Monthly Archives: September 2016

Does your job depend on the Internet? Does your day extensively involve the Internet? Bruce Schneier, long an Internet security expert, discloses a disturbing trend using Lawfare:

SR-71
Source: The Aviationist

Over the past year or two, someone has been probing the defenses of the companies that run critical pieces of the Internet. These probes take the form of precisely calibrated attacks designed to determine exactly how well these companies can defend themselves, and what would be required to take them down. We don’t know who is doing this, but it feels like a large a large nation state. …

It reminds me of the U.S.’s Cold War program of flying high-altitude planes over the Soviet Union to force their air-defense systems to turn on, to map their capabilities.

Thoughts go many different ways from here.

What would happen if the Internet went down for an extended period? Or, roughly equivalent, became unstable and undependable? A number of companies would be in deep trouble, although the larger corporations, such as Amazon and Alibaba, might have contingency plans in place. It’s a little difficult to imagine the content of such plans, beyond laying everyone off.

Who does not hurt themselves by introducing instability into the Internet? No doubt autocratic countries have less to fear, as control of the population may outweigh the virtues of the Internet.

And how about those defensive strategies? Bruce suggests the sites are being forced to show their entire arsenal. I wonder if there’s an attempt to vary the response over time, making analysis more difficult. I’m not a security expert, so I’m just guessing, but it seems to me the more variability you can show, the less certain an attacker can be of a specific approach working.

Finally, this may be the symptom of a contingency plan for the attacker. Understanding the vulnerabilities of potential enemies is the responsibility of the armed forces of any country. In fact, spying on friends is not unknown – although rarely appreciated. So it’s certainly possible this is merely a preparation for a Plan B or C.

It could even be American. Improbable, implausible – but not impossible.

“But these aren’t shrubberies!”

They’re a lot scarier.

A friend posted this to Facebook. It’s a blog post by Jason Scott on ASCII, and, having been an inadvertent part of the free software and (mostly) open source movement from the mid 1980s through the 1990s, it stirs memories and emotions I don’t often dip into.

Screen capture of Jason’s blog entry

In September of 2016, a talented programmer released his own cooked update to a major company’s legacy operating system, purely because it needed to be done. A raft of new features, wrap-in programs, and bugfixes were included in this release, which I stress was done as a hobby project.

For me, this is the expulsion of commercial interests from the arena of computer programming. Programmers come in a variety of temperaments. For some, it’s just a job that brings home the dough, a simple enough concept that’s applied to coal mining, retail sales, and darn near any human activity that has occurred.

For many mathematicians, programming is just another variety of mathematics, albeit a rather dubious and painful exercise in intellectual activity. The advent of functional programming is a step towards a cleaner version of programming for many mathematicians, I suspect, as it’s based, in part, on the theory of mathematical functions.

Some programmers consider programming to be Art, the construction of a program as an expression of their aesthetic sensibilities. Since a program is the expression of someone’s inner conception of a solution to a problem which can be solved through computation, this is not as outré as it might sound.

Some programmers are engineers, working to solve problems in (something resembling) a rigorous manner. I tend to fit a little bit into this category, a bit into the Art category (especially when working on a difficult problem, the creative side of me can come to the fore as I strive to create a solution that not only works for the current problem, but can be applied to similar problems), and just a trifle in the mathematicians’ frame of mind – given my druthers, I’d be working in a functional programming environment.

And, finally, a few programmers work from the community viewpoint. These comprise some of the open source software movement (some just want to do “sexy” programming, as I call it, which these days, besides Linux, will probably include some Big Data programming, those folks doing the cool astronomical probe visual rendering, and a few other areas), and apparently the “legacy software” folks. I knew there was a little activity out there, because a few years back I had reason to work on my old open source work in an MS-DOS environment, and not having the compilers anymore, I went out looking for them and found them on the Embarcadero web site under “antique software.” Judging from Jason’s post, this programmer (John Brooks) may be motivated by community programming – or he may be more of an Art programmer.

But for a good 15 years my free time was spent being a community programmer – I maintained a bulletin board package written by Cynbe ru Taren, used by an unknown number of people over a 20 year period (I didn’t do much work on it the last 5 years, as the Web took over). I had the pleasure of providing free support to many appreciative users, while learning the craft by working in a highly constrained environment. I’ve since moved on to other hobbies, and this blog is a bit of a move back to the old BBS habits – a chance to discuss what’s on my mind and interact with others, although without the feeling of doing something entirely new, as it felt back then.

But seeing this release of ProDos does bring back the memories. Memories of writing code purely to enable people to do something they found useful, whether it was to extend the mail capability, or to connect bulletin boards over the phone lines in a network, without regard to marketing plans, managers who want a schedule without realizing that this or that has never been attempted before, back when there were hobbyist groups, people who sensed computers had a lot of potential to do good in the world – not today, where we curse the instabilities and eccentricities, worry about “malware” and clicking on “bad links”, wonder how we could have ever designed this mess so that there can even be a “bad link” as we mean it today.

Breathe.

And leave it at that.

A reader writes concerning Hillary’s tactic:

I hope she’s that crafty, because to judge by the number of minutes MPR spends blabbing about, quoting and playing clips from Trump in the morning, Trump’s going to win. The amount of free press he’s getting is, well, huge.

During the primaries, Trump seemed to know precisely how to dance on the knife-edge of ridiculousness – he must have received about as much free press as the other sixteen GOP candidates put together. Now that he’s the nominee, anything he says is newsworthy, so he gets more free press. Sadly, the press hasn’t figured out that puerile assholes don’t deserve coverage – or they figured that if they didn’t cover him, they’d be accused of bias.

And I do continue to worry that apparently a large percentage of my fellow citizens can be taken in by this consummate con-man. The idea that we need to “shakeup” things in D.C. may be true, but it would be more effective to eject the current majority in both branches of the legislature, who is responsible for the logjam and frankly amateurish behavior that we’ve witnessed over the last six years, than to put a man who doesn’t even understand the world-wide consequences of using nuclear weapons in a position where he can shoot them off whenever a fellow world leader mildly annoys him.

Experts should not be judged by how much their recommendations upset you or how much they agree with your preconceptions. Economist Art Laffer is a vivid example. He is the creator and advocate of the Laffer Curve, the idea that tax cuts will pay for themselves. Sounds wonderful to a conservative tired of paying taxes and seeing it sometimes used to fund odd proposals, doesn’t it?

But it never worked out. As Steve Benen puts it,

Perhaps the first sign that Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R) was pursuing a misguided economic policy was when he chose a high-profile advisor: Art Laffer. The far-right economist, best known for his ridiculous “Laffer Curve” that says tax cuts can pay for themselves, guided the Republican governor’s agenda.

The “experiment” failed spectacularly: the Kansas plan fell short on every possible metric, from growth to job creation to revenue. The state’s finances are in shambles, leading to Kansas’ bond rating getting downgraded, and then downgraded again.

Steve’s article is from 2014; Kansas has actually become much worse since. It may be the worst State in the Union these days. Adherence to an ideology that never worked, because, damn, it sounds good!

Back to my point, experts should be judged on results. This isn’t a revolutionary thought; it, in fact, is right at the heart of the concept of the United States as a meritocracy, where the measure of the person is in their results, not in their big talk (like Trump), nor their birthright (which is why we don’t elect a new King every time the old one dies). This is really a very conservative idea that can be shared by everyone on the political spectrum that is not engaged in a search for power, but for the betterment of society. When Representative Ryan disdained experts, he was, inadvertently, betraying this very conservative principle at the heart of the nation. He may not pay for that betrayal immediately. It may take a few terms for his approach to implode, damaging the Nation in some awful manner. And then he’ll deny it.

It’s what politicians of all stripes do.

But it clarifies the question at hand: Donald Trump has no accomplishments in the public sector. None. I won’t even bother to explain how his accomplishments in the private sector are tainted, I’ll simply note they have little to no applicability. Hillary Clinton? Elected service; service as a government lawyer; service as a Cabinet level Secretary. Accomplishments AND mistakes. Mistakes she acknowledges and learns from.

And Trump? After years of being a salient member of “birther” chorus, just this week he agreed that President Obama was, indeed, born in the United States. Via NBC News, here’s how Trump admits to a mistake:

In acknowledging that the president was born in the U.S., Trump, however, falsely claimed that his rival, Hillary Clinton, was the original source of the theory.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it, I finished it,” Trump said. “You know what I mean.”

Lloyd Alter on Treehugger.com is an architect and excited about the use of holograms in elevator maintenance:

Source: Microsoft

Essentially, you look through the goggles and see the object, can walk around it, zoom in and out, rotate and if it was built to do so, explode it into its components. As an architect, I can say right now that this is going to revolutionize the design, construction and maintenance of buildings, perhaps as dramatically as CAD and BIM have.

I believe this because elevators are a big, complex and expensive part of buildings, and thyssenkrupp Elevator is revolutionizing the way they work on them right now. However the technologies that they are demonstrating have broad implications for everyone in the building and many other businesses.

Elevators carry a billion people a day around the world, and are complex mixes of thousands of mechanical and electronic components. When they break down it’s a big deal, whether you are waiting for it or stuck in it. Lives depend on it. Maintenance is critical, both scheduled and emergency; thyssenkrupp alone has 24,000 technicians running around in trucks doing service. Given the different brands of elevators and the 150 years they have been in buildings, there must be millions of different configurations and parts. No wonder it always seems that it takes forever to fix them.

24,000 technicians. Sometimes you don’t think about the infrastructure requirements of just one company.

Still in the early scenes of Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) my Arts Editor gasped, “Ack! I have a stitch in my side,” before she resumed gasping with laughter, cringing and covering her ears.

This shows the successful machination of the classic plot device: contrast. The story of a real woman who yearned to sing opera through the 1930s and ’40s, Florence (Meryl Streep) has money, a devoted husband, a distinguished voice teacher, contacts with powerful musical personalities, and now needs an accompanist in order to sing what she needs to sing. A suitably eccentric and timid young man is recruited, and it is only now we discover the fly in the ointment, around which all seems to revolve.

The woman has no talent and no skill, and worse yet, she doesn’t realize it.

And so, for a time, we hoot with laughter at someone who thinks she’s more than she is, much like the buxom blonde who literally must crawl out of the music hall, laughing so hard at Florence’s unconscious ineptitude that she cannot stand: a low-class foil for Florence and her up-scale associates. But, as with many good plots, not all is as it seems. A story that merely jeers at this would-be coloratura soprano would be uninteresting and unworthy of our notice.

Instead, darker facts emerge: Florence’s hidden, deadly illness, which she has endured for fifty years and which endangers her life with each performance; a vocal coach who, perhaps, encourages her too much; a husband who has not the courage to tell her she’s not really suited to do what she wishes. Each performance, planned or impromptu, as awful as it may be, now gains a serious facet. Florence morphs from a comic figure to an Everyman, someone carrying woes & dreams, demons and angels, for whom the everyday burden of just living must, from time to time, be transcended by a dream. She is, as it were, a member of the audience, to be hugged and held, adored and comforted, and all that returned; sharing that commonality of ours, before returning to her dream, the stage, and the music which wreathes her spirit.

Now we come to her apex performance: playing the legendary Carnegie Hall.  Her stage fright, even with its comic facet, excites our sympathy as well as our humor.  Her shrill and off-key opening number plays to a truly raucous crowd, and trembles to a halt as the audience jeers.  And then a figure, buxom and blonde, shows her true colors, leading the audience in a resounding encouragement of our heroine’s performance. But there’s a fly in the ointment…

I’m reminded of an oft-repeated aphorism, that it’s the journey, not the destination, which matters (mention this not to the poor airline traveler!); here, the essence is not the achievement, but the striving; not the glory of grand recognition, but the love of the music which is truly important. In this light, the machinations of the husband, the carefully chosen words of the vocal coach, are not ill-considered deceit to be regretted or condemned, but the tools of men attempting to compound the love of a woman for something they, too, love – art.

Meryl Streep is, as usual, spot-on, revealing a woman who wants to sing, who’ll give it her all – but in the midst of some broken-backed attempt conveys her inner bewilderment at the difficulty of the musical paths she must tread. Hugh Grant plays her husband, Sinclair, and he’s up to the task – a man daft in his love, willing to cater to her every delusion in order to ignore the metaphorical ugliness inflicted on her.  Her accompanist, Cosmé McMoon, is more than capably performed by Simon Helberg, a man, eccentric already, who may be overwhelmed by greater eccentricities.

This is a movie with a pacing from another era. We’re given plenty of time to consider the undercurrents and questions, and if the dialog is not as clever as in some movies, in a movie about music, this may be appropriate.

Strongly recommended.

(This review written with many contributions from my Arts Editor.)

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com talks about the latest use for … algae:

One interesting biotech company called New Wave Foods hopes to address all these problems [environmental degradation, shocking labor practices] in one fell swoop. It has pioneered a technique for making fake, plant-based shrimp out of algae. The algae turns the shrimp red and is a powerful antioxidant. The srimp are shaped like regular shrimp, and even have the rubbery texture and faintly fishy taste of real shrimp. They are vegan, kosher, have zero cholesterol, and are safe to eat for people with shellfish allergies.

Using the useless to replace the overworked is always an interesting approach, although our uselessness can be another organism’s critical requirement, which can circle around to bite us on the ass.

In American Archaeology (fall 2016, first few paragraphs online) Julian Smith writes about the Bears Ears Controversy in an eponymous article, covering in detail a proposal for President Obama to declare part of southeastern Utah a National Monument:

Source: Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance

San Juan County covers almost 8,000 square miles of Utah’s southeast corner. It is the largest and the poorest county in the state, and about half of its 15,000 residents are Navajo and Ute Indians. People have occupied its striking landscape of mountains, mesas, and river canyons for thousands of years. The Bears Ears region may have more archaeological sites than any other county in the United States, but many have not been documented and are effectively unprotected. A proposal to set aside a large part of the county as a national monument has set off a lively debate over how the federal government should go about protecting cultural resources on public lands in the West.

Utah’s quarter of the Four Corners region, where it joins Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado, centers on a distinctive pair of 9,000-foot buttes called the Bears Ears. Visible for miles, they overlook Natural Bridges National Monument and Cedar Mesa, a broad plateau sliced by sandstone canyons and bounded by the Colorado and San Juan rivers.

Since this is an archaeology magazine, the bulk of the article covers what has been found and may still be found in the area, the enormous damage caused by looters and general recreation activities, as well as the campaign itself. There are several players here, starting with the archaeologists, whose value system is built around the knowledge they hope to extract from the artifacts left behind by ancient peoples. That’s their motivation.

Then there are the Indian Nations, who are also advocating for National Monument status. The Protect Bears Ears Coalition, consisting of the Ute, Zuni, Hopi, and Navajo Nation, collects and dispenses information, from Indian to archaeological to  “outdoor industry” support of the National Monument drive.

The UTL’s resolution is the most recent demonstration of overwhelmingly unified support for Bears Ears National Monument among sovereign tribal nations, grassroots Native Americans, and Utah citizens. The UTL resolution joins independent declarations of support from 25 Tribes throughout the Four Corners states and a joint resolution from the National Congress of American Indians with membership of nearly 300 Tribes. The Utah Tribal Leaders association has now formally joined the call for President Barack Obama to exercise his power under the 1906 Antiquities Act to protect Bears Ears National Monument.

As the traditional lands containing artifacts and religious significance, their motivation should be clear. The Grand Canyon Trust’s Advocate Magazine covers it from the inside:

Malcolm Lehi remembers the stories his father told him about the Bears Ears Buttes and the deep cultural ties of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe to the mountainous knolls, canyons, forests, water and wildlife of the Manti-La Sal National Forest and surrounding public lands.

It’s where Lehi, a lawmaker and member of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribal Council, harvests chokecherries,knowledge passed down by his father, who taught Lehi where to find them. It’s mid-July and the berries are about the size of a quarter.

The Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance is also behind the national monument.

On the other side? Legislators and others who don’t like the idea of the Federal government sucking up more land. The Salt Lake Tribune covers the opposition, which started with an alternative named the Public Lands Initiative:

Source: Light Pollution Map

Curious about light pollution distribution? Here’s a link for an interactive map. Here’s an FAQ. It handles multiple datasets and even user input data, but I’ve not been able to find much other information on it.

Source: You Can See The Milky Way

Here’s another one. This one features an alternative map and a satellite view. And I don’t have an explanation for some of the funky state names.

This Scientific American video covers light pollution’s effects in 60 seconds. It points out something I had not thought about: light pollution can effect nocturnal animals, so light pollution is an ecological problem and therefore elevated from mere annoyance for astronomers to another serious problem to be dealt with on a national level.

It would be interesting, at the next Minnesota governor’s race debate, to bring a snapshot of one of these maps centered on the Twin Cities and ask them how they intend to remove that blot of light from the map? I wonder if we’d just get blank looks, or if they’d question the need.

Murfster35 on The Daily Kos doesn’t believe Hillary Clinton made a mistake – s/he believes she’s just employing a carefully calculated whistle of her own:

Hillary has been playing this game with the press for more than 25 years, she’s a pro. The Orange Julius steals an entire news cycle or more with each outrageous statement. She’s turning the tables on Trump, but with an almost surgical purpose. If she had said “a few” or “some” of Trumps supporters were “deplorable”, it would have caused a minor tremor, but not overtake the cycle. In saying “½ of his supporters” I have no doubt that she was referring to the 61% who think that Obama is a secret Muslim-Marxist-Kenyan here to destroy the country. The “50%” was the hook to grab the attention of the press. Look how quickly and professionally the campaign walked back only the “50%’ portion, I’m betting that they had that written by the time she made the original statement. …

This is clearly aimed at one particular demographic. And it’s a big one, one that no Republican has ever lost since polling started tracking it, college educated white voters. As we speak, Trump is tied with Clinton with white college educated males, and he’s getting his ass kicked by a whopping 23% with white college educated women. And guess what? In a recent WaPo poll, 60% of college educated whites think that Trump is biased against women and minorities. Kudos to the WaPo for not poisoning the well on this poll! They very carefully used the word “biased”, as opposed to the more inflammatory “racist” or “bigoted” that could have skewed the honest results.

The next week or two of polls will tell the tale.

The Snowden leak of NSA documents concerning mass surveillance has certainly been one of the great earthquakes of the last 20 years. Now, on Lawfare, Timothy Edgar is advocating that Snowden be pardoned – because he caused so much damage:

Edward Snowden’s actions caused great damage to national security.  They should not have been necessary to achieve the sensible reforms of the past four years.  That they were represents a failure of leadership by the intelligence community and the national security teams of the previous two administrations. …

There is an inherent tension between the values of a free society and mass surveillance.  For Snowden and his supporters, the answer is easy.  End mass surveillance—which is to say, most of what the NSA does.  Those of us who believe that the NSA’s far-flung operations are essential to national security and global stability have the harder task of keeping mass surveillance under control.

If Snowden deserves our thanks for both this round of surveillance reform and the next, it is only because the laws and institutions we created to control surveillance had become so obsolete. Intelligence agencies should not need the shock of massively damaging leak to abandon programs that are not working and refine and improve those that are.  Disclosing details of classified programs should not be the most effective way to force change.

But apparently they were.

Recalling that Richard Nixon was preemptively pardoned by President Ford, I suppose Snowden could be pardoned for the charges that are currently lodged against him.

For those who worry about Iranian nuclear issues, they might want to look at the water situation, which appears to be dreadful. Alireza Ramezani in AL Monitor digs in on the capital city of Tehran.

Source: Wikipedia

Tehran’s population has ballooned so immensely in the past decade that Energy Minister Hamid Chitchian has warned of an impending failure to supply clean and safe drinking water to residents should the capital’s population — currently hovering at 12 million — continue to rise, Hamshahri newspaper reported on Aug. 22. “The water-security problem is very serious in Tehran and needs to be addressed immediately,” Chitchian said.

Some signs are emerging. A rising number of Tehran residents have been experiencing a drop in water pressure, according to leading economic newspaper Donya-e Eqtesad. People living on the third floor or higher have had to installpowerful water pumps to suck up more water from the urban pipelines, the paper noted. The wave of pump installations has further lowered water pressure, worsening the situation for citizens without pumps.

The use of pumps is now so widespread that water experts advise residents to also set up small water tanks on their roofs to draw from, to help minimize the pumps’ impact on water pressure. Water pressure has dropped in recent weeks by 30% in some districts, Donya-e Eqtesad reported.

Alireza references this article by Andrew Follett on The Daily Caller News Foundation, which reports:

Iran’s vice minister of energy for water announced Wendesday that several of the country’s major cities will have a water crisis this summer and that little could be done to prevent it. The minister pointed out that Iran’s per-capita water consumption is nearly twice the global average. The crisis has been largely caused by improper use of groundwater resources, a rapidly growing population, and decades of mismanagement by the government.

I’m somewhat non-plussed by the use of a comparison to a world average, and would be much happier if they had reported average Tehran water usage in terms of percentage of recommended consumption of water for good health for all purposes. If the consumption is substantially above the recommendation then consumption can be reduced without imperiling the health and welfare of the people involved – assuming consumption reduction is spread equally across all inhabitants.

Alireza reports on sources of water:

Tehran’s water is mainly supplied by five dams — Taleghan, Karaj, Mamlo, Latian and Lar — and 480 deep wells located across the city. As no further dams can be built around Tehran, the energy minister has warned that more water will have to be extracted from the wells if the situation gets worse — a move that could cause health problems for Tehran residents, as more intense extraction activities increase exposure to pollutants.

I wonder how climate change will affect water production in that area of the world. Just for fun, here’s a population graph of Iran:

Mark Sumner on The Daily Kos is really angry at the Associated Press regarding the Clinton Foundation scandal … or, in his eyes, the faux-scandal:

The truth is that the Associated Press examined the data and found, quite simply, that donors to the Clinton Foundation made up a very small percentage of visitors to Hillary Clinton’s office as secretary of state. Though they worked for an extended period to obtain records, dug through disorganized information to create searchable data, and spent days picking through the resulting information, in the end they found … nothing. They found no preferential treatment. No unethical contact. Not a hint of services rendered. Nothing. There was no story there.

It had to be frustrating, especially for Braun and Sullivan, who had been at the center of the endless-attention-generating email server story. So the Associated Press decided that “no story,” was not the story they would tell.

They chose to eliminate more than 1,700 meetings from the data, and to pretend that a tiny group of 85 meetings held with contributors to the Clinton Foundation constituted some sort of “majority” of “discretionary” meetings, even if that took treating as discretionary meetings with people who had met with previous secretary of states, people who were involved in projects funded by the State Department, and people heading up groups directly working to provide aid to refugees. In no universe were these meetings “discretionary” except that generated for the purpose of making a story.

It’s a lovely rant.

Elizabeth Lunday’s “Extra Toes Conferred Extra Status” (American Archaeology, fall 2016, print only) teaches me a little something about social prestige:

“Six-toed individuals [in Chaco Canyon] seem to have been treated well, but not as gods,” [University of New Mexico archaeologist] Crown says. The team recently published a paper in the journal American Antiquity.

The Maya revered individuals with extra digits, treating them as gods. Crown and her colleagues wondred if the Chacoans did the same. … High status could account for the high rate of polydactyly among the population. “If you have a trait people value, that can lead to greater reproductive success and the trait may appear more often,” says Crown.

So we’d ignore or remove an extra toe. The Mayans and Chacoans would revere them. Sort of like winning the lottery, but not really.

Melissa Breyer on Treehugger.com discovers an analysis of household dust:

While the possibility of noxious dust bunnies comes as little surprise – it’s a topic we’ve written about before – this new study is the first comprehensive meta-analysis of toxic chemicals found in house dust. It reveals that the average American is likely exposed to an icky chaos of chemicals that come from consumer products and building materials – chemicals that have been linked to numerous health effects including cancer, hormone disruption, and reproductive problems.

The new data comes from a multi-institute team of researchers, hailing from Milken Institute School of Public Health, Silent Spring Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council, Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, and Occupational and Environmental Medicine Program.

“Our study is the first comprehensive analysis of consumer product chemicals found in household dust,” says lead author Ami Zota, ScD, MS, assistant professor of environmental and occupational health at Milken Institute SPH. “The findings suggest that people, and especially children, are exposed on a daily basis to multiple chemicals in dust that are linked to serious health problems.”

Melissa then gives ameliorative pointers. But will studies like these lead to a cloud of legal action? It probably should.

… and out pops something. Today it was,

In computers, virtues are additive; sins, multiplicative.

Philip Bump, writing for WaPo’s The Fix blog, points out that President Obama’s approval rating is well over 50%:

From The Washington Post

The last time that President Obama’s approval rating in Washington Post-ABC News polling was as high as it is in our new survey was six months after he took office. At 58 percent, Obama’s approval is 15 points higher than it was on the eve of the 2014 elections, where his party got blown out. Hillary Clinton’s hope is that the reversal of opinions on Obama two years later will also lead to a reversal of fortunes for other Democrats — and there’s reason to think that it will.

This must be a source of discouragement for the GOP, as Clinton is certainly hoping for a tailwind from her former boss, and he appears to be peaking at precisely the right moment to blow her along. But this is also a blast in the face of … Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel, as Ben Caspit reports in AL Monitor:

On Sept. 9, Netanyahu had a small “slip” that betrayed a fraction of his real emotions: In an English-language public relations clip that was disseminated on the internet, Netanyahu spoke about the Israeli settlements in Judea and Samariaand said that the casting of settlements as an obstacle for peace is “perplexing.” He compared the presence of the Jewish settlers in the West Bank to the presence of “nearly 2 million Arabs living inside of Israel.” …

“This clip,” said a high-level diplomatic source to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, “is a stab to the Democratic soft spot in general, and to Hillary Clinton specifically: the subject of settlements and the connection to human rights.” According to high-echelon Israeli sources, Netanyahu directed his arrows precisely: Trump said several times recently that he supports Israel’s right to build in West Bank settlements. “Trump differentiated himself from Clinton on the settlement issue in an effort to paint himself as a clear supporter of Israel,” a diplomatic source in Jerusalem told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “Therefore, Netanyahu’s statements turning US policy on the settlements to supporting ‘ethnic cleansing’ is music to Trump’s ears.”

“Netanyahu did his homework,” a senior Israeli official in Jerusalem told Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity. “This time, he drops heavy hints without leaving clear footprints. He will not host Trump for a fundraising event in Jerusalem as he did for Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in 2012. But he will say things from which people can understand that Trump’s policies are more favorable to Israel than those of Clinton. The last clip is only one example. But Netanyahu wants to keep all his options open in case Hillary does win, as opposed to what happened with his failed bet on Romney in 2012.”

But with President Obama flying high, this stab to the underbelly may have little effect in the United States – only is Israel, in which Netanyahu faces his own challenge. The buffeting Israel receives from United States presidential elections is interesting and makes me wonder if they ever consider refusing to buy military supplies from the US, thus mitigating our influence over their policies.

A new variety, or was I mistaken before? Wrap their seeds around your skinny necks and pretend you’re glamorous…

Arms exports to Saudi Arabia I knew about. But it’s leading to some bipartisan action in Congress, of all places, and, in conjunction with the previously noted bill to permit 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia, it could be more strain on our allies in the Middle East. Julian Pecquet in AL Monitor documents the particulars:

The State Department requests — and Congress approves — a token $10,000 in military training every year, but the heart of the relationship is America’s massive weapons trade with Saudi Arabia: a record-shattering $115 billion approved and pending arms deals under Obama, according to a new report by the nonprofit Security Assistance Monitor. …

[Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif] has been leading the charge in Congress to stop a pending sale of tanks, guns and ammunition to Riyadh for its war against the Iran-backed Houthis. Saudi Arabia denies accusations that it has deliberately targeted civilians or acted recklessly in Yemen.

The vote suggests the kingdom’s influence in Congress has taken a plunge as voters on both sides of the aisle increasingly reject taking sides in what they see as proxy wars between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shiite Iran for control of the region. At the same time, the recent release of 28 pages of previously classified inquiries into alleged, but unproven, ties between Saudi officials and the Sept. 11 hijackers has also rekindled public distrust of Riyadh.

Congressional resistance would likely only increase if the Saudis were to lose in court and then refuse to pay the victims’ families, as they’ve already indicated is their intention. Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir personally told lawmakers this spring that Riyadh would sell as much as $750 billion in treasury securities and other US assets rather than risk seeing them frozen by a US court. …

The day before the 9/11 bill vote, a bipartisan group of four senators — Rand Paul, R-Ky.; Chris Murphy, D-Conn.; Al Franken, D-Minn.; and Mike Lee, R-Utah — introduced legislation to block the proposed sale of $1.15 billion in tanks, guns and ammunition to Riyadh. And 64 House members signed on to a Lieu-led letter to Obama last month urging him to delay the sale.

Paul and Lee are certainly far-right, while Franken certainly leans left – so this is really bipartisan, and an interesting commentary on how the stock of the Saudis has fallen recently. Of course, it would be interesting to trace out how a fall in munitions exports would impact the American companies manufacturing them – and where they’re located. Members of Congress are notorious for protecting programs that require work by companies located in their districts / states. Are these four merely fortunate to not have impacted companies in their districts? The report from Security Assistance Monitor referenced by Julian includes this nugget:

Since taking office in January 2009, the Obama administration has offered over $115 billion worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia in 42 separate deals, more than any U.S. administration in the history of the U.S.-Saudi relationship. The majority of this equipment is still in the pipeline, and could tie the United States to the Saudi military for years to come.

U.S. arms offers to Saudi Arabia since 2009 have covered the full range of military equipment, from small arms and ammunition, to howitzers, to tanks and other armored vehicles, to attack helicopters and combat aircraft, to bombs and air-to-ground missiles, to missile defense systems, to combat ships.  The United States also provides billions in services, including maintenance and training, to Saudi security forces.  For example, Vinnell Arabia, a division of Northrop Grumman, is involved in a $4 billion effort to train and equip the Saudi Arabian National Guard (SANG), which, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, has played a key role in the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen. [references deleted by me]

A note clarifies the situation:

Of the more than $100 billion in offers reported to Congress, $57 billion have been translated into formal sales agreements.  The U.S. has delivered $14 billion worth of weaponry to between 2009 and 2015.  The gap between orders and deliveries reflects the fact that for deals involving major equipment like fighter aircraft, attack helicopters, armored vehicles and combat ships there can be a considerable lag time due to various factors …

The gap between delivered and on offer is the carrot for American defense companies to attempt to influence Congress to moderate its stance concerning Saudi Arabia.

This must be a little tough for Congress as Iran remains one of the more detested countries in the world, and Saudi Arabia is fighting a proxy war with them in Yemen. Perhaps we’ll see the anti-Saudi sentiment wane as this year’s 9/11 anniversary fades away; or perhaps more evidence will arise tying the Saudi royal family to the attack. How would the Saudis react if we were to demand the extradition of a royal family member? If they refused, would the matter be smoothed over – or would we eject them from our “valued allies” list?

… then you just have to quote them and admire them. In the print-only article, “The Better Angels of Our Nature vs the Internet“, Skeptical Inquirer, September/October 2016, p. 56, David J. Helfand (professor of astronomy, Columbia University, etc) describes how our evolved nature clashes with the Internet:

Thus, I see the Internet as a qualitatively different kind of threat than the printing press or television. It is a powerful, free, global channel for propagating misinformation and disinformation. The devious tribesman who led his kin away from food supplies so he could have them all to himself was soon ignored or dispatched. Today, the climate change denier, homeopathic practitioner, or presidential candidate can easily, quickly, and cheaply raise armies of the uninformed, the gullible, and the disenchanted by providing their echo chambers with any endless diet of self-reinforcing nonsense. This undercuts any possibility that consumers can make informed personal decisions, and it poisons the climate for the creation of effective public policy. [typos my fault]

Thus everyone has a right to an opinion – but not everyone’s opinion is right.

I didn’t write anything about the tragedy of 9/11, mostly because I was ill, and otherwise because nothing reminded me of it, nor would I have been particularly motivated. Fortunately, the big reminder for me was this post of Jim Wright of Stonekettle Station, who manages to say what I would have said with more authority – and more flamboyance – than I could have summoned up.

You’re expecting some kind of obligatory 9-11 post, aren’t you?

Here it is, but you’re not gonna like it.

15 years ago today 19 shitheads attacked America.

They killed 3000 of us.

And then … America got its revenge for 9-11.

Yes we did. Many times over. We killed them. We killed them all. We killed their families. We killed their wives and their kids and all their neighbors. We killed whole nations that weren’t even involved just to make goddamned sure. We bombed their cities into rubble. We burned down their countries.

They killed 3000 of us, we killed 300,000 of them or more.

8000 of us came home in body bags, but we got our revenge. Yes we did.

We’re still here. They aren’t.

We win. USA! USA! USA!

Right?

You goddamned right. We. Win.

Except…

Every year on this day we bathe in the blood of that day yet again. We watch the towers fall over and over. It’s been 15 goddamned years, but we just can’t get enough. We’ve just got to watch it again and again.

& etc. Perhaps a bit prolix, but excellent nonetheless.

[9/13/2001 – h/t Tim Foreman]

NewScientist (3 September 2016) reports on some n=1 science:

WHAT an awakening. A man has been roused from a minimally conscious state by stimulating his brain with ultrasound.

The 25-year-old man, who had suffered a severe brain injury after a road traffic accident, progressed from having only a fleeting awareness of the outside world to being able to answer questions and attempting to walk.

He was the first person to undergo an experimental procedure that stimulates the thalamus area using pulses of ultrasound. “It’s extremely exciting,” says Martin Monti at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Fascinating!

Completing a troika of food-poisoning-fueled movie reviews, we saw Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) last night, and found it mystifying. Between the ghosts of Martian survivors who fled to Earth eons ago when Ghidorah destroyed their civilization, fairy-humans who can talk to Mothra and Mothra’s child, Mothra’s child whose diplomatic skills cannot bring Rodan and Godzilla into a coordinated front against Ghidorah, a subplot in which a beautiful Himalayan princess is the target of assassins who manage to ignore rampaging monsters in their devotion to their profession, this movie lacks focus and theme, and consequently is only compelling in answering that common and morbid question, What could possibly rescue this hodge-podge from those who began it? Sadly, the answer to that question is neither good nor satisfying, and I would not recommend this movie even for a lazy Sunday afternoon in January.

Continuing this thread, on Lawfare Gabriella Blum, Dustin Lewis, and Naz Modirzadeh discuss a purported new concept – war algorithms:

How should policymakers, technologists, armed forces, lawyers, and others conceptualize accountability for technical autonomy in relation to war? In a recently-published briefing report from the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict, we devise a new concept: war algorithms. We define a war algorithm as any algorithm that is expressed in computer code, that is effectuated through a constructed system, and that is capable of operating in relation to armed conflict.