As soon as I read the title of Ed King’s post at Climate Home, “If Trump quits, California could apply to join UN climate talks”, I knew I had to comment:

Asked by Climate Home on Thursday if the golden state could replace the United States, California senate leader Kevin De Leon said it was an “option that I want to keep open”.

Legal experts at Harvard and Yale were already researching if a sub-national body could join the UN climate talks he said, but added this would be a “political decision”.

“We will continue to be active in the international movement to address climate change,” said De Leon, who branded Trump’s threat to the UN process as a “jobs killer”.

“To the extent the UN wants to coordinate with work we are doing we are more than willing to take part in these discussions,” he added.

My impression is that Mr. King is a Brit and as such can be excused for not knowing about Article I, Section 10 of the U. S. Constitution:

No state shall enter into any treaty, alliance, or confederation; grant letters of marque and reprisal; coin money; emit bills of credit; make anything but gold and silver coin a tender in payment of debts; pass any bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts, or grant any title of nobility.

No state shall, without the consent of the Congress, lay any imposts or duties on imports or exports, except what may be absolutely necessary for executing it’s inspection laws: and the net produce of all duties and imposts, laid by any state on imports or exports, shall be for the use of the treasury of the United States; and all such laws shall be subject to the revision and control of the Congress.

No state shall, without the consent of Congress, lay any duty of tonnage, keep troops, or ships of war in time of peace, enter into any agreement or compact with another state, or with a foreign power, or engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.

What’s the excuse of the “legal experts” from Harvard and Yale? Such participation would also seem to violate the Logan Act.

My dad used to complain about lawyers for whom the only law with which they seemed to be familiar was the U. S. Constitution. Now, apparently, they aren’t even familiar with that.

And you thought you paid a lot for your Thanksgiving turkey. From RealClearFuture:

This Thanksgiving, Paul Mozdziak will be giving thanks that people are finally paying attention to his big idea.

He wants to grow turkey meat in 5,000-gallon tanks.

Mozdziak is an expert in growing avian muscle cells in a lab flask. That obscure corner of research recently landed the North Carolina State University professor of poultry science at the cutting-edge of “cellular agriculture,” or the idea that animal protein could be manufactured in bioreactors rather than by animals.

The technology, also known as in vitro meat cultivation, may sound strange. But it has been drawing a following of environmentalists, animal-rights activists, and investors who think meat can be made by biotech companies rather than on farms.

and

Lab-grown meat is still far from being economical. In Mozdziak’s lab, his team grows cells as a thin layer inside plastic flasks. If the cells become too thick, nutrients can’t get in. Growing a turkey-size amount of white meat this way would require about 11,340 flasks and about $34,000 worth of growth serum.

My back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that translates into about $2,000 a pound.

So, think of the bargain you got when you cut into your Thanksgiving turkey today.

The latest whine about the outcome of the 2016 presidential election comes from Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine:

And now, the women and people of color who made up Clinton’s base and were the most enthusiastic supporters of her campaign, the ones who have the most to lose under the Trump administration, have found themselves on the receiving end of the lion’s share of the blame for our recent national cataclysm.

[…]

It is unconscionable, this know-better recrimination, directed at the very people who just put the most work and energy into defeating Trumpism, coming from those who will be made least vulnerable by Trump’s ascension.

Clinton’s erstwhile primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, seemed to amplify Lilla’s message on his book tour this week by recommending that Democrats embrace the working class and “Ditch Identity Politics,” according to one headline. In fact, the headline was overblown: Sanders did not say we should dump identity politics, and affirmatively noted that “we should bring more and more women into the political process” and that “we need 50 women in the Senate!”

But Sanders did say something telling. Asked by a young woman who described herself as wanting to become “the second Latina senator in U.S. history” for tips, Sanders offered not advice, or even acknowledgment of the particular roadblocks — sexism, racism, fundraising, party support — she might encounter. What he offered instead was an insulting reaction to what he assumed must motivate her ambition: an argument based purely on identity. Noting that she “would not like” what he was about to say, he scolded her that it was “not enough” to say, “Hey, I’m a Latina, vote for me”; that it was “not good enough for somebody to say, ‘I’m a woman! Vote for me!’ No, that’s not good enough.” Never mind that nobody has ever made that argument for a female or minority candidate except in the fevered imaginations of Hillary haters. It is clear that this is what Sanders hears when someone describes a desire to overcome representational inequality in politics: an infantile, politically unsophisticated, feather-brained appeal to narcissistic self-advancement.

I don’t blame “Hillary Clinton’s base” for her loss in the election. I blame them for her candidacy. It was blind loyalty to Hillary Clinton at the expense of the Democratic Party.

In grossly oversimplified form, the electorate is presently 30% Republican, 30% Democratic, and 40% independent. You can’t win national elections just by turning out Democrats, let alone a single person’s “base”.

That Hillary Clinton couldn’t trounce Trump handily is proof positive that she was the wrong candidate at the wrong time. Look in the mirror, people.

I think there’s actually a kernel of truth in what Symone Sanders says here, reported by RealClearPolitics:

Symone Sanders, former spokeswoman for the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign, appeared on CNN Wednesday afternoon to weigh in on the future of the DNC and the Democratic party. Sanders dismissed the idea of Howard Dean returning as DNC chairman commenting, “we don’t need white people leading the Democratic party right now.”

“Howard Dean is also on record maligning young people and millennials. Telling those Bernie folks they just need to get in line and maligning Bernie Sanders. And that is not what we need,” Sanders said about the former party chairman.

“In my opinion we don’t need white people leading the Democratic party right now,” Sanders said. “The Democratic party is diverse, and it should be reflected as so in leadership and throughout the staff, at the highest levels. From the vice chairs to the secretaries all the way down to the people working in the offices at the DNC.”

The voting base of the Democratic Party is just about half black. About a quarter of Democratic members of the House are black and only one senator. If the party’s diversity is to be anything but a cynical charade, there should be more black members of the House and at least ten Senate Democrats should be black.

The editors of Bloomberg leap to the defense of Medicaid:

Whatever the problems with other parts of Obamacare (chiefly, rising premiums in the state insurance exchanges), Medicaid expansion has worked. Rolling it back now would hurt state budgets, the health-care industry and, most of all, the newly insured.

To place the issue in a little perspective here are the ten states with the largest Medicaid enrollments, what percentage of the state’s population that represents (based on Census Bureau figures), and I’ve color-coded the states not participating in the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid:

To refresh your memory, Medicaid is a shared federal-state program with federal payment rates depending on the state’s per capita income, i.e. wealthier states pay more.

BTW, that calculation of which states are “givers” and which “takers”, i.e. the ROI of the states based on federal taxes paid in the state vs. federal monies received? Most calculations that I’ve seen don’t include SSRI, DI, Medicaid, or Medicare. If you find a source that calculates state “dependency” that includes SSRI, DI, Medicaid, and Medicare, and other federal spending, tell me about it and I’ll crank that into my table.

While I think that the characterization of the Trump campaign as a start-up is interesting, I don’t think it really explains what we’ve witnessed. Trump’s campaign is an insurgency. That was pointed out as early as February of this year by John Robb:

Trump is trouncing the competition. He’s doing so well that the prediction systems give him a 81% chance of winning the nomination — despite the opposition of the entire Republican establishment.

What’s most surprising to many pundits and analysts is that Trump has done this without presenting all of the detail plans, voluminous position papers, etc. that we’ve come to expect over the last couple of decades.

He has simply refused to play by those rules, and he’s not paid a price for it.

Trump is able to pull this off because he’s not running a political campaign. Instead, he’s running an insurgency.

We are presently in the third phase of that insurgency. The first phase of the insurgency was waged against the other presidential candidates in the Republican Party. Then attention was turned to defeating Hillary Clinton.

This insurgency is presently in its third phase and that’s directed against the major media outlets, the civil bureaucracy, and other entrenched power structures, mostly in Washington, DC. In each phase Trump has successfully insinuated himself into his opponents’ OODA loop. If you’re looking for consistency in Trump’s policies, start there. Don’t expect what he’s said at the various stages of his insurgency to be internally consistent. He’s said whatever’s been necessary to get into his opponents’ heads.

You can see the Trump insurgency as dark and sinister, as completely ego-driven, or take it at face value. I’m skeptical that Mr. Trump’s strategies can be applied to actual governance but who knows? It’s hard to deny that it’s Fourth Generation Warfare as applied to politics.

A “unicorn” is a start-up valued at over $1 billion. This Forbes article by Steven Bertoni made me wonder. Is Donald Trump the political equivalent of a unicorn?

The Russian playwright and short story writer characterized his rule of parsimony in drama like this:

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.

Why isn’t there such a rule governing opinion writing? The title of Gus Van Horn’s RealClearMarkets piece is “In Defense of a Strong U.S. Patent System”. Nowhere in the piece were there any hints of what he thought a strong patent system would look like.

I can tell you what my idea of a good patent system indeed any system of intellectual property would be. It would have the following characteristics:

• Patents would be of short duration.
• They would not be extendable including by the Congress.
• They would be rigorously enforceable without regard to the patent-holder’s ability to pay.

I once heard Dean Kamen speak. His advice to would-be inventors was don’t invent anything big or important until you’re rich enough to defend it from big companies. They’ll infringe your patent at will and have the legal firepower to withstand attacks from upstarts.

In his Washington Post post Ed Rogers offers more of that advice to Democrats I mentioned yesterday:

I would tell the Democrats to keep Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) as their House minority leader. More of the same from her would be great. And if they really want to exile someone, I would say they should get rid of the able, media-savvy Donna Brazile as head of the Democratic National Committee and elect another member of congress, a la Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to serve as a part-time, conflicted chairman. I would order them to elect a real leftist, such as uhh . . . Rep. Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who was a Bernie Sanders supporter and who has been associated with both the Council on American-Islamic Relations and Louis Farrakhan.

That’s the analog of the view that the more right-wing members of the Republican Party have held for some time with stronger arithmetic support, that is, if the party just nominates candidates that are far enough right, they’ll be elected in landslides. I don’t think it has dawned on them yet that Donald Trump is the living refutation of that.

Robert Conquest’s Laws of Politics seem to apply:

1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

particularly #3. That also probably explains why self-described independents now outnumber either Republicans or Democrats. Why, when Nancy Pelosi became House Speaker half of all Americans thought of themselves as Democrats.