In Tenure Veritas: Libations From The Ivory Tower

 I have a simple observation, and while I recognize the absurdity of noting hypocrisy in the modern political world, this point seems relevant.  "The unitary executive."  Do you remember this notion?  It is a conception of executive authority which holds that the power of the executive branch is vested solely in the president.  It is actually an expansive conception of presidential power, used to advance extreme doctrines under the George W. Bush administration, and then again under the Trump administration.  Go read a bunch of stuff by John Yoo, for example.  The important point, though, is that it is a scholarly model used to claim expansive executive power, including by Trump .  OK, let's apply unitary executive to executive privilege .  All power is vested solely in the president .  Ex-presidents can suck it.  Why?  Unitary.  One.  That one is the one that the ex-president can suck.  If you apply the theory o...

 Suppose there is a very bad person in a position of power.  Abusive, manipulative, sadistic... what would you do?  Presuming you could do anything.  What would you do to take power?  And if you succeed, if you succeed in taking power, if you succeed, in that other meaning of the word, to the position of power, what next?  Read The Library at Mount Char , by Scott Hawkins.  Perhaps some of these questions and themes might strike you as relevant. Here is the set-up, doled out rather effectively.  Reality is occasionally re-written as one great power succeeds a prior.  The current power is "Adam Black," which is as good a name as any for a very, very old entity.  He is tens of thousands of years old, and whether or not what he does counts as "magic" is something to be contested within the novel, but whatever.  He has been at it for a very long time, and he has been writing books about how he does what he does.  So many that, at t...

 Fall in the northern hemisphere means Spring in the southern hemisphere, which means new COVID variants are in bloom.  Omicron is the latest to flower in several southern African nations, and let's try not to freak out, but there are always some very bad worst-case scenarios.  Epidemiological information is still sparse, and you should get your epidemiological information from an epidemiologist, not me.  Instead, let's do a bit of political commentary.  Do you know how much it would cost to vaccinate the planet?  Everyone?  Estimates range from $50 billion to $70 billion, from what I've been reading.  Big numbers, by any normal, human telling.  I can't afford that, and in all likelihood, neither can you.  Otherwise, hi Elon!  Take the spliff out of your mouth and vaccinate the fucking planet!  But I'm getting to that.  Not the spliff, nor Elon.  The vaccination process. Anyway, it is strange to say this as a politica...

 As a foodie and blogger, I must ipso facto  be a food blogger, and it is my social duty to promote social cohesion during these difficult times by helping you to ensure than your holiday meal is as inclusive as possible.  With that in mind, let's all keep these tips in mind to balance the health, dietary and political restrictions of our conspiracy-minded relatives, and in so doing, we'll avoid any unnecessary conflict beyond what's already going to happen tonight when your asshole uncle gets drunk. The first thing to keep in mind is that it is very important to pre-brine your Thanksgiving baby.  If you buy your baby at a Q-osher butcher, or it it stamped with a "Q," it will of course  be pre-brined, but Butterball babies-- those big, fat things at your local grocery store getting slapped by rednecks?  Those have not been pre-brined, and they will not only dry out, they will not meet the dietary restrictions of Q-ashrut.  So you see, this works out al...

 This modest and unread blog has a Sunday tradition of political analysis through science fiction, and I have a few in the pipeline.  I just read The Library at Mount Char  (excellent), and I just started China Mieville's Perdido Street Station (wow!), but this morning, we indulge our mutual love of Shakespeare.  And by "we," I mean the royal "we."  In this case, Henry and me.  After all, nobody reads this damned blog, so I can type whatever I wish to type.  Or in this case, hand the blog over to a friend for a guest post, as I occasionally do.  This morning's guest blogger needs no introduction.  He is a follower of Jack Cade, known far and wide as Dick The Butcher.  Dick, take it way. Dick:  The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Um... O-kay.  Thanks for sharing Dick.  I suppose that sentence needed a comma, didn't it?  Kind of an Eats, Shoots & Leaves situation there.  Now you know where the ...

 If you have not been paying attention to the redistricting process in Ohio, it is time to start.  It is not just bad, but potentially a harbinger.  Several forces are colliding, and in fact, colliding with some of my published research.  Here is what is happening.  A few years ago, Ohio passed a reform intended to limit partisan gerrymandering by doing as follows.  In order to establish a set of district lines for a full, 10-year cycle, a plan must secure bipartisan support.  If one party pushes a plan through the legislature on a 50%+1 partisan vote ahead of the electoral deadline, against the opposition of the minority party, the plan will sunset.  When the reform was proposed, I... shocked myself.  I supported it.  I tend to oppose any goo-goo* reform.  Most are misguided at best, and likely to backfire.  This one, I liked.  My work on redistricting has led me to advocate bi partisan gerrymanders, wherein we eliminate ...

 Paul Gosar, blah-blah, the GOP has no bottom.  Yes, we know.  Let's observe something more interesting.  Were you to hear that two Republicans in the House voted to censure Gosar, you would know , without a doubt, that those two Republicans were Cheney and Kinzinger.  There is important information here.  In order to break from your party, you must break from your party.  Behold my tautological tautology.  As I often implore you, you must learn to recognize the cranks and charlatans on your own side.  Gosar, of course, is worse than a crank, and worse than a charlatan.  He is a psychopath.  Yet breaking from the party, and recognizing that, and saying it, and taking appropriate action all require having a mindset of a willingness to break from the party.  Once you start , you start to recognize all of the other places you need to break.  Let's note something.  Gosar is not Trump, and this has nothing directly to do w...

 Let's do something slightly different this morning.  Inflation is the subject of the day.  Have you done your Thanksgiving shopping yet?  Probably not, but do it soon.  Don't be one of those poor, unfortunate people stuck in the grocery store Wednesday of next week amid the seething crowds scrounging for enough green beans that are still green .  And don't get me started on the fights over fresh rosemary on that Wednesday.  And while I'm on the subject, here's the real reason we need drone delivery of groceries.  You know  you're going to forget something.  You'll swear  it's in your fridge, and it won't be, or it'll be bad, or something, and you'll discover it on Thursday, and those Thursday emergency trips to the grocery store really  suck, and damnit, Bezos, gimme my 30-minute pizza  grocery delivery!  We'll call you Uncle Enzo!*  Anyway, the point is, inflation.  Prices are-a-goin' up.  On grocerie...

 Once upon a time, being a political scientist was fun.  The process of it becoming less fun was a gradual thing, although there is no mystery about the inflection point.  As a warning, I'm going to spend a few sentence, or perhaps a paragraph, digressing on mathematics before I get to politics.  It's a thing I'm going to do to clear my head.  It's the math geek version of deep-breathing.  Ohm-ohm... An inflection point has a specific mathematical meaning.  A minimum or a maximum.  You find the local minimum or maximum of a function by finding the point at which the first derivative of that function becomes 0.  You differentiate the function, and any point at which the derivative takes a value of 0 is either a local minimum or a local maximum because the slope of the line tangent is 0.  Yet the curvature of a function can also change.  At what rate does the slope of a function change?  It can get more or less steep.  The "...