CapitalistImperialistPig

After saying that there is no reason that a rich society should not provide a minimum of economic security to all its citizens, Hayek adds: Nor is there any reason why the state should not assist the individuals in providing for those common hazards of life against which, because of their uncertainty, few individuals can make adequate provision. Where, as in the case of sickness and accident, neither the desire to avoid such calamities nor the efforts to overcome their consequences are as a rule weakened by the provision of assistance— where, in short, we deal with genuinely insurable risks—the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong. There are many points of detail where those wishing to preserve the competitive system and those wishing to supercede it by something different will disagree on the details of such schemes; and it is possible under the name of social insurance to introduce measures which tend to make competition ...

Hayek claims that fascism and National Socialism arose partly due to the envy of the poor and educated for the more favorable positions of the unionized workers - the beneficiaries, in his view, of socialism's successes. They were quite ready to take over the methods of the older socialism but intended to employ them in the service of a different class. The movement was able to attract all those who, while they agreed on the desirability of the state controlling all economic activity, disagreed with the ends for which the aristocracy of the industrial workers used their political strength. Hayek, F. A.. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (Kindle Locations 3514-3517). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Interestingly, the founders or at least principal sponsors of US libertarianism made the same choice - to imitate Leninist tactics and methods.

So long as property is divided among many owners, none of them acting independently has exclusive power to determine the income and position of particular people—nobody is tied to any one property owner except by the fact that he may offer better terms than anybody else. Hayek, F. A.. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (Kindle Locations 3303-3306). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Perhaps you recall that it was precisely the issue of particular people being tied to any one property owner that exercised Paul Krugman and brought on your denigration. I added a few other instances of laws and contract structures having this effect. I'm sure you learned somewhere that actual serfdom was precisely the condition of workers being tied to one property owner. In the US today, it's common for students to graduate from university, or worse, fail to gradu...

I seem to recall having heard that Hayek published a Reader's Digest version of his Road. I should have looked for it. So far, he has expended about 25,000 words on saying (1)Government direction of the whole economy doesn't work, (2)Will restrict individual's freedom, and (3)Socialism is bad. Concision is not in his wheelhouse. Oops, I forgot one - the autobahn was an economic disaster because it wasn't carrying much traffic before the war. I guess he has also proclaimed - I can't say argued - that the development of Civilization (up to the invention of Socialism, anyway) has been a gradual expansion of individualism and individual rights - what a load of crap. Despite some advances in recent Centuries, the overall development has been almost opposite. I agree with the first three, but I'm really, really bored. I would at least like him to say something I could argue with, something that would surprise me, or be some kind of revelation, however minor.

We can rely on voluntary agreement to guide the action of the state only so long as it is confined to spheres where agreement exists. But not only when the state undertakes direct control in fields where there is no such agreement is it bound to suppress individual freedom. Hayek, F. A.. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (Kindle Locations 2568-2569). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition. Which of course is the whole point of the State. Most of Hayek so far has consisted of inveighing against the kind of central planning that nobody still believes in. it may have been an important message 80 years ago, but not so much today. My question is whether he has anything relevant to today.

It's pretty clear that all human society, from primitive band to tribe to civilization, is based on collective action. The most fundamental human skill is cooperation. The trouble with cooperation is that it carries evolutionary risk, the risk that something an individual does for the collective benefit will be exploited by cheats, thieves, and free riders. Thus, cooperation only works if those particular individualistic tendencies can be suppressed. In individual hunter-gatherer bands, such suppression is managed by an ethic and by punishment, the ethic being a collective consciousness and the punishments being ridicule, banishment, and execution. More complex societies evolved more elaborate means of control: myth, hierarchy, religion, and law. Perhaps civilization's greatest contribution in this regard was money, which greatly expanded the capability of cooperation via trade. Civilization also invented new instruments of collective action, like debt. All of these had...

Hayek's starting point, and slogging through 27% of the much prefaced and introduced edition of The Road to Serfdom I have, has only barely gotten me to that point, is that England and America (in the 1940s) were just arriving at a point that had already transformed Germany, Italy, and Russian into totalitarian states, and that the central agent of that transformation was socialism. Obviously that latter was true in the case of Russia. My first impression is that Hayek is a very narrow minded fanatic, who is heroically trying to force history into the Procrustean Bed of his own obsession. In particular it would seem to ignore long established authoritarian histories of all three nations as well as their recent social and economic convulsions. But I should wait to hear his argument. One thing I would note from one of the many prefaces, was that Hayek says: But, whatever the name, the essential point remains that all I shall have to say is derived from certain ultimate values. ...

A conservative movement, by its very nature, is bound to be a defender of established privilege and to lean on the power of government for the protection of privilege. The essence of the liberal position, however, is the denial of all privilege, if privilege is understood in its proper and original meaning of the state granting and protecting rights to some which are not available on equal terms to others. Hayek, F. A.. The Road to Serfdom: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition: Text and Documents--The Definitive Edition (The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek, Volume 2) (Kindle Locations 1230-1234). University of Chicago Press. Kindle Edition.

I read a lot, but most of what I read is not literary. From time to time I tackle a book blessed by the literary types, possibly just to try and convince myself I'm not a Philistine. Gravity's Rainbow and Infinite Jest are a couple of bricks I've read but been left more disappointed than impressed. Not that the authors lack talent and skill. I rather liked the books of Delillo and Franzen that I read - again just one of each, but I've never been impressed enough to read another, yet anyway. Haruki Murakami is often compared to the first three of these, but I'm already reading my fifth Murakami novel - this time, A Wild Sheep Chase, and as always, I'm sucked right in. Murakami is more accessible, I think, and his imaginative power more impressive. Also, his characters, who are all Japanese, feel more real and vivid to me than the Americans who populate the novels of the American writers mentioned above.

I'm tempted to send a copy of the book the National Security Advisor General McMaster. Think he would get it if I sent it to him at the White House?

When Curtis LeMay took over the Strategic Air Command (SAC) near the end of 1948, he found a disastrously unprepared force with no experience in realistic training. After some bloody pruning of the staff, he ordered a realistic simulated attack on Dayton Ohio by every aircraft SAC could get in the air. Richard Rhodes: Since Air Force intelligence could supply only vintage prewar aerial photographs of Soviet cities, LeMay gave his crews 1938 photographs of Dayton. He instructed them to bomb by radar from thirty thousand feet and to aim for industrial and military targets, not radar reflectors. “Oh, I’ll admit the weather was bad,” he recalled in retirement of the January 1949 mission. “There were a lot of thunderstorms in the area; that certainly was a factor. But on top of this, our crews were not accustomed to flying at altitude. Neither were the airplanes, far as that goes. Most of the pressurization wouldn’t work, and the oxygen wouldn’t work. Nobody seemed to know what life wa...

Josh Marshall: Though I wrote about the particulars yesterday afternoon, the picture only fully crystallized for me this afternoon. President Trump’s visit to Brussels/Europe wasn’t just another grab bag of impulsive aggression and gaffes. It wasn’t scattershot. It was quite clearly focused on destabilizing and perhaps eviscerating the NATO Alliance and somewhat secondarily, but relatedly, the European Union. This has been the strategic goal of Russia and before it the Soviet Union for decades. The sum total of everything that happened on this trip casts the entire Trump/Russia story in a decidedly more ominous light. ... Again, let’s go back to Brussels and NATO. Trump now has around him a number of advisors who if they are reasonably criticized on various grounds hold conventional pro-NATO views on Europe. Defense Secretary Mattis appears to be the most important of these. McMaster, Powell and others figure in the mix too. They apparently worked on him closely to make a clear sta...

Luboš and Mark Zuckerberg are both Harvard dropouts. Zuckerberg dropped out as a Sophomore when he got a zillion dollar idea. Lumo dropped out of the professorate for some other kind of reason. Like many who have actually earned a doctorate, Luboš is none too thrilled when rich guys like Z get one for just being rich. What really annoys him though, is that Zuckerberg said something about climate that conflicted with the Lumonator's climate delusions.

It looks like my former Montana compatriots are going to put Greg Gianforte in the house. Gianforte is one of those rich guys who puts the thug in Rethuglican, getting his fifteen minutes of national fame for beating up a reporter on election eve. Quite likely many of the voters had already voted before the incident made news, since MT has a lot of early voting, but it's not clear that the assault would have made a difference if it had occurred a week ago.

One of the bibles of Libertarianism is Friedrich von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom . It argues, so I read , that state control of the economy and centralized planning lead to the enslavement of the individual. I should note that I haven't read it, and don't actually plan to. Most of what I know of it comes from Wikipedia, linked above. At any rate, it seems clear to me that as with any religious document, its fans like to oversimplify and distort its message, usually to suit their own economic benefit. In particular, Hayek recognized an important role for government, especially in matters like protection of the environment, one of the favorite targets of many Libertarians. Hayek's book had many fans, including John Maynard Keynes and George Orwell, but Orwell, in particular, was careful to point out that there was more than one road to serfdom. From the linked Wikipedia article: George Orwell responded with both praise and criticism, stating, "in the negative...

In what the NYT has labelled an "enormous success" a big genome wide association study is reputed to have found a number of gene variants associated with intelligence: In a significant advance in the study of mental ability, a team of European and American scientists announced on Monday that they had identified 52 genes linked to intelligence in nearly 80,000 people. These genes do not determine intelligence, however. Their combined influence is minuscule, the researchers said, suggesting that thousands more are likely to be involved and still await discovery. Just as important, intelligence is profoundly shaped by the environment. Still, the findings could make it possible to begin new experiments into the biological basis of reasoning and problem-solving, experts said. They could even help researchers determine which interventions would be most effective for children struggling to learn. I'm not too impressed with the story. The second quoted paragraph is mislead...

News reports say that a small sinkhole has appeared in front of Mar a Lago, but the one that's going to suck the proprietor down is the one he is making with his own stupidity. The latest revelation is that Trump personally asked intelligence officials to shut down the Russia investigation: The Washington Post reported, citing unnamed current and former officials, that Trump asked Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats and NSA Director Michael Rogers to publicly deny that any evidence of collusion existed. He made that request after former FBI Director James Comey confirmed to the House Intelligence Committee that his bureau was conducting an investigation into whether there was any “coordination” between Russian officials and Trump’s associates during the campaign, according to the Washington Post. Two unnamed current and two unnamed former officials cited in the report said that Coats and Rogers deemed Trump’s request inappropriate and refused to do so. Trump made t...

George Marshall: George Marshall, who replaced Byrnes as Secretary of State in January 1947, told a Pentagon audience some years later, “I remember, when I was Secretary of State, I was being pressed constantly, particularly when in Moscow, by radio message after radio message, to give the Russians hell. . . . When I got back I was getting the same appeal in relation to the Far East and China. At that time, my facilities for giving them hell—and I am a soldier and know something about the ability to give hell—was one and a third divisions over the entire United States.1250 That is quite a proposition when you deal with somebody with over 260 and you have one and a third.” Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (p. 282). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition. The drastic US disarmament after World War II left the US at a drastic strategic disadvantage that made professional soldiers very nervous, especially when they looked at Stalin's quite different behavi...

We have a thoroughly Republican Congress and they would like to impeach the current Republican President almost as much as they would like to suffer the Mongolian fire torture. Nonetheless, I think that it's pretty likely that the President will not complete his term in office - not so much because of the misdeeds already committed as because of those he has yet to commit. This is a guy burning with resentment with next to no impulse control, an ignorant fellow with no self-awareness, who moreover is showing signs of incipient senility. Essentially all his troubles today are of his own making, caused or at least initiated by his lack of impulse control and terrible judgement. My guess is that sooner rather than later his own terrible judgement, or perhaps his response to external events, will collapse his remaining support and send the Republican Congress heading him for the exits.

I wish I could just enjoy mine at Trump's troubles, but unfortunately he can still destroy the planet, not to mention his capability to harm in a million smaller ways, not least by incompetence. For actual malice, though, this is a good one (Jordan Weisssman in Slate): According to Politico, President Trump told his staff this week that he wants to cut off a crucial set of subsidies that are paid to health insurers under Obamacare, a move that could potentially bring about the collapse of the law's coverage marketplaces. ... Many of Trump's advisor's, including Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price, apparently oppose the plan, because they “worry it will backfire politically if people lose their insurance or see huge premium spikes and blame the White House.” Which is a reasonable fear. Americans tend to blame their president for their personal misfortunes, particularly when they can easily trace them back to the discrete, rash actions of the man in the O...

Seth Myers via the NYT: “During a press conference this afternoon, President Trump said that his administration is getting things done at a record-setting pace. For example, most presidents take four years to finish a term, and it looks like Trump’s gonna get it done in, like, eight months.” — SETH MEYERS

I learned a lot of what I know about writing from Derek Hartfield. Almost everything, in fact. Unfortunately, as a writer, Hartfield was sterile in the full sense of the word. One has only to read some of his stuff to see that. His prose is mangled, his stories slapdash, his themes juvenile. Yet he was a fighter as few are, a man who used words as weapons. In my opinion, when it comes to sheer combativeness he should be ranked right up there with the giants of his day, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Sadly, however, he could never fully grasp exactly what it was he was fighting against. In the final reckoning, I suppose, that’s what being sterile is all about. Hartfield waged his fruitless battle for eight years and two months, and then he died. In June 1938, on a sunny Sunday morning, he jumped off the Empire State Building clutching a portrait of Adolf Hitler in his right hand and an open umbrella in his left. Few people noticed, though— he was as ignored in death as he had been in life....

Brad DeLong sees a Machiavellian Mike Pence maneuvering to make himself President: A Persian Dialogue About Mike Pence and Donald Trump... Artemisia: I am now on Team Bannon? Atossa: Why are you now on Team Bannon? Artemisia: Because Steve Bannon warned Donald Trump that firing James Comey would be big trouble. Also Rince Priebus. Atossa: But Trump listens to the last people he talked to. Why did he fire Comey then? Artemisia: Because Jared Kushner and Mike Pence told him it would be no problem. Atossa: And they got to him later. Artemisia: But why would Jared Kushner say firing Comey wouldn't be a big problem? Atossa: Because it was what Trump clearly wanted to hear. And Jared Kushner hasn't spent any time in Washington—he doesn't know much about how politics works. Artemisia: But Mike Pence knows a lot about how politics works! Atossa: Yup! Artemisia: Mike Pence knew it would be big trouble! Atossa: Yup! Artemisia: Why would Mike Pence do something like that...

I did not have sexual financial relations with that man, Mr. Putin. Depending on what the meaning of is is. Or something like that. I notice that Sean Spicer has taken to phrasing his denials in the form "The President denies..."

Shepard Smith on Fox News observed that the last time Trump got a bump in the polls was when he bombed Syria.

From the Washington Post, the comments by Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy from not quite a year ago: KIEV —A month before Donald Trump clinched the Republican nomination, one of his closest allies in Congress — House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy — made a politically explosive assertion in a private conversation on Capitol Hill with his fellow GOP leaders: that Trump could be the beneficiary of payments from Russian President Vladimir Putin. “There’s two people I think Putin pays: Rohrabacher and Trump,” McCarthy (R-Calif.) said, according to a recording of the June 15, 2016 exchange, which was listened to and verified by The Washington Post. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher is a Californian Republican known in Congress as a fervent defender of Putin and Russia. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) immediately interjected, stopping the conversation from further exploring McCarthy’s assertion, and swore the Republicans present to secrecy. Before the conversation, McCarthy and ...

Trump is pretty miserable as President. He hates the press, he dislikes his staff, and he feels like everybody hates him. But he does like the red button on his desk that summons a Diet Coke. Our dreams of impeachment no longer look quite as idle as they did a month ago. Well, that's not going to happen anytime soon. I'm mean on a time scale where Trump's probability density for destroying the planet integrates to values greater than 1/2. So, is there any chance that he might quit? I can dream, can't I. Not that Pence would be much of an improvement.

Obligatory ABBA link: Harari argues that money, because of its role in cooperative behavior, is probably the most important human invention since language.  The first money we know of, Mesopotamian barley money from 5000 years ago, is only a relatively small abstraction from pure barter, but it was a giant step in the promotion of commerce.  If you are a scythe maker and need a pair of boots, it can be a huge pain to find a bootmaker who needs a scythe, but once money exists, you only need find anyone with money who wants a scythe and then trade the money to someone who makes boots.  Not for the first time in human history, the symbol became more important than its realization. Barley money had a number of disadvantages: it is bulky, it rots, and rats eat it.  Another major step to purely symbolic money was silver.  Silver, at least in the Mesopotamian world, had essentially no intrinsic value.  It's too soft to be useful in construction or weapons,...

Trump strongly hinted that there were tapes of his dinner conversation with Comey where he allegedly asked for a loyalty pledge. We know that the oval office has taping facilities, so it's at least plausible that the conversation where Comey claims Trump asked him to kill the Flynn investigation was taped. Congress has made it clear that it wants the Comey memos. They should also promptly ask for any relevant tapes.

I bought this book yesterday and just finished all 608 pages of it, so I guess one might call it a page turner. Murakami is masterful at sucking one in. Toru Okada is an ordinary sort of thirty year old guy, a sort of legal assistant who quits his job at a law firm because it doesn't seem like something he wants to stick with. That's when his troubles start, when first his cat and then his wife go missing. If you've read Murakami before, you probably won't be surprised that this is the start of some strange adventures, not all of them strictly of this world. He soon finds himself involved in the affairs of a number of rather strange women. The real world is always present in Murakami's version of magical realism, perhaps most grittily in the reminiscences of a couple of characters from the war in Manchuria and the subsequent captivity in a Siberian mining camp of a side character. There is no doubt in my mind that Murakami is one of the greatest living novel...

The Daily Beast: White House and administration officials are reeling at reports that President Donald Trump reportedly shared classified information with Russia’s top diplomats during an Oval Office meeting last week. ... “I doubt he did it to collude [with the Russians]. I think he’s dumb and doesn’t know the difference,” a former FBI official who worked aspects of the Russia investigation told The Daily Beast. “He thinks he’s arranging some business deal except that he’s not.” “I don’t think he shared the classified intelligence to collude. I think he shared because he thinks he’s playing chess when he’s actually playing checkers. International affairs is not like buying a golf course,” added a second former FBI official. When asked if the Russians could use the information Trump provided in way that harms the U.S., this official said, “of course.” The Russians, the source added, “like [Trump’s] mental instability and stupidity. They don’t like his unpredictability.” Candida...

Donald Trump has a kind of universal credibility acid which dissolves the credibility of anybody associated with him. Tillerson and McMaster were supposed to be the adults in the room who would restrain Trump's worst impulses, but both found themselves releasing lawyerly statement denying that Trump discussed "sources and methods" with the Russians, and claiming that that demonstrated that the stories in the Washington Post and elsewhere were therefore false. Today, their credibility lies in tatters, since those stories made no such claim. Instead, they reported that the details released, in the opinion of intelligence professionals, allowed the deduction of sources and methods, implying major clues to the identity of inside informants.

The Washington Post is reporting today that Trump disclosed highly sensitive intelligence to the Russians in his recent meeting with the Russian ambassador and foreign minister. The president’s disclosures to the Russian foreign minister and ambassador in their Oval Office meeting last week jeopardized a critical source of intelligence on the Islamic State — an information-sharing arrangement considered so sensitive that details have been withheld from allies and tightly restricted even within the U.S. government, current and former U.S. officials said. Trump appeared to be boasting of the “great intel” he receives when he described a looming terror threat, according to an official with knowledge of the exchange. This data is so sensitive that it isn;t shared even with some close allies. McMaster and Tillerson are claiming that not sources and methods were disclosed, but intelligence professionals are disagreeing, saying that the revelations are likely to get sources killed. If t...

...why ransomware attacks like WannaCry are so hard to trace. They are asking for money, so the money should be traceable, at least by the banks carrying out the transfers. Of course some banks may have an interest in facilitating this kind of crime. How about just nuking them, virtually or actually? The virtual nuke would be just freezing them out of the international banking system and seizing any external assets of the banks and their principals. I get it that a lot of tax evaders, drug dealers, corrupt officials and the banks that serve them would wanna cry, but is there any actual reason this would be a bad idea?

Fareed Zakaria had a couple of Venezuela experts looking at the catastrophe that is modern Venezuela. One diagnosis particularly caught my eye: "political necrophilia," referring to attachment to long discredited political and economic ideas, in this case Marxism. Not that that is Venezuela's only problem. Rampant corruption and related disregard for law not only siphons off money but makes productive enterprise all but impossible. Unfortunately, it's hard to see any easy fix. Getting rid of Maduro will neither be easy nor sufficient. He and the Chavistas have made Venezuela a one industry town, and that not currently a healthy one.

Clinton Watts, former FBI agent, offers a bit of information on the progress and direction of the FBI's investigation into Russia's interference in the US Presidential election. He thinks one needs to "follow the trail of dead Russians." It not exactly news that people deemed dangerous to Putin have a way of turning up dead. RON WYDEN: There is a stack of documents - a voluminous stack of documents that points to various financial relationships between people who are close to the president, part of his world and the Russians. And for me, one of the key questions in doing an investigation is to always follow the money. In fact, Clint Watts, the former FBI man, came to our committee and said, Senator, you're right, you ought to follow the money, but you also ought to follow the trail of the dead bodies. MARTIN: We are joined now by Clinton Watts, who offered up that advice to the committee back in March. He's a former FBI special agent, and he joins us on th...

Professor Molly Worthen has written a defense of old school formality in an NYT op-ed. After one too many students called me by my first name and sent me email that resembled a drunken late-night Facebook post, I took a very fogeyish step. I began attaching a page on etiquette to every syllabus: basic rules for how to address teachers and write polite, grammatically correct emails. Over the past decade or two, college students have become far more casual in their interactions with faculty members. My colleagues around the country grumble about students’ sloppy emails and blithe informality. Mark Tomforde, a math professor at the University of Houston who has been teaching for almost two decades, added etiquette guidelines to his website. “When students started calling me by my first name, I felt that was too far, and I’ve got to say something,” he told me. “There were also the emails written like text messages. Worse than the text abbreviations was the level of informality, with no...

For reason quite mysterious to me, two of my most popular recent posts (as measured by pageviews) concern the travels of a book that I ordered from Amazon. The cheapest price was from a bookshop in London, even though the book was written, published and printed in the US. Anyway, here is one more. Anyway, I ordered a couple more books, and again the best deals were in that old town astride the Thames. I won't get them for a bit yet, but both have made it back to the US, one to Compton, CA and the other to Secaucus, NJ. International trade is weird. However, an anthropologist friend assures me that a slave girl captured in Sweden 1800 years ago might have had a similarly convoluted and doubtless much longer trip to the slave markets of Aleppo.

...especially of the future. It's an aphorism attributed to Niels Bohr, but it seems to apply to science fiction these days. Once upon a time SF writers were mighty in the art of prediction. Arthur C. Clarke famously predicted the communication satellite and the smart phone, for example. So how are they doing now. If the SF series I'm reading now is typical , not so hot. The setting is several hundred years in the future, when man has colonized much of the solar system, but aside from fusion powered space ships, the technology is mostly off the shelf 2015. Battle are fought with bullet shooting guns pretty much like those that have been around for hundreds of years, or fists, (or in one case, a can of chicken.) Biology is pretty much lab standard the present, though modest progress seems to have been made against cancer. I wonder if it has become too difficult to imagine anything not already almost in technologies grasp.

Josh Dawsey at Politico: President Donald Trump weighed firing his FBI director for more than a week. When he finally pulled the trigger Tuesday afternoon, he didn't call James Comey. He sent his longtime private security guard to deliver the termination letter in a manila folder to FBI headquarters. He had grown enraged by the Russia investigation, two advisers said, frustrated by his inability to control the mushrooming narrative around Russia. He repeatedly asked aides why the Russia investigation wouldn’t disappear and demanded they speak out for him. He would sometimes scream at television clips about the probe, one adviser said. Trump's firing of the high-profile FBI director on the 110th day since the president took office marked another sudden turn for an administration that has fired its acting attorney general, national security adviser and now its FBI director, whom Trump had praised until recent weeks and had even blew a kiss to during a January appearance. Th...

The circumstantial case that Trump fired Comey for investigating his ties to Russian interference in the election is starting to look ironclad. MATTHEW ROSENBERG and MATT APUZZO in the New York Times: WASHINGTON — Days before he was fired, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, asked the Justice Department for a significant increase in money and personnel for the bureau’s investigation into Russia’s interference in the presidential election, according to three officials with knowledge of his request. Mr. Comey asked for the resources during a meeting last week with Rod J. Rosenstein, the deputy attorney general who wrote the Justice Department’s memo that was used to justify the firing of the F.B.I. director this week. Mr. Comey then briefed members of Congress on the meeting in recent days. So far, the Republican Party looks determined to ride the Trump train wherever it goes, and the options are looking decidedly unpalatable.

The Comey firing is a scary moment for American democracy. There is no proof, but it sure as hell looks like Trump is desperate to hide something big, and perhaps fatal. Josh Marshall : There is only one reasonable conclusion that can be drawn from the decision to fire Comey: that there is grave wrongdoing at the center of the Russia scandal and that it implicates the President. As I write this, I have a difficult time believing that last sentence myself. But sometimes you have to step back from your assumptions and simply look at what the available evidence is telling you. It’s speaking clearly: the only reasonable explanation is that the President has something immense to hide and needs someone in charge of the FBI who he believes is loyal. Like Jeff Sessions. Like Rod Rosenstein. This is a very dark and perilous moment.

Comey was a screwup, but I can't believe that's why Trump fired him. Look at the people he keeps. Was the FBI closing in on the Russia connection? Some other Trump crime?

Getting people to support a candidate is hard, partly because every candidate has flaws. I'm not the type to run for office, but there are some people that I would really like to throw out of office. So how hard is it to set up a fundraising site just to defeat a hated Congressman or local official? One that specifies the incumbent's crimes against the electorate and promises to spend all its money on defeating him/her?

...so little shelf space. Actually I have a fair amount of shelf space, but most of it seems to be taken up with books. Also, my wife insists that a bunch of it be occupied with junk like dishes, cooking implements and other impedimenta. I suppose I should get rid of a lot of them. But it would be like parting with my children. Of course I didn't want them to leave either, but they insisted.

I have an unusually large number of page views today, most of them from Russia. It's probably unlikely that I have quite suddenly acquired a large Russian fan base, so what's going on? Just a routine sweep by some new robot? A sinister plot by hackers? Or has Putin discovered that I am secretly, secretly, head of the CIA?

I used this book by Cathie Clarke and Bob Carswell to study for the fluid dynamics portions of my Astrophysical Dynamics and Fluid Dynamics course, and found it very useful. The authors base the book on lectures they have given to third year students at Cambridge. For me, the level was about right. It assumes no fluid dynamics but expects reasonable proficiency in vector analysis. Nearly all physics equations are carefully derived, usually with no missing steps that were too difficult for me to fill in. Most of the book is devoted to inviscid compressible fluids, with a strong focus on astrophysical applications, although the last three chapters (which I haven't studied) treat viscous astrophysical fluids and plasmas. I worked my way through much of the book, usually deriving every equation, and it's pretty amusing if you like that sort of thing. There is always a payoff in physical insight. Convection, hydrostatic equilibrium, sound waves, supersonic flow, shock waves...

A few weeks ago I ordered a brick from Amazon. Actually, it was a book, but it would make a pretty good brick, at least in heft (4.4 lbs). A couple of weeks ago I wrote about its peregrinations here. Having now received that selfsame brick, I wanted to document its itinerary. It was written by an American author and published and printed in the United States. Somehow it made its way to a bookstore in London, UK. I ordered it from Amazon, taking the cheapest price for a new book. From London, after a decent interval, it flew to Compton, California, perhaps for the purpose of enjoying a bit of West Coast rap. Straight Outta Compton, it flew over me to a location near Dallas, in Texas. From there, it made its way the thousand or so miles back to me in Las Cruces by US mail, arriving yesterday. It looks lovely, and not a bit worse for the wear due to its 13,000 or so miles of travel. It is interesting to me that such a roundabout route could provide the cheapest price. Comment...

The New York Times is widely considered a left wing paper. This is mostly because the American right wing, which has been driven increasingly to the right by it's plutocratic sponsors, keeps saying so. In fact, the NYT is yet another paper owned by plutocrats, operating in a mainly liberal town, and steering a rather middle of the road course. Many readers are outraged by the fact that its op-ed pages have added a racist, anti-feminist, climate denialist to its stable of right wing columnists, an op-ed page that includes zero comparably left wing columnists. Jim Naureckas, writing in the arguably left-wing FAIR, takes a look at, among other things, the history: To understand this anomaly—and the real reason that the New York Times would rather have a climate-denying bigot on its staff than a single-payer advocate—it helps to go back to the beginning of the Times dynasty, as Times veteran John L. Hess (Extra!, 1/00) did in his review of The Trust: The Powerful and Private Fami...

... of Dave Goldberg's The Standard Model in a Nutshell. Not long after I buy something from Amazon, that leviathan solicits a review. Thus it was with TSMIAN. However, since I haven't actually read it yet, my review may lack in acuity what it gains in pith. It looks good on my bookshelf. It also has a nice feel in the hand, and the cover picture has a starwarzee feel to it. I did try the page 67 test, and that page seems admirably clear intellectually as well as visually (being printed in a font that I can read without eye strain.) All in all, call it promising.

After the war, Oppenheimer, Acheson and others were tasked with the problem of how to control the nuclear Genii they had loosed on the world. They came up with a plan, but Bernard Baruch torpedoed it. This fragment of dialog between Truman and Oppenheimer is a good illustration of the kinds of errors of judgement even a smart President can make: “When will the Russians be able to build the bomb?” asked Truman. “I don’t know,” said Oppenheimer. “I know.” “When?” “Never.” At some level, for Harry Truman, US monopoly mooted the issue of international control. Rhodes, Richard. Dark Sun: The Making Of The Hydrogen Bomb (pp. 241-242). Simon & Schuster. Kindle Edition.