Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales

Henry Turner, the 9 year-old son of Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann, paddles out to sea then jumps overboard with a rock tied to his ankle.  He sinks to the bottom and lands on the deck of the Flying Dutchman.  The ship surfaces and his father (Orlando Bloom), who is partly covered by barnacles, confronts him.  Henry has a plan to free his father from the Dutchman but his father is skeptical.

Ten years later, Henry (Brenton Thwaites) is aboard a British Man-o-War as it chases down a pirate ship.  Seeing that the ship is about to sail into suicidal waters, he confronts the captain and is soon tossed into the brig.  Of course, the ship sinks and the ghost of Captain Salazar (Javier Bardem) leaves Henry alive to tell Jack Sparrow that vengeance is coming.

In St. Martin, Carina Smyth (Kaya Scodelario) has been convicted of witchcraft - because erudition is a clear sign of sorcery in women - and sentenced to hang.  However, she manages to escape the prison because she is also skilled at picking locks.  She happens to dash past the grand opening of a new bank.

 

In the bank is none other than Captain Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp), who is clearly inebriated, entangled with the banker's wife, and rather perplexed as to why he is there.  It turns out that he is robbing the bank.  Thus begins a ludicrous chase in which a team of horses drag the entire bank through the streets while Jack attempts to intercept and just happens to bump into Carina on the way.

 

To add to the cast of characters, Captain Hector Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush) has risen to the pinnacle of the Caribbean pirate hierarchy but the unleashed ghost of Captain Salazar is wiping out his fleet and can only be sated by the death of Jack Sparrow.  Thus, Barbossa sets out to find Jack.

 

Inevitably, all these parties collide in outlandish and comedic fights and chases.  Henry and Carina provide the romance.  It is a fun romp, but - like Alien: Covenant - does not bare much scrutiny after its over.

 

There are plenty of anachronisms, some of which have occurred in previous films in the franchise.  The guillotine is still some decades from being invented and, even when it was, it was not adopted by the British.  Why is everyone baffled by the idea of celestial navigation?  Carina is the only one who can navigate by stars.  Also, Carina is familiar with John Harrison's use of chronometers for determining longitude and uses a pocket watch for that purpose.  Such pocket watches were not introduced until 1759.  However, Blackbeard (died 1718) was prominent in the last movie, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.  Jack should be a very old man.  Executions of witches mostly ended with the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, long before Carina was born but I suppose having an educated woman accused of witchcraft was supposed to be funny?

 

The movie contains the modern practice of making oafs out of men and a paragon out of the heroine.  Carina can do no wrong and is this endless source of confidence, witty comments, and demeaning barbs  At one point she asks if all pirates are this stupid to which all the pirates agree.  Yes, it was funny but it plays to an all too common trope in modern movies.  When she is on the gallows, she starts to give a lecture to the unwashed and banters with Jack who is about to be guillotined.  When rescued (no, that isn't a spoiler, we all knew she was going to be rescued), she upbraids her rescuer for the placement of his hands.  Such gratitude.

 

There is a post credit scene that promises a sequel with Will and Elizabeth.  At the current pace, I suspect this one will take place during the Napoleonic Wars.

Fake News Marches On

Here is a story that shows why Trump thinks the media are both hostile and fake.  Rather than headphones, Trump only wore an earpiece in one ear to hear translations during the G7 summit.  However, a casual observer could conclude that he wasn't listening.  One must remember, Trump has a very particular hairstyle and clunky headphones are not helpful in maintaining it.  Thus, he was just wearing an earpiece in his right ear.

 

The negative version - that he was ignoring the Italian translation - was posted on Twitter and has been spread far and wide - 20,000 retweets.  The correction was later posted on Twitter and it went nowhere - 175 retweets.  The false story - which reflects poorly on Trump - has vastly better circulation than the correction.  This is not unusual.  When papers publish a front page story that proves to be incorrect, the correction is very rarely front page news.

 

Is it any wonder that the media is distrusted?

Alien: Covenant

The movie opens on Earth with David (Michael Fassbender) having a discussion with a middle-aged Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce), setting this scene decades before the events in Prometheus.  The story resumes a decade after the Prometheus went missing.  Walter (Michael Fassbender) is aboard the Covenant, a colony ship bound for Origae-6.  The ship is struck by a neutrino burst that requires waking the crew.  Several colonists and Captain Branson are killed in their stasis pods.  First Mate Christopher Oram (Billy Crudup) becomes the new captain and the new first mate is Dany Branson (Katherine Waterston), the grieving wife of the deceased Captain Branson.  While repairing the damage, Tennessee (Danny McBride) intercepts a signal - clearly human - from a nearby planet that appears to be a near perfect planet for a colony.  Though Dany advises against it, Oram changes course to investigate.

 

The planet looks great and even at the landing site, Oram starts plotting where to build the new colony.  Of course, a couple of crewmen are soon infected with a parasite that quickly grows into a xenomorph.  Disaster follows catastrophe and the surviving crew are rescued from rampaging xenomorphs by the arrival of David, formerly of the Prometheus.  David explains how Dr. Elizabeth Shaw died when they crashed on the planet and the planet is devoid of any non-xenomoprhs because of the parasite.

 

The movie is engaging and generally fun though often the suspension of disbelief becomes impossible.  The cluelessness of some characters grates although not as much as in Prometheus.  There is some great action and all the standard tropes one expects from an Alien movie.

 

Spoilers beyond this point

 

Oram is abysmally stupid.  Oh, and he is very religious.  Therefore, devout people are stupid and make terrible decisions.  I see no other reason for highlighting his religiosity.   First, showing absolutely no sympathy, he literally orders that there will be no observance of the death of Captain Branson and is later irritated that Dany and several others had an impromptu funeral for him.  Seriously?  How much more unsympathetic can we make this idiot?  The ship arrives at the signal origin and the majority of the crew go to the planet to investigate its habitability and the source of the signal.  They are not wearing any sort of air filtration as they exit the ship.  I'm sure it will be fine.  No, it turns out that it isn't fine.  The landing craft is destroyed and the survivors are stranded.  Oram finds David communicating with a full-grown xenomorph that has clearly just killed one of the crew in an area that David had assured them was safe.  Does Oram shoot the clearly treacherous android?  No.  Does he restrain him?  No.  Does he tell the rest of his crew?  No.  Our genius, devoutly religious captain follows David into the bowels of the complex and then, with further assurances that it is perfectly safe, approaches an alien egg that opens when he gets close.  Then, with added prompting to take a look, sticks his face in it to see what that thing is under the surface.  Hello, Facehugger.  Now, if he hadn't already seen an alien burst from one of his crew, this truly clueless decision might have rated slightly lower on the abysmal stupidity scale but not by much.  Sadly, he is not the stupidest character.

In the most brainless move ever, Dany leaves Walter to fight it out with his identical twin, David.  When 'Walter' rejoins her later, she has no doubts that it's Walter.  After all, Walter has only one hand and the android that just climbed aboard has only one hand; it must be Walter.  Back on the Covenant, a xenomorph has burst from one of the survivors and starts killing the remnants of the crew.  It is left to Dany, Tennessee, and 'Walter' to kill it.  At the end, Dany has just put Tennessee in his stasis pod and climbs into her own.  Walter is just activating it when she asks a question that Walter should be able to answer but isn't.  Oh no!  You're not Walter!  Gee, how did you not see that coming?  How did you not have some means of confirming that you came back with the correct android?  Heck, even if you did come back with the right android, it probably would have been wise to jettison him into space just to be certain.

 

In a flashback scene, we are shown that David hovered over the Engineer city and unleashed the plague that was meant for Earth.  The whole planet was swept of all animal life.  But this doesn't fit what we have seen previously.  We are led to believe that the Engineers abandoned LV-223 - the planet from Prometheus - hundreds of years ago but we have the Engineer homeworld in range of a comparatively ancient ship.  Huh?  Also, if David only committed planet-wide genocide in the last decade, where are all the cities and ruins?  Even from space, the Covenant should have been able to see that a vast and highly advanced civilization had lived here.  Why no satellites in orbit?  This spacefaring race seems to live primitively.  Surely, David didn't arrive on the only spaceship on the planet and their must be some means of traveling from population center to population center.  Or did this one dinky city constitute the whole of Engineer population?

 

Walter observes that David is insane.  Sure, he is a nutter but he's also stupid.  His goal is to get off the planet with his 'children.'  He practically danced with glee when he heard there were 2,000 colonists on the Covenant.  The last thing he should be doing is infecting the crew that might get him off the planet.  Heck, with every infected individual, that is one more mark against Tennessee launching a rescue.

 

If Tennessee had any sense, he would have set course for Origae-6 as soon as he learned his wife had died when the lander exploded.  Even if he does rescue the survivors, they absolutely, positively must been in quarantined, not mingling with the 3 crewmen who didn't set foot on the death planet.

 

It was enjoyable while watching it but collapsed under the weight of its stupidity when I had an opportunity to think about it.  Leave your brain behind - most of the Covenant crew did - and enjoy the popcorn fun.

Spinning the Portland Stabbings

On Friday, Jeremy Christian started ranting at a pair of Muslim women on a train.  Several men attempted to intervene, at which point Christian stabbed them, killing two and injuring one.  This story in the Washington Post offers a lot of added information that was first filtered through other sources.  For example, The Portland Mercury states that he was a "known right wing extremist and white supremacist."  Right-wing?  Are they saying he is a Republican?  That is the implication.  Of course, there is also a picture of him giving a Nazi salute and Nazis are invariably described as right wing despite being National Socialists.  Reading further, some information about Christian's Facebook page - provided by the notorious Southern Poverty Law Center - exposes him as a racist, white supremacist who hails Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, as a hero and a patriot.  However, SPLC fails to reveal that the Facebook page shows Christian was a supporter of Bernie Sanders and Jill Stein, a couple of Socialists.  Huh.  I'm sure that was unintentional.

 

On Twitter, Jill Stein complained that this was a "tragedy in Trump's America."  If she only read the Washington Post, her conclusion that Christian is a Trump supporter is not unreasonable.  However, another post that the SLPC didn't provide declared Christian's opposition to pipelines (presumably Keystone XL and Dakota Access) and the prison/military industrial complex, both popular left-wing views.  As for white supremacists, the KKK was founded by Democrats.

Yes, Voter Fraud does Exist

According to this story, there really were fraudulent votes in the 2016 election.  No, not millions but certainly hundreds, maybe thousands.  In the case of North Carolina, about 500 fraudulent votes have been discovered.  Of course, since Trump's margin in the state was over 100,000 votes, it made no difference.  However, sometimes 500 votes make all the difference.

In 2000, George W Bush won the presidency by 537 votes in Florida.

In 2004, Christine Gregoire lost with the initial count (by 261 votes) and lost again in the mandatory recount (by 42 votes).  However, she was declared the winner of the Washington gubernatorial race after a SECOND recount put her 129 votes ahead of Dino Rossi.

In 2008, Al Franken defeated incumbent Norm Colemen and secured a 60 seat supermajority in the United States Senate by 255 votes.  These 255 votes allowed for the passage of the Affordable Care Act.

It is a virtual certainty that there is voter fraud in every election and that, in the vast majority of cases, it makes no difference because of the margin.  However, in some cases, the payoff can be huge.  Was there fraud in the examples given?  Perhaps.  Whether there was or wasn't, the case of North Carolina shows that fraud does occur and is large enough to change the outcome in close elections.  This is why making sure that the people who vote are allowed to vote and don't vote multiple times is important.  One can argue about how to keep fraud out of voting but everyone ought to agree that it should be done.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2

The crew of the Milano have been hired by the Sovereign race to protect some powerful batteries from a transdimensional squid monster.  Their battle with the beast happens during the opening credits where Baby Groot's antics are the center of attention while the action is background.  No sooner have they defeated the monster and secured payment - a very unhappy Nebula (Karen Gillan) - than Rocket (Bradley Cooper) steals some of the batteries and provokes a space battle from the irate Sovereign.  They are rescued from their peril by Ego (Kurt Russell), who proves to be Peter's (Chris Pratt) father and pretty much a god.  The Sovereign hire Yondu (Michael Rooker) to capture the Starlord and his crew.  In the aftermath of the space battle, the Milano is a crippled wreck.  Rocket and Groot work on repairing it and keep an eye on the captive Nebula while Peter, Gamora, and Drax go with Ego for a family reunion on Ego's planet.  This splits the narrative between the two groups.

 

All the characters get further development along the lines one expects and new ones are added to the mix.  The sibling rivalry between Gamora and Nebula explodes, the sexual tension between Peter and Gamora advances, Rocket's self-pity parade continues, Drax's mourning for his family is further explored but he also develops into a somewhat more comical figure than last movie.  Of course, Baby Groot is just hilarious and adorable.  All that aside, the big character arc is that of Yondu.  His banishment from the larger Ravager community, his association with the original Guardians - led by Stakar Ogord (Sylvester Stallone), and his contentious father-son relationship with Peter are all explained.  He also gets the best line of the movie: "I'm Mary Poppins, Y'all!"

 

The movie is very enjoyable but the pacing is not as good as the last one.  The movie gets slow and clunky when Peter and Ego have their father-son bonding.  I did not particularly like Yondu's magic whistle arrow in the last movie (why didn't one of those idiots shoot him rather than just stand baffled as he whistled left-right-up-down-zig-zag?) and it is even worse this time around.  Perhaps that was for comedic effect but raining bodies was over the top.  There are 5 mid and post-credit scenes that setup future installments and provide laughs.  Go see it and stay all the way to the end.

 

Moore, Roger Moore

Roger Moore (1927-2017) has died.  I saw my first James Bond movie in 1977, Roger Moore's best outing as the character in The Spy Who Loved Me.  I became a Bond fanatic and Moore was instantly my favorite Bond.  In fact, he was probably my favorite actor at the time, which is funny when you consider his very narrow range.  While he was Bond, he was a hot commodity and had plenty of work.  When video stores arose with VHS, I always kept an eye out for Roger Moore movies.  Shout at the Devil, Sherlock Holmes in New York, The Naked Face, The Sea Wolves, ffolkes, The Wild Geese, and more.  I watched reruns of The Saint, his British TV series that was the basis of the disappointing Val Kilmer version which featured the saddest excuse ever for a cameo for Moore.  When I became more discerning, my preferences changed but Moore remains the first Bond to me despite following Connery in the role.  After he left the Bond franchise, at least 2 films too late, he vanished.  The last movie I saw of his in the theaters was The Quest, a Jean-Claude Van Damme stinker in which Moore played a dodgy aristocrat.

 

As Bond, Moore was the most humorous of the bunch and brought a tongue in cheek quality to the series.  My favorite of his Bond films is For Your Eyes Only.  It played like a Cold War thriller rather than a fantasy spy movie.  It was a nice return to earth after Moonraker.

 

RIP

Useless Knowledge?

Here is a story that shows the overwhelming dominance of foreigners from the Dominican Republic in the heroin trafficking in Boston.  Knowing this, would it be racist for the police to put extra scrutiny on Domincans?  Is it racist for law enforcement to use this information because Dominicans are mostly Hispanic and/or black?  If President Trump instituted a travel ban from the Dominican Republic to cut the flow of heroin, would that be racist?  If the racism charge will be leveled by using this information, is there any point in collecting it?

Celebrating Death

Roger Ailes, the media maven who built Fox News, died this week.  Today, I came across a Facebook post celebrating his death.  The comments on the post condemned Ailes to hell, cheered at his death, even said 'F**k Roger Ailes.'  To read the reactions, one would think Ailes was a murderous tyrant on the scale of Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.  Nope, he was just a Republican media consultant and Cable TV CEO.  This practice of celebrating the death or ruination of political opponents is something that happens almost exclusively on the left.  I have not seen celebratory postings of Anthony Weiner's fall from grace.  Even on the news, when Ailes death is mentioned, there is also the allegation of sexual harassment.  By contrast, when Ted Kennedy died, the media did not bring up Mary Jo Kopeckne.  No, he was the Lion of the Senate and his Republican colleagues spoke well of him in his passing.

 

Charles Krauthammer has noted that Republicans think Democrats are stupid and Democrats think Republicans are evil.  This is an interesting observation from a man who has been in both those camps, notably switching from stupid to evil.  However, one does not celebrate the death of an idiot in the same way one would celebrate the death of an evil person.  Clearly, the reaction of leftists to Ailes death vs. the reaction of conservatives to Kennedy's death shows how accurately this perception predicts.

 

Obviously, half the country is not evil though it is not obvious that half the country is not stupid.  If you are happy because a person with a different political philosophy has died, you need some serious introspection.

The Lost City of Z

The movie opens with Major Percy Fawcett stationed in Ireland and engaging in a hunt.  He is in his late 30s and has no medals to show for his long service.  If he is to advance, he needs to see some action.  Unexpectedly, he is called to the Royal Geographic Society and dispatched to map a river in the Amazon to establish the border between Bolivia and Brazil.  Percy Fawcett made his first expedition into the Amazon in 1906.  He made his last in 1925, where he presumably died at the hands of hostile natives.  During his many expeditions in between, he heard tales of a great city from the natives and discovered pottery shards that indicated a more advanced civilization than had previously been encountered in the region.  Fawcett believed their was a great city to be discovered and called it Z.

James Gray's screenplay feels like it is addressing modern issues rather than historical ones.  At one point, his wife proposes that she should accompany him on his trip, stating that childbirth is every bit as difficult as surviving the jungle for months on end.  It felt like a feminist screed which might be fine if the setting was post 1950s but the conversation takes place in 1912.  She argued that the kids would be in school.  Really?  Is this a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week school?  The scene felt like a bra burner from 1969 had been transported to 1912 to have an argument with a male chauvinist.  Elsewhere, Fawcett argues that no one wants to believe his claims of a lost civilization in the Amazon because they are racist, thinking Indians are too stupid to have a civilization that could have pottery!  Um, Aztecs, Mayans, Incas?  Those advanced civilizations were beyond dispute when he gave his impassioned speech against racist Englishmen who apparently believed natives incapable of civilization.  This speech falls particularly flat since no great civilization was uncovered.  Yes, there was a civilization in the area but it pales in comparison to Incas.  In his final expedition, he explains that it is important that he go with a small party as the Americans are sending a huge expedition that is going to ruin the Amazon.  Yeah, can't leave out some America bashing.  Then there was the rebellious son who attacks his father for 'abandoning' his family for long periods to go on these fruitless expeditions.  Military personnel to this day have long absences from their families and we can fly around the world in a day!  A hundred years ago, absences were considerably longer.  For example, in 1907, Theodore Roosevelt dispatched the Great White Fleet to circumnavigate the globe.  It left in December 1907 and returned February 1909.  Imagine how many teenagers berated their sailor fathers for abandoning the family in the wake of this travesty.  Give me a break.

Not only does the movie give early 20th century characters the attitudes of early 21st century characters, it is boring.  Here is the tale of a man who inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to create Professor Challenger but he is mostly a tedious blowhard with delusions of El Dorado.  What the heck was with the scene of the Gypsy reading his palm in the trenches of World War I?  Why even bother including his service in World War I as it just detracted from the titular story?  Of course, the fact that it has proven to be the Lost Village of Z really detracts from the epic nature of the story.  Why the character assassination of James Murray?  His heirs should consider a libel suit against the makers of the movie.  There is very little admirable about this depiction of Fawcett.

Do not waste your time on this stinker.

Placing Obstacles

In the right leaning media, there is a lot of astonishment at the Democrats going bat poop crazy, reading deep psychological trauma in President Trump having two scoops of ice cream when everyone else had one or believing that  the Russia collusion story is true despite a continued lack of evidence, which is untenable when one considers the waterfall of leaks on anything that is even mildly embarrassing to the president.  It has become standard for everything Trump does to be somehow compared with Nixon during Watergate.  Cries of impeachment are heard from Representatives and are a common meme on Facebook.  Has the left lost its mind?  No.

This is a strategy.  It is a somewhat desperate one but it is also an effective one.  Thanks to the ubiquitous panic, the travel moratorium - which was mostly going to last 90 days - would have been over in many cases by now but it has yet to be implemented.  Ground has not been broken on the wall, appointments have run at a glacial pace, healthcare reform has been slowed, and tax reform appears stalled.  Trump's 100 days saw lots of executive action but very little legislatively.  The 'craziness' is serving as an excellent holding action.  The longer the delay, the better the chance of Democrats recapturing the House and bringing any hope of Trump having a legislative legacy to an end.

 

The danger of the strategy is that it could alienate voters.  The Democrats have spent most of the last eight years describing Republicans as the Party of No and have now taken that mantle on themselves.  Of course, the Republicans are too inept to throw that label back in the Democrats' faces but a canny electorate will notice.  The Republicans are digging their own graves by repeatedly failing to get legislation to the president's desk.  A lack of successful legislation now that the House, Senate, and Presidency are all Republican will assure Nancy Pelosi's return to the Speakership in January 2019.  Many Congressional Republicans would probably be okay with that.

 

Draining the swamp is going to require legislation.  If Trump is serious about it, he needs to spend more time in the Capitol Building to sell a legislative agenda and use the bully pulpit to browbeat recalcitrant Republicans into passing it.

Game of Thrones seasons

I am a fan of the series and am eager to see the story continue but one thing has annoyed me from the start.  How do these people keep track of time?  Winter has been coming for several years.  Without seasons, how does one know how long a year is?  There is much talk of something having happened in the time of the Andals or the Fall of Valeria but there is no associated year like we have.  Charlemagne ruled from 768 to 814 but Aegon the Conqueror invaded Westeros '300 hundred years ago.'  Really?  How do you know that?  Initially, I thought the series just wasn't going to bog down the viewer with made-up dates but, having read the first four books in the series, it isn't addressed there either.  Bran Stark was born after the last winter and is seven years old in the initial episode.  Again, how does this world keep track of time if the seasons come and go in an arbitrary fashion and last an uncertain number of years?  As far as fantasy calendars, I think only Tolkien really outlined a history of his world with specific years.  For instance, Bilbo Baggins was born in the 2,989th year of the Third Age, or the year 1389 by Shire Reckoning.  Such specific dates are never mentioned in any of the movies - as far as I recall - but it is there as a foundation and, as Middle Earth has ordinary seasons, such isn't really necessary.  My guess is that Martin began writing his epic and the issue of how years are determined didn't really come to play until he was too far along to rectify it.  Therefore, the issue is ignored.  The historian in me cringes at the absence of a dating system.

Generational Attitudes toward Government

On a recent EconTalk, Russ Roberts interviewed Tyler Cowan.  Cowan's latest book is The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.  He posits that a slow down in social change, a diminishing mobility, and a growing aversion to risk is causing the US to become less innovative and productive.  It is a really fascinating discussion and recommended.

 

What really got me thinking was a comment he made about how Millennials have a very different cultural view of government:

 

So, whereas I grew up with the space program, which put a man on the moon, maybe they grew up with the second Iraq War or the Financial Crisis.

 

This is a significant observation that deserves deeper consideration.  The government won praise for its successes and was trusted with more tasks based on those successes.  However, a string of failures is what has followed and yet the government wants to be trusted to do even more.  It cannot accomplish the basic tasks of government (e.g. maintain the borders, balance the budget, win wars, etc.) but still wants more money and authority to do even more.  Where are the great successes to justify more responsibility?  Republicans blame Democrats, Democrats blame Republicans but the end result is continued failures and poor governance which is always explained away by intransigence by the other party.  BS!  Based on performance, the scope of the federal government should be severely curtailed.

 

The greatest success of the Obama years was his neglect of NASA.  At first, I was aghast even though the dynamism of NASA from the 1960s has ossified into a bureaucracy that hasn't been able to put an astronaut in space since 2011.  But I didn't see other options.  Then SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and Blue Origin started launching rockets and developing new technologies.  Spacecraft haven't been this exciting since the Apollo Program.  More of government would benefit from the NASA treatment.

James Comey, Political Football

Democrats last week: FBI Director Comey's last minute reopening of the email case cost Hillary the presidency.  Very bad!

Democrats today: FBI Director Comey should not have been fired.  Important investigations will be derailed.  Saturday Night Massacre!

Hmm.

Politically, Comey is a win-win for Democrats.  If he stayed on, he was a handy punching bag for Hillary's loss, a role he still retains but it is now secondary.  With Comey fired, he now becomes a symbol of the Russia Collusion investigation and Trump's effort to quash it.  By contrast, it was lose-lose for Trump but he has decided that getting rid of Comey - a director who enjoys strong bipartisan disapproval - was the lesser of two bad options.

 

Comey's public approval rating was miserable and is unlikely to draw much sympathy.  Up until yesterday, he was widely hated by Democrats for costing Hillary the election and it is hard for the rank and file to turn on a dime.  It is easier for the elites to see the political benefits of being pro-Comey rather than anti-Comey.  As Trump has shown, consistency isn't required for success.

Lying with Statistics

Living here in Texas, I was kind of surprised when I saw this story that claimed Mexico was the 2nd deadliest conflict in the world last year.  What?  Really?  I read the story and it struck me that there was no discussion of the relative sizes of the countries being discussed.  The population of Syria is around 17 million while the population of Mexico is around 120 million.  Therefore, with 7 times the population, Mexico has seen less than half as many deaths.  One out of every 340 Syrians was killed last year vs. one out of every 5,200 Mexicans.  Rounding out the list, Afghanistan was the second deadliest with 1 in 2,100 killed, followed by Iraq with 1 in 2,500, and finally Yemen with 1 in 3,600.  Of course, St. Louis saw 1 out of 1,667 citizens killed in 2015, making that city deadlier than all of these countries except Syria.  See, I can use statistics too.

 

Someone started looking at absolute number of people killed rather than the ratio of people killed to population and decided on a shocking headline.  Not to minimize the large number of deaths that surround the drug cartels in Mexico, but it isn't in the same league with these Middle Eastern war zones.

Director Comey, You're Fired!

President Trump has fired FBI Director Comey.  Though Comey surely deserves to be fired for his ham-fisted handling of the agency during the presidential campaign, this is going to trigger a firestorm of controversy and obviously be painted at Trump trying to quash the Russia investigation.  Even though many Democrats will probably cheer at Comey's firing, none will allow this PR windfall to go unexploited.  Of course, had Hillary been elected president, I suspect Comey would have been fired already.

Comey's greatest failing was his July press conference in which he 'cleared' Senator Clinton by announcing that no charges would be filed.  If no charges were going to be filed, he should have shut up.  He had no business delineating what sounded like a series of crimes only to then announce that no reasonable prosecutor would take the case.  If that is so, you shouldn't be having a press conference.  Don't commit character assassination when there is no indictment.  Besides, it is the job of DOJ prosecutors to indict, not the FBI.  That press conference was a political show.  Was he having a temper tantrum in response to Attorney General Lynch meeting with Bill Clinton on the tarmac in Arizona the previous week?  If so, that was highly unprofessional on his part.  If he thought the fix was in, he should have resigned in protest and then had a press conference.

 

Though Comey richly deserved to be fired, doing so looks to be a political loser.  I don't see any benefits for Trump or his administration by dumping Comey but lots of downside.  The Russian collusion story, which had died to a low simmer after the cruise missile strike on Syria, will come roaring back to life now.  Then again, Comey managed to infuriate both political parties and is unlikely to earn much sympathy from the public.  Comey may be unpopular enough that his firing is not as controversial as it might seem.

Pre-existing Stupidity

The House passed something that isn't really a repeal but rather a scaling back of Obamacare.  In order to get enough votes, more money had to be injected for those with pre-existing conditions to be covered by 'insurance.'  Obviously, Congress still does not understand how insurance works.

Let's consider a house.  The house is worth $200,000.  Flo is willing to insure the house against fire, burglary, hail damage, etc. for $2,000 a year.  Both the home owner and Flo hope that the insurance policy never pays off.  Flo doesn't want to give back that $2,000 she has been getting year after year and the home owner would rather that the house didn't burn to the ground.  However, if the worst happens, the home owner dodges financial ruin thanks to Flo's accepting that risk.  Now, consider if the home owner had not purchased insurance and instead decided everything would be fine.  And then the house burned down.  Well, the smoldering ruins of a $200,000 house are a pre-existing condition and Flo can't deny coverage.  Therefore, by law, Flo sells a policy to the home owner and then rebuilds the $200,000 house after requiring a $1,000 deductible.  That's not insurance, that's a path to bankruptcy.

 

How about a wife buying a $500,000 life insurance policy with the pre-existing condition that her husband died last week?  What if a driver wants to increase his coverage after having driven his car through the supermarket?  The huge costs are a pre-existing condition.

 

Flo stays in business by selling insurance to many home owners while knowing that comparatively few of them will suffer catastrophic harm.  The same is true for health insurance.  It would be foolish to sell a $6,000 a year policy to a person who already requires $5,000 a month in treatment.  That's not insurance, that's charity.  If mandated by law, that's welfare.  By requiring companies to 'insure' the wrecked car and smoking remains of a house, the premiums will necessarily skyrocket.  Duh.

 

If this reform manages to get through the Senate and find its way to Trump's desk, it will manage to transfer blame for bad healthcare to the Republicans.  Well done.  A better option would be to get the government out of the 'insurance' business and just create a bail out program for people with pre-existing health issues.  It would be vastly cheaper than the latest government overreach.

Most Qualified?

In yesterday's musing, I mentioned that James Buchanan was arguably the most qualified person elected to the presidency.  Didn't President Obama recently opine during the election that Hillary Clinton was the most qualified?  Let's consider.

James Buchanan was born in Pennsylvania in 1791.  After graduating college with honors in 1809, he studied law and was admitted to the bar in 1812.  He was a highly paid lawyer through the rest of the decade.  Though opposed to the War of 1812, he volunteered when Maryland was invaded and took part in the Defense of Baltimore.  Soon thereafter, he was elected as a member of the Pennsylvania House, where he served for 2 years (1814 to 1816).  In 1821, he was elected to Congress and served for 10 years, the last two as the Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.  In 1832, President Andrew Jackson appointed him as the Minister to Russia.  Shortly after returning from Russia, he became a Senator for Pennsylvania (1834 to 1845).  When James Knox Polk was elected to the Presidency in 1844, he offered Buchanan a nomination to the Supreme Court!  Buchanan declined and instead served as Secretary of State.  The Polk years (1845 to 1849) were exciting ones for foreign policy, involving both a war with Mexico and resolving the Oregon Question with England.  Polk had stated his intention to serve only one term.  When Franklin Pierce was elected in 1852, he appointed Buchanan to be the Minister to the United Kingdom (1853 to 1856).  With this immense depth of experience, Buchanan then failed spectacularly as the 15th president of the United States (1857-1861).  Like George H. W. Bush, Buchanan wasn't particularly interested in domestic affairs and really wanted to tinker on the world stage.

 

Hillary Clinton graduated from Wellesley with honors in 1969 and earned her Juris Doctor from Yale in 1973.  She served as an attorney for the Children's Defense Fund (established 1973).  In 1974, she advised the House Judiciary Committee during Watergate.  She became First Lady of Arkansas (1979 to 1981 and 1983 to 1992).  During this period, she was a highly-paid lawyer at the Rose Law Firm.  When her husband was elected president, she followed him to Washington where she became First Lady (1993 to 2001).  She managed the healthcare overhaul that failed so badly as to trigger the Republican wave of 1994 in which the Democrats lost the House for the first time in 40 years!  Her first elective office was that of New York Senator (2001 to 2009), where she served on many committees but chaired none.  She served as President Obama's first Secretary of State (2009 to 2013), a tenure overshadowed by the collapse of Libya and American deaths in Benghazi.

Looks like a hands down victory for Buchanan and he proved to be a disaster as president.  Of course, the man who followed Buchanan had a thin resume by comparison, having served only 2 years in Congress and 8 in the Illinois House of Representatives.  On paper, Lincoln has less governmental experience than either of these two highly qualified individuals but is regularly rated among the best presidents, if not the best.  Government experience is not as valuable as one might expect.

The Civil War and Andrew Jackson

Because we had a Civil War, most believe that it was unavoidable.  A Civil War was baked into the Constitution because of the three-fifths rule and the allowance of the slave trade to proceed until 1808.  Two very different regions had joined forces to leave the British Empire.  Independence required unity but the cultures were not easily united.  It's an excellent point.  I've been on the receiving end of many lectures that outline the inevitability of the Civil War.  And yet, the United States is the only country that fought a Civil War to abolish slavery.  Russia was able to end serfdom (a slightly less onerous form of slavery) through legislation and compensation.  Many other countries didn't even offer the compensation when ending the practice.  The British Empire had a system whereby slaves were transformed into 'apprentices' for a set period of years and then freed.

 

The United States suffered a lack of leadership in the 1850s.  Zachary Taylor, father in law of future Confederate President Jefferson Davis, had the misfortune of dying while the Compromise of 1850 was being debated.  His death allowed it to pass in a form he had opposed.  Millard Fillmore assumed the presidency and mostly kept the seat warm for Franklin Pierce.  Pierce blithely triggered Bleeding Kansas with the ill-fated Kansas-Nebraska Act.  Moreover, he proposed purchasing Cuba to extend slavery further south.  It is hard to believe that he was born and raised in New Hampshire, a state that began abolishing slavery in 1783.  The catastrophic Pierce presidency was followed by James Buchanan, arguably the most qualified man to ever be elected and regularly rated as the worst president in US history.  Buchanan was inaugurated on March 4, 1857.  On the 6th, the Supreme Court handed down the Dred Scott decision.  With an ever-clearer widening divide between North and South, Buchanan twiddled his thumbs.  When secession finally came after Lincoln's election, Buchanan did almost nothing, leaving the war to his successor.

 

The disastrous 1850s led to armed conflict in the 1860s.  Had an Andrew Jackson-like figure been present rather than a slew of mediocrities, it is certainly arguable that things would have progressed very differently.  Had Fillmore, Pierce, or Buchanan been president during the Nullification Crisis, the Civil War might have started in 1833 instead of 1861.  Now, Jackson himself - a slave owner with a volcanic temper - might not have been the best choice to mediate the conflict but he would have been better than what we had.