Monthly Archives: March 2017

Benjamin Wittes and Quinta Jurecic on Lawfare pinpoint a key part of the American governmental system – the Presidential Oath of Office – and what happens when the populace begins to suspect the President is not taking it seriously:

So what does it look like when large numbers of people do not trust the President’s oath and, as a consequence, do not believe he “enter[s] office with a presumption of regularity in his work”? It looks something like what we’re seeing now, in which a wide array of actors simply do not afford deference to presidential actions and words.

Let’s start with the courts. There’s much to argue about in the astonishing flood of judicial opinions that followed Trump’s issuance of his executive order on visas and refugees. For present purposes, the only point is that a very large number of judges around the country behaved in a fashion untouched by deference or any kind of presumption of regularity in the President’s behavior: by our count, at least eight district courts and one circuit court have issued stays or temporary restraining orders against the executive order. Note that they did this in an area of broad statutory grants of power to the president in the face of a claim by the President that he was acting to protect national security. They intervened rapidly. And their lack of deference was, in some cases, proud.

This is a long, interesting post. For example, there’s a good section on how Presidents Bush and Obama respect each, but Bush no longer extends the same respect to Trump: a point for conservatives to consider. And if you’re still thinking that leaks from government sources, in this instance, are unethical, well, they don’t agree:

But if a staffer in a federal agency doesn’t believe in the integrity of the president’s oath, that mistrust breaks key bonds that tie that staffer to the executive will. After all, the reason to follow orders in the executive branch is that the president is both elected by the people, and thus represents the popular will, and has sworn an oath to faithfully execute the laws. If you don’t believe that oath and you don’t believe that he is necessarily pursuing the public’s interest, why follow orders and carry out his policy? Such a staffer may feel no compunction about telling someone in the press about policy discussions he doesn’t believe are being undertaken in a sincere effort to “faithfully execute” the functions of the executive branch and to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution. He may actively believe that his own oath of office requires a certain degree of undermining of those policy processes, both with forms of internal pushback and resistance and with public exposure. Or, less nobly, he may simply feel freed from normal bonds of loyalty and hierarchical discipline and thus able to embarrass a hated boss or scuttle policy changes he doesn’t like.

They make a lot of sense. It’s worth remembering that we are a Nation of Law, not of Men (nor of Gods!), which leads to the old aphorism about how all are equal in the eyes of the law. Those who take oaths as officers of the Nation take it to the Nation, not to the President. He (or she) may be responsible for making big decisions, but in the end he’s just another officer of the Nation, with delineated and delimited powers, and a defined lifetime.

Not a temporary King or CEO.

And that leads off to other thoughts, once again, about how the different sectors of society have different goals and different methods, and that this post reminds me of how true this remains. But I shan’t pursue the rabbit…

Anabolism:

Regardless of an organism’s energy source, its metabolism is a balance of catabolism, breaking energy down into usable units, and anabolism, using those units for vital building projects such as bone growth. [“20 Things You Didn’t Know About … Metabolism,” Discover Magazine (March 2017)]

In connection with the Montana legislation covered by Syd, one of the wealthiest and most influential men in America comes down on the side of public schools  – Warren Buffet’s annual letter to shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway:

America has, for example, decided that those citizens in their productive years should help both the old and the young. Such forms of aid – sometimes enshrined as “entitlements” – are generally thought of as applying to the aged. But don’t forget that four million American babies are born each year with an entitlement to a public education. That societal commitment, largely financed at the local level, costs about $150,000 per baby. The annual cost totals more than $600 billion, which is about 3 1⁄2% of GDP. …

This economic creation will deliver increasing wealth to our progeny far into the future. Yes, the build-up of wealth will be interrupted for short periods from time to time. It will not, however, be stopped. I’ll repeat what I’ve both said in the past and expect to say in future years: Babies born in America today are the luckiest crop in history.

Yes, some might argue that these two paragraphs aren’t really connected, but I argue that they are because that investment in the education of our children is how we, and they, assure their future. Two of the smartest (including his partner Charlie Munger) – and most honest, from what I’m reading in the letter – guys around happen to think public education is important. If you read further, you find they’re four-square behind the current economic system, etc etc. I think that endangering public education by permitting the private schools to eschew the requirements placed on public schools is really just a way to make the education of the students into a dice game, because education goes on for years. When a school collapses, such as we’ve seen here in Minnesota, students get hurt. They lose dollars, they lose time, and they lose their trust in the free enterprise system – because it was applied to a sector where it doesn’t belong. And I think Warren and Charlie might agree.

Katherine Martinko on Treehugger.com gives an overview of the zero waste community’s best blogs:

3. Zero Waste Chef

Written by a San Francisco-based editor named Anne Marie who loves to cook, this blog focuses on food management at home. She acknowledges that, until she lives on a farm and produces everything from scratch, she will still rely on a bulk-food system that generates trash in its supply chain (think of those plastic bags lining the bins, etc.), even if she’s not the one bringing it home. She has lots of great ideas for cutting out processed foods, better meal planning, fermentation, and minimize food waste.

The Snake Woman (1961) concerns the unintended consequences of science. A herpetologist, located in rural Britain, has been controlling the insanity of his wife by giving her injections of snake venom (surely an off-label application), which brings her some lucidity. But now it’s time to give birth, and the child she dies giving life is ice cold – cold-blooded, one might say. The midwife runs to the village and incites a mob against the child, and they come and burn the place down.

Your music … it gives me … shivers … and that taste of venom in the back of my … throat …

But the child has already been sent away and survives.

Nineteen years later, a Scotland Yard inspector is sent to the village in response to a string of deaths by poisonous, foreign snakes. The midwife puts in an appearance and entices him into shooting a doll three times; the local doctor tells the inspector the story; and he meets the child, now a quiet woman who has never heard about not staring people in the eye, nor developed a respectable taste in music. Eventually we learn she can change shape from human to snake in the blink of an eye (the energy consumption! the energy consumption!), another corpse or three piles up, and the inspector decides to go rescue her from herself, but while she thinks about his proposal, he whips out his gun and shoots her dead.

Sounds silly? It is.

But it’s put on in the great British tradition of taking it all very seriously and straight. The actors are, for the most part, quite good (although we did catch the inspector with his mouth hanging open, as if he was waiting for his cue and couldn’t be bothered to shut it) in their roles, the B&W cinematography clear and compelling, and the sets are quite competent – indeed, the visit to the burned out research lab was quite interesting as the supporting timbers, blackened by the fire, are still in place, leading to quite the spooky effect.

But the story itself is not credible. I’ll pass on making fun of the science; the reactions and motivations of some of the characters, the inspector in particular, were such that I couldn’t quite give credence to them, unfortunately.

If you enjoy the classic British acting tradition, you may enjoy this. But it will take a bit of a stretch when it comes to the story.

What are the secondary ramifications of the terrorist bombing of an airliner? AL Monitor‘s Menna Farouk reports on the losses to Egypt after the crash of Russian Airbus A321 after it took off from the Egyptian town of Sharm el-Sheikh:

Before the revolution, the country received nearly 15 million tourists a year. However, the downing of a Russian jet that took off from the Red Sea resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh in October 2015 has prompted foreign holidaymakers to book their vacation elsewhere.

According to data released by the Ministry of Tourism, Egypt incurred monthly losses of 3.2 billion Egyptian pounds ($198 million) directly and indirectly after the bombing of the Russian plane in the Sinai Peninsula. Following the deadly incident, several foreign countries, including Russia, the UK and Germany, imposed travel bans on flights to Sharm el-Sheikh.

NewScientist (18 February 2017) reports on Plan B if the decline of the pollinating bee population continues:

Eijiro Miyako at the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology in Tsukuba, Japan, and his colleagues have now built a drone that fulfils [the role of pollinating bees]. The manually controlled craft is 4 centimetres wide and has a mass of just 15 grams.

The drone’s underside is covered in horsehair coated in a sticky gel. Pollen grains that stick lightly to the gel when the drone visits one flower will get rubbed off on to the next flower visited. In experiments, the drone was able to cross-pollinate Japanese lilies (Chem, doi.org/bzk8).

Miyako says the team is now working on autonomous drones that could help pollinate crops. “We hope this will help to counter the problem of bee declines,” says Miyako. GPS, high-resolution cameras and artificial intelligence will be required for the drones to navigate independently between flowers and visit them correctly, although it will be some time before all that is in place.

I wonder if they’ve thought about problems from would-be predators, bad weather, even strong spider-webs. For that matter, does this constitute competition for the local bee population.

And, of course, this really must be a Plan B, to only be used in the case of disaster. Although it amuses me to think of the farmer organizing his fleet of bee-drones, deciding where to pollinate next. Although pollination is not necessarily a year around activity … on the other hand, the drones shouldn’t be all that expensive.

I note in the referenced academic paper the researchers also applied the gel directly to ants:

ILG [ionic liquid gels] droplets were prepared on the hips of F. japonica ants by photopolymerization in a manner almost similar to that used to make the hybrid flies. We carefully observed the pollen-collection behavior of these hybrid ants after releasing 30 specimens in a plastic container with three T. gesneriana flowers. The hybrid ants moved in the flowers, and large amounts of pollen grains became attached to their bodies as a result ( Figure 2D). The hybrid ants adsorbed more pollen grains on their bodies than did wild ants (Figures 2E and 2F; Movie S1). SEM imaging also revealed that the hybrid ants adsorbed more T. gesneriana pollen grains on the ILG droplets than did wild ants ( Figures 2G, S11, and S12). The adhesiveness and superwettability of the ILGs were particularly helpful in the effective collection of pollen grains from the flowers. Further, all hybrid ants (30) survived and did not exhibit any movement-related issues when placed in a container for 3 days or longer. In summary, these results indicate that the synthesized ILGs could be used as efficient pollen collectors with high biocompatibility for pollination using living insects.

It’s not clear to me if anointing numerous ants with this gel would be an efficient operation. But it might keep the farm kids busy.

But us casual gardeners?

Andrew Sullivan’s weekly essay contains this observation:

Jobs are vital not simply because of money — but because they give lives meaning, a meaning that now seems so remote people medicate themselves with opiates. People are grieving for a lost way of life. This is not racist or retrograde or even backward. It is, rather, deeply human. For it is in these places that a deeper identity forms, that Americanness, Britishness, la France profonde, endures. And what we’re seeing right now, across the developed world, is a bid to retain the meaning of a culture and a way of life in the headwinds of faceless, placeless economics.

Nationalism is one response. The answer to it is not globalism, which is as cold as it is remote, but patriotism, that love of country that does not require the loathing of other places or the scapegoating of minorities or a phobia of change, that confident identity that doesn’t seek to run away from the wider world but to engage it, while somehow staying recognizable across the generations. If the Democrats hope to come back, that patriotism is going to have to define them once again. But can they get past their racial and sexual and gender obsessions and reach for it?

I must note that this only applies to those who belonged to those places. For those of us who never felt like they belonged, then it’s a little harder to place value on them as they go away. For example, black people in America, homosexuals darn near anywhere, transgendered ditto – because those places also rejected them, not for what they did, but for what they simply are. It’s difficult to mourn the loss of a village that hated you when it found out you were homosexual, I should think.

But sometimes the rejection comes for less well defined reasons. I never really felt like I was part of society in general, so when the community of bulletin boards sprang up, a whole lot of normally introverted, shy people, from kids as young as ten to judges to myself suddenly found a community which welcomed them, that they could help build and participate in. And when the Web came and ate it, there was some mourning, although the tech savvy of those folks made it a trifle easier, as well as the experience of the earlier rejection. You see it go to dust, and you move along and search for another community out in the greater world of the Web.

But, to return to Andrew’s point, that seeking for the past’s stability and value unfortunately includes those elements which have become, contentiously, judged to be socially undesirable. Just as we ultimately decided that beating up the Irish was not in the interests of justice, but merely an indulgence in xenophobic hatred, so it is with lynching blacks, whether as it was done previous to the Civil Rights period, or as it happens today through the agency of police rotten apples – as evidenced through various arrests and convictions of a few police officers. I will certainly grant that most such folks are not racists, but an unfortunately set of racists have certainly attached themselves, as useless parasites will, to the group, and use it to their own ends.

All that said, I’m glad Andrew has reiterated the point that jobs are more than money, they are meaning and satisfaction and self-worth. This recognition must impact the implicit assumption of capitalist society that it’s all about the profits, and everything else be damned. In truth, capitalism is simply one way to deal with the problems of the creation of things and services of value to each other. There are other methods: communism, mercantilism, out and out thievery for that matter. Each has been subjected to valid criticisms, and so should capitalism – and it has been. Capitalists need to remember that the precepts of capitalism may appear to lead to a stable, productive system – but it assumes that the people it is thrust upon are dedicated capitalists.

They’re not. It’s not their purpose in life.

A thousand purposes we share. From fulfilling the commands of The Church, to the self-expression of the compulsive artist, the explorer looking at far horizons, for the vast majority capitalism is merely one of the many means to their personal end that they need. Because capitalism is not their end point, it is a flawed instrument, and as such it needs some regulation. Trump may actually recognize this: witness his proposal to tax imports at a higher rate than exports. It’s a recognition of the damage job movement to other countries does to communities in the short-term. Whether this is true in the long term of centuries is another question, since wages grow in the developing countries as more and more jobs move, and eventually it’s no longer economical to move those jobs.

The Pull The Finger Joke doesn’t work when you’re a cog in the machine, John.

But how to impose effective regulations such that smaller communities are stabilized is not at all clear to me, or even if it makes sense; cities are more efficient, and in this age of over-population, this may be of overriding importance. Perhaps regulation smacks too much of taking a hammer to the flower bed approach; an indirect approach, such as UBI, might yield better, if harder to predict results.

But it’s worth remembering, as Charlie Chaplin once elegantly pointed out, we are not cogs in a capitalist machine.

Because, of course, it has to be: President Trump doesn’t make many mistakes. Oh, he may rate his communication skills a C (a source I select with dry humor), but really, he runs a class operation. Really.

So, therefore, there must be a wiretap to explain all these leaks, as CNN reports:

You mean I’m built of Legos?

The Bride (1985) is an odd collage of pieces: mostly good acting, good cinematography, uninspired dialog, jumpy editing, a dubious grasp of physics, and at least some characters who act in odd ways, to the point where the audience may lose interest and wander off. It’s billed as an interpretation of Shelley’s Frankenstein, but perhaps it would be better described as a reinterpretation of Bride of Frankenstein (1935), although I confess I have not yet seen the latter, while I have read the former (but remember little).

First, the good parts. Clancy Brown turns in an excellent performance as the first construction of Dr. Frankenstein, built of dead parts and named Viktor, but surprisingly good-natured about his entire ordeal. David Rappaport takes on the role of Rinaldo, who befriends the Monster, the pair working up a circus act through which they’ll enrich themselves. Jennifer Beals turns in a credible performance as Eva, Frankenstein’s second construction, although her mouth hangs open a bit too much. The cinematography, as noted, seems adequate to the job.

But then we come to the bad parts: a dialog that inspires little interest, except for Browns, which he delivers with a certain meditative spirit; the editing, which jumps and jumps and jumps (perhaps this is a result of watching the TV version, in its defense);  the physics. For example, when Eva is brought to life, the electrical storm sparks a fire and explosion. Judging from the damage done to the heavily built tower, everyone inside should have been badly hurt, even pulped.

And the story. Oh, the story is a story of conveniences. For example, and continuing from our physics example, the story would have been hopelessly confused if Baron Frankenstein had thought his first creation was on the loose after the tower explosion, so he assumes – with no body found – that Viktor died in the explosion and fire, and even walls up the entrance to the tower. When Viktor eventually makes his appearance, the Baron is barely surprised – perhaps this is partly the fault of Sting, who portrays the Baron in a remarkably one note performance. Another example is a scene in which Viktor wishes to buy a necklace for Eva. The merchant is handed a bag full of coins, and it seems clear he’ll be taking advantage of the rather naive construct, until at the last moment he selects a single coin and hands the balance back to Viktor.

This could have been a telling moment in another story, if it were followed up properly. Alas, we’re in this story, and it’s not followed up. It stands there like a callow youth, rejected in his first advance to a partner, unsure what to do or what it means. Less of a convenience than a puzzlement, as is the phenomenon of some sort of weak, psychic link between the two constructs. Why? It doesn’t serve a purpose – except to disinterest the viewer.

The balance of the story is not quite so arbitrary, but it is predictable – the Baron wishes to rape Eva, Viktor finally comes back from his circus tour, yada yada yada.

I am not unaware that the movie reached for the level of veiled allusions. For example, at one point a book concerning Prometheus is tossed into a fireplace: not only a visual pun, but also a reference to the full title of Shelley’s novel – F.; or the Modern Prometheus. Victor was the name of the Baron in the novel; Eva, who is represented as having been trained to have a liberal mind on an equal footing with men, may herself represent Mary Shelley, who was raised by a father with highly liberal views for his time. But these are irrelevant as the story is not up to the basic task of entertainment, of involvement. They’re nothing more than Trivial Pursuit questions, when they could have been more.

The movie is not awful. I enjoyed several of the performances. But the story, obviously, bothered me. But your mileage may vary.

Old friend Sydney Sweitzer has just opened a blog, Common Sense Under The Big Sky, concerned about Montana issues, and has a lovely whack [link coming – use this for now] at private charter schools. A deduction that I missed:

Montana education funding is a around  $11,000 per pupil (a little less in large districts, a little more in small districts). The public schools spend all of that. We can certainly argue about how well that is spent, but we do know it is spent. A charter school is for profit. It will get that same $11,000 but it will only spend part of it, because it has to return profit to the corporation running it. Less is spent on educating each student, AND the profit is likely leaving the state.

[Emphasis mine] This makes explicit the comparison between public and charter schools. The former are staffed by unions, and come with all the attributes (a word I choose with care), whether it be union corruption, or dedicated, well trained teachers. The latter must cut costs because there’s another hand in the pie – those who want a profit, the owners of the company. And while free enterprise boosters may be nodding with no surprise in their eyes, what they don’t see is the cost of trimming costs to the educational enterprise. Such institutions, K-12, are not built by teachers who are around for a couple of years and then move on when they realize the charter school is a deathtrap of broken morale, but by teachers who are around for decades, who can serve as mentors, who can engender the pride in profession which is necessary for a teacher to function at the top of their profession. Frederik deBoer also addressed this, which I excerpted here – I fear Frederik’s blog may be gone, leaving me with a broken link. Still, he’s far more learned on the subject.

And this fits in with my concerns on the subject in the context of the sectors of society. Based on Syd’s post, it sounds like Montana is going all out to make sure the charter schools succeed in the private sector sense by shielding them from all measures implemented for the public sector. All they have to do is show a profit for their owners, and convince their customers that they deliver the goods – at least for long enough until the public school system shuts down. Then they don’t even have to do that. (How much do you want to bet that then the charter schools will clamor at the Montana legislature that they need monopoly protection?)

Sounds like a sweet deal for short-term investors – slop at the public trough. I wonder if they could force the owners of these companies to not harvest profits for twenty years?

Years ago, I sat in on a family conference with a nephrologist as we discussed my mother’s condition and prognosis. As it happens, the nephrologist was covering for his partner, the regular doc. Unlike the very “up” regular guy, our substitute was rather dour.

The psychologist (in training at the time) was devastated. She was reading the emotions of the dour guy compared to his partner.

My Dad and I just shrugged at the end of the conference – there was very little new.

But it was fascinating to see how we read the information in our different ways. The psychologist in training didn’t yet understand that the information was more important than the delivery; my dad and I were/are engineers, used to looking only at information.

So it was with a sense of familiarity that I read Andrew Sullivan’s summation of Trump’s speech to Congress earlier this week:

After the terror, the smile. It suddenly beams, and the voice calms. You feel the warmth again and are momentarily overcome with gratitude and relief. Suddenly, all the man’s malice and rage and narcissism disappear and the world turns suddenly normal. And you thrill to that normality. It’s what you’ve craved for so long, and been denied for so long. You forgive. You hope. You wonder if all the fear and dread you felt only a few moments ago were just in your imagination.

I didn’t watch it – my excuse, reasonable or not, is that so many falsehoods come out of his mouth that I cannot keep up, and without accurate information, how can you possibly hope to evaluate what he is saying? But I say this only for full disclosure; my conclusion remains the same – those trying to read emotions as a primary source are, in general, always at risk of being misled. So he seemed Presidential – is that important when he’s lying? We already saw he lied in preparation for the speech – so in retrospect, why write something nice about him, especially based on an irrelevancy such as his delivery of a speech? This country exists on criticism and self-improvement, not on appearances, to be brutally honest, and so far Trump is not improving.

But what those in the press need to remember is that they’re not only reporters, they are also exemplars. Don’t write a complimentary column because he managed to read a teleprompter in a pleasant manner – no Oscar is given for that. Nor is this about Oscars, it’s about performing in the biggest arena around. So the press should say, well, we fact checked him and he lied more than once a minute – if it’s so. And then acknowledge that he was pleasant, rather than incoherently angry for a change – and point out how that changes nothing important. Then note how he lied to the press just to gain a momentary advantage – and rake him over the coals. Because this electorate needs to do more than read the emotions of someone making promises to them – they need to step up and evaluate the plans put forth, and if there’s no plan – there’s no future.

Kevin Drum mourns the paring back of one of his favorite programs in the EPA – lead cleanup:

What an idiot. This is hardly the biggest issue in his budget, and I’ll grant that the current allocation for lead cleanup is so pitiful that a 30 percent cut hardly matters. On principle, though, it’s obvious that Mick Mulvaney’s crew just saw a line item in their spreadsheet and slashed it without knowing anything about it. Nice work, folks. You get a gold star.

He suggests that the use of punishment is futile. You have to like his chart.

I wonder about the size of the standard deviation in the blood level measurements. Curious concerning lead’s effects on the body? Here’s the Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry, in lesson plan format:

It must be emphasized that there may be no threshold for developmental effects on children.

• The practicing health care provider can distinguish overt clinical symptoms and health effects that come with high exposure levels on an individual basis.
• However, lack of overt symptoms does not mean “no lead poisoning.”
• Lower levels of exposure have been shown to have many subtle health effects.
• Some researchers have suggested that lead continues to contribute significantly to socio-behavioral problems such as juvenile delinquency and violent crime (Needleman 2002, Nevin 2000).
• It is important to prevent all lead exposures.

While the immediate health effect of concern in children is typically neurological, it is important to remember that childhood lead poisoning can lead to health effects later in life including renal effects, hypertension, reproductive problems, and developmental problems with their offspring (see below). The sections below describe specific physiologic effects associated with major organ systems and functions.

Retraction Watch notes the achievements of a certain Joachim Boldt:

The Annals of Thoracic Surgery has retracted two papers from the early 1990s on which Boldt was the first author – bringing the retraction tally for the disgraced German anesthesiologist to 96, by our count. Both articles were found to contain manipulated data.

I was busy being aghast – and then discovered Retraction Watch keeps a leaderboard, presumably for those of us who never want to be without a scoreboard. Dr. Boldt is … #2. #1? A certain Yoshitake Fujii. Although, to be fair to the other contenders, RW is using multiple sources and not just their reporting, so there may be duplicates or missing data to be considered. Still, 183 is certainly a number to be … proud … ashamed … of.

“Reject universes that lead to cosmic brains“, Anil Ananthaswamy, NewScientist (18 February 2017). The last paragraph is fun, too.

“If a theory predicts that the overwhelming majority of observers are Boltzmann brains, then that theory is ruled out,” he says. But he thinks Carroll’s argument introduces an unnecessary mystique. “There is no need for fancy notions like ‘cognitive instability’.”

This story from Sarah Kliff on Vox made me chortle, if only because I can also see the Democrats laughing with glee, if behind their hands, as they pursued the rabbit. The rabbit? Why, it’s the lop-eared replacement for the ACA:

Democratic House members and Republican senators were not to be included in this process [of reviewing the bill early on]. But by Thursday morning, they decided to take the matter into their own hands.

The draft legislation was rumored to be in H-157, a nondescript meeting room in the House of Representatives. When legislators arrived, Capitol Police were guarding the entrance, and dozens of reporters were waiting outside for the much-anticipated legislation.

But the first Congress member to arrive — Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), who appeared to have a mobile printer in tow, perhaps to make copies of the bill — was promptly denied entry.

“We’re here asking for written copy of this because this should be an open and transparent process,” Paul said after being denied entry into Room H-157. “This is being presented as if it’s a national secret. As if it’s a plot to invade another country.”

What a wonderful story! As Matt Fuller reports on HuffPo …

Sounds like another example of GOP leaders going back on their word. Don’t these guys get it? Not only are they laying themselves open for campaign reprisals in a year and a half from the Democrats, they’re also becoming more and more vulnerable to the RINO crowd, Ryan in particular.

But I’ll bet at least half the Democrats thought it was fun to search for the treasure. I just hope they don’t end up with poo, instead, as many commentators expect from the GOP replacement.

Stephan Haggard on Lawfare covers recent events in North Korea. Perhaps most worrying is the missile test and its context:

But missile tests are not just for show; they are ultimately about the development of capabilities. The acceleration of North Korea’s testing under Kim Jong-un—neatly documented in an infographic from the CSIS Missile Defense Project—has both quantitative and qualitative dimensions. The numbers are straightforward: four tests in 2012, eight in 2013, 18 each in 2014 and 2015 and 23 in 2016. The majority of these 70 tests—42—have been short-range Scud variants. But in 2016, the tests included the long-range “satellite” launch in February, a succession of tests of intermediate-range Musudan missiles (at least one of which succeeded), an intermediate-range Nodong that landed within 125 miles of Japanese waters, and several submarine-launched ballistic missile tests, as well as a ground test of a new rocket engine. A crucial aspect of these tests is the shift from liquid- to solid-fueled engines. John Schilling explains the implications:

[Solid fuel rockets] require little maintenance, can survive rough handling and off-road transport, are less prone to leaking toxic, corrosive vapor at the slightest provocation, and even the largest solid-fuel missiles can be launched on a few minutes’ notice. That last characteristic is going to be particularly important for North Korea, as South Korea’s missiles can reach targets anywhere in the North in the fifteen minutes or so it would take to fuel and ready a liquid-fuel missile for launch.

I wonder what advantages liquid-fuel launch systems have over solid-fuel, but that’s merely an idle question.

The test resulted in a reaction by the West:

The fact that the missile was not of longer range appeared to obviate the “red line” problem created by the president’s intemperate “won’t happen” tweet. And even more importantly, the test activated the hidden lineaments of the alliance, including a Trump statement of support for Japan (although not South Korea), a phone call between then-National Security Advisor Michael Flynn and his South Korean counterpart, Kim Kwan-jin, and a joint call by the U.S., Japan and Korea to convene a Security Council meeting.

If that is the good news, the bad news is that the test is not just a diplomatic-political signal. It is rather another step in the development of the country’s missile capabilities, which have continually been underestimated.

I must admit to not being certain how lineaments is used, with this definition my best guess:

Usually, lineaments. distinguishing features; distinctive characteristics:

the lineaments of sincere repentance.

I have to wonder why South Korea didn’t receive a supportive phone call, unless it’s its ongoing political crisis makes it a dicey proposition. Regardless, North Korea – not a permanently fractured Islamic world which is perpetually chewing on itself and faced with a mildly hostile, nuclear-armed Indian nation on its flank – will, in my neophyte judgment – remain one of the most important challenges of the Trump Administration, and one of the most volatile, where the greatest gains or the greatest losses will be seen.

skiff:

Scottish, North American

• A flurry or light covering of snow. [Oxford Dictionaries]

Heard at lunch a couple of days ago, and new to me. Yes, it also refers to a small boat as well.

Poppa! You have George Washington’s wig on your head!

Taras Bulba (1962) follows the eponymous character (Yul Brynner), a Cossack leader who loves the steppes, women, his sons, and fighting, and the escapades of his sons, who are sent to live among and learn from the Poles, the hated Poles who have betrayed and fought them over the years. Besides the casual cruelty of the Poles, one of the sons (Tony Curtis) falls in love with a young Polish noblewoman, for no particular reason that I can see, beyond a purported beauty. Eventually, he finds that he must choose between his beloved people and steppes, and the love of this woman, and inexplicably picks the woman, a choice which leads to his destiny.

This is a fairly lightweight movie – it’s not easy to discern any particularly compelling themes. While I was diverted by scenes of exotic dancing, testosterone, orgies, testosterone, the plague, more testosterone, and some impressive facial hair, I was distinctly put off by the lust, the infatuation for a strange woman who, honestly, is nothing more than pretty, a lust-ridden chase which endangers a collection of Cossacks who had shown great loyalty. It feels like an artificial subplot tacked on to a movie which lusts (but fails) for an epic historical quality.

To say it’s lightweight is not to suggest the plot lacks some complexity. Neither the Cossacks nor the Poles lack in calculation, deception, and resources, as they struggle for dominance on the steppes, and that has some value. The back and forth is certainly an important element in any plot.

But, in the end, between the lack of a compelling theme and the slack-witted lust of the son, the movie leaves one to admire the individual acting performances, and the wardrobes and makeup, while more or less avoiding the mass battle scenes and wishing the story line had a little bit more going for it.

Lawfare‘s Ryan Scoville comments on the travel habits of Congress people, including staff. I found this chart, covering the destinations of the travelers for privately funded trips, to be quite interesting:

Figure 3 shows the total number of privately funded visits to each of the top ten destinations. With nearly 1,400 visits from 2011 to 2016, Israel easily led the way and accounted for nearly a third of all of the 4,400 trips that occurred within the reporting period. Turkey was also quite high with roughly 750 visits, but other countries trailed far behind. In all, House members and staff traveled to 113 different countries.

The leading destinations seem significant as plausible indicia of congressional priorities and expertise. I imagine that, all else equal, members of Congress are more likely to appreciate the complexities of U.S. foreign relations with the countries they’ve visited. I also suspect that legislators and staff are more likely to return to the United States with greater sympathy for the policies advanced by the governments of host countries. The implication is that many members of Congress may now be particularly knowledgeable about and sympathetic toward Israel and Turkey, not necessarily because of constituent preferences or abstract ideas about the importance of U.S. relations with those countries, but at least partly because of the travel itself, which has placed members and staff in close contact with government officials, the public, and economic and political conditions in Israel and Turkey.

Israel is understandable, but I was surprised by Turkey.

Sponsor identities seem significant in the sense that they suggest the purposes of the underlying travel. AIEF, a charitable organization affiliated with AIPAC, funds delegations to promote support for Israel within Congress, while the Turkish Coalition of America and the Turkic American Federation of the Midwest do likewise with respect to Turkey. The Aspen Congressional Institute offers nonpartisan programs of education on matters of international concern. The Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE), an international humanitarian organization, appears to use the trips to promote foreign aid.

This is a article written from the outside perspective, so Ryan offers no concrete reasons for the visits. As Turkey’s turn towards authoritarianism, not yet complete, is very recent there’s no reflection of the event in the data – it’ll be interesting to see how that changes over the next couple of years.

The GOP‘s redistricting plans suffered another blow when SCOTUS ruled that race cannot be used to guide redistricting, as noted by Lyle Denniston on the Constitution Daily blog:

The trial court had ruled that, if race was used without violating any other redistricting rules, it was valid. Only such a conflict, that court said, makes the use of race unconstitutional as a form of discrimination.

That is the result the Supreme Court overturned. Even if a new map satisfies all of the customary requirements for new districts, the map may still be unconstitutional if race was the guiding factor. Conflict with traditional principles might help prove that predominance, the Justices ruled, but that is not necessary to show unconstitutionality.

In the practical world of redistricting, that declaration by the court is almost certain to compel state legislatures to be newly cautious in how race is considered. While the court has never barred all use of race as a redistricting factor, and in fact has conceded that legislators always are aware of it because minority voters tend generally to vote for Democratic candidates, the new ruling and prior decisions on the subject give the predominance factor heavy weight when a new map is challenged as having been based on racial gerrymandering.

The vote was 7-1, and the holdout, Justice Thomas wanted to go even further down this road. This appears to me to be a strong rebuff to the GOP redistricting plans. That said, I’m glad to have never been given a task like this – between partisan howls and the apparent lack of either accepted process or even goal, it makes me wonder if the use of easily changeable district lines really makes sense. Unfortunately, there are problems with other approaches that come right to mind – but I suspect someone out there thinks they have the perfect solution to the problem, I just haven’t run across it, yet.

My reader comes up with more information on PSCK9:

I can’t speak to how well PCSK9 works on damaged hearts, because my husband’s artery blockage was discovered before any heart damage (perhaps just a few days before, given that they rushed him into surgery on a SUNDAY). He was extremely lucky to have a wonderful GP and great cardio team at the U of M. … from what I’ve read, PCSK9 dramatically reduces cholesterol levels for virtually everyone who takes it. His cardiologist, the brilliant Dr. Daniel Duprez, feels that its use is directly responsible for the dramatic drop in cardiac surgery (i.e., repairing blockage and heart damage).

As for PCSK9 being affordable … that’s a relative concept. In the US, it costs $14,000 a month. It’s clearly more affordable in Europe, where it has been approved for a while. Dr. Duprez feels that the US price will drop when American usage is more common. But that won’t happen until the insurance companies allow more people to use it. It’s a Catch-22.

For more PCSK9 information, see Dr. Duprez’s report, “Clinical efficacy and safety of evolocumab for low-density lipoprotein cholesterol reduction”: https://www.dovepress.com/clinical-efficacy-and-safety-of…

For a cheaper, more accessible alternative to statins, Dr. Duprez “kind of” recommended foods with added plant sterols/stanols. (He’s not into fortified foods, but if insurance won’t pay for drugs and you can’t tolerate statins, well….. ) We’ve tried the products from Step One Foods, which I really like because they’re all real food. Unfortunately, my speshul snowflake hubby has a reaction to the stanols/sterols as well. But most people don’t. More info here: https://www.steponefoods.com/…/alternatives-to-statin…

I can’t resist this one even though the source I’m quoting evidently suffered a production catastrophe, which I’ll reproduce.

Virtue Epistemology:

Epistemology, of course, is the branch of philosophy that studies knowledge and provides the criteria for evidential warrant – it tells us when it is, in fact, rational to believe or disbelieve a given notion. Virtue epistemology is a particular approach within the field of epistemology, which takes its inspiration from virtue ethics. The latter is a general way to think about ethics that goes back to Aristotle and other ancient Greek and Roman thinkers.

Briefly, virtue ethics shifts thjat e [sic – perhaps the] focus from questions such as “Is this action right/wrong?” to “Is the character of this agent virtuous or not?” The idea is that morality is a human attribute, which has the purpose of improving our lives as individuals embedded in a broader society. As such, it does not yield itself to universal analyses that take a god’s eye-view of things, but rather starts with the individual as moral agent. [“The Virtuous Skeptic,” Massimo Pigliucci, Skeptical Inquirer (March/April 2017), offline only]

Mediaite reports on Trump’s hasty use of political capital:

CNN reported Wednesday on a senior administration official admitting that the White House intentionally misled reporters ahead of President Donald Trump‘s congressional address in order to get generate positive press coverage as part of a “misdirection play.”

Multiple reports Tuesday indicated that Trump would embrace a more moderate tone on immigration and would announce that he was willing to negotiate granting millions of illegal immigrants legal status. Most of those reports, cited to a “senior administration official,” came immediately after anchors lunched with Trump. Some of those outlets then just attributed the claim to the president himself.

But when it was time for Trump to actually give the speech, he said nothing of the sort. CNN’s Sara Murray complained the next day about “the bait and switch that the president pulled when it came to immigration yesterday. He had this meeting with the anchors, he talked about a path to legal status.”

Multiple news organizations are now reportedly wondering why they should ever trust Trump again. My feeling is that the Trump Administration has, at the very best, a very flawed conception of planning. They have four years ahead of them, if they’re lucky, and they just lost any last hope they had of gaining positive coverage from the mainstream press – all for a momentary uptick in positive coverage.

Are they that desperate? Or do they really believe their own fantasies that the mainstream press is about to roll over and die? About all they can really expect is that they won’t lose anyone in their base – they’ll probably not hear about it, and if they do, they’ll figure the press deserved what they got. After all, by wide report, his base thinks he’s doing wonderful and don’t understand why he’s not receiving plaudits from the press.