There is no lack of bitter complaint or recrimination following the confirmation of President Trump’s appointee, Brett Kavanaugh, to the Supreme Court yesterday by a 50-48 vote. A single Democrat, Joe Manchin of West Virginia voted for Kavanaugh’s confirmation. One Republican, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, abstained. The editors of the New York Times declaim:

The degrading spectacle of Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation process is behind us; the degrading era of his service on the Supreme Court lies ahead. If senators vote as expected on Saturday, Judge Kavanaugh, with a razor-thin victory on an almost strict party-line Senate vote, will be sworn in as the newest associate justice of the Supreme Court as early as next week.

Credible accusations of sexual assault, lies told under oath, explicitly partisan attacks on the senators trying to assess his fitness to serve: None of it was enough to give Republican leaders more than momentary pause in their campaign to seize decisive control of the Supreme Court.

while the editors of the Washington Post strike a more reasoned note:

THE SENATE voted Saturday to confirm Brett M. Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, after one of the most contentious nomination battles in history and by the slimmest margin for a justice in the modern era. Now, difficult as this seems, it will be up to the new justice to seek to reassure a country riven over his selection that he has the temperament and judgment to do the job; as important, it will be up to the court as a whole to demonstrate that it is not just another partisan institution. And it will be up to those who opposed his confirmation, including this page, to evaluate Mr. Kavanaugh fairly in his new position.

Many Americans believe, with reason, that the GOP-majority Senate muscled the Kavanaugh nomination through in its drive to install a reliable fifth conservative vote. Now, an increasingly dysfunctional Congress and a wayward presidency threaten to place more demands on this new court to address major social problems and perhaps even defuse threats to the nation’s constitutional order. Meantime, a cemented conservative majority will face temptations to wreak major changes in the law. As they confront these challenges, the justices must act as the careful, restrained jurists they claim to be, not the partisans in robes many fear.

Democrats are right to complain that Republicans blocked the appointment of President Obama’s appointee, Merrick Garland. But it ain’t beanbag and they are wrong to argue, as they persistently have, that two wrongs make a right. It would be easier to take their bitterness more seriously if they hadn’t drummed up charge after charge against appointees by Republican presidents, if they had not treated Christine Blasey Ford as shabbily as they have, and if they didn’t defend their own accused of much worse offenses than those of which now Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh was accused by Dr. Ford.

In my view President Trump should have withdrawn his appointment of Brett Kavanaugh and appointed someone else in his place whom the Senate could have quickly moved to confirm. That would have been terribly unfair to Judge Kavanaugh but it might have avoided what is now an open sore, likely to fester over the course of a generation.

The new tack of the Democrats appears to be to complain about the terrible unfairness of our present electoral system, conveniently forgetting that Bill Clinton was elected twice by minorities of the electorate and to delegitimize the Supreme Court. Perhaps the best outcome of this whole sorry chapter would be if Democrats were to suddenly rediscover federalism.

We don’t need the Russians to challenge the legitimacy of our system. We’re doing a fine job without them.

At Politico Theodoric Meyer wonders why anyone would seek to become governor of Illinois:

Illinois — the sixth-biggest state, by population — has seen its credit rating cut to near-junk status in the decade since the financial crisis. Its bonds are now considered as risky as those of Russia and Romania. Its pension system is in worse shape than that of almost any other state. Springfield, the state capital, has grown so paralyzed that Illinois’ own governor compared the state to “a banana republic.” And a bitter standoff between Rauner, a Republican, and Democrats in the state Legislature has left Illinois more than $7 billion in unpaid bills and a sense among the state’s residents and creditors that Illinois might not be governable anymore.

“The state is on the edge of financial collapse,” says Laurence Msall, president of the Civic Federation, a good-government nonprofit in Chicago. What scares budget experts the most is that Illinois is facing a fiscal crisis even as the national economy, and the state’s, is roaring ahead. The unemployment rate in Illinois is 4.1 percent. “If there’s a hiccup in the economy, if there is something that’s unexpected, Illinois does not have reserves to basically weather any economic downturn at this point,” Msall says.

He barely scratches the surface of Illinois’s problems. Not the least problem is that the state is effectively ruled by a man, sometimes called the “most corrupt politician in American politics”, who only needs to get 10,000 votes to stay in office.

A month from now multi-billionaire J. B. Pritzker will likely be elected Illinois’s next governor over incumbent billionaire Bruce Rauner. Pritzker is running on a tax and spend platform, most of the provisions of which are either violations of the U. S. constitution, the Illinois constitution, or impossible to get through the state legislature. It is fantasy as a substitute for policy. The legislature stands four square against any measure which might actually solve Illinois’s problems. Worst job, indeed.

At RealClearPolitics Nancy Jacobson of No Labels wonders how we can dig our way out of the pit of partisan politics we have dug for ourselves:

There is one clear way to signal this change, establishing a beacon for the clear majority of Americans aghast at the current state of our politics. We need a unity ticket. We need a major party’s presidential nominee to select as his or her running mate a person from the other party. We need the two of them — two leaders who may not agree on every issue, but agree that America is worth the compromise our democracy demands — to stand in stark contrast to those who would keep pushing the country further along its disastrous current trajectory. As people working through the group No Labels have begun to argue, nothing would signal that enough is enough as powerfully as a Democrat and Republic running on the same party ticket.

I think she’s dreaming. Many explanations for our present situation have been proposed:

1. Russian meddling
2. Chinese meddling
3. It’s all the Republicans’ fault.
4. It’s all the Democrats’ fault.
5. It’s the outcome of a bipartisan consensus among elected officials to pursue goals not favored by most Americans using means not favored by most Americans.

I lean towards #5 and there’s no clear remedy for it short of a broad reaction against incumbents, something not yet in evidence. Does it make any difference which candidate you vote for when either will inevitably support endless war? Or crony capitalism?

As I read this jeremiad on how unfair our present national electoral system is by Kathy Gill at The Moderate Voice:

Yet in a very real sense, that 51-49 vote on Friday represented the tyranny of the minority, just like the committee vote that preceded it.

Those 51 senators represent only 44% of the U.S. population.

The 49 opposition senators (46 Democrats, two Independents, one Republican) represent 56% of the U.S. population.

On the Senate Judiciary Committee, all Republican members are men; 51% of the U.S. population is female. Most women in America, according to polls, oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination.

Tyranny of the minority.

it occurred to me how narrow the analysis was. Why are party and gender the only things that matter in electoral politics? Why does party matter at all? I don’t think that Ms. Gill realizes how ironic her use of a quote from James Madison was. Madison thought that political parties as such were problematic.

The Democratic Party is already majority minority or very nearly so but that’s not reflected among the Democratic House representative or senators. If it were there would be many more black and Hispanic representatives and senators than at present. If you’re going to argue for proportional representation, proportion of what? Total population, legally resident population, voting age population, eligible voters, registered voters, voters? In a country where the majority of those registered to vote can’t be bothered to do so, it’s hard to sympathize.

Switzerland approximates direct democracy. Every matter of significance is put to a popular vote but Switzerland is small. Would such a system work in the U. S.? Why is representative democracy sacrosanct?

As I have tried to make clear over the years, I favor federalism, subsidiarity, and a federal government limited to its enumerated powers. “Subsidiarity” means that government action and authority resides at the lowest practicable level. In the U. S. that would require an enormous devolution of power back to state and local governments. The irony of holding those views and residing in the state of Illinois is not lost on me. I believe that our present system infantilizes state governments until we get, well, Illinois. An epitome of what I believe is that I think that banks should not be able to operate across state lines and that they should be regulated by states.

One month before the midterm elections the analysis of the likely outcome of the elections from one of the best sources of which I’m aware, Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia summarizes the state of the House:

Our best guess in the House right now remains a Democratic net gain in the low-to-mid 30s, with enough uncertainty that we would not rule out the Democratic gains sputtering out short of the 23-seat net gain they need.

and Senate:

As we noted last week, Democrats need to win 80% of all the Senate races this year (28 of 35) to win the Senate, something a party has accomplished only twice before in more than a century of Senate popular elections. We remain skeptical of their ability to do so but we won’t rule it out either.

Let me summarize it this way. It is possible that the Democrats will take both the House and the Senate. It is possible that the Republicans will eke out a victory and continue to hold both the House and the Senate. It is likely that the Democrats will narrowly take control of the House while the Republicans continue to control the Senate. Which is about what I said six months ago.

If the elections actually turn on who shows up to vote and in what numbers, judging from the polling data the Democrats have made a strategic error. Back in July the Democrats were favored in the “enthusiasm gap” by a comfortable 14 points (the prevailing wisdom is that if the Democrats are up by 7 points or more, they win). Now they’re up by 1 point, well within the margin of error meaning Republicans might actually be more motivated than Democrats at this point.

The Chicago Tribune reports that the police officer who shot and killed Laquan McDonald, the events captured on video, has been convicted of 2nd degree murder:

A Cook County jury convicted Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke of second-degree murder in the shooting of Laquan McDonald.

The eight-woman, four-man jury deliberated about 7 ½ hours over two days before reaching its verdict.1:59 p.m. Van Dyke also convicted of 16 counts of aggravated battery

The jury also convicted Van Dyke of all 16 counts of aggravated battery — one for every shot he fired at Laquan McDonald.

He was acquitted on the single charge of official misconduct.

When my wife asked me my opinion of the case a few days ago, I responded that if Van Dyke were not to be convicted it would be proof positive that a Chicago police officer couldn’t be convicted of anything in a Cook County court. Perhaps this conviction will begin healing some of the ill feelings between the Chicago police and the communities on the South and West sides of the city. I’m not optimistic but you can always hope.

At Nautilus Dean Keith Simonton explains something I’ve remarked on many times. IQ is a weak predictor of success in life:

The relation between IQ and achieved eminence is not huge or even large. Most statisticians would classify it as a “moderate” relationship. In practical terms, that means that there’s ample room for exceptions at either end. The highly eminent can have IQs lower than average and supremely high IQs can be associated with relative obscurity. I’ve already given three examples of the former, so who illustrates the latter? How about Paolo Sarpi, the Venetian historian? Although his estimated IQ was as high as 195, making him one of the very brightest among the 301, his eminence ranking put him in the lower 20 percent, that is, 242nd!

A more contemporary example is Marilyn vos Savant, who was once listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as having the highest recorded IQ. Reportedly, she had taken a revised version of the Stanford-Binet when she was just 10 years old, and got a perfect score! Although there’s some debate about how best to translate that performance into a precise IQ estimate, it is certainly arguable that she is more intelligent than the brightest Termite and any member of Cox’s 301. Yet what is her main accomplishment? Becoming famous for her super-high IQ!

It always amuses me how the fans of certain politicians put so much stock in the high IQs of their idols. They’re confusing IQ and accomplishment. Everything we know about Barack Obama or Bill Clinton tells us that their IQs are between median and one standard deviation above normal—completely ordinary members of the professional class. But there are other kinds of smarts than IQ, notably socio-emotional development which includes the ability to get people to do what you want. Bill Clinton in particular has that ability in spades. That’s a genius of sorts but it has little relationship with IQ.

I see that others are pointing out that reducing carbon emissions is a mug’s game. At RealClearEnergy Beau Rothschild articulates the case for carbon capture:

Next month, United Nations scientists are set to report that we can no longer win the battle against climate change by reducing carbon emissions: we have to start draining those emissions from the air. This conclusion simply adds to a growing scientific consensus that carbon removal technologies that actively remove CO2 already in circulation can be delayed no longer. Thus far, the U.S. government has only shown lukewarm support for these technologies, but America has as much to gain as anyone from their mass adoption. It’s time for President Donald J. Trump and his administration to take a second look at this issue to put America first in carbon capture technology.

The UN report is hardly surprising given the problems that have blighted the Paris climate agreement. Trump, of course, has already pulled out, and many other countries are showing indifference; a report earlier this year ranked three-quarters of EU member-states “poor” in their attempts to meet their Paris obligations. A recent meeting, supposed to lay down a set of rules for the agreement’s implementation, ended in deadlock – the latest in a series of tetchy summits that have exposed political fault lines in the accord.

He goes on to touch on various technologies for accomplishing this from planting trees to carbon capture and storage systems. In the past I’ve mentioned artificial trees. As he notes, the places to install these devices are coal-fired power plants.

For decades I’ve been asking whether we can trust Chinese companies to be our sole sources for memories, processors, and other electronic components. This report from Bloomberg has provided the answer:

In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.

Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.

We can’t. Read the whole, lengthy thing. Apple has got to be quaking in its boots.

Over the period of the last 40 years we have allowed one product after another, one industry after another, to vanish from the United States in favor of Taiwanese, then mainland Chinese sources. Memories were an early casualty. The microprocessors.

This story is a cautionary tale. There are security reasons if no others for us not to allow that to happen.

Update

Related to the above, from Forbes:

A long-awaited White House report on the state of the U.S. industrial base finds that “all facets of the manufacturing and defense industrial base are currently under threat,” and warns that entire industries vital to national security are facing “domestic extinction.”

The report, which was directed by an executive order that President Donald Trump signed on July 21, 2017, took a year to complete, involving a dozen federal agencies and 300 workers. Its findings were distilled down to 50 pages plus appendices summarizing the stresses eroding U.S. industrial strength. Many of the recommendations derived from the analysis are contained in a classified (secret) annex — some of which are already being implemented.

The White House decided to release the report after financial markets had closed on Thursday evening. Although its findings are not likely to move markets, they present an alarming picture of U.S. industrial decay driven by both domestic and foreign factors.

The report begins by identifying five “macro forces” causing weakness in industries important to national security: unpredictable federal funding, poor government business practices, predatory behavior of other nations, erosion in traditional manufacturing industries and inadequate investment in critical skills. It then lays out ten “archetypal” risks caused by the macro forces, such as diminished industrial capacity, declining competition and dependence on offshore sources for key items.

That’s all so obvious it’s hardly worthy of a report. As fellow St. Louisan Yogi Berra put it, in theory there’s no difference between practice and theory but in practice there is. There are more considerations in trade than a little efficiency or a little additional GDP.