Donald Trump Is Turning America Into a "Watchmen" Comic

NYT:

On Thursday, the group of scientists who orchestrate the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic instrument informing the public when the earth is facing imminent disaster, moved its minute hand to two and a half minutes before the final hour. 

It was the closest the clock had been to midnight since 1953, the year after the United States and the Soviet Union conducted competing tests of the hydrogen bomb.

Why? "In an op-ed for The New York Times, Mr. Titley and Mr. Krauss elaborated on their concerns, citing the increasing threats of nuclear weapons and climate change, as well as President Trump’s pledges to impede what they see as progress on both fronts, as reasons for moving the clock closer to midnight."

But Voter ID Laws Aren't Racist.

Vox:

A study for the Black Youth Project, which analyzed 2012 voting data for people ages 18 to 29, found 72.9 percent of young black voters and 60.8 percent of young Hispanic voters were asked for IDs to vote, compared with 50.8 percent of young white voters.

FYI

About the Twitter Rebellion

So about the Twitter rebellion apparently being mounted by social media managers at various government agencies...

There's a theory within conservatism that America's "administrative state" — basically, your mid-level federal bureaucrats — has become an unaccountable tyrant, both by virtue of issue regulations independently of Congress and, through unionizing, becoming a political force that politicians must appease instead of their own constituents.

A lot of people who hold to that theory signed on to the Trump Bandwagon pretty early in the process, believing that he alone had the chance to smash the bureaucracy and return American government to its more accountable roots. And Congress' move this session to make it easy to punish individual federal workers is of a piece with that theory. So is Trump's hiring freeze for federal workers.

All of which is to say this: Enjoy the Twitter Rebellion while you can, if you're so inclined.  But the odds are it can't last — and, in fact, might provide the pretext the bureaucracy smashers want to really crack down on the federal workforce. Bureaucrats who are supposed to serve the executive — Trump — are ill-positioned to lead the resistance.

Slowing Down

I'm edging my way back into social media. But it's kind of like edging your way back into the path of a fire hydrant: You can't get just a little wet — you're going to get soaked on contact.

Anyway, here's the mantra I'm trying to live by right now:

You don't have to express your opinion about everything.
You don't have to express your opinion about everything.
You don't have to express your opinion about everything.

It's possible, in fact, that the more opinion I put into the world, the less valuable any one opinion might be. So. Trying to control myself.

(Pauses.)

If I were to have an opinion about shit that doesn't matter much, though, it would be this:

Gov. Pence shouted to his wife, Karen, his closest adviser, at the other end of the table.

"Mother, Mother, who prepared our meal this evening?"

The legislators looked at one another, speaking with their eyes: He just called his wife "Mother."

Maybe it was a joke, the legislator reasoned. But a few minutes later, Pence shouted again.

"Mother, Mother, whose china are we eating on?"

Mother Pence went on a long discourse about where the china was from. A little later, the legislators stumbled out, wondering what was weirder: Pence's inability to make conversation, or calling his wife "Mother" in the second decade of the 21stcentury.

Mike Pence has a lot of ideas I find objectionable. If he chooses to address his wife in the manner of a 1930s innkeeper featured in a Frank Capra movie, so be it. Move on.

Yoga

I've been making some life changes lately — trying to use the time I have, now that I'm back in Kansas, to improve my health and lifestyle. Among the changes: More exercise. 30 minutes a day on the treadmill. Doesn't sound like a lot, but some is more than none, and I know from experience that getting overambitious early leads to failure. So. Thirty minutes a day.

One other thing: Yoga, a couple of times a week. It's nothing huge — a 15-minute flexibility routine downloaded from an iPhone app. But I've noticed that I'm increasingly limber.

Tonight, friends, I noticed a piece of trash on the floor. I bent over at the waist and picked it up, and threw it away.

Then I wept. I literally could not remember the last time I'd tried to pick something off the floor without grunting and bracing myself. I just did it.

Small victories, people. Small victories.

Hey David Brooks, Here's Why a Diverse Media Should Matter

David Brooks this morning:

But now progressives seem intent on doubling down on exactly what has doomed them so often. Lilla pointed out that identity politics isolates progressives from the wider country: “The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.”

There's a contradiction in the Lilla-via-Brooks complaint.

How diverse is the press? Not very.  It's pretty white. So. Diversifying the press is one way of producing people more aware of the conditions of "Americans in every walk of life." I'd hanker to say the same thing is true in the education arena, too.

Somehow, though, I don't think that's what Brooks or Douthat mean.

Quote of the Day: Philip Roth

New Yorker

“I was born in 1933,” he continued, “the year that F.D.R. was inaugurated. He was President until I was twelve years old. I’ve been a Roosevelt Democrat ever since. I found much that was alarming about being a citizen during the tenures of Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. But, whatever I may have seen as their limitations of character or intellect, neither was anything like as humanly impoverished as Trump is: ignorant of government, of history, of science, of philosophy, of art, incapable of expressing or recognizing subtlety or nuance, destitute of all decency, and wielding a vocabulary of seventy-seven words that is better called Jerkish than English.”