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Monday’s Forum
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24 responses to “Monday’s Forum”
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Happy Monday, everyone.
Getting back from a beach vacation with the family, I see that not much has changed. Unfortunately.
Went to Gulf Shores AL. Beautiful beaches. The Gulf beaches from Apalachicola west to Mississippi are some of the nicest anywhere. Been going to Gulf Shores ever since I was stationed at Gunter AFS in Montgomery in the 80s. The growth has been tremendous. Even more astounding is the growth a few miles east of there is Orange Beach. Much more upscale with a quite a few million dollar yachts in the marinas. We had beach chairs, umbrellas, and blankets.
Anyway, got to read a spy novel. I’ve been enjoying the Gabriel Allon series by Daniel Silva. Gabriel Allon is, improbably, the ex head of the Mossad AND an expert Old Master art restorer. The book I read last week was called A Death in Cornwall which started with the death of an Old Masters art specialist who dealt in verification of stolen Nazi art. Which led to the entanglement of the offshore tax evading banking systems centered around Switzerland, Monaco, the Bahamas and more. Which led to the influence of fabulously, wealthy, ruthless billionaires and fall of the British prime minister (whose wife was a participant in some Russian billionaire’s scheme to set up a favorable PM). All along with a little commentary on the growing lawlessness of the wealth inequality of the world. With actual facts and figures, not just polemics.
How about you all? Any pleasant experiences or are we just back screaming into the void.
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Mostly void-screaming here. I remain astonished at how much this administration and Trump in particular are allowed to get away with on a daily basis. Democrats need to remember this. It’s the VOLUME that is enabling this behavior. Dems don’t need to be lawless, but they SHOULD just start to correct everything at once. If they go issue by issue, it will allow the media time to pick it apart, regroup, pick the next issue apart, regroup, etc.
Everything Everywhere All At Once needs to be the Dem correction objective.
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I had nice day out last week over at Hay-on-Wye, a lovely little town just inside Wales, known for its bookshops.
Went for a walk in the hills nearby; it really is a lovely area.
Met up with some friends, had a good pint in the Blue Boar, bought some books and a couple of old LP’s.
Then we had a good dinner at the Rhydspence Inn.
A very pleasant day indeed.Also, the Proms are being broadcast on Radio 3!
Minimising on news consumption while on holiday seems to make me less likely to scream voidwise.
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This is an example of the amateurism of this administration in the defense contracting business.
Defense companies are not going to do anything without two things: a contract and money.
They will not spend or invest without assurances of being paid. DoD can send a defense company a sole source cost plus letter contract which has very few terms and conditions applied and provides the least protection to the taxpayer. DoD can go a little more protective with an “undefinitized” contract meaning that the contractor can start work and the government/contractor team will work out the cost details later. Also very little protection for the taxpayer.
No competition means more risk and more money.
These people are panicking.
And they will sell it as “rebuilding the industrial base ruined by the incompetence of the Biden Administration”.
Good times.
Pentagon pushes defense companies to boost weapons production after concerns of depleted stocks
The Pentagon is pressing the U.S. defense industry to accelerate production of weapons to help replenish its diminished stockpile of munitions, including those depleted in the ongoing war with Iran.
Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a statement Saturday that the department was actively focused on boosting munitions acquisitions to provide “the weapons our warfighters need at the pace the threat demands.” He confirmed department efforts in the last week to significantly speed the process but insisted it was part of a broader modernization effort that predated the five-month-old conflict.
Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg wrote to industry leaders on Wednesday, giving them no more than 21 days to submit plans to “drive significantly faster, more aggressive delivery schedules and/or increased production for critical capabilities,” according to a memo obtained by The Washington Post.
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IIRC, there is something called the Defense Procurement Act that authorizes the prez to order companies to produce weaponry through an emergency exec order (given the felon has been shy about exec orders…). This includes ordering companies that produce sub components to shift production to defense work, so if the issue is microchips, then Intel, Nvidia etc would need to shift to producing chips needed by the defense contractors.
If the current situation is really a crisis, there are measures in place ameliorate the issue.
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Interesting side note. Nvidia doesn’t own any fabs. They design chips and license them, or contract for them to be made.
Intel once owned fabs, but I’m not sure how many of them they still own. Again, this is all licensed and outsourced. Typically to outfits in Taiwan or Singapore, but I’m sure there are other offshore plants.So. Can the president order a Taiwanese fab to switch to chips intended for the US defense industry? Is that even a good idea?
I think this is a much more complex and tricky situation, which our current president is not up to managing, since he believes every problem can be solved as if he were Alexander cutting the Gordian knot.
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A piece on NPR claims 50% support for proportional representation in multimember districts in the US.
Oh, and that Americans want more than two parties.
I don’t know. it seems like a positive development, but we hear about how fed up everyone is with the political duopoly every time there are elections.
the proportional representations is far more interesting. Although it says nothing about such representation in the Senate, and make snot one mention of the electoral college.
this quite, though, is spot on:
“Arguably the only reason we don’t use proportional representation is because it wasn’t used anywhere in the world at the time of [America’s] founding. And we just kept doing elections the same way.”
No political system is perfect, not even for multiple values of perfection, and all abide by Kathy’s First Law: there are downsides to everything. However, a system that depends on the goodwill of the participants seems to me to be far less stable, and far less beneficial, than one that depends more on structural arrangements.
Both these things exist in all systems, naturally, but not in the same proportion. One can argue the people who wrote the US constitution were conscientious about their civic duty, and could not imagine any of their descendants would not be. Which just proves there’s a very thin line separating naivete from idealism.
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claims 50% support for proportional representation in multimember districts in the US.
I continue to be baffled by this, other than the observation that people are far more invested in their “team” identification, aka their political party, than they are in actual governance. I mean, literally anyone can register themselves as a Democrat or a Republican, and I believe that applies to most of the other minor parties too. What sense would it make to award seats to a political party whose candidates may or may not adhere to the party platform, insomuch as the platform means anything any more?
If you live in a red state or county or town, register as a Republican so you can have an impact on the party nominee, and vice versa for Dem areas. If you want to seek office, seek it through the party that dominates your area, regardless of whether your actual positions align with their fig-leaf of a platform. Given the current state, they cannot stop you, and if you win the primary you are on the ballot that fall as the candidate of that party. Given the close association most voters have with their team, they will pull the lever for you, even if the other party’s candidate reflects their values more.
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Part of the idea of proportional representation is to allow smaller parties to win enough votes to have representatives in the house.
Would this work in the US? Who knows. The duopoly parties used to be big tents, holding a spectrum of ideological views. This is still partly true of the Democrats. I don’t see it in the Republiqan party any more. It’s all allegiance to El Taco or else!
I’m sure there are Republiqan voters who don’t care for the current pretend president, yet vote for him and his party because somehow the alternative is worse. It may be with proportional representation they’d vote for a less extreme version of the GQP. Or it may not.
People tend to want structural change and for things to stay the same.
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art of the idea of proportional representation is to allow smaller parties to win enough votes to have representatives in the house.
The point I was trying to make is that, given the universality of the primary voting system and the inability of parties to enforce membership requirements on candidates, why bother with another party? Who cares? It doesn’t mean anything to be a member of a party, except what a candidate decides to mean.
If a candidate is interested in governance as opposed to being a member of the “right team”, then they should run under whatever party is most likely to be elected in the general. Who cares if it’s the Republicans or Democrats? Who cares if “traditional” leaders of that party don’t like it?
This idea that somehow governance will get better because we have more parties is, at least to me, counter intuitive, as it depends on parties having a go/no-go say over their candidates, and in the US today that simply is not true
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I know it will never happen, but here’s my take on how to get proportional representation in Congress:
Remove districts from state boundaries.
For the House, pick a number of seats (let’s say 500, so as not to get radical on the size). Divide the US into 250 districts based on included population, and mathematical parameters that ignore politics–and ignore state boundaries. Each district gets two Reps. The number of seats stays the same until a threshold is reached, and then increases by a pre-determined number (e.g., increments of 25) at which time the districts are redrawn based on the most recent census.
Do the same for the Senate, but with 50 districts (though I’d prefer that DC, Puerto Rico, and all US holdings get included and get to cast their votes).
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Here’s the AI dreck on the issue, which says that a Constitutional amendment would not be needed, only a change in a federal statute.
The U.S. Constitution does not mandate or explicitly prohibit proportional representation, but it structures representation around state populations via the Census and the Great Compromise. While the U.S. uses a winner-take-all single-member district model, shifting to proportional representation would require changing federal statute rather than amending the Constitution.
However it seems likely to me it will require amending the state constitutions in most place as those documents usually stipulate how elections will be accounted.
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Bibi has rejected Trump’s Hamas plan publically. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/09/israel-rejects-us-led-15-point-gaza-peace-plan-says-netanyahu
Significant change or not? What do MAGA think about this? -
Trump is now demanding reparations from Iran to be included in any negotiations.
I think maybe negotiations are not going smoothly.
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Apparently, children in the US don’t die at high enough rates.
Notice the incoherent attempt to link vaccines to autism.
Apparently, helping to kill one million of his own people during the trump pandemic is not a high enough body count.
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As if to prove my point in the post above pointing out the meaninglessness of party affiliation in 2026 in the US, cue the Democratic Socialists of America:
Recently I noticed that many or most of the DSA elected officials who’ve achieved some level of electoral success have been denounced, censured or rejected by the local affiliates or council who endorsed them in the first place. Along similar lines, the national DSA is consistently more doctrinaire and left-wing not only than its candidates but its local chapters in the major metros where its power is strongest. This isn’t surprising or really new. It’s a general pattern for ideologically-based organizations, an unsurprising feature of the tensions between ideology and complex electorates.
That was from Josh Marshalls Blog on TPM. The DSA has no control over who runs in their name. People are free to run for their line on the general election ballot even if the nominal party leaders are against it.
We would all be better off if candidates who are truly interested in governance simply ran in the party most voters in the are see as the “home team”, and ignore the actual leaders of that party.
I can tell you that this certainly happens in Democratic Primaries here in Baltimore. The differences between the candidates is truly astonishing, ranging from lock-em-up tough on crime guys to pro-business lick spittles to let’s-take-a-serious-look-at-reparations types, and everything in between. And since they are all running for the Democratic nom, their party affiliation has no impact.
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