Current Affairs – US

1. Politicians not paying attention to experts? Surely not…
The British government is facing awkward questions now that it has emerged that the brand new airport built on the South Atlantic island of St. Helena is likely to be unusable in its current location because of excessive wind shear.
It emerged that the Meteorlogical Office in the UK had warned the government that this was likely to be the case; however, nobody thought to ask them until airport construction was already in progress…
In the meantime the airport may end up as a white elephant even worse than the billion-plus Cuidad Real Airport in Spain. At least that airport was actually opened, although not enough people used it to prevent the operating company from going bankrupt.

2. Accomplishments
One of the new nonsense memes circulating on the internets is one claiming that Hillary Clinton has no accomplishments.
Accomplishments.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
What I think the people who post these memes are really saying is that they do not think that Hillary Clinton has done anything for them. This is probably true. However, that does not mean that she has no accomplishments. Most people would regard being elected to the US Senate and becoming the US Secretary Of State as accomplishments, so trying to post a meme contradicting that really shows that the posters are, on this topic at least, profoundly unserious. Most likely they dislike Hillary Clinton for whatever reasons, and the meme is just another juvenile internet slam. Yawn.

3. Racism, Facebook hacking and personal responsibility
I work in IT, where corporations are expected to be responsible for securing their own data and the data of their clients against attack or theft. If my employer allows an unauthorized third party to hack into its network and steal information, or make unauthorized updates to data, that’s on us. We can blame the hackers, but in reality we should have prevented the hack in the first place. Certainly the third parties filing lawsuits will not be chasing the hackers. They will file against us, because it was our responsibility to secure data and we failed to exercise that responsibility.
Which brings us to the interesting story of Patsy Capshaw Skipper, the interim Mayor of Midland City Alabama. On August 25th Ms Skipper lost the Mayoral election to an opponent who is black. Shortly afterwards, her Facebook page showed a woman by the name of Patsy Capshaw Skipper moaning “The Nigger won” when asked about the election result.
Perhaps rather predictably, when this was noticed, Skipper deleted the messsage thread and then claimed that her Facebook account had been hacked.
Here’s the bad news Patsy. Even if your account was hacked, this is on you. It’s up to you to ensure that malicious people don’t hack your Facebook. Facebook is one of your windows to the wider world. Anything on your Facebook page, as you can see now, is viewed by the world as your property, a representation of you. Thanks to this reality, a lot of people in the world now think of you as a mean-spirited racist little chickenshit. No, blaming hackers doesn’t get you off the hook. It’s up to you to protect your online accounts. Not Facebook, or God, or the tooth fairy.
After all, you belong to the political party that constantly bloviates about “personal responsibility”.

4. There are reasons why I am occasionally contemptuous of Christian churches. Here is one of them
This church in Colorado apparently thought it was OK to not report felony sexual abuse of a 12 year old by a Church official because they determined that Biblical counselling would suffice.
OK.
I would like to see every person involved in that decision hauled into court. This would include the father of the 12 year old girl, who clearly has no interest in obeying the law, having the church obey the law, and who appears to regard his daughter as church property, a sexual chattel to be abused on request by church leaders.
Seriously. This is basically a conspiracy to cover up felonies.

One of the more amusing aspects of the Donald Trump show is how he seems to think that he can plonk his posterior down in the Oval Office and do stuff Just Like That.
The last time a self-proclaimed “different” person ran for office and gained a significant share of the vote was in 1992, when Ross Perot ran as an Independent. At the time, in interviews that I saw in the UK, Perot behaved a lot of the time like the highly successful businessman that he was. He consistently made comments indicating that he saw the USA as simply like EDS, only a lot bigger, and that he would bring some of his successful “business discipline” to bear on the USA if elected, and SHAZAM! things would be better, and damn quick.
The thing was, I had seen how that panned out when tried in the UK in the early 1970s. The Conservative Party, partly as a reaction to what they saw as the dangerous tendency for the Labour Party to listen to input from trade union leaders, began a campaign to get business leaders to enter the government. They persuaded John Davies to quit his business job, arranged for him to be given a “safe” Member of Parliament seat, and promoted him to be Trade and Industry secretary.
The move was a disaster. Davies had no idea about the very real differences between being a CEO and being in government. He was a poor performer on television, was a terrible speaker in the House of Commons, and failed to form any constructive working relationships with civil servants, who are essential enablers in the UK government system for Getting Stuff Done, and he soon discovered that the sort of hard-nosed thinking that leads to uneconomic private businesses being shut down is not applicable to large national industries that are labor-intensive, where closedowns have the ability to lead to governments being un-elected. After several years, he gradually withdrew from politics, and returned to business.
I was thinking of this when I saw Ross Perot being questioned by interviewers on his policy ideas in 1992. He sometimes became irascible and short with interviewers who asked him penetrating questions, which is something that I have seen and heard about with people who build businesses from scratch. Many of them are not used to having their ideas questioned, much less criticized. It is my belief that Perot, for all of his ideas and energy, would have been a lousy President. He would have become frustrated in a matter of weeks when he discovered that no, Mr. President, you cannot just Do That. It needs Congressional or Senate approval. That pesky three co-equal branches of government thingy would have reduced him to grinding frustration quite quickly.
Which brings us to Donald Trump, the man of the expansive promise to Do Stuff. How the hell he thinks he is going to do most of what he says he will do, given the constitutional limitations on the authority of the President, is a mystery to me. This tweet provides the most likely explanation:

@Popehat you have to remember how Trump thinks the presidency works. He thinks it's the CEO of America.

— Jason ̆̈ (@XaiaX) September 21, 2016

1. A lack of understanding of the word “Freedom” in Beaumont TX
In which players who kneeled during the playing of the National Anthem were informed that if they did it again they would be removed from the team. As the article makes clear, some of the supervisory leadership of the Beaumont Bulls are astonishingly ignorant not only of settled law (they need to go read this case in detail for starters) and are also utterly lacking in understanding of the roots of the protest.
See this summary of some of the issues and questions surrounding kneeling for the National Anthem.

2. Trump’s appeal is almost entirely based on him behaving like he is unfiltered
As J.D. Vance, the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” explains in this interview, a large part of Donald Trump’s appeal lies in his (probably deliberate) use of language that sets him apart from other contemporary politicians. Those politicians communicate in an articulate, measured and careful style, that has become regarded with suspicion and contempt by many of Trump’s supporters, who see them as shysters and hucksters who do not give a damn about them as people.
Effectively. Donald Trump talks much like the bar-stool bloviator down the street, using poorly structured, rambling sentences with little or nothing in the way of coherent solutions. However, many people like this because this is exactly the way they wish that they could talk to professional politicians. The fact that many of Trump’s grandiose promises are hopelessly impractical or unrealistic is not something that many of his supporters even want to consider. The fact that somebody understands them is enough for the time being.

3. Today’s unbelievably stupid question from network television
The question and the best response so far on Twitter…

Short answer: YES

Long answer: YES, OF COURSE, YOU USELESS ASSHUFFING TABLOID TV SHITWEASELS pic.twitter.com/dxy0ha9kKO

— Micah J Reid (@mjreid) September 21, 2016

4. The practical realities of Brexit
As I said at the time of the referendum, the UK vote to leave the EU was the equivalent of an 8 year old child having a petulance attack and shouting “I HATE you and I’m leaving home NOW”. Those 8 year olds soon discover that leaving home at that age is not easy or achievable. Ditto the UK now that they have to not only negotiate their way out of the EU, but also negotiate separate trade agreements with dozens of countries, when all of the trade negotiation experts work for the EU. This is going to be a train-wreck, and the voters who voted Leave are going to find out the hard way that not only is it not as simple as it looked at the time, but the results may not be to their liking.

To recap: the Skittles tweet was a recycled white supremacist meme, plagiarized from a radio host, with a photo stolen from a former refugee

— Gabriel Snyder (@gabrielsnyder) September 20, 2016

Well, the attempt to explain the process might look like this…

One of the more frustrating underlying issues of the 2016 election campaign is how Donald Trump has been playing most of the mass media like a cheap violin. He verbally abuses them on almost a daily basis in his campaign rallies, even going so far as to mock one journalist with a physical handicap. He arbitrarily and capriciously decides who gets press credentials and who does not, and, most recently, he claims to be holding a press conference which turns out to be a formal public statement occurring after the journalists are expected to sit through an infomercial for the press conference venue, which just happens to be owned by one of Trump’s companies. (To their credit, the media collectively refused, perhaps for the first time, to go along with that particular piece of weapons-grade bullshit).
In the UK we have a term for this behavior pathology. It is called “taking the piss”.
Donald Trump’s strategy (if you can call it that) is simple to understand. Since he despises the mass media, because they have the power to point out his lying, dissembling and general level of BS, he is going to give them the run-around, humiliate and embarrass them at every opportunity, and generally treat them like something he would normally scrape off the bottom of his shoe. The objective is, simply, to render them irrelevant, so that he can continue to hold rallies and utter nonsense in a resonant well-modulated voice. His campaign is not based on winning over the media, followed by a ground game to get out the vote, as most campaigns set out to do. He intends to bypass nearly all of the normal and accepted approaches to winning elections, and win the job of POTUS by direct appeal to an angry and highly motivated base which may be unrepresentative of the modern USA, but which is going to Push the Button for him without fail.
The problem for the mass media is a rock-meet-hard-place one. As they see it, if they refuse to engage with Trump, his high percentage of lies and bullshit go unreported and unchallenged to a wider audience. However, if they attempt to engage with him, he seems to be able to treat them like dirt and there is no negative consequence for him. Most of his supporters also hate the mass media, who they consider to be biased, so for him there is no current downside to treating the media this way.
This article by Tom Scocca departs from the usual agonizing over “should we be tougher on Trump?” to point out that the underlying relationship between Donald Trump and the media is really based on negotiation. The media decides most of the time what questions to ask Donald Trump in interviews and press conferences, and, as Scocca points out, right now the question of when Donald Trump will release his tax returns is one that the media refuses to use as a negotiating card with Trump. Politicians need publicity like you and I need oxygen, and the media, no matter how much Trump may despise them, provide him with most of his publicity oxygen. Even if he holds 2 rallies a day for the rest of the campaign, he can at most reach 50,000 people directly a day. He can reach 10 million easily in a TV interview. The math is not even close.
Scocca’s view is that the media needs to be consistently and persistently demanding that Trump release his tax returns as it’s #1 question, and should consistently remind viewers and listeners that Trump will not do that, unlike Hillary Clinton. His view is that my sticking to that question and refusing to tolerate dissembling and BS answers, the media will be taking a negotiating position (“You can refuse to release your tax returns, in which case that is all you will hear questions about, or you can release them, in which case we will move to the next question”).
Would an approach like this work? Well, if the media took lessons from Jeremy Paxman, they might stand a chance.
UPDATE – Given that Donald Trump apparently promised to donate $5m to charity if Barack Obama was born in the USA, and Mark Cuban has offered Trump $10m to debate him for 4 hours on policy, the media can always add those two questions to the one about tax returns.

…and now i wish I hadn’t.
There was a breakin to regular programming because of a shooting incident in West Fort Worth, which so far has resulted in 1 death and 2 police officers wounded, one seriously.
NBC5DFW went into full overdrive mode, with on-the-scene people near the scene of the shooting and also at the hospital where the two wounded police officers were taken.
It was soon clear that the whole purpose of TV news these days is not to inform. They could have done that in about, ooh, 2 minutes, based on what was not a lot of information, especially since the entire scene was on lockdown because of concerns that a shooter might still be alive and at large. Of course, I had this dream of an NBC reporter sneaking into the crime scene to try and get an “exclusive” with the shooter…(“Mr Smith, can you tell our viewers how you felt as you shot the police officers?”).
The entire 20 minutes was geared towards two objectives, none of them laudable.
Objective #1 – generate drama. I tell you, these reporters could be moonlighting for a TV cops-and-robbers drama. They didn’t inform, they performed. They went into this bizarre Highly Serious mode, talking in hushed reverent voices every time the police officers were mentioned. Then they would snap into breathless “OMG something is happening – let’s go to our man on the scene” mode and quiz the on-the-ground person, eleciting next to nothing of any significance.
Objective #2 – make it last. A two minute summary was spun out to 20+ minutes by all of the faux drama, constant to-ing and fro-ing from the studio heads to umpteen live locations in Fort Worth. A press officer from the Fort Worth PD showed up, but, this being an ongoing incident, he didn’t exactly have a lot that he could say, and most of the content was already known. Nevertheless, he managed to join in the drama by asking viewers to pray for the officers, and the media had to ask him umpteen questions, most of which he could not answer because he had literally only just showed up and probably didn’t know everything yet.
As I watched this cluster**k of a broadcast, all of the reasons why I no longer watch network or cable news came up in front of me in sharp relief. This, folks, is the USA news media. Over-dramatic, obsessed with minutae, spinning everything out, speculating up the wazoo…all of the underlying structural faults were laid bare in one 20 minute extravaganza of almost substance-free faux-drama. But here’s the bad news. We the viewers will continue to see this crap every time we turn on until we stop turning on.

…Leilani Thomas, who has been sitting out the Pledge of Allegiance in school since the second grade, and recently faced off against a teacher who played the same “you’re being disruptive” card that the people objecting to NFL players seem to play a lot of the time.
As this story explains, not only did Leilani refuse to back down, but the school backed her, and the teacher who tried to shut down her principled and legal dissent has been disciplined.

One of the more distressing features of the US political system is the heavy reliance on what has been termed “dog whistles” by reactionary and regressive politicians and political candidates. A “dog whistle” is a message that is designed to activate a positive emotional response in the candidate’s core supporters, whilst plausibly appearing either anodyne or completely different to uncomitted listeners.
“Dog Whistles” are in some ways a form of innuendo, another form of indirect speech that I am very familiar with, having grown up in the UK in an era where you were not allowed to directly mention or talk about sex on radio or television. As a result, innuendo became a standard device for introducing sex into programs, while allowing the performers to plausibly (if deceptively) answer in response to objections “I have no idea what you’re talking about. What did YOU think I was talking about?”.
Historians and fans of old English literature will recognize the same underlying indirect speech pathology in the old story of the murder of Thomas Beckett in 1170, after the King of England, in exasperation, uttered the classic line “Will nobody rid me of this turbulent priest?”. Another excellent example of indirect speech (drawn from the London East End gangster world), showing the sinister potential, is on display starting at 01:46 of this comedy sketch from Monty Python about a shakedown.
One of the classic early political “dog whistles” in the US political process was “States Rights”, a mantra first used by George Wallace when he ran for President. Supporters of Wallace hearing “States Rights” heard “I will permit states to continue with racial and ethnic discrimination”. The fundamental logical nonsense that states do not have rights, only people have rights, was never really discussed. This rhetorical sleight of hand, still used today, allowed candidates to signal to supporters that they still tacitly supported discriminatory practices.
To bring us bang up to date, Donald Trump used a “dog whistle” today, when talking about Hillary Clinton. I am pasting the Twitter exchange that sort of explains it. This example of indirect speech, when translated from the dog whistle, is revealing and sinister in equal measure. He seems to be basing his wish on the (false) premise that Hillary Clinton wants to abolish or modify the Second Amendment regulating the possession and use of firearms.

@anamariecox @jeffjarvis An excellent example of what Stephen Pinker terms "indirect speech"

— gshevlin (@gshevlin) September 17, 2016

I am not sure what the best response is to something as sinister as this. Ideally nobody would pay it any attention. However, in the current election cycle, where Donald Trump’s whole campaign seems to be predicated on old-style rabble-rousing, ignoring it may not be an option.
UPDATE – Jim Wright at Stonekettle has the best response so far:

So basically he's saying that gun nuts are dangerous and can't be trusted not to kill people they disagree with https://t.co/EBFqSXO4Ba

— Stonekettle (@Stonekettle) September 17, 2016