Last night was not a happy one in our home. Agua Dulce Mighty Special RAE MX MXS MXJ MJG NF, our Smidge, has died. She was only seven.

Four weeks ago to the day she was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic liver cancer. Shortly after her last agility competition five weekends ago she began exhibiting symptoms that were initially diagnosed as pancreatitis. Additional investigation revealed terminal liver cancer. We were told she had days to live.

We elected palliative care, making her as comfortable as possible and letting her live her normal life as completely as we could. It’s what I would want for myself under similar circumstances.

She had four weeks of happy life after her diagnosis, eating food she liked, getting lots of love, running an agility course every now and again. Yesterday she began failing very rapidly.

The picture above was taken a few weeks ago when our friends did something very special for Smidge and us. As of her last official agility competition Smidge was just 10 points short of the 750 needed for her Master Agility Championship (MACH).

My wife and Smidge had attended an agility competition in which Smidge had been slated to complete but was unable due to her health. At the end of the competition, the bars on the jumps were lowered and Smidge went on a final agility run. When she completed it she was given an honorary MACH bar, signed just as would have happened officially if she had been able to complete her MACH as she surely would have. We were tremendously touched. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house. Mighty special, indeed.

Now there’s a Smidge-shaped hole in our pack and in our hearts.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper has submitted his resignation. From NBC News:

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper delivered some reassurance Thursday to Americans worried about the Trump transition — along with his resignation.

“I know a lot of people have been feeling uncertain about what will happen with this Presidential transition,” Clapper said. “There has been a lot of catastrophizing, if I can use that term, in the 24-hour news cycle and social media. So, I’m here with a message: It will be okay.”

The exit of Clapper, who submitted his resignation Wednesday evening, is not a surprise.

What’s surprising is that he’s stayed out of jail. Committing perjury used to be a serious offense.

I strongly recommend you take a little time and read this post by medical professional (and Trump opponent) Scott Alexander. Here’s the context:

I work in mental health. So far I have had two patients express Trump-related suicidal ideation. One of them ended up in the emergency room, although luckily both of them are now safe and well. I have heard secondhand of several more.

Like Snopes, I am not sure if the reports of eight transgender people committing suicide due to the election results are true or false. But if they’re true, it seems really relevant that Trump denounced North Carolina’s anti-transgender bathroom law, and proudly proclaimed he would let Caitlyn Jenner use whatever bathroom she wanted in Trump Tower, making him by far the most pro-transgender Republican president in history.

I notice news articles like Vox: Donald Trump’s Win Tells People Of Color They Aren’t Welcome In America. Or Salon’s If Trump Wins, Say Goodbye To Your Black Friends. MSN: Women Fear For Their Lives After Trump Victory.

Vox writes about the five-year-old child who asks “Is Donald Trump a bad person? Because I heard that if he becomes president, all the black and brown people have to leave and we’re going to become slaves.” The Star writes about a therapist called in for emergency counseling to help Muslim kids who think Trump is going to kill them. I have patients who are afraid to leave their homes.

Listen. Trump is going to be approximately as racist as every other American president.

Here’s his peroration:

Stop turning everything into identity politics. The only thing the media has been able to do for the last five years is shout “IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS IDENTITY POLITICS!” at everything, and then when the right wing finally says “Um, i…den-tity….poli-tics?” you freak out and figure that the only way they could have possibly learned that phrase is from the KKK.

Stop calling Trump voters racist. A metaphor: we have freedom of speech not because all speech is good, but because the temptation to ban speech is so great that, unless given a blanket prohibition, it would slide into universal censorship of any unpopular opinion. Likewise, I would recommend you stop calling Trump voters racist – not because none of them are, but because as soon as you give yourself that opportunity, it’s a slippery slope down to “anyone who disagrees with me on anything does so entirely out of raw seething hatred, and my entire outgroup is secret members of the KKK and so I am justified in considering them worthless human trash”. I’m not saying you’re teetering on the edge of that slope. I’m saying you’re way at the bottom, covered by dozens of feet of fallen rocks and snow. Also, I hear that accusing people of racism constantly for no reason is the best way to get them to vote for your candidate next time around. Assuming there is a next time.

and here’s his conclusion:

Stop making people suicidal. Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. Stop terrifying children. Stop giving racism free advertising. Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them. Stop. Stop. Stop.

The post is full of quotes, graphs, and meticulously documented. Read the whole thing.

Since Donald Trump’s election I’ve seen a lot of thrashing back and forth and handwringing about the Affordable Care Act. “Repeal and replace” seems to be a foregone conclusion.

My question is whether the problem is the ACA or the very idea of insurance as applied to healthcare? The cost of healthcare insurance is proportional to the cost of healthcare. There’s no way to control the cost of healthcare insurance without controlling the cost of healthcare and the cost of healthcare is presently rising at a multiple of all other costs.

Even if healthcare costs could be brought under control, to make insurance applicable to healthcare you’d need to limit what was covered to insurable risks. That’s politically impossible.

The following table was derived from the FBI’s report on hate crimes for the most recent year available, 2015:

What can or cannot reasonably be surmised from that? Hate crimes against other religious sects or denominations were in single digits.

FWIW by far the greatest number of hate crimes are those perpetrated against blacks. They account for a quarter of all hate crimes, more than the total of all hate crimes perpetrated on the basis of religion.

In his Wall Street Journal column James Taranto remarks on Judis’s and Texeira’s predictions I mentioned yesterday:

In all, we’d say Judis and Teixeira were about half right. They correctly predicted that nonwhite voters would improve Democratic prospects in states like Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia—but they failed to anticipate the scope of Republican gains in other states.

The latter trend probably can’t take the GOP much further; Maine, Minnesota and New Hampshire are the only obvious opportunities Trump didn’t realize this year. It’s certainly possible that the former trend will continue, as Teixeira now predicts, and the emerging Democratic majority will finally emerge.

Or it could recede again. Trump improved slightly over Mitt Romney’s performance among blacks, Hispanics and Asian-Americans—and there’s still plenty more room for improvement.

I think there are several problems with the hypothesis. First, although black voters clearly vote as a reliable bloc, Hispanic voters don’t. They don’t even vote as two blocs (Cuban and other). Might Republicans have permanently alienated Hispanic voters? Sure. But the evidence doesn’t prove it.

And I think that Mssrs. Taranto, Judis, and Texeira all neglect the effects of internal migration. Black voters moving from Illinois to Georgia will make Illinois less blue and Georgia less red. Will Hispanic voters moving from California to Texas turn Texas blue? Or will they become less blue themselves?

In the last four presidential elections 2004-2016, whites have voted for the Republican candidate in the following percentages: 58, 55, 59, 58. During the same period black voters have voted for the Democratic candidate in the following percentages: 88, 95, 93, 88. Hispanics voted for the Democratic candidate in the following percentages: 56, 68, 71, 65.

What conclusions can you reasonably draw from that? What conclusions cannot be reasonably drawn from that?

The surprising election of Donald Trump has caused all sorts of people to discover that the United States has three branches of government, as though setting foot on a foreign shore for the first time. One of these is Norm Ornstein, who in his Washington Post op-ed calls for Senators to curb the worst excesses of a Trump presidency:

Senate Republicans should also make sure that destructive policies, whether to increase the debt with unpaid-for tax cuts, blow up agencies, make mindless cuts in regulations, pursue trade wars, accept torture, move us closer to an all-out war with Islam or curtail civil liberties, do not get jammed through Congress. They cannot succumb to the pressure sure to come from the radical right to blow up the filibuster not just for nominations but also for legislative actions. Not every Senate Republican will heed this call. But from a group including Graham, Jeff Flake (Ariz.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Shelley Moore Capito (W.Va.), Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), Bob Corker (Tenn.), John McCain (Ariz.), Johnny Isakson (Ga.), Ben Sasse (Neb.), among others, there should be sufficient numbers to provide a check and balance against authoritarian and divisive rule.

and

What about Senate Democrats? They will be tempted to adopt the 2009 Republican playbook, when Democrats controlled Washington: Vote in unison against everything, filibuster everything, even those things you like, to obstruct action and make it look ugly, allow damage to the country in the short term to reap political rewards in the next election. That would be a mistake.

Democrats have a chance to use their filibuster power not just to obstruct but also to improve. The first opportunity to do that will likely be on an infrastructure bill. Financing a good portion of the package through repatriated corporate profits invested in long-term, low-interest infrastructure bonds is one key. Making sure that a significant share of the program goes to green energy, broadband, cybersecurity and the electrical grid should be strong demands. So should a guarantee that any corporate tax reform that is a part of the deal not be simply another giant tax cut and giveaway.

I don’t think he needs to worry. Each sitting senator has won his or her own elections and few of them are aligned with Trump. Those who are will likely be drawn into the incoming administration.

Senators tend to see themselves as presidents-in-waiting, are jealous of their prerogatives, and some of them, like Orrin Hatch or Patrick Leahy, have been in the Senate since before Donald Trump had been married the first time. They can’t be told what to do.

I anticipate a new-found regard for the power of the Congress and why we are a nation of laws rather than of men.

At Foreign Policy Emile Simpson sees a major political realignment taking place throughout the developed world:

Brexit and Trump were not anomalies, accidents of political history that can be explained away to maintain the integrity of the inherited notion that “normal” politics involves competition between a center-left party and a center-right party. Rather, in my view, they are symptomatic of a paradigm shift in the configuration of Western political life, one which has only just started.

Consider the familiar political category of left and right, which since 1945 has provided the basic organizing category of political differentiation in Western democracies across the vast majority of issues. Although the language of left and right dates to the French Revolution, the category started to take substantial political meaning in the late 19th century, and was forged over the following decades on the anvil of intense political fights over industrialization in the West, and all the changes in economic, social, and political relations that came in its wake.

The crucial point is that left and right are symbiotic, because they represent both sides of the argument over the problem of industrialization, over which there are good arguments to be made on either side. It is the interaction of these arguments set up by the mediation of the left-right categorization that produced sensible compromises across a whole range of issues.

I’m not entirely sure that’s what’s going on. I think what we’re seeing has more to do with the nature of greed.

Greed has no limits but the rate of economic growth does. When there’s lots of economic activity the desires of the powerful go barely noticed. It’s not that they’re not greedy. It’s that the greed is hardly noticed.

But when economic activity slows the underlying avarice that was there all along stands out more starkly. The entire developed world has experienced more than 50 years of great economic activity. There have been ups and downs but the trend was up.

But now that’s slowed down. Maybe the brakes are only on temporarily. Maybe it’s permanent. The guys at the top still demand their cut. A hundred million here and a hundred million there and pretty soon you’re talking about real money.