Reality has once again intruded on Donald Trump’s fantasy world:

Bowing to bipartisan concerns in Congress, President Trump retreated Tuesday from his plan to create an independent “space force” in the Pentagon, proposing instead to consolidate the military’s space operations and personnel in the Air Force. The scaled-down plan would still establish a new military service focused on war-fighting in outer space — the first new branch since 1947 — with a four-star commander who would become a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an executive order that Trump signed Tuesday.

So now it’s just a branch of the Air Force, which is more-or-less what it already is since the Air Force Space Command already exists. It’s just going to get a little bigger now.

Should police be able to seize this $42,000 car for a crime with a maximum fine of $10,000?Jaguar Land Rover

This is excellent news:

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously Wednesday that the Constitution’s prohibition on excessive fines applies to state and local governments, limiting their abilities to impose fines and seize property….The court ruled in favor of Tyson Timbs of Marion, Ind., who had his $42,000 Land Rover seized after he was arrested for selling a couple hundred dollars’ worth of heroin.

The maximum fine for Timbs’ offense was $10,000, and the Land Rover was worth four times that amount. The Court ruled that this was plainly excessive, and that the prohibition against excessive fines applies to states in addition to the federal government.

But if seizing a car after selling a small amount of heroin is unconstitutional, then surely seizing a car after being convicted of nothing is also unconstitutional. This happens all the time in civil asset forfeiture cases, where police seize cash, cars, houses and more even if the owner has never been convicted of a crime. It is then up to the victim to go to court if she wants the property back.

I can only assume that this case sets the stage for a big ruling on civil asset forfeiture. This is one of the great injustices in the American justice system, and it’s long past time for the Court to either ban it or, at the very least, to severely rein it in.

Oh dear:

President Trump has grown increasingly disenchanted with Director of National Intelligence Daniel Coats, who has served as the nation’s top intelligence official for nearly two years, leading some administration officials to worry he will soon be dismissed, according to people familiar with the matter.

This is what happens in the Trump administration when you tell the truth. Coats should have known better. I recommend that he be replaced by Steve Doocy.

Donald Trump can’t seem to get it through his head that the Justice Department is not his personal legal firm. The New York Times reports that last year, after Trump forced the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, he called Matthew Whitaker, his interim attorney general, with a question about the Russia investigation:

He asked whether Geoffrey S. Berman, the United States attorney for the Southern District of New York and a Trump ally, could be put in charge of the widening investigation, according to several American officials with direct knowledge of the call.

Mr. Whitaker, who had privately told associates that part of his role at the Justice Department was to “jump on a grenade” for the president, knew he could not put Mr. Berman in charge because Mr. Berman had already recused himself from the investigation. The president soon soured on Mr. Whitaker, as he often does with his aides, and complained about his inability to pull levers at the Justice Department that could make the president’s many legal problems go away.

Trying to install a perceived loyalist atop a widening inquiry is a familiar tactic for Mr. Trump, who has been struggling to beat back the investigations that have consumed his presidency. His efforts have exposed him to accusations of obstruction of justice as Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel, finishes his work investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Trump denies this, of course, which means nothing. He probably did it, and Mueller probably knows he did it—which means that by trying to make the obstruction of justice allegations go away, Trump made them worse instead. He just can’t seem to stop digging, can he?

Dave Roberts says that centrists who say they prefer a “market-based” carbon tax to other, more regulatory climate change policies, are just trying to con everyone. The problem is not that a carbon tax wouldn’t work. The problem is that it would work only if it were huge—and if it were huge it would be no more politically palatable than all the other stuff the centrists are against.¹

Which illustrates that the vast majority of people who say they “believe” in climate change do not really understand it, haven’t internalized it, and are not *behaving as though* it is real. For some reason, that has depressed me more than anything in the past 2 miserable years.

— David Roberts (@drvox) February 19, 2019

I’m beating a dead horse here, but it’s really worth harping on this: Virtually nobody behaves as though climate change is real. That includes Dave and me and just about everyone reading this. We believe that climate change is an existential crisis for the planet, and the evidence supports that. But if it’s really that big a crisis, why don’t we act like it?

Let me put this in concrete terms. If you truly believe that climate change will broil the planet in the next 50 years or so, the very least you should do is immediately get rid of your car and adopt a vegan diet. How many of you have done that? How many of you have even considered it? Virtually none of you.² And like I said, that’s just a start. If you’re really serious, you should also toss out your air conditioning; only heat your house if temps are down in the 40s; never travel anywhere by plane; buy local food; and install rooftop solar. I’m going to let you keep your too-big house, but only because I’m a nice guy.

It seems as though I’m being facetious here, but I’m not. With current technology, this is what it would take from all of us to make a serious dent in climate change. And you’re not doing it. Neither am I. Nor, if we’re being honest, would we vote for anyone who we thought might force us to live like this. And that’s despite the fact that people like us are the most likely to support serious carbon reduction. As we all know, there are plenty of others who won’t even go so far as to support modestly higher CAFE standards or decommissioning of coal plants.

This should be a lesson to all of us: if we ourselves, who believe passionately that climate change is an existential threat, aren’t willing to make serious sacrifices to stop it, we should step back and ask why. Is it solely because it would be unfair for some of us to sacrifice like this when others aren’t? That’s certainly a handy excuse. Would we then be willing to support laws that forced everyone to live like this?

I very much doubt it. But why? After all, the hard part is already done: we believe in climate change. Think about this a bit and you’ll have a better understanding of why other people are unwilling to make even modest sacrifices to fight climate change.

¹Just to give you a sense of what we’re talking about, policymakers tend to talk about carbon taxes in the neighborhood of $30-50 per ton. That’s laughably inadequate. As Dave Roberts suggests, what we need are carbon taxes in the range of $300-500. A carbon tax of $100 equates to roughly $1 per gallon of gasoline, so this means a serious carbon tax would raise the price of gas by $3-5 per gallon. This is hardly inconceivable: Europeans already pay fuel taxes this high. And yet in America, you might just as well suggest that we murder puppies on live TV.

²If you’re planning to comment this, please, I’m begging you, don’t play stupid games. If you live in New York City you probably already don’t own a car. If you belong to PETA, you’re probably already vegan. Obviously there are people who don’t need a car in the first place and don’t care much about eating meat. I’m talking instead about the vast majority of us: people who love meat and own cars to get around. Giving that up would be a huge sacrifice, and it’s the scale of the sacrifice that I’m trying to communicate here.

This is the stairwell of a local hospital here in Irvine. It may be beige and dreary inside, but outside it’s got all the colors of the rainbow.

International Dose-Response Society

Susanne Rust of the LA Times brings us the latest fabulous news from the Trump adminstration:

In early 2018, a deputy assistant administrator in the EPA, Clint Woods, reached out to a Massachusetts toxicologist best known for pushing a public health standard suggesting that low levels of toxic chemicals and radiation are good for people….Less than two weeks later, [Ed] Calabrese’s suggestions on how the EPA should assess toxic chemicals and radiation were introduced, nearly word for word, in the U.S. government’s official journal, the Federal Register.

“This is a major big time victory,” Calabrese wrote in an email to Steve Milloy, a former coal and tobacco lobbyist who runs a website, junkscience.com, that seeks to discredit mainstream climate science. “Yes. It is YUGE!” wrote Milloy, in response.

We could stop right there if we wanted. Steve Milloy is one of the most prominent purveyors of crap science in the world. He’s a climate change denier with close ties to the tobacco industry and the author of (among others) Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Control Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them. If Calabrese and Milloy are buddies, that’s probably all you need to know.

And where has Calabrese’s funding come from? Do I even have to tell you?

By the 1990s, Calabrese had solidly established himself as a trusted scientist with the tobacco industry. He found they were interested in research that questioned the methods that regulatory agencies use to assess risk.

….It was when he began his work on hormesis that Calabrese got attention from a broader range of industries. With seed money from R.J. Reynolds, Dow Chemical, Procter & Gamble and others, as well as the EPA, Calabrese established a hormesis working group at the University of Massachusetts, which he called the Biological Effects of Low Level Exposures, or BELLE….Between 1990 and 2013, Calabrese received more than $8 million from companies and institutions, including R.J. Reynolds, Exxon Mobil, Dow Chemical, General Electric, the Department of Energy and the U.S. Air Force, to conduct research on hormesis.

There you have it. As usual, the tobacco industry is the root of all scientific evil, and their approach long ago caught on with every other polluting industry out there. “Manufacturing doubt” is their goal, and abuse of research into processes like hormesis is their holy grail. It’s not that hormesis is impossible. There may well be a few isolated examples where it has application—and as far as polluting industries are concerned, one example is plenty. They can then fund research claiming to find it all over the place.

If you want to read the whole grim story, check out Rebecca Leber’s piece from last October about how Calabrese’s ideas became embedded in the EPA’s rulemaking process after Trump took office. It’s the Trump era in a nutshell.

As long as we’ve started the day out with movies, here’s the latest from the The Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film at San Diego State University:

There’s been a little bit of progress in the past decade or so, but not a lot—and it seems to have flattened out in the Trump era. Here are the types of leaders that women are mostly portrayed as:

This is pretty grim.

Here it is. Your favorite movie president is….Peter Sellers!

Hmmm. This might have been unfair. Which Peter Sellers are we talking about here? The president from Dr. Strangelove or the president from Being There? Maybe I should have had two separate entries?

And poor Aaron Eckhart. According to Google’s official tally, he got zero votes. Zero! Sad.

It’s interesting that the top four presidents (or top five if you count Peter Sellers twice) are all from comedies. I’m not sure what this says about my readership, but you guys sure like comedy presidents a whole lot more than dramatic presidents.

UPDATE: Sorry, I blew it. Sellers was on his way to becoming president in Being There, but never actually became president. I never liked the movie and haven’t seen it since it came out, so I forgot.

But that means you all made Sellers #1 solely for his role as President Merkin Muffley in Dr. Strangelove. Really? Sellers played the role straight, and it was hardly one of the more memorable characters in the movie. What’s wrong with you guys?

Today is Presidents Day, so I scoured my backlog of photos for something that related to presidents. I came up empty. Totally empty. So instead, here’s a pretty picture of sparkly raindrops on a rose branch in our backyard. All things considered, maybe it’s better than thinking about presidents anyway.