Monthly Archives: August 2016

A reader draws a connection between Minnesota and the Met Opera:

Why does this sound exactly like the Minnesota Orchestra, except the musicians did back down? Yeah. I still think the management at the M.O. [Minnesota Orchestra] are a bunch of crooked bastards. Like so many other idiots, they pissed in the soup and won’t be forgiven or forgotten for many decades.

I suspect Scott would agree that the situations are remarkably similar. However, I do not agree that it won’t be forgotten, because management is not the face of the Minnesota Orchestra – it’s the players. In 10 years, perhaps 15% of the audiences will remember the hiatus and who caused it. Hopefully, in 20 years the current management team will be entirely gone, and the replacements will be better – and not drawn from the business world. And the audience, by and large, will neither remember nor care. Just a few – hopefully the important ones.

Like Scott and you.

When Obama took office one of his goals was the shuttering of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility. From MTV:

A long time ago, Senator Barack Obama explained why the detention facility at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay needed to close. “Our legitimacy is reduced when we’ve got a Guantanamo that is open,” he said during a debate in June 2007. “Those kinds of things erode our moral claims that we are acting on behalf of broader universal principles.”

More than eight years later, after getting a significant promotion, he hasn’t changed his mind. “For many years it’s been clear that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay does not advance our security,” President Obama said on Tuesday at the White House. “It undermines it. … This is about closing a chapter in our history.”

Upon announcement of the transfer of 15 more detainees to the United Arab Emirates (leaving 61 still resident, from a high of nearly 800), Benjamin Wittes publishes a comment on Lawfare:

First, this is a significant accomplishment, in my opinion. Getting detainees out of Guantanamo is very hard. There is both an intensive internal review process and, for those detainees who clear that process, there’s the additional hurdle—sometimes a very time-consuming hurdle—of finding a country that will take the detainee subject to the security and humane assurances that the review process and other U.S. legal and policy constraints demand. The result are two backlogs: the backlog of detainees who cannot be cleared for transfer, and the backlog of detainees who are cleared but cannot be removed. This one action clears 43 percent of the second backlog. Before it, there were 35 detainees at Guantanamo cleared for transfer; now there are only 20.

Second, with this transfer, Obama is getting rather close to the point at which keeping Guantanamo open looks just plain silly. I’ve never much cared whether Guantanamo closes or not. I dislike the symbolic politics of the “Close Guantanamo” movement about as much as I dislike the chest-thumping symbolic politics of the Guantanamo-is-toughness crowd. If Obama manages to remove a substantial fraction of the remaining 20 people cleared for transfer and Hillary Clinton maintains his policy of not bringing new detainees to the site (Donald Trump promises to revitalize detention there, so if he wins the presidency, the point is moot), the notion of maintaining an entire detention facility for the long-term detention of as few as 40 or so detainees will become increasingly hard to sustain. Guantanamo is not Spandau Prison, and it doesn’t make much sense to maintain it for the sake of maintaining it.

Just plain silly. How much longer will Congress obstruct the closing of Guantánamo Bay?

The ACLU is not entirely happy with the Administration’s approach to rendering Guantánamo Bay meaningless:

SkepticalRaptor on The Daily Kos writes about those who are pushing the “medically unfit” rumor about Mrs. Clinton:

Who’s behind the medically unfit Hillary Clinton myth

According to the article in Breitbart, “The executive director of a physicians’ organization questions how the mainstream media can ignore signs of what could be a traumatic brain injury in the Democrat nominee for president.”

Wow, that sounds serious. And from someone who heads a “physicians’ organization.” That person must be running the American Medical Association. Or maybe they head the American Neurological Association, because they mentioned traumatic brain injury.

That would be no.

The person behind this trope is Dr. Jane Orient, who has some official position with the physician organization, Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She is also the managing editor of the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (JAPANDS), published by AAPS. The journal does not have an impact factor, and does not appear to be indexed in PubMed.

It’s a full on attack, which is to be expected on a progressive’s website – but not inappropriate, if the facts as presented are valid. They suggest Dr. Orient is operating outside of her specialty, possibly outside of ethics, and is part of an organization which is anti-vaccine, etc.

Given the same set of knowledge about biomed and the rumors about Mrs. Clinton, I would have taken a far different approach to writing about it – I’m not nakedly partisan, I just think Trump’s a disaster.

All that said, this is the sort of sniping at the Clintons that has been going on since the beginning of Mr. Clinton’s Administration, if not earlier. I recall sitting in a Mazda dealership’s service waiting area, reading an article out of REASON Magazine, my mouth literally hanging open as the article explicitly said that Bill Clinton, sitting President of the United States, was an emotionally damaged child, and was only operational in combination with Hillary. From someone who had personally examined Bill? No, no. Just from what they’d seen on TV.

From a magazine with the word reason in its name.

REASON mostly published interesting material, so that was part of the shock – this was pathetic, and also damn long – much longer than their average feature article. But I wonder how many readers just lapped it up, since I’m sure a substantial portion of the readership was rabidly conservative. How many understood the absurdity of publishing that article in a magazine named Reason – and how many just nodded and added it to their mythos?

I gave up on REASON shortly after Matt Welch took over as editor. While a good columnist, when he assumed the top editorial position the magazine became excruciating to read: deeply anti-Obama without using actual reason, and switching to columnists whose command of the art of writing was so bad that I couldn’t evaluate their facts or reasoning abilities. I don’t know if this was Matt’s fault, or the publisher, who for a long while was Robert Poole, a well known conservative engineer. In any case, with my marriage imminent, it seemed like a good resource-eater to be rid of.

They have Godzilla. It destroys cities.

We have … a big rubber duck.

Image: http://www.thebigduck.us

According to Lake Superior Magazine, it’s due in Duluth right now.

As if a dozen or so tall-masted ships arriving in Duluth would not generate enough buzz, the organizers of Tall Ships Duluth 2016 have signed up another iconic maritime figure for the summer festival.

The “World’s Largest Rubber Duck” will be joining the galleons and schooners at the August 18-21 event.

The profession of software engineer (except in those locales where “engineer” is a legally defined term, in which case I’m a computer programmer) brings with it a literal turn of mind, required in order to understand the code someone has written and you must understand. While this is hopefully something I can turn on and then off (when speaking with those human creatures who operate on other planes of existence), sometimes that discipline can leak through those compartments we make of our minds.

Thus it is with a phrase most of us will read with little concern about those things which, in my case, leap out and try to throttle me with illogic. From Archaeology magazine (August / September / October 2016, p 24) comes this tidbit by Samir Patel on ancient Morocco:

A hominin bone belonging to the species Homo rhodesiensis and around 500,000 years old, found among a large deposit of bones in a cave in Casablanca, had been cracked, gnawed, and punctured—probably by an extinct hyena.

So I’m bothered in at least two different ways. First, individual creatures do not go extinct, they die; extinction applies to species and greater groupings. Call this a semantic blunder.

Second, extinct creatures do little more than lie around and rot. They do not chew up the bones of anything, much less relations to homo sapiens. This is a sort of chronological disorder. It makes me worry that my headstone will read Here Lie The Pieces of H. White, Ripped Asunder by Saber-Toothed Tiger.

Yeah, yeah. That’s how my mind sometimes works.

[And in a bit of irony, the next day I correct the date on the magazine.]

My Arts Editor sprang this … this … thing on me. How Quiznos possibly survived it beggars belief.

And if you were spellbound, here’s the Sponge Monkeys shilling for another victim.

Akiva Eldar finds the conduct of high government officials in Israel, as noted earlier, to be deplorable, as he explains in AL Monitor:

These words epitomize the xenophobia, separatism, racism and cruelty that are eating away at every value that Israel once held sacred. These toxic waters are trickling down from the top to the very roots of society, overflowing and flooding the environment. They began with Knesset member Miri Regev, the current culture minister, calling asylum seekers a “cancer” in Israel’s body in 2012, and then moved on to the group calling itself Students for Southern Tel Aviv, which a year ago “ratted out” soldiers who volunteered at daycare centers for the children of asylum seekers. At the time, the army spokesman issued a response to the right-wing Jewish Voice website that ran the item, stating that the activity was part of the army’s encouragement of soldiers to contribute to their communities, that it was apolitical and that it was approved, as usual, by the commanders and education officers of their unit. Of note, IDF soldiers also assist Holocaust survivors, children with disabilities and charitable organizations that distribute food to the poor.

Indeed, in an enlightened society, the state bears responsibility for those less fortunate — the state, not soldiers and other volunteers, such as the nongovernmental organization Elifelet, which takes care of children of asylum seekers. The asylum seekers, who numbered 57,000 in 2012, cannot be deported because of the danger that would await them in their homeland. There is no doubt that they are needy, among other reasons because of draconian Israeli laws and regulations, and that they reside in Tel Aviv. Given this, why are they not worthy of consideration as “paupers” who have priority? After all, the Talmud’s maxim does not refer to “Jewish paupers.”

When a nation is subjected to persistent attacks of all kinds, verbal and physical, whether existential or not, some of its citizens will crack, as it were, abandoning values of national importance, and they will find ways to despise those who attack them. Those who Eldar condemn, if his characterization is true, have climbed to the heights of power on the backs of those who have been trained to be fearful, not generous, to fear those who may indeed be ready to attack them. Perhaps it is right to grieve for both those who’ve lost their way even as they attain power, and those who see it, and can do little more than write about. Eldar finishes with this:

So, kindhearted soldiers were forced to abandon the toddlers they took out of the darkness of the children’s warehouses into the sunlight. It is a missed opportunity to substitute a photo of an Israeli soldier hugging a non-Israeli baby for the one that filled the pages of foreign media showing the IDF soldier who shot and killed a wounded Palestinian assailant in Hebron in March or of a politician comfortably ensconced in the Defense Ministry flexing his muscles at the chief of staff on the backs of miserable babies. All that really matters is that the Ministry of Strategic Affairs has appointed a special team to battle, so explained the ministry’s general director Sima Vaknin, Israel’s image as a “pariah state.”

In Turkey, suspicion of the West links the coup plotters via their cash, as reported by Tulay Cetingulec in AL Monitor:

One-dollar bills have been found on high-ranking officers involved in the July 15 coup attempt, in what is perhaps the most bizarre of the many oddities to emerge from the massive crackdown on the Gulen community, the accused culprit in the putsch. The $1 bills have been found also on policemen, judges, academics, businessmen, teachers and other civilians linked to the Gulen community, the government’s former ally, which it now calls the Fethullah Gulen Terror Organization (FETO).

The bills are said to denote membership in the secretive group, and their serial numbers are believed to have coded meanings. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag has said the $1 bill “is undoubtedly of some important function within FETO,” while Prime Minister Binali Yildirim has vowed to defeat “the lowlifes who sell their souls for $1.”

Assuming these are authentic, just how information assigned by a third party could have a coded meaning stretches credulity, although a very sophisticated operation could do it – or, as is explained (not really authoritative, could be someone making it all up) here, very simple:

One of the exchange offices Al-Monitor visited had accumulated hundreds of $1 bills, with one employee grumbling, “It’s not like before. People are afraid to both buy and sell them.” Another currency dealer said the demand for $1 bills ended “at a stroke” after Gulenists were reported to use them for secret communication. “People have come to see them as criminal tools,” he added. A third shop had done away with the $1 bill altogether. “No $1 bills here,” the dealer said. “Neither buying nor selling.”

Yet, not all $1 bills are of an “incriminating” nature. The serial number matters. According to media reports, a serial number that begins with the letter F denotes that the holder is a top Gulenist leader, while C is for lower-level managers and J for ordinary members. Other reports claim the $1 bills were blessed personally by Fethullah Gulen, the US-based cleric heading the sect, before being distributed to members, and that the serial numbers serve as a sort of ID number, the records of which Gulen keeps at his mansion in Pennsylvania.

This has the effect – possibly primary – of effectively removing one of the greatest of currencies from usage in Turkey. A suspicious person might suspect this scheme is just one step in a purposeful attempt to make Turkey more insular and turn them away from the secular ways of the West.

Scott Chamberlain, an experienced non-profit organizational hand, and my cousin, thinks he’s caught the management of the Met Opera with their pants down. First, he notes a recent report that the Met has reported achieving a balanced budget. Then comes this:

Two years ago, the Met was in the midst of contentious contract negotiations with its unionized workers.  At that time, General Manager Peter Gelb repeatedly told the press the Met was in a dire financial situation, and the company literally faced bankruptcy in two years.  The only way to stave off financial disaster was to have the unionized workers at the Met agree to massive concessions with sacrificial pay cuts right that very minute.

The workers refused, and Mr. Gelb was forced to back down. His proposed cuts never went through.

Well, here we are two years later—the exact length of time until Mr. Gelb’s projected bankruptcy. And the Met has recorded two straight years of balanced budgets.

Huh.

Given this astonishing record of overblown, self-serving, and erroneous statements, why would any reporter give credence to anything Mr. Gelb says about… anything?

When it comes to an analysis, there is a fine line here. Do we cut management a break under the argument that reality can be highly variable? Or are we hard on them under the argument that management should be aware that of that variability and not been so dictatorial to the union? I incline towards the latter, but I don’t know much about this world.

The balance of the post complains that the Met is mistreated in the press with regards to its non-profit status, and hands out some expert opinion on running a non-profit.

Posters, campaign pins, bobbleheads – all common and collectible. But these?

From The Verge.

Five identical statues of a nude Donald Trump have appeared overnight on street corners in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Cleveland, Seattle, and New York City. So, The Verge ran down to Union Square in NYC to see as much of fake nude Trump as our eyes could possibly tolerate …

I so look forward to seeing one of these on Antique Roadshow in 20 years or so. Will the appraiser be excited, or appalled? And will some Trump supporters try to imitate the stunt? Morbid curiosity requires the question, but I don’t know that the answer will be good.

Will the nation be traumatized by the damage age does to us? Or just realistic, giving given our demographics?

(h/t my Arts Editor)

The local fast food joint uses pressurized gas for ketchup dispensation – when it works, it’s fast, clean, and makes it easy to get exactly the amount of ketchup desired. When it overworks, you get …. carbonated ketchup.

And, since we’re talking liquified tomato, here’s a spiritual predecessor to ketchup.

Some say it’s a nipple. To me, I see inflated cheeks and something about to be ejected, a la the sauce dispenser in Chicken Run.

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUdew5gMbTg

Roughly 2:00 minutes into this clip.

For the past several days I’ve been trying to write a review of Finding Dory (2016), the long-awaited sequel to the Disney classic Finding Nemo (2003) and have been failing. What’s bugging me the most is this: three quarters of the way through this visually excellent movie I found myself thinking …

My God! These fish have stereoscopic vision!

As if this is important in an animated movie about sentient sea-life.

Yet here’s a picture of Dory’s real world counterpart, a regal tang. It might have limited stereoscopic vision, or more accurately binocular vision¹.

So the real point is that I was not captivated by this movie. This is despite the usual high Disney standards in animation and voice talent; there’s little to fault in these areas. I believe there are two problems with this movie.

First, and unavoidable, is the lack of novelty. We’ve been here before, we know the feel and the rules of the place. Indeed, we’ve lost the sharks, who certainly added a lot to the first movie through the injection of human concepts into the fish-realm, and how sometimes human concepts are either ridiculous or, more rarely, transcendent. And in terms of the landscape and the supporting characters, little is added.

Second, the story does not really result in growth for any of the characters. In Finding Nemo, both little Nemo and his father, Marlin, learn and grow emotionally during the movie. I don’t see the same happening in Finding Dory. As a fish with short term memory loss, Dory has a hard time learning anything; the best that can really be said is that her recall of important facts are beneficial, that we really shouldn’t forget. As a lesson, it’s not really forceful.

There are other characters, of course, such as Hank the octopus, but while an argument can be made that each faces a challenge and overcomes it, none of them are nearly so compelling as those of the first film.

For me, at least, out of context this is a fine movie; but in the context of its predecessor, it suffers. It simply is not as captivating.

¹It’s also bugging me that I can’t find an antonym for binocular vision. Oh, now that I have the right term it’s obvious: monocular vision.

It is a great mystery to me how Octaman (1971) was ever made, much less released. The story of a mutated monster octopus (obviously wearing boots) caring for its children in a Mexican lake, one of her children is taken and subjected to vivisection by a scientist, whom she promptly murders. Maybe she. Maybe he. The rubber suit doesn’t give us a clue. I was impressed how a tentacle could be used like a sword, though, although it’s not used with abandon. Maybe that’s too bad.

Another scientist returns, along with a carnival owner and a few assorted others – one might be a mestizo, but who can say, he smiles far too much for being in such a life-threatening situation – and they’re on the hunt for this clumsy, slow monster that somehow keeps taking them by surprise. Her, I mean his weakness? The lone lady of the expedition, who can somehow daze him with her, uh, well she’t not outstandingly beautiful, isn’t flashing cleavage, so what’s motivating this monster anyways? Her personality?

Tricked into being trapped in a cave, the expedition collapses except for the mestizo, who finds a way out and leads them back to their Winnebago-like vehicle, but as they prepare to pile into it and run away, the guy in the rubber suit comes bursting out of the vehicle and assaults them yet again! But he, or she, must be losing stamina as now when she barely touches an expedition member, they fall over but get up a little later, whereas before one lazy slap was good enough to lay them out for good.

I would compare this with the equally dreadful Empire of the Ants (1977), except my Arts Editor and I were unable to finish that one, so technically a comparison would be unfair. Still, I’d have to say that this movie is a true time-waster.

If there’s anything good to say about this movie, I’d have to say the eyes of Octaman (oh, maybe that’s a clue to gender!) were exceptionally striking.

Lloyd Alter catches wind of the test flight of the Airlander 10 for Treehugger.com:

… the Airlander 10 took its first flight on August 17. It was a short flight, only 19 minutes, 500 foot altitude and only 35 knots speed, but it is perhaps the start of a new era of low-carbon transportation. It is also not going to catch fire, because it is filled with helium, not hydrogen. TreeHugger used to worry about using so much helium in blimps, but major new fields have been discovered that lessen the worry about peak helium. …

Airships have a few advantages over other flight tech; they are quiet, they don’t pollute nearly as much, since their engines are not doing the heavy lifting, but are for control and movement. The Airlander has 4- 325 hp, 4 litre V8 direct injection, turbocharged diesel engines; that’s smaller than the engine on a pickup truck. Most of the lift is provided by the helium, but as much as 40 percent of lift can come the aerodynamic shape of the hull; it is a giant flying wing. This means that it is not a truly lighter than air vehicle like the dirigibles were, but a hybrid:

Image: Hybrid Air Vehicles

Questions concerning high wind conditions were not discussed, which leaves me dubious of what is otherwise an attractive technology. There are few examples, since lighter than air craft have not been in common use, but consider that of the USS Shenandoah, operated by the U. S. Navy, as related by Airships.net:

On September 3, 1925, on its 57th flight, Shenandoah was caught in a storm over Ohio. Updrafts caused the ship to rise rapidly, at a rate eventually exceeding 1,000 feet per minute, until the ship reached an altitude over 6,000 feet. Shenandoah rose, fell, and was twisted by the storm, and the ship finally suffered catastrophic structural failure, breaking in two at frame 125, approximately 220 feet from the bow. The aft section sank rapidly, breaking up further, with two of the engine cars breaking away and falling to the ground, killing their mechanics.

The control car, attached to the bow section, also separated from the ship and crashed to the ground, killing the six men still aboard, including the ship’s captain, Lt. Cdr. Lansdowne. Without the weight of the control car, the remaining bow section, with seven men aboard, including Navigator Charles Rosendahl, ascended rapidly. Under Rosendahl’s leadership, the men in the bow valved helium from the cells and free-ballooned the bow to a relatively gentle landing. In all, fourteen members of the crew were killed in the crash.

I’m no expert – just a nervous nelly when it comes to storms and high, unstable places.

Today WaPo is reporting good news about a long dormant thread!

The Justice Department plans to end its use of private prisons after officials concluded the facilities are both less safe and less effective at providing correctional services than those run by the government.

Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates announced the decision on Thursday in a memo that instructs officials to either decline to renew the contracts for private prison operators when they expire or “substantially reduce” the contracts’ scope. The goal, Yates wrote, is “reducing — and ultimately ending — our use of privately operated prisons.”

“They simply do not provide the same level of correctional services, programs, and resources; they do not save substantially on costs; and as noted in a recent report by the Department’s Office of Inspector General, they do not maintain the same level of safety and security,” Yates wrote.

In summary …

“The fact of the matter is that private prisons don’t compare favorably to Bureau of Prisons facilities in terms of safety or security or services, and now with the decline in the federal prison population, we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to do something about that,” Yates said.

This only applies at the Federal level, so State prisons may still be privately run. It’s not a sudden cutoff, but implemented as contracts run their course. But it’s a necessary step.

My only regret is that the official memo cites failings of the prisons, rather than the fundamental problem that private operators are not oriented towards the government goals.

Lawfare’s Nicholas Weaver posts a note suggesting a near-legendary agency may be human after all:

And on Twitter, Mikko Hypponen noted an announcement on Github that had gone overlooked for two days, a group is hosting an auction for code from the “Equation Group,” which is more commonly known as the NSA. The auctioneer’s pitch is simple, brutal, and to the point:

How much you pay for enemies cyber weapons? Not malware you find in networks. Both sides, RAT + LP, full state sponsor tool set? We find cyber weapons made by creators of stuxnet, duqu, flame. Kaspersky calls Equation Group. We follow Equation Group traffic. We find Equation Group source range. We hack Equation Group. We find many many Equation Group cyber weapons. You see pictures. We give you some Equation Group files free, you see. This is good proof no? You enjoy!!! You break many things. You find many intrusions. You write many words. But not all, we are auction the best files.

…

Because of the sheer volume and quality, it is overwhelmingly likely that this data is authentic. And it does not appear to be information taken from compromised targets. Instead, the exploits, binaries with help strings, server configuration scripts, 5 separate versions of one implant framework, and all sort of other features indicate that this is analyst-side code—the kind that probably never leaves the NSA.

And then things get scarier. As I’ve noted in before, computers are multipliers. Spy agencies have always been targets of other spy agencies, but prior to computers, breaking in was hard and then the materials stolen were simply harder to move.

Nowadays, once a compromise occurs, poof! It’s all copied, not removed, and sometimes it takes months to discover what happened.

Another item in my email caught my attention. Penned by now-retired journalist Charley Reese (and confirmed by Snopes.com), this is one of several versions, written (supposedly) at his retirement in 2001. I think it’s rather naive. I think he’s trying to correct a system through shame, which, to me, seems like a futile effort. It’s better to understand the limitations of the system – and representative democracies have limitations, just like any other – and then work around them.

Notice the lead-in, which I take to be someone’s attempt make the reader respect the effort more. If you do so, the inevitable lesson is that the current form of government is bad. But you decide for yourself.

A very interesting column.. COMPLETELY NEUTRAL Be sure to Read the Poem at the end.

Charley Reese’s final column for the Orlando Sentinel… He has been a journalist for 49 years. He is retiring and this is HIS LAST COLUMN.

Be sure to read the Tax List at the end.

This is about as clear and easy to understand as it can be. The article below is completely neutral, neither anti-republican or democrat. Charlie Reese, a retired reporter for the Orlando Sentinel, has hit the nail directly on the head, defining clearly who it is that in the final analysis must assume responsibility for the judgments made that impact each one of us every day. It’s a short but good read. Worth the time. Worth remembering!

545 vs. 300,000,000 People

-By Charlie Reese

Politicians are the only people in the world who create problems and then campaign against them.

Have you ever wondered, if both the Democrats and the Republicans are against deficits, WHY do we have deficits?

Sure. Differing priorities, compromises good & bad, a few wars, some justified and some not. The insinuation is that this should be easy to fix; the problem is that the budget of the United States is not analogous to a household budget.

Have you ever wondered, if all the politicians are against inflation and high taxes, WHY do we have inflation and high taxes?

Inflation is not under direct government control. Sometimes when they want it they don’t get it, such as the recent recession. (Note: I did not expect Charlie to know about the great Recession.)

You and I don’t propose a federal budget. The President does.

You and I don’t have the Constitutional authority to vote on appropriations.The House of Representatives does.

You and I don’t write the tax code, Congress does.

You and I don’t set fiscal policy, Congress does.

You and I don’t control monetary policy, the Federal Reserve Bank does.

One hundred senators, 435 congressmen, one President, and nine Supreme Court justices equates to 545 human beings out of the 300 million are directly, legally, morally, and individually responsible for the domestic problems that plague this country.

A dubious remark concerning a non-unitary entity, an entity deliberately made non-unitary for non-financial reasons.

I excluded the members of the Federal Reserve Board because that problem was created by the Congress. In 1913, Congress delegated its Constitutional duty to provide a sound currency to a federally chartered, but private, central bank.

And, knowing I’m completely rhetorical here, why did they do that? Going through a brief history leading up to its creation, it appears to me that permitting several hundred amateurs to pull the levers of financial policy was madness. A decentralized central bank lets the experts – as much as we deride them, they are the most learned in the subject – be the guardians of monetary policy.

I excluded all the special interests and lobbyists for a sound reason. They have no legal authority. They have no ability to coerce a senator, a congressman, or a President to do one cotton-picking thing. I don’t care if they offer a politician $1 million dollars in cash. The politician has the power to accept or reject it. No matter what the lobbyist promises, it is the legislator’s responsibility to determine how he votes.

This is ridiculously naive. From horse-trading to out and out extortion, the members of Congress can easily be vulnerable individuals in a host of ways.

Those 545 human beings spend much of their energy convincing you that what they did is not their fault. They cooperate in this common con regardless of party.

Not that I ever noticed. Even forty years ago, a campaign often saw many revelations that I wish had not be relevated. To suggest they cooperate strains the boundaries of credulity.

What separates a politician from a normal human being is an excessive amount of gall. No normal human being would have the gall of a Speaker, who stood up and criticized the President for creating deficits. The President can only propose a budget. He cannot force the Congress to accept it.

The Constitution, which is the supreme law of the land, gives sole responsibility to the House of Representatives for originating and approving appropriations and taxes. Who is the speaker of the House now? He is the leader of the majority party. He and fellow House members, not the President, can approve any budget they want. If the President vetoes it, they can pass it over his veto if they agree to.

Not honest. It requires a 2/3 majority in each chamber. How often does a party, often a fractious entity, have that much of a majority? Wash, lather, repeat: Unitary Fallacy.

It seems inconceivable to me that a nation of 300 million cannot replace 545 people who stand convicted — by present facts — of incompetence and irresponsibility. I can’t think of a single domestic problem that is not traceable directly to those 545 people. When you fully grasp the plain truth that 545 people exercise the power of the federal government, then it must follow that what exists is what they want to exist.

Not much of an imagination. Various crimes, bigotry, pollution – these are all the government’s fault? The balance of the paragraph once again buys into the unitary fallacy, as do the following assertions. Most, I believe, are the result of 500+ individuals with 500+ priority lists, some compatible, some not, wrestling over how to best run a huge country.

If the tax code is unfair, it’s because they want it unfair.

If the budget is in the red, it’s because they want it in the red.

Or perhaps because it has to be in the red to build a better country for our children. Don’t make the damn-fool assumption that a government’s budget must run in the black just because a family’s should.

If the Army & Marines are in Iraq and Afghanistan it’s because they want them in Iraq and Afghanistan …

If they do not receive social security but are on an elite retirement plan not available to the people, it’s because they want it that way.

There are no insoluble government problems.

Do not let these 545 people shift the blame to bureaucrats, whom they hire and whose jobs they can abolish; to lobbyists, whose gifts and advice they can reject; to regulators, to whom they give the power to regulate and from whom they can take this power. Above all, do not let them con you into the belief that there exists disembodied mystical forces like “the economy,””inflation,” or “politics” that prevent them from doing what they take an oath to do.

Those 545 people, and they alone, are responsible.

They, and they alone, have the power.

They, and they alone, should be held accountable by the people who are their bosses. Provided the voters have the gumption to manage their own employees…

We should vote all of them out of office and clean up their mess!

Yeah? Good luck with that. Remember the old chestnut about draining swamps? Send me an alligator.

What you do with this article now that you have read it… is up to you.
This might be funny if it weren’t so true.
Be sure to read all the way to the end:

Now we get to someone else, I think, who can’t stand the thought that the advantages of living in a civilized country with the barbarians somewhere else might actually cost him a nickel. Not that I approve of the tax system – it’s convoluted and rude. But that’s not this fellow’s point, whoever he is – he’s working the reader into an anti-government frenzy without ever thinking of all the positives that come with government, from health to defense to basic research to laws to law enforcement … and the list goes on.

Tax his land,
Tax his bed,
Tax the table,
At which he’s fed.

Tax his tractor,
Tax his mule,
Teach him taxes
Are the rule.

Tax his work,
Tax his pay,
He works for
peanuts anyway!

Tax his cow,
Tax his goat,
Tax his pants,
Tax his coat.

Tax his ties,

Tax his shirt,
Tax his work,
Tax his dirt.

Tax his tobacco,
Tax his drink,
Tax him if he
Tries to think.

Tax his cigars,
Tax his beers,
If he cries
Tax his tears.

Tax his car,
Tax his gas,
Find other ways
To tax his ass.

Tax all he has
Then let him know
That you won’t be done
Till he has no dough.

When he screams and hollers;
Then tax him some more,
Tax him till
He’s good and sore.

Then tax his coffin,
Tax his grave,
Tax the sod in
Which he’s laid…

Put these words
Upon his tomb,
‘Taxes drove me
to my doom…’

When he’s gone,
Do not relax,
Its time to apply
The inheritance tax.

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax

Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax
STILL THINK THIS IS FUNNY?
Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago, & our nation was the most
prosperous in the world.
We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the
world,and Mom, if agreed, stayed home to raise the kids.

Actually, we were a second banana republic who had the good fortune of tremendous natural resources, something closer to a meritocracy than most countries had, and competition that it was trashing itself in Europe. Even though we were in World War I, we didn’t suffer the kind of losses our competition – on both sides – was suffering.

What in the heck happened? Can you spell ‘politicians?’

People doing their best, mostly. Even the current crop; they’re just so under-talented that they can’t do much but pout at Obama.

I hope this goes around THE USA at least 545 times!!! YOU can help it get
there!!!

GO AHEAD. . . BE AN AMERICAN!!!

Ah, yes, patriotism – that last refuge of a scoundrel. – Samuel Johnson

The Mark of Zorro (1940) slashed its way across our screen, and it was a light-hearted doozy, featuring Tyrone Power in the eponymous role, and a youngish Basil Rathbone playing his foil, the evil Capitan Esteban. For all that the newly returned Don Diego (Power) swiftly falls into the foppish, jaded ways of a foolish young nobleman, the story moves along at a spirited clack. For motivation, it depends, perhaps too much, on tax-collecting scenes and mild threats of a whipping, and while Basil tries to exude evil, I fear only the greed of a decayed fencing master comes through. Mere assertion of their dishonorable ways lack in punch, and perhaps a bit more depiction of their depravity would have boosted the story.

No matter. Power’s Zorro is dazzling as he fools his parents, his priest, and the buffoonishly greedy leader of this California colony, while courting the man’s beautiful niece, although I did have to wonder what she’d done to admire his wide-eyed admiration – but perhaps such would not be historically accurate. He is clever, but not without error, which is good to see – but his opponents, even the redoubtable Esteban, have no true wit about them. A fine, if short, dueling scene is tossed in, and I felt their footwork was excellent, and while the stage combat requires rather large moves, I saw a number of feints, circular parries, and other credibly executed maneuvers – only the head slashes seemed ridiculous.

Zorro escapes once again, breaking the heart of the wife of the evil leader while winning that of the niece, and all comes out well. A fine way to spend a tired evening or a rainy afternoon. The careful ear may even detect a few double entendres.

New York City is apparently quite uncomfortable these days – for humans. For cockroaches? Treehugger‘s Melissa Breyer, take it away!

This is a story of the American cockroach (Periplaneta americana). Not the skittish little ones that live in cabinets and creases, but the giant ones – reaching astonishing lengths of 3 inches or more – that seemingly appear from nowhere. In the south they are called Palmetto bugs, and are elsewhere referred to as water bugs … likely because they revel in city sewers. So charming. They come into our homes in search of food and water. Finding one inside is basically like stumbling across the awful love child or a threesome gone wrong, an unlikely mix of a lobster, an armadillo and a creepy alien.

And in the heat of the summer, add a pterodactyl to that impossible parentage because in weather like this, they fly.

That’s a visual for you – cockroaches, like carrier pigeons, darkening the skies in their, ah, trillions…

A number of responses concerning Mr. Trump’s drive for the Presidency:

[Moore is a] good source for making stuff up. But the idea had occurred to me some time ago. What does that say about me?

Another:

Just a few weeks ago, Michael said Trump was going to win.

My oh my. Covering all the bases, eh? And another reader replies:

Why are the two ideas mutually exclusive? It is entirely possible that Trump could win despite not wanting to.

Which just about makes my head explode. While another disagrees with Mr. Moore:

I’m in agreement with Moore that Trump absolutely does not want to be labeled as the loser, but I disagree in that I think Trump actually does want the position.

So there’s news today out of Camp Trump – a shakeup. Is it just more maneuvering to keep the supporters happy, or does Mr. Trump really believe bringing in a co-founder of Breitbart will help? Many sources, Steve Benen on Maddowblog is convenient and has a neat tidbit:

For the third time in five months, Donald Trump has overhauled his presidential campaign’s leadership team. As of this morning, Kellyanne Conway is now the Republican candidate’s campaign manager – a post that was apparently vacant since June – and Stephen Bannon, of Breitbart News notoriety, is Trump’s campaign CEO. …

GOP consultant Rick Wilson told the Washington Post, “If you were looking for a tone or pivot, Bannon will pivot you in a dark, racist and divisive direction. It’ll be a nationalist, hateful campaign. Republicans should run away.”

For more background info on Trump’s new top aides, Bloomberg Politics published an interesting profile on Bannon last fall – it described him as “the most dangerous political operative in America” – while Media Matters has published overviews of Breitbart News and Kellyanne Conway’s controversial record.

From the Bloomberg Politics report cited by Steve:

Bannon is the executive chairman of Breitbart News, the crusading right-wing populist website that’s a lineal descendant of the Drudge Report (its late founder, Andrew Breitbart, spent years apprenticing with Matt Drudge) and a haven for people who think Fox News is too polite and restrained.

There’ll be no shortage of entertaining news for a few weeks. I wonder what Mr. Bannon was promised if Mr. Trump wins?

The withdrawal of Aetna from several ACA exchanges, citing financial losses, sounds like bad news for the ACA from a fundamental viewpoint – if insurance companies lose money on these policies, then perhaps ACA won’t work.

Except there may be more to it than that, as Steve Benen on MaddowBlog notes, along with Kevin Drum and others:

What’s less clear is why, exactly, Aetna made this decision. As Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum noted this week, “Aetna did a lot of business on the Obamacare exchanges, and until recently claimed that it was a good investment. Now they’ve suddenly changed their mind. Why? No one can say for sure, but the skeptical among us suspect it’s payback. The Obama administration blocked their proposed merger with Humana, so now they’re going to exit Obamacare. Nyah nyah nyah.”

There’s fresh evidence Kevin may have been onto something. The Huffington Post’s Jonathan Cohn and Jeffrey Young published a rather striking report overnight.

[Aetna’s] move also was directly related to a Department of Justice decision to block the insurer’s potentially lucrative merger with Humana, according to a letter from Aetna’s CEO obtained by The Huffington Post. […]

[J]ust last month, in a letter to the Department of Justice, Aetna CEO Mark Bertolini said the two issues were closely linked. In fact, he made a clear threat: If President Barack Obama’s administration refused to allow the merger to proceed, he wrote, Aetna would be in worse financial position and would have to withdraw from most of its Obamacare markets, and quite likely all of them.

The report added that for ACA supporters, this suggests the insurer “was using its participation in Obama’s signature domestic policy initiative as a bargaining chip in order to secure approval of a controversial business deal.”

I hope the government sits tight and let’s them throw away their “losses”, which may be profits. Perhaps impose a penalty – don’t permit re-entry to the exchanges they exit for a year or five.

Yesterday, post-storm, St. Paul was crowned with a rainbow. My Arts Editor cleaned up & enhanced the efforts of my smartphone….

And just for fun….

My correspondent rejoins with an authoritative source on Trump – Michael Moore:

A follow-up to our discussion a few days ago: http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-self-sabotage-campaign?src=newsletter1061977

From that article:

But, let me throw out another theory, one that assumes Trump isn’t as dumb or crazy as he looks. Maybe the meltdown of the past three weeks was no accident. Maybe it’s all part of his new strategy to get the hell out of a race he never intended to see through to its end anyway. Because, unless he is just “crazy,” the only explanation for the unusual ramping up, day after day, of one disgustingly reckless statement after another is that he’s doing it consciously (or subconsciously) so that he’ll have to bow out or blame “others” for forcing him out. Many now are sensing the end game here because they know Trump seriously doesn’t want to do the actual job—and most importantly, he cannot and WILL NOT suffer through being officially and legally declared a loser—LOSER!—on the night of November 8.

Trust me, I’ve met the guy. Spent an afternoon with him. He would rather invite the Clintons and the Obamas to his next wedding than have that scarlet letter L branded on his forehead seconds after the last polls have closed on that night, the evening of the final episode of the permanently canceled Donald Trump Shit-Show.

Michael fails to cite sources, but it’s a fun read, nonetheless.

The old e-mail tray has yielded up another contribution to the sense of victimization of the conservatives of America, by which they become more paranoid, distrustful of their fellow citizens – and prey to those who manipulate them. It’s an interesting mix of truths, half-truths, and lies. Let’s take a look at the email, with a little commentary…

My New Reality

It seems that lately my life has been getting more complicated, and I want to thank those of you who are brave enough to still associate with me regardless of what I have become. The following is a recap of my current identity:

I was born a white male, which makes me a racist.

Attribute to physical reality what is, in fact, a controllable attitude.

I am a fiscal and moral conservative, which makes me a fascist.

It all depends on with whom you’re associating.

I am heterosexual, which makes me a homophobe.

Just no. See being white male.

I am non-union, which makes me a traitor to the working class and an ally of big business.

This one’s unclear. The author is anti-union, or just doesn’t belong to a union? In the former case the probability is it’s accurate; the latter is non-determinitive.

I am a Christian, which makes me an infidel.

Which is both a semantic fact (which is to say, the fact that we have this human concept of religion, with no root in reality but a huge impact on same, which has a rule that says if you’re not part of a particular variety of religion, then you have this word infidel attached to your identity) and a subtle reference to the paranoia about all Muslims.

It would be interesting to know if there is a similar email to this circulating in, say, Iraq, where they reference being Muslim and that this makes them … well, there’s a variety of pejoratives, isn’t there?

I am older than 65 and retired, which makes me a useless old man.

It’s hard not to feel some sympathy, 65 not being all that far off for me. It’s a shared feeling, but at the same time I cannot help but think of the many volunteer activities that are available. Being useless is self-directed in our society, not imposed.

I think and I reason; therefore I doubt much that the main stream media tells me, which makes me a reactionary.

And then we slam right up against a silly statement, which juxtaposed against “I’m so old” becomes a fallacious appeal to authority. It’s also an invitation to another common logic error, affirming the consequent, which, in this case, would be to appeal to those who distrust the media by making them think that therefore they must think and reason. But it’s not true; they may just have a distrust of the media because it says things they don’t like. Not everything in life conforms to your preconceptions; your training, no matter how much you love or hated your parents, your church, and the other institutions, is sometimes flawed, particularly in those areas in which unreasoning obedience is expected.

I am proud of my heritage and our inclusive American culture, which makes me a xenophobe.

An affirmation of a proud society which often believes God has endowed us with perfection, or so certain preachers would have us believe. My advice: learn a little history. Discover the basis of our society, the hideous massacres of the native people, the slavery we used and abandoned so late in the game, the bigotries and prejudices. There are other viewpoints of our society, based on reality on the ground rather than the truly admirable ideals of the Founding Fathers and others. Being soberly proud of our ideal is one thing, but quite another to precipitously take pride in a culture which has indulged in its share of injustices.

I value my safety and that of my family; therefore I appreciate the police and the legal system, which makes me a right-wing extremist.

A bit of folderol. The vast majority of Americans would agree with the author, with the caveat that the two systems need to improve, to cast out the abusers and affirm the desperate need for justice.

I believe in hard work, fair play, and fair compensation according to each individual’s merits, which makes me anti-socialist.

Then I hope you’re not a Trump supporter, since Two-Faced Trump only pays lip service to these ideals. Although there is some validity to the interesting idea of UBI.

I acquired a good education without student loans and no debt at graduation, which makes me some kind of odd underachiever.

No, it makes you unfamiliar with how higher education has changed over the years in terms of financial support and financial consumption. See here and here.

I believe in the defense and protection of the homeland by all citizens, which makes me a militarist.

Now they are trying to inspire more unjustified paranoia, although since we could beat the world with one hand tied behind our back right at this moment, I don’t really understand it. In fact, we should be in the business of cutting DoD funding, not raising it, as that would lead to long-term economic gains (but some short-term pain), but that’s another rant…

I believe guns do not kill people by themselves. People kill people, which makes me anti people.

While this has some vague sensibility about it, which I bought into for a while myself, the cold fact of the matter is that there’s a hidden assumption that mankind is a rational actor.

Every case of domestic abuse destroys this assumption. Every little accident that hurts or kills a child destroys it. Every time a child grabs and uses a loaded gun destroys it.

You want to make this argument? Why do guns exist? To make it easier to kill. It’s easier to kill a deer with a gun than it is with a knife; the same applies to a human. Guns kill people. This argument doesn’t cut it.

Please help me come to terms with this, because I’m not sure who I am anymore!

My newest problem is that I’m not sure which bathroom I should use

Use the one on the left. Heh.