This piece in The Atlantic by Adam Serwer is a reminder that for Trump’s supporters, cruelty isn’t just a side-effect of Trumpism. It’s a feature. That the current U.S. president chose to mock the victim of a sexual assault by a Supreme Court nominee is hardly surprising. But what little hope I had for Trump supporters, particularly those at the Mississippi rally who joined Trump in his mockery, is gone.

A method of searching the official Russian language National Corpus using Python and SQLite.

Oh, those fiscally-responsible Republicans

Axios has an article on Trump’s love of debt. He’d borrow the first installment from Russia.

Regex 101 is a great online regex tester.

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Speaking of regular expressions, for the past year, I’ve used an automated process for building Anki flash cards. One of the steps in the process is to download Russian word pronunciations from Wiktionary. When Wiktionary began publishing transcoded mp3 files rather than just ogg files, they broke the URL scheme that I relied on to download content. The new regex for this scheme is: (?:src=.*:)?src=\"(\/\/.*\.mp3)

Interestingly, Fox News rejects requests from the Tor Browser. The New York Times loads perfectly normally via Tor. I don’t often visit Fox News but an article title caught my attention.

Politico has a piece today about Trump’s outrageous claims in the face of weather disasters. In almost every context, he reveals himself to be an abject fool; but lurking beneath that idiocy is another layer of loathsomeness - the complete lacking in understanding of science. I want a reporter to ask him any of the following questions about hurricanes:

• “Mr. Trump, can you describe for us your understanding of how hurricanes form?”
• “What role do Coriolis forces play in the formation of tropical cyclones.”
• “Given that hurricanes possess massive amounts of energy, what are the sources of that energy?”

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An article from the Times on why yelling at children is comparable to physical punishment. Children who are subjected to yelling have lower self-esteem, and more depressive and anxiety symptoms.^[The article cites a study that shows a reciprocal amplifying effect of yelling and behavioural problems: “Mothers’ and fathers’ harsh verbal discipline at age 13 predicted an increase in adolescent conduct problems and depressive symptoms between ages 13 and 14. A child effect was also present, with adolescent misconduct at age 13 predicting increases in mothers’ and fathers’ harsh verbal discipline between ages 13 and 14.”]

A recent piece in The Atlantic by Peter Beinart filled in a cognitive gap in understanding how a large minority of U.S. citizens continue to support an abjectly incompetent, almost certainly criminal, willfully ignorant, and generally hateful man as president. The article Why Trump supporters believe he is not corrupt makes the argument that when Trump defenders concern themselves with the idea of corruption they are not thinking of political corruption so much as corruption of the purity. This is consistent with Jonathan Haight’s research into the determinants of a person’s moral judgments as a function of political affiliation.^[This has been noted before by Thomas Edsall back in early 2016 writing for The New York Times.] Conservatives are likelier than liberals to concern themselves with tradition and purity. When Donald Trump uses the word disgusting which he has done scores of times on Twitter, he’s invoking the conservative fear of taint. The Special Prosecutor’s inquiry into possible collusion and other crimes committed during the 2016 elections, in Trump’s view, are not only unlawful, biased, or unfavourable in some other objective way. It is, to Trump, disgusting (“this Rigged and Disgusting Witch Hunt.”)

My approach to wrestling with iTunes to make it (barely) usable for classical music collections.