Pandemic stress dreams

I dreamed last night I went without a mask into a crowded restaurant where nobody else was wearing a mask, and realizing I probably had just signed my own death warrant.

I didn't sleep well last night.

The sources of Donald Trump's shame

The Week: "In his first one-on-one interview since the general election, President Trump told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo over the phone that he is "ashamed" he once endorsed Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R)."

Let's see:

He's not ashamed of committing adultery on numerous occasions.

He's not ashamed of failing the country during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He's not ashamed that his Iran policy has failed so spectacularly.

He's not ashamed of running his businesses into the ground, or of acquiring massive debt.

He is ashamed of once endorsing a guy who failed to assist his cheating.

Whatever.

A little theology for Sunday morning

From The Atlantic:

Rev. William J. Barber II: Well, I was trained in theology that whatever you call your spiritual experience, if it does not produce a quarrel with the world, then the claim to be spiritual is suspect.

Sounds right to me. 

Maybe it is time for the NFL to give up on this season

The astonishing thing is that it has taken this long for professional and college sports to arrive at this point. I wouldn't have guessed anybody could get very far this year, and I was wrong about that, but football -- with its rosters of fifty-some-odd people -- has too many moving parts for this not to happen.

 

To schadenfreude or not to schadenfreude?

I am torn by hoping that Republicans' cynical and false allegations of voter fraud come back to bite them by persuading their voters there is no reason to vote again -- costing them elections they might've won -- and a believe that democracy isn't sustainable if a huge chunk of the population doesn't believe the results are legitimate.

Today on the Kansas River

 

One small step to putting civilians back in charge at Defense

NYT reports that Lloyd J. Austin III, a retired Army general, is under consideration to lead the Department of Defense under Joe Biden. I'd prefer not -- not because of anything necessarily wrong about Austin (I know literally nothing about him) but because Trump tried to blur the whole distinction between civilian and military control of the military, which has been a pretty important principle of our democracy. That's how former General James Mattis became Trump's first secretary of defense, even though he required a waiver to do so. There are civilian Democrats with expertise in national security. Pick one of them.

Humans and Vulcans

There's a lot of talk about "Federation values" in the Star Trek universe, but humans and Vulcans are pretty much always jerks to each other, except when they learn the lesson not to be at the end of the episode.

No, journalism is not 'morally indefensible'

Also from Ryu Spaeth's takedown of Ben Smith:

However, every journalist, very much including Smith, at some point will have to face the morally indefensible way we go about our business: namely, using other people to tell a story about the world. Not everyone dupes their subjects into trusting them, but absolutely everyone robs other people of their stories to tell their own.

Oh, bullshit.

At its best, journalism provides journalists a platform not to rob other people of their stories, but to amplify the stories of people who might not otherwise be heard widely. This is especially true of journalists at local papers, who go to church and shop in the same stores and send their kids to the same schools as the people they both serve and cover. It's an imperfect, messily human process, and journalists don't always get it right. I haven't always gotten it right. But to characterize this process, of listening and then passing on what you have heard, as a robbery -- instead of the necessarily flawed process of communication that it is -- is morally obtuse.

Question about the assassination of Iran's top nuclear scientist

I get that hawks are hawks, and they're going to want to go to war. But why do hawks in Israel and the U.S. seem to want a war with Iran so badly? What am I missing?

Have I been using em-dashes incorrectly?

 From TNR's critique of media columnist Ben Smith:

Wait. I often use em-dashes like Smith does, basically as a replacement for a colon. I also use them, paired, basically as parentheses within a sentence.

Have I been doing it wrong the whole time?

Presidential transitions are bad

 If we can’t shorten transitions after a presidential election, perhaps we could at least make them less-prone to mishchief? A president should serve out the full length of the term, of course. But maybe rule making should cease between election and inauguration, when a new president is arriving in office. If you didn’t get it done in the four years before now, well, you had your chance. 

Donald Trump demands proof of a negative

 

Needless to say, we don’t require people in America to prove their innocence. It’s up to Trump to prove fraud happened in the election. So far, he has made a lot of allegations. Proof? Not so much. But it is worrisome to suggest the White House is Biden’s only if Biden can prove he didn’t do the stuff that Trump is making up about him. He may be a bad authoritarian, but this is still authoritarian behavior.  

I couldn't sleep for a long time. Now I can.

This year, I am thankful for the ability to sleep. Because until earlier this year, I hadn’t slept well for most of a decade. And it was killing me. Let me tell you a story...

I trace my years of bad sleep back to the surgeries I had in 2011. My already-bad nasal passageways were messed up even more by a bad attempt to shove an oxygen tube up them before the second surgery, with the result that almost no air got through afterward. (I was a mouthbreather by necessity.) I never really recovered from those surgeries -- my torso is broken -- and my sleep was the worst outcome of all: During my last years in Philly, I would fall asleep at work (humiliating -- I even fell asleep during a cop corruption trial in front of colleagues) or wake up in my home at night having sleptwalk around the place. A couple of times I woke up because I was accidentally injuring myself.

And the exhaustion was total.

My life felt awful. My ability to hold a regular job, instead of freelancing, felt awful. (Spending eight hours in an office was an ungodly challenge.) My blood pressure and weight ballooned. Depression set in. I couldn’t read a book or watch a movie without falling asleep. Everything was a struggle.

A nasal surgery a couple of years back helped restore some function -- I haven’t sleptwalk in a couple of years -- but honestly -- I entered 2020 ready, and maybe even willing, to be done. To die. It was that bad. It had been years since I slept more than about two hours at a stretch, and even that sleep was nastily oxygen deprived.

I took a sleep apnea test the night of the Iowa caucuses. It came back how I expected, but with a discouraging result: The CPAP machine they tried to use on me was impossible. I felt like I was drowning. I couldn’t keep it on for more than a few seconds at a time. I felt like I had run out of options.

Only, I hadn't.

One weird thing about the pandemic lockdown. They made me reset. I stopped eating out much. The result: No more fried foods. The reflux that had been a regular part of my life for years just ... kind of disappeared. And the anxiety made my heart palpitate a bit, so I stopped drinking coffee. And I adjusted my sleeping arrangements to prop my upper body up a bit so that my sleepy breathing is better. 

And sometime over the summer, I realized I'd had a few good nights of sleep. That I wasn't waking up all the time.

That I felt ... rested.

There is something of a virtuous feedback loop to all of this. Not being exhausted and out of oxygen has made it possible for me to exercise better than I have in a long time. Starting in August, I regularly walk two miles a day. When the year started, that would have been beyond me.

So the weird thing for me about 2020 is that I arrive at Thanksgiving more personally hopeful about my ability to live than I have been for years. I am a better father and husband than I was, I think. Not so crippled by depression, or an inability to walk more than a block without needing to find a seat. I am not all the way back -- and honestly, I probably won't get there. But I am a lot further back than I expected to be. I'd lost hope. Now I can sleep again. And everything about me is better for it.

The Pentagon's big old budget

 Stephen Wertheim speaks the truth: 

This is true about domestic priorities as well. I think it's weird, for example, that there is so much talk about having the military distribute a coronavirus vaccine. A country as prosperous as the United States has been should have a robust enough public health system to do that job, shouldn't it?

Call me Cassandra

Are people really arguing that because Donald Trump has failed to steal the election, the people who were worried he would try to steal the election are silly and overwrought?

Because ... he really tried to steal the election.

The Electoral College is failing on its own terms

I think about Federalist Paper No. 68 sometimes:

The process of election affords a moral certainty, that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications. Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States. It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue. And this will be thought no inconsiderable recommendation of the Constitution, by those who are able to estimate the share which the executive in every government must necessarily have in its good or ill administration. Though we cannot acquiesce in the political heresy of the poet who says: "For forms of government let fools contest That which is best administered is best,'' yet we may safely pronounce, that the true test of a good government is its aptitude and tendency to produce a good administration.

Read the whole thing, of course, but the Electoral College was intended to prevent corrupt figures from capturing the imagination of the masses and riding that adoration to the presidency. It failed to do so in 2016. Now Donald Trump is trying to game the system -- despite the clear preference of the masses --  to stay in office. The Electoral College is failing on its own terms. Demolish it.

One thing I have to remind myself of these days...

 ....is that I can be a serious person while also taking moments for frivolous things that bring me some small bit of joy in this miserable world.

So, yes, I just spent a few minutes perusing the Star Trek reddit.

Prosecuting Trump

At the beginning of the week, I was prepared to argue that investigating and prosecuting Trump -- at the federal level, at least -- would be more trouble than it's worth. I don't want the Biden Administration to *also* be all about Donald Trump. Four years is enough, right?

Now I think he's a tumor that must be excised. It will probably cause a lot of pain, but there has to be a price for his wholesale assault on the integrity of the election, on top of his thoroughgoing corruption.

My post-Trump future

I would really like to settle down for a few minutes to think about how to be an effective and quality opinion writer when Trump leaves office. The benefit of Trump's presidency was a certain, righteous clarity -- he is such a bad president, that often writing was a matter of waiting for him to do something bad, then criticize it. That's overly reductive, but not as much as I would like it to be. And I'm ok with that. Trump really is a bad president. Serving truth, in my mind, means constantly pointing how how he steers America wrong.

The problem with my whole "pivot to a post-Trump future" plan, though, is that Trump won't pivot. There's still too much happening. We should be looking forward to Joe Biden's presidency. Right now, though, the current president is still keeping all of us on our tippy toes.

One of the things I worry about...

 ...is that our healthcare system might be broken if and when we get to the other side of this.

More than 900 staff members across the Midwest Mayo Clinic system have been diagnosed with Covid-19 over the last 14 days, a spokesperson told CNN "Our staff are being infected mostly due to community spread (93% of staff infections), and this impacts our ability to care for patients," Kelley Luckstein wrote to CNN in a Wednesday email.

Republicans are Democrats now

Jamelle Bouie explains why President Trump did better than expected:

At the end of March, President Trump signed the Cares Act, which distributed more than half a trillion dollars in direct aid to more than 150 million Americans, from stimulus checks ($1,200 per adult and $500 per child for households below a certain income threshold) to $600 per week in additional unemployment benefits. ... But voters, and especially the low-propensity voters who flooded the electorate in support of Trump, aren’t attuned to the ins and outs of congressional debate. They did not know — and Democrats didn’t do a good enough job of telling them — that the president and his party opposed more generous benefits. All they knew is that Trump signed the bill (and the checks), giving them the kind of government assistance usually reserved for the nation’s ownership class.

I think there's something to this, but I'm also kind of amused. The conservative critique of social spending has often been that amounts to Democrats buying political power -- votes -- by bribing voters with government goodies. Remember Romney's "47 percent"? Remember "Obamaphones?" Republicans have even argued against universal health coverage because it would "revive the reputation of the party that spends and regulates, the Democrats, as the generous protector of middle-class interests."

Trump tossed that line of thinking away, and honestly, maybe that's valuable in the long-term. Except: Republicans will rediscover their fiscal rectitude when Biden takes power, of course.

God help us

 

When America plays cop in the world...

...it can end up having the same effects that cops sometimes do at home.

WaPo:

Ahmad’s relatives are among the civilians killed in events that are being documented with an unprecedented level of precision in a new accounting of the U.S.-led war against the Islamic State. Using U.S. military geolocation data being made public for the first time, U.K.-based watchdog group Airwars has pinpointed locations, some of them to within a meter squared, for hundreds of strikes resulting in more than 1,400 civilian deaths.

Throughout the campaign, strikes took place in crowded urban environments, where it was more difficult to distinguish between civilian and Islamic State targets. They also occurred in remote or militant-controlled areas, which complicated intelligence gathering and target verification.

Let me explain myself.

When police officers in America shoot unarmed civilians, they frequently end up unpenalized because the law gives great leeway to agents of the state who use lethal force when they "reasonably" feel like their personal safety is under threat. As we have seen, that "reasonably" stretches a long way, to almost unreasonable lengths.

Similarly, it appears that in the fight against ISIS -- a genuinely terrible, deadly organization -- the United States has decided to err on the side of its own safety, the the degree that the safety of non-American innocents becomes, well, not nearly as high as a priority as it should be.

It is probably the case that each individual targeting decision can be individually justified. Taken together, though, this number of civilian deaths is unconscionable. 

Sen. Josh Hawley could make himself really useful....

...by proving his economic populism bona fides and putting real pressure on Sen. Mitch McConnell to do something about this.

NYT:

The Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research warned on Wednesday that there were “significant downside risks” to the nation’s financial stability from the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic and predicted that many households and businesses might be unable to recover without additional government assistance.

The end of the pandemic may be in sight. But we'll get there faster, and with less damage, if we spend a lot of money now.

The "Live Not By Lies" guy....

...is notably silent about all the lying this president is doing in order to keep his job. 

I guess some lies are more equal than others.

'That's politics'

This part of Paul Waldman's column alarms me:

And unlike the zillions of investigations of Democrats that Republicans have mounted whenever they had the opportunity, these wouldn’t be undertaken solely to gain political advantage. But so what if they were? That’s politics. If there’s actual wrongdoing to be exposed, then the investigation is justified.

Investigations shouldn't be undertaken solely for political advantage. Period. There's plenty to investigate about the Trump years. But it's wrong to use the powers of government just to usurp your rivals. It was wrong when Trump tried to pressure Ukraine into investigating Biden. It was wrong when Republicans investigated Benghazi forever. Democrats might help themselves by playing the same game, but it would still be wrong and corrosive to what's left of our idea of "the rule of law."

A note about grace

About a decade ago, when I was undergoing a series of surgeries that saved my life but also left me broken, I was struck that several people reached out to me -- people with whom I thought I had burnt bridges, people I didn't expect or have any right to expect to show me kindness -- to express well-wishes and a speedy recovery for me.

I received a lot of grace, in other words.

Grace isn't something you earn or deserve, as a recipient. But it is wonderful to receive, and it can relieve the burden of hurt feelings and wrongdoings left unrighted.

I mention this because I ran into an old friend on the river trail today -- somebody whose entrance into my life a few decades ago caused a lot of anguish for people I deeply cared about. And I realized that, as the recipient of grace, I also needed to try and give it.

There's a quasi-spiritual dimension to all of this, I realize, that not everybody will buy into. I recognize that my understanding of all this is probably shaped by my Christian upbringing. What's more, I'm not in a position to expect anybody to show grace to others, especially when they've been wronged. All I know is that receiving grace humbled me. And for me, the proper response to that is to pay it forward.

About guns and suicide

 This piece in the NYT is frustrating:

Clark Aposhian, chairman of a lobbying group for gun owners in Utah, where suicides outnumber homicides by a factor of eight, said he did not believe the numbers when he first heard them: “How did we not know?” Mr. Aposhian blamed the media for hiding the truth and fostering an impression that most gun deaths are murders.

There has been lots of coverage of guns-as-a-major-tool-of-suicide, though. (Those links are all examples from within the last year.) The "media" has covered murders quite a bit, yes, but there has been a lot of reporting about the gun-suicide link.

There has been a problem with gun-rights activists playing down those suicide numbers, though, for fear it will increase pressure to restrict gun sales somehow.

In counting down top-three fake news stories about guns from 2017, NRATV host Grant Stinchfield asserted that suicides by firearms shouldn't be counted as "gun deaths," even though they very clearly are deaths by gun. Fancy that.

"The final fake news of the year comes in the form of a statistic, the overused 30,000 gun deaths a year," Stinchfield said. "The left never mentions that two-thirds of those include suicides. Yet it is a number thrown around like confetti. And it’s deceptive to say the least. From The Washington Post to The New York Times, they all use it to wage war on gun ownership."

This just happened last month:

The Commander John Scott Hannon Veterans Mental Health Care Improvement Act, now awaiting the president’s signature, still does things the commander’s family says he would be proud of: funding community organizations that work with veterans, and scholarships to train more mental health professionals.

But before it was modified, the bill would also have required health care workers who treat veterans to be trained on how to talk with at-risk patients about the danger of having guns in the house and about how to reduce that risk — a strategy known as lethal-means safety.

The provision was stripped out "because the provision in question touched a third rail in Washington politics: the danger posed by firearms."

The link between the availability of guns and completed suicides isn't a secret, and hasn't been for years. There are a few people, though, who have been invested in playing down that link. 

The problem with the Substack revolution

Matt Yglesias is leaving Vox to start his own Substack blog. There is part of me that really likes this -- my preference would be to get off social media and return to the blog glory days of the late aughts. I've tried doing it a couple of times, but I always fail to stick with it -- partly because people are on social media instead of blogs, and it gets to feeling very lonely around here.

I'll subscribe to Yglesias' free tier. But I won't spend money on him, or Andrew Sullivan, or Matt Taibbi or any of the other, um, independent thinkers who have abandoned big publications in the last year or so to strike out on their own for Substack and its subscription model.

My subscription dollars are finite. So I have to make them work efficiently. Which means they'll go to publications where I can get news and multiplicity of voices. I simply can't afford to support every writer I want to read who decides to strike out on their own. I can't imagine I am the only person in this position.

And this strikes me as a problem, both for the writers and the larger discourse.

A number of observers have already noted that rise of newspaper paywalls, while absolutely necessary to sustaining what's left of the news media, is a problem for democracy. You can get all the misinformation you want for free, but it increasingly takes cash to get reported, reliable news. Somebody's got to pay for the reporters, writers and editors -- but that means that people who can't or won't pay for that news are vulnerable to misinformation.

Similarly, if -- as appears to be the case -- somewhat independent writers increasingly feel uncomfortable or unable to exist within the framework of a larger publication where their coworkers don't all love their views, and they follow Yglesias et al to Substack and its paywall, it might also be the cases their voices go missing from the national conversation. It'll be easy not to pay to hear ideas you don't want to hear, and if you don't pay, it's less likely you'll be forced to encounter them.

I don't love everything about Yglesias, Sullivan or Taibbi, but it is also true that the three have done valuable work over the years. People are complicated! And sometimes it's good to have complicated people complicating the discourse, even if it's also irritating. It worries me that the complications are disappearing behind a paywall.