Coincidences happen all the time

I had been trying for a couple of days to remember the first name of someone I knew but had not met for a while and it had slipped my mind. I find it frustrating when something is on the periphery of my brain but I cannot quite haul it in. The name I was seeking was Shira, which is not a common one. Then I got an email from one of the many advocacy mailing lists that send me stuff and the first name of the sender was Shira. If I were one of those people who think that there is some grand cosmic plan at work and that there are messages revealing its secret workings that could be decoded, I might have thought that this coincidence had some secret meaning, though the only one I could come with was that the universe felt it was important for me to recall the name.

Of course, I dismissed this as just a coincidence but some people tend to be impressed when, for example, they dream about someone they had not been in contact with for a long time and then they hear from them or learned that they had died. There is a tendency to give enormous weightage to events of this sort, seeing them as premonitions.
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Georgia on his mind?

Keeping score of all the criminal charges against serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) is not easy because there are so many of them. As of now, he has been indicted in four different jurisdictions (Washington DC, Manhattan, Miami, and Atlanta) by three different prosecutors (Jack Smith, Alvin Bragg, and Fani Willis) for a total of 91 criminal counts. SSAT has managed to evade consequences for his actions for all his life, mainly by lying, not putting down anything is writing, using verbal commands to get other people to do his bidding, and then buying their silence or threatening them.

But it seems unlikely that SSAT can sweep the board and be acquitted on all the 91 charges and he faces the real threat of going to prison. His best bet is to try and win back the presidency. If he does so, he can use the presidential pardon process to try to pardon himself. Whether he can do so is an untested issue and will surely be challenged in the courts. But even if it is found that he can, that can only be done for the federal offenses that have been brought by Smith. What he is more likely to do if he becomes president is to order his attorney general to drop the federal cases and you can be sure that he will only appoint an AG who will agree in advance to do that. That and any self-pardon should be impeachable offenses but the unprincipled Republicans in congress will do no such thing.
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Camping

In the comic strip Pearls Before Swine, Rat is the most unpleasant character, someone who is rude, self-centered, and cynical. So it is disturbing how often I find myself agreeing with him.

(Pearls Before Swine)

Actually, I did go camping once. Just after we completed college, a group of a dozen friends spent a week on a beautiful, isolated stretch of beach in Sri Lanka. I had a lot of fun but part of the enjoyment for me was the novelty. Now it is a case of ‘been there, done that’ with no desire to repeat that experience, though some of my friends on that trip continued to enjoy going camping all their lives.

Trump and 18 others indicted in Georgia

Fani Willis, the district attorney of Fulton county Georgia, has released the indictments issued by a grand jury against serial sexual abuser Donald Trump (SSAT). While the indictments had been long expected, I was startled by how wide and sweeping they were. In addition to SSAT, 18 others were indicted on 41 felony counts and Willis said that they would be tried together and were expected to voluntarily turn themselves in by Friday, August 25th at noon. She would like to hold the trial within six months. You can read the indictment here.

The named defendants are: SSAT, Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Kenneth Chesebro, Jeffrey Clark, Jenna Ellis, Ray Stallings Smith III, Robert Cheeley, Michael a. Roman, David Shafer, Shawn Still, Stephen Lee, Harrison Floyd, Trevian c. Kutti, Sidney Powell, Cathleen Latham, Scott Hall, and Misty Hampton.

While eight of the names (SSAT, Giuliani, Eastman, Meadows, Chesebro, Clark, Ellis, Powell) are familiar to me, the rest are not. I suspect that they are members of the Georgia GOP. [UPDATE: This article has more on the people indicted.]

Every one of the defendants will be charged with one count of violating Georgia’s RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act that is usually used to go after organizied crime.

The act essentially allows prosecutors to link together different crimes committed by different people and bring criminal charges against a larger criminal enterprise. The law requires prosecutors to show the existence of a criminal enterprise that has committed at least two underlying crimes.

Prosecutors have long used the federal Rico act to go after the mafia. But Georgia’s version is even more expansive than the federal statute. It allows prosecutors in the state to bring racketeering charges if a defendant attempts or solicits a crime, even if they don’t bring charges for those crimes itself.

I expect that SSAT will be seething that he will be tried together with all the rest, including people who are relatively unknown, since he likely sees himself as special even when being charged with crimes. You can expect SSAT to go on a major rant in the coming days.

UPDATE:

This article has more on the people indicted as well as the others who are somehow involved.

DeSantis’s unforced errors

One of the notable things about the faltering campaign of Florida governor Ron DeSantis is that many of his problems have been self-inflicted, showing a lack of political skills.

It can be said to have started with him picking a fight with the Disney company that has resulted in them backing away from massive new investments in the state. DeSantis has shown himself willing to use the power of the state and a pliant legislature to attack a company for daring to criticize him, a move that has has alarmed the natural constituency of the Republican party which is big business.

The consequences of DeSantis’s actions are not limited to the Disney dispute. Florida’s political climate, characterized by controversial policies concerning LGBTQ rights and race, has led to a growing number of conventions and conferences avoiding the state altogether. At least five groups have canceled or moved their events out of Orange County and Fort Lauderdale over concerns about the state’s policies.

Florida’s tourism industry is displaying broader signs of decline, particularly in the Orlando area. The Orange County comptroller’s office reported a 6.7% decrease in tourist development tax collections for May compared to the previous year, marking the second consecutive decrease since February 2021.

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The book banning craze

We are now going through a period where right wingers are demanding that any books that might ‘disturb’ the sensitivities of children (i.e., introduce them to any ideas that they will not encounter in their homes) be removed from public and school libraries and are threatening to cut their budgets and even violence against librarians and library board members that do not immediately accede to their demands, accusing them of being pedophiles and groomers. The target of their ire is mainly books that have any LGBTQ+ themes, although. some have extended their scope to deal with books that deal with racism. They are aided in their quest by some conservative state governments who seek to pander to extremist religious constituents.
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The rise and fall of neoliberalism

The term ‘neoliberal’ is used quite a lot these days (including by me), usually in a pejorative sense but like all umbrella political and economic labels, its boundaries that determine what falls under the umbrella and what does not, are a little fuzzy. In a review of the new book The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Louis Menand traces the history of the neoliberal ideology and movement, in an essay that has the same title as this post.

What’s “neo” about neoliberalism is really what’s retro about it. It’s confusing, because in the nineteen-thirties the term “liberal” was appropriated by politicians such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and came to stand for policy packages like the New Deal and, later on, the Great Society. Liberals were people who believed in using government to regulate business and to provide public goods—education, housing, dams and highways, retirement pensions, medical care, welfare, and so on. And they thought collective bargaining would insure that workers could afford the goods the economy was producing.

Those mid-century liberals were not opposed to capitalism and private enterprise. On the contrary, they thought that government programs and strong labor unions made capitalist economies more productive and more equitable. They wanted to save capitalism from its own failures and excesses. Today, we call these people progressives. (Those on the right call them Communists.)

Neoliberalism, in the American context, can be understood as a reaction against mid-century liberalism. Neoliberals think that the state should play a smaller role in managing the economy and meeting public needs, and they oppose obstacles to the free exchange of goods and labor. Their liberalism is, sometimes self-consciously, a throwback to the “classical liberalism” that they associate with Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill: laissez-faire capitalism and individual liberties. Hence, retro-liberalism.
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This would be obvious to anyone but SSAT

I am, of course, not a lawyer nor am I familiar with how criminal trials are scheduled by courts but I would be surprised if judges feel obliged to schedule them around the convenience of the defendant. Hence the ruling by judge Tanya Chutkan that she will not take into account the serial sex abuser Donald Trump’s (SSAT) political calendar when scheduling his trial that special counsel Jack Smith has requested for January 2, 2024 was to be expected. She also issued restrictions on what he can say about the case.

The federal judge presiding over Donald Trump’s 2020 election subversion case on Friday warned inflammatory remarks from the former president would push her to schedule the trial sooner, saying she would take every step to safeguard the integrity of proceedings and to avoid tainting the potential jury pool.
…

Broadly speaking, Chutkan ruled that Trump was free to share “non-sensitive materials” as designated by prosecutors, but narrowed the scope so closely that it could ultimately amount to only a pyrrhic victory. Chutkan also ended up rejecting the majority of Trump’s other requests.

The judge repeatedly emphasized that she would not take into account Trump’s presidential campaign, telling Trump’s lead lawyer John Lauro that the former president’s free speech rights were not absolute and that they came second to the fact that he is now a criminal defendant.

“What the effects of my order are on a political campaign are not going to influence my decision. This is a criminal trial,” Chutkan said. “The defendant’s desire to conduct a campaign, to respond to political opponents, has to yield.”

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Benefits of walking

While I am generally aware of the negatives of a sedentary lifestyle and the benefits of exercise, my own physical limitations rule out all strenuous forms of exercise. Hence I was interested in a new study that says that just walking, which I can do at least in limited amounts, can provide significant benefits.

The study, published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology, suggested that walking at least 3,967 steps a day started to reduce the risk of dying from any cause, while 2,337 steps a day reduced the risk of dying from cardiovascular diseases.

Above these cutoffs, each increase of 1,000 steps a day was associated with a 15% reduction in the risk of dying from any cause, while an increase of 500 steps a day was associated with a 7% reduction in dying from cardiovascular disease.

“Our study confirms that the more you walk, the better. We found that this applied to both men and women, irrespective of age, and irrespective of whether you live in a temperate, subtropical or subpolar region of the world, or a region with a mixture of climates,’ Banach said.

“In addition, our analysis indicates that as little as 4,000 steps a day are needed to significantly reduce deaths from any cause, and even fewer to reduce deaths from cardiovascular disease.”

For younger age groups, the sharpest improvement in health was seen in individuals taking between 7,000 and 13,000 daily steps, while for those aged 60 years and over, it was between 6,000 and 10,000 steps.

For some time now I have been experimenting with how many steps a day I am capable of realistically doing. Too high a goal can become onerous and result in getting discouraged and giving up, while too low a goal may not help much. I finally arrived at an average 6,000 steps a day as my optimal level so I was glad to see that it seems worthwhile.

I do not do the steps all at once, though. I do it in four or five stages a day and try to mix up indoor and outdoor walking. I also used to, when driving somewhere, try and park my car closest to the destination but now I actually park far away just so that I have to walk a bit. Little things like that can increase the step count without becoming a burden.

It struck me that this is something that technology has helped a great deal. We now have pedometers that can count steps automatically, either built into one’s phone or as a cheap separate unit, making the targeting of goals easy. Before we had them, one would have to specify goals either in terms of the distances walked per day, which are very hard to estimate, or one would have to specify the total time that one walks, which is hard to keep track of.