Monthly Archives: March 2017

The tide continues to go out on the coal mining industry, as CBS Moneywatch notes:

Electricity company Dayton Power & Light said on Monday it would shut down two coal-fired power plants in southern Ohio next year for economic reasons, a setback for the ailing coal industry but a victory for environmental activists.

Republican President Donald Trump promised in his election campaign to restore U.S. coal jobs that he said had been destroyed by environmental regulations put into effect by his Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama.

Dayton Power & Light, a subsidiary of AES Corp. (AES), said in an emailed statement that it planned to close the J.M. Stuart and Killen plants by June 2018 because they would not be “economically viable beyond mid-2018.”

Sadly, the plants employ a lot of people:

“They are by far our largest employer and it will absolutely be devastating to our community here in Ohio,” Michael Pell, president of First State Bank in Winchester, Ohio, said in a phone interview. Pell, one of several local community leaders who have lobbied to keep the plants going, has become a spokesman for Adams County on the issue. …

The plants sit at the heart of a region Trump vowed to revitalize with more jobs and greater economic security during his 2016 campaign. As part of his pledge to reinvigorate the area, Trump also said he would “bring back coal.”

It’s unfair to blame this entirely on the free market economics – part of the straw that broke these camels’ backs were environmental requirements, making it too expensive to upgrade the plants. But it’s entirely fair to shut down coal since a clean environment is essential to human health and overall prosperity. Since Trump’s campaign promises included bringing coal back to this part of Ohio, I wonder if he’ll compensate through retraining programs or some other approach.

Or if he’ll just toss them into the ocean, so to speak.

On our way out of the Guillermo del Toro exhibit at the Minneapolis Art Institute, we stumbled across this installation.  It’s a project by local artist Alison Hiltner, in which she cultivates bags of spirolina algae.

The Minneapolis StarTribune describes the presentation:

“A total of 56 teardrop-shaped sacs, heavy with a multihued soup of green, are suspended in groups of four from a canopy of metal racks. Each sac is warmed by a utility lamp and connected to black tubing, tangled overhead like sinister vines. The tubes connect to a hydroponic pump that serves to aerate the algae. But this does not occur unless gallerygoers breathe into a CO² sensor, which triggers an Arduino microcontroller to actuate a series of power switches that run the pump.”

Kind of a cool concept.  The room gurgles, bubbles and wheezes as the algae breathes in CO₂ and breaths out O₂.  It’s a stark contrast to the spectacular detail and polish of the del Toro exhibit, but no less impressive in its way.

If you’re a Guillermo del Toro fan and weren’t aware that the Minneapolis Institute of the Arts was hosting an exhibition concerning his film work, make yourself aware – and it closes May 28, 2017. We visited this afternoon, and, after having forked over our $20/ticket, we had a leisurely stroll through an exhibit that illustrates his obsessions, motivations, and working process. Included in this are his work journals, which left my Arts Editor virtually speechless at his restless imagination.

Pictures are encouraged, but I decided not to distract myself with excess photography. This was striking enough to photograph, though:

So go and enjoy!

Carl Engelking on D-brief discusses the latest odd finding – matching names to faces:

A name might also affect the face we see in the mirror.

In a battery of studies involving hundreds of participants, researchers at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem showed that people can correctly match a name to a face better than random chance. That’s because over time, according to researchers, we develop a look that reflects the associations people commonly have with our given name. …

[Yonat] Zwebner designed 8 different experiments; six that measured how well hundreds of individuals from France and Israel could match a name to a face, and two that tested a computer’s ability to do the same thing. Participants saw a headshot, and were required to choose the correct name from a list of four. In every experiment, participants’ accuracy exceeded random chance, or 25 percent. Their computer learning algorithm, trained on 94,000 faces, correctly matched names to faces with 54 to 64 percent accuracy.

But here’s where it gets interesting: In one experiment, French participants correctly matched French names and faces 40 percent of the time, but when French participants were asked to match Israeli names and faces, their accuracy dropped to 26 percent—just about chance. Similarly, Israeli participants were better at matching Hebrew names and Israeli faces than French names to French faces. This disparity, researchers say, is evidence that culture-specific stereotypes influence the characteristics we associate with a name.

Going further, researchers say these stereotypes ultimately affect a person’s facial appearance. But how?

And … no real answer. The presented one – that we internalize expectations and “… cultivate a look that reaffirms those expectations.” Rather chicken and egg, if you ask me.

Of course, I wonder what happens to folks who change their names. Do their faces follow suit? Or are we merely talking about facial hair and eyebrow shaping?

And what about those of us with rare names? Neither Hue nor my given name of Hewitt are burdened with the barnacles of expectations – does this mean I’m freer than most?

Concerning the American military’s response to climate change, a reader writes:

Now you got me wondering how much of the hubbub in the South China Sea is related to a desire to control access to ocean life as it migrates north from equatorial waters. Pretty much every form of life capable of migrating to temperate climates will as global warming increases. We definitely need to be focusing on food sources during that shift and the smart money will be anticipating. The U.S. isn’t even reacting.

I wonder how many GOPers are depending on the private sector to take care of it, without understanding that the governments of other nations are going to provide their food sectors with all the extra muscle they can – and that our private sector will be at a disadvantage.

On Slate, Mark Joseph Stern reports on a tragedy:

Andrew Scott and his girlfriend were playing video games in their Florida apartment late at night when they heard a loud banging at the front door. Scott, who was understandably disturbed, retrieved the handgun that he lawfully owned, then opened the door with the gun pointed safely down. Outside, he saw a shadowy figure holding a pistol. He began to retreat inside and close the door when the figure fired six shots without warning, three of which hit Scott, killing him. Scott hadn’t fired a single bullet or even lifted his firearm.

The figure outside was Deputy Richard Sylvester. He failed to identify himself as a law enforcement officer at any point. He had no warrant and no reason to suspect that Scott or his girlfriend had committed a crime. He did not attempt to engage with Scott at all after he opened the door; he simply shot him dead. And on Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11^th Circuit held that Scott’s parents and girlfriend cannot sue Sylvester because the officer’s conduct was not “clearly” illegal.

I think it might be more helpful to focus on the larger issues, rather than get tied up in the legal doctrine of qualified immunity, which is the legal reasoning used by at least two courts now to find the deputy non-culpable. There have been many calls, and many efforts, to build trust between law enforcement and the communities it polices. For example, following the Castile shooting, the Falcon Heights City Hall issued an email to residents which states, in part,

Our goals are to unify our community around a plan to address the concerns we have heard since this tragic incident, and to work to restore trust between law enforcement officers, and the residents and city visitors whom they serve.

We should start from ground level and work our way up, and that means collaboratively constructing¹ a definition of the word trust. I don’t want to thrust forward a full, detailed definition, but rather I simply want to bring out a facet of the word which I think should be emphasized, and it is this.

Trust must imply vulnerability.

Trust is about partnership, not about a hierarchical relation in which the superior is granting favors out of the goodness of their heart – or fear of pitchforks and torches. Trust is about opening oneself up to the possible fatal wound of another – and trusting they won’t do it.

The application of qualified immunity automatically puts law enforcement personnel in a superior position, and while I recognize they are doing a tough job, if they want that job to be a little bit easier, they must be willing to show that trust by being vulnerable. By discarding this doctrine and saying, yeah, he didn’t point a gun at me, and, no, I didn’t identify myself properly, and now I have to face a penalty.

Another situation – approaching a vehicle with your guns drawn. Without additional information that the occupants are dangerous, that gun should be in the holster. Does that raise the danger level for the cop?

Sure does. No doubt it’ll get a few killed through ambush.

But by approaching so many cars with innocent citizens with guns drawn, those very citizens who are supposed to be safeguarded are, instead, endangered. Accidents do happen. After a while, law enforcement personnel burn out and have suboptimal responses. And then innocents die and a little bit more trust withers

And our society becomes a little less special.

¹I avoid the word “asking” as it implies an unwarranted hierarchical structure to society. I also avoid the word “defining” as that may lead people to think the dictionary is the best authority for this process.

Wait, Captain, these farmers like their isolation!

We see Strange Invaders (1983), and we find a strange mixture of elements: good acting by actors faced with odd material; oddly well done special effects which take advantage of shadows and clouds to gesture at the aliens waiting at our door, without wearying us with poorly done details; believable, ordinary characters dealing with an extraordinary world as best they can.

On the other hand, the editing and continuity are a wretched mess; the reactions of the bigger institutions dubious; and a happy ending is tacked on to what could have been a very effective movie if they had, instead, gone with a good noir ending. Thematically, we’re left with a standard Persistence pays off theme; I’m not sure, absent the happy ending, that a rational, appealing theme could be pulled from the debris – but that hypothetical dark ending might have made you cry.

But you do feel like these are characters that were lived in, that had other things to do until Centerville, IL, became a petri dish, and you do find yourself watching, almost despite yourself, as the movie hops erratically along towards a climax less about heroic actions, and more about heroic resolve.

You may enjoy this with mood enhancers, though.

Chalazae:

Ever noticed those little springy white cords attached to egg yolks? Have a look next time you crack an egg. They’re the chalazae and they hold the yolk suspended mid-egg, so that it floats in an incubation bath with a constant temperature. They also ensure the developing chick is not damaged when its mother turns the egg. Egg-turning only evolved in modern birds. Opposite birds buried their eggs, so it is possible their eggs didn’t have those stringy bits. [“Flipping the birds,” sidebar, Jeff Hecht, NewScientist (4 March 2017, paywall)]

NewScientist (11 March 2017) reports on the latest theory for OCD:

THE thoughts and urges that are characteristic of obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) may be caused by an inability to distinguish between safe and risky situations.

People with OCD feel they have to carry out certain actions, such as washing their hands again and again, or repeatedly checking the oven has been turned off. Those worst affected may spend hours every day on these compulsive “rituals”.

To find out more about why this happens, Naomi Fineberg of the Hertfordshire Partnership University NHS Foundation Trust in the UK and her team trained 78 people to fear a picture of an angry face. They did this by sometimes giving the volunteers an electric shock when they saw the picture. About half the group had OCD.

The team then tried to “detrain” the volunteers, by showing them the same picture many times, but without any shocks. Judging by how much the volunteers sweated when they saw the picture, the team found that people without OCD soon learned to stop associating the face with the shock, but people with the condition remained scared.

Brain scans revealed that the people with OCD had less activity in their ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a brain area involved in signalling safety and predicting rewards (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1609194114).

Suggesting an organic problem susceptible to medical treatment. It has the virtue of being believable.

Feel the G-forces, lady?

It may have Bogart in it, but he’s a very young Bogart, with just hints of what he’ll become. Love Affair (1932) is a stilted affair, and the version we saw had a hissing audio which served to underline the problems in this film: characters who didn’t ring true, dialog with no imagination, delivered after uncertain pauses, and a story that didn’t drag us into its clutches.

I don’t wish to suggest it’s entirely without virtue, as the opening scene is quite engaging as Bogart, a pilot, takes a pretty young socialite up in his biplane for some stunt flying. It’s fun and the two develop a fair bit of chemistry, between doing loopedy loops and holding down the vomit. But then we veer off into random social torture, the vicissitudes of the Great Depression and the lusts, however politely held in check, of older men, and, oh, I’ll tell you that this had twists and turns – and I didn’t care. This is Bogart still learning his craft, his face uncarved, merely a pretty boy.

And while there are some nice parts, you have to tramp through too much to get to it.

Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare gives his learned opinion on how to read FBI Director Comey’s testimony today regarding the Russia investigation:

But free as I am from the shackles of any actual knowledge, let me offer readers the following user’s guide to Comey’s testimony, which can be summed up in one simple sentence: Comey’s communicativeness with the committee—and through it with the public—will almost certainly be inversely proportional to the seriousness of the Russia investigation.
That is, if Comey says a lot, makes a lot of news on Russia matters, and cheers a lot of anti-Trump hearts by maximally embarassing the President for his outrageous comments on Obama’s alleged wiretapping of Trump Tower, that will very likely be a sign that Comey has relatively little to protect in terms of investigative equities in the Russia matter and is thus free to vent. Conversely, a quiet, reserved Comey—one whose contrast with the relatively loquatious FBI director who talked at length about the Clinton email matters will infuriate a lot of liberals and frustrate those who want to know what’s going on with Russia—may well spell trouble for the President.

Why? Stipulate that there’s very big news concerning Russia and the Trump campaign:

 Comey, in other words, has significant investigative equities to protect and he believes that he needs to be there in order to protect them—in other words, that he has a responsibility to not get himself fired because of his anger about the Trump tweets (or anything else) because he has to make sure the investigation can proceed unimpeded. In this situation, I would expect him to be minimally verbal. He may have to answer yes or no questions in certain instances, including about the truth of the wiretapping allegations, but he will refuse to answer a lot of questions. He will make as little news as humanly possible. He will be exceptionally spare with his opinions. He will make a point of not antagonizing the President. Lots of people will leave disappointed.

So I was at work all day. How did the testimony go? NBC News reports:

Sitting beside the director of the National Security Agency, Adm. Michael Rogers, Comey began the hearing by revealing in his opening statement that the FBI was in the midst of a counterintelligence investigation into the Russian campaign to hack, leak and promote bogus news stories. Part of that investigation, he said, would examine whether the Trump campaign coordinated with that effort.

Comey said he could not disclose any details about the probe. Normally, he said, the FBI doesn’t confirm or deny investigations, but it can make exceptions in cases of major public interest.

This ride could get very interesting.

Tangentially with regards to Obama’s alleged primary failure, former Secretary of Labor for President Clinton Robert Reich recently visited Washington and thinks Trump’s victory is the result of people distrusting an apparently rigged system. What happened when he mentioned that to various denizens of Washington?

Many people asked, bewilderedly, “How did this [Trump] happen?” When I suggest it had a lot to do with the 35-year-long decline of incomes of the bottom 60 percent; the growing sense, ever since the Wall Street bailout, that the game is rigged; and the utter failure of both Republicans and Democrats to reverse these trends — they give me blank stares.

Here’s his Tweet; this Daily Kos posting from Keith Pickering is more legible.

If Trump leaves before four years have elapsed, his successor may have to consider returning Glass-Steagall to law after an appropriate campaign to blame its abolition for the Great Recession. It would certainly be easy enough, since it’s already been written; industry should remember it, if not fondly, but better, perhaps, than Dodd-Frank; and it may even be true that its removal by a business-owned Congress is to blame for the Great Recession.

If we accept and continue the story arc of blame, the GOP‘s plan to replace the ACA with a vastly inferior substitute could be a devastating act of seppuku, perhaps leading to its reincarnation as a reasonable political party once again. However, in the interim, who will take over in the power vacuum?

Palladium:

(secondary) A palladium or palladion is an image or other object of great antiquity on which the safety of a city or nation is said to depend. The word is a generalization from the name of the original Trojan Palladium, a wooden statue (xoanon) of Pallas Athena that Odysseus and Diomedes stole from the citadel of Troy and which was supposedly later taken to the future site of Rome by Aeneas, where it remained until perhaps transferred to Constantinople and lost sight of after the conversion of the Empire to Christianity. [Wikipedia]

Noted in President George Washington’s Farewell Address:

The unity of government which constitutes you one people is also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in the edifice of your real independence, the support of your tranquility at home, your peace abroad; of your safety; of your prosperity; of that very liberty which you so highly prize. But as it is easy to foresee that, from different causes and from different quarters, much pains will be taken, many artifices employed to weaken in your minds the conviction of this truth; as this is the point in your political fortress against which the batteries of internal and external enemies will be most constantly and actively (though often covertly and insidiously) directed, it is of infinite moment that you should properly estimate the immense value of your national union to your collective and individual happiness; that you should cherish a cordial, habitual, and immovable attachment to it; accustoming yourselves to think and speak of it as of the palladium of your political safety and prosperity; watching for its preservation with jealous anxiety; discountenancing whatever may suggest even a suspicion that it can in any event be abandoned; and indignantly frowning upon the first dawning of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together the various parts.

While politicians may be able to get away with deny climate change, but the Pentagon has to be more careful. Military Times reports on the contents of the Quadrennial Defense Review:

Economic competition. Thawing in the Arctic has opened new maritime routes and revealed new energy sources, creating new competition between the U.S. and Russia. The Pentagon’s 2013 Arctic Strategy statement details its plans for safeguarding American interests there and ensuring freedom of navigation. It calls the region a “strategic inflection point,” noting that as the ice caps continue to melt, there will be rush to claim the oil, natural gas and other resources there.

The Pentagon views the Arctic as vital for establishing ballistic missile defenses to safeguard the homeland. But  Russia’s buildup there has greatly exceeded that of the United States. Its military has established a new Arctic command, added four brigades, 14 airfields, 16 ports, and has 40 operational icebreakers and 11 in production. The U.S. has only one working icebreaker, and it was commissioned in the 1970s.

In the South China Sea, warming waters have forced fish stocks to migrate north, increasing the potential for conflict between China and U.S. allies whose economies depend on that trade, says Frank Femia, who heads the Center for Climate and Security. The non-partisan think tank includes several senior retired military officers concerned about climate change and its impact on national security.

A reminder that climate change will be changing the very nature of many conflicts, both military and economic. The refusal of many in the US Congress to acknowledge and begin to deal with climate change and its results may doom the United States ambitions to disappointment.

IT’S HARD TO SAY, as a crisis properly handled could turn things around. But right at the moment, it appears President Trump’s budget and backing for the GOP ACA replacement is not playing well to the crowd, according to Gallup:

This looks to be his low point so far, and tomorrow’s update should be fascinating, although honestly his approval rating (37% in this chart, with a disapproval rating of 58%) will probably move back up as the vagaries of polling and regression to the mean takeover. But I think we’re seeing the results of being an autocratic business owner thrust into a government office which attracts constant attention for its occupants’ behavior – and their attention to liberal democracy ideals. He admits his policies will hurt his own supporters; he wants to inflate the military even more; and while some of his more outré promises continue to have his active support, many others have fallen by the wayside. His New York mannerisms may have played well with those who needed to hear that someone sympathized with their economic plight, and would promise to do something for them, there may now be a dawning recognition that they are little more than a convenient trampoline. As a private business owner, Trump only rarely had to worry about the facts, as they only assumed importance in courts of law who insisted he pay attention to those facts. But in the public sector, an insistent free press makes facts and truth more important, more relevant – if not to him, then to those who are affected by his actions, and can return the favor. I wonder if his support for Speaker Ryan’s ridiculous replacement for the ACA was, in part, a political quid pro quo to not be impeached.

My question remains the same – will he resign, or will he be thrust out forcibly by Congress?

A lush example of the murder mystery genre, Laura (1944) is a leisurely delight. A body, shot in the face with a shotgun, is found in the entryway of a high end apartment by the maid, and the hunt is on for Laura Hunt’s (ahem!) killer. Is it her long-time mentor and (perhaps) lover, the caustically witty and famous columnist, Waldo Lydecker? Is it her alleged fiancee and wastrel, Shelby Carpenter? Is it the woman who also loves Shelby, Diane Redfern?

Is it the woman who also loves Shelby, Ann Treadwell? Was it the maid, Bessy?

Heck, we even speculated it was the cop, the hard-boiled Mark McPherson.

This is a quietly all-around well-made movie, featuring luscious, intriguing sets. But the real treat is the competition between a story that weaves together questions of guilt, love, and passion, and the actors who are performing the story. To the former are the strengths of understanding the difference between information and critical information, as we try to discern who committed this horrific crime – and why? And dialog which clarifies the characters for us – the rapid fire patter of the columnist, Lydecko, the brusque, brooding lines of McPherson, and the languid, vague inspidities of the wastrel, Carpenter. We hear them and they help us zero in on the essence of these characters. But along with that comes a plot featuring move and counter-move, ambiguities and how they pain both he who has to interpret those ambiguities – and she who delivers them. Did she break her word to him – or did she just break his word to himself?

But characters need actors, and these actors deliver. Dana Andrews is a particular standout as the cop, McPherson, clearly communicating that this is a man with some inner demons, leaving us wondering how they drive him – to find guilty murderers, or be one himself? But matching him is Clifton Webb as the ascerbic Lydecko, so often ready with a murderous quip, a prick pried from his shell by the beautiful Laura Hunt. Laura, seen in flashbacks, and fiancee Carpenter, played by an absolutely towering Vincent Price, are forced to the second tier in this movie, despite valiant efforts. But even outside of the main cast, regardless of very limited minutes, both the maid Bessy and Carpenter’s third place lover, Ann Treadwell, are brought to devious life by performances which stir up questions about themselves and human nature which well-nigh demand movies in themselves to answer. Kudos to both story and actors for giving them backgrounds which actually, in one case, made my skin crawl. But, perhaps most to the entire movie’s credit, afterwards my Arts Editor and I talked out several small plot holes – but we didn’t care. The momentum of the movie carried us through those and on to the finale.

This is a movie which can grab your attention and not let go until the final shot is fired and the clock runs out on our murderer.

Strongly Recommended.

Lee Schafer opines in the StarTribune on the inexplicable behavior of Jim Surdyk in breaking the law concerning Sunday liquor sales, and in the process manages to bring President Trump into it:

The rule of law takes a beating in this kind of political environment, too. It’s particularly telling that one in four respondents in a February survey said President Donald Trump should be able to overturn a judge’s decision if he happened to disagree with it.

Our new president isn’t exactly a staunch defender of our traditional sense of the rule of law, of course. He has done things like complaining that our laws forbidding Americans to bribe people when doing business abroad are “horrible” and criticizing a “so-called judge” for taking “law enforcement away from our country.”

Yet this is an issue that seems to have partisans on both sides with blind spots, and critics of the president seem to have a cart-and-horse problem when discussing issues like a perceived threat to our rule of law. It seems far more accurate to call his election as president a result of what’s been happening in our culture, not the cause of it.

Meanwhile, over at The Minnesota Skinny, Frank (I think) also drags President Trump into the Surdyk fray as he defends the opening of the Surdyk’s liquor store.:

It might not have been the right thing, it might not have been the fair thing, but the numbers may one day reveal a risk that produced value despite the penalty. For a similar example, we can look toward the White House.

We still haven’t seen Donald Trump’s tax returns, and you know what? We’re never going to. Never ever ever. No stupid petition you sign on the Internet is going to get those books open. Bernie Sanders might as well shout into a seashell. Trump was supposed to open the books during his campaign, wasn’t he? I’ve no doubt the contents of those returns would have him removed from the White House, but nobody can make him produce them. So, he didn’t. He was lambasted, he’s still being lambasted, but it didn’t stop him from getting elected. Nobody could punish him then, and sure as hell nobody can punish him now.

Frank looks at the law as simply part of the risk equation of life, while Lee is looking at the law as a more sacred part of society, the part that helps us get along with each other. Honestly, while Frank’s view has a certain hipster appeal to it, it’s the sort of approach that only works so long as a small fraction of society is doing it. What happens if everyone decides to drive faster than everyone else? We end up with pileups worth of a Formula 1 race. Robbing banks? We can tolerate that until everyone’s robbing a bank. Frank’s approach is the parasite’s approach, the approach that seems to yield great results – but, to lapse into software engineering patois, it has no scalability.

And, of course, it suffers from the ethical lapse of the end justifies the means.

Getting back to Surdyk and his liquor store for a moment, I’ll just state right now that, for the next couple of years, my wife and I will not be visiting Surdyk’s for any of his products. Sure, this is symbolic – we go through maybe 5 bottles of wine a year, mostly for cooking, and there are wine shops much closer than Surdyk’s. But we have visited there in the past, as they have a better selection than most places, and the smell of the cheese shop is quite heavenly.

But we’re going to take a skip. His lack of respect for society is repugnant.

If you’re an American, President George Washington should require no introduction (and I’ll just point you here if you want one). However, knowing about him and studying his thoughts on the matter of the construction of the United States are two entirely different things. Being the first President of the United States, he faced a special challenge in nearly all he did during the time of his Presidency, and perhaps his Farewell Address was not the least of the challenges.

Once beyond his confessions of humility and doubt, President Washington proceeds to delve into the necessary structures of the United States, and the dangers, within and without, which he saw facing it. I entered into reading it wondering if it would be quaint (and its language is definitely not that of today, being more metaphorical) and perhaps out of date.

Half way through it, I find myself wondering why the study of Washington’s Farewell Address is not a required study subject in high school. Not a specialist subject, as it is addressed to all citizens; and its subjects range from a defense of the construction of the government to the lessons learned by a man of now elder years (presumably written in 1797, he would have been sixty five hard-lived years of military and government service). And some are of spectacular relevance to today. I think it would benefit many students to begin contemplating the issues which resound even in today’s society.

I commend its sober reading and meditation upon to you; meanwhile, I’ll pull out some particularly relevant passages and blog about them over the next few weeks.

In contemplating the causes which may disturb our Union, it occurs as matter of serious concern that any ground should have been furnished for characterizing parties by geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western; whence designing men may endeavor to excite a belief that there is a real difference of local interests and views. One of the expedients of party to acquire influence within particular districts is to misrepresent the opinions and aims of other districts. You cannot shield yourselves too much against the jealousies and heartburnings which spring from these misrepresentations; they tend to render alien to each other those who ought to be bound together by fraternal affection. The inhabitants of our Western country have lately had a useful lesson on this head; they have seen, in the negotiation by the Executive, and in the unanimous ratification by the Senate, of the treaty with Spain, and in the universal satisfaction at that event, throughout the United States, a decisive proof how unfounded were the suspicions propagated among them of a policy in the General Government and in the Atlantic States unfriendly to their interests in regard to the Mississippi; they have been witnesses to the formation of two treaties, that with Great Britain, and that with Spain, which secure to them everything they could desire, in respect to our foreign relations, towards confirming their prosperity. Will it not be their wisdom to rely for the preservation of these advantages on the Union by which they were procured ? Will they not henceforth be deaf to those advisers, if such there are, who would sever them from their brethren and connect them with aliens?

One of Washington’s primary themes is that of the inadvisability of Party. I suspect this came from both sad experience, as Party tends to magnify ambition and, potentially, ruthlessness, over duty and loyalty, as well as the recent history exhibited by their late Colonial masters, the English and the many Parties indulged in by elite of England. In this paragraph we see a lesson easily applicable to the Iran nuclear deal, a negotiation adamantly opposed by the GOP for reasons readily dismissed by experts. The opposition soon came to be viewed with puzzlement by those not swayed by Party loyalty, and today I credit jealousy and a terror of being rendered irrelevant to the great political drama of the country for the sad behavior of the GOP; the latter might also explain the inexplicable behavior of their behavior in relation to the ACA.

His theme, at its heart, calls for the greater loyalty to be to Country over Party, and this, of course, make sense, for if our loyalties are greater to Party, then the Country is threatened with dissolution as Parties become geographically-affiliated entities; worse yet, this is a potentially recursive operation, until portions of the former Country are partitioned into small entities, and, not unlike the Greek cities of history, at erratic war with each other.

Such is not conducive to prosperity and progress in vital areas, and leaves humanity in a miserable condition. (See the video in this post for an authoritative voice on matter in today’s society.) Thus, by extension I am willing to bet that he suggests the evaluation of each candidate for office of their own terms, rather than their affiliation with Party: on policy stance, administrative competency, and other such matters. Adherence to Party? That’s the mug’s game.

Although President Washington might select a more graceful phraseology for what is my informal interpretation.

This is an old, commercial site that I just ran across – how to make model cars out of beverage cans. Sandy’s CanCars:

Cool stuff. More here.

superprecocial:

In biology, precocial species are those in which the young are relatively mature and mobile from the moment of birth or hatching. …

Extremely precocial species are called “superprecocial”. Examples are the Megapode birds, which have full flight feathers and which, in some species, can fly on the same day they hatch from their eggs. [Wikipedia]

Seen in “Flipping the birds,” Jeff Hecht, NewScientist (4 March 2017, paywall):

Where the eggs hatched is also odd. We know that adult opposite birds mostly lived in forests and had feet made for perching on branches, but fossil nests show they began their lives in eggs partly buried in soil. The ground-dwelling bush turkeys, or megapodes, of Australia are a modern example of this. Their chicks dig their way out of the ground after hatching, a bit like turtles. Megapodes are also the only living birds with superprecocial young, says David Varricchio of Montana State University. “[They] are completely independent of their parents. They hatch and run off on their own.”

When it comes to robots usurping human jobs, most libertarians will point to history to prove that they are no threat to overall human employment. However, in NewScientist (4 March 2017, paywall) Sumit Paul-Choudhury disagrees:

Those who back the robot revolution often point out that previous upheavals have always created new kinds of jobs to replace the ones that have gone extinct. However, one important pressure valve might not work this time. Previously, when automation hit one sector, employees could decamp to other industries. But the sweep of machine learning means that many sectors are automating simultaneously. So maybe it’s not about how many jobs are left after the machines are done taking their pick, but which ones.

The evidence so far suggests they might not be very satisfying. For example, we have seen the rise of the “gig economy”, in which algorithms direct low-skilled human workers. While this is an employer’s dream, it is frequently an insecure, unfulfilling and sometimes exploitative grind for workers.

Sumit goes on to discuss the taxation of robots and the possible use of UBI to cushion the plight of displaced workers; perhaps robot taxation could be used to fund UBI. But his suggestion that the robot onslaught will hit all sectors simultaneously is both interesting and somewhat suspect. Why? Because robots don’t come equipped ready to take over a job. They require specialized training, even more so than the more advanced humans they are replacing, because they have no instincts and no general base of knowledge to fall back on. However, once a training result is established, it’s far more easily replicated than it is among humans; and, of course, they’re cheaper, on average, than humans, and if an accident occurs, there’s little chance of being sued just because a robot is wrecked.

At least not until the robots are artificially intelligent and can value their own existence.

Andrew Sullivan supplements last week’s discussion of intersectionality in this week’s column in New York Magazine:

It’s also a useful insight, it seems to me, to see “intersectionality” as responding to a practical problem on the “social justice” left: how to prevent each oppressed group fighting the others. If everything is connected, and if you can’t separate out one oppressed identity from all the rest, then we have a chance for a truce: Everyone against white straight men! There’s something perfectly perverse about an anti-sexist and anti-racist movement agreeing on an “enemy” that is defined by sex and race. What’s also revealing is where the intolerance is strongest. Brookings’s Richard Reeves and Dimitrios Halikias have crunched the numbers. The answer is: the most expensive colleges. Specifically:

The average enrollee at a college where students have attempted to restrict free speech comes from a family with an annual income $32,000 higher than that of the average student in America.

What you have here is an elite class paying for their kids to avoid ideas that might make them uncomfortable.

So the act of demonization is the result of coming to a conclusion in the arena of justice, no? A problem is identified and a malefactor, or group thereof, is identified. So far, so good. But then both an intellectual and physical violence is visited upon that malefactor, as discussed last week, Is this really an element of justice? Granted, pacifists are rarely winners, and the Hindu counter-example is really that of tactics, not strategy (or, as an unnamed colleague from 30 years ago said, “What if it hadn’t been the British, but the Nazis?”). However, we are not in the arena of governmentally enforced justice, but that of the pinnacles of higher education, implicitly loyal to the free debate of ideas.

Furthermore, if I were a member of one of these social justice groups, I’d have to be wondering about the leaders of the other groups – who are simply sincere, and which are trying to ride their horse to greater power? Justice should be harmonious; groups fighting each other should not require some overriding, new philosophy to meld them together into some faux-fighting force. If they’re at war with each other, either there’s some bad information out there – or some bad philosophy.

Finally, using force can be a counter-productive strategy. Andrew goes on to note an observation by William Deresiewicz in The American Scholar that

Not coincidentally, lower-income whites belong disproportionately to precisely those groups whom it is acceptable and even desirable, in the religion of the colleges, to demonize: conservatives, Christians, people from red states. Selective private colleges are produced by the liberal elite and reproduce it in turn. If it took an electoral catastrophe to remind this elite of the existence (and ultimately, one hopes, the humanity) of the white working class, the fact should come as no surprise. They’ve never met them, so they neither know nor care about them. In the psychic economy of the liberal elite, the white working class plays the role of the repressed.

These are groups already, to some extent, distrustful of the Eastern liberal elite colleges; to visit violence upon them is unconscionable and unworthy of those Eastern elites (although I should point out that recent studies also point at well-educated conservatives as being among the strongest proponents of such groups as climate change denial and creationism). And it’s a betrayal of the principles of those colleges.

In essence, it sounds to me like they continue to be too lazy to work out the differences between the groups, to understand how justice must play into their social justice movement. They invent a new philosophy that justifies short-cuts, and employ it.

Let’s not play into the Marshal Tito fallacy, wherein disparate groups are forcibly bonded together, this time using bad philosophy. We’re already seeing the intellectual failures appear. The followers of intersectionality really need to be better than that.

And if they want to be better – each individual should spend a year in a small, dying town. Work in the diner, and SHUT UP. Listen to what these Americans have to say. Figure out where they’re coming from. Develop some empathy for them. If nothing else, learning your opponents intimately is always a good practice. But you might find out – they’re as sincere as you are. They just may hold different assumptions.

1. The advent of the automated car has led the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to adopt a hierarchy of classifications in order to categorize the vehicle you may be driving in the future.  Wikipedia has a quick summary:

• Level 0: Automated system has no vehicle control, but may issue warnings.
• Level 1: Driver must be ready to take control at any time. Automated system may include features such as Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC), Parking Assistance with automated steering, and Lane Keeping Assistance (LKA) Type II in any combination.
• Level 2: The driver is obliged to detect objects and events and respond if the automated system fails to respond properly. The automated system executes accelerating, braking, and steering. The automated system can deactivate immediately upon takeover by the driver.
• Level 3: Within known, limited environments (such as freeways), the driver can safely turn their attention away from driving tasks, but must still be prepared to take control when needed.
• Level 4: The automated system can control the vehicle in all but a few environments such as severe weather. The driver must enable the automated system only when it is safe to do so. When enabled, driver attention is not required.
• Level 5: Other than setting the destination and starting the system, no human intervention is required. The automatic system can drive to any location where it is legal to drive and make its own decisions.

TechRepublic presents an overview and analysis:

So why are the levels important? They serve as general guidelines for how technologically advanced a vehicle is. In terms of what consumers need to know, Thilo Koslowski, former analyst for Gartner, thinks that ultimately, there are three stages that will be relevant: “automated, autonomous, and driverless.” It’s important to distinguish between “autonomous” and “driverless,” he said: “driverless is a more advanced stage of autonomous.”

But while drivers themselves may be less concerned with the distinctions, the differences could be significant when it comes to issues like car insurance, which is expected to change radically in the era of self-driving cars.

KPMG, a consulting firm, has issued a report on how the car insurance business will be affected, since the number of accidents are predicted to go down 80% by 2040. The different levels are important because they “change the risk profile of the car,” according to KPMG expert Jerry Albright. “Insurance companies need to understand how these new capabilities affect driving risk.” Joe Schneider, managing director at KPMG, put it this way: “It’s like a baby, going from crawling to walking to running.”

Albright said, “The car becomes safer and safer as it moves towards fully-autonomous driving.”

But Jamais Cascio reports in NewScientist (4 March 2017, paywall) that the assertion may actually be false – some stages actually regress:

Level 3 allows the driver to safely turn attention away on some road types, but to be ready to take over – and it’s what is up next for commercially available autonomous cars. Audi is poised to launch one by 2018, with Nissan, Honda and Kia to follow.

However, Ford has cast doubt on the wisdom of this road map. In tests of level 3 systems, it has found that drivers lose “situational awareness”, sometimes falling asleep. The problem persists even with buzzers, vibrating seats and a second engineer to watch the first.

As a result, Ford technical lead Raj Nair has restated the company’s desire to skip level 3. It aims to make fully autonomous cars by 2021, without pedals or steering wheels, for use within a predefined area: level 4 autonomy. The intent is to create a vehicle for ride-sharing or ride-hailing. Passengers would be free to chat, use phones or nap without worrying about taking control… because they can’t take control.

And, of course, that last sentence may freak some people out. Like me. Even though you also can’t take control of a bus, or a train. But in those cases, they’re an act of faith in your fellow human, someone you can empathize with, even chat with. Not so much the computer running the car, though, especially if you’ve heard that certain Big Data techniques can result in conclusions which, although correct, are not really explainable, even by the algorithm’s coders and creators.

It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Will there be underground games involving messing with the traffic patterns that’ll evolve from automated cars? On the other hand, will it be harder to sabotage automated vehicles, i.e. the bomb in the boot trick which is seen from time to time?

Here comes the future – hang on tight.

Regarding the importance of the Presidential oath of office, Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic on Lawfare continue their discussion, noting we may be seeing the evolution of an entirely new body of law in which the person, and not just the role, is in play during judicial reviews:

In this scenario, the underlying law is not actually moving much, or moving or at all, but the normal rules of deference and presumption of regularity in presidential conduct—the rules that underlie norms like not looking behind a facially valid purpose for a visa issuance decision—simply don’t apply to Trump. As we’ve argued, these norms are a function of the president’s oath of office and the working assumption that the President is bound by the Take Care Clause. If the judiciary doesn’t trust the sincerity of the president’s oath and doesn’t have any presumption that the president will take care that the laws are faithfully executed, why on earth would it assume that a facially valid purpose of the executive is its actual purpose?

In this scenario, there are really two presidencies for purposes of judicial review: One is the presidency when judges believe the president’s oath—that is, a presidency in which all sorts of norms of deference apply—and the other is a presidency in which judges don’t believe the oath. What we may be watching here is the development of a new body of law for this second type of presidency.

This, we suspect, is the true significance of all of the references in both district court opinions to the many statements made by Trump and his aides about the Muslim ban and the true purpose of the policy effectuated in both orders. These references present, of course, as discussions of whether there is truly a secular purpose to the policy in an Establishment Clause analysis using the Lemon test. But there’s at least a little more going on here than that. The lengthy recitations of large numbers of perfectly objectionable presidential statements about Muslims coexist with a bunch of other textual indicia showing not merely that the judges doubt Trump’s secular purpose but that they doubt the good faith of his purpose at all—indeed, that they suspect that he is simply lying about his own motivations.

Perhaps an unanticipated move by the judiciary, but it does seem logical. The erratic behavior of Trump during the campaign and, more importantly, since his victory in the Electoral College, has been alarming – and it’s not been just a media thing, I suspect, for the judiciary, but a real What The Hell Is This? moment.

So, if Benjamin and Quinta are correct, what does this presage for the future? Will the character and publicized utterances of a President, or other officer of the government, become a regularly pertinent facet in court cases? Will the judiciary come to a collective, informal conclusion concerning the trustability of the President & other officers during judicial reviews of the Executive Branch? And will this lead to a political polarization of the judiciary, or will their loyalties be largely to the judiciary rather than the political party which happened to appoint them? I suspect that as the political parties become cognizant of a new body of law, they will redouble their attempts to control the judiciary – although this would collide with the current urgings to make judges an elective, rather than appointed, position.

So long as we are a tolerant liberal democracy at heart, we can hope for a judiciary that remains loyal to its own ideals. But if we continue down the path of mutual intolerance, where the vendetta against “liberal” continues largely unrebuffed by the conservative community, where the worst tendencies of religious sects are uncurbed and even nurtured by congregants distrustful of education and expertise, and where, on the other side, the loathing and disdain for their political opponents by the progressive community leaves me cold and unsympathetic to their position … where was I going with this? Oh, yeah, I was getting a bit pompous. And, honestly, I grew up in an era where the intolerance of both sides was primarily a fringe phenomenon; I suspect, if you look through American history, you see a lot of this sort of thing, and we’ve mostly survived it – with the ugly volcanic exception of the Civil War.

So now we’re going through another period of religious dominance and political intolerance. Hopefully, the lessons of such soft-minded indulgences are not lost on the new generations, who’ll use them to relearn the lesson of mutual tolerance and trust which makes us a great nation.