I remember when Firefox was a stable little browser.
Now it crashes multiple times a day.
Aggravating. If I want to move on to Vivaldi, I’ll have to upgrade my Linux box. I’ve been avoiding that for … YEARS … because the X11 drivers didn’t recognize the graphics cards. But it may be time.
</vent>
The Guardian is reporting that a new study indicates neonicotinoids may be even more dangerous than previously thought:
Three pesticides banned in Europe for their potential to damage bee populations could pose an even greater threat than was thought, according to a new assessment by the European Food Safety Authority (Efsa).
Already proscribed for seed treatments and soil applications, the Efsa analysis says that clothianidin, imidacloprid and thiamethoxam also pose a ‘high risk’ to bees when sprayed on leaves.
The UK is currently facing a legal challenge to an emergency exemption it granted, allowing use of two of the substances, after protests by the National Farmers Union.
But far from supporting the British case, the advisory expert assessment will add to pressure for an extension of the ban to apply to fruit orchards after blooming, and crops gown in greenhouses, Greenpeace says.
Big Ag is not happy:
But industry groups deny any link between the disappearing bees and pesticide use. Syngenta, which manufactures one of the banned substances even threatened to sue Efsa officials involved in the original risk assessment.
Which is unfortunate. They should be challenging the study on scientific grounds, because we’re talking about the relatively simple arena of science, not the horribly complex area of politics.
The events at Lake Nyos, in Cameroon, Africa, in 1986 are terrifying, as the sudden release of tons of carbon dioxide asphyxiated the local population. Some died in their sleep, others as they investigated the noise of the gaseous eruption and resultant cloud. They simply collapsed.
But on the evening of Aug. 21, 1986, farmers living near the lake heard rumbling. At the same time, a frothy spray shot hundreds of feet out of the lake, and a white cloud collected over the water. From the ground, the cloud grew to 328 feet (100 meters) tall and flowed across the land. When farmers near the lake left their houses to investigate the noise, they lost consciousness.
The heavy cloud sunk into a valley, which channeled it into settlements. People in the affected areas collapsed in their tracks — at home, on roads or in the field — losing consciousness or dying in a few breaths. In Nyos and Kam, the first villages hit by the cloud, everyone but four inhabitants on high ground died.
And a similar situation may exist at Lake Kivu, threatening millions, as reported by The Observer.
Now a slow motion version of a similar problem involving currently sequestered carbon may be present in eastern Siberia. NewScientist‘s Eli Kintisch reports (15 August 2015, paywall):
The trees at Hellhole – the moniker sticks – were burned a decade ago and could provide an important clue in the debate over the impact of Arctic fire (see diagram). There is no question that warmer temperatures, drier conditions and, possibly, an uptick in lightning are catalysing a rise in blazes across the Arctic. This summer over 9 million hectares of forest in Alaska and Canada have burnt – a record – drawing thousands of firefighters to help.
Fires devour the organic layer of leaf litter and shrubs on the floor of boreal forests and tundra alike. As this layer offers insulation during the summer, burned sites could see an increase in the depth of the soil that thaws in summer, before refreezing in winter. More thawed soil could mean more microbial respiration of ancient Arctic carbon into the atmosphere, eventually turning the boreal forest from a carbon sink into a source.
Not the immediate deaths of millions, as at the lakes – but a large potential addition to the climate change crisis. But will it happen?
McKenzie Kuhn, a recent college graduate, checks one of a series of funnel-shaped bubble traps she set in the [Siberian] pools days ago. In the anoxic conditions found in the soil beneath the ponds, microbes can create methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The team is now trying to measure emissions from the ponds and determine if they come from the carbon locked in the permafrost.
Back in Cherskiy, preliminary lab tests of the gases emitted by the soils below Hellhole’s ponds show surprisingly high amounts of methane. So by destabilising the soil and creating microponds, the scientists hypothesise, fire may be creating a new fuse on the Arctic carbon bomb.
A great deal of methane, another component of climate change, is currently sequestered in the form of methane hydrates, methane frozen inside of ice. As the globe warms, there are concerns that these could melt, adding to our woes. They are found in the depths of the oceans as well as in permafrost. CommonDreams contributes this report:
Warning that a dramatic “burp” or “pulse” of methane from beneath the fragile permafrost of the Arctic caused by continued global warming would set off a “climate catastrophe,” a new study says that the continued melting is also an economic “time bomb” that could cost the global economy $60 trillion.
Billions upon billions of tons of methane remain stored in the permafrost throughout the Arctic regions, but specific concern has been placed on the enormous reserves that sit locked beneath the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. Scientists have repeatedly warned that if these deposits—many frozen in the form of methane hydrates—were released, they would trigger massive feedback loops and dramatically increase the rate of global warming.
The new study confirms these established fears, but also looks at the potential social and economic costs that would follow.
On this thread a reader writes,
Chew on this for awhile, Hue: http://s-f-walker.org.uk/…/Julian_Jaynes_The_Origin_of…
I’ve heard of this but never read it. Another writes:
Dennett proposed consciousness occurred after everything else years before they “proposed” this. And he was building on experiments from the 80s and earlier. Grumble grumble damn scientists get off my cognitive lawn
Or, Something’s Taken a Chomp Out Of My Tree!
NewScientist (15 August 2015, paywall) notes complaints that Australia is backing off its climate change commitments:
Prime minister Tony Abbott said on Tuesday that Australia would aim to cut emissions by 26 to 28 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030. This is much less than is recommended by the country’s Climate Change Authority.
“This is a responsible and achievable target,” Abbott said. “It is comparable to the targets of other developed countries and allows our economy and jobs to grow strongly.”
But using the same baseline year of 2005, the US aims to cut emissions by 41 per cent by 2030 and the UK by 48 per cent.
The Climate Institute takes note:
“The initial target offer ahead of the Paris climate negotiations in December is a core test of the government’s climate and economic credibility,” said John Connor, CEO of The Climate Institute. “This target fails tests both of scientific credibility and economic responsibility in a world increasingly focused on modernising and cleaning up energy as well as economic systems.”
“This target is bad for the climate and bad for our international competitiveness.” …
“If other countries took the same approach as the government announced today, the world would warm by 3-4°C.”
“The government’s weak target is also bad for the economy. As many other nations continue to step up actions to limit emissions and modernise their economies through clean energy and other investments, this target implies that Australia will be the most pollution intensive developed economy by 2030.”
“This target also means we would still be the highest per capita polluter among developed economies in 2030.”
A lovely bit of public shaming, that. The official Australian Dept of the Environment page is here. Earlier in the year, the Department of the Prime Minister and the Cabinet released this report:
Australia’s climate will continue to have high variability. Nevertheless, a verage temperature s are projected to continue to increase and extreme rain events are projected to become more intense. A verage rain fall in southern Australia is projected to decrease.
Australia is taking strong action on climate change. Between 1990 and 2014 the economy nearly doubled in size and our population grew strongly, while greenhouse gas emissions remained broadly the same. Australia’s emissions per capita have reduced by 28 per cent since 1990 and by 20 per cent since 2000 and emissions per unit of gross domestic product have fallen by 52 per cent since 1990 and by 35 per cent since 2000.
The Australian Government is committed to achieving a five per cent reduction on 2000 emissions levels by 2020. This target is equivalent to a reduction of 13 per cent below 2005 emissions levels and a 19 per cent reduction from projected business as usual emissions.
Strong action? Not everyone agrees.
Climate Action Tracker has a current evaluation of Australia, including a really nice chart, which is not embeddable. The same page also includes a summation of the world by country, divided into categories. The USA is rated at the bottom end of Sufficient (to my surprise); Australia is at the top end of Inadequate. Only one country, Bhutan, is listed as above Sufficient; and certainly not all the countries of the world are listed.
Peter Hartcher of the Syndey Morning Herald has a cynical view of the Australian government:
If the carbon emissions target that the federal government is about to announce is connected to climate science, it’s by coincidence. …
… this government doesn’t make its big decisions based on science, economics, markets, or any value other than politics. So let’s set aside the pretence that this is really about climate change.
As we know, Tony Abbott once described himself as a “weather vane” on climate change; the winds that blow him about are political.
Otherwise why would he classify coal as good and wind farms as bad? Do rocks and wind turbines have moral qualities?
This is not about an open minded examination of energy markets. Like all of this government’s big decisions, it’s about ideology and politics.
If you want to understand the frenetic claim and counter-claim you’re going to hear on this subject, you’ll find this simple, two-point guide indispensable. The political rubric is:
1. If the argument is decided mainly on climate or environment considerations, Labor wins.
2. If it’s decided mainly on electricity prices, the Coalition wins.
[etc…]
The Prime Minister is of the Coalition, of course. A quick look at his history certainly seems to show he’s a political creature, through and through, which is hardly what you want to see in government if you see a non-political problem needing resolution by the government. While he’s made gestures towards science, one must wonder about his sincerity.
It does occur to me that, if we do manage to achieve the goal of < 2° C rise in temperature, and thus nothing too horrible happens, then we’ll be faced with the cries of the deniers that, indeed, nothing has been proven and they were right all along.
Further commentary on this thread, which apparently spills salt on a raw nerve:
Hue, I agree with all of your remarks at the bottom of your first blog post. Proprietary software my ass. How hard is it to add up numbers and do a little cross checking? Nothing proprietary in that, and as open source software has shown for millions of other applications, it’s more than up to the task of just about anything. But your point about the need for speed is best — we don’t even need computers to do voting. There is no hurry. We could safely take 3 months every election to tally the votes. There’s no doubt in my mind that the system is corrupt; this news only makes it more concrete and widespread.
I couldn’t agree more. Indeed, a three month wait to discover if you’re getting that new job could even kill off a few of the less worthy applicants. I can’t help but wonder if TV dramas could be built around the idea….
NewScientist (15 August 2015, paywall) publishes one of the most mystifying popular science articles I’ve ever read. Outside of string theory, of course. This is on the subject of consciousness, and it’s worth mentioning the title and leader:
Consciousness evolved for the greater good, not just the self
The unconscious mind tricks you into believing in a sense of self, argue two psychologists. And it does this for an unexpected reason
Who am I to argue with a couple of psychologists? They are Peter Halligan of Cardiff University and David Oakley of University College London. And it must be kept in mind that this is a relatively short article falling under NewScientist‘s The Big Idea rubric. Still, statements like these make me goggle:
A close examination of your own conscious experience reveals how little control, if any, you have over it or its contents. When you regain consciousness each morning, after losing it the night before, it arrives without effort. Likewise, your thoughts and memories arrive ready formed and you can’t really exercise control over that experience: a blue shirt remains a blue shirt even if you wish it to be different.
The first statement appears to be an artificial division between consciousness and “you”. To me, consciousness is me; to suggest I have control over it appears, in my untrained opinion, a non-sequitur. On the second statement, I congratulate them, because I certainly must fight way back to consciousness after a night’s sleep – and, no, I do not have sleep apnea. The rest of the statement is rather vague, much like myself: except that sometimes, given enough time, a blue shirt is a green shirt, as much work on memory has confirmed over the years. Not that I don’t get their point, I just wish they’d had an editor working on this; thoughts, in my experience, are triggered, directly and indirectly, by external events impinging on my consciousness: evaluating survival tactics, triggering desires, enjoyment. Memories come up as part of the thought processes, roughly as data being sent to algorithms, although I’m wary of the ‘computing brain’ analogy.
We proposed 15 years ago that consciousness is an elaborate creation and that everything experienced in consciousness has already been formed backstage by unconscious processes (New Scientist, 18 November 2000). Relevant information is broadcast from the unconscious to form the contents of conscious experience. This means that self-awareness, thoughts, feelings and intentions are simply broadcasts of unconscious brain outputs. This occurs in much the same way that having the experience of seeing the colour blue or feeling the emotion of sadness is the product of a series of uncredited unconscious brain processes.
We hold that our very real experience of the contents of consciousness is a characteristic of this internal broadcasting and hence conscious awareness has no specific or generic cognitive function.
Unconscious? Conscious? I’m tempted to wonder if this is a circular definition; but I suspect it’s the lack of definition of unconsciousness (the dangers of pop-sci!) which leaves me grumpy and suspicious. (Defining an unconscious process as a cognitive process of which you are conscious mind is unaware just might make me scream at this point.) And I note the last sentence once again presupposes a division between consciousness and myself. Then there’s this:
So why did this powerful sense of conscious awareness that we feel on waking evolve? What purpose does it serve?
Wait a moment. You just told us “… hence conscious awareness has no specific or generic cognitive function.”!
Although our conscious experience feels personal and intimately real to us, we suggest that it is a product of evolution that provides a survival advantage for the wider social group, rather than directly for the individual. We think that consciousness emerged alongside other developments in brain processing that conferred a powerful social evolutionary benefit of communicating our internal thoughts to others.
Which gives the individual a better opportunity to reproduce and carry on the species.
This all seems to be motivated by a certain set of experimental observations:
… measurements of brain activity reveal that muscles and brain areas prepare for an action, such as a reaching out for an object, before we are even aware of our intention to make that movement. As noted by the psychologist Jeffrey Grey and others, consciousness simply occurs too late to affect the outcomes of the mental processes apparently linked to it.
Which does have its fascinating implications, once you’re assured of the validity of the data, which is always primary in science (and way outside of my competency to consider, so I’m willing to stipulate it). I’m considering the action of a parry in fencing: the attack of your opponent is coming so fast that sometimes I find myself lodging a command to what I conceptualize as the mental machinery responsible for the response to the attack: direct parry vs indirect parry, for example. It’s rarely even perceptibly a conscious response, just that an attack in this line gives me several choices and this will be the choice; then I depend on reflexes to handle it.
30000 years ago reflexes would have been far more important, and consciousness may not have been fast enough. That we’re measuring neurological responses anticipating conscious awareness is very interesting, but I’m not sure I see the explanation, as roughly described as it is to a layman, as convincing; there are others, as I darkly sense. Unless all actions show an anticipatory neurological response! In that case, it’s a different ballgame….
They finish up with this:
As the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche noted, “consciousness is really only a net of communication between human beings…consciousness does not really belong to man’s individual existence but rather to his social or herd nature.” Consciousness therefore provides a powerful evolutionary advantage by allowing shared communication, and extending each individual’s understanding of the world.
I have not read Nietzsche, so the context of his remark eludes me. Any philosophers care to elucidate his remark?
A reader reminds me of recent historical trends WRT voting:
This is how I know we are doomed.
They’ve been saying election results haven’t been matching exit polls for a few election cycles now.
Also, that whole “Republicans are less likely to answer pollsters” thing has always sounded like a whitewash excuse to me. That’s a sweeping statement about all GOP voters? As if they get a fax in the AM of election day instructing them not to talk to phone pollsters and exit pollsters? Nothing about that make sense. It seems like the number of people who don’t like to talk to pollsters would be evenly distributed among all parties in large enough sample groups.
The other “reason” thrown around for landslide victories in precincts where polling results didn’t predict that was the famous “They put some gay rights initiatives on the ballots, and we know those GOP people are going to turn out in droves just to vote against those.” While everyone was nodding yes to these reasons as making sense, like bobblhead dolls, red flags were going off for me.
Premier Election Solutions, previously Diebold Election Systems, has had controversy swirling about it. Wikipedia helps us out here:
In August 2003, Walden O’Dell, then the chief executive of Diebold, announced that he had been a top fund-raiser for President George W. Bush and had sent a get-out-the-funds letter to 100 wealthy and politically inclined friends in the Republican Party, to be held at his home in a suburb of Columbus, Ohio.[13]
In December 2005, O’Dell resigned following reports that the company was facing securities fraud litigation surrounding charges of insider trading.[14]
And here, which is a discussion of various (and many! they sound like a pack of amateurs) security flaws. Or, perhaps, a machine designed to be easily compromised. Mother Jones covered Diebold back in 2004:
That label sounds ominously accurate to the many who are skeptical of computerized voting. In addition to being as decisive as the 2000 polling in Florida, they worry this year’s vote in Ohio could be just as flawed. Specifically, they worry that it could be rigged. And they wonder why state officials seem so unconcerned by the fact that the two companies in line to sell touch-screen voting machines to Ohio have deep and continuing ties to the Republican Party. Those companies, Ohio’s own Diebold Election Systems and Election Systems & Software of Nebraska, are lobbying fiercely ahead of a public hearing on the matter in Columbus next week.
There’s solid reason behind the political rhetoric tapping Ohio as a key battleground. No Republican has ever captured the White House without carrying Ohio, and only John Kennedy managed the feat for the Democrats. In 2000, George W. Bush won in the Buckeye State by a scant four percentage points. Four years earlier, Bill Clinton won in Ohio by a similar margin.
In recent years, central Ohio has been transformed from a bastion of Republicanism into a Democratic stronghold. Six of Columbus’ seven city council members are Democrats, as is the city’s mayor, Michael Coleman. But no Democrat has been elected to Congress from central Ohio in more than 20 years, and the area around Columbus still includes pockets where no Democrat stands a chance. One such Republican pocket is Upper Arlington, the Columbus suburb that is home to Walden “Wally” O’Dell, the chairman of the board and chief executive of Diebold.
And what was the result? Presidential:
Ohio was won by incumbent President George W. Bush by a 2.1% margin of victory. Prior to the election, most news organizations considered the Buckeye state as a swing state. The state’s economic situation gave hope for Senator Kerry. In the end, the state became the deciding factor of the entire election. Kerry conceded the state, as well as the entire election the morning following election night, as Bush won the state and its 20 electoral votes. The close contest was the subject of the documentary film …So Goes the Nation, the title of which is a reference to Ohio’s 2004 status as a crucial swing state.
In the House of Representatives there were no changes for Ohio – all incumbents re-elected.
Professor Clarkson’s results is just the latest in a suspicious pattern of clues. I hope she wins her suit.
As I have been working on this project, I noticed some duplication of the BNFs, but with different requirements, and this bothered me. I felt this was required by production 80,
EncodingDecl ::= S ‘encoding’ Eq (‘”‘ EncName ‘”‘ | “‘” EncName “‘” )
The key in this production is that EncName names the code set for the input, implying that you may have to change your transcoding mechanism. It seemed the most forthright approach was to use the parser to pull off the encoding name, so I duplicated the relevant BNFs and used a separately scoped recursive-descent parser to properly recover the encoding name.
Then I ran into production 28:
doctypedecl ::= ‘<! DOCTYPE’ S Name (S ExternalID)? S? (‘[‘ intSubset ‘]’ S?)? ‘>’
which looks rather harmless, until you read this:
Well-formedness constraint: External Subset
The external subset, if any, MUST match the production for extSubset.
I looked at that, and then traced out extSubset a little bit. I could see it would require a different return value than the general case. Here’s extSubset:
extSubset ::= TextDecl? extSubsetDecl
and if you trace it out, you see a lot of use of other, common, productions. Common implies I’d have to duplicate them for the new functionality. That irritated me – inelegant AND (to quote my colleague Chris Johnson) “copies aren’t”.
So I have worked out a refactoring. The single package, sax, is now two: sax and sax_foundation. sax_foundation will be a generic package, which is to say, it is parameterized, in this case, along with the handlers [noted below], it also accepts a specification of a return value. sax now manages the parsing effort. sax_foundation contains the entire BNF and provides parsing entry points for the encoding, the general case (which I think could be conflated with the encoding case), and (anticipated) extSubset. When sax needs an encoding from the document, it uses an instantiation of sax_foundation which returns a String containing the name; when it needs to execute extSubset, it’ll use an instantiation of sax_foundation that returns the Dtd structure; and in the general case, the return value will be a structure containing the handlers (content, lexical, error, and entity – so far), which is the structure sax itself will return to callers.
I am currently running regression tests to make sure the new structure works at least as well as the old structure. One batch of problems resulted from splitting sax in two – exceptions went from sax to the inner, hidden sax_foundation, which is not appropriate, so I split the exceptions into an independent package that everyone can access. The other batch of problems has come from inadvertently losing behavior that was implemented by the now-eliminated duplicate BNFs for EncodingDecl; this has been only a couple. Once these are cleaned up, regression should be clean. Then I can implement the link to extSubset. This will be done using a callback function. sax will send the callback function, and when it’s called (by production 28) it will invoke a new sax_foundation customized for returning a new Dtd (since that’s what extSubset is all about, as I understand it) and process the extSubset of the new instantiation using a yet to be defined entry point.
The callback function is, essentially, a hack, but not a bad one, since it removed a great deal of duplicated code.
On my TODO list: find (or, reluctantly, construct) a set of XML pages which may be considered to be an official test suite for XML parsers, including expected responses for a SAX-style parser. Share the knowledge if you happen to know of such a suite!
Also, finding a few huge XML pages will be necessary as I’m interested to see if an internal hack I constructed for scalability has also had a positive effect on performance. Unfortunately, I don’t have a way to construct a baseline, so this won’t be a professional-grade assessment, but just a “gee-whiz, that went fast”, or not. This may also require waiting for the release of a new version of Mythryl, as the current version seems to have a problem with handling file I/O in the manner I need. (Or perhaps I just haven’t figured it out.)
Sadly, there are concerns for the future of Mythryl. Earlier this year, the primary (and only) compiler developer, Cynbe ru Taren, was afflicted with colorectal cancer. Today I received news that while the removal of the cancer went well, he now has lung cancer. He continues to work on the project, but I do not believe he has any fellow developers, so if he goes down, the Mythryl project will probably die with him, which would be a shame. It has some great potential, and brings into sharp relief the excessive dangers of C & C++; the possibility of using formal methods for verifying code, impossible (or extremely difficult) in other languages, is quite alluring. If you think you’re a compiler hacker with some sharp skills, you might want to consider getting involved. Cynbe has done the majority of the lifting (which is to say, translating an academic project into a production-grade compiler), but I’m sure it could still use a lot of work.
A Wichita State mathematician by the name of Beth Clarkson is asking for access to voting records in order to research anomalies noted in summary voting records in Kansas and across the nation. From The Wichita Eagle:
Beth Clarkson, chief statistician for the university’s National Institute for Aviation Research, filed the open records lawsuit in Sedgwick County District Court as part of her personal quest to find the answer to an unexplained pattern that transcends elections and states. The lawsuit was amended Wednesday to name Secretary of State Kris Kobach and Sedgwick County Elections Commissioner Tabitha Lehman.
Clarkson, a certified quality engineer with a Ph.D. in statistics, said she has analyzed election returns in Kansas and elsewhere over several elections that indicate “a statistically significant” pattern where the percentage of Republican votes increase the larger the size of the precinct.
While it is well-recognized that smaller, rural precincts tend to lean Republican, statisticians have been unable to explain the consistent pattern favoring Republicans that trends upward as the number of votes cast in a precinct or other voting unit goes up. In primaries, the favored candidate appears to always be the Republican establishment candidate, above a tea party challenger. And the upward trend for Republicans occurs once a voting unit reaches roughly 500 votes.
Her request to Kansas for access to the requisite information has been blocked by the Secretary of State, and she is suing for access.
This is very interesting – an attempt to quash the Tea Party faction? Even more interesting, given the puzzling ascendancy of Governor Walker in Wisconsin, is her final comment for the Eagle’s story:
Clarkson became more interested in the issue after reading a paper written by statisticians Francois Choquette and James Johnson in 2012 of the Republican primary results showing strong statistical evidence of election manipulation in Iowa, New Hampshire, Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma, Alabama, Louisiana, Wisconsin, West Virginia and Kentucky.
Clarkson said she couldn’t believe their findings, so she checked their math and found it was correct and checked their model selection and found it appropriate. Then she pulled additional data from other elections they hadn’t analyzed and found the same pattern.
Clarkson’s blog is here. Her most recent blog post (disregarding the post saying she has no progress yet on her lawsuit) discusses possible real voting fraud involving voting machines.
My statistical analysis shows patterns indicative of vote manipulation in machines. The manipulation is relatively small, compared with the inherent variability of election results, but it is consistent. These results form a pattern that goes across the nation and back a number of election cycles.
Which pushes me to recall the inappropriateness of using computers for voting, a position I’ve quietly held since they were first introduced. Here’s my points:
This may turn out to be quite entertaining.
TIME has published an article about a group interview of a collection of Trump supporters. If you’ve found that phenomenon mystifying then this is fascinating:
A flock of two dozen mad-as-hell supporters of Donald Trump agreed to assemble on Monday night in a political consultant’s office to explain their passion for the Republican frontrunner. Gathered in a corporate-looking room with the shades drawn, they railed against Washington politicians who hire consultants, and sang their admiration for the one presidential candidate who promises to go his own way. …
The Donald devotees sang a contrapuntal tune, simultaneously a dirge to national decline and an ode to Trump. They believed Washington politicians and the Republican party had repeatedly misled them, and that the country is going down the tubes. They looked for relief in Trump. …
“We know his goal is to make America great again,” a woman said. “It’s on his hat. And we see it every time it’s on TV. Everything that he’s doing, there’s no doubt why he’s doing it: it’s to make America great again.”
The focus group watched taped instances on a television of Trump’s apparent misogyny, political flip flops and awe-inspiring braggadocio. They watched the Donald say Rosie O’Donnell has a “fat, ugly face.” They saw that Trump once supported a single-payer health system, and they heard him say, “I will be the greatest jobs president God ever created.” But the group—which included 23 white people, 3 African-Americans and three Hispanics and consisted of a plurality of college-educated, financially comfortably Donald devotees—was undeterred.
Their belief that government has failed them is, perhaps, unsurprising. I think this may be an unexpected downside of the subtlety of Obama. He doesn’t always sing his own praises from the rooftops, and sometimes it’s even counterproductive to do so. But still, being citizens they have to operate on their knowledge base, so if they don’t know something (and it’s a huge country, I don’t necessarily blame them for not knowing), it’s a problem. As Steve Benen points out,
In reality, border security has reached unprecedented levels, but Trump backers believe the opposite. In reality, there’s ample evidence that America’s global standing is strong and getting stronger, but Trump backers believe the opposite. In reality, President Obama has run circles around Putin’s Russia, but Trump backers believe the opposite.
So, for example, you have to know that oil is Russia’s most precious commodity – and the steep drop in oil prices is hurting them badly. The realization that Obama’s policies and, possibly, politics in the MidEast, is giving Russia big squeeze for their adventures in the Ukraine requires a knowledge base that isn’t always advertised.
But that’s sort of dull. Here’s the passage from the TIME article that really caught my eye:
“I want to put the Republican leadership behind this mirror and let them see. They need to wake up. They don’t realize how the grassroots have abandoned them,” Luntz continued. “Donald Trump is punishment to a Republican elite that wasn’t listening to their grassroots.”The group said Trump has their best interests in mind, while other Republicans are looking out for themselves. “We’ve got to show the Republicans that we’ve had it with them, that we will not be there every single time. They treat us like crap and they lie to us and promise us things and then they expect us to vote again,” said a Republican woman. “That’s why we want Trump.”
Luntz is Frank Luntz, a Republican political consultant. The point that catches my attention is that this is the grassroots. I’ve noted in other posts the team politics requirement of the Republicans; this results in a hierarchical structure which imposes ideological demands on its members.
But the grassroots is not part of that hierarchical structure. They’re disconnected from the top of the structure, whether that’s the Koch brothers, Sheldon Adelson, others, or a collective of same. They’ve been fed a lot of false information by the Republican leadership, and, as many liars have noted over the years, keeping lies straight is a lot harder than keeping the truth straight (although scientists might wish to dispute this remark).
And now the Republican grassroots suspect something. This may be an interesting whirlwind for the Republicans. Could a third party arise to try to take even more advantage of the grassroots? The Donald refused to support the eventual Republican nominee, alone amongst all on the stage at the debate. Bruce Bartlett may get his wish – a kick in the Republican pants of significant proportion. I’m willing to crawl out on a limb here – Democratic control of both the Senate and the House in 2016 becomes a stronger and stronger possibility as Trump continues to lead the primaries. And if he falls out of favor, a good possibility his supporters will sit out the next election in their disgust at the Republicans.
(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)
Unlike most criticisms of the Iran deal, Lawfare is worth reading through. First comes Yishai Schwartz, who worries about a possibly poor precedent:
This debate is important, but it also misses the larger point. What happened in the IAEA negotiations with Iran was precedent setting. The IAEA demanded access to an Iranian site in order to resolve questions about weaponization of Iran’s nuclear program. Iran refused, and in large part, the IAEA acquiesced. A set of arrangements was developed–which may or may not be technically sound for each and every one of the IAEA’s purposes (for this, we must follow the debate among experts closely)–which precluded actual IAEA access to the site. …
But what of the long-term, precedential effects? Based on the Parchin agreement, we can already predict what will happen 5, 10, 20 years from now, when Iran once again chooses to explore or pursue weaponization. The IAEA will demand access to a sensitive Iranian site, and Iran will stonewall. And when the time comes to negotiate, Iran will insist that IAEA and international community has already acknowledged it doesn’t really have a right to demand full access to military sites. After all, look at Parchin! And this agreement, rather than Iran’s actual legal obligations under its safeguards agreement and additional protocol, will become the new baseline.
Iranian negotiators have a track record of pocketing what seem at the time like limited and isolated Western concessions, only to argue (successfully) that they are of much larger significance. (This is, for example, what happened when the IAEA accepted that Iran wasn’t really bound by the Additional Protocol or Modified Code 3.1) With Parchin, I worry that we have just handed them another.
In contrast, Cody Poplin criticizes what appears to be a reasonable Congressional response – legislation permitting the President to respond to Iranian transgressions forcefully:
Middle of the road Iranians might just as well see an AUMF as adding sour bellicosity to a deal ostensibly meant to avert conflict—if not also as evidence of bad faith. As for hardliners, a force authorization, however conditional, could hand politically useful cover to officials and clerics eager to cheat on Iran’s side of the deal.
The doubtful efficacy can be paired with this downside, too: A rainy day Iran authorization likely would be a tough nut to crack legislatively. Under Einhorn’s formulation, for example, the president would be required to present “evidence” that Iran had cheated, before any force authorization could kick in. But as previous debates have shown, it’s not obvious what counts as evidence and at what threshold Congress should be convinced. Given the predictable political wrangling, a conditional AUMF thus present a great risk: the worst of all possible outcomes for deterring an Iranian breakout would be one wherein an administration spent significant resources to get a preemptive authorization only to end up failing.
I leave these with no comment. However, I also received this video in email today:
To which a very simple response is necessary:
We are, after all, the Great Satan.
Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog points to a new column out by GOP pundit Irving Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, suggesting that the GOP field really needs a surprise candidate:
Shouldn’t Republicans be open to doing what Democrats are now considering? That is: Welcoming into the race, even drafting into the race if need be, one or two new and potentially superior candidates? After all, if a new candidate or new candidates didn’t take off, the party would be no worse off, and someone from the current field would prevail. If the October surprise candidate caught fire, it would be all the better for the GOP–whether he ultimately prevailed or forced one of the existing candidates to up his game.
Who could such a mysterious dark horse be? Well, it’s not as if every well-qualified contender is already on the field. Mitch Daniels was probably the most successful Republican governor of recent times, with federal executive experience to boot. Paul Ryan is the intellectual leader of Republicans in the House of Representatives, with national campaign experience. The House also features young but tested leaders like Jim Jordan, Trey Gowdy and Mike Pompeo. There is the leading elected representative of the 9/11 generation who has also been a very impressive freshman senator, Tom Cotton. There could be a saner and sounder version of Trump—another businessman who hasn’t held electoral office. And there are distinguished conservative leaders from outside politics; Justice Samuel Alito and General (ret.) Jack Keane come to mind.
Particularly interesting is the suggestion of Justice Alito, and not only for the question of whether or not a sitting SCOTUS justice could also hold the Presidency, but also why would the GOP base be enamored of him? Trump is leading the polls, but not because of any intellectual flare – he appeals to the xenophobe, he appeals to the voter who wants a dictatorial leader who’ll do this, that, and the other thing – no matter whether it falls within his responsibility. Subtlety and nuance are not his forté, nor is relevant experience – despite Trump’s claims that it’s all about management. Despite his education, he does not come off as an intellectual, but as someone with little impulse control, and a base nature. He’s willing to point his finger of blame at anyone who’s not a member of the GOP base.
Does Justice Alito (Princeton, Yale Law School) really fall into this category? Indeed, any of his suggestions? Until he ventures into “another businessman” territory, which his quite vague, he’s mostly mentioning GOPers with domestic experience – just what the base doesn’t want. He’s talking about people who might use their judgment to come to a conclusion unacceptable to the base.
But let’s take a step out into left field here. When I’m wearing my software engineer hat, there”s a certain feeling you get when you’re working in a well-designed system. It doesn’t just meet the specs, have good performance, and scale well, but every time you’re asked to add something to it, it’s easy – there’s no mad hacking, when you find you need an algorithm to do something, it’s there and easy to use, and the whole thing comes together with an ease and a feeling of rightness because certain principles were followed in the base design. (Let’s not talk about those principles further as they’re not relevant and I couldn’t enumerate them if they were.)
Let’s pull this idea out of the constricted field of software engineering and into real life, of which politics is a pale reflection. I suggest, with absolutely no embarrassment, that a leading principle of life and politics should be truth, and its ally, honesty. The interesting application of these principles is the GOP judgment of President Obama, which, to this independent, appears to be deliberately and dishonestly wretched in its assessments. In virtually all he has done, the current President has performed at the highest levels and adhered to our best traditions. Certainly, we can nitpick – why didn’t he prosecute the previous Administration for war crimes, for example? But in the main, he’s been excellent.
But the GOPer, unless his name is Colin Powell, is obligated to condemn as feeble, or incompetent, or any denigrative adjective of his choice, the work of Obama. Thus are the orders from on-high.
So, how does the matter of good principles interplay with the sordid behavior of the GOPer? Think about it: can the GOP candidate for anything deviate from the anti-Obama script? This is team politics, and now we see the dark side of this phenomenon: you can’t deviate, you can’t dispute what’s gone before. What do you do?
The Iran Deal is the same as sending the Jews to the ovens.
Medicare needs to be rubbed out because no one likes it.
Paul Ryan’s budget devoid of rational mathematics.
The ACA is resulting in wrack and ruin.
The GOP has to walk on the wild side, because any tick of rationality, of agreeing with political opponents on anything substantive, will get you branded a RINO. Here’s the thing about pig-headed anti-intellectualism – you eventually discover that the dishonesty you’re indulging in forces you to either recant and get kicked out of this big national party where you have coveted influence – or you can go farther afield as your predictions fall afoul reality. As Benen notes here, now they’re flirting with the madness of slavery.
All because they put party loyalty, party purity, ahead of simple truth and honesty. The importance of good principles for life is paramount, folks. The GOP is becoming an object lesson. How many can learn from it?
Dave Goulson, a biologist and bumblebee specialist, writing in NewScientist (15 August 2015, paywall) reports on some preliminary results of an European Union (EU) moratorium on neonicotinoid pesticides in the UK and, to a lesser extent, across the EU:
Crops sown in spring 2014, mainly sunflower and maize, were the first not to have the pesticides applied. Across the EU, their yields were higher than the five-year average, in some regions more than 25 per cent higher. …
Debate in the UK has focused on oilseed rape. Here it is mainly autumn-sown, so the first neonicotinoid-free crop wasn’t in the ground until August 2014, and is being harvested now. … it was down 5 per cent overall.
The original European Commission decision is reported here; a BBC report on that decision in 2013 is here. Goulson also notes how Big Ag participated in the debate over instituting the moratorium:
The UK was in the minority of countries voting against. Perhaps the government was swayed by glossy reports funded by the agrochemical industry, declaring that the ban would slash crop yields and cause huge job losses.
One such document states that if the moratorium went ahead, in five years the European Union could lose at least €17 billion, 50,000 jobs could go, and “more than a million people engaged in arable production… would certainly suffer”. …
Debate in the UK has focused on oilseed rape. Here it is mainly autumn-sown, so the first neonicotinoid-free crop wasn’t in the ground until August 2014, and is being harvested now. However, the UK’s National Farmers Union (NFU), which opposes the ban, pointed to Sweden and said that up to 70 per cent of spring-sown oilseed there had been wiped out by pests. As it turned out, it was down 5 per cent overall.
The NFU also highlighted claims that on some UK farms up to half of the autumn crop was being lost to flea beetles. Recent figures show that overall 3.5 per cent of the sown area was lost. But remember that some crops are lost every year, even with neonicotinoids.
So Big Ag may turn out to be guilty of hyperbole. But is this the end of the story? Rebecca Randall, a journalist at The Genome Literacy Project reported in January of 2015:
Yet, as activists continue to campaign to get neonics banned, news from Europe, where a two-year moratorium went into effect last year, suggests that farmers are unable to control pests without them. Partly in desperation, they are replacing neonics with pesticides that are older, less effective and demonstrably more harmful to humans and social insects, and farm yields are dropping.
The European Commission banned the use of neonics despite the fact that the science community is sharply split as to whether neonics plays a significant role in bee deaths. The causes of CCD and subsequent winter-related problems have since remained a mystery—and a heated controversy. …
But there is no bee crisis, say most mainstream entomologists. Globally, beehive counts have increased by 45 percent in the last 50 years, according to a United Nations report. Neonics are widely used in Australia were there have been no mass bee deaths, and in Western Canada, where bees are thriving. Over the past past two winters, bee losses have moderated considerably throughout Europe and beehives have gone up steadily over the past two decades as the use of neonics has risen.
While many environmental activists, and some scientists, have coalesced around the belief that neonics as a likely culprit, most mainstream entomologists disagreed. May Berenbaum, the renowned University of Illinois entomologist and chairwoman of a major National Academy of Sciences study on the loss of pollinators, has said that she is “extremely dubious” that banning neonics, as many greens are demanding, would have any positive effect.
That article is from January, which may mean it’s been superseded by Goulson’s. However, there are two issues here: first, is discontinuation of the use of neonicotinoids causing devastation of crops, and, second, are bee colonies recovering? The second point remains not only unaddressed by Goulson, but may not need addressing in this way.
But The Guardian published this article on Goulson’s research:
A study on which the UK government bases its position that neonicotinoid pesticides do not threaten bees may actually be the first conclusive evidence that they do, according to a leading bee scientist.
Dave Goulson, a professor of biology at the University of Sussex, reanalysed a 2013 study on the effect of the world’s most heavily used pesticides on bumblebees by the UK’s Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera).
Fera’s scientists said that bee hives “remained viable and productive in the presence of the neonicotinoid pesticides under these field conditions”. Yet, Goulson said the experiment found that all hives where clothianidin, a common neonicotinoid, was present had reduced numbers of queen bees.
Goulson said: “The conclusions they come to seem to be completely contrary to their own results section.”
“They find that 100% of the time there is a negative relationship between how much pesticides were found in the nest and how well the nest performed, and they go on to conclude that the study shows that there isn’t a significant effect of pesticides on bee colonies. It doesn’t add up.”
The study was never published in a peer-reviewed journal and has been rejected by the EU’s safety authority. Yet the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) cites it on their website as a foundation for its support of the pesticides.
It’s extremely disturbing that the UK is basing a position on an important, scientifically-connected matter on a research paper that has not been published, despite time to do so, and appears to have anomalies – although the authors are not given room for rebuttal in this newspaper article. However, The Guardian continues:
The lead author on the Fera report left the agency just months after its publication to work for Syngenta – a major producer of neonicotinoids. This lead to suggestions that the government was too close to the pesticide industry.
Gathering this data has its own collection of pitfalls, namely derogations (the partial revocation of a law). EurActiv.com provides an interview from 2014 with Martin Dermine, a bee activist, on the problems of data gathering:
In 2013, the Commission banned some neonicotinoids because of their suspected harmful effect on bees. One year on, how is this ban working?
The partial ban on neonicotinoids and fipronil was a fantastic victory for the environment, even though we would have liked to see a full ban on these bee-harmful chemicals. From the information we have, the ban is properly applied by member states. Unfortunately, several member states, such as Finland, Romania, Germany, Latvia and Estonia have provided derogations to their farmers to keep using neonicotinoids on certain major crops. This annihilates the benefit of the ban for bees.
What kinds of derogations did the ban leave for the pesticide industry?
Member states provide 120 days derogations for forbidden pesticides on a regular basis, in response to a request from farmers, or the pesticides industry.
European pesticide regulation clearly states that derogations can be given where no alternative exist, but member states do not actually respect this principle. For instance, in 2014, Romania provided a derogation for the use of thiamethoxam on maize, whereas Italy has banned its use since 2008, and has shown that it did not reduce yields. Furthermore, non-toxic alternatives exist on the market.
Adjusting for changes in conditions must be quite difficult for the scientists.
Giving Dave Goulson the final word on a recent UK action from the NewScientist article:
In highlighting losses, the NFU [National Farmers Union] was attempting to garner support for an application to allow UK farmers to ignore the ban. This has now been approved for a limited part of southern England, despite a 400,000-signature petition opposing it. So why was it approved? Getting an answer is hard. The NFU’s case is being kept secret on the grounds that it is “commercially sensitive”.
That means we cannot see why environment secretary Liz Truss decided some farmers could again use chemicals that the European Food Safety Authority says “pose an unacceptable risk to bees”.
The Conservatives are currently in power in the UK, and while they bear scant resemblance to the United States’ GOP, this action does make them appear to be unduly influenced by Big Ag – and the farmers who may not properly value pollinators. Not that we’d necessarily all die if the bumblebees became a non-factor, but food prices would certainly go up – and perhaps obesity would drop? Or would we just eat more of the bad food?
Oh, and the title of Goulson’s article? “Sowing Confusion”. Yeah, I’m confused, too.
In “New York’s Original Seaport”, by Jason Urbanus (Archaeology, September/October 2015, offline only), we learn that the notorious Aaron Burr, murderer of Alexander Hamilton and former Vice President, founded the Manhattan Company, which was tasked with supplying clean water to lower New York City using a web of buried wooden water mains – hollowed out tree trunks. In fact, they still run across these disused remnants of the original system today, encountered during repairs.
The Manhattan Company struggled with this task. But they didn’t go under, as the real purpose of Burr’s company was to become a bank, a difficult proposition at the time due to monopolies. As Wikipedia makes clear, Burr’s company used a loophole in its charter, granted by the State, that permitted it to use surplus funds for banking transactions. Opportunistic maneuvers during epidemics permitted the Manhattan Company to survive until 1955.
When it merged with Chase National Bank.
And, today, it’s the earliest of the predecessor institutions for JP Morgan Chase & Co.
The story of Michigan State Representatives Todd Courser and Cindy Gamrat, both claiming Republican / Tea Party status, has been making the rounds, generating some baffled condemnation, by which I mean the progressives who despise them seem puzzled. Here’s an example from Steven Payne @ The Daily Kos plus his commenters, which includes both an explanation of the timeline of events (the two had a love affair, Courser concocted a tale of being caught in a homosexual love affair, for reasons unclear, tried to get an aide to leak it to the press, but the aide refused and the entire sordid mess came to light), and some of Courser’s subsequent explanation.
As of now, neither has resigned their elective post. The political world, particularly their opponents, the progressive faction of the United States, has had little sympathy for them. I think this is a mistake.
So it’s worth looking at Courser’s remarks, and to view them as sincere in trying to understand him. Here are some of the things he wrote, all from Payne’s diary on The Daily Kos.
In my life sin had its root and it worked to undo so much and has yet to undo so much more; my life, my reputation, my relationship with my wife and children and my extended family; not to mention my relationships and reputation around the world. This sin in my life has been and will continue to reap its reward.
He clearly speaks in a religious context, mentioning how sin seems to control his life. We can ask if he has problems with impulse control, is married to the right woman, is addicted to sex or novelty. He acknowledges the mistakes of his ‘sinning’, and how they negatively affect him; it not only raises the question of why he indulged in this, but also to reflect on our own lives & mistakes over the years.
In every one of these experiences it has been an incredibly humbling to me.
Humbling is an interesting word, as it brings up images of submitting to a greater power, admissions of failure, and that sort of thing. His discussions with fellow sinners may actually bind him into the community at a different level than us less humble types might experience.
After some discussion of how this affects his family and some sad commentary on his critics, he writes,
I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do. And if I do what I do not want to do, I agree that the law is good. As it is, no longer I myself who do it, but it is sin living in me. I know that nothing good lives in me, that is, in my sinful nature. For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no the evil I do not want to do-this I keep doing. Now if I do what I do not want to do, it is no longer I who do it, but it is sin living in that does it.
The should of life, if I may write in fragments. Learning what one should do in the context of society, in order to survive and prosper, is perhaps one of the great driving forces of human existence. For most citizens of the United States1, some form of religion offers a source of should, and whether the source is engaged intelligently or literally, it colors the outlook of the adherent. Given his religious outpouring, we can understand he looks to the Bible for guidance for a world to which he lacks an intuitive understanding. That same Bible offers ambiguous guidance on other matters, but to him, as his guide, he tries to apply it. It is not so important to understand the Biblical portion, but the desperation portion; he dare not dispute with his guide in any portion, for that questions all in a perilous world in which he needs guidance – even if he ignores it. It would be interesting to hear if he puts the Bible first, above Justice. I suspect so; but has he considered the question? The unquestioning injustice of reserving marriage only for heterosexuals must be terrifying, once it is acknowledged.
And, finally, redemption. A key force in both religion and American life. It is, in fact, no surprise that he and his lover have chosen not to resign their posts. The publicity concerning their personal failures has, in effect, immunized them from further leverage; their sin has connected them to their communities in new ways, while permitting their constituents to realize that, in their humiliation, they’re just like themselves.
If this is their first public mistake, then I suspect they may both be re-elected (although Michigan has term limits on state Reps); another moral failing, say enrichment at the public’s expense, might get them booted out, though.
1 Source: Gallup.
The Lone Wolf Meets a Lady (1942), a moderately amusing tale of a retired diamond thief who can hardly escape his past, with a diamond necklace disappearing and its loser, a lovely lady, bumping into him in her flight from a body.
Doesn’t quite have the right pacing, but a right relief from today’s frenetic blockbuster movies.
A correction and a note on the Iran Deal:
o Senator Menendez does indeed have political ties to Israel: he is under indictment for corruption, and his legal defense fund has a number of large donors with ties to Israel, as Lobelog points out.
o MSNBC reports on another key supporter of the deal:
President Barack Obama’s controversial nuclear deal with Iran received an important boost on Friday from Democratic Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, who announced he would support the agreement.
The endorsement makes Nadler the only Jewish New Yorker in Congress to approve of the deal, which is being seen as a win for Obama even as other Democratic lawmakers in the Empire State – including Sen. Charles Schumer and Reps. Eliot L. Engel and Steve Israel – have refused to back the accord.
“I bring to my analysis the full weight of my responsibilities as a member of Congress, and my perspective as an American Jew who is both a Democrat and a strong supporter of Israel,” Nadler said in a statement after receiving a personal letter from Obama addressing some of his concerns. “I have sought to ignore the political pressures, as well as the demagoguery and hateful rhetoric on both sides that I think has been harmful to the overall political discourse.”
(h/t Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog)
Jason Lobell reports in Archaeology (September/October 2015) about an affect of climate change on the oldest mummies:
The work revealed that, while the mummies have been decaying for at least a decade, the process seems to have accelerated, perhaps as a result of climate change, despite the museum’s climate-control systems. “The climate in this region has changed from cool and dry to warm and damp, and the increased humidity has caused microbes that are common to all of our skin, but usually get washed off, to grow and damage the mummies’ skin,” says Mitchell.
Of course, as water levels rise, archaeological sites located in zones thought to be soon flooded will disappear. This doesn’t necessarily mean their destruction, of course, but certainly endangers them. On the other hand, climate change can occasionally have a positive effect, as noted in another article from the same issue of Archaeology. Entitled “Cultural Revival,” it is not available online. Here’s the summary from the online Table of Contents:
Excavations near a Yup’ik village in Alaska are helping its people reconnect with the epic stories and practices of their ancestors
Long story short, back in 2007 carved wooden objects began washing up on the shores of the village of Quinhagak. They were traced to an abandoned Yup’ik village a few miles to the south, the site of an internecine massacre in roughly 1650. After the deaths of the inhabitants, the victors left and the the village left to the elements. Now the incoming sea has washed away some of the covering turf, revealing the artifacts and washing many out to sea, and then back in where Quinhagak is located, fortunately. So in this case, climate change is double-edged, as the site is being destroyed, but at least it was brought to the attention of the Yup’ik, and onwards to archaeologists.
And the rest of the story? Usually, the Yup’ik leave the sites of their ancestors alone, but in this case the elders of Quinhagak saw an opportunity to connect their children with their ancestral history. The youth have sketched the artifacts as they are excavated, relearned the old arts of carving, and even taken up the suppressed (by Christian missionaries) practice of dancing – although without the carved masks, so far. And the village of Quinhagak is now making plans to move – away from the sea.
Forgotten for the previous post is this overview of the impeachment of the Economics Minister from AL Monitor‘s Arash Karami:
Ebtekar [an Iranian newspaper] published an article titled “A new season of political impeachments,” which read, “The Rouhani administration has reached the halfway point and already the record for most questions by members of parliament put to ministers has been broken. [Parliament] has asked approximately 2,000 questions of the Cabinet.”
The article said that while questioning ministers is part of the parliament’s function, “many believe that in the last two years another goal was used for this function.” The article states that with the exception of a handful of ministers, ministers “have felt the shadow of impeachment above their heads.” The article’s reasons for record number of summons and questions range from personal issues to having an eye on the 2016 parliamentary elections.
Arash Bahmani has written for Al-Monitor about the troubles facing Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Ali Jannati, who Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has reportedly reprimanded. As Alireza Ramezani wrote in Al-Monitor, “As the parliamentary elections approach, conservatives will try to find alternative solutions to drive the administration back and compensate for their loss in the battle over the nuclear deal.”
Iranian hardline conservatives, although not a majority in the legislature, nevertheless are unafraid to accuse anyone crossing them of incompetence in their quest for power, as sometimes the moderate conservatives will join them to make a majority. Their tool of choice: impeachment, which apparently is not unusual. Last year TIME reported on the loss of the Science Minister:
In what amounts to a major blow against the moderate president Hassan Rouhani by hardliners in Iran, the Science and Research Minister Reza Faraji-Dana was impeached on Aug. 20 by the Iranian parliament. The impeachment, which followed months of intense lobbying to prevent it by conservatives and reformists alike, has dealt a major setback to the implementation of Rouhani’s campaign promises of a more tolerant policy in Iran’s universities. …
“Faraji-Dana was one of the president’s main ministers,” says Saeed Laylaz, a political analyst in Tehran “He had been tasked with one of the most important assignments in internal politics, but the president’s success in economics and the nuclear talks caused his political opponents to react by impeaching one of his most competent ministers.”
The Iran Project has several articles on this ouster here. AL Monitor‘s Ali Afshari gave the explicit reasons for Faraji-Dana’s ouster, and in this 2014 article summarizes the future:
Faraji-Dana’s impeachment was a warning sign to the moderate administration that the rival group has recovered from its loss in last year’s presidential elections. Rouhani, Vice President for Legal and Parliamentary Affairs Majid Ansari, as well as his media team, were weak in their defense of Faraji-Dana. Rouhani’s rivals are determined to defeat him and make his supporters lose faith in him. If Rouhani cannot find a way to stop them, then his other ministers, who have already received yellow cards, will be impeached as well.
Adnan Tabatabai at Muftah suggests this is all about the raucous 2009 elections:
Most significantly, Faraji-Dana brought back to the universities “starred” students and professors who were expelled because of views expressed during and after the highly-contested 2009 presidential election—indeed, the core issue around which the impeachment process culminated.
Over the past five years, the 2009 post-electoral crisis has morphed into a latent, if not chronic, factional conflict; a ghost that haunts everyday politics.
Meanwhile, in multiple speeches, high-ranking officials including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei himself have maintained that the “sedition”—the official term describing the 2009 unrest and those supportive of the Green Movement—has ended and those “anti-revolutionary” elements have been crushed. The “political epic” (hamaase-ye siaasi) of the 2013 presidential election that won Rouhani the presidency have served as further evidence that the “sedition” had been overcome. …
Faraji-Dana’s impeachment demonstrates that, for a considerable number of conservative parliamentarians, anxiety over the 2009 unrest is still the determining criteria used to assess the eligibility, integrity, and suitability of Iranian officials.
Suggesting the conservatives are rattled when they discover the students are no longer with them, but would prefer a more open society. Much like today’s GOP. IranPolitik opined about a great divide:
The impeachment vote was not the result of the intransigency of the more hardline PFIR faction or an alliance between it and the Principlist faction alone. The numbers appear to indicate that moderate conservatives from Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani’s Followers of the Leadership faction must have joined the hardline factions to give the vote of no confidence its slim majority. This episode highlights the “great divide” in Iranian politics. On one hand, an elite consensus exists within the regime on the need to moderate certain elements of Iranian foreign policy, especially as it relates to nuclear negotiations with the West, for the time being. On the other hand, at best no consensus exists on whether or not to reform the conservative social,political, and cultural policies in place, and at worst a slim reverse consensus exists to block reforms.
Now Middle East Eye reports on the recent attempted ouster of the Education Minister:
Critics had accused Education Minister Ali Asghar Fani, part of Iran’s moderate camp, of failing to address complaints from teachers over low salaries.
But the impeachment effort, led by ultra-conservatives, was seen as an attack on the Rouhani’s government.
The impeachment motion was rejected by 167 lawmakers in the 290-seat parliament, with 76 voting in favour.
It had been expected to fail after the majority group in parliament, the moderate conservative “Followers of the Leader” faction, had assured the minister of its support.
A member of the faction, Behrouz Nemati, denounced the motion as “partisan hostage-taking by anti-government lawmakers”. …
The next one on the block is the Economy Minister, reports the Tehran Times in a report dated August 10th of this year:
Iranian Minister of Economy Ali Tayyebnia faces impeachment as he failed to convince Iranian members of the Parliament during a questioning session on Sunday.
This was the third time Tayyebnia was put to questioning by the MPs and failed at providing satisfactory explanations, Nasim news agency reported.
According to Iranian law, failing three times to provide convincing answers to lawmakers paves the way for impeachment.
During an open session of the Majlis (parliament), Tayyebnia faced two questions by MP Mehrdad Bazrpash. The questions were about a banking law and a tax report.
As the MP was not convinced with Tayyebnia’s answers, he asked other lawmakers to cast votes to show whether they were convinced with the answers.
80 MPs voted for the minister while 105 MPs voted against him and 10 others abstained.
While impeachment is a word with strong emotional connotations in the USA, in Iran it’s a more normal maneuver – President Ahmadinejad, President Rouhani‘s predecessor, lost at least 9 of his 21 ministers (when Ali Kordan was successfully impeached). However, while (to make an example of him) Kordan was reportedly impeached for fabricating his educational background (“… after it came to light that a doctoral degree allegedly awarded to Ali Kordan was fabricated, and that the putative issuer of the degree, Oxford University, had no record of Kordan receiving any degree from the University.”), it is not clear that Rouhani’s ministers are being impeached for anything other than being active members of the Reformist camp.
Steve Benen @ MaddowBlog notes that if the Republicans wish to quash the Iran deal, they’ll need help from the Democrats – and they’re not getting enough:
That strategy is already unraveling. This week, Sen. Joe Donnelly (D) of Indiana, one of Congress’ most conservative Democrats, announced his support for the diplomatic solution. This morning, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) of Missouri, widely seen as an on-the-fence member, also backed the deal. The Kansas City Star published the senator’s endorsement.
“I’ve spent weeks digging into the details of this agreement. And I’ve had extensive conversations with both those countries who are part of the negotiated agreement, and those countries currently holding Iran’s sanctioned money.
“It is clear to me that there is no certainty that Iran’s resources will be withheld from them if America rejects the agreement. Instead, I believe it likely that the sanctions regime would fray and nothing would be worse than Iran getting an influx of resources without any agreement in place to limit their ability to get a nuclear weapon.”
At this point, the arithmetic is hard to ignore. As we’ve discussed, congressional Republicans, no matter how intense their zeal, cannot kill the policy on their own. GOP lawmakers will need no less than 44 House Democrats and 13 Senate Democrats to partner with far-right members to crush the international agreement.
As of now, the grand total of Senate Dems opposed to the deal is two, while in the House, there are 12 Democrats siding with Republicans.
According to The Washington Post, the two Democrats against the deal are Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.). The latter leans heavily towards Israel, and so is influenced by Israel government politics, which is against the deal. Menendez was elected chair of Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and so may have enough experience to evaluate the deal – i.e., he may have an honest opinion and it happens to differ from his Democratic colleagues and many other experts.
Finally, flitedocnm @ The Daily Kos is waxing ecstatic over an Op-Ed piece by Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.). While it is not a piece filled with overwhelming rhetoric certain to overwhelm even the toughest critic of the deal, it gives his credentials and then his evaluation in a calm, direct manner which I can appreciate.
I have studied both the science and the politics of the nuclear-age world we live in from an early age. I grew up listening to my father, who served in the Navy in the ’50s, tell what it was like to watch a nuclear blast firsthand and to see the formation of a mushroom cloud over Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands. While studying engineering at the University of Missouri, I worked at one of the largest research reactors in the United States. More recently, I have seen the centrifuges dedicated to the peaceful production of nuclear energy, which are housed in New Mexico. …
The comprehensive, long-term deal achieved last week includes all the necessary tools to break each potential Iranian pathway to a nuclear bomb. Further, it incorporates enough lead time so that, should Iran change its course, the United States and the world can react well before a device could be built; a scenario I hope never occurs, but one that leaves all options on the table, including the military option.
It’s worth reading the entire piece, either at The Daily Kos or in the Albuquerque Journal.
Ever wonder about those crescent half moons rendered in gold?
These are known as lunula, (pl. lunulae). Jason Urbanus has a lovely article on Archaeology.org concerning Irish lunulae, in particular the origin of the gold and how it changes our understanding of trading patterns during the Bronze Age, lends an insight into tribal power structures – and an even better picture.
