Monthly Archives: December 2016

First Liberty has announced its filed for certiorari with SCOTUS for the case of …

… LCpl Monifa Sterling, a Marine convicted at a court martial in 2013 for refusing an order to remove Bible verses from her personal workspace.

The IB Times reported during previous, military court appeals:

Sterling was charged after she refused to take down a single Bible verse she used to decorate her cubicle in three locations. She later told the court she had posted them in a triangular shape to represent the Holy Trinity. …

“This is a case of insubordination,” Brian Keller, the attorney representing the federal government, told a five-judge panel Wednesday during the hearing. The judges are expected to weigh the arguments and release their decision later this year.

So it’s not entirely clear to me if the issue is the display of religious verses, or failure to obey an order. First Liberty, a conservative group devoted to religious freedom, suggests the issue is the former:

First Liberty attorneys argue that Sterling’s right to post Bible verses is protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) of 1993, a federal law that should apply to all American citizens.

But so far, every court to hear Sterling’s case has claimed that RFRA doesn’t protect Sterling’s right to display a Bible verse.

Chris Rodda on HuffPo points out that Sterling had also been court-martialed for other charges unconnected with the Bible incident, such as refusing the orders of a superior officer and lying about a medical treatment, and suggests this is all trumped up:

The Seattle Times reports that the Washington Supreme Court has ruled that psychiatrists can be sued for the actions of their clients:

The family of a Spokane woman who was murdered along with her son can pursue a lawsuit over whether the killer’s psychiatrist should have done more to protect them, the Washington Supreme Court held in a case with implications for mental-health professionals around the state.

Rebecca Schiering and one of her sons, Phillip, were shot by her ex-fiance, Jan DeMeerleer, in 2010. DeMeerleer, who also wounded another of Schiering’s sons in the attack, then returned to his own home and killed himself.

Schiering’s family sued the killer’s psychiatrist, Dr. Howard Ashby, and Spokane Psychiatric Clinic, alleging they were negligent in their treatment of DeMeerleer and that they should have done more to protect the victims. Ashby knew his patient had previously expressed homicidal and suicidal ideas, but found no “real clinical problem” in their most recent meeting, three months before the killings.

In a 6-3 opinion, the Supreme Court held Thursday that the lawsuit can go forward. The majority said mental-health professionals must act with reasonable care to identify and mitigate the dangerousness of psychiatric patients.

There is no real simple answer to questions like these. The profession of psychiatry is not an exact science. But this must have some frightening implications for psychiatrists, psychologists, and those who aspire to those professions. As the article notes, this could result in a far more conservative approach adopted by practicioners, with more involuntary committals, as well as more second-guessing.

Gino Segrè is a physicist fascinated with the concept of temperature, to the point where he’s written a history of it, entitled A Matter of Degrees. It’s interesting, and here’s one of the better parts encountered so far. All typos are mine.

But there is some evidence that fever enhances the functioning of the immune system; white blood cells, the system’s agents, move more rapidly as temperature approaches 104 degrees, but that’s only one of the possible reasons for the evolution of the fever response. P. A. Mackowiak has suggest that fever sometimes plays a protective role: a mild infection heals rapidly with perhaps a slight enhancement of the immune system, but a raging high fever that leads to a rapid death of the afflicted individual helps limit the spread to the individual’s kin of a violent contagious infection.

Hmmmmmmmm! Biological evolution applies to populations; individuals are merely the constituents of the populations, not the epitome.

And that’s a good thing. In case your latest memory of the theory of human migration into North America is the Clovis First model, you’re out of date. American Archaeology editor Michael Bawaya writes in the Editor’s Corner column of the Winter 2016 issue (article offline only):

Source: National Geographic

The subject of the Americas’ colonization had long been the exclusive purview of archaeologists, but then some geneticists dared to butt in. … If the first Americans arrived roughly 16,000 years ago, as geneticists seem to think, how could they have occupied a site in South Carolina that an archaeologist claims is 50,000 years old? …

… fashioning all this disparate information into a model, even a remotely plausible model, is beyond the most nimble of minds. The Clovis First model is dead, but now what?

So if you happen to run into a Paleo-Indian archaeologist, don’t even bother to ask.

[typos mine] For a scientist, questions are better than answers! So this lack of consilience is really a positive, giving impetus to future archaeologists.

Coincidentally, my Arts Editor and I once wrote a novel (unpublished) in which the demise of the Clovis First model plays a small part.

Continuing this thread on Israeli settlements, I ran across this article from an angry Akiva Eldar in AL Monitor concerning funding distribution in Israel these days:

In a letter to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the [Union of Local Authorities] warned that a planned 230 million-shekel ($60 million) cut in the budget of the Interior Ministry, which funds local governments, would result in the collapse of some of these weak municipalities in Israel’s “social and geographic periphery” and directly affect the services they provide to local residents. The cut stems from a Dec. 18 government decision to slash 1.25%, or 1.2 billion shekels ($313 million), across the board from its annual spending over the next two years, including on health, welfare and education services. …

In accordance with a policy that proves that crime pays, the public coffers, meaning the inhabitants of Israel, will lose another 130 million shekels ($34 million). That’s the price tag of getting a few dozen criminals living in the unauthorized West Bank outpost of Amona, on stolen Palestinian lands, to obey a court order to vacate their trailer homes and move to an adjacent hilltop also not under the sovereignty of their state. In northern Tel Aviv, across from the railroad station on Arlozorov Street, dozens of law-abiding citizens live in frayed, rain-drenched tents (forced out of apartments they could no longer afford). No one offers these homeless Israelis an iota of the aid that the government is pouring into the “legal” settlements — as the government calls them, in defiance of international law — in the occupied West Bank and the outposts there. The price of the deal with the settlers of Amona also includes the cost of demolishing dozens, perhaps hundreds of houses built without permits by Arab-Israelis in their communities within Israel’s sovereign borders. According to recent reports, that’s what Netanyahu promised the Jewish lawbreakers from the settlement movement in a compromise outline for the evacuation.

In the post-shame era, the government doesn’t even bother concealing the source of the millions that it will hand over to the Amona squatters. The Finance Ministry proposal presented to the Cabinet said the budget cuts are needed, among other things, to fund the Amona deal. One might say that 130 million out of the 230 million shekels being cut from the budgets of 190 disadvantaged local councils are destined for distribution to 40 squatter families. Truly distributive justice.

Lately I’ve been seeing religious groups as simple power structures, hierarchies built on notions of supernatural beings. The purported inclinations of those beings, deduced from subjective experiences, writings of mystics, and out and out fraud, are used to build the rickety ladders of the hierarchy, climbed unsteadily by the ambitious and power hungry.

The dangers of building a power structure on anything but reality – actions are taken on twisted, unshared notions of justice and right, damaging those truly in basic need, while those whose only need is satisfaction of religious sensibilities get the resources destined, in the case in Israel & by any sensible being, for the first group.

Humans are social creatures, drawn to groups for protection. Here we see a nation, originally secular, but transforming into a religious nation, which is no longer protecting its citizens, but only those favored by the power structure in place because those favored have chosen to climb the ladder already surmounted by those in power. The favor is bestowed upon only certain subgroups, and so does Israel betray those most in need, and brings shame upon itself.

All this assuming Eldar’s assertions are facts. I’m in a particular mood this morning.

On another tack, I notice that categorizing groups into power structures thrusts atheists back into a position that some of them detest. They often protest that they are different from religionists on the basis that they do not believe in God (or, like me, do not know, although based on lack of evidence, the position of the religionists seems grim). However, as they form their own groups, even as they’re based on their vision of reality, unexpectedly slippery as that can be (compare the a-religious philosophies of libertarians and communists – both supposedly based on reality), they are forming just another power structure. Built to protect, operating as a competitive arena in some form, the differences only lie in their underlying assumptions; the outcomes may measure the conformance of their vision of reality with reality itself.

Sally Adee interviews André Spicer in NewScientist (10 December 2016) regarding the increasing concern corporations have for our health:

So what is this obsession in corporate culture with enhancing health and happiness?

There’s always been debate over whether a happy worker is more productive, but a more interesting question is how employers are now intervening to “make things better”. In the last decade or so, they’ve suddenly become interested in employee happiness and are designing workplaces to make the physical space itself increase happiness. One company built a workplace to look like a pirate ship.

But most interventions involve the employees themselves. BP gave each employee a Fitbit. It was a gift and using it was optional, but increasing numbers of companies are now insisting you use these things. At a hedge fund in London, the traders have to wear them, plus record things such as their diet and sleeping habits, and then the employer correlates that with their trading activities. At one Swedish utility company, if you don’t go to the gym as part of your working week, you get paid less.

I know my Arts Editor was periodically harassed concerning her health habits before she retired, with money dangled to buy her cooperation – although she was notably dour about those episodes. I work at a large engineering firm, and while there’s an occasional corporate email about taking care of our health, it hasn’t risen to the level of active intrusion into our lives.

I suppose I should be horrified, but this bit amused me instead:

So this is all about companies squeezing everything they can from their staff?

That’s one aspect. The second part is a cultural shift – what psychologists or philosophers would call category mistakes. Employers are starting to equate physical fitness with corporate competence. It’s this idea that if you’re slim and running marathons, you’re going to be a fantastic CEO. From 2001 to 2011, the proportion of CEOs in the US who ran marathons doubled, and you can be sure those marathons are featuring on their CVs. Give employers a choice of two CEOs with exactly the same skills and they’ll almost always choose the slimmer one. Your hobby can no longer be the community garden or whatever you’ve been doing. You have to be running marathons.

I also know that the Mayo Clinic offers an expensive, thorough, quick examination for CEOs – visualize a Formula 1 pit stop where all the tires get changed.

I don’t have the reference handy, but as I recall they mentioned that one CEO came in and left with an acute leukemia diagnosis and a bottle full of pills – and off he went back to his duties just a few hours later.

André is quite dour himself in interpreting these developments, especially in the light of automation threatening many jobs, as well as the new 5 AM to 9 PM work cycle:

So that explains this new economy built around self-enhancement, happiness and the body?

Yes, that’s one way of creating new forms of employment when knowledge-economy work is in decline. We are transitioning to the body economy. It’s also simply capitalism: what do you do when all other sources of growth have been exhausted? You turn to people’s private lives and you begin looking into their bodies and psychologies. You turn their minds and bodies into something you can sell.

Leads one to wonder if automation will be increasingly met with brickbats. Perhaps it’s time to consider how to decide which tasks should be automated. Keep in mind the hidden difficulties with such proposals, for which I have two examples, that computers used to reference mathematicians, not the modern digital wonders that have replaced them, and that we used to employ many secretaries and clerks whose duties today are automated. Was it wrong to automate those jobs out of existence? Nowadays it seems quite normal, doesn’t it? So while I’m tempted to propose that jobs that are very dangerous or very difficult (read: damn near impossible, such as flawlessly calculating mathematical tables) should be eligible for automation, whereas everything else isn’t, I do not feel it is truly a workable proposal.

Considering it honestly, either

1. The libertarians are right, and that by freeing up people from boring and dangerous tasks, we’ll create new jobs with a more creative flare;
2. Or (1) used to be true, but there’s a limit to how long this can go on.
3. [I’ve managed to forget what I had dreamed up here.]

I also can’t help but notice how corporate competition appears to be limitless – rather like that of biological evolution, albeit on far more rapid and plastic basis. Are their endpoints in biological evolution? I think you’d have to assume endless geological stability, and that doesn’t really exist on the time scale of evolution.

sorus:

A sorus (pl. sori) is a cluster of sporangia (structures producing and containing spores) in ferns and fungi. This New Latin word is from Ancient Greek σωρός (sōrós ‘stack, pile, heap’). [Wikipedia]

Noted in the Aperture column of NewScientist (10 December 2016):

THESE glowing orbs harbour the progeny of a strange life form. Their goal? To propel that progeny as far away as possible so it can conquer new habitats. An explosive launch will eventually help them disperse their contents.

They are the sporangia of fern plants, found on the underside of their leaves, or fronds. These sporangia grow in clusters called sori and are seen here under a fluorescence microscope, which uses a higher-intensity light source than conventional microscopes and labels the specimens with a fluorescent substance. This results in beautiful images that enhance the 3D features of small specimens: the sporangia don’t normally glow like this.

Follow the link for the pics.

Anything can be used in the culture wars, can’t it? For example, this lovely effort to commemorate World War II, The Fallen, which remembers, in a brief sort of way, the 9000 people lost on Normandy’s beaches during D-Day.

Yes, those are representations of dead bodies.
Source: The Fallen

Andy Moss and myself from Sand In Your Eye developed the idea of the Fallen Project together to mark Peace Day.  The objective was to make a visual representation of 9000 people drawn in the sand which equates the number of Civilians, Germans Forces and Allies that died during the D-day landings, 6^th June during WWII as an example of what happens in the absence of peace.

The email mostly just uses the pictures on the website sans text and then adds its own subtly nasty comment:

What is surprising is that nothing about this
was seen here in the US.
Someone from overseas had a friend that sent it
with a note of gratitude for what the US started there.
Please share with others who understand
“freedom is not free–nor has it ever been”

Well, no. Both Fox News and the Huffington Post (both ends of the political spectrum) covered it. And the mail is introduced with this line, which clarifies the hidden agenda nicely:

A large percentage of our country doesn’t know of or care about Normandy.

This serves to define an appreciative audience which is better informed, even superior, to the general run of American citizenry. In combination with the end note, the group marks itself as a patriotic group, firmly rooted in history and all that’s good.

The problem? It’s divisive. It doesn’t appeal to our reason, but to our emotions, to the xenophobic emotions which drive our current cultural divides. And by creating a xenophobic group, those who choose to belong to it become vulnerable to the next emotional hook, that perhaps some political figure is also part of the group and should be voted for, without further consideration, at the next opportunity.

We saw an example of this during the recent American Presidential campaign when Mr. Trump was asked to name his favorite book from the Bible. His fumble was apparently not fatal.

But this is sadly un-American. We like to consider ourselves the best and brightest, but we’re not when we’re letting our emotions run our lives. Best comes from reason, not conspiracy theories and finger-pointing and all that rot.

Since the smartphone is basically a miniaturized bundle of sensors, I suppose this was inevitable – but it’s still cool. NewScientist’s Timothy Revell reports on how smartphones can be used in earthquake monitoring:

An app called MyShake is revolutionising earthquake detection. The app turns anyone’s phone into a seismology tool, and the project’s first results show it is surprisingly effective.

“We found that MyShake could detect large earthquakes, but also small ones, which we never thought would be possible,” says Qingkai Kong from the University of California, Berkeley, who is a co-creator of the app. Since launching in February, it has detected more than 200 seismic events across the world using data captured by 200,000 people who have downloaded the Android app.

The comments in Google Play are all over the map, so I don’t really get any sense about its utility on the ground, and my phone is too old to run it.

As a software engineer, I wonder if they’ve structured this so that other data can be collected as well, much like the BOINC project, which is used for distributed network computing for many applications, the first of which was SETI@Home, which I’ve been running since before BOINC came out, roughly April of 1999.

[UPDATE] While looking through the MyShake site I noticed it listed a 7.7 earthquake off the Chilean coast, which I had not heard about.

But here’s an independent report from CNN:

A magnitude 7.7 earthquake occurred off the coast of southern Chile Sunday, 40 km (about 25 miles) southwest of Puerto Quellon, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

The Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued a tsunami threat message for parts of the Pacific Ocean close to the earthquake. Tsunami waves 1-3 meters above tide level are possible on parts of the Chilean coast, according to the center.

The Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service of the Chilean Navy issued a tsunami alert for the region of Los Lagos.

Meanwhile, Chile’s Ministry of the Interior and Public Security has asked people to leave the beach areas of the regions of Bio Bio, La Araucania, Los Rios and Aysen near the quake zone.

Does the harmonica blow for you?
Nyah.

This is a movie about dreams.

It’s a movie about the dream of building a railroad so that a man who’s seen the Atlantic Ocean can see the Pacific Ocean.

It’s a movie about the dream of building and owning a railroad station house.

It’s a movie about the dream of marriage.

It’s a movie about the dream of killing a man.

It’s Once Upon A Time in the West (1968). I’m not a Western fan, but I’ve seen a few, and this is an epic. It’s about the intersection of many dreams and how that intersection affects their pursuers. It’s the quintessential good guy, Henry Fonda, shooting a little boy at point blank range, deliberately and with pleasure.

The first time you see it, maybe even the second and third times, it’s about trying to understand the actions. Why does Charles Bronson play a harmonica? What is Jason Robard’s Cheyenne doing, anyways? Is Fonda just a sadist?

After that, you watch this for the pleasure of Sergio Leone’s decisions. His leisurely examination of the faces of his characters, up close and personal, from the pitted faces of Bronson and Robard to the casual perfection of Claudia Cardinale. His use of sound, both in the haunting melodies and especially the attunement of his characters to the sonic profile of their surroundings – an entire family freezing when the locusts abruptly go silent signals this will be a movie as much about sound as it is about visuals.

And his script is in tune with the rest of movie’s components, doling out critical information in a most stingy fashion, even as it floods you with visceralities. All of the major characters, and many of the minor characters, are fully realized men & women who’ve seen life and don’t talk about it but in the most thoughtful of phrases. And Leone doesn’t hesitate to linger, even in the violent parts of the movie, over the details, letting you view the eyes of characters, whether they’re drinking a whiskey, or meeting their fate.

This is a long movie, with running time listed at around 2 and a half hours, depending on which version you’re watching.

And you won’t really mind.

Highly recommended.

A reader remarks on the Israeli settlements:

Ugh. I hate what Israel is becoming. Right wing religious fanatics controlling what is supposed to be a secular Jewish state. Bibi is an ass. The settlements are not ok. The RW of the GOP is all het up to “protect” Israel and provide weapons and excuse all manner of ill behavior — but it is NOT because they “love” Isreal at all. It is because Israel and Jews are required for their nutty end times scenarios. I think Israel should stop participating in that. And IMO this makes me a GOOD Zionist, because I understand that Israel has a responsibility in the world community, has to abide by the general standards of civilized people, and needs to participate in world organizations. Bibi is now threatening to stop paying UN dues, to possibly leave the UN. Great. And become North Korea? I’m sure that will work out well.

Yes. And the funny thing is these attempts to manipulate the world to conform to end-times predictions are terribly offensive tot he very concept of God. If there is a God and he’s ordained the world will end in a specific way on a specific time, it doesn’t matter if you try to encourage it or not. It will happen.

The truly responsible thing to do is to run the world as if there’s no God. Then if, against all odds, God pops up and torches the world, it doesn’t matter as it’s God. And if God doesn’t show up, the world’s not ruined.

But logic is rarely the strong suit of the religious fanatic. As Heinlein noted, it’s the guy who’s best at praying, not the woman who’s most rational.

Speaking of the retraction of scientific papers, Neuroskeptic is pondering the question of peer review:

Is it the job of peer reviewers to detect scientific fraud?

I’ve been pondering this question for a while but lately my interest was sparked by the case of a retracted cancer biology paper in the high-profile journal Nature Cell Biology. Written by Taiwanese researchers Shih-Ting Cha et al., the article was published on the 15th August and retracted just three months later, after anonymous posters on PubPeer noticed several anomalies in the results.

For instance, there was image duplication: the paper contained identical images that were meant to be of different mice [image omitted].

It seems to me that a publisher should make every effort to validate the papers it publishes, not as a matter of honor or good taste, but as a matter of survival. Like other institutions, publishers are subject to evolutionary pressures, and in this case we’re talking about putting a premium on truth and reality. A publisher that gains a reputation for shoddy, fallacious papers within the community of scientists will lose both readers and quality content – a vicious vortex.

[I’ll now pause and consider the evolutionary pressures on religious publishers.]

I think scientific publishers should be taking a systematic approach to the problem, and that should include the use of our quasi-artificial intelligence systems to investigate possible image duplication, not only within papers, but stolen from other papers as well, as well as attempting to do the tedious validation of statistical analysis, if only in the mathematics – actually judging the validity of any particular approach may be beyond an AI system. (Or maybe it’s easy. I do not keep up with AI advances.)

Certainly the role of a peer reviewer remains important in judging the importance and quality of a paper overall. But we do need to remember that, after all this effort, a paper can still be wrong or irrelevant. Something both Neuroskeptic and his correspondents either ignored or forgot about is the role that study replication plays in the process of producing good science. A single experiment is rarely adequate; it’s more like a single torch on the path. Replication is as important, if not more so, as peer review.

Or, as engineers working on far more critical systems than I do, think about it, it’s all about redundancy.

exsolve:

Geology
1 (of a mineral) separate out from solid solution in a rock:
‘the homogeneous alloys exsolved into metallic phases’

1.1 usually as adjective exsolved[with object] Form (a mineral) by the process of exsolution:
‘coarsely exsolved ilmenites’

[Oxford Dictionaries]

From a response on the Neuroskeptic blog:

Example: Disposable injection-molded plasticware is high volume, low cost. Bang ’em out! That requires a trace of mold release that exsolves during molding so the part can be easily ejected, typically a biologically inert cheap fatty acid amide like oleiamide. While that may be inert orally, a trace in your cerebrospinal fluid will put you to sleep in a snap – the natural ligand.

A few pics of the Christmas tree…

And the Christmas poinsetta.

In Israel the power of social networks is being used to kill off the practice of soft punishments for men in power. Mazal Mualem on AL Monitor has the story:

The first whistleblower, the woman who became the symbol of the Facebook fight against sex crimes, was Israeli soldier May Fatal. Fatal submitted an official complaint that the commander of the Givati Brigade in which she served sexually harassed her and forced her to engage in indecent acts. She chose to reveal her identity on Facebook on April 27, 2015, after the details of a plea bargain reached between the military advocate general and the commander, Liran Hajbi, were reported in the media.

Fatal’s post went viral, prompting extensive protests across the internet. A veritable army of young women and mothers launched a campaign against the deal, and finally succeeded influencing the outcome of the affair. Hajbi was eventually not only punished, but also demoted and dishonorably discharged.

Another trailblazer in November that same year was religious journalist Rachel Rotner, who came out against one of the rising stars of the religious Zionist HaBayit HaYehudi, again through the medium of Facebook. She posted that the chairman of the party’s parliamentary faction, Knesset member Yinon Magal, sexually harassed her at his sendoff party when he left Walla! News. Before his election to the Knesset, Magal was the senior editor of the site, which meant that he was Rotner’s editor too.

Party leader Naftali Bennett summoned Magal for a talk that same day, and within a week, Magal resigned from the Knesset. It all happened without the involvement of law enforcement. Magal, who is also an internet personality, realized that in an age in which women’s struggles reverberate so extensively, he would have a hard time functioning as a public figure, especially in a religious party.

The positive aspects are undeniable, but it is a form of mob justice – so how are false accusations handled by the mob? So far, it appears that the social networks are activated after a guilty plea or verdict is returned, and the punishment is thought to be inappropriate – most of the time. The Magal case may not fit that description, as law enforcement was never involved.

It also provokes questions of whether we see the same problems and solutions in the United States? We’ve certainly seen some attempts, notably concerning judges who hand down lenient sentences for rapists. Whether these have been effective is a question for which I’ve seen no answers. And the United States is, at two magnitudes larger than Israel in terms of population, a less coherent society.

Cloverfield (2008) is a movie shot entirely from the viewpoint of hapless, powerless civilians in the midst of a kaiju attack. Over the eternity of a single night, we see how the attack begins, endures, and ends as the civilians strive to survive, take care of each other, and even achieve wondrous accomplishments, while a city rains down its pieces around their ears. Their hand-held camera captures intriguing bits and pieces, and, in the end, we’re left with our questions, foremost being What would I have done?

All aspects of this movie are good – special effects, acting, story, characters – although you may not appreciate the latter all that much.

If you enjoy us against the monster movies, then this is a must-see. If you don’t, it’s still an interesting show, unless you like your movies to have an obvious moral, in which case you may not think much of this movie.

And pay attention during the last scene.

… but will we be zagging in a couple of weeks? I freely grant my knowledge base when it comes to Israel and the Middle East is quite limited, but I’ve felt for some time that the encroachment of Jewish settlements on Palestinian land is a form of illegal annexation. I neither celebrate nor condemn the news today of the Obama Administration’s reaction to a UN resolution, from CNN:

The United States on Friday allowed a UN Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlement construction to be adopted, defying extraordinary pressure from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in alliance with President-elect Donald Trump.

The Security Council approved the resolution with 14 votes, with the US abstaining. There was applause in the chamber following the vote, which represented perhaps the final bitter chapter in the years of antagonism between President Barack Obama’s administration and Netanyahu’s government.

In an intense flurry of diplomacy that unfolded in the two days before the vote, a senior Israeli official had accused the United States of abandoning the Jewish state with its refusal to block the resolution with a veto.

I’ll watch with great interest. As the Israeli government has swung farther and farther to an aggressive and religious right which believes they have a divine right to the land, they also seem to believe they deserve unconditional protection from the United States. Given that much of the population of Israel derives from the remnants of the European Jewry exterminated by the evil of the Nazis, acting as a protector is certainly in character for a United States that has, at least in part, its own dreams of Godliness – silly as they are¹.

However, that transfers a certain moral responsibility to ourselves, and regardless of one’s religious aspirations, reality is that acting as if you’re the chosen of God can get you smacked down. The importance of international law cannot be over-stressed when the alternative is a bloody war.

¹In reality, we’re neither better nor worse than most countries, and those who have suffered at our hands have certainly a right to paint our hands red with blood – while keeping in mind that the reverse also holds true.

Humanity is a murderous species, truth be told.

The conservative experiment in Kansas has cost the GOP 13 state legislative seats, The New York Times reports:

Brett Parker, an elementary school teacher and rookie politician, was a Democrat running against a Republican incumbent in a Republican state that the Republican presidential candidate, Donald J. Trump, clinched by 20 percentage points.

In spite of all that, Mr. Parker will be sworn into the Kansas House of Representatives next month, one of 13 legislative seats the Democrats picked up here.

In this election year, voters across Kansas leaned firmly to the right at the federal level, but showed far more nuance when it came to their state. In parts of Kansas, they punished conservative legislators linked to Gov. Sam Brownback’s tax-cutting doctrine, instead gravitating toward moderate Republicans and Democrats like Mr. Parker who blame the governor and his legislative allies for imperiling the state’s finances and putting public schools at risk.

So not only were 13 seats were lost, more, not enumerated, went to moderate GOPers – who, given the methods of today’s GOP, could be tomorrow’s DFLers. Per usual, the conservatives will blame outside forces:

Here, conservatives attribute much of the strain to downturns in the agriculture and energy industries, both central elements in the Kansas economy. Others question whether the cuts and deficits are symptomatic of a political swing that went too far to the right.

“The pendulum finally snapped,” said Brian Brown, a Republican who lives in Mr. Todd’s House district, but who spurned his own party and volunteered for Mr. Parker’s campaign.

But as noted in a previous post to this thread, that excuse is dubious. At some point, it’s necessary for mature adults to admit that reality has up and slapped you in the face. I know all about the conservative kant about lower taxes, governments never create jobs. etc. – I read it for years in REASON Magazine. At some point, you have to take a step back and evaluate your beliefs in relation to the facts on the ground. In contrast, this post (which is mostly just a pointer to this Daily Kos post) remarks upon the prosperity of Minnesota, which has not pursued a conservative economic agenda. It suggests that a strong infrastructure and well-educated citizens matter more than lower taxes – both problems in Kansas.

Complicating matters, the Kansas Supreme Court is expected to rule soon on a lawsuit challenging the adequacy of state funding for public schools. The Supreme Court justices, many of whom conservatives tried unsuccessfully to oust in last month’s election, could order hundreds of millions of dollars in additional education spending.

The DFL remains the minority party for votes along party lines. The moderate GOPers have a chance to distinguish themselves through leadership by allying themselves with the DFL on key issues – we’ll see how ambitious they may be, or if the RINO throwers intimidate them into line.

Or maybe the RINO-throwers will be asked to leave the party.

As I perused Steve Benen’s MaddowBlog piece on Sean Spicer’s appointment as White House Press Secretary, I began to speculate on Mr. Spicer’s ability to understand what he’s in for – and if he doesn’t understand, then if he’ll ever figure it out. First, just one of Steve’s observations on Mr. Spicer’s … loose connection to reality:

More recently, after Trump was caught lying about voter fraud in this year’s presidential election, Spicer said, “There was a Washington Post story not too along ago that showed the number [of fraudulent votes cast] could be as high as 14 percent.” The Post hadn’t actually published any such piece; Spicer was completely wrong.

With Mr. Spicer’s accession to one of the highest profile posts in the world will come one of the highest levels of fact-checking anyone experiences. Does he understand that he’s moving from a political sphere where the truth is only valued in relation to its conformance to ideology and its usefulness in moving tribal members to a public sphere in which facts matter? Does he understand that attempting to formulate public policy based on lies will have negative consequences – if not for you, then for someone else?

And when he comes down for the last time from the mountain and discovers that people, outside of his own little political sphere, just don’t care about his opinions, and consider him one of the worst occupants of his position, will he be able to understand why?

Or is he just too much of an ideologue? I suspect so; given how often he’s wrong, I do not think he loves truth.

With apologies to The Simpsons TV show for using the enchanting word embiggen.

Jason Goldman, @WhiteHouse Chief Digital Officer, comments on the digital institution We The People, the site used to create and maintain petitions to the White House.

A half million petitions. Over 40 million signatures. Hundreds of responses. We the People has been a remarkable experiment in a new kind of democracy: transparent, accessible, and responsive. A way for anybody, from anywhere, to send a message directly to the White House — and, if they collected enough signatures, to receive a direct response. When we launched in 2011, we were excited to bring a new level of transparency and access to the Administration, but we weren’t sure what would happen.

I’m very proud of the work that was started by the Office of Digital Strategy years before I joined — and where we’ve taken We the People since.

Half a million petitions – I had no idea. Mine was one of them – a failure, but a good failure. And the future?

While we’ve taken every step possible to make it easy for future administrations to carry on this tradition, it’s ultimately up to the incoming team.

You could see this as part of the political wars – an attempt to open communications with those currently living in their Fox News echo chamber. I’ve seen nothing on how well it worked.

This quote may turn out to be a little haunting:

“Citizens should be engaged and empowered. That those in power should serve the people, not themselves.” — President Obama, video message to the Open Government Partnership Global Summit, December 12, 2016

President Obama’s always had a clear vision of what government should be, and it’s a good one. I doubt Trump shares it. It would be a matter of morbid fascination to introduce the mythical truth drug into President-elect Trump and then ask him his opinion of the purpose of government.

From a friend….

Mark Pulliam of American Greatness, a Constitutional Originalist of finicky opinion, has some definite thoughts on who the Illegimate Justice should be:

As the volume, scope, and burden of federal regulations—laws enacted by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats—continue to grow, critics have begun to question the constitutional foundation of the administrative state. Noted constitutional litigator Chuck Cooper and Columbia law professor Philip Hamburger (who wrote a 2014 book called Is Administrative Law Unlawful?) have made a powerful case that administrative agencies, as currently constituted, violate the constitutional separation of powers, echoing arguments that Justice Clarence Thomas has made in recent opinions. Trump should appoint justices in the mold of Thomas, who are willing boldly to reconsider prior SCOTUS decisions that have mistakenly granted the federal government powers in excess of its constitutional limits.

Not all of the candidates on Trump’s short list fit the bill. Some lean toward the Wilkinson model of excessive deference, and others lean toward the libertarian model of insufficient deference. For example, 11th Circuit judge William Pryor, widely regarded as a front-runner, is on record as describing New Deal commerce clause precedents as “defensible.” Granted, federal court of appeal judges are not expected to critique Supreme Court precedents, so the significance of this comment is limited. More troubling is Pryor’s concurrence in a decision that upheld the exercise of federal jurisdiction over an assortment of stray cats belonging to the Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, on the ground that the cats “substantially affect interstate commerce.”

In contrast, 10th Circuit judge Neil Gorsuch has thoughtfully questioned Chevron deference and even suggested that Chevron is “no less than a judge-made doctrine for the abdication of the judicial duty.” I haven’t done enough analysis to endorse (or oppose) any particular candidates, although in my opinion the list could profitably be expanded to include some additional prospects, such as D.C. Circuit judge Brett Kavanaugh and Senator Ted Cruz. Bottom line: President Trump faces a momentous decision. Let’s hope he chooses wisely.

On the one hand, you have to have some sympathy for Mark concerning an opinion in which a pack of stray cats are considered to affect interstate commerce. On the other hand, it all dries up when he mentions Senator Cruz as a good pick.

And maybe it’s out there.

Wait, there’s more! Matt Novak on Gizmodo has collected more pictures from this Russian fisherman’s Twitter feed – see here.

So looking at these – ya gotta wonder if there’s a conspiracy theory group out there dedicated to believing the deep-sea scientists are just making these up in order to get more funding – or notoriety! I mean, goodness. This one looks like something an ambitious 5 year old might make. (Decompression may have been unkind to this guy.)

Hope he’s not swimming through my dreams tonight.

The Seattle Times notes that our privacy dike appears to be a little holey:

A federal board responsible for protecting Americans against abuses by spy agencies is in disarray just weeks before President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

The five-member Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board will have only two remaining members as of Jan. 7 — and zero Democrats even though it is required to operate as an independent, bipartisan agency. The vacancies mean it will lack the minimum three members required to conduct business and can work only on ongoing projects. Trump would have to nominate new members, who would have to be confirmed by the Senate.

The board was revitalized after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden’s disclosures on the scope of U.S. spying in 2013. It notably concluded that the NSA’s phone surveillance program was illegal.

Since then, it has been crucial in ensuring members of Congress and the public have a window into the highly secretive and classified world of intelligence agencies. But it’s unclear if Trump will support robust intelligence oversight. During his campaign, Trump appeared to support strengthened intelligence overall and surveillance of mosques, but he’s more recently expressed distrust of intelligence agencies. The Trump transition team didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Lovely. I bet they didn’t even know it existed. But then, neither did I.

Paul Rosenzweig doesn’t think Trump cares, either:

Anyone who thinks that filling the PCLOB’s 3 or 4 open slots will be an early priority of the incoming Trump Administration will also be interested in the bridge I have available for sale in Brooklyn. [Though, to be fair, filling the board was unlikely to be a high-priority for the Clinton Administration either.] Best guess: The board is unable to function for all of 2017 if not longer — and that can’t be a good thing for governance.