The Tick (2017)

The Tick has returned to the small screen and it is generally good.  It is different than the last effort but still has a skewed view from the standard super hero fare.  Arthur (Griffin Newman) is given a lot more backstory and comes to the super hero game reluctantly.  Rather than some mild mannered accountant who shows up in a moth suit one day, here we have a psychologically damaged accountant who became obsessed with The Terror in the wake of a childhood tragedy.  No sooner has he stumbled upon a big clue regarding the supposedly-dead villain's whereabouts than the Tick (Peter Serafinowicz) appears and attaches himself, almost tick-like, to the hapless Arthur.  Tick assured Arthur that destiny is calling and he needs to answer that phone call.  Classic Tick banter.

 

Where the Tick has usually been pure comedy, this mixes some drama with the pure goofiness.  Though I like Serafinowicz in general, I would currently say he isn't right for the role.  Patrick Warburton was so perfect with his glib deliveries of epic blather that it would be nigh-impossible to meet that bar.  This is going to be a different Tick.  This is quite interesting since Ben Edlund - the creator of Tick - has been behind every version of the character thus far.

 

Only half of the season has been released and it ended with Arthur being abducted.  Thus, the current storyline won't reach conclusion until sometime next year.  Dang!  I look forward to it.

Katrina Redux

Like New Orleans in the run up to Katrina, the city of Houston was not evacuated.  This should be blamed on the mayor but it will almost certainly find its way to being Trump's fault in much the way that Bush was to blame for problems related to Katrina.  Also look for Trump's ascribed indifference to the fact that the city is more than 40% Hispanic.  If some newsreader on MSNBC hasn't already made that claim, it is coming.  This is the new Katrina and even if Trump does all he can and does it perfectly, he will have been wrong at every step and a cruel villain as well.  Go up the chain of authority until a Republican is found and there is where the blame lies.  Perhaps Governor Abbot will shoulder some of the blame but the Democratic Mayor, Sylvester Turner, will be blameless.

Republican Suicide

After years of promises to repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, and get the fiscal house in order, the Republicans are reneging on all of it.  With Democrats having no levers to prevent Republicans from doing just about anything they want, there are no excuses for not enacting at least some of their long-stated agenda.  Whether they like Trump or not (they don't), they can still make common cause with him on those items where they agree.  Nope.  Years of false promises - lies - have been exposed for all the voters to see.  The Republicans no more want to reduce government than do the Democrats.  It is just too much fun spending other people's money and tell them how to live their lives.  Power has corrupted.

Rigged Election!

"Court Admits DNC and Debbie Wasserman Schulz Rigged Primaries Against Sanders"

Michael Sainato, Observer

This is both funny and sad.  Some upset Bernie supporters filed a class action suit against the DNC and Wasserman Schulz in 2016.  Though the judge finds that the plaintiffs are right on every count, he dismissed the case because it isn't the place of the courts to tell the DNC how to run their primaries.  Awesome.  Even as unpopular as Donald Trump is, this going to be hard for the DNC to overcome.  How do they run a primary in 2020 and have the voters trust the results?  Bernie won 43% of the vote in the 2016 primary and it is now a fact that the DNC put a thumb on the scale to favor Hillary.  What do those 43% (13.2 million voters) do in 2020?  There is talk of the Republicans splitting thanks to Trump's following vs. the Never Trump wing.  The Democrats have a similar problem that isn't getting the same media attention.  The Green Party may see a big boost come 2020 with disaffected Democrats switching parties.

 

Also, this really hurts the rigged election claims by the Democrats.  If it was okay for you to cheat against Bernie, why isn't it okay for Trump to cheat against you?  Who cheated first?

The Brand New Doomed Afghan Strategy

President Trump has outlined a plan for further extending America's longest war without providing a means for us to win without Afghan support.  The US didn't care a whit what the random Japanese thought about the war and did not make a plan that depended upon them supporting US troops.  The US did not work with the German government to defeat the Nazis.  In both of those cases - which took considerably less than 15 years - we flattened the enemies cities, invaded their territory with no local support, and imposed a new system of government on them while purging the proponents of the ideology that brought about the war.  Nazism was outlawed and Nazis were hunted like the criminals they are.  Imperialist policies were squeezed from the fabric of Japan to the point that their military has been purely defensive in nature since WWII.

 

What is the equivalent of Nazism in Afghanistan?  Islam.  Islam calls upon its followers to subdue or kill infidels.  Unlike Nazism, Islam is a religion and thus purging it is disallowed by American attitudes toward religious freedom, even a religion that calls upon its adherents to slay all Jews.  Dying while killing infidels is a guaranteed path to paradise.  If one is unwilling to practice forced conversion - which is what Muslims have done to conquered lands over the centuries - then the next best option is to install a dictator who will oppress the people.  A Hosni Mubarak or a Muammar Gaddafi are far preferable to the Mullahs of Iran or the anarchy of Afghanistan.

 

Trump's plan, though an improvement on Obama's, is no more likely to succeed.  If you don't fight the ideas that inspire the terrorists, you aren't fighting to win.  Even Turkey, the best example of a Westernized Islamic country, has suffered backsliding and is likely to de-Westernize in the coming years.  Islam is not compatible with Western values and never will be.  All these politicians who proclaim that Islam is a religion of peace and the terrorists and their ilk have been misinterpreting it for 14 centuries are delusional.  I'm willing to bet that Osama bin Laden the lifelong Muslim had a stronger understanding of Islam than George W. Bush the Methodist.

 

Winning requires tactics that no one will implement.  Therefore, we will not win.  We can only contain and suppress.

Fear Skynet? Meh

Elon Musk is worried about Artificial Intelligence (AI).  He holds that it is far more dangerous than nuclear-armed North Korea.  However, he also posits that we are living in a computer simulation.  If we are nothing but a computer simulation - just so many AI versions of people in a super advanced computer - then an AI takeover has already happened, hasn't it?  Elon needs to reconcile his beliefs.

Much like the panic the preceded Y2K, the AI concerns are overblown.  A great deal of effort is spent in making computers secure from hacking, an unending process that always seeks to patch exploits that are found in each new line of code.  Those who are worried about the coming takeover by Skynet forget that Norton, Vipre, Sophos, Kaspersky, McAfee, and countless others make a living by preventing the sort of destructive intrusion that the feared all-powerful AI needs to do in order to become all-powerful.

Failing McConnell

President Trump has unleashed his ire on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and McConnell has responded by explaining how the president doesn't understand the legislative process.  Mitch is full of crap.  With virtually the same batch of senators, he managed to get a repeal of Obamacare onto President Obama's desk in January of 2016.  In that instance, the President was hostile to the legislative process and yet McConnell and Ryan overcame.  This time, with a president who is cheerleading the effort, they fell short.  The only problem that Trump brings to the process is that he will sign the legislation.  In 2016, the Republicans could send the legislation with supreme confidence that it wouldn't be signed but they would be able to go back to their districts and say "See, I passed it and the President vetoed it."  It was the best of both worlds, a way to convince the rubes back home that Republicans were opposed to Obamacare while still retaining all the money and power that the Affordable Care Act provided.  This time around, they couldn't even repeal just the mandates.

 

McConnell is offering empty excuses that are clearly false.  You passed it last year when Obama was there but can't pass it now that the Republicans have an even stronger hold on government?  Nah.  You don't want to pass it.  You want to keep all that power in Washington, where you are top dog in the Senate.  You don't really believe in limited government or, at the very least, too many of your Republican colleagues in the Senate don't believe in it.

Calm Brought Us Here. Time for a New Approach

Keith Ellison, the deputy chair of the DNC, thinks that Kim Jong-un is acting more responsibly than President Trump.  The man providing frequent provocations by launching missiles toward Japan or the United States is responsible while the man telling him to knock it off or there will be serious consequences is irresponsible.  Ellison wants a president who brings calm.  The last president brought plenty of calm and we have a nuclear power with steadily improving missile technology.  North Korea is a basket case of a country that survives by extorting benefits in exchange for stopping its nuclear program.  It is amazing how few recall that President Clinton pursued the Agreed Framework that was supposed to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula.  How did that work?  Failed.  President George W. Bush included them in the Axis of Evil but mostly left them to stew while he sought to nation build in the Middle East.  President Obama spoke loudly and carried no stick at all.

"North Korea will not be accepted as a nuclear power." John Kerry, Secretary of State

What does that even mean?

We've had nothing but calm presidents and the situation has grown worse.  Twenty years ago, the Hermit Kingdom had no nukes.  Today, it has some that may be small enough to mount on an ICBM.  Kicking the can down the road has been a disaster.  It should be noted that President Obama had the equivalent of the Agreed Framework with Iran so we can expect this same situation to arise with the Iranians in 10 to 20 years.

 

An attack on the United States by North Korea will end the regime.  Kim may be a nut but he is aware of this.  His father and grandfather knew this too.  However, they have gamed a restart of the Korean War to extort their neighbors.  Sure, if the war were to restart, North Korea would end but isn't it cheaper to just pay them to calm down?  Trump appears to be not so keen on playing this game and is calling the bluff.  That's brinksmanship but it doesn't make Kim the more responsible person.

Mutiny of the Deep State

Here is a story about how federal employees are defying President Trump and his appointees.  The story is generally sympathetic to the mutineers.  Working in government is not a right.  Long tenure does not mean that you get to set policy.  Love him or hate him, President Trump is the chief executive.  He's the boss, the top dog, the big cheese, the orange overlord.  When the Obama Department of Justice declined to prosecute the New Black Panthers for voter intimidation after they had loitered with clubs at a polling station during the 2008 election, J. Christian Adams resigned and became a critic outside of government.  He disagreed with the decision of President Obama and his appointees but didn't become some mole in the administration who would leak classified data.  Too often, that is what is happening now.

 

The deep state, the regulatory state, the bureaucracy, or whatever else one might call it is profoundly unconstitutional.  The Constitution says "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States."  The EPA is not the Congress and yet the Federal Register returns 14,640 documents regarding EPA rules.  These rules are binding on the citizenry but they were not legislated by elected representatives; they were written by career bureaucrats who remain in their jobs for decades, regardless of which party is in office.  There are so many of these bureaucracies that Congress doesn't have the time for anything but cursory oversight.  Worse, the Congress has passed laws that limit the executive's authority (that's also unconstitutional) in managing these almost independent fiefdoms of regulatory power.  ANY rule or regulation that can result in a penalty must be legislated by the Congress.  By outsourcing legislative power under the euphemism 'regulation,' the government has experienced massive growth.

 

Sticking with the EPA, here are a few of the arms within the agency:

 

1. Office of Policy: The OP creates the regulations and is the effective legislative branch of the EPA.

2. Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance:  The OECA enforces the regulations, basically what an executive branch does.

3. Office of Administrative Law Judges: The OALJ adjudicates the regulations and is the judicial branch.

 

Look how convenient that is: legislative, executive, and judicial all in one agency.  Who needs separation of powers?  The separation of powers exists to prevent the consolidation of power into one entity but too many of these regulatory agencies are self-contained realms whose various parts are unlikely to provide a fair hearing to those it chooses to harass.

 

The swamp likes this cozy arrangement and is alarmed by Trump's threat to drain it, thus the mutiny.

Sane Immigration Reform

Last year, I proposed some ideas for immigration reform.  It looks like Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue may have perused my considered opinion and offered a more merit-based system of immigration.  The big problem with a merit-based system is that those immigrants will consume less government than the current unmerited immigrants.  Sure, that may sound like the preferred situation but that is like a business turning away customers.  Government provides services.  The more customers it has, the better.  Self-sufficiency is the bane of government.  Vast bureaucracies require 'customers.'  If everyone was self-sufficient, the government might have to scale back the nanny state.  Oh, hell no!  Thus we get the Tsarnaev brothers who receive welfare and college tuition from the taxpayer while planning the Boston Marathon bombing.

 

If an immigrant can't support himself, he needs to be deported back to his country of origin.  Don't import liabilities.  Duh.  Because this is patently obvious, I am virtually certain it will never get through Congress.

Confederate

The makers of Game of Thrones have floated the idea of a new HBO series that considers what America would be like had the South won the Civil War.  Doubtless, the success of Man in the High Castle - which proposes an alternate history in which Germany and Japan divided the United States between them after winning WWII.  Let's look at the numbers.

The 1860 Census found that the United States had 31.4 million people.  Of those, approximately 9 million lived in the South and 22 million in the North.  That's a pretty impressive advantage for the North but there's more.  Of the 9 million people in the South, more than 40% were black.  In South Carolina, the population was 57% black, virtually all of whom were slaves.  The North had 72% of the railroads, 92% of iron & steel production, 75% of the wealth, 68% of the exports, and 85% of the factories.  The math is quite hostile to a Confederate victory.  The only reason the South lasted as long as it did was because they had a better officer corps at the start of the war.

 

The South was fighting a defensive war, which is often a recipe for defeat.  Twice, Lee sallied into the North; some of his army refused to follow.  They had joined to fight against Northern aggression, not commit Southern aggression.  However, suppose that Lee took Washington, DC and even captured Lincoln and most of the government.  Suppose that the North accedes to the South's separation.  There still remains an Underground Railroad.  More John Browns will attempt to spark slave revolts.  After the Colonies won the Revolutionary War in 1783, England tried to undo it in the War of 1812.  The same would happen with the North and South and unless the South dramatically departed from the King Cotton economy, the North would be even more formidable in a rematch.

 

I may watch the premiere but my suspension of disbelief is going to be stretched to the breaking point very quickly.