Straining The Rice

Do you eat rice? Are you concerned about arsenic in rice? The BBC has an article of interest on how to cook rice to reduce the arsenic level:

Source: BBC

  1. Soak your rice overnight – this opens up the grain and allows the arsenic to escape
  2. Drain the rice and rinse thoroughly with fresh water
  3. For every part rice add five parts water and cook until the rice is tender – do not allow it to boil dry.
  4. Drain the rice and rinse again with hot water to get rid of the last of the cooking water.
  5. Serve your reduced-arsenic rice – it’s as simple as that!

In 2011, the Oman Medical Journal discussed the situation in Bangladesh and a quick summary of arsenic’s effects:

In Bangladesh, arsenic contamination in groundwater was first detected in the year 1993. According to the data provided by UNICEF in 2008, there are approximately 8.6 million tube-wells in Bangladesh. Of these, 4.75 million tube wells (55%) have been tested for arsenic among which 3.3 million (39%) were marked green indicating that the ground water is safe; while 1.4 million (16%) were marked red indicating that they are unsafe to use as sources of drinking water due to the high arsenic level, (Fig. 1). Recent findings show that about 20 million people in Bangladesh are using tube-wells contaminated with arsenic over the permissible level (>50 ppb).

Chronic arsenic exposure is associated with many human health conditions, including skin lesions and cancers of the liver, lung, bladder and skin. It is also associated with many non-cancer health conditions, such as adverse reproductive outcomes, neurological disorders and impaired cognitive development in children. Cardiovascular effects in human drinking arsenic-contaminated water include black foot disease, atherosclerosis, cerebrovascular diseases and ischemic heart disease. Moreover, maternal arsenic exposure via drinking water is associated with fetal loss, small size at birth, infant morbidity and mortality.

If your consumption of rice is spotty, I should think there’s nothing to worry about – but if you relish a good rice, then the cooking suggestion is probably worth your time.

The Iran Deal Roundup, Ctd

The liberals of America are angry at President Trump – and so are the conservatives of Iran, albeit for different reasons. The guy just can’t catch a break. What’s the problem with the Iranians? Why, it’s that damn JCPOA, aka the Iran Nuclear deal that President Trump promised to rip up. Rohollah Faghihi reports on AL Monitor:

During the US presidential election, [Hossein] Shariatmadari described Trump’s promise to tear up the deal as “the wisest decision.” He said, “The JCPOA is a golden document for the United States but is considered nothing except humiliation and a loss for Iran.”

Shariatmadari, who is the chief editor of hard-line Kayhan newspaper, told Fars News Feb. 7, “Trump was unaware during his presidential campaign what a big and windfall score the JCPOA has provided for the United States. That is why he had promised to tear up the JCPOA.”

He added, “Unfortunately, Trump has now come to his senses and has realized that his ex-pals [in the White House] swindled Iran. Therefore, not only is he unwilling to tear up the JCPOA, but he also announced that he will support [the JCPOA] completely.”

Since the signing of the JCPOA in 2015, the hard-liners have been attacking the nuclear deal in order to disvalue it in the eyes of ordinary people in Iran, so that in the presidential election in May the moderates and Reformists would not be able to brag about the JCPOA as an achievement.

I wonder how much the Iranian hard line conservatives are opposed to the deal out of fear – the fear that, if the deal is successful in reviving the economy and returning Iran to the world community, the conservatives will be discredited, perhaps for more than a generation. This would be analogous to the GOP fear of the ACA, in that it would solidify Democratic control of Congress for many years as people perceive how it improves their lives.

Or could this be Iranian subtlety? Something to think about. Although the Iranian hardliners have been consistent in their hatred of the JCPOA.

Politics, politics, politics, while lives swing in the balance…

Word of the Day

Pedicle:

Each antler grows from an attachment point on the skull called a pedicle. While an antler is growing, it is covered with highly vascular skin called velvet, which supplies oxygen and nutrients to the growing bone. [Wikipedia article on Antlers]

Seen on the Rivermen Rod & Gun blog at the very bottom of this page:

This deer had some very uncomfortable days until he was harvested by this hunter.  It is obvious that there was a fight during the rut and this deer ended up with an extra antler (embedded below the eye).  You can see that the antler from the attacking deer was broke off below the base of the antler as there is still blood on the pedicel [sic].  That takes a tremendous amount of pressure.

Rafsanjani In The Rear View Mirror, Ctd

When Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani of Iran passed away recently, it was the loss of another of the central revolutionaries responsible for the modern Islamic Republic of Iran. And it’s also precipitated another struggle between the Conservatives and the Reformists, as Arash Karami reports in AL Monitor:

The reframing by conservatives undoubtedly is intentional. It is an effort to bring Rafsanjani’s legacy into the fold, to once again rebrand him as a pillar of the state, and most importantly, one in the vision of Iran’s conservatives. Rather than the untouchable statesmen who pushed the envelope on sensitive political topics, conservatives will rebrand him as a revolutionary who got in line behind the supreme leader. This reframing will rob Reformists of the opportunity of using Rafsanjani’s numerous public statements to push their political agendas. It will also seek to demand that Reformists and moderates get in line behind both Khamenei and the conservatives who claim to speak on the supreme leader’s behalf. Reformist and moderate media, who often are at the mercy of conservative forces in the security establishment and the judiciary, will have a difficult time pushing back against this narrative. Rather than using Rafsanjani’s political legacy to their advantage, they are likely to waste considerable resources on the defensive, pushing back against the legacy presented by conservatives.

When one has too much reverence for the past, then that’s where the struggle will take place. Rather than a commitment to the truth, to studying his writings and his actions, those who are committed to ideological positions will try to do whatever is necessary to take a hero and turn him into something that he may not have been. Is this a problem?

Well, yes. The disregard for the truth, while perhaps relatively harmless in this particular instance, can result in serious mistakes when dealing with realities. An extreme example might be an ideological position regarding how nuclear reactions work – an ideological disconnect with reality could lead to disaster for the person handling the nuclear material.

And it may not be entirely harmless in this case. If the Conservatives overplay their hand, they risk losing the trust of the general populace. Now, perhaps in Iran this does not matter – perhaps the instinct to tribalism is so strong that it doesn’t matter a great deal, although I have to think that it does, given how the Iranian Presidency has swung between Conservatives and Reformists over the decades. And if it does matter, and the Conservatives are not exceedingly tidy in how they attempt to retell Rafsanjani’s story, it could lead the Iranian citizen to question their trustworthiness.

Religious rectitude may be enough for some of a naive disposition, but I doubt that many Iranians are naive.

It Worked, But Why Again?

Stem cells continue to show promise in treating certain neurological conditions such as strokes, but it appears it isn’t because the stem cells are replacing the damaged cells, as predicted. In NewScientist (21 January 2017, paywall) Jack Price has a report:

Rats injected with stem cells following a stroke recovered sensation and movement to a degree rarely seen before. On closer inspection, though, there was a surprise. The reason it worked wasn’t because dead and dying cells had been replaced with shiny new ones, although this did happen to some extent. Even when stem cells remained in their immature state and didn’t differentiate at all, they still contributed to recovery. In many cases, the implanted cells didn’t even survive for more than a few weeks, but still the animals showed significant recovery.

What seems to be happening is that stem cells release growth factors and other chemicals that stimulate the brain to heal itself, potentially giving compromised circuits the ability to regroup and reorganise. Some of these chemicals may also boost the immune system, reducing inflammation and helping to stimulate blood vessel growth – all crucial if a newly mended bit of brain is going to thrive. In fact it could even be that this plays a more important part in brain fixing than cell replacement.

Can the growth factors be produced without the stem cells? Is it possible to apply them to spinal cord injuries and other nerve damage? It’s rather like reprogramming the cells to return to an earlier phase of life. If it is, then it may be a very productive avenue for healing catastrophic injuries.

Who Was That Guy?

As Americans, we tend to carry around characterizations of Presidents in our heads, with perhaps the brightest being JFK’s Camelot. I can’t put a real finger on LBJ’s, although perhaps Vietnam vets might supply a fine epithet; Nixon was a common crook; Ford maybe a bulldog, but because of his abbreviated term, it’s faint. Carter, his impotence on Iran, although ameliorated by post-Presidency performance; Reagan’s really a bit of a tug of war between conservatives who remember the shining city on a hill and the fall of Communism, and liberals who remember his negligence when it came to HIV research. Bush I engaged in Iraq War I, and won it, while Clinton, sadly, is remembered for his blow job and subsequent impeachment, which no doubt gave momentum to the radicalization of the GOP. Bush II is remembered for discredited policies, controversy over torture, and simply general failure. Obama is too soon gone from the job, but I suspect, once the partisan furor dies down and the far-right returns to discredit, he’ll be seen as thoughtful and mostly effective, although, like any President, he’ll have his failures – I suspect historians will point out his impotence when it came to North Korea, but the Iran deal will be seen as effective if it’s left alone.

Which all leads up to Trump. While some may see it as premature to begin exploring the post-Trump period – assuming we even get there in a condition we can recognize as normal – a couple of strong themes stand out. Some folks will point at Bannon and the allied host of appointees and advisors who appear to be mostly incompetent, mostly ideologically driven creatures who are about to run smack-dab into reality. Others will point at the constant lies which Trump and his team indulge in; speaking as an American independent who is not viewing them through the cloudy partisan lens, but through the skeptical lens of the independent, I’ll evaluate on my own terms lens, it’s truly discouraging to see the leader of one of the major political parties so married to version of reality so tilted towards making himself magnificent. Steve Benen brought this into full focus for me today. After noting that once again Trump has announced our crime rate is at a 45 year high, when it’s actually at a 50 year low, Steve says:

We were surprised because it’s not true. In terms of the evidence, Trump has this exactly backwards. The president who boasted the other day about his skills as a leader who calls his own shots, “largely based on an accumulation of data,” seems incapable of understanding basic and straightforward crime figures.

Source: PolitiFact

Kellyanne Conway, asked to explain her boss’ repeated lies on the matter, said yesterday, “I don’t know who gave him that data.” …

All joking aside, the broader point here goes beyond the president’s incessant lying about the U.S. murder rate. The larger significance has to do with why he’s so fond of this specific falsehood.

For Trump, the potency of fear has become more than a campaign tool; it’s now a governing mechanism. Note, for example, that the day before he lied about the murder rate, the president also lied about a media conspiracy to hide information from the public about terrorist attacks.

The White House has a series of goals, and Trump World has apparently concluded that demagoguery is the way to reach those goals.

NBC News’ First Read team had a good piece along these lines yesterday: “[I]f you take the White House at its word, what it wants is wall-to-wall coverage for every knife attack and every wounding. Why do they want that? What goal does that accomplish? So the White House wants the public to feel more terrorized? To what end?”

The answer, evidently, is the implementation of Trump’s priorities. He wants a Muslim ban, so we must be afraid at all times of terrorism. He wants a border wall, so he urges us to fear illegal immigration. He wants expanded new police powers, so he insists we believe his interpretation of crime data, even if it’s the opposite of the truth.

But I’m not going to concur with either of these views, because they really only speak to facts; Americans respond much better to a good story. I think, at the end of his term, whether it’s four years from now, or four months, a majority of the citizens are going to look back and wonder, Why did any of us trust him?

Trump will be the President who taught US to, as Reagan said, trust but verify. Liberal or conservative, we now have the tools to get the facts to check the President’s assertions, which they always use to justify policies, good and ill. We let him hoodwink a significant number of us, partly for various reasons ranging from he promises what I need (without a plan) to apparently he heralds the end of the world, hurrah! (immature drama queens doomed to disappointment, just like the last batch) to simply he says what I want to hear about the world (again, an immature attitude – the world is what it is and you should learn to deal with it and not listen to only those sources that say it’s different – I’m a little crabby today).

Many of us – in fact, a majority of the voters – appear to have this figured out, but I fear we’ll have to go through a major lesson plan to drive the point home for a lot of folks who haven’t been paying attention and swallow news uncritically.

At the end of the day, is has to be trust but verify. Ironically, a good Russian proverb. Sigh.

Typo of the Day

The Rivermen Rod & Gun blog has a wonderful typo.

THIS BLOG claims no credit for any images posted on this site unless otherwise noted. Images on this blog are copyright to its respectful owners. If there is an image appearing on this blog that belongs to you and do not wish for it appear on this site, please E-mail with a link to said image and it will be promptly removed.

It’s respective – but I love the typo.

Random Motion Machine, Ctd

A reader comments on communicating with the President:

This: “It is altogether likely that the president himself has not finished consolidating his policies…” Leads me to think this: It will never happen, if it remains in DT’s hands. He has no coherent Israel policy, or international policy, or policy of any kind. It’s all knee-jerk what makes me look good and feel good at this moment. Of course, such things may be delegated, given up or forcibly taken by others at some point.

It makes me wonder if he fashions policy in the same way it’s rumored he selects Cabinet nominees – do they look the part? Does the policy look like a good policy? Never mind the implications, of course. We can see that in the plan to move the American embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, and damn the repercussions.

Sigh. It’s actually quite wearisome to talk about this President; and the news that the DeVos has been approved as Secretary of the Department of Education, when she’s clearly unprepared, is a depressing commentary on the state of the GOP senators. I did try to find a way to spin that vote, since two GOP senators finally showed some gumption – could I suggest these are future leaders of the GOP?

I couldn’t get my heart into it. In all likelihood, the two Senators, Murkowski of Alaska and Collins of Maine, will now be hounded out of the GOP. If the attack dogs are hasty, they’ll chase them out before the end of their terms (The Daily Signal reports Murkowsi has a full 6 year term ahead of her, while Collins still has 4 years left), and we’ll end up with an evenly split Senate. That’ll be interesting to check on.

Nested Lakes, Ctd

Remember the brine lake within the Gulf of Mexico? There’s another one in the Mediterranean Sea, called the L’Atalante basin – so deeply briny and lacking in oxygen that nothing can live there.

Until, as NewScientist‘s Colin Barras (21 January 2017, paywall) reports, someone took a sample and found life.

It was a shock, then, when biologist Roberto Danovaro scooped up samples from the bottom of this briny pool and found a thriving community of microscopic animals living there. The discovery went against everything we thought we knew about animal life and its reliance on oxygen.

It’s so shocking that some biologists think an error was made during the sampling process. But, interestingly enough, this discovery – once confirmed – ties in with observations going back to the origin of life, when oxygen was a rare molecule indeed.

… in 2014, Daniel Mills and Donald Canfield at the University of Southern Denmark in Odense set about investigating how much oxygen real primitive animals need. They began by collecting living breadcrumb sponges from well-oxygenated water off the Danish coast, a relevant test case because sponges are one of the earliest animals to have evolved. Then the researchers carted them back to their lab and did their best to suffocate them.

Over several days they reduced their oxygen supply, first to 70 per cent of current atmospheric levels, then 50 per cent, then eventually to 5 per cent. Even then, the sponges clung to life, with one even seeming to grow slightly (PNAS, vol 111, p 4168). It suggested that [Bruce] Runnegar’s calculations [indicating ancient worms needed very little oxygen] pointed the right way: simple animals could have coped with ancient oxygen levels.

This obviously has the potential to change our understanding of life’s history from day one, as well as biological processes today – and both might have practical consequences.

Another Despicable Missive

As long time readers know, I occasionally like to examine the more loathesome emails that appear in my mail, not only to vent my disgust at these subtle attempts to create hatred within the hearts of those vulnerable to such – that is, to divide our great nation along religious lines, much to our grief – but also to remind my readers that some of these emails that seem to cite the obvious are misleading and require a closer reading.

So what’s our specimen of the day? I think in this case we’ll take it apart bit by bit. Information about the Marines comes from Wikipedia, which I include out of respect for the Marines. Additionally, what appears to be the same letter appears on this web site, which appears to be quite the contradictory mess.

Some interesting pieces of forgotten U.S. History

When Thomas Jefferson saw there was no negotiating with Muslims, he formed what is the now the Marines (sea going soldiers). These Marines were attached to U. S. Merchant vessels.

Actually, the first version of the Marines were created and served during the Revolutionary War, officially 1775, and were known as the Continental Marines. After the war they disbanded, but reformed in 1798 in response not to Muslim aggression, but the Quasi-War with France. With this knowledge, we begin to realize that the author of this missive respects neither Muslims nor Marines – nor the reader.

When the Muslims attacked U.S. merchant vessels, they were repulsed by armed soldiers, but there is more.

The Marines followed the Muslims back to their villages and killed every man, woman, and child in the village. It didn’t take long for the Muslims to leave U.S. Merchant vessels alone. English and French merchant vessels started running up our flag when entering the Mediterranean to secure safe travel.

This is quite the war crime, if true. I did some poking around and did not find either verification nor refutation – that is, the question is never even raised. This may be because of the lack of context, or lack of diligence on my part. I should like to think U.S. Marines would not engage in barbarism, but our history with the American Indians tribes makes this at least believable.

But the real point here isn’t historical accuracy, but preparation of the reader to descend into the hell of radicalism. Islamic radicalism? No.

Our own.

By suggesting our elite troops destroyed, with the approval of President Thomas Jefferson, entire villages, killing women and children to their last member, this subliminally prepares us to accept and approve barbarous war crimes. To sink to a level unacceptable to our parents and our grandparents. Because there’s an acceptable precedent, Muslim civilians are civilians no longer, and an accepted rule of war – sparing civilians – goes out the window to satisfy the blood-hunger of the author of this missive.

At the height of the 18th century, Muslim pirates (the “Barbary Pirates”) were the terror of the Mediterranean and a large area of the North Atlantic. They attacked every ship in sight and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. Those taken hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart-breaking letters home, begging their government and family members to pay whatever their Mohammedan captors demanded.

Not entirely true. Muslim slavery in this case, as noted here, permitted slaves to accumulate wealth and marry, and some captured slaves climbed the social hierarchy until they could actually advise the top leaders. However, it’s also true that most of the captives were miserable.

These extortionists of the high seas represented the North African Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers –collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast – and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American Republic.

Before the Revolutionary War, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of Great Britain. When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the ships of the United States were protected by France. However, once the war was won, America had to protect its own fleets.

Thus, the birth of the U.S. Navy. Beginning in 1784, 17 years before he would become president, Thomas Jefferson became America’s Minister to France. That same year, the U.S. Congress sought to appease its Muslim adversaries by following in the footsteps of European nations who paid bribes to the Barbary States rather than engaging them in war. In July of 1785, Algerian pirates captured American ships, and the Dye of Algiers demanded an unheard-of ransom of $60,000. It was a plain and simple case of extortion, and Thomas Jefferson was vehemently opposed to any further payments. Instead, he proposed to Congress the formation of a coalition of allied nations who together could force the Islamic states into peace. A disinterested Congress decided to pay the ransom.

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Great Britain to ask by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American citizens, and why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.

The two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran that all nations who would not acknowledge their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussel man (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Despite this stunning admission of premeditated violence on non-Muslim nations, as well as the objections of many notable American leaders, including George Washington, who warned that caving in was both wrong and would only further embolden the enemy, for the following fifteen years the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to over 20 percent of the United States government annual revenues in 1800.

Stunning? How so? Europe had been involved in so many wars that you needed two scorecards to keep track. The rationales for these wars? Religion – generally Catholics vs Protestants. This statement serves to falsely highlight, for the reader unaware of history, the terrible evil of Muslims – that is, to demonize a people as being out of the ordinary evil, unlike the Europeans, who all did the same things, but under the guise of Christianity,

Jefferson was disgusted. Shortly after his being sworn in as the third President of the United States in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli sent him a note demanding the immediate payment of $225,000 plus $25,000 a year for every year forthcoming. That changed everything. Jefferson let the Pasha know, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with his demand. The Pasha responded by cutting down the flagpole at the American consulate and declared war on the United States. Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers immediately followed suit. Jefferson, until now, had been against America raising a naval force for anything beyond coastal defense, but, having watched his nation be cowed by Islamic thuggery for long enough, decided that it was finally time to meet force with force.

He dispatched a squadron of frigates to the Mediterranean and taught the Muslim nations of the Barbary Coast a lesson he hoped they would never forget. Congress authorized Jefferson to empower U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods of the Pasha of Tripoli and to “cause to be done all other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war would justify”. When Algiers and Tunis, who were both accustomed to American cowardice and acquiescence, saw the newly independent United States had both the will and the right to strike back, they quickly abandoned their allegiance to Tripoli. The war with Tripoli lasted for four more years and raged up again in 1815. The bravery of the U.S. Marine Corps in these wars led to the line”…to the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn, and they would forever be known as “leathernecks” for the leather collars of their uniforms, designed to prevent their heads from being cut off by the Muslim scimitars when boarding enemy ships.

Islam, and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of their prophet and their god, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply. America had a tradition of religious tolerance. In fact Jefferson, himself, had co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam was like no other religion the world had ever seen. A religion based on supremacy, whose holy book not only condoned but mandated violence against unbelievers, was unacceptable to him. His greatest fear was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even greater threat to the United States.

To say we had a history of religious tolerance is to stretch a square into a circle. We had, and still have, the First Amendment,  prohibiting the making of any law specific to a religion; culturally speaking, however, our tolerance was, at the time, more mythic than reality. We can see this in this example here (taken from this long, long post here), or in the treatment of atheists, Jews, or Catholics.

But this serves, once again, to highlight the unacceptability of the Muslim to the author of this screed. The fact of the matter is that Christianity has walked down the exact same path, declaring war on religions other than itself. Christians have burned libraries, such as those of the inhabitants of South America when the Spaniards arrived; engaged in the Crusades; the wars against the American Indian in contravention of United States treaties; and the previously mentioned wars on each other. All in the name of religion.

And, as an aside, Jefferson had little use for any religion. He was simply a realist about them.

This should concern every American. That Muslims have brought about Islamic women-only classes and swimming times at taxpayer-funded universities and public pools; Christians, Jews, and Hindus have been peremptory challenged from serving on juries where Muslim defendants are being judged; Piggy banks and Porky Pig tissue dispensers have been banned from workplaces because they offend Islamist sensibilities; ice cream has been discontinued at certain Burger King locations because the picture on the wrapper looks similar to the Arabic script for Allah; public schools are pulling pork from their menus; several American companies have placed the Muslim symbol on their products in the name of Allah; on and on and on and on.

The accusations comes thick and fast, and I have limited time. Let me just note that women-only colleges of a Christian nature also exist; that dietary restrictions also exist for those of the Jewish faith. I have seen a report on a request for a shariah-court to settle a matter; the request was tossed out on its ear, as it should have been. Simple vigilance in following our laws suffices to the problem of an aggressive religion seeking its limits; they need to be made lawfully clear. To be sure, we should keep in mind the supremacy of the secular state – anyone is welcome to live here given they acknowledge that supremacy, and in exchange it rules as lightly as possible with regard to religion. And if an immigrant can’t deal with that, they can leave.

That’s the deal.

In the end,  this is the lament of an author not resilient to change. We’ve seen this evil a dozen times, when the Italians came, the Irish came, the Germans came, the Polish – each wave brought strangers with strange customs. Shall we fight those who differ from us, just because a few who claim kinship to them exercise violence in support of their own lust for power – or even belief in theological extremism.

For such has been true of Christians, from Pope Alexander VI splitting the New World in half, to those who murder doctors who provide abortion services. From the children of Indigenous parents in North America and in Australia who were ripped from their parents in the name of Christianity, to the burning at the stake of both Protestants and Catholics, by their religious adversaries. Christianity has tried to rule supreme.

And proven a miserable failure.

If anyone wishes to point at the horror of 9/11 as something unique, I would reply this is merely the result of the superior technology of the day – tall, tall buildings that hold thousands, and vehicles which can hit them.

It’s death by a thousand cuts, or inch-by-inch. Sadly, it seems that most would rather be politically correct in today’s U.S.

Abandoning our ideals is the death by a thousands cuts. They have taken us this far; allowing the fear of the other to drive us into a war which will cost us lives, wealth, and most importantly our reputation – now that’s the disaster.

BTW-
If you have any doubts about the above information, Google “Thomas Jefferson
vs. the Muslim World

Keep this in mind – it’s not the presented information that’s of importance, it’s the omitted information.

Random Motion Machine

In fencing, a highly experienced and rated fencer fencing a novice does not have an assured outcome, because the experienced fencer tends to expect his or her opponents to select from a known set of responses, and if the novice is too inexperienced to use any from that set, but does something right out of left field, well, sometimes even a highly experienced fencer will get caught a few times – sometimes enough to lose a bout. I call such novices ‘random motion machines’ and fear them.

It’s beginning to look the same in Israel. Netanyahu may have years of experience, but Trump is the random motion machine. The settlements in Amona are being evacuated – grudgingly – but a bill to compensate the illegal settlers isn’t working out as expected, as reported by Ben Caspit of AL Monitor:

Officials in the Israeli defense system recommend not to try to establish facts on the ground — namely construct new West Bank settlements — before full coordination is attained with the new administration in Washington. Netanyahu’s emissaries who have met with the Trump administration’s top brass several times are still unable to put their finger on the new president’s policies. It is altogether likely that the president himself has not finished consolidating his policies with regard to the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians. Netanyahu is trying to maneuver between all these opposing forces and hold the stick at both ends, while investing great efforts in trying to understand the new rules that President Donald Trump will lay out for him.

The bill was supposed to have passed its second and third readings in the Knesset and become Israeli law last week — simultaneously with the evacuation of the illegal outpost of Amona. On the evening of Jan. 28, Netanyahu announced that the law would be passed “on Monday.” Then, on Monday he promised it “will pass this week,” but the week went by and on the morning of Feb. 5 he was still throwing out hints that he intended to make the push and pass the bill into law on Feb. 6. But then he reconsidered and said that it was preferable to wait for coordination with the Trump administration. He said that he wanted to talk with Israel Ambassador to the United States Ron Dermer, so that the latter could coordinate the process with the administration.

Opposite him were the members of HaBayit HaYehudi who did not blink when hearing Netanyahu’s words Feb. 5. Associates of Bennett and Shaked said that the coalition would be in danger if the law was not passed this week. And Netanyahu, who from an airplane ramp just prior to taking off for a quick visit to London, said, “I hear fake ultimata all the time. It doesn’t move me.”

And the unexpected from the supposedly pro-Israel Trump?

The euphoria that filled Jerusalem after Trump’s election was replaced by tense anticipation. The White House announcement last week, which criticized the Israeli statement about building thousands of housing units in the territories, set off warning bells in the prime minister’s office — even though the criticism was toned down. True, the Americans noted in the announcement that “we don’t believe the existence of settlements is an impediment to peace” — a phrase that constitutes a dramatic policy change compared to all the preceding US administrations. But the announcement ended by saying that new construction in the territories may harm chances for peace. This was a surprise that no one in Jerusalem had anticipated.

Welcome to our world, Mr. Prime Minister. He may be all that you could ask for – but getting to the promised land may take far more effort than you expected.

Current Movie Reviews

If you’re looking for the latest in manic car chases and wild explosions, well, Paterson (2017) won’t be to your taste.

But if you’re looking for something with an atypical plot, this may be to your taste.

If you’re looking for wild & wooly sex, well, Paterson will not satisfy.

But if you want to look in on a poet, this may be to your taste.

This is the examination of a week in the life of bus driver Paterson, his wife, Laura, and their English bulldog, Marvin, who tries to steal every scene. We see his bus driving, his poetry, his wife’s ambitions, and how he likes to spend his evenings.

And that’s it.

And I was fascinated.

There are typical plots, and there are atypical plots. Both are driven by a look into the unknown. It can be the visceral excitement of exploring a new planet; the intellectual excitement of the to and fro of opposing ideas; the very human back and forth tussle over some prize.

Or the simple exploration of how someone else lives. This film has high points, but they are not life, they are not death. There are accomplishments, but they remind us of the importance of community, from the bartender’s love for the pictures of those who have come from the city of Paterson, New Jersey, to Paterson taking a moment to make sure a young girl, momentarily alone, is kept company and safe until her mother returns from a task. It may sound mundane, but it’s a reminder to a society increasingly and tragically paranoid about violence (such as the extraordinary case of Jacob Wetterling) that withdrawing, treating everyone around us as potential predators, leads to an emptier and less safe, rather than more safe, existence.

The director, Jim Jarmusch, leisurely builds a background, marvelously detailed, that reflects the life of a couple, and the method of building brings those small, yet unusual and important events which can shape a life out in a bright relief. For those of us who have contemplated making a movie, there are a lot of implicit questions worthy of contemplation, even if you cannot answer them.

This isn’t a movie for everyone; as my Arts Editor and I discussed the movie while the credits rolled, I heard one guy, walking hurriedly out, say “THIS got 96% at Rotten Tomatoes?” Well, yes, it did, from the critics – but only 78% from the audience. But for me, just one facet has been to try to fit this into the evolutionary theory of story telling – what does this story bring to my life that makes me wiser about the future?

The answer is just about everything. The importance of community. A look into how someone else is working through this thing we call life. How they get along with each other. How to deal with threats, and yet love those that threaten. And how to express one’s thoughts on matters akin to these, in a language built on trite cliches? I have no idea if Jarmusch shares the same theory of story that I use, but I could see it. I could easily see it.

Or I could be so totally wrong.

Strongly Recommended.

When Doing Bad Is Your Intention

Jack Goldsmith on Lawfare speculates that the Immigration Executive Order, which he considers to be poorly constructed and rolled out, was done with intention:

What might lead Trump to criticize Robart and judges for weakening American security?   It is possible that he thinks his tweets will pressure the judges to cave and act in his favor.  Judges don’t like to be responsible for national security debacles (which explains the deference they often give the political branches in this context), and thus they might worry about Trump’s predictions of a causal nexus between their rulings and a future terrorist attack.

The much more likely result of his tweets, however, is just the opposite.   The Executive branch often successfully argues—quietly, in briefs and at oral argument, with citations to precedent—for its superior competence to judges in national security, and for the potentially dangerous consequences that might flow from too much judicial review in that context.  But when arguments for deference to the President are made via threatening public tweets before an actual attack, they will certainly backfire.  The tweets will make it very, very hard for courts in the short term to read immigration and constitutional law, as they normally would, with the significant deference to the President’s broad delegated powers from Congress and to the President’s broad discretion in foreign relations.  Judges in the short term will be influenced by the reaction to the EO Immigration order, and by doubts about executive process, integrity, truthfulness, and motivation that the manner of its issuance implies.  They will also worry a lot about being perceived to cave to executive pressure.  The pressure from Trump, and related events, thus make it more likely—much more likely, in my view—that the Ninth Circuit and, if it comes to it, the Supreme Court will invalidate the EO in some fashion.

If we stipulate this to be true, then there’s a few things to worry about:

  1. Currently, vetting from the Obama Administration, which was considered to be effective, is in use – I hope. The question is whether Trump or someone on his team meddles with it. I would expect this to be a subtle approach, but the personnel in Homeland Security should be aware of it.
  2. A stronger version of #1 would be a subtle invitation of an attack by a hostile party. There’s little hope in expecting such a party to be suspicious of such an invitation, because the larger picture is of an America that is falling apart in its most important dimension – the freedoms and guarantees it offers citizens and immigrants.

Trump will run a risk, though, that a successful attack will not be pinned on the judiciary – but on the Administration. A secondary risk is the antagonization of the GOP, which does hold the weapon of impeachment. A tertiary risk, which may be non-existent, is the antagonization of the judiciary. Since it’s supposed to be indifferent to political circumstance, this shouldn’t be a major risk, or even a minor risk – but judges and justices are human, and if they perceive Trump as actually betraying the United States to build political capital, he may be made to pay for it regardless.

On the other hand, and way near zero on the probability scale, is an opposite interpretation – he wants the EO to fail for some other reason, but wants his political base to think he gave it the old college try. This would be a lot more reassuring, but is unverifiable in the current climate.

According to Goldsmith, there is one person who might have more evidence to offer: White House Counsel Donald McGahn.

One person who must bear responsibility for the awful rollout of the EO is White House Counsel Donald McGahn.  The White House Counsel is charged with (among other things) ensuring proper inter-agency coordination on important legal policies and with protecting the President from legal fallout.  McGahn should have anticipated and corrected in advance the many foreseeable problems with the manner in which the EO was rolled out.  And he should have advised the President after his first anti-Robart tweet, and after the other more aggressive ones, that the tweets were hurting the President’s legal cause.

If McGahn did not do these things, he is incompetent, and perhaps we can attribute impulsive incompetence to the President.  But if McGahn did do these things—if he tried to put the brakes on the EO, and if he warned his client about the adverse impact of his tweets—then he has shockingly little influence with the President and within the White House (i.e. he is ineffectual).  And if McGahn is ineffectual as opposed to just incompetent—if he did, in other words, warn the President about the impact of his tweets and was ignored—then that lends credence to the suspicion that Trump knows the consequences of his actions and wants to lose in court, with the most plausible explanation being that he is planning for after the next attack.

It would be interesting to hear from Counsel McGahn on the matter.

Sometimes It’s Just So Hard To Talk To That Important Person In Your Life

BuzzFeed reports the President is easily taken in by fake news:

President Donald Trump on Thursday posted to his official Facebook page a news report that erroneously claimed Kuwait had followed his recent immigration order by implementing a visa ban on several Muslim-majority nations.

The story from Jordanian outlet Al Bawaba claimed “Syrians, Iraqis, Iranians, Pakistanis and Afghans will not be able to obtain visit, tourism or trade Kuwaiti visas with the news coming one day after the US slapped its own restrictions on seven Muslim-majority countries.”

“Smart,” President Trump wrote in his Facebook post, which was subsequently shared more than 65,000 times. (The post was still live on Saturday afternoon).

However, the Kuwaiti Ministry of Foreign Affairs has since expressly denied the reports.

In a statement to state-run news outlet Kuwait News Agency, Assistant Foreign Minister for Consular Affairs Sami Al-Hamad said the ministry “categorically denies these claims and affirms that these reported nationalities…have big communities in Kuwait and enjoy full rights.”

This may just be a precursor of what’s to come: the bombardment of an American President, not with bombs, but with fake news, knowing he’s so credulous he’ll believe anything that accords with his world-view (also known as confirmation bias). There’s a couple of facets of interest here.

First, what will be fed to him? The motivation would be to lead him down paths that benefit those who generate and feed him the news. A key factor will be the half-life of effectivity for the average bit of fake news, which will dictate the goals that may be accomplished by leading him astray. Additionally, this “smart guy” may actually figure it out and thus dampen the value of this approach to manipulating him. It sounds like quite the dance.

The second facet is, of course, who will be motivating the dance. The Russians are a given, but more interesting is that the President’s own staff has admitted that the best way to communicate with the President is not in face-to-face meetings, but via TV. If the President chooses a path with which his staff disagrees, would they use fake news, spread to channels they know he favors, in order to manipulate him down the paths they prefer?

I sense more than one scientific study unfolding in the minds of the science community even as I type.

RIP Ray Christensen

Today I heard on MPR that Ray Christensen, “the voice of the Minnesota Gophers,” has passed away at age 92. I grew up listening to him broadcasting many University of Minnesota Golden Gopher sports (Dad was an alumnus and liked to listen), and Ray is the only broadcaster who made any sort of impression on me. He had a drone of a voice that modulated to the words he wanted in a rather memorable way – a voice that really matched up to the imagined immensity of the football stadium, or the old Barn for basketball.

But more importantly, Ray was a good role model, and it’s very simple to sum it up: he rejected tribalism. For all that he was an inveterate Gophers fan, he was also a very fair person. More than once he expressed the sentiment, “Hey, I’m a Gophers fan, but, boy, Penn State is sure playing well today.” Sounds meaningless? Compare that to, say, modern GOP behavior, a take-no-prisoners, say nothing good about the enemy approach, which denies any kind of common bond which we should share across this nation. Reading the partisans of both sides, I cannot imagine them getting together over a beer to discuss the problem of today. But Ray? Just listening to how he conducted himself, you knew he didn’t hesitate to share a meal with his colleagues from Penn State, or Indiana, or the coaches of those teams.

And that’s vitally important. Our technology may be advancing at a breath-taking pace, but culturally speaking, we’re regressing. The entire GOP appears to have sunk back to the level of pre-World War I, where epithets were applied to all other countries, and the idea of dealing fairly with other countries was considered radical. And from my exposure to leftist “progressives”, they seem to be following the GOP down that same hellish rat hole. By contrast, Obama conducted himself in the old style of believing we all had something to contribute, continually offering to work with the GOP.

I have no idea what Ray’s politics might have been, but I suspect sitting down with Ray and talking about them would not have been a traumatic experience. And I don’t have that hope for the partisans of today. I can only hope they die off quickly enough so that we can return to the task of maturing – as a nation.

Word of the Day

Oleograph:

a chromolithograph printed on cloth to imitate an oil painting [Merriam-Webster]

Seen on the Center For Inquiry blog (Joe Nickell):

A folk-art phenomenon of yesteryear was so-called “tramp art”— wood items handcrafted from discarded materials, ostensibly by hoboes, either to sell or to barter for food or drink. Pictured here (see photo) is a tramp-art frame with its religious oleograph (which I acquired for my collection in 2002).

 

 

Belated Movie Reviews

A repeated background event appears in The Time Travelers (1964), the destruction of a habitable Earth by atomic war, which also motivates events in the just previously reviewed In the Year 2889, although this time the war happens in the future, not the past. A group of physicists are researching how to open a window on the future and they accomplish their goal – showing a blasted barren land where their campus currently resides. As they struggle to stabilize the window, they inadvertently convert the window into a door. One of their assistants, a goofy power engineer, stumbles through the doorway and into the future. When he disappears from view, the scientists set out in search of him.

I see into our future. It appears to be filled with coneheads!

Attacked by human-like creatures and having lost their doorway, they retreat (I openly admired how the young lady could out-sprint her male colleagues despite her high heels) into a maze of rocks, until they are trapped in a cave. Much to their relief, they are saved by the last true humans on Earth. They learn the plans for escaping this blasted place (it’s not a bad plan), but that they don’t fit in. What to do? That’s where the tension starts to build.

Unfortunately, the makers of this film introduced a scene or two that didn’t really belong: the seduction of the power engineer, a comedic scene involving android parts which move on their own, a scene in which the women discuss their romantic inclinations, all done to terribly dated, even excruciating music. These feel superfluous and detract from the pacing of the movie. On the other end of the spectrum, a creature described as midway between the enemy mutants and true human is introduced, saved from out-of-hand execution, and then never seen again. What?

We’re also subjected to a couple of battle scenes, which have some passing interest in how the androids’ destruction is handled, but are really rather amateurishly handled. However, as one of the battles takes place in the laboratory as the scientists feverishly work on their problem, it does show some ambition on the part of the movie-makers to ratchet up the tension.

The visuals are also a bit amateurish, and the sound is fuzzy at times; definitely not a tour de force for the movie making staff. This is not a movie made for the ages, nor do I recommend it; yet, for all that, I will say that their depiction of the final conundrum is innovative without being didactic, bringing home a basic problem the scientists face – and may never solve.

RIP Phanny, Ctd

A cat dies, and within a month you expect little more effect on you.

But Phanny, our inherited calico who passed away last July, and left in her wake one destroyed computer monitor and multiple floor stains, not to mention wrecking my parents’ wooden living room floor more than once, has one more incident to her credit. Deb tried to use her fencing lamé for the first time in months – and it didn’t work. We knew Phanny had peed on it, and, yes, we had cleaned it – but it appears the incident was far more harmful to the lamé than anticipated.

Just one more thank you from a cantankerous calico.

Cool Astro Pics, Ctd

I didn’t have to dig for this one, this is right up front and center on the ESA/Rosetta gallery, and it’s really quite glorious

But I also like it because I can imagine finding this place on Earth. It has a certain element that’s almost human-like to it, an element that gives us a connection to what is actually the speeding comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko.

It’s A Bad Precedent, Ctd

Readers comment on the nomination:

Well, he accepted being the whirlwind. If he was REALLY principled, he would have said “Garland is the guy you need to vote on now.”

Gorsuch will forever be remembered as a lesser Supreme, of a diminished and corrupt Supreme Court, if he’s confirmed. He’ll aways be Gorsuch (R), the Republican hack who took Garland’s stolen seat.

Yeah, and that would be the end of his career. Still, it’s a great fantasy, him up at the podium and saying, “I told President Trump that I accepted the nomination, but, like him, I lied: we should be debating Judge Garland’s qualifications and nomination.” I wonder if it ever crossed his mind to make that move.

Another reader retorts:

Gorsuch was appointed by the President and has nothing to do with Obama’s cheap shot on appointing a candidate on his way out the door that he knew full well wouldn’t be approved by the congress, who BTW at the time was controlled by the Liberals,

If Justice Scalia had passed away in October 2016, I’d be in full agreement that this was a back door appointment and the United States would have been better served by having the next President make the nomination. That’s not what happened, though. Justice Scalia died the night of Feb 12 /13, 2016, nearly a full year before the end of President Obama’s second term. It was Obama’s responsibility to make a nomination, for the good of the Nation. Indeed, at the time Clinton was the odds-on favorite to win the election – can you imagine the uproar if President Obama had stated that he was going to abdicate the choice to the future President? Given the fear, even paranoia attaching to Hillary Clinton, among a GOP that is controlled by self-interest (and perhaps that’s why they fear Clinton and Obama, who do not appear to share their motivation of taking advantage of their positions to engorge themselves and their sponsors, mostly indirectly), I suspect the business for hearing-aids would have greatly expanded in the last months of President Obama’s term – the shrieks from the GOP would have been too much for my frail ears, I’m sure, and many others.

With regard to the reader’s other point, only the Senate approves Supreme Court Justices. For the last two years of Obama’s second term, the Senate makeup was 54 Republicans, 44 Democrats, and 2 Independents (Bernie Sanders, Angus King). As the two Independents caucused with the Democrats, it was effectively a 54 / 46 split in favor of the Republicans – not the Liberals, as asserted.

Gorsuch remains heir to the epithet I.J., Illegitimate Justice.

Coal Digestion, Ctd

A reader requests more information regarding mercury and tuna:

I just had tuna last night. Tell us more about tuna-induced mercury poisoning, please!

Consumer Reports in 2015 gives a quick summary:

Mercury can damage the brain and nervous system, especially when exposure occurs in the womb. That’s why we recommend that pregnant women not eat tuna and any other high-mercury fish, such as shark and swordfish. High-mercury seafood can pose health risks to other vulnerable groups as well. So we also recommend that young children, women of childbearing age, and anyone who eats 24 ounces or more per week of any fish limit their tuna consumption, especially those kinds that are high in mercury, such as yellow­fin and other species used in sushi.

The importance of that advice was underscored earlier this year by a study that found that mercury levels in yellowfin tuna had increased at an annual rate of almost 4 percent from 1998 through 2008. Rising mercury levels in oceans because of pollution from coal-fired power plants and other industrial sources are to blame, the study suggested.

More recently there has been good news, although tempered by the election of President Trump, as reported in November 2016 by Scientific American:

Image Credit: Oceana

Levels of highly toxic mercury contamination in Atlantic bluefin tuna are rapidly declining, according to a new study. That trend does not affect recommended limits on consumption of canned tuna, which comes mainly from other tuna species. Nor does it reflect trends in other ocean basins. But it does represent a major break in the long-standing, scary connection between tuna and mercury, a source of public concern since 1970, …

The new study, published online on November 10 by Environmental Science & Technology, links the decline directly to reduced mercury emissions in North America. Most of that reduction has occurred because of the marketplace shift by power plants and industry away from coal, the major source of mercury emissions. Pollution control requirements imposed by the federal government have also cut mercury emissions.

Bluefins are long lived, giving them a lot of time to absorb mercury, so this is a surprise, according to the article.

“We could as easily have expected it to take a century” for the fish to show signs of recovery, Fisher remarks. The contrary finding “tells me we don’t just have to wring our hands about the high level of mercury in these fish. There is something we can do about it and get pretty quick results.” [Study co-author Nicholas Fisher, a marine biogeochemist at Stony Brook University.]

It’ll be fascinating to hear why the bluefins are not as highly contaminated as expected. Have they evolved a way to excrete the mercury, or otherwise avoid it?

What If This Product Needs A Recall?

Tongue firmly in cheek, The Postillon reports on one approach to building the southern border wall:

The Scandinavian furniture maker has offered the USA a practical, ready-made solution with “Börder Wåll”. All they need to do is pick it up in a van from the nearest IKEA branch and put it up where they want it to go. Totalling US $9,999,999,999.99, “Börder Wåll” is significantly cheaper than a conventional wall. Estimates suggest that a conventional wall would cost between US $15 and $25 billion.

Of course, IKEA products have had a few problems over the years, especially if they’re improperly installed. I’m just having visions of the entire wall tipping over… and then all the immigrants trapped inside the United States escaping in one great mass while Immigration Agents hurriedly try to prop the thing back up again to keep them in…

Packaging The Solution With The Problem

This might save the phone even if the battery fails. Published on journal site Science Advances, an approach to the lithium-ion battery fires:

Although the energy densities of batteries continue to increase, safety problems (for example, fires and explosions) associated with the use of highly flammable liquid organic electrolytes remain a big issue, significantly hindering further practical applications of the next generation of high-energy batteries. We have fabricated a novel “smart” nonwoven electrospun separator with thermal-triggered flame-retardant properties for lithium-ion batteries. The encapsulation of a flame retardant inside a protective polymer shell has prevented direct dissolution of the retardant agent into the electrolyte, which would otherwise have negative effects on battery performance. During thermal runaway of the lithium-ion battery, the protective polymer shell would melt, triggered by the increased temperature, and the flame retardant would be released, thus effectively suppressing the combustion of the highly flammable electrolytes. [Science Advances  13 Jan 2017: Vol. 3, no. 1, e1601978, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1601978]

They need a better editor, but it’s an interesting approach. Hopefully, your local phone technician will be able to tell that your battery didn’t burst into flame. (See, I can write as poorly as these folks.) (But my ideas aren’t nearly as good.) Of course, better to solve the problem a priori; this is more of a clean up after the problem has occurred.