Michael Nigro/Pacific Press via ZUMA

This morning, mostly in passing, I mentioned that I couldn’t quite tell exactly who Donald Trump was condemning in his tweets about last night’s march by white nationalists in Charlottesville. I’ve been out all day since then and just got home. The first thing I read about were the deaths and injuries in today’s march: one woman was killed by a car that rammed into the crowd; two police officers died in a helicopter crash; and dozens more were injured. And what does our president have to say about that?

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.

And this:

This is the White House’s only response to my asking three times if the President condemns white supremacists pic.twitter.com/6YLUrrRLOM

— Ken Schwencke (@schwanksta) August 13, 2017

What a miserable little race-baiting piece of shit. Our country can’t be rid of him soon enough.

Can you figure out what’s wrong with this picture?

Answer: it was taken at 1 in the morning by moonlight. Isn’t that amazing? You’d think it was taken at sunrise.

And what was I doing snapping pictures at 1 in the morning? I was meteor watching, something I’ve never done before. Perseids, to be precise. To my surprise,¹ I saw several meteors, including a couple of very nice ones. However, my goal was to get a picture of meteors, and I failed miserably at that. Also, I had bad luck. I initially adjusted my camera settings for a long shutter speed, and several meteors streaked across the sky during this session. However, none of them showed up in the images.

So then I re-adjusted my settings to be more meteor-friendly (I think), and naturally there were no meteors. Finally, as I went back to my car, a really nice meteor streaked by, and this got me all excited again. So I took a bunch more pictures. But no meteors.

Hmmph. The good news is that I learned what I think I need to do. Maybe I’ll go out again tonight. The moon is coming up later, and if I go out an hour earlier I should have a pretty dark sky to work with. I also think I can get my camera to take pictures automatically with no manual intervention from me. Gotta check out the instruction manual about that.

Anyway, if I give it another try and have any success, you’ll be the first to know.

¹Why was I surprised? I guess because I’m a city boy and I’ve never seen a meteor before. Deep inside, I’m not sure I believed they’d really show up until I saw one myself.

A couple of hours ago on Twitter, Donald Trump condemned the white nationalists who marched in Charlottesville last night. Or did he?

We ALL must be united & condemn all that hate stands for. There is no place for this kind of violence in America. Lets come together as one!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2017

Am in Bedminster for meetings & press conference on V.A. & all that we have done, and are doing, to make it better-but Charlottesville sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2017

Am I the only one who can’t tell for sure who Trump is talking about in these tweets?

And by terrible, I mean fawning:

Between 2012 and 2016, Metacritic, a website that aggregates critics’ reviews for music, films, television and video-games, gave just eight out of 7,287 albums a “red” score—a designation that means reviews were “generally unfavorable” or worse.

In other words, only 0.1 percent of all albums reviewed were judged even mildly bad, let alone awful. So far in 2017, the number is 0 percent.

Here’s the latest Kaiser tracking poll on the popularity of Obamacare:

Approval of Obamacare has been rising steadily ever since Trump won the election. Net approval has now been positive for eight consecutive months, by far the longest stretch of positive approval since the law took effect in January 2014. On the less positive side, however, we also have this:

It is, I suppose, a relief that a majority of Republicans don’t want Trump to deliberately sabotage Obamacare. At the same time, a full 40 percent of Republicans think this is a great idea. That’s not surprising, perhaps, but it sure is discouraging.

Yonhap News/Newscom via ZUMA

I want to make a quick point that’s pretty obvious, I guess, but that hasn’t been getting much attention. It’s this: North Korea and the United States have been successfully practicing mutually assured destruction against each other for more than half a century. It’s not the same as MAD between the Soviet Union and the US during the Cold War, in which the threat on both sides was the same—nuclear armageddon—but it’s been effective nonetheless:

• South Korea. The United States keeps about 30,000 troops along the North-South Korea border. This is not because South Korea needs the extra manpower. They have 600,000 active troops and several million more reserves. Our troops are there as a tripwire. If North Korea ever launched an attack, it would kill lots of American troops, guaranteeing that America would respond and North Korea would be wiped off the map.
• North Korea. The DPRK maintains an immense amount of artillery along its border with South Korea. Since Seoul and other large cities are only 30 miles from the border, North Korea can immediately inflict tremendous loss of life on South Korea if it’s ever attacked.

  

So: North Korea can’t attack because they risk being destroyed by an American response. South Korea can’t attack because they risk losing thousands or millions of lives in a North Korean response.

This is a ghoulish standoff. But despite the alleged madness of North Korea’s leaders, it’s worked. Since 1953 there have been hundreds of fracases and dozens of more serious incidents along the border, but thanks to the grisly logic of deterrence none of them have turned into anything more serious. If North Korea develops the means to launch nuclear missiles at the United States, there’s no reason to think it won’t continue to work. The weapons are different, but the fundamental calculus isn’t.

Three months ago, I posted a picture of Hilbert playing under the sheets as we made the bed. I intended to post a matching picture of Hopper the next week, but things just kept getting in the way. Today my excuses finally ran out. So here it is, the long-awaited second half of my diptych “Cats Under the Sheets.”

By the way, I have gotten some queries about why I ignored the so-called International Cat Day earlier this week. Hilbert and Hopper just scoffed when I asked about it. Every day is cat day, after all. Puny human holidays mean nothing to them.

Caitlin Owens reports that a pair of House Republicans—one a moderate and one an archconservative—are working on a bill to stabilize Obamacare:

Reps. Tom MacArthur and Mark Meadows are working together on an individual market stabilization package, according to a senior GOP aide. It will include funding for the Affordable Care Act’s cost-sharing reduction payments to insurers, although it’s unclear for how long….One crucial piece, according to a second GOP aide, is an agreement on “very flexible 1332 waiver language” in exchange for CSR funding. The state waivers are an important priority for conservative Republicans.

This is the most obvious short-term compromise possible. If the CSR subsidies go away, premiums will go up about 15 percent next year. Not only will that be really unpopular, but it would, counterintuitively, cost the government a bundle since the higher premiums will generate higher subsidies. Meanwhile, conservatives have been pushing for a long time for waivers that allow states to run health care systems radically different from Obamacare.

Needless to say, the devil is in the details. On the CSR side, they key is how long the funding would be guaranteed. Appropriations can only be made for two years, but it’s possible to convert the CSR subsidies into mandatory spending that doesn’t require an appropriation. That would make it permanent. On the waiver side, everything depends on just how far the waivers go. Conservatives want a blank slate. Moderates and liberals want to keep some of the key provisions of Obamacare, like essential benefits and tax subsidies.

I’m pretty sure that a bill like this can’t be passed under reconciliation (the 1332 waivers wouldn’t qualify), so it would need 60 votes in the Senate. That means it needs to be acceptable to Democrats, not just Republicans.

It’s possible that something with this at its core could be doable. Stay tuned.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the number of people who are underpaying their estimated quarterly taxes and incurring IRS penalties is skyrocketing:

Apparently it’s something of a mystery why this is happening. The number of filers has gone up only slightly. The total penalty amount has stayed about the same. The laws haven’t changed. So what’s going on?

Beats me. But I do recall looking at this once for a friend who was worried about penalties, and concluding that it hardly made any difference. The penalty amount was pretty small, and not a lot different from the interest you’d earn from underpaying and then paying the penalty. Unless you’re really rich, in which case you have accountants doing this anyway, it didn’t really matter that much.

So…maybe people have just gotten lazy because they’ve realized that tax penalties aren’t that big a deal?

John Podhoretz is unhappy:

The sheer PCness of this list is suffocating. https://t.co/qkDH5Kf6D0

— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) August 11, 2017

Even though this Esquire list is more than a year old, I couldn’t help myself. I clicked the link, expecting to find a wild list of obscure femino-socialist tracts that no one in the real world has ever read. Instead I got something…surprisingly ordinary. I’ll break the Esquire list into two lists. Here’s list #1. Every one of them is very well known, and most are part of the standard literary canon:

1. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
2. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
3. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
4. Beloved, Toni Morrison
5. The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield
6. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
7. The Complete Poems, Emily Dickinson
8. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
9. Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
10. Giovanni’s Room, James Baldwin
11. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
12. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
14. Harriet the Spy, Louise Fitzhugh
15. Heartburn, Nora Ephron
16. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
17. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
18. Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
19. The Liars’ Club, Mary Karr
20. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
21. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
22. Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon
23. Middlemarch, George Eliot
24. Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
25. The Neapolitan Novels, Elena Ferrante
26. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
27. Parting the Waters, Taylor Branch
28. Play It As It Lays, Joan Didion
29. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
30. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
31. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
32. Selected Stories Of Alice Munro
33. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
34. The Stories Of Vladimir Nabokov
35. Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
36. Sula, Toni Morrison
37. Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
38. Things Fall Apart, Chiunia Achebe
39. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
40. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
41. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
42. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
43. The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson
44. The White Album, Joan Didion
45. Underworld, Don DeLillo
46. A Wrinkle In Time, Madeleine L’Engle

Here’s list #2. Some of these are obscure, while some are just lesser-known works by famous authors. Some of them I haven’t heard of, so I can’t judge them:

1. Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson
2. Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
3. The Ballad Of The Sad Café, Carson McCullers
4. Balm, Dolen Perkins-Valdez
5. Bastard Out Of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
6. The Best Of Everything, Rona Jaffe
7. Birds of America, Lorrie Moore
8. The Boys of My Youth, Jo Ann Beard
9. The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
10. Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
11. The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch
12. Citizen, Claudia Rankine
13. The Collected Stories of Grace Paley
14. Forgotten County, Catherine Chung
15. The Group, Mary McCarthy
16. Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage Alice Munro
17. Housekeeping, Marilynne Robinson
18. Just Kids, Patti Smith
19. The Leopard, Tomasi di Lampedusa
20. The Lover, Marguerite Duras
21. Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
22. NW, Zadie Smith
23. Possessing the Secret of Joy, Alice Walker
24. Redefining Realness, Janet Mock
25. The Round House, Louise Erdrich
26. Shadowshaper, Daniel José Older
27. Silver Sparrow, Tayari Jones
28. So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
29. Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison
30. Stone Butch Blues, Leslie Feinberg
31. A Thousand Years Of Good Prayers, Yiyun Li
32. An Untamed State, Roxane Gay
33. Walk Two Moons, Sharon Creech
34. The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman

This list was explicitly put together by eight women as a response to Esquire’s ill-received 2015 “80 Books Every Man Should Read,” which contained exactly one book written by a woman.

It’s hard for me to find anything either suffocating or PC about this list. There are lots of standard-issue great books, along with the usual smattering of idiosyncratic choices that might or might not be especially widely read. That’s no surprise: every author or critic worth her salt carries around a mental list of personal favorites that they wish more people had read. The list is heavily populated by women, but not nearly so heavily as the original list was populated by men. The themes of these books are considerably different than the themes of the “Every Man” list, which is hardly surprising. And there are fewer pieces of nonfiction than there are on the men’s list.

Anyway, it’s a list that might not appeal to a lot of men. Them’s the breaks. On the other hand, maybe it provides some good ideas for novels to expand their horizons. You never know til you try.