left “devastated” and “heartbroken.”

“He knew what society deemed illegal and unethical, but disregarded that based on a pernicious megalomania guided by the defendant’s own values and sense of superiority,” prosecutors said…

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War for Ukraine Day 754: A Brief Monday Night Update

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I’m still fried, it’s been another long day, so just a brief update tonight. Once I get through this week, things should even out a bit. Basically, I’ve been both the gorilla and the bear in the video below for the past week.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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Monday Night Open Thread

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At this point I am a nervous ball of anxiety walking around making sure I have not missed anything. I’m planning on just putting the cats in the car before bed and letting them acclimate over night while I am not around to hear their bullshit, so their space in the car is all ready to go:

Monday Night Open Thread 4

My luggage except my travel bag is in the carrier on top, in the front seat I have a small electric cooler to keep beverages and Steve’s insulin. Everything else is staying. I’m not really leaving any clothes because I didn’t bring a helluva lot of stuff, and besides, if I keep disciplined and continue to watch what I eat, none of them are going to fit in six months when I come back anyway.

Speaking of weight loss, I am down 32 lbs since what I refer to as “Peak John Cole” and I am down over 20 since I got here. I’ve really gotten quite used to this new way of doing things, which is basically to exercise a lot more, and I basically don’t eat during the day. After the first week or so, I don’t even really get hungry during the day- and I was never a big morning eater anyway. So basically I just exercise, drink tons of water, and then just eat from the hours of 4-9 pm. Will I always do this? I have no fucking idea. It’s working for now and I am definitively a “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it” kind of guy. If I get super hungry I’ll have a healthful snack, but those times are few and far between. Am I grumpy during the day without eating? Yes, but that is because I am awake and not because I am hungry.

At any rate, I am sad to leave. The sun is a nice thing and I wish there was more of it back in West By God. I am also glad I am getting out of here before the sun becomes a weapon against all mankind. And it’s time to start getting things ready for the garden and I have to power wash the house, and the front porch needs to be painted, and Gerald ripped down 2/3 of my ridiculously sized deck because I could not afford either mentally or financially to keep repairing the thing and replacing boards every year and I never really used it anyway, so now I need to go paint it, and move all the plants that were surrounding the deck but are now just in the middle of the yard because there was no deck.

At any rate, I’ll holler at you from some Red Roof Inn or some other place in the midwest tomorrow night. Be nice to each other for a fucking change.

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Monday Evening Open Thread: Readership Capture

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In the ‘national divorce’ the GOP loves to talk about, Dems already got ice cream, football, Taylor Swift…

Genuinely good news, assuming it happens:


 
… Aaand, another development from the Trump Crime Cartel:

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Three Months That Changed The World (Respite)

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Time for another thread, and perhaps a break from our exhausting round of ragegasms.

I don’t have anything particularly useful to offer, so I’m afraid that what you get is some random musing on some science-y stuff.

Yesterday afternoon I was reading a fascinating essay by Abraham Pais* on Einstein and quantum theory (as one does).  I was rolling along when this passage brought me to a screeching halt:

In the last four months of 1859 there occurred a number of events which were to change the course of science.

On the twelfth of September, Urbain Jean Joseph Le Verrier (1811-1877)submitted to the French Academy the text of a letter to Hervé Faye (1814 1902) in which he recorded that the perihelion of Mercury advances by thirty-eight seconds per century due to “some as yet unknown action on which no light has been thrown,” (Le Verrier, 1859). The effect was to remain unexplained until the days of general relativity.** On the twenty-fourth of November a book was published in London, entitled On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, by Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882). Meanwhile on the twentieth of October Gustav Kirchhoff (1859) from Heidelberg submitted his observation that the dark D– lines in the solar spectrum are darkened still further by the interposition of a sodium flame. As a result, a few weeks later he proved a theorem and posed a challenge. The response to Kirchhoff’s challenge led to the discovery of the quantum theory.

I know, I know.  While Darwin’s book was pretty much instantly understood to open enormous new vistas in the study of the living world, no contemporary observers could have had more than a twitch of recognition of the significance of either Mercury’s motion or what would come from a deep dive into the electromagnetic spectrum.  But in hindsight we can (as Pais did) see those three months as a watershed, a before and after moment in the making of modern science, and hence of so much of our allegedly modern lives.

Three Months That Changed The World (Respite)

The economic historian Brad DeLong has made the case that 1870 or so was a critical turning point, the moment when humankind at last broke out of Malthusian trap that had capped growth and the chance for an ever increasing fraction of humankind to enjoy lives that exceed subsistence. He makes a strong argument, IMHO, but what strikes me is the way the last half of  the nineteenth century was genuinely a break with the past across so much of human experience, for ill (see, e.g. this) and very much for good.

My book in progress (out next spring) looks at one of those shifts, born of the long struggle to understand the mechanisms of infectious disease that came to a climax in the 1870s and 1880s. Pais here points to parallel leaps in other scientific domains. There’s no doubt that a raft of technologies born of various sciences made everyday life in the last third of the century meaningfully different across growing swathes of the globe than what one’s parents or grandparents had experienced in recent decades.

All of which to say is that I’m finding it both fun and provoking to look into that time.  History does not repeat itself, but, as they say, it knows the chords. I’m hearing a lot of resonances between our own time and what was going on about one hundred and fifty years ago.

That’s enough late-night dorm room meandering from me.  What do y’all think?  Leaving the miseries of minute-by-minute politics aside for a moment, how radical a shift in our understanding of and engagement of the world have we gone through over the last while?  What are the odds we’ll find a way to turn any such new ideas into human flourishing.

Or, if you’d rather, MLB’s Opening Day is ten days away.*** That’s fair game too.

Which is to say, this thread is as open as are at this blessed moment of possibility each team’s chances of winning the World Series.

*Pais was a physicist, a friend of Einstein and Bohr, the biographer of both men, and someone I had the good fortune to know, albeit slightly. One afternoon we got to walk around the Prague Jewish cemetery together; it was a truly moving hour or so.

**I tell the story of Le Verrier’s Mercury discovery and the at once serious and comic scientific quest that followed in The Hunt for Vulcan. It’s a fun read, if I do say so as shouldn’t.

***I, for one, do not take this coming Wednesday’s two game set in South Korea as baseball’s opening day. YMMV.

Image: Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving that Lecture on the Orrery… c. 1766.

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Trump: Bottled in Bond

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Seems our favorite adjudged rapist and fraudster is having a spot of bother raising half a billion:

Trump: Bottled in Bond

[That link leads to Friedman’s feed, as the post itself seems to be visible only to Bluesky users.]

TL:DR–no one in the rather small universe of insurance companies that provide such bonds will take on such an enormous sum without cash or cash-equivalent collateral.

Trump: Bottled in Bond 1

What I found particularly interesting was the remark in an insurance broker’s affirmation that most of the handful of companies that do handle transactions on this scale cap their exposure at $100 million.

That suggests to me that even if Judge Engeron were to reduce the bond to, say, the principle amount without interest (high in the $300 millions) or even just to cut the demand in half ($232 million) Trump would still have a big hill to climb. And even at the lower amount, he’d still be on the hook for a 4% premium, or over $5 million in ready money.

[ETA: to repeat, I am not a lawyer, but if I’ve read actual lawyers correctly, the bond has to cover 110% of the judgment, so if Engeron does not drop the amount required Trump needs to raise or get surety for over $500 million.  That’s kinda of a lot of money even for a real billionaire.]

Not to mention that Trump and his attorneys did not exactly ingratiate themselves with this judge.  That shouldn’t and maybe won’t make a difference to Engeron’s engagement with the merits of their argument, but (recalling that IANAL) it seems likely that the quality of mercy may be just a bit strained in this instance.

In possibly unrelated news, popcorn futures opened significantly higher in the morning markets.

As open as Trump’s books aren’t, this thread is.

Image: Victor Dubreuil, Barrels of Money, c. 1897

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Monday Morning Open Thread: Are You Better Off?…

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My Irish-American Nana, the lace-curtain one, would’ve had a phrase for this: Irish schmaltz. There’s a particular kind of faith-and-begorra blarney that hides a knife, and President Biden is gifted in its use: The Kennedy family, which has given so much to America & Democratic politics, is always welcome here. But RFK Jr — the closest you’ll get is if you take the visitors tour, assuming you can score a ticket.

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